In the old days, as
his excellency might remember, they had eaten a bit of meat on Sundays,
and drunk aquarolle with their supper; but since the new taxes it was as
much as the farmers could do to feed their cattle, without having a
scrap to spare for themselves. Jacopone, 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.
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