by Ouida
She was ready for a costume ball. She came out on to the balcony — just so, — the sun was setting. I sketched the scene, and showed it to her on the morrow. So the picture grew. And, now, what shall I call it? Not her name, she will not have it. It might be the ‘tanta rossa’ of Dante: or, I thought, of the mistress of Giorgione; she might have looked just so upon his balcony in Venice; and the lute is broken — there will be no more music in her life, — a little space, and the red oleander leaves will be falling like rain upon her grave and his. The picture would tell all that Giorgione story, not ill, I think. You see, under that lowest blossom to the left I have put the little arrowy head of an asp that will serve for the symbol of the plague. I asked her once if I might call it so, and she Said: ‘As you like; only Giorgione’s mistress would smile, I think; she Would know that death was about to be merciful to them both. But, as you like,’ she said; ‘as you like.’ So I can call it so. And it is more Venetian than Florentine in colour after all. Her name! I wonder that you have to ask. The world knows you both so’ well. She is often in Florence, but she is not here now. She is the daughter of a great personage, a very great personage.”
Then he lets the purple cloud of the curtain fall again over that fire-glow of the flowers, a little angered with the doubt that Titian’s roses being pale, he perchance is wrong. But I stand looking at the shadow that had fallen and see still the oleander, and the broken lute, and the eyes of the woman which have no smile in them as the eyes of Giorgione’s mistress would have had.
For the face of the picture is to me as the face of one risen from the dead.
A great personage, so he says, leaning there with the gold tissues falling all about her on the marble, and the Florentine carnations in her breast, and the gleam of jewels on her throat and forehead, and at her feet the lute, whose broken chords she, with all her greatness, could not heal again so that they would ever breathe forth the old, sweet, simple, tender notes. A great personage: yet surely also the child that had once gone with me through the lily-whitened grasses and the moon-lightened fields of maize, singing as the birds sang and careless of the morrow.
I feel chilly and grown old, as I felt by the side of the grey Grève water, where the sun had flashed amidst the canes. For there is no ghost whose breath is so cold, as the ghost of a love that is dead; and I have met two this day, this April day, when the soil is all yellow with daffodils, and all the earth is glad.
Would it be better to know her under the dusky marbles of some aisle of graves, in the mouldering heart of some world-forgotten city, or to find her great like this, with jewels in her breast, and that strange haunted look in her eyes?
The lute is broken: does she remember, I wonder?
Has she forgotten the days on the sunny hillsides, by the shallow brook waters, and the leaves of the vines, and beneath the murmuring poplars? Has she forgotten? Has she forgiven? What can it matter — anyway — if she be great like this?
She must be dead to me, you know.
And that living death is worse than the death of the grave, they say; that living death when the voice speaks still to all others, and only is silent to you. And yet the world is full of these things! One wonders the sun still drags on its way; one wonders all men are not mad.
The seeding grass was wet with torrents of blood down there on the March day of Novara, and the cannon balls, as they swept through the rising com, did the work of the harvest sickle. How came Fate to miss me amongst the slain? I wonder; — and grow old.
I have tried to love other women; I have told other women I did love them; but I do not think they believed me, and I know I did not believe myself.
And now that I have seen that picture — yes, that is, of course, how she must be; a great lady, with a knot of diamonds in her breast There is not much left in her of the bold, shy, pretty, saucy child that I walked through Verona with, that night of the Veglione. Nothing left probably, not even perhaps a regret A flush of shame at most, perhaps, when this brilliant illustrissima remembers how she roamed the fields and hills with a troop of strolling comedians; remembers too, maybe, now and then, that one of those wandering players set his lips to her cheek and held her little hand in his in the autumn hour, when the wild anemones were all aglow beneath the brown Badià.
Well, no one will ever know that I remember it too. She last and least of all; if ever I should meet her.
There are things one is bound to forget, or, at least, that bind one to live as if they were wholly forgotten.
And what is Oblivion if it be not Age? I feel old, I say, as I felt at noon where the little red roses nod by the Grève stream.
* * *
“You are sure there is never a scorpion?” says Astra, the actress, to me this April day, when at sunset we go up together to the great open-air theatre that draws all Florence to it on summer nights where it stands under the pine woods on the hillside beyond the Gate of the Cross.
“You are sure there is never a scorpion?” says Astra to me, bathing her fair face in the lilies and lying breast downward in the grass with the vine-shadows playing, as if in love with her, over her soft, indolent, wanton limbs.
I tell her no; but alas! grow the lilies ever so richly there is always a scorpion somewhere for me.
That is just because a man ever desires the thing he has not, you see; most surely desires it of all when that thing is called woman. For the lilies are yellow as soon as gathered, but the scorpion stings on and on, on and on.
I talked with a scorpion once; an old, old scorpion, long as my hand, and hoary as Esau with length of years. I found him, and made his acquaintance in a prison in Venice long, long ago, where the Stranieri lodged me three months or so for having spoken words too strong and too seasoned one riotous Carnival time, when I had rolled my first little Arte under the wings of the Lion.
The old scorpion never hurt me but would lash his tail and talk by the hour together. He had heard the sad tale of the wild Lagoon waters and the sigh of the Gondolier’s Stali! for ages and ages and ages there in his sea-girt chambers; since first he had come from the East, no bigger then than a scarabeus, hidden in a fold of gold tissue that one of Dandolo’s men had brought with him from mighty Byzantium, and thrown on the couch of his mistress one amorous night in August. The scorpion stung her and she died — why not? there is always a sting in all love, and perhaps the quickest death to it is the kindliest He had seen many things and many centuries this old wise bearded scorpion of Venice, and one day when he sat in his chink, — a black blot in a line with the sun, — I asked him to tell me, since we were good friends together, what was the secret and source of that mystical power for which my human kind was wont to curse him and his; and slay them and embalm them in oil as dead Pharaohs were buried in perfume.
The old scorpion made me answer; he who had lived in the beautiful wanton breast of that Venice, which men have called the harlot of Italy; the old scorpion made me answer.
“What do we slay with? And what is the death in our sting? A venom that is as that fire which no water quenches, and as the grave-worm that no feast of flesh can slake? What is that, you fool, with which we arm ourselves and strike where we will and never fail? Listen here then, and know that this for which you all curse us is born of yourselves, not of us. For in the beginning of time when Death came forth from the gates of hell on the bloodless white horse and was set free to pace to and fro the world, and scatter desolation as he would, Death scattering himself broadcast in many shapes and fashions, Death one night made us the scorpions and set us to run over the earth.
“The first scorpion was only a harmless big beetle at the beginning, ugly, of course, but quite innocent, but Death took it up and steeped it in two human hearts that all bleeding and smoking lay in the hollow of his hand. And from the man’s heart the first scorpion sucked desire, and from the woman’s heart it sucked jealousy; and when it had sated itself of these to the full, Death set it down on the ground.
“Now be fruitful and
multiply,” he bade it. “And do your work on the human race, for you have a venom in you that never will die while the world rolls on round the sun.”
So the old scorpion talked, blinking at the light from the sea walls in Venice.
And now, — bloom the blue lilies ever so brightly, there is always a scorpion somewhere for me.
For Astra and Poppea there is a great supper spread this April night, under a tent at midnight when our play is over. They have acted superbly, and they have had all the glory their souls could desire, and they laugh à gorge déployée, their red lips parting over their, snowy teeth, playing with flowers in bands of jewels that some of the nobles have flung to them. They are famous, and spoilt, and capricious, and cruel sometimes, and jealous always; and like children in their mirth, as all artists are all the world over.
The white folds of the tent flutter, the torches flicker in their brass sconces, the young actors have dressed the canvas with boughs and pennons and fluttering scrolls; where the curtains open there shines the white radiance of magnolia trees that grow just there on the hillside, and whose closed cups are silver in the moon.
There are laughter and jesting, and such amorous follies as women like Astra and Poppea await whenever their eyes may beam upon the sons of men. They lie there like Tiziano’s women, and their jewels gleam and their pretty hands crush the bursting fruits; and without, down the hills, the people troop away shadowy, cloud-like, singing as they go, the sweet sounds grow fainter and fainter as they stream farther away under the low stone pines.
We ourselves go down the hill together a little later; it is the fancy of Astra and Poppea to leave their horses champing by the gates and use their own pretty listless lightsome feet.
Their silken skirts shiver over the grasses, sweeping down the lilies; the young men go before them with flute and mandoline singing the Invitation of Paesiello; there are gleams of blue where the iris are growing, the air is full of magnolia fragrance, the night is as clear as the day, it is past one of the clock, Florence sleeps silvery and very still.
A shrouded figure passes us masked, Astra and Poppea shrink a little; it looks dismal in the moon; they take it for some brother of the Misericordia. I see that it is a woman. But why masked, and on the hills too? It is not even Carnival.
We go on through the gates into the silent city, the sleepy guards let us through, the music and the singing wake all the echoes as we pass along the dark old streets and under the Church of the Croce.
The lads sing more sweetly as they go by and their voices drop to a tender minor key; they remember that Michelangelo and Leonardo lie there. Now and then a woman drops a rose to us from her lattice; now and then a lover comes out from some vaulted doorway, looking warily to see if any talebearer be lurking near; now and then a stream of light falls from some balcony where two shadows lean one on the other.
So we go on through the silent city, on into the square of the Signoria, and here, late though it is, there are men grouped together in little knots, murmuring eagerly, with their cloaks cast about them and their faces flushed and dark.
We have left Astra and Poppea at their palace; the youths have ceased their singing; we pause by the Cathedral and look up; someone has set against the bronze Judith a flag of three colours; the red in it glows like blood in the silver glistening cool Florence night “What is it?” we ask; we have lost our memory tip there on the hills in music, and have forgotten for the moment the storm that hovers northward where the city of Virgil lies.
“What is it?” we ask, whilst the Judith bends her trows against the moon.
They answer us in one word. “War.”
* * * * *
WAR again away there in the North.
As I go homeward by myself I am glad.
I am tired of Astra and Poppea, of the masquing and the folly, of the paper laurels and the hobble of lead, of the showers of gold and the laughter of fools.
I come upstairs to the broad tapestried chamber where the moonrays lie so white upon the marble floor, and I go to an old chest and I take out the old knapsack and the old musket that I carried years ago over the Lombard fields.
After all, they are the truest friends a man has; after all, when one is a Florentine, one is a soldier before one is anything else.
They lie there in the moonlight, old battered moulded war-worn things; on the barrel of the musket there is red rust, it was a fellow-student’s life blood; I never had the heart to touch it. How shabby and broken the knapsack is, too; it was nearly new that day in Pisa when I saw the Zinzara and her people troop by under the old grey walls, and went after them on the same sea road and caught them as they travelled along in the dust, singing and eating their cherries.
There are the cherry stains now on the leather, for she would fill it with fruit, I remember; the stains are black, — a dying man leaned his head on it amongst the crushed grass whilst a burning village smoked in the midst of the millet fields, as Carlo Alberto’s hopes died down with the setting sun.
I sit in the moonlight with the old pack in my hands and the musket at my feet, thinking of all the dead years that seem to drift by me one by one as the clouds go by past the casement.
Some friends of mine break into the room, and find me there, the musket at my feet.
They are all breathless and excited talking of the news.
“You are not going, Pascarèl!” they cry to me.
I tell them yes.
“But you are mad!” they say in chorus.
I shrug my shoulders. It is very possible.
“But, with your fame!” they cry.
“Oh, altro! my poor paper laurels — a plaything for a Mardi Gras — what more!”
“But you will be ruined!” they urge.
“That is very possible, too.”
“But just when you are great,” they cry; “just when the world catches your words as if pearls fell from your mouth — to thrust that all away into a common soldier’s knapsack — it is lunacy.”
“That is as it may be. Italy wants Venice and Verona.”
I rub the old cherry stains on the old knapsack, and think how strange it is that all we students dreamed of in the gloom of Pisa, — and were called mad and worse for so dreaming of as we marched twelve abreast by night through the sombre streets, chanting sonnets of Manzoni, — should now be come and be coming to pass with a precision, and romance, that together make it like the work of magic.
They stay till the day breaks arguing with me — what is the use? The old musket lying there on the marble, seems to suit me better now than the painted bladder and gilded bells of the pantomime. To care for the follies of the carnival fair, one must have a heart as light as the bladder, and mirth that rings like the bells.
Well, I had these longer than most men. If the bladder be weighted with lead and the bells are jangled and out of tune now, at least my measure lasted longer than it lasts for most men.
At length my friends go away; they go sorrowful, and they think me a fool.
The chamber is black and grey around me. The dawn breaks, but breaks slowly.
I felt old to-day as I went by the shallow Grève water.
I felt weary as Astra laughed amongst the lilies.
How still it is! — here, — high amongst the roofs.
I am left alone in the chilly light of the dawn. The shadows are black on the marble floor. A mouse creeps up and smells at the musket where the blood of the dead soldier is crusted on the steel. The knapsack still lies on my knee. I think of Pisa.
How prettily and innocently jealous she was, the donzella, leaning out of the old grated window, because she had heard how, in the student days, the Zanzara had wound a red ribbon to my mandoline. Yet I remember too, how as we went underneath the old palaces, and spoke together of Margherita of France, she marvelled how the princess could wish to wander with gipsies, and to leave all the pride and the pomp of her royalty for mere freedom and mirth and the fresh air of heaven. She marvelled, yes, though
she had wandered with the Arte and me. She would not have been happy with us in other years; no doubt she is best as she is.
And yet, — does she never, I wonder, think of the hours when we went together through the trailing vines light of foot as of heart in the warmth of the sun?
Oh, those old fair dead days! they were so glad and so innocent and so simple. Why could they not last for ever beneath those blue Tuscan skies?
The city is still asleep.
The first chimes ring muffled through the shadows of night that still lingers. Good women will rise from their beds and will go out into the darkness of the churches, and will break their hearts in prayer over the sons and the lovers who are going out to war, on the old Lombard battle-fields, where the maize and the vine are green.
I have no one to pray for me.
It is always so, when one has loved too many. We gather the roses too quickly, and the wind blows the leaves away hither and thither, and our hands are left empty.
Well, the musket lies there; and, there is always Italy.
If the lute be broken and the fool’s bells be jangled it is time to die as my fellow-students died amongst the trampled corn.
CHAPTER II.
Her Story.
Do you know Sta. Margharità’s? the little brown square church with its bell clanging in the open tower, above in the sweet air on the hills?
There is level grass all about it, and it has a cool green garden shut within walls on every side except where a long parapet of red dusky tiles leaves open the view of the Valdarno; underneath the parapet there are other terraces of deep grass and old old olive trees, in whose shade the orchids love to grow, and the blue iris springs up in great sheaves of swordlike leaves.