by Ouida
CHAPTER XXII.
THE spring came in Venice.
There were flowers all the day long everywhere, and music all the night; the swallows and the doves were happy in the cloudless air; the sweet sea wind only blew softly enough to lift the hair of the women standing on the wet marble stairs to meet the boats of fish and of fruit.
It was the city of Desdemona, of Stradella, of Giorgione, of Consuelo. Signa lived in it as in a dream; this silence enfolded him like sleep — sleep filled with the stir of birds’ wings, the sound of waves, the sigh of the wind in the casements full of lilies, the murmurs of amorous whispers.
“Am I awake?” he would say to himself in this wonderful trance of slumberous delight, when all the air was full of his own melodies, and all the people’s eyes turned after him.
Signa drifted on the tide of the city’s praise and passion, like a rose dropped on a smooth flowing river. He hardly wondered. The women’s touch and words would make him colour like a girl, and he submitted to them with a soft timidity, graceful as the bending of a reed in the wind. Otherwise he was quite tranquil. No glory and no beauty could be quite so glorious or so beautiful as those of his dreams.
To him who had dreamed of a triumph like Petrarca’s and a grave like Palestrina’s, who had dreamed of gates of gold for his Lastra, and all the nations of the earth for his singers; to him nothing could appear very startling or very great. True, he was only a little contadino, who still loved best his feet shoeless and his breast bare; a little rustic from the vines and the olives, happiest to sit in the sun and eat a slice of bread and a handful of fruit; but the native grace of movement and absence of self‐consciousness made him as serene in a ducal palace as one the hillside at home, and less moved at a prince’s compliment than at the shout of a boatman or a fruit‐seller.
He came into the fame that welcomed him as a young heir into his heritage. It was nothing strange to him. He had looked for it so long.
“Only to long and dream, and give up all hope, and then to wake of a sudden and find the dream all true — that is to be happy, indeed!” he would say to himself; and happy he was with the sweet, glad, thoughtless innocence of a child. So happy that he never thought to turn his steps backward to those who watched at home on the high lonely hill in the light of the setting sun.
Every day, indeed, he thought: “To‐morrow I will go.” But when the morrow became the present day, he still said— “To‐morrow!”
He was caressed, adored, feasted, sought, done homage to all through the city in the months of spring. In any other country there might have been a coarseness in the adulation, a vulgarity of fashion in the universality of praise which might have sated or nauseated him; but here, in the city that heard the serenades of Stradella and held the women of Tiziano, it was all one simple impulse of ardour, one unstudied outburst of rapture, one sweet natural inspiration answering his own as the whole forest full of song‐birds answers the first morning singer at sunrise; and the days were one long festa, and the gondolas wafted him from palace to palace, and all women caressed him, from the bare‐limbed fish‐girl, standing in the surf of the Lido, to the jewelled lady leaning on her fringed cushions of silk.
Others beside the Moon leaned down to kiss this young Endymion.
He was so great a rarity to them; so innocent, so shy, and yet so full of grace; with all his peasant’s simplicity and ignorance, yet so far away from them by that look in his eyes and that serious beauty of his fancies; so utterly unlearned in all the usage of the world, and yet so dreamfully calm amidst it all as if he were some young marble god that had been touched to life out from his sleep of twice a thousand years in Latin soil.
For he was dreaming of another opera.
He had the story of the Lamia in his head. The Venus Lamia of Athens; the young Greek flute‐player, whose face is still seen on the carved amethyst in the library of the Louvre; she, who, in Alexandria, made captive, became the sovreign mistress of her conqueror, and by the magic of her music and her beauty, vanquished the victor of Ptolemy and changed death into love.
He knew very little of any other learning than his own sweet science, but here and there the old classic stories had beguiled him, and the “Lamia” had of all others pleased him; perhaps because the girl, who became a goddess by force of a man’s passion for her, had been a high priestess of his own art, and by that art had changed death into love.
In the glad spring days, the music for his Lamia came to him as the butterflies came in on the sea breeze over the white lilies in his window. The Actea had been solemn with the gloom of wasted love and martyred courage; the Lamia as she came to birth was radiant with all the glory of young life.
He had read the story one day sitting on a boat’s keel on the Lido sands, with his feet in the water and the white sea‐birds above his head in the sunshine. He saw his Lamia in the waves of light that ebbed and flowed from the shining sea to the shining skies; saw her though he had never seen the amethyst; saw her with her pure Greek face and her passionate eyes and her floating veil and her fillet that marked her the priestess of melody — the Lamia Aphrodite of Athens.
And the story haunted him, and the music came with it, and had all the passion in it that was in all the air around him, and yet not in his own heart; that women here breathed on his own young lips, and yet which left him so unmoved to it, as the sirocco goes over a lyre and leaves it mute.
The red sullen glow of old Nile, the white serene radiance of Athens, the brooding darkness of Egypt, the living rings of the dance chain of the Hormus, the palm‐crowned virgins in the feasts of Hyacinthus — all the faces and things gone from the earth three thousand years and more — became living and visible to him. Actea had been but a shadow to him in his music; Lamia lived for him and smiled. Women wanted him to love them. He did not. But he almost loved Lamia.
“Shall I see her likeness living one day?” he thought; and his face grew warm.
It was the first time that any thought, save that of his music, had quickened the pulse of his heart.
“You do not care for us,” said a young fisher‐girl, with her beautiful bronze limbs thrown down by him on the sand, and with her hands stroking his hair.
Signa smiled.
“Oh, no! Why should I? I see creatures so much lovelier than any of you on earth.”
“Where?” said the girl of the Lido.
“In the sun — in the sea — where the swallows go — where the shadows are — anywhere, everywhere. But most beautiful of all when I close my eyes, and play in the dark — so softly; and then they come.”
“Who come?” said the girl.
“Ah, who!” said Signa, and he smiled lying back on the sand, with his eyes on the blueness of the vault above him.
“Does no one love you at home?” said the girl.
“Only a man,” said Signa.
“And the great ladies here? The princesses? — that one with the blue and gold in her gondola, who seeks you so often?”
“She is — a princess. And I, I am only a peasant, you know. At least I was yesterday.”
“Then you do not love her; though she loves you?”
“No.”
“And you do not love me?”
“No, dear.”
“Then, what is it you love?”
“The things that I hear,” said Signa. “And I will love the Lamia when I find her.”
CHAPTER XXIII.
WITH the spring a little house was reared on the bit of ground by the brook; a little square, low house, of the grey stone that is quarried above; roofed with red tiles, and entered by a small arched door.
A peasant came to live in it; a very poor labouring man, who could hardly keep body and soul together; but he was enough for the work of the place. The corn was green and promised fairly; the olives and the vines were well set for blossom; the reeds and the rushes grew all the thicker for deep winter rains and some weeks of hard frost.
When the little grass paths between
the fields were all white with the clusters of the sweet‐smelling snowflakes, that are called in this country the churchbells of the spring, there came up on Sundays and days of Feast, a handsome, pensive‐looking man; a black‐browed, stout‐built woman, with a red shawl and gold pins in her uncovered hair; and a tribe of riotous children.
Bruno, working in his cattle‐shed, saw them.
They were Lippo and the family of Lippo.
They came up often, and brought a flask of wine with them, and rolls of bread and cold‐meats, and would sit down under the olives and eat and drink, and see the children race about, and laugh very noisily, and seem the very soul and symbol of content; — never quarreling by any chance whatever.
Bruno saw them through the trees. Their words could not reach him, but the echo of their laughter did.
They were friends of the cheese‐seller no doubt. The cheese‐seller never cared to come up thither himself; perhaps being so far away down in the city.
Bruno never spoke of it; and no one ever spoke of it to him.
Who would, must come. He was a stranger there.
Later on fell S. Mark’s day.
Bruno was at work.
Since he had lost the land and the boy, he could not keep the saints’ days holy; he could not lie idle in the sun; he could not endure the quiet of leisure. Unless he had always some toil to do, some effort to make, he felt as if he would turn sick or mad, or do some evil thing. In the dawn he would go to the first mass; that done, he laboured all the rest of the day till nightfall.
He was digging up his early potatoes and shaking the earth off the roots; it was a calm, bright day; there had been showers; the yellow water iris was pricking up in every runlet, and the little black velvet lily, that the city took for her arms and her emblem, was in the grass everywhere wherever he turned.
He did not strike them down with his spade now. Signa had cared so much for flowers.
He was working on the side of his farm that looked upward to the land he had lost.
There was a belt of fir‐trees between him and it, and then a field of young barley, and then again another row of firs. Looking down on the black earth and the green plants of the potatoes, he did not see three men come through the trees and stand and look at him.
He only raised his head as a voice said his name softly.
Then he saw his brother Lippo, with his youngest child clinging to his knees, and beside him his two friends, Momo the barber, and Tonino the tinman.
“Bruno!” said Lippo, very softly.
Bruno struck his spade deep down into the earth, and struck his heel on it; and seemed as though he had not heard.
Lippo left the nearer belt of firs between his brother and himself. He stood a little distance amongst the half‐grown barley. His youngest child, a girl of three years old, with a face like a little St. John, and a temper like her mother’s, clung to him, dressed in fresh white clothes, and with a knot of red field tulips in her hand.
“Bruno — dear Bruno,” said he, softly. “You must see us often here. I thought I would come and tell you; you might hear it by accident and wonder. I thought you would be sorry for your land to go out of the family; once having been in it. So — the name was Avellino’s, I have known him long and well, a most good creature; but the money was mine, and the land is transferred to me, you understand? I am a poor man, but I have a kind father‐in‐law, and when one has so many young ones, one tries to save and better oneself — you understand? I thought you would be glad. And you wil see us often here; and if you will be neighbourly and brotherly dear Bruno, both Nita and I shall be most willing. The children might come in and cheer you, you so lonely here—”
The self‐satisfied, soft smile died off his face; the little girl hid hers and screamed. Yet Bruno had done nothing; he had only dashed his spade into the soil to stand erect there by itself, and stood with his eyes blazing upon Lippo’s. Then by the mightiest effort of his life he controlled himself, and bent over the earth and dug again, stamping his foot down on the iron as though he stamped a traitor’s life out with it.
Lippo waited with a vague and gentle appeal upon his face, and a look every now and then of gentlest wonder at his friends.
Bruno dug on, scattering the black ground right and left.
“Will you not speak, dear Bruno?” said Lippo, mournfully. “I thought to give you pleasure.”
Bruno stood erect.
“Christ spoke to Iscariot — and forgave him. He was the Son of God. I am a man. If you say one word, or tarry one moment, I will brain you where you stand.”
Momo the barber and Tonino the tinman plucked back at Lippo’s sleeve.
“Come away — come away. He is possessed—”
“Envy!” murmured Lippo, with a sigh, and let himself be led away back through the green and bending barley.
Bruno, leaning on his heavy spade, breathed loudly, like a man exhausted; the veins of his throat swelled; his bronzed face grew black with the rush of blood.
“Christ, keep my hands from blood guiltiness,” he muttered. “I cannot! — I cannot!”
CHAPTER XXIV.
DOWN in the Lastra at evening, Momo the barber and Tonino the tinman told the townsfolk how Bruno had threatened his brother’s life for the second time: — beware the third!
“We heard him ourselves. It is worse than Cain!” they said, in the merry little wineshop in the Place of Arms. “He squandered away his bit of land just to keep his boy in lewd living away in the cities; and good Lippo, to do the matter delicately, bought it back, only getting another’s name, not to seem too forward or hurt him too much, and thinking only of saving his brother’s credit, so that it should not pass to a stranger; and when he breaks this to him, so prettily — oh, so prettily! — and offers him love, and good will, and the children to keep him com‐ pany, the brute threatens to brain him; — to brain him with the spade he worked with, and said that the Son of God should have done the same by Iscariot. It is too horrible! Lippo is a saint, else would he bid the guards of the law keep their watch over Bruno. This we heard with our own ears. This we saw with our own eyes.”
And the wineshop echoed, “Worse than Cain!”
VOLUME III.
CHAPTER I.
THE spring went by and the summer, and the tidings that came to the Lastra were always good.
The boy wrote now from here, now from there — now from a mountain town, where his music was playing in a summer theatre; now from a lake palace, where some great prince had summoned him; now from the cities, where foreign directors were seeing him; now from the seashore, where great ladies were wooing him. He said so little; he was hidden from them in a golden cloud; they could scarcely follow him even in fancy. But he was well, he was happy, he was triumphant — he wanted for nothing. They had to be content with that, and to imagine the rest — as best they could.
All the northern country was echoing with his music, up to the edges of the Alps, and from the one sea to the other, and the boy was wandering, welcomed and praised and rejoiced over everywhere, and with his own melodies always ringing in his ears, as the gorgeous genius of the “Anacreon of Genoa” had been three hundred years before. This was all they knew, and they had to be content with it.
He was gone over the land like one of the improvisatori of the old times, with the sound of his “sweet singing” in herald of him everywhere; their lark had gone up against the sun; they could see him no longer; they had their work to do, the work that kept their eyes on the earth.
Bruno laboured on his lands, and went to and fro the markets, and toiled early and late in all weathers, and seldom spoke to any living thing except his dog or his oxen; Luigi Dini opened and folded the black robes of the brethren, and saw the sick and the dead carried by, and unclosed and closed the church doors, and thought that the days grew very long; poor merry Sandro died, quite suddenly, of a ball in his throat; and Palma had to sell her hair to a barber in the town to pay the grave, and to keep the boys and the
roof over their heads as best she could, two of them earning something small, and three of them nothing at all; old Teresina fell down her wooden stairs and broke her leg, and could trot about no more as her chief pleasure had always been to do, but had to lie and look over the tops of her roses in the little square window, and only knew when the sun went down by the glow in the bit of sky that was all she could ever now see; — the weeks and the months were very slow to all these, and the luxuriant summer only brought them heat and pain. They could not follow their lark, even in fancy; he was gone so high and so far; and though the summer had come for them, it was all dark and dust. But they were glad to think he was away against the sun — glad all of them.
One morning Bruno went down early to the market in the city. It was August, and he had samples of his wheat with him. He worked hard; never looking over through the belt of pines to the brook under the rushes; worked as hard as he had done when he had worked with a great hope and goal before him; partly because it was the one habit of his life, partly because he so had least time for thought; and also — although, indeed, the boy needed nothing now, and made his money for himself, and would have none sent to him — because the time might come that he would want it.
“Di doman non si è certezza.”
One never knew — so Bruno said to himself, and laid by what he could in the old leathern pouch thrust behind a loose brick in the chimney corner, that had once held the purchase‐money of the land that he had lost.
It was five in the morning; a morning cold with that fresh alpine clear coldness which precedes at daybreak the hottest weather for the noon, and refreshes the thirsty earth with its dense dews, that are as thick as rain. On the bridge he met a girl slowly toiling under a great burden of linen; she stopped as he passed her, and lifted her large eyes to him. She was very thin and very brown.
“Is it you, Palma?” he said to her; he could not refuse to stop: poor Sandro had been a good friend and kindly to the boy. “Is there anything I can do for you? You look ill?”