Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  CHAPTER VIII.

  The little red Box.

  AT this time the winter set in with an almost unexampled severity.

  All over Italy it was cold; so they said; and poor Verona lying in her open plain receiving full upon her defencelessness the strokes of the alpine storm winds, seemed to crouch and perish under the driving of the hurricanes; her huge old houses were riven through and through with cold, and her high leaning walls whose shadow was so precious in the summer noons, seemed now like barriers of ice.

  That winter was a very terrible one to Mariuccia and to me.

  Poor we had always been, but that winter we had absolutely nothing. Of my father we had not heard for nearly twelve months, and the last of Florio’s letters was already half a year old.

  Mariuccia earned a little, a very little, by spinning and by selling the work, but this was all. We lived on the very barest food that could keep life in any human creatures.

  Of clothing there was no absolute need, for my poor mother’s wardrobe had been costly and almost indestructible. But even in this we had come to the very last, and I was forced either to wear rustling silks and lustrous velvets, which made me look like a figure out of a masked ball, or else go without covering in the bitter alpine blasts.

  Happily it did not matter so much in Italy as it would have mattered any where else; yet I used to feel absurdly and cruelly out of keeping with my fate as I wove lace to get a pennyworth of bread to stand between me and starvation, whilst all the time my brocaded skirts swept the brick floor, and a boddice sown with gold thread and seed pearls imprisoned my aching and hungry heart I was fifteen; and old enough to know that it was very terrible to be without friends or money in the world; and very bitter to sit endlessly crossing and knotting the threads of my lace all the while wholly powerless to untwist one of the threads of fate.

  If I could only escape from Verona, I used to think — it seemed to me it would all be quite simple then, once beyond the gates: — just once.

  The Christmas week came, and kept the bells of all the churches ringing all day and night.

  The dark, black-faced Befana had her feast day, and the people rejoiced and ate and drank and sang at the midnight mass, and exchanged compliments and confetti, good will and generous wines.

  And all this time Mariuccia and I had not so much as a log of wood for the hearth, or a slice of meat for the soup pot; we were cold, poor, alone.

  We went to mass all the same; and no one looking at her in her ruddy serge kirtle and her great Tuscan hat, and at me in my satin skirts and my velvet hood, would ever have dreamed we were in want of anything. For Mariuccia in her way was very proud; and so was I in mine. Nevertheless, so utterly did we want that we besought the Madonna humbly to send us a crust of bread.

  But no doubt the Madonna hears this cry of “bread, bread, only a little bread,” so very often that she has got deaf to it.

  Be that how it may she sent us nothing; and in a little while it came to pass that for one whole day we did not even break our fast, and must have gone supperless to our chill beds, had not the padrona, from whom we could never quite conceal our dire needs, toiled up the stairs in the dark with a smoking pan of maccaroni lentil flavoured, and besought us to partake of it for the love of God.

  Mariuccia accepted it with tears in her fearless old eyes, which for more than eighty years had never failed to open at dawn to the day’s labour. Mariuccia would take a gift as frankly as she would give one; yet to eat the meal of charity was very bitter to her; she had done her best so long to live without alms; it seemed to her, I think, hard not to have died a little earlier, so as to have escaped this degradation.

  That night she prayed very long to her Mother of Many Sorrows; I sobbed myself to sleep shivering and without a prayer.

  In the morning, when we rose, there was not a thing in the house for our hunger; not a drop of milk for our thirst Mariuccia set out the cups and plates by sheer habit, but they remained empty; there was not so much as a dust of charcoal with which to heat any water.

  It was a very cold day, but very bright. The sun was shining. The bells were ringing. Already in the streets below there was a crowd of quickly moving feet and of laughing voices. The Carnival had come. It was the first day of the corso di gala.

  Mariuccia and I looked at one another with the dry eyes of an absolute despair.

  After a little space she went to a drawer in an old walnut-wood press, and took out a little red box. She brought it to me where I sat with the pillow of my work lying idle in my lap. She took out of it a few trinkets; corals and mosaics.

  “These were your mother’s,” she said tenderly. “She had a great mass of jewels when I went to her first. After her death your father took them away, and sold them all no doubt I have never seen them again. He kept these few little things; they are not of much value, though they are good of their kind. I have kept them for you. I could not think it right to sell them. But now it is a question whether they go or you starve. You are old enough to choose; — say.”

  I held them in my hand whilst she spoke; there were earrings and lockets and a bracelet, all — in mosaic.

  My poor young mother! I had never felt such pity for her, such nearness to her as I felt then.

  My eyes grew wet with a rush of tears. I threw my arms about Mariuccia’s throat “Keep them to-day,” I murmured. “Dear, dear Mariuccia! — just to-day. I have thought of something. I am going to Ambrogiô.”

  I had flung my velvet hood over my head, and was out of the chamber and down the stairs into the street before she had time to question me; moreover she had no fear; I went every other day to Ambrogiô.

  The sun was shining radiantly upon the frosty pavements as I went out upon them. It was the fourteenth day of the new year and the first of the carnival.

  In the teeth of the cold people were all astir; hugging close their charcoal braziers, and wrapping their faces to the eyes in their cloaks; and although it was scarcely noon, in many a dark doorway there flashed some gay mummer’s disguise.

  The chimes of all the churches were ringing madly; there were bursts of music here and there; a set of the Tedeschi flashed by me, driving in the Tirol fashion; muffled with scarlet rugs and brown sables, their horses in belled harness stretched like greyhounds; from a balcony above, there fell on them as they galloped by a shower of house-reared violets and roses, a woman laughed gaily as she cast the flowers; their Tirolean postilions roused the echoes of the old gateways with a tarantarratara upon their tasselled bugles — how pretty and bright it all was!

  It was the first gala of Carnival, and although the procession had scarcely commenced all the city was out in holiday attire, and in holiday humour.

  There was a wonderful glow everywhere of many various colours.

  In the great multitudes that thronged every square and street and passage-way, and shelved upward like banks of flowers against the huge stones of the palaces and prisons, there were beautiful half tones of crimsons and greys and ambers, with here and there a broad flash of white from a woman’s coif, or a glisten of golden spangles from a mummer’s gear.

  Here and there about in the throngs ran Stenterello or Arlecchino, or some other of their quaint, gay, bespangled and beribboned brotherhood.

  Now and again the ranks of the people parted with shouts to let through some group of masks in all the colours of the rainbow, or some conjuror all aglow in scarlet, striking at ‘them with his magic rod.

  Through the swarming masses there began to sweep the gorgeous equipages of the patriciate, ushered forth in all the old-world pomp of Carnival; with the child-nobles clad in the costumes of their ancestors, powdered and jewelled with their rapiers at their side.

  The draped balconies and the deep embrasures of the casements were filled with bright-eyed children, dark browed women, and old men with grey and noble heads, like a painter’s studies for Prospero or Bellincion Berti.

  Sometimes there was a burst of music, sometimes some gli
ttering troop of cavalry clanged and clattered through the press, sometimes there rose the blare of trumpets, the tinkling of mandolines, the cries of the vendors of confetti, the shouts of little lads baiting the pantomime; and above it all, the laughter of the populace was always murmuring like an unresting sea.

  I ran eagerly through the twisting passages to Ambrogiô’s. I had an idea that he might get me some employment in the chorus of the opera house. I found his attic empty; the people of the place told me he was gone to a rehearsal at the theatre of Don Pacheco.

  I ran then not less quickly to the coppersmith’s under the Spiked Mace; I thought I would ask Raffaelo’s mother to take a little coffee and bread for pity’s sake to her poor old gossip and friend. But there was not a living creature in the workshop: even the blind woman had gone forth with her children to hear the echoes of the festivities she could not see.

  I thought of poor Cecco, who would I know share his last soldi with me, but he and all his heedless tribe would be I knew as surely out in the town, busily helping or hindering the preparations of the mumming and the harlequinade, and all the gay street shows with which the Carnival would be welcomed in its royal pomp.

  Broken-hearted and hungry, and with my cheeks wet with tears, I wandered carelessly about the streets, unwilling to return; the time stole on, the people began to pour out in throngs that grew merrier and larger with every moment; even the very cripples and beggars looked glad and triumphant, and had garlanded their crutches or adorned their rags with wreaths of leaves or knots of ribbons.

  I only was all alone and most unhappy.

  All at once a flute-like voice called out to me: “Oh, dear donzella, come up here, come up here. I have looked for you everywhere. My mother is gone with my big brothers, and I have been to the house to look for you, and you had been out quite an hour and more, so the padrona said. Come up here; it is such a good place. One sees everything, and the crowd is getting large.”

  It was little Raflaelino who called to me, standing on the topmost edge of a flight of marble steps in one of the arched doorways of an old palace.

  I joined him where he stood; and so it came to pass, that day, that I sang to the people in the great Piazza in my violet hood and my amber skirts, and that I heard the band of the maskers and scaramouches running down the street, with their coloured bladders, crying, in eager chase:

  “Pascarèllo! — Pascarèl!”

  BOOK II. THE CITY OF LILIES.

  CHAPTER I.

  The Gifts of Gala.

  “WHAT is Pascarèl?” I asked of Raffaelino as they passed away, and I gathered my fallen treasures and rose to go homeward to poor Mariuccia.

  The little lad did not know; he said that he would ask his brothers. He thought that it must be the name of some new-fashioned game of the Carnival.

  At the entrance of my dwelling, ‘Ino poured all his own spoils into my arms, and before I could refuse them or arrest him, he had fled off down the street again as fast as his fleet, brown, bare limbs could carry him.

  He wanted to avoid being pressed to take a share; and, moreover, altogether to lose seeing the gala would have been a trial too bitter for his pleasure-loving Italian temper to endure to contemplate. He loved me, and had sacrificed himself to serve me; but now that he could no longer benefit me, the gala resumed all its supremacy.

  The tears were still wet upon my cheeks, but my heart bounded joyously against the grim, graven stone of the Fates as I crossed the courtyard and flew up the staircase.

  The house was quite empty; everyone was gone to see the Corso; there was no sound but the drip, drip, drip of the water in the stone fountain, and the wailing of little Zoto and Tito, the padrona’s youngest children, who being too small to go out by themselves without being trampled on, and too troublesome for their mother to spoil her festa by looking after them, had been locked in, in the lower part of the house, and left to console themselves as they could with a few chesnuts and some curls of wood shavings for playthings.

  I ran like a greyhound up the stairs and across the bare chambers to the little inner den where Mariuccia always sat and span under the high turret window that was stained in many colours with the life and miracles of S. Bruno.

  I was covered with violets and confetti; they had lodged everywhere, in my hood and my curls, in my skirts, in my gathered-up dress which held, like a great yellow pannier, the heaps of rosettes and bouquets, and crisp bank-notes, and florins, gold and silver, and sweetmeat-papers, and knots of carnations.

  My old nurse glanced up, startled, as I appeared before her like the very genius of the Carnival incarnated and filled with gifts, for, as I threw open the door, a flood of high noonday sunlight streamed in with me, and danced upon the yellow daffodils and the rosy knots of the other flowers, and the bright bands of the ribbons that streamed away from me in all directions.

  Breathless and wordless, I poured my gleanings into her lap before she had fully seen that I stood before her.

  “Here is enough for weeks and weeks and weeks!” I cried to her. “You need never be cold any more, and the stew-pots shall always be full. Just a few minutes in the square, and it is done! We shall never want to sell the mosaics!”

  Mariuccia looked, stupefied, down upon the confused heap of gold and of silver, of bank-notes and of cakes, of fruits, and of sugared dainties. I dropped down on my knees before her and laughed in her face with delight; a delight to which tears lay close.

  “Are you so astonished, Mariuccia? You never thought the people would care so much? It was Ino’s thought, not mine. He would not take a thing for himself, not so much as a candied chesnut. But are you not glad, Mariuccia? Only think how we can live now! Just a song or two in the streets, and we are rich!”

  Mariuccia’s strong old frame shook with a sudden emotion that vaguely awed me; a glance that was stern and yet piteous flashed on me from her dark eyes; a quick sad-stricken cry escaped her: —

  “In the streets!” she echoed; “in the streets? for money? And for me? O child, O carina! What shame!—”

  “Shame?”

  I rose to my feet chilled, silenced, mortified. I had used the one little gift with which Nature had dowered me, and the people had only given me what they would in return for the song that I gave them. Where was the harm? It was simple and fair, and honest; how could it, then, bring any shame?

  So I pondered, being but a child.

  Meanwhile Mariuccia covered her face with the hem of her garment, and, rocking herself to and fro, wept bitterly.

  “In the streets? for money?” she murmured again and again. “Oh, carina! the shame of it, the shame!”

  I said nothing; I felt the tears swell to my eyes, but I would not let them fall.

  I took up my poor treasures from the floor, on to which they had fallen in a disordered heap, and carried them to the head of the stairs and sorted them.

  The notes and money I put away in the little old oak coffer that always held our riches when we earned any: then I leaned over the deep well of the staircase and called the names of Zoto and Tito.

  The poor little lonely babies came tumbling and tottering to me at the summons from their old playground in the snow-filled court; I filled their little dirty eager hands with all the ribbons and roses, and sweetmeats, and pretty painted toys, which no longer had any beauty in my sight, or flavour to my mouth.

  “Take them — all, all, all!” I cried to the astonished children who stood before me open-eyed at my sudden wealth and their good fortunes: they wanted no second permission to seize on all they saw; in another moment I had nothing left, and they, rapturous and shouting loudly in over glee, toddled down again in the court below, keeping high carnival amidst the snow.

  As for me, I sat cold and still and sorrowful exceedingly beside the broken Donatello. Against my heart I still held the Fates.

  I was wrong when I was proud, so they said; and now, when I had conquered pride for honesty’s sake, I was wrong too; — the perplexity was a knot I
could not unravel.

  Mariuccia, the dear tender soul, soon found me sitting there, and came to me, and laid her hand upon my shoulder and kissed me between the eyes.

  “‘Nella mia, I was wrong to be so quick with you,” she said, whilst her voice still shook. “You did for the best, dear, and it was good of you to think of me at all. But, all the same, it must not be; you must never go out in the streets again — never, never.”

  I sat silent upon the marble stairs; I was pained, angered, mortified, perplexed. She spoke to me, I thought, as if I had robbed in the streets instead of simply using the gifts with which Nature had dowered me, and taking nothing but what the goodwill of the people had joyously cast to me.

  Mariuccia kept her hand on my shoulders where she stood before me, trying to see down into my dropped veiled eyes.

  “Promise me you will never do such a thing again, ‘Nella!” she said, anxiously; “I love you for it, carina; dearly, dearly. But it is so shameful!”

  I shook her hands off me, and rose. I felt my face burn with anger; anger that was not perhaps so very unjust after all, for I had tried honestly to do right “Shameful!” I echoed. “I see nothing shameful in it. You speak to me as though! Were a thief. I think it is much more shameful to sit still and see you starve of cold and hunger, and live myself on the padrona’s charities. Sell the mosaics, if you like, if you think that better. But they will not last long, and what shall we do then! Altro! I am not a baby now. I know we have no money at all, and that you cannot tell where to write to my father. Are we to die of famine like caged rats, then, because you will not let the people pay me of their own goodwill for pleasing them? I am fifteen now, Mariuccia; and something or other I will do with my life; I will not mope and moulder for ever in this old prison-house. I will go away, as my brothers have gone.”

  My heart smote me as soon as the words had passed my lips. I saw her sturdy old frame shrink as if I had struck her a blow.

  No doubt it was hard — harder than in my thoughtless youth I realized — to have given so many years, so much patience, such long unchanging care to the rearing of us motherless things, only to have us all as we reached our strength and stature impatient to escape her hold and pass from out her sight.