by Ouida
“If I be any trouble to you,” I began —
He stopped me with a tender gesture.
“Never say that — it is not that I mean. It is — a safe and quiet home were better for you. But since fate wills it otherwise, oh, cara mia! credit me, you shall be as sacred to me as though my dead mother lived to care for you.”
I looked up at him in wonder at the emotion in his voice; his thoughts were in nowise clear to me.
There was a long silence in the dark old house.
He leaned against the wall, lost in meditations that my imagination failed to follow.
He looked down suddenly, and spoke:
“I have learned nothing at Verona,” he said, with a certain tone of sadness that wounded me, for it seemed as though he were regretful not to be rid of me. “No one has seen your father, nor could anyone give me any news of him. Nor do they appear to know any more of who or what he really is than you do. But there is one sad story that I heard for you, and that is of your old master.”
“Ambrogiô?” I cried, and all my heart went back to the poor old lonely man whom I had forsaken in a child’s eager desires for fresh fields and pastures new.
“Yes, dear donzella,” answered Pascarèl.
I sprang to my feet eagerly; he answered me with a slight, hopeless gesture of the hands that chilled me into a great awe.
“He died the night you left Verona. They found him dead over his empty brazier in his garret — all alone. The children saw him first; going to take their lesson in the morning. He is buried by now.”
The simple words seemed to pierce my heart as I heard them.
My poor dead master!
I saw the place — the still lone garret, the uncurtained lattice, the robin singing on the sill, the dreary roofs, and the snow mountains far beyond; the miserable home, with the grey ashes of cold fires in the earthen brazier; the children at the half-opened door, peeping with pale scared faces, and whispering together, and pointing at the figure on the hearth — all the sad, dreary, colourless picture, draws in the black and white of Age and Death, arose before me as I listened.
I sank down on a bench, and cried bitterly, as for a woe all my own.
Was this the end — the only bitter end — of all those years of wrong and want? One other nameless grave in the snow under the bleak blasts in old. Verona!
Pascarèl let me sob on, and did not seek to console me; but I poured out all the history to him in my sorrow, and he listened gravely, there, in the old, dim, lonely room, heavy with the scent of the long-died-out fires that had warmed so many faces and forms that were now dust in the crypts and sepulchres of the city.
“You must never tell the tale but to me, my child,” he said, at length. “The secret belongs to the dead. He chose to keep it in his life; you must keep it for him in his death. Rothwald is rich and famous? Yes; why not? Justice is not of this world.”
“But why does God permit such things?” I cried, in the despair of my poor lost master’s wrongs.
Pascarèl gave an impatient sigh.
“Oh child! Has the human race solved that problem in all these many thousand years since the first men dwelt in the first lake-cities? We shall never know that till our souls leave our bodies—”
“But for no punishment to fall!” I cried, and sobbed afresh, weighed down with the burden of all those long, lone fruitless years, whose end was a beggar’s grave in sad Verona.
“Ay! if the bolts would smite, and the heavens would open, life would be so much easier, and hope so much easier too,” said Pascarèl; “but, perhaps, even in this world, there may be more punishment than we can know.
“Listen, donzella,” he pursued. “Did never you hear the story of Andrea dal Castagno, who lived here in the street hard by? No? Well, then —
“He and the bright Venetian Domenico dwelt together in great and close friendship; so much so, that they shared the same chambers, painted in the same studio, were inseparable in pursuits and pleasures, and aims and endeavours, and were cited all through the city as the very symbol of faithful comradeship.
“Well, one night, the Venetian went forth as usual, with his lute under his cloak, to serenade his mistress in the moonlight; and there, in the dark archway of the street, a dark figure lay unseen in wait for him, and he was stabbed through and through, and his love-song was stifled in his throat, and he was slain.
“Who had killed him?
“The city could not tell.
“Andreà was found painting quietly by lamplight when they bore the dying man home; and he tore his hair and rent his garments in agonised lamentation over the bleeding body of his dear dead friend.
“Yet Andreâ was the murderer.
“For greed of the secret of the oils and varnishes, some say; some say for envy of the woman’s love. Which no one ever rightly knew.
“Andrea lived in honour all his days. He was a great artist, and all men spoke well of him. Suspicion never fell on him. Had not Domenico breathed his death-sigh in his arms, blessing him to the last? Nay, the State even employed him to paint the traitors hung on the city walls by their heels — and his brush did not falter.
“He had long life, I say, and everything to make it good and even glorious. Yet, though he had riches, and fame, and, as men call it, happiness, he never once in all that time could ever quite forget. He never once forgot; he never ceased to see the kindly faithful face dead there in the lustre of the summer night; he never ceased to hear the familiar voice in the last love-song ere he had stifled it in its death-struggle; he never ceased to be pursued night and day by the remembrance of his guilt; never, that we are sure; for, though he kept his secret close all his life long, he could not keep it to the very end. On his death bed he confessed his crime, and Florence, though at the tenth hour, despoiled him, and dishonoured him, and gave him a felon’s grave.”
I shuddered as I heard.
The tale told in that old dark Florentine room, within a stone’s throw of the place of murder, had a terrible ghastly awe in it. I shrank closer to Pascarèl, and he stretched his hand out and took mine.
“Did I tell you too frightful a story?” he said, caressingly.
“No, no,” I murmured, “it is not that. But my poor old master! And see here: if Andreâ were chastised, what did that compensate Domenico? It could not give him back his life and love—”
“Of compensation to Domenico there was none,” said Pascarèl, sadly. “But of chastisement to Andrea I think there was enough. I told you the tale to show you that, where we think glory and gain are most abundant, there sometimes burns the fire that quenches not, which men call remorse. Your master left his vengeance with his God. We must so leave it likewise. And now, donzella mia, you shiver in this cold dark room. Come out, and let us get to the light and warmth again, and forget all these weary meditations. You must wander with us; those Fates on the onyx so will it Well, I swear to you, carina, that you shall never repent your trust in me.”
He touched my hands lightly with his lips, and we went down the stone staircase, and out of the dark and lonely house of the mosaic-worker.
I clung close to him as we went through the now gloomy streets, and I was glad when we reached the little bright archway of the locandà in Oltrano, where Branotta met us with many exclamations, and with the ruddy flame of a wood fire she had lighted glowing on her little plump figure and her gorgeous silver ear-rings.
The Arte was shut that night, for it was the Domenica di Passione.
She had a little supper ready for us of shining brown alardi, crisply fried, and stewed rice with pears. She, like Pulci’s Margutte, was given to swearing “neither by black nor blue, but only by a good capon, whether roast or boiled,” and had no notion of starving even on the gravest fast of the Church.
It was all quiet in the quarter of the Silver Dove.
Bells were sounding for the vespers, that was all; and as we sat at our little meal people streamed by the open door, going in flocks to pray in the
great white vaulted stillness of the Santo Spirito.
Pascarèl and I were silent that night He thought of his friend Orfeo; and I of my old dead master.
Nevertheless, we were both glad, I think, that the morrow was not going to part us; and whilst Brunétta and the boys played together at taròc, I sat and looked every now and then at the delicate profile of Pascarèl against the shadows from the oil-lamp, and felt no trouble or fear for the future.
CHAPTER V.
Giudentu dell’ Anso.
WE stayed in Florence through the long, cool, sunny weeks of the Quaresima, broken here and there with the mad frolic of the Mi-Carême, and the fun of the Fairs of the Innamorati and the Curiosi and the Gelosie at the Gates of the City.
The great lilies, white, and azure, and purple, were just beginning to bloom everywhere round the city, and the streets and the woods seemed to shine as snow with the clusters of the stainless anemoli.
There is nothing upon earth, I think, like the smile of Italy as she awakes when the winter has dozed itself away in the odours of its oakwood fires.
The whole land seems to laugh.
The springtide of the north is green and beautiful, but it has nothing of the radiance, the dreamfulness, the ecstasy of spring in the southern countries. The springtide of the north is pale with the gentle colourless sweetness of its world of primroses; the springtide of Italy is rainbow-hued, like the profusion of anemones that laugh with it in every hue of glory under every ancient wall and beside every hill-fed stream.
Spring in the north is a child that wakes from dreams of death; spring in the south is a child that wakes from dreams of love. One is rescued and welcomed from the grave; but the other comes smiling on a sunbeam from heaven.
All the Quaresima we abode in Florence; and he made glad and perfect to me each lenten hour as it glided by; and when the sun set, it left me always tired, happy, thoughtful, full of peace.
CHAPTER VI.
The old Star Tower.
ONE day, I remember, we strolled slowly out by the Romano gate towards the hills as the day drew to its close.
The old frescoes on the house wall were bright in the afternoon light; there was a group of soldiers drinking; there were some asses laden with straw for the plaiters’ market on the morrow; a bare-foot, brown-frocked monk went by amongst the soldiery; the cypress and ilex road stretched up into the distance; coming down the Stradone was an old white horse with a pile of fruit upon his back, and a lad in a yellow shirt at his bridle; about the base of the old broken statues of Petrarca some children played.
“How very little that is!” said Pascarèl. “And yet it is all a picture. It is a pity ever to do anything in Italy; the country is made just to lie still in and dream in, with the body half asleep and the mind wide awake, but lost in fancies. Italy soothes us as a mother’s arms lull a wayward child, if only we will let her do it: but if we struggle from her natural influences, and try to spend our lives in strife, then her sun stings, and her dust blinds us, and all her charm is gone.”
So, talking whilst we passed the people, and followed closely by the three dogs, he took me up to the Star Tower of Galileo amongst the winding paths of the hills, with the grey walls overtopped by white fruit blossom, and ever and again, at some break in their ramparts of stone, the gleam of the yellow Amo water, or the glisten of the marbles of the City shining on us far beneath, through the silvery veil of the olive leaves.
It was just in that loveliest moment when winter melts into spring.
Everywhere under the vines the young com was springing in that tender vivid greenness that is never seen twice in a year. The sods between the furrows were scarlet with the bright flame of wild tulips, with here and there a fleck of gold where a knot of daffodils nodded. The roots of the olives were blue with nestling pimpernels and hyacinths, and along the old grey walls the long, soft, thick leaf of the arums grew, shading their yet unborn lilies.
The air was full of a dreamy fragrance; the bullocks went on their slow ways with flowers in their leathern frontlets; the contadini had flowers stuck behind their ears or in their waistbands; women sat by the wayside, singing as they plaited their yellow curling lengths of straw; children frisked and tumbled like young rabbits under the budding maples; the plum-trees strewed the green landscape with flashes of white like newly fallen snow on alpine grass slopes; again and again amongst the tender pallor of the olive woods there rose the beautiful flush of a rosy almond-tree; at every step the passer-by trod ancle deep in violets.
The air was cool, but so exquisitely still, and soft, and radiant, that as the old people came out of their dark, arched, stone chambers, and sat a little in the sun, and made up into bunches for selling the blossoms which their children gathered by the million, without seeming to make the earth the poorer, one felt as if the sun shining on them as it did must make them young again — as if no one could very long be very old or very sad in Italy.
It was the thought of a child, and of a happy child. When one is old it must surely be better to creep away under the mists, into the darkness of some chimney-corner, in the chill, short twilight of the loveless and bitter North, than to behold this divine light, cloudless and endless, which seems to beat with all the pulses of passion, and to laugh with all the sweet, soft, foolish ecstasies of love.
Who was it that called Italy the country of the dead? Not they surely who have beheld her in the days of spring.
About the feet of the Tower of Galileo, ivy and vervain, and the Madonna’s herb, and the white sexagons of the stars of Bethlehem grew amongst the grasses, pigeons paced to and fro with pretty pride of plumage; a dog slept on the flags; the cool, moist, deep-veined creepers climbed about the stones; there were peach trees in all the beauty of their blossoms, and everywhere about them were close-set olive trees, with the ground between them scarlet with the tulips and the wild rose bushes.
From a window a girl leaned out and hung a cage amongst the ivy leaves, that her bird might sing his vespers to the sun.
Who will may see the scene to-day.
So little changed — so little, if at all, from the time when the feet of the great student wore the timber of the tower stairs, and the fair-haired scholar, who had travelled from the isles in the northern sea, came up between the olive stems to gaze thence on Vallombrosa.
The world has spoiled most of its places of pilgrimage, but the old Star Tower is not harmed as yet, where it stands amongst its quiet garden ways, and grass-grown slopes, up high amongst the hills, with sounds of dripping water on its court, and wild wood-flowers thrusting their bright heads through its stones.
Generations have come and gone: tyrannies have risen and fallen: full many a time the plain below has been red with the invader’s fire, and the curling flame has burned the fruitful land to blackened barrenness; full many a time the silence of the olive thickets has been broken by the tumult of war and revolution, and the dead bodies of men have drifted thick as leaves in the blood-stained current of the river.
But nothing has been changed here, where the old square pile stands out amongst the flowering vines.
It is as peaceful, as simple, as homely, as closely girt with blossoming boughs and with tulip-crimsoned grasses, now as then, when from its roof, in the still midnights of a far-off time, its master read the secrets of the stars.
You can see it to-day — any day that you will — this quiet shadowy hill-side place amongst the fields.
But come up softly between the old gnarled olive stems; tread noiselessly the winding pathway where the wild hyacinth shakes its blue bells on the wind; be reverent a little — if reverence in this age be possible — as you climb the narrow wooden stair, and through the unglazed arches of the walls look westward where the sea lies, and southward towards Rome.
Be reverent a little, for a little space at least: for here Galileo learned the story of the sun; and here Milton, looking on Valdarno, dreamed of Paradise.
CHAPTER VII.
Due Amori.
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WE scattered the pigeons that day as they picked their way amongst the rose trees, and we went across the sombre quiet court, and up the wooden stairs, on to the square roof where the great Tuscan had sat so many and many a night with his listening pupils round him, and, beneath, the dark stillness of the sleeping plains.
“How fair she looks down there!” said Pascarèl, resting his eyes fondly on the City. “I have seen pretty well all the world, but I have never seen anything that can make one forget her. I am of the same way of thinking as was Visino; — better a flask of Tribbiano and a berlingozzo of Florence than all the kings and queens and courts and camps in Christendom. Look at her now; she lies like a golden galley of old upon a silver moon-lightened sea.”
Very fair indeed she was, the Lily Queen, that evening.
There had been shadows all day, and in the west there were masses of cloud, purple and blue-black, spreading away into a million of soft scarlet cirri that drifted before a low wind from the southward, tender and yet rich in tone as any scattered shower of carnation leaves.
Through that vast pomp of dusky splendour and that radiance of rose, the sun itself still shone; shone full upon the City.
Leaning on the broken edge of the watch-tower and gazing down below, all Florence seemed like the seer’s dream of the New Jerusalem; every stone of her seemed transmuted; she was as though paven and built with gold; straightway across the whole valley stretched the alchemy of that wondrous fireglow, and all the broad level lands of the Valdigreve were transfigured likewise into one vast sheet of gold, on which the silver olives and the dim white villages and villas floated like frail white sails upon a sunlit sea.
Farther — still farther yet, beyond that burnished ocean — the mountains and the clouds met and mingled, golden likewise, broken here and there into some tenderest rose-leaf flush, miraculously lovely, as a poet’s dreams of nameless things of God.