“So you believe that, my son?” asked a voice behind him. He sat up and looked about; an old man in a long dusky cloak and small flat cap had come over the brow of the hill. He answered, a trifle defiantly, “Perhaps I do. At any rate, that is the song.”
“Oh, it is true,” the old man said quietly as he knelt beside Zipero on the turf. He examined the bandages on the little dog’s neck and forelegs, undid them, laid some bruised leaves from his basket on the wounds. The small creature, with his eyes on his master’s face, licked the stranger’s hand gratefully to show that he was more at ease. “Man alone is free. This herb cannot change itself; it must heal; that one must slay. Saturn is ever the Greater Malignant; our Lady Venus cannot rule war, nor can Mars rule a Court of Love. The most uncertain creature in the world is a man. The stars themselves cannot force me to revile God.”
Ranulph was silent. After months and years among rude street crowds, the dignity and kindliness of the old man’s ways were like a voice from another world.
“I can cure this little animal,” the stranger went on presently, “if you will let me take him to my lodgings, where I have certain salves and medicines. I shall be pleased if you will come also, unless you are occupied.”
Ranulph laughed; that was absurd. “I am a street singer,” he said. “My time is not in demand at present. I must tell you, however, that the Count is my enemy—if a friendless beggar can have such a thing. One of his varlets set his ban-dog on us both, this morning.”
“He will give me no trouble,” said the old man quietly. “Come, children.”
Ranulph got to his feet and followed with Zipero in his arms. At the foot of the hill on the other side was a nondescript building which had grown up around what was left of a Roman house. The unruined pillars and strongly cemented stone-work contrasted oddly with the thatch and tile of peasant workmen. They passed through a gate where an old and wrinkled woman peered through a window at them, then they went up a flight of stairs outside the wall to a tower-room in the third story. A chorus of welcome arose from a strange company of creatures, caged and free: finches, linnets, a parrot, a raven which sidled up at once to have its head scratched, pigeons strutting and cooing on the window-ledge, and a large cat of a slaty-blue color with solemn, topaz eyes, which took no more note of Zipero than if he had been a dog of stone. A basket was provided for the small patient, near the window that looked out over the hills; the old servingwoman brought food, simple but well-cooked and delicious, and Ranulph was motioned to a seat at the table. It was all done so easily and quickly that dinner was over before Ranulph found words for the gratitude which filled his soul.
“Will you not tell me,” he said hesitatingly at last, “to whom I may offer my thanks—and service—if I may not serve you in some way?”
“Give to some one else in need, when you can,” said his host calmly. “I am Tomaso of Padua. A physician’s business is healing, wherever he finds sickness in man or beast. Your little friend there needed certain things; your need is for other things; the man who is now coming up the stairs needs something else.” Taking a harp from a corner he added, “Perhaps you will amuse yourself with this for an hour, while I see what that knock at the door means, this time.”
Whoever the visitor was, he was shown into another room, and Ranulph presently forgot all his troubles and almost lost the consciousness of his surroundings, as the harp sang under his hand. He began to put into words a song which had been haunting him for days,—a ballad of a captive knight who spent seven long years in Fairyland, but in spite of all that the Fairy Queen’s enchantment could do, never forgot his own people. Many of the popular romances of the time were fairy-tales full of magic spells, giants, caverns within the hills, witches and wood-folk hoofed and horned like Pan, sea-monsters, palaces which appeared and vanished like moon-shine. When they were sung to the harp-music of a troubadour who knew his work, they seemed very real.