Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “No,” she said, timidly. “I wanted to know — Do you have any news of him ever?”

  “All is well with him — yes,” said Bruno. “That Gigi sees — sees in the printed papers. He has not written now — not for some time. You see, it is not as if we could read what he writes or write ourselves. I daresay it seems to him as if we forgot, since we can never answer.”

  “He will not think that we forget,” said Palma, and stood still with her great eyes clouded.

  “No. But no doubt it seems as if we were all dead. It is to be half‐dead in a way — not to read and write — I see that now. I used to think it only fit for poor pale fools in cities. Not a thing for a man — unless one were a priest.”

  “But he knows we cannot write,” said Palma, “and Luigi Dini does for us — for you, at least. Perhaps it is he himself who does forget.”

  “Why not?” said Bruno. The thought was like an arrow in his heart, but he would never open his lips to blame the boy.

  “Why not?” murmured the girl.

  Why not indeed? They had nothing to do but remember; — he had all the world with him.

  “Good day,” she added, and moved to take up the bundle of linen, that she had rested for a moment on the parapet of the bridge.

  But Bruno looked at her curiously. He had seen her a score of times since the Lenten time when Sandro had died, but he had not noticed before that her hair was clipped short to her head like a young conscript’s.

  “What have you done with all your braids?” he asked.

  “I sold them.”

  “What for?”

  “To pay for my father’s burial: — it just paid it.”

  “I wish you had let me know, I would have paid. Poor child! I never noticed it before.”

  “That is because I tied a handkerchief on. The barber shaved my head quite close. Now the hair is grown just a little.”

  “You are a good girl. Can you manage to live — any how?”

  “Yes. We can just live. Franco and Beppo earn a little.”

  “But you must work very hard?”

  “I have always done that. Why not?”

  “But you are a pretty girl when you have your hair. You must marry.”

  Palma gave a quick shudder.

  “Oh, no.”

  “And why not?”

  She coloured to the bronze rings of her shorn curls.

  “My brothers will want me many years yet; and then I shall be old.”

  She nodded to him, and went her way over the bridge, carrying the linen she had washed for the canon’s housekeeper on the hill. Bruno walked onward: he thought little of the girl — though he had always liked her for her courage and her industry — he thought much of one of her answers: “Perhaps it is he himself who does forget.” Yes; — of course it was he himself; it is always the one who goes that forgets, always the one who is left that remembers.

  No doubt the boy forgot them; why not? He said so to his own heart every day all through the long months when the letters came so seldom and the printed papers were so full of Signa’s name and Signa’s music.

  He walked on trying to fancy what his boy looked like in all those strange cities amongst all those strange faces; trying to fancy how it was when the streets were thronged and the flowers were tossed and the theatres were besieged and the vivas were shouted: he had seen such nights of applause, such hours of homage himself in carnival times in his youth when Florence had found some singer or some musician in whom its heart delighted, and for whom its winter roses were gathered, and its voices uplifted in one accord.

  But he could not imagine the boy amongst such nights as these — Pippa’s son — the little delicate lad running with barefoot by him in the dust, and looking up through his curls to see if the heavens had opened to show him the singing children of God.

  It perplexed him. He could not grapple with it.

  All through the warm months, in the long oppressive evenings, with the thunder‐clouds brooding overhead, or the sirocco driving the straw and dust through the gates, the old man had sat in the doorways and read out to all the many listening groups this tale and that, this history and the other, of the victories of Signa’s music wherever it was heard, welcomed in every little city of the plains and every gay town on the shores of lake or sea as the carnations were welcomed and the swallows and the nightingales; — all through those months Bruno, hearing, had come no nearer to comprehension of it, no nearer than the vague dull sense that the world had got the boy and he had lost him.

  He had grown used to it, as we grow in a manner used to any pain, wearing it daily as the anchorite his girdle of sharp iron; he was proud of it in his own silent way as the seamen on the shores of Genoa were proud when they heard how the old world had been forced to take an empire from their “Nudo nocchior; promettitor di regni.” Proud when he went through the Lastra or down the streets of the city, and men who had long shunned him paused in his path to say, “and that young genius they talk so much of northward, is that indeed your boy?” and he answered, “yes: it is Pippa’s son,” and went his way. Proud so. Proud of the boy and for him: — the little corncrake that left the fields to cleave his flight where eagles go.

  But he could not comprehend it; could not realize that the little fellow so late singing his sequence at mass, with the other children, in holy week, with his ragged homespun shirt, and hungry stomach and sad eyes, could now have name and fame with other men, and be spoken of as they spoke in Florence of the great Cimarosa.

  It was true, no doubt, and he was sure of it; and working in his field he thought of nothing else, and said for ever to himself, “if he has got his desire, what does it matter for me?” but still it was dark to him; there were times when the great oppressive weight of it lay on him as if he had been buried alive, and in his grave could hear the footsteps of the boy going away — away — away, farther and farther, always over his head, but beyond his reach and beyond his call for ever.

  It was a stupid feeling, no doubt, born out of ignorance and emotion and solitude; but that was what he felt often — often in the quiet lonely nights when there was no moon in the skies, and no sound on the mountains.

  This day he walked straight to the city, and did his trafficking in the square before the heat had come, and while the shadows were still long on the steps between the white lions.

  By noon these matters were done with by most of the men, for the weather was at its sultriest, and the shade of the cool arched granaries and winebarns in the country better to be desired than the scorching pavement. He went into the place of S. Maria Novella, having a last errand there to a harness maker; in the blinding sunshine of the unshadowed square there was a white slender figure, a boy’s face, a gesture that he knew — be‐ fore he could speak Signa had thrown himself upon his neck.

  “It is I! yes it is I,” he cried, “I have just come by the iron way that you hate so — I thought I would walk, I thought I might meet you, being Friday. Ah, dearest, truest, best friend! — all that I am you have made me; all that I may become will be yours!”

  Bruno looked at him speechless. Once before he had rejoiced so greatly — only to find his error. He dared not now be glad.

  He gazed at the boy — so changed and yet in so much the same — the solitary sunlit square went round and round him like a whirlpool of white fire. The great stones seemed to heave and dance.

  “I made sure now you had forgotten,” he muttered; and stood stupidly like own of his own oxen when it has been very long in the dark, and is led out on a sudden into the full blaze of the noon.

  “Forgotten. Did you think me lower than the beasts?” said Signa, and he kissed the man’s brown hands.

  “Yes, it is true,” he added. “Yes, I was base not to come back long ago. But every day I said to‐morrow, and every morrow brought some change, some wonder, some great thing to do or to hear; and so the summer has slipped away as the spring did. But forget! — oh, never, never! What would I be now but f
or you? — a starved and beaten thing in Lippo’s house.”

  “Let us go in here,” said Bruno, and he mounted the steps of the church with the white marble of it shining in the noonday sun, and went into the body of it where the light was like a great rainbow stretching from one stained window to another. There were a few people about it, some gazing at the pictures; some kneeling in dark corners.

  Bruno drew him down the marble steps into the silence of the green cloister; there was not a soul there; the gate was left open, the guardian of the church dozed in the heat, sitting in the shade under the pillars.

  In the solitude where only Giotto’s faded saints and angels looked upon them, he drew the boy close to him and looked in his face.

  “My dear, my dear! God is good!” he muttered. “I doubted it, aye, I doubted; God forgive my doubt. When that traitor took the land I could have killed him. God is good. My hands are clean. And the world has not taken you from me; men have not made you forget. Ah, our God is good. Let us praise him!”

  He leaned against one of the columns with his face bent down on his arm; his bare chest heaved, his strong nervous limbs trembled; the hot sun poured in on his uncovered head, then silently he put his hand out and grasped Signa’s, and led him into the Spanish Chapel, and sank on his knees.

  The glory of the morning streamed in from the cloister; all the dead gold and the faded hues were transfigured by it; the sunbeams shone on the face of Laura, the deep sweet colours of Bronzino’s Cœna glowed upward in the vault amidst the shadows; the company of the blessed, whom the old painters had gathered there, cast off the faded robes that the Ages had wrapped them in, and stood forth like the tender spirits that they were, and seemed to say, “Nay, we, and they who made us, are not dead, but only waiting.”

  It is all so simple and so foolish there; the war‐horses of Taddeo that bear their lords to eternity as to a joust of arms; the heretic dogs of Memmi, with their tight wooden collars; the beauteous Fiammetta and her lover, throning amongst the saints; the little house, where the Holy Ghost is sitting, with the purified saints listening at the door, with strings tied to their heads to lift them into paradise; it is all so quaint, so childlike, so pathetic, so grotesque, — like a set of wooden figures from its Noah’s Ark that a dying child has set out on its little bed, and that are so stiff and ludicrous, and yet which no one well can look at and be unmoved, by reason of the little cold hand that has found beauty in them.

  As the dying child to the wooden figures, so the dead faith gives to the old frescoes here something that lies too deep for tears; we smile, and yet all the while we say, — if only we could believe like this; if only for us the dead could be but sleeping!

  Bruno sank on his knees on the bench by the west door, under the beautiful Bronzino that the shadows were so covetous of; where the word Silenzio is written on the wall.

  In him the old simple blind faith lived, as it had lived in the hearts of the old painters, that had covered the stones here with their works.

  He cried straight to heaven, and he believed that heaven heard him.

  Holding the boy’s hand in his, and with his head thrown back, and his eyes meeting the full sunrays that glanced from Bronzino’s Christ to him, he blessed God, who had brought back the body safe and the soul pure.

  Then his head sank, his forehead fell upon the back of the bench; he knelt silent many moments. He spoke to his God alone — or to his dead; not even Signa heard.

  CHAPTER II.

  WHEN he rose he looked calm, and his eyes shone with the peace of a tranquil happiness.

  “Let us talk here a little,” he said, and they went out into the arcades of Giotto’s cloister, where the mountain winds, and the autumn rains, and the fierce beating of the midsummer suns, have stripped the saints and prophets bare.

  “And you are a great man!” he said, with a slow soft smile. “A great man! you — Pippa’s son — my little cowherd and sheep boy! Forgive me, dear; it seems strange.”

  “Nay, the music in me is great; not I;” said Signa. “I am like the reed that the gods took to breathe through — that is all.”

  “And that is pretty of you to say. But a man is known by his works, as a tree by her fruit; and yours are good. You were no dreamer, my boy, as we thought.”

  “But if you had not sold the land!” said Signa.

  Bruno winced.

  “Why talk of that? What is done is done. The land was for you; you were right to have it sold. I see that now, dear — it was only hard at first.”

  “But who has it? You said a traitor.”

  “Lippo has it. He brought it secretly. Honestly as money goes — but not fairly — there is a difference. But why speak of these things. Never put back on your teeth a walnut that has the worm. Dear — you think I have suffered. Do not poison your pleasure with that fancy. When the news came that winter night, I had more content — for you — than ever the land would have brought with it. I said, ‘God is good.’ God is good. He has given you your heart’s desire; and you have come back safe; and have not forgotten.”

  He was leaning against one of the columns, the boy was sitting on the marble ledge where the graves are. Bruno looked down on him as the sun shone above his young upturned face. Signa was not much changed; his dress was all of white linen, but it was very simple; the sea, the travel, and the hope, and new glory of his life had warmed his cheek, and invigorated his limbs; that was all; but there was about him, and upon him, that immeasurable, indescribable alteration which raises up the childhood that dreams into the manhood that has accomplished; he was a boy still, but he was a boy who had fought his fight, and had conquered.

  He was no longer Endymion sighing fitfully in a tormented sleep with vain desire; he was the Endymion who had held his divine mistress in his arms, and vanquished, and possessed her.

  “Do not think of the land any more, ever again,” said Bruno. “It was of use. That was all it could ever have been. It is for me now as I had never had it. That is all. Dear, tell me of yourself rather; — you have so much to tell.”

  It was a noble lie.

  The land was the cruellest loss of his life. Every time that the voice of his brother echoed up through the pines, every time that he saw the strange hands amongst the olive boughs and the river rushes, the longing of vengeance possessed him as ardently as in the moment of Lippo’s first taunts, the sharpness of his loss was as poignant to him as in the hour when the had first said to the notary, “sell.” But Bruno gave his gifts with both hands; he did not weight them with a millstone of appraisement.

  Signa had so much to tell; days, weeks, months, could not have exhausted for him the story of his wanderings and his victories. He had lost nothing of his simple eager faith, nothing of his spiritual endless aspirations; only now, instead of dreaming of victory he had achieved it; now, instead of the passionate praises of genius, he had its passionate joys.

  He told his story sitting under the arches of the noble cloisters, with the strong August sun making the marble warm like human flesh. It was the same story that Bruno had heard from the letters and from the printed sheets, month after month; but it only now took life and colour for him, it only now became an actual truth for him, heard from the boy’s happy breathless lips, with the blue shining above the open court.

  Signa was a great singer in the land, as Cimarosa had been in his, with his gay melodies caught from the threshing barns and the orange‐gatherers and the coral‐fishers and the vintage‐dancers; as the poet Chiabrera had been with his mighty odes that echoed like the roll of battle; as the improvisatore Bernardo had been with his silver lute that held the Romans still as listening goats that circle round a shepherd’s pipe: — that he could understand now, wonderful though it was; now that the boy’s eyes shone back to his, and the boy’s own lips told him of cities and villas and seashores and mountain palaces, and the tumult of towns in summer nights, and the chorus of strange voices under his casement singing his own songs till the dawn broke.
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br />   He could understand it now; and though it took Pippa’s son away from him — quite away into a world where he himself could never tread — yet he was proud of it and glad — bewildered, but very glad.

  “That you should be so great, you little thing!” he murmured, and smiled, thinking of the night coming in from the Certosa, when he had carried the child, worn‐out and tired, as the owls cried and Signa dreamed of the Fair Angel.

  To Bruno the boy was only such a little thing — no more than a girl was, or a bulrush, or a willow rod in the stream.

  And half the nation was chaunting his music, and the other half babbling of his name!

  “The land did not go in vain!” he thought, with a thought that he would not utter aloud, lest it should seem a regret or a reproach; and then he rose and shook himself, with a glow of joy on his olive skin and a softened light beaming under his straight drooped eyes.

  “Let us go, dear. Hark! The clock is striking. We have talked here three hours. I will get your baggage; you left it yonder — yes? It is not fair to keep you from the Lastra. And you are tired, too, no doubt, and hungry. Will you sleep to‐night on your own little hard bed, after lying under those great nobles’ roofs? Do palaces smell sweeter than our hills? I think they cannot.”

  Talking so, with a quickness and abundance quite rare to him, that came with the proud overflowing of his silent heart, he went and sought the boy’s small packages, and swung them over his shoulders and came out again into the hot sunshine smiling.

  He was only a peasant, with bare feet and shirt open at his breast, and his face dark with many years of toil; but there was nobility about him, and dignity, and freedom.

  Signa, who, though he had half forgotten, loved him, looked at the dark erect figure of him against the white marble and the blue sky, and thought the old painters might have painted him there in the chapter‐house as the Shepherd King, the Re Pastore of Metastasio.