by Ouida
His voice was very hushed and quiet as he spoke, and there came a dreamy look into his eyes — the faraway look that men always get who dwell amidst the heights.
I hardly understood him well; for, though he spoke Italian it was not our Italian; yet there was something so gentle and simple in him that it pleased me to hear him talk.
I was glad to have him to speak to in that oppressive endless gloom, with the surging noise of the horses’ gallop always on my ears, and only now and then some break in it when a lantern flashed its red glare in upon us, and hoarse, shrill voices piped discordant orders at the doors of some roadside posting house.
Finding that I listened to him, he went on to tell me all about himself — how his name was Marco Rosas; how he was of Italian race; how he was left fatherless in infancy; how his twin-brother and himself lived together on the little farm on the green slope of the Berg; how he was twenty-two years old, and well-to-do in his own way, and indeed quite rich for a farmer of the Tirol.
He described all his treasures to me; his châlet of pinewood, shingle-roofed against the hurricane and avalanche, in autumn hung over with the great yellow ears of the millet; the herds of small dun cattle, with their antelope-like eyes, and flocks of silvery hill goats; his stout little horse, with its peal of musical bells; his vines, that yielded such sweet huge purple grapes as were never ripened save in that clear, lustrous, buoyant air; the painting of the Holy Trinity that was fastened in his wall, over his house door, in an iron grating, to be a blessing on the place; his orchard, and his pastures that stretched in such perfect vivid green up the hillside, whilst above all the great snow slopes towered.
Most of all he talked of his mother — a woman whom, if all he said were true, must have been one of those who are far above rubies. A tender, homely, noble soul as this mountaineer sketched her, such, indeed, as those great silent hills produce not seldom — a woman with the life of a saint and the heart of a hero, though she neither read nor wrote, but span her own linen, milked her own herds, and had had the sweet strong breath of her own mountain air upon her all her years.
So we journeyed on our way, and, like Conraddin before us, passed “per Lombardia e perla vià di Pavia,” into the Romagna country.
The day was one long bright flood of sunshine with beautiful flakes of clouds floating before a fresh mountain wind.
The broad plains that have been the battleground of so many races and so many ages were green and peaceful under the primitive husbandry of the contadini.
Everywhere under the long lines of the yet unbudded vines the seed was springing, and the trenches of the earth were brimful with brown bubbling water left from the floods of winter, when Reno and Adda had broken loose from their beds.
Here and there was some old fortress grey amongst the silver of the olive orchards; some village with white bleak house-walls and flat roofs pale and bare against the level fields; or some little long-forgotten city once a stronghold of war and a palace for princes, now a little hushed and lonely place, with weed-grown ramparts and gates rusted on their hinges, and tapestry weavers throwing the shuttle in its deserted and dismantled ways.
But chiefly it was always the green, fruitful, weary, endless plain trodden by the bullocks and the goats, and silent, strangely silent, as though fearful still of its tremendous past.
Day came and night again, and all the heavy, chill, bitter, lonely hours jumbled themselves away in some dreary chaos. The journey had become horrible to me. I was stiff and cold and miserable. I lost all heart to look out at the spaces between the leathern curtains on to the country beyond. I had lost all power to watch for the first outline of Tasso’s “grand’ Apennino.”
We had passed through Padovà in the darkness. and I had not noticed the young Tirolese descend there. But I found the sheepskin left about my knees, and was touched by this little gentle wayside flower of kindness.
I suppose I must have slept some portion of the time, but the beat of the horses’ hoofs never ceased to thunder through my brain.
There were red flashes of lights on my eyes as we stopped to Change at a posting-house; wonderful purple and rose sunsets and sunrise; a sense of endless gliding green distances that never grew any one whit the nearer; a confusion of cruel noises; a continual sense of pain and of unrest; and then at length the cumbrous vehicle paused under an immense vaulted gateway; a sentinel challenged; a guard looked in, holding up a lantern; the gates unclosed and closed again; and as we rolled over the stones I heard the tired travellers mutter the name— “Bologna.”
I trembled, and felt afraid as the tired horses toiled wearily over the pavement underneath the ink-black shadows of those vaulted footways.
It seemed to me as though they would never end; their silence, their gloom, their architecture, the enormous height of the walls, the vista of the interminable arches, the hollow echo of the stones that had been trodden for fifteen hundred centuries by the feet of men and beasts — all terrified me with a vague poetic awe which yet was, in a sense, delightful.
Every old Italian city has this awe about it — holds close the past and moves the living to a curious sense that they are dead and in their graves are dreaming; for the old cities themselves have beheld so much perish around them, and yet have kept so firm a hold upon tradition and upon the supreme beauty of great arts, that those who wander there grow, as it were, bewildered, and know not which is life and which is death amongst them.
To enter Bologna at midnight is to plunge into the depths of the middle ages.
Those desolate sombre streets, those immense dark arches, dark as Tartarus, those endless arcades where scarce a footfall breaks the stillness, that labyrinth of marble, of stone, of antiquity; the past alone broods over them all.
As you go it seems to you that you see the gleam of a snowy plume and the shine of a straight rapier striking home through cuirass and doublet, whilst on the stones the dead body falls, and high above over the lamp-iron, where the torch is flaring, a casement uncloses, and a woman’s hand drops a rose to the slayer, and a woman’s voice murmurs, with a cruel little laugh, “Cosa fatta non capo ha!”
There is nothing to break the spell of that old world enchantment Nothing to recall to you that the ages of Bentivoglio and of Visconti have fled for ever.
The mighty Academy of Lu vena Juris is so old, so old, so old! — the folly and frippery of modern life cannot dwell in it a moment; it is as that enchanted throne which turned into stone like itself whosoever dared to seat himself upon its majestic heights.
For fifteen centuries Bologna has grimly watched and seen the mad life of the world go by; it sits amidst the plains as the Sphynx amidst her deserts.
CHAPTER VII.
Under the Garisendà.
I SEEMED to awake roughly from some marvellous dream, when the vehicle stopped at a post-house with a great ‘gilded sign of a golden boar projecting far out in the dull lantern light across the shadow of one of the narrow streets.
The entrance to it was through a deep archway into a paved court; from within there was the feeble light of oil wicks burning in iron sconces; beyond I could see the kitchen, with the glimmer of its copper and pewter and the sturdy padrona in a kirtle of orange and green, who was sending her people right and left in her eagerness to retain for the night all travellers by the stage.
The diligence stopped for good at the Cignale d’Oro, and I thought that I could do no better. The inn folk came round me eyeing me with some amazement and with some suspicion; but an Italian’s first impulse is always one of ready kindness; the vociferous padrona softened her voice for me, her household smiled on me, and when I asked them for a little bed where I could sleep in peace, a black-browed damsel showed me up a wooden stair to a little bare chamber with a radiant gleam of her white teeth and laughter of her dusky eyes, such as might fairly have made sunshine in the shadiest place.
That sunny smile of Italy! — it has in it all the youth of the earth’s golden ages — all the faith of man�
��s first dreams of God.
My little chamber was very bare, very narrow with a floor of red brick and a casement that looked only on to a pigeon-house in the roof. But I had been used to simple ways of living, and I was very tired; I wanted nothing but rest; and being young, rest came to me as soon as I stretched my limbs out and closed my eyes upon the hard grass mattress.
I slept all night dreamlessly; and when I awoke with the sun shining full on my face, and the pigeons, white and grey, pluming themselves upon the roof outside, I sprang up refreshed and fearless; eager to begin again this strange new story of life, whose first chapter I had read and turned down for ever when I had looked my last at sunset on Verona.
There is nothing in any after times, however radiant with pleasure or success those latter times may be, so perfectly happy as the buoyant and fearless ignorance of the creature who has just left childhood for youth, just first thrust out its head from the shell of dependence and ventured alone to survey with dazzled and delighted eyes the illimitable domain that lies in the mere Possible.
To any other than myself it would have seemed, as it had done to the Tirolean, that nothing in the whole range of human fate could be more desolate or more appalling than my fate; there was a child of fifteen years let loose upon the world with a dozen gold florins for her solitary possession, without a friend, without a refuge, and with no relative in all humanity, except a father who had abandoned her, and of whom she knew not even so much as whether he were living or were dead.
Nothing could well have been more lonely or less to be envied surely than I; and yet when I had flung the cold water over myself and tossed the hair back over my shoulders, and looked out of the window to say good morrow to the pigeons opposite, I laughed quite happily in the face of the bright day and was not afraid.
It seemed to me that nothing could long go very ill in that fresh spring air, in that warm living light, in that pleasant murmur of birds’ wings, and of drowsy bees, that rose upward on the stillness of the city from the little garden court below.
It was early as I unslid the wooden bar of my door and ran downstairs in the mirthful sunlight; but the padrona was up and about, and all her stout damsels at work with her, coming and going in their many-coloured garments to and fro in the brightness and the shadows of the open court and the sombre archways.
Great turkeys were ruffling and strutting about the passages, hens were squatting by the stoves, a big white owl blinked his eyes on a butter tub, and grey rabbits ran between the swiftly flying feet of the inn-maidens as they vied in haste to obey the shrill commands of their mistress.
In the square court they had set out the winter-housed store of lemon trees.
There was a thread of water bubbling from a sculptured Medusa’s mouth into a huge earthen amphora; on the door sill an old woman was slicing carrots; above her in the carved lintel was a Lucca della Robbia worth its weight in gold: it was such a scene as might have stayed there unchanged since Guido had first dipped his brush in oils.
I had all the forenoon before me, and not liking to take up room there in that busy tavern, I wandered out to look a little at the city.
A winding passage-way led from the court-yard straight out in front of the two leaning towers, with their coppersmiths’ workshops beneath them and above the clear blue sky of the Romagna.
It was about nine o’clock and a market day, and all the town was astir; throngs of busy, laughing hurrying people were crying their goods aloud, or lustily chaffering for the goods of others; whilst around them were those old sun-burned walls, those dim gigantic frescoes, those austere arcades, those mighty stones that had borne the fires and the furies of a thousand years of sack and siege.
Mules brayed, dogs barked, poultry cackled, the charlatan screamed his sing-song recitative, the hawkers vaunted their dried pumpkin seeds, their little fried alardi, or their barrowful of many-coloured woollen socks and kerchiefs; the bells clanged sonorously, the old scriveri held solemn court within their dens, the peasants rode in on their asses laden with cabbages or with poultry; the ringing hammers of the countless coppersmiths and pewterers resounded from a hundred workshops; and it was all life, mirth, tumult, business; and amidst it all rose the old unfinished mournful pile of the Duomo, the ancient palaces with beggars’ rags fluttering from the balconies, the slanting shafts of the twin towers, the arched footways brown and sear with the passing of a thousand generations.
In the gay sunlight it was not so terrible as in the darkness of night; but it was perhaps more melancholy still.
I wandered on and on, looking now at the contention of some buyer and seller under the leathern awning of a market-stall, and now at the grandeur of some decaying fresco dying slowly of neglect and age above on the sculptured houses.
I stood gazing up at the Garisendà, where it leaned above against the delicate blue of the immense Romagna skies, whilst beneath in their dusky workshops the brawny bare-armed coppersmiths beat the ruddy metals, their hammers rising and falling with steady and deafening rhythm.
I stood gazing at the Garisendà and the Assinelli that in their day had seen the slender hands of Properzia de’ Rossi at work upon the monumental marbles; and had heard the last Bentivoglio called from his workshop to a crown; and had watched the scholars come from all far countries — from wild Ireland, away in the mists of the northern seas, as from fountain filled Damascus rose-girt on the edge of the desert, — trooping by thousands and tens of thousands to pace the stones and learn the lore of the great Academy.
I loitered long in the old stone labyrinths of the Bentivoglio’s city. It awed me, it oppressed me, yet it allured me.
The Past is very gaunt and grim in the old University, but it is noble for all that. It is like the lofty skeleton of a dead knight wrapped in the black cloak of the Misericordia.
The people chattered with me gladly; and told me where to find the Raffael, the Guido, the Domenichino, the Tarini, above all their darlings — the Carracci.
In Verona I had felt but little the genius of the place. Verona had forgotten so much; the foe’s heel had stamped out her brain; and besides, her great Paolo, ages ago, was stolen utterly from her by wanton Venice.
But here in Bologna it was beautiful to find how dear and living to them their three Brethren were.
Stendahl was astonished to find his cobbler in Bologna able to tell him all sorts of traits of the Carracci, and really full of sorrowful reminiscences, because Luigi had died of grief at some bad drawing of his own in the angel of the Annunciation. Stendahl adds that a cobbler in Paris would have had a gilt chair in his shop, but would have told you nought of Greuze or of Gros.
It is just this tenderness of the past and knowledge of it, which make the Italian populace unlike any other under the sun: — in these peoples’ eyes there are always dreams, and in their memories there is always greatness.
Wandering full of these thoughts, vivid and yet confused in my brain, the hours sped away uncounted by me.
That there was pain or danger or singularity in my position, I had utterly forgotten. I was only glad to be free and to be amidst these places which had lived so long for me only in the light of imagination and of history.
I was standing under the Garisendà picturing that old academic life and thinking how good the days of a student must have been in those times when the meaning of scholarship had just touched the world with its light; I was just standing there, when the voices of men and women beside me caught my ear, speaking of an opera which had been given the previous night with unusual pomp before all the great people of the Romagna.
Its name arrested me; for it was the Alkestis.
“A German opera!” said one with a shrug of his shoulders. “We have to swallow it.”
“Nay, it is fine music; music that has held all the stages of Europe forty years,” said another. “And it is more Italian than anything; the man studied always in Milan—”
“But what good thing has he written since!”
&nbs
p; “Mere roba,” grumbled the first speaker. “It is that which beats me; and he gets such prices! — he is as rich as all the Ghetto — whilst look at our Rossini.”
“Those German hogs get all the truffles of Europe,” said the other with a sigh. “But there is this Rothwald, the guest of the Grand Duke, to-day, and tomorrow of the Cardinal, and what not, and good Italians starving their naked bones over a pinch of charcoal in their garrets, with more melody in their do, re, me, as they sing to themselves as they saunter about, than this fellow in all his long lifetime.”
“Caro, caro, be just,” laughed the others. “The Alkestis is perfect, quite perfect; our fathers settled that long ago; but then of course it is due to Milan, since he studied there. Rothwald is a great old man, that we are bound to confess, and his music is as fresh to-day as though some youngster had just penned it. The chorus people sang his great Cora degli Dei, under his window in the Palace this morning early. He was quite touched; he came out into the balcony, and there threw down a handful of gold whilst they tossed him carnival flowers.”