2. CHAPTER II.
The hospital of St. Girolamo is attached to the
convent of that name, standing on one of the canals
which put forth on the seaward side of Venice. It is
a long building, with its low windows and latticed
doors opening almost on the level of the sea, and the
wards for the sick are large and well aired; but, except
when the breeze is stirring, impregnated with a
saline dampness from the canal, which, as Pasquali
remarked, was good for the rheumatism. It was not
so good for the patient.
The loving wife Fiametta grew worse and worse
after the fatal festa, and the fit of rheumatism brought
on by the slightness of her dress and the spattering he
had given her in the race, had increased by the end of
the week, to a rheumatic fever. Fiametta was old
and tough, however, and struggled manfully (woman
as she was) with the disease, but being one night a
little out of her head, her loving husband took occasion
to shudder at the responsibility of taking care of
her, and jumping into his gondola, he pulled across to
St. Girolamo and bespoke a dry bed and a sister of
charity, and brought back the pious father Gasparo
and a comfortable litter. Fiametta was dozing when
they arrived, and the kind-hearted tailor willing to
spare her the pain of knowing that she was on her way
to the hospital for the poor, set out some meat and
wine for the monk, and sending over for Turturilla
and the nurse to mix the salad, they sat and ate away
the hours till the poor dame's brain should be wandering
again.
Toward night the monk and Dame Bentoccata were
comfortably dozing with each other's support (having
fallen asleep at table), and Pasquali with a kiss from
Turturilla, stole softly up stairs. Fiametta was mutturing
unquietly, and working her fingers in the palms
of her hands, and on feeling her pulse he found the
fever was at its height. She took him, besides, for the
prize pig of the festa, for he knew her wits were fairly
abroad. He crept down stairs, gave the monk a strong
cup of coffee to get him well awake, and, between the
four of them, they got poor Fiametta into the litter,
drew the curtains tenderly around and deposited her
safely in the bottom of the gondola.
Lightly and smoothly the winner of the pig pulled
away with his loving burden, and gliding around the
slimy corners of the palaces, and hushing his voice
as he cried out “right!” or “left!” to guard the
coming gondoliers of his vicinity, he arrived, like a
thought of love to a maid's mind in sleep, at the door
of St. Girolamo. The abbess looked out and said,
“Benedicite!” and the monk stood firm on his brown
sandals to receive the precious burden from the arms
of Pasquali. Believing firmly that it was equivalent
to committing her to the hand of St. Peter, and of
course abandoning all hope of seeing her again in
this world, the soft-hearted tailor wiped his eye as
she was lifted in, and receiving a promise from Father
Gasparo that he would communicate faithfully the
state of her soul in the last agony, he pulled, with
lightened gondola and heart, back to his widower's
home and Turturilla.
For many good reasons, and apparent as good, it is
a rule in the hospital of St. Girolamo, that the sick
under its holy charge shall receive the visit of neither
friend nor relative. If they recover, they return to
their abodes to earn candles for the altar of the restoring
saint. If they die, their clothes are sent to their
surviving friends, and this affecting memorial, besides
communicating the melancholy news, affords all the
particulars and all the consolation they are supposed
to require upon the subject of their loss.
Waiting patiently for Father Gasparo and his bundle,
Pasquali and Turturilla gave themselves up to hopes,
which on the tailor's part (we fear it must be admitted),
augured a quicker recovery from grief than might be
credited to an elastic constitution. The fortune of
poor Fiametta was sufficient to warrant Pasquali in
neglecting his shop to celebrate every festa that the
church acknowledged, and for ten days subsequent to
the committal of his wife to the tender mercies of St.
Girolamo, five days out of seven was the proportion of
merry holydays with his new betrothed.
They were sitting one evening in the open piazza
of St. Mark, in front of the most thronged cafe of
that matchless square. The moon was resting her
silver disk on the point of the Campanile, and the
shadows of thousands of gay Venetians fell on the
immense pavement below, clear and sharply drawn
as a black cartoon. The four extending sides of the
square lay half in shades half in light, with their
innumerable columns and balcomes and sculptured
work, and, frowning down on all, in broken light and
shadow, stood the arabesque structure of St. Mark's
itself dizzying the eyes with its mosaics and confused
devices, and thrusting forth the heads of her four
golden-collared steeds into the moonbeams, till they
looked on that black relief, like the horses of Pluto
issuing from the gates of Hades. In the centre of
the square stood a tall woman, singing, in rich contralto,
an old song of the better days of Venice; and
against one of the pillars, Polichinello had backed
his wooden stage, and beat about his puppets with
an energy worthy of old Dandolo and his helmeted
galley-men. To those who wore not the spectacles
of grief or discontent, the square of St. Mark's that
night was like some cozening
tableau. I never saw
anything so gay.
Everybody who has “swam in a gondola,” knows
how the cafés of Venice thrust out their checkered
awnings over a portion of the square, and filled the
shaded space below with chairs and marble tables.
In a corner of the shadow thus afforded, with ice and
coffee on a small round slab between them, and the
flat pavement of the public promenade under their feet,
sat our two lovers. With neither hoof nor wheel to
drown or interrupt their voices (as in cities whose
streets are stones, not water), they murmured their
hopes and wishes in the softest language under the
sun, and with the sotto voce acquired by all the inhabitants
of this noiseless city. Turturilla had taken ice to
cool her and coffee to take off the chill of her ice, and
a bicchiere del perfetto amore to reconcile these two
antagonists in her digestion, when the slippers of a
monk glided by, and in a moment the recognised
Father Gasparo made a third in the shadowy corner.
The expected bundle was under his arm, and he was
on his way to Pasquali's dwelling. Having assured
the disconsolate tailor that she had unction and wafer
as became the wife of a citizen of Venice like himself,
he took heart and grew content that she was in heaven.
It was a better place, and Turturilla for so little as a
gold ring, would supply her place in his bosom.
The moon was but a brief week older when Pasquali
and Turturilla stood in the church of our lady
of grief, and Father Gasparo within the palings of the
altar. She was as fair a maid as ever bloomed in the
garden of beauty beloved of Titian, and the tailor was
nearer worth nine men to look at, than the fraction of
a man considered usually the exponent of his profession.
Away mumbled the good father upon the matrimonial
service, thinking of the old wine and rich
pastries that were holding their sweetness under cork
and crust only till he had done his ceremony, and
quicker by some seconds than had ever been achieved
before by priest or bishop, he arrived at the putting on
of the ring. His hand was tremulous, and (oh unlucky
omen!) he dropped it within the gilden fence
of the chancel. The choristers were called, and
Father Gasparo dropped on his knees to look for it —
but if the devil had not spirited it away, there was no
other reason why that search was in vain. Short of
an errand to the goldsmith on the Rialto, it was at
last determined the wedding could not proceed. Father
Gasparo went to hide his impatience within the
restiary, and Turturilla knelt down to pray against the
arts of Sathanas. Before they had settled severally
to their pious occupations, Pasquali was half way to
the Rialto.
Half an hour elapsed, and then instead of the light
grazing of a swift-sped gondola along the church
stairs, the splash of a sullen oar was heard, and Pasquali
stepped on shore. They had hastened to the
door to receive him — monk, choristers and bride —
and to their surprise and bewilderment, he waited to
hand out a woman in a strange dress, who seemed dis
posed, bridegroom as he was, to make him wait her
leisure. Her clothes fitted her ill, and she carried in
her hand a pair of shoes, it was easy to see were never
made for her. She rose at last, and as her face became
visible, down dropped Turturilla and the pious
father, and motionless and aghast stood the simple
Pasquali. Fiametta stepped on shore!
In broken words Pasquali explained. He had
landed at the stairs near the fish market, and with two
leaps reaching the top, sped off past the buttress in
the direction of the goldsmith, when his course was
arrested by encountering at full speed, the person of
an old woman. Hastily raising her up, he recognised
his wife, who, fully recovered, but without a gondola,
was threading the zig-zag alleys on foot, on her way
to her own domicil. After the first astonishment was
over, her dress explained the error of the good father
and the extent of his own misfortune. The clothes
had been hung between the bed of Fiametta and that
of a smaller woman who had been long languishing
of a consumption. She died, and Fiametta's clothes,
brought to the door by mistake, were recognised by
Father Gasparo and taken to Pasquali.
The holy monk, chop-fallen and sad, took his solitary
way to the convent, but with the first step he felt
something slide into the heel of his sandal. He sat
down on the church stairs and absolved the devil from
theft — it was the lost ring, which had fallen upon his
foot and saved Pasquali the tailor from the pains of
bigamy.
