Gradually his moaning sank and then stopped with a
dry sob. He crawled on his knees a little nearer
to the bed and eyed fearfully a patch of blood on
the counterpane. Just God! what was that patch?
A faint circle smeared with the finger, and through
the midst of it a ragged dart. Carlo Formaggia
had been there! He knew that mark! And then
the whole truth blazed before him like a sheet of
fire. He fell forward on his face. The thin
thread of scarlet from Marco Zoppa’s gaping throat
crawled drop by drop on to his shoulder.
Carlo Formaggia had limed his bird.
WITH THE BROWN BEAR
The secret of happy travelling is contrast. Suffer,
that you may drowse thereafter: grill, that you
may have a heat on you worth assuagement. Wherefore,
to the Italian wanderer, it will be worth while to
endure the fierceness of the Lombard plain, even the
gilded modernisms of Milan (blistering though they
may be under the stroke of the naked sun) and the
dusty, painful traverse of the Apennines, to drop down
at last into the broad green peace of the Val D’Arno.
Take, however, the first halting-place you can.
You will find yourself in a hollow of the hills, helping
the brown bear of Pistoja keep the Northern gates of
Tuscany. It is not unlikely that the Apennine
may “walk abroad with the storm,” or hide
his moss-brown slopes in great sheets of mist.
This, while it means a fine sight, means also rain
for Pistoja. A quiet rain will accordingly fall
upon the little city, gently but persistently.
Only in the gleams may you guess that you have the
Tuscan sky over you and the smiling Tuscan Art round
about. But the ways of the Pistolesi will confirm
the feeble knees; such at least was my case.
For the Pistolesi were there beside foul weather,
and splashed about under green umbrellas with prodigious
jokes to cut at each other’s expense, of a sort
we reserve for Spring or early June. For them,
with a vintage none too good to be garnered, it might
have been the finest weather in the world: but
I am bound to add my belief that they would have laughed
were it the worst. With no money, no weather,
and taxes intolerable, Pistoja laughed and looked
handsome. Was not Boccaccio a Pistolese?
I was reminded of his book at every turn of the road:
life is a wanton story there, or, say, a Masque of
Green Things, enacted by a splendid fairy rout.
They were still the well-favoured race Dino Compagni
described them far back in the fourteenth century—“formati
di bella statura oltre a’ Toscani,” he
says. The words hold good of their grandsons—the
men leaner and longer, hardier and keener than you
find them in Lucca or Siena; and the women carry their
heads high, and when they smile at you (as they will)
you think the sun must be shining. They are mountaineers,
a strong race. At pallone one day, I saw
muscles “all a-ripple down the back,” arms
and shoulders, which would have intoxicated the great
