by Ouida
Half a hundred times a day his mood and his manner altered with that ardent vitality in every phase of their countless changes which was the life and soul of the man himself. Not for one whole half hour together was he the same throughout; and yet, grave or gay, riotously laughing with the crowd, or dreamily questioning the lost secrets of the old masters, selling a yellow bandana to a housewife at a fair with buoyant raillery, or straying through the dim arcades of the old academies tenderly recalling the heroism and the learning of their earliest ages, he was always, in all his contrasts, Pascarèl.
He was like the child’s toy of the kaleidoscope, with every moment his moods changed their shapes with unpremeditated caprice; but the hues which made them did not alter.
“Were you truly a tinker’s son?” I asked him, late in that day, when we were stretched again upon the grass of the Cascine woods.
“Che diamine!” he cried, in the expressive Tuscan affirmative. “Utterly and simply a tinker’s son. But, to console you, though tinkers we had become, we were of a race that yielded in ancientness of blood to none. I think old Malispini even accounts for us as amongst those who, on coming out of the Ark after the Deluge, bestirred themselves in the building of Fiesole. In the old, old days, my people were of that territorial nobility beside which the Medici are mere rubbish of yesterday. We were Ghibellines, and in their ruin fell, of course. Our utter destruction came when one of us would have a palace fashioned by Orcagna, to pay for which his descendants in the third generation had to sell nearly all their worldly goods and lands, like that hapless fool Luca dei Pitti. Jews of the Oltrarno got the little there was left in time. Old races die hard with the load of long debt round their necks; but — they die. For two centuries we had been poor, poor, poor. Poor as the devil. At last we worked for our daily bread. Old races have done worse. My grandfather toiled to and fro as a facchino in the country where his forefathers had scowled defiance on Carlo di Valois, and mowed down the burghers round the red Carroccio on that terrible day, ‘che fece l’Arbia colorata in rosso.’ From a facchino to a tinker is hardly a fall; perhaps it is even a rise, for a tinker must own some little stock in trade of tools, whereas the facchino only toils underneath the goods of other people. At any rate, a tinker my father was, God save his soul! and a man of most infinite humour. I know he scratched a prince’s coronet on his smelting pot. Coronets have been in worse places. He was weak enough, I am ashamed to say, to be ever proud of his lineage, and fed me when I was a little fellow on all sorts of dead glories out of Dino Compagni and Villani. But I ran about with bare legs over Tuscany, and cared nothing that I ran over the graves of my ancestors. At any rate it was more harmless than to run about with a bare sword as those Pascarèl princes did. It was queer, perhaps, to blunder into some old church in some little hill-town or city of the plain, and see a great white statue, and read the record of some mighty Pascarèllo; and all the while one was a Pascarèllo too, though only a little mischievous dog, ragged and hungry, scouring the country for saucepans to mend. It set one thinking, no doubt But, after all, what did it matter?”
“It would have broken my heart!” I cried, where I sat beside him amongst the crocuses.
Pascarèl laughed.
“It was likelier to break my head. For, being a little fool, and strong for my years, I would get fighting for that coronet on the smelting-pot times out of number with half the boys of half the villages we entered. They thought a coronet on an old iron pot ridiculous, and they surely were right; but I was resolute to have both pot and coronet respected, being my father’s; and perhaps I was right also. At any rate, I had the courage of my opinions, and got half killed for them over and over again, as all people rash enough to keep such ticklish possessions as opinions invariably do. A princely couronne and a travelling tinker! Supremely ridiculous, that is certain; but would they have been less so if I had whimpered and had not fought? It is stupid to have a bad cause, no doubt; but after all, as far as we ourselves go, perhaps it is not the cause that matters so much as it is one’s way of upholding it. The Carroccio was a sorry childish emblem in itself enough; but does that take from the grandeur of the deaths of the Tomaquinci round it? My Carroccio was my father’s old tin pot; but I am glad even now to think how many sucking Tuscans I in my babyhood thrashed for sheer love and honour of that sacred household god. Not love of the coronet, mind you, but love for what he had put there; if he had scratched a cat’s head on the pot, and they had laughed at it, it would have been the same to me, and I, Pascarèl, should have been bound to fight for it.”
“Did you ever work with him?” I asked, glancing at those long, slender, brown hands of his which were weaving some rushes together.
“Altro! of course I did. Tinkered many an old woman’s copper kettle all along the country, east and west, from Livorno to Venice. But I never took to the work. I had a natural genius for making holes, not for mending them. The people used to call me the Marchesino, in derision of the leaves and balls on the tin pot. But they dropped that after they found by frequent experience that I could make holes in their sons’ skulls past all power of apothecary’s soldering. Not that I was a bully, believe me; but when they shouted their ‘Marchesino’ in derision I thought of the marble Pascarèlli in the churches, and hit out — a little too straight home sometimes. I was a little lad at that time, trotting on bare legs after my father’s barrow from house to house all over the land. It is all forgotten now. I buried his tin pot in his coffin with him, as his forefathers were buried with their golden crowns, and I have buried all the old follies with it I was fifteen years old when he died.”
“And you are the last Pascarèllo?”
“The very last Much good may it do me. The people, God bless them! have forgiven me all the broken heads of my boyish time, and have learnt to love me — well. I am afraid the Ghibelline Pascarèlli who live in marble in the churches could never say as much.”
“And you are content with that love?”
“Eh, Dio! I should blush for myself if I were not” A great darkness stole over his face as he spoke — that melancholy of an Italian face which is as intense as is the sunlight of its happiness.
“Oh, cara mia, when one has run about in one’s time with a tinker’s tools, and seen the lives of the poor, and the woe of them, and the wretchedness of it all, and the utter uselessness of everything, and the horrible, intolerable, unending pain of all the things that breathe, one comes to think that in this meaningless mystery which men call life a little laughter and a little love are the only things which save us all from madness — the madness that would curse God and die.”
A little laughter and a little love! Across the brilliant fancies of my supreme ignorance the words fell with a pathetic meaning. Was this all, indeed, that the wide world could offer? And was it worth while to wander so far to reach so little?
“Yes, cara mia,” he said, with his quick divination of another’s thoughts. “Yes. They are all that are really worth the having in this world; and they lie so close to us sometimes, and we flee away from them, not knowing, and perhaps we never meet them face to face or have them in our reach again. For neither of them will come for the mere asking.”
“How, then, shall we gain either?” I asked.
He smiled.
“There was once a youth who was a shepherd. He was all alone in the world, and sorrowful. No man tarried with him, and no woman found him comely.
“A fairy took pity on him, and gathered a yellow blossom of celandine, and put it in his hand. ‘Breathe on the flower, and wish thrice,’ she said. ‘Three times you shall have your desire.’
“He breathed once on the golden flower, scarcely believing in his own good fortune. ‘Let me laugh as other men do,’ he wished. Immediately he laughed on and on, not pausing, over a flagon of wine that was never emptied; but there was no joy in his mirth, and he grew sick of it.
“He breathed a second time on the flower. ‘Let me love as other men do,’ he wished. Instantly a you
ng maiden kissed him on the mouth, and he toyed with her, and yet was not content; it seemed to him that her lips were cold and her eyes without any light.
“Then he breathed the third time on the flower and cast it down weeping, and crying, ‘Let others laugh and others love. Joy is not for me, I see.’
“Then, strange to say, all at once his heart grew light, and he was glad, and sang aloud with rapture, and the maiden rejoiced beside him, and the kisses of her lips were warm and sweet as the suns of summer.
“The fairy took from him the golden flower. ‘Now laughter is yours and love,’ she said. ‘For the wish that you wished was for others, and pure of the greeds of self.’
“Do you know what the story means? No; you have only just got your yellow celandine, and have scarcely breathed upon it.”
But I knew what it meant enough to know that he himself used his golden flower for the gladness of others — always.
CHAPTER IV.
Beside dead Fires.
UNDER the financial government of Pascarèl my florins seemed endlessly to expand. As yet I did not appear upon the stage with any of them, though he trained me for it sedulously with all the skill and subtlety that were given to him by the unerring instincts and the long practice of his art.
We were completely happy; Brunétta was a little humble merry soul, quick as a mouse, bright as a bird, honest, I thought, as the day. Cocomero and Toccò worshipped the ground that their chief even trod on, and would have laid their lives down willingly to do his bidding in the merest trifle. Whilst Pascarèl himself, the life and soul, the alpha and omega, of the small community, governed it with that gentle sway which lends to obedience as sweet a charm as lies in liberty.
He inquired everywhere, as best he could, for tidings of my father and of Fiorio. But either the people knew nothing, or those who knew anything had been bidden not to reveal it; we learned no intelligence of any sort, and at the post in the Uffizi he heard that letters from Verona had been addressed to the name of Tempesta, and were still lying there unclaimed. Doubtless, these neglected things were those which old Maso Sasso had penned for Mariuccia in the den of his loggia.
Pascarèl sought, honestly and unweariedly, on my behalf; but he did not affect to be sorry for the result.
“No one who has once caught hold of destiny likes to lose that slippery sovereign,” he would say, with a laugh; and so I remained with him and his, through the cool weeks of the Quaresima.
At times, indeed, he spoke to me — like one who does an unwelcome duty — of seeking shelter for me in some convent’s safety and stillness; but my passionate terror of the captivity disarmed his wiser resolves; and, indeed, to have won the money necessary to secure such a refuge was as impossible to me as to draw down the moon; and to take it from him, as he sometimes hinted, — for he said he had a few hundreds of lire laid by in the hands of a goldsmith of Florence, lest any evil should befall him and leave his troop adrift, — would have been a debt from which, child though I was, all the instincts in me revolted.
Before we left Florence on the springtide wanderings, he betook himself to Verona, to see, for his own satisfaction, what could be learned of my father.
I heard long afterwards that he went at great peril to himself, and in disguise, from the hatred of the Austriaci against him; but of this he said nothing to me at that time. Of danger to himself he never spoke. This was only a week or so after I had first fallen in with the merry little party in the ilex woods, and I was vaguely startled to feel how deadly a blank his absence caused to me. The skies lost all their light, and the city all her golden and transfigured beauty.
He placed me, whilst he went, at a house on the other side of the river, where a good friend of his, ‘ Orfeo Orlanduccio, a master worker in mosaic, dwelt.
Orlanduccio was a widower, with one little, pretty, merry child called Bicè. They were very good to me in the dusky ancient house, through whose grated casements one looked out, like prisoners, on the world, and whose massive chambers were all rich with carving, and scented with that curious old world incenselike aromatic odour of which the Florence streets are full.
It was in the Via de la Pergola, not far off the house that the Duke gave to Cellini; and as I leaned against the barred windows I used to think of the bronze-workers in that little garden, and of the fierce molten metal seething out under the flame from the oak timbers; and of the stream, hot and red, like blood from a murdered man’s throat, crushing in to fill the beautiful mask of the Perseus, and of the artist — breathless, agonised, torn betwixt hope and fear, rent by the noble rashness of genius and the feebler human dread of accident — coming out under the dark hanging fig-leaves with armsful of his household gods of silver and pewter and copper and gold, and casting them all into the furnace, as children were cast to Moloch, so that his Thought might arise from the fires and live for all time in men’s light Orfeo Orlanduccio was a grave, melancholy, stern, good man; he had been lamed in the wars of Carl-Alberto, and was subject to suspicion for his advanced political creeds; he had a noble grey head like Luca della Robbia’s, and it was a picture to see him in his dark workshop piecing the tiny fragments so deftly into all manner of delicate arabesques and dainty flowers with his lithe slender fingers that had used to grasp a sabre to hard purpose, they said, in earlier days.
I stayed with him and the little, saucy, smiling rosebud of a Bicè whilst Pascarèl went northward. Brunétta did not come with me there; indeed the mosaic maker seemed to me to know little or nothing of her existence.
On the fourth day of my stay with them, the good Orfeo, coming from the market-place, was arrested and borne to the Bargello under some accusation of conspiracy. I know not what, but all liberal thinkers were under suspicion in those days.
His apprentices brought word of his misfortunes, and little Bicè, a merry babyish thing, of nine or ten, cried her pretty eyes red with weeping for her’father, and in the evening time her foster-mother, a peasant of the Casentino, came in and bore her off to dwell in the country till her parent should be set free, which might not be for many months, they said.
I remember the sense of desolation, of belonging to no earthly soul or thing, that shivered over me that night as the little heedless child went, laughing through her tears to hear the mule bells ring, and the apprentices took down their caps and stared at me stupidly, and the woman who did the housework there in the daytime, having cleaned her pots and pans and swept up the kitchen, came and looked at me with her arm in her side, and asked me, meditatively: —
“The signorina will betake herself to her friends? the lads sleep out, and then I will bar the place up safe. Orfeo has been in this sort of trouble before. Men are such fools; — they will craze their heads for things that have no concern for them. Will the signorina go; I want to bar the doors; it is dark now.”
I begged her to let me stay a little. I had promised Pascarèl not to leave this house until he came for me, and no force in Florence, I think, would have availed to make me disobey him.
A rebel to all other authority since my babyhood, I took a passionate delight in obeying this stranger’s mere glance and gesture.
The donna di fatica, moved by my loneliness and my supplications, lit me a lamp and left me, promising to return in an hour, when go I must, she said, for she had served Maestro Orfeo twenty years and more, and was not going to leave his bottega open to thieves for all the yellow-haired signorini in Christendom.
Her heavy steps trod slowly out of the stone passages, and the massive nail-studded door closed behind her. My heart sank as I was left alone in the empty house with its unfinished mosaics strewn over the floor, and its dreamy aroma from the millions of pine cones and oak logs that had burned on those old hearths in the fires of five hundred centuries.
It was one of the oldest dwellings in Florence. Its massive stones and iron stanchions had stood against sack and siege, flame and mob. It was only antique and strange with the ‘prentices’ merry feet on the stairs and Bicè’
s rosy round face at the grated casements, but when one was alone in it, at night, there seemed dim clouds of ghosts in every dusky chamber.
My heart leaped with the sweetest gladness it had ever known as I heard a light swift footstep on the stairs, and the clear sweet ring of a Tuscan voice.
“My donzella!” it called, in the gloom, “are you all alone here?”
I sprang to him in joyous welcome, and did not notice till he had sat down beside me on the oaken settle by the fireless hearth that his face looked worn and weary.
“Yes, Orfeo is imprisoned,” he said, impatiently. “There is nothing to be done. He is known to be in the confidence of Mazzini, and papers have been found — do not let us talk of it His child is safe, and he will come back to his old place in a year or less. He is a good man and true. We must have patience.”
He was silent The lamp burned dully. The old house was silent around us.
“I am vexed for him — and for you,” he said, after a long pause. “I thought, dear signorina, that it would be better for you to stay with little Bicè than to roam with us. Orfeo is the only man whom I can trust My friends lie amongst poor people — very poor — or men honest, indeed, but reckless and given over to wild work, who can be of no sort of good to you. Orfeo, indeed, I could have trusted. He would have given you a safe home, though a poor one. But it seems willed otherwise.”
“But I am to go with you!” I cried, aghast at this disposal of me.
He smiled gently, but a darkness and impatience passed like a mist over his face. He was silent, trimming the wick of the oil-lamp.
“Well, so it seems, dear donzella,” he said, after awhile, with a certain hesitation not natural to his frank, free, rapid modes of speech. “Well, I will do my best by you — God help me, and forgive us sinners! Nevertheless, if Orfeo had not fallen on this evil chance, it had been better.”