“But I thought Venice interesting.”
“Sufficiently, signor. Ma!” said the Mouse, shrugging his shoulders, and putting on the air of being luxuriously fastidious in his choice of cities, “the water is so bad in Venice.”
The Mouse is dressed in a heavy winter overcoat, and has no garment to form a compromise with his shirt-sleeves, if he should wish to render the weather more endurable by throwing off the surtout. In spite of his momentary assumption of consequence, I suspect that his coat is in the Monte di Pietà. It comes out directly that he is a ship-carpenter who has worked in the Arsenal of Venice, and at the ship-yards in Trieste.
But there is no work any more. He went to Trieste lately to get a job on the three frigates which the Sultan had ordered to be built there. Ma! After all, the frigates are to be built in Marseilles instead. There is nothing. And every thing is so dear. In Venetia you spend much and gain little. Perhaps there is work at Ancona.
By this time the horses are watered; the Mouse regains his seat, and we almost forget him, till he jumps from his place, just before we reach the hotel in Rovigo, and disappears—down the first hole in the side of a house, perhaps. He might have done much worse, and spent the night at the hotel, as we did.
The next morning at four o’clock, when we start, he is on the box again, nibbling bread and cheese, and glancing furtively back at us to say good morning. He has little twinkling black eyes, just like a mouse, and a sharp moustache, and sharp tuft on his chin—as like Victor Emanuel’s as a mouse’s tuft can be.
The cold morning air seems to shrivel him, and he crouches into a little gelid ball on the seat beside the driver, while we wind along the Po on the smooth gray road; while the twilight lifts slowly from the distances of field and vineyard; while the black boats of the Po, with their gaunt white sails, show spectrally through the mists; while the trees and the bushes break into innumerable voice, and the birds are glad of another day in Italy; while the peasant drives his mellow-eyed, dun oxen afield; while his wife comes in her scarlet bodice to the door, and the children’s faces peer out from behind her skirts; while the air freshens, the east flushes, and the great miracle is wrought anew.
Once again, before we reach the ferry of the Po, the Mouse leaps down and disappears as mysteriously as at Rovigo. We see him no more till we meet in the station on the other side of the river, where we hear him bargaining long and earnestly with the ticket-seller for a third-class passage to Bologna. He fails to get it, I think, at less than the usual rate, for he retires from the contest more shrunken and forlorn than ever, and walks up and down the station, startled at a word, shocked at any sudden noise.
For curiosity, I ask how much he paid for crossing the river, mentioning the fabulous sum it had cost us.
It appears that he paid sixteen soldi only. “What could they do when a man was in misery? I had nothing else.”