"He persuaded another man's wife to run away with him. She was a peasant, very young and innocent, with a sweet pensive Perugino face; she had been his model, up to her marriage with Niccola Potenza."
There was a sharp affirmative breath from the listener.
"Niccola Potenza was a cooper, with good prospects. He was considered quite a match for the girl; but he turned out to be dull, silent, and preoccupied. Little Agata was romantic; and her thoughts ran easily back to my friend. The fault was, assuredly, all his. He thought that he loved her, and so, indeed, he did; although he loved better, alas, the adventure and the rebellion. At any rate, he took her away boldly from her husband and her babes, and set up life in his old studio, in Florence. The cooper, sworn to revenge himself, had nearly hunted my friend down, when on Easter Day he fell from a crowded and festooned inn-balcony, and broke his thigh. Somehow, after that, his fury failed him; and he sank, under his misfortune, into a sort of apathy. Things went wrong also with the lovers. Agata kept only for a while her soft, joyous, docile ways, and then grew restless and wretched, with the canker of a good heart spoiled, which nothing on earth can cure. She would spend hours in the chapel near by, her face covered, thinking and weeping; and then she would go back to her little household tasks, and move about in my friend's sight, her pale penitent face driving him wild more effectually than any audible reproach could have done. Of course he saw what was in her soul: the struggle between her foolish passion for him, and mortal home-sickness for the inner peace which had attended her old honorable life. He, on his part, resented the moral awakening in her, and stamped down both her conscience and his own. Against the voice within which bade him, since he had done her an irretrievable wrong, to take the legal burden of it upon himself, and make her his wife in America, arose his tyrannous social cowardice. He dared not; he had a depraved but intelligent dread of discord and incongruities. And so, as many another man as weak has done, he served his æsthetic sense, and threw honor to the winds. He was never, I think, wilfully unkind to Agata; his selfishness would seem to me now less diabolic had he tried to estrange her from him. But as soon as their first apprehensive year together had passed, without any talk on the subject, he left her. Before he took his train, that night in May, my friend drew up a paper for poor Agata's maintenance. The sum was small, but much more than she had been accustomed to call her own. I know he had no forewarning of—of his child; he provided for her alone." Mr. Openshaw was speaking with some difficulty. "When were you born?"
"On the feast of San Stefano, the twenty-sixta of December, eighteen hundred sixta-five."
Rodolfo had been listening under a strain keener than that of physical deafness. The more nervously overwrought of the two at this particular moment, he was likewise the more restrained. A certain question was hot in his throat. Though he had not understood all of Mr. Openshaw's melancholy monologue, he had apprehended the heart of it only too well. But he said nothing further.
A flock of pioneer blackbirds, in delirious chatter, were gathering overhead for their autumn migration, darkening the narrow sky-space with their circling wings. Openshaw looked up.
"Those birds go from pole to pole to find—what? So did he. His youth was killed in him; and before long, nevertheless, he was cheerful and active again, and courted by the world. He came home to his own honest and normal life, and after a while he married. He had no tidings of Agata, and had actually resolved once to try to find her, when he heard what must have been a false report, that she had died; and he did not doubt it, for he used to see her faithful patient little face in all his dreams. From what I have learned of late, I believe that he is most miserable, and near his own end. He does not deserve to hear of her last days. But if by letting me know, you can punish him through me, do not spare him. I will not, I promise you."
Rodolfo sat in the boat, immovable, the thin leaves of the bowery wild-grape flapping overhead, and flickering him with elfin light and shade. "My mother," he began in a low voice, "did the best: the grace of God was in her. Niccola was sick; the trade was gone, and then was mucha poverty. With me in her amiable arms, she return on the feet to Ferrara, and petition him; and, lo! the good cripple man, he pardon. There us four in one family, we flourish. The American money she could notta help, go among all till all are grown; she die of the fever sixa year ago, with many candles and masses for her soul; and because it is notta fit that my brothers spend on me, I ask Niccola's blessing, and come to America. That is the end."
Openshaw inquired presently, when he could do so: "Had you any education, as a child? Can you read and write, Rodolfo?"