by Ouida
There are trees of every sort in the cloistered garden, the turf is rich and long, the flowers are tended with the tenderest care, the little sacristy glows red in the sun, an acanthus climbs against it; the sacristan’s wife comes out to you plaiting her straw and brings you a cluster of her roses; you sit on the stone seat and lean over the parapet and look downward, birds flit about you, contadini go along the grass paths underneath, and nod to you, smiling; a delicious mingled loveliness of olive wood and ilex foliage and blossoming vineyards shelve beneath you; you see all Florence gleaming far below there in the sun, and your eyes sweep from the snow that still lies on Vallombrosa to the blue shadows of the Carrara range.
It is calm and golden and happy here at Sta. Margharità’s, high on the fragrant hill air, with the gueldre roses nodding above head, and the voices of the vinedressers echoing from the leaf-veiled depths below.
To live here and dream the years away and only score the time by the colour of the vines, it would be well, I think; very well. Only for such a life one must needs be so happy. Happy as one is for an hour, for a day, for a month, but never for longer. Happy as one can only be when a great passion is close about us, and is past, and present, and future, is world, and sun, and God.
Sometimes I come up here for quiet’s sake and lean my arms on the red ledge, and wait to watch the sun sink down behind the deep azure of Carrara and change the broad green valley to a sea of molten gold.
I used to come here with Pascarèl — many times, many times.
One day in especial I remember. The wooden Arte had been reared in the village yonder; it was a giorno di festa; it was in the April time; we came up along the narrow road between the high walls, overtopped with china roses and hawthorn; we came into the garden by the church and sat down, he on the parapet, I on the little stone bench in the corner under the aloe.
Mass was over; in the sacristan’s house they were going to the mid-day meal; they brought food out to us and would take no denial. We shared the simple feast of soup and bread and salad, there amongst the green leaves and the flowers; we paid them for it with the mandoline and many songs of Florence.
We stayed there all the afternoon till the sun set, and we heard the Ave Maria ringing from all the belfries in the valley as we strolled backward along the grass paths of the hills; he gathered the dainty orchids for me under the olive trees; we laughed and jested and made music as we went To-day the same scene lies before me in the sun; the old bell in the little square tower strikes the quarters with the same sound; the garden and the church are nowise changed; the sacristan’s wife comes out smiling, plaiting her straw, and holding to me a little knot of flowers; she calls me the most illustrious, she gazes with gentle awe at the jewels on my hands; she does not look aged and her husband is stooping over the dark moist fresh-turned earth binding carnations just as we left him on that day.
It is just the same, just the same, only the music is silent.
Only!
I lean on the red edge of the wall and look down; two contadini go by under those old gnarled olives; they are young; he laughs and her cheeks grow red. I would give the world to be the girl, bareheaded there in the sun, poor, plaiting her straw as she goes along over the grass-grown furrows.
For the music is not silent for her. It may only indeed be a homely little pastoral song, only a peasant’s stornello, rhymed to the hum of the spinning wheel and the bleat of the goats in the meadow. But it is the song that makes blythe her heart in the ragged bodice and light her feet in the ox-ploughed ways. It is perfect to her, and lips that are eager and tender murmur it low in her ear; she is blessed amongst women, I say. But to me the green earth silent Varkò, the painter, made my portrait the other day. I stood in the sunset one night in a court-dress that pleased him. He brought me an old trecentisto lute and asked me to sing him some Florence song as he worked. As I stretched out my hand the lute fell and broke in two on the marble floor. “Paint it so,” I said to him; he did not know why, but so it seemed fittest to me.
And the lute is there on the picture, broken — beyond the cunning of men to mend. He calls the painting Giorgione’s Mistress. It seems an ill-chosen name to me. For she must have been happy always; all that glad life in Venice that was one long golden flower-crowned masque, and then the short sharp death that did not divide them but wedded them closely for all time, together forever in the quiet of the grave and in the memory of the world.
It is so few years, and yet it seems so many ages since the white roses came to me in farewell.
There followed on that time a space of absolute unconsciousness. It is all blank, all dark to me.
When I awoke again there were no more around me the bare Florentine walls, the aromatic pungent Florentine odours, the gay vibrating Florentine street chatter. I saw no more the old carved window and the little brown figure of the stocking mender with the sun on her silver earrings and the silken hose at her feet.
It had all faded away as though it had never been.
I awoke with gold and silver and fine linen and rosy hues about me, I awoke with great wide windows before me, through which there gleamed gilded rails and chesnut trees in blossom, and a light vivacious crowd of children, running hither and thither with lilac in their hands; I awoke with Fiorio’s whispers in my ears.
“Oh, carina mia, you will live? you will live! Only see, this is Paris and we are so rich, so rich. If the donzella like to eat gold she can have it as easily as grapes in vintage time! Oh, carina mia, you will live, you will try a little to live, will you noti.”
I looked at him stupidly, pushing the curls from my aching forehead; live? why should I live? the blue lilies were all dead in Tuscany.
One day they set before me great cases of sapphires and diamonds and other precious stones. They were heirlooms, they said.
“You are too young for them,” said my father, “but they will become you, as those old yellow and purple velvets used to do in old Verona. Make yourself your handsomest to-night, the world will see you.”
I had no choice but to obey.
The world saw me and made itself a fool for me: the great dazzling lawless world of Paris. I stretched my hands to it thankfully, it gave me a feverish forgetfulness; anything was better than to sit and see the chesnuts bud in the cool sunlight and to go mad with longing for the deep vine shadows and the sweet mountain stillness of my Tuscany. Anything was better than to stare till one was blind at the cruel glare on the shadeless pavements, and grow sick with longing for the mere smell of the oak wood fires in the Florence streets.
One day I saw an iris behind a gilded garden-pale; an iris as blue as my lost heavens — the iris of Dante that blooms in millions down the olive slopes and amongst the maize in Tuscany with the first wakening of the spring-time sun.
I thought that Dante in his hell had missed the sharpest torture of it all. Why did he not set a little Italian meadow lily to grow in the darkness of Caina and Ptolomea and smile with its azure eyes at the despair of those for whom the sun of Italy had forever ceased to shine?
Am I not mad? as mad as dead’Dino’s Pazza, calling on the waters to give up her lover by sad Ferrara? I call on the dead days, and they are drowned and mute like’Dino.
My father is good to me, in his cold idle manner. He is proud because the world calls me so handsome, and he fills my hands with riches; I spend in a day when I like what would make this little paese on the hills here a fairyland for all its people. Men love me — or vow they do, — and I play with them, and they say I have no heart Women envy me as I pass by, and hate me with that hate which is a woman’s cross of honour. What more can any female creature want?
And yet you see one is so thankless. I, who dreamed ceaselessly of all this greatness, and thirsted for it lying wide-awake on my truckle bed, and watching the moon rise over the Scala’s palaces, and light the painted loves of Orpheus on the vault above, I often shake the jewels off my aching head and fling myself down weeping as’Dino’s Pazza weeps be
side the riverside, for the time when the wild poppies were twisted in my wind-blown curls by the hands of Pascarèl.
Many have asked me in marriage. My father looks at me with a curious look often and says, “Gather your roses while you may — that is sound counsel, though a poet’s.”
But how shall I gather them? I? who only hold a dead rose to my heart that no one sees, as old Giùdettà held hers fifty long years in silence and in faith.
I have no faith; if I had had faith, never had I let so poor and vile a thing as his dead amorous folly stand betwixt me and my belief in him. All that I know; too late, too late.
But so much faith as this I have. He kissed me there, on the dark hillside on the night of the saints under Fiesole. No other shall ever touch me; so much faith as this I have.
A woman who carries lips un-virgin to her husband, what better is she than the adulteress?
So I think at least; old Mariuccia would say so if I could rouse her from her hard-won rest away there where the alpine storm-winds lash the sullen sea-green of the Adige into foam.
There is one who torments me more than all others to be faithless to this single poor shred of human fealty that I treasure.
I have seen him but lately, since we came hither, back into this dear Tuscan land; it is he who in the old villa above Lucca begged me to sing to the mandoline with so insolent an eagerness in his bold eyes.
He is my father’s cousin and heir; the likeness in him that I saw that night was no chance resemblance. At times I wonder if he recognizes in me the child that leaned against the screen in the great hall with her strange masquerade dress of violet and gold: I cannot tell. He never talks of it; he is a man full of grace and courtliness, and to all people my father speaks of me as having been reared in a convent of Northern Italy. No one doubts:, why should they? Only sometimes I think my cousin doubts; sometimes I think he knows full well that I was once the little wandering Uccello of the Arte.
He loves me, or pursues me at the least with a strong ardour and with delicate wiles and ways. My father favours his suit, so far at least as he ever rouses himself from his voluptuous apathy to urge upon me anything. The man is sole heir to all his late-come greatness and he would be glad that I should bear the mighty name and wear the honour of it always.
So they talk; so they talk; and my cousin woos me as only men skilled in the world as he is can; he has my father’s beauty and my father’s grace and ease; but I — whilst his words are most eloquent upon my ear, all I can hear is one voice murmuring in its sweet sonorous Tuscan, “Oh, gioja mia!” in the dreamy lustrous midnight when the falling stars dropped over white Fiesole.
For how can I forget? how shall I ever forget till I am dead?
What woman forgets the first kisses that have burned on her cheek and throat, unless she grow light enough and foul enough to lend her lips to fresh caresses? And that I am not; — nay, thank God; — so much of womanhood there is in me, though in so much else, I, the great lord’s daughter and the great world’s darling, am so far sunk beneath the little simple wayward, fear-innocent less, Uccello.
Yet there must be something more, for in the world there where they sing my praises, they always say “a beautiful thing — but wild — and with an untamed look;” and when I shake off my rich velvets and my priceless laces at the end of the long nights of pleasure, I shiver a little, and in my soul long for the old simple dusty skirts stained with the juice of the trodden grapes, and the play of the bleating kids and the dew of the wind-blown acacias where I ran bareheaded and happy in the summer sun in the wake of the wandering Arte.
For I am so young still, and yet I feel so old; and all that one sweet buried summer time has all my dead youth with it in its grave of withered rose leaves.
“What would Mariuccia say if she came before us now!” cries good, merry, blissful Fiorio, a thousand times if once: ah, yes! I have all the greatness and the glories that I sighed my soul out for in my ungrateful babyhood, sitting at her feet under the broken Donatello. And what good is it to me? so little good that when I see a little white anemule shine under those olive trees my heart is sick with longing and I am weary unto death.
Is it three years? only three years? It seems eternity since there, by the Mouth of the Lion, the crowd of Oltrarno bore him away on the wild rejoicing night?
Men talk of him; I hear his name and see it on the walls of cities.
“A great genius,” they say, “fitful and never to be controlled, but of wit keen as the needle’s edge, and of powers varied as the sunset’s hues.” The fame of him has leapt into sudden light before the world; “a player’s fame!” says my cousin with a sneer, “a player’s fame! a mushroom’s fungus growth that will die down with the first day of rain!”
Does he remember, — my cousin? When he says these things, I think so.
Can I be glad that he has those paper laurels, as he used to call them?
No, for art is a rival longer lived than any woman. Ah, dear heaven! I should have known that a woman’s love is worth nothing unless it be doglike and takes good and evil alike uncomplaining? Yes, perhaps; but as it is my heart burns with love still.
Last night, only last night, I was weak enough to wish to see his face again there on the hillside where the great open-air theatre stands, and I left my horses at the base of the slope, and put my mask and domino on, and went upward on foot where the red and white flag fluttered high above the oak woods.
How still the night was; and the great golden moon hung in the silvery air, and the white magnolias gleamed like lamps, and a cloud of rosy oleander leaves was blown in my face by the wind.
Do you know what the night is in Italy? No? Then you do not know how near heaven your earth can be.
It is a great place without a roof, a summer theatre for the people. The grass grows up to the walls and the oak woods are all above. It was quite quiet; there was a sound of dreamlike music sighing everywhere upon the silent and leafy sides of the hills.
There were many doors all open to the air. In one a group of pifferari leaned; next to them was a peasant girl with a bulrush in her hand; next her again a woman who rested her basket of melons on a rail and held a child to her bare breast Behind, the little wandering pifferari strayed near the entrance without paying, their eyes aglow under their tangled hair; the metal workers and perfume pressers and mosaic makers from the town leant together with bended brows; the noble stooped his delicate dark head to hearken yet more surely; the proud duchess at his side beat the measure softly with her broad black fan, so they listened, the Tuscan people, with the shadow of the great roofless walls around them and above their heads the blue night skies. And the genius of what they had heard had entered into them, and the sweet sounds of it were sighing in echo from all their mouths, and they laughed aloud in pleasure, while their eyes kindled and flashed through the shadow, and a great shout went up from three thousand voices to the quiet stars where the clouds were floating.
They all cried one name; “Pascarèl!”
I glided in and stood in the press between a cobbler in his leathern apron who had brought a shoe to sew there and a contadino with his brown cloak tossed over one shoulder and behind his ear a knot of asphodels.
The light and shadows played about them; the oil flames burned clear, the smell of the fresh herbs and grass drifted from the hills without; above head were the purple clouds with the moon a globe of gold, and a great dusky hawk winging his slow way across the face of the sky.
Ah, God! the familiar sweetness of it all! I lost all sense of time and place. I was once more the little wandering Uccello of the Arte, happy because the breeze blew, happy because the sun would rise, happy for every trifle of the day and night, happy as the flowers in the fields.
The people made a little way for me and I sank on the seat that the old cobbler rose to surrender to me. They looked but little at me, they were absorbed in what they had heard, and a woman masked is not so strange in Italy as elsewhere. I sat quite still.
The great circle went round and round before my sight, the lights wavered in the dusky shadows of it, the music sounded like the swell of some far-off sea.
Whether it were harmony or discord I had no perception, nor how long it lasted after my entrance there I cannot tell.
I could feel the wind blowing in my eyes, I could see the hawk hovering above with outstretched wings, I could smell the sweet familiar scents of the wild hillside; that was all.
My consciousness was with the old dead days.
The silence around me was broken by tumultuous shouts; the music had ceased, the people were sending the thunder of their applause up to the quiet darkness where the stars were; the hawk had soared away.
It was all vague and full of fury, like a storm, to me; the waves of sound beat on my ears but I did not hear them.
Then — lightly as a leopard in its own deserts, Pascarèl leaped on the stage with a bound, and thunders of homage echoed through the house, and his eyes flashed over the sea of faces and the clear resonant vibrations of his voice thrilled through the murmuring welcome of the hushing house.
And so I saw and heard him — I — once more; I who had felt his kisses there on the far hillside beneath Fiesole that unforgotten night before the Feast-day of the Dead.
And yet I sat quite quiet, and only drew a little into shadow where the gaslight would not find my diamonds. Women are liars, say you? Well, they need be.
There was silence, tumult, silence, tumult again; then the people streamed away out into the moonlight I was left all alone. I could hear them going down the hills playing on their mandolines. The lights were blown out There was only the white light of the full moon.
Near at hand there was laughter and singing. They sounded strangely, waking all the echoes in the great silent amphitheatre. My life thrilled with sharp sickly pain, as though a snake had bitten me.
I heard the clear vibration of the laugh of Pascarèl, that Italian laugh, like the ring of silver upon stone, which is like no other upon earth. The light merriment of women crossed it, and a burden of a love song followed.