by Ouida
A child like that — sixteen years old — and fearless because knowing no evil, and beautiful in her way as the flushed flowers of the rose-laurel.
I dropped like a dead man, they tell me, and when they brought life back to me it came in the form of a raging fever — the only sickness that I ever remember in the whole course of my life.
Little Toccò got leave to tend me, and did it so well that I got over it when the prison leeches had abandoned me as only good for the graveyard. He said that I kept hold of the Fates in my hand all the weeks through; but raved of such a medley of cities and seasons and women’s faces and poets’ fancies, that none were a whit the wiser for what I said.
By the time I was strong again it was the end of my term of captivity. The lad capered and flung his cap for glee when the gates unclosed for us. But as for me, when that flood of dancing sunshine flashed upon my eyes I reeled like a drunken man. For the first time since I had run barefoot after my father’s barrow the translucent living light of my Italy was hateful to me. For how could I tell if the child were living or were dead?
A good and loyal friend of mine was waiting for me, a worker in gold and silver, who dwelt hard by in the old street of the Ghibellines; he lies now in the fields by the village of Magentà.
I staggered into his workshop that day and sat down and felt like a man from beneath whose feet the solid earth splits and opens. I had never suffered greatly in my life before; — except in sympathy for grief outside myself — and be one as philanthropic as one may, one bears the woes of others more lightly than one’s own, — but now I was dulled and dazed with the misery I felt. And misery to me meant utter bereavement in a wider sense of desolation than rich men can know. Misery to me meant famine of the body and the soul and the senses. For if I could no longer laugh at Fortune, I must feel her buffets as the galled jade the lash. And if I had not my light heart to wander with, what wealth had I on the face of the earth! — for it is only by gaiety of heart that one can escape the thorns of the rough hedge-school which is only mirthful in one’s Maytime when the hawthorn buds are fresh in blossom.
Well, they sent me out of Florence that night and forbade me the city. My friends tried to find trace of the child for me in Florence, and I tried hard in the country. But it was all of no use — no use. Some straw-plaiters in Settignano thought that they had seen a young girl in an amber skirt go down the oakwood-path towards the town one feast-day at early dawn. But that was all; and this slender clue broke in our hands and led ns no further than those old oaks under the war-seared Vincigliata.
And the truth of the matter never dawned upon me — never once. All I could think of was that she had heard of my seizure in the Loggia and had tried in her rash innocent fashion to help me, and had so come to some horrible ending by some crime done to her that the guilty doers smothered.
I believe I was quite mad for the time, ranging north and south to find her. But that Brunétta had aught to do with her flight I never thought Men are such fools.
One day in the spring-time I rested a little in a village in Friuli, whilst I was ranging Lombardy and Venetia in the vague hope to hear or find something of my darling.
Brunótta was nothing to me, but how could I send her adrift — a little helpless, ignorant creature like that! She had loved me very much that San Giovanni’s day and every other day afterwards, or at least so she swore twenty times in as many hours. I did not doubt the truth of it; perhaps I was too vain and thought too well of myself to imagine that a little empty-headed rogue out of the Casentino, who could not for her life have read or written her name, would ever be tired of me; of Pascarèl. Anyhow, could I send her adrift? A poor little simpleton whom I had taken for my whim and fancy away from her straw-plaiting and her goat tending, and could do nothing in the world except hop about on her little plump feet, and that too clumsily for any greater theatre than mine?
I had always winced at the sight or the touch of her since I had seen that child’s eyes in the Cathedral square in Verona; but I would not be cruel to her. I had had so many pleasant sunny heedless, foolish days with her, going over the length and breadth of the land in our idle gladsome fashion. Men are tender to women for remembrance’s sake long after all love has died out of them. Brunótta to me was like a little round brown bird out of the woods; I could not wring the bird’s neck just because its homely little song had lost all music to me; I could hardly even fling it down the wind to go its own gait away from me. It was such an innocent little thing, I thought; and if it fell into the fowler’s snare through my abandonment, things would go ill with me.
I joined her and the boys where of their own whim they had set up the Arte in a Friulian village. I wandered carelessly, stupidly, wretchedly, seeking only one thing, and that always vainly. I had ceased to play; the laughter choked me; I did field work when I worked at all, and for the rest I had some few hundred pieces laid by with an old goldsmith in Florence, so that I could keep together the poor little troop, of which the lads and dogs — and the browneyed dancing girl too, as I thought — were all dependent on me for every mouthful of bread.
Pepito and Pepita had been poor stray brutes that I had saved from drowning; Toto had been sentenced to death as dangerous when I had cut his halter one day in Pisa, and showed the Guardia that his madness was nothing more than thirst; Toccò I had taken out of the hell of the galleys; Cocomero had been perhaps the most utterly desolate of all when I had found him in the streets; his father had been a clown, called Flageolet, who travelled with a French circus, and had been killed by a horse’s kick in the ring that very noonday, leaving his son — without a coin in the world and leagues away from his birth-country — to weep his poor cowardly heart out in the burning sun of grim old Rimini.
We waited the night in a little place where a green bough above the door told us we could get wine and bread. It was only a little mountain village, too poor and small to have any regular place of resting. All Friuli is sad and unlovely; if it were not for the glimpses of the Alps away there towards Venice it would be hateful, that desolate historic land that had every rood of it stamped bare by the iron heel of Barbarossa.
This little village lies flat on the grey slope with nothing to break its melancholy and its barrenness where it is swept by the sharp sea winds. The people were poverty-stricken and scraped the arid soil assiduously to get a bare subsistence from their wines and millet It has been incessantly a battlefield in the times of the episcopal wars and of the aggrandizement of Milan, and it seems still as if the torch of war had scorched it sear forever.
Still even here the vine leaves were thick and green, and the grapes were budding in the little pergola, which the poor house that entertained us had managed to stretch out between doorway and garden wall in the teeth of the keen breezes that blow from the lagunes and the chain of the Tirol. In the heat of the noon I sat there, glad of the shelter of the leaves; bitterly sad at heart and tortured with a thousand imaginings of all that might have chanced to that young and pretty thing adrift by herself in the width of the world. I had tried all I knew to trace her and had failed; the madness and the suspense of it were eating away all the life of me. I reproached myself for a million things that I had done and had said and for a million things that I had not done and had not said. I seemed to myself such an utter fool; no better than a man who holds a diamond fit for kings in his hands and lets it slip through his fingers into a foul ditch where the toads can swallow it.
I sat there in the scirocco that blew like a furnace blast over the nakedness of the land; the insects were buzzing and booming in the thickness of the vine leaves; it was two o’clock in the day and quite quiet Presently in the drowsy stillness there came a murmur of voices; one was Brunótta’s. I was so used to hear it humming all the hours through without cessation about millions of little odds and ends that served her for endless discourse, that I heeded it no more than a man who lives on a millstream heeds the noise of the churning water.
The sense of wh
at she was saying drifted to me without my being aware; I heard as it were without hearing; I was so used to the sound of all her little shrill notes piping on by the hour over a mislaid ribbon or a smoked dish of macaroni.
“Pray take more care,” it was saying now with a little stifled terror in it like a scolded child’s. “He would beat me, perhaps, or you, if he got to know. He can be so violent when he is cheated.”
“Why not let us run away?” whispered another voice, and this time it was the voice of my eighteen-year-old Coco. “You are afraid of him — afraid of your ears of him since that dreadful night the donzella went, and we do cheat him, as you say, and, when one thinks, it is not well — why not let us run away, right away?”
“How could we live? We have not a bit of talent hardly, you and I, and it would be very bad to starve,” said Brunétta. The practical objection always comes from the woman.
“But then if you love me?” murmured Coco; the man, you see, is always such an enthusiast, and always thinks that love is meat and drink.
“Oh, I love you best a thousand times,” cried Brunétta. “I used to think I loved him, and so I did, and specially whilst I was jealous of the donzella. But you see Pascarèl is too great for me. He is always doing and saying some wonderful thing, and all that cleverness tires one; it is like walking on the tight rope — don’t you know? I can do that; but I am always so glad to jump down, so sick of being up so high. Pascarèl is just like the tight rope to me. But you are such another simpleton as myself, as one may say; and you are just my age, and you like to romp about and stuff your mouth with fruit and make an ass of yourself just as I do, and besides you have sworn you would go before the priest with me, and I should like to show my old foster-mother the ring on my finger — just to spite her — and besides I do love you, Coco mio!”
And with that she kissed him where these lovers stood together upon the other side of the vine leaves.
I thought it time to rise and walk out of the pergola. Brunétta screamed and dropped upon her knees. Coco was as white as his ghost, and his limbs trembled under him.
I soon put them out of their misery.
“My dear children,” I said to them quietly, “instead of cheating me, why not have trusted me? Instead of deceiving me behind my back, why not have said all this to my face? You are two little fools, as Brunétta has sensibly said, and you have succeeded in tricking a man who thinks himself no fool. The wiseacre is always served quite rightly in such cases. How long has this been going on — some months? Oh, I might have guessed that you had learned too many comedies by heart not to act them to your own profit some day. I might have wished indeed that it had been anybody but Coco — but after all, that is the merest sentimentality. You owe me so much? Altro! what of that? Ever since the world began, that has been only a reason for the debtor to pay his debts by making a dupe if he can. If you wish to marry this poor lad, Brunétta, pray do, I will not stop you. It will be very bad for him, but that is his affair — not mine. I have a thousand lire in Florence put by, that I always intended for you whenever we should wish to part company. Set up in life with it as best pleases you both, and only take my advice in one thing — never talk secrets close to a pergola in full leaf.”
And they did as I told them, and went before the priest, and bought a little piece of land with my money, two leagues beyond the Frediano Gate by Florence.
Coco indeed crawled at my feet and wept and cursed himself, and was all for not touching one of the thousand pieces. Men have so much more conscience and so much less common sense than women. But Brunétta persuaded him out of those scruples, and chose the little bit of ground herself, and selected as the mission and fulfilment of her life the fatting of the finest turkeys in all Valdarno, which had indeed, she confessed, been all her life-long the secret and chief ambition of her dreams.
No doubt it is a thing to be duly thankful for when a little girl who has helped one to filer le parfait amour for a few foolish seasons takes to so decorous an end for herself as marriage and fat turkeys. It is a much more agreeable reflection than the water-lilies of Ophelia or the prison bed of Marguerita are to their lovers; and rids one of all responsibilities clearly. It would be manifestly absurd to reproach a man with having broken his mistress’s heart or blasted her youth and her peace, when who will may see her plump and busy jogging on the Pisan road upon her mule and selling poultry under a green umbrella hard against the Strozzi pile any market day at noontide. Still — such is the vanity of man, I suppose — one scarcely likes a little brown egg-wife to play the traitress to one with a poor scamp like Cocomero. And to have lost all that I lost through that little silly false-tongued thing is bitter — very bitter — sometimes.
For, when they were fairly married out of anybody’s power to part them, and when the little bit of land had been made their own where the roses nod over the high dusty walls as you go up to the place where Amo’s fury overthrew Castruccio’s plans in the old times whilst all the glad Valdarno was a smoking ruin, when all, I say, was quite safe and sure with them, Coco, who was not a bad lad at heart, though timorous and deceitful, as it proved, came and threw himself at my feet and lay there on the ground as a beaten spaniel might, and bemoaned himself that he had got a thing to confess to me.
“Say on,” I said to him. “If it be a new villany, make a clean breast of it. My dogs will not bite me, but they are the only things whose life one can save without being made to rue for it.”
That was a harsh saying of mine, no doubt, but I was mad with pain of which I could say nothing to any creature, at not finding any trace of the donzella, and even this little miserable treachery of the lad Coco, whom I had befriended as far as I had been able ever since I had found him sobbing in the sun in Rimini, had cut me a little; one is always so weak in those things.
And then Coco, weeping like a child, confessed to me with sore terror that it was no fault of his own that he had now to tell, but one of Brunótta’s which he had known long before, but had never dared to relate until she was surely bound to him, being foolishly fond of her, poor lad, and having set his silly heart on having her for his wife and dwelling with her on that dusty rood of land towards Signa. But now that she was fairly his own, and could no more fly away from him than his land could, and he was sensible that he was seeing the last of me, and had broken our fellowship by a piece of ingratitude for which he was sorely repentant, plucked up his heart and told me what he knew, and of how she had betrayed me that autumn evening under the vines below Fiesole. And so I learned at the last why it was that I had received back my onyx. Coco, I think, was terrified at the effect on me of his revelation; for when I came to myself he was grovelling at my feet and beseeching me not to kill Brunòtta; and indeed in that moment if she had come before me I could not have answered for myself very surely. These foolish vile things sting so deep — so deep — and then we are to let them alone because they are foolish and vile, forsooth! It is hard to hold one’s hand sometimes.
He told me word for word as he had overheard it all, that scene under the vine by the Badià; and I needed no more to tell me the reason that the Fates had come back to me. And I had never once in the wildest of my fancies imagined that Brunótta had been to blame. I had never once in my sharpest pain suspected that Brunótta had been lying when she had run weeping out of the Fruilian shadows to lament to me for the loss of the donzella. No, I had never dreamed that her jealousy had been at work, and that her rain of tears was all a lie; never once! men are such fools.
Well, it was over and done, and there was no help for it, and the poor foolish lad crouched aghast at his work at my feet I bade him never let me see their faces again; and then I turned away and left the village as the sun set; and went where chance might take me. What did it matter? — the world seemed as empty to me as a shrivelled gourd. To me — Pascarèl — to whom the world had always been as full of red colour and of pungent flavour as any pomegranate that one cuts open in the first heats of April weather. The thin
g was over and done, I say, and as far as I know, the issue of it might have been that the child had already drifted dead down some mountain river, and the fair white body of her have been already thrust unshriven amongst the nameless and the lost in the marble desolation of some Campo Santo.
WE Italians love the soil, I think, more closely than other nations. I, wanderer though I have been all my days, I always want to tread again the grey Macigno after I have had the Alps awhile betwixt myself and Florence. One wants the light too; the dreamful radiance of the skies, that is neither so intense nor so blue, nor yet either so glittering as the poets and painters will make it, but is an endless ecstasy of light — light clear and pure and gentle, always soft, always silvery rather than golden; always tender and dreamful, like the eyes of a woman who lies awake and remembers the kisses of her lover.
So I came back here to the city so soon as my time of exile was ended, with little hope that she were living, but solely from long habit and love of the soil.
And as I entered the town, the people got hold of me, and would fain feast and welcome me, and bore me in the midst of them all down the old Oltrarno. And then — up on high, behind a barred casement against the corner of the Lion’s Mouth — I saw her face, and then —
Well, then the sins and follies of my old life smote me from the lightning of the child’s eyes of scorn; and she spoke words I merited, no doubt, but still such words as one cannot hear even from a woman twice; and so I saw my duty plain before me, and did it, though late in the day, no doubt.
It was long and tedious labour to find her father, more especially because I had to earn my daily bread, whilst I sought for him, by any such handicraft or labour of the roads as came to my share in the bitter, joyless, strange countries where the people only saw in me a travel-stained vagrant with a brown skin and a foreign tongue.