"Marianna!" the old man continued crying. "She has gone!--she has flown!--the villain Antonio has robbed me of her! Away!--after her! Good people, have pity! Get torches; search for my dove! Ha, the serpent!"
And the old man was making off; but the officer held him fast, saying: "If you mean the pretty young girl who was sitting by you, I rather fancy I saw her slip out with a young fellow--Antonio Scacciati, I believe,--some considerable time ago, just as you were beginning that useless, silly quarrel with the actor who had on a mask something like you. Signor Pasquale, it is my duty to arrest you, on account of your behaviour, and the murderous attack upon the actor."
Signor Pasquale, with pale death in his face, incapable of uttering a word or a sound, was marched off by the very Sbirri who had come there to protect him from masquerading demons and spectres. Thus there fell upon him deep distress and sorrow, and all the wild despair of a foolish and deceived old amorous fool, on the very night when he looked to celebrate his greatest triumph.
Salvator Rosa Quits Rome For Florence.
The End Of This Story.
All things here below under the sun are subject to constant change and fluctuation, but there is nothing that more deserves to be called fickle and fleeting than mankind's opinions, which keep rotating in an eternal circle, like Fortune's wheel. Bitter censure falls to-day upon him who yesterday gathered a grand harvest of praise; he who walks to-day a-foot may to-morrow ride in a gilded chariot.
Who was there in all Rome who did not scorn and mock at old Capuzzi, with his mean avarice, his silly amorousness, his crazy jealousy?--or who did not wish the poor tormented Marianna her freedom? Yet now that Antonio had succeeded in carrying her off, all the scorn and mockery suddenly turned to pity for the poor old fellow who was seen creeping about the streets of Rome, with bowed head, inconsolable.
Misfortunes rarely come singly. Soon after Marianna had been carried off, Pasquale lost his dearest bosom friends. Little Pitichinaccio choked himself with an almond, which he incautiously tried to swallow as he was in the middle of a cadenza; and a slip of the pen (of his own making) put a sudden period to the life of the renowned Pyramid-Doctor, Signor Splendiano Accoramboni. Michele's cudgelling had such an effect on him that he fell into a fever. He determined to cure himself by a remedy which he believed he had discovered. He demanded pen and ink, and wrote a recipe, in which, by putting down a wrong fever, he enormously increased the quantity of a very powerful ingredient; so that as soon as he swallowed the medicine he fell back upon his pillow and was gone; proving, by his own death, the effect of this final tincture of his prescribing in the most striking and heroic manner.
As we have said, all who had previously laughed the most heartily at Capuzzi, and the most sincerely wished success to the brave Antonio in his undertaking, were now all compassion for the old man; and the bitterest blame was laid, not upon Antonio so much as upon Salvator Rosa, whom they all, with very good reason, held to have been at the bottom of the whole affair.
Salvator's enemies (of whom there were a goodly band) were not slow to stir up the fire to the best of their ability. "See!" they said; "this is Masaniello's worthy comrade, always ready to lay his hand to any evil trick, any robberish undertaking; if his dangerous stay in Rome is prolonged, we shall soon feel the effects of it heavily."
And, in fact, the ignoble herd of those who conspired against Salvator succeeded in stemming the bold flight which his fame would otherwise have taken. One picture after another came from his hand, bold of conception, magnificent of execution, but the so-called "connoisseurs" always shrugged the shoulder; said, now that the mountains were too blue; now, that the trees were too green, the figures too tall, or too stumpy; found fault with everything where there was no fault to be found, and made it their business to detract from Salvator's well-merited renown in every possible way. His chief persecutors were the members of the Academia di San Luca, who could never get over the affair of the surgeon, and went out of their own province to depreciate the pretty verses which Salvator wrote about that time, even trying to make out that he did not live upon the fruit of his own land, but pilfered the property of other people. And this, too, led to Salvator's being by no means in a position to surround himself with the splendour and luxury which he had formerly displayed in Rome. Instead of the grand, spacious studio, where all the celebrities of Rome used to visit him, he went on living at Dame Caterina's, beside his green figtree. And in this very restrictedness he, doubtless, soon found comfort and ease of heart.