I have carried the commission about Italy several months. Before I
left England, there came to me one night a certain generous and
gentle English nobleman (he is dead in these days when I relate the
story, and exiles have lost their best British friend), with this
request: 'Whenever you come to such a town, will you seek out one
Giovanni Carlavero, who keeps a little wine-shop there, mention my
name to him suddenly, and observe how it affects him?' I accepted
the trust, and am on my way to discharge it.
The sirocco has been blowing all day, and it is a hot unwholesome
evening with no cool sea-breeze. Mosquitoes and fire-flies are
lively enough, but most other creatures are faint. The coquettish
airs of pretty young women in the tiniest and wickedest of dolls'
straw hats, who lean out at opened lattice blinds, are almost the
only airs stirring. Very ugly and haggard old women with distaffs,
and with a grey tow upon them that looks as if they were spinning
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out their own hair (I suppose they were once pretty, too, but it is
very difficult to believe so), sit on the footway leaning against
house walls. Everybody who has come for water to the fountain,
stays there, and seems incapable of any such energetic idea as
going home. Vespers are over, though not so long but that I can
smell the heavy resinous incense as I pass the church. No man
seems to be at work, save the coppersmith. In an Italian town he
is always at work, and always thumping in the deadliest manner.
I keep straight on, and come in due time to the first on the right:
a narrow dull street, where I see a well-favoured man of good
stature and military bearing, in a great cloak, standing at a door.
Drawing nearer to this threshold, I see it is the threshold of a
small wine-shop; and I can just make out, in the dim light, the
inscription that it is kept by Giovanni Carlavero.
I touch my hat to the figure in the cloak, and pass in, and draw a
stool to a little table. The lamp (just such another as they dig
out of Pompeii) is lighted, but the place is empty. The figure in
the cloak has followed me in, and stands before me.
'The master?'
'At your service, sir.'
'Please to give me a glass of the wine of the country.'
He turns to a little counter, to get it. As his striking face is
pale, and his action is evidently that of an enfeebled man, I
remark that I fear he has been ill. It is not much, he courteously
and gravely answers, though bad while it lasts: the fever.
As he sets the wine on the little table, to his manifest surprise I
lay my hand on the back of his, look him in the face, and say in a
low voice: 'I am an Englishman, and you are acquainted with a
friend of mine. Do you recollect - ?' and I mentioned the name of
my generous countryman.
Instantly, he utters a loud cry, bursts into tears, and falls on
his knees at my feet, clasping my legs in both his arms and bowing
his head to the ground.
Some years ago, this man at my feet, whose over-fraught heart is
heaving as if it would burst from his breast, and whose tears are
wet upon the dress I wear, was a galley-slave in the North of
Italy. He was a political offender, having been concerned in the
then last rising, and was sentenced to imprisonment for life. That
he would have died in his chains, is certain, but for the
circumstance that the Englishman happened to visit his prison.
It was one of the vile old prisons of Italy, and a part of it was
below the waters of the harbour. The place of his confinement was
an arched under-ground and under-water gallery, with a grill-gate
at the entrance, through which it received such light and air as it
got. Its condition was insufferably foul, and a stranger could
hardly breathe in it, or see in it with the aid of a torch. At the
upper end of this dungeon, and consequently in the worst position,
as being the furthest removed from light and air, the Englishman
first beheld him, sitting on an iron bedstead to which he was
chained by a heavy chain. His countenance impressed the Englishmen
as having nothing in common with the faces of the malefactors with
whom he was associated, and he talked with him, and learnt how he
came to be there.
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When the Englishman emerged from the dreadful den into the light of
day, he asked his conductor, the governor of the jail, why Giovanni
Carlavero was put into the worst place?
'Because he is particularly recommended,' was the stringent answer.
'Recommended, that is to say, for death?'
'Excuse me; particularly recommended,' was again the answer.
'He has a bad tumour in his neck, no doubt occasioned by the
hardship of his miserable life. If he continues to be neglected,
and he remains where he is, it will kill him.'
'Excuse me, I can do nothing. He is particularly recommended.'
The Englishman was staying in that town, and he went to his home
there; but the figure of this man chained to the bedstead made it
no home, and destroyed his rest and peace. He was an Englishman of
an extraordinarily tender heart, and he could not bear the picture.
He went back to the prison grate; went back again and again, and
talked to the man and cheered him. He used his utmost influence to
get the man unchained from the bedstead, were it only for ever so
short a time in the day, and permitted to come to the grate. It
look a long time, but the Englishman's station, personal character,
and steadiness of purpose, wore out opposition so far, and that
grace was at last accorded. Through the bars, when he could thus
get light upon the tumour, the Englishman lanced it, and it did
well, and healed. His strong interest in the prisoner had greatly
increased by this time, and he formed the desperate resolution that
he would exert his utmost self-devotion and use his utmost efforts,
to get Carlavero pardoned.
If the prisoner had been a brigand and a murderer, if he had
committed every non-political crime in the Newgate Calendar and out
of it, nothing would have been easier than for a man of any court
or priestly influence to obtain his release. As it was, nothing
could have been more difficult. Italian authorities, and English
authorities who had interest with them, alike assured the
Englishman that his object was hopeless. He met with nothing but
evasion, refusal, and ridicule. His political prisoner became a
joke in the place. It was especially observable that English
Circumlocution, and English Society on its travels, were as
humorous on the subject as Circumlocution and Society may be on any
subject without loss of caste. But, the Englishman possessed (and
proved it well in his life) a courage very uncommon among us: he
had not the least fear of being considered a bore, in a good humane
cause. So he went on persistently trying, and trying, and trying,
t
o get Giovanni Carlavero out. That prisoner had been rigorously
re-chained, after the tumour operation, and it was not likely that
his miserable life could last very long.
One day, when all the town knew about the Englishman and his
political prisoner, there came to the Englishman, a certain
sprightly Italian Advocate of whom he had some knowledge; and he
made this strange proposal. 'Give me a hundred pounds to obtain
Carlavero's release. I think I can get him a pardon, with that
money. But I cannot tell you what I am going to do with the money,
nor must you ever ask me the question if I succeed, nor must you
ever ask me for an account of the money if I fail.' The Englishman
decided to hazard the hundred pounds. He did so, and heard not
another word of the matter. For half a year and more, the Advocate
made no sign, and never once 'took on' in any way, to have the
subject on his mind. The Englishman was then obliged to change his
residence to another and more famous town in the North of Italy.
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He parted from the poor prisoner with a sorrowful heart, as from a
doomed man for whom there was no release but Death.
The Englishman lived in his new place of abode another half-year
and more, and had no tidings of the wretched prisoner. At length,
one day, he received from the Advocate a cool, concise, mysterious
note, to this effect. 'If you still wish to bestow that benefit
upon the man in whom you were once interested, send me fifty pounds
more, and I think it can be ensured.' Now, the Englishman had long
settled in his mind that the Advocate was a heartless sharper, who
had preyed upon his credulity and his interest in an unfortunate
sufferer. So, he sat down and wrote a dry answer, giving the
Advocate to understand that he was wiser now than he had been
formerly, and that no more money was extractable from his pocket.
He lived outside the city gates, some mile or two from the postoffice,
and was accustomed to walk into the city with his letters
and post them himself. On a lovely spring day, when the sky was
exquisitely blue, and the sea Divinely beautiful, he took his usual
walk, carrying this letter to the Advocate in his pocket. As he
went along, his gentle heart was much moved by the loveliness of
the prospect, and by the thought of the slowly dying prisoner
chained to the bedstead, for whom the universe had no delights. As
he drew nearer and nearer to the city where he was to post the
letter, he became very uneasy in his mind. He debated with
himself, was it remotely possible, after all, that this sum of
fifty pounds could restore the fellow-creature whom he pitied so
much, and for whom he had striven so hard, to liberty? He was not
a conventionally rich Englishman - very far from that - but, he had
a spare fifty pounds at the banker's. He resolved to risk it.
Without doubt, GOD has recompensed him for the resolution.
He went to the banker's, and got a bill for the amount, and
enclosed it in a letter to the Advocate that I wish I could have
seen. He simply told the Advocate that he was quite a poor man,
and that he was sensible it might be a great weakness in him to
part with so much money on the faith of so vague a communication;
but, that there it was, and that he prayed the Advocate to make a
good use of it. If he did otherwise no good could ever come of it,
and it would lie heavy on his soul one day.
Within a week, the Englishman was sitting at his breakfast, when he
heard some suppressed sounds of agitation on the staircase, and
Giovanni Carlavero leaped into the room and fell upon his breast, a
free man!
Conscious of having wronged the Advocate in his own thoughts, the
Englishman wrote him an earnest and grateful letter, avowing the
fact, and entreating him to confide by what means and through what
agency he had succeeded so well. The Advocate returned for answer
through the post, 'There are many things, as you know, in this
Italy of ours, that are safest and best not even spoken of - far
less written of. We may meet some day, and then I may tell you
what you want to know; not here, and now.' But, the two never did
meet again. The Advocate was dead when the Englishman gave me my
trust; and how the man had been set free, remained as great a
mystery to the Englishman, and to the man himself, as it was to me.
But, I knew this:- here was the man, this sultry night, on his
knees at my feet, because I was the Englishman's friend; here were
his tears upon my dress; here were his sobs choking his utterance;
here were his kisses on my hands, because they had touched the
hands that had worked out his release. He had no need to tell me
it would be happiness to him to die for his benefactor; I doubt if
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I ever saw real, sterling, fervent gratitude of soul, before or
since.
He was much watched and suspected, he said, and had had enough to
do to keep himself out of trouble. This, and his not having
prospered in his worldly affairs, had led to his having failed in
his usual communications to the Englishman for - as I now remember
the period - some two or three years. But, his prospects were
brighter, and his wife who had been very ill had recovered, and his
I carry to his benefactor the first of its wine? Ay, that I would
(I told him with enthusiasm), and not a drop of it should be
spilled or lost!
He had cautiously closed the door before speaking of himself, and
had talked with such excess of emotion, and in a provincial Italian
so difficult to understand, that I had more than once been obliged
to stop him, and beg him to have compassion on me and be slower and
calmer. By degrees he became so, and tranquilly walked back with
me to the hotel. There, I sat down before I went to bed and wrote
a faithful account of him to the Englishman: which I concluded by
saying that I would bring the wine home, against any difficulties,
every drop.
Early next morning, when I came out at the hotel door to pursue my
journey, I found my friend waiting with one of those immense
bottles in which the Italian peasants store their wine - a bottle
holding some half-dozen gallons - bound round with basket-work for
greater safety on the journey. I see him now, in the bright
sunshine, tears of gratitude in his eyes, proudly inviting my
attention to this corpulent bottle. (At the street-comer hard by,
two high-flavoured, able-bodied monks - pretending to talk
together, but keeping their four evil eyes upon us.)
How the bottle had been got there, did not appear; but the
difficulty of getting it into the ramshackle vetturino carriage in
which I was departing, was so great, and it took up so much room
when it was got in, that I elected to sit outside. The last I saw
of Giovanni Carlavero was his running throug
h the town by the side
of the jingling wheels, clasping my hand as I stretched it down
from the box, charging me with a thousand last loving and dutiful
messages to his dear patron, and finally looking in at the bottle
as it reposed inside, with an admiration of its honourable way of
travelling that was beyond measure delightful.
And now, what disquiet of mind this dearly-beloved and highlytreasured
Bottle began to cost me, no man knows. It was my
precious charge through a long tour, and, for hundreds of miles, I
never had it off my mind by day or by night. Over bad roads - and
they were many - I clung to it with affectionate desperation. Up
mountains, I looked in at it and saw it helplessly tilting over on
its back, with terror. At innumerable inn doors when the weather
was bad, I was obliged to be put into my vehicle before the Bottle
could be got in, and was obliged to have the Bottle lifted out
before human aid could come near me. The Imp of the same name,
except that his associations were all evil and these associations
were all good, would have been a less troublesome travelling
companion. I might have served Mr. Cruikshank as a subject for a
new illustration of the miseries of the Bottle. The National
Temperance Society might have made a powerful Tract of me.
The suspicions that attached to this innocent Bottle, greatly
aggravated my difficulties. It was like the apple-pie in the
child's book. Parma pouted at it, Modena mocked it, Tuscany
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tackled it, Naples nibbled it, Rome refused it, Austria accused it,
Soldiers suspected it, Jesuits jobbed it. I composed a neat
Oration, developing my inoffensive intentions in connexion with
this Bottle, and delivered it in an infinity of guard-houses, at a
multitude of town gates, and on every drawbridge, angle, and
rampart, of a complete system of fortifications. Fifty times a
day, I got down to harangue an infuriated soldiery about the
Bottle. Through the filthy degradation of the abject and vile
Roman States, I had as much difficulty in working my way with the
Bottle, as if it had bottled up a complete system of heretical
theology. In the Neapolitan country, where everybody was a spy, a
soldier, a priest, or a lazzarone, the shameless beggars of all
four denominations incessantly pounced on the Bottle and made it a