It was by way of this footpath that they first fell into the hands of Fortunato. They were forever falling into some one’s hands and finding the results agreeable, for they kept their minds open to suggestion and abjured all hard and fast lines of intention, being wise enough to realize that what is known as “a good traveller” usually misses all the good of travel by the cut-and-driedness of his aims.
Fortunato was sure that he could “spika da Englishy,” though what led him to suppose so, other than a large command of illuminative gesture, never became clear. Some half-dozen words—adorned with superfluous vowels to a point of unrecognizability—he did possess; the rest was Sicilian, sympathy, and vivid intelligence, which sufficed to make him the perfectly delightful guide he explained himself to be. His age he declared to be fourteen, he looked all of ten, but his knowledge of the world, of life, of history, and of the graces of conversation could hardly have been acquired by any one less than forty. Within twenty minutes he had made them free of such short and simple annals of his career as he judged to be suited to their limited forestieri minds, having first firmly assumed the burden of all their small impedimenta—jackets, kodaks, and parasols. He was one of fifteen, he explained, and also the main staff of his parents’ declining years; the six staffs younger than himself being somewhat too short for that filial office. The other eight had been removed from this service by the combined ravages of marriage, the army, and emigration. When time and the growth of his juniors enabled him to lay down his absorbing duties he had the intention of joining in Nuova Yorka a distinguished barber, who enjoyed the privilege of being his elder brother. Nuova Yorka, he had been given to understand by this brother, boasted no such mountains as these of Girgenti, but its streets were filled for months with hills of ice and snow, and this information Peripatetica and Jane were regretfully obliged to confirm.
No matter! even such rigours could not check his ambition to “barb,” and as his brother had explained how necessary it was that he should be complete master of Englishy before landing in Nuova Yorka if he hoped to escape being “plucked” (great business of illuminating gestures of rapacity) he employed in guiding Americans such brief hours as he could snatch from school.
They discovered later that Fortunato snatched from school just seven entire days every week.
It had been the intention of the two to spend the morning among the gigantic ruins of the temple of Zeus, and yet when Fortunato put pressure upon their ever flexible impulses at the gate of the strange old Panitteri garden, they found themselves instead under the walls of the church of San Niccola, where the gillyflowers and wild mignonette rioted from every crevice. Meekly they climbed a great stone terrace adorned with crumbling statues and Corinthian entablatures. Meekly they examined the great baths, and delighted in the shining panorama of sea and plain and hill, with golden Concordia seen in its most lovely aspect between two gigantic stone pines.
Still sternly shepherded by the small guide they climbed down again to make a closer acquaintance with the Oratory of Phalaris. Phalaris of the infamous legend of the brazen bull, into whose heated body were cast the enemies of the ancient Tyrant of Akragas, because that humorous gentleman’s fancy was highly diverted by the similarity of their moanings, as they slowly roasted, to the lowing of kine. It is said that he fretted a good deal because nobody else appeared to think the thing as good a joke as it seemed to him, but then taste in jests will differ, unfortunately. The Carthagenians when they came over and conquered Sicily were quite delighted with the ingenious toy, and carried it off triumphantly to Africa. They were finished artists in torture themselves, and appreciated a valuable new idea. Scipio found the bull in Carthage, when he made a final end of that city, and he returned it to Akragas, but appetite for really poignant fun appears to have died out by that time, and Fortunato, whom they consulted, seemed to think it was probably eventually broken up for the purpose of manufacturing braziers, or possibly warming-pans.
Memory of the Bull almost obscured the fact that the Oratory was a beautiful Greek chapel, such as was used to hold some statue of a god, and the memorials of ancestors, and served for private daily devotions without need of a priest. The Normans had the same habit of private family chapels, so the Oratory had served them in turn, being pierced by a Norman window and the square-headed entrance door fitted with an arch.
Half a dozen races and centuries had each had a hand in the Church and Convent of San Niccola too, apparently. It was built from stones filched from that vast ruin of the Temple of Zeus they were on their roundabout way to see, and which has always been an exhaustless quarry for Girgenti. So late as in the last century the huge stones that formed the Porto Empedocle, a long mole from which the sulphur is shipped, were stolen from poor Zeus. Doors, windows, roofs, arches, had been added or changed in San Niccola, just as each generation needed, and each in the taste of the period. The holy-water stoup at the entrance, for example, was an enormous marble hand, taken from one of the temples. For the Greeks too had fonts of holy water, consecrated by plunging into it a burning torch from the altar, and as the worshippers entered they were asperged with a branch of laurel.
The poor Saint was not in flourishing circumstances in these later days, it would seem, judging by the bareness of his sanctuary, and the torn cotton lace upon the altars, and yet he was an industrious healer, if one might reason from the votives that hung about his picture. A few were wrought in silver, but more in wax, or carved and painted wood, reproducing with hideous fidelity the swollen limbs, the cancerous breasts, the goitered throats, the injured eyes, the carbuncles and abcesses he had healed through his miraculous intervention. Indeed, he was a general jobber in miracles, for the naïve, rude little paintings on the wall showed a spirited donkey running away with a painted cart, the terrified occupant frantically making signals of distress to San Niccola in heaven, who was preparing promptly to check the raging ass. Or he was drawing a chrome-yellow petitioner from a cobalt sea, or turning a Mafia dagger aside, or finding a lost child in the mountains. He certainly “studied to please,” and it did seem a pity he should be housed in so bare and poverty-stricken a shrine. Many less active saints lived amid welters of gilding and luxury.
In spite of Fortunato dragging them aside later to see a little “Casa Greco,” where they could trace delicate tesselated pavements and the bases of the columns of the atrium amid the grass, they still succeeded in arriving that same afternoon at their original goal.