by Ouida
No, I loved the people; I had enough soul in me for that; but all the same, even in my happiest hours, I never dreamed for an instant, as Mariuccia dreamed for me, of being content to dwell amidst them for ever.
And happy hours I had; though my brothers and I sat at night reading Vasari, or old Pulci, or the Chronicles of Compagni, or Ferreto, or the wonderful stories of Croce, that Bolognese “Homer of Children,” by the light of one poor little miserable lamp; and though in the winter sometimes we had barely charcoal enough to heat the small brown jars, and though even on most summer days we had little else to eat than a roll of bread and a broth of herbs, a few ripe figs from the old tree in the court, or a slice of the padrona’s polenta.
CHAPTER V.
The Peacock’s Plumes.
WE were happiest when we were alone with Mariuccia.
We were children, and strong and well, and there was the bright, broad, living sunlight about us, and all things were possible for us in the future. But when my father came and Florio it was different We did not reason on it, but we were vaguely affected by their presence, vaguely depressed by it Some breath from a world we knew nothing of blew in on us, and chilled us in our bare old home in the mellow Lombardie heats.
“Oh, Dio mio! but it is terrible!” Florio would say, lifting his hands as he peered into the faggotless cupboard, the empty stewpans, the ill-furnished bread pot, and then we became sensible of the privations which we had scarcely perceived before, and alive to that vital truth of the old Condottieri, that “Senza soldi non possono fare?
“It is terrible,” Florio would say, cooking a couple of little larks and some toadstools out of the woods in such magical fashion that they would have deceived any epicure in the country into belief in them as ortolans and mushrooms. “It gets worse, you see, every year; of course it gets worse. He wins less often; and he takes more brandy when he loses. It is always the way. It is a puzzle to live at all, and half the cities are shut to us. Debt — debt — debt It slaps the gates in our faces. There is hardly anywhere that they will trust him now. It will end in that, — some day, — and soon.”
With “that” he gave a gesture as though he drew a knife across his bare throat Mariuccia shook her head.
“End in that? End?” she echoed. “And, say you, Florio, what pray will then begin for them! For the dear little ones? It is very well to say ‘end,’ as if he were the only one concerned in the matter. Four of them: and not a farthing except the few notes he leaves with me when he comes and goes,’ which the Holy Mother knows would be hardly enough to feed up a goose for San Giovanni’s day, let alone feeding four big hungry children from one Lent on to another.”
Such discourse as this we used to hear between them in stray fragments; and they left on us a subtle, indistinct sense of some impending evil; and even I, despite the innumerable illusions and indestructible faiths in which the name of my father was involved for me, grew by degrees dimly sensible that he only returned to us at such times and seasons as it had become impossible for him to live elsewhere.
The old barren dusky palace was the cheapest roof that we could have found all the world over to cover our heads, and when he came thither for a temporary refuge, the fidelity of his two servants still contrived to sustain around him some show of ceremonial and some sense of comfort. How they did it I cannot tell, nor even at this day can I imagine; but do it they did; with surpassing patience and with unwavering self-sacrifice.
An Italian can subsist on almost as little as an Arab; and if he only offer you but a couple of dates he can serve them on a majolica plate with a few lentiscus leaves and a little myrtle in such fashion that they will lack nothing in grace of service that any king could desire at his banquet.
Such a man as my father was could not be anywhere wholly without companions.
The native nobility and gentry never came nigh him; but the Austrians used to flash their white uniforms on our dark staircase many and many a night. They used to pass within the doors of his room and remain till daylight; and all night long Florio used to be gliding to and fro with glass jars of chartreuse, or fresh flasks of brandy.
They were my old Tedesco acquaintances who had waltzed me round a hundred times to the swell of their military bands; but as I grew older my father sternly bade Mariuccia take heed that I was never about upon the stairs at evening, and she kept me imprisoned by her side under the lamp, weaving the lace, which I hated, or studying the scores of Ambrogio Rufi, which I loved.
Other of my pleasures came to an end too about this time.
It was a lovely spring in Lombardy, mild even as though amidst the Sorrentine orange woods.
Everywhere the meadows were white and hyacinthine-hued with a million crocuses. The violets followed them in countless hordes amongst the grass tufts underneath the vines. The maple and mulberry trees were pushing forth their tender leaflets, and in the dark old city there were soft blushes of colour where the yellow daffodils and the home-reared carnations blossomed in the casements and the balconies.
And away to the northward was the silvery cloud of the Alps, and the students would go outward thither and come back with the fresh winds blowing in their hair, and with their hands full of blue gentian flowers.
In the spring, even, our level plain of the Adige, which had not the beauty either of the mountain or the valley, had a certain charm of its own under the budding vine boughs and amongst the delicate acacias; I used to be in the fields all the day long, with my brothers and Raffaelino, playing till we were tired, and then, lying down to rest, watching the blue sea, of those immeasurable distances beyond which lay the world.
One day when I had filled my arms with masses of wood violets, I clambered up the stairs to the bottega of one of the students. He was very fond of flowers, and introduced them in all his sketches, and I was accustomed to take him a share of my field-spoils. He was a swarthy, large-limbed, tender-hearted creature; a son of peasants of an Aquillian village, whom we always called Cecco.
One day, when I was about twelve years old, I went my round as usual amongst my friends the painters. It was a fine bright day in February; I had been out in the woods by daybreak with my brothers and the padrona’s boys gathering violets; the great odorous purple violets that, like so many other flowers, smell surely sweeter in Italy than ever they do elsewhere.
We came home by noon laden with them; the padrona’s lads went out to stand with their share of the forest plunder at the corners of the streets, and see if they could get a penny to play with at boccette; I filled Mariuccia’s pots and jugs with some of mine, and took the rest to my friend Cecco, who loved flowers, as I say, and so often introduced them in his pictures that the students nicknamed him Il Squarcionino, or the Little Squarcione, from that old Padovan who was the first of the Early Masters to paint flowers and fruits in arabesque.
He lived at the top of a lofty old house in a gloomy bye-street I climbed the hundred and odd stairs with labour, for they were rotten, twisting, and slippery from over much dirt; and, with my arms full of violets, purple and white, darted into his painting room, that was as bare as a bam, and not half as cleanly.
With Cecco there were three or four other lads, smoking and laughing, and talking as they worked. He had an admirable light in his great, ugly workroom; and those comrades of his who were not so fortunate in that respect were wont to set up their easels beside his, and labour together all in their various manners.
They welcomed me with enthusiasm, went on their knees to me and my violets, and abandoned their work that they might sketch me.
“Just as you are, signorina!” they called to me. “No! do not touch a thing; it is perfect Look at her now, with the light on all that ruffled hair, and the little gay skirt full of the violets, and the colour all hot in her face from the wind: ah, bellina, bellina!”
So they cried around me in twenty different forms of admiration — the artists’ admiration, which is so curiously compounded of fancy and of fact, and which they were
accustomed to pour out on me as unthinkingly as though I had been a porcelain figure.
I was so accustomed to it, that it hardly hurt me more than it would have done the china; I knew Nature had made me good to look upon and picturesque. Altro! I used to shrug my shoulders and think no more about it except to give a passing pity to the unfortunate ones who were not similarly gifted.
So that day they hoisted me up upon the wooden dais where their models were accustomed to stand, and, with their four easels in the four corners of the room, set to work to paint me as I was, with my load of violets, and my hair all blown from the rough mountain breezes.
In a couple of hours they had all contented themselves more or less thoroughly with a first sketch, and simultaneously laid down their brushes.
“I have made her the Genius of Spring,” said Bernardino Scalchi, surveying his workmanship with his head on one side, like a robin’s.
“And I have made her ‘La Primavera della Vita, La Gioventù dell’ Anno,”’ said Beppo Lavo, who wrote very pretty verses, and could sing them, too, not ill.
“And I have made her the Renaissance of Italy; the type of the Dawn of Freedom, the Symbol of the Future,” said Neri Castagno, who was a patriot and a red republican.
Old, swart, clumsy Cecco laughed a little as he turned round to them:
“I am very prosaic after you. I have only made her what she is — a child.”
And yet, when all the sketches stood side by side, in the dying light of the late afternoon, it was Cecco’s, they frankly admitted, which had the true poetry in it, after all.
A child with a skirt full of violets, with a rough wintry sky behind her, with a fresh wind tossing her hair, and with her feet gaily flying over the wet earth already green with the coming of spring: that was all that Cecco had made of it; but beside his picture the others looked false in sentiment, strained in fancy, and garish in grandiloquence.
Their work over, they made me jump from my throne; they thrust the violets in a bowl of water; they insisted that I should stay and have a little feast with them. Cecco had been in luck that day; a small panel of his, a girl’s face in a garland of roses, had sold for the enormous sum of twenty florins; he was a millionaire, at least, for a day, in his own estimation.
He ran downstairs into the street, and in a few minutes came back in gay triumph with a couple of flasks of chiante, with a pan of steaming chesnuts, with a round sweet-almond cake, and a big bundle of cigars.
Then he thrust me in an old oak chair draped with dusky tapestries; he cast over me a magnificent old brocaded robe that the Jews would have bought of him to cast in the fire for its gold to melt out of the threads, but which he would never part with, because it had belonged to his father, who had been an artist before him; he gave me a sceptre of peacock’s plumes, and a diadem of silvered paper with which models were crowned when they had to sit for Madonnas; and then our feast began.
How we enjoyed ourselves! how we chattered! how we laughed! how rich the wine tasted! how crisp were the chesnuts! how we shouted the “Fuori gli stranieri!” how we sang every song that occurred to us, from motives of Rossini’s and Bellini’s to the last chorus of the newest street song!
We were merry at heart, and full of zest, in the deepening twilight and the clouds of smoke, while a ruddy light from the setting sun glanced on the swarthy face and kindling eyes of Cecco, and lit up the peacock’s plumes of my thyrsus and the gold stitches in the brocade: so merry, indeed, and so full of zest, that we never heard the door unclose or perceived that anyone besides ourselves had entered the painting-room.
Only at the sound of a strange voice did Cecco tumble hurriedly up from the floor where he was stretched, and, with eager apologies and bewildered haste, strike light to a lamp and welcome three strangers, who, going the round of the ateliers, had come in its turn to his.
I, seated on my brocaded throne, with my Madonna’s crown on my tumbled hair, and my pewter plate of chesnuts on my lap, paused in my singing, and looked up; two of the strangers were Austrians, the third was my father.
Trembling, I slid down and stood like a little culprit, with the folds of the brocade curled like many-coloured serpents round my feet: it was not that I had any sense of doing what was wrong, it was only that he was to me a mystery so full of awe, and wonder, and attraction, that to see him suddenly there appalled me.
It was the first time in my life that I had ever met him in Verona out of our own old home.
His eyes glanced across me and he knew me in a moment; that I saw; but he gave me no recognition.
As chance would, however, have it, one of the Austriaci looked at me by the flickering lights of the lamp and the sunset.
“A charming little figure!” he cried. “Fantastic but very charming. A model, of course, in all that tinsel and brocade.”
Dumb and perplexed, and glancing at my father in a vague terror, I stood still, with the silver crown upon my curls, and wished to sink into the depths of the old brocades; but he, hearing his friend speak, came forward and looked at me coldly.
“A pretty little beggar,” he said, with a cold, swift glance of his eyes. I knew his meaning in a moment: he chose to affect to avoid all recognition of me.
My face burned, my heart rose, my fear of him was forgotten. I threw off my silver diadem and the old robes, and stood up straight before him, the poor neglected peacock sceptre trailing on the bricks.
“If I be a beggar, it is not my fault, nor yet Mariuccia’s,” I said, boldly, with a scorn for him that thrilled me with a horrible sense of guilt and of humiliation. “We are very hungry and very cold — all of us — very often. They do not dare to tell you. But it is true. And if I can forget it a little while laughing here, where is the harm? I am not ashamed.”
My father’s face, haggard and cold though it was, flushed deeply, whether with anger or any more tender sense of shame, I cannot tell. He thrust me from the room.
“Whatever else you be, you are too young to rant so glibly,” he said, as he closed the door upon me.
I ran down the street to fling my woes at Mariuccia’s feet, and sobbed as I ran, the poor bedraggled peacock’s plumes still trailing from my hand, and gathering in their course the dust and ordure of the uneven and uncleanly stones.
I fled along under the darkling shadows of the grim fortresses which overhung the pavement, burning all over with a sense of outrage and of indignant scorn.
My father was not ashamed to starve me, but he was ashamed to acknowledge me because I sat and laughed and sang, and was glad in a garret, in a paper diadem, over a horn of cheap wine, and a handful of chesnuts, and a bowl of wood-violets.
I had a passion of scorn for such shame: and yet the weight of it was heavy on my child’s heart, for I had a vague, shapeless, unreasoned-on sense of foreboding that, as my father had judged, so would the world judge likewise.
Mariuccia comforted me in her tender, homely fashion, and washed clean the peacock’s plumes, and set them up over the stove with a palm-sheaf blessed for good luck in Holy Week.
But at evening-time she told me sadly that my father had forbidden her to allow me ever again to visit any of the students.
The loss of that cheery, good-natured, chivalrous, riotous companionship of theirs cost me many and many an hour of rebellious tears, and from that moment I ceased to be loyal to my father.
I would look at the peacock sceptre again and again, and think to myself —
“If you had been of gold and ivory, he would have praised you.”
And I loved my feather-thyrsus all the more tenderly for other’s neglect of it; and for my father a settled scorn fired itself in me, and killed love.
CHAPTER VI.
Mater Dolorosa.
So things went on, until I reached my fifteenth year. I was tall, but I was still, — for I had the open-air life which develops the limb and strengthens the body, — I was still in my ways and my tastes quite a child.
Raffaelino grew apace, too, and h
is people talked of his entering the priesthood; they did not know what to do with him; he had no taste for any hand trade; he was for ever haunting the churches; and to his mother, who was a religious soul, there seemed no life more beautiful or blessed than life amidst the silent marble cloisters, and the perpetual calm of Certosa or Camaldoli.
One of my brothers long before had died of fever in one of the hot, nauseous, pestilential summers of the uncleanly town; another had gone of his own will off with a Genoese sea-captain, whom he had met by chance, and who had dazzled him with stories of the sea, and he had been drowned on his first voyage; a third had kissed us, and clung round Mariuccia’s neck, and confessed, shamefacedly, that his heart was breaking with monotony and inaction, and so had also gone his way to see the outer world with some other young students, as poor and hopeful as himself, who talked of immortality and starved upon a dream; and of him, also, we had heard that autumn that a knife-thrust in a students’ scuffle had ended his short life just as it had opened into manhood.
She and I were left alone in the old home.
We closed the great rooms, and lived through a dreary winter in one little chamber abutting on her kitchen, and looking down into the stone court where the fountain that year was frozen, and the cold killed even the hardy bitter-orange-trees.
We had not heard of my father since the previous Easter-term.
Twice or thrice, Mariuccia had gone to the little dark den on the piazza, where the letter-writer of the poor people sat, ready to indite an amorous effusion or a summons for rent, a proposal of marriage or a butcher’s bill, according to his clients’ requirements; and thence she sent a letter each time to Florio or to her master.
I suppose she did not care for me to know of it, since she did not avail herself of my aid to pen them. Twice or thrice, in answer, Florio sent a little money, as from my father; but I have had many doubts since that Florio had contrived to gain it by some one of his innumerable talents, and robbed himself for our sakes. From my father, directly, we received no word.