They admitted that the situation, though the best possible, was not ideal. The corporal has to sleep at the caserma and pretend to the authorities that he is a free bachelor, he can only visit the mother of his future children in his spare time. And this regrettable state of things had arisen in consequence, or partly in consequence, of my respect for law and order. I did not put it like that to him. I pointed out that if I had sent the 4000 francs I should have been obliged to deny myself the pleasure of coming to see him in Sicily. He concurred and thanked me for my consideration. His experience of life had already taught him that the same money cannot be spent on two different objects, and he was grateful to me for choosing the one which gave him the pleasure of making me acquainted with his fidanzata. The 4000 francs from some other source or the government appointment might drop into his
lap at any moment, and at the latest, he could regularise his position in five years, when he should be forty, by leaving the service, returning to the carpentry, marrying and legitimising any children that might have been born.
So I said good-bye to the brothers, wished the corporal every happiness and gave him my sympathetic cigarette-case as a non-wedding present, or rather as something that by an enharmonic change should become transformed into a wedding present on the solemnisation of his marriage, and he swore to keep it till death as a ricordo of our friendship.
* * * * *
Next morning Ivanhoe called upon me and said:
“My dear Signor Enrico, I am in want. Would it be possible for you to lend me five francs till next week?”
I replied, “My dear Ivanhoe, it distresses me to hear you are in want and it lacerates my heart that you should have made a request which I am compelled to decline.”
“I do not ask for myself. It is for my children.”
“Would you mind telling me, merely as a matter of idle curiosity and without prejudice to the question of the five francs, whether the mother of your children is your wife or your fidanzata?”
“She is my wife. We have been married thirteen months.”