CHAPTER VII

A week following the day of meetings on the Motterone, Luigi the spy was in Milan, making his way across the Piazza de’ Mercanti.  He entered a narrow court, one of those which were anciently built upon the Oriental principle of giving shade at the small cost of excluding common air.  It was dusky noon there through the hours of light, and thrice night when darkness fell.  The atmosphere, during the sun’s short passage overhead, hung with a glittering heaviness, like the twinkling iron-dust in a subterranean smithy.  On the lower window of one of the houses there was a board, telling men that Barto Rizzo made and mended shoes, and requesting people who wished to see him to make much noise at the door, for he was hard of hearing.  It speedily became known in the court that a visitor desired to see Barto Rizzo.  The noise produced by Luigi was like that of a fanatical beater of the tomtom; he knocked and banged and danced against the door, crying out for his passing amusement an adaptation of a popular ballad:—­“Oh, Barto, Barto! my boot is sadly worn:  The toe is seen that should be veiled from sight.  The toe that should be veiled like an Eastern maid:  like a sultan’s daughter:  Shocking! shocking!  One of a company of ten that were living a secluded life in chaste privacy!  Oh, Barto, Barto! must I charge it to thy despicable leather or to my incessant pilgrimages?  One fair toe!  I fear presently the corruption of the remaining nine:  Then, alas! what do I go on?  How shall I come to a perfumed end, who walk on ten indecent toes?  Well may the delicate gentlemen sneer at me and scorn me:  As for the angelic Lady who deigns to look so low, I may say of her that her graciousness clothes what she looks at:  To her the foot, the leg, the back:  To her the very soul is bared:  But she is a rarity upon earth.  Oh, Barto, Barto, she is rarest in Milan!  I might run a day’s length and not find her.  If, O Barto, as my boot hints to me, I am about to be stripped of my last covering, I must hurry to the inconvenient little chamber of my mother, who cannot refuse to acknowledge me as of this pattern:  Barto, O shoemaker! thou son of artifice and right-hand-man of necessity, preserve me in the fashion of the time:  Cobble me neatly:  A dozen wax threads and I am remade:—­Excellent!  I thank you!  Now I can plant my foot bravely:  Oh, Barto, my shoemaker! between ourselves, it is unpleasant in these refined days to be likened at all to that preposterous Adam!”

The omission of the apostrophes to Barto left it one of the ironical, veiled Republican, semi-socialistic ballads of the time, which were sung about the streets for the sharpness and pith of the couplets, and not from a perception of the double edge down the length of them.