by Ouida
The fiddle grew louder and wilder and faster; the ape screamed in chorus; the dogs jumped over each other and sank panting on the ground. Pascarèl and Brunétta danced and danced and danced, with the grass beneath them and the leaves above, and every now and then a blaze of sunshine catching the blue tassels at her skirt and the scarlet ribbons on his hat.
Then, at last, exhausted and laughing, and panting like their dogs, they cast one another aside, and dropped down on the turf in the shadow.
“How well it is to be poor!” cried Pascarèl. “If we were dukes and duchesses we could not scamper like that in a wood! we could only go masked, in the gas, to an opera ball.”
As he spoke he laughed, and fanned himself and her with a sheaf of chesnut leaves. I, sitting alone in the depth of the shadow from the cypress, watched them, wondering, and envying their glad content Brunétta of the bird-like eyes seeing me sitting there alone in the dark, rose and crossed to me, and touched me again gently.
“Pascarèl says it is always well for those who love to be poor!” she whispered.
I shivered a little. The double trouble was mine, to be poor without any love to help me under it “If both are content, perhaps,” I murmured aloud. But I was very doubtful.
“He is; — I don’t say I see it so myself,” said the little player, as she dropped down by me and wove a plait of grasses, and talked in a cheery, quick, babbling voice like the tinkling of a brook; “we are poor — so poor — but then we are so merry. Pascarèl was not always so poor. He is a great comedian; only the people are all he will play to, and he does not care to be great Coco’s father was a Harlequin and never had any money; and they used to travel much as we do now. He danced for his own bread when he was three years old; and then, when he grew older, he played. He is eighteen now. Pascarèl has a talent — such a talent: I have none. I never did anything until three years ago, except milk the goats and take the insects off the vines, and plait straw, and spin, of course. I can only hop about We have travelled with three or four companies, but Pascarèl never could get on with the directors; one director made love to me; and another one was cruel to poor little Toto; and a third one failed and ran away in debt to all his troop, and so on and so on; so we are as we are, and we have a merry life. The two lads and the animals love us, and we go about where we like; and Pascarèl can always make the people laugh, and we always get enough to live upon; and it is much better than being at any tyrant’s beck and call; and now and then we have a holiday in the woods — like this. In the winter it is a little harder, of course; but even then the little towns are bright and warm, and the people are always glad to be made merry; and before one has romped through Carnival — presto! — the winter is gone! A hearty laugh makes one forget that one could eat more maccaroni, and when one’s toes are cold in the snow a dance warms them quicker than anything. Sometimes I am sorry Pascarèl cares nothing at all to make himself great, because he has such a talent; and if he were great one would have such good things to eat every day, and fine clothes and real jewels; but he says one should not care for such things — but then to be sure he does not trouble his head whether he eats a ciambello or a cucumber, a swan or a sparrow! But how selfish I am to run on so! — you are unhappy?”
The little actress saw the whiteness that came over the face above her, and paused in the weaving of her braid of grasses, and said softly again: —
“You are so unhappy?”
“Of course; but it does not matter.”
“Yes, it does. Everything seems so unhappy — except just Pascarèl and myself, and the dogs; and it is such a pity, in a sunshine like this, when everything ought to live like the crocuses, being glad and taking no thought. You are unhappy because you are alone, no doubt. Will you come with us? I am sure Pascarèl would be glad! It will be so much better; and we will not teaze you to know what you do not wish to tell — if there is anything—”
“But you know nothing of me—”
The girl laughed.
“Ah bah! We are not great people that dare not taste a pear till they know what stem it was grafted on. We are only poor players; we have nothing to lose; and if we take a liking to a face we are not afraid of its fellowship. There is so much liberty in being poor, you see!”
“Is there!”
I could not see it; it appeared to me that poverty was an ass’s hobble, with which one was tied miserably to one place that we had long browsed bare.
“It is the difference between an old shirt and a new,” said Pascarèl, rising and lounging near. “The new is embroidered perhaps, and very white and handsome, no doubt, but it is tight and the stitches gall; that shirt is respectable, admirable, and fit for a palace; but comfortable — no. The old is ugly maybe, and looks bad, and in it you will not be asked to a noble’s table or a bishop’s feast; but it is so easy to wear, and it has so many recollections, that dear old shirt: you pawned it here, and you danced in it there, and pretty fingers darned it in one place, and a rosy-cheeked laundress cobbled it in another; it is picturesque, it is memorial, it is venerable; above all, it never scratches. Those two shirts are Wealth and Poverty.”
“Will it not be much better!” said Brunétta, eagerly interrupting him, “much better, if the signorina come with us for a little space!”
Pascarèl swept the turf with his ribboned sombrero, and declared his willingness in flowery phrases.
“Only — only,” he said, at the end of his graceful and gracious sentences, “you forget one thing, Brunétta.
The signorina is gentle-bora and gentle-bred; our mode of life would be but a sorry one for her.”
“But what can she do?” cried the little Brunétta.
“Ah! what, indeed?” I thought; and I threw myself down face downwards on the earth in a very paroxysm of despair.
Pascarèl threw one gentle look on me, then turned and walked up and down under the trees in meditation.
“Brunétta!” I heard him call; she went to him, and I heard their voices, low and earnest, in conversation at some distance from me, too far away for their meaning to be intelligible.
Then they ceased, and all was quite silent in the wood except the joyous and wild bark of the dogs as they chased a bird or a rabbit I lay still there with my face pressed on the dry, hard earth.
“If they would only kill me,” I thought, “and make an end of it all!”
A little picture rose before my memory of Raffaelino sitting at the coppersmith’s door at sunset playing on his mandoline, while his mother and Mariuccia gossiped within over the lamp, and the light shone on the huge red coppers, and the stars came out over the dark quiet piazza.
“Oh, why! oh, why!” I thought, “cannot we know when we are happy!”
I would have given away twenty years of my young unspent life only to have been back once more in that old, despised, safe home in the city of Can Grande!
Pascarèl aroused me, touching me on the shoulder.
“Rise up, cara mia,” he said, gently. “That is not the way anyhow to get back your florins, or to win yourself new ones.”
I rose as he bade me, and looked him in the face; my own face I felt was white with pain and desperation.
“I have been very foolish,” I said to him, “and you have been very good; you are all strangers, and can care nothing for me. I will go now; I thank you very much — you and yours.”
I put out my hands to him in farewell; his eyes were so beautiful, and he had been so kind, I could hardly keep the tears from flooding my own eyes as I spoke to him, and yet I knew I must not trouble them any longer — all strangers as they were.
Pascarèl took my hands and kissed them lightly with the easy grace of all his actions.
He looked troubled and almost embarrassed.
“Not so fast, donzella,” he said, gently; “wait awhile; Coco is not back yet with any news, and even if he find your florins, it cannot be said that you are in very fair case for wandering over the country all alone. See here, we are not of your
grade in life; we are poor strolling Bohemians; we are not, as I tell you, very reputable people, and we are poor as the devil — altro! — and yet, if you would like to stay with us as — as — Brunòtta said, it might be safer at any rate for you than to stray about Italy by yourself as helpless as my little Toto would be if I lost him. We are a sorry resort, I know, but perhaps we are better than nothing, and I may be more able to find your father than you. Say, will you wait with us a little?”
Ere I could answer him, the youth Cocomero burst through the bushes breathless from having run to and from the town.
“There is no news,” he panted, gloomily. “They knew nothing at the Silver Melon, and the guards say there have been many foreign cutpurses in the city of late. They have had a score of such robberies this winter.”
Pascarèl shrugged his shoulders and lifted his hands with that indescribable gesture in which an Italian expresses consummate disgust and resignation.
“It is destiny!” he murmured, resting his eyes on me with a look I did not understand. “Well, signorina mia, will you stay with us?”
“I should be glad!” I said, with a little sob in my voice. “It is so horrible — so very horrible — to be alone!”
“Of course it is horrible,” he echoed, as he took my hands afresh within his own, and cast himself down upon his knees before me where I stood, in that easy unstudied abandonment of himself to each impulse and emotion of the moment which makes grace of posture as natural to an Italian as it is to a deer or an antelope.
“You will stay?” he murmured, still lightly holding my hand in his. “That is well — at least for you it shall be well; that I swear. Riches we have not, and glory we have not, and the ways of our life will be hard — for you. But all that we can do we will.”
“You are very good!” I said to him, scarcely knowing what indeed to answer him.
He was a stranger, seen but half an hour before, and yet already he seemed like a familiar friend.
A shade of sadness and impatience swept over his speaking face.’
“Che-che! Wait to praise us till you know us. We are good for very little, cara mia. We will make you laugh sometimes, that I can promise, and perhaps that is much in this life.”
“But if I stay with you?” I said, a sudden fear and remembrance striking me with its shame, “if I stay — I have nothing; I will not be a burden to you; never, never! Is there nothing I can do to get my bread? My voice is good—”
“Yes! You sing like all the angels.”
“About the angels — I do not know. But anything; — always.”
“But you are so young—”
“Not too young for that — only I promised dear dead Mariuccia — But I will not stay with you unless you tell me of some way to get my bread.”
“Bread? Nonsense! You eat, I daresay, as much as one flings to the swallows. But, if you are in earnest, you might be one of us.”
“A player! I?”
I echoed the words half in affront half in delight. My pride rebelled, my fancy was allured.
“Why not?” said Pascarèl. “Do you know aright what it is to be one?”
“Surely!” I answered him, with a little gay contempt — had I not seen them scores of times in Verona? “It is to be no longer a man or a woman, but only a mere wooden burattino that has to dance or die, to swagger or shrink, just as its master chooses to make people laugh for a copper coin. A fine thing, certainly!”.
Pascarèl released my hands and sprang to his feet erect His mobile face flushed darkly; his changeful eyes flashed fire.
“Is that all you know?” he cried, while his voice rang like a trumpet-call. “Listen here, then, little lady, and learn better. What is it to be a player? It is this. A thing despised and rejected on all sides; a thing that was a century since denied what they call Christian burial; a thing that is still deemed for a woman disgraceful, and for a man degrading and emasculate; a thing that is mute as a dunce save when, parrot-like, it repeats by rote with a mirthless grin or a tearless sob; a wooden doll, as you say, applauded as a brave puppet in its prime, hissed at in its first hour of failure or decay; a thing made up of tinsel and paint, and patchwork, of the tailor’s shreds and the barber’s curls of tow — a ridiculous thing to be sure! That is a player. And yet again, — a thing without which laughter and jest were dead in the sad lives of the populace; a thing that breathes the poet’s words of fire so that the humblest heart is set aflame; a thing that has a magic on its lips to waken smiles or weeping at its will; a thing which holds a people silent, breathless, intoxicated with mirth or with awe, as it chooses; a thing whose grace kings envy, and whose wit great men will steal; a thing by whose utterance alone the poor can know the fair follies of a thoughtless hour, and escape for a little space from the dull prisons of their colourless lives into the sunlit paradise where genius dwells; — that is a player, too!”
His voice trembled a little over the closing words, and, ashamed of the passionate eloquence into which the sting of my idle slighting phrase had hurried him, he turned away and began to romp and laugh and gambol with Pepite and Pepita.
I listened; ashamed myself; moved, I knew not very well why; and regretful to think that I had wounded him.
I waited a little while; then I went up to him where he stooped over his dogs, and laid my fingers on his arm.
“I spoke idly,” I murmured. “I did not think. And — and — I will try and be a player too.”
He lifted his head, with a flash of light over all his face, and touched my hand caressingly with his own.
“Altro!” he said. “It is a fate. Come with us. But as for being a player; — wait and see. You must not choose your future in blind haste.”
Then he bade me sing to him, which I did, and Toccò touched his violin in quaint accord with me; and Pascarèl himself raised the echoes of the wood with half the popular songs of Italy.
So, laughing and singing, and pausing to watch the dogs at play, we idled time away under the black pines and the budding chestnut trees.
I was only a child; I was almost happy again. Sometimes I started and wondered if indeed I had been so wretched, there, in that very place, an hour before.
Was he a magician, I wondered, this Pascarèl?
I was ungrateful to the supreme magician — Youth.
BOOK III. THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES.
CHAPTER I.
Under the Red Lily.
THE day rolled onward, growing chill something early, for it was still but the very first commencement of the spring.
I seemed to have known them all my life long — this little gay, good-humoured band; and the poodles frisked and fawned upon me as impartially as on Brunétta.
She — this pretty little brown thing — was not jealous of their sudden transference of caresses; she was about six years older than I — a girl of the people, no doubt, but with something so good-natured, so confiding, and so gay about her that one could not choose but trust in her and like her. She was so fond, too, of her brother, that one could see at a glance, and very proud of him, and a little afraid of him also.
He was very different in mind and manner to her; though a strolling player, as he said, he had the tone and the temper of a scholar: whilst little Brunétta confessed to me, half in glee, as one who had escaped a gruesome penalty and peril, that, like the padrona’s son at the Golden Boar, she knew not her alfabeto.
What did that matter to me?
Raffaellino only knew it just enough to carry him through the offices of the Church: it never seemed to me a science indispensable in people ere I took them for my friends, which, no doubt, was a grave error on my part, and due to my running loose in my babyhood amongst these Bohemians at Verona.
The shadows and the cold came early in that dusky wood; we were almost in darkness, whilst the road and the plain were still in full sunlight. Pascarèl gave the signal for moving towards the city.
We emerged from the ilex groves on to the highway — Brunétta and I, P
ascarèl and his dogs, and the two lads following us with the monkey and the fiddle.
“You have seen good players?” he asked me, as we walked on towards Florence, whilst the silver bells of Perretola and the deep toll of the city churches crossed each other ringing the Ave-Maria.
“I have seen the Burattini hundreds of times, and the Personaggi too, in melodrama,” I answered him eagerly, proud of my experience, which was due to Cecco and the rest of the students.
Pascarèl gave his charming gesture of ineffable disdain.
“Fantoccini and melodrama! Oh, cara mia! how much you have to learn, — and to unlearn, — which is much the harder of the two at all times! No wonder you think little of the stage.”
I thought that I was willing to be great as Lillo was great, who had had the showers of gold and of lilies in Verona; but I could see no possibility of any greatness in a strolling player, as we passed over the white dry road, out of the rosy reflex of the sunset, on into the shadow of the Florentine walls.
“Even Destiny loses the light out of her hair here,” said Pascarèl, with a laugh, as we passed into the deep gloom of the Borgognissanti.
He looked as if he meant to call me Destiny; but how could I be that, I wondered — I who was but a poor little stray leaf blown and buffeted by the hazards of every breeze of fate!
As we crossed the Carraia bridge and entered the heart of the city, into the twisting streets that curve all around the red dome of the Santo Spirito, and the frowning front of the Pitti, we passed by a cobbler’s stall planted against the roadway; the old man, who was stitching at his leather by the aid of a dim lantern, called out gladly to him: —
“Che-che! is it you, Pascarèl! You are welcome as figs in summer!”
Some urchins standing idly near caught up the name; the street became quite noisy with the cry of “Pascarèl! Pascarèl! eccô il Pascarello!”