Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  He had not forgotten. He had needed nothing. He had only come back from remembrance and affection. The moment paid Bruno for all the twenty long months of solitude and toil.

  “You wanted to see me, and you walked all the way!” he said, over and over again; those words and nothing more. It was so incredible to him, and yet so natural. He was grateful, as liberal natures are to those who owe them all things, and pay them with an hour’s tenderness.

  Signa coloured a little and looked away.

  “Yes, I walked; what of that? It was so long a time — to see you and the Lastra—”

  Then he touched Bruno’s hand with his lips, in soft caressing grace.

  “It was good of you,” said Bruno, simply, and the tears stood in his eyes. The boy had loved him always — never forgotten — had walked all the way only to see his face again!

  The seventeen years of labour and of sacrifice and of forethought and of shelter all rolled away from his recollection; he had done nothing, so it seemed to him; and it was he who was Signa’s debtor. Generous natures wrong themselves as much as others wrong them.

  “If you had sent me word you should have had the money to travel; I would have got it somehow,” he said, resting his elbows on the table, and still gazing at Signa, while the brass lamp burned between them, its wick wavering in the draught. “I did not ask you, dear — no — Luigi Dini said that you were best left undisturbed, and I said, let him be till his heart speaks — till he remembers and wants to come. Ah, dear, it is more than your body that comes back — it is your heart too.”

  “Surely,” murmured Signa, but the colour rose a little again in his pale cheeks, and he drank off his wine quickly.

  “You have walked far to‐day?”

  “Only from Prato: and through Carmignano — I thought of Gemma. Nothing is ever heard of her?”

  “Nothing. Palma is well — a good girl, as good as gold.”

  “Poor little Gemma!” said Signa, with a sigh; he could not quite forget the pretty golden‐headed sullen little temptress that had made him play and dance that fair day on the stones of Prato.

  “If she be alive she is bad. You cannot change a gnat to a bee,” said Bruno, briefly. “And, dear, do tell me of yourself — there is so much to hear — you have been happy?”

  Signa’s eyes shone like Endymion’s lifted to the moon.

  “Happy! — that is so little. It is much more than that.”

  “But the people are good to you. You want for nothing? You have all you wish?”

  “Oh, no, I want for nothing. Perhaps, I am hungry sometimes and cold; — the other lads laugh, the masters blame; — the bread runs short, the shirts are worn out, the women say so — what does it matter? It makes so little difference. While one has strength enough, and can have faith in oneself — one has the future. What do the little things signify? One does not notice even—”

  Bruno was silent. He did not understand.

  “The angels speak to him, I suppose,” he thought.

  “Is the Lastra changed?” said Signa, “I cannot give it gates of gold — not yet.”

  “How should the Lastra change?” said Bruno, to whom it was immutable and eternal as the mountains.

  “I do not know, “ said Signa. “Only I am so changed that it seems to me everything else must be so too. It is as if I had been away a thousand years.”

  “You were so sad of heart for us.”

  Bruno’s face lightened with a deep unspoken gladness. All this while that he had been resigned to be forgotten, the boy had longed for his old home, and now had tramped on foot two hundred miles and more to clasp him by the hand!

  Signa answered with swift questions of a score of things: Tinello and Pastore, and Teresina at the gate, and the harvest, and the flowers of Giovoli, and the old priest on the hill, and the things and people of the old life he had left.

  Himself he knew that he seemed to have been parted from them a thousand years, not for his regret or for his sorrow, but for the immeasurable distance of thought and knowledge that divided him from them all; from that hopeless sense “they cannot understand,” which yawned in an unbridged gulf of difference between himself and them.

  “And to‐morrow we begin to gather,” said Bruno, replying to him. “It will take two days or more. The grapes are very fine; the last rains swelled them so. You will see all the people. There is not one dead. They will be so glad. No doubt you thought of vintage when you chose the time? It was well chosen.”

  “I did not remember,” murmured Signa, glancing at the brown knapsack that he had put away in one corner. “But as I came along I noticed the vines were ready; and by Carmignano a woman gave me a ripe bunch. You will be busy then all the week?”

  “But you will stay the week, and more?”

  “If you wish.”

  He leaned his head on his hand; he spoke wearily; his face flushed a little with the same uneven changeful colour.

  “You are tired, dear,” said Bruno, tenderly. “From Prato; — it is a long way for you. Very long. And the nights cold. You look to have so little strength. You must have overworked yourself. Go to your bed, dear. That will be best now. We shall have time to talk; and it is selfishness to to keep you up; and with your eyes so sleepy. Look, you see the bed is ready. I have always kept it so. Quite ready. For I said who knows — he may get tired of the city or of his learning, and come back without one’s knowing. Only I did think you might forget; — and you have not forgotten. The people will be so glad; and you will play to them.”

  “And if ever you should tire and should be of a different mind,” he added, setting down the lamp by the little bed. “They say boys do change — dream of great things, and of learning, and then see the cities a little, and the hollowness and labour of it all, and grow content to return into the old quiet ways, and leave the world to its own burdens — they say so, men who know. Well, if ever it should be so with you, or if it be so now, why there is your bit of land by the brook always ready for you as this bed is, and getting better and better every year, and yielding more. A safe place for you, and daily bread, and the house we would build in no time — that is, you know, if ever you should change and wish for it. There it always is. A solid bit of land: — if you should ail anything or be disappointed, or see with different eyes; that is all, dear. Good night, and the saints keep you. And it was good of you to think of me, and to walk all the way.”

  Signa was too tired to hear the words very clearly, and was ready to stretch himself wearily on the little familiar mattress over which Bruno had been careful to set the blessed palm of the previous Easter. Bruno left him and took his gun again and went out into the moonless night to continue his watch of the vineyard.

  But all the sky seemed light to him.

  The boy had wanted to see him, and had walked all the way! He was quite happy as he sat in the silence and the darkness. A great hope was warm around his heart. The boy had come back.

  That proof of love was so precious to him that all his years of toil were effaced by it and all his solitude glorified.

  Who could say that the old ways and the old habits, and the native air and the native soil, and the freedom of the high hills, might not have some sweetness in them after all, and roost at home those young, tired, wandering feet? It was possible at least.

  Bruno crossed himself where he sat, with the musket resting at his knee, and thanked the Mother of God. He thanked her. He would not pray for anything. He would not ask for anything. He was content, — quite content.

  The boy had come back. That was enough.

  “Only to see me; only just to see me! — and walking all the way!” he repeated to himself while the hours wore away.

  Dawn came very soon.

  It seemed to Bruno that it had come when the last gleam of the moon behind the mountains had shone on the face of Signa, with the red vine‐leaves against his forehead.

  CHAPTER XV.

  WITH the sunrise the vintage began.

&n
bsp; Signa opposed nothing; but entered into all the work and pleasure as if he were the little fellow who had run home with his Rusignuolo seven years before. There was an effort in it all; his heart was not in it; in his eyes there was the old far‐away wistful look; and, at times, he fell into abstraction and silence. But Bruno was too incessantly occupied to notice these shadows on his sunshine. The boy was home again; that was enough. When he saw Signa’s slender brown hands pulling down the grape clusters, and heard his voice calling across the hillside to the men with the teams, he was content; so utterly content himself that it did not occur to him to dream that the youth could be otherwise. And he was very proud of him.

  Proud of his soft grace, of his straight limbs, of his delicate, serious beauty; proud of that very something about him which was so difficult to define, but which seemed to separate him from all those around him as widely as the solitary gold‐winged oriole differs from the brown multitude of the tree‐sparrows.

  Signa had learned other things beside his own art away there under the Alpine winds; he had studied all that he could, night and day, old lore and new; — it was not very much, but to his old associates it seemed miraculous; they did not understand what it was, but they felt that this young scholar was a glory to them. One told another, and from all the country about, as far as the bridge of Greve, people came to see him and speak with him, and when the good priest challenged him in Latin, and he could answer with ease and grace, and when the head gardener of Giovoli, who was a Frenchman, spoke to him in his own tongue, and was fairly answered in it, Signa seemed to his old friends and com‐ panions something very wonderful — a little fellow running barefoot and cutting food for the oxen only a day ago, as it seemed.

  They said one with another that he could not have been Pippa’s son; — no, certainly, that was surer than ever, — never poor Pippa’s son; — if Bruno’s! Who knew? Bruno had been famous for his physical comeliness in his younger years. Who knew? — patrician ladies had strange fancies sometimes; their contadini could tell rare tales of some of their love fancies.

  So they gossiped going down the hill after seeing the boy in the cool evening shadows, or talking with him in the Lastra. At last it became settled with them; the human tongue, once beginning to jump, takes such grasshopper‐leaps from conjecture to affirmation — yes, that was the secret of it all, they said. Bruno had pleased some grand dame too well for her peace or honour, and this was how it came that hte boy had such tastes and such an air about him, and Bruno money enough to make a scholar of him; — yes, that was how it was.

  “We always knew it,” said the women, with a sagacious twirl of their distaff; and added, that they could name the erring princess if they chose, but it was perilous work to light truth under great names; like thrusting burning straws under a hornets’ nest.

  As for Lippo he waited, hearing all they said; and then, by accident, was in the street close by the Livorness Gate as the boy came down old Teresina’s stairs, and stopped with his gentlest smile before him.

  “Dear; we rejoice to hear you do so well,” he said, with outstretched hands, knowing his wife was safe over her linen, washing in the brook underneath the trees by S. Maria. “It is so sad. Bruno is hard to turn — we are estranged. But is was all an error. I was too rough with you about that violin when you were little. Yes, that I feel; I have done penance for it often. But we were as good to you as we knew how to be, so poor as we were and with so many children. Indeed, we loved you always, and Nita nursed you. You and my Toto are foster‐brothers. I never can forget all that.”

  Signa put out his hands.

  “I forgive everything,” he said gently. “When one is free and away, that is easy. But friends we cannot be; it would be unjust to Bruno. And I do not know that I do well. I cannot tell — not yet. One may fail.”

  And he went on his way to the church of the Misericordia, the little dark church, where his first communion with the old masters of his art had opened to him the glories that lie in the science of sound.

  Lippo went the other way, chagrined.

  “I wish he would not say that he forgives,” he thought; “it sounds as if one had dealt ill by him. I am glad I did not ask him to the house. Perhaps it is all moonshine what they say of him. ‘One may fail,’ he says. Fail in what thing I wonder? Nita was right. It is as well to wait, and be quite sure. Only, whatever happens, Nita nursed him. That he never can forget, if he should succeed in anything and get a name.”

  For Lippo, like many others before him, held that a life that rises from obscurity to triumph should look back in grateful obligation to those who, when it was in obscurity, did their best to keep it there.

  The stone in the mud cries to the butterfly against the clouds, “Come down and kiss me, for when you were a grub I did my best to crush you: is not that a link between us?”

  “We will go down to Fiastra,” said Bruno, on the third evening, when all the grapes were gathered in. It was so the old farm‐house was called where all the hillside danced at vintage time. The bell was ringing from its roof; an old bell that had on its copper— “Lavora: et noli contristari,” and had been cast in the tenth century or earlier.

  They were rich peasants at Fiastra. They had cattle and horses of their own. They had a wide rambling dwelling‐house with immense halls and large lofty chambers. There was a great stone court‐yard in the centre; the house ran round three sides of it; the fourth side was open to the hill‐slope, with all the landscape shining through a screen of pines. They had a numerous family of grown‐up sons and young daughters. All through the vintage month, while the maize was being picked, they used to dance there, and ring the bell above the roof and bring all the contadini above and below within hearing up and down to the merriment. The youths and the maidens shelled the Indian corn, and romped and jested and made love; when night fell, some one played on a mandoline; perhaps there was a pipe or a flute, too, and sometimes some wandering musician had a tambourine. They whirled and jumbped about to the rattling music, while the old people smoked or spun, and the babies tumbled with the dogs, with the yellow maize lying in a pile and the calm night skies above, and the hill‐side shining white in the starlight through the colonnade of the graceful serious pines. They had done this in the old house for centuries, always, as maize harvest and vintage came round; prosperous folks, honest, simple and gay; generation succeeding generation, without break, and changing in nothing.

  There still are many such in this country. Soon there will be none. For Discontent already creeps into each of these happy households, and under her fox‐skin hood says: “Let me in — I am Progress.”

  They had always gone down to Fiastra. It was the custom on all the hill‐side. But since Signa had been away, Bruno had had no heart to go there; the lads and the girls were so merry and so happy in their manner of life; it had made his heart ache the more; why could not Pippa’s son have been so?

  But now all was well again. It was different. The boy had come back. “Walked all the way! — just to see me!” Bruno had said to each neighbour that day, going out of his habit of silence in the gladness of his soul.

  It was early; they were still shelling the last maize; the bell was just beginning to sound; girls were trooping in, in their work‐a‐day dress; but each had their little strings of pearls round their throats. Palma, who came amongst them, had no pearls. She was not so much even as a contadina. She felt very brown and rough and unlovely beside the grace of Signa. She oculd not keep herself form thinking how Gemma would have looked if she had stayed there and had lived; how pretty, though having no ornament but her bright glancing hair and her wild‐rose cheeks.

  Palma took a portion of corn and shelled it, sitting apart on a bench. She was not content like Bruno.

  “His body has come back, but not his heart,” she thought: “and his feet will soon wander again.”

  “Will you not dance with me, Palma?” he asked her, when they touched the mandoline.

  Palma looked up a
nd smiled; but she shook her head. She danced like all the rest at other times, but this night she could not; she seemed to herself to have suddenly grown coarse and heavy, and to have her feet shod with lead. To be fit for him, she thought, one wanted butterfly’s wings and a face like a flower’s — a face like what Gemma’s would have been, if Gemma had been dancing there.

  Bruno stood with the elder men and talked of the vintage and the new wine, smoking their pipes under the eaves of the house, where a great walnut tree touched the red tiles.

  But all the time his eyes followed Signa.

  He thought, “He enjoys the old life; he is happy in it; he will not go away again.”

  Palma sat and shelled her maize and watched him too, as he threw his light limbs about in the careless gestures and joyous bounds which here, without order or figure, do duty for the western saltarello and the tarantalla of the south.

  But Palma thought:

  “He does it to please them; he does not care; he is thinking of other things; he wants to be away.”

  For Palma noticed that his laugh ceased quite suddenly very often, as the laughter of one who at heart is not gay; she noticed that he hardly looked at the brown buxom maidens whom he whirled round in the measures, but often looked away through the stems of the pines to the starlit country, as if the tall straight trunks were the bars of a cage; she noticed that when he paused to take breath and came and sat down beside her and some other girl, though his mouth smiled, his face was grave, and though his words jested, his attention wandered.

  “He sees the old ways are good, and that there is no place like home,” thought Bruno.

  But Palma thought:

  “He loves us all still; but he is tired of us. We are dear to him still; but we are wearisome to him, and he would like to be away.”

  For Bruno deceived himself, because he had hope; but Palma having no hope, had no deception.

  After a time, they were fatigued with their romps and their dances, and all rested awhile; cracking walnuts, eating almonds, whispering, joking, bandying love nonsense, with the stars over their heads, and the old dark house behind them, with rich bits of colour here and there in the men’s blue shirts, in the girls’ red petticoats, in the children’s brown limbs, in the broad gold of the sunflowers, in the glazed terra‐cotta of the Ascension above the house‐door, in the scarlet kerchiefs hanging from a casement, as the light of the stars or of the lamp in the doorway fell fitfully on them.