by Ouida
Pippa cast the twenty gold pieces into the mud of the street, where the poor scrambled and clutched and fought for them. She understood that she was forsaken.
All he had said was true; but the great truth was what he had not said. Pippa was ignorant of almost everything; but this she knew enough to know.
That night they took her to a madhouse, and cut close the long brown braids of her hair, and fastened together the feet that had used to fly, as the wind flies, through the paths of the vines in summer.
Poor Pippa! She had always plaited ill; the women had always said so.
In half‐a‐year’s time she gave birth to a child, and her reason came back to her, and after a time they let her go. She promised to go to her own country.
But she cheated them, and went to Dresden. She had kept that name in her mind. She got there as best she could, begging on the way or working; but of work she knew so little, and of workers there were so many. She carried the child all the way. Sometimes people were good to her; sometimes they were bad; oftenest they were neither one nor the other. Indifference is the invincible giant of the world.
When she reached Dresden it was summer. The city was empty.
With much trouble she heard of him. The copy was done, and he was gone back to France.
“Perhaps he does not want you. If he wanted you he would not leave you,” said a comely woman, who was sorry for her, but who spoke as she thought, giving her a roll of bread under a tree in the street.
“Perhaps he does not want me,” thought Pippa. The words awoke her memory. She had been left by him. He would not have left her unless he had been tired — tired of all the poverty and pain, and of the passion that had lost its glow, as the poppy loses its colour once being reaped with the wheat.
There was a dull fierce pain in her. There were times when she wished to kill him. Then at other times she would see a look of his face in the child’s and would break into an anguish of weeping.
Anyway, she set backward to find him.
Carrying the child, that grew heavier with each day, and travelling sometimes with gipsies and vagrants, and mountebanks, but more often alone, and begging her bread on the way, she got back into France after many months. She had got stupid and stunned with fatigue and with pain. She had lost all look of youth, but she kept the child as fresh as a rose; and now and then she would smile, because his mouth laughed like her lover’s.
Back into Paris she went. The strange fortunes that shelter the wretched kept her in health and strength, though she rarely had a roof over her at night, and all she ate were the broken pieces that people gave her in pity.
In his old haunts it was easy to hear of him; he had gone to study in Rome.
“He will do well for himself, never fear,” they said in the old house on the Seine water, where her dream of joy had dreamt itself away. Some great person, touched by his poverty and genius, and perhaps by his beauty, had given him the means to pursue the high purposes of his art at leisure. Some said the great person was a woman, and a princess: no one knew for sure. Anyhow, he was gone to Rome.
Pippa knew the name of Rome.
People had gone through Signa sometimes, to wind away by the sea road, amongst the marshes and along the flat sickly shores, to Rome. And now and then through Signa, at fair time, or on feast days, there had strayed little children, in goatskins, and with strange pipes, who played sad airs, and said they were from Rome.
But the mountains had always risen between her and Rome. It had always been to her far off as some foreign land. Nevertheless, she set out for Rome by the sole way she knew — the way that she had travelled with him — straight across France and downward to the sea, and along the beautiful bold road, under the palm trees and the sea alps, and so along the Corniche back to Signa.
She knew that way; and toilsome though it was, it was made sweet to her by remembered joys.
He had gone with her; and at every halting place there was some memory so precious, yet so terrible, that it would have been death to her, only the child was there, and wanted her, and had his smile, and so held her on to life.
Her lover had been with her in the summer and autumn weather; and all the way had been made mirthful with love’s happy foolish ways; and the dust of the road had been as gold to her, because of the sweet words he murmured in her ear: and when they were tired they had leaned in one another’s arms, and been at rest; and every moonlit night and rosy morning had been made beautiful, because of what they read in each other’s eyes and heard in the beating of each other’s hearts.
Pippa had forgotten nothing; she had only forgotten that she had been forsaken.
Women are so slow to understand this always; and she, since that day when she had flung the money in the street, and fallen like a furious thing, biting the dust, and laughing horribly, had never been too clear of what had happened to her.
There was the child, and he — her love — was lost. This was all she knew.
Only she remembered every trifle, every moment of their first love time; and as she went, walking across great countries as other women cross a hayfield or a village street, she would look at the rose‐bush at a cabin door, and think how he had plucked a rosebud there; or touch a gate rail with her lips, because his hand had rested on it; or lift the child to kiss a wayside crucifix, because he had hung a rope of woodbine there and painted it one noonday; and at each step would murmur to the child, “See, he was here — and here — and here — and here,” and would fancy that the baby understood, and slept the sweeter because told these things.
Poor Pippa! — she had always plaited ill.
Women do, whose only strand is one short human love.
The tress will run uneven; and no man wants it long. Still, it is best to love thus. For nothing else is Love.
So she had walked on, till the golden autumn weather lost its serenity, and stirred with strife of winter wind and rain; so she had walked, and walked, and walked — a beggar girl for all who met her, with no beauty in her, except her great, sad, lustrous eyes — until she found herself come out once more on that familiar road which she had trodden daily in her childhood and her girlhood, with her hank of straw over her arm, and a pitcher of milk, or a sheaf of gleaned corn, or a broad basket of mulberries balanced on her head.
She thought she would see Bruno — just once. He had been rough and fierce with her; but once she could have loved Bruno, if he would have let her do so. She thought she would show him the child, and ask him — if she never got to Rome —
Then her foot slipped, and she fell down into darkness, and of Pippa there was no more on earth — only a dead woman, that the flood took out, with the drowned cattle and the driftwood, to the sea.
CHAPTER VIII.
LOCAL tradition has it that all this plain of Signa was once a lake with only the marsh birds calling and the reeds waving in the great silence of its waters — long ago. Their “long ago” is very dim in date and distance, but very clear to fancy and to faith. Here Æneas is a hero born only yesterday, and Catiline brought his secret sins into the refuge of these hills an hour since its seems; and Hercules — one can almost see him still, bending his bold brows over the stubborn rock in that stream where the quail dips her wing and the distaff cane bends to the breeze.
Nay, it is not so very far away after all since the dove plucked the olive off the moun‐ tains yonder, and no one sees anything strange in the stories that make the sons of Enoch and the children of Latona tread these fields side by side, and the silver arrows of Apollo cleave the sunshine that the black crucifixes pierce. Nay, older than tale of the Dove or legend of Apollo is this soil. Turn it with your spade and you shall find the stone coffins and the gold chains of the mighty Etruscan race whose buried cities lie beneath your feet, their language and their history lost in the everlasting gloom.
This was once Etruria, in all the grace and greatness of her royalties; then through long ages the land was silent, and only heard the kite shriek or the mo
untain hare scream; then fortified places rose again, one by one, on the green slopes, and Florence set to work and built between her and the sea — between her and the coast, and all her many enemies and debts — the walled city of Lastra Signa; making it noble of its kind, as she made everything that she touched in the old time; giving it a girdle of the massive, grey mountain stone, and gateways with carven shields and frescoes; and houses within, braced with iron, and ennobled by bold archways and poetised by many a shrine and symbol.
And the Lastra stood in the green country that is called the Verdure even in the dry city rolls, and saw the spears glisten among the vines, and the steel head‐pieces shine through the olives, and the banners flutter down from the heights, and the condottieri wind away on the white road, and the long lines of the pilgrims trail through the sunshine, and the scarlet pomp of the cardinals burn on the highway, and the great lords with their retinues ride to the sea or the mountains, and the heralds and trumpeters come and go on their message of peace or strife; and itself held the road when need arose, staunchly, through many a dark day, and many a bitter night, for many a tale of years, and kept its warders on the watch‐towers, looking westward through the centuries of war. And then the hour of fate struck when the black eagle, who has “two beaks to more devour,” flew with his heavy wing over the Arno; and the Republic had no help or hope but in Gideon, as she called him: — frank Ferruccio.
Ferruccio knew that the Lastra was the iron key to the gates of Florence. But he had no gifts of gods to make him omniscient, and he was rash, as brave men are most apt to be. With his five hundred troopers he wrought miracles from of valour and of relief, but in a fatal hour he, scouting the country to search the convoys of food that he conveyed to Florence, left the Lastra for Pisa, and the traitor Bandini whispered in the ear of Orange, “Strike now — while he is absent.” And Orange sent his Spanish lances and the Lastra beat them back. But he sent them again as many in numbers against the place as well as all Ferruccio’s army, and with artillery to aid, and they made two breeches in the walls, and entered and sacked and pillaged, and ravished and slew; the bold gates standing erect as they stand to‐day.
Is not the record painted in the Hall of Leo the Tenth?
The brave gates stood erect, but the Lastra was an armed town no more.
Its days of battle were done.
The grass and the green creepers grew on the battlements; and out of the iron doors there only passed the meek oxen and the mules and the sheep.
The walls of the Lastra are very old, and are still beautiful. Broken down also in many places, and with many places where are hillocks of grass and green bushes instead of the old mighty stones, or, worse still, mean houses and tiled roofs. But they are still erect in a great part and very picturesque, with the ropemakers at work on the sward underneath them, and the white bullocks coming out of their open doors. The portcullis still hangs in the gateways that face the east and the west, and the deep machicolations of the battlements are sharp and firm as a lion’s teeth. There is exquisite colour in them, and noble lines severe and stern as any that Arnolfo drew, or raised. “She is so old — our Lastra!” say the people, with soft pride, while the women sit and spin on the stairs of the old watch‐towers, and the mules drink, and the waggons pass, and the sheep are driven under their pointed archways.
Of the Lastra it may be written, as of the old tower of Calais church:— “It is not as ruins are, useless and piteous, feebly or fondly garrulous of better days; but useful still, going through its daily work as some old fisherman beaten grey by storm yet drawing his daily nets.” Its years of war indeed are done; it can repel no foe — it can turn aside no invader; the wall‐sorrel grows on its parapets, the owl builds in its loopholes, the dust of decay lies thick upon its broken stairs; in its fortified places old women spin flax and the spiders their webs; but its decay is not desolation, its silence is not solitude; its sadness is not despair; the Ave Maria echoes through it morning and night; when the warm sunrise smites the battlements, its people go forth to the labour of the soil; when the rays of the sunset fill the west, there rises from its mountains a million spears of gold, as though the hosts of a conquering army raised them aloft with a shout of triumph; it garners its living people still as sheep within a fold— “its bells for prayer still rolling through its rents.” Harvest and vintage and seed‐time are precious to it: fruits of the earth are brought within it; the vine is green against its doors, and the corn is threshed in its ancient armouries; beautiful even where unsightly; hoary with age, yet linked with living youth; noble as a bare sea cliff is noble, that has kept the waves at bay throughout uncounted storms, the Lastra stands amidst the green billows of the foliage of the fields as a lighthouse amongst breakers; its towers speaking of strength, its fissures of sorrow, its granaries of labour, its belfries of hope.
When a great service was over, and the bishop and the nobles had passed away in their glory, and the bells had ceased for a season to ring, and the white‐robed contadini had gone up amongst their hills, and the families of Lastra had gone within doors and closed their window‐shutters to the sun, the little singer, who loved every stone of the old place, laying off his little surplice, and by a rare treat being free of task and punishment, and sent only to gather salads from the hill garden of his one friend, made his way quickly through the village, and out by the western gate.
Just a child of Pippa’s — with no name or use or place or title that anyone could see, or right to live at all, if you pushed matters closely.
That was all he was — a child of Pippa’s, who had died without a coin upon her, or a roof she could call her own, or anything at all in this wide world except this little sunny‐headed, soft‐limbed, useless thing, fresh as dew and flushed like apple‐blossoms, that she left behind her, as the magnolia‐leaf, dropping brown, to the brown earth, leaves a blossom.
Himself, he did not know even as much as this, which indeed was as bad as nothing to know. To himself he was only a foundling, as he was to everyone else; picked up as any blind puppy might have been, motherless, on the face of the flood.
The old white town had stood him in the stead of father and mother, and nation and friends; and though the Church, purifying him with baptismal water, had given him a long saint’s name, Signa was his true eponymus.
The children had called him Signa, because of the name on the little gilt ball that they were scratched on — the little gilt ball which Nita had hung round his neck by its string again.
“It looks well to give it to him,” she had said to her husband. “And it would fetch so little, it is not worth keeping for oneself.”
So his little locket had been left him — the locket that had been bought that day of the fair, and filled with a curl of sunny‐brown hair, which Pippa had cut off herself in the dusk where the vines met overhead; — and he was called after the word that was on it, first by the children, and then by their elders, who had said, “As well that as any name, why not? the dogs of Jews are often called after the towns that bear them; why not this little cur, so near drowned here, after the place that sheltered him?”
Hence he was Signa, like the town; and in a vague fancy that he never followed out; he had some dim idea that this village of the Lastra, which he loved so dearly, had created him; out of her dust, or from her wandering winds, or by her bidding to the owls that roosted in her battlements: how he did not know, but in some way. And he was thoroughly content; loving the place with a great love quite reasonless, and quite childlike, and yet immeasurable.
He was proud because he had the name. Whey they beat him, he would not cry out, because the Lastra had been brave; so the old people who told stories of it to him said; and he would be brave likewise.
It was like his impudence to dare be brave when honest‐born children squealed like caught mice! so Nita would say to him a score of times, slapping his cheek when Toto had trodden on her gown, or beating him with the rods of alder when Toto had stolen the fritters fr
om the frying‐pan.
“She is a good woman, Nita,” said the neighbours, shaking out the gleaned hay before their house‐doors, or sitting to plait together in the archways; “and Lippo is an angel. To think of them — seven children, and an eight nigh — and keeping, all for charity, that little stray thing found at the flood. Any one else had sent it packing, a poor child, as one could tell by its clothes that were all rags, and no chance for any rich folk ever coming after it. And yet treating it always like their own, share and share alike, and no preference shown — ah, they were good people. Old Baldo, too, not saying even a word, though he was a sharp man about shoe‐leather, and no blame to him, because, after all, who will save the skin of your onion for you unless you do it yourself?”
As from a baby it grew into a little child, Bruno ever and again saw to its wants.
“The child must be clean,” he had said; and he would not have it go in rags.
“The child must be well kept,” he had said; and he would not have its curls shaved close, as Toto’s was.
Then as it grew older.
“Let the child learn,” he had said; and Nita humoured him, because she believed it to be his own offspring, and Lippo, because of that good half of everything, which kept his father‐in‐law in such good humour, and left himself free to idle in the sun, and lie face downward on the stone benches, and do nothing all day long except kill flies.
So Lippo and his wife were very careful to have the child’s curls shine, instead of shearing them close as they did their own babies’, and when he ran into the street would give him a big lump of crust to eat as people passed, and on saint days take him with them to the church in a little frock snow‐white, like one of the straight‐robed, long‐haired, child‐figures in any panel or predella of Della Francesca or the Memmi. He was so pretty that people gave him cakes and fruits and money, just for the beauty of his wistful eyes, and to see his little mouth, like a carnation bud, open to sing his Aves.