by Ouida
He had no light of knowledge by which to pursue in hope or fancy the younger life that would be launched into the untried realms. To him such separation was as death.
He could not write; he could not even read what was written. He could only trust to others that all was well with the boy.
He could have none of that mental solace which supports the scholar; none of that sense of natural loveliness which consoles the poet; his mind could not travel beyond the narrow circlet of its own pain; his eyes could not see beauty everywhere from the green fly at his foot to the sapphire mountains above his head; he only noticed the sunset to tell the weather; he only looked across the plain to see if the rain‐fall would cross the river. When the autumn crocus sank under his share, to him it was only a weed best withered; in hell he believed, and for heaven he hoped, but only dully, as certain things that the priests knew; but all consolations of the mind or the fancy were denied to him. Superstitions, indeed, he had, but these were all: — sad‐coloured fungi in the stead of flowers.
The Italian has not strong imagination.
His grace is an instinct; his love is a phrenzy; his gaiety is rather joy than jest; his melancholy is from temperament, not meditation; nature is little to him; and his religion and his passions alike must have physical indulgence and perpetual nearness, or they are nothing.
Bruno, who had strong passions and blind faiths, but who had no knowledge and no insight, was solitary as only a man utterly ignorant can be solitary. But he never complained even in his own thoughts: and he never attempted to seek any solace. He had set himself on absolute self‐sacrifice, and he went through with it, as thousands and tens of thousands of his own countrymen have done before him in the old days from Chrysostom to Francis, in the monasteries that rise majestic amidst the brown wastes of the sun‐burned plains, and crown the emerald radiance of the hill‐throned vines.
He was in the fields all day, having a crust of bread in his pocket, and a flask of his own wine under the hedge. He went indoors only when it was quite dark, and was at work again before any gleam of sun showed over the Umbrian mountains. Nothing broke the monotonous measure of his time. Nothing relieved the constant strain of toil. He thought that he grew old. But it was only that his weeks and months had the dulness and the barrenness of age.
Climbling the steep vinelands, reaping in the sun, driving his oxen, working among the bare boughs in the teeth of the north wind, he thought always of Signa, far away there in the unknown city amongst the unfamiliar people.
Did Signa think of him?
He wished that he could know.
The boy’s letters were few; but then that was because their postage cost money, and every centime was of value. Luigi Dini read them. They had always messages, tender, thankful, affectionate.
But that was not much.
Bruno knew that the boy’s soul and heart and fancy had long left him, and soared into a world that he himself could no more reach than he could reach the star Sirius shining over the reapen fields in the hot nights. He doubted if remembrance had much hold on this child, who when with him and beside him had always been dreaming of the future. He did not reason about it. Only he said to himself: —
“It is as if he were dead.”
But as, had the boy been dead, he would have spent all that he possessed on masses and prayers to ransom his soul and purchase heaven for him, as he would have fancied that he could do, so he toiled now, and with as little thought of recompense or remembrance.
“It is as if he were dead,” he said often.
“Nay, nay!” the old man would urge to him. “He only lives a stronger life, that is all, on his own wings, as full‐fledged birds do. The world will hear of him. He will be fortunate, I think. He will do something great. He has true genius. Then he will come to you and say, ‘I should have been a little hungry homeless goatherd all my years had it not been for you. All that I am, and all that I do, and all that men praise in me, I owe to you.’ That is how he will come back one day.”
But Bruno shook his head, and worked on amongst his vines and wheat, not lifting his eyes up from the soil.
“What will be, will be,” he said, curtly.
But he did not deceive himself, nor did he even desire to be much remembered.
Remembrance of himself would mean, for the lad, failure.
CHAPTER XIII.
MEANWHILE Lippo, munching tomatoes stewed with garlic, in the warm weather with his casement open to the evening air, said to his wife:
“Nita, I met a man in the city to‐day who has come over from Bologna upon busines. He told me that old Dini’s boast is not untrue — that the boy of Bruno’s is doing well at the Music School, and that people say he is clever, and he gains quattrini singing in the churches — only Bruno does not know that. The man knew, because his own son is at the great School, having a good bass voice that they think to make something of in a year or two. It is a good thing that we never stinted the lad, and that all the Lastra said how good we were to him, and always let him go to mass, and never a clean shirt for Toto but there was one for him too. If ever the lad should do anything that the world talks about (not that I think it likely, an idle, dreaming brat), still, if ever it do come to pass, people will know we have fair claim on him, and nobody could say that if he neglect us that it would be other than rank thanklessness. Not that what we did, we did for gain. No, never! But they do say those singing men and women make rare fortunes. Or if he write for the theatres and the churches — there is the man of Pesaro that wrote the ‘Gazza Ladra’ and the ‘Otello’ — I have heard them scores of times down in the city, he lives still, or did quite lately; and such a fuss with him as kings and queens and other countries make — if it should be ever so with the dainty boy of Bruno’s — well, we did our duty by him, wife. That we can say honestly.”
“Aye, that we did!” said Nita, with a grin on her wide angry mouth, scarlet as the tomato that she ate.
Nita was a rough woman and a masterful, and could lie when need arose with all the stubborn‐ ness and inventiveness that could be desired from any daughter of Eve. But she could not take the daily pleasure that her lord did in keeping up the lie all the day long in her own household, when all need was over, and not a creature there to be the dupe of it.
“We did our duty by him, and very few there would have been who would have taken pity on Bruno’s base‐born, and brought him to a sense of what he owed to it,” said Lippo, pushing his emptied plate away with a sigh.
He had talked himself very nearly into the belief that the boy was Bruno’s, and his own charity just what he had told the neighbours. He had said it so often that he had nearly grown into the belief that it was true.
“I was thinking,” he added, timidly, for he was always timid before Nita, since who could say how she might persuade Baldo to leave his money? “I was thinking — after all, he is our blood, though not come rightly by it — what do you say if we were to send him a little basket of figs and the like when this man goes back to Bologna? It would be just a little remembrance, and show one bore no rancour against him for that fit of passion when he blinded you.”
“Wait till he has written his opera,” said Nita, with her mouth still in an angry laughter. “You are a shrewd fellow, Lippo. But sometimes you are too over‐fond of counting your chickens before your hen has even laid an egg. Figs are figs, and fetch five centimes each till August comes. And clever boys are like lettuces: in much sun they run all to seed. Your precious brute Bruno gives the lad all sun. If I had him—”
“Ah!” said Lippo, with a smile and sigh together, and girded up his loins and went intohe street to see who was inclined to play a turn at dominoes; and told the barber and the butcher that the poor boy Signa was trying to do right in Bologna, and was studying hard.
“Oh, I bear no ill‐will. We are all poor creatures; where should we be at our best unless the saints were there to intercede for us?” said he, with gentle self‐deprecation, when they prais
ed his kind way of speaking. “Oh, I bear no ill‐will; Bruno is hard, and always unjust, and the greed of getting gold grows on him; but some day he will see the wrong that he has done. I can wait. It is sad to live ever in estrangement, but when one knows one’s innocence and good intent — and the poor lad truly never was to blame. He was encouraged in rebellion and ingratitude. I have sent him a trifle of money by a man that is going to Bologna; he is in little difficulties, so they tell me, and one does not like a boy to suffer for his elder’s fault. Besides, now he has left, he sees who were his true friends. Bruno dotes on him; oh, yes, in a mad fashion, but hoards for him, and presses poor men he lends to, as he did to Baccio — poor Baccio Alessio; he is in the Bargello for another debt! and all his children starve! it is not the way to bring a blessing on the lad. So I have a mind to tell Bruno, only he is so violent, and never speakes to me, being ashamed no doubt. But all that is not the lad’s fault. Nor would one visit it.”
And Lippo sat down to his dominoes, and was so pleased with himself that he cheated a little more than usual by way of self‐reward. He never cheated greatly, because he knew that to cheat a little every evening, with success and undetected, is much more productive and more prudent than to cheat with a big audacity, that reaps one golden harvest and then is found out, and so for ever ended.
“You will call him ‘nephew’ if he should write for a theatre, and get paid?” said old Baldo, looking up at him through his spectacles, as he returned, with some loose notes in his pocket, of which he would not speak to Nita.
“Blood is blood, without the Church or notary, that I do think,” said Lippo, gently; he liked these vague well‐sounding phrases that pledged nothing.
Old Baldo chuckled and smoked a second pipe. Baldo settled within himself that he would let all his savings and his snug little purchase of land above Giovoli go unrestricted to his daughter; her husband, he saw, was not a man to waste money or opportunities, poor‐spirited fool though the cobbler thought him, as he heard Nita’s voice saluting his return to bed with a shower of invectives, that rolled through the open casement on the night stillness up to the Pisan Gate.
“My dear,” he heard Lippo’s soft voice answer. “My dear, I have only been to drink a cup of coffee with the good canon. When he was so gracious as to do me so much honour, how could I say no?”
Baldo chuckled.
He did not like Lippo; he was impatient of him, and contemptuous of him, but he felt a sort of respect for him, nevertheless, as he listened where he sat on the porch.
Anyway, Lippo was a safe man to leave one’s money to, and all one’s little outstanding crop of bad debtors.
He might be poor‐spirited — no doubt he was. A bold opponent might wring his neck like a chicken’s. But such pretty, neat, ready‐lying as this would stand him in better stead than all the high spirit in the world; which, after all, only serves to get a man into hot water in this life and eternal fire in the next.
Baldo put his pipe out, and nodded to the barber, who was taking his neighbours’ characters away by lamplight under the Madonna of Good Counsel, and double‐locked his house‐door, and carried his stout old body to his bed.
“I used to wish she had married the other one,” he thought, as he laid himself down. “But he would have throttled her in a fit of passion; he would never have kept her quiet with the Canon’s cup of coffee. And he would never have got in for me all my bad debts. He would have burnt my ledgers as soon as I was dead. He is a fool. I am glad she married the clever one.”
CHAPTER XIV.
NEARLY two years had gone away.
It was a still night at the end of September. It was on the eve of the vintage.
The vines lie open everywhere: to the roads, to the streams, to the mule‐tracks, to the bridle‐paths, over the hills, down by the water under the cypresses, against the old towers, anywhere and everywhere, climbing like gipsy children, and as little guarded.
Only when they are quite ripe, then the peasants keep watch with their guns at night; the gipsy children have grown as precious then as little queens. Over the dark and quiet country shots echo every now and then; perhaps it is a bird shot, or a dog, or, a fox, or nothing at all, or perhaps a man — it matters little; if he were stealing the grapes he deserves his fate, and living or dead will never complain.
Bruno, like others, loaded his gun and watched abroad in these latter weeks when the vintage was so near.
In September, summer has the day, but autumn takes the night. It was the twentieth, and after sunset was cold. He wrapped his brown cloak round him, and with his white dog walked to and fro the grass paths of his vines, or sat on the stone bench outside his house while the hours wore away.
On the morrow they would all begin to gather; nearly everybody in the Signa country, at the same time and moment. Then the winepresses would run over in the shade of the great sheds, and the oxen would munch at their will the hanging leaves unmuzzled.
It would be an abundant vintage, and wine in the winter plenteous and cheap; there was joy in all the little households scattered over the mountains and the plains, behind the gold of their stacks, and under the blue of their skies.
The hours wore away. The clock of the vil‐ lage church midway on the hill told them with its sad dull sound; all clocks and bells sound mournful in the night. There was no wind; but the smell of the ripened fruit, and of the stone‐pines, and the balm firs, was strong upon the air. The moon was a slender crescent, just resting on the black edge of the mountains before it sank from sight. The turf was pale in the shadows, with the faint colours of the leafless colchicum, and the blush hues of the mitre‐flowers. The screech‐owl hooted with joy high in the tops of the trees. The bats wheeled, like brown leaves blown about on a wild breeze. Bruno sat in the fragrant cold darkness, with his old gun resting against a hive, and stretched before him the dog.
He sat thinking of the yield of the morrow, out alert for every sound. It was so lonely here that theieves were likelier to be daring than in any place with aid nearer, within call; but on the other hand, there were no tramps from the towns, nor idlers from the beggar‐haunts; it was too high to be traversed, or even known to such as these. He had had frays with poachers thrice in all the years he had lived alone there; that was all; and each time they had been worsted, and had fled with his good swanshot in their flesh.
As he sat now, when it was past midnight, and the moon had vanished behind her mountain, withdrawing her little delicate curled golden horn, as if to blow with it the trumpet call of morning, he heard steps coming up the steep ascent of his own fields, and the fallen leaves rustling and crackling. The dog sprang up, barking. Bruno pointed his gun.
He did not speak; it was not his way; if they came there after an evil errand let them get their measure, and be paid for it. He waited.
It was too dark to see anything. It was of no use to fire aimlessly into the cloudy blackness of the clustered vines.
The steps came nearer, the leaves rustled louder. He lifted his gun to his shoulder, and in a another second would have fired at the wavering shadow that seemed to move the boughs; when suddenly the dog’s wrath ceased; it sprang forward with a yelp of welcome, leaping and fawning; he paused, afraid that he might fire on the dog, angered with the beast and astonished; the dog bounded into the darkness, and out of the darkness there came a slender swift figure, graceful from the vines, as the young Borghese Bacchus.
Signa stretched his arms out.
“Do not fire! do not fire! It is I!”
Bruno threw his gun upward, and shot the charge off in the air, then with all his soul in his eyes, caught the boy in his strong hands.
“Oh, my dear! oh, my love! I might have killed you!”
All the great silent longing heart of him went out in the tenderness of the words.
Till this moment he had hardly known how he had longed to see the face of the boy.
After a little he drew Signa within the porch, and went and lighted a lamp, and
brought it out, and let its rays shine on the lad from head to foot; and looked at him again and again and again, with his own dark oxlike eyes, dim and yet luminous, with all his heart shining out of them, while he never spoke a word.
Signa had changed but little, except that he had grown tall, like a young acacia tree; he was very pale, and very thin; he looked fatigued and weak; he had all the soft grace of his nation; his limbs were beautiful in shape, though very slender; his throat was like a statue’s, and his delicate head drooped always a little downward, like a flower on a bending stalk.
He was more than ever before like the Endymion of the Tribune.
The moon had kissed him. With earth he had nothing more to do. His eyes seemed to say —
“Why keep me here?”
Bruno felt it — dimly.
“Your body is come back,” he said, sadly. “But—”
He did not end his phrase. He knew what he felt. But he knew hardly how to say it.
The sould would never come back: never.
“Yes, I am come back,” said Signa, with a smile, answering the words and not the thought. “I would not write. I walked all the way to save the money. I thought I should have been here before dark. Have I seemed thankless? What can I say? You have given me more than life. You have given me life eternal.”
“Hush! Come in and eat. You look weak, come in.”
Bruno — someway — why he did not know, could not bear the boy to thank him. He gave all his own life for the boy’s — just that — no more, no less. But he could not bear to speak of it.
Leaving the vines to any chance of theft, he took Signa within and heaped for him such rude fare as his house held; bread and wine, and some fine fruit that had been meant for the market. He watched him at the meal with fond eyes, as a mother might have done, but he spoke little. His heart was full. He was so happy.
The boy had walked all the way to see him; only to see him!