by Ouida
Should the lips that had touched hers seek mine again? should the man who could sink to that baseness of a sensual bondage kneel at my feet and pray to me for union of my soul with his?
I dared not trust myself to look on him; I flung my head back, and strained against the all-compelling force of his embrace.
“You talk — you talk — you talk — as poets do!” I cried to him, in my vain, bitter, childish rage. “It is your art, your trade! You string the terza rima for a brazierfull of contadini’s pence — any night they ask you — at a village fair. A poet — you, who for three years could find companionship in such as she; who, for all those seasons could stay unshamed and show yourself upon your stage ‘beside her like your own dancing dog beside its chained and collared mate! I will not hear you — no! It is too late. Go to her — go! Since once you found your level with her, keep it. It is too late, I say: — words? — oh, yes! They are your art; I know. You can make men weep, and laugh at them in your sleeve. You can make children laugh; and you all the while as weary and sad as death. That is your trade, to lie. A little lie or two — one more or less — what does it signify? You dupe a woman — what of that? It is your art to fool the world with the sham artifice of every counterfeit emotion. Practise on every fool that loves you — her or me, or any other — what does it matter? you are still upon your stage!”
He loosed his arms from round me and rose slowly, staggering a little in the dusky shimmer of the shadows and the moonbeams. There was a look upon his face that I had never seen there. God forgive me! So, I think, must a man surely look who gets his death-blow straight through flesh and bone, and lives a second’s space to look death in the face.
“You say that — you?” he murmured; and then was still, resting his eyes upon my own in an unspoken reproach, that pierced me like a knife thrust through my heart.
“Yes, I say it — I — why not)” I cried to him, stung by remorse at the pain I dealt, and yet driven on by what I deemed my wrongs. “Have I not seen you, heard you, watched you a hundred times if once, playing at any passion that you would) Of course it was so easy to cheat me, a child that trusted you, and took your every word as a fixed law of God’s! From first to last you know that you deceived me; from the day you gave me the gold florins, to the night you said you loved me. If you had loved me, would you have let me live in that paradise of falsehoods for one single hour) Would you not rather have sought for me my father and my kindred? I come of a great race; I told you so; somewhere in the world live people who would own and shelter me, people who would lift me up into some light of fair repute and of known dignity. If you had loved me, that is the thing you would have done; I being too young, and poor, and simple, and ignorant to be ever able to do it for myself: you boast of honour; you say you are the last of a once mighty line, though only now a wandering player; if it were so, if you were worthy of the loyalty and love those people in the streets give to you for their country’s sake, would you have let your feet rest or your eyes close until you should have given me some firm, straight place in life, some hold upon my kith and kin, some knowledge of my heritage? For me it is impossible; but for you to have done that, how easy! Then, indeed, I might have said you loved me.”
He was quite quiet as he listened. Men are so generous — oh, heaven, yes, how generous — for only think how rare it is that ever a man will strike a woman? And they, themselves, daily, hourly, incessantly stung, and bit, and galled, and chained by scorpion words and adder kisses! Men are so generous; he was so. He never once lifted up his voice and said, as he might have said so justly: “And what title had I to serve and save you? Why did I not leave you as I found you, a beggar in the ilex wood that day?”
He was quite quiet All the glow and eagerness and fervour of passion had died off his face; it grew cold, and colourless, and still, with the impenetrable stillness of an Italian face that masks all pain.
“No doubt you are right,” he said, gravely. “It would have been better had I done so. But, — you doubt I loved you, — I?”
In lieu of such a gentle word as that, why did he not throw me down under his feet, and cast on me his goodness and his grace, his tender thoughtfulness and patient care of me, like coals of fire on my vain, foolish cruel head? If men set their heel more often on what is weak and worthless, I think women might be better than they are; God knows.
All my old perfect love for him, all my old perfect faith in him, welled up in my faint heart and almost broke the forces of my bitter vanity and greed. Almost, but not quite; for what I knew, might he not have come to me fresh that very night from the babbling lips and the brown hands of his old toy?
I was passionate with woman’s passion; I was cruel with children’s cruelty.
“Why should I believe you?” I cried to him. “You have let me believe a lie — once!”
His face flushed crimson, then grew very pale under its olive darkness. I think he looked as a dead man must do. He shrank a little as though one had struck him a blow, a blow that he could not return.
“You have a right to reproach me as you will,” he said very gently. “And how should you know, how should you know?”
A heavy sigh ran through the words and made them barely audible. He looked at me very long, very wistfully, with no passion in his eyes, only a despair, that was so great that it chilled me into speechless terror. For it was so unlike himself, or at least I thought so in my ignorance. He paused a moment, looking so.
A convulsion of longing seized me to throw myself into his arms and cling to him for ever, for ever, for ever, forgetting all and all forgiving. But I was a child; I was fierce, I was ignorant, I was wayward, and I had been wounded in the one sweet, sacred, perfect faith of my short life. I stood there silent and unyielding; my burning eyes were tearless, my scornful mouth was mute.
There must have been that in my attitude, or in my look, or in my silence, that stung him like some insult, for the blood flashed back into his face, and he raised himself with his old dauntless and grand gesture.
“Even you shall not say that twice,” he murmured. “I will serve you in other ways, God willing, but you shall not see my face again. Farewell.”
Before I had measured the force of what he had said he had gone; turned away and passed from sight.
A single step, a single cry would have called him back. But I stood motionless and silent still; and let him go: O God!
The clamorous people thronging the staircase and the stairs, filled the night with their loud outcries. I called him back, but all in vain; my voice was drowned in the tumult as a child’s death-cry in a storm at sea.
CHAPTER IV.
Dead Roses.
THIS was in the week that followed upon Pasquà.
The summer months went by, and I neither counted them nor knew what they were bringing.
The days and nights passed by in an agony, at times fierce and at others dull, but always agony like that of a gunshot wound which burns like a flame one hour and aches like a bruise another.
The face of Pascarèl I never saw; and once when little Tista went by and Giùdettà asked him what was become of the wild fellow for whom he had made her burn her lamp all night, Tista called up to her sadly, “He is out of the city, mother; and we are flat as ditch water — all of us.”
I never stirred out; — never once.
I thought that it would make me mad to see the sun shine upon his Florence — and I did not fear death, but I feared madness.
I had seen it once, in a beautiful dark woman in old Ferrara, whose lover had been swept down in the winter floods and drowned before her eyes, and she was forever walking to and fro along the water’s edge and calling to it to give up her ‘Dino;T had seen her pacing there crying forever the one name when the sun was up, as when the moon was high; she was sacred in Ferrara; the rudest ruffian of the streets would not have touched dead’Dino’s “Pazza.” And sometimes I feared — in the hush of the night I often feared — that I should be just like her. F
or all I said, ever, and ever, and ever, was just one name, as she did, — only I said it in my heart, — and no one heard.
I never stirred out — as I say.
Often Giùdettà strove to take me with her to Sta. Spirito, and draw me out to see the humour of the streets; but week by week, and month by month dragged on, and I stayed there by the cold hearth and saw the hand’s breadth of blue sky burn above the palace roof, and prayed — as far as I ever prayed — to have an end made to my pain in death.
But death, like other gifts, comes not for our asking.
One morning, as I lay there upon my bed, old Giù detta drew her stocking off her arm, put down her spectacles, and looked at me with her brown Tuscan eyes.
“Do you know that it is the Ascension week, and we are now in June?” she asked me suddenly.
I shook my head wearily; what to me was the flight of time, or the advent of summer?
“I have seen sixty-eight summers come and go,” she said, after a pause.
I did not answer.
“Sixty-eight summers,” she said again. “There was a time with me when the sight of the sun and the smell of the flowers made me sick — soul and body — as you are.”
I heard her, but her words were nothing to me. I should not have heeded in these days, I think, the roar of flames, or thunders of a flood.
“Listen to me a little,” said Giùdettà, and she turned her round on her oaken stool and sat with the sun touching the grated panes above her old white head. She was a little tender old soul, forever chirping on her lonely hearth like a little brown grillo, and very good and patient with me, and I all the while brutally thankless. “Listen a little. You young things think no one was ever born before you; it seems so new to you, all you suffer. You are wrong. Listen. When I was fourteen I was a dancer at the opera-house here; — like these girls I mend for, only I had prettier feet than they. I was a simple, honest, happy thing; dancing for my bread and my mother’s, and thinking no harm, and doing none. I danced a couple of years; heart whole and content, though I never got in the front, or made over half a paul a-night.
People all said I was pretty. Perhaps I was, as a robin is. One Carnival night, as I ran home in the snow, I slipped and fell down on Carraria bridge; it was very bad in those days. A passer-by picked me up and carried me home, for I was light of weight, and had sprained my foot, so I could not stand. There was no dancing for me for weeks. He came to see how it fared with me; came often; he was a nobleman, and a soldier; a Francese, too. Before the vines were in flower we had got to love one another. Some-people shook their heads at me, but that did not matter; no man had touched so much as my hand till he kissed it. That year — well, I thank the good God for it. One can live on a year. He would have given me all manner of great and rich things. But I said, ‘No, no, no; if I take a paul of yours, what shall I be better than the rest?’ And all he ever gave me was a few knots of roses. I have got them. They will be put in my coffin with me. When the year was lived out, — I thank the dear God for that year, — there were war and trouble, and that great one they called Napoleone was in his death-struggle, so they talked. Then my love came to me and said, ‘See, he was my chief, and I owe him much, and I cannot let him fall and I not there. You are the light of my eyes, Giùdettà, but what can I do when my honour speaks?’ I tried all I could to speak to him. For honour — that sounds so hard to us women. We do not see it; and it is always set against us; and we have no share with it; and we hate it, I think. But all I could do did not stir him. ‘If I come not back in a year’s space I am dead in battle,’ he said. Then he kissed me for the last time and went. Napoleone was ruined and put?n chains; that they said; but he — he never came back — not at that year’s end, nor any other’s. And never a word have I had. It is near fifty years now. Never a word — dear God. People made a mock of me, and cried, ‘A fine lover! — he was only tired, and fooled thee!’ But I never answered them back. I knew he was dead, or he would have come. What use was it to have loved him if one had not such little faith as that?”
Her voice shook a moment, and dropped into silence; it was all still in the chamber; the gold sunbeams shone through the gratings and cast an aureole on her old bent head.
After awhile, she took up her tale again.
“There were times I was mad, and was nigh throwing my body in the river, and making an end, but I thought the good God would not let me meet him in Paradise if I did that. So I went on and on, and bore with my life. I never danced again — no, no, — it was not for others to look on what he had used to call fair. I took to mending the magliè and the hose, as I do now, just getting bread; that was all. My poor old mother lived a long while. She used to fret herself, and curse me. I was good to look at, and there were many men of our quarter here wanted me — all in marriage and honesty. And my mother could not see why I shook them off all for a bad man, and a dead one, or as good as dead,’ she would say — she did not know. She lived a long while here; — yes, here; — I was born in this room. I shall die in it. He used to want me to change to some fine villa up in the orchards and gardens; but I always said no; — if I had taken an ounce of silver from him, I should have felt he had bought my kisses. I only took the roses, — I have them safe, — they will put them in my coffin with me. So many, many, many years I used to look out at this window to watch for him coming down the street, as he used to do, just at nightfall, as the moon came up over the old palace there. I go and look still — still — and I always think I shall see him just the same, just as young and light of foot as he was then. And it is fifty years ago — fifty years this Carnival.”
She was silent; the sunbeams fell through the grating on to the stone floor. She drew her stocking on her arm again, and worked on and on, on and on.
I shivered where I lay.
Fifty years! and always alone thus!
My life looked ghastly to me, seen by the light of this corpse candle that shone over these buried lives.
Should I live to be as old — always alone — always alone — live to tell my tale calmly, sitting in the evening light?
If I had had strength, I think, in that moment’s agony, I should have yielded to the temptation that had in her youth beset Giùdettà, and have gone out into the streets, and flung myself into the full flood of the mountain-shed Amo water.
Swift death! fierce death! how fair and pitiful it looked beside these fifty lonely years passed in poverty and pain under the strong summer suns and all the driving winter blasts!
“And did you never doubt him — never doubt that he lived and was faithless to you?” I asked her, roused out of my apathy and isolation into a faint passing sense of some human interest.
She looked at me with eyes a little angered and more surprised, and paused in her work, the stocking on her arm.
“Doubt him! But, bambina mia, you have not understood. I had loved him and belonged to him; how could I ever doubt him — after that?”
The answer burnt me with a hot, sharp shame.
She was an old ignorant woman — one of the very poor; she could not read or write; she had no knowledge of any sort; she had a child’s eagerness for seeing feasts and pastimes; she would gossip by the hour with the people in the street about any passing trifle of the town; she was a little homely, harmless, hard-working body, who went to pray in great white Santo Spirito in a dumb, dog-like, wistful, pagan sort of faith; she was the gossip of the washerwoman over the way, and the crony of the cobbler at his stall in the road below; she was only old Giùdettà, the mender of the dancers’ magliè; and yet, shut up, unseen in the rude, wrinkled, weather-worn rind of her rough life, there was hidden the pure white heart of this notile and deathless faith!
Beside her I seemed in my own sight to fall away worthless and rootless — with neither love nor faith.
This was such love as he had dreamed of, there on the star tower, in the days of spring — the love that sees as God sees, and, has pardon and pity, wide as the width of heaven.
/> It had not been in me; young, with the years Love loves, and dreaming with glad eyes against the sun, and fleet feet, light as a blown leaf upon a world of flowers. It was in her, poor, old, and utterly alone; — whose solitary hope on earth was that a dead rose should lie with her in her grave: — a rose dead fifty summers.
CHAPTER V.
Under the White Lion.
GIUDETTA found time betwixt the mending of the magliè to do many a little helpful act for her poor brethren and neighbours. She was always moving about at such times, as the hose she had to mend were not so many that they occupied all her time from sunrise on to midnight. But one August day, going down the seventy odd stairs of the old house she dwelt in, she slipped and twisted her foot under the brass pail that she was carrying for water to the well below.
She was a helpful, stout-hearted soul, and bore it well, and contrived to do for herself and me, and even to make the little frugal meals all the same. But she could not move beyond the church to which she went nightly at vespers; and her neighbour’s child had to run hither and thither over the town to fetch and carry home the stockings that were her only source of income.
I should have done this, no doubt; but I was too deeply sunk in the apathy of pain to notice any duty. Nevertheless, one day, when the little lad was later in than usual, she so begged of me to take homeward some magliè, without which the poor dancer waiting for them would be unable to make her appearance at the summer theatre that night, that a vague sense of the shamefulness of my own absorption stirred in me; and, the hour being close on evening-time, and the streets already dusk, I wrapped myself closely in an old dark-hooded cloak of hers, and for the first time in six months and more, went out into the air.