by Ouida
It is brutal in me, I know that, but I cannot sit quietly here and hear him talk of her. I rise from the boat’s rest and shake him a little as he leans with his head upon his hands.
“Dio! you are wet through. Do you want to die before you see a battlefield? Get up; you have done folly enough for one day’s work.”
He gets up, as I bid him; there is a startled pain in his eyes that moves me with remorse for wounding him.
I laugh a little that he may see no change in me.
“Nay, ‘Ino, you were my nightingale, and belong to me; I am angered to see you come to be shot down with all the sparrow-hawks and vultures. A girl might as well stay a breach with her slender arm as you come out to feed the cannon. Besides, the music in you! You should have had pity on your genius—”
“It was not by pity on their genius that your Florentines made Florence great in the old days you love,” he murmured. “And, on your own, what pity have you had?”
“Mine! Oh, altro! A trick of imitating any other creature that I see; and being able to play a little with words upon the hearts of a people who laugh or cry without knowing why when I tell them! A fine thing. But you — who speak in music, that is the very voice of God Himself amidst men! — Well, now you are here you cannot turn back. We must do our best for you. Rise up and come out of this wild weather. If you would serve Italy, you must keep your strength.”
A gleam of moonlight from a rift in the clouds falls on his face as he lifts it “If they kill me, it does not matter,” he said softly. “You know I have loved the donzella ever since we sang together in my father’s workshop amongst the clank of the hammers; and always, wherever I wandered, I thought of finding her; and always, when I have dreamed of my music, I have heard her voice as it used to sound in the still old square in the summer nights; and when they praised my music, and talked of a great future for me, I thought to myself, perhaps she is in pain and in poverty somewhere, or even perhaps in shame, and I shall lift her up and crown her with my crown, and give her all that men give me; but now it is over — all over for ever! And now she is set on high there, and she can never be anything ever again to me; and I feel as if I should never bear to hear a note of music; and my music was all my soul, you know. And it is dead.”
Ay, indeed, I know; know but too well. When you can solace a mother for her first-born’s death, then, and then only, shall you solace an artist for the death in him of his Art.
Then the lad rises up and walks a little feebly along the grey sea line: and we go in silence — perfect silence, backward into the heart of the town.
The rain has lifted a little. The fires of torches and of illuminations light the grim stone heights of the old palaces; we tread on laurels as we mount the steep and crowded streets; from the terraces, where the orange boughs toss in the wind, distant voices come chanting still the “Fuori il Stranier!”
Raffaellino turns to me a moment with his tender pale face in a sudden glow from the warmth of the reddened lights in a gallery above.
“You hear them?” he says, softly. “Nay, she was right — so right What can one ask better than to lay down one’s life for Italy?”
CHAPTER IV.
In the Land of Virgil.
IT is not an army, I say, that goes out to war, it is a nation in arms that sweeps across the Mincio to grapple with the old hereditary foe. When one heart beats in the million breasts of a nation, the nation is invincible. Man cannot hurt her, and God will not.
Every square inch of this soil, through whose golden harvests the child Virgil once ran with fleet feet chanting strophes to the great Ceres Mammosa, has been thrashed through and through by the iron flail of man for twice a thousand centuries.
The struggle is so old, so old — older than the old iron crown of Lombardy. Down from the dreary fastnesses of the Dolomite, the imperial eagle has swooped so many times to fasten beak and talons in the fair eyes of our Italia.
Against the empire! It is the old old war-cry.
No doubt it was grander work going out across the green Valdarno, with the red Carroccio and the milkwhite oxen, and the banners of the Silver Dove and the Silver Temple; no doubt it was grander; but perhaps we are not altogether unworthy our forefathers as we toil through the hot sun and the blinding dust, with the mosquito in our flesh, and the regulation knapsack heavy on our shoulders. One is only a volunteer; but still, if one does one’s best —
The other day, after a toilsome march, some of us bivouacked in sight of Mantua; our arms were stacked, and our tents set up where there were old grey crumbled ramparts just on the very edge of the lake. Some young soldiers, who were students from Ravenna and comrades of mine, cared for such old things, and spent their leisure in tracking out the line of the fortifications beneath the rank grass and the wild tulip roots that grew so thickly beside the water, where the castello with its village clustering beneath it had stood in the bygone times of Bonacolsi and Avvocati. And amongst other marks and sculptures on the fallen stones they found most often a prince’s coronet, and two hawks fighting, and dates of that old old time, when the Lake-city yonder, in the midst of its melancholy waters, had quivered under the velvet hands in their gloves of steel of Beatrice and Matilda.
I said nothing to the lads as they scraped the grass away with their swords off the crown and the two hawks, but I knew the cognizance well, it had been carven in many a razed fortress and ruined town over the Tuscan fields and the Aquilean marches, in the sign manual of the Pascarèlli. If I had had all those old fiefs and that crown, perhaps; — poof! it was the first time that I had ever wished for them. But the Fates lie like lead on my heart, — mine; to whom the three grim Parcæ had ever been up to that time of the Feast of the Dead only only as three gladsome maidens that only summoned me to dance whilst they sang.
As it is, I go the next day into Alessandria, and an officer, seeing me, and wanting his horse held, throws me the bridle, with a word of command.
I walk up and down with the horse over an hour. When the general comes out of the house he had entered he looks over me with a steady glance: “A volunteer?”
I salute, and assent.
“What do you get?” he asks.
“A musket and twenty-five centimes a day.”
“You are a noble?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“A vagabond.”
He smiles and throws me, instead of the bridle, a soldo, and so rides away. I keep the coin.
A copper coin for holding a horse; well, the Pascarèllo Princes in their graves there, under the ruined fortress, could not be ashamed.
In its way that copper coin is worth the ducal crown.
It is fierce and dark work here in this fruitful land of Virgil. The world has got so tired; it has seen so much of heroism and carnage; it has grown old and dull, and would scarcely open its drowsy ears at a noble deed, though the note of it were loud as that bugle blast of Orlando which made the birds drop dead in all the forests of Roncesvalles.
Else the world has seldom seen anything finer than this fiery torrent of national life rushing to the plains of the Mincio as fast and as furiously as Mincio in time of flood can rush from her Mother of Garda. The noble fights beside the populano. The young marquis leaves his marble villa, as the cobbler his board at the street corner. The prince strides through the millet, shoulder to shoulder with the coppersmith and the mosaic-maker. This is the reason that we are so strong in this summer-season; strong as a chain of which every link has been proved in the fire.
The men who march and fight with me have laughed and frolicked with me a thousand times in the masquerades and sweetmeat showers of the Carnival, and I can do them some little good. Even Italians find it hard to raise a jest sometimes, plodding through the rain-soaked earth in autumn with only a muddy blood-stained brook to drink at, and the ants settling by the score in the gaps of half-healed wounds. Even Italians feel their hearts a little heavy, straining under the weight of rifle and knapsack ove
r the parched ground in the scorch of noon, with comrade after comrade falling out of the ranks from sunstroke, and the mosquitos buzzing horribly where the sword-slash is still unclosed. I can do some little good, perhaps, raising their courage with a strain of Leopardi or Giusti, or taking them back to their village under the vines by some burden of a country-ritomella, sweetening their hard black bread with a tale out of Boccaccio, and making them forget their ague on the marshy ground by some one of the infinite jests in the old comedies, of which my brain is full, and their ears are never tired.
I strive to keep up my mirth for their sakes; — at night lying round the fires that we light to keep off the marsh fever, or by day tramping along the dry, white, tiresome roads with the clouds of gnats at our parching throats.
But it is hard to do it, sometimes. War is sickly work at its best; and life, I say, is weary. So it seems to me as I go to-day — alone, for once, — through the smiling country where the maidens pluck the mulberry leaves as though no such things as flame and steel were as near them as the vines are near.
My heart is heavy as I pace between the lines of olives and watch the runlets of water glisten in the grass.
Poor little Toccò has died here.
He volunteered with me, poor dear little lad, only seventeen then, and merry as a lark; leaving the bottega and the work he loved, and the fun and frolic of the Florentine street life; and in the very heart of Magenta, as we marched through the standing corn, under the hail of iron, a bullet struck him, and he fell.
I could not stay to see for him then; the sea of blood swept me away, a league away, as it seemed, in a second, and all the day long it was as much as we could do to keep our feet amidst that trampled wheat under that fierce red sun.
But when old Mars, who ever loved Florence, had turned the balance in our favour, and the carnage was over and done, and the sun was gone down westward, there beyond the Apuleian Alps, then I had time to seek for him, and after long search I found him; one amongst so many other simple brown-eyed lads in their rough coats of blue, and their little peaked caps, and their straps and their belts, lying torn and crushed and nameless and forgotten, down there amongst the summer harvest He was not quite lifeless.
He took a drop of water, and lifted his eyelids, and smiled; he knew me, though it was quite night, and he was nearly dead.
“It is a great thing — to die for Italy,” he said gently, with a light like morning on his little parched sad face; then a shiver shook him, and his hand tried to fold itself in mine, and he stretched his limbs out, and all was over.
He was only a sod of clay that cumbered that harvest field.
Ah, Dio mio! — the world is weary after all.
I go through the green glad country.
Who could tell that death in its most ghastly shapes walked here with every day and night?
It is all so peaceful.
The white road runs straight and shining in the sun. The red roofs of the farmhouses glow through chestnut woods and olive orchards. The mighty river glistens here and there where a break in the vines shows its course. Away in the shadows are the towers of Pavia; and, beyond, the beautiful snowy sea-like surge of the Alpine crests where Milan lies. Near me girls are putting mulberry leaves into great baskets, chatting the while; and through the vineyards gentle white oxen drag the lumbering waggons.
Only now and again there is some headless helmet in the grass, or the dogroses blossom above a dead warhorse; or a cherry tree, red with fruit, lies on the ground, its stem broken under a rain of bullets.
I walk on, and think of another sad thing that I saw yesterday.
It was by the wayside in a little village. There had been a short sharp struggle between Tirolese, who held the street, and Bersaglieri who wanted to sweep it clear. The Bersaglieri won, and carried the position. The little narrow road all green and golden with fruit trees, where the women were wont to sit out at their thresholds at evening spinning and singing in unity, was strewn with dead and dying.
I had helped the Bersaglieri — being in the way; and when all was over tried to help the wounded.
I carried one Tirolean into a cottage. He was a tall, strong, and very handsome man; a mountaineer; and he had been shot through the head, and had but half an hour to live.
I soothed that half-hour for him as well as I was able; he lying on the mud floor of the hovel with the door wide open, and through it shining the glory of the afternoon sun, and the whiteness of a late flowering peach-tree. He had been unconscious since the time the shot had struck him; before death his reason came to him — it is often so.
His hand sought his chest feebly and uncertainly, like the hand of a blind man.
“Do not take it away,” he muttered, with his wistful beautiful frank eyes looking with passionate prayer into mine — his enemy’s. “Do not take it away — it is all I have. She laughed, you know — but she did not mean to hurt — oh, no, oh, no. Look at that white — is that snow? We must bring the cattle down from the mountains. Yes — I am in pain; a little pain. Do not tell my mother — nor Anton. Lift me a little, so I can see the hills — she laughed, you know, but then she did not mean to hurt Do not take it away — it is the only little thing I have.”
And so gazing at the whiteness of the fruit blossoms in the open door, and thinking it the lustre of the virgin snow upon his own eternal hills, he shuddered a little and turned wearily on his side, and so looking up at me like a dog in pain, drew his breath with a sigh and died.
When we stript to bury him his right hand was on his chest, and on it was a little tuft of the wild grass that is called the maiden’s hair.
We laid him to rest in the little garden under the fruit trees, with his face turned to his own mountains.
His name I never knew.
His is one of the many million nameless graves that strew all that green country betwixt Alp and Apennine. But I have no doubt that if it could be known we should find it to be — Marco Rosas.
Away in a chalet of Unterinnthal the good mother will sit and spin and pray; and the cattle will come from the grass lands in autumn, and the sun and the clouds will play on the broad snow fields, and the calves will low at the barred byre door, and the seasons will come and go till the Alps are once more smiling blue as the eyes of a northern child, with the gentian flowers and the hyacinths of the spring.
But always in vain will the old mother pray, and never again will the feet of her first-born come over the mountains.
CHAPTER V.
The Song of the Grilli.
I HAVE kept the dear little Raffaello beside me as much as possible.
Every soul treats him tenderly, as if he were a girl. There are hundreds of lads as young as he; but there is something in his pretty innocent face with its curls of Giorgione’s gold, and its clear, wondering, wistful eyes that wins the heart out of the toughest veteran and wildest trooper.
The boy looks so astray in it all.
His soul is in music. This thunder of cannonade, and screams of dying horses, and clash of crossing steel, and falling trees and burning houses, must be a hell to him. He has always a startled look.
Yet he is brave in his way, this little dreamer, who only the other day was a barelegged child, singing while the robins sang in the garret of Ambrogiô Rufi.
He is brave in his way, though he clings so closely to me, and will hardly quit my shadow.
One day I found him hidden by the high yellow corn, listening — listening — listening with an intent and wondering face. I spoke and roused him, and forced him away; for a battery of the Austrians commanded these very fields, and their fire was raking through the bending wheat not ten yards off him.
“What were you doing there!” I asked him in some wrath.
“I was hearing what the grilli said,” he answered me; and then he got out his little trecento viol which lies always in his knapsack; and began to echo out on it the story of the grilli; the little brown grilli singing so happily here in joy of the sun an
d the summer, amongst the yellow com stalks and the flame of the tossing poppies; the poor little grilli caged for Christ’s sake on Ascension Day, and singing still on and on in the little prisons till their life grows out of them, whilst every hut and homestead on the olive hills and in the vine-lands sets bread and wine on its threshold and hangs out a lanthorn to guide the steps of Christ who walks that night on earth.
Raffaellino played the plaint of the grilli that day, whilst a score of rough soldiers stood round, he nothing noting them, and not a few of them had their fierce eyes dim with tears. Then all in a moment he broke it off suddenly, and thrust the viol behind him, and went away by himself into the little bare plaster cottage, where a dozen of us were quartered.
When I followed him he was crying like a child.
“What is it?” I asked him.
He hid his face shyly, as a girl may do.
“Only — only — I have loved my music for itself, you know, and it was quite enough for me. But now I do not know — I think the things and feel them, and I can make others feel them too, but all the harmony is gone out of it for me. In all I do, I only see her face, I only hear her voice. My music is like the grilli’s in the cage; it is my nature — and so it will not leave me — only I am faithless to it, so I die. She will never be anything to me, you know; how should she? great like that, and I a little beggar? Oh, I know, I know it is my folly; but you see in old Verona she had no one else but me, and so—”
And so the gentle heart of the little lad is half broken; a childish love and as innocent as ever this impure earth ere saw, but still one that has killed art in him, and made the adder of memory hiss in every sweet note that was once his solace.
He is no more fit for the fiery furnace of war than are those delicate heads of the millet, that blow like a girl’s auburn curls upon the summer wind. Nevertheless, the battle does not spare the frail maize feathers, but sweeps them aside, and treads them down, and tramples them in blood. Nor does it spare Raffaellino.