Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  There was a little piece of ground on the hillside which was much neglected — a couple of fields, a strip of olives, and a breadth of wild land on which the broom and myrtle only grew. It ran with the land which Bruno farmed, and he had often looked at it longingly.

  It was allowed to go to waste in a great degree; but Bruno knew the natural richness of the soil, and all that might be done with it; and it had the almost priceless advantage of a water‐course; a mountain‐fed rush‐feathered brook, running through it. To own a little bit of the land entirely is the peasant’s ideal of the highest good and glory, everywhere, in every nation. Nine times out of ten the possession is ruin to themselves and the land too. But this they never will believe till they have tried it.

  It was Bruno’s ideal.

  All the other land of the hillside was the duke’s, his padrone’s; that he never thought of possessing any farther than the sort of communism of the Tuscan husbandry already accorded it to him. But this little odd nook always haunted and tempted him to passionate longing for it.

  It belonged to a carver and gilder down in the city. It was said that the man was poor and incapable, and often in difficulty. Bruno, who was not a very good Christian in these matters, used to wish ardently that the difficulty might drift as far as bankruptcy, and so the morsel of soil come into the market.

  For he had an idea.

  An idea that occupied him as he drove Tinello and Pastore under the vines, and looked across at those ill‐tilled fields, where the rosemary had it nearly all her own way, except where the bear’s berry and the wild cistus and the big sullen thistles, and the pretty little creeping fairy‐cups disputed possession. An idea that grew more alluring to him every night as he smoked his pipe before sleeping, and watched the first ripple of moonlight on the little brook under the brush‐reed, the gardener’s rush, and the water‐star.

  It so grew with him that one day he acted on it, and put on a clean blue sht, and threw his best cloak over one shoulder with the scarlet lining of it turned back; and, being thus in the most ceremonious and festal guise that he knew of, he went first to his own fattore, who was a good old man and his true friend, and then took his way straight down in to the city.

  A few weeks later Tinello and Pastore were driven through the rosemary and turned it upside down, and a pruning‐hook shone among the barren olives, and a sickle made havoc amongst the broom‐reeds in the little brown stream, and the gardener’s rush was cut too to tie the broom‐reeds up in bundles.

  There was no one there to see except a neighbouring peasant or two, who knew Bruno of old too well to ask him questions; and the fattore, when he rattled up‐hill in his little baroccino, knew what was doing, and stopped to look with approval.

  But when rumours of it in time filtered down the hillside to the city market‐place — as rumours will, trickling through all obstacles like water — and busybodies asked the carver and gilder in his dusky shop in the shadow of the Saints of Orsanmichele, whether it were true that he had sold the land or not, the man said, “No,” and said it angrily.

  “How could any man,” he asked, “sell any place or portion of his own in this now‐law‐ beridden country without his hand and seal and all his goods and chattels and his price and poverty being written up and printed about for any gaping fool to read?”

  Which was true: so the busybodies had to be content with conjecture; and Bruno, with whom the busybodies never meddled any more than dogs do with a wasps’‐nest, worked on the little nook of land at his odd hours, till the rosemary dared show her head nowhere, and the brook thought it only lived to bear brooms for the market.

  This addition made Bruno’s work more laborious than ever; but then it was of his own chioce if he did so, and no affair of anyone’s. Besides, no one except its own peasants ever concerned themselves with what went on upon this big, bold, lonely hill, with its lovely colours and fragrant smells, that had the sunset blaze over it every night in burning beauty in weather serene, or dark with storm. It was his fattore’s business only, and his fattore was content.

  And the carver and gilder was so, down in the city by Orsanmichele; for every month on a market‐day he had a little roll of much‐soiled bank‐notes, and these were so rare to him thay they were thrice welcome. Whatever else Bruno’s secret might be, he kept it — with a mountaineers silence, and a Tuscan’s reticence.

  Tinello and Pastore turned the first sod of this bit of land in the month when Signa was found and Gemma lost; and Bruno always took an especial pleasure in sending the boy to work on that little brook‐fed piece of the hill rather than on any other.

  He himself never neglected his own acres; but he took a yet greater pride in this small slope, which he had made golden with corn; and those old rambling trees, which he had made bear as fine olives as any on the whole mountain side.

  On great feast or fast days — when even Bruno, who was not altogether as orthodox as his Parocco said he should be, in being useless on the hundred odd days out of the year that the Church enjoins, let his plough, and spade, and ass, and ox be idle — he would, as often as not, saunter down into this nook, taking the boy with him; and for hours would loiter through the twisted olive boughs, and sit by the side of the pretty, shallow, swift water running on under the sun and shade, with the tall distaff canes blowing above it, with a dreamy pleasure in it all, that he never took in the land, well as he loved it and cared for it, where his father’s fathers had lived and died, ever since Otho’s armies had swarmed down through the Tyrol passes, and spread over the Lombard and the Tuscan lands.

  “You are so fond of the these three fields. Why is it?” said Signa, one day, to him, when they walked through the green plumes of the maize that grew under the olives.

  “They were barren; and see what they are now. I have done it,” answered Bruno.

  And the boy was satisfied, and cut the brook reeds into even lengths, sitting singing, with his feet in the brook and his face in the sun.

  He thought so little about these things: he was always puzzling his brain over the old manuscript music down in the sacristy in the Lastra. Whenever Bruno let him go off the hillside he ran thither, and sat with his curly head bent over the crabbed signs and spaces, sitting solitary in the window that looked on the gravestones, with the ruined walls and the gateway beyond, all quiet in the sunshine.

  The music which the old Gigi had most cared for and copied, and gathered together in dusky, yellow piles of pages, was that which lies between the periods of Marcello of Venice, and Paësiello, and which is neglected by a careless and ingrate world, and seldom heard anywhere except in obscure, deserted towns of Italy, or in St. Peter’s itself.

  There was no one to tell Signa anything about this old music, on which he was nourished.

  The names of the old masters were without story for him. There was no one to give them story or substance; to tell him of Haydn serving Porpora as a slave; of Vinci, chief of counterpoint, dying of love’s vengeance; of Paësiello gathering the beautiful, savage, Greek airs of the two Sicilys to put into his operas, as wild flowers into a wreath of laurel; of Cimarosa in his dungeon, like a blinded nightingale, bringing into his music all the gay, rich, elastic mirth of the birth country of Pasquin and Polichinello; of Leo marrying the sweet words of Metastasio to sweetest melody; of the dying Mozart writing his own requiem; of the little scullion, Lully, playing in the kitchen of the Guise the violin that the cobbler had taught him to use; of Stradella, by the pure magic of his voice, arresting the steel of his murderer on the evening stillness of San Giovanni Lateranno; of Pergolese breaking his heart under the neglect of Rome, while Rome — he once being dead — loved and worshipped him, and mourned him with bitter tears, and knew no genius like his; of Jacopo Benedetti, the stern advocate, leaving the world because the thing he loved was slain, and burying his life in the eternal night of a monk’s cell, and as he penned his mighty chaunts, and being questioned wherefore, answering weeping, “I weep, because Love goes about unlove
d.”

  There was no one to tell him all these things, and make the names of his dead masters living personalites to him. Indeed, he knew no more than he knew the magnitude of the planets and distance of the stars, that these names which he found printed on the torn, yellow manuscripts, a century old or more, were of any note in the world beyond his own blue hills.

  But he spelt the melodies out, and was nourished on them: — on this pure Italian music of the Past, which has embalmed in it the souls of men who followed Raffaelle, and Mino, and Angelico, and Donatello, and who breathed in all the mountain‐begotten and sea‐born greatness of “il bel paese Ch’Appenninen parte e’l mar circonda, e l’Alpi” — men who were as morning stars of glory, that rose in the sunset of the earlier arts.

  CHAPTER VI.

  “YOU never come to the garden now,” said Palma. “You are always in the sacristy.”

  “The music is there, and Gigi will not let me bring it away,” said Signa.

  “But what do you want with that music?” said Palma. “You make it so beautifully out of your own head.”

  Signa sighed.

  “I learn more — playing theirs. You like my music; but how can I tell? — it may be worth nothing — it may be like the sound of the mule’s bells, perhaps.”

  “It is beautiful,” said Palma.

  She did not know what else to say. She meant very much more than that.

  Signa was fifteen now, and she was the same.

  Palma was a tall, brown girl; very strong, and somewhat handsome. She had her dark hair in great coils, like rope, round her head; and she had an olive skin, and big brown eyes, like a dog’s. She had a very rough poor gown, far too short for her, and torn in very many places; she wore no shoes, and she worked very hard.

  She was only a very poor common girl; living on roots and herbs; doing field work in all weathers; just knowing her letters, but that was all; rising in the dark, and toiling all day long till nightfall, at one thing or another. And yet, with all that, she had a certain poetry of look in her — a kind of distant kinship to those old saints of Memmi’s on their golden grounds, those figures of Giotto’s with the fleur‐de‐lys or the palms. Most Tuscans have this still — or more or less.

  With the rest and food that Bruno allowed to him, and the strong hill air, which is like wine, Signa, from a little, thin, pale child, had grown into a beautiful youth: he was very slender, and not so strong as the young contadini round him; but the clear, colourless brown of his skin was healthful; and his limbs were agile and supple; and his face had a great loveliness in it, like that of Guercino’s Sleeping Endymion. And his empress of the night had come down and kissed him, and he dreamed only of her; she was invisible yet filled all the air of heaven; and men called her Music — not knowing very well of what god she comes, or whither she leads them, or of what unknown worlds she speaks.

  It was a noon, and Palma had snatched a moment of leisure to gnaw a black crust, and to sit under the south wall, and to talk to Signa, who had come for melon‐seeds for Bruno.

  She loved him dearly; but he did not care very much for her. All the love he had in him outside his music he gave to Bruno.

  Bruno he had grown to love strongly since the story by the sea; he did not wholly understand the intense devotion of the man to himself, but he understood it enough to feel its immeasurable value.

  With Palma and him it was still the same as it had been on the night of the white currants and green almonds. He kissed her carelessly and she was passionately grateful. They had been playmates, and they were often companions now.

  Only he thought so little about her, and so much of the Rusignuolo, and the old manuscripts in the Misericordia Church.

  And Palma knew nothing; which is always tiresome to one who knows something, and wants to know a great deal more, as Signa did. The lot of an eager, enquiring, visionary mind, cast back on it own ignorance, always makes it impatient of itself and of its associates.

  The boy felt like one who can see amongst blind people: no one could under stand what he wanted to talk about; no one had beheld the light of the sky.

  Palma indeed loved to hear his music. But that did not make her any nearer to him. He did not care for human ears.

  He played for himself, for the air, for the clouds, for the trees, for the sheep, for the kids, for the waters, for the stones; played as Pan did, and Orpehus and Apollo.

  His music came from heaven and went back to it. What did it matter who heard it on earth?

  A lily would listen to him as never a man could do; and a daffodil would dance with delight as never woman could; — or he thought so at least, which was the same thing. And he could keep the sheep all round him, charmed and still, high above on the hillside, with the sad pines sighing.

  What did he want with people to hear? He would play for them; but he did not care. If they felt it wrongly, or felt it not at all, he would stop, and run away.

  “If they are deaf I will be dumb,” he said. “The dogs and the sheep and the birds are never deaf — nor the hills — nor the flowers. It is only people that are deaf. I suppose they are always hearing their own steps and voices and wheels and windlasses and the cries of the children and the hiss of the frying‐pans. I suppose that is why. Well let them be deaf. Rusignuolo and I do not want them.”

  So he said to Palma under the south wall, watching a butterfly, that folded was like an illuminated shield of black and gold, and with its wings spread was like a scarlet pomegranate blossom flying. Palma had asked him why he had run away from the bridal supper of Griffeo, the coppersmith’s son, — just in the midst of his music; run away home, he and his violin.

  “They were not deaf,” resumed Palma, “But your music was so sad — and they were merry.”

  “I played what came to me,” said Signa.

  “But you are merry sometimes.”

  “Not in a little room with oilwicks burning, and a stench of wine, and people round me. People always make me sad.”

  “Why that?”

  “Because — I do not know: — when a number of faces are round me I seem stupid; it is as if I were in a cage; I feel as if God went away, farther, farther, farther!”

  “But God made men and women.”

  “Yes. But I wonder if the trapped birds, and the beaten dogs, and the smarting mules, and the bleeding sheep think so.”

  “Oh, Signa!”

  “I think they must doubt it,” said Signa.

  “But the beasts are not Christians, the priests say so,” said Palma, who was a very true believer.

  “I know. But I think they are. For they forgive. We never do.”

  “Some of us do.”

  “Not as the beasts do. Agnoto’s house‐lamb, the other day, licked his hand as he cut its throat. He told me so.”

  “That was because it loved him,” said Palma.

  “And how can it love if it have not a soul?” said Signa.

  Palma munched her crust. This sort of meditation, which Signa was very prone to wander in, utterly confused her.

  She could talk at need, as others could, of the young cauliflowers, and the spring lettuces, and the chances of the ripening corn, and the look of the budding grapes, and the promise of the weather, and the likelihood of drought, and the Parocco’s last sermon, and the gossips’ last history of the neighbours, and the varying prices of fine and of coarse plaiting; but anything else — Palma was more at ease with the heavy pole pulling against her, and the heavy bucket coming up from the water‐hole.

  She felt, when he spoke in this way, much as Bruno did — only far more intensely — as if Signa went away from her — right away into the sky somewhere — as the swallows went when they spread their wings to the east, or the blue wood‐smoke when it vanished.

  “You love your music better than you do Bruno, or me, or anything, Signa,” she said, with a little sorrow that was very humble, and not in the least reproachful.

  “Yes,” said Signa, with the unconscious cruelty of
one in whom Art is born predominant. “Do you know, Palma,” he said suddenly, after a pause. “Do you know — I think I could make something beautiful, something men would be glad of, if only I could be where they would care for it.”

  “We do care,” said the girl gently.

  “Oh in a way. That is not what I mean,” said the boy, with a little impatience which daily grew on him more, for the associates of his life. “You all care; you all sing; it is as the finches do in the fields, without knowing at all what it is that you do. You are all like birds. You pipe — pipe — pipe, as you eat, as you work, as you play. But what music do we ever have in the churches? Who amongst you really likes all that music when I play it off the old scores that Gigi says were written by such great men, any better than you like the tinkling of the mandolines when you dance in the threshing barns? I am sure you all like the mandolines best. I know nothing here. I do not even know whether what I do is worth much or nothing. I think if I could hear great music once — if I could go to Florence—”

  “To Florence?” echoed Palma.

  It was to her as if it were a thousand leagues off. She could see the gold cross, and the red roofs, and the white towers gleam far away in the plain against the mountains whence the dawn came, and she had a confused idea that the sun rose somehow out of the shining dome; but it was to her like some foreign land: girls live and old women die within five miles of the cities, and never travel to see them once; to the peasant his paese, — his hamlet, — is the world. A world wide enough, that serves to hold him from his swaddling bands to his grave clothes.

  “To Florence,” said Signa. “There must be great music there. But Bruno will never let me go. If there be vegetables to take to the city, he takes them himself. He says that cities are to boys as nets to birds.”

  “But why?” began Palma, having eaten her crust, and with her hands braiding the straws one in another.

  But Signa pursued his own thoughts aloud: