by Ouida
After awhile the clouds broke and the moon shone out; through the oak leaves one could see the vast silent valley stretched far, far below, and the amphitheatre of the endless hills encircling it. Even in my stupor and misery I had some vague sense of its wonderful, solemn, mystical shadowy beauty.
Only a week or two before we had gone up that road on our way from Casentino to the annual fair of S. Francis at Fiesole, and we had talked of Masaccio and Desiderio as we saw their little white town on the slopes, and had gathered the wild anemones that covered the ground with bloom, and had sung songs to the mandoline, passing under the acacias by the fortress walls, and mounting higher and higher and higher with a gay good-morrow to the smith at the mountain forge.
Only a week or two before! And now!
The hours passed in a horrible nightmare for me. The cart shook, jolted, rattled on the stones; my body was bruised and lacerated by the thickets and the vines; the palms of my hands were bleeding from the thorns of the rose-trees; the night was very cold, as autumn nights are, north of the Abruzzi. But the misery of my thoughts killed in me all sense of bodily pain.
All I heard was the sweet music of his voice. The music lost to me for evermore.
The night seemed endless.
The horse often paused to rest and crop a little of the wayside grass or drink at some stone tank in a monastery wall.
The old contadino awoke now and then to say a word to it, or to trim his lantern, then slept again, while the rope of the reins dropped idly from his wrists.
The road seemed interminable, going down, down, down, along the face of the hills, always with the same stretches of olives and vines on either side, always with the dark vapours of the plain spread like a sea beneath. Now and then an owl flew by with a low croak; now and then there shone a little gleam from some lamp at a roadside shrine — that was all the change there was.
The cart crawled on under the boughs and past the dusky stone walls, still down, down, down into the lower wood, where the oak is changed for the fir tree, and the path becomes sharp and sheer and bent into curves that make the stoutest mule stumble.
The first grey of daybreak had scarcely lightened in the skies when the horse paused at a turn in the descent. The old pottery dealer woke for the first time with eyes wide opened, shook himself, and descended from his seat.
The old man roused me roughly.
“Signorina, you had best get out here if you want Florence. I go to Settignano, and that will be out of your road. Keep straight on, and go down, down, always, and you cannot miss to come to the Croce Gate.”
The cart jolted on its way to Masaccio’s birthplace, and I staggered, blind, and sick down under the stone-pines.
I felt feeble, broken, aged by ten years. My head was giddy, and the sunshine swam around me in bright rings of amber. I felt numb, and, when I moved, the earth seemed hollow and tremulous beneath my feet.
So, like one blindfolded, I stumbled down into the City that is called Beautiful.
CHAPTER VII.
The Church of the Cross.
IT was full sunrise.
The light was streaming from the east, golden and glistening as it came gleaming across the desert In the streets deep shadows still slept. Lithe brown hands were unloosening the wooden lattices, and flowers pent in casements thrust their heads out to the air.
All was very quiet There was only the sound of the bells tolling for the first mass of the churches, tolling everywhere, north and south, east and west, over the wide Valdarno. Here and there a priest passed to some holy office; here and there a sun-belated reveller went gaily home touching a mandoline; here and there a woman with brown bare arms swept down her steps or hung her linen out of window, gossiping the while to neighbours across the passage-way.
It all went giddily and dimly round before my sight I was faint, and my limbs shook as I dragged them over the stones.
There was a sound of footsteps and of outcries behind me.
On the sheer instinct of the hunted deer, I paused and shrank into the shade, and gazed around for shelter. Close against me the doors of the S. Croce stood open. The vast, dark, solemn church yawned like a grave. I crept into the shadow of its porch.
At its altars they were saying the first mass.
A lady, all lace and jewels, as she had come from some palace ball, was on her knees in the dusk and the solitude praying, while the voices of the priests echoed dully under the vast vaulted roof that shelters the dust of Michelangelo and Giotto.
Behind me were the darkness, the coldness, the peace of the great church, the lights burning dimly far away, the sepulchral undertones thrilling the stillness.
Before me, in the open air, there came, swift as the wind, a rush of feet, a clamour of angered voices, a shower of weapons, a tramp of horses, a cloud of dust, a flash of daylight, and, in the midst, a gleam of beautiful bold eyes that last had looked at me in the white moonshine underneath the leaves away on the hill-side by Dante’s Solitude.
The crowd went by like a whirl of dust and of leaves on a day of scirocco. I sprang and caught the arm of an old man who had uncovered his head reverently as it went by the church.
“What is it? Oh, nothing,” he said, with a shadowy smile. “Nothing. They broke on the wheel in my time. How scared you look, you pretty child. It is only the ducal guard who are taking Pascarèl to the Bargello; and the people want to rescue him, that is all. Done? No, he has done nothing that I know of; but the town cares for him, and he tells awkward truths, and it has been easy to seize the salt in his speech and tax it There was a sort of riot yesterday, and he quelled it; but they made that an offence against him. A player and a populano! What right has he to power? — to such power as Love gives and gets! So they arrested him last night, and they take him now to the Podestà for judgment. I daresay they will give him three months in prison. For the Bargello is strong and the people are weak as yet.”
The old man, still with that subtle wintry smile upon his face, shook my hold off him, and went feebly along the street.
The crowd in its cloud of dust had passed from sight. I lost all sense of where I was, and fell, like one dead, upon the stones of Florence.
BOOK VI. THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE.
CHAPTER I.
Oltrarno.
You know the old old quarter, whose emblem on the banners that were borne in war around the red Carroccio, was the Silver Dove? The church is there, though flame has ravaged it thrice; but the standard that bore the bird of the Holy Spirit over the reek and carnage of the plains has crumbled away none know whither in some closet or crypt of the city.
Yet the quarter is barely changed at all, since in the days of the Republic the men of San Lorenzo and of San Giovanni crossed the river to sack it from end to end under the storm of arrows and the rain of fire.
It is dark, and dull, and noisy, and noisome there in the old historic quarter of the Silver Dove: and yet it is so full of story, so sacred, with so many names and memories, that there is a charm about its twisting gloomy streets, its high walls shutting out the sun, its dungeon-like chambers, its iron-bound palaces, grim and firm set as sea-washed cliffs, its huge archways dark as Erebus, its narrow passageways where two mules can scarce pass one another over the slippery and uneven stones.
It is all haunted ground in old Oltrarno. Come to it in a summer morning. There is no sun in it, except in some square-walled garden behind the frowning front of some antique, coronetted house, where stray sunbeams make a glory on shining lemon-boughs and broken water-cisterns. It is all dark, for the houses are so high, and the walls lean so close. It is full of the strange, dreamy old-world Florentine odour, that smells always as though some king’s coffin had been freshly opened, and the spices and the perfumes of the cere-clothes lately loosened on the air. The people are walking, leaning, gossiping, laughing, quarrelling, all in the open street, and at the open threshold. The cobbler is at his stall; the tinker at his barrow; the huckster at his board of cloths and linens; th
e melon-seller at his truck of green paponi. In every one of the great dusky interiors there is an etching worthy of Rembrandt In every one of the sculptured, unglazed windows, there is a study of colour fit for Velasquez. It is all dark, and dusty, and noisy, and noisome, I say, and yet in its way it is beautiful — the place is so gruesome, and the people are so gay.
And then — so many steps are echoing after yours, so many faces look at you from the grated windows.
See — in that dim street there is old Toscanelli’s white head bending over the charts busy with vague dreams of the unknown world across the seas; — yonder enters a saucy, airy, ribboned, plumed cavaliere, who sings a stornello as he goes, and fingers the sprig of box with which he is playing the Lenten love game, begun in Carnival with the original of Madama Pampinet; — away behind the Carmine church, where gentle Masaccio came and painted in his title-deeds to immortality, runs a little barefoot, ragged imp, his mouth full of stolen convent cherries, whom poor old Mona Lapaccia tries to catch and lead to the good friars to be fed and clothed, and made in his due time into Fra Lippi; — under the deep shadows of the walls there goes to his sombre and frugal home the finest wit and keenest logician of the Rucellai Gardens, musing on sore straits of personal poverty, and foreseeing, perhaps, with a certain delicate, cynical sadness, that he who lives with clean hands the honestest of men in Florence will so pass down to posterity that the name of Machiavelli will be used, to all time, as synonym for Prince of Rogues.
See there — who comes down hither in the gloaming of the last night of Carnival? by the corner that is called of the Lion, under the shade of the Carmelite’s church? Handsome and reckless still, as when he, Benvenuto, hurled defiance at Diane de Poitiers from the Tour de Nesle, — prince of craftsmen and king of egotists — since his eyes opened to the light in the little house in the Chiara street, full of its flutes and clavecins and harpsichords, its mirrors of silver and its viols of ivory, wherein, in the winter nights, the old father sat “singing all to himself” by his brave oak fires for pride and gladness of heart, because a son was born to him and to the city. He is come to seek the recreant Tonino, — he has left his workshop in the Mercato strewn with grotesques in gold and acanthus leaves in silver, and blazonries in enamel, and lilies in diamonds, and poniards in damascened metal; — the sword that hangs by his belt was red a little while ago in the sack of Rome; — the gold crowns in his pouch are payments for Fontainebleau from King Francis — he is in anger and in haste, yet going thus through the darkness to the ingrate monk he thinks a little wistfully, great artist and reckless liver though he be, of the old days when he and Michelangelo, and Piloto, the goldsmith, used to saunter hither on summer eves to listen to the madrigals when all the dim night world was dewy with the scent of roses.
See there, yet again, — through the gloaming, goes a white-frocked Dominican, with bent head and meditative eyes; of all the many thousand monks in Florence, he is “Il Frate” to the people. When he scourges himself in the crypt, and sees the pictures and the sculptures feed the flames, does he ever sigh for that old bright vine-hung bottega where he woke with the sunrise and worked till the evening bells, when he was only Baccio della Porta, the painter, dwelling just outside the gate here, where the cypresses guard the entrance of that glad green country whose smiling beauty gained it its gentle name of Verzajà even in the dry grim records of the city’s rolls?
Down the old street of the Augustines there comes a group of merry-makers fresh from the laughter and the wine-cups of the supper at the tavern by the Tower of the Amidei away by the Jewellers’ Bridge. They loiter in the moonlight to hearken to the sweet singing of the street-choristers, and note with painters’ eyes one beautiful, gentle, golden curled youth, to whom many a white hand undoes a casement, or lets drop a lovescroll tied with a tress of hair. They are men who are called Michelangelo, and Cellini, and Bugiardini, and Albertinelli, and Manzuolini.
A little while, and Michelangiolo paces the stones alone, with his cloak wrapped about him and his hand ready to his sword-hilt, and his heart heavy for the fate of free Florence; for the bell of the people has long rung a stormo, and his cannon bristle and his bastions rise on the old monastic heights, and the fire has burnt black the shady gardens of Gicciardini, and above them, on the hills where Corsini built the cloisters for the Augustines to dwell in all their days in peace, there the fierce Spaniards are crying, “Lady Fiorenza, bring out your brocades, and we will measure them at the pike’s length;” and there, too, floats that banner which has been for ever the malediction of Italy, on whose yellow folds there is blazoned black,
“l’Aquila grifagna
Che per più divorar due becchi porta;”
In the morning when the birds are singing in the old grey gardens behind the old grey palaces, and the walls lean together and frown against the sun, you, thinking of all these who have trodden the stones before you, shall stray slowly down the Via Maggio — the Street of the Maytime — the street named from the sweet season of the lilies and the lovers in the old amorous days of free Florence, when, with the first morning of May, the youths of the city went forth from the gates by the sunrise, and came back with the spoils of the woods and the fields to the sound of the lute and the viol, and at every grated casement hung up the branch of hawthorn, and the knot of ribbon, and the scroll of love words, each wooer for his own innamorata, so that under the green wreath of leaf and blossom the dark iron-bound walls looked like the helmet and hauberk of Rinaldo flower-decked by the rose trails of Armida on the amorous banks of Orontes. And so musing, you shall pass out by the gates and feel the sweet winds blowing fresh again over the vine-lands of the Vald’ema, and you shall meet a woman carrying white roses with her to lay upon some tomb upon the hill there; and you shall think of the night feast of Pardon, when all Florence was wont to flock up hither under the stars to wash their souls clear before the fall of Pentecost; and so quiet of heart, and yet glad for the beauty of dead days, and of the living summer time, you will go up and up higher and higher till you reach the stillness of the olive-woods upon Arcetri.
Shall you be dull and weary in dark Oltrarno — now?
Nay, not if you have eyes that see, and ears that hear.
But the world is full of deaf and blind.
CHAPTER II.
At Boccaccio’s Window.
I WAS both blind and deaf in that horrible time.
I think a flower, when they break it off its stalk and throw it down to sicken in the sun, must feel as I did all those weeks and months. Only the flower faints and dies, and is so far at peace; but I lived on, though all my youth, and heart, and soul, and hope were killed in me.
It seems so long ago; so very, very long ago; and yet at times near, as though it were only yesterday, that I saw the people sweep past the great gaunt pallor of the Santa Croce, his face in their midst within the reddening light of dawn. The vast yawning dark — the woman with her jewels at her prayers — the gleam of the silver at the altars — the sweet shrill voices of the singing children — the rush of the crowd — the ghostly gleam of day — how near they all are, and yet so far. Sometimes I fancy they were only dreams — dreams, too, all that one glad summer year of wandering — and then I go slowly over the links that bind me to the time, as other women in their pain tell beads.
The links are clear enough, but I can say no prayer to them. My beads are full of thorns, and hurt me — still.
There must be good people, though one doubts it so. A woman saw me fall thrice on the stones before the Florentine Pantheon, and had me borne upstairs to her little chamber before the Misericordia bell could boom for me. She was an old woman, and quite poor; she got her living darning the silken hose of dancers and of ladies; she lived in that little crooked passage-way under the shadow of the Pitti, where old Toscanelli dreamed his way across the unknown waters to the unknown land, and gay Boccaccio, with his cynical fine smile, loitered to see the dames of Florence pass in their gold-fringed litters and their gemmed
zibellinè to the feasts in the Palaces of Bardi and Frescobaldi.
She was a little brown, crisp, clean woman, seventy years old; she had a wide, bare, stone chamber under the unceiled roof; all day long she darned at the stockings, looking now and then out of the window, as Boccaccio had done before her, but seeing no gold-fringed litters and jewelled dames, but only the weary mules, and the pushing people, and the pedlar’s stall of cloth and linen, and the cobbler at his work over the way.
In that barren chamber I lay sick unto death for weeks, talking in so strange a confusion of cities and villages and flowers and singing birds, and the notes of lutes and the shine of the moon on the maize fields, that none who heard could make sense of the medley. There she kept me; there I slowly got my hold again on life as youth will even when most reluctantly; there I recovered in a dull, hopeless, sullen, stupid way; and there the dreamy days would roll away with gleams of the beautiful rose-flecked sky just left to madden one above the frowning palace pile.
The old creature would sit in her garret window sewing on at the silken hose; there was delicate carving all about the window, and a great shield with a marquis’s crown above; it had been a palace in the old days when the San Lorenzo men had set all Oltrarno ablaze from the Niccolò gate to the Frediano. There she would sit and sew; chirping to my dull deaf ears in her Tuscan; she had stories for all the stockings that used to lie in a great mixed heap in a rush basket — the needy duchessa’s with the gay ballerina’s.
“See!” she would say, holding one after another up to the strong light. “See! what a little atom that is — just worn in the ball of the foot with dancing, — a fairy might put it on, and for certain a lover has been glad to stroke it, many and many an hour when the dance was over and done with, and the fire-flies put their lamps out ere the sun rose, and in the balcony where those little feet were, it was all so still — so still.”