by Ouida
“But Verona, — oh, yes, — Sordello’s song is here, if only you listen, and it is the same moon that Giulietta saw from the balcony, and those great Scali — they seem to daunt and to awe the place still, — and do you not see Adelaïda ever bending her terrible brows in the shadows?
“Nor Cunizza, the faithless, with her ‘strong, cruel star,’ that ruled her life so ill, and her lovely eyes burning with the madness of the Romano, and at her side her gentle Troubadour, Ser Folcol. Do you never see them? They lived and loved here in this old Verona that you despise because you are so ignorant of all its beauties.
“And then, far away, — so far away in the dawn of the poets — the pretty Lesbia twisting the roses in her lover’s locks in their gardens yonder, while at a bow-shot in the circus the citizens shouted, ‘Ad leones?’ Oh, you should not hate Verona. It is so ancient, and it was so mighty once, though it never used its might for any very good purpose.”
He talked on thus merely of course for the purpose of banishing my fear, and reconciling me to the strangeness of my position, in wandering the streets thus at night, with an unknown masquer in the dress of Florindo. There was that true and kindly delicacy in him which would not to prolong his own amusement, and gratify his own curiosity, increase my embarrassment, or cause me pain.
His voice was so beguiling, his eyes so frank and tender, his whole bearing so full of a certain gentleness and carelessness, that I was attracted into an irresistible sense of confidence in him.
He was an utter stranger; he was one of those mad carnival mummers who had imbued me with a vague sense of unspeakable, intangible evil; he was only a Veglione masquer, gay and grotesque in his vari-coloured disguise in the white Veronese moonlight; and yet I trusted him, and felt a sense of security in his presence, and spoke to him as simply and as naturally as I could have done into the ear of little Raffaelino.
“But this was very naughty of you,” he said, still with the smile in his eyes, as he heard my sins.
“I am never good!” I confessed very piteously. “I am like that wicked Speronella of Padova, whose namesake I am — so my nurse says, at the least.”
He laughed indulgently.
“Oh come! not quite so bad as that, I trust And you will grow wiser in time. Let us hope rather that you will end like that good Nella whom her husband, even in a better world than this, if poets may be credited, quoted as a priceless perfection. But what possessed you to go to that place to-night? A freak of mischief no doubt, but what promoted it?”
“I wanted to see what Pascarèl was! That was all. That was all indeed!”
He paused a moment in the silent street, and laughed outright.
“Well,” he asked, “did you find out?”
“No! Do you know? Pray tell me.”
“I have tried to find out too,” he said, with the laugh on his lips. “Tried all my life, and never succeeded yet.”
“Is it something so wonderful?”
“Oh, dear, no. No wonder of any sort in it.”
“Is it an enigma then?”
“Well — yes — a little. Probably the answer lies in nothing deeper than in the one word with which Œdipus answered the Sphinx. Do not trouble your head after it. It is not worth your while.”
“Why? The people seem to care.”
A tender and saddened shade swept over his face. “Ay! the people, perhaps, a little.”
“What is it then? Do tell me.”
In my eagerness I paused midway in the street; the snow lay lightly on all the roofs and stones and balconies; the icy Alpine air had frozen it into all sorts of lovely and fantastic shapes.
The masquer broke off one of the pretty snow flowers off an iron scroll, and held it in his hand.
It slowly melted and vanished.
“That is what Pascarèl is; nothing more!” he said, lightly. “Do not talk of it; tell me about yourself.”‘
I had not space to tell him much, for the old palace was at a stone’s throw from the opera-house, and he and I stood in a few moments’ time before our huge, cavernous, arched portals, whose nail-studded ancient doors stood forever wide open, night and day, for we were all too poor there to have fears of theft, having naught amongst us all to lose.
At the entrance he paused and uncovered his head.
“I will bid you good-night, donzella, and go back to my pranks and my follies. To-morrow, if you will let me, I will come and see you. Gratitude? Oh, altro! you have no cause for that. It is I rather who am grateful to the Fates. By-the-way, I wish that I had had something brighter and fairer to give you than the old grim onyx; they are an ugly portent I am afraid, those stem sisters. Never mind, I will try and get you some roses to-morrow. They will be very much fitter for you. Nightingales and roses have belonged to one another ever since the days of paradise. Addiô!”
He kissed my hand with easy grace, and turned away down the deep shadows of the street; in the moonlight the red and white of his dress — colours of Florence — glistened as the moon-rays caught them; he went singing, half aloud, the catalogue of the Loves from the Giovanni.
I watched him until he was lost to sight in the darkness that fell from the lofty palaces, Half fortress and half prison, the twisted galleries, the marble balconies, the frowning stones of Romeo’s city; it was a little scene from the Tre Cento, from the Decamerone, from Goldoni; the old dead amorous poetic life seemed suddenly to breathe and move again amidst the decay and the despair of old Verona.
I went slowly up the staircase, past the ruined Donatello, and fancied that the broken, dust-strewn stairs were the steps of the Capulet palace, and that I was Giuliettà in that tender daybreak, when the lark sang all too soon.
CHAPTER III.
The Last Sleep.
As I entered the chamber where I had left Mariuccia, and groping for a match lit the little lamp, I saw that she was still in her oak chair by the fireless hearth. Her hands were folded, and her chin had sunk upon her breast. I knew that she was used to allow herself a little rest and slumber after her long day of toil, and I imagined that she had dozed on and on, not noticing my absence, nor the flight of time.
I slid down quietly upon the floor at her feet, and did not speak lest I should waken her.
I was glad that she could in sleep forget the hunger and the cold. I was glad, too, to have escaped the reproaches and rebukes that my conduct merited.
I leaned my head against her knee as I had done so often in my babyhood, and sat there, very quiet, with her hands resting heavily against my shoulder.
It was deadly cold; my limbs were frozen; my brain swam a little from long fasting and excitement; it was quite dark; from the streets below there came ‘ the hum and outcry of a city in its holiday; Mariuccia did not waken.
I think that I also must have slept a little or at the least lost consciousness of time, for I started as one starts when suddenly roused from a bad dream, as the last fireworks of the night’s pageantry rose with a rushing sound above the roof, against the moonless sky.
A great girandola shot its fountain of many-coloured fires up above the black outline of the Duomo, fired most likely by the last revellers of the Veglione, and the reflection from it fell, golden and reddened, through the little grilled window into the chamber; its light fell upon Mariuccia’s face.
Something in the look of its closed eyes and silent mouth made my heart tighten with a breathless fear.
“Mariuccia!” I cried to her. “Mariuccia! You frighten me! dear Mariuccia — are you still asleep?”
She was indeed asleep.
The brief and fitful fires of the girandola died away, and left behind it the blank of an utter darkness; the dense impenetrable darkness that precedes a winter’s dawn.
Upon the old quiet patient face there was a look of rest, and the withered hands on which I rained my kisses were yet warm. Yet I, who never before had looked on death, knew well that death was here, and that whilst Verona laughed on her first night of Carnival, I sat in the sile
nce of the old palace, alone with the dead body of the sole friend I had on earth.
CHAPTER IV.
At Ave-Maria.
THREE days from that time Mariuccia had gone to her last home.
The wooden shell had been jostled in the common hearse and buried in the common resting-place where the poor lie. The padrona and Raffaello and his blind mother and I had toiled after it through the driving cold of the early morning, and heard the heavy clods fall on it one by one.
It was all over — all over: the strong, pure, honest, tireless life had gone, spent in obscurity and toil, unrecognised and unrecompensed to the last I was but a thoughtless, wayward, and selfish child. I had been heedless always, cruel often. I had taken the countless sacrifices that she made to me with all a child’s reckless, tyrannous, unconscious egotism. I scarcely even now knew the immeasurable debt I had owed to her.
Yet a vague heavy pain, that was almost remorse, weighed on me, and on some insufficient yet pregnant sense.
I realised all that this one lost life, old as it was, and humble and poor, had yet been to me from my birth, with its buckler of stanch fidelity held ever between me and the evils of the world.
The dreary weeks went by; to all the rest of Verona they were gay with all the zest of Carnival.
Night after night the fireworks would blaze against the skies, and the music would roll through the sad old streets, and the mad and merry maskers would scamper and frolic under the shadow of prison and fortress and monastery.
The echoes and the reflections of the noise and the lights would come to me where I sat in my dismal little chamber, but that was all the share I had in them.
The padrona, though so poor, would have some friends to laugh with her in her dim old kitchen, and would find some copper pieces to give her a sight of the puppets and the shows that enlivened for Verona those long and chilly days when the winds swept down like dragons whose breath was ice from the deep Tirol valleys and the desolate Dolomite range.
But I was all alone, except when Raffaellino came and tried to while away my sorrow by his innocent fanciful talk and the tender strains of his viol.
With the sad morrow my Romeo of the Veglione never returned.
Even in my passionate remorse and grief I could not but think often of him that day.
When we returned from our dreary errand in the snow, there was awaiting me a great cluster of roses, red and white, that must have come from Tuscany or Rome.
Little Giàn, who had been upon the stairs when they arrived, said that a boy about his own age had brought them, saying nothing whence they came.
I knew.
I set the beautiful things before me against the dismal grated window, and wept my heart out over them. The grief was most for the loss of dear dead Mariuccia; but a little also for the broken faith of the Florence masquer.
What could I do!
I knew no more whither my father was gone than whither the crows flew when they passed in a black cloud over the Adige; and though the good padrona served for me, cooked for me, and bade me be as welcome under her roof as were the rains in summer, I was too proud to think a moment that such dependence on another could ever long endure.
The desire to escape from Verona grew stronger on me with every hour. I had no notion of what I should do elsewhere: but all good things seemed possible to me if once only I could cross the dreary plain and seek the sunrise of the south.
I said nothing; for I knew that Raffaello would weep and protest and the padrona take fright, and the priests would be spoken with, and some means perhaps be found to detain me, if ever they knew that I wished to take wing.
But all those winter days, when the Corso was at its gayest and the streets were full of masks and mummers, I sat in my dull little stone chamber and revolved again and again a thousand schemes for my freedom.
As the first step towards liberty, I went out one day at the close of the Carnival to see the scrivere whom Mariuccia had been wont to employ for her communications to Florio.
A certain sense of reluctance to trench on anything that seemed like a secret of the dead had held me back from asking this letter-writer any questions; but as the weeks of silence succeeded one another, I argued that not to try and find my father would be a folly and a fault, and in the last hours of one wintry day I crossed the square to where Maso Sasso held his councils at his little worm-eaten desk.
I thought sadly as I went of the homely old figure that had always been at my side spinning and talking as she hobbled over the stones; I thought a little too of that gay red and white masker whose eloquent eyes had smiled on me in the moonlight of Juliet’s city.
Why had he not followed his roses!
He was not a man to me, nor a stranger; he was a poem, a picture, a thing of grace, a shape of the cinque cento; Sordello, only not so sad; Romeo, only not so boyish; Ariosto, perhaps, that gayest of lovers and poets; or one of those patrician improvisatori who spent half their lives in a court and the other half in the marketplace.
I was thinking of him still as I crossed the piazza to the hole in the wall where Maso Sasso sat.
When the Ave-Maria was rung he used to close his office by a bronze wicket and his day’s work was done. Then he would pass methodically across the piazza to his favourite trattoriâ; and in front of it, taking his frugal repast, would make himself amends for the long silence of the day by detailing to an interested audience such of the sayings and doings of his clintela as he deemed it proper to reveal.
He was known to be a miracle of propriety and discretion; nevertheless he was a good companion when the sun was set Indeed, they were used to say if you brewed him a bibita to his liking, there was very little that you might not hear concerning your neighbour in Verona. But a public that has to recount its joys and sorrows aloud to its penman cannot be very scrupulous about secresy, and the popularity of Maso Sasso never waned on that account He had his office in a little dark stone loggia; curiously black and still in the midst of the changeful life of the piazza.
He was a little meagre, yellow, shrivelled old man, who sat all day long in his den and heard all the comical comedies and tearful tragedies of the city, and never seemed to be touched at all by any one of the innumerable idyls and the pathetic obscure heroisms which came hourly before him, as the citizens and the contadini flocked around his stall eager to have had some good tidings sent to some absent one, or to unfold some stiff and blotted scrawl from over the mountains and the sea.
There was a crowd of people around the loggia in which his desk was placed when I drew near it; it was nearly four, and it was known that no press of public necessities would ever make him prolong his sittings after the Ave-Maria.
I had to wait patiently my turn.
A broad-shouldered crimson-kertled contadina wanted a love-letter sent to a soldier away in Piedmont; she did not care what was said so that it was all as sweet as sugar.
A poor wife held out a dirty miserable scrawl, and fell down in a loose lifeless heap upon the stones, as she heard that her husband had been drowned off Ischia.
A jager of the Tirol, with his green plumes dangling in his saucy black eyes, dictated an offer of marriage, giggling and grinning as the pen flew.
An old meek, timid creature tendered a paper with a trembling hand, and turned away with a heart-stricken moan as the slow changeless tones of the scrivere read aloud to her that her only son was sentenced for life to the galleys far away in the Regno.
What an epitome was Maso Sasso’s den of human nature and of human fate!
I stood and listened with my hood drawn over my face: when my turn came I had forgotten my own sorrows.
“Oh how can you bear it — every day and all day long — like this?” I cried to the wizen, immovable, indifferent old man.
He spread his palms outward over his desk in a gesture of silent contempt “Signorina — it is life!”
“But the sorrow — the joy — one against the other — the comedy — the tragedy — it i
s horrible!”
The old man smiled grimly.
“What does that matter to me? — joy or sorrow — tragedy or comedy — I get my scudo for my trouble.”
“But how can you bear it?” I cried again, “day after day, year after year — always those terrible things, side by side with all this laughter.”
The old man shrugged his shoulders and took off his horn spectacles to wipe them free of dust.
“Signorina — whether it is woe or laughter, what does it matter to me? I get my scudo, and have something to gossip about. That is all that concerns me.”
In later years I have found that the world is very much of opinion with the scrivere. It scans the mass of human life through its spectacles, and whether it reads a fiat of death or dishonour, or a jest-story of love and of lightness, it cares nothing so that only it can take out of both its scudo’s worth of scandal.
He asked me for the third time what I needed; I was keeping more profitable customers from his stall. I inquired of him whether Mariuccia had addressed her letters to my father. Maso Sasso shrugged his shoulders again, and sought in the full stores of his memories.
“The letters were to be left at the post, anywhere,” he said at last. “Sometimes Nice — Paris — Vienna — the last time, I think, Florence. Yes; Florence. But always the post-office. Nothing more.”
“You are sure it was Florence the last time?” I cried, entreating him tremblingly.
“Yes, quite sure. But the last time was eight months ago. Will the Signorina please to move aside? People are waiting, and the sun will soon set.”
I moved aside mechanically, and walked dreamily across the square and sat down on the steps of a great church, where the beggars were wont to sit Florence seemed a long way off; and the chance but a very slight one. Nevertheless, it was all I had.