by Ouida
“When we met you in the wood that miserable day, and I, like a fool, asked you to join your life with ours, he took me aside, and he said to me, ‘What does the donzella think that we are to each other?’ And I answered him that you had taken it into your head that I was his sister, and that I had not contradicted you — that was all.
“Then he said to me, ‘So let it rest, then. Mark my word; I will not have her ears soiled with the truth. She is innocence itself. If she go with us she must never know. It is a sorry sort of protection, but she might fall under worse.’ And that night he made me solemnly promise him — nay, Ì swore to the saints — that I would never tell you the truth of my relation with him.
“I meant to keep my word; I did, indeed. I never was tempted to break it till that storm about Rosello Brim. That made me feel mad against you.
“At first I had thought, ‘She is a donzella; she will find her own great people; it will only be for a little space.’ And I felt a sort of love for you; I did indeed. You were so different to me.
“But after that my eyes were opened, and I have watched him, and I have seen that it was you whom he loved, and not me any longer; and then I have thought and thought, ‘If I let her stay with him, soon he will not so much as cast a look at me,’ and that made me mad; and I said to myself, ‘Why should I be so coy with her, and not tell her the truth, when it is easy to see she would ask nothing better than to be in my place.’
“The people do nought but talk of him and you. They know what such amicizia means, if you do not; and very nice it is for me to hear their jokes at my expense.
“And then to hearken to him, always — the donzella this and that, and such care had of you as if you were a princess born, when all the while you are a lesser thing than I, for what, pray, do you ever do to get your bread? But I wash, and bake, and stew, and mend his linen, and do all manner of things — to say nothing of my bringing in money for him by my dancing; while you lead a life like any cockered-up peacock on a villa terrace, though all the time, as everyone knows, it costs Pascarèl half the theatre’s receipts to keep you and to pay your lodgings.
“And yesterday I saw him look at you — just with that look in his eyes that it is like a sorcery for one; and I would not wait any longer. I said, ‘She shall know to-day, and I will see if she will go, or if she will wait and oust me and take my place. It is best to know the worst straight at once.”’
I stood and heard.
CHAPTER V.
Nightfall.
I REMEMBER staring at the russet leaves and the blue sky, at the children under the pear-tree and the grey cat that walked amongst the yellow pumpkins. And that it could be the same world, that it could be going on in the same light and laughter, seemed to me horrible, hideous, incredible.
For me the world was dead.
I did not speak; I did not move.
Brunétta grovelled, frightened and sobbing, at my feet. The beautiful vine foliage, the drooping grapes, the shimmering of sunrays through the darkness of the leaves, the blaze of sunset light on the white wall beyond, the gleam of scarlet from the woman’s kerchief moving to and fro in the window, the silver glisten of the earrings in the bowed head at my feet — they went giddily round, and round, and round in a sickening whirl of colour before my blinded eyes.
For many and many a month afterwards, whenever I closed my eyes at night, I saw them still.
“You will not tell him, donzellai” whispered the poor, little, treacherous, cowardly creature on the earth before me, clutching closer the hem of my skirts. “You do not know what his passion can be. He would kill me. He would kill me surely. If you do not care for him, go away; go straight away, and I shall be happy again; he so soon forgets. But if you love him, as I think, best say so to me straight out. I will make an end of my life some way; it does not hurt much. And I could not live to stand by and see you take my place—”
“Your place!”
The outrage broke the spell that held me paralysed. Poor, little, foolish, ignorant, coarse-fibred soul! How could she know the shame she did me? How could she tell the unbearable torture to me of that level with herself to which all ignorantly she dragged me.
But in the pain and desperation of my wound I was incapable of excuse or justice for her.
I was stunned and maddened by the shock of the first sense of falsehood, the first perception of evil, the first horror of treachery that had ever touched me.
Some indescribable unknown guilt seemed to rise around me, like noxious fumes of baleful fires, and stifle all the young life in me. Of the sin of the world I knew nothing; of the treason of it I knew as little.
That I had been betrayed, insulted, outraged, was rather an instinct with me than any reasoned knowledge. He had deceived me; that was all I knew, and all I cared to know.
She grovelled in the sand before me, clutching my skirts, bathing my feet with her tears, beseeching me not to reveal her broken troth to him.
When I thought that he had loved her, and then loved me — oh God! how wretched, base, and poor a thing I grew in my own sight!
I loathed myself as much as I loathed her; and yet, great heavens! how I hated her, because his lips had touched hers; because she, too, had known that touch, that smile, that kiss which, child as I was, I would have given my life away to win one hour!
And he loved her! this timorous, treacherous, base-born, base-bred fool, who was not even true to him, who had not even such poor, simple, natural virtue in her as lies in loyalty and in good faith.
All the blood in me burned like a flame. I drew my skirts from her grasp, and thrust her away with my foot Looking back on the unutterable passion and horror of that time, I wonder now I did not strike her.
I understand how men strike women — men who are not cowards either.
“You will not tell him?” she moaned, dragging herself upon her knees again to me. “You will not tell him? You do not know how violent he can be in his rage. You will not tell him? He would kill me.”
I thrust her again from me with an unutterable loathing. He had loved her! loved this craven thing which could dare betray him, and yet not dare to brave his vengeance.
“No; I will not tell him,” I answered her; the words seemed to suffocate me as I spoke.
She had been good to me once; in her way she had shown me hospitality and good will; she was safe from any revenge of mine.
A sudden fear seemed to fall on her with my answer; not fear for herself, but fear of me. No doubt my face looked strange to her — there, where I stood in the vine shadows, with the golden sunset world reeling around me, and all the beauty of my young life struck dead in me at one blow.
“Are you going away?” she muttered, under her breath. “How you look! I wish now I had not told you. If you love him indeed so much—”
I seized and shook her, mute.
“Oh fool, fool, fool!” I cried to her. “Have you no fear that I may kill you?”
I thrust her away once again with such violence that she was driven from me, like a spurned dog, under the shadows of the leaves; and she shivered a little and crouched, and then rose slowly on her feet and stood shivering and sore afraid. But I had taught her silence.
I left her there, and went down the green length of the pergola, out of the gold of the sunny garden, across the archway of the threshold, and so on into the darkness and the coldness of the house.
At every step I dreaded to hear the voice of Pascarèl.
I went up to my own little room, and barred the door, and flung myself on my bed in a stupor of misery.
All my faith in God and man seemed killed in me.
CHAPTER VI.
Along the Mountains.
AGAINST the little square of the open window the breeze gently blew the clusters of roses that had climbed there; the chirp of the birds was shrill on the silence; there was a soft splash of water below as some one filled and refilled the metal pail at the well. All these things were distinct to me and horrible. My l
ove was dead; why were not all other things dead too?
I did not cry aloud, and my eyes were dry; what I had heard, and the shame of it, seemed to have scorched and shrivelled all the life in me. I was little more than a child. I was all instinct; I had no reason. I abandoned myself without meditation or analysis to any impulse of the moment My love for him had been one of the noblest, sweetest, purest impulses of my life. It had been better than myself. AIL love, if it be worth anything, is higher than the nature that begets it.
My love had subjugated all weaker and vainer things in me; it had vanquished my pride, and my selfishness had been subdued and destroyed by it.
It had been passionless because quite childlike; it had been quite happy only to see him come and go, to have the clasp of his hand, to listen to his fancies and his dreams; it had possibly irritated him often by its unconsciousness and its contentment in so little; and yet it had been intense with all its innocence, and, in its way, perfect Had I been older I should have paused and weighed awhile these cruel doubts that had fallen on me, like drops of scalding lead upon an open wound.
Had I been truer and more faithful I should have known that the love of a woman to be worth aught must be dog-like, and take good and evil alike in implicit faith, and kiss the cherished hand that deals the blow.
Had I been wiser in the world’s wisdom I should have been able to measure the emptiness and the weariness of these mindless ties, of the soulless bondage woven that fatal night, when, for sake of a rosy face and a smiling mouth, he had said, “will you wander with me?” as the boat shot away in the moonlight But I was only a child, and I loved him with a child’s ignorance and a woman’s narrowness, and I was only alive to the one intolerable unutterable shame which seemed to fall on me with the coarse invective of this creature, who begrudged her place to me.
And with it all, a nobler despair, a deadlier woe, smote me in the sense — so slow to dawn on me, so blasphemous, as it still seemed to me — that he could have told a falsehood to me, that he could have let me live on and on and on, unthinking and unsuspecting, in the tainted sunshine, in the plague-smitten beauty, of a paradise of lies.
Since then I have known passions that beside it were as the rushing stream of lava beside the limpid mountain burn; yet I doubt if I have ever known a love, more purely and perfectly love, than this I then bore to Pascarèl.
And it was all dead — worse than dead; struck in the eyes, as it were, with all the insult of a blinding blow. At a stroke, the words of this poor false fool, had dragged it down from the heaven of its innocent exaltation, and levelled it with all that was poorest, basest, meanest, coarsest, in the acrid jealousies of women and the amorous infidelities of men.
Her jealousy degraded me in my own sight.
Beyond every other thing I was proud. The evil had been subdued by his influence, but never uprooted; beneath the sting of torture it rose up in tenfold strength.
“Take her place — take her place!”
I said the words that had outraged me a thousand times over and over again between my locked teeth. There were times when the ferocity of a beast awoke in me, and I was on fire to spring at her throat and kill her.
For he had loved her once: so I believed, at least; I who knew nothing of men or women either.
Nothing of the brevity of the mere desire of the senses. Nothing of the leaden weight of a sensual bondage. Nothing of the languid reluctance of a sated fancy to strike and free itself. Nothing of the indolent impulses and mindless passions with which the heart of a man may be drawn hither and thither without once touching or sighting the goal of its ideal. Nothing of all which might have given pardon to him, to her, to myself.
The innocence of youth is cruel, because it is of necessity also ignorance, and ignorance is cruelty always.
I did not stir, my eyes were never wet, no cry escaped me; but where I lay, face downward, as I had flung myself, I bit through and through, like a wild animal that is trapped, the woollen coverture of my little pallet bed.
The time went on; the robins ceased to sing, the roses blew against the window frame; when I looked up it was quite dark, and there were stars shining.
I heard the pressure of a foot upon the woodwork of the old, ricketty, worm-eaten door, a feeble, little, sobbing voice began to mutter through it to me of a thousand selfish terrors. The sound of it stung me to blind fury; he would be home at sunset; home to her and me; one at the least I vowed to heaven he should not find there.
I had no space for hesitance, no time for thought; there was but one way — I was young and supple as a willow bough, and mad with pain — I sprang on the stone coping of the casement, turned and grasped the network of the rose-stems, and the boughs of the fig, knotted and tough from half a century of sun and storm.
Then holding by that hazardous support, I let my body drop along the surface of the leaf-covered wall, dragging a ruin of rose leaves as I fell. The house was very old and low: I touched the grass beneath with a dull shock, but without violence; as I reached the earth I heard above the crash and splinter of the panels forced and driven in before the blows of some one whom Brunótta had summoned in her affright It was quite dark; the garden was deserted; I paused an instant to draw my breath; with the soft shower of the rose leaves still like tears upon my face.
I felt bodily pain, but that only served to madden me, as the lash maddens a beast already bruised; I leaped the low stone wall of the garden and flew like a lapwing into the dusky shadows.
Little Toccò leaned over the wall that parted the garden from the olive orchards. He was singing clearly a sweet merry melody, and gazing down through the gloom to try and see who passed across the bridge. I crept up to him and slid into his hand the onyx with the Fates.
“Give it to him when he comes,” I murmured.
The boy started and stared, no doubt at the changed sound of my voice; but dreading lest he should detain me, I thrust the stone into his hold and fled away through the shadows before he well knew who had spoken to him.
Behind me I heard a noise of many voices, and as the household of the little place roused itself to its Padrona’s summons. Turning my head once I saw lights flash in its windows and underneath the trellis of its pergola. I held straight onward, running with winged feet where the grass lands allowed my passage, stumbling and slipping where the maples and the vines woven together opposed my progress.
At times I fell into the trenches cut in the hard soil against the hill floods of winter. At times I bruised myself on the tangled sticks of dying vines.
At times I lost myself amongst the thickets of olive, shining white as the winding-sheets of ghostly apparitions. At times I sank over my feet in shallow brooks that rippled from the mountains, and went on with my garments heavy-weighted with the moisture.
At times I crouched in some shed or under some sheaves of maize to get my breath, and then I saw scattered over the country, close about the little wine-shops, the lights of lanterns that flickered fitfully in and out amongst the foliage; and then I gave myself no rest, but gathered my skirts close and ran again.
At length — it may have been one hour, it may have been three or four, by the look of the stars it was quite night — one of the vineyards that I crossed opened abruptly and without fence upon a highway on which I heard the sound of a horse’s feet Looking behind I saw no lights; there was only the great brooding darkness of the deserted country, with here and there a silvery gleam as some ray of the young moon caught a belt of olives, or a breadth of water.
I went into the road and waited there. To be beyond their reach I knew I must not pause to rest amidst my flight I knew, too, that I was nearly at the end of all my force.
Through the gloom there came towards me a white horse, with a red woollen covering spread over it in the Tuscan fashion, dragging slowly a contadino’s cart As it drew near me I saw, by the light of the lantern which hung at the shafts, that the peasant was an old man of seventy or eighty years.
His cart s
wayed heavily backward on its wheels; it was filled with straw and earthenware; he dozed as he went, and the horse picked its own way amongst the stones at will.
I called to him and stopped him; he awoke, thinking of roadside robbers, and began to mutter incoherent prayers to a leaden saint in the band of his hat I made him, with difficulty, understand that I was harmless and alone and tired, and that if he would give me a lift for a league or two I would pay him well. When he had recovered his alarm, he told me that he was going with his pottery to a fair at Settignano; that to get a good place amongst the stalls it behoved traders to be there whilst the dawn was grey; that he never hurried or harassed his beast, and so had started at nightfall to make his journey by easy stages.
He hesitated some time over my offer, then yielded.
The cart was a light one, he said, and my weight was light too; it would not harm the horse; I might get in amongst the straw if first he saw my money.
I gave him the little gold piece that my father had given me on the stairs in Verona; it had been slung round my neck with the onyx. He let me climb up amidst the rough pottery of his trade stock, and the patient beast set forward again upon its road; the old man settled himself again to doze at ease; the cart creaked onward down the steepness of the slopes, the lantern glimmering redly in the gloom.
He paused a long time in the desolate grey piazza of Fiesole.
All the town was asleep upon its high hills, but there was some friend he knew dwelling by the church who at his rap hung out a lantern on a hook in the wall, and brought him a flask of wine, over which they talked long together in the darkness.
Then the horse jogged on again along the stony gloomy roads, on and on and on into the oak woods of Borgunto, where the great masses of wooded hills sloped away, above and below, in an intense stillness, only broken by the cry of an owl.
It is a winding and difficult road that passes along the side of the mountain from the town of Fiesole to the old fortress of Poggibonzi, and the agony of the slow and weary way seemed endless.