by Ouida
Many things that he said may have been obscure to them, for when the mood for speech was on him he forgot all except the thoughts which thronged upon his fertile and lavish fancy. Yet they in a manner understood it all, for the Italian peasant is quickly touched to “fine issues,” and has a poetic pathos in him which utters itself in his rhymed rispetti and ritornelli.
He had chosen the better part, no doubt, since he was so content; in wandering thus amongst his country people he was free as any swallow on the wing. But he had said truly, Sarto’s wife has many sisters; to women the crowns of Francis seem ever better than peace of conscience and immunity from care. As I looked at him where he stood under the broad green shadows of the chestnut, with the starlight of the early night upon his face, and the musical, sonorous Tuscan rhythm coursing off his tongue, I could not but wish that the world knew him as I knew him; that the great people of the great cities should be his auditors rather than these labourers of the mountains and the forests.
I wanted to fasten the gilded string round the foot and draw the broidered hood over the eyes of my free and fearless hawk, in lieu of leaving him to lean on the wild west wind and spread his wings to the sun in full liberty: that is to say, child though I was, I was a woman.
A little later, when he had shaken himself loose from the people, and we were sitting under the chestnuts alone on the edge of the hillside with the lucciole-lightened plain before us, far, far down below, I returned to the old story with which in those days I must sadly and often have teazed him. I tried so hard, I know, to persuade him that the hobble of lead was a golden band that fastened only more firmly the pinion of Hermes. But he shook his head and laughed, and would not be convinced.
“What would you?” he said, almost impatient at the last. “I am not the great genius you think me. I am only a wandering idler with a trick of my tongue, that half the peasants in the country share with me, and a whole knapsack of droll, quaint, out-of-the-way fancies as jumbled and, perhaps, as worthless as the odds and ends of a curiosity dealer’s barrow.
“I promised you last night to go up for the paper laurels? Nay, ‘promise’ I never did. I said I might, to please you. But not even to please you, I think, shall I ever bring myself to go into harness. The nomadic life is what suits me.
“Women do not see the beauty of it — no! They are for ever breaking bounds and roaming in imagination, but it is always into some land flowing with milk and honey, and abounding in creature comforts. Even my divine Angelica never forgot a banquet. Now I do not care for banquets, and I care very much for liberty.
“You cannot alter me, my donzella. Nature cast me in her gipsy mould so many years before ever you were born. It may sound very shocking to say so, but between ourselves I have very little doubt, I assure you, that Menighella’s life was a great deal happier than Michelangelo’s.
“You know that cheery, simple, merry wanderer whom Michelangelo loved so well? straying over the country with his sketches that the contadini bought at fair and market; his S. Francesco, that the peasants would have frocked in gay colours in utter defiance of fact and the frate; his quaint little saints in pasteboard, and his waxen Christs, for which his illustrious friend gave the models.
“Think of the fanciful pleasant days he had in all the little towns and castella, with his light load of apostles in terracotta and martyrs in millboard; welcome for all the baptisms and weddings and feasts and fairs; and bidden to sup here, drink there, laugh with this one, sorrow with that, according as the people bought a S. Anna to bless a baby’s birth, or a S. Petrus to guard a mother’s grave.
“Oh, take my word for it, roving, humble, merry Menighella must have been much happier than his mighty friend, badgered by Pope and council, and hunted by patrons from city to city; besides, the ambulant artist can have been no fool, and must have had a soul in him, or he had never been so dear to Michelangelo.”
I listened to him, glad as I was ever of hearkening to the swift sweet music of his voice. It was a perfect night: the forests were still as death; the great moon hung yellow and lustrous as gold above the dark edge of the high mountains.
“But men you honour did not disdain fame?” I said, a little timidly, to him, for I had always of him that soft sweet fear — which yet is not fear — without which no woman’s or girl’s love is worth a fallen chestnut husk. “Look at your Ariosto! and I think you are as great a poet as he, only you never will write down a word.”
He laughed gently.
“As great a poet as Ariosto, because I can string the terza rima at times as an old woman reels thread off her distaff? Oh, my child, you would make me as vain, if I believed you, as the dauber Niccolò Soggè when he dared to challenge Del Sarto.
“It is national in us, that is all, that knack of verse. Jules Janin says somewhere, ‘to say an Italian poet, is needless; say an Italian, and the poet is a matter of course.’ Now I would not go as far as that, but there is a certain truth in his pretty compliment We are always poets at heart and Romeos when the moon rises.
“It always seems as if that well-spring of poetry and art which arose in Italy, to feed and fertilize the world when it was half dead and wholly barren under the tyrannies of the Church and the lusts of Feudalism; it would always seem, I say, as though that water of life had so saturated the Italian soil, that the lowliest hut upon its hills and plains will ever nourish and put forth some flower of fancy.
“The people cannot read, but they can rhyme. They cannot reason, but they can keep perfect rhythm. They cannot write their own names, but written on their hearts are the names of those who made their country’s greatness. They believe in the virtues of a red rag tied to a stick amidst their fields, but they treasure tenderly the heroes and the prophets of an unforgotten time. They are ignorant of all laws of science or of sound, but when they go home by moonlight through the maize yonder alight with lùcciole, they will never falsify a note, or overload a harmony, in their love songs.
“The poetry, the art, in them is sheer instinct; it is not the genius of isolated accident, but the genius of inalienable heritage.
“It is universal. It is an Easter egg that lies alike in the hands of gentle and simple; not a Roc’s egg, that falls from the skies once in a thousand years. Being thus diffused it has ceased to produce individual and conspicuous achievement: but it is this diffusion which — bringing with it a perpetual ideality and an eternal youth — will render possible for us our Italia Rediviva.”
As he ceased to speak, as though in answer to him, there came from the distance the sound of a man’s singing. Down below, through the maize, there was going a little knot of peasants; they carried great bundles of green canes on their shoulders; the lùcciole flashed from their feet as they passed away into the darkness where their little homes were gathered round a campanile; the voices, softly sighing, died away in the wild sweet love songs that echo all over the land unwritten by any human hand, only passed from mouth to mouth, from age to age, telling the one eternal story.
We listened till all was silent.
He turned to me and smiled.
“Does all poetry want to be written to live? Ah, no! cara mia — not so long as men love.”
A soft strange trouble, that yet was infinitely peaceful, stole on me. I sat quiet in the white moonlight and put ray hand into ray breast and felt for the stone Fates. They were quite warm where they rested against the beating of my heart.
The tears filled my eyes suddenly; sweet tears, and glad; I could not have told whence nor why they came.
“Ah! you are right, you are right,” I murmured. “What does fame matter? your life is so beautiful as it is!”
He stretched his hand out and held mine closely, and sighed a little as he answered. His moods were so swift in variation; his fancy was so vivid and so fast; one could never quite be certain whether any mood would last with him much longer than a butterfly may rest upon a flower.
“Ah, dear donzella!” he said, with a sigh, “perhaps, that i
s too much to say. I am afraid so. It is hard to find a beautiful life in these days; riches are not hard to come by; even success, if one is not too particular as to the roots of it, is moderately easy likewise; luxury, there is no doubt, was never at any time so general. But beauty —
“Perhaps there was never any kind of life so really beautiful as that of the improvisatore in the middle ages; such as Bernardo Accolti’s for example. What a life that must have been: the sun can never have set on it “Roaming the length and breadth of the land, the guest of all that that was most brilliant and most graceful in each city; everywhere the streets garlanded and the shops closed at his coming; everywhere the whole people, from princes to beggars, gathered in the vast squares, in the breathless sunlight, hushed like little listening children at the first words that fell from his lips.
“All the pageantry, all the warfare, all the genius, all the tumult of the age, spread like a wondrous gold-threaded tapestry before him for him to tread on it as he chose. All the passion and the poetry of the era close to his hand like flowers to be woven into his own myrtle wreath as he would. All the nation, from its cardinals to its contadini, like so many chords of an æolian harp, that the breath of his mouth could thrill like the winds of the summer.
“The mountain lord, the brigand chief, the fierce free lance, the begging friar, the weaver and the armourer, the prince-bishop and the Ghetto Jew, the damsel at her lattice, and the page in his satin hose, the Pope’s mistress above in her silk-hung balcony, and the trooper’s leman below with a wound in her ragged breast — all the vast motley of the century his to paint and to sing as he would in the great sunburnt piazza, with the swallows wheeling against the blue sky, and on the edge of the listening crowd — who knows! — perhaps the angel face of Raffaelle.
“And then always for rest, Urbino, with the breath of the Adrian sea and the breeze of the Apennine hills blowing through its palace chambers, and the night waning on Bembo’s tireless wit, and the morning breaking above the Monte del Cavallo before the Court of Love had solved one half its problems. A beautiful life that, a beautiful life that, if you will.
“I am not sure that I do not envy Bernardo even more than Boiardo, though the fire of his words was quenched with the ashes of his body, and when we read him now, we find him dull as dust, and wonder what the spell was that once held all Rome speechless as he spoke.
“Well, there is a compensation in all things. Bernardo had his life: a perfect life surely, if a whole people’s applause, and years that were as one long feast day, count for anything. But Bernardo’s is an empty name now to all save a few scholars who only hold him as a poor stilted sterile fool; and where is the child that has not heard of One who died warworn, and heartsick, and exiled, alone in Gothic Ravenna!”
His voice sank dreamily into silence.
We stayed there both silent a little while under the chestnut shadows; the wind from the south blew over us on its way to wander over the country of the poets. Then, silently still, we arose and went homeward; the moonlight white about our lingering feet.
I leaned long at my little lattice that night, watching the lùcciole where they shone amidst the waves of millet and amongst the tendrils of the vines; rocking on the bough of a rose, or glancing in clusters where the leaves of the arum grew thickest I stretched my hands out and caught one as it went by my casement, and held it, half gladly and half timidly, as a child holds a ladybird that it deems a fairy.
Had it been a love word once on any woman’s ear? Had Romeo breathed it, or Paolo? Had it died of its own sweetness, as love will? Had it life eternal, as he said, amongst the roses?
It told me nothing, but burned there; a little star; captured in the hollow of my hand.
I looked at it a little while, then let it go and dance upon the wind.
“What do I want with you?” I murmured to it; “if you be living fires, yet you are dead words. And I have his — all his — for me alone.”
Then half ashamed that even the lùcciole should hear me, I shut the lattice, and, whilst my face grew warm as with some noonday fervour of the sun, I stole into my bed and slept and dreamed.
CHAPTER XIII.
The Tomb of the King.
FROM the date of St John’s Day, Brunétta treated me with coldness and with something that was almost like aversion. Her gifts and goodness to me ceased, and nothing that I could do or say would win a smile from her.
I had noticed sometimes before that when we were with Brunétta he treated me differently, with more deference, but with far less tenderness. Before Brunétta he never kissed my hands, nor let his eyes dwell on me fondly, nor called me all the pretty caressing names that he lavished on me when we were alone.
Sometimes, too, I noticed the bright merry eyes of the little Tuscan watch me with a keen, hard suspicion, and at times she would turn away from us with some little sullen, petulant phrase that was only not satirical because her powers were not equal to more than a childish sulkiness.
But the only result of this change of manner in her was to send her more to the companionship of her favourite Cocomero, who was a good, silly, laughter-loving lad, always comically afraid of the flail of her tongue; and to leave Pascarèl and me more free to wander by ourselves through the vine-shadows of the country sides and the dim arcades of the ancient cities. And I was too glad of this to give the cause more thought Cocomero and Brunétta were so well suited to one another, they loved to wrangle for a lean poulet, to gossip at a village well, to cheapen trumpery at the fairs, to tussle with the tavern keepers, to cheat the guards at the town gates by bringing in a smuggled snipe or water melon.
These were their daily joys; whilst to them Pascarèl and I seemed utter fools, dreaming through the fields content with a bird’s song, or wandering for hours in some old silent grass-grown place abandoned by the world, but to us memorable for the sake of some great life that there had opened to the light in the dead ages.
“If it were not for me you would all go without bit or drop from dawn to moonrise,” Brunétta would cry, displaying some booty from the farms that she had borne into the town under the very noses of the unsuspecting guards at the gateway, and which was made tenfold more sweet to her by the falsehoods and perils which she had incurred in its transit “A beautiful plump peahen — eating for a prince — and spinach and herbs to garnish it — all for three soldi — worth walking out four miles for any day — things are so dear in the markets. Spinello lived and died here? — and you two have been dreaming over him and Petrarca all day? The Saints help us! What fools are clever folk! And who was he when all is said? A dauber in colour? Oh, I know; his paintings are in the little church — whitewash would look as well, and it kills insects too. A Madonna one must have, of course, but Our Lady I know is quite content with a wax figure of her, and those pretty paper flowers and some coloured tapers — they look much better than the frescoes — Cheche! how fat the hen is! — and all for three soldi, Pascarèl!”
Pascarèl would shrug his shoulders with silent ineffable disdain, and go out into the archway of the house and stand under the vine-leaves, sending smoke into the air with a troubled and impatient contempt upon his face.
They were as far asunder as the poles these two who travelled together, played together, lived and laughed together, and yet never caught sight one moment of each other’s souls.
That day he and I let the fat peahen stew on neglected amongst its herbs over the little charcoal pan, and wandered about the old, old streets of Arezzo, talking of Maecenas and Petrarca and the merry Bacco in Toscana and thinking wistfully of that noble old cathedral that was levelled with the dust for the war lust of the Medici. He was sad at heart that day; the contact of Brunótta’s low little soul seemed to have jarred on him; his hours of melancholy were not frequent, but the gloom, when once it settled there, was deep. Sometimes he was curt and full of scorn in it; this day he was gentle, and his eyes dwelt on me with a soft pain in them.
We searched, and vainly, for Sp
inello’s tomb; like the cathedral, it was lost in the summer dust.
There was a tired looking, humble olive, that by its look had grown there beneath the walls five hundred years if one; but all the pomp and beauty of the pagan temple had dissolved like a dream of the night We sat in the shadow of the olive, and in our fancies rebuilded the temple.
It was full midsummer.
The Tuscan sun was burning in a cloudless heaven.
A cloud of swallows were silver in the light The mountains were soft in hue as rose-leaves. Everywhere - in the plains of maize the shrill cicale were loudly singing their rude love odes. Above the grey walls there was a flush of pomegranate flowers, and amongst them there hummed the yellow porselline that the people so prettily say bring happiness wheresoever they rest.
The city so great in Etruscan, in Latin, and in Renaissance days, was very quiet in cloudless sunshine.
It was all bright and hot, northward over the Tuscan olive valleys, and southward, where tawny Tiber dragged his way, deep bosomed in the Umbrian oakwoods.
“It is just the same country,” said Pascarèl, glancing down north and south. “Just the same scene as when Maecenas was born here, and Pliny pondered beneath the garden-trees upon the hills yonder.
“The city has crumbled to dust twice, and been rebuilded in new fashions, though the new is now so old that we cannot find Spinello’s tomb, but I doubt if the district has changed a whit since Livy wrote of it.
“What a great book a great student might write upon Arezzo! What an epitome in this single town of the Etruscan, of the Roman, and of the Mediaeval life! And of the Renaissance alone what countless and various types!
“Fighting ecclesiastical Tarlati; shrewd, gay, merry Redi; our idealic Petrarca; good heavens! one could string great Arezzan names until the sunset!