by Ouida
His voice ceased.
What he spoke of was no metaphor to him, but dark dread truth, as sure to come to pass as night to follow day.
Signa looked, half fearfully, up into his face. What could the boy say?
He only vaguely understood all that the strength and the weakness, the sternness and the tenderness, the force and the frailty of the man’s soul wrestled with and overthrew. He only felt the dead weight of a future that appalled him, being forced on him by the hands that were stretched out to give him blessing.
A bitter sense of his own cruel thanklessness, and of his impotence to make himself more thankful, choked up in his heart all other emotions.
He was mute a little while, his chest heaving and his eyes burning with an insufferable shame of his own ingratitude. Then all at once he threw up his head, and spoke with the desperate pain of one who feels himself most utterly unworthy, yet is carried out of himself by the force of a passion stronger than his will.
“What can I say?” he cried. “Oh, how good you are to think so of me and never once of yourself! And any other boy — oh, yes, I know — any other than I would be so happy and so proud. You must hate me, because I am so thankless. No — not thankless in my heart. Most thankful — only it is not what I want. It sounds so vile to say so; and you toiling and saving, and thinking only of me and of my future all those years. But one is as one is made. You know the rose could not live the water‐life of the rush, the dove could not burrow in the moss and sand like the mole. We are as we are made. We cannot help being rose or rush, dove or mole. Something does it for us — God they say. Only one wonders. You must hat me, so cold as I seem, and so base and so callous; and you thinking only of me all these years, and giving up your life for mine. But it is better to tell you the truth, and you will try and forgive it, because I cannot help it. It is stronger than I am. I do not want any land nor any girl. I do not want to be a contadino always, living and dying. I should do no good. I love this hillside — ah, dearly! I would spend all my life upon it. But then not in the way you wish. Only when I should have learned all I want, and should come home here for ever and ever, and watch the sunrise, and make music all day long that should go away to all the ends of the earth and take the name of Signa with it, and make it great everywhere in men’s mouths. But to stay here now and always — never knowing anything, never hearing a mass sung, nor a cantata placed, nor an opera given; never doing anything except put the grain in and reap it, and dig round the olives and trim them — oh, I would rather you would throw me in the brook, and fling stone on me till I should be dead. When I take the cattle out, I do not think of them — I think of the music that is always about me, all around me, everywhere. I love the land, but it is because of its beauty I love it; of ploughing and weeding, and watering, and stacking — I help you because I ought to do it; but my heart is not in my body while I do do it. My heart is with the birds, with the clouds, with the stars — anywhere — but never in the labour at all. If I were alone here in other years, as you say, I should let the briars and the rosemary eat it all up as Baccio did. Oh listen, do listen, and do not be angry. What I want to do is to learn; to hear beautiful things, and see if I cannot make more beautiful things myself. I have heard that there are schools of music, where one can know what one is worth. I play the old great things the great masters wrote, and when I play them, then my heart is in my body, and my soul seems to live in my hands. I cannot help it. The only thing I care for in all the world is music, and I do think that God has meant me to give my life to it for the world. You remember what that stranger said when I sang to him when I was only a child. I do not want my mouth to drop pearls. I do not want gold, or pleasure, or comfort. But if I could go away where I could learn. I have written — but I do not know what it is worth. If I could go away where I could hear great things, and study them, then I think I could make you proud of me — then I think I could honour the Lastra. Oh, listen, listen, listen! I am not thankless, indeed. But what I want is to have the beautiful things that I hear live after me. I would die a thousand deaths, if it were possible, so that only I could give life to them, and know that the world would say, ‘He was only a little lad — he was only Signa — but his music was great.’”
Then his voice ceased quite suddenly, and he dropped his face on his hands and trembled. For he was afraid of the fruit of his words; and his unthankfulness made his soul black and loathsome in his own sight.
At the first phrase Bruno had sprung to his feet, and had all the while stood looking down on him, not breaking in upon him by a breath or by a sign. Only over his face there had come the old darkness that had been banished so long; his eyes under the straight black line of his brows had the old murderous fire in them.
He listened to the end.
Then he set his heel on the violin which laid on the sedges at his feet and stamped it down again and again as if it had been a snake.
“Accursed be the toy that has bewitched you — accursed the gold that bought it, and the man that gave — !”
The bruised wood cracked and broke under his heel; a single string snapped with a shrill, sad, shivering sound, like the cry of some young thing dying. The boy sprang erect, his fair face in a blaze of wrath and horror, his slender hands clenched. For a moment they looked at one another; — a sullen gloom set in the man’s flaming eyes; a wild reproach and a hopeless defiance in the boy’s.
Then Signa’s arms dropped, and he flung himself on his ruined treasure — covering it with kisses — weeping as girls weep.
Bruno looked down on him, and the fierce scorn on his face deepened, and he laughed aloud.
Mourn in despair for a broken plaything, and slay without a thought a love that would burn in hell through all eternity to serve him!
Without a word he turned and went up the mountain‐side.
The boy lay face downwards in the grass, sobbing, with the shattered wood under his quivering lips.
Bruno never looked back.
CHAPTER IX.
IT was night when Signa crept back from the side of the brook to the house.
The sun had left a stormy red over the mountains. In the valley it was raining heavily. Wind blew from the west. The bells were ringing for the benediction through the dense violet‐hued vapours.
The poor peasant who most often aided Bruno on his fields was putting up the bar before the oxen’s stable.
He turned his lanthorn to the boy, and nodded.
“You will be up by dawn, Signa — will you? It is too much for me to do alone.”
The boy stopped, shading his face from the lanthorn lest the man should see his swollen eyelids and his pallid cheeks.
“Is Bruno gone?” he asked.
“Yes. Did you not know? But, there; he never says anything. It is his way. How your voice shakes. You have got a chill. Yes. He came down from the mountains an hour ago and told me he should be away a day — two days; perhaps more; — would I sleep in the house and see to the things? No offence. But you are no more than a baby. Mind, the guns are loaded; and leave the wine where I can get it easy if you go to bed.”
Signa locked himself in his little room, heeding neither the guns nor the wine.
All night the rain beat against his lattice and the winds raged over the roof. All night he tried by the light of a feeble little lamp to mend his shattered Rusignuolo.
It was quite useless. The wooden shell he could piece together well enough; but the keys were smashed beyond all chance of restoration, and for the broken silvery strings there was no hope.
The Rusignuolo was mute for evermore. As mute as a dead bird.
Signa never slept, nor even undressed. He sat looking at the violin with a sick dead apathy of pain.
He watched by it as a living bird will watch by the dead one which has been its comrade in song and flight, and never more will spread wing with him or praise the day beneath the summer leaves.
When the morning came and the peasant flung a shower of pebbles at h
is shutter to rouse him, he was still sitting there, tearless and heart‐broken, with the fragments of the Rusignuolo before him.
The habits of his life were strong enough to make him rise and dip his head in water and shake his hair dry, and go down and help the man in his stable and field work. But, first he laid the violin reverently, as though he buried it, in a drawer, where his rosary and his communion ribbon and his book of hours and his little locket were all laid with sprigs of fir and cypress and many rose leaves to keep them sweet. His face was very white: he had a scared, appalled look in his eyes, and he hardly spoke.
The peasant asked him if he had seen a ghost in the night?
Signa shook his head; but he thought that he had heard many — ghosts of his silent melodies, ghosts of his dead dreams, ghosts of all the gracious, precious, nameless, heaven‐born things that he and the Rusignuolo together had called to them from the spirit‐world; from the shadows and the storms, from the stars and the sun.
The long, dreary, dull day dragged out its weary length. It had ceased to rain, but the valley was hidden in vapour. He could not see the river or the villages, or the distant gleam of the golden cross. Dusky mists, white and grey, floated along the face of the mountains, and rose like a dense smoke from the plains.
He helped the peasant all the day, his own peasant training teaching him by instinct to labour whilst he suffered. He fed the beasts and plucked up the beet‐root, and drew water and stacked wood, and did whatever the man told him to do.
No one came near. The hillside was still as a grave. The fog drifted beneath it, and hid the rest of the world. He and the man worked on alone. The oxen lowed in the byre, missing their master. The screech‐owl finding it so dark began to hoot. A great awe, like that of the sight of death, weighed upon Signa.
He feared every thing, and yet he feared nothing.
The Rusignuolo was ruined and voiceless.
It seemed to him as if the end of the world had come.
He went up the stairs and looked at it often. No tears would come to his eyes; but his heart felt as if it would burst.
Never again would it speak to him.
Never!
A dull aching hatred of the man who had done this evil rose up in him. Hatred seemed like a crime — after all that he owed to Bruno; but it was there.
He was unutterably wretched.
If there had been anyone he could have spoken to, it might have been better; but the only thing that had ever understood him was dead — lying mute and broken amongst the rose leaves.
He could only work on silently with his heart swelling in him, and let the horrible grey hours come and go.
The peasant wondered fifty times, if once, where Bruno could be gone. Bruno, who, for forty‐nine years, never had set foot off his own hill and valley, save that once to the sea.
But Signa answered him nothing. He did not care. He did not ask himself. If Bruno were dead — the Rusignuolo was dead. It would be only justice.
The boy’s heart was cold and numb.
The Rusignuolo was dead, and all his hopes and all his dreams and all his faiths dead with it.
“Why did he take me out of the flood?” he thought, as he looked down in to the dull vapours of the great rain‐clouds that hovered between him and the plain.
There is a silence of the mountains that is beautiful beyond all other beauty. There is another silence of the mountains that is lonely beyond all other loneliness.
The latter silence was about him now with the world of water and mist at his feet; that dim white grey world in which he might have drifted away with his mother — but for Bruno.
“Why did he save me, then?” he thought. “If he must kill all that is worth anything in me now?”
And his heart grew harder against Bruno with each hour that went by, and brought the wet, oppressive, sullen evening round again, with the wind loud amongst the pines.
The boy looked out through the iron bars of his open lattice into the cold still night, full of the smell of fallen leaves and fir‐cones. The tears fell down his cheeks; his heart was oppressed with a vague yearning, such as made Mozart weep, when he heard his own Lacrimosa chanted.
It is not fear of death, it is not desire of life.
It is that unutterable want, that nameless longing, which stirs in the soul that is a little purer than its fellow, and which, burdened with that prophetic pain which men call genius, blindly feels it way after some great light, that knows must be shining somewhere upon other worlds, though all the earth is dark.
When Mozart wept, it was for the world he could never reach — not for the world he left.
With the morning Palma came up; the same weather lasted, but weather did not matter to her. She came for sticks and gorze for her firing, which she could glean above on the wild ground. Usually Signa helped her. Now he murmured that he had too much to do, and let her go up under the trees alone in the falling rain.
What was Palma to him, or any living thing? the Rusignuolo was ruined.
He sat on the low stone wall with the rain on him, and left all his work undone.
The absence of Bruno weighed on him with a vague sense of misfortune and fear, and yet he did not wish him to return; he wished him to keep away — always, always, always, he thought; how should he bear to see the man who had slain his Rusignuolo, and how could he ever avenge it on the man who had given him bread and shelter and love, and almost life?
The boy’s heart was sick with sorrow, and the first bitterness of wrath that had ever found resting‐place in him.
He wished that he were dead — he wished that he had never lived.
Palma came down from the higher ground under the ppines, with a sack of fir‐apples on her shoulders, and a great bundle of dry boughs and brambles balanced above it on her head. Her feet were black with the moss and mud; her wisp of a skirt was clinging to her, wet through; her brown face was warm with work. She stopped by the wall.
“Is anything the matter?”
Signa shook his head; he could not speak of it.
“Cippone told me Bruno was gone away,” she said, meaning the man in the field: ‘Is that true?’”
“Yes, it is true.”
“Then there must be something.”
Signa was silent; sitting on the wall with his wet hair blowing about him.
Palma rested her sack and her faggot on the stone parapet, and looked anxiously in his averted face.
“Dear Signa, do tell me.”
“It is nothing,” said Signa, slowly; “only he is a brute — he kills what is greater than himself; and I hate him.”
“Oh, Signa!”
The girl’s sunburned cheeks grew ashen: the slowness and coldness of his answer frightened her more than any outburst of wild grief or rage would have done. It was so unlike him.
“I hate him,” said Signa. “Palma, see here. He pretends to love me, and he breaks my Rusignuolo, and he breaks my heart with it; and he thinks he loves me, both body and soul, because he buys a bit of land and bids me live on it all the days of my life, and dig, and sow, and plough, and hew, and draw water, and lead a life like the oxen’s — no better: he calls that love. To do with me exactly what he wishes himself! To make a mule of me — a mule — a stupid plodding thing, mute as the stones: he calls that love.”
“Oh, Signa!”
She could say nothing else. She was so amazed and so aghast, that all her love of the soil as a Tuscan, and all her instincts of class and of custom as a peasant, were roused in horror at him. Only she was so fond of him. She could not think him wrong. She had a true woman in her — this poor brown girl, who went half naked in the wind, and bore her burdens on her back like any beaten ass.