by Ouida
“Why did you show it me? Do you know anything? Do you mean anything?”
“Nothing. It is only a picture.”
And he walked away.
She leant over the tank and reached and plucked it out from the water; it was a photograph, and the moisture ran off, and did not harm it. She stood and looked at it. She was alone against the white brick wall, her rough, blue skirt clung wet and close to her; she had a red handkerchief over her short cropped hair; the wind blew over her naked feet and her bared arms; the wide green hills were behind her, the brown wooden door of the shed before her; there was a cold azure sky above the golden budding trees.
She stood and looked at the picture. Her face burned, though she was all alone. She shuddered and hated it.
“He is a hard, cruel man,” she said. “How could he bring me such a thing ? My Gemma is safe with Christ.”
Then she threw the picture in the water again, and as it floated put a great stone on it and sunk it, and as it rose, flung another greater stone, and then another, and then another, until the picture dropped under it like a drowned dead thing, and lay at the bottom with the mud and weeds. She felt as if she slew a devil.
“My Gemma is with Christ,” she said; and she went back to the washing women and the hard work and the coarse linen, while the winter sun shone, and the winter wind blew.
CHAPTER XIV.
BRUNO went straight to the steward, and told him that he was about to go to Rome.
It was as base to him to leave his land as it is to the soldier to desert his post.
The land was more than your mother; so he thought; it fed you all your life long, and gave you shelter when you were dead, and men would have you cumber their households no more. He loved every clod of the good sound earth, and every breath of its honest fresh fragrance. He looked to lie in it when he should be buried and gone for ever, by the side of Dina, under the pines, with his feet resting for ever on the mountain‐side that they had trodden so long. He had always a fancy that in his grave there he should know when the corn was springing and feel the soft rainfall.
The love of the country was in his blood, in his brain, in all the soul he had. He could not comprehend how life would go on with him elsewhere. He was rooted to his birthplace as an oak is to its forest.
Nevertheless he tore himself away.
He did not know what penalty might avenge, what fate might follow, his desertion of the soil. His lord might be furious. His possessions might be pillaged. When he returned he might find himself ruined, ejected, displaced; — if he returned at all; — if; — who could tell?
The thing he did was, to him, as if he stepped off a great precipice into the emptiness and nothingness of silent and unfathomable air.
Its bones might be broken in the fall, and his very existence cease to be.
Nevertheless he went: as he would have leapt off an actual height down into unknown space, if by so doing he could have saved the boy.
In the white marble of the great Borghese sculpture, Curtius leaps down, and the world hails a hero: — no one saw Bruno, or would have praised him had they seen, yet the courage was scarcely less, and the sacrifice nearly as absolute.
Indeed the hero saw glory in the bottomless abyss and darted to it: — the peasant saw nothing except impenetrable gloom and hopelessness. Yet he went; because the son of Pippa was in peril.
He went back to his homestead, and put all his things in order.
It was high noon.
He took out from its hiding place his copper pitcher with his savings in it. They were not much in value. He had had only one harvest time and one vintage to save from, since his all had been taken for the Actea. Such as they were he stitched them in the waistband of his trousers, and put a shirt or two up in a bundle, and so was ready for his journey. He could not go until evening. He worked all day; leaving everything as it should be, and so far as it was possible nothing for new hands to do; except so far as seeing to the beasts went, that was of necessity a new care every day.
He had been brought up on this wooded spur, looking down on the Signa country; all his loves and hatreds, joys and pains, had been known here; from the time he had plucked the maple leaves in autumn for the cattle with little brown five‐year‐old hands he had laboured here, never seeing the sun set elsewhere except on that one night at the sea. He was close rooted to the earth as the stonepines were and the oaks. It had always seemed to him that a man should die where he took life first, amongst his kindred and under the sods that his feet had run over in babyhood. He had never thought much about it, but unconsciously the fibres of his heart had twisted themselves round all the smallest and the biggest things of his home as the tendrils of a strong ivy bush fasten round a great tower and the little stones alike.
The wooden settle where his mother had sat; the shrine in the house wall; the copper vessels that had glowed in the wood‐fuel light when a large family had gathered there about the hearth; the stone well under the walnut tree where dead Dina had often stayed to smile on him; the cypress‐wood presses where Pippa had kept her feast‐day finery and her pearls; the old vast sweet‐smelling sheds and stables where he had threshed and hewn and yoked his oxen thirty years if one: all these things, and a hundred like them, were dear to him with all the memories of his entire life; and away from them he could know no peace.
He was going away into a great darkness. He had nothing to guide him. The iron of a wasted love, of a useless sacrifice, was in his heart. His instinct drove him where there was peril for Pippa’s son: — that was all.
If this woman took the lad away from him — where was there any mercy or justice, earthly or divine? That was all he asked himself, blindly and stupidly; as the oxen seem to ask it with their mild sad eyes as they strain under the yoke and goad, suffering, and not knowing why they suffer.
Nothing was clear to Bruno.
Only life had taught him that Love is the brother of Death.
One thing and another had come between him and the lad he cherished. The dreams of the child, the desires of the youth, the powers of art, the passion of genius, one by one had come in between him and loosened his hold, and made him stand aloof as a stranger. But Love he had dreaded most of all; Love which slays with one glance dreams and art and genius, and lays them dead as rootless weeds that rot in burning suns.
Now Love had come.
He worked all day, holding the sickness of fear off him as best he could, for he was a brave man; — only he had wrestled with fate so long, and it seemed always to beat him, and almost he grew tired.
He cut a week’s fodder for the beasts, and left all things in their places, and then, as the day darkened, prepared to go.
Tinello and Pastore lowed at him, thrusting their broad white foreheads and soft noses over their stable door.
He turned and stroked them in farewell.
“Poor beasts!” he muttered, “shall I never muzzle and yoke you ever again?”
His throat grew dry, his eyes grew dim. He was like a man who sails for a voyage on unknown seas, and neither he nor any other can tell whether he will ever return.
He might come back in a day; he might come back never.
Multitudes, well used to wander, would have laughed at him. But to him it was as though he set forth on the journey which men call death.
In the grey lowering evening he kissed the beasts on their white brows; there was no one there to see his weakness, and year on year he had decked them with their garlands of hedge flowers, and led them up on God’s day to have their strength blessed by the priest — their strength that laboured with his own from dawn to dark over the bare brown fields.
Then he turned his back on his own home, and went down the green sides of the hill, and lost sight of his birthplace as the night fell.
All through the night he was borne away by the edge of the sea, along the wild windy shores, through the stagnant marshes and the black pools where the buffalo and the wild boar herded, past the deserted ci
ties of the coast, and beyond the forsaken harbours of Æneas and of Nero.
The west wind blew strong; the clouds were heavy; now and then the moon shone on a sullen sea; now and then the darkness broke over rank maremma vapours; at times he heard the distant bellowing of the herds, at times he heard the moaning of the water; mighty cities, lost armies, slaughtered hosts, foundered fleets, were underneath that soil and sea, whole nations had their sepulchres on that low windblown shore. But of these he knew nothing.
It only seemed to him that day would never come.
Once or twice he fell asleep for a few moments, and waking in that confused noise of the stormy night and the wild water, and the frightened herds, thought that he was dead and that this sound was the passing of the feet of all the living multitude going for ever to and fro, unthinking, over the depths of the dark earth where he lay.
CHAPTER XV.
LIPPO in this last lengthening day of February found hours of sunshine and of leisure to loiter in and out the Lastra doors, set open to the noonday brightness and the smell of the air from the hills, which brought the fragrance of a world of violets with it.
Lippo, with sad eyes and softened voice, said to his gossips:
“My brother is gone down to Rome. Yes — left the old house where we were born, and all his labours, and gone down to Rome. I dread the worst — poor Bruno! He has been an unbrotherly soul to me, and harsh and hasty, and has been misguided always and mistaken. But before he went, he asked my pardon frankly, and you know when a man does that, bygones are bygones. I do not understand those hard hearts which never will forgive. Yes: I dread the worst. You see the poor lad Signa has fallen in evil courses, and been taken in the coils of a base woman, and Bruno hears of it, and will go see for himself, and says that he will drag the boy from ruin though it cost bloodshed. I do dread the worst. Because, you see, youths are not lightly turned from their mad passions and Bruno is too quick of hand and heavy of wrath — it makes me very anxious. Oh, yes indeed, I know he has had little love for me, and been unjust to me, and done me harm; but when a man says that he repents — it may be weak, but I for one could not refuse my hand. And between brothers, too. Indeed, I loved him always, and the poor boy knew that.”
And Lippo sighed.
“What a heart of gold!” said the barber, looking after him as he went up the street.
“Aye, truly, tender as a woman when you take him the right way,” quoth the butcher.
“And a man of thrift: money soon jumps itself treble in his pocket,” said Toto the tinman.
“And a good son of the church,” said the parish priest, who was passing by; and the barber nodded solemnly and added:
“And never a shrewder brain under my razor, with all the polls I have shaved as clean as pumpkins — forty years and one last St. Michael — in the Lastra.”
Lippo went on to the sacristy of the Misericordia Miserecordia , where he had risen to be of good report, and one of the foremost capi di guardia, by dint of assiduous service in the black robes, and bearing to and fro hospital or graveyard his sick or lifeless fellow‐creatures; and being constantly present at mass and requiem.
There was a dead body lying upon the hills as far away as Mosciano — the body of a poor sister of the order, a peasant woman — and the bier and catafalque were going out to fetch her. One of the daily servitors, whose turn it was, had met with an accident to his foot in answering the summons: Lippo, with kindliest quickest willingness, took his place, and bade the man go home and rest, and he would himself pay his fine of absence.
Amidst blessings Lippo moved away under the black and dismal pall.
“A pure good Christian soul,” said the bystanders. “It will be hard for such a man if his wild brother make a shame and scandal for him down in Rome.”
From the Lastra to Mosciano is a long and toilsome way, winding up into the green hills and under the steep heights that are left as nature made them, and have the arbutus and the oak and the stone pines growing at free will in beautiful dells and on bold rocky knolls that lie high under the skies, nameless, and rarely seen of men. There is infinite loveliness in these lonely, wild, richly‐foliaged hill‐tops, with the great golden valley far below, and beyond on the other side the shining plains by the sea. The day was fair; the opposite mountains were silvered with snow; the fox and the wild hare ran across the solitary paths; but it was cold; the north wind blew, the ascent was steep, and the way seemed endless, lying along over the green chain of the high woods. The men, labouring under the weight of the bier, grew footsore and tired; when they brought the poor dead sister down, and laid her in the chapel to await her burial on the morrow, the long hours of the day were already gone — it was night.
Lippo wiped the sweat from his forehead as he laid away his cowl; he was aching in every limb, and his feet were cut and bruised, but he was well content. Those were the things which smelt sweet in the nostrils of his neighbours. To walk in a steam of good savour is, he knew, to walk soon or late to the goal of success.
“You are not strong enough to take such exertion; it was noble of you, but you overtask yourself,” said pretty Candida, the vintner’s wife, as he left the church; and she would have him in, and made him warm himself beside her stove, and brewed him some coffee, and praised him, and hoped with a sigh that Nita knew her own good fortune and his worth.
“Do not make me vain,” murmured Lippo, with a pathetic appeal in his soft lustrous eyes, “Do not make me vain — nor miserable.”
And he said it so sweetly, and his hand stole so gently into hers, and his eyes were so eloquent and so plaintive, that pretty Candida was ready to promise him coffee — or aught else — whenever he passed that way.
So Lippo went home, having done a good day’s work, and meeting the vintner within a few yards from the door, pressed him by the hand warmly, and said — was Candida well? he had not seen her for a week or more; and being praised a little farther onward by the parish priest, said — he had done nothing: oh no! Mosciano was a stretch, but what mattered a little fatigue when there was God’s labour to be done, and the saints’ pleasure? and then, with modest denial of any virtue in himself, took a few farther steps, and mounted to the upper chamber, where his wife was sitting and waiting for him with a scowl and loud upbraiding.
“Nay, dear,” said he, “do not be angered. Poor Tista hurt his ancle at the church, and so I took his turn in fetching a corpse down from the hills; that is all. From Mosciano — an endless way; a day’s work, and a hard one, for a mule. I thought I should have died. And not a bit or drop passing my mouth since noonday, and it is nine of the clock. Dear, give me some wine — quick — I feel faint.”
And Nita, who loved him in a jealous, eager, tyrannous way, got him of the best, and waited on him, and roasted him some little birds upon a toast, and sorrowed over him.
For she was a fierce‐tongued, fierce‐eyed, jealous creature — but his dupe. The sharpest woman will be the merest fool of the man she loves, if he choose to fool her.
“There is a letter come for you,” said Nita, when the birds were eaten.
A letter was a rarity in any household of the Lastra.
Lippo broke it open, and slowly spoiled it out, syllable by syllable.
“Heaven is good to us,” he said softly, and laid it down by the brass lamp.
“What is in it?” asked his wife, watching his face breathlessly.
“Dear — your aunt of most blessed memory is dead; God rest her soul! She died of a stricture of the stomach, all in a moment. Would I had been there! She leaves us all she had; it seems she saved much; her cottage at Assisi and twenty thousand francs in scrip; all to us — to me — without reserve.”
Nita screamed aloud, with her black eyes all kindling with ferocious joy, and flung her brown arms about his neck and kissed him.
“Oh Lippo! oh Lippino! How clever you are! To have thought of taking the silly old soul those conserves and cough potions just in the nick of time! How clever! — I
never will say you nay!”
Lippo returned her caress, thinking the lips of Candida were softer. His face grew very grave, with a pensive reproach upon it.
“Oh, my love, your words are unbecoming. You know full well I had no thought of after gain in paying that poor soul the deference due to age. You know it pains me now to be in friendship with all our relatives — and she so old too — it was only duty, Nita; believe me. dear, when we do right, heaven goes with us. I am thankful, of course, that so much more is added to us to keep you and the children in good com‐ fort; but I would sooner far that the kind old creature were living and enjoying life, than gain this greater prosperity by her death; and so, I know, would you, though your quick tongue outruns your heart and does belie it.”
Nita suddenly drew back, and made unseen a grimace behind her husband’s handsome head. She began to feel he was her master. She began to realize her own clumsy inferiority to this delicate fine workmanship of his.
“Anyhow, the cough syrup has brought good measure back” she muttered; her eyes still aglow.
“My journey to Rome, in my boy’s interests, has prospered, thanks to heaven,” said Lippo with calm serious grace; and went and read the notary’s letter to old Baldo.
“You will be a warm man, Lippo,” chuckled the cobbler, who had grown very infirm and kept his bed; “a warm man. You will have all I have too, ere long.”
“May it be very long!” said Lippo, and said it with such earnest graceful tenderness that the old man, though he had known him tell lies morning, noon, and night for five‐and‐twenty years, was touched, and almost thought that Lippo said the truth and meant it.
“Once,” said Baldo, “I did wish that my girl had taken your mad brother. But now I know that she chose aright. Yes — you are a man to prosper, Lippo.”
“All things are with God,” said Lippo; and tired though he was, sat down by the bed and spelt out aloud to the old man, who was drawing near his end, and liked to be well with heaven, one of the seven psalms of penitence.