by Ouida
The next day after he has listened to the grilli’s chaunt in the cornfields, there is bitter struggle over all this fertile smiling land, with its festooned vines and its leaf-hidden watercourses, that is like one vast sheet of verdure enrolled between the far mountains.
It is a struggle that is called, later on, the Field of Montebello.
“We go in black with powder; we shall come out red with carnage,” says one of its soldiers, and it is true that we do. We dip the scarlet lilies of Florence and the white cross of Savoy in blood till they are both of one colour. We strangle the black eagle that day, down there amongst the tangled vines and the full-eared corn in the country of Virgil.
It is a hot and blinding day.
The sun lies heavily on all the white roads. The bruised vines, and trodden corn, and ruined orchards, are sad to see.
At intervals here and there, on the green face of the country, there are dusky clouds of smoke and dark small masses slowly moving. There is a battle scattered over the great plain. The fine ethereal lines of the mountains are delicate as gossamer against the summer sky. So they looked when Theodoric and Otho fought here. They have seen so many millions of men slaughter one another here, since the far ages when men were not, and all this laughing land of the vine and the pomegranate was only a primaeval valley of ice.
How the battle goes elsewhere I cannot tell. Where I am, we hold a villa and its courts and gardens against the Austrians.
It is a rambling old place, with great walled gardens, and great echoing chambers, and great discoloured frescoes peeling in the sun. Its owners have fled long before.
There is only an old man, a gardener, who sits by a well in the central court while the struggle goes on round him, and stares and looks stupid, as though his wits were gone.
God knows how we fight — I do not There are some fifty of us and a handful of Bersaglieri — that is all; and the Austrians are very numerous. They held the position early in the day, and we took it from them at noon; and we have held it against the worst that they can do until it is now four by the sun-dial on the wall where the great mulberry grows and a cherub’s head is painted.
The musketry rolls; the smoke is thick; the dead men fall down the broad stone steps, and lie under the red oleander flowers. The staircase is disputed step by step. The pavements are all wet with blood. The din is horrible. Amidst it all I know I hear, in a moment of stillness, a little bird singing. I look up and see it above my head, on a tendril of a vine that comes through the large unglazed window.
There is a young face lifted to listen to it. It is innocent and heavenly looking, like the cherub’s on the frescoed wall. It is terribly out of keeping with the ghastly scene around. It is quite white, even to the lips; but they are firmly closed, although so pale, and Raffaellino has not left my side to-day.
The sun-dial points four in the afternoon.
We have looked for reinforcement, but none comes. How the battle goes elsewhere we cannot tell. The enemy are strong here still and keep pressing upward through the courts and gardens.
All the later half of the bitter burning day our own men seem to close round me, and look up to me as their leader. I do not think how or why it is — whether all those in command are dead or not. I lead them because it comes naturally — I, a mere volunteer, a common soldier, like the rest of them, with nothing but my musket.
As the bird sings, and a little lull comes in the strife, as such a pause will, even in the fiercest struggle, I look around me anxiously. My clothes have been shot through and through, but, strangely enough, nowhere is the flesh grazed or the bone broken. Yet men have fallen round me like chestnuts in the autumn forests.
We are very few.
However the day go elsewhere in the plain, here it goes against us.
Jâgers have joined the Whitecoats, and are pressing up through the ilexes.
We hold the staircase and the inner court still; — but for how long?
If I could send word to the head of the bridge, a mile off, the Sardinians are there, and might spare men. Raffaellino, watching my face, in that one little moment as the bird sings, reads my thoughts, and whispers to me through the din —
“If I crept through the laurels and ran, the poplars would shelter me; once by the river-side, to the bridge is not far?”
I do not answer him.
The lad is dear to me. Did I not see him first, the pretty child, touching his little viol that carnival day in the cathedral square where grim Roland keeps watch and ward!
The passage to the bridge is possible; but whosoever makes it — being seen — will surely meet his death. For all the way is set thick with Tirolese, who mark their men as on the hills they mark their chamois.
“No, it is too dangerous,” I say to him abruptly. “No; I forbid you.”
Raffaellino lifts his golden head; the sun coming through the open window makes an aureola round it. A little feverish flush comes on his cheeks.
“And I — disobey you!” he said quickly. “Even before you — Italy!”
And then he runs out swiftly, and through the window I see him in the open air, and then I lose him underneath the leaves, and have only space to breathe for him that half-unconscious prayer which the most reckless men will cling to by an instinct; for the lull is over, and the Jàgers are in the inner court, and a ball has struck down the old man sitting at the well, and I have to draw my comrades closer round me, and hold the hall as best we can with a raking fire that makes the Tedeschi reel and scatter as they come.
Then follows the fiercest, hottest, darkest, dreadest moments of my life.
The shadow on the sun-dial creeps on; it is a quarter past four and more. My little troop is only half in numbers what it was when the bird sang. The grape-shot falls like hail. Unless the Sardinians come quickly —
The shadow on the dial creeps onward.
It is no longer mere firing and counter-firing; it is a hard, devilish, hand-to-hand, throat-to-throat struggle on the marble stairs and pavement that is all slippery with carnage.
Some of the Jagers have found a second stairway on the other side of the villa, and so have crept up unseen by us, and pour out on to the head of the great staircase, and thrust us downward, so that we are between two forces, as in a vice. We are some thirty men in all — not more; and many of us are wounded, and very weak from long thirst and the heat of the day.
Caught between these two, the Jagers pressing on us from behind, the Tirolese forcing us backwards on to their comrades’ steel, we struggle, God knows how, in a horrible crush and medley, across the court and into the green grass-lands of the gardens, where the ripening grapes are hanging on all the trellised vines.
Here, if the Sardinians do not come, we must be butchered like so many sheep. Yet all the while it is hardly of the Sardinians that I think; it is of the dear little lad making his perilous way through the canes underneath the poplars; and every now and then, even in the fellness and ferocity of the struggle, I turn my head to look beyond the laurels to the grassy stretches across which he must return.
The brutes hem us in on both sides. The men go down like com under the sickle. I and the few who remain contrive to force a little breathing space, so that we have our backs to the villa gates and get clear a moment of one half the pressure.
At that moment I see Raffaellino.
He is running, not creeping fox-like, as he should do, for the canes to shield him; but running erect, his feet are bare as in his childish days over the stones of Verona, that he may speed himself the quicker; his fair tangled hair is blowing back from his face. He has picked up a shattered standard somewhere, and the colours of Free Italy float from him as he comes.
He waves it and cries aloud to me, the dear, rash, impatient, unselfish little lad; because he knows that, in such straits as ours, hope, being a moment delayed, may be too late forever.
He cries to me, the little dear, brave lad —
“Hold out ten minutes, and they are here.”<
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Then, as he speaks, there is a shower of green leaves above his head; he throws his curls back with a strange dizzy gesture; then he stops short there in the grassy path, with all the vines and the rose-laurels close about him; then down he falls, face forward, on the turf.
They have shot him from behind the laurel-hedge.
What it does to me I know not; I only know that all the rage of desert lions wounded, and all their strength with it, seems to pour into me.
Seeing the child fall there, I only know that I pierce the storm of shot, and cleave the pressure of the Austrians with a fury before which all is borne down as before the rush of a mountain tempest.
I only know that so do the agony and vengeance in my soul set light to the passions of every Italian with me in that hour, that, ere the ten minutes are spent, ere the Sardinians are with us, we — not thirty men in all, and faint and bleeding, and far outnumbered — have driven the foe out from the courts and gardens, and hurled them on to meet their death under the hewing steel and trampling hoofs of the Sardè horsemen as they sweep up to aid us by the river’s course.
And then — when it is all over, and the place is clear, and over the broad plain all men know that Italy has won — then I go and find the dear child, there where he fell, with the torn flag under him, and the rosy laurel flowers hanging their clusters over his pretty head.
Is he quite dead?
Not quite. When I lift him, his heavy, blue-veined lids raise themselves, and his eyes smile. But I, who have seen so many men die, know that this is Death, though the strong sun still shines so clearly and the rose-laurels blow in the wind.
“Give it me,” he says softly; his voice is barely audible.
They have shot him in the chest, and he bleeds to death internally.
I know what he means.
I unstrap his knapsack and take out the little viol that he used to play on in the moonlight in the arch of the coppersmith’s door in sad Verona.
He thanks me with his sweet, wistful, shining eyes, and tries to touch the chords.
It is of no use; he has no strength left. He tries no longer; his hand falls, and he sighs a little, whilst the rose-laurels brush his curls.
“Take it to her from me,” he murmurs. “Perhaps she will remember a little — now and then.”
Then he lifts his face, like a tired child, and kisses me on the cheek, and smiles against the sun.
“Do the dead grilli sing where God is?” he says; and then the breath quivers a moment on his mouth, and the eyelids fall, and I know that he sees the sun no more.
* * * * *
At evening on that day all men praise me, and they speak great things of my leadership whereby the villa was won; and even my king gives me brave words upon the field; and I, Pascarèl, the player, have won a name as a soldier of Italy that is not unworthy the dead Pascarèlli who live in stone in the crypts and the cloisters.
But I hear it all as in a dream; I see it all as through half-blind eyes.
What I hear is the song of the grilli that is silent for evermore with all the rest of the sweet wild music that lived in that innocent soul. What I see is the tender body of Raffaellino, where we have laid it in the silent hall of the villa, with the moonbeams shining white about his head, and on his breast a knot of the red rose-laurel.
Ah, God! it is as cruel as to wring the throat of a bird in full song. Ah, God! the fair dawn that will have no noon; the sweet blossom that will have no flower!
CHAPTER VI.
Red and Gold.
MY father tells me to put on that cinquecento dress of red and gold, and set the rose-diamonds he gave me in my breast and hair, and be ready for a great masque at a great palace to-night, when all Florence is mad and drunk with joy.
Here in the stillness of the villa gardens, up where Sta. Margharità lifts her little bell-tower to heaven, even here, though so high in the hills, the sound of the people’s rejoicing comes to me all the day long, as the heavy sough of a distant sea rolls up to those who sit on the cliffs above.
I have told them I am tired and so cannot see the city in her festivity to-day. But it is not true. The truth is, that I shudder from the shouts of homage and the sight of mirth.
For he is not dead; he has even done great things upon those terrible plains — so rumour says; giving him the green bay of the patriot in lieu of the paper laurels of the player. But I cannot go down into his Florence, this the first day her troops return to her. I cannot risk to see his face as strangers see it, and look upon him in the press of the glad streets, maimed, perhaps, war-worn, dust-covered, lame with long marches in the summer suns — as heaven knows I may.
And little Ino; my rash words must have sent him to the front, for they know nothing of him in that old cool cypress-shaded chamber behind the Torrigianni Palace; and I can hear nothing of him — a mere little lad, a mere grain of dust in the great plains, a mere drop of blood in the vast sea of carnage.
Men make no account of him. I cannot hear if he be living or dead; my poor little bright playmate, who stood and sang with me that day of carnival in old Verona. And whatever his fate be, I sent him to it Ah! why do we frail, foolish, fire-filled things that they call women live only to hurt and kill? — all heedlessly as children catch at flies?
My heart is heavy as I sit within all the long luminous Tuscan day, and hear the echo of the people’s mirth, the thunder of the guns, the tramp of marching columns, the roll of beaten drums that comes dulled by distance up the olive slopes upon my ear.
But when the day is dead I cannot have the sad luxury of solitude longer. My father and cousin will not be denied. I put on the masque dress with the diamonds that Varkò painted, and I make ready for the festa of the night.
It is a wonderful and costly thing, this dress; I have not worn it yet in public. The train is cloth of gold, and the scarlet skirts beneath are sown with little diamonds. It was my father’s fancy, copied from some old Florentine picture that he has.
It is very beautiful and rare, and lights me like a robe of flame, and makes my eyes gleam black as night, and my rebellious hair all shine like crisp new gold.
And yet — and yet — I fancy I looked better in the old yellow and purple skirts, with my hands full of poppies and my curls caught with the wild vine.
I lean on the terrace balustrade, and, despite my wealth of diamonds, am sick at heart My cousin joins me: he is courtly and full of grace; but a great distrust of him is always on me, and some memory that I hate, yet cannot disentangle, arises in me always with the sound of his voice — a voice ever harsh, however skilfully modulated.
This evening, while the sun is sinking over Carrara, he urges, for the twentieth time, his love upon me.
He is in earnest, that I think. He seeks me with passion and purpose; and my father has more than once sought to persuade me that the destiny of my future years lies here, in all this man can give.
This evening, while the sun is red, my cousin presses his prayer on me until I turn in weariness and rebellion.
“Once for all,” I say to him, with a tired impatience of his honied phrases that sound so poor and pale beside the memory of those words amongst the golden vines under Fiesole. “Once for all, will you not take my answer? I have said it often — no! no! no!”
“I am then quite hateful to you?” he asks, very low.
I look him full in the eyes, and answer straightly.
“Well, you are.”
No milder way will end his importunity.
Then the veiled evil in him wakes.
“That is your last word?” he asks.
“My very last.”
“Well then,” he says, and smiles a little cloudy as he speaks. “Well then, I have a tale to tell you. I, straying about in this dear Italy of yours, found myself, of a winter’s night, in old Verona. There was a masked ball. I went to it Amongst the crowd there was a beautiful wild, naughty thing who had broken loose from home and took her pleasure there. I paid her entrance-m
oney; so I know—”
He checked with a gesture the cry that escaped me, as the memory which had pursued me in the sound of his voice rose clear.
“Nay, hear me. I will make my story brief. I had no thought who the girl was — a pretty, foolish, feather-brained fierce thing; but as time went I found she bore, rightly or wrongly, the name I bore myself, I lost her in Verona, and in the summer of the selfsame year I saw her wandering with some strolling players, and let her go, for what was she to me? A little while, and, through many deaths and strange accidents in my family, the lands and the titles fell on one who had been disowned by all his race for his loose living — a worn-out gambler, to whom fortune came at last in much magnificence. I came to know him, since I was next of kin, and in his daughter I discovered my waif and stray of the Verona carnival. And then, — foolishly, no doubt, — I grew to love her. Ay, I do love her, that I swear; and all a gentleman can offer to the woman he loves I offer now to her. But if she turn against me, if she say me no in her haughty, pretty fashion, that is half wild still, then let her beware. For, though she holds herself so royally, she is but a bastard born. For, though none knows it but myself, her mother, the Florentine singer, was no wife.”
The blood leaps into my face, and seems to sting me like a thousand vipers. Not knowing what I do, I strike him hotly in the eyes with a bough of the pomegranate that I hold broken in my hand.
“It is a lie!” I cry against him.
He recoils a moment, pale as death. Then, bowing low, he says, —
“Go, — ask your father.”
“You dare me to that!”
“Go, — ask,” he says to me calmly, with a quiet smile.
I go.
My father is there in the great dusky white room that the sunset is touching to all kinds of tender hues, like those that fall through the painted casements of great churches.
I go to him swiftly across the vast glistening floor, very silently; yet he looks up with a startled glance in his cold clear eyes.
Perhaps I look strangely; I do not know; my mouth burns and my face is flushed. I feel lost, and amazed, and feverish, and vaguely frightened, as I did when I was astray in the press and fury of the Veglione.