They were peasants, by their dress - a young father and
mother and a little girl or two, and then a gentle, elderly woman, with
a baby in her arms, at which she looked proudly down. They were in their
simple best, and they had good Tuscan faces, full of kindness. I
ventured some propitiatory coppers with the children, and, when the old
woman made them thank me, I thought I could not be mistaken and I
ventured further: "You are the grandmother?"
"Yes, signer," she answered; and then we had some talk about the age and
the beauty of the baby, which I declared wonderful for both, in praises
loud enough for the father and mother to hear. After that they seemed to
hold a family council, from which I thought it respectful to stand apart
until the grandmother spoke to me again.
I did not understand, and I appealed to our guide for help.
"She wishes you to be godfather to the child."
I had never yet been a godfather, but I had the belief that it brought
grave responsibilities, which in the very casual and impermanent
circumstances I did not see how I was to meet. Yet how to refuse without
wounding these kind people who had so honored me I did not know until a
sudden inspiration came to my rescue.
"Tell them," I said, "and be careful to make them understand, that I am
very grateful and very sorry, but that I am a Protestant, and that I
suppose I cannot, for that reason, be godfather to their child."
He explained, and they received my thanks and regrets with smiling
acquiescence; and just then a very stout little old priest (who has
baptized nearly all the babies in Pisa for fifty years) came in, and the
baptism proceeded without my intervention. But I remained, somehow,
disappointed; it would have been pleasant to leave a godchild behind me
there in the neighborhood of Pisa; to have sent him from time to time
some little remembrance of this remote America, and, perhaps, when he
grew up and came to Pisa, and learned the art of the statuary, to have
had from him a Leaning Tower which he had cut in alabaster for me. I was
taking it for granted he was a boy, but he may not have been; there is
always that chance.
If I had been alone, I suppose I should still have gone into the Campo
Santo, from mere force of habit; I always go, in Pisa, but I had now
with me clearer eyes for art than mine are, and I wished to have their
light on the great allegories and histories frescoed round the
cloisters, and test with them the objects of my tacit and explicit
reserves and misgivings.
