There was no exaggeration in this. His clothes were rags, his shoes barely held together, and the only covering he had for his head was the little skullcap he used to wear in school hours. Even old Pippo began to scoff at his miserable appearance, and hinted a hope, that before the season of the contraband begun Gerald would have taken his departure, or be able to make a more respectable figure. As Gabriel had now been gone many weeks, and no tidings whatever come of him, the old man's reserve and deference daily decreased. He grumbled at Gerald's habits of study, profitless and idle as they seemed to him, while there was many a thing to be done about the house and the garden. He was not weak or sickly now: he could help to chop the wood for winter firing; he could raise those heavy water-buckets that swung over the deep well in the garden; he could draw the net in the little stream behind the house, or trench about the few stunted olives that struggled for life on the hillside. Gerald would willingly have done any or all of these, if the idea had occurred to himself. He was not indolent by nature, and liked the very fact of active occupation. As a task, however, he rejected the notion at once. It savoured of servitude to his mind, and who was this same Pippo who aspired to be his master?
The more the boy's mind became stored with knowledge, the fuller his intelligence grew of great examples and noble instances--the more indignantly did he repulse the advances of Pippo's companionship. 'What!' he would mutter to himself, 'leave Bossuet and his divine teachings for his coarse converse! Quit the sarcastic intensity of Voltaire's ridicule for the vulgar jests of this illiterate boor! Exchange the glorious company of wits and sages, and poets and moralists, for a life of daily drudgery, with a mean peasant to talk to! Besides, I am not his guest, nor a burden upon his charity. It is to Gabriel I owe my shelter here.'
When driven by many a sarcasm to assume this position, Pippo gravely remarked: 'True enough, boy, so long as he was here; but he is gone now, and who 'll tell us will he ever come back? He may have been sentenced by the tribunal. At the hour we are talking here he may be in prison--at the galleys, for aught we know; and I promise you one thing, there's many a better man there.'