Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  For a month King Carnival would reign supreme in mockery and merriment over the lives of men; his path strewn with violets, his sovereignty shouted over wine, his dynasty proclaimed far and wide — everywhere, by high and low, from the cobbler who pranked himself in the guise of Stenterello to the great lady who laughed through her velvet mask of Venice.

  And at the month’s end, at nightfall, just as the moon should rise, with music and many a jest and sound of horn and drum, and rioting of Arlecchino and Pulcinello and all their immemorial brotherhood, at nightfall the fickle people would lead the old King out to his funeral pyre in the great square, and there would burn him in all pomp and cruelty until the flames should redden grim Roland standing at his vigil at the cathedral doors, and be seen afar off, where the last outposts of the great Alps kept watch and ward in the quiet of the silence and the chillness of the snow.

  Bum him, — a monarch yesterday, to-day a scapegoat, in grimmest ironic symbol of all human histories.

  Poor King Carnival!

  His rule has lasted longer than any other dynasty; for though his nations burn him one year, he rises from his ashes, and they cry All hail! to him the next.

  But the axe is at the root of his throne. The old glad days of his mumming are numbered, and the pomp of his pageant is shorn. The world is old and very weary.

  Here “nel aer dolce, che del sol s’allegra,” life is brighter and more buoyant than elsewhere.

  Here the people still laugh from clear throats, and the hours still reel away, marked with flowers; here they sit in the sun, and still know the priceless pleasures and true uses of leisure; and here the heart of a child still beats in the war-scarred breast of the nation.

  Yet even here the world is older, greyer, sadder than of yore; and even here the day is close at hand when King Carnival will ride his last ride round the city walls, and be burned for the last time, in all the panoply of his historic robes, upon a pyre whence his ashes shall never rise again.

  The world is too wise to be foolish — so they say. Or is it too foolish to be wise?

  King Carnival might tell us if he would. Perhaps he would answer: —

  “In the days when men were so great that they did not fear to stoop, and were so strong that their dignity lost nothing by their mirth, they rode in my train and followed me — Carnivale, the old King — and laughed as children laugh — those men of those days of Dante, of those days of Lionardo, of those days of Shakspeare. Are you wiser than they? or weaker? or only more weary, perhaps? No matter. I have held high feast with the giants, and they were not ashamed to be glad. But you, who blush for your mirth because your mirth is vice, bury me quickly. I am a thing of the Past.”

  And the old King would speak sadly aright; for his name is almost emptiness, and his earth-swaying orb is but now an empty gourd in which the shrivelled beans of the world’s spent pleasures are shaken in fruitless sport and sound.

  For in the old days, — when he reigned supreme, over all men’s lives, from sovereign’s to serfs, for a few weeks’ span of full feast and fair folly, — in the old days men lived greatly great lives to great ends.

  Their faith was ever present with them — a thing of daily use and hourly sweetness. Their households were wisely ruled and simply ordered. They denuded themselves of their substance to give their gold to the raising of mighty works — vivis lapidibus — which to this day do live and speak.

  Great artists narrowed not themselves to one meagre phase of art, but filled with all its innumerable powers the splendid plenitude of their majestic years.

  And that art was in the hearts of the people who followed it, and adored its power and were nourished by it, so that it was no empty name, but an ever-vivifying presence — a divinity at once of hearth and temple that brooded over the cities with sheltering and stainless love.

  Therefore in those days men, giving themselves leave to be glad for a little space, were glad with the same sinewy force and manful singleness of purpose as made them in other times laborious, self-denying, patient, and fruitful of high thoughts and deeds.

  Because they laboured for their fellows, therefore they could laugh with them, and because they served God, therefore they dared be glad.

  In those grave, dauntless, austere lives the Carnival’s jocund revelry was as one golden bead in a pilgrim’s rosary of thorn-berries.

  They had aimed highly and highly achieved; therefore they could go forth amidst their children and rejoice.

  But we — in whom all art is the mere empty Shibboleth of a ruined religion whose priests are all dead; we — whose whole year-long course is one Dance of Death over the putridity of our pleasures; we — whose solitary purpose it is to fly faster and faster from desire to satiety, from satiety to desire, in an endless eddy of fruitless effort; we — whose greatest genius can only raise for us some inarticulate protest of despair against some unknown God; — we have strangled King Carnival and killed him, and buried him in the ashes of our own unutterable weariness and woe.

  For the old King is heartsick to hear the manful laughter that he heard in his youth; and we — we cannot laugh; all we can give is a sneer — and a sob.

  CHAPTER II.

  The Bird and the Fates.

  NEVERTHELESS in Verona this first day of Carnival men made believe to be glad.

  In the deep wintry gloom of the old sad city the gold of the alien tyranny had been scattered broadcast that the people might wear at least the mask of contentment; and on the whole they wore it, nothing loth, grinning gleefully from ear to ear.

  The old stone balconies were draped with amber and rose and silver; the beautiful trecento windows were filled with eager faces; the dusky crypt-like streets were full of colour and tumult; the great marble tombs, looming white in the darkness of their sepulchres, were flecked with the pretty pallor of violets from Rome.

  Verona under her taskmasters took holiday.

  Under a deep porch, sculptured with vine foliage and the heads of griffins, two children stood looking on the pageantry, and not thinking very much about it; for one of them — the girl, — was full of trouble, and the boy tried his best to solace her.

  “Do look at Stenterello!” the little lad murmured. “How nimble he is — look, look! the boys have caught him. No! — he slips through like an eel. Ah, ah! do look! There is Arlecchino angling for a priest’s hat with a gilded fishing-hook. Oh, carina mia! to think you have no heart to laugh to-day—”

  The tears brimmed over in his companion’s eyes.

  “How can I laugh? We have nothing — absolutely nothing. We must sell those poor little jewels of my mother’s, or Mariuccia will starve. It must not be, you know; she is so old, so old! And yet to sell the jewels! See here, ‘Ino. I have a voice, and I am fifteen years old, and I am good to look at, you all say. Why should I not sing in the choruses? You know how often we have laughed at them — the fat ugly women with the crowns that would always tumble off. Now I am as thin as a cane, and am handsome, and could wear a crown as one should be worn. Why might I not sing in the chorus?”

  The pretty boy looked perplexed, and his little bare foot traced nervously an arabesque on the stone of the dusty stair.

  “That would never do, dear donzella! Your father is too illustrious—”

  “But one cannot live on being illustrious. One wants to eat — somehow. And there is nothing to eat. Nothing. We have not heard of my father for more than a year, and Florio even does not send now. Why should I not sing in the chorus? It is quite easy, all that sort of music.”

  He shook his pretty, curly, golden, Venetian head, in grave concern.

  “Oh no, dear donzella; it would never do. Mariuccia would never allow it. It is so late at night, and the women are not fit for you: it would never do.”

  “Then the jewels must go? And they are all that I have of my mother’s — the only, only, little thing!”

  The words ended in a sob; and the whirling, many-coloured procession of the Carnival was hidden from t
he child’s sight by a haze of sudden tears.

  At home there were an empty cupboard, a cold hearth, and an old woman of eighty years, who had not broken her fast. Such things seem hard to bear when one is very young; and it is the first day of Carnival; and beneath there, in the street, all the mad and merry masque is flaunting on its way.

  The boy listened wistfully, with a tender and anxious face.

  “See here, dear donzella,” he murmured, after a pause. “I have a thought. Sing in the chorus you must not; but why not sing in the streets? The people are all happy and good-tempered to-day. I have got my lute here, and we will sing, and then ask them frankly to help us. Why not? We have made music for them often out of pure love and goodwill. They will certainly give us a little money now, and no harm done.”

  “Oh, ‘Ino! You never sang for money yet, nor I. It is so different—”

  “We have not sung for it, because we have not wanted it. But if we do want it, where is the harm—”

  “It is shameful!”

  “Shameful! How shameful? When the great singer Lillo went through here last spring, do you not remember that the least atom of standing room in the theatre was worth gold, and the people took the horses from his carriage, and drew him through the streets, shouting and smothering him with Easter lilies?”

  “That is very different.”

  “Not at all different. Except that they pay Lillo by millions and we only want a few florins.”

  “But why, then, will you never take money when you play yourself? You never do.”

  He crossed himself, and glanced gratefully at an old battered, black-faced Madonna that hung behind an iron grating high up above in the doorway.

  “Our Lady has been so good to me, and I have never wanted for anything. And the people who would have paid me have always been so poor — so poor. But I would play for money rather than sell a thing of my mother’s. Perhaps your mother up there says to Our Lady, ‘Look at my donzella; she is proud: take that sin out of her heart.’ And Our Lady says, ‘We will prove her: she must love you a little, though she never looked on your face.’ And so Our Lady sets this thing in your way. And your mother up there waits, watching and trembling, to see if indeed you do love her, or only care for your pride. For mothers never forget. That I am very sure. No, not though they sit on the right hand of God with His angels.”

  The boy’s voice was very sweet and solemn, and murmured with a strange softness and clearness through the riotous laughter and uproar that rose from the Carnival crowds in the street below. He looked no longer at the antics of Stenterello and the pranks of Arlecchino, but up at the breadth of blue serene sky which stretched above where the gabled roof parted, His companion listened, with the colour coming and going, fleeting and burning, in her downcast face; then suddenly she caught his hand and sprang down the first stair.

  “Let us go, ‘Ino — let us go!”

  And hand in hand they ran down, and were mingled with the hundreds who were streaming in frolicsome humour, through the narrow tortuous street towards the great Piazza.

  A few minutes later they also were standing in the Cathedral square.

  They were a picturesque little pair — the girl taller than the boy by full a head.

  He was barelegged and barefooted — a child of the populace; he wore the loose shirt and the red waistband of the Venetian gondoliers; and slung round him by another bit of scarlet was an old ebony mandoline. She was clad in quite another guise, so that she looked like some silky-leaved flower growing out of the grey stone pavements; she had a hood of dark velvet over her head, from which great, bright, trustful eyes looked out wonderingly upon the world; her skirts were of heavy amber satin, that seemed to have been fashioned out of some brocaded train; her hands were full of flowers that she had picked up from the ground as the people of the balconies flung them downward.

  As they stood together, hand in hand, the contrast of colour and the grace of attitude made a picture against the dusky pile of the Duomo and in the crisp whiteness of the sunny frosty air. Many people passing paused to look at them; the little lad whispered to her, and then unslung his mandoline.

  There was a lull in the sports of the day. Some sporting of a band of mummers headed by a scarlet Mefistofelo and a gorgeous Dulcamara was over and done with: the commencement of the traditional Galà was delayed; the crowd was unoccupied and willing to be amused, but not impatient nor out of temper, because it was a crowd of Italy.

  The boy judged his time accurately, and touched the cords of his lute. The girl wavered a moment with the colour hot in her face; then with a sudden gesture threw the hood back off her curls, and lifted up her voice and sang.

  Her song was an old familiar street-song of the Lombard population.

  Far and wide on the clear wintry air, keen with the hard breath of the mountains, the strong pure notes of a voice in its earliest youth rang out like a bell over the muttering and shouting of the people. Those nearest to her listened, and hushed down the noise around them; the silence spread and spread softly like the circles in the water where a stone is thrown; the boisterous gaiety dropped to a quieter key; in a little while all the square was still.

  The hood fell back wholly upon her shoulders; the sun shone upon the little group; the amber of her skirts, the violets in her hands, the scarlet wool of the boy’s sash, all glowed in the light; above all hum and buzz from the other quarters of the city the song rose on the air clear as only the tones of childhood can be.

  “L’Uccello!” the people shouted. “Go on, go on!”

  A smile rippled over her face, as at some familiar word of greeting: she sang on at their bidding song after song of the sweet unwritten melodies of the nation. Now and then the boy struck a chord or two from his mandoline, but seldom; her voice was rich enough and strong enough to fill the square without aid, and it leaped aloft in the wintry air with the eager, straight, upward flight of a hawk that is loosed from its holdings.

  When at length it ceased, the throng in the great square screamed, laughed, almost cried with delighted applause; the people in the balconies clapped their hands, the loungers at the caffé dashed their hands on the marble tables till their glasses rang, the masquers and merry-makers shrieked a hundred times, “Viva l’Uccello! Viva l’Uccello!”

  The boy marked the propitious hour. He took the red berretta off his curly head, and advanced amongst the multitude, and with the infinite grace of his nation, the grace which is so perfect because so utterly unconscious of itself, stretched out his hand to them for charity.

  “Some little thing, signori, for the love of God. There is an old woman at home who wants bread.”

  He was generous, and he sought to bear all the shame of the alms-seeking for his own portion. But his companion saw his purpose, and sprang to his side. Her cheeks were flushed, the tears were bright on her lashes, the winds blew the heavy gold of her hair and the snow off her courtly skirts; her voice had lost its strength, and trembled a little.

  “It is not for him, signori!” she cried. “It is for me. For himself, when he plays and the people would give him coins or cakes or confetti, he will never take payment for his music. He says it is God’s gift, not his. The money that he begs now is for me. I am illustrious; oh yes! but I am very poor. I have an old nurse at home who wants bread, and sits by a fireless hearth. She is so old, so old. And we have nothing to sell but a few little jewels, and they were my mother’s, who is dead. Will you give me some little thing, if my songs pleased you?”

  The answer came from a hundred hands at once — from above and around, on every side.

  Paper money fluttered to her feet; loose silver rolled like sugar-plums; here and there a piece of gold flashed like a star through the air; flowers and toys and gilded horns of sweetmeats, and ribboned playthings of the pageantry were all showered upon them from the balconies above and from the throngs around, until their arms ached with stretching for the gifts, he his red berretta, and she her amber skirts.

&
nbsp; Great ladies, leaning in the draped galleries of old palaces, cast down money with lavish hands; white-coated soldiers, laughing over their wines at the marble tables, tossed bright florins to swell the store; a child-noble in his gala-costume of white and gold and powder and jewels, ran down some palace steps and shyly thrust a roll of notes into the singer’s hand, and hastily lifted his soft smiling mouth to kiss her cheek; the poorest of the people sought in their leathern pouches for some copper pieces to give.

  In vain the boy and girl, being honest, protested, laughing and crying both at once— “Basta, basta! — enough, enough!”

  In vain; the golden shower did not cease until, in the distance, as the first of the patrician pageantry appeared on the entrance of the square, there rose a glad shout, “The Galà! the Galà!”

  And the populace, kindly of heart, but fickle of temper, turned to the new pastime, and the little noble ran to his people, and the great ladies looked the other way, and the golden chariots rolled under the historic walls, and the sea of the bright masque surged outward; and the children were forgotten where they stood.

  Then to them there came one who had listened and watched all the songs and all the payments where he had leaned in the shadow of the cathedral wall.

  He uncovered his head as he approached, and the sun fell full on his face — the dark, poetic, historic face of Florence.

  “Ah, cara donzella,” he murmured softly with a smile. “Money I have none to give you, until I make some more to-night I too am an artist; and so — it goes without words — I too am poor. Nevertheless, let me thank you.”

  He dropped a ring into her amber skirts, amongst the violets of Parma and the daffodils of Tuscany, and turned away and vanished in the throng.