by Ouida
“Nay, never — poor Pippa!”
So they muttered, plodding over the broken heavy ground, with the sound of the swollen river in their ears and the lanthorn lights gleaming through the steam of the rain. In the noise of the waters the child sobbed and screamed unheard. The man had tossed him over his shoulder as he carried the new‐born lambs, only with a little less care.
They clambered up into the road and tramped through the slough of mud into the town. The woman had drawn nigh to the upper town by a dozen yards, when her foot had slipped, and she had reeled over to her death. But the feet of the shepherds were bare, and kept sure hold, like the feet of goats. They tramped on, quick, through the crooked streets and over the bridge; the river had run high, and along the banks, and on the flat roofs of the towers there were the lights burning of the men who watched for the flood. They heard how loud and swiftly the river was running as they went over the bridge and down in to the irregular twisting streets, and under the old noble walls of the lower village of the Lastra.
The one who carried the child opened a rickety door in the side of a tumbledown house, and climbed a steep stairway, and pushed his way into a room where children of all ages, and trusses of straw, and a pig, and a hen with her chickens, and a black crucifix, and a load of cabbage‐leaves and maize‐stalks, and a single lemon‐tree in a pot, were all together nearly indistinguishable in the darkness. He tossed the child to a sturdy brown woman with fierce brows.
“Here, Nita, here is a young one I found in the fields. Feed it to‐night, and to‐morrow I will tell the priest and the others, and we shall get credit. It is near dead of cold already. No — I cannot stay — do you hear how the waters are out? Bruno is down below wanting me to help to house the sheep.”
He clattered away down the stairs, and joined his brother in the street.
“I told her nothing of Pippa,” he said, in a whisper. “If she knew it were Pippa’s not a drop of milk would he get to‐night. As it is, it is a pretty little beggar; she will let him share with Toto. She knows charity pleases Heaven. And — and — see here, Bruno, why need we speak of Pippa at all.”
His brother stared at him in the murky gloom. “Why? — why we must fetch her in and bury her.”
“The waters will do that before morning if we let them alone; that will spare us a deal of trouble, Bruno.”
“Trouble — why?”
“Oh, it is always trouble — the church and the law, and all the rest. Then you know the Syndic is such a man to ask questions. And nobody saw her but ourselves. And they may say we tumbled her over. She has come back poor, and all Signa knows that you struck her with your knife on the day of the fair, and that she has been a disgrace and a weariness always. We might have trouble, Bruno.”
“But the child?”
“Oh, the child! I have told Nina we picked it up lost in the fields. Why should we tell anybody to‐night about Pippa? The poor soul is dead. No worse can come. Men do not hurt dead women. And there is so much to do to‐night, Bruno. We should see for our sheep on the other side now, and then stay down here. The devil knows what pranks the Arno may not play to‐night. In five hours I warrant you he will be out all over the country.”
“But to leave her there — all alone — it is horrible!”
“How shall we show we did not push her there to her death?”
“But we did not.”
“That is why they would all say we did. Everybody knows that there was bad blood with us and Pippa: and most of all with you. Let the night go over, Bruno. We want the night to work in, and if she be there at day dawn, then we can tell. It will be time enough.”
“Well — lie as you like,” said the other, sullenly. “Let us get the sheep in anyhow.”
So they went out to the open country again, through the storm of the west wind that was blowing the river back from the sea, so that it could not get out, and was driven up again between the hills, and so overflowed the lands through which it travelled. The men worked hard and in earnest, housing their own sheep and driving their neighbours’ cattle on rising knolls, or within church doors, or anywhere where they were safe from the water; and then came down again into the street towards midnight, where all the people were awake and astir watching the Arno, and holding themselves ready to flee.
“You have got the ague, Bruno,” said the man at the wine‐shop, for his arm shook as he drank a draught.
“So would you if you had been up to your middle in water all the night like me,” said the elder brother, roughly.
But it was not the water, they were too used to that. It was the thought of the woman dead all alone under the old sea‐road.
The night became a bitter black night. Up the valley the river was out, flooding the pastures far and near. Boats went and came, taking help, and bringing homeless families. Watchfires were burning everywhere. Bodies of drowned cattle drifted in by scores. There were stories that the great city herself was in flood. In such a time every breath is a tale of terror, and every rumour grows instantly to giant proportions.
The upper town of Signa itself was safe. But was great peril for the low‐lying Lastra. No one went to their beds. The priest prayed. The bells tolled. The men went to and fro in fear. The horrid loudness of the roaring waters drowned all other sounds.
When the morning broke, sullen and grey, and still beaten with storm, the cold dull waste of water stretched drearily on either side of the great bridge. The two brethren went with the crowd that looked from it eastward and westward.
The river had spread over the iron rails, and the grassy, broken ground, and the bushes of furze, and reached half way up to the rocks and the hill‐road above. The wind had changed, and was blowing in from the eastward mountains. The water rolled under its force with furious haste to the sea like a thing long imprisoned, and frantic with the joy of escape.
“It has taken Pippa,” said the brothers, low to one another.
And they felt like men who have murdered a woman.
Not that it mattered of course. She was dead. And if not to the sea, then to the earth, all the dead must go, — into darkness, and forgotten of all.
CHAPTER IV.
THE brothers looked pale under their brown skins in the ashen light of the dawn.
But they had lost sheep like other folks, and so like other folks were pitied as they went back into the Lastra to get a mouthful of bread, after the sickly vigil of the night.
Bruno was an unwedded man, and could bear misfortune; but Lippo was a man early married, and having six young children to clamour round his soup‐pot, and fight for the crusts of bread. He was pointed out amongst the crowd of sufferers, and was one of those who were pitied the most, and who was sure to get a good portion of the alms‐giving and public relief.
“Give Bruno a cup of wine and a crust, Nita,” said he, going up the stairs into the house of his wife. He lived there with her because her father, who was a cobbler, owned the place, and he himself best liked the life of the Lastra. The wife, too, having been a cobbler’s daughter and grand‐daughter, had been always used to see life from the half‐door of the workshop; she would not become a mere contadina, hoeing and weeding and plaiting and carrying dung in a broad‐leaved hat and a russet gown — not she, were it ever so; and Anita was one those strong and fortunate women who always get their own way by dint of their power to make everyone wretched who crosses them.
“Leave me to speak,” said Lippo, with a glance of meaning to his brother.
It was five in the morning, very cold, and still dusky. Anxiety was allayed, since the wind blew from the east, and the waters were sinking, though slowly.
Nita, who had been up all night on the watch, like the rest of the women, was boiling coffee in a tin‐pot, and fanning the charcoal. The chil‐ dren lay about as they chose on the floor. None of them had been put to bed, since at any moment they might have had to run for their lives.
Bruno looked round for Pippa’s child. He did not see it.
> “An awful night,” said Lippo, kicking the pig out of a doze. “They do say the Vecchio bridge is down in Florence, and that the jewellers could not get out in time. I wish the gold and silver and stones would drift down here. All the Grève country is swamped. St. Guisto sticks up on his tower like a masthead. The cattle are drowned by herds. Whole stacks of wheat are against the piles, making hungry souls’ mouths water; rotted and ruined; fine last year’s grain; the good God is bitter‐hard sometimes. Where is the baby I brought you last night, my woman?”
Nita pointed with her charcoal fan; her coffee was on the point of boiling.
The brothers looked where she pointed, to a nest of hay close to the hen and her chickens. The child lay there sound asleep, with his little naked limbs curled up; and close against him was Toto, a yearling child also.
The elder brother turned away suddenly, and his body shook a little.
“You have never dried your clothes, Bruno,” said his sister‐in‐law. “What a baby gaby a man is without a wife. Drink that, it is hot as hot. And what did you bring me that baby for — you and Lippo? You know whose brat it is, I suppose, and look out for the reward? I thought so, or I would not have given it house‐room. Toto is more work than enough, so masterful as he is — and so ravenous.”
“Nay,” said Lippo, as with a sheepish apology for his weakness. “I know nothing of whose brat it is — I was just sorry for it; left in the soaking fields there; and I picked it up as I should pick up a lame lamb. What do you think of it, my dearest? does it look like a poor child or a rich one, eh? Women are quick to judge.”
The black brows of Nita lowered in wrath.
“Mercy of heaven! Who would have to do with such dolts as men? Just because the child was there you pick it up, never thinking of all the hungry mouths half‐fed at home! Shame on you. You are an unnatural brute. You would starve your own to nourish a stranger!”
“Nay, sweetest Nita!” murmured Lippo, coaxingly. “On such a night — and a child taken down by flood, too — not a living soul but would have done as I did. And who knows but he may be some rich father’s child, and make our fortunes? Any way, the township will give us credit, and he can go to the Innocenti to‐morrow if we find no gain in him. Look what his things betoken.”
“Oh, his things are rough‐spun enough, and vile as can be,” said his wife, in a fuming fury. “And would a rich man’s child be out on flood? It is only the poor brats that the weather finds loose for it to play antics with; the child is a beggar’s son, and this thing linked round his neck by a little string, is a thing you get at the fairs for a copper‐bit.”
The two men looked together at the locket that she held to them; it was of base‐metal — a little poor round trumpery plaything. On it there was the one word in raised letters of Signa, and inside a curl of soft light hair. That was all. They could none of them read, so the letters on the metal told them nothing. They stooped together over the sleeping child.
He was pretty and well made; he lay quite naked in the hay, and beside brown Toto looked like one of the little marble children of old Mino. His lashes and his brows were black, but over his forehead hung little rings of soft, fair, crumpled hair.
Bruno turned away.
“She used to look just like that when she was a little child,” he muttered to himself.
Lippo glanced round to see if his wife heard. But she was busy with the hen, who had got into a barrel of rice, and was eating treble her own price at the market at one meal.
“The brat must go,” said she, turning and flogging the hen away. “As for a chance that it is a rich man’s child, that is all rubbish. You make your bread with next year’s corn. Chances like that are old wives’ tales. What we have to do is to feed six hungry stomachs. You were a fool to bring it here at all. But to dream one should keep it! Holy Mary!”
“Holy Mary would say, keep it,” said Bruno, munching his crust.
“Maybe it is your own, Bruno. Those that hid can find,” said his sister‐in‐law sharply. “The child shall pack to‐day. I shall go and tell them at the guard‐house. Toto is more than enough, and as for that locket, you can get such trash as that at nay fair for a couple of figs. That goes for nothing.”
“Well, well, keep the poor baby till noon, and I will see what the Curato says. It is always well to see what he says,” her husband answered her hurriedly, and afraid of the gathering storm on Bruno’s face.
Bruno was passionate, tempestuous, and weak, and the quieter, subtler brother ruled him with ease whilst seeming to obey. But for turning the baby of dead Pippa’s to public maintenance — Lippo had a foreboding in him that in this matter his brother would be too strong for him.
He hurried away out of pretext of labour awaiting them in the inundated country, not without misgiving that the darkest suspicions as to the fatherhood of the foundling were awakening in the jealous soul of his wife.
They went straight to the edge of the river, and got out their old black boat, with its carved prow and tricoloured tiller, and pulled down the current of the now quiet water to see with the rest what could help so save from the flotsam and jetsam jetsum of the flood. Whole districts lay under water, and the river was full of dead cats and dogs, drowned sheep, floating pipkins and wine‐casks, bales of hay, carcases of cows. and broken bits of furniture from many a ruined farmstead and peasant’s hut laid low.
“Listen,” said the elder brother suddenly, when the boat was fairly out from the bank, and with his hooked pole he drew in a spinning‐wheel with its bank of flax drenched like a drowned girl’s hair. “Listen to me, Lippo. Pippa’s son must not go to charity. Do you hear?”
“I hear. But we are poor men, and Pippa was—”
“That is neither here nor there,” said Bruno, with his dark brows meeting. “She never asked alms of us, nor house‐room, nor did anything except to go to her death just as sheep tumble over a rock. The baby must not go to the parish. We did faulty enough — letting her go down flood with never an office of church said over her. And who knows — who knows — she might not be quite dead, after all.”
“Nita will not keep him — that is sure,” said the younger quickly. “Look, that is Barcelli’s old red cow. You may know her by the spot on her side.”
“Would she keep him if she were paid?”
Lippo’s eyes lighted with joy, but he bent a grave face over his pole as he raked in a floating oil‐flask by its wicker coat.
“I doubt if she would. She has a deal of trouble with Toto. And who is there to pay, pray? We know no more than the cow there who the man was — you know that.”
“I will pay.”
“You!”
“Yes; I will pay the child’s keep.”
“Holy angels! And you who were for ever at words and blows with Pippa, and stabbed at her even for being too gay!”
“I will pay,” said Bruno.
Lippo rowed on in silence some moments.
“How much?” he asked at last.
“I will give you half all I get.”
Lippo’s white teeth showed themselves in a sudden smile. His brother gained a good deal in corn and oil and beans and hay and wine, being on good land, and being a man who worked and got the uttermost out of the soil that he shared with his master, and Lippo was often pinched by his father‐in‐law Baldo the cobbler, and half famished by his wife, and was a true son of the soil, and knew the worth of a hundredth part of a copper coin as well as any man between sea and mountain.
“Half all you get, and we to keep the child?” he said absently, and as with reluctance. “But what can we say to Nita?”
“You are never at a loss for good lying, Lippo.”
Lippo smiled; his vanity was flattered.
“I never lie to Nita. She always finds one out. Only in the matter of Pippa’s son I hid the truth to please you. She never would nurse the child if she guessed. Bust as for making her keep him, say what one will, it will be impossible — impossible, my dear.”
“It must be,” said Bruno, withdrawing his hand from the tiller and bringing it down with violence on the boat’s side, while his eyes flashed with blue fire as the lightning flashes most summer nights over the blue hills of his own Signa. “It must be. I will pay. I will give you half I get. Good harvests — you know what that is. But Pippa’s child shall not go to parish while I have an arm to drive a plough through the ground or to guide over the field. Settle it with your wife your own way. But Pippa’s child shall grow up amongst us.”
“Dear Bruno, to please you I will try,” said gentle Lippo with a sigh. “But we have brats too many in the house, and you know what Nita’s ‘Nay’ can be.”
“Nay or yea, the child stays,” said Bruno.
“The half of everything,” murmured Lippo, as he bent to his oars and passed by a dog howling on the top of its floating kennel to reach his pole to a butcher’s basket of meat that was tossing amongst the rubbish.
But Bruno, having the tiller, pushed first to reach the dog.
“It is only a cur,” said Lippo.
Bruno pulled the dog into the boat.
In the Lastra, and in the town, and in all the country round or near Signa, the brothers were known as well as the mass‐bells of the churches. The Signa people thought that Bruno the contadino was a bad man enough, ready with his knife and often in a brawl, and too often seen at fairs and with other men’s wives on feast‐days. Lippo they liked and respected, and everybody spoke him fair; and he would keep the peace most beautifully when men got angry in the streets before his house‐door.
They were both handsome men, and could neither of them read, and believed in their priest and their paternoster, and had never been beyond the mountains around Signa, except now and then — Bruno with his bullocks, and Lippo in a donkey‐cart to buy leather — down the Valdarno into the Lily City.
Bruno lived on the wild hillside, amongst the thyrne and the myrtle and the gorze and the grass‐cropping sheep and the ever‐singing nightingales. Lippo dwelt down in the street, doing as little as he could, and by preference nothing, in the smell of his wife’s frying and in the sound of her father’s little hammer; rowing out his boat when there was any chance for it to pay, and seeing after the few sheep that the shoemaker kept above the bridge. They had been born within a year of one another — sons of peasants and workers in the fields. Bruno stayed on the old land where his fathers had had rights of the soil uncounted generations. Lippo had loitered down love‐making into the Lastra, and had married very early the daughter of well‐to‐do old Baldo.