Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  She was silent, and so was I; down in the courtyard the children played with their spoils in riotous glee; a sound of trumpets and of laughter came, deadened, through the closed casements from the distant streets.

  “Do you hear them?” I cried to her at last in impotent impetuous pain. “Everywhere there are mirth and riches, and ease and pleasure; why am I not to have my share? I am handsome, so you all say; I have a voice; I am not a fool; I could do something in the world, I think. Anyway, can one do worse than die of cold and of want of food here?

  Let me go, as my brothers have gone. Whatever the worst may be, it cannot be worse than this.”

  Mariuccia grew very pale, with that strange terrible pallor of age when the emotions come and go so slowly and with so much pain.

  She looked down into my eyes which now met hers speaking, no doubt, the longing that possessed me with more eloquence than my words could hold.

  Her strong withered hands shook where they still rested, on my shoulders.

  “Wait a little,” she said, at length, “wait, and let me think. The boys, at the worst, can only die; but you—”

  She left the phrase unended and went from me, and passed away into the gloom of the passages.

  Where I sat, under the broken Donatello, a shiver, that did not come from the chillness of the marble solitudes, or from the winds that blew from over the mountains and the snow, ran through and froze the bright current of my warm young blood.

  What was this calamity, worse than death, which could not come to my brothers, but to me alone?

  The rest of that day Mariuccia and I spoke not at all to one another; we sat silently as two strangers in the little square dark room with its smell of dried rose leaves and of the onions that keep off the evil eye.

  She sat and span on at the distaff at her girdle, for she came of the class that cannot lay aside its daily work however much it may endure or may lament; but I sat aimlessly doing nothing, leaning my forehead against the grated window and watching the Carnival throngs far down beneath me in the white piazza.

  Once as the twilight closed in, Mariuccia called me to her; her voice sounded a little feeble. I could not see her very plainly, the shadows were so dark.

  I bent to her to hear what she would say; her hand went up to my forehead, and passed over my hair in her old familiar gesture.

  “Bambina mia,” she said, eagerly, quite in a whisper, as she held me there; “promise me you will not sing in the streets again. Promise me! What should I say to your mother in heaven?”

  “I will promise,” I answered her, for there was an accent in the words that vaguely awed me, and almost vanquished the angry rebellion that was astir in my heart “Our Lady be with you ever,” she muttered, softly and wearily, like one who is half asleep from fatigue, and speaks but on unconscious instinct I went back to my place by the grated casement and fretted my soul in mute repining.

  Now and then people flung up at me crowns of evergreens or showers of sweetmeats, but these all struck against the barred panes and fell back again into the street below.

  I did not care to reach my hand and open the lattice so that they might enter.

  The day went dully on its course; the duller in that little room of ours because of the mirth and mischief in the town below. It was the first day of the first Carnival in which Mariuccia and I had not clothed ourselves in the best and brightest apparel that we could and gone down to wander through the crowded ways laughing at every step, giving gay greetings, and lingering until with the grey of night the lamps had glittered by their tens of thousands all over the lines and domes of the green old city.

  It was the first day in which we sat within and let the rejoicing throng flash by without us.

  The hours were very slow, very cold, very dreary; there was no charcoal in the stove; there was no bread in the pot; the padrona and all her flock had gone forth to the popular mirth-making; in the old house all was dark, and still, and melancholy.

  The twilight came early; there was no oil for our lamp; no food for our hunger; it was night very soon; we sat quiet in the darkness, which was only broken when some torch-lit procession or some blaze of fireworks flashed a fitful reflection into the chamber from the streets and squares of Verona.

  We should go, cold to the bone and supperless, to our chill beds; yet neither she nor I stirred to take the money I had gained in the morning from its place in the oak coffer.

  I looked at Mariuccia. She was still asleep.

  At length, the rebellion and the weariness in me vanquished every other feeling. Why should I not go and enjoy with the rest? Why should I sit and mope here like an owl in the market-place, because a foolish old woman had quibbles and foibles about the good blood in my veins and the dangers of girlhood?

  So I reasoned in the wickedness of my heart until the revolt in me ripened.

  I stole again a glance at Mariuccia. She did not stir nor seem to hear. I stole noiselessly across the room, trimmed the lamp afresh, reached down my hood, and went out on to the stairs.

  There was no one to say me nay. Every soul in the house was out that night, except the two bambini, who were fast asleep curled together on a heap of pine shavings, the emptied sugarplum-horns and the broken toys strewn all around them.

  I was soon in the streets and squares, that were all alive with throngs of people, bent hither and thither, laughing and talking, some singing, others dancing down the gloom of the solemn passage ways.

  It was quite late.

  Time had glided away unperceived as I had sat in that monotonous vexation and quietude. They were setting fireworks in the cathedral square, and the great bells were ringing the tenth hour of the night

  CHAPTER II.

  The Veglione Masquer.

  LONG familiarity with the Veronese ways had made me quite able to take care of myself in a crowd; and the Italian crowds, though often riotously mirthful, are never rough or rude.

  I got in a coign of vantage just under the grim old stone Roland, and seated myself comfortably and carelessly to see the girandola.

  The fireworks were very fine, and shot upward in streams and clouds of glory on the frosty night air, shedding their many colours on the sea of upturned faces, and flashing over the darkness of the Duomo pile. I yielded myself eagerly and with utter zest to the enjoyment of them.

  I was very hungry, to be sure, and cold still; but it was much better to be hungry and cold but well amused than to suffer the same thing in loneliness and gloom. I had not been born in Italy without being born to as much philosophy as lay in this simple reasoning.

  So I gave myself up to the girandola sitting aloft under the paladins, laughing, and shouting “Bellissima!” and “Brava!” with the throng around me, and for the time utterly oblivious that I had wept such bitter tears under the Donatello, and, alas, equally forgetful, I shame to say, that Mariuccia sat at home alone in her sadness and her patience.

  The bands of the Austrian regiments were playing in the piazza, to keep the Veronese in good humour; and the music, the fireworks, the picturesque chiaroscuro of the thronged square, as the various fires illumined it, all combined to make me forget my woes, and to rouse me into an exhilaration which was all the more excited and unreal because I had fasted for so many hours.

  I was in no mood to go home and creep to bed in the cold supperless. It was now midnight, I knew, but I was indifferent Mariuccia would scold; but then — had she not done so when I had tried to please and help her in the forenoon?

  So I hardened my heart; and when the last sheaf of coloured flames had died out, and the streams of people began to pour outward, this way and that, I strolled on also, looking to see if by any chance there might be other amusements still forthcoming.

  The Stranieri spent their gold lavishly in diversions for the populace; and the Veronese Carnival at the time of that foreign dominance, if its mirth were hollow, was, at least, as brilliant in festivity as any in Italy.

  Mariuccia would scold, of course,
when I went home, but what of that? Words break no bones.

  So I said to myself, in my wilfulness and revolt. Alas! that hour has been a remorse to me ever since.

  As I have said before, I was never very good and often very bad in those days, so far as waywardness and daring went As a child — and I was still no more than a child — I was affectionate always; and courageous, when my imagination was not affected by fear; I told the truth, and I would give anything I possessed, however much I might want it myself.

  But there my virtues ended. I was disobedient to a headlong rashness; and I was in a mood to be so to-night.

  As I went out of the piazza, there was a little laughing group of sightseers, cloaked and hooded in an odd fashion. They looked like monks, but they were waltzing down the pavement, and singing a tavern song very popular then in Verona.

  “Pascarèllo! Pascarèl!” they screamed at the top of their voices, as a flash of red went by under an old archway; and they set off running swiftly, their monkish robes showing beneath them women’s little feet with rosetted ribbons flying.

  This mystical name fascinated me; the desire to know its meaning grew stronger and stronger.

  I flew in their wake, and ran too. The gleam of scarlet had vanished into the gloom of the arch.

  Soon I came upon a throng of people standing before some columned steps and some wide entrance doors. Above, many lamps glittered, and against the wall there fluttered on a scroll, in great white letters on a scarlet ground, the word of Veglione.

  From the belfries of the city midnight was sounding. The stream of people was passing within the building; they looked very strange to me; they made me think of an old painting that hung in our old palace entrance-hall, and that was called the “Gates of Hell.”

  But I pressed on to enter with them; I was not afraid; it was the Veglione by the writing on the wall.

  I had heard strange and wonderful things of that saturnalia, and I imagined many more; moreover, here had entered those veiled figures who had been seeking Pascarèl.

  I ran eagerly up the steps, and was carried by the press of the pleasure-seekers into the body of the hall. There was a barrier at which they stopped me for payment.

  I stood helpless, with the rushing sound of the many footsteps on my ears; a man’s hand, stretched over my shoulder, cast down the money for me and a man’s voice laughed in my ear, “So handsome, and not masked? Pass in, pass in, carina.”

  The pressure of the onward moving throngs swept me through the barrier, and away from my deliverer. I was borne into the very midst of the strange torrent of colour and tumult, of laughter and of music.

  I stood still and looked, the blaze of the light half blinding me; my face was uncovered; my hood fell back; my feet were bare; my yellow skirts were stained with many a crushed fruit and bruised flower, in the old glad days of my wanderings; my little hot hands held between them the onyx ring against my breast There was a broad piece of mirror before me in the entrance-hall; I saw my reflection in it, and was charmed and yet ashamed.

  My cheeks burned like wild poppies; my hair was in a lustrous tangle: my eyes looked like great burning lamps in the thinness of my hunger-worn, small face; my mouth was scarlet and parched with excitement; and yet I knew so well I looked handsome — so well that the people would look at me and cry, “Beilina!”

  I was frightened, and yet I was fascinated. There seemed some horrible evil about me, and yet it was so vivacious, and so gay, and so full of pictures, that I could not help being allured by it.

  Pascarèl I did not discover, and, truth to tell, I forgot all about that mystery.

  I was too absorbed in it all to be conscious that I was singular in going thus bareheaded and unmasked amongst the dominoes.

  It was a pageantry to me, nothing else; and I moved on as I should have done in the streets; the people supping at their little snowy tables in their boxes; the quaint, glittering costumes that leaned over the panels; the stir and colour of it all, the headlong flight of the mad waltzers, the white mousquetaires wringing the champagne from their long moustaches; the gorgeous eighteenth-century dresses crowned with powdered hair; the crowd of black monk-like figures that served only to intensify the gaiety of colour — all these were so many pictures to me.

  I wandered on enchanted, and unheeding the observation that I gathered in my course; the only thing that I noticed was the intentness with which I was followed by the eyes of a Florentine Florindo, who wore that traditional dress with an easy grace that was in a manner familiar to me. But the Florindo did not approach me, and I soon ceased to think about him in the midst of the masquers.

  For me, I never doubted that it was pandemonium itself; and yet the fantastic charm, and the lurid brilliancy of it bewitched me. It was horrible, and yet it was beautiful.

  The women’s eyes, as they glittered like snakes’ eyes through the blackness of the masks; the cloud, and flutter, and tumult of colour; the furious speed of the dancers whirling, stamping, shouting, reeling in all the maddest ecstasies of folly; the sombre darkness of the gliding dominoes passing silently with little low, sneering laughs, as the arrows of their whispered speech hit some blot or some wound in men’s strength or women’s weakness; the intoxication of the loud, gay music crossed every second by the wild war-whoop of the revellers; the dazzle of innumerable hues and shine of countless jewels in the great semicircle full from floor to roof, whilst here and there some masquer, ablaze with diamonds, flung her flowers from above, and some noble, powdered and jewelled, leaned down to pledge a dishevelled, panting dancer, in rosy, foaming wine; the wonder, and chaos, and glow, and tumult of the scene bewitched me as I gazed on it.

  It was only the masked ball of the Carnival; but to me it was beautiful as paradise and horrible as hell.

  It all swam giddily before my sight, and the music rolled like thunder above my head.

  As I stood, a dancer, in the dress of the Louis Treize musketeers, flung his arms about me, and swept me into the circle of the waltzers with a force that bore me off my feet “Cara mia,” he cried in my ear, “you are in strange guise for the Veglione, but what matter that? I paid for you at the doors. You shall reward me up yonder.”

  He never ended his phrase. I struck him on the mouth blindly with both hands on the mere instinct for freedom, and broke from his hold, and ran through the maze of the dancers without sense or sight of what I did.

  Shrill cries rose round me; the people parted hastily to let me through, and many fled from me in terror; a shout arose that I was mad, and had broken loose from the hospital. The sense of the outcry came to me dully as voices ring over water from a far shore to a drifting boat Suddenly I stopped, and flung my head upward like a beaten stag, and looked across the blinding blaze of colour, vaguely seeking help.

  Fronting me was the red glow of drooping curtains, a great knot of carnival camellias, a little group of men and women, like a picture from the Decamerone, a medley of violet and gold, and scarlet and black, and diamonds and pearls; it was an opera-box, in which five dominoes leaned and laughed, and drank and jested.

  The central figure of them all stood erect, with a red plume tossing in the light; he was in a flash of ruby colour and of white; he wore the dress of the Florentine Florindo, and had a dark oval face like that of an old picture; his hand was on his sword-hilt; he laughed gaily with the masked and mirthful women.

  I do not clearly remember what ensued.

  A band of débardeurs surrounded me; a hideous cock crowed at me; a clown grinned and gabbered; a set of black masks hooted and threw their limbs hither and thither in wild contortion.

  The Mousquetaire seized me afresh; lifted me from the ground, and plunged into the wild gallopade that was rushing down the boards like a troop of riderless horses on San Giovanni’s day in Florence.

  I shrieked for help and release.

  My tormentor, screaming with laughter, held me the tighter. There was a moment’s pause; then a crash of sound, a loud outcry, a tumult of
the masquers, and the Florindo with the scarlet plume had sprung from the box above, had struck or tossed the arms away that held me, and had hurried me through the maze of the dancers out of the heat and the glare into the cool white moonlight that was streaming through the darkness of Verona.

  “Pascarèllo — Pascarèl!” the people had shouted as he came; and there was no pursuit, and no offence taken against him.

  He stood and looked at me in the silvery light; a bright and many coloured figure, flashing with the grace and glitter of the old dead centuries under the gloom of the walls of the Scala.

  “Well, my singing bird,” he said, with a smile in his eyes, “what were you doing there, may I ask?

  It is a place for kites and hawks, and all manner of evil birds; but not for nightingales. You did not seem as if you liked the air?”

  The voice was the voice of the giver of the onyx. I burst into tears, and told him what had drawn me thither.

  He heard me with a gentle amusement in his eyes; dark eyes, tender and poetic, such as Sordello’s might have been here in this very same Verona.

  “The best thing I can do for you is to take you homeward quickly,” he said, moving onward, and bidding me show him the way to my home. “To be abroad on a Veglione night is not the best thing for you, donzella. Courage is very admirable, but a little prudence is needful too in this world.

  “It is to make your cake all of coriander-seeds — to make life up of rashness only.

  “Tell me — why were you singing in the streets this morning? You look like a little princess, Signorina Uccello. Nay; never mind. You shall tell me to-morrow. You will let me come and see you to-morrow.

  “You want to get out of Verona? Oh, fie, for shame. That is not poetic at all. To get away from the Stranieri is always good, I admit, but surely Verona has a charm of her own still, if only you will look for it “She is not like my Florence, indeed; it is not given to every city to be born out of fields of lilies, and keep their sweetness with her for ever, as Florence does; a woodland fragrance always amidst the marble and the gold.