Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/111

 His good fortune! As he sat upon his wretched bed in his tiny lodging, luxurious words rang in his ears. "And the chance of achieving fame and fortune, keep that in the foreground!" Fame and fortune! And he had been overjoyed because he had obtained a chance of earning a few shillings as a bookseller's hack, a chance for which he was indebted to a handicraftsman. But a poor first step towards fame and fortune, Marian would think! He understood how utter had been her inexperience, and his own; he had learned the wide distance between the fulfilment of such hopes as theirs, and the best of the bare possibilities which the future held for them, and the pain which this knowledge brought him, for the sake of his own share in it, was doubly keen for hers. It was very hard for Walter Joyce to have to suffer the terrible disappointment and disenchantment of experience; but it was far harder for him to have to cause her to share them. Marian would, indeed, think it a "poor first step." He little knew how much more decisive a one she was about to take herself.

A months ago a petition was presented to the Italian parliament, which, though it concerned a matter of private interest only, and was one in a crowd of many others presenting no features of interest whatever, excited some attention in Italy, and will appear yet more strange and remarkable to English readers. It was the petition of certain members of a family in Sicily, begging that they and their descendants might henceforward be exonerated from a certain payment which they and their forefathers had hitherto been called upon to make every year to the fiscal agents of the government.

The payment in question has been made regularly, ever since the year 1724. In that year, a certain Sister Gertrude, a Benedictine nun, was burned alive for heresy, in the city of Palermo. Now, although the expenses attending this execution were cheerfully supported by the royal exchequer, it was not to be expected that those occasioned by the long previous proceedings before the tribunal of the Holy Inquisition, enormously increased as they were by the obstinacy and perversity of this heretic nun, should be also paid out of the royal funds. Who then was to pay these expenses? If it be a rule of jurisprudence in our own heretical latitudes that the Crown never loses its claims, far more is it utterly out of the question in orthodox Catholic lands that Mother Church should lose any portion of her dues, rights, and profits! And on this occasion the Holy Inquisition had worked so hard, and so assiduously during so long a time! Who was to pay for all this? The family of the heretic nun were condemned to pay the costs of her trial. But all that the unhappy family of the nun possessed in the world, was far from sufficient to pay the charges of the Holy Office for condemning its heretic daughter to the flames. Under these circumstances a paternal government came to the rescue, paid the money down, and decreed that the family should pay so much a year to the royal exchequer for ever after!

This was the payment from which the descendants of the family of that unhappy and troublesome Sister Gertrude, now sought, in the year of grace 1868, to be relieved, after a hundred and forty-four years, during which it had been regularly and annually made.

The Italian parliament is not without its fair proportion of members whose notions of human policy may be summed up in the well-known formula of the drill-sergeant, "Be as you was!" and it is perhaps strange that on the presentation of this petition no honourable member rose in his place to point out the demoralising effects that would follow in a secluded and religious little community in the Sicilian highlands, from destroying the above record of a great and salutary example. But the tide of public opinion is running rather strong just at present against Rome and its ways and works; and no one was found to gainsay the petition of the long-suffering Calatanisettan family.

The one or two papers which noticed the incident, said that the petition proceeded from a family of Palermo. But this was an error. The family of Sister Gertrude belong to Calatanisetta, a little inland townlet among the mountains. It is wonderful enough that the revenue of united and regenerated Italy should have been increased by such a payment for several years. And it would have been more extraordinary still, if the people had belonged to, and the circumstances had happened at, Palermo. It must be supposed that, at Calatanisetta, it is only just beginning to dawn upon the minds of the inhabitants that the government of Victor Emmanuel might be induced to excuse a payment exacted on such grounds. Or perhaps it had been entirely forgotten why this annual charge was made; perhaps it was not until some local antiquary happened to stumble on the history of the matter, that the idea of getting the payment remitted, occurred to the family.

Nevertheless, the deed on account of which this money has been paid yearly for a hundred and forty-four years, was by no means done in a corner. It is duly chronicled by the historians of Sicily and of the kingdom of Naples. It was the subject of a special record and detailed description published at the time (and now become very scarce), which a Bolognese publisher has just reprinted.

From this latter source is taken the following account of a scene that was being enacted in Palermo while George the First was reigning,