'The villains!' he grumbled; 'have I not written four sonnets in the best rhyme praying for firewood, and not a stick has come. I shall certainly be reduced to burning my banisters: no one comes to visit me save Jews, and if they break their necks so much the better.'
However, he spared the banisters. His eye fell on the makeshift leg of his bed, and he considered which were the more dangerous, a fireless room or an insecure sleeping-place. The storm swept through the room, blowing in at the chinks and shrieking in the chimney like a witch. With desperate decision Bernardo tore away the support of his couch, chopped it up and cast it on the hearth. The fire blazed up anew, and he sat before it on a stool, putting his blue fingers to the flame, and apostrophising the last warm friend of a lonely poet.
'A dog's life!' he muttered presently; 'and of a truth I merit these castigations less than others. Was it not of my forefather, the Florentine, who lived before the house of Sforza had been heard of, that the divine poet wrote:--
"Bellincion Berti vid' io andar cinto Di cuoio e d'osso"?
Good Lord, when I came to Milan this herd of creeping animals did not know a sonnet from a _strambotto_. Who is it has taught them the elegancies of the new poetry? Was it not through my facile fingers that the waters of Hippocrene enriched the Lombard plain, and even threatened an inundation? And this is my reward! To lie like a dog in a kennel! To be neglected by all because, forsooth, I am poor! A poet situated as I am, is unknown as he whose face is hidden by a mask or deformed by the smallpox.'
And he recited certain lines from his epistle to Ludovico, the Duke:--
'I cry for aid to every one, But each in turn replies, "Begone!" Ah, wretched poet! for his pains, Thou generous lord, what meed remains? The very cap and bells to him denied, Among the beasts of burden harness thou his pride!'
And he hung his bald head, smiling bitterly; on his stool by the fire, crouching, and very thin, with a long red nose, he looked like some melancholy roosting bird.
Presently a knock was heard at the house-door below; then the sleepy grumbling of the surly old woman who was the poet's sole attendant; and then steps upon the brick floor.