Marzios Crucifix and Zoroaster | Page 9

paid for his matchless work went straight from the
workshop to the bank, while Marzio continued to live in the simple
lodgings to which he had first brought home his wife, eighteen years
before, when he was but a young partner in the establishment he now
owned. As he sat at the bench, looking from his silver ewer to the green
lampshade, he was asking himself whether he should not give up this
life of working for people he hated and launch into that larger work of
political agitation, for which he fancied himself so well fitted. He
looked forward into an imaginary future, and saw himself declaiming
in the Chambers against all that existed, rousing the passions of a
multitude to acts of destruction--of justice, as he called it in his
thoughts--and leading a vast army of angry men up the steps of the
Capitol to proclaim himself the champion of the rights of man against
the rights of kings. His eyelids contracted and the concentrated light of
his eyes was reduced to two tiny bright specks in the midst of the pupils;
his nervous hand went out and the fingers clutched the jaws of the iron
vice beside him as he would have wished to grapple with the jaws of
the beast oppression, which in his dreams seemed ever tormenting the
poor world in which he lived.

There was something lacking in his face, even in that moment of secret
rage as he sat alone in his workroom before the lamp. There was the
frenzy of the fanatic, the exaltation of the dreamer, clearly expressed
upon his features, but there was something wanting. There was
everything there except the force to accomplish, the initiative which
oversteps the bank of words, threats, and angry thoughts, and plunges
boldly into the stream, ready to sacrifice itself to lead others. The look
of power, of stern determination, which is never absent from the faces
of men who change their times, was not visible in the thin dark
countenance of the silver-chiseller. Marzio was destined never to rise
above the common howling mob which he aspired to lead.
This fact asserted itself outwardly as he sat there. After a few minutes
the features relaxed, a smile that was almost weak--the smile that
shows that a man lacks absolute confidence--passed quickly over his
face, the light in his eyes went out, and he rose from his stool with a
short, dissatisfied sigh, which was repeated once or twice as he put
away his work and arranged his tools. He made the rounds of the
workshop, looked to the fastenings of the windows, lighted a taper, and
then extinguished the lamp. He threw a loose overcoat over his
shoulders without passing his arms through the sleeves, and went out
into the street. Glancing up at the windows of his house opposite, he
saw that the lights were burning brightly, and he guessed that his wife
and daughter were waiting for him before sitting down to supper.
"Let them wait," he muttered with a surly grin, as he put out the taper
and went down the street in the opposite direction.
He turned the street corner by the dark Palazzo Antici Mattei, and
threaded the narrow streets towards the Pantheon and the Piazza Sant'
Eustachio. The weather had changed, and the damp south-east wind
was blowing fiercely behind him. The pavement was wet and slippery
with the strange thin coating of greasy mud which sometimes appears
suddenly in Rome even when it has not rained. The insufficient gas
lamps flickered in the wind as though they would go out, and the few
pedestrians who hurried along clung closely to the wall as though it
offered them some protection from the moist scirocco. The great doors

of the palaces were most of them closed, but here and there a little red
light announced a wine-shop, and as Marzio passed by he could see
through the dirty panes of glass dark figures sitting in a murky
atmosphere over bottles of coarse wine. The streets were foul with the
nauseous smell of decaying vegetables and damp walls which the
south-east wind brings out of the older parts of Rome, and while few
voices were heard in the thick air, the clatter of horses' hoofs on the wet
stones rattled loudly from the thoroughfares which lead to the theatres.
It was a dismal night, but Marzio Pandolfi felt that his temper was in
tune with the weather as he tramped along towards the Pantheon.
The streets widened as he neared his destination, and he drew his
overcoat more closely about his neck. Presently he reached a small
door close to Sant' Eustachio, one of the several entrances to the
ancient Falcone, an inn which has existed for centuries upon the same