by Ouida
He touched the self-drawn portrait of Pascarèl with many beautiful and tender lights, so that I saw that the painter had done himself but sorry justice.
“I am so happy here — so happy,” said the gentle philosopher to me one day, as I leaned out of the high arched grated window from which Pascarèl had watched the Zinzara and her troop go by on their seaward way, “and I owe it all to him. He was a greater scholar than I. I was his second in mathematics, but only second, never his equal. Ah! you would not think it, you, who only see him smoking over his little comedies, or gathering beans with a pretty peasant in an inn garden.
“But it is true. There was never a greater scholar born than Pascarèl. So great that though he had been very wild in many of its pranks, and in that manner a constant terror to the academy, they wanted sorely to keep him always for the glory of Pisa, and they offered him the vacant Chair of Mathematics when our poor old Dottore died of apoplexy.
“Now, let Pascarèl tell you what he will, it is a fact that the professorship would have been very welcome to him for awhile at least He would have tired of it and gone on his own ways in time, no doubt, but he would have liked to have had it for he loved these rooms of his, and at that time, for all he was so gay and even riotous, he had a passion for science, and for all manners of abstruse study, which he could pursue at his ease and leisure here.
“But he knew that I was very poor, he knew that I had an old mother and a sister to keep, he knew that I pinched myself of bread and oil, and that I was glad to pick up the leavings off the dishes of the younger students, so what does he do?
“He goes straightway to the authorities, and he says to them in his careless fashion, ‘Illustrissimi, I thank you for your offer, and the honour you would do me, but do not take my meaning ill if I tell you that you have made a great error. I am only a reckless good-for-nothing, a scamp at heart, a riotous free liver, who, as your excellencies know, have had the gates shut against me scores of times, and black marks against my name always. Do not give your empty Chair to me; but give it to one who is as good a mathematician as I am, as sound a scholar as I am, and who, unlike me, will furthermore do you credit by the simple and blameless life that he leads. Give it to Ezio Luceone, and I, Pascarèl, will hold myself as beholden to your Signoria, as though I filled the Chair myself.’
“That is what Pascarèl said to them, and they were so struck that they gave it to me, and I have held it ever since that time.
“He told you he surrendered it to follow that Frenchwoman and her comedians. Oh! no doubt.
That is just like him. But he relinquished the professorship in the month of March, and the Zinzara and her people only came into the town at Easter time, which fell, as I well remember, towards the middle of April in that year.
“It has been a wonderful thing for me, most wonderful. The stipend is quite enough to keep my mother in perfect comfort; and my heart and soul are in my work; and the college lads love me and I love them; and I ask no better life of God or man.
“But it is Pascarèl I owe it to most surely; only I pray of you do not tell him that I have told you, or he will never forgive me, never. I came to know it through one of the Signoria, which vexed him sorely; he had always tried to make me believe that it was only just the reward of my own merit But it was all his own doing — all.
“I was the gainer, you see; but nevertheless my heart ached when I saw him go for ever out of the sea-gate with his pack on his back and his mandoline slung from his shoulder; the mandoline he has now? yes. The Frenchwoman put a scarlet riband to it, I remember, sitting just there down in the street in the sun as they ate pomegranates one warm Easter day.
“He does not know what has become of her, so he says; but he was wild about her then; a handsome woman, I remember, with great burning black eyes and beautiful feet.
“She did with Pascarèl what she liked; if it had not been for her I think the world would have heard of him. For he had some ambition in those days; and he is the last of the Pascarelli, you know. And they were really princes once? oh, yes! you may read it in Malespini and Villani.”
So the gentle scholar would murmur on, and I would listen, leaning my body over the grated sill, and watching the narrow street far down below, where in other days the Frenchwoman had sat, and wound the scarlet riband about the stem of the mandoline, with the lights of the sun and of Pascarèl’s eyes shining on her.
I hated to think of it; I hated to think of that far-away love-lightened past of his, in which I had no memory and no share.
Every woman, at all young and innocent of life, has felt the feeling that I mean when she has loved.
Pascarèl came behind me that day, having heard the latest words of his old friend.
“Ah, yes, cara mia,” he murmured, softly, while sadly. “So many hands have tied so many ribbons to the mandoline — yes, I shame to say so — and the ribbons have all fluttered away God knows where, some to the dust-hole, some to the carnival-ball, some to deck other men’s guitars, some to lie amongst the cinders in the ragpicker’s basket But after all what does that matter? the ribands never touched the chords of the mandoline; the ribands were only for fairs and feast-days and follies; it takes something stronger and better than a riband to get music from the strings.”
I understood him a little though not wholly, and was comforted, leaning there out of the grated window as Marguerite had leaned when she had communed with the gipsies, and thought their liberties and love lore better than the gilded palle of the Medici.
CHAPTER IV.
The Poets’ Country.
WE did not wait very long in Pisa.
The laughter of the Arte wakened its hollow echoes, and the Florentine pennon fluttered amongst its haunted ways for a brief space only. And whilst it was still springtime — late spring — we left its gates and went over the ghostly plain that had been soaked through and through with the blood of so many centuries of warfare, and so back into the Val di Greve and between the mountains along Arno’s side.
Only to one place was he always constant amidst his inconstancy; wander away from it perpetually as he would, no less surely would he ever again come back to where the Vecchio battlements were set sharp as lion’s teeth against the sky.
He would always come back thither; and Saint John’s Day, and the Beffana, and the Pasquâ, and the Berlingancio, and the Ceppò, and the Capo d’Anno, and the Anna feast, when the flags of the Trades were set round the church, and all the other giorni festivi that are as many as the golden eyes in a child’s string of daisies, would have been robbed of much mirth and life to the populace of Florence, if they had failed to bring through the gates Pascarèl.
All that lovely May time we were afoot through Tuscany.
Is there anything in all the world so beautiful as the springtide greenery of Italy?
The gold of her sunsets, the wonder of her orange groves, the rose of her evening skies, the grandeur of her sterile mountains, on these and on their like words of adoration have been lavished by the million; but who has stayed to bethink themselves of her homelier and humbler charms?
And yet, of these also, she has so many — so many.
Come out here in the young months of summer and leave, as we left, the highways that grim walls fence in, and stray, as we strayed, through the field-paths and the bridle-roads in the steps of the contadini, and you will find this green world about your feet touched with the May-day suns to tenderest and most lavish wealth of nature.
The green com uncurling underneath the blossoming vines. The vine foliage that tosses and climbs and coils in league on league of verdure. The breast-high grasses full of gold and red and purple from the countless flowers growing with it.
The millet filled with crimson gladioli and great scarlet poppies. The hill-sides that look a sheet of rose-colour where the lupinelli are in bloom. The tall plumes of the canes, new born, by the side of every stream and rivulet The sheaves of arum leaves that thrust themselves out from every joint of maso
nry or spout of broken fountain. The flame of roses that burns on every handsbreadth of untilled ground and springs like a rainbow above the cloud of every darkling roof or wall. The ocean spray of arbutus and acacia shedding its snow against the cypress darkness. The sea-green of the young ilex leaves scattered like light over the bronze and purple of the older growth. The dreamy blue of the iris lilies rising underneath the olives and along the edges of the fields.
The soft, pretty, quiet pictures where mowers sweep down with their scythes the reedy grasses on the river banks; where the gates of the villas stand wide open with the sun aslant upon the grassy paths beneath the vines; where in the gloom of the house archways the women sit plaiting their straw, the broad shining fields before them all alive with the song of the grilli; where the grey savage walls of a fortress tower on the spur of the mountains, above the delicate green of young oaks and the wind-stirred fans of the fig-trees; where the frate, in broad-leaved hat of straw, brushes with bare sandalled feet through the bright acanthus, beaming a Rabelaisian smile on the contadina who goes by him with her brown water-jar upon her head: where deep in that fresh, glad tumult of leaf and blossom and bough the children and the goats lie together, while the wild thyme and the trefoil are in flower, and the little dog-rose is white amongst the maize; where the sharp beak of the galley-like boats cuts dark against the yellow current, and the great filmy square nets are cast outward where the poplar shadows tremble in the stream; all these, and a thousand like them, are yours in the sweet May season amongst the Tuscan hills and vines.
The earth can be no greener even away yonder in the pine valleys of the Alps; and for the air, — what air can be like this that wanders from Adriatic to Mediterranean across a land of flowers bearing lightly on its every breath and breeze the burden of love songs, the sighs of nightingales, the odours of budding fruits, the warmth of amorous suns?
Poets of every nation have celebrated the great and the gorgeous scenery of this land that is the native land of every artist; its magnificence of outline, its riot of hue on sky and earth, its voluptuous delights and violet seas, its classic ruins, and its dryad-haunted groves; these have been over-painted and over-hymned till half the world is weary; but of its sweet, lowly, simple loveliness that lies broadcast on every hillside and under every olive orchard, amongst the iris lilies in the meadows, and along the loose lush grasses where the sleepy oxen slowly tread their fragrant path — of these, I say, not one in a thousand wanderers thinks, perhaps not one in ten thousand even knows.
All that time we wandered about according to our whim and will, from the blue waters of Spezzia to the green fields of the Casentino, and from the spires of Milan to the shadows of St Mark.
We never tarried long in any place; the true nomadic temper was in Pascarèl.
The flag of our wooden Arte seldom fluttered longer than two or three evenings under the same knot of chestnut trees, or on the same hillside. A certain restlessness always impelled its owner to frequent change and movement, and though he would lie and dream for hours together in the sun, he preferred that the sun when it rose should seldom find him in the same spot where it had shone on him at its last setting.
We went through all the historic country that the Apennines girdle with their broad belt of vine leaves and marble; the country of the poets that has heard their “sweet singing” through so many centuries, from the love-notes of Catullus to the death-sigh of Tasso.
Beneath Peschiera, that still “sits a fortress” as in Dante’s time, to denote the old Teutonic Tyrol ways.
On the stones of the sad City of the Lake, builded above the bones of that “cruel virgin” who wandered from far Thebes to lay her down to rest amidst the “thousand fountains.”
Through the Reggio district at the mountains’ foot where Boiardo had sung, and laughed, and loved, and fought his graceful life away.
By sad Ferrara, repenting in widowed loneliness the crimes of her lord of Este against the poet who dared to plead in the teeth of pride “per amor mio.”
Far northward as Cremona, where the seeding grass and the wild barley grew above that dreadful ditch, once filled up with the bleeding and stifled peasants thrust into a living death that the knights might spur their horses in safety over the chasm whilst Carlo Malatesta’s golden mantle fluttered in all the pride of war.
Southward within the sound of Santa Lucia’s bell, in saintly Assisi, when the morning dews were wet on the ivy-grown bridge of the Clausura, and the linnets sang in the same old boughs that had sheltered the birds that once had chaunted their Easter litanies to S. Francis.
To strange San Leo, mighty watch-tower of nature, towering over the wide wild waste of up-tossed rocks and barren mountains.
Along the treacherous moonlit waters of the Po, where the bridal barge had floated to the moat tower, whilst Lucrezia in her albernia of woven gold bent before her lord, and the torches glowed on the plumes of the Moorish dancers, and the Bacchides was played to the sound of Mantuan music.
On the high hills, once the eyrie of the Eagle of the Montefeltro, where Dante dwelt with the great Ghibelline chieftain, and the hazel eyes of the baby Sanzio opened to the light.
In the green gay country where merry-hearted Pulci strung together his “heaps of sonnets big as the clubs they make of cherry blossoms for May-day.”
Amidst the Lombard fields and garden where Ariosto, “‘twixt the April and the May” of his life, had loves as many and as roseate as pomegranate blossoms in a July noon.
By old Urbino, in whose gaunt silence the silvery echoes seemed to come of Raffael’s laugh, and Tiziano’s wooing, and Bembo’s wit, and the voices of Vittoria and Veronica, and the applause of that gay and gracious court as it listened to the cantos of the “Furioso” and the pages of Il Cortegiano, in the mosaic-chamber, whilst the sea-winds blew over Monte Carpegna, and the stars rose above the iron-stone of Nero’s mountain.
“If I had been any famous personage at all, I think I should have chosen to be Boiardo,” said he one day as we sat under the shadow of a fig-tree in a little village of the plains, whilst the white oxen trod slowly under the blossoming vines, and the shallow threads of water were all blue with hyacinth and iris.
“Boiardo’s life,” said he, “must have been worth the living from first to last in that pleasant and thrice-famous Reggio country, green with the vines as this is. A beautiful life — bold, free, graciQus, loving, and well loved; a life full of the deeds of a soldier and the dreams of a poet, a life made sweet and fresh by the open air, heightened by passion and battle, but chiefly absorbed in the ideal, for did he not set the bells of Scandiano all a-ringing until the people all thought a new saint had been canonised, when it was only his joy at having found a fit name for his hero? Boiardo was to be envied, I admit: much maybe for having begun the ‘Orlando,’ but much more for having his name pass into â proverb for a fair fortune. ‘Heaven send Boiardo to your house!’ So the country folk of all the Reggio district say still when they wish you well. How a man must have been adored by his countryside to be transmitted so down the stream of tradition!”
He spoke thus of Boiardo, nothing arrogating to himself; yet it was hardly less love that was won by him through all his birth country.
The fame of him was not indeed spread like that of the courtly rhymester of the “Orlando Innamorato” amidst nobles’ palaces and in kings’ circles, but there was not a lowly capanna betwixt the two seas that was not the lighter and the gladder for the fall of his footstep on its threshold, and not a peasant from Alp to Abruzzi that would not bring forth to honour his coming the last shred of the goafs flesh and the last drop of the rough red wine.
Money he had not to give them, but he gave them all the riches he had — mirth and music and goodwill, and a strong hand to part them in their quarrels, and a tender patience to aid them in their wants, and a sunny wit to beguile them in their sorrows.
There was, indeed, always that about him which made one think of Ariosto and of Gabriello’s l
ines on that great Lombard: —
“Credere uti posses natum fellicibus horis
Fetid fulgente astro Jovis atque Dionis.”
At his coming the people trooped out from all their villages and towns in wildest welcome. The shout of “Pascarèl, il Pascarello!” from some shepherd in the fields or some lads playing pallone on the outskirts, brought the whole population of any place which he approached rushing helter-skelter towards him, running and singing before his footsteps, and almost fighting for the coveted honour of giving him shelter for the night He might have drunk a hundred stoups of wine, he might have kissed a hundred women, he might have supped at a hundred tables within any gates he entered.
The poorest hamlet got together some little show of riches in his honour, and the best of everything, if poor that best might be, was dragged forth and spread out in delighted homage before him under the fig-trees or the cork-trees in the mellow evening light I grew to understand how and why he was so happy with his life, and how and why he would have been loth to leave it for any other. There were in it such perfect liberty, such continual change; and what touched him most, I think, so great a love for him everywhere.
It was perhaps only a sunshiny form of selfishness, the laughing and indolent life that this man of fine powers and of fine culture led from village to village over the face of his native land.
Yet it had a great influence over me that purified and ennobled my faults and my follies, and I think it had often the same over the populace amongst whom he dwelt For once in a hamlet on the plains, when cholera raged, I saw Pascarèl welcomed as though he had been an angel who had brought them healing on his wings; and once in a turbulent street riot in Vicenza, he controlled a furious and death-dealing mob with the mere charm of perfect courage and trick of timely and skilful wit.