by Ouida
I walked silently beside him with a swelling heart, and a pride sorely wounded.
A baby!
I consumed my soul in muteness and bitterness, while watching the canes bend and break under his petulant strokes, whilst the Gonfio flashed brownly amidst the pebbles of its precipitous bed.
Then with that instinct of coquetry which comes untaught to every woman in whose face men ever care to look, I turned my head over my shoulder, and glanced at him full in the eyes.
“A baby!” echoed I; “I am a head taller than Brun òtta, and you — you seem to think me woman enough sometimes!”
His eyes flashed into mine a regard so sudden, so subtle, so ardent, that the languor and the fire of it seemed to sweep over me like a sirocco.
He stood still a moment, and caught my hands and kissed them; his own were burning.
We went on by the curving course of the torrent, quite silent till our travel of that day was done.
Oh, glad and gracious days!
I love to linger on them, for they were lightened with the sweetest sunlight of my life. Never since for me have flowers blossomed, and fruits ripened, and waters murmured, and grasshoppers and grilli sung, as in the spring and summer of that wondrous time.
To rise when all the world was flushed with the soft red of the earliest dawn; to go through the breast-high corn at speed, with scarlet poppies clasping the gliding feet; to see the purple wraith of rain haunting the silvery fairness of the hills; to watch the shadows chase the sunrays on the dusky purple of the mountainsides; to feel the living light of the cloudless day beat as with a million pulses all around; to go out into the lustre of the night aflame with lucciole, until the dark still plains blazed like a phosphorescent sea; to breathe the wondrous air, soft as the first kisses of men’s love, and rich as wine with the strong odours of a world of flowers; these were my joys, joys at once of the senses and the soul.
CHAPTER IX.
The Feast of St. John.
LITTLE BRUNÓTTÀ had always seemed to me as innocent as mindless, and as happy a thing as any firefly that danced away its little life amongst the boughs of the magnolias and over the fields of maize.
She was supremely ignorant, infinitely good-natured, and always content, humming on her heedless way with all the light-heartedness of youth; and all that buoyancy of nature, which seems to go in exact proportion to the poverty and ignorance of every creature. Brunóttà, with nothing in the world but a pretty face and two twinkling feet that could dance her every night into as much money as would pay for her bread on the morrow, was happy always — as it is not given to any ta be happy when once they have become the owners of either mind or gold.
Brunóttà, indeed, when she saw her brother and myself lingering to watch the sunset fires pale into the ethereal luminance of the night, would shrug her shoulders and go in to see that there were enough onions put in the soup, or that the donna di facienda did not get at our leathern flask of wine and weaken it with water.
Brunóttà, when he and I wer, as she called it, stargazing in some old monastic church where, neglected or forgotten by the world, some painting of Rozzi or Girolano was slowly dropping to pieces in the damp and darkness, Brunóttà would be busy in the tavern kitchen ironing out her dancing skirts, or standing chattering over all the gossip of the town at the well in the market place with the young men and the old mothers.
Brunétta, with all her homage for Pascarèl, was not as averse as might have been wished to the coarse compliments of the youngsters of the places we passed through, and on more than one occasion at our coming unexpectedly upon her had shot round the corner of a garden wall, or through the portals of a public building with suspicious swiftness and shyness, leaving to confront us some sturdy contadino in his brown cloak and red shirt sleeves, cracking his whip over his mule’s head with a sheepish look of conscious guiltiness.
Brunétta was certainly only a little plump brown earthen pipkin of commonest clay, and had nothing in common with the fine porcelain of her brother’s nature, but she was a little cheery tender soul, full of good-will to all living creatures; and if Pascarèl saw any faults in her he never chid them, but treated her with the habitual indulgence and good-humoured oblivion that he might have shown to a child too much a favourite ever to be rebuked, but too ignorant to be ever consulted pr considered.
I held her in sincere affection: she was very good to me, and observed with me always that wondering, deferential homage which she had from the first blended with her cordial familiarity.
“You are a donzella, and Pascarèl says you are not as we are,” was her formula always in answer to my expostulations against the services she rendered me and the distance which she would occasionally remember to set between herself and me.
She would trot to and fro untiringly in my service. She would always take care that some daintier fare than their own was prepared for me. And whenever any of her many adorers brought her offerings from the village fairs or fruits off their own little bits of land, she would always bring me the best of it all, and urge me to take it:— “It is worth nothing, signorina, nothing at all; but just to please me!” she would say.
And then I used to pretend to be charmed with the thing — perhaps some hideous paste necklace or some gaudy-flowered handkerchief, which was of no more use to me than the statues in the piazza; and it was all done so honestly and with such good-will that I got to love the little dancer out of sheerest gratitude.
One day she pressed one of these gifts upon me, a choicer one than common, a band for the hair, of the Sicilian fashion, and of real silver. I took it and fastened back my own hair with it as I had seen Sicilian women do; it was really pretty, and I said so.
“Oh, do keep it, signorina!” she urged on me for the twentieth time. “Pray keep it Look! I have got all these corals for myself — real corals. They suit me very much better. That silver fillet is made too delicate for me. My great coarse black braids would break it; and it looks so pretty just holding-in all that loose gold of your hair.”
It was San Giovanni’s day; the great feast of the Saint of Florence, a beautiful smiling Midsummer day, with the pleasant breath of a sea-wind blowing through the radiance of its warmth and light.
At sunrise all the chimes were pealing, and all the high altars were dressed with masses of roses and lilies, and all the city was waking up to one of those days of mingled masses and mirth which are the delight of the Italian popolani.
Our Arte stood brave on the green meadow, where the grass was high along the little stream where Calandrino once searched for the magical stone of invisibility, and that day the theatre had many rivals for the popular favour.
All the lines of the buildings were threaded with gay coloured lamps, to be lit when the night should fall, and all down the cascine woods, under the oaks and the ilex, the canvas of mountebanks’ booths, and the bright colours of itinerant shows, and the little dainty bell-tents of the vendors of bibiti and berlingozzi were ranged one on another in a pretty pleasure camp.
All the day long the people were threading the streets and the woods with that pleasure in the simple sense of sunshine and of sociability which is characteristic of the Tuscan temperament.
All the day long we wandered and laughed, and chattered and sang songs, and ate and drank under the trees, and watched the humours of the crowds.
Now big Brindellone rolled on his old historic way; now a squadron of cavalry swept through the sunlight; now a bespangled acrobat turned somersaults above the pines; now the athletes raced each other round the circle; now a negro climbed into the highest foliage to set the lamps amongst the boughs; now a troop of children danced, with great bouquets in their hands, to the music of some piping flute and fluttering lute that heralded some saltimbank’s performance.
And everywhere the grass blew, and the ilex shadows flickered, and the magnolias opened pale and cool in the heat, and the lovers wandered away down the dim green aisles, and the mountains were dreamily blue, like
the iris in Maytime.
San Giovanni’s day — old as the walls of Florence, dear to her since the earliest time that she ceased to be a pagan, and was baptised a Christian queen in the old basilica that is still sacred to the seer of the Syrian Desert.
San Giovanni’s day, — it was the very heart and core of Florence life, — the very pearl of the people’s traditions.
Its lines of fire trace the battlements no more, and no more glitter on the moonlit water; it is dying slowly away, and the city instead is bidden to the Feast of the Statute. But the Feast of the Statute is not the same thing to the people, and the heart of Florence is not in it as it was in the old glories of their own St John.
But on this day when the Arte stood beneath the Apennines, and we laughed and sang under the ilex shade, San Giovanni’s day was in the height of its power, and had no rival, save in old King Carnival, whose kingdom lay buried in the winter snows, and never clashed with the rose garlands and summer sovereignty of St John.
It was a pagan way of deifying her patron saint, no doubt; but Florence is always half a pagan at heart — she, the daughter of Hercules, who saw the flying feet of Atalanta shine upon her silvery hills, and heard the arrows of Apollo cleave her rosy air.
She cannot ever altogether forget the old cultus, that laughter of hers is still heathen, an echo of the joyous ages when the symbol of immortality was the butterfly on the brow of Psyche.
Pascarèl, who was all pagan, laughed his glad way through the day, enjoying and scattering enjoyment broadcast; telling fortunes, selling wares in the fair, pelting the children with confetti and ciambellini; playing dance tunes on his mandoline; leading the songs over the barrel of chiante broached in the shade of the ilex, whilst half a kid smoked by a gipsy fire, and purple plums and cherries of Prato tumbled out of dusky rush baskets, and the great Cavolo, who is a titular divinity in Italy, slept in rotundity and benignity in the smoking soup-pot with his court of garlic and of beans around him.
Italy has three kings — Cavolo, Carnivaie, and Cocomero, — and between them the reign of the seasons is joyous all over the land.
But Pascarèl would not have been Italian soul and body as he was if, with all his gay good-humour, and his sunny elasticity of temper, passion, fierce and swift as the lightning’s play, had not slumbered in him to be roused when occasion served.
Though I had wandered with him these four months and more, I had seldom seen him out of temper — never seen him fairly angered. But St. Giovanni’s day showed me a little what his wrath could be.
Little Brunétta excited it early in the morning, when she tripped like a little sparrow down the green glades of the woods in her brightest holyday gear, with heavy silver ornaments about her, and the glories of a new rose-coloured kirtle flashing in the sun.
“One loves the very name of the day,” said Pascarèl, as we walked along under the limes that were all in flower, with here and there shining a white rose-laurel, and here and there glowing a red pomegranate-tree all in blossom. “One loves the very name of the day, if it were only for Ariosto. It was on a St. John’s day that he saw Alessandra Benucci, with the vine-leaves on her robes, and the laurel on her golden hair,: coming through these very streets of Florence with the strong June sun bright upon her, as the town went mad with joy because Leo and the Palle had won the triple crown. The dear Ariosto was a swift lover, no doubt, and a bold, and a most inconstant; we have his own word for it How could a man be otherwise who saw in fancy that face of Angelica asleep under her bower of wild roses! She must have paled all living women — that perfect creature who brought Sacripant from the Circassian hills, and Agrican from the Caspian seas, and made a fool of even the great Paladin himself.”
“What is the good of talking so about a creature in a poem that never existed at all!” said Brunòtta, who had so little imagination in her that it was hard at times to believe in her nationality. “We, too, met on St John’s day; you remember that night, Pascarèl!”
“Do you remember this day three years!” she cried to Pascarèl, who had remained silent “What weather it was! — and all that press of people on the bridge — and how frightened I was because the fireworks hissed — and how you came behind and took me by the waist and lifted me down into your boat — and I took you for some great lord, Pascarèl; do you remember, because you spoke so softly, and your white coat was so fresh and clean — .”
“I remember!” said Pascarèl, with petulance, cutting the leaves with his cane as he went “Took him for a lord!” I cried. “What, did you not know him, then? — did you not recognise him? — how was that?”
Brunétta laughed gleefully.
“Why, it was the first time I saw him!” she cried, and then stopped short in the middle path of the green stradone, and stood blinking at him and me with half-shut, frightened, shy, cunning, pretty brown eyes.
Pascarèl stifled a half-dozen oaths under the droop of his moustaches.
“I had been a wanderer so long,” he said, coldly, “and Brunétta had never left her foster-mother and her village away there in the Casentino, and knew nothing except the names of her goats and the trick of her straw-plaiting. Come on quicker, donzella, or we shall miss the start of the Barberi.”
I hurried on at his desire, and Brunétta followed, penitently murmuring into the ear of Cocomero. I felt that there was some secret connected with this day of St John.
The little scarlet-mantled, brown, saucy thing followed us, sulkily, like a scolded child; and by the glance of her, restless and cunning, I saw that she had done something amiss of which she was conscious; but I was too happy to weary myself much with conjecture; what did anything really matter after all? — the sun of Florence was shining above head, and Pascarèl laughed beside me.
Now, as we went along, her silver and corals glimmered bravely on her brown throat and arms, and the band that she had given me caught the sunlight in the avenue as it glistened beneath the lace veil, which, to pleasure Pascarèl, was always cast about my head in Genoese fashion, in preference to any other head-dress.
Pascarèl’s eyes flashing uneasily from her to me as we hurried to see the riderless horses start from the gates, caught for the first time the perception of some new ornament upon us both.
He paused suddenly in the midst of the green walk, whilst the other pleasure-seekers streamed on unnoticed.
“Where did that trinket come from, donzellai” he asked me, the swift Italian anger lighting up his eyes.
“Brandtta gave it me this morning,” I answered him, attaching no import to the answer.
But he apparently attached much, for he turned sharply round upon her as she followed us with the two lads.
“And who gave it to you, Brunétta!” he asked. “And how came you by those silver and coral gewgaws that are all new on you I seel.”
Brunétta flushed under her sun-burnt skin, and shifted herself uneasily on to one foot like a little ruffled duck ill at ease.
“Rossello Brim gave them to me,” she muttered.
“Rossello Brim! And who, pray, may that bel” asked Pascarèl, pausing there under the ilex shadows, with the angry light increasing in his eyes, and a restless impatience betraying itself on all his flexile features.
“Annunziatà Brim’s brother, the sailor. He is with his people a little while, in the Sdrucciolò,” murmured Brunétta, with her heart fluttering in her mouth. “I had a bit and drop with’Nunziata yesterday when you were in the botteza with the signorina over all that ugly pottery; and Rossello is a fair-spoken, honest man, and he had just come from Sicily and brought the things; and he had seen the donzella in the street with you, and thought her handsome, and he has been friends with me for ever and ever so long. And the corals and things were for me, and that silver fillet for the signorina. And where is the harm? I am sure there is no harm. Other women take all they can lay their hands on—”
“And since when have you been in the practice of imitating them?” asked Pascarèl.
I should not have thought that his voice could have sounded so sternly, or that his eyes could have had so fierce a flame in them as they had now where he stood before the palpitating and frightened Brunétta.
“Have you taken gifts before?” he asked at length, when he had waited some time for her to speak.
Brunétta shifted herself on to the other foot, and put one little plump finger in her rosy mouth like a chidden baby.
“Not often,” she muttered at last; but it was easy to see the denial was a lie, and a lie not easy to tell, with that full sunlight and those searching eyes falling relentlessly upon her.
Her glances were roving restlessly from place to place, going in every direction, rather than encounter the gaze of Pascarèl; and suddenly the sullen, embarrassed trouble on her face cleared; a look of eager relief lightened it; she espied an object upon which to divert the anger of the moment from herself.
“There is poor Rossello!” she said, with the coolest treachery in the world. “Go and scold him — his is the fault; not mine!”
With a true woman’s justice she surrendered her accomplice to cause a diversion in her own favour.
She pointed out as she spoke a brown, loftily-built man in a sailor’s dress, who stood amongst a troop of people round a pole, on which a spangled acrobat was climbing; the sailor affected to be absorbed in the gymnastics, but his restless, glittering eyes roved ever and again from the meadow where he stood to the avenue in which we were pausing.
Pascarèl, without a word, lightly loosened the trinkets off Brunótta’s throat and wrists, and invited me, by a gesture, to unfasten the band from my hair; with all the ornaments in his hands, he swept out of the stradone and across the pasture on which the tumblers and climbers were performing hard against the old pozzo of Narcissus.
We stood motionless, and following him with our eyes; a vague fear fell upon us all, and Brunétta, who always wept easily, began to shake her little shoulders and sob.