by Ouida
The old painters had these gardens, and walked in them, and thought nothing better could be needed for any scene of Annunciation or Adoration, and so put them in beyond the windows of Bethlehem or behind the Throne of the Lamb — and who can wonder?
The mighty lives have passed away into silence, leaving no likeness to them on earth; but if you would still hold communion with them, even better than to go to written score or printed book or painted panel or chiselled marble or cloistered gloom, is it to stray into one of these old quiet gardens, where for hundred of years the stone naiad has leaned over the fountain, and the golden lizard hidden under the fallen caryatide, and sit quiet still, and let the stones tell you what they remember and the leaves say what the sun once saw; and then the shades of the great dead will come to you. Only you must love them truly, else you will see them never.
Signa, in his little ignorant way, did love them with just such blind untaught love as a little bird born in a dark cage has for the air and the light.
When he stole into the deserted villas, where, after centuries of neglect, some fresco would glow still upon the damp walls where the cobwebs and the wild vine had their way; when he saw the sculptured cornices and the gilded fretwork and the broken mosaic in the halls where cattle were stabled and grain piled; when he knelt down before the dusky nameless Madonnas in the little churches on the hills, or found some marble head lying amongst the wild thyme, the boy’s heart moved with a longing and a tenderness to which he could have given no title.
As passion yet unknown thrills in the adolescent, as maternity yet undreamed of stirs in the maiden; so the love of art comes to the artist before he can give a voice to his thought or any name to his desire.
Signa heard “beautiful things” as he sat in the rising moonlight, with the bells of the little bindweed white about his feet.
That was all he could have said.
Whether the angels sent them on the breeze, or the birds brought them, or the dead men came and sang them to him, he could not tell. Indeed, who can tell?
Where did Guido see the golden hair of S. Michael gleam upon the wind? Where did Mozart hear the awful cries of the risen dead come to judgment? What voice was in the fountain of Vaucluse? Under what nodding oxlip did Shakespeare find Titania asleep? When did the Mother of Love come down, chaster in her unclothed loveliness than vestal in her veil, and with such vision of her make obscure Cleomenes immortal?
Who can tell?
Signa sat dreaming, with his chin upon his hands, and his eyes wandering over all the silent place, from the closed flowers at his feet to the moon in her circles of mist.
Who walks in these paths now may go back four hundred years. They are changed in nothing. Through their high hedges of rhododendron and of jessamine that grow like woodland trees it would still seem but natural to see Raffaelle with his court‐train of students, or Signorelli splendid in those apparellings which were the comment of his age; and on these broad stone terraces with the lizards basking on their steps and the trees opening to show a vine‐covered hill with the white oxen creeping down it and the blue mountains farther still behind, it would be but fitting to see a dark figure sitting and painting lilies, upon a golden ground, or cherubs’ heads upon a panel of cypress wood, and to hear that this painter was the monk Angelico.
The deepest charm of these old gardens, as of their country, is, after all, that in them it is possible to forget the present age.
In the full, drowsy, voluptuous noon, when they are a gorgeous blaze of colour and a very intoxication of fragrance, as in the ethereal white moonlight of midnight, when, with the silver beams and the white blossoms and the pale marbles, they are like a world of snow, their charm is one of rest, silence, leisure, dreams, and passion all in one; they belong to the days when art was a living power, when love was a thing of heaven or of hell, and when men had the faith of children and the force of gods.
Those days are dead, but in these old gardens you can believe still that you live in them.
The boy, who did not know hardly why he was moved by it so greatly, musing in this garden of Giovoli, and sitting, watching the glowworms in the ground bindweed, was more than half consoled for the cruelty of his playmate. When the nine o’clock chimes rang down below in the Lastra, he did not move; he had forgotten that if he were away when Nita should shut her house up he would have another beating and no supper.
How often was Giotto scolded for letting the sheep stray?
Very often, no doubt.
When the moon had quite risen, with a ring of mist round her, because there was rain hanging in the air, little feet ran over the bindweed, and a little rosy face, all the prettier for the shadows that played in its eyes and the watery radiance that shone in its curls, looked up into his with saucy merriment.
A little piping voice ran like a cricket’s chirp into the stillness.
“You may swing me to‐morrow — do you hear?”
Signa started, roused from his musing.
The beautiful things were mute; the clouds and the leaves told him nothing more. He was only a little bare‐footed boy, vexed at being left alone and jealous of big brown Tista.
Gemma was a pretty sulky baby, with a pert tongue and a sturdy will of her own; a little thing that could not read a letter, and cared nothing but for eating and for play; but there were shadowed out in her the twin foes of all genius — the Woman and the World.
“Are you sulking here?” said Gemma. “Tista swung me so high! — so high! Much better than you. You must get out of the garden now; father is come to lock the gates.”
Signa got up slowly.
“Good‐night, Gemma.”
“Good‐night, Gemma!” echoed the child, mimicking the sadness of his answer. “Oh, how stupid you are! Just like Palma! Tista has more life in him, only he never has anything for one except those little green apples. You may come and swing me tomorrow, if you like.”
“No; you love Tista.”
“But I love you best.”
She whispered it with all the wooing archness and softness of twenty years instead of ten, with the moonbeams shining in her eyes till they looked like wet cornflowers.
Signa was silent. He knew she did not love him, but only his pears that he got for her from Bruno, or his baked cakes that he coaxed for her from old Teresina.
“You will come to‐morrow?” said Gemma, slipping her hand into his.
“You will flout me if I do come.”
“No,” said Gemma.
“Yes, you will. It is always like that.”
“Try,” said Gemma; and she kissed him.
“I will come,” said Signa; and he went away through the dewy darkness, forgetting the stolen apricots and the choice of Tista. It was so very seldom that she would kiss him, and she looked so pretty in the moonlight.
Gemma glanced after him through the bars of the high iron gate with the japonica and jessamine twisting round its coronet.
Tista was going away on the morrow into the city to be bound ‘prentice to a shoemaker, who was his mother’s cousin, and had offered to take him cheaply.
But it had not been worth while to tell Signa that.
“There would have been nobody to swing me if I had not coaxed him,” thought Gemma; “and perhaps he will bring me one of those big sweet round pears of Bruno’s.”
And the little child, well contented, ran off under her father’s shrill scolding for being out so late, and went indoors and drink a draught of milk that Palma had begged for her from a neighbour who had a cow, and slipped herself out of her little blue shirt and homespun skirt, and curled herself up on her bed of hay and fell fast asleep, looking like a sculptor’s sleeping Love.
CHAPTER XI.
A FEW days later fell the feast of SS. Peter and Paul, and Signa for more than half a year had been promised a great treat.
Bruno had said that on that day he would take him to see the marble men and the painted angels of the Certosa Monastery, some ten miles away
along the bend of the the green Greve water.
What Bruno promised he did always; the child had the surest faith of his word; and by five o’clock in the fair sunrise of the June morning, Signa slipped down the dark staircase, and undid the door and ran out bareheaded into the sweet cold air, and stood waiting on the stones.
The Madonna of Good Council smiled on him through her wooden wicket; bells were ringing over the country around; some tender hand had already placed before the shrine a fresh bunch of field flowers; the sky was red with the rose of the daybreak.
He had not waited long before a tall figure turned the corner, and Bruno’s shadow fell upon the slope.
“You are ready? That is right,” he said, and without more words the child ran on by his side out of the lofty Fiorentina gate.
The morning was fresh and radiant, very cold, as it always is in midsummer, before the sun has warmed the earth and drunk up the deep night dews that drench the soil.
The shutters of the houses were unclosing and through the open doors, and in the darkness of the cellars there was the yellow gleam of wheat, cut and waiting for the threshers; the gardens and yards were yellow, too, with piles of straw‐hats wetted and drying; the shadows were broad and black; men were beginning their work in the great arched smithies and workshops; there was everywhere the smell of the wet earth refreshed and cooled by night.
They went along the road that leads to the Greve river; — past the big stone barns where the flails would be at rest all day for sake of good SS. Peter and Paul; past the piles of timber and felled fir‐trees that strewed the edge of the road; past the old grey villa of the Della Stufa who nigh a thousand years before had come over the mountains, Christian knights and gallant gentlemen, with their red cross and their tawny lions on their shields; the chapel bell was calling the scattered cotters of Castagnolo to first mass; past the pretty bridge of the Stagno (the pool) with its views of the far mountains, and the poplar‐trees that the Latins named so because of the restlessness of their leaves, like the unresting mob; past the great fortress of the Castel Pucci, once built to hurl defiance at the city itself, now white and silent, sheltering in its walls the woeful pain, and yet more woeful joys, of minds diseased; past the worthy barber’s shop, where it is written up that he has only painted his sign with the tricolour to quiet tasteless whirligigs, he being a man of humour, with a pity kindred to contempt of all the weathercock vagaries of politics; past the old dirty, tumble‐down, wayside houses, where the floors were strewn with the new straw picked for the plaiting, and the babies were lying in flat fruit‐baskets, swaddled and laughing, and the girls were getting ready for mass with bright petticoats and braided hair and big earrings, and, if they were betrothed maidens, strings of pearls about their throats; past all these till they came to the Greve bridge, where they met a priest with the Host in the brightness of the festal day‐dawn.
They uncovered their heads and knelt down in the dust and prayed for the passing soul till the little bell, borne before the holy man, had tinckled tinkled away in the distance. Then they walked on by the Greve water under the shivering poplars and amongst the grazing sheep.
There is no regular path along the river; but they made one for themselves, brushing through the canes, getting round the rushes, or when it was needed, wading knee‐deep, or oftener, for the water was low, walking in the stony sand of the dry river bed.
Once it was a warlike water enough, in the old days when the Lotteringhi and Alberti, and Acciajoli and Pandolfini, and all the other great races, Guelph and Ghibelline, had their fortified places bristling along its banks; when its stone landing quays were crowded with condottieri watering their horses ere they went to lend their lances to the strongest; when mighty nobles in penitence raised shrines and built hospitals beside it to seek God’s grace upon their arms; when the long lines of pilgrims wound along it, or the creeping files of sumpter mules, of the bright array of the White Company; in those days Greve was a busy stream, and was as often as not made red with the blood let out in many a skirmish or the reflected flames from a castle fired in feud.
But all that is of the past. Now it is only a millrace, a washing pool, a ford, a fishing burn, anything the people liked to make of it; it sees nothing but the miller’s mules or the grape waggons, or the women with their piles of white linen; and the only battles it beholds are the fighting of the frogs in the canebrake or of the tree sparrows in the air. Now the Greve is a simple pastoral river. No one has ever sung of it that one knows. It lies so near to the Arno, held dear by every poet and made sacred by every art, that the little Greve is as a daisy set beside a crown diamond; and no one thinks of it.
Yet perhaps — only one dare not say so for one’s life — perhaps it has as much real loveliness as Arno has. It has the same valley — it has the same mountains — it is encompassed by the same scenes and memories; and it has a sylvan beauty, all of its own, like Wye’s or Dart’s or Derwent’s.
Grassy banks where the sheep browse; tall poplars, great oaks, rich walnuts, firs, and maples, and silver larch, and the beautiful cercis that blossoms all over in a night; calm stretches of green water, with green hills that lock it in; old water‐mills, half‐hidden in maize and dog‐grass and plumy reeds; broken ground above with winding roads from which the mule bells echo now and then; steep heights, golden with grain, or fragrant with hay, and dusky with the dark emerald leaf of the innumerable vines; deep sense of coolness, greenness, restfulness everywhere; and then, where the river’s windings meet its sister stream the Ema, set in a narrow gorge between two hills, yet visible all along the reaches of the water while far off, the mastery of the Carthusians — the Certosa — ending all the sweet song of peace with a great hymn to God.
This is the Greve — with flowering rushes in it, and the sun in its water till it glows like emeralds, and goats going down to drink, and here and there a woman cutting the green canes, and dragon‐flies and swallows on the wing, and oxen crossing the flat timber bridge, and from the woods and rocks above the sound of chapel bells and reapers’ voices falling through the air, softly as dropping leaves.
Bruno and the child kept always along the course of the water, walking in its bed or climbing its banks as necessity made them.
Bruno was never a man of many words; the national loquacity was not his; he was fierce, sudden, taciturn, but he smiled on the little lad’s ecstasies, and though he could tell him none of the ten thousand things that Signa wished to know, yet he said nothing that did not suit the joyous and poetic mood of the child; for though Bruno was an ignorant man, except in husbandry, Love is sympathy, and Sympathy is intelligence in a strong degree.
Signa was wildly happy; leaping from stone to stone; splashing in the shallow water with a jump; calling to the gossipping frogs; flinging the fir‐apples in the air; clapping his hands as the field‐mice peeped out from the lines of cut grain; wondering where the poppies were all gone that a week before had “run like torchmen with the wheat.”
Once, his hands filled with blossoms and creepers from the hedges, he stopped to gather a little blue cornflower that had outlived the corn as mortals do their joys.
“Why is it called St. Stephen’s crown?” he asked.
“How should I tell?” said Bruno; for indeed it seemed to him the silliest name that could be.
“Do you think it saw when they stoned him, and was sorry?” said Signa.
“How should a flower see? You talk foolishness.”
“Flowers see the sun.”
“That is foolish talk.”
“And the moon, too, else how could they keep time and shut and go to bed? And somebody must have named them all — who was it?”
Bruno was silent. Cattle liked dried flowers in their hay, and horses would not eat them; that was all he knew about them, and when the child persisted, answered him:
“The saints, most likely.”
But he said within himself:
“If only the boy would pull off lizards’ tails,
or snare birds, like other boys instead of asking such odd questions that make on think him hardly sensible sometimes!”
Signa, a little pacified, gathered his hands full, and ran on, puzzling his little brain in silence. He had a fancy that St. John had named them all one day out of gladness of heart when Christ had kissed him. That was what he thought, running by the Greve water.
Who did indeed first name the flowers? Who first gave them, not their Latin titles, but the old, familiar, fanciful, poetic, rustic ones that run so curiously alike in all the different vulgar tongues?
Who first called the lilies of the valley the Madonna’s tears; the wild blue hyacinth St. Dorothy’s flower? Who first called the red clusters of the oleander St. Joseph’s nosegays, and the clematis by her many lovely titles, consolation, traveller’s joy, virgin’s bower? Who gave the spiderwort to St. Bruno; the black briony for Our Lady’s Seal; the corn‐feverfew to St. Anne; the common bean to St. Ignatius; the bane‐berry to St. Christopher; the blue valerian to Jacob for his angel’s ladder; the toywort to the shepherds for their purse? Who first called the nyctanthes the tree of sadness; and the starry passiflora the Passion of Christ? Who first made dedication of the narcissus to remembrance; the amaranthus to wounded, bleeding love; the scabius to the desolation of widowhood? Who named them all first in the old days that are forgotten?
It is strange that most of these tender old appellatives are the same in meaning in all European tongues. The little German madchen in her pinewoods, and the Tuscan contadina in her vineyards, and the Spanish child on the sierras, and the farm‐girl on the purple English moorlands, and the soft‐eyed peasant that drives her milch cows through the sunny evening fields of France, all gathering their blossoms from wayside green or garden wall, give them almost all the same old names with the same sweet pathetic significance. Who gave them first?
Milton and Spenser and Shelley, Tasso and Schiller and Camoens — all the poets that ever the world has known, might have been summoned together for the baptism of the flowers, and have failed to name them half so well as popular tradition has done, long ago in the dim lost ages, with names that still make all the world akin.