by Ouida
They seemed gay as the grilli in the grasses, and their dress was light and full of sunny hues; and from the broad hats of the men long scarlet ribbons floated. They had only bread and herbs, and some purple wine; but their laughter all the while was like a rippling brook, and they seemed not to know nor to want any better or fairer thing under heaven than thus “in sweet Valdarno to forget the day in twilight of the ilex.”
They had a lute with them, and now and then one of them, the one who seemed leader amongst them, sang to it. His voice had the clear, sonorous, far-reaching vibration, like the chords of some stringed instrument, that belongs alone to Italian voices.
I sat there in a sort of stupefaction, listening to them, wondering dully how much longer the sun would only fall on other people and the gloom alone be mine. The slow tears dropped down my cheeks; my sobs had ceased; I had passed into the passive exhaustion of a great grief.
After awhile I think they caught sight of me, for they whispered together in lower tones. The woman with them rose and came towards me — a little pretty figure, plump as a little rabbit, blue, light, and gay, with twinkling feet and a small brown face under the lace headgear of Genoa, that seemed to me as bright and rosy as any tulip-bell amongst the wheat in Maytime.
She came towards me with a fresh charming grace, and paused before me.
“The signorina does not seem happy,” she said, hesitatingly. “Has anything gone ill?”
I could not speak to her; I was ashamed and full of pride. I tried for her not to see the tears that were wet upon my face.
“I am sure there is something ill,” she persisted. “The donzella is weeping, and all alone; if she would tell us, perhaps we might help?”
I turned my face to the trunk of the pine; but I could not keep from her sight the great mute sob that shook me from head to foot as I leaned there.
Perhaps it frightened her, for she was silent some time, though she did not move away; then, turning a little, she called to her companions.
I heard the step of a man brush through the grasses and approach her.
“Speak to her, caro mio,” said the girl, in a low voice. “There must be something amiss with her, I am sure — and she so young too! — only a child!”
“If the signorina will not speak we can do nothing,” said the voice of the man. It was very rich and flute-like. It was he who had sung the songs to the lute.
It conquered my pride. I turned and answered without looking at him.
“I had only twelve gold florins in all the world,” I cried, in the despair of my heart “And they have taken them, every one — every one!”
“Who have taken them?”
“A thief — how can I tell? In the fiera, last night, it must surely have been. They were safe when I came into Florence, and now — see here!”
I turned and showed them my poor little slit pouch.
I did not look up in the face of the speaker, for my eyes were blinded by their rain of tears.
He took the bag and examined it.
“Cut through with a knife, no doubt,” he said, after awhile. “And you are very sad for the loss of this money, signorina? Someone will scold you if you go home without it, is that it?”
“Oh no!” I cried, with a fresh passion of weeping that I could not repress. “If it were only that! It is all I have in the world, I tell you — all — all — all!”
“But your friends?”
“I have none.”
“What! You were adrift on the world with twelve florins — you?”
“Yes. Why not? I have no one to give me anything. I made that money honestly; it was all mine. It would have lasted me till I should have got to Rome. And now I have not a farthing in the world — not one — not one. I can sing a little, indeed, but then I promised Mariuccia never to sing in the streets, and I dare not break my word, for she is dead, you know. And I am all alone here in Florence. I do not know a soul. And my brothers are all dead; and no one can tell where my father is. But nothing of that frightened me so long as I had the money. But now I am frightened, oh Mother of God! for I have nothing in all the world, you see; I must just starve and die; perhaps even they will not believe what I say, but will take me for a thief, when they find that I have nothing! And if I had only died in Bologna!”
The passionate stream of the words had coursed from my tongue unbroken when once my pride had given way and found a refuge in speech; when my Voice dropped in very weariness I stood before them heart-broken and striving with my piteous sense of shame; my cheeks burned dry my scorching tears, and my sobs died silent in my throat.
The man standing above under the ilex leaves laughed, but the laughter was tender and gentle.
“All nonsense, nonsense, cara mia!” he cried lightly. “No one ever dies in Bologna that can help it It is not pleasant, you see, to be walled up in a square of bricks, and labelled dismally in the lump, with a thousand other ‘vagabondi,’ or ‘ladri,’ or ‘briccôni,’ just as it may please the good town complimentarily to classify you. Take heart, signorina, and come and breakfast with us. Your gold florins, after all, may perhaps have been left at the house you slept in — who knows! You may mistake, or the thief may repent, or be found out, which is indeed the same thing. Come along and see my dogs, and taste my wine, if there be any left Do not be afraid of us; we are none of us very respectable perhaps, except the dogs, but we will do you no harm.”
Something in his voice and laugh, something of silvery resounding clearness, “com’ il dolce suonar d’una lira” ringing on a metal plate, thrilled through my heart familiar and full of solace. I dashed the blinding mist from my eyes and my falling hair from my forehead, and gazed up at him breathless and entranced “And you never came the next day!” I cried to him in passionate reproach. “And you never saw me last night! Do you not know me now? I have kept one of the roses — look!”
I took out of the folds of my dress one of the dead white roses of Verona. His face flushed darkly; he laughed; but his beautiful eyes looked dim.
How had I been a moment without knowing him? partly, because absorbed in the terror of my grief I had paid hardly any heed to anything around me; chiefly, because on the two nights when I had seen him he had been disguised in the gay masquerade of the carnival costumes.
And yet his was a face not commonly seen, nor once seen lightly forgotten; the Cinque Cento face, the face of the old Renaissance when the features of men bore the reflex of the artistic and heroical life which was in its full flower in their midst. The face with aquiline outline, dreaming lids, thoughtful brows; profoundly melancholy in repose, and in mirth gay as a young child’s; with eyes sad as death, and a smile frank as sunlight; the face which is the most historical and purely idealic of all human countenances.
Be the reason what it may, lie as it will in climate, race, or breeding, it is a fact that the Italian physiognomy retains as no other nation’s does, the impression of the past upon it The noble comes to you down the bare stone galleries of his old palace, and it is still the noble of Tintoretto and Tiziano that salutes you with that cold and lofty grace, which can change at will to the joyous and caressing softness of a woman. The peasant of the contado flings his brown mantle across his mouth to screen himself from the mountain blast in the market place, and it is still the model of Angelo and of Sarto that laughs aloud from those glancing teeth, and saunters through the braying mules and bleating kids with those supple and sinewy limbs, and that unconscious harmony of gesture.
Were it not too fanciful one would say that those great centuries, while they gave an immortal soul to the pagan graces of art and produced human genius in its most complex and complete form, had so entered into the blood and bone of these people that their influence is deathless. The sun of that wondrous summer noon of art has set indeed; but the after-glow of its rays shines still in the regard of the living sons of Italy.
Such a face was this which had laughed on me in the moonlight in the streets of Verona, and now in gentle co
mpassion was before me in the City of Lilies.
CHAPTER XIII.
The Great Magician.
I SLID the rose back into its hiding-place a little shyly. The black-eyed girl was gazing at me with wide parted, astonished lips, and a little jealous wonder in her eyes.
“And you never knew me, last night?” I murmured to him. “Last night I almost touched you, and you never saw—”
“Last night! no;” said he, frankly. “When I go mad at the Carnival fair, I know nothing and nobody. But to-day, donzella, oh yes, I recognised you the instant you sat down under the cypress. That you have a genius for adventure is self-evident. How come you here all this way over the mountains?”
“But you never kept your promise!” I cried to him, intent on my one especial wrong.
“But you never came to me!” I cried to him, “You only sent the roses!”
“No, for the best of all reasons, signorina,” said he, with a smile. “I had talked sedition that day, or so the stranieri construed it I had lashed thy people with more than bladders, and had salted their soup with more than jokes; and to crown it all, in the Veglione, after I left you that night, I made an harangue which to Austrians’ ears savoured of downright treason. So, in the grey of the daybreak, as I went home singing and dreaming no evil, the good Tedeschi seized hold of me, and marched me out of the gates, and gave me not a second to pack my knapsack or send a word to my people, but set off with me for the frontier in the sleet and the teeth of the wind. They were fifty to one, so there had been no sense in resistance. Hard by the gates I spied a flower shop, just opening its shutters; I asked the soldiers to let me stop and light my sigaretto. Then I picked out a knot of roses, the best I could see, and paid for them, and bade them take them to you. I am glad they did so honestly. It was very cold tramping across Lombardy, at a horse’s tail, in that Florindo masquing dress, which looked absurd enough in the midst of the grey and white plain; and it snowed hard, and the tramontàna blew like a knife, but the sharpest thing about it to me was the thought that you would believe I had broken my promise.”
He smiled a little as he spoke, that wondrous Italian smile which has so much mirth in it, so much tenderness, so much pathos. Surely that smile of Italy is the loveliest thing left in all the width and weariness of the world!
Something in his accent made me turn and gaze at him. I breathed quickly in a happy excitation.
“Then you had not forgotten me really!” I cried. “I thought you had; I quite thought you had last night.”
He laughed.
“Certainly not. I knew you, cara mia, at my first glance at you under the cypress yonder. You sang too well in Verona that day to be forgotten, and that wonderful black and gold dress, and your hands full of the Carnival roses, and that hair of yours with all the yellow lights in it; — yes, I saw you, and a pretty picture you made, that I grant I should have stayed a little to find you out; but your Tedesco friends and I have no love for one another. They say I excite the people. So I was fain to go out of Verona, not knowing your name, signorina.”
“They have not stolen the onyx,” I cried, breathless, standing still with the red sun in my eyes, whilst I tore the little silk cord from about my throat and drew the ring from its hiding place.
A flush of pleasure swept, like light, over his expressive face.
“Ah-ah! you kept that stupid thing? Too large and clumsy for your pretty little fingers, and no use to you at all. What did you do with the rest of the treasures? You had a fine lapfull that morning.”
“I gave them away,” I said, dreamily, not very well knowing what he said, gazing at him in the lustre of that crimson flash of the red and fading light in which we both were standing.
The little plump brown rabbit of a maiden peeped with her pretty, shy, raven-like eyes over my shoulder: she saw the ring with the Fates.
“Why, Pascarèl, that is your onyx,” she cried to him; “the onyx you lost in Verona that first day of the Carnival when I was not with you, you remember!”
Pascarèl looked a little impatient.
“Did I ever tell you I lost it? At any rate the donzella found it, and it is hers now by every law of possession. Cara mia, those dismal old immutable Parcæ do not look fit dispensers of the Future to you.”
“Would you not have it again?” I murmured, seeing that he now wore no ring.
He repulsed it with a sort of gentle impatience.
“Would you insult me because I am poor? Keep it, signorina; though it be a grim and gloomy fashion of gift to you.”
I hardly heard him, I was so bewildered at his recognition of me. I slipped the onyx fondly back within my dress. I looked at him, glad and astonished.
“How strange it is!” I murmured.
“Forse il destino!” hummed Pascarèl, in a soft mezza voce, as if in answer.
“Do you believe in destiny?” I asked him, wistfully, in a little awe.
“To be sure!” he answered me. “But it is always feminine, cara mia, whatever our grammarians may say to the contrary. And, now, will you tell me your story a little?”
“What could he be, I wondered, ceaselessly; of what grade, what habits, what pursuit? A scholar in every accent, a gentleman in every gesture, with the pure inflexions of voice, with the slender delicacy of form, with the indescribable ease and indifference of manner which only come of birth and of breeding, he lived solely, as it seemed, amongst the populace; his white linen garments were worn and threadbare; his meal was of the simplest and most frugal; and his companions were nothing more than populace, little more indeed than vagrants.
Perhaps he caught and understood the speculative wonder in my gaze at him. At any rate, what could he be, I wondered. He did not leave me long in doubt “We are strolling players, at your service,” he said, with his bright laugh, casting himself down beside me. “She who was so terrified about you is called Brunotta; that short lad with the round head is little Toccô; and the other one owns the time-honoured name of Cocomero. The three poodles are Pepito, Pépita, and Toto. The monkey is Pantagruel. Toto in especial is the star of my troop. Now you know us all. As for me, I am Pascarello or Pascarèl. If you are not afraid of such disreputable companionship, will you narrate us something of your own history, signorina?”
He had made me drink a little of his red Chiante wine and break a crust of bread; it was a solace only to be able to speak of my immense calamity; I told him willingly all my story, warming to the recital of my woes and of my wrongs.
He listened, stretched on the grass and leaning on one elbow; the girl Brunôtta lent an eager ear, her little round brown face flushing and growing pale in sympathy; the two lads leaned against a tree openmouthed and breathless; flattered by my interested and reverential audience, I grew a little calmer under my loss, and waxed more and more fluent in the narrative of my sad adventures.
My tale ended, Pascarèl sent the youth, whom he had called Cocomero, into the city to acquaint the guardia with the theft, and make enquiries at the locanda; that done, he threw himself again upon the turf. I wondered if he were sorry for me — he had not said so. All the ejaculations of sorrow and compassion had been Brunotta’s.
I was full of passionate sorrow for myself; the sight of these light-hearted people only made my sense of utter desolation weigh the heavier upon me; when the excitement of the relation of my miseries had passed away, a very horror of despondency possessed me; and, without reasoning very much upon it, to find my Romeo of the Veglione nothing more than a hedge-comedian cast a shadow of bitter disappointment over the romance of my vague dreams.
“So you are absolutely all alone, cara mia?” said Pascarèl, bending his luminous eyes down on mine.
“All alone — yes!”
“And if we cannot find this thief, have not a copper paul in all the world?”
“I have told you so!” I cried with a desperation of pain at being driven to repeat my degradation.
“Altro!” he said, breathing gently that wonderful exple
tive which comprehends in itself every shade and variety of human emotion.
“Do you know what it is to be all alone and penniless in this best of all possible worlds?” he said, slowly, cruelly, as I thought. I almost burst out sobbing afresh under the torture of the question.
“If I do no harm, can I be hurt?” I asked, wistfully looking in his face.
He laughed, in a kindly compassion.
“Ah! if one does no harm, it goes very ill indeed with one in this world. We are suspected — for ever!”
In the stupefaction of my sorrow the irony was too fine to reach me.
“Is it fight to do wrong, then, ever?” I asked, bewilderedly; for I knew that Mariuccia had been my only teacher, and that she, poor soul! had known nothing of the world. Besides, — in Ambrogiò’s story, was it not Rothwald who had done the wrong, yet who had thriven?”
“There is only one thing wrong in the world — poverty,” answered my new friend briefly.
“It is much the same in the country too,” the little Brunétta murmured.
“Assuredly,” said the player, stretched on his back in the sun. “The country is only human nature washed in buttermilk; the town is human nature soaked in brandy.”
“Why will you talk as though you were a cynic, Pascarèl?” said Brunétta in petulant expostulation.
He held up the ragged sleeve of his old white jacket; it had been, I saw, of finest and silkiest thibetti.
“Every one is a cynic who has a hole at his elbow,” he answered her.
“But — as if you cared!”
He laughed, and pinched her pretty rosy ear.
“We do not care; but then we are very disrepu table. All respectable people care. It is only scamps who smile.”
“A smiling scamp is better than a frowning miser,” said the girl; and she set the two white dogs, Pepito and Pepita, to waltz round with each other, whilst she waltzed too, singing a dance tune, down the avenue.
Pascarèl sprang up and caught her round the waist, and set himself whirling likewise; the boy with the fiddle struck out a wild waltz measure: the dogs capered, the monkey chattered loud, the man and the girl span round and round laughing, with their hands on each other’s shoulders, and their feet flying like leaves blown in circles by the wind.