by Ouida
“What did he not do, rather? He did as he does now. He went and amused himself, and threw away the little he had in gambling, and left us for weeks and months to starve in some hole, whilst he feasted in gaming-towns and winter-cities, and spent such gold as he might win on creatures as bad and as useless as himself. Oh, it is no good your curling your lips and getting on fire like that, signorina. It is the truth, as you will know to your cost one day. Why do you ask me of your mother if you do not believe what I say? You are always angry that you are so poor; pray whose fault is it if not your father’s, and how should he be worth anything, I would be glad to know, when not a soul of all his own people ever takes notice that he lives, but every one of them leaves him alone as men pass by a trodden fig, or a dead dog on the causeway.”
That used to silence me, for I knew it was true; and I could only sit in mute rebellion shelling the beans with a swelling heart, while the bright golden lizards darted to and fro on the stairs, and the radiant sunset lights poured down from the frescoed lunette.
Then Mariuccia, whose temper was as close a mingling of sour and sweet as the core of a ripe pomegranate, would relent, and would suspend her bean-shelling to lay her hand on my head.
“Carina,” she would say tenderly, “why will you vex yourself about your father? Little one, he cares as much for that lizard as for you. Do your duty by him; that is proper, of course; but do not make a god of him. Fret yourself for some good love, not for a foolish one. It is all very well for the maple to be choked for the vine’s sake; but it is rubbish for the maple to die for the nightshade.”
Which hard saying she left for me and the lizard to digest as best we might, whilst she went into the cavernous gloomy little crypt which served her for a kitchen to fry her beans in oil, or set them to stew with a cabbage. That, or something like it, was our daily meal; dainty little birds and tempting little pots of chocolate went in for my father when he was there, procured and prepared by Florio, who was a sort of universal genius; but we children never tasted of such fare. We thought ourselves in wondrous luck if we got a big dish of eggs and macaroni in the Pasquà Week, or could have a handful of sweet ciambelle or a lump or two of pan giallo for the Befana night.
As for envying my father his quails and thrushes and mullets, I should have thought it as blasphemous as Mariuccia would have thought it to envy the Madonnas in the churches their weight of jewelled garments and crowns of beaten gold.
At such times as Florio was with us, which was but seldona, I had more success in my endeavours to hear good of my idol.
Florio, in Italian fashion, had attached himself to us, and having once done so was not to be separated from us by anything that adversity could do to him. Once on the staircase I heard the padrona ask him how he could waste his years in service, so little lucrative, so often indeed, actually only repaying him by privation.
Florio shrugged his shoulders with the most expressive pantomime in the world.
“Eh! what would you!” he replied to her. “I have got to love them, — it is all said.”
Florio would acquiesce in all my enthusiasm for his master, though he looked a little grave sometimes. But when I would fain have learned from him how my father spent those innumerable long absences of his, Florio would tell me nothing. He would pretend to laugh and show his white teeth.
“No, no, no,” he would cry. “In good time the donzella will see for herself how men live; but she could not understand it yet; — no, no, no.”
Once again also I overheard him say to Mariuccia, “It is almost always such bad luck with him now; sometimes he has a good vein, and then we live like quails in the fattening coops; but it is very seldom now. They are all scared of him. At Nizza this very winter they warned him privately from the Masséna. And to be too bad for the Masséna — !”
Florio threw up his hands in the air with a gesture that concluded his sentence more eloquently than any speech.
Florio was about forty years old at that time; a little plump man, as round as a ball, with merry eyes, and the frank, tender smile of his nation.
He was a charming creature. There was very little he could not do. He could put on a white apron and cook to perfection; he could talk most languages, more or less correctly; he could draw inimitable caricatures; he did not disdain to wax a floor, and skim on it with brushes for skates; on occasion he has woven Machramme as well as any woman lacemaker along the Riviera; he could string a lute and sing on it in a very pretty tenor; and he would go to market with a big basket and bargain for butter and cheese with a terrible acuteness that was feared by the stoutest shrew that ever sat under a green or crimson umbrella on a sunny piazza, with her live hens screeching in her old mule’s panniers.
As far as his principles went, looking back to that time, I should say he was absolutely innocent of even knowing the existence of such things.
He would lie with the sweetest smiling serenity in all the world, and he would cheat — in our service at least — with the most exquisite dexterity. Yet in other ways he was as frank as a babe, and if moved to pity he gave with both hands, withholding nothing from any thought of self interest Yes, — Florio was a charming creature; the most perfect mixture of intense shrewdness and entire simplicity that I have ever met; and wholly and entirely devoted to a service in which his multifarious talents were utterly lost and almost utterly unrequited. And yet even Florio blamed my father!
It was a terrible perplexity to me. What evil could my father do?
Night after night I used wearily to wonder over the problem, lying awake on my truckle bed, in a vast room painted with the loves of Orpheus and Eurydice, while the bats beat against the lofty windows and the beautiful white moon sailed past them backed in clouds.
To the condemnations upon him I attached no idea of gambling, despite Mariuccia’s invectives.
I saw everybody gamble; the children in the court below, the people in the streets and at the public lotteries, the men in the coffee houses and taverns, the boys in the market-places, the old beggars on the church steps: they all gambled, with cards, or dice, or balls, with nuts, or little cheeses, with dominoes on the pavement, with the gay painted cards at taroc, or by means of their fingers alone, at morra, if they had no other method available. That a pastime so universal in the broad daylight could be in any one criminal never occurred to me.
And having a strong and entirely reasonless adoration of my father, who fascinated me into love for him by his mere look and gesture, as he fascinated Florio into his service by a mere surface kindness and gracious trick of manner, I came to the conclusion as I watched the clouds and the moon, that my father was a man deeply wronged by his world and his relatives. It was very easy for me to solace myself thus, for I knew nothing of either one or the other.
He was called Milordo, and our name was Tempesta — as the Italians had it — that was all I knew: and I had mingled my ideas of him vaguely and oddly enough with that great Tempesta, who has left his sign on so many frescoes and canvases throughout Italy, and who fled to Isola Bella with his fatal love and all its crime upon his soul, and dwelt there between sea and sky.
Such small obstacles as centuries and probabilities were nothing to me, lying awake under the smile of Eurydice, and watching the bats in the moonlight beat their wings against the painted casements.
One winter in Verona he stayed longer than usual. He was not well in health Florio told us; and he had found some Austrians who amused him. He used to go out every evening and return at dawn; that I knew, for I could tell his step and listened for it I do not think he rose all day; for Florio was perpetually in and out of his master’s rooms, with some frothing cup of chocolate, some sparkling cool drink, or some dish of dainty flavours, compounded by his skill.
One evening I was upon the stairs as he came down them.
Our stairs were very dark. One little poor oil lamp burning under a hapless Madonna who had lost her nose and hands was all that illumined the immense depth of it from hall to d
ome. I had been to’ my lesson with Fortunato; it was cold; I was muffled in a little purple-velvet hooded cloak that Mariuccia had made me out of one of my mother’s dresses; my cheeks were warm with the run home; I had in my hands a silver laurel-wreath — Fortunato’s yearly prize — with which he had just presented me, for the fourth time, in all solemnity and honour.
In the deep shadows I saw my father descending the steps; involuntarily I paused; my heart gave a great bound; if he should notice the laurel-wreath, I thought?
By a miracle he stopped likewise.
“Is it you, ‘Nella? Let me look at you.”
He drew me up under the lantern which was hung a step or two above, and bent his eyes in studious scrutiny upon my face; I trembled from head to foot; I was a bold child enough, but I was afraid of him because I loved him, and because he was to me such a majestic mystery, unapproachable, and inscrutable.
He looked at me long; my hood had fallen back; my hair was blown about me by the wind; I felt my cheeks changing in colour every second under his gaze.
“Heavens! how like you look to your mother,” he murmured. “And yet you are like us too; — how old are you?”
I told him that I was nearly ten years old — at least so Mariuccia said.
“I daresay, I daresay,” he said, carelessly. “You have grown very much of late. You will be a beautiful woman, ‘Nella. Do they tell you so?”
“Many people do,” I murmured; my limbs shook under me; my face was scarlet; my heart beat like a wild bird’s: — he had praised me!
He laughed a little, wearily.
“Already? Very well! Good-night, little one.” He slipped a little gold piece into my velvet mufflers, and, for the first time in my life, touched my lips lightly with his. As he went out of sight into the gloom below, I sat down on the filthy marble stair under the Madonna and her poor dull lamp, and burst into tears, — tears of passionate joy.
When Mariuccia found me, she found me sobbing bitterly, the laurel-wreath neglected on the stones.
CHAPTER IV.
With the Popolani.
THAT small gold piece I treasured ever afterwards; piercing it, and hanging it round my neck. I used to be often hungry in those days, but no temptation of coriander cakes, or anchovy pastries, of Neapolitan confetti, or Florentine dolci, ever allured my little precious five-franc from its hiding-place.
The next day Florio summoned Mariuccia into my father’s room; he gave her a sum of money, and bade her get me with it such education as she best could in Verona. She had taught me to read; Fortunato had taught me to dance; Florio had taught me to sing ritornelli to a mandolin; but these were all my acquirements; at ten years old I was barbarously ignorant, and knew nothing, except such quaint old stray pieces of knowledge as I had gleaned from some odd volumes of Vasari and Ammirato, of Villani and Muratori, and the like, which I had found left by some former tenant in our chambers, and which made me conversant with some art-lore and with the heroical histories of
“Le donne, i cavalieri, le armi, gli armori.
Le cortesie, Ie audati imprese.”
of the by-gone centuries.
“It is the Tedeschi’s money,” grumbled Mariuccia, with her face dark, and full of reluctance and of abhorrence.
Florio showed his white teeth.
“What is that to you?” he responded. “All your business is to spend it That is enough.”
Florio theoretically hated the Tedeschi as much as she did, but practically he thought the best use Tedeschi could be put to was that of spoliation.
“They are foreigners; they are hateful; they are our tyrants and our oppressors; and we will make them fly one day,” he would say. “But while they are here, we may as well get what we can out of them. That is the true patriotism.”
It was the true philosophy, at all events; and one that served its professor exceedingly well.
As for me, I could not understand how my father’s money could be said to be the Austrians’ also.
“It is not much,’ anyhow,” I heard Mariuccia say, when she busied herself over her pots and pans while Florio plucked a Piedmontese partridge as plump as himself. “As I had the chance to see the signore, I spoke up the truth a little. When he had given his commands for ‘Nella, I said to him, “And the boys, excellenza? What of them? They are growing tall, strong, dauntless lads, and they live with Pepe, and Zoto, and Giàn, and the children of the people; and they are as ignorant as so many young mountain bulls. Will vossignoria deign to say what is to be done about them?”
“He only laughed a little. ‘They must do as they can,’ he answered me. ‘When they are old enough, your Tedeschi friends will give them rank in some regiment, I daresay; and there is very little learning wanted for that.’ Did ever you hear such an answer, Florio? As if the blessed children would ever draw a sword against Italy? But he would not say anything better; he bade me begone in that gentle way of his which, as you know, there is no gainsaying. But was it not horrible?” she went on lifting the lid off her stewpan. “The noble lads! I am sure they would be cut in a thousand pieces before they would wear the white, and help to enslave Italy, who has been a foster-mother to them from the very days of their birth.”
Florio smiled, as having plucked, he proceeded to truss his partridge.
“To be sure; to be sure. Of course we none of us would. Nevertheless, the Vienna beer tastes very light and good in the caffès, they say; especially when it costs nothing; and I have seen a good many of our people with their noses buried in the tankards.”
Mariuccia poured her stew into a dish with a charitable wish that an “accidente” might strangle forever all Italians who so far forgot themselves as ever to drink the horrible barley brew of the accursed stranieri; it was to be as vile a traitor as Judas, she averred, when God himself had given the Italians the juice of the vine.
So it came to pass that I had such teaching as Verona could afford, whilst my brothers ran wild like young colts.
Mariuccia locked the sum my father had given her away in a stout bronze coffer, and eked it out, with religious fidelity, as long and to as good purpose as she was able. Every atom of it she spent loyally, as she had been bidden; and shrewdly as became her Florentine citizenship.
She wanted many things direfully, for he and Florio went away with the first months of spring, and left her but a miserable pittance for all household purposes. But to take the smallest note from that money to procure rice, or wood, or onions, or flour, or oil for her daily needs, would have been a falseness to the trust of her stewardship which I am certain never even tempted in imagination that good, sturdy, honest soul of hers.
She laid it out to the last in the culture of my worthless little brain; if I did not profit by it as I might have done, it was no fault of hers. It was the fault of the saucy impatience of restraint, and the indolent love of basking in the sun, doing nothing, which the country and its habits had fostered in me. For I was decidedly a naughty child; I loved my own way and generally took it; and my sins of omission and commission were so many and various that with every Eve of Epiphany I listened in fear for the tinkling bell in the streets, and dreaded the bag of ashes and the long cane with which the black-faced Befana punishes the wilful.
Mariuccia went very wisely to work; she would have nothing to do with women teachers or schools; there were many old professors, old scholars, in the town whom she knew were terribly poor, and yet full of erudition, and not too grand to take something for imparting it. To these men she went, and so she secured me the means of getting a knowledge much more worth the having than the convent-culture which the children of my sex ordinarily obtain; that I profited too little by it was, as I say, no fault of my dear old nurse.
For the only teacher amongst them all to whom I really gave attention and obedience was my singing-master.
I adored music; it is impossible, I think, not to care for it, if you are reared in Italy. Everything seems to sing, from the cicale upwards. All that unwritten music of
the populace whose scores no hands have ever penned, is exquisite; and every now and then in the streets, or from some high casement in the roof, you hear the notes of a divine voice, and you seek it out through filthy courts, up cut-throat stairways, into dark, dismal, foul-smelling chambers, and you find that it is only Pasqua the washerwoman singing at her tub, or Gillo the facchino amusing himself as he carries up the wood.
I had my mother’s voice — so Mariuccia said. It seems that she had been of infinite promise as a singer when my father, desperately enamoured of her for the moment, bore her off from the stage in the second season of her public appearance, and the first of her performances at the Pergola. What my voice was to others, I do not know; I only know that all my life long song has been as natural to me as to any thrush or bullfinch.
The Veronese used to call me L’Uccello, the bird; and where there were so many uccelli, all more or less musically-throated, the name was in itself a distinction. Many and many a time, in Verona, when I have been out alone, I have found myself the centre of an eager little crowd, which followed me because I was singing aloud as I went; and to pacify them, I have vaulted on a parapet or a ledge, or anything that was convenient, and repeated the stornelli to an enthusiastic circle of blacksmiths, and horse-boys, and porters, and fruit-sellers, and beggars; — Mariuccia knowing nothing.
And then they would escort me homeward, humming the choruses of the songs themselves, delighting in me with that mingling of charming familiarity, and yet perfect respect, of which the Latin nations alone seem to know the secret; and saying nothing to me, that a little princess might not have heard, but waving their caps to me, and tendering me, by the hands of some old butcher, or some young ostler, a knot of china roses, or a plume of lilies and verbena, with the prettiest grace, and the sweetest smiles in all the world.
Ah! dear people, dear people! when I think of you, I repent me that I have said I hated your ugly town; for of a truth I loved you, and you me.