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. Filomena, it was clear, was master at
Pontesordo; for though Giannozzo was a man grown, and did a man's work,
he still danced to the tune of his mother's tongue. It was from her that
Odo, shivering over the smoky hearth, gathered the details of their
wretched state. Pontesordo being a part of the ducal domain, they had
led in their old days an easier life than their neighbours; but the new
taxes had stripped them as bare as a mulberry-tree in June.

"How is a Christian to live, excellency, with the salt-tax doubled, so
that the cows go dry for want of it; with half a zecchin on every pair
of oxen, a stajo of wheat and two fowls to the parish, and not so much
as a bite of grass allowed on the Duke's lands? In his late Highness's
day the poor folk were allowed to graze their cattle on the borders of
the chase; but now a man dare not pluck a handful of weeds there, or so
much as pick up a fallen twig; though the deer may trample his young
wheat, and feed off the patch of beans at his very door. They do say the
Duchess has a kind heart, and gives away money to the towns-folk; but we
country-people who spend our lives raising fodder for her game never
hear of her Highness but when one of her game-keepers comes down on us
for poaching or stealing wood.--Yes, by the saints, and it was her
Highness who sent a neighbour's lad to the galleys last year for felling
a tree in the chase; a good lad as ever dug furrow, but he lacked wood
for a new plough-share, and how in God's name was he to plough his field
without it?"

So she went on, like a torrent afte