by Ouida
The songs of the people now are like their fireflies in summer. They make night beautiful all over the dusky hills, and the seas of vine, and the blowing fields of maize, in a million lonely places of the mountains and the plains. But the fireflies are born in the corn and die in it; few eyes see their love‐fires, except those of the nightingale and the shrew mouse.
Theocritus cried aloud on his Sicilian muses, and the world heard him and has treasured the voice of his sweet complaining.
But the muse of these people now lives with the corncrake under the wheat, and the swallow under the house‐eaves, and is such a simple natural home‐born thing that they think of her no more than the firefly does of her luminance. And so they have no Theocritus, but only ever‐renewing bursts of song everywhere as the millet grows ripe, and the lemon‐tree flowers, and the red poppies leap with the corn.
Often they do not know what they sing: — Does the firefly know that she burns?
This little fellow did not know what he sang.
He did not know what he was.
At home he was always being told that he had no right to exist at all; perhaps he had not; he did not know.
Himself, he thought God had made him to sing, made him just for that; as he made the finches and nightingales. But he did not tell any one so. At home they would have asked him what should the great God want with his puny oat pipe. Toto could make as good a noise cutting a reed in the fields any day.
Perhaps Toto could. He thought his own voice better, but he was not sure. He was only glad to sing, because all the world seemed singing with him, and all the sky seemed one vast space of sweetest sound — as, perhaps, it seems to a bird, who knows?
When he went to bed in the hay he could hear the nightingales and the owls and the grilli singing all together in the trees behind the village and in the fields that stretched by the river; and in the dusk of the dawn when he ran out with his little bare feet, dripping with dew, there were a million little voices hymning in the day. That was what he heard. Other people, no doubt, heard cart‐wheels, and grinding mills, and the scolding of women, and the barking of dogs, and the creaking of doors, and a thousand other discordant things; but to him the world was full of the singing birds and the humming insects, and the blue heavens teemed with a choir of angels: he could not see them, but he heard them, and he knew they were near, and that was enough: he could wait.
“Do you hear anything up there?” the other children would ask him, when he stood listening with his eyes lifted, and they could not see so much as a bird, and he would look back to them quite sorrowfully.
“Do you not hear, too? You are deaf then!”
But the children of Signa would not allow that they were deaf, and pelted and fought him for saying so. Deaf, indeed! when it was he who was the simpleton hearing a bird song where none was.
Were they deaf? or, was his dreaming?
The children of Signa and he never agreed which was which.
It is the old eternal quarrel between the poet and the world; and the children were like the world, they were strong in numbers; since they could see no bird, they would have it there could be no music, and they boxed his ears to cure him of hearing better than his neighbours.
Only it did not cure him.
His angels sung above him this day of the Corpus Domini, and he did not feel the sun hot on his bare head, nor the stones sharp under his bare feet, and he did not remember that he was hungry, and that he had been beaten that morning, until the music ceased suddenly, and he dropped to earth out of the arms of the angels.
Then he felt his bruises, and the want of food gnawed in him, and he gathered up his little white acolyte’s dress and ran as quickly as he could, the withering poppies shaking off his hair.
He was only Pippa’s child.
CHAPTER II.
THERE is wild weather at Signa. The mountain streams brim over and the great historic river sweeps out in full flood, and the bitter Alpine wind tears like a living thing over the hills and across the plain. Not seldom the low‐lying fields become sheets of dull tawny water, and the little hamlets amongst them are all flooded, and from the clock‐towers the tolling bells cry aloud for succour, while the low, white houses seem to float like boats.
In these winters, if the harvests before have been bad, the people suffer much. They have little or no bread, and they eat the raw grass even sometimes. The country looks like a lake in such weather when the floods are on; only for ships there are churches, and the lighthouses are the trees; and like rocky islands in all directions the village roofs and the villa walls gleam red and shine grey in the rain. It is only a short winter, and the people know that when the floods rise and spread, then they will find compensation, later on, for them in the doubled richness of grass and measure of corn.
Still, it is hard to see the finest steer of the herd dashed a lifeless dun‐coloured mass against the foaming piles of the bridge; it is hard to see the young trees and the stacks of hay whirled together against each other; it is hard to watch the broken crucifix and the cottage bed hurled like dead leaves on the waste of waters; it is hardest of all to see the little curly head of a drowned child drift with the boughs and the sheep and the empty hencoop and the torn house door down the furious course of the river.
Signa has seen this through a thousand winters and more in more or less violence, and looked on untouched herself; high set on her hills like a fortress, as indeed she was, in the old republican days.
In one of these wild brief winters, in a drenching night of rain, a woman came down on foot along the high road that runs from the mountains, the old post road by which one can travel to the sea, only no one now ever takes that way. In sunshine and mild weather it is a glorious road, shelving sheer to the river valley on one side and on the other hung over with bold rocks and bluffs dusky with ilex and pine; and it winds and curves and descends and changes as only a mountain road can do, with the smell of its rosemary and its wild myrtle sweet at every turn. But on a winter’s night of rain it is very dreary, desolate and dark.
The woman stumbled down it as best she might.
She had come on foot by short stages all the way from the sea some forty miles over hill and plain. She carried a bundle with her, and never let go her hold on it however wildly the wind seized and shook her, nor however roughly the rain blew her blind. For the bundle was a child.
Now and then she stopped and leaned against the rocks or the stem of a tree and opened her cloak and looked at it; her eyes had grown so used to the thick darkness that she could see the round of its little red cheek and the curve of its folded fist and the line of its closed eyelashes. She would stop a minute sometimes and bend her head and listen, if the wind lulled, to the breathing of its parted lips set close against her breast; then she would take breath herself and go onward.
The child was a year old, and a boy, and a heavy weight, and she was not a strong woman now, though she had once been so; and she had walked all the way from the sea. She began to grow dizzy, and to feel herself stumble like a footsore mule that has been driven until he is stupid and has lost his sureness of step and his capacity for safety of choice. She was drenched through, and her clothes hung in a soaked dead weight upon her. Even with all her care she could not keep the child quite dry.
Somewhere through the darkness she could hear bells tolling the hour. It was eight o’clock, and she had been in hopes to reach Signa before the night fell.
The boy began to stir and cry.
She stopped and loosened her poor garments and gave him her breast. When he grew pacified, she stumbled on again; the child was quiet; the rain beat on her naked bosom, but the child was content and quiet; and so she went on so.
Sometimes she shivered. She could not help that. She wondered where the town was. She could not see the lights. In earlier years she had known the country step by step as only those can who are born in the air of it and tread it daily in their ways of work. But now she had forgotten how the old roa
d ran. Her girlhood seemed so far away; so very, very far. And yet she was only twenty‐two years of age.
But then life does not count by years. Some suffer a lifetime in a day, and so grow old between the rising and the setting of a sun.
She had gone over the road so many times in the warm golden dawns and the white blamy nights, plaiting her wisps of straw, bare‐headed in the welcome air, and with a poppy or a briar‐ rose set behind her ear for vanity’s sake rather than for the flower’s. But she had been long away — though she was so young — at least it seemed very long to her, and with absence she had lost all the peasant’s instinct of safe movement in the dark, which is as sure as an owl’s or an ass’s, and comes by force of long habit and long treading of the same familiar way. She was not sure of her road; not even sure of her footing. The wind terrified her and she heard the loud surge of the Arno waters below; beating and foaming in flood. She was weak too from long fatigue, and the weight of the water in her clothes, and of the child in her arms, pulled her earthward.
No one passed by her.
Every one was housed, except sentries on the church‐towers watching the rising of the waters, and shepherds getting their cattle upward from the low‐lying pastures on to the hills.
She was all alone on the old sea‐road, and if she were near the lights of Signa she could not see them for the steam and mist of the furious rain.
But she walked on resolutely, stumbling often over the great loose stones. She did not care for herself. Life was over for her. She would have been glad to lie down and die where she was. But if the boy were not under some roof before morning, she knew he would perish of cold in her arms. For she could give him so little warmth herself. She shivered in all her veins and all her limbs; and she was soaked through like a drowned thing, and he was wet also. So she went on, growing frightened, though her temper was bold, and only keeping her courage to love by feeling now and then as she went for the fair face of him at her breast. But the touch of her hand made him cry — it was so cold — and so even that comfort ceased for her, and she could only pray in a dumb unconscious way to God to keep the numbness out of her arms lest they should drop the boy as she went.
At a turn in the road there is a crucifix — a wooden one set in the stone.
She sat down a moment under it, and rested as well as she could, and tried to think of heaven. But the wind would not let her. It tore the covering off her head, and tossed her long hair about; it scourged her with a storm of snapt boughs; it stung her with a shower of shrivelled leaves; it pierced through and through her poor thin clothes. She prayed a little as well as she could in the torment of it, but it went round and round her in so mad a whirl that she could not remember how the words should go. Only she remembered to keep the child warm, as a mother‐sheep sets her body between the lamb and the drifts of snow.
After a while she began to cry.
Do what she would she could not keep a sense of chilliness and discomfort from reaching him; he wanted the ease and rest of some little cosy bed; her cramped arms held him ill, and the old shawl that wrapped him up was wet and cold.
She murmured little words to him, and tried even to sing some scrap of old song; but her voice failed her, and the child was not to be comforted. He cried more, and stirred restlessly. With great effort she bent her stiffened knees, and rose, and got on her way again. The rocking movement, as she carried him and walked on, stilled him a little.
She wished that she had dared to turn up a path higher on the mountain that she knew of, which she had passed as the Ave Maria bell hand rung. But she had not dared.
She was not sure who was there; what welcome or what curse she might get. He who was certain to be master there now had always been fierce with her and stern; and he might be married, and new faces be there too — she could not tell; five years were time enough for so much change.
She had not dared go up the path; now that is was miles behind her she wished that she had taken it. But it was too late now. The town she knew, must be much the nearer of the two, now that she had come down so far; so she went onward in the face of the blinding rain‐storm. She would go up in the morning, she thought, and tell him the truth; if he were brutal to herself, he would not let the child starve; she would go up in the morning — so she said, and walked onward.
Her foot had slipped a dozen times, and she had recovered her footing and gone on safe. Once again in the dark she slipped, her foot slid farther on loose wet earth, a stone gave way, she clutched the child with one arm, and flung out the other — she could not see what she caught at in the dark. It was a bush of furze. The furze tore her skin, and gave way. She slipped farther and farther, faster and faster; the soil was so drenched, and the stones were unloosed. She remembered the road enough to know that she was going down, down, down, over the edge. She clasped the child with both arms once more, and was borne down through the darkness to her death.
She knew nothing more; the dark night closed in on her; she lost the sound of the ringing bells, and she ceased to feel the burden of the child.
CHAPTER III.
AN hour later two men came with lanthorns into the fields that lie between the rough vineyards underneath the road from the sea. They had sheep there, which they were going to drive into the town in the morning, and they were afraid that the flock, terrified in the winds and rains, might have broken loose, and strayed across the iron rails of the other road that runs by the river, and might get crushed under the wheels of the night trains running from the west.
As they went they stumbled against something on the ground, and lowered their lights to look.
There was a broken bramble‐bush, and some crushed ferns, and a thing that had fallen from the height above the soaking soil. By their dim lanthorns they saw that the thing was a woman, and bending the light fuller on her as well as they could for the rain, they saw that she had been stunned or killed by the fall.
There was a great stone on which the back of her head had struck. She lay face upward, with her limbs stretched out; her right arm was close round the body of a living child; her breast was bare.
The child was breathing and asleep; he had fallen upon his mother, and so had escaped unhurt.
The men had been born peasants, and they were used to wring the throats of trapped birds and to take lambs from their mothers with small pity. They lifted the boy with some roughness and some trouble from the stiffening arm that enclosed him; he began to wail and moan; he was very wet and miserable, and he said a little word which was a call for his mother, like the pipe of a little bird that has fluttered out of the nest, and lies cold on the grass and frightened.
One of them took him up, and wrapped his cloak across the little sobbing mouth.
The other knelt down, and tried to make his light burn better, and laid his hand on the woman’s breast to feel for pulse of life. But she was quite dead. He did what he could to call back life, but it was all in vain; at length he covered her breast, and stared up at his fellow.
“This looks like Pippa,” he said, slowly, with a sound as of awe in his voice.
The other lowered his light too and looked.
“Yes, it is like Pippa,” he said, slowly, also.
Then they were both silent for some moments, the lanthorn light blinking in the rain.
“Yes, it is Pippa; yes, certainly, it is Pippa,” said the first one stupidly; and he ran his hand with a sort of shudder over the outline of her features and her form.
The one who held the child turned his light on the little wet face; the baby ceased to cry, and opened his big, dark, wondering eyes at the flame.
“And whose byblow is this?” said he.
“The devil knows,” said he who knelt by the mother. “But it is Pippa. Look here on her left breast — do you see? there is the little three‐cornered scar of the wound I gave her with my knife, at the wine fair, that day.”
The other looked closer while the rain beat on the white cold chest of the woman.
Then they were both silent again a little, for they were Pippa’s brothers.
“Let us go and tell them in the Lastra, and get the bier.” said the one who knelt by her, getting up to his feet, with a sullen, dazed gloom on his dark face.
“And leave her here?” said the one who had the child.
“Why not? nobody will run away with the dead!”
“But this little beast — what can one do with him?”
“Carry him to your wife.”
“There are too many at home.”
“She has one of his age; she can take him.”
“She will never touch Pippa’s boy.”
“Give him to me, then, and stay you here.”
“No, that I dare not — the foul fiend might come after her.”
“The foul fiend take your terrors. Let us get into the Lastra; we can see then. We must tell the Misericordia, and get the bier—”
“There is no such haste; she is stone dead. What a pipe this brat has! One would think he was a pig with the knife in its throat.”
“It is very cold. Who would have thought it could have lived — such a fall as that, and such a night!”
“It lives because nobody wants it. She had no gold about her, had she?”
“I do not know.”
The one who held the child stopped over the dead woman awhile, then rose with a sigh of regret —
“Not a stiver; I have felt her all over.”
“Then she must have done ill these five years.”
“Yes — and yet so handsome, too. But Pippa never plaited even.”