by Ouida
In many eyes there was the gleam of tears.
They did not dare to cluster round him with shout and song that night, and bear him off as was their wont to some wine feast within the walls. They left him alone, as one who was their master and apart from them.
Only some lads, quite young, whose fathers had died with Carlo Alberto and with Ugo Bassi, drew near him timidly, and gently kissed his garments as in homage.
These were all his thanks in grey Arezzo. But could any greed of pomp or storm of plaudit have been greater?
He himself said never a word, but left us to go indoors to our rest in the street of Orto, and went away outward through the gates into the shining country where the moon was white upon the fields of olive.
CHAPTER XV.
The Sceptre of Feathers.
I REMEMBER that night, that sweet hot August night, I sat sleepless at the open window, watching down the moon-lightened street for the sheer sake of seeing Pascarèl pass through its shadows when he should come homeward.
The hours went slowly by, and he did not come. The old street was silent as a grave; beneath me, before the entrance of an old palace, two Italians stood talking together. They looked gentle people, and their accent was pure and scholarly.
“What genius has that stroller Pascarèl!” said one of them; “and what a sway over the people, and what a rush of words, and what a choice of powers! In the Trecento he would have been at the head of Tuscany!”
“Oh, altro!” assented the other, heartily. “But in our modern days it is not the men of genius who are eminent; it is the men of talent All the earth over, it is careful and cautious combination which now succeeds; and it is exactly this of which the nervousness, the impetuosity, the impressionability, the force and the weakness of men of genius, are incapable. This man Pascarèl might have led High Italy when she was a group of art-cities, that could be grasped together like a bundle of divining rods or firebrands, and hurled at church or empire by a hand that was fearless enough and able enough not to let them scorch it But what place is there for a man of his sort of capricious inspiration, and poetic temper, in any part of modern Europe! What Europe crowns now are — drill-sergeants and accountants.”
And the Tuscan having said so much, sauntered on with his friend through the high, dark archway where the acanthus was clinging about the old sculptured bosses of some race whose very name had perished in Arezzo.
As they disappeared, there came into the street the figure of Pascarèl; his white dress caught the gleam of the moonbeams, and he passed thoughtfully down the grey stones, through the cool brown shadows.
The church clocks of Arezzo were tolling four o’clock; in the east there was the first tremulous lighting of the skies that heralds daybreak.
He came slowly down the street, very slowly, under the leaning antique walls that had heard the first frail wail of Petrarch’s opening life.
Looking up, he saw me where I leaned above. There was a trecento stone gallery to my casement, and in it was growing, set in a great red conca, a gum-cistus, all white with flower.
I looked down to him through the leaves.
“Ah, donzella! up so very early?” he said to me. “That is not wise when we are not upon the road. What! not been to bed? Oh, that is very wilful.”
“You have not been to bed yourself,” I said to him. “What did you find in those fields? I thought you would never come back.”
“You have been watching for that? I shall be very angry if you ruin your health in such nonsense.”
He did not look very angered. There was a smile on his mouth, and the beautiful sudden light in his eyes that I loved so well.
“But what did you find in the fields?” I cried to him. “Have you been to the king’s tomb again!”
He paused a moment, then glanced down the street to see that it was empty.
“Well, no, donzella,” he said, hesitatingly, with a little flush on his face. “I may as well tell you — it will give you pleasure. You were sad to-day for that poor contadino, with his old sick people and his seven children, who had had nothing to eat all the summer, the worm being at his wheat, and his padrone a hard man? Well, I went to take him half the Arte’s receipts. It was so full I could easily spare him that without begrudging ourselves another fat peahen. And I went to-night — well, because walking at night is pleasanter than by day in this time of the year, and I thought I should meet the poor heart-stricken wretch just going out across his fruitless fields — as I did. Besides, the old woman, without food, would not have lived long past noon. It is no use talking to people about a chain of gold for Italy, unless one does one little miserable mite towards forging a lilliputian link of it.”
“Oh, I am so glad, so glad!” I cried, in my thoughtless delight in him, leaning down through the cistus flowers of silver. “It is so good of you, so like you. What did the contadino say? Was he not happy?”
“Ah, we will not talk about what he said,” murmured Pascarèl, lightly. “When you have seven children and an old father and mother all wailing for bread, and a hard padrone who will screw you down to the letter of the Mezzadrià, and, if the soil be empty, lets your mouth be empty too, — of which hardness there is very little in this Tuscany of ours, God be praised, — when you are in this sort of plight, of course any little gift brings gladness to you, and you are apt to talk a very great deal too much about gratitude, as this poor fellow did, until I was fain to run away from him, and leave him weeping over his two lean bullocks, who look the worse for no provender themselves, poor beasts! But get to bed, bambina mia; these old streets are not too healthy in the moonlight Good night, and dream of Petrarca.”
But I dreamed, instead, of Pascarèl, He might have ruled Tuscany in the old days of Gian della Bella, or the Uberti — so they said. Well, like enough. But was it not better as it was?
I thought nothing could be freer or gladder than this life he led.
It was like the old sceptre of peacock’s plumes that Mariuccia had set on high, with the blessed palm-sheaf; in emblem of so many simple joys, of laughter in a garret, of a bowl of field-born violets, of jests over a pan of chestnuts, of a dusty brocade brought down from high estate to embellish a child’s masking.
The world would have contemned, like my father, the sceptre of feathers.
But could the world have given aught better in exchange?
I thought not, — sinking to sleep, while the daybreak stole over the dusky stillness of Arezzo.
And I was sure that the poor contadino, hurrying homeward at sunrise to his capanna, in the midst of his barren fields, bearing food and oil to his famished children, and wine to his old dying people, would have thought not likewise could one have asked him.
The gold was rare and costly that had been found in the tomb of the king that day; but it seemed to me that all the gold in Etruria could not have outweighed that impulse which had sent the feet of Pascarèl on their errand through the moonlit olives.
We wandered awhile about old Umbria. The mighty oak woods were welcome in the hot suns of August, and there was no sweeter place for a Midsummer dream than where the birds were singing in the flower-sown shadows about S. Francis’s quiet Carceri.
We loitered in Gubbio, thinking of Maestro Georgio and of his wondrous rainbow hues; and we sat on the stony slopes where Pliny’s villa once stood by the thread of hill-fed water; and we watched the sunset colour burn on the Spoleto mountains, with great rainclouds waiting the fall of night to break above the marshes; and we sauntered in the clear elastic dawns, over the sites of the buried cities, where the goat cropped herbage above the sunken altars, and the smoke of the charcoal-burners curled up amongst the oak boughs where the incense had once risen to Jupiter Feretrius, or Venus Pandemos.
And thence we strayed into Tuscany for the vintage month, and laughed to our heart’s content amongst the vines, and saw the wines pressed in the old, wasteful, classic fashion, and the children tumble half-drunk amongst the reddening leaves, and the d
ogs gorge themselves on grapes unstinted, and the great wains roll homeward laden with purple wealth through the narrow paths where the crocuses were all alive again in millions, till the earth was like one great amethyst with them, and across the vast, still, sleeping valleys, where the sun was still hot, and the white homesteads were all hung with the golden ropes of that year’s millet We worked and laughed and feasted on grapes with the rest all the shining days through, and at evening the Arte was thronged with the lusty Contadini, their mirth the readier for a plenteous vintage, and their strong brown limbs grape-stained like the limbs of Bacchus.
The recoltà, which was of abundance, except in some few places, as about Arezzo, where the fly and worm had ravaged, made Tuscany all glad and gay, gladdest and gayest of all the Val di Grève, and the Mugellino, and the y al di Chiana, and the other Pianurè lying close about Florence.
We paused in all the little towns one by one, and October passed away, golden and sultry, and ruddy with jest and song about the great wine vats; and the gardens full of the strong sweet smell of damask autumn roses and the waxen tuberosa, and the grass filled at every step with the van-coloured cups of the wild anemones.
On the first day of the new month, which is dedicated to all the saints — in imitation of the old great Latin feast of all the gods in the times of “gli dei falsi e bugiardi,” we came down from the heights where we had been amongst the forest farms of the Casentino and of Vallambrosa.
For the weather had grown chill there on the mountains, and we had come slowly downward with intent to go into Florence and rest there through the winter frosts, until the time of Carnival should have come round again, and have again passed away, killed with the cannonade of the Confettò.
Before he should enter the town, however, Pascarèl had taken a fancy to set the Arte a little while under Fiesole, so that the scattered people in the little paesi along the hill sides should have their hour’s mirth under the Red Lily without being driven to take a long tramp for it down the stony slopes. And the place he chose for the Arte, and got permission to use from the owner, whom he knew, was a narrow piece of grassland amongst the stripped vineyards, with the grey bleak slopes rising above, and making sunrise late and sunset very early to the few who dwelt in that ravine of the mountain-shed Mugnone.
The Feast of the Saints rose a cloudless and radiant day, in which the scent and the warmth of the summer were sure to prevail, so soon as the first chill crispness of the early morning on the heights should have disappeared before the sunrays.
I remember how we came over the mountain side in the clear cold of the early day.
How we heard the matins bells ringing in the dusky depth where Florence was lying.
How we watched the white mists lighting little by little as the sun came over the edges of the hills.
How the libeccio was blowing keenly as we crossed the square of Fiesole, but fell into a mere soft breeze as we went down the winding road between the grey stone walls and the wild green hedges, with ever and again some scarlet glimpse of roses burning above a villa gate.
It was only cold enough to make the air free and elastic and inspiriting as a sea air.
All the hillside was in a pomp of scarlet and purple, and gold and bronze, with great masses of deep green where the ilex and acanthus grew, and soft pale greys where the olives were. Everywhere there were clouds of autumn flowers. At times, as we passed some wine-presses under the trees, the people shouted us a gay good-day. At times a kid, browsing amongst the stripped vines, bleated a tender little note upon the silence.
I remember how we went down the shelving zigzag ways, the mules having passed before us at daybreak with the Arte in charge of a peasant lad. Pascarèl and I were foremost; he had his mandoline slung about him, and struck it now and then so that a sound, sweet and fine as the call of a thrush, came from it, and seemed to drift away down amongst the wreaths of the mist.
At some little distance Brunétta followed, talking eagerly with Cocomero of a quarrel she had had with a contadina about some duck’s eggs in the place where we had slept Little Toccò ran hither and thither at his fancy, now chasing a lizard, now plucking a rose that nodded over a wall, now stopping to chatter with the women plaiting the straw.
I remember how we went down the hill lighthearted in the morning air, pausing reverently as a priest passed by with the Santissimo for some sick creature, a white-frocked chorister going before him ringing the little bell along the peaceful ways.
I remember how we strolled on silenced for a moment or two, and then talked of the winter in Florence, and fell softly, as people will who have learned to love one another, into recollection of the first day we had met in the City of Lilies; and so, with the west wind in our faces, came down above the bridge of the Badià, where the old brown monastery stood, russet with age, amongst the olive and the mist I remember how we broke our fast whilst the sun was still low in the east, at a little dwelling-house a mile above the village, where Pizzichiria was scrawled in chalk along the wall, and the green bough above the doorway told that the tenant of the house sold wine as well.
I remember how we sat out under the pergola where some grapes still hung, and brake our bread and drank sweet foaming draughts of milk, the cow meanwhile, in her shed hard by, gazing at us with her eyes of Hèrè over a great green dew-wet mound of trefoil; and below, amongst the olives, the sacred Solitudine, rising gaunt and bare, and brown and sombre with innumerable memories.
I remember how we sat there, and laughed and clattered gaily, and then took up the mandoline afresh and sang all sorts of follies and of fancies, and then rose and strolled away down the hills to see where they would set up the Arte, and soon found a broad field a few roods above the Badià itself, where the fattore, knowing us, had given eager acquiescence for the throne of our hedgerow Thespia to be erected.
Ah, yes; I remember it all so well — so well — that last day of that glad, poetic, fanciful, careless life which was fated to be broken off suddenly and for ever, as the pomegranate flower is snapped from its stalk by the mistral.
BOOK V. THE FEAST OF THE DEAD.
CHAPTER I.
The Fountain of the Pine.
IT had been all summer — endless, cloudless summer — from the time of the carnival violets to the time of the autumn cyclamen. And there was no foreboding of storm or of winter in the air that day of All Saints, though, whilst I knew it not, I heard for the last time the soft low laughter of Pascarèl — of my lover; — my lover surely, though he spoke never directly of love but only uttered it in those million ways and words and charms of touch and eloquence of glance which are love’s truest, subtlest, and most perilous language.
He and I stayed in the field behind the Solitudine and threw ourselves down there beside a little threadlike brook whose water was all red and purple with anemones. Little Toccò wandered away as his habit was under the stripped vines; Cocomero had stayed with Brunétta to help her, as they said, beat some linen in the shallow course of the Mugnone.
It was yet quite early in the morning, and the gentle coolness of daybreak had not left the air.
It is quite wild up there; the hills rise steep and sombre, their sides dark with the cypress; the stream runs through a deep gorge, and a bridge with a pointed arch rises over it quaint and grey; at this time, before the floods of winter had come down, it was still shak low, and a man was wading it with a fishing-net upon his back.
Southward, above us, rose the old Etrurian slopes, and the walls and towers of the city that perished for daring to aspire to be rival of the Scarlet Lily.
Westward towered the great Salviati pile amongst its vines and olives: and lower down was the smaller, humbler villa set in a sea of roses, and girt with willow and lemon and magnolia, whither the great nobles were wont to come down in the hush of the fruit-scented nights to their love trysts; directly at our feet was the gloom of the Solitudine; away there in the far centre, betwixt the lines of hills, Florence was stretched as a white swan may
spread her wings to sleep upon her river nest Yet not so far but what we heard each note of her warning chimes; for it was the feast-day of the saints, as I have said, and the bells of her countless churches were calling to one another.
All about us were the vine lands and the olive woods, the rich rank vegetation sown thick with wild anemones. And so we resolved that there the theatre should stand, and then we threw ourselves down amidst the thick grass and the trefoil with the delicate heads of the cyclamens about us in tens of thousands.
“No theatre was ever better placed,” said Pascarèl, lying at my feet amongst the olives. “Not even where ankle deep in thyme the Latins laughed over the roaring fun of Plautus. It is a little profane, I fear, to set a playhouse so near the Badià?
“When one thinks how often those great sad eyes of Dante’s have gazed through this same mist of olive leaves away to the dome of the Duomo yonder. It is very profane, I am afraid.
“When one thinks of all those monks, too, of San Marco-in-Urbe, who used to come up here to their mountain Badià to rest their eyes and souls a little out of hearing of the city riot: — Savonarola who, in all his life of storm and prayer, and triumph and torment, had time to cherish a damask rose-tree: — and that bravest of brave souls, Domenico, whom one loves, I think, almost better than any other saint or hero of them all: — FraBartolommèo must have worked here too; though there is not his mark upon the walls: — and the divine Angelico sometimes left the dim old convent down in Florence to come hither and paint for the Solitudine.