by Ouida
“Livorno!” the name told hardly anything to Bruno; it was where the fish came from, that was all he knew, and the river ran there; and now and then from it to Signa there would come some seafaring fellow home for a week to his parents or brothers, bringing with him tales of strange coutnries, and weeds that smelt of salt, and wonderful large shells; and such a one would put up in one of the chapels a votive‐offering, picturing a shipwreck, or a vessel burning on the ocean, or a boat straining through a wild white squall, or some such peril of deep waters from which he had been delivered — that was all Bruno knew.
Except into the great towns to sell or buy seeds or oxen, Bruno had never stirred from the hill he was born on, and to quit it had never entered his imagination.
To him, Livorno was as Nova Zembia or the heart of Africa is to denizens of wider worlds.
The contadino not seldom goes through all his life without seeing one league beyound the fields of his labour, and the village that his is registered at, married at, and buried at, and which is the very apex of the earth to him. Women will spin and plait and hoe and glean within a half a dozen miles of some great city whose name is an art glory in the mouths of scholars, and never will have seen it, never once perhaps, from their birth down to their grave. A few miles of vine‐bordered roads, a breadth of corn‐land, a rounded hill, a little red roof under a mulberry tree, a church tower with a saint upon the roof, and a bell that sounds over the walnut trees — these are their world: they know and want to know no other.
A narrow life no doubt, yet not without much to be said for it. Without unrest, without curiosity, without envy; clinging like a plant to the soil; and no more willing to wander than the vinestakes which they thrust into the earth.
To those who have put a girdle round the earth with their footsteps, the whole world seems much smaller than does the hamlet or farm of his affections to the peasant: — and how much poorer! The vague, dreamful wonder of an untravelled distance — of an untracked horizon — has after all more romance in it than lies in the whole globe run over in a year.
Who can ever look at the old maps in Herodotus or Xenophon without a wish that the charm of those unknown limits and those untraversed seas was ours? — without an irresistible sense that to have sailed away, in vaguest hazard, into the endless mystery of the utterly unknown, must have had a sweetness and a greatness in it that is never to be extracted from “the tour of the world in ninety days?”
But Bruno was almost as simple and vague in belief as the old Father of History, and the idea of the earth he dwelt on was hardly clearer to him than to any Lake dweller in Lacustrine ages. Dangerous people called Francesi were in great numbers beyond that sea whose west wind sent the rain up, and the floods, and the fish; and in Rome God lived, or St. Peter did — which was the same thing: so much he knew; he did not want to know more; it would not have done him any good, the priests said so.
Therefore, when he heard now that the children were gone to the sea shore, it was for him as if they had gone with any falling star into the dusky and immeasurable depths of night. But being a man who thought little but acted fast, and would have followed Signa into the fires of the bottomless pit, he did not tarry a moment, but flung his cloak over his shoulder, and prepared to go straight seaward.
“I will go get the pony,” he said, stupidly, like a man stunned, and was moving off, but the old man raking in the dust stopped him.
“Nay: what good is a pony, forty miles if one? If the beast were fresh you would not be in time. The Ape is there by this time. Go by the iron way. So you wil get to the sea a little after sunrise.”
“The iron way?” said Bruno, dully: the thought was new and strange and weird to him; he saw the hateful thing, it is true, winding every day through the green vineshadows underneath his hill, but to use it — to trust to it — it was like riding the horned Fiend.
“To be sure,” said the old man with the rake and basket. “Come — I will show you the way — it is a good step — you will give me something for charity.”
“I might get a horse,” muttered Bruno, and pulled his canvas bag out and counted his coppers and his little dirty crumpled notes.
He had not very many francs; twenty or so, that was all; just what he had taken in the market on the Friday before. He ahd never been away from home. He had no idea what travel might cost.
“No horse that you could hire would get by day‐break to the sea,” said the old man, who knew he would get nothing by his hiring a horse, but thought he might turn a penny for leading him to the rail. “Think — you want those children — and if you saw the ship just out of port and could not reach her — would you forgive yourself? You would never see them again then — never all the rest of your days. The Ape would take care of that. But go by the quick way. They will come through from Florence in a few minutes. I hear the clock striking.”
Bruno shivered a little under his brown skin. Never to see the boy again! — and what would he say to Pippa on the great day when all the dead should meet?
“For the boy’s sake,” he muttered: there was no peril or evil he would not have run the gauntlet of to serve or save the boy.
“Show me the way — if it be the best way,” he said to the old man, with that curious and pathetic helplessness which at times comes over men who, physically courageous, are morally weak.
“Yes, I will show it you. But you will give me something?” stipulated the rag‐gatherer, shouldering his basket. Bruno nodded.
The old man hobbled on before him through a few crooked lanes and little streets, throwing quaint black shadows on the moon‐whitened pavement with his rake and his rush‐skip. Bruno followed; his brain in a dark confusion, and his heart sick for the danger to the boy.
When they reached the place by the Bisenzio Gate, the iron horse already was rushing in through the cool white night, flinging foam and fire as it came.
It seemed to Bruno as if ten thousand hammers were striking all at once. The showers of sparks seemed to him as from hell itself.
He would watch for thieves alone on the dark hillside in autumn nights. He could break in wild colts to the shafts and fierce steers to the yoke. He would stride through a hostile throng at a brawl, at a winefair, careless though every man there were his foe. He had the blood in him that has flowed freely from Monteaperto to Mentana. But he was afraid of this unnatural and infernal thing. His fancy was bewildered, and his nerve was shaken by it.
He was like a soldier who will face a mine, but shudders from a spectre.
“It is horrible — unnatural — unchristian,” he muttered as the great black engine, with its trail of flame and smoke, stood panting like a living animal.
“But we must use the devil’s work when it serves us. All the saints say that,” said the old man, dragging him to the hole in the wall, and twisting his money out of the bag and getting him his pass in due exchange.
Bruno was like a sheep; he followed mechanically; dull with the ghastly fear of what had happened to the boy, and the vaguer personal terror of the unknown force to which he had to trust.
There were great noise, great shouting, hurrying to and fro; roaring of the escaped steam; lights green and red flashing in the dark.
Confused and uncertain, Bruno caught his bag out of the old man’s hand, sprang in a hole that someone shoved him to; and felt himself moving without action of his own, with the sparks of fire dancing past his eyes.
“For the boy,” he said to himself; and made the sign of the cross under his cloak, and then sat down as he saw others do.
If he went to his death it was in seeking the boy: he would meet Pippa with a clean soul.
The old man hobbled away chuckling. Bruno, true to his word, had given him a penny; but in his palm he held four of the dirty notes, each of one franc.
“I might have taken more,” he said to himself, with self‐reproach. “He never would have known. The saints send one folks in trouble!”
Bruno was borne on swiftly through
the night.
With him there were a monk, a conscript, and two contadini with a basket of poultry between them, and two melons in a handkerchief. An oil lamp burned dully overhead, throwing yellow gleams on the young soldier’s boyish face, and the begging‐friar’s brown cowl, and the black brows of the sleeping peasant woman, and the green wrinkled globes of the fruit.
They rocked and thundered, and rattled and flew; the white steam and the rain of sparks drifting past the wooden window.
Bruno was like a man in a nightmare. He only dimly understood the danger assailing the boy. He had heard that men took children to foreign countries; tempting them with fair promises, and then grinding their little souls in the devil’s mill. But it was all vague to him like everything else that was outside the lines of his vines, or beyond the walls of the Lastra.
Only a word of the rag‐picker’s haunted him like a ghost.
The man would take ship; and he, himself, might reach too late and see the ships sailing — sailing — sailing — and never be able to overtake it or see the face of the child again.
The horror clung to him.
He sat gazing into the night; making the sign of the cross under his cloak, and muttering ever and again an ave.
“You are in trouble my good son?” said the monk.
“Yes, father,” answered Bruno: but he said no more. It was not his way to take refuge in words.
A great dull tumult of horror was on him. The strange noise and swaying motion added to it. All the ill that ever he had done in all his life — and it was much — surged up over him. It was divine vengeance on his sins, he thought; he had not clean hands enough to save Pippa’s child. He had been a wild, fierce man, and had never ruled his passions, and had struck rough blows when he should have asked forgiveness; and had been lawless in his loves, and had made more than one woman rue the day his wish had lit on her.
It seemed to him that it must be his sins which were pursuing him. For the little lad was so innocent; why should this misery befall them else?
His thoughts were all in disorder, shaken together, and whirling round and confusing him, so that all he could think of was that ship sailing away and he on shore, helpless: — only now and then, in the midst of his pain, he thought too of his oxen, Tinello and Pastore: — were they hungry? — would the man to whom he had left them have wit to give them their suppers? — would they bellow with wonder at not seeing him in their stable? — if he were a minute late they always lowed for him, thrusting their great white heads over the wooden half‐door.
So his thoughts went round and round, and the night train flew on with him past the shining river in its thickets of cane and acacia, and the grey hills silvery in the the moonshine, and the knolls of woodland with their ruined fortresses, and the vineyards that grew green where ruined Semifonte was levelled with the soil; and the silence of walled Pistoia holding the ghost of great Farinata; and Pisa with her cold dead beauty like a lifeless Dido on her bier; and so past the great dense woods and breezy heathery moorlands of the king’s hunting grounds, till in the light of the moon a white streak shone, and the monk pointing to it said to them:
“There is the sea.”
CHAPTER II.
IT was four in the morning.
On the long, low sandy lines of the coast, and on the blue waters, the moonlight was still shining. In the east the great arc of the sky; and the distant mountains, and the plains, with their scattered cities, were all rose‐coloured with the flush of the rising day. Night and morning met, and kissed and parted.
Bruno went down to the edge of the sea, as they told him, and looked, and was stupefied. In some vague way the strange beauty of it moved him. This vast breadth of water that was so new to him, sparkling under the moon, with white sails motionless here and there, and islands, like clouds, and, in face of it, the sunrise, awed him with its wonder as the familiar loveli‐ ness of his own hills and valleys had no power to do.
He forgot the child a moment.
He crossed himself and said a prayer. He was vaguely afraid. He thought God must be there.
He stood motionless. The rose fo the dawn spread higher and higher, and the stars grew dim, and the moon was bathed in the daylight. A boat put out from the shore, and stole softly away across the gleaming blue, making a path of silver on the sea.
Bruno, like a man waking, remembered the warning of the ship: for aught he knew, the boat was a ship, and the child was borne away in it.
His heart grew sick with hear. He stopped the only creature that was near him on the way; a fisherman going to set his pots and kreels in the rock‐pools to catch crabs.
“Is that a ship going away?” he asked.
The fisherman laughed.
“That is a little boat, going fishing. Where do you come from that you do not know a ship?”
“Has one sailed yet, since night? Away? — quite away? — not to come back?”
“What do you mean?” siad the fisherman. “If you mean the mail‐ships or the steamers to Elba or Genoa — no! Nothing will leave port till night. Some will come in. Why do you ask? Do you want to get away?”
The fisher glanced at him with some suspicion.
Bruno’s eyes had a strange look, as if some peril were about him.
“You are sure no ship will go away?” he asked persistently.
“Not till nightfall,” said the fisherman. “There are none due. Besides, there is a dead calm: see how these rowers pull.”
And he trudged on with his lobster‐pots and kreels. This man was in trouble, he thought; it was best not to meddle with him, for fear of getting into any of the trouble.
Bruno went on along the wharf.
The natural shrewdness of a peasant’s habits of action began to stir underneath the confusion of his brain and the perplexity of his ignorance and his sorrow. In many things he was stupid, but in others he was keen. He began to consider what he could best do. That great wide water awed him — apalled him — fascinated him; but he tried not to think of it, not to gaze at it; he looked, instead, up at the moon, and was comforted to see it was the same that hung over the hills of Signa, to light the little grey aziola homeward through the pines. It seemed to him that he was half a world away from the quiet fields where Tinello and Pastore drew the plough beneath the vines.
But he had to find the boy; — that he must do before ever he saw the Signa hills again. He pondered a little, passing along the wharves, then turned into a winehouse that was opening early for seafaring men, and ate some polenta, and drank, and asked them tidings — if they could give any — of a little lad with a violin, who had been stolen.
The tavern folks were curious and compassionate, and would have helped him if they could have done, but knew nothing. Only they told him that if the child had a pretty trick of melody, he would be nearly sure to be taken to earn money where the gay great people lived southward, along where he could see the tamarisk trees. If he did not find the children in the old town, it would be best to go southwards towards noon.
He thanked them, and wandered out and about all the old, ugly, salt‐scented lanes and streets and busy quays, piled with merchandise and fish, and lines of fortifications, and dull squares and filthy haunts, where there was the smell of salt‐fish all day long, and the noise of brawling sailors of divers coutnries, and screaming foreign birds, and the strong odour of fishing nets and sails and cordage.
He heard nothing of the boy; but learned that a ship would go away to the coast of France at sunset.
So at noon, as they had told him it would be best to do, he went along the seashore, southwards, past the lighthouse and through the green lines of feathery tamarisks, that Titania of trees with its sweet breath, that is flower and forest, and spice and sea, and feather and fern, all in one, as it were.
To ask any public authority to aid him never occurred to him. He had been to often at feud with it in his wild youth to dream of seeking it as any help. Bruno and the guardians of order loved not one an
other. When he saw them at street corners with their shining swords and their soldiering swagger, he gave them a wide berth; or, if forced to go by them, passed with a fiercer glance than common, and a haughtier step, as of one who defies.
His heart was sick as he went by the shining water. The horror came on him that he had been misled. Neither mountebank nor rag‐picker had been sure that the children had come to the shore. At best, it had been only a thought.
Bruno felt for his knife in his waistband, under his shirt. If only he could deal with the man who had taken the boy; and with Lippo.
His soul was black as night as he went along in the full sunshine, with the azure water glowing till his bold eyes ached to look at it.
He had never known till now how well he loved the child.
And if he had drifted away to some vile, wretched, sinful, hopeless life — the life of a beaten dog, of a stage monkey, of a caged song bird, — if he lived so and died so, what could he say in heaven or in hell to Pippa?
The sweet tamarisk scent made him sick as he went. The play of the sun on the sea seemed to him the cruellest thing that ever laughed at men’s pain.
When he came amongst the gay people and the music, and the colour and the laughter of the summer bathers, and the beautiful women floating in the water with their long hair and their white limbs, he hated them all — for sheer pain he could have taken his knife and struck at them, and made the sparkling blue dusky with their death. It was not only the child that he lost; it was his power to save his own soul.
So he thought.
He went through the long lines of the tamarisks a brown straight figure, with naked feet and bold eyes full of pain, like a caught hawk’s, in the midst of the fluttering garments and the loosened hair, and the mirthful laughter and the graceful idleness of the bathers, whom Watteau would have painted for a new voyage to Cytherea.
Bruno did not notice what he was amongst. The Tuscan blood is too republican to be daunted by strange rank or novel spectacle. Whatever be its other faults, servility is utterly alien to it, and a serene dignity lives in it side by side with indolent carelessness.