The lady looked at him in wonder.
“It’s a beggar,” he explained after a moment, scratching away rapidly. “I can’t be bothered with them in here.”
She looked out of the window as well as she could for the leaves, and saw an arm in a ragged coat-sleeve, and a hand stretching toward the wall, and, at the same instant, the bell rang in her very ear with a force that made her start back. The bread was on a little shelf near by, an old knife beside it. She prudently cut the loaf in two, and dropped half to the unseen mendicant.
“That’s just like Carlin!” she exclaimed. “I don’t suppose any
one else would think of rigging up a beggars’ bell.”
“I shall know where to go when I want bread,” she said aloud, seeing him pause in his work. “It will be only to come under your window, pull a string, and hold up my apron.”
“Oh! by the way, please to pull in the string,” he added. “I never let it hang out, except when I have made an appointment. I told him to come if he didn’t get anything for dinner. Said he hadn’t eaten anything for twenty-four hours. It’s a disagreeable thing to go twenty-four hours without eating.”
Carlin knew what it was well. He had come to Rome fifteen years before without a dollar in his pocket, except what had paid his passage, and, without patronage, almost without friends, had climbed, step by step, through all the dark, steep ways of poverty, suffering what no one but himself knew, till at length a modest success rewarded his efforts. He never told his experiences, seemed to choose to forget them; but never a pitiful tale of suffering from poverty was told him without the ready answer, “Yes, yes, I know all about it,” springing as if involuntarily to his lips.
There was a knock at the door, which immediately opened without a permission, and a young man entered—one of those odious, well-dressed, rather handsome, and easy-mannered men who repel one more than rags, and ugliness, and stupidity.
“Good-morning!” he said with confident politeness. “Don’t let me interrupt you. I only want to see Mrs. Cranston’s bust. Promised her I would take a look at it.”