“You call me duffere,” he said quickly; “beggare I understand, but duffere I never heard.”
“It means,” said Harry, drawing on his imagination, “the best-hearted, silly kind fellow in the world, always going out of his way to help somebody, holding out his hand to a suspicious beast the moment he lands in a strange place, never giving him up though he behaves like a brute, giving everything like an idiot, but flaring up if you want to give him anything in return.”
“Not that, not that,” said Paolo, laying his hand upon his friend’s arm. “I give you my lofe, and I wait for your lofe in return. If there is a thing you want I take it upon myself. Siamo amici! is there any more to say? I know nothing; all is in that. If it is true that I am your amico, then you are a beggare, you are a beast, you are all bad,” said Paolo, with flashing eyes, “to be so base as to offer to pay me—money. Ah! che! che! there is nothing too bad, nothing too dreadful to say. Inglese brutale! false amico——!” Here he stopped all at once, and gazed piteously into Harry’s face. “Forgive me, forgive me, my friend!” he cried.
This all happened at dinner, at the table-d’hôte, which fortunately was not very full that day. There was nobody sitting opposite, which was a great relief to Harry’s mind; but he could see from the end of the table the cynical Englishman, who had never taken any notice of him, giving an amused glance now and then at the group of friends—Paolo shedding tears into his plate, Antonio, with a face full of sympathy, tenderly removing it, essaying to console the sufferer. This was a greater trial to Harry’s temper than even the sentiment of Paolo. He shot an answering glance of defiance at his countryman, who had never so much as given the help of a kind word to the stranger.
“Let’s say no more about it, Paolo,” he said, “you and I are quite different, you know. I daresay I am a brutal Englishman, but I can’t help it. That’s our nature. We don’t think so much of a little thing as you do, and we abhor making a fuss. Perhaps you don’t know what that means?”
“I will nevare make a fuss more. I will learn to be a duffere, and do as you do,” said Paolo, in all the tenderness of reconciliation.
Harry looked at him something as Joan looked at his mother. He had too good a heart to despise his little friend, and he did not understand him; but this sentiment was extremely inconvenient and very troublesome—on that point there could be no doubt.
However, later in the evening, Paolo, who had inherited all the Italian thrift, gave his friend some very sensible advice. Instead of going to the Café, they went to Paolo’s appartamento, which was on the highest floor of a high house in one of the narrow streets. Though he called it an appartamento it was a single room, with an odd little closet in the shape of a kitchen, and offices attached to it. The room itself was somewhat low in the roof, being so high up, but had three or four windows, and a little balcony suspended over the street, into which it made Harry dizzy to look down as into an Alpine ravine. The floor was of tiles, the walls white, with a pattern in distemper, very graceful and flowing, round the top and bottom. The bed was a very tiny and bare article, put away in a corner. In another corner stood a table. A few chairs, and an old, very straight-backed settee, with two arms, in old gilding and brocade, stood against the wall. There was a tall, brass lucerna, the lamp common throughout Italy, with its little bundle of snuffers and extinguisher and scissors to trim the wick, hanging from it by a chain, and a few books on a shelf. Nothing could be more bare. There was a small rug by the bedside, but no other covering for the bare area of tiles which was the chief feature in the room. Paolo had a little picture of the Madonna, a bad copy of that which is called the Madonna del Granduca, and a basin for holy water over his bed, which was covered with a red and blue cotton coverlet. Everything about showed the same bareness and absence both of comfort and ornament. But Paolo regarded his appartamento with eyes full of pleasure. He saw nothing wanting in it. It housed him sufficiently of nights, and was cool and pleasant in the summer mornings, when he rose, as most Italians do, in the early daylight, to get through all the private work he might happen to have. He looked round upon it with a gentle complaisance. Some old prints, and one or two copies of famous pictures, hung on the walls. In the best light was an old painting of a gloomy and uncertain aspect, which Paolo believed to be a Margheritone. It might have been anything. He was very proud of it. “Ecco!” he said, when they went in, “my old master. He is a little dark, but when you study him you will find much in him. He is of the trecento—very early—very early. The painter have seen the blessed father, San Francesco; that indicates how old it must be.”
Harry did not make any reply to this. For his part he liked things better for being new. The dark old picture had no charm for him at all, and he thought the appartamento rather worse as being larger than his own little room at the hotel, which had hitherto seemed to him the last example of bareness and dreariness. “A horrid little hole,” more adapted for a dog than a man.
“I’ll tell you one other thing,” said Paolo, taking him affectionately by the shoulders before they sat down by the table; “if you will make economies, and do well, Isaack mio, you will not live always in the hotel. Me I dine there; it is the best thing to do; but live all the time—oh no! It is only for Englishmen to be so extravagant like that.”