Many years ago a company, with capital to back it, took a lease of the manganese mines in the province of Valle Amena. Perhaps the “Pleasant Valley” may at one time have deserved its name; but nowadays there is nothing pleasant about the monotonous barren hills, of no use to any one but the goats, and the distant woods, too scanty to lend any tint of green to the dry and desert landscape. The company’s employés were scarcely to be blamed for not liking the place; everything was scarce, even pretty faces—at least such as had had the benefit of soap and water. But the pay was good, and more than one among them had hopes of becoming a shareholder, or at least cashier; and so things went on somehow or other. Two hundred navvies pushed the work rapidly forward, and enormous trucks full of the grey metal blocked the postal road day and night.
But all that glitters is not gold; and one day the report spread that the flourishing company had failed, as though prosperity had undermined its foundations like stagnant water. It made a great talk in the neighbourhood, and every one concluded his or her comments by long exclamations of astonishment.
“Mah!” ejaculated the old, dried-up chaplain of the Misericordia,[[18]] with his hands in the pockets of the threadbare shooting-coat which he always wore except when he put on his surplice to go and fetch the dead. “In my opinion it was just like when a set of people leave the gaming-table, where low cards have been dealt; but they do not all leave with the same advantages.”
“There is no getting at the exact truth,” remarked the landlord of the village inn, who did not repent nearly so much of his sins as he did of having given credit; “but in this business I too believe that the rogues have done the honest men who trust their neighbours, and never suspect any cheating.”
“What nonsense!” exclaimed Signor Vincenzino; and perhaps he would have said more, only that, being syndic, and very rich, he thought it possible he might be risking the chance of a decoration. He rose from his seat in the Caffé del Giappone. “In any case,” he continued, keeping his back turned to the host, “there is the law.”
“I’d like to see it!” replied mine host. “But it’s very seldom that rogues who have grown rich do not find some one to help them, in one way or another, in keeping what they have stolen.”
“Precisely!” retorted the chaplain, holding up his finger like Dante under the Uffizi. “There are certain experts and certain lawyers who show a most extraordinary ability in this respect, and acquire enormous credit, so that sometimes the Government is even forced to raise them to the rank of Commendatore. You alone, poor Phœbus...”
And so on, and so on.... It would be tedious to repeat all the conversation that took place at the Caffé del Giappone. As to Phœbus, however, I should not be altogether disposed to agree with the chaplain. If Phœbus found no one to make the best of the arguments on his side when—having been blinded by the effects of an explosion at the works—he asked for a miserable little pension, which the Company refused, saying that his misfortune was due to his own carelessness, and not to the necessities of his work,—if, I say, he had no one to plead his cause, this must be regarded merely as an accident, which happened to him, as it may happen to hundreds of others in a like condition. Then came the crash; and if a company were going to give every man what he wants, what motive could it have for declaring itself insolvent. In this case, to recommend the fulfilment of any humane duties is like running after a mist-wreath, or asking a routed army, in full retreat, to think of the dead and wounded they are leaving behind.
I do not deny that the consequences were certainly unpleasant for Phœbus, who had now eaten nothing for three days, and sat in the chimney-corner, yawning and stretching his arms to such an amazing extent, first in one direction, and then in another, that he looked like the castle of St. Angelo when the fireworks are being let off on Easter Day. A miserable hen, which sat motionless, not daring to attract attention to itself, and a cat which seemed to have nothing more to wish for in this life, having now reached the very utmost degree of leanness, and lay curled up, with half-closed eyes, on the dead ashes of the hearth, were the only creatures not audibly complaining in the melancholy darkness of the hut, which covered so much misery. It seemed as though they were meditating on the infinite vanity of things. But not so Phœbus’s wife, nor Vittorino, his little son; for the one, by continual whimpering, and the other with her reproaches, added notes of sickening despair to the symphony of those sonorous, expansive, and well-nourished yawns of the blind man. Yet the wife had not the slightest reason for envying the cat; she was dry and thin as though she had nothing left for hunger and grief to gnaw at;—she was near her confinement, poor soul, and, with her face the colour of sodden dead leaves, and her black eyes, greedy, feverishly bright, and sunken in their sockets, she was a very different person from the comely young Rosalinda whom Phœbus had married when he returned from serving in the Bersaglieri. That was six months before the accident at the quarries; and now she was more like one of the thirsty, dropsical wretches in Dante’s “Malebolge.”
