she continued, was bent double with the rheumatism, and had not been able to drive a plough or to work in the mulberries for over two years.  He and the farm-lads sat in the cow-stables when their work was over, for the sake of the heat, and she carried their black bread out there to them:  a cold supper tasted better in a warm place, and as his excellency knew, all the windows in the house were unglazed save in the bailiff’s parlour.  Her man would be in presently to pay his duty to his excellency; but he had grown dull-witted since the rheumatism took him, and his excellency must not take it ill if his talk was a little childish.

Thereupon Filomena excused herself, that she might put a clean shirt on Jacopone, and Odo was left to his melancholy musings.  His mind had of late run much on economic abuses; but what was any philandering with reform to this close contact with misery?  It was as though white hungry faces had suddenly stared in at the windows of his brightly-lit life.  What did these people care for education, enlightenment, the religion of humanity?  What they wanted was fodder for their cattle, a bit of meat on Sundays and a faggot on the hearth.

Filomena presently returned with her husband; but Jacopone had shrunk into a crippled tremulous old man, who pulled a vague forelock at Odo without sign of recognition.  Filomena, it was clear, was master at Pontesordo; for though Giannozzo was a man grown, and did a man’s work, he still danced to the tune of his mother’s tongue.  It was from her that Odo, shivering over the smoky hearth, gathered the details of their wretched state.  Pontesordo being a part of the ducal domain, they had led in their old days an easier life than their neighbours; but the new taxes had stripped them as bare as a mulberry-tree in June.

“How is a Christian to live, excellency, with the salt-tax doubled, so that the cows go dry for want of it; with half a zecchin on every pair of oxen, a stajo of wheat and two fowls to the parish, and not so much as a bite of grass allowed on the Duke’s lands?  In his late Highness’s day the poor folk were allowed to graze their cattle on the borders of the chase; but now a man dare not pluck a handful of weeds there, or so much as pick up a fallen twig; though the deer may trample his young wheat, and feed off the patch of beans at his very door.  They do say the Duchess has a kind heart, and gives away money to the towns-folk; but we country-people who spend our lives raising fodder for her game never hear of her Highness but when one of her game-keepers comes down on us for poaching or stealing wood.—­Yes, by the saints, and it was her Highness who sent a neighbour’s lad to the galleys last year for felling a tree in the chase; a good lad as ever dug furrow, but he lacked wood for a new plough-share, and how in God’s name was he to plough his field without it?”

So she went on, like a torrent after the spring rains; but when he named Momola she fell silent, and Giannozzo, looking sideways, drummed with his heel on the floor.