by Ouida
“Punish him I will,” murmured Lippo, goaded to desperation, but thinking woefully of what his brother would say, or worse still, do, on his own skin and bones. “Still, he is such a little thing, and saved by me, as one may say — not that I take merit. It is a horrible thing — all that good gold squandered on a fiddle, and we robbing our precious children nine long years to feed a bastard deserted by those that had the right; and yet, dear friends, a child no older than my Toto—”
“Maudlin ass,” quoth Baldo in high wrath, while the barber said that Lippo was too great a saint to live, and the others answered that such goodness was beautiful, but Lippo must look at home; and all the while Nita screamed on to the night air, bewailing.
Signa heard, as he laboured up the hill beneath his load of cabbages, the angry voices rolling down the slope and drifting to the Madonna sitting with the glory round her head behind her little wooden wicket.
The poor Madonna often heard such words. When they had spoken them worst they gave her flowers.
Signa heard. What had he done? That they had power to put him in prison he never doubted. They had power to beat him — why not to do anything else?
His limbs shook, and his heart sank within him. Yet one great thought of comfort was with him — the fiddle was safe under its rose‐leaves and its lilac mint‐flowers. Teresina would not let it go.
He understood that the story of his buying the violin had run through the Lastra, gathering exaggerated wonders as it went. Indeed, if only he had thought a little, he would have known that the scene at the tinman’s shop by the archway never could pass without being talked about by the dozen idle folks who had had nothing to do but to watch it.
But even Bruno had not thought of that. Italians love secrets; but they bury them as the ostrich buries her head.
Toiling up under his overshadowing cabbages, and in the dusk of the evening, they did not see him. The loud shrill voices thrilled to his very bones.
“Let me get at him!” thundered old Baldo, who echoed his daughter always. “Two hundred francs! The little brute! And he owes me that for lodgement! Oh, Nita mine! now see what comes of taking nameless mongrels—”
“Two hundred francs!” moaned Lippo, his voice shaking with a sort of religious horror, “When he might have brought half to my wife, who has been an angel of mercy to him, and spent the other half in masses for his poor dead mother’s soul, which all the devils are burning now!”
“That is the thought of a good man, but of an ass!” said Baldo bluntly. “They should have come to your strong box and mine, son; and as many francs as there were shall he have lashes!”
“Let me get at him! — let me get at him! Oh, the little snake that I suckled at my breast, robbing my own precious child for him! Two hundred francs! two hundred francs! A year’s rent! A flock of sheep! — wine to flood the town! — waggons of flour! — ten years’ indulgence! — half this world and all the next, why one might buy for such a sum as that! And flung away upon a fiddle‐case! But to prison the child shall go, and Tonino must disgorge. Let me only catch him! Let him only come home!”
Signa, in the dark upon the stones, looking up, saw this excited crowd, with waving hands, and fists thrust into each other’s eyes, and faces glowing in the light of the gateway lamp, and voices breaking out against him and blaming Bruno.
They were ready to fling him bodily into the Arno.
He was shy, but he was brave. His heart sickened and his temples throbbed with horror of the unknown things that they would wreak upon him. But he lowered the load off his shoulders, and darted up the paved way into their midst.
“It is all untrue,” he panted to them. “It was only forty francs, and Bruno had nothing to do with it, and the little Gesu of Perugino sent me the money for my own, and selfish it might be, I know; but that I have asked God; and beat me you may till I am dead, or put me in prison, as you say, but it was all my own, and my wooden Rusignuolo is safe, and you cannot touch it, and—”
A stroke of Nita’s fist sent him down upon the ground.
He was light and agile. He was on his feet in a second. All the wrongs and sufferings of his childhood blazed up like fire in him. He was a gentle little soul, and forgiving; but for once the blood burned within him into a furious pain.
Stung and bruised and heated and blinded by the blows that the woman rained on him, he sprang on her, struck her in the eyes with all his force, and tearing himself out of the score of hands that clutched at him, he slipped through his tormentors and fled down the slope.
“I will tell Bruno! I will tell Bruno!” he sobbed as he went; and while the women surrounded the screaming Nita, who shrieked that the little brute had blinded her for life. A solemn silence fell upon the men, who looked at Lippo. If Bruno were told, life would not pass smoothly at the Lastra.
That minute of their hesitation gave the child time for his liberty. When Lippo and the barber pursued him, he was out of sight, running fast under the shadow of the outer walls, where all was silent in the dusk.
“This comes of doing good!” groaned Lippo to the barber.
CHAPTER XIII.
SIGNA ran on under the walls where the men make ropes on the grass, but where it was all deserted now.
He had never known what passion was before. He had borne all ill‐usage as his due. He had let himself be kicked and cuffed as a gentle little spaniel does, only looking up with wistful eyes of sorrowful wonder.
But now the fury of a sudden sense of unbearable wrong had boiled up in his veins and mastered him, and was hissing still in his ears and beating still in his brains.
A sense of having done some great crime was heavy on him. He knew he had been very wicked. He could feel himself striking, striking, striking, and the woman’s eyeballs under his hands. He might have killed her for anything he knew. To his vivid little fancy and his great ignorance it seemed quite possible. And yet he had borne everything so long, and never said a word, and lain awake so many nights from pain of bruises.
Could anybody be very angry with him for having lost his temper just this once?
Bruno would not — that he knew.
He heard the steps of Lippo and the barber and the mutterings of their voices pursuing him. He ran as if he had wings. A great vague terror of hideous punishment lent him the speed of a gazehound. He doubled the walls at headlong speed, his bare feet scarcely touching the ground, and darted in at the door of old Teresina’s dwelling in the western gateway. By heaven’s mercy she had not drawn the bolt.
The old woman was in her short kirtle, with the handkerchief off her grey knot of hair, getting ready for going to bed, with one little lamp burning under a paper picture of the Nativity.
Signa ran to her, tumbling over the spinning‐ wheel and the dozing cat and the huge brown moon‐like loaf of bread.
“Oh, dear Teresina! let me hide here!” he cried in his terror, clinging to her skirts. “Lippo is after me. They are so angry about the violin, and I have hurt Nita very much because she knocked me down. Hide me — hide me quick, or they will kill me or give me to the guards!”
Old Teresina needed not twice telling. She opened the big black coffer with the illuminated figures, where she had hidden the violin inside, and motioned the child to follow it. The coffer would have sheltered a man.
She left the lid a little ajar, and Signa laid himself down at the bottom with the old‐world smell of incense and spiced woods. His wooden Rusignuolo was safe; he kissed it, and clasped it to him. After all, what did anything matter, if only they would leave that to him in peace?
“Lie still till they have been here to ask for you,” said Teresina; and she tied her handkerchief over her head again and began to spin.
In a few minutes there was rapping on her door.
Teresina put her head out of the window, and called to know who was there.
“It is I — Lippo,” a voice called up to her in answer. “Is the little devil with you? We have loved him as our own, and now he has
half murdered Nita — Nita that fed him from her bosom and treated him inch for inch like Toto all these years! Here is Papucci — he will tell you. Is the boy with you?”
“I have not seen him all day,” said Teresina. “I thought he was on the hills. Come up, good Lippo, and look, and tell me more. The child has a sweet pipe, but heaven only knows where the devil may not lurk. Come up, Lippo, and tell me all. You make me tremble.”
“You work late, mother,” said Lippo, suspiciously, tumbling up the stairs into the chamber.
“Aye. Lisa’s bridal is on S. Anne’s day, and there is next to no sheeting. A granddame must do what she can for the dower. But tell me all — all — quick, dear! How white you look, the saints keep us!”
“White! With a little viper nurtured nine years stinging you, and a dear, good wife blind, I daresay, for life, who would not be white?” wept Lippo, glancing sharply through the shadows of the room. “And of course you must have heard — two hundred francs and a beastly fiddle! and it is enough to bring the judgment of Holy Church—”
“I have heard nothing,” said Teresina, with her hands uplifted in amaze. “Sit down and tell me, Lippo and Pupucci too; you look ready to drop, both of you. Two hundred francs! Gesu! why, it would buy up the whole of the town! And a fiddle — ah, now I think of it, the dear naughty little lad was always sighing for an old thing in Tonino’s window that he had played on once.”
“If I could find him or it I would break it in shivers over his head,” said Lippo, forgetting his saintly savour. “I am a meek man, as you know, and a merciful, and never say a harsh word to a dog; but my dear wife blind, and all that money squandered, and Bruno, if that little beast is gone to him, ready to smash every bone in my body! It is horrible!”
“Horrible, truly,” gasped Teresina. “It is like a green apple to set one’s teeth on edge. But tell me the tale clear; how is one to understand?”
They told her the tale, both in the same breath, with every ornament that imagination and indignation could lavish on it: death may be imminent, time may be money, a moment lost may mean ruin or murder or a house devoured by flames; but, all the same, Lippo and his country‐people will stop to tell their tale. Let Death’s scythe fall or Time’s sands run out, they must stand still and tell their tale.
The story‐tellers of the Decamerone are true to nationality and nature.
And while they told it Teresina trimmed fresh her lucernata, and made the wick burn so brightly that there was not a nook or cranny of the little place in which a mouse could have been hidden unseen.
“But you never will go after him to Bruno’s,” she said, when the narrative was done, and all her horror poured out at it in strongest sympathy. “The child is half‐way there by this time, and Bruno takes part with him right or wrong — you best know why — and he is so violent; and at night, too, on that lonely hill; there might be mischief.”
“Aye, there might,” said Papucci, with a quaking in his voice: she knew her men.
“No fear of that,” said Lippo, with a boast; “Bruno is fierce, we all know his fault — dear fellow, the saints change his heart! But with me — oh, never with me.”
“For all that he shook you once many years ago when you beat the child all in justice and good‐meaning — shook you as a big dog does a little one,” said Teresina, with a nod of her head and a twinkle in her eyes. “I would not go nigh him, not to‐night; you must think of your good Nita and all those children. With the morning you shall be cool, both of you. But Bruno on that hill, in the dark — I should not care to face him, not on ill terms. You have your family, Lippo.”
“But if we leave it till the morning—”
“Well, what harm can come? The child’s sin is the same, and Nita can have law on him; and, about the money, Bruno, of course, must hear reason, and give up the fiddle, and let you get the whole sum back. Tonino would see the justice of that: you have reared and roofed the child; all his is yours — that is fair right. But if you cross Bruno, of a sudden, in the night—”
“There is reason in what you say, mother,” assented Lippo, whose heart was hammering against his ribs in mortal terror of confronting Bruno.
And after a little while he went, glad of an excuse to veil his fears from the loquacious barber.
“Tell Nita I shall see her in the morning, and how sorry I am, because I loved the lad’s little pipe, and never thought he had such evil in him,” said Teresina, opening her door to call the valediction after them down the stairway. Then she came and opened the lid of the coffer.
“He is gone now — jump out, little one.”
“Oh, why did you keep him?” cried Signa, looking up as if he were in his coffin. “I thought he never would go, and I was so afraid. And have I hurt her so much as that, do you think?”
“As if your little fists could bruise a big cow like Nita — what folly! I kept him to send him away more surely. When you want to get rid of a man, press him to stay; and if you have anything you need to hide, light two candles instead of one. No, you have never hurt Nita. Take my word, she is eating an onion supper this minute. But there will be trouble when Bruno knows, that I do fear.”
Signa sat up in the coffer, holding the violin to his chest with two hands.
“Am I a trouble to Bruno?” he said thoughtfully.
“Well, I should think so — I am not sure. The brothers are always quarrelling about you. There is something underneath. You have never complained to Bruno?”
“No. Georgio told me Bruno might kill Lippo if I did, and then they would hurt Bruno — send him to the galleys all his life; so Georgio said.”
“Like enough,” muttered Teresina. “But you cannot hide this, little one. All the Lastra will talk about it.”
“And there will be harm for Bruno?”
“He will be violent, I dare say — he always is. Bruno does not understand soft answers, and Lippo is all in the wrong; and then, of course, Bruno must learn at last how they have treated you. It will be a pasticcio.”
Teresina sat down on her wooden chair, and twitched the kerchief off her head, again perplexed and sorrowful; to make a pasticcio — a bad pasty — is the acme of woe and trouble to her nation.
“Can I do anything?” said Signa wistfully, sitting still in the open coffer.
“No — not that I see — unless you could put yourself out of the world,” said the old woman, not meaning anything in particular, but only the utter hopelessness of the matter in her eyes.
Signa looked up in silence; he did not miss a word.
“No, there is nothing to be done,” said Teresina, in anxious meditation. “Bruno will get into trouble about you — I have always thought he would. But that is not your fault, poor little soul! There is something — . Lippo is a fox. He plays his cards well, but what his game has been nobody knows. Perhaps he has made a mistake now. Bruno must know they have ill‐used you. That comes of this money. Money is god and devil. Why could that painter go and give you gold? — a bit of a thing like you. Any other man than Bruno would have put it by to buy you your coat for your first communion. But that was always Bruno — one hand on his knife and the other scattering gifts. For my part, I think Bruno the better man of the two, but no one else does. Yes; there must be trouble. Bruno will break his brother’s head, and Lippo will have law on him. You might go to Tonino and get him to take the fiddle back; but then it was only forty francs, and Lippo will always scream for the two hundred that the fools have chattered about; that would be no good. Oh, Dio mio! If only that angel at the Certosa had not sent you anything. Angels stand aloof so many years, and then they put their finger in the dough and spoil the baking. May they forgive me up above! I am an ignorant old woman, but if they would only answer prayer a little quicker or else not at all. I speak with all respect. My child, sleep here to‐night, and be off at dawn to Bruno. Sleep on it. Get up while it is grey, to have the start of Lippo and his people. But sleep here. There is a bit of grass matting that will serve you — ther
e, where the cat is gone. And I will get you a drop to drink and a bit of bread, for tired you must be and shaken; and what the Lastra see in Lippo to make a saint of baffles me; a white‐livered coward and a self‐seeker. He will die rich; see if he do not die rich! He will have a podere, and keep his baroccino, I will warrant, before all is done!”
She brought the child the little glass of red wine and a big crust; he drank the wine — he could not eat — and laid down as she told him by the cat upon the matting. He was so unhappy for Bruno; the Rusignuolo scarcely comforted him, only every now and then he would stretch out his hand and touch it, and make sure that it was there; and so fell asleep, as children will, be they ever so sorrowful.
He woke while it was still dark, from long habit, but the old woman was already astir. She made him take a roll and a slice of melon, as she opened her wooden shutter and looked out on to the little acacia trees below, and the big mountain, that was as yet grey and dark.
“Get you up the hill, dear, to Bruno, and out of the house before the men are about underneath with the straw,” she said to him. “and I do not know what you can say; and I misdoubt there will be ill words and bad blows; and it has been said for many a year that Bruno would end his days at the galleys. I remember his striking his sister once at the wine fair in Prato — such a scene as there was — and the blood spoiled her brand bran new yellow bodice, that was fit for the Blessed Mary — speaking with all respect. There is Gian undoing his big doors below — every place is full of grain now. Run, run, dear little fellow, and the saints be with you, and do not forget that they love a peacemaker; though, for the matter of that, we folks are not like them — we love a feud and a fight, and we will prick our best friend with a pin rather than have dull times and no quarrel. Run off quick, and take the melon with you.”