by Ouida
Bruno ought to have learned never to hope.
But his temper was courageous and sanguine: such madmen hope on to the very end.
He put the things down on the settle, and went to put up the mule. The little rose‐tree had been too roughly blown in the windy afternoon; its flowers were falling, and some soon strewed the floor.
Bruno looked at it when he entered.
It hurt him; as the star Argol had done.
He covered the food with a cloth, and set the flower out of the draught. Then he went to see his sheep.
There was no train by the seaway from Rome until night. Signa would not come that way now, since he had to be in the town for the evening.
“He will come after the theatre,” Bruno said to himself, and tried to get the hours away by work. He did not think of going into the city again himself. He was too proud to go and see a thing he had never been summoned to; too proud to stand outside the doors and stare with the crowd while Pippa’s son was honoured within.
Besides, he could not have left the lambs all a long winter’s night; and the house all unguarded; and nobody there to give counsel to the poor mute simpleton whom he had now to tend his beasts.
“He will come after the theatre,” he said.
The evening seemed very long.
The late night came. Bruno set his door open, cold though it was; so that he should catch the earliest sound of footsteps. The boy, no doubt, he thought, would drive to the foot of the hill, and walk the rest.
It was a clear night after the rain of many days.
He could see the lights of the city in the plain fourteen miles or so away.
What was doing down there?
It seemed strange; — Signa being welcomed there, and he himself knowing nothing — only hearing a stray word or two by chance.
Once or twice in his younger days he had seen the city in gala over some great artist it delighted to honour; he could imagine the scene and fashion of it all well enough; he did not want to be noticed in it, only he would have liked to have been told, and to have gone down and see it, quietly wrapped in his cloak, amongst the throng.
That was how he would have gone, had he been told.
He set the supper out as well as he could, and put wine ready, and the rose‐tree in the midst. In the lamplight the little feast did not look so badly.
He wove wicker‐work round some uncovered flasks by way of doing something. The bitter wind blew in; he did not mind that: his ear was strained to listen. Midnight passed. The wind had blown his lamp out. He lighted two great lanterns, and hung them up against the door‐posts; it was so dark upon the hills.
One hour went; another; then another. There was no sound. When yet another passed, and it was four of the clock, he said:
“He will not come to‐night. No doubt they kept him late, and he was too tired. He will be here by sunrise.”
He threw himself on his bed for a little time, and closed the door. But he left the lanterns hanging outside; on the chance.
He slept little; he was up while it was still dark, and robins were beginning their first twittering notes.
“He will be here to breakfast,” he said to himself, and he left the table untouched, only opening the shutters so that when day came it should touch the rose at once and wake it up; it looked so drooping, as though it felt the cold.
Then he went and saw to his beasts and to his work.
The sun leapt up in the cold, broad, white skies. Signa did not come with it.
The light brightened. The day grew. Noon brought its hour of rest.
The table still stood unused. The rose‐leaves had fallen in a little crimson pool upon it. Bruno sat down on the bench by the door, not having broken his fast.
“They are keeping him in the town,” he thought. “He will come later.”
He sat still a few moments, but he did not eat.
In a little while he heard a step on the dead winter leaves and tufts of rosemary. He sprang erect; his eyes brightened; his face changed. He went forward eagerly:
“Signa! — my dear! — at last!”
He only saw under the leafless maples and brown vine tendrils a young man that he had never seen, who stopped before him breathing quickly from the steepness of the ascent.
“I was to bring this to you,” he said, holding out a long gun in its case. “And to tell you that he, the youth they all talk of — Signa — went back to Rome this morning; had no time to come, but sends you this, with his dear love and greeting, and will write from Rome to‐night. Ah, Lord! There was such fuss with him in the city. He was taken to the foreign princes, and then the people! — if you had heard them! — all the street rang with the cheering. This morning he could hardly get away for all the crowd there was. I am only a messenger. I should be glad of wine. Your hill is steep.”
Bruno took the gun from him, and put out a flask of his own wine on the threshold; then shut close the door.
He stripped the covering off the gun.
It was such a weapon as he had coveted all his life long, seeing such in gunsmiths’ windows and the halls of noblemen: a breech‐loader, of foreign make, beautifully mounted and inlaid with silver; amongst the chasing of it he could see engraved lines: he could distinguish his own name and Signa’s — the one he knew the look of, having seen it so often on summons papers for mad deeds done against the petty laws of his commune; the other he knew because it was painted over the railway place upon the hill. He could decipher Bruno — Signa; and he guessed the rest: a date, no doubt, and some few words of memory or love.
He sat still a little while, the gun lying on his knees; there was a great darkness on his face. Then he gripped it in both hands, the butt in one, the barrel in the other, and dashed the centre of it down across the round of his great grindstone.
The blow was so violent, the wood of the weapon snapped with it across the middle, the shining metal loosened from its hold. He struck it again, and again, and again; until all the polished walnut was flying in splinters, and the plates of silver, bent and twisted, falling at his feet; the finely tempered steel of the long barrel alone was whole.
He went into his woodshed, and brought out branches of acacia brambles, and dry boughs of pine, and logs of oak; dragging them forth with fury. He piled them in the empty yawning space of the black hearth, and built them one on another in a pile; and struck a match and fired them, tossing pine‐cones in to catch the flames.
In a few minutes a great fire roared alight, the turpentine in the pine‐apples and fir boughs blazing like pitch. Then he fetched the barrel of the gun, and the oaken stock, and the silver plates and mountings, and threw them into the heat.
The flaming wood swallowed them up; he stood and watched it.
After a while a knock came at his house‐door.
“Who is there?” he called.
“ It is I,” said a peasant’s voice. “There is so much smoke, I thought you were on fire. I was on the lower hill, so I ran up — is all right with you?”
“All is right with me.”
“But what is the smoke?”
“I bake my bread.”
“It will be burnt to cinders.”
“I make it, and I eat it. Whose matter is it?”
The peasant went away muttering, with slow unwilling feet.
Bruno watched the fire.
After a brief time its phrenzy spent itself; the flames died down; the reddened wood grew pale, and began to change to ash; the oaken stock was all consumed, the silver was melted and fused into shapeless lumps, the steel tube alone kept shape unchanged, but it was blackened and choked up with ashes, and without beauty or use.
Bruno watched the fire die down into a great mound of dull grey and brown charred wood.
Then he went out, and drew the door behind him, and locked it.
The last rod rose dropped, withered by the heat.
CHAPTER XII.
FEBRUARY days are in the Signa country often soft as the May weathe
r of the north.
The trees are setting for leaf, the fields are green, the mountains seem full of light; the birds sing and the peasants too, the brooks course joyously down the hills, the grass is full of snowdrops and the pearly bells of the leucoium, and millions of violets pale and purple; there are grand sunsets with almost the desert red in them, and cold transparent nights, in which the greatness of Orion reigns in its fullest glory, and, watching for the dawn, there hangs that sad star which we call the Serpent’s Heart, and the Arabian astrologers called the Solitary One.
The stars were still out when Bruno with each dawn rose from his short, troubled, lonely sleep, and went out to his work as was his wont.
He worked early and late. There was nothing else for him to do.
He was consumed with impatience and anxiety, but he laboured on in his fields. To leave them never occurred to him. The sailor in mid‐ocean is not more chained to one narrow home than Bruno was by habit and custom and narrowness of knowledge to his high hill tops.
A fever of desire to hear, to see, to learn, to make sure, consumed him. He ate his very heart away with the gnawing wish to know the worst. But Rome was as vague to him and as far off as the white moon that faded away over his pine‐woods as the daylight waned to noon.
On his own land, in his own labour, he was a strong skilful man, able to cope with any labour and turn aside any disaster. But away from his own soil he knew nothing. Custom and ignorance hang like a cloud between the peasant and the outer world. He is like the ancient geographers of old, who feared to step off the shore they knew lest they should fall into an immeasurable, incomprehensible abyss.
Bruno would have walked through fire or plunged headlong in the sea to serve or save the boy; but the lack of knowledge paralysed him; Rome to him was far off as the stars; he could only work and wait, and rise in the dark coldness before morning, haunted with nameless fear, and counting the dull dead days as they dragged on, and meeting the old sacristan who said always, “he does not write; — oh, that is because all is well; when young things are happy they forget.”
Once or twice he took out a handful of money from off the copper pitcher set behind the chimney bricks, and went to his priest. “When we pay for masses for the dead it does do them good?” he said. “Hell if they be in it gives them up — lets them loose — is it not so?”
“Most certainly, my son,” said the old pastor.
“Then can we not buy them for the living? There is hell on earth,” said Bruno, and emptied out his handful of curled yellow notes, and looked at his priest with wistful pitiful eyes.
“Tell me what the trouble is,” said the Par‐ roco, who was the best and kindliest of souls, and had always had a weakness for this sinner whom he had confessed and shriven every Easter for so many years.
“I am not sure what it is,” said Bruno, and told him what he knew.
“Masses will do nothing, since there is a woman,” said the old priest, sadly.
“Are women stronger than hell then?”
“I have lived seventy years; and I think so. But it is not a case for masses. Prayer for your lad I will say with my full heart’s willingness. But put up your notes. I will not take them.”
But Bruno would leave them on the little wooden seat of the sacristy. “Give them away in charity,” he said; “perhaps heaven will remember it to the boy.” And he would leave them there.
“We may get a soul out of purgatory, but a lad out of a woman’s toils — that is harder,” thought the priest, but he only said, rolling up the notes: “I will make sick folks happier with them, Bruno, since you wish it. That can neither harm you nor him.”
“Pray for him, never mind me,” said Bruno, simply; and he left the little old red church, with its high crumbling tower, where the daws built, and the owls, and the beautiful blue jays.
It was a little solace to him that prayer should rise up there in the stillness of the hills, and pass out of the narrow windows with the wind, and go up through the sunshine and the clouds to where they said God and the saints were. Who knew what it might do?
But it gave little rest to the anxious, troubled, heavy soul of the man. Nature had made Bruno for action; to pray, and hope, and trust, and wait resigned, was a woman’s way; it was not his.
The bitter ferocity, too, with which he had broken and burned the gun had not passed away. With Bruno nothing passed. His passions were flames which burned their passage indelibly. He kept the secret of his pain in his own mind unspoken; but the rage with which he had destroyed what had seemed to him as insult — as payment in base metal when the gold of remembrance and of affection was withheld — that rage chafed in him always.
He never opened his lips to blame Signa. He never let any one in his hearing say they marvelled at Signa’s forgetfulness of him. When any man said within earshot of him that it was strange that the boy should have passed a night in the city and never sent any tidings home, Bruno had answered him sharply: “The lad has great things to think of; he belongs to all the world now; not to one hill‐top; when I complain of him others may do so too; till then let them have a care.” And people knowing his humours were afraid, and never said a slighting word; but supposed that Bruno was content.
But the fury with which he had thrust the rifle into the fire consumed him always. The gift — hurting him like a blow, cast to him as it seemed like so much wage — had dug a chasm between him and the boy he loved.
Any other time he might have taken it as a symbol of grateful tenderness. But now — when Signa forsook him‐it added a sting to the sharpness of his pain under neglect. It seemed to him the very insolence of success of triumph of riches, which said,— “So my debts are paid.”
In cold reason the next day, when he raked out the fire and found one silver plate unburned amidst the embers, he stamped it under his heel, and hurled it into the deep well at his door.
Signa had had the unhesitating unhalting sacrifice of twenty years of his life, and thought to pay him by a gunsmith’s glittering toy!
That was how it seemed to him.
So he worked on amidst the fields, and let the days go: between him and the boy there was a gulf of silence. Bruno’s heart revolted against him. He asked himself why he had let the years go by and lived without woman’s love, and the laughter of children, and the good will of men which comes from easy spending, that Pippa’s son might have his way and pay him with forgetfulness? Why had he consumed a score of years in rigid self‐denial, ceaseless labour, and barren solitude for this boy’s sake only in the end to be abandoned for the first wanton face that smiled, and recompensed with such reward as careless princes give the forest‐guards that drive their game?
Yet the great loyal love in him cleaved even to what he thought thankless and thoughtless and forgetful. He still would have bought Signa’s peace at any price of his own body or soul; he still said to the priest, “Pray for him; for me it does not matter.”
But in the short soft days and in the long cold nights there was a heavy darkness always on him. Once he said to the priest:
“If she take him from me — there is no God.”
And he toiled in his fields with the fragrance of the coming spring in all the soil, and looked across at the low lines of the hills, and felt his heart like a stone, his feet like lead.
One fresh chill daybreak, as he worked with the silver dew on every blade of grass, and spread like a white veil over all the hills, his brother’s voice called him.
Looking up he saw Lippo. He stood on the other side of one of the low stone walls that are built across the sloping fields to stay the force of water coming from the heights in winter rains.
Bruno did as he had done ten years and more; he worked on and seemed never to see the figure of his brother between him and the light.
They met a hundred times a year and more; Bruno did always so. For him Lippo had ceased to live.
The priest had urged him vainly to forgiveness.
“Who cannot h
ate, cannot love;” Bruno had answered always. “Forgetfulness is for women. Forgiveness is for dogs: I have said it.”
“Bruno, may I speak a word to you?” said Lippo, gently. He had his softest and most pensive face; his eyes were tender and regretful; his voice was calm and kindly; in his boot he had slipped a knife, for fear — no one could tell, — Bruno was violent, and he had left his cowherd in the lower fields within a call; but in his look and attitude Lippo had the simplest trustfulness and candour. He seemed oppressed and sorrowful: that was all.
Bruno went on and worked as he had done on the day that he had heard his brother was the owner of the neighbouring land. He was cutting his olive‐trees. He slashed the branches and flung them from him with force; so that if they would they might strike Lippo in the face.
Lippo watched the gleaming steel play in the grey leaves; and was glad he had bethought him to slip that knife within his boot.
“Bruno,” he said, very gently. “Do not be in haste or rage. I come in all true brotherliness; the saints are my witnesses. You have been in anger against me many years. Some of your anger was just; much unjust. I could not defend myself from your accusations of having dealt ill with Pippa’s child unless I had blamed Nita — and what husband can shield himself at his wife’s cost? Poor soul! She has many virtues, but her hand is rough, and her tongue harsh, and mothers think it a merit to hurt other children to benefit their own. A woman’s virtue is locked up in the cupboard by her own hearthstone. Nita has been an honest wife to me; but she has — a temper.”
Bruno slashed a great bough from his tree, and flung it downward; it struck Lippo. He moved aside, blinded for the moment, then went gently on.
“A temper: — oh, I know it, none so well. No doubt the poor child suffered from it, and were it not that in marriage one must serve a wife at every hazard, and take her wrong‐doing as one’s own, I could have proved to you with ease that what you thought my treachery was none of mine, but bitter pain and grief to me; aye, indeed. Again and again I have gone supperless to give the little lad my portion. You know I never was master in my house. The money has always been hers and her father’s. Never once have they let me forget that, though Baldo is a good soul in much.”