A FORGOTTEN TALE

Taranaki Daily News, 31 January 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

A FORGOTTEN TALE

THE WOUND IN THE SIDE

(By

“Juvenis.”)

•Fra Duval gives us the story. It happened in 15'31, when there was a food shortage, and it concerns the merchant Marello, the workman Rigaud and Fra Duval. Fra Duval, a sort of secretary to the merchant, made notes in manuscript.

It appears that the merchant Marello collected paintings and was particularly famous for his collection of paintings of the Christ. Fra Duval collected little tragedies much as a scientist collects skulls. The workman Rigaud collected money for Marello. According to Fra Duval, there was little money to collect that year. “In the poor quarters, I hear, the people are killing and eating the rats from the sewer,” he writes. Not so much as “Poor devils!” docs he write with it. A man with frozen veins, Duval was, watching affairs with hard, bright eyes and a brain that saw human problems as quadratic equations. It was little wonder that Rigaud came back from collecting the rents every week with a slender purse, “ihe great clown is chicken-hearted,” notes Fra Duval. “He will not say to the tenants, ‘Pay or go!’ He sits with the old men in the chimney corner or takes the children on his knee.” And we have a picture of big, chicken-hearted Rigaud talking to old men of their rheumatics, soothing fretful babies, while the rents slide by and Marello has paintings to purchase. There was one painting in particular he wanted to buy. It was a life-size painting of Christ on the Cross, by Raphael, it is believed. But there you are—no rents, no paintings. So one day lie called Rigaud in. “I was copying accounts at the time,” writes Duval. Quite plainly we can see him lurking in the shadowed part of the room, his cowl bent over his desk, copying each precise farthing. “The fellow came in, his face now red as the poppy, now white as the lily, writes Duval. “I sat quietly.” So we see Rigaud come in, the blood storming at his temples, while the monk sits so quietly in the shadows, only his eyes glittering. It is an equation of which he has long ago worked out the answer. But Marello told the monk to go. “So I went out and closed the door and made the sound of footsteps going down the passage, then returned softly and stood with my ear to the panel.”

The monk with the sensitive ears stood listening. He heard Marello speak in tones “going neither up nor down,” explaining that the rents were falling off, that Rigaud was too easy, that he must go. Then he heard Rigaud, “in a voice like a rusty bolt”—for a deep voice will squeak with emotion—say he would be firmer with the tenants, that it was not convenient to go, that his wife was about to have a child. While Marello ‘‘regrets exceedingly,” but not so excessively as to give way. “Has he not the Christs to buy?’’,writes Duval. Curiously, hidden in a dark alcove, Fra Duval waits to watch Rigaud leave. “The great strong fellow had a twitching of the face and a moisture of the eyes.” Soon after, “Marello called me in, his eyes shining at the thought, and commissioned me to buy the Christ of Raphael.” That very evening, “we hung it on the wall of the supper-room. Laws Deo!” A month later Rigaud's child was born. “I saw the child,” notes Duval. “A pretty creature but thin and poorly. Rigaud can find nothing to do and earns nothing to keep it. He has sold his furniture and the house is as bare as a board. I told him to go to the State. He replied that he had gone to the State and the State had given him milk for the child, but it was fevered milk.”

The painting was widely admired by the other merchants and coveted. Marello, so the monk says, almost worshipped it. It was well-known that there were rogues about, so he had the doors double-locked and the windows of the room barred. He spent money like water, noted Duval, so that the painting should come to no harm. ‘‘The child has a disease,” writes Duval a fortnight later. It would seem to have been what we would call rickets. “Its little stomach is puffed up like an air bladder,’’ noted Duval. “The joints are abnormally enlarged. Rigaud’s hair is gone white. He told me the child would die. God’s will be done.”

It must have been shortly after this that Marello planned the evening which so disturbingly ended. There was to be no-one at supper but the merchant and the monk. “We ate and drank well,” wrote Duval. “Afterwards we were to sit back listening to music and admire, aesthetically, the Christ.” ' For supper there were sweet-meats and Choice wines, red and white. “I spoke of the culture of the Greeks.” One sees them sitting at table together, in the brilliantly lit room, Fra Duval, suave and subtle, leaning slightly forward, talking of Aristotle’s Principles of Art. Marello, well-fed, leans back in his chair, shading his eyes with a jewelled hand. ■But supper was scarcely ended when someone “breaks into the room. It is Rigaud of the twitching face. Marello cries, ‘What is it?’ and Seizes the cord of the bell.” But the fellow “was almost apologetic, swaying his head from side to side like a great dazed bull, saying quietly, ‘The child is dead,’ and then treading softly away.”

But it is clear that Marello was shaken. “He ordered music for ease of the mind, then turned to the painting. And I cried aloud. For there, from the wound in the side, the wound from the soldier’s spear, ran a small red trickle while I heard a voice, grievously and softly say, ‘Why crucifiest thou Me?’ ”

The words no doubt were a trick of the subconscious, a phrase from the monkish memory. The painting no doubt hung on a damp, warm wall so that the paint ran. The whole thing no doubt was an hallucination. Wasn’t it?