by Ouida
The winter was terribly dull Mariuccia was getting very old, and wept sadly and often for the loss of her boys.
They had been as the very apple of her eye; she had toiled for them from the very days of their births; she had spent many a sleepless night and weary day beside their sick-beds in their wayward infancy; she had gone without her morsel of meat many a time to feed better with it the young lion cubs she loved; and now — one was dead, and the other two had thrown their arms about her neck, and laughed, and talked of the future, and gone gaily away, thinking only of the worlds they had never seen, and of the dreams they were sure would come true.
That was all her reward: it was hard.
I saw those firm-shut lips of hers quiver often as she sat and spun by the dull lamplight; and I heard her many a night murmur on her knees to the Mater Dolorosa, “Do not forget them, thou Blessed One. They will forget thee — children will — but mothers are not angered for that.”
“What has made you stay with us, Mariuccia?” I asked her once, smitten suddenly with some remorseful consciousness of the enormous debt we owed to her. “Why have you stayed with us? It has been a hard life always; and we have been only a trouble to you and no reward?”
She looked at me with a steady look that had a certain pathetic sadness in it.
“One must love something,” she said, simply.
I pondered darkly on the saying.
CHAPTER VII.
A Twilight Tale.
THE winter was very dull. My father’s forbiddance had taken from me many of my old pleasures; and the failure of funds had arrested all continuance of my education. There was only Ambrogiô Rufi to whom I still went, and in whose attic I was solaced by the strains of Cherubini and the melodies of Gluck.
It was bitterly cold there.
The snow was thick on the roof, and the wind from the mountains poured through and through the unprotected place. The old man could afford no such luxury as a stove; and the bare brick floor was like ice to the feet. I used to shiver as I sang.
And yet when I think’ of the sweet sigh of the violin melodies through the white winter silence; of Raffaelino’s eager, dreamy eyes, misty with the student’s unutterable sadness and delight; of old Ambrogiô, with his semicircle of children round him, lifting their fresh voices at his word; of the little robin that came every day upon the water-pipe, and listened, and trilled in harmony, and ate joyfully the crumbs which the old maestro daily spared to it from his scanty meal — when I think of those hours, it seems to me that they must have been happiness too.
“Could we but know when we axe happy!” sighs some poet As well might he write “Could we but set the dewdrop with our diamonds! could we but stay the rainbow in our skies!”
During this sad time of privation, I saw a little way into the closed past of my old music-master.
Verona perceived nothing in him but a meagre old man, who took his toilsome way noon and night to the theatre; who chaffered in the market for a pinch of charcoal and a bit of goat’s-milk cheese; who wore his clothes so long that they fairly dropped asunder; and who made their boys and girls cry bitterly at many a sharp word and blow of his fiddle-bow when they sung not to his liking.
But I had always felt or fancied — fancy is so much feeling with every child — that there was something sadder, wiser, nobler in Ambrogiô than the townsfolk credited.
Perhaps he liked me better than he did the others, or he liked my voice better; all human creatures were only counted as so many voices by him; at any rate he now and then let fall, in my hearing only, brief sentences which seemed to me born of a mind higher than most of those with which I came in daily contact Mariuccia would not listen to any idea of the kind. She was a little jealous of my regard for him.
“Those music-mad people,” she would say, “are just like that big sea-shell the dear lads brought me from Genoa. The sea-shell sings all day long if you put it to your ear. Why does it sing? Just because it is empty. Just because the heart that used to beat in it is dead and gone. It is just so with them. They are all melody because everything else born in them is withered up — che-e-e!”
One night, as it grew dark, I ventured, contrary to usage, to go and see my old maestro.
I was dissatisfied with my tiresome fate; I was ill at ease and impatient; I wanted I knew not very well what I climbed up his dark staircase, and found him in his chamber.
It was a night when there was no performance at the theatre of which he was one of the orchestra. He sat alone in the cheerless, fireless attic scanning some old scores by the light of a miserable little oil lamp.
He looked up as I entered; I think that he was always glad to see me, though he said nothing in welcome at any time.
“It is late for you to be out,” was all his greeting.
I told him the Ave Maria had only just then rung; and asked him to explain again some obscure instruction in counterpoint which had been hard for me at his last lesson.
He went through and through the passage lucidly with me; he was always willing to smooth difficulties to a patient student, and in music I had patience, though in nothing else.
When the point was so clear to me that I had no longer excuse to linger over it, I still loitered by him, sitting there at the old bare table, leaning my elbows on it, and my face on my hands, and gazing at the red, dull wick of the ill-fed lamp.
“Talk to me a little, maestro!” I said, suddenly.
Ambrogiô took off his spectacles slowly, and gazed at me in stupefaction.
“Talk!” he echoed: it never happened to him to be asked for words; such things as he had it in him to say he said through the strings of his violin.
“Yes! Talk,” I repeated, with the insistance of a spoilt child, — for poor Mariuccia had spoiled me sadly, despite all her warnings. “You must have seen the world sometime. Tell me a little about it.”
“The world!”
He said the words with a startled, heavy breath. He looked like one who hears the long, unuttered name of some dead thing.
“Yes. The world,” I said again. “What is it like?”
“Go in a convent, and never know,” he answered, with a bitter brevity.
“Is it so bad, then?”
He looked at me across the deal table in the dull, yellow lamplight; a dreary, grey, shrunken figure, very old, very poor, very hopeless, with his great hollow eyes burning bright with the fires of awakening memories.
“Bad? Good? Pshaw! Those are phrases. No one uses them but fools. You have seen the monkeys’ cage in the beast-garden here. That is the world. It is not strength, or merit, or talent, or reason that is of any use there; it is just which monkey has the skill to squeeze to the front and jabber through the bars, and make his teeth meet in his neighbours’ tails till they shriek and leave him free passage — it is that monkey which gets all the cakes and the nuts of the folk on a feast-day. The monkey is not bad; it is only a little quicker and more cunning than the rest; that is all.”
I sat silent; it seemed to me but a dreary prospect, this monkeys’ cage which I should be doomed to enter when once I should be across the mountains.
“Tell me a little more,” I urged to him. “You must have seen so much when you were young.”
“No,” he answered me. “I never saw very much. The man who is poor can only look out of a garret window. He sees the skies, and the sun, and the moon, and the changes of the clouds, better than anyone else; but it is all he does see.”
“But he can walk abroad?”
“Can he? Shoe leather costs money; and though bare feet might safely tread the sands of deserts in the days of saints, they go but ill upon the flints of the king’s highways — now.”
This I felt was true; indeed I knew it by many a painful moment when my little worn-out shoes had click-clacked sorrowfully over the scorching stones of Verona in midsummer.
I grew cold with a sort of sickly fear of this new world into which a second earlier I had been all eagerness to plunge.
“But you must have seen so much to what I have seen,” I urged, after a pause, again with a child’s persistency. “Do tell me something — some story I mean — of your old life?”
His eyes were full of pain beneath his shaggy brows as they met mine across the dim light.
“Child, you should never open dead men’s graves,” he said, drearily, with a sort of shudder. “I tell you I was always poor. It is a kind of blindness — poverty. We can only grope through life when we are poor, hitting and maiming ourselves against every angle.”
“But you had genius?—”
He shrugged his shoulders in a pathetic, hopeless gesture of resignation that went to my heart through all my thoughtless selfishness.
“I have been most unhappy,” he answered simply. “Yes; you are right.”
I felt that I knew his meaning, vaguely though his words shadowed it “And how then,” I said under my breath, “how then — not great?”
He smiled a little, very wearily.
“How? Well, I loved Art, and not the world, and, in my way, was honest Time was, when I was young, that I dreamed a little of being, as you call it, great. At twenty-five, I was — yes, even I — was happy.
“I was poor indeed; in winter I had to keep my bed lest I should die of cold, and in summer I was glad to dispute the acorns with the swine. But I was happy. I had my Art, and I had a friend closer than a brother.
“He was a German, Karl Rothwald; together we studied music at Milano. He had no strong talent, only a graceful taste. I — well, I had genius, God help me, and of the most arduous study I was never tired.
“At twenty-five I trusted myself to commence my first great work — an opera upon the theme of Alkestis. I was two years engaged upon it They were the two happy years of my life.
“Rothwald and I dwelt in the same chambers together; we walked abroad in the daybreak and the evening times, and we sat up late into the nights, I all the while dreaming of Alkestis, and giving shape to the creations that haunted me, and calling on his sympathy and joy each time when my composition was good on my own ear and satisfied my own desire. He never was fatigued, nor ever failed to rejoice with me.
“Often and often as we went through the millet-fields at sunrise, or sat in our garret through the long moonless nights, and the power of song that was in me broke forth and arose triumphant, and filled me with its own exultant strength, he — my friend — would laugh and weep in his boyish fashion and fling his arms about my shoulders and cry out how beautiful and strong my music was, and prophesy I should rank with Bach and Gluck and Palestrina.
“Those two years I was quite happy, — quite, — though I was but a starving scholar, and had often to go without bread to be able to buy paper for my scores. —
“All the world was full of hope and of beauty to me; everywhere I heard delicious melodies in leaves, and waters, and bells, and winds, and all the things that moved, and my friend was with me, — close as a brother, — dear almost as a mistress. I wanted nothing more, and was sure of fame.
“My opera was barely finished when Rothwald was summoned from my side; some illness in his northern home, he said.
“I begged him to return swiftly; I pledged my word to him not to submit my opera to the direction of La Scala until he should return. ‘My triumph would be robbed of half its joy if thou wert not with me to rejoice in it;’ so I spoke to him as we bade each other our farewell. It was then autumn.
“The delay was sad for me, for I had hoped to have seen the Alkestis produced that winter; but I never thought of putting it forward in his absence. I loved him only second to my work; and I had pledged him my word that he should be present whenever it should be given to the public.
“The first months of winter are bitter in Milano; they were very cheerless and desolate to me; but I had many tender letters from him to keep warm my heart, and I occupied myself fondly in touching and refining the creation on which all my future hung.
“No one had ever heard a chord of it, except himself, but I had not much fear that it would not be accepted. At the great Scala, they knew me; and the conductor of orchestra, who was powerful with the direction, had a liking for me, because of my execution upon the violin.
“Rothwald had been gone four months; there were snow and ice in Milan; one day I sat shivering in my garret, yet with my heart warm still, because so much hope abode in it. The chief of orchestra paid me a visit; he was, as I say, good to me; I could not have maintained my life at all without the place he gave me amongst his musicians.
“He spoke to me of myself this day. ‘Ambrogio,’ he said, ‘it seems to me that you have too much genius to sit behind my bâton all your life. I hear that you have attempted original composition. Is it true? Then let me see your score. It should be something great You are a master of counterpoint’ He argued with me so kindly and so long, that in the end he prevailed, and I drew out my Alkestis, and bade him judge of it “‘Alkestis? Alkestis?’ he murmured, as he heard the name. ‘Is that your theme? It is unfortunate. There is a new opera this very week produced in Vienna on that same old story.’
“I was pained to hear that I had been forestalled; I asked him by whom it was composed.
‘“Nay, that I forget, and am not sure if I have heard,’ he answered me. ‘But, anyway, you had best go thither and judge of it for yourself. If it be poor and fail, you can still produce yours; but if a triumph, as I am told, we must needs fit your music to some other narrative. Ah! I know how you love your first thought — your first poem, — but still we might manage to alter the libretto without much injury. Well, go you to Vienna — nay, nay, do not be so proud. Take my gold for the journey, and we will leave the matter as a debt to be paid me when La Scala first brings out your opera. Nay, do not argue. Go. You must, of necessity, judge your rival for yourself.’
“So I took his gold and went through the bleak white winter over the mountains at peril of my life.
“It was night when I reached Vienna.
“The gay city was all ablaze with light. I had travelled far and fast; I was exhausted. Nevertheless, before I changed my clothes, or broke my fast, I made my way to the opera-house. There they played Alkestis.
“I paid my entrance-money, and went into the heat and glare and stood and listened. The house was shaking with thunders of applause. When the clamour ceased, the music rose again — it was my own.
“Phrase after phrase, chorus on chorus, solo and septuor, and recitative, I heard them all like one made stupid by a blow. They were all mine.
“The curtain fell; the rapture of the people cried aloud, ‘Rothwald!’ ‘Rothwald!’ ‘Rothwald!’
“Then I understood; “I fell like a stone; so they say; they took me up as dead.
“He had stolen it all — all — all: stored up in his notes and his copied score.
“It made him a great name. You may hear of him now in the world. He has done nothing great since; the world wonders; but it is possible to stretch one triumph over a lifetime so that it covers every after failure. To make a name is hard; but once made, to live on it is easy.
“As for me — I say — I was dead. My heart, my brain, my genius were all killed. It is only my body that has dragged on life ever since.
“I never denounced him — no. For I had loved him. And if I had denounced him, where had been my proof? None would have been found to believe.”
As the last words died on his lips, his head sunk on his chest; a film overspread the weariness of his hollow eyes; the silence of the innumerable years that he had passed, mute and alone, amidst his kind, stole afresh over him.
In vain I knelt before him; in vain I caressed his withered hands; in vain I spoke to him, begging his forgiveness for my thoughtless cruelty which had thus torn open rudely this deadly wound so long concealed from every human glance.
In vain: he answered nothing; he heard nothing; his dulled eyes only gazed at the gleam of the lamp; his hands only moved vaguely as though straying ove
r the chords of some half-remembered music; his lips only muttered now and then under their breath:
“He betrayed me; yes; he stole all, — all, — all. But could I denounce him? He had been my friend.”
And this he said again, and again, and again, many times; not knowing rightly what he said; and murmuring between whiles softly to himself sweet broken snatches of sad melodies — the melodies, doubtless, of his lost Alkestis.
I stole away, awed and afraid, for I was but a child, and went out into the flood of moonlight, into the bath of cold and luminous air, and there in the streets I sat down and wept bitterly for a woe not my own — for a life that was ended.
On the morrow he did not seem to remember the confession he had poured out to me, nor ever again did any allusion to it pass his lips, or mine. But he had become sacred, to me; every time that I stood before him I could have kissed his hands for very love, and reverence, and pity.
From that hour I loved and honoured, and never dared be wayward with him.
He was only an old withered man, very bent and broken and poor, ill clad, and taking snuff with trembling hands in the bitter cold of his fireless attic, but to me from that night onward he was a hero and a martyr, and whilst he lived I never told to anyone what he had told to me, not even to Raffaelino.
When a man’s eyes meet yours, and his faith trusts you and his heart upon a vague impulse is laid bare to you, it always has seemed to me the basest treachery the world can hold to pass the gold of confidence which he pours out to you from hand to hand as common coin for common circulation.
It was Mariuccia who had reared me in that manner of thinking.
“Child,” she used to say, “if they gave a diamond in trust to your safe keeping, would you run with it to the goldsmith’s shops in the public streets? Well, is not human faith of more sanctity than diamonds?”
She thought so; being an old stanch republican of Florence and a woman very poor always, who knew little of the world or of its ways.