"Let me pass, Emmanuel," she said to a broken-backed, stunted broker, who was hanging some filthy rags on a string which stretched across a narrow lane.
"Pass! so you shall, my love, my own bright eyes: but you shall give me a kiss first," said the cadaverous-looking wretch; and he put his thin, bleared, and hairy lips near her face; but in the act he turned his head half round, and, for the first time, he saw me.
"Oh, I ask your pardon, Rachel!" he said; "the Christian, of course, before one of our own tribe. I know you well, my darling, you never deceived me in your brightest days. You are a great lady; but, after all, we are both more or less in the same line. I sell old clothes, you sell old kisses; the difference is, that I cannot get rid of my wares as fast as you can of your kisses."
Suddenly she turned round in all her beauty; flushed with indignation and trembling with anger, contempt, bitterness, and hatred, could not have been more gloriously expressed. The sallow, sickly, hollow-eyed impertinent was looking up at her face when, with one push, she hurled him over a heap of rubbish, which in the centre of the street supplied the place of a gutter; and shouts of laughter saluted him as he slunk, downcast and defeated, back into his shop.
When I looked at him, I observed that his eyes, which before had only expressed lust and sordid avarice, now gleamed wildly with a look of intense and bitter hatred.
There are none whom we are so disposed to punish as the mean and sordid, and yet there are none whom it is more dangerous to offend; they feel, with tenfold virulence, the disgust which they engender; they go about bearing with them a curse, which they are ever ready to transfer to any who offend them. No man is ignorant of his possessing the lower qualities; and no one, not even he who suffers from their action, can so intensely hate and despise them as their possessor. They are the chains on the galley-slaves, which clank at every step, but which they cannot shake off, allowing them only that amount of liberty of action which incessantly recalls their restraint.
My guide turned sharp round to the left, and the next moment we were at the foot of the broken stair. Two or three dogs, which as usual had taken possession of the small space allotted for the passage to the primo piano, rushed, with frantic yells, down stairs. It could scarcely be properly called a house; it was rather a collection of planks nailed together, supporting the most rickety description of roof. It was quite wonderful how the whole fabric held together at all; for between the chinks of the rotten and creaking floor we could look into the shop below, where, amid immense piles of bales and casks, children were riotously playing.
There was a curious expression of doubt and uneasiness in Rachel's countenance, when, with some slight degree of impatience, I begged her to be quick and show me the lace. She looked carefully round the room, as though fearful of being observed. At last, after some hesitation, she ransacked an old drawer, and drew forth the lace from beneath a heap of rags and rubbish.
It was certainly the most magnificent specimen of old lace which I had seen in Italy. A large and deep flounce of the pointe du roi; that lace which was made solely for the Grand Monarque, and subsequently sold at immense prices, a great portion of it coming into the possession of the cardinals. It was in a most perfect state, and the only thing that surprised me in the transaction was the excessively low price which she asked for it: but, of course, it was not my business to tell her the real value of her own property; so I eagerly wrote a check on Torlonia, and requested her to pack it up.
My attention had latterly been so absorbed by the beauty of the fabric, that it was not until I placed the check in her hand I observed how she trembled. She endeavored, when she saw me observing her, to conceal her agitation, but it soon defied even her dissimulation. She leant against a small chest of drawers, and had barely strength enough to point to a cup, which was half full of spirits, which I handed to her. She drank it off with the energy of apparent despair, and then it was that she commenced to revive slowly; but her forehead was still damp from agitation, and her lips were as pale and colorless as her cheeks.