"Are you the owner of this place?" I asked.
"Si, signor!"
"What has become of the old man who used to live here?"
He laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and drew his pipe-stem across his throat with a significant gesture.
"So, signor!--with a sharp knife! He had a good deal of blood, too, for so withered a body. To kill himself in that fashion was stupid: he spoiled an Indian shawl that was on his bed, worth more than a thousand francs. One would not have thought he had so much blood."
And the fellow put back his pipe in his mouth and smoked complacently. I heard in sickened silence.
"He was mad, I suppose?" I said at last.
The long pipe was again withdrawn.
"Mad? Well, the people say so. I for one think he was very reasonable--all except that matter of the shawl--he should have taken that off his bed first. But he was wise enough to know that he was of no use to anybody--he did the best he could! Did you know him, signor?"
"I gave him money once," I replied, evasively; then taking out a few francs I handed them to this evil-eyed, furtive-looking son of Israel, who received the gift with effusive gratitude.
"Thank you for your information," I said coldly. "Good-day."
"Good-day to you, signor," he replied, resuming his seat and watching me curiously as I turned away.
I passed out of the wretched street feeling faint and giddy. The end of the miserable rag-dealer been told to me briefly and brutally enough--yet somehow I was moved to a sense of regret and pity. Abjectly poor, half crazy, and utterly friendless, he had been a brother of mine in the same bitterness and irrevocable sorrow. I wondered with a half shudder--would my end be like his? When my vengeance was completed should I grow shrunken, and old, and mad, and one lurid day draw a sharp knife across my throat as a finish to my life's history? I walked more rapidly to shake off the morbid fancies that thus insidiously crept in on my brain; and as before, the noise and glitter of the Toledo had been unbearable, so now I found it a relief and a distraction. Two maskers bedizened in violet and gold whizzed past me like a flash, one of them yelling a stale jest concerning la nnamorata--a jest I scarcely heard, and certainly had no heart or wit to reply to. A fair woman I knew leaned out of a gayly draped balcony and dropped a bunch of roses at my feet; out of courtesy I stooped to pick them up, and then raising my hat I saluted the dark-eyed donor, but a few paces on I gave them away to a ragged child. Of all flowers that bloom, they were, and still are, the most insupportable to me. What is it the English poet Swinburne says-"I shall never be friends again with roses!"