by Ouida
I heard, and ray cheek burned, and my heart beat high with hatred: I thought of Ambrogiô Rufi as I had left him stooping over his wretched and solitary hearth.
“They honour Rothwald like that?” I cried to the students, heedless who my hearers were, as it was my careless childish fashion to be, everywhere and always.
They looked at me in surprise, and no doubt I had a strange enough aspect, glowing in my purple and yellow against the darkness of the coppersmiths’ dens, and above me the quaint Garisendà.
“Why not, signorina?” they cried gaily to me, possibly amused at the rage of disdain that doubtless quivered over all my face. “Because he is a Tedesco? — a good reason, we grant.”
“Because he was a traitor!” I said to them, and then could gay no more, but turned away with a burning face and a swelling heart, for there seemed to rise before me the broken-hearted, weary, death-stricken form of my dear old master, and the thought of this man who had betrayed him was unbearable to me; this man, who dwelt in princes’ palaces, and scattered gold broadcast, and received the songs and the flowers of the nation he had robbed.
In the fury against injustice and the passion of longing to redress it, which are part and parcel of all youth that is at all generous or at all unworldly, I felt strong enough to force my way to the palace itself up high on the hill there amongst the cypresses, and fling the truth in the face of this perjurer whose lie had been for forty years fair and fruitful before the world.
“Oh! why does God let such things bel” I cried in the rebellion of my heart against the cruelty of creation, as I dropped down under a little shrine in a twisting passage-way out of the public square.
Bologna had lost its charm for me; it seemed only a great dark, dusty, noisome, cruel place, with its strange city of the dead walled up beyond its gates.
What was it to me that my old master sat alone by a wretched hearth whilst the man who had betrayed him was feasted by cardinals and honoured by nations? What was it to me?
Nothing indeed.
And yet I sobbed bitterly as I turned from the streets into an old dark church, ashamed that the people should see the tears upon my cheeks.
CHAPTER VIII.
The Maidenhair.
THE church was quite empty: an immense naked marble desolation, with a white Christ looming vast and sad above the altar.
I sat down on an oaken bench and cried my heart out, as the children say: most for the cruelty of Ambrogiô’s fate, but also a little for the utter loneliness of my own.
I had little hope of finding my father; and if I found him, how could I tell he would not disown a little travel-stained penniless wanderer, as he had disowned the child with the peacock’s plumes in the painting chamber of the Veronese students?
I dreaded his calm cold smile; I dreaded his icy incredulous response; I resolved within myself, if I found him not at Florence, to seek him no more, but to go on and try my fortunes at Rome.
For once, when I had sung in the streets to a little knot of people in Verona, an old man had come up to me and had told me he was the director of the Corea, and had bidden me, if ever I had a mind to appear in public, to betake myself to him there in the Eternal City.
“Might I not help you a little, illustrissima?” said a gentle, timid voice. I started, and saw the young Tirolean, the bright colour in his costume glowing in the gloom of the dusky aisles.
I was not sorry for companionship, yet I was wounded to be seen in my sorrow. I stared at him stupidly through my tears.
“You did not stay at Padova, then?” I asked him at length, seeing that he seemed more ashamed than I.
“No, signorina,” he answered shyly, and then was still.
“You have business in Bologna?”
“No.”
He spoke with downcast eyes, and swept the dust of the pavement with the long plumes in his hat.
“I was sorry for the little eccellenza,” he stammered humbly. “And it seemed so terrible for her to be alone; so young, and with such a face as that; and so I dared to travel on with her. I was on the roof of the diligenza all the way from Padova.”
Then he was silent; lifting, timidly, his brown, honest, dog-like eyes, that were wistful like a dog’s that dreads a beating.
But I was too used to the comradeship of Il Squarcionino and all his boyish brethren to be in any whit embarrassed by this act of the young mountaineer. I took it as a kindly piece of thoughtfulness, no more.
“It was very good of you,” I said, brightening a little, “and — and — it is true, I am all alone. But no one would hurt me — why should they? I am not afraid.”
“The little illustrissima is hardly more than a child,” murmured Marco Rosas, with a pity in his look I did not comprehend. “It is so damp and cold in this church. Would the signorina come a little in the country! There is a great Madonna here to see, they say, and the day is long.”
I hesitated a moment, then consented. What harm could there be! And anything was better than being alone; and the young man was so gentle, so simple, and so frank, that he seemed to me only like a bigger Raffaellino.
So out of the gates I went into the white wide country, with the sun on its dusty roads, along which the bullock waggons were crawling.
Anywhere else I should have been stared at — in my yellow and violet, with the hood lying on my shoulders and my hair uncovered to the sun, and the young Unterinnthaler in his picture-like dress of velvet, and broad red sash, and hat with the drooping myrtle-green plume.
But in Italy — blessed Italy — no one noticed.
There is such immunity from observation in a country where colour is a household fairy brightening every rent and ruin, in lieu of an unknown god at once dreaded and derided.
So I went on in the sunshine along the road that leads to the Madonna of S. Luca high on her green hill.
We made our obeisance at her shrine, and gazed through the wonderful breadth of the plains with their countless cities and towns, and the low lines of the circling mountains lying curve on curve in endless undulation.
Then we came down from the height and wandered whither we knew not exactly amongst fresh-turned fields and vines just set with leaf, and orchards of olive and mulberry, where many a little quiet paese nestled with white-walled houses and red-roofed dovecotes. At one of these poderi there was a woman with a merry handsome face and a scarlet kirtle sitting spinning on the top of a flight of steps under a dark archway hung with convolvulus.
Marco Rosas asked her if she could give us a draught of milk.
She assented joyfully, and brought out not only milk but honey and pomegranates and black sweet bread, and set them out on a stone bench on the top of the step under the convolvulus; and would have us eat there and then, she spinning all the while and telling us her own history and her grandmother’s before her, looking across the great sunny plains that stretched away like the sea-green ocean, some white tower rising here and there out of the sun-mist like a seagull on the wing.
She was a cheery, good-hearted creature; she lived on the most wondrous battle-field of all Europe, but she knew nothing of that; she only knew that her eggs sold well in Bologna market, and her bit of land was fruitful, and her husband was a good man though careless, and her olive-trees had been bit by the frost and would bear ill that summer.
We had a pleasant hour with her there on the sunny steps facing the low tumbled crests of the Apennines, hyacinth-hued in the clear spring weather.
We bade her farewell with many good wishes on either side, and went on our way to the city. The sun was not far from its setting.
During those long sauntering walks the Unterinnthaler had told me still more about himself and his birthplace in the high mountains.
As we drew under the city walls he began to speak again, and a little confusedly, of his country, of his home, of his people. His millet-fields and his mountain cattle were dearer to him than all the dead glories of Bologna.
“The châlet is large,” he told me, “and
Anton, my brother, is a good, gentle lad. There is a great store of linen, for my mother and her mother before her were great spinners; and there is some little silver in the plate chest, for our people have been there for generations. It is not so very cold in the winter-time, for everywhere we have double windows, and we can afford to burn as many oak logs as we like. And then in the spring it is so beautiful — all the waters leaping as though they were mad, and the loose snows rushing, thundering down, and the cattle lowing with delight to get once more up on their pastures, and the hyacinths and gentian springing up everywhere — oh, signorina, you do not know how beautiful it is upon our mountains then!”
“No doubt,” I answered him, dreamily, my thoughts not being with him.
“Much more beautiful than all this!” he said, with a sweep outward of his hand to the country. “Here it is just maple and mulberry, mulberry and maple, over and over again, and those endless vineyards everywhere — so flat, so pale and tiresome.”
“No doubt,” I said again to him, indifferent, watching the white bullocks come through the gates with an open waggon of the past year’s hay.
He was silent a little while; then he spoke again; his voice was swift and low.
“Signorina, did ever you hear of a tale that our priest told us once! There were terrible times across the mountains, amongst the Francesi, I think, and the peasantry rose against the aristocrats, and everywhere they slew the nobles; and at one place the nobles were drowned by thousands in a river. Do you know?”
“You mean the Noyades of Nantes?”
“It may be. I cannot tell the name. It was in some time of revolution, and they did not spare even the women. All the wives and daughters and mothers of the nobles were bound and flung into the water. There was only one way that anyone of those young noble maidens could be spared;, it was if one of the men of the populace asked and took her in marriage—”
He stopped abruptly. I, gathering some tufts of maidenhair off the city wall, laughed a little.
“The waters were better, I should think. Well?”
“Signorina,” he began once more, and as I looked up, astonished at the tremulous sound in his voice, I saw his eyes fastened on me in pathetic entreaty, still as of a dog that prays of you not to beat him. “Signorina, I have been thinking. It is almost as ill with you as with those young noble Francese maidens. You are all alone, and you have no home and no friends — you have told me so; and surely your father cannot be amongst the living, or he had never been silent so long. Now, I am only a mountaineer, I know that, and ignorant, and altogether beneath you, and yet if you would let me give you my home so long as ever — as ever — you want one. The world is bitter and bad for a motherless child.”
He paused and grew very red, then hurried on with his explanation.
“I meant — if you would come to us — my mother is so good: the little illustrissima would get to care for her; and the place is humble indeed, but sweet and wholesome — and safe. I would go straight back with the donzella, and not rest till she was safe with my mother on the mountains. And I — I know well the donzella would never look at me, never think of me — I should never dream of it. But if she would only let me be of use to her, only let me put a roof over her head, I should be so thankful! I would serve her like a dog. For — for — in this one little short day I have got to love her so well!”
Then he stopped abruptly, and grew very white, and I could hear his quick hard breathing as we stood together outside the gates of Bologna in the red sunset light My first impulse was that of ungrateful waywardness.
What! escape from Verona only to end my gorgeous dreams in a peasant’s shieling on northern mountains! I, who had set my face to the golden south, dreaming of my Sordello of the winter’s masque, of my Romeo of the fairy roses.
I am ashamed to say that, like a spoilt and cruel child as I was, I flashed on him a contemptuous glance and laughed aloud.
The moment my laughter had struck on the evening silence I was sorry. I shall never forget the look on the frank fair face of Marco Rosas.
“The donzella is right and I was mad — no doubt,” he murmured, humbly; then he fell behind, and followed me in silence through the gates into the grim old town.
My heart smote me a little as I went He had meant so well; perhaps it was cruel in me to wound him.
I heard his slow firm tread behind me until I had passed into the open court of the Cignale d’Oro.
Then he stopped, and his voice — quite changed in tone — muttered in my ear —
“Signorina, I will never see your face again. Say you forgive me once!”
I turned and looked at him, relenting a little. It was so absurd; and yet some sense of his thorough goodness, of his perfect simplicity and sincerity, stole on me and moved me despite myself.
I stretched my hand out to him with the little shaking maidenhair as a peace-offering.
“You were very good,” I said to him, half laughing, half crying. “I thank you very much indeed; only, it was so absurd, you know; — go away and forget me; pray, pray do, or I shall be so sorry!”
He took the little tuft of grasses and looked at me with a wistful sadness in his eyes that haunted me for many an hour after.
“I shall never forget, dear signorina. Never — till I die.”
Then he bent his head very low, and turned away and left me.
One little short day, and a life was won!
I felt a strange thrill of conscious power, yet a sense of some wrong thing done by me, as I watched him pass wearily through the entrance passage and disappear into the blackness of the shadow.
I let him go in silence, and went upstairs to my little room under the eaves.
CHAPTER IX.
The Snow-flower.
I WAS pained and yet incensed.
It seemed as though all the cares and sorrows of mature years crowded in on me in one moment I had been so happy in my heedless goodfellowship with any one who smiled on me, and was willing to be idle and mirthful with me for an hour.
I do not know how others have been moved by the first utterance of love to them; but to me it brought a weary sense of burdensome power and of lost liberty. All the golden hazy glory of my future seemed to have faded suddenly. The future was only now to me a blank uncertainty, which might hold anything — or nothing.
All the gay elastic hopefulness of the previous day was gone from me. I leaned on the edge of my little casement, tired, and with an aching heart.
It was another red and gold evening.
The voices were merry in the cortile below. The little boy of the house played dominoes with his granddam on the stone steps. The padrona and her maidens hurried in and out, for the inn was full of travellers passing through towards Padova and Venice and Milan.
The whole was a little bright busy picture in the sombreness of this great old city, which had seen so much bloodshed, so much genius, so much woe, so much splendour, and now lived on, on its past, as childless greybeards do alone amidst their palaces.
I had no heart any more that day for the streets of Bologna. I shut myself in my little chamber and watched the pigeons plume themselves upon the roof, and heard the chattering, laughing voices down below, and vexed my soul as young things will over the perplexities and the cruelties of human life.
The warm sunset was just tinging the solemn greys of the city into all manner of tender hues, when above the clatter of the voices I heard the little shrill voice of the child of the inn crying as he ran out into the court, —
“Oh, mother, mother! give me a scudo — just one to spend to-night.”
“Fie, you naughty soul!” grumbled the mother; “you are always spending money. You will come to no good, Berto. The Frate says you do not know your alfabeto, and you with those blessed Scolopi Fathers over two years!”
“Give me a scudo, mother!” pleaded the little lad “Only one! I will win it back at ruzzola tomorrow.”
“Oh, I daresay,” sighed the padrona; �
�all my dear little cheeses bowled away down the streets. You are a wicked one, Berto, and you my only child, and I a widow; seven years old too, as you are!”
“Give me a scudo!” cried Berto, clinging to her skirts, and, in fine, helping himself without more ado from the leathern pouch that hung at her girdle.
“What is it for, Berto?” she asked, catching the child by his long hair.
“Pascarèl, mother mine!” shouted the little scapegrace, who might have seven years at the uttermost “To-night — just to-night — and then on to Florence. Will you come too? Do, mother!”
“I do not mind if I do,” said the padrona, casting her lace veil about her head. “There is only that little donzella in the house, and two traders from Ferrara. I do not mind if I do. Pascarèl is as good as a winning number at lottery. Here, Pasquà, Gilla, Marta,” —
She called her maidens round her, and set them their tasks of cooking, spinning, poultry-feeding and the like, standing in a circle of red light in the black and white paved court under my casement, and then went out with her little son down into the dusky tunnel of the passage-way.
Pascarèl! the name bewildered and yet comforted me. What would it be, I wondered; a game, a show, a dance, or the name of a living creature?
The name of the man who had chosen the bright. melting snow as its emblem? — the snow-flower that glittered a day in the light, and then vanished?
Anyway, it had a solace for me when I leaned there in the red evening, while the place grew quite still as the pigeons went to roost, and the old chimes called to vespers, and the inn maidens ran to chatter within-doors to the Ferrarcse as soon as their mistress’s back was turned.
Whatever it might be, this mystical Pascarèl, it went before me southward to Florence. If it were only a snow-flower that would melt at a touch, it seemed to me better than all the deathless flowers of Paradise.
As I leaned there watching the silvery birds fly against the reddened sky, I thought — why I do not know — of Properzia de’ Rossi.
I knew her story. I had often pondered over it, and looked at the delicate sad face of her, with its drooped lids and its Madonna’s eyes. She had dwelt here, in this mighty Bologna; and Bologna had made her its saint and sovereign whilst her short life lasted, and in her death had mourned her almost as Rome Raffaelle.