by Ouida
“Why do you cry, Palma?” said the youngest of her brothers, who was only twelve, and a cripple, with his small limbs mis‐shapen and withered.
“Do you ask? — with father not six months in his grave?” murmured Palma.
Her heart smote her as she said it. She was lying to the child.
She went about her daily work. It was for her as if she did it in the dark. But she did it, missing nothing — not even slurring anything. There was so much to be done, with all those five boys, and two only of them earning anything.
Once in that long, laborious day she stole up‐stairs, and looked at the necklace.
“He was thinking that he was buying for Gemma,” she said, as she looked.
Later in the day, the eldest son of Cecco, the cooper, came and leaned over the wall as she worked. He was a cooper too, and a fine‐built youth, and well spoken of in the Lastra.
“You will not think of it, Palma?” he said to her, with his brown eyes wistful and sad.
“You are good; but, no; — never!” said Palma, and went on weeding.
What he wanted her to think of was himself. He did not mind her cropped hair, that would grow. He loved her industrious ways, her independence, her patience, her care of her brothers. His father was well‐to‐do; he would look over the absence of a dower.
“I shall not marry,” said Palma, always.
And when the young cooper said, for the hundredth time, “You will not think of it?” — in this warm, radiant, summer forenoon — Palma only said, “Never!” and went on, stripping her tomatoe bushes of their fruit, and hoeing between the lines of her newly set cauliflowers.
She belonged, she said, to her brothers. So her living self did — her body and her brain, such as it was; and her strong, laborious, untiring feet and hands. But her heart belonged to two other lives — one dead and the other lost: the two lives that had been by hers in their childhood, in the moonlit lemon alleys of Giovoli, and the calm shadows of the old church of St. Sebastian.
Signa and Gemma were always together in her thoughts: — one dead, the other lost.
Cecchino, the son of Cecco, could give her a good house in the Lastra, and a full soup‐pot always, and a good store of house linen, and shoes and stockings, and a settled place in the world. Oh, yes; she knew. And his mother, who was a tender soul, had said, “He loves you, we will not mind about the dower, and you shall have my own self‐spun sheets and my string of pearls.” And they were all good — good as gold. And Beppo and Franco, who foresaw help for themselves in this union, upbraided her always, and railed at her when the bread was too stale, or the sour wine ran short.
But Palma — though she knew, none better, the worth of bread and wine in this life, and the use of a strong arm to bar the door against the Old Man Poverty whom the devil has given leave to hobble perpetually upon the earth and creep in at all cold hearths — Palma shook her head, and would not even think of it, however Cecchino besought her.
“I will not marry you; I do not love you,” she told him. And Cecchino urged that marriage should come first, love last, with women.
“Not so,” said Palma. “That is to have the leaves bitter and the flowers leafless — like the endive. But it is not only that. I will not marry. I will work for my brothers while they want it; and when they do not want me, I will go into a convent — and rest so. That is what I mean to do — Our Lady willing.”
And Cecchino could not change her.
That was what she meant to do.
Rest so; — a brown‐faced, middle‐aged woman, in a white coif, saying prayers in a little cell, on knees stiff from many years of toil, and going amongst the orphans and the poor, and tending dying souls — that was how she saw herself in the future.
It did not appal her.
Any thought of marriage did.
In the convent she would be able to pray for Signa and for Gemma; — and then in heaven she might see their faces.
Perhaps if she worked very hard and prayed very much, the Madonna might call her up quickly, and give her some grace of beauty, there, in heaven to be like them. Sometimes she hoped that, quite humbly; and never sure that she could merit it.
In the twilight of this day — having laboured hard, and seen her brothers come and go, and smiled on them, and forced a cheerful laugh for them, because a dull house was bad for boys, and apt to drive them to the wineshops and the lotteries — Palma stole up, foot‐weary though she was, to the little church above the gardens of Giovoli.
She carried her little crippled brother on her back, because he fretted if he were left long alone, and set him down where the last gleam of sun fell, and gave him a few pebbles to play with, which contented him, because he was not very bright of brain.
Then she went herself and prayed in the nook by the column where S. Cecilia hung. She had lost faith in it, because he had seemed to have none. He had thanked her for her thought of him, but he had never seemed to think it possible that it could have helped him in any way to fame.
“Keep him safe in the world, and let him meet Gemma in heaven,” she prayed; and said it over and over again, in passionate reiterated supplication, clinging to the pillar with her arms wound about it, and her forehead pressed against its cold grey stone.
She prayed there till the moon shone through the stained window on to the broken jasper; and the little cripple cried because the air grew cold, and he could not rise to catch the glow‐worm alight upon the altar step.
She did not ask anything for herself.
Hard work for ten or twenty years longer, and then rest — on the rough boards of a convent bed, and by the death agonies of beggars.
That was her future.
It did not affright her.
“Only keep him safe on earth, — and her in heaven.”
That was all she prayed.
She was sure the saints would hear her.
She came out into the moonlight, carrying the lame boy on her back, and with the glow‐worm like a little lamp within her hand. She was almost happy.
Prayers, innocent and in firm faith, brought the benediction of their own fulfilment. She was sure of that.
CHAPTER VI.
IT was a sultry night northward.
There was a storm in the air, but it had not broken. The great lake was curled by the faintest of breezes. There was the smell of oranges — leaf and flower and fruit — upon the air. Little boats went sailing through the shadows. The constellations of the Winged Horse shone clear high up in the heavens, though all round the horizon the skies were overcast — the Horse that has a star for his nostril, and that is plumed with strong desire, and that says to the poet, “Mount, and ye shall enter the realms of the sun with me, and ride also through the endless night where Persephone lies sighing.”
Signa — who did not know the stars by any name, but loved them as all dreamers do, and held them in that wistful awe which was with him one half the terror of a child, one half the wonder of a thinker — was drifting in a little boat over the quietness of the water, and looking up at Pegasus.
They were giving his music at Como; and they were about the bring the Lamia out in Milan. He went where his music went, as the way is in this country. But the small strife of the theatres, and the contentious and envious revilings, and the men and women with whom he had to do were all painful to him: too rough, too real, too coarse for him. He broke from them whenever he could, and they had ceased to try and alter him; he was no more fit for their world, they saw, than a young nightingale for a gay brawling street. They laughed at him — which he seldom knew, or knowing did not heed — and let him live in his own fashion as he liked, and made their money out of him, and said all genius was no better after all than an inspired idiotcy, and he was such a boy: only a little peasant still, though he had so sweet a face and so soft a grace.
Signa was careless of them — utterly careless.
He was so purely, naturally, innocently happy, that nothing could much stir or trouble him. Al
l the noise around him was like the sound of a whirlpool to a child seated high on the rocks, who hears it, but only sees the silver seagulls and the sunshine. All the fret of their life could not hurt him; he saw only the dreams and the destinies of his own.
What was beautiful to him in those long months of wandering were not the pleasures which his associates found; he hardly cared even for the praise that made his pilgrimages triumphs. What was beautiful to him were the changing mountains, the fresh wide waters, the unknown old cities, the treasuries of lost arts, the noble churches, the silent monasteries, the lonely little towns that had all some wonder of stone or of colour; the delicious free sense, as of a bird’s flight, with which he was borne from place to place, filling his brain with memories, as a child its hands with flowers, thinking each new one found still lovelier than the last.
He drifted now in his little boat: a fisherman rowed him from point to point along the shores. He had talked to the man till they were both tired; going with the current, little movement of the oars was needful; the man sat mute, thinking of his haul of fish of that morning; Signa lay back looking up at the radiance of Pegasus.
He did not know it as the constellation that belongs to all who dream of any art, but its stars shone down on him with a bright serene light, and he thought how they were shining too upon the water and the hills about his home.
His heart always went back to the Lastra.
His fondest fancy was of what should be the manner of his return to it; to raise works of marble like the palaces he saw, and live a great life in peace and pleasure, with a choir of young singers like himself around him, and the love of all the country with him.
He was so young still; such dreams were possible to him. His hands were filled with the fast fading laurels of earth, but he believed them the changeless asphodels of heaven.
The life of Rossini, had he seen it close, would have hurt him like a blasphemy.
To Signa — reared in simple religious faiths, half pagan, half monastic, which were quite real to him — victory was obligation.
God had given him his desire; so he thought. He said always to himself, “What can I render back?”
In so many things he was only a little peasant still.
The boat floated along, rocked gently on the liquid darkness.
He watched the stars, and dreamed, and dreamed, and dreamed, and seemed to see again, white upon the shadow, a statue he had seen that day at noon: the Love and Psyche of Canova.
Canova — whose soul was dead when he moulded the lascivious charms of the Borghese Venus and the poor vulgar graces of the Dancing Girls — has put all his soul into this marble.
For one moment, in his vision of the face of Love, he has reached the height where the Greek sculptors reign alone.
In the face of Love there is the very heaven of passion — all its longing, all its languor, all its ineffable abandonment and yearning, all its ab‐ solute oblivion, which makes it live only in one other life, and would let the earth dissolve and the heavens shiver as a burnt scroll, and take no heed, so that “only from me this be divided never.”
The boy had watched the statue long, with a strange sense of something missed in his own young years — something unknown; and like a hot wind over him had come the memory of the dancing girl of Istriel.
He had hated that memory, yet there it came.
Her face effaced the softer face of Psyche: Psyche, who is not worthy Love in the marble, as in the fable of the lamp.
Floating along the shores of the lake he dreamed of the statue; only, do what he would, instead of Psyche he saw always the form of the dancer of Istriel. And the boy in his ignorance smiled, remembering the warnings of Bruno.
“What does he know?” he thought, “living on his hill there. All men love — the lowest and the highest. One would be greater surely in all ways, not lesser — if one loved.”
For he did not know that Love will only reach his height by treading all other things beneath his foot. He did not know that Love lends a fire divine to human souls only by burning all their world to waste.
The boat paused at a bend in the shore, grated a little, and then was fastened to the land.
Signa leapt out with the fresh cool leaves smiting him sweet blows upon his eyes and mouth. They had reached the little village where he liked to sleep and see the dawn break over the lake better than to remain in Como, where the singers drank, and laughed, and quarrelled until daybreak, and thought it ill of him unless he joined them.
The boat went on to where the rower lived; — Signa strolled a little on the shore. It was not late, and he could see the white‐walled cottage where he had house room amongst its orange‐trees and myrtles, and he wished to watch the storm which, country‐born and hill‐bred as he had been, he knew was rising, though the lake was still.
The village stood on a small creek: its woods and thickets went to the water’s edge; it was a wilderness of roses. It had a little white church, with one bell; several huts and houses of peasants and fisherpeople; and a few villas that were sought by summer idlers and by rich strangers towards the early autumn time.
Signa walked on the edge of the water, his feet in roseleaves and fallen jessamine flowers: the shore was all a garden, wild or cultured according as the proprietor of the soil were poor or rich.
He wandered along till he lost sight of the roof of his own little dwelling, listening to the soft lapping of the little waves upon the stones and the splash of distant oars.
All at once he paused. He saw a statue in the water through the leaves — at least, the thought it so.
It was the white figure of a woman, half clothed in close clinging draperies, which with her right hand she held upward to her knees; with the other hand she was gathering her hair into a great knot; her naked feet were in the shining water; her arms were bare too. She was quite still at the moment he saw her first, as though awaiting something; the moon had come out of a heavy cloud, and fell on her, so that she looked a piece of sculpture, white as Psyche was.
Then, tired of holding up her hair, she let it fall in a sudden shower, thrust the boughs of the wild roses apart, and stepped from the pebbles and the water on the shore. The movement brought her face to face with Signa.
He saw she was no statue, but a woman; young and living, and impatient of some delay; dripping with water, which ran from her hair and limbs in silvery rain, and made her white thin garments cling to her. She had been bathing in the solitude of her gardens, into which he unwittingly had strayed.
Signa stood still and gazed at her, too much amazed, too startled, too confused, to move or speak. His face flushed with shame — shame for himself and shame for her.
“Forgive me,” he murmured; but his feet were rooted to the ground, his heart beat so loudly it seemed to him to fill the air. The woman — all white there, with her shining limbs and shining hair tangled in the thickets of the roses, with her wet small feet like ivory upon the moss — he thought it all a dream.
She had started, too; then she looked at him with a smile slowly uncurving the rose leaves of her close pouted lips. She was in no wise embarrassed. She stood looking at him with the moonrays full upon her, making the water‐drops like pearls.
Then she laughed.
A pretty laughter pealing through the garden silence, she shook her hair over her like a veil, her white arms and bosom shining through it as through a golden network, like cobwebs in the sun . ,
Another woman ran quickly up to her with breathless excuse for absence, holding a scarlet shawl in her outstretched arms. She let it be wrapped round her, and turned away, looking at Signa through her hair.
“Stay there,” she said to him; “stay there, and string a romance upon me. I am wet — I was bathing. I will come back. Stay there!”
He stood there, stupefied and entranced, as she had bidden him; not sure, still, whether it were a woman indeed, or only a statue that his fancy warmed.
He was not sure that all was not a t
rick of his own imagination, and of the sudden shining of the moon out from the dark night.
He stood, bewildered and breathless, listening with throbbing pulses to every noise in the leaves and on the water. If she were a living creature, she had bade him wait.
For his life he could not have moved away.
He felt hot with shame for her if she were indeed a living thing.
Strange stories he had heard in the old folk‐lore of the Lastra — where people believe in many an eerie phase of the night side of nature — came over him with a shiver. What human thing could have looked half so white? or could have borne his gaze without a blush? or could have laughed straightly in his face as she had done?
His brain was giddy, his heart beat high; — he glanced up to find his stars, but they were gone — the clouds had covered them. The rose‐boughs rustled, the grasses seemed to thrill, the shallow water shimmered at his feet. Would she come back, or had she only mocked him? Was she like the beautiful white woman who cannot forget her crimes, but wakes from her grave and strays all night through the great forsaken gardens of the Medici? He shuddered as he thought — he who had been reared where the people believe in the ghostly wanderings of Bianca Capella.
He longed for her back again, and yet he feared her. He strained his eyes to watch for her in the gloom, and yet he was afraid — afraid as he had never been in his childhood going in the darkness over the lonely hill‐lands peopled with the spirits of the dead, as peasants told him.
It might have been hours that he waited there, it might have been but moments; he could not tell which, he had no sense of time; but the moon was still shining when he saw her.
She came under the leaves of the orange‐trees through the crossing rose‐boughs to him; she was still wrapped in white — some glistening thing with silver in it, like a spider’s web that has caught the dew; her wet hair fell over her shoulders; her feet were shod in soft white furs; she had put a string of pearls about her throat, which gleamed a little as snow does as she moved; she came through the shining moonlit leaves, bending down towards him and smiling.