by Ouida
“He will kill him, as like as not,” whispered Cocomero, to whom it seemed the passions of his chief were not unknown terrors and tragedies. “Do you not remember, Brunétta, that day two years ago when he was angry at Ravenna? — he as good as murdered the count for kissing you in the fair, and throwing him a gold piece for payment?”
Brunétta sobbed aloud that she remembered only too well, and that the count had meant nothing but courtesy, and that it was terrible to have to deal with a man all lightning and gunpowder as Pascarèl was if only a word went wrong.
Meanwhile, across the sunny green meadow, strode Pascarèl, with that habitual action of his, which was as swift as a bird’s, and as light as a woman’s.
We stood and watched, powerless and breathless. There was the lofty pole of the acrobat, the climber aloft in a blaze of spangles, a particoloured crowd staring upward, a belt of green boughs, and in the midst of it all the figure of the marinaro.
Pascarèl cut through the throng as a sickle through wheat, and went straight to where the sailor was, and tossed the trinkets into his face.
The chattering of the eager crowd drowned every word he spoke, but a space between the gymnast and his spectators left the forms of Pascarèl and of Rossello Brim plain before us in the sunlight The Sicilian stood like one stupefied for a moment, bewildered, no doubt, by the sudden flash of the ornaments in his eyes; then the silver and the coral fell together in a little heap on the turf, and the sailor snatched a long knife from his girdle.
We saw the naked blade of it, like a snake’s tongue, glitter in the hot keen air.
The people did not see; they were staring upward at the acrobat, and discussing furiously with one another the chances there were that the pole would break beneath him, and the pole was at that instant bending like a reed, and the poor clown was in jeopardy; and the Florentines had neither eyes nor ears for any other thing than that reeling mast against the trees, and the gambling that they were rejoicing their hearts with on its hazards.
We alone, left in the stradone, saw that deadly flash of the southern steel.
Brunétta screamed, and hid her eyes, and fell upon her knees, crying to the Virgin; but I said nothing.
I stood and gazed with wide-opened eyes, unblenching, like one turned to stone.
Before the dagger could sheath itself in his breast Pascarèl, with one of his lithe and subtle movements, sprang and caught the sailor’s arm in the air, and held it there fixed as in a vice. Then, throwing his other arm round Rossello, he wrestled with him and flung him backwards on the turf with a dull, hollow crush that resounded above all the glad tumult of the people’s wagers.
He twisted the knife out of the Sicilian’s hand, snapped it across his own knee, and tossed the fragments across the meadow.
Then he walked back to us through the sunshine, calm and colourless, and with no trace of anger on his face, singing half aloud to himself as he came the burden of one of my songs.
“Do not take things again, Brunétta,” he said, gently. “It is bad for those who give them to you. That pole there will not break, though the people would give their souls it should. Let us go and see the Barberi.”
“But you might have killed him!” I murmured breathlessly, clinging to his arm in terror still.
He smiled down into my face.
“Altro! Of course I might have done, and I shall probably be very sorry that I did not before the sands of life are run out with me. But you see, signorina mia,” laughed Pascarèl, “Florentines were always magnanimous, that is well known. Don’t you remember the great Asses Bell that tolled day and night for a month before we went to war ‘for greatness of mind, that the foe might have full time and warning to prepare himself.’ To be sure, Semifonte, and the Ambona, and a few other little trifles are to be set up against our generosity; but what would you? — even Florentines are human.”
No one had interfered.
To an Italian combat seems the natural issue of any quarrel, and a murmur went through the crowd of “jealousy!” which explained the action to the satisfaction qf all.
Rossello Brim accepted his beating quietly, if he resolved in himself to take vengeance some dark night in a lonely passage-way; and Pascarel’s passion, as transient as it was violent, left no trace on him to mar his sunny and good-humoured enjoyment of the day.
Jealousy?
As I heard the whispered word pass from mouth to mouth in the laughing sightseers, I felt my cheek burn and my heart beat high. No man is jealous of his sister; so then his wrath had been for me?
It was pleasant for me to think so; pleasant with a sweet, tumultuous, unrestful wonder that I could not altogether understand, but that made the rest of San Giovanni’s feast hours burn brighter than any that had gone before.
I remember in the fair under the trees Pascarèl that afternoon bought Brunótta, to console her, a gorgeous necklace of silver and great amber beads, with a medallion of the Madonna, gleaming in many colours, suspended from the chain. But for me he only bought a beautiful ivory-white magnolia, just opened, with all the spices of Asia in its breath.
“It is a cup fit for the King of Thule,” said he, as he handed it to me.
The necklace cost several lire, and the flower but a copper piece; but I would not have changed my magnolia for all the jewels that ever gleamed in Golconda.
CHAPTER X.
On the Hills.
SOMETIMES there would be brought a message to Pascarèl from some old rambling white castello set on a hill slope, with all its treeless mountain side bare and brown as a man’s hand — a message bidding him come up thither and amuse its duca or cavaliere, where he yawned through the listless day, in the old, vast stone chambers, with no sound to break the monotony of the hot hours, except the shrill saw of the cicala and the fall of the water in the fountain in the court But Pascarèl never would obey that sort of summons.
“The signore can come to me,” he would answer to the messenger, and send him back as he had come, along the blinding bleak ascent to the old villa where it stood with blistered walls in the midday sun.
“Dio! Not I, if I know it!” he would say to Brunétta, who always would fain have gone up to the great house, as she urged that there was sure to be good chiante and savoury messes steaming and stewing somewhere towards three o’clock in the day; and Brunétta was of opinion with the Giant Morgante that dinner at least was no dream.
“Toil up that hill in the sun,” he would reply, “to make a bow to Don Antonio or Ser Lorenzo, as he stirs out of his siesta after a surfeit of quails? — what! heat and fuss oneself before sunset over French drolleries and Florentine oddities in the face of his Ulus trissimo, to be rewarded with a yawn and a concession that one is not so very poor, after all, for a strolling player, and a little pitiful wonder that one has never tried one’s fortunes at the Logge theatre? Not I, if I know it If illustrissimi want to crack their sides with laughter,. let them come down into the valley to my little wooden house, and see if I can make them do it there. I shall never go to them, that is certain.”
And he never did: having a good infusion of obstinacy in his disposition, and, along with his Florentine republicanism, some lingering reluctance, no doubt, more or less strong in him, for the last of the once mighty Pascarèlli to bend his body as a comedian, and tune his mandoline in old houses in which his fathers had feasted as equals or harried as conquerors.
The Pascarèlli had been cut down, root and branch, stem and twig, centuries before, in one of those ruthless and complete destructions by massacre, and exile, and confiscation with which so many of the histories of the old territorial races end abruptly, like great hardy oaks uprooted and smitten through and through, and blackened to the youngest crown of leaf by a thunderbolt It was all a thing of the past — such a far, far away past, too; it was all emptiness, rubbish, weakness — anything contemptible and absurd that you might choose to call it So he said.
But all the same, Pascarèl, who had fought for the coronet on the
smelting-pot when he was a little bare-legged rogue, scouring the country from fair to fair, Pascarèl had something of the pride of race in him; and he would not go up to villa or castello, no, not if it were ever so, to pleasure the noble yawning there among the vine shadows on the marble floors, in the long, hot days when the very lizards seemed to pant in the cracks of the earth, and the very stones seemed to shiver in their whiteness and their nakedness because no moss would cover and no dew would cool them.
Sometimes the “illustrissimi,” nothing daunted nor offended, did come down from their hill fastnesses or their olive thickets to the fair or the festa, where their peasant folk were laughing their hearts out in the little wooden house of Pascarèl, and they would pay their money and enter and laugh too, which they were welcome to do, as far as he was concerned, though the populace would as soon have been rid of them.
Life was very dull, no doubt, in those long summers to those noble people in those vast dusky, silent dwellings up there on the bare-swept side of some spur of the Apennines or the loneliness of some Friulian or Emilian hollow, lined grey with olives, as a bird’s nest with sheep’s wool.
Life was very dull, no doubt, to them, watching the waste amongst their vines, or chronicling the cones of their silkworms, there in the old places where their fathers had rioted with Ezzelino as the slaughter went on in the cells of St George, and had ridden love-raids in Sicida with the Biandrati.
Life was very dull, no doubt; and now and then some one of them would find his way into the little theatre glimmering brightly with its oil lights under the silvery moonlit leaves on the edge of some mountain village or hamlet of the marches, and there amongst the stone-cutters, and the vine-dressers, and the goat-herds, would sit and smile at the pasquinades of Pascarèl, and call for him as vociferously as the rest, “Fuori! fuori!” when the curtain fell.
Amongst those now and then there would be some obscure lordling with a face like an Attavante miniature, or some young Sordello, fretting his soul in the monotony of his war-wasted and tax-shaven fief; and these would surely find their way behind the little stage to us, and offer to Brunétta many gay compliments, and to me very graceful phrases, backed most likely on the morrow with flasks of montepulciano and great clusters of camellias or magnolia flowers.
Pascarèl was wont to break the necks of the good wine with an angry twist of his wrist, and pour it out in a headlong fashion to all the country folk of the place, touching none of it himself. He always dealt in this mode with any gifts from the villas.
“Let them leave us alone,” he would say, impatiently. “They paid their coin at the door, I suppose: there is nothing more needed of them. The wine I want to drink I can buy; and when I can afford to buy it no longer, there is always a public well in every square for any ass to drink at, heaven be praised!”
“Che — e — e — e!” murmured Brunétta, wonderingly, at such outbursts. “That is odd indeed. You were not like that in the old times, Pascarèl. When the like of those noble lads came, they were welcome, and you would laugh and drink with them just as well as with the others. What is your quarrel now?”
Pascarèl would toss a wrinkled pomegranate up into the sunshine.
“What does it signify? None that I know of: the good townsfolk of Bergamo yonder cut the throats of a hundred odd Calabrians, as you may have heard, because they carved the wings of the fowls in a wrong fashion at supper. We Italians are an unaccountable people. We take our likes and our dislikes hot and strong, and neither gods nor devils can change us.”
After which profanity he would slake his thirst with the pomegranate.
One day only he broke through this rule.
At one time, when we were wandering through the hills that lie round the plain in which the little brave walled city of Lucca stands, there came to him many urgent messages from a villa on the mountains praying him to go up thither, because the heir and only son of the house was a child and a cripple, and could not stir from his threshold to gain any amusement or distraction of his pain.
Pascarèl resisted long, then gave way to the impulse of compassion, which was always stronger with him than any prudential or personal consideration.
So as the sun went down, we left our village where the wooden Arte had been set up under a clump of chestnut-trees, and we took our way along the face of the hills to where the great villa had stood long before in the old days when Lucca had hung upon her tower the chains of her freed Castracani.
Pascarèl had been inclined to leave me in the contadina’s cottage which served us for an inn; but I had begged and besought him to let me go with them so eagerly, that he who seldom found the force to refuse me let me have my way, and I walked beside him through the thick, rough herbage full of blue borage, and the white stars of Bethlem, and the many-coloured cups of wild anemones, Brunótta and the two lads following in our wake, along the side of the hills, where the little, brown, bare mule track wound up, and up, and up into the heights.
Pascarèl had the lute slung across him; and as we went, we sang to it staves of contadini choruses, of love songs, and the like, such as the peasants sang as they guided the oxen through the fields or searched for the aphis in the vine leaves.
Now and then the kids scampered from our path; now and then a puff of blue wood-smoke rose through the branches from some charcoal-burner’s cabin; now and then, some great magnolia flower shivered its rosy needles at our feet; far away down below, we could hear the Ave Maria chiming from the church towers in the plain; above, low rain clouds, fretted and edged with amber, floated near the sun; over all the sky was that wondrous-evening hue which is like the soft violet-blue of the iris, and is so clear and yet so mystical, as children’s eyes are when they wake from dreams of angels.
We looked up at it through the traceries of the boughs of the cistus, and the ilex, and the fig-tree, and we thought of the skies of Raffael; and we changed the gay allegro of the popular songs to choric - thoughts of great Palestrina and antique symphonies of Lasso; and so went along the hill-path in the delicate light, and were glad of heart because the earth was beautiful like this, and we were free to move hither and thither in its soft air as we would.
No northern landscape can ever have such interchange of colour as the Italian fields and hills in summer. Here the fresh vine foliage, hanging, curling, climbing, in all intricacies and graces that ever entered the fancies of green leaves. There the tall millet, towering like the plumes of warriors, whilst among their stalks the golden lizard glitters. Here broad swathes of new-mown hay, starred over with butterflies of every hue. There a thread of water sown thick with waving canes. Here the shadowy amber of ripe wheat, rustled by wind and darkened by passing clouds. There the gnarled olives silver in the sun. And everywhere along the edges of the corn and underneath the maples little grassy paths running, and wild rose bushes growing, and acacia thickets tossing, and white convolvulus glistening like snow, and across all this confusion of foliage and herbage always the tender dreamy swell of the far mountains.
It is only the common country where the oil and wine and corn are pressed and reaped; it goes for leagues and leagues and leagues, over many a perished city and unrecorded battle field, everywhere where the soil is tilled between the mountains and the sea; it is simple and lowly enough, and no poet that I know of has sung it; but it is beautiful exceedingly, and its hues would be the despair of any painter.
The villa was high upon the mountain side — vast, dusky, crumbling, desolate without, as all such places are, and within full of that nameless charm of freedom, space, antiquity, and stillness, that does no less perpetually belong to them.
Where these old villas stand on their pale olive slopes, those who are strange to them see only the peeling plaster, the discoloured stone, the desolate courts, the grass-grown flags, the broken statues, the straying vines, the look of loneliness and of decay.
But those who know them well love them and learn otherwise; learn the infinite charm of those vast silent halls, of th
ose endless echoing corridors and cloisters, of those wide wind-swept, sun-bathed chambers, of those shadowy logge, where the rose glow of the oleander burns in the dimness of the arches; of those immense windows wreathed with sculpture and filled with the glistening silver of olive woods, and mountain snows, and limitless horizons; of those great breadths of sunlight, of those white wide courts, of those tangled gardens, of those breezy open doors, of those wild rose trees climbing high about the Ætrurian torso, of those clear waters falling through acanthus leaves, into their huge red conche; of that sense of infinite freedom, of infinite solitude, of infinite light, and stillness and calm.
A stranger will see but the nakedness of the place, and the sadness thereof, by reason of its impoverishment and of its age; but let him wait a little in that marble silence where the cicala rings from dawn to eve, let him wander a little in those peaceful ways where the lemon boughs are golden against the monastic walls, let him live a little in that liberty of air and sunshine where the vines uncurl in the drowsy warmth and the tulips spread a thousand colours to the sun, let him rest a little in it all, and after awhile all other places will seem surely to him dark and narrow, and gaudy and full of noise, and in their hues and substances soulless and meagre, and a little coarse, beside the old white villa on the silent olive hills.
It belonged to a great family, and the old chambers were still full of ancient and costly treasures; though the outside walls had long been peeled bare by the sun and the winds, and weeds might grow as they would amongst the oleanders and camellia trees on the stone terraces.
Italy cannot be trim and smirk in modern wise and modern gear; half muse, half mænad as she is, with the thyrsus and the calliope in her hands, and her feet scorched by the smoke of war, she can neither deck herself with theatric paint and power, nor gird herself with a housewifely care and prudence.