by Ouida
The wild vine on her blown hair, the old Etruscan gold on her bare breast, the tangle of knotted ivy cast about her loins, the snow of the field-lilies wreathing her beautiful bruised arms, — these are her only ornaments.
Let her alone with them.
She is best so.
CHAPTER XI.
The Hobble of Lead.
WE went into the great open court of the villa just as the last sun rays died away behind the hills; Pascarèl flicking his mandoline into harmony with the lazzarone song which he was humming to himself.
They brought us wines and meats in the great breezy loggia, where the fig leaves curled around the dull tawny gold of the traventine cornice.
The moon rose; all ate and laughed and jested; the old servants stood and looked on and gossiped and laughed too; great puffs of odour were blown, by a light breeze, from the magnolias.
This is how one lives in Italy, sauntering, talking, idling, dreaming, always in the open air, always amongst the flowers, always finding the people ready to lean their arms on an old wall and exchange some good-humoured chit-chat while the lizards run in and out the stones and the nightingale sings in the ilex leaves.
Then we went within to the central hall, where the raised platform built for musicians was to serve us as a stage. When all was ready we saw that though the lad of the house was a cripple, indeed, who was carried in on his couch by a servant, the villa was at that moment full of gay people strayed over from the baths in the hills above Lucca and from the sea places of Spezzia and Livorno.
As Pascarèl watched the hall fill with them from behind the screen that was drawn across our stage, a dark displeasure flushed his face; he saw that he had been tricked into coming thither to arouse a set of idlers. But there was no help for it; he had agreed to play, and play he did in two of his own briefest, wittiest, gayest, most sparkling and most satirical pieces.
“But you shall not sing for them, donzella,” he said with an oath in his throat. “You shall not sing a note for them, that I swear.”
I who was proud of my talent in that way, and had set my heart on displaying it to those brilliant looking persons, was sorely chagrined at his decision, and had I loved him less I should have rebelled against it As it was, I sat in mute unwilling submission on a stool behind the screen, through the chinks of which I could see the great dim hall, the oil-lamps, the group of noble people at the farther end, the doorways filled with the eager faces of the household, the high windows open to the night, and the pale flood of moonlight that poured through them across the marble floor.
Perhaps in the solitude of those chesnut woods idlers ceased to be critical; or perhaps the genius of Pascarèl and the mirth of him swept languor and apathy before it, as fogs are swept away by sea winds.
Whichever it was, as he played to them, they were stirred to almost as much enthusiasm as though they were his general audience of vine-dressers and pewterers and cobblers and shepherds; first in his comedietta, where the irony bit as sharply as aquafortis, and then in a bright, airy, satirical grotesque, graceful sort of masque, in which all his little troop were concerned and in which he was wont to improvise the most stinging verses that would suit the humour of the moment, with all the skill and all the salt that ever Lorenzo Cavelli himself could have displayed when he lampooned the Tedeschi from under the old three-cornered hat of Tuscan Stenterello.
And yet very bitter were his rhymes that night; showered in profusion from his flexile lips like almond blossoms shaken downward in an April breeze.
Very bitter; — I was not sure why; — perhaps because he had been thus entrapped into beguiling the lazy hours of a few rich people, or perhaps because it struck him a little hardly that he should come as a strolling player into old feudal places where the Pascarèlli Princes would have only come with a herald’s note of defiance and a flutter of the Red Lily on a white standard in the sun.
Whichever it was, or whether both in one, it gave an additional burnish to the gold coinage of his wit that night; he had never been keener, subtler, swifter, and he strung his glittering pasquinades together on the finest silken chord of decorous derision.
“A clever rogue,” I heard one of the villa people say, when they leaned on their couches in the shadow of the great vine-canopied windows, and another assenting, murmured back:
“Beaumarchais and Lema?tre in one; what does he do here strolling with a wooden booth? The fool might make his hundred francs a night in Paris.” Then, the thing being over, they called him again and again upon the platform before the screen which had served for all his scenery, and yet again, not satisfied, summoned him by a servant to go up the hall and speak to them in person.
But thereto Pascarèl gave point blank refusal.
“Go and tell your illustrissimi,” said he, “that I bow to them upon the stage because I belong to my public whilst I am in my art; but the moment that I cease to play I cease to be an artist; and with me personally they have no more to do than with his holiest Holiness the Pope.”
And when the servant having delivered this message, or more probably having translated it into some politer guise, they sent again and yet again with no happier result; and in the end the illustrious persons themselves being curious as to who could thus so well amuse them without any adjuncts of scenery or decoration, came down the hall to visit this contumacious stroller who deliberately refused to obey the invitation which he should have construed humbly into a command.
Pascarèl received them with the frank nonchalance of his habitual manner, which never varied at any time for prince or peasant Being a Florentine, he was a little curter, a little cooler with the first than with the last; that was all.
The great persons essayed in all ingenious ways to discover his history and his reasons for straying across the country like a mountebank when he had a talent that would make him welcome on the most famous boards of Europe. But Pascarèl was too truly Italian not to be as impenetrable at some moments as he was transparent at other.
“Tuscan eyes can say everything, or can say nothing,” and Pascarèl’s eyes as well as his lips and his gestures and his inflections of voice were truly Tuscan in this sense.
Had he cared, he could have been as fine and as subtle a master of craft as ever was he who studied men and their motives under the boughs of the Rucellai gardens. But it would have been too much trouble for him, and the rule of his temper was frankness.
Whilst they talked with him they gazed at me while I leaned against the screen.
As I had come to a great house my vanity had led me, careless of the heat, to take out my old gorgeous dress of amber satin and purple velvet, which I kept for feast days and high holyday, loving its richness, its weight, its very incongruousness; treasuring it too a little because I had worn it that day when he had given me the ring of the Fates.
One of the villa guests, a man young and handsome, with a look that was familiar to me in his eyes, paid me many graceful compliments, and gleaned from me much more about the life we led than his friends could gather from Pascarèl. Hearing that I sometimes sang in our theatre, and was called l’Uccello by the people, he brought the mandoline from a corner where it had been cast down, and eagerly entreated me for one song at least.
I glanced at Pascarèl; his face grew very dark.
“You sing to villagers, why not to us?” urged the foreigner with that look on his face which startled me with some vague remembrance. “It seems to me that your impresario keeps the fairest constellation in his histrionic heaven for his own especial pleasure; that is scarcely just to his audience; — or to the star herself.”
The boldness of his eyes and the insolence of his accent gave more meaning to his words than shone upon their surface. Pascarèl listening keenly, though affecting to be in converse with the seigneur of the place, Pascarèl swung round, his changeful eyes flashing and stormy in his wrath; and took the answer from me in hot haste.
“My histrionic heaven does not open its gates for gold. I came to-night thinking
to pleasure a sick lad. I find that I was tricked into whiling the empty hours of a herd of idlers. I have given you what I choose, and you shall have nothing that I do not choose. Put the money you would pay me in the poorbox of your chapel, and learn for once, oh, most illustrious, that we of Florence never were docile to dictation yet.”
With that sole sudden outbreak of the anger which had been gathering in him all the evening through since he had first seen that he had been decoyed thither on an exaggerated pretext, he swept the mandoline from my lap, signed to the two lads to follow him, and with a salutation to the owner of the villa, took my hand with his gravest grace and led me from the hall.
The people he had thus suddenly abandoned were too amazed or too incensed to follow him. We went out unmolested into the moonlight.
Their servant indeed was sent after him with a profuse present in money, and even a silver box embossed with the count’s own arms; but Pascarèl tossed them all back again with so impetuous a disdain and so headlong a torrent of fiery words, that the bearer fled in terror, crying aloud that he never had thought to have lived to see the day when a Florentine would have refused a payment.
After that we went on in silence down the white terrace steps and under the avenues of ilex and cypress, Brunétta in the rear, and shaking her little plump shoulders in pitiful sobs, because she would have had so good a supper if only Pascarèl had not been so impetuous; she had seen it all laid out on the table in the loggia, and she had even smelt it too; for the ideas of Brunétta found their paradise in
“Un’ oca beurica piu che burre,”
and similar juicy dainties, and she had all Pulci’s disdain for
“Qualche fratta frutta,”
and the like poor stuff for supper; being hardly Italian at all in her tastes, except so far as her love of idling and of dancing may be counted to her credit.
Pascarèl for once did not attempt to console her, but strode on apace through the gardens. He did not slacken his steps nor speak until he was out of the gates of their vineyards, and once more on the mule path along the side of the hills.
Then he turned to me, for him a little roughly.
“What made you look so much, donzella, at that insolent fool who bade you sing! You were half inclined to do his bidding — too!”
“He had a look of my father in his eyes,” I answered him dreamily, still haunted by the vague and shadowy resemblance.
“Ah! what, was that all?” laughed Pascarèl, with a contented sound in his voice.
All! it seemed to me that it was very much.
I was always pursued by the fancy that perchance some day or another those very great people to whom my father undoubtedly belonged would somewhere arise and claim me.
In the old time I had wished it fervently, and spent upon the vision of it many golden hours of fancy, but now it made me shudder a little. No life could seem more perfect to me than the one I led. Even my father himself I had some fear rather than much strong desire of meeting.
“Why were you so angered against them?” I asked him in counter question. “They meant well, I think; and I heard one of them say that with your genius you would make a hundred francs a night in Paris?”
In the moonlight, as he walked beside me, I saw the quick disdain smile on his mobile lips.
“If I could make a thousand — still I should lose my liberty.”
“But you would be famous?”
“Famous? Oh yes! About as much so as the bull they decorate for Mardi Gras, and lead about with music, and eat afterwards in stews and steaks. A day’s carnival of flowers, and then the chopping-block of the critical butchers, and then annihilation in the teeth of the world’s oblivion; — a player’s fame lasts just as long as the bull’s. But perhaps — if you wish it, donzella, — perhaps—”
“Perhaps what?”
“Perhaps — one day I will go up for my Mardi Gras and risk my murder afterwards, if you have a fancy to handle my paper laurels in those soft little fingers of yours. Perhaps? — Who knows?”
So we went on along the rough hill-side, and Pascarèl recovered the serenity of his temper, and again strains of Pergolesi and of Lasso were heard in the moonlight as we went down through the glistening herbage with the smell of the flowering vines rising up to us from the plains below.
It was midnight when we reached the little village in a cleft amongst the rocks and chestnut woods where our temporary home had been made.
All its small world was asleep. There was no light except where a knot of fireflies burned under the great leaves ‘of the gourds and the pumpkins in the contadina’s gardens.
Where our wooden Arte was planted, its red and white flag drooped in the moonlight and the clear drowsy air, as though it were sad to think how in other times its scarlet giglio had been borne in victory aloft over clumps of spears along that plain beneath where Lucca lay.
Pascarèl glanced up at his flag as he passed his theatre.
“I told you truly, donzella,” he said, with a certain sadness in his voice, “truly, the night I saw you first, that Art, being once weighed by the gold it brings, changes the Hermes’ wings it lent you for an ass’s hobble of leather and lead. Like the ass, you can graze so shackled, but it is all that you can do. Unhappily women always prefer grazing to flying. Sarto’s wife has many sisters.”
With that he bade me go within, for we had to rise with the sun on the morrow; and as I undressed by the light from the gleaming skies I could hear the little shrill voice of Brunétta still piping its lamentations over the savoury meats she had lost, and through the casement screen of the vine leaves I could see the shadow of Pascarèl passing slowly to and fro along the slip of turf in front of the porch, thinking his own thoughts, no doubt, of the paper laurels and the hobble of lead.
And all the while the living fires of the lùcciole burned above the green seas of flax and maize, and shone like clusters of fallen stars along the side of Shelley’s Serchiò.
CHAPTER XII.
The Legend of the Lùcciole.
“THE pretty lùcciole; one cannot wonder that the poets love them, and that the children believe them to be fairies carrying their little lanterns on their road to dance in the magic circle under the leaves in the woods.
“But you know what the lùcciole really are? No? Oh, for shame!
“I heard it when I was a boy from a dark-eyed woman, with a mouth like a rose, who leaned down from her loggia in the summer-time, and gleaned them from the acanthus coils to set them in her hair.
“The lùcciole are just this: they are all the love words that are spoken in Italy.
“For these are so eager and tender and burning that no other land hears their like, as they fall from the lovers’ lips in the lustrous moonlit midnights, when the mask is thrown down with the knots of roses, and the ball is left far away and forgotten, and the hands are folded fast in one another, and the soft sighs tremble to silence in the softer warmth of caresses.
“Now, long, long ago, the god Eros, who has always reigned supreme in this land, the god Eros, floating one summer night, as is his wont, from balcony to balcony, from breast to breast, breathing through mortal mouths those amorous ardours, bethought himself that it was sad that things so beautiful should perish with a breath, and to himself, thus musing, said: —
‘“These murmuring and burning words, — surely they should be deathless, for they are so old, so old, and yet they are so new, and no man’s mouth is weary of them, and no woman’s ear is tired. They ought surely to live for ever. They are too perfect to die with a breath. See — I whom men call Love — I will give these sweet words wings, and let their fire burn in them like the stars, and fling them out upon the summer nights, and let them live their lives in glory there amongst the dewy darkness of the myrtle and the blush flowers of the wild pomegranate. And so no love word shall be ever lost, but shine amidst the flowers as a lùcciola.’
“As Eros said so did he; wherefore the lùcciole gleam in millions all through
the months of summer whilst the magnolias shed their rose-flushed arrows on the balconies, and the vine shadows dreamily darken the logge wherever the lovers lean.
“Year after year they burn, tender and fitful fires, along the green garden ways and under the women’s casements — deep in a lily’s white heart, or high where the rose-laurels climb.
“Some say they die in a day; some say they live on for ages. Who shall tell? They look always the same.
“For are they not winged words of passion — the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever?
“And this is the truth of the lùcciole.
“Let him who doubts, walk abroad in the gorgeous nights of the midsummer, when they make pale the red oleander, and light to flame the magnolia whiteness, while the notes of the lute thrill the stillness, and under the shade of the ilex two shadows lean one on the other.
“He will doubt no more then — if he love.”
* * * * *
I heard Pascarèl tell this legend a few nights later on in the sultry June weather, when the lùcciole were bright over all the land; sparkling in the grasses, dancing in the boughs, clustering around the cornstalks, and lighting the chestnut forests.
We were in a little village in the mountains, a little beautiful green nook in a deep gorge with one of the many hill-torrents bubbling and foaming headlong down its rocks. The people had clustered round him at sunset, and had caressed him, and clamoured for a song, a story, a personation, anything; and he, with a touch or two of the mandoline, and leaning his back against a great castagno tree, had rhymed for them, in the quick improvisation that was at once nature and habit with him, and strung together for this knot of charcoal burners and of quarry workers strings of golden fancies and pearls of wit and wisdom.
All kinds of poetic imaginations and of quaint conceits fell lightly into rhythm off his lips with all the tender, gay, sympathetic humour of Puléi and of Berni in them. He had refused to pleasure the noble idlers in the white villa above the Serchiò, but he begrudged nothing to this little community of rough foresters as they, gathered about him under the shadow of the chestnuts with the’warmth of the afterglow and the dreamy obscurity of the descending night upon their upturned faces.