Half-way up the street, at the corner of a house, stood an image of the Virgin, round which the villagers stopped for a moment, as much to rest as to pay their devotions. As Inglesant stopped also, he noticed an old man of a wretched and abject demeanour, leaning against the wall of the house as though scarcely able to stand, and looking eagerly at some of the provisions which were carried past him. True to his custom, Inglesant—when he had given him some small coin as an alms—began to speak to him.
"You have carried many such loads as these, father, I doubt not, in your time, though it must be a light one now."
"I am past carrying even myself," said the other, in a weak and whining voice; "but I have not carried loads all my life. I have kept a shop on the Goldsmith's Bridge, and have lived at my ease. Now I have nothing left me but the sun—the sun and the cool shade."
"Yours is a hard fate."
"It is a hard and miserable world, and yet I love it. It has done me nothing but evil, and yet I watch it and seek out what it does, and listen to what goes on, just as if I thought to hear of any good fortune likely to come to me. Foolish old man that I am! What is it to me what people say or do, or who dies, or who is married? and why should I come out here to see the market people pass, and climb this street to hear of the murder that was done here last night, and look at the body that lies in the room above?"
"What murder?" said Inglesant. "Who was murdered, and by whom?"
"He is a foreigner; they say an Inglese—a traveller here merely. Who murdered him I know not, though they do say that too."
"Where is the body?" said Inglesant. "Let us go up." And he gave the old man another small coin.
The old man looked at him for a moment with a peculiar expression.
"Better not, Signore," he said; "better go home."