The Romance of Giovanni Calvotti | Page 2

me, and I am contented in spite of her. Good gracious! Is a man to lose everything because his stomach is empty? The goddess Circumstance shall not keep my heart empty, let her keep my shelves as bare as she will. My Lady of Circumstance, Giovanni Calvotti proffers to you a polite but irrevocable defiance!
This morning my canvas child was a landscape. This afternoon it was an inglorious smudge. It is now on its way back to the landscape condition, and will have revived all its glories by to-morrow. It was noon when I rang my bell.
'Madame,' I said to my landlady, in my cheerful Italian manner, 'will you again extend to me your courtesy?'
My landlady is not an educated woman, but she is a good creature, and has a delicate and refined susceptibility. She recognises in me a gentleman. She reveres in my person a genius to which I make no pretension. I am not a man of genius. A man of genius does one thing supremely well. Some men of exceptional talent do many things admirably, but nothing supremely well. I am a man of exceptional talent. Pardon the modest candour which is compelled to assume the garb of egotism.
My landlady looked at my canvas child, and then at me, and laughed.
'To Mr. Aaron's, sir?' Asking this, she put her hands upon the edges of the framework of the canvas.
'Yes, madame,' I answered, for we have always the same formula on Fridays at noon. 'To my estimable uncle round the corner.'
'Anything more than usual?' my landlady asked me.
'No, madame,' I answered. 'A loaf, a pound of coffee, half a pound of bird's-eye tobacco, the ticket from my estimable uncle, a receipt for the week's rent, and the change.'
My landlady laughed again and said, 'Very good, sir.' Then she went downstairs with the picture, and I felt unhappy when my canvas child was gone, and was fain (an idiom employed by your best writers) to solace myself with my violin. So far there was nothing to mark this Friday morning from any other Friday morning for the last nine weeks. It is now nine weeks that I have been a hermit. I was very hungry, and was glad to think of the coffee and the loaf. I should have told you that my habits are very abstemious, and that I am admirably healthy on a low diet. My native cheerfulness, my piano, my violin, my violoncello, my canvas children, and my pipes, all nourish me like meat and wine. I played upon my violin a little impromptu good-bye to my landscape--a melodious farewell to a sweet creation. The time seemed long before my landlady returned, and when I put back my violin in its case, I heard a sound of crying on the stairs. I opened the door and looked out, and there was a little English angel, whom I had never before seen, sitting upon the topmost step, close to my attic door, crying as if her heart had broken.
'What is the matter, my poor little maid?' I asked very tenderly, for I know that young girls are easily frightened by strangers.
She looked up with eyes like the skies I was born under. The pretty pale cheeks were all wet, and the pretty red lips were trembling, and those beautiful blue heavens were raining as no blue skies ought to rain.
'Ah, come, my child,' I said to her; 'how can I help you if you do not tell me what is the matter?'
'Oh, signor,' she said, with many sobs and tears, 'I have spoiled your beautiful picture.'
She held it up--my canvas child--all besmeared with mud. I could not resist one exclamation of sorrow. The news was too sudden for my self-possession to remain. But when I saw that the little English angel began to weep afresh at this exclamation, I longed for one moment to be able to get out of my own body, that I might chastise a poltroon so un-philosophical. I took her by the hand instead, and led her into this room and made her sit down, and, whilst I sponged the picture with cold water, made her tell me how the accident had happened. For I thought, in my Machiavellian Italian way, 'If she should go away without having quite familiarised herself with this unhappy incident, she will always be afraid of me.' Therefore I lured her on.
'Mrs. Hopkins asked me to take the picture to Mr. Aaron's,' she began, still sobbing. 'I was just passing the corner when a gentleman leaped out of a cab. The cab was moving at the time, and I did not expect to see anybody jump from it. The gentleman missed his footing and stumbled against me. I fell down and the picture fell face downwards on the