by Ouida
And of course there was reason that the child, once home, should give up the cakes and fruits to the other children who were like foster‐brothers and sisters to him, and as for the money, of course he could not keep it, being such a little thing; they took it from his to take care of it — they were good, honest people.
As for the little lad, true he was hungry often, and beaten often, when no one was looking, and worked like a footsore mule at all times.
But then nobody noticed that, because he was always taken to mass, and had the little white shirt on just like Toto, and no difference made, and all his curls brushed out. The curate’s sister said there never was so sweet a soul as Lippo’s, for of course it all was Lippo’s doing; Nita was an honest woman, and true‐hearted; but Lippo it was that was the saint in the house. Another man would have turned the brat out by the ears first sight: not he — he cut the stray child’s bread as big as any of his boys’, and paid for him, too, to learn his letters.
So the curate’s sister said, the neighbours said after her; and Lippo, being a meek man, smiled gently, and cast his eyes down underneath the praise, and said in answer, that no one could have turned a pretty baby like that out after once housing it, and added, with a kindly grace that moved the women to tears, that he hoped the child might be like those gold‐winged porcellini that, flying in your window with the sunbeams, bring good will and peace, the people say.
This day, after the ceremony, the little fellow ran over the bridge and up the hill‐road, where his mother, of whom he knew nothing, had met her death. He was stiff with a severe beating that had been given him.
The night before there had been a basket of red cherries missing, and Toto had been found crunching them in the loft, and Toto had said that he had been given them by Signa, who first had eaten half; and old Baldo, who had got them as a present for the priest, had been beside himself with rage, and Nita had beaten Signa, as her habit and daily comfort was, because he never would cry out, which made him the more provoking, and also was always innocent, than which there is nothing more irritating anywhere.
He was very stiff, and felt it now that the music was all done; but almost forgot it again in the pleasure of the hill‐side and the holyday.
The country was full of joys to the child that he never reasoned about, but which filled him with delight. The great bold curves of the oak bough overhead; the amethyst and amber of the trefoil blossoms; the voices of the wood doves; the jovial croakings of the frogs; the flash of butterflies; the glories of the oleanders here, white as snow, and there rosily radiant as flame; the poppies that had cast their petals, and had round grey heads like powdered wings; the spiders, red and black, like bits of old Egyptian pottery; the demure and dusky cavaletti, that looked like ghosts of nuns, out by an error in the daylight; the pretty lizards that were so happy asking nothing of the world except a sunbeam and a stone to sleep under; the nightingales that were so tame, and sang at broad noontide to laugh at poets; the orchids, gold and ruby, the mimicked bees and flies to make fun of them, because there is so much humour in nature with all her sweet seriousness of beauty; the flies that shone like jewels; the hedges of china roses that ran between the corn; the gaunt stern spikes of the artichokes; the green Madonna’s herb; the mountains that were sometimes quite lost in the white mists, and then of a sudden lifted themselves in all their glory, with black shadows where the woods were, and hazy breadths of colour where the bare marble shone beneath the sun; — all these things, so various, great and small, wonderful and obscure, under his feet, or on the far horizon, were sources of delight to the child, who as he went lost sight of nothing from the little gemmed insect in the dust he trod to the last glow left on the faintest, farthest peak of the great hills that rose between him and the sea.
Nobody had ever told him anything.
None had led him by the hand and bade him look.
Some instinct moved him to see and hear where others were blind and deaf. That was all.
To the ploughman of Ayr the daisy was a tender grace of God, and the mouse a fellow traveller in the ways of life.
To Signa, who was only a baby still, and was beaten most days of the week, and ran barefoot in the dust, the summer and the world were beautiful without his knowing why, and comforted him. For in all the sea of sunshine — as in the music — he forgot his pain.
He ran like a little goat up the road with the green river winding below, and the hills changing at each step with those inconstancies of light and shade, and aspect, and colour in which all hills delight. It was an hour before, always climbing steadily, he reached an old stone gateway set in breadths of grain just golden for the sickle, with a black crucifix against it, and above it a little framed picture of the Annunciation.
He stooped his knee, and crossed himself; then ran between the old stone posts, which had no gate in them, and sent his voice up the hill‐side before his feet. “Bruno! Bruno! Bruno!”
“Here!” sang the man’s voice in answer from above, amongst the corn.
Signa climbed the steep green patches that ran between the wheat and under the vines up the face of the hill, and threw his arms round Bruno’s knees.
“A whole day to spend!” he cried, breathless with running. “And are you working? Why it is Corpus Domini. They do not work anywhere!”
Bruno put down the handful of corn that he had just cut and wound together.
“No; one should not work,” he said, with some shame for his own industry. “But those clouds look angry; they may mean rain at sunset; and to spoil such grain as this — and the Padre will not come this way; he never gets so far down on feasts. And you are well, Signa?”
“Oh quite well.”
“But you must be hungry? — running so?”
“No; I can wait.”
“You have had your bread then?”
“Yes.”
It was not true. But then Signa had found out two things: one, that when he told Bruno that he was ill‐treated or ill‐fed at home, there were quarrels and troubles between Bruno and his brother; and the other, that if he let Bruno see that he was at all unhappy, Bruno seemed to be consumed with self‐reproach. So that the child whose single love, except that for the old town itself, was Bruno, had early learned to hold his tongue and bear his sorrows silently as best he might, and tell an innocent little lie even now and then to spare pain to his friend.
Bruno always took his part. It was Bruno who got him any little joy he ever knew, and Bruno who would not let them shave his pretty clustering curls to make a bare round pumpkin of his head like Toto’s; and one day when he had been only seven years old, and Bruno by chance had found him crying, and learned that it was with the smart of Nita’s thrashing, Bruno and Lippo had had fierce words and blows; and late that night the eldest boy of Lippo’s had come and shaken him in his bed of hay, and hissed savagely in his ear:
“You little fool, if you go telling my uncle Bruno we ill‐treat you, he will strike at my father and kill him perhaps, who knows, he is so violent, and then a nice day’s work you will have made for every one; — you little beast. My father dead, and Bruno at the galleys, all through you who are not worth the rind of a rotten melon, little cur!”
And Signa, trembling in his bed, had vaguely understood the mischief he might do, though why they quarrelled for him, and why Lippo gave him a home, and yet ill‐treated him, or why Bruno should have any care to take his part, he could not tell; but he comprehended that all he had to do was to accept ill‐usage dumbly, like the dogs, and bring none into any trouble by complaining. And so he grew up — with silence for a habit: for he loved Bruno.
Bruno, who was fierce and wayward and hated and feared by every one on the country side, but who to him was gentle as a woman, and was always kind. Bruno, who had a terrible knack of flashing out his knife in anger, and who had quarrelled with all the women he had wooed, and who had a rough heartless way of speech that made people wonder he could be of the same blood and bone as mild and pleas
ant Lippo, but who to him was never without a grave soft smile that took all the darkness from this face it shone on, and who for him had many tender thoughts and acts that were like the blue radish flower on its rough, grey, leafless stalk.
The child never wondered why Bruno cared for him. Children take love as they take sunshine and their daily bread. If it rain and they starve, then they wonder, because children come into the world with an innocent undoubting conviction that they will be happy in it, which is one of the oddest and the saddest things one sees; for, being begotten by men and borne by women, how can any such strange error ever be alive in them?
Bruno put by his reaping‐hook, and let the big bearded turkish wheat stand over for another day. He had risked his own soul to make sure of the wheat — for to Bruno it was a soul’s peril to use a sickle on a holy day; — but he let go the corn rather than spoil the little fellow’s pleasure.
“You can eat something again — come,” he said, stretching his hand out to the boy’s.
Pippa’s child was like her, only with something spiritual and far‐reaching in his great dark eyes that hers had never had, and a gleam of gold in the soft thickness of his hair that did not come from her. He was more delicate, more slender, more like a little supple reed than Pippa ever had been, and he had a more uncommon look about him; but he was like her — like enough to make Bruno still shudder now and then thinking of the dead woman left all alone to the rain and to the river.
“Come and eat,” he said, and took the child indoors.
His house had a great arched door where Pippa had stood plaiting many a night. It had a brick floor and a ceiling of old timbers, and some old dusky chests and presses that would have fetched a fortune in city curiosity shops, and a strong musty smell of drying herbs and of piles of peas and beans for winter uses, and trusses of straw cleaned and cut for the plaiters; and hens were sitting on their eggs inside an old gilded marriage coffer six hundred years old, if one, whose lid, that had dropped off the hinges, was illuminated with the nuptials of Galileo in the style of the early school of Cortona.
Through a square unglazed window there was seen the head of a brindled cow munching grass in her shed on the other side, and through a wide opening opposite that had no door, the noon sun shining showed the great open building that was granary and cart‐shed, and stable and hothouse all in one, and where the oil‐presses stood, and the vats for the wine, and the empty casks.
Against one of the walls was a crucifix with a little basin for holy water, for Bruno was a man who believed in the saints without question; and above the arched entrance there grew a great mulberry‐tree that was never stripped, because he had no silkworms, and magnolias and cistus‐bushes, and huge poppies that loved to glow in the stones, and big dragon‐heads flaming like rubies, and arabian jessamine of divinest odour, and big myrtles, all flourishing luxuriant alike together, because in this country flowers have nine lives like cats, and will live anywhere, just because no one wants them or ever thinks of gathering them unless there be a corpse to be dressed.
“Eat,” said Bruno; and he got the little lad out some brown bread and a jug of milk, and a cabbage‐leaf of currants, which he had gathered early that morning before the mass‐bells rang, being sure Signa would come before the day should be over.
Signa ate and drank with the eager goodwill of a child who never got enough, except by some rare chance on a feast‐day like this; but the larger part of the currants he left on the leaf, taking only one or two bunches.
Bruno watched him.
“Are you going to give them away?”
“I will give them to Gemma — I may?”
“Do as you like with your own. But if you must give them to any one, give them to Palma.”
Signa coloured on both his little pale cheeks.
“I will give them to the two,” he said, conscious of an unjust intention nipped in the bud.
“Palma is a better child than Gemma,” said Bruno, sharpening a vine‐stake with his clasp‐knife.
Signa hung his head.
“But I like Gemma best.”
“When that is said, there is no more to be said,” answered Bruno, who had learned enough of human nature on the hills and in the Lastra to know that liking does not go by reason nor follow after merit.
“Gemma is so pretty,” said the little fellow, who loved anything that had beauty in it; and he ran and got his mandoline out of the corner where Bruno let him keep it, and began to turn its keys and run his fingers over its strings and call the cadence out of it with as light a heart as if his back had never been black and blue with Nita’s thrashing.
“If Gemma broke your chitarra, would you like her the better then?” asked Bruno.
“I would hate her,” said Signa under his breath; for he had two idols — his lute and the Lastra.
“I wish she would break it, then,” said Bruno, who was jealous of this little child for whom Signa was saving his currants.
But Signa did not hear. He was sitting out on the threshold of an empty red lemon‐pot turned upside down, with the slope of the autumn corn and the green hillside beneath him in the sun, and beyond them, far down below in the great valley, and golden in the light were first the walls of the Lastra set in the sea of vines, and then the towers and domes of Florence far away; and farther yet, where the east was warm with morning light, the mountains of Umbria, with the little towns on their crest, from which you see two seas.
With all that vast radiant world beneath him at his feet, Signa tuned his mandoline and sang to himself untired on the still hillside. The cow leaned her mouth over the window‐sill, and listened; cows seem so stupid, chewing grass and whisking flies away, but in their eyes there is the soul of Io; the nightingales held their breaths to listen, and then joined in till all the branches that they lived in seemed alive with sound; the great white watch‐dog from the marshes came and laid down quite quiet, blinking solemnly with attentive eyes; but the cicali never stopped sawing like carpenters in the tree‐tops, nor the gossipping hens from clacking in the cabbage‐beds, because cicali and chickens think the world was made for them, and believe that the sun would fall if they ceased from fussing and fuming: — they are so very human.
Bruno laid himself down face forward on a stone bench, as contadini love to do when they have any leisure, and listened too, his head upon his arms.
The water dropped from the well‐spout; a lemon fell with a little splash on the grass; the big black restless bees buzzed here and there; blue butterflies danced above the grain as if the cornflowers had risen winged; the swallows wheeled round the low red‐tiled roof; the old wooden plough lay in the shade under the fig‐trees; the oxen ate clover and the leaves of cane in fragrant darkness in their shed; the west wind came from the pines above with the smell of the sea and the thyme and the rosemary.
Signa played and sang, making up his song as he went along, in rhymes strung like chains of daisies, all out of his own head, and born in a moment out of nothing, and, beginning with the name of a flower, and winding in with the sun and the shadow, the beasts and the birds, the restless bees and the ploughshare at rest, and the full wheat‐ears and the empty well‐bucket, and anything and everything little and large, and foolish and wise, that was there about him in the midsummer light.
Anywhere else it might have been strange for a little peasant to make melody so; but here the children lisp in numbers, and up and down on the hills, and in the road when the mule‐bells ring, and on the high mountains with the browsing goats, the verse and song of the people fill the air all day long — this people who for the world have no poet.
Bruno, lying face downward and listening, half asleep, to the rippling music, thought it pretty, but nothing rare or of wonder; the little lad played better than most of his age, and had a gift for stringing his rhymes, that was all.
For himself, he was almost jealous of the lute as he was of the child Gemma. For Bruno loved the boy with a covetous love and a strong love, an
d felt as if in some way or other Signa had escaped him.
The boy was loving, obedient, grateful, full of caressing and tractable ways; there was no fault to find with him; but Bruno at times felt that he held him no more surely than one holds a bird because it alights at one’s feet.
It was a vague feeling with him. Bruno, being an unlearned man, did not reason about his impressions nor seek to know whether they were even wise ones. But it was a strong feeling with him, and something in the far‐away look of the little lad’s eyes as he sang, strengthened it.
Pippa had never had that look; no one had it except the little Christs or St. Johns sometimes in the old frescoes in the churches that Bruno would enter once a year or so, when he went to Prato or Carmignano or Pistoia to buy grain or to sell it.
“That is God looking out of the eyes,” an old sacristan here said once to him, before one of those altar pictures, where the wonderful faces were still radiant amidst the fading colours of the age‐clad frescoes.
But why should God look out of the eyes of Pippa’s child?
Why was God in him more than in any others?
Those children in the frescoes were most fitting in their place, no doubt, amongst the incense, and the lilies, and the crosses, and above the sacred Host. But to sit at your bench, and eat beans, and be sent to fetch in sheep from the hills; — Bruno felt that a more workaday soul was better for this, he would have been more at ease if Signa had been just a noisy, idle, troublesome, merry morsel, playing more like other boys, and happy over a baked goose on a feast‐day. He would have known better how to deal with him.
And yet not for worlds would he have changed him.
CHAPTER VIII.