Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “Little Signa, that we thought no better than a baby!” said his son, a strong, lusty, young blacksmith.

  “Little Signa, that is only Pippa’s son!” said Cecco, the cooper. “Only Pippa’s son! and that baseborn.”

  “Little Signa no more,” said Luigi Dini; “and baseborn? what does that matter? God has called him into the light of the world.”

  “Will he ever look back to us?” murmured the old woman, with the slow tears falling down on her hank of flax.

  “Never mind. We will look up at him,” said the old man, gently. “But I do not think he will forget. We do not think the stars see us in the daytime, but if we go down into a well, we see that they do, just the same: so will it be with him. The great light may hide him from our sight, but he will see us all the same.”

  They were all silent.

  “Did he write anything himself?” said Cecco, the cooper, after a pause.

  “He wrote, ‘Tell Bruno,’ and sent me all these papers. That was all.”

  “Bruno!” echoed the cooper, who was his friend.

  They had none of them thought of Bruno.

  “Poor Bruno,” said the old man, sadly; he was thinking of the price that Bruno had paid for the night of victory in Venice.

  “You cannot go up to him to‐night,” said Sanfranco; “the hill‐paths are perilous.”

  “No. The post came so late too, from the state of the roads. I will go up the first thing in the morning.”

  “Perhaps he will be in here to‐night. I think he went through to the wine‐fair. I think he had to go — yes, he said so.”

  “Yes, he said so,” echoed Cecco. “But only to take wine to Savio’s stall. He will not stay.”

  “Does he expect to hear this news at all?”

  “Not at all,” said the sacristan. “The man of Venice had dealt so ill with the lad, putting off, till here is nigh the close of the carnival. We began to think that he would cheat us utterly. He had a ballet that ran well. He did not care. No. Bruno had ceased to hope. ‘What is done is done;’ that is all he has ever said about it.”

  “It is a wonderful glory!” said the woman. “Read us again. Read us again, good Luigi.”

  And he read again, the story which already he knew so well by heart, that it mattered little that his eyes swam so often, and that the printed letters were wrapped in mist.

  As he read this second time, the heavy iron‐beaded door swung open, letting in a blast of bitter frosted air, that almost blew the lights out: a man came into the room, shaking snow at each step on to the red bricks, and muffled in his thick brown cloak, wearing it across his chest and his mouth, in the same fashion that Dante and Guido Calvacanti once did theirs.

  It was Bruno.

  His baroccino stood without, with the mule tired and cold, and the candle dark in the lantern that swung from the shafts. He had deposited the wine at Savio’s stall, and had come away, leaving to others the riot, and dance, and glee, and jest, and mumming, and masking of the great carnival fair, under the arches of the galleries on the edge of the Arno.

  In many a bye‐gone year he had been the wildest there; with rough jests over the sale of the wine, and rough wooing of the women’s torch‐lit graces, and mad dancing with black dominoes and rainbow‐hued maskers, while the drums and flutes had resounded through the great arcade till the daylight broke.

  “Sanfranco, will you give me a light?” said he, coming into the midst of them with the rush of cold air; “mine is gone out, and the frost makes the hills bad driving.”

  Then his sight fell on the sacristan with the printed paper, and he glanced over all the faces of the others, and read them.

  He strode up to the old man.

  “There is news of him?” he said, under his breath, with passionate thirsty eyes.

  “Yes, great and good news,” said Luigi Dini; but his feeble voice was drowned in the deep shouts of the men, and the women’s shrill cries, each eager to tell the tale the quickest, and to be the first.

  “Great and good news!” they clamoured. “All Venice is mad for him, Bruno. He has taken the city by storm. The people have feasted him, and chanted him all the night long. Only think! only think! Just our own little Signa. Just Pippa’s son — as you say. He is great. He is famous. He has all the world after him. Only think! only think!”

  Bruno stood in the centre of them, the snow falling in flakes off his garments, his eyes turning bewildered from one to another. Then he put his hand up before his sight, like a man blinded with a sudden blaze of light. It was so hard to understand. It was so hard to conceive as possible.

  “Do they laugh at the boy? or at me?” he muttered, with the anger of a sudden suspicion awakening in the flash of his glance.

  “No, no! No, no!” said Luigi Dini; “who would have the heart to make a mock of it? And what is there so strange? It is what we hoped and prayed for, only it passes beyond all our prayers. The lad is great — yes, do not look so. The dear child is great, and his future is safe. God is good; and you sold the land not in vain.”

  Bruno dropped down on a bench that stood near.

  “God is good,” he muttered.

  They were all silent. They could not shout and chatter and praise and wonder any more. There was that in his intense stillness which overmastered and awed them.

  Whether it were pain or thankfulness they could not tell. Whichever it was, it was beyond them.

  Sanfranco was the first to speak. He touched Bruno on the arm.

  “Stay here in the warm and let him read you the news — such news! We have heard it twice over, but we can hear it thrice. I will see to your beast. Do not go back to the hills this rare night. We ought to have a bonfire on the roof of the big gate. Stay with us.”

  Bruno rose to his feet, still with that unsteady dazzled look on him like a man wakened by a blaze of fire.

  “No,” he said, absently. “No; — see to the mule — he is cold and lame; — come away with me, Luigi. Let me hear — all alone.”

  The old sacristan made a gesture to the others to be quiet and cease from their pressing; and gathered up all the papers.

  “Yes. We will go to my quiet little room. It will be best,” he said, and put his hand on Bruno’s arm and guided him out of the doorway into the dark freezing night. It was but a stone’s throw to the sacristy. Bruno went out like a blind man.

  Sanfranco followed them, and put up the mule in his stable.

  “One would think he was not glad after all,” said he to his wife, returning.

  “Nay, he is glad and thankful,” said his old mother‐in‐law, who was clipping an oil wick. “If it had not been for his labour, who would ever have heard of the dear little lad? But — look you — the stars may see us in the day, as Luigi says, mayhap they do; but if a star were all one had to love, it would be hard work to feel the loneliness and the cold close in, and sit in the dark water of the well and only catch a glimpse of the star now and then shining ever so far away up in the light of the sun — and we out of the light for ever.”

  “That is true, mother,” said Sanfranco. “But you talk like a book.”

  “Nay, nay, never so; — I talk sense,” said the old Teresina. “But that is how it will always be with Bruno and Pippa’s boy; just the well and the star; — just the well and the star — do you see?”

  “I see,” said Cecco, the cooper, who loved Bruno; and he emptied half a flask of wine.

  The grey dawn came into the little room by the Misericordia Church, with the black crossbones and the memento mori everywhere about it, and beyond its lattice the old broken battlements and the dull winter skies.

  He had it all read to him — over and over again. He sat leaning against the table with his head on his hands.

  He understood it all; he understood it — the fame of the arts is that which is most intelligible to the peasants of this country, those descendants of the men who ran weeping and laughing before Cimabue, and filled the churches to hearken to the oratories
of S. Philip Neri.

  They understand it by instinct.

  So did he. But it was still like a sudden blaze of flame, so close to his face that whilst he was dazzled by it his eyes were darkened and sightless.

  Was he thankful? — yes, he thanked God. God was good. So he said from the depths of his heart.

  Living for the world, the boy was dead for him.

  And yet he thanked God.

  Time went away and he took no count of it. His feet and limbs were cold, but he had no sense of it. The little lamp paled and the chilly dawn came, but he had no perception that it was morning. He sat thinking — thinking of this wonderful thing which that night had brought: of this distant city, where the little fellow who had run barefoot by his side was raised up as a prince amongst men.

  Affection quails before the supremacy of art; as art in its turn cowers under the supremacy of passion.

  The boy was dead to him; that he knew.

  The old man who had sat quiet and patient, sleeping a little and waking up to warm hands over his little pot of ashes, touched him at last, almost frightened at the silence and the stillness with which he leaned there, with his head on his hands.

  “The dear, good lad!” he said, softly. “He will write himself, ‘princeps musicorum’ after all; — aye, we always said it; — he and I dreaming here together, the old fool and the young one as they used to say. But do not lament for it, Bruno; I mean do not sorrow for ourselves. He will not forget. He is too true of heart.”

  Bruno shivered a little, waking to his first sense of the cold that had frozen around him. He rose: he smiled a little.

  “I will pray that he may forget,” he said, slowly. “When he remembers — then he will have dropped down from this height. He was my lark. I broke his cage. Let him go up — up — up. Why should he fall — for me?”

  He spoke dreamily, and he had his hand before his eyes, with the same dull sense of confusion and of wonder which had come upon him when he had first listened to the news. He put out his hand and grasped Luigi Dini’s in farewell.

  “Tell him I have heard,” he said. “Tell him I am glad. What money I can, I will send. There is nothing more to say.”

  Then he threw his cloak over his mouth, and went down the staircase through the little church that was quite dark. Luigi Dini fumbling with the keys, unlocked the door and let him out; he passed up the street towards the seaward gate, without remembering that his mule stood in Sanfranco’s stable.

  CHAPTER XIX.

  WAS he thankless?

  No. He thanked God.

  God was good: so he said from the depths of his soul. Had not the boy his desire? But Bruno said, “God is good,” as the Argive mother said it when, in answer to her prayer for their blessing, her sons were smitten down dead.

  She did not doubt the goodness of her gods: nor did he that of his.

  But as the woman’s heart was rent in two by the fulfilling of her prayer, so was his now.

  Some faint hope had been alive in him which he had hated because it was hope, which he had plucked at to pluck out from his soul as his the basest and meanest of crimes: some faint hope, cruel, irrepressible.

  As he went, some men and women coming from the fair, merry and loud‐tongued from wine, tossing their masks by the strings, and flinging white comfits and pellets of chalk one from another up against the closed casements and the iron bars, reeled against him as they passed and recognised him.

  “Ah, Bruno, black Bruno!” they called to him, half drunkenly. “There is rare news of your little lad in the city, of Pippa’s son, as you call him. A lion in Venice, a lion with wings! Such a fuss never was. The boy is a great man, just at one leap. Bravo! Why not? We will have his music down in Florence at Easter. If he be your own boy — say so now. Claim him while you can get him. Another year he will be too fine to notice you — oh, they are all the same, those sweet‐throated brids, when they get a nest of gold and a bough of laurel to sing in — che, che! — he will be like the rest.”

  Bruno passed them without a blow or word. And yet men had often hurt him less, and all his blood had been in flame, and his steel had been in their flesh.

  The maskers, laughing, dashed their chalk up at the grated casements, and reeled noisily through the still sleeping Lastra; he walked away over the bridge, with the mountain wind fierce in his teeth.

  The solitary bell of his own little brown church was ringing for the first mass when he reached the hills above the farm of Fiastra, tolling sadly through the grey winter‐fog.

  He entered it, and prostrated himself on the stones.

  There was no one there save the old priest officiating; the candles burned dully, the white mist had got into the church, and the vapours of it hung about the altar; the voice of the priest seemed to come from a cloud. Some sheep left out all night, forgotten by the shepherd, had crept in and lay huddled together at the foot of one of the pillars; the north wind blew loud without.

  Bruno kneeled there in the dampness and the darkness and the bitter cold.

  “O God, save the boy always,” he prayed with all the might of his heart. “Do not think of me — if I starve here — if I burn hearafter — it does not matter — I am nothing. Only save the boy.”

  So he prayed again and again and again, with his forehead on the stones, and his heart going out to the great unknown powers he believed in with a mortal agony of supplication. The world was as a fiend to him that wrestled with him for the soul of Pippa’s son. Of himself he could do nothing.

  Would heaven be on his side?

  Would the great quiet angels stir, and come down and have pity?

  When the mass was over, and the old priest, thinking the church empty, had gone away to break his fast, the shepherd, seeing his strayed sheep, followed with his dog within the church doors, and found them sleeping together at the foot of the pillar; and found besides them a man stretched face downward, half senseless, in a trance of prayer.

  “It is that tall, strong, fierce brute. We thought him made of iron!” said the shepherd, wondering, to his sheepdog.

  CHAPTER XX.

  THE next morning old Teresina, being a hale old body, and active, climbed up the slope to Giovoli, and told Palma the tidings.

  The girl was hoeing amongst the frost‐bitten ground, and digging out cauliflowers.

  She straightened her back and listened, with her great eyes open in humid wonder, to the tale the old woman brought; a tale enlarged and glorified, as such narratives ever will be passing from mouth to mouth.

  Palma could understand nothing of it; less than any of them. She had never been out of the Lastra. She had never been in any city, or heard any music except that at church and at the country merry‐makings such as those at Fiastra. It was all obscure to her, terrible, incomprehen‐ sible. It was as if they had told her Signa had been made a king.

  “Sure it was his heart’s wish, so we ought to be glad,” said old Teresina, when all her story was done.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Palma; but her head was in a whirl, and her throat was full. She knew, as Bruno knew, that living for the world, he was dead to them — quite dead. All the country was talking of him: how should he remember?

  “She is a stupid little mule,” thought the old woman, angrily. “She feels nothing, she sees no greatness in it all — she is only good to grub among her cabbages.”

  And she went away huffed, and thinking she herself had been a fool to walk all the way to Giovoli to tell her news.

  Palma worked on amongst the hard sods, filling her hand‐truck with cauliflowers, which her brother would wheel down to the market at the back of the Palace Strozzi.

  She was always hard at work, in the open air in all weathers, and knowing no rest; for they were poorer than ever now her brothers grew so big; and, what with the mill tax, and the goods tax, and the tax at the gates for every scrap of eatable stuffs or inch of homespun cloth, the lives of the poor are terrible in this land, where all the earth runs over with plen
teousness.

  Hour after hour she hoed, and dug, and uprooted, and packed the green heads of the vegetables one on another: all the while her heart was like lead, and her tears were dropping.

  “One ought to be glad; he would have broken his heart here; one ought to be so glad,” she said to herself.

  But gladness does not come for the commanding of it, nor at the voice of duty. She could not feel glad; she could only feel, “We shall never be anything more to him — never any more.”

  Signa had been the one grace, the one poem, the one sweet gleam of leisure, rest, and fancy, in all the deal level of her laborious life.

  All the rest was so dull, so hard, so unlovely; all the rest was just one constant uphill struggle for sheer life — one ceaseless rolling of the stone of poverty upward every day, to have it fall heavy as ever back again with every night. Her father was idle, her brothers were quarrelsome; their needs were many, and their ways of meeting them were few; everyone leaned one her, everybody looked to her, everything was left for her to do and save: she had a nature that would have been happy on a very little, but she had no time to be happy; no one every thought she could want such a thing. All the loveliness about her always, from the blaze of sunrise over the hills to the mitre flower in the path between the cabbages, she had no time to note; if she had a moment to rest, she was so tired she could only sit down with closed eyes, heavily, stupidly, like an overdriven horse.

  Signa alone had sometimes made her look up and see the daybreak, look down and see the cyclamen; Signa alone, with his smile and his song, and his dreams and his fancies, had brought her a little glimpse of that life of the perception and of the imagination without which the human life differs in nothing from that of the blinded ass at the grinding mill.

  She clung to him quite unconsciously; he was the sole ray of light in her long dark day of toil: toil that no one thanked her for, because it was so simply her duty and her obligation.

  She loved him with the simplest, tenderest, most innocent affection; and with infinite humility, because she so seldom could reach the height of his thoughts or the stature of his mind. He was the one beauty in her life; he was so unlike all else that surrounded her; even when she knew him wrong, his error was more divine to her than others’ right; the hope of him when he was coming, the memory of him when he had gone, had illumined for her so many days of joyless labour; when his life had gone quite out of hers she had been desolate, with a desolation the more absolute because no one guessed, or, guessing, would have pitied it.