Title:  A Roman Singer

Author:  F. Marion Crawford

Release Date:  May 14, 2004 [EBook #12346]
[Date last updated:  February 9, 2006]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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A ROMAN SINGER

F. MARION CRAWFORD

1909

[Illustration:  “Shut the door and double turned the lock.”—­Chap.  XXI.]

CHAPTER I

I, Cornelio Grandi, who tell you these things, have a story of my own, of which some of you are not ignorant.  You know, for one thing, that I was not always poor, nor always a professor of philosophy, nor a scribbler of pedantic articles for a living.  Many of you can remember why I was driven to sell my patrimony, the dear castello in the Sabines, with the good corn-land and the vineyards in the valley, and the olives, too.  For I am not old yet; at least, Mariuccia is older, as I often tell her.  These are queer times.  It was not any fault of mine.  But now that Nino is growing to be a famous man in the world, and people are saying good things and bad about him, and many say that he did wrong in this matter, I think it best to tell you all the whole truth and what I think of it.  For Nino is just like a son to me; I brought him up from a little child, and taught him Latin, and would have made a philosopher of him.  What could I do?  He had so much voice that he did not know what to do with it.

His mother used to sing.  What a piece of a woman she was!  She had a voice like a man’s, and when De Pretis brought his singers to the festa once upon a time, when I was young, he heard her far down below, as we walked on the terrace of the palazzo, and asked me if I would not let him educate that young tenor.  And when I told him it was one of the contadine, the wife of a tenant of mine, he would not believe it.  But I never heard her sing after Serafino—­that was her husband—­was killed at the fair in Genazzano.  And one day the fevers took her, and so she died, leaving Nino a little baby.  Then you know what happened to me, about that time, and how I sold Castel Serveti and came to live here in Rome.  Nino was brought to me here.  One day in the autumn a carrettiere from Serveti, who would sometimes stop at my door and leave me a basket of grapes in the vintage, or a pitcher of fresh oil in winter, because he never used to pay his house-rent when I was his landlord—­but he is a good fellow, Gigi—­and so he tries to make amends now; well, as I was saying, he came one day and gave me a great basket of fine grapes, and he brought Nino with him, a little boy of scarce six years—­just to show him to me, he said.