eyes towards
it, smiling and proud, heirs of all the ages, neglecting their sails and
nets and spars of wood. They can imagine nothing better than it. They
see nothing at all sinister or absurd about it, these simple fellows.
And simple Umberto, their captive, strives to wheel round on his
pedestal and to tear but a peep-hole in his sheeting. He would be glad
could he feast but one eye on this bit of national glory. But he remains
helpless--helpless as a Sultana made ready for the Bosphorus, helpless
as a pig is in a poke. It enrages him that he who was so eminently
respectable in life should be made so ludicrous on his eminence after
death. He is bitter at the inertia of the men who set him up. Were he
an ornament of the Church, not of the State that he served so
conscientiously, how very different would be the treatment of his
plight! If he were a Saint, occluded thus by the municipality, how
many the prayers that would be muttered, the candles promised, for his
release! There would be processions, too; and who knows but that there
might even be a miracle vouchsafed, a rending of the veil? The only
procession that passes him is that of the intimidated orphans. No
heavenly power intervenes for him--perhaps (he bitterly conjectures) for
fear of offending the Vatican. Sirocco, now and again, blows furiously
at his back, but never splits the sheeting. Rain often soaks it, never
rots it. There is no help for him. He stands a mock to the pious, a
shame and incubus to the emancipated; received, yet hushed up; exalted,
yet made a fool of; taken and left; a monument to Fate's malice.

From under the hem of his weather-beaten domino, always, he just
displays, with a sort of tragic coquetry, the toe of a stout and
serviceable marble boot. And this, I have begun to believe, is all that
I shall ever see of him. Else might I not be writing about him; for else
had he not so haunted me. If I knew myself destined to see him--to see
him steadily and see him whole--no matter how many years hence, I could
forthwith think about other things. I had hoped that by this essay I
might rid my mind of him. He is inexcutible, confound him! His pedestal
draws me to itself with some such fascination as had the altar of
the unknown god for the wondering Greek. I try to distract myself
by thinking of other images--images that I have seen. I think of
Bartolommeo Colleoni riding greatly forth under the shadow of the
church of Saint John and Saint Paul.