by Ouida
I stood and listened: the flicker of the oil-lamp on my face, and on my ear the eager headlong torrent of my old friend’s words.
Little by little — very slowly — the truth dawned on me.
My bidding had been done; and fortune came to me.
Then, in a passion of weeping, I wrenched myself from Florio’s hands and cast myself face downwards on the bare stones of the floor.
Great? great?
Oh, God! what use was that?
Only to wander once again light of heart and of foot in the sweet Tuscan summer when the magnolias bloomed on the wide hillside and the lilies were blue in the vine-shadowed grasses — only to wander so once again with my hand held in his and his kiss on my cheek! What use were the greatness of kings to me?
I was left that night and day with old Giùdettà, and Fiorio went and came a hundred times, bringing me silks and satins, and jewels, and sweetmeats, and pretty painted toys, and all manner of rich dainty things, to be a surety to me of my new-won wealth; and he, good merry soul, full of joy and glory to the brim at the wondrous fortunes of the man to whom he had clung through every evil chance of penury and shame, he could not comprehend, but was sorely wounded because I would not look on any of the treasures, but turned my face to the wall and kept crying: “Take me back to dear Mariuccia — take me back.”
For it seemed to me, a brave glad child by nature, and therefore the more utterly unnerved and passionbeaten under my great pain, that the only real good that life could do me would be to take me back ‘again to that old innocent despised home, where the lizards had sported under the broken Donatello, and the crack of the bean shells had struck sharp on the silence.
All that I could have any sense to hear was when he spoke of Pascarèl, and this he did often; because the story seemed strange to him.
“It is odd,” said he, “that you have chanced on that wild-living fellow. Ah, dear donzella, I knew him so long long ago — when you were not born — a clever rascal, playing with French people who strolled through Savoy. They used to say, even then, that he might be a famous artist, and a rich one, if he chose.
“But he never chose. He is a vagabond at heart That is certain. But I suppose he dealt with you as well as he could; for my lord, your father, let him go without rebuke, nay — seemed to be rebuked by him, if one might say so without disrespect “And of a surety he showed judgment and honour in never letting you be seen on his wandering stage. I suppose he did as well by ‘you as he could, since you do not complain. But it was a terrible fate for a little illustrissima like you. And your father says that you are not to breathe one word, of it “If you could have seen that fellow Pascarèllo sweeping through us all as light and as swift and as fierce as a panther, all dusty and travel-stained, and very pale, and with a strange light in his eyes, and calling aloud to see your father, with all haughtiness and insistance as though to be sure he were a prince himself, as some folks say his ancestors were in this Tuscany.
“Yes, to be sure it was strange: to see that clever rogue, last in his booth, in a little sea town on the Corniche making a hundred fisher people split their sides with laughter; and then next to find him a dozen years later calling out like a king to have speech with your father, all that way away in the northern islands — it is strange enough surely.
“And the people were so terrified at him because of his imperious way and his language, that was all unknown to them. But it was good of him, that I will always say, and I think only an Italian would have done it; to take all that pains and trouble to trace your father; and it was no slight work, such a change having come to our fortunes. A selfish man, dear donzella, would have been tempted to keep that pretty face of yours to deck his stage for him; and a mean one would have looked for some vast recompense. But Pascarèl — your father is a great noble now and has been a very bold person always, but I think he would no more have dared to offer a reward to Pascarèllo than a boy would have dared to face the Rè Satana.
“And it is very piteous to see you with your little white handsome face always shivering and weeping, though it is bright sunshine like this.
“Pascarèl said, I think, that he lost you when he got caged in Bargello; and I suppose, though this good soul has done her best by you, still you have been half starved and very wretched.
“Never mind, carina; you will be so great now — so very, very great, and when we have got the roses back into your cheeks again you will have all the world at your feet For even miserable as you look, my darling, you are very handsome still — beautiful, if one could get that haunted look out of your eyes.”
So he would speak, and I would listen, my heart breaking as I heard. And I could see it all, — so well, so well, — in that dreary misty land that I had never trodden, in those towering castles of my father’s race, that were set seawards against the clouds and billows of the vexed Gaelic water. I could see it all, the steel-hued waves, the grey bare country, the towering skies, the heavy pomp, the sullen northern crowds, and amidst it all the proud and wayward grace, the rapid voice, the lustrous eyes, the fearless eloquence of the Italian, dropped amidst them in utter unlikeness like a pomegranate flower shaken down on winter-withered bracken.
I could see it all, and broke my heart with vain-spent weeping at the thought of it.
In face of all my cruel words he had left his country and his people, and his free and simple life, and had gone northward in my service, maintaining himself doubtless by hard toil — for he was poor.
And I had driven him away, and said that I would never see his face again, — for what? For that poor little fickle traitorous thing who had screamed to her roosting birds there at sunset on the Signa road.
When Fiorio had left me that night in Giùdettà’s garret to sleep my last hours under its kindly shelter, for which I had been so thankless always, I sat and thought, and thought, and thought, till I was mad staring at the blue summer sky above the piled black roof of dark Oltrarno.
Giùdettà came and looked at me and put her hands gently on my bowed head.
“You are going to great people and great things, dear little lady,” she said gently; “well, no doubt the world must be very fine for those who are rich and full of might in it As for me I cannot tell, I have darned magliè here by the Bocca di Lione all my days. But I do not know rightly what is amiss with you. You have never spoken. But if you have ever loved one man do not ever try to love another. No. Not if it be ever so. So only can you ever live and die pure of heart and pure of body. That I know, though I have only mended magliè all my years in Florence.”
Then she bade the Mother of God bless me, and left me in the twilight and went to her vespers in the Church of the Dove as her wont had ever been for seventy years at evening-tide, when there was no longer any light to draw together the silken threads.
I was alone, in the shadows that deepened and deepened till the brown front of the palace grew black and the streets had only little gleaming stars of flame where the people’s oil lamps flickered.
When it was quite night there came a little knock at the door; a pretty barefooted child stood there with a great knot of roses.
She crossed the floor and brought them to me.
They were the same sweet snowy beautiful things that had come to me at day-dawn after the Veglione. Round them was a roll of paper, and on it was written only: “Be happy. Farewell.”
I crushed them to me as mothers crush their dying children in their arms, and my hot tears burned them like dropping fire.
This Was the end? the end of all? Was the old sweet life of that Tuscan summer dead and gone then for evermore! Should never I see a blue lily bloom in its lowly grass nest without this sickness of soul upon me! Should never I smell the fresh scent of the vines and drink the magnolia breaths on a moonlight night, without this madness of memory that is worse than all death. Was this the end! the end of all!
BOOK VII. THE FIELD OF FLOWERS.
CHAPTER I.
His Story.
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THE villa stands amongst the hills.
It is four hundred years old. The broken sculptures on the terrace walls are all the shields of the great race that once reigned here. The chapel is changed into the chief reception room; it is long and lofty, and has a high vaulted ceiling, painted with frescoes of the Paradise; through its one vast window at the end there is a mass of silver shining; it is so beautiful and luminous and strangely white that nothing could compare with it except newly-fallen snow upon the Alps, — yet, go closer and look, it is only the plum trees in blossom there, beyond the wall, above the lily-filled grasses.
Out yonder in the rough simple gardens, where all that whiteness shines, you can see the towers of the city rising amongst the olives far below; nearer glisten the marbles of the old Monte Croce Church amongst the cypresses; farther than all, away there in the north there is Vallombrosa; the pinewoods at that distance are like cool blue shadows, and above them there is still snow, white as these fruit blossoms that the wind shakes against your hair.
A great artist has made his dwelling here; there under those roof arches of green leaf is his open air studio. On the old stone terrace there is a litter of brushes and sketches, and books open at a verse of Dante or a page of Boccaccio. Beneath, in violet clusters, lies a mandoline. Under the ilex darkness stands a contadino; he has a wreath of golden tinted laurel in his hand; he has been a model for a study from the Decamerone. A window is half open into a chamber within; through the space there gleams the deep rose of a velvet curtain, and the ebony of an old cinquecento portrait frame. Within doors a sweet strong voice is singing half aloud a fishing song of Naples. Who sings like that? oh, only little Gillino, the gardener’s lad, who is plucking the dead leaves off the trellis work in the open court there, beyond the doors.
Save for Gillino’s singing and a little tremulous note from the mandoline, as a lizard runs across its strings there is not a sound on the sunny stillness of the day.
The artist paints on in silence under the ilex shade; the contadino erect before him with the sun full on his yellow jerkin and his black straight brows, and the tawny leaves of the winter-gilded laurel.
I, Pascarèl, come up through the fields where thousands of yellow daffodils are blowing and the peach blossoms are scattered by millions on the grass; come through the fields and vault the low walls and stand by the painter’s side.
“You would make a much better Panfilo,” said the artist, looking up with a smile of welcome. “Take Giacone’s place and let him go to his vines.”
The peasant goes, nothing loth to be liberated, and I take up the laurel bough and stand with the sun in my eyes.
“I am not young enough for Panfilo.”
“You are young enough for anything,” says the artist. “You will never be old.”
So the painter paints on, and his Pamffilio stands there while the golden daffodils blow in the fields, and the city shines far down below, beyond the light clouds of the olive foliage.
Shall I never be old? — I, Pascarèl? I felt very old to-day before I came up here amongst the white plum trees. I felt very old as I walked through the Frediano Gate this morning, across the Grève river, towards Signa, for where the red roses were nodding over the field walls, I met a little woman on a black mule with a great crate full of cackling poultry, and she was as plump as a guinea-pig, and was hung about with big cabbages in nets, and she screamed shrilly to her mule as she beat him. And she looked at me and started a little and crossed herself, and beat her mule afresh to hurry onward. Then I felt old.
Only the other day it seems she was a little round rosy laughing thing in the boat on the river, when the fireworks flashed red against the blue night sky; then she learned to dance the saltarello with the frolic of a kid, and her lips were like two cherries — only the other day!
Now, — on the Feast of the Dead that November morning, I was heavy of heart as I went along down into Florence. For what could I say, I thought, to my darling whom I had wooed and won? It seemed to me that for an honest man who had tried his best to do right I had come as near to looking like a scoundrel as might be. I would never judge men again, that I swore to myself; for there was I who had suffered more than I cared to confess to myself for the fair face of that child, and had curbed and controlled myself in a way altogether novel to me, here was I who had endeavoured with all my might to do well by her, here was I, I say, become as nearly like a rogue, turn it which way I would, as a man can well become through the love of woman. And what a large latitude that is, all men know without my telling them.
And how I loved her? dear God! Well, what use was that?
I saw my way none the clearer for it as I stumbled down the stony road from Marco Vecchio, not being willing to see the donzellai two soft radiant eyes until I had faced the perplexities before me and solved them.
For how could I tell her the truth? And how could I tell her what was not the truth? One was as hard as the other.
Chance solved the question for me as it does often for most of us.
For when I got down into Florence that day there was a storm in the air. All about old bronze Porcellino, and in the square of the Signoria the people were clustering with dark words and darker brows, and it wanted but a touch of the match to the tinder to have had a day of darkness and bloodshed. There had been aggression and irritation, and they were sharp on the edge of revolt; and I knew the time was not ripe, and that they would only fill the graveyard and prison, and I took their leadership, for they always loved me, and one must do one’s best for Florence, and I spoke to them from the old Loggia as worthier men than I had done in older times; and so held them in hand all that day, and saved, as I may say without boasting, their bodies from shot and steel, and the city herself from feud and from flame. And at sunset for my pains I was arrested and borne away to the Bargello Tower, and when I asked my crime was told that I had harangued the people and incited them to tumult.
Old Porcellino knew better, but being of bronze he could not bear witness, and the people who could were not listened to; so in the Bargello I lodged that night amongst thieves and murderers, not able even to send so much as a word to the Capanna above Marco Vecchio, and fretting my soul bitterly because of the trouble I knew must be there on account of my unexplained absence.
The only thing I could hope was that some noise of the tumult and of my own arrest would be taken up the hills by some villager or another going home from the market in Florence.
On the morrow, quite early, they moved me from the Bargello for judgment; and the people wanted to rescue me, and were wild for a little space; but I begged of them to keep quiet, for the soldiery were strong, and I wished no Tuscan blood shed about me — a straw, a bubble, a player. The tribunal condemned me to three months of prison.
It was not the first time by half-a-dozen. I had seen the solitudes of Spielberg, and I had heard the water wash the dungeons of Venice, and I had been quartered with the rats in old Vicenza, and had spent a few dreary weeks behind the fortress of San Leo, high above the rent and rocky land, on the bare peak against the blaze of the skies. For I had never been behindhand wherever the people had been moved against the Princes, and for many a rash word spoken in my Arte the feeble Dukes and the powerful Tedeschi had alike been adverse to me.
But that day the sentence fell on me like a thunderbolt Before, it had been only myself that had suffered when the prison gates had closed on me; I was without a tear, without a pang; I laughed when I went in, I laughed when I came out What was I that I should complain of what Boethius and Tasso had endured? But now — now I fear they saw that they hurt me, for what could my song-bird do, homeless and friendless in the snows of the winter, that were so soon to drive down through the open gates of the Apennine gorges’?
I was heartsick that day as they took me through the old familiar streets in the noon-day sun back to the Bargello Tower, and for the moment I was remorseful that I had not allowed those streets to run with blood at daybreak when the
people had clamoured for me.
For it is a bitter thing — perhaps as bitter as life holds — when you hear the bolts grate in their sockets, shutting you out from the living world, and know that for want of you that world may be worse than hell itself to some helpless female thing that is all adrift in it like a young bird in a storm. For there you are in your iron cage, and your bird may beat her breast till death release her, and you cannot touch her through the bars.
For many days I heard nothing and could send no word, and so fretted my soul in sickly desperation, as many worthier men had done before me.
Somewhere about the twelfth day little Toccò came, having wrenched down a lamp-iron and done some other naughtiness to get taken to prison and have a chance to be near me — poor dear little lad — for this was his notion of loving one, and a notion so loyal that one could hardly believe that he had ever been born of a woman.
Toccò delivered me many messages from Brunótta, and weeping and frightened brought out from round his little brown throat my old onyx ring with the Fates.
Then I knew what I had lost; I knew before he had told me that the child had fled away, none knowing why nor whither, in the dusk of that very day when they had arrested me in the Loggia of the Free Lances.
What had driven her away? I could not tell. Nor for one moment did I dream that the sin was Brunótta’s — men are such fools. I thought that in some manner she must have heard of my peril and have flown down the hillside in her wild innocent childish impulse to aid me, and so had come to some terrible woe in the city; and been killed perhaps — or worse. Who could say?