PAGE 2
The Strange Man’s Sorrow
by
“I smartened the place up wonderfully, within doors and without. I got flowers, roots, and annuals, and slips of geraniums, and made the little plateau under my drawing-room window a blaze of tulips and ranunculuses, so that the Queen–she was at Spezia for the bathing–came once to see my garden, as one of the show spots of the place. Her Majesty was as gracious as only royalty knows how to be, and so were all her suite in their several ways; but there was one short, fat, pale-faced man, with enormous spectacles, who, if less polite than the rest, was ten times as inquisitive. He asked about the soil, and the drainage, the water and its quality–was it a spring–did it ever fail–and when, and how? Then as to the bay itself, was it sheltered, and from what winds? What the anchorage was like–mud–and why mud? And when I said there was always a breeze even in summer, he eagerly pushed me to explain, why? and I did explain that there was a cleft or gully between the hills, which acted as a sort of conductor to the wind; and on this he went back to verify my statement, and spent some time poking about, examining everything, and stationing himself here and there on points of rock, to experience the currents of air. ‘You are right,’ said he, as he got into his boat, ‘quite right; there is a glorious draught here for a smelting-furnace.’
“I thought it odd praise at the time, but before six months I received notice to quit.
“Pertusola had been sold to a lead company, one of the directors having strongly recommended the site as an admirable harbour, with good water, and a perpetual draught of wind, equal to a blast-furnace.”
Looking at the dress-coat in which you once captivated dinner-parties, on a costeimonger–seeing the strong-boned hunter that has carried you over post and rail, in a cab,–are sore trials; but nothing, according to my companion’s description, to the desecration of your house and home by its conversion into a factory. Such an air of the “Inferno,” too, pervades the smelting-house, with its lurid glow, its roar, its flash, and its furious heat, that I could readily forgive him the passionate warmth with which he described it.
“They had begun that chimney, sir,” cried he, “before I got out of the house. I had to cross on a plank over a pit before my door, where they were riddling the ore. The morning I left, I covered my eyes, not to see the barbaric glee with which they destroyed all around, and I left the place for ever. I crossed over the Gulf, and I took that house you can see on the rocky point called Marola. It had no water; there was no depth to anchor in; and not a breath of air could come at it except in stillness. No more terrors of smelting-house here, thought I. Well, sir, I must be brief; the whole is too painful to dwell on. I hadn’t been eight months there when a little steamer ran in one morning, and four persons in plain clothes landed from her, and pottered about the shore–I thought looking for anemones. At last they strolled up to my house, and asked permission to have a look at the Gulf from my terrace. I acceded, and in they came. They were all strangers but one, and who do you think he was? The creature with the large spectacles! My blood ran cold when I saw him.
“‘You used to live yonder, if I mistake not,’ said he to me, coolly.
“‘Yes, and I might have been living there still,’ replied I, ‘if it had not been for the prying intrusion of a stranger, to whom I was weak enough to be polite.’
“He never noticed my taunt in the least, but, calmly opening the window, passed out upon the terrace. The others speedily gathered around him, and I saw that he knew the whole place as if it had been his bedroom; for not only did he describe the exact measurements between various points, but the depth of water, the character of the bottom, the currents, and the prevailing winds. He went on, besides, to show how, by running out a pier here, and a breakwater there–by filling up this, and deepening that–safe anchorage could be secured in all weathers; while the headlands could be easily fortified, and ‘at a moderate cost,’ I quote himself, ‘of say twenty two or three millions of francs, while a fort erected on the island there would command the whole entrance.’