by Ouida
He paused abruptly; he had spoken with broken impetuous passion; the long‐locked gates of his silence once burst asunder, all his heart rushed forth in his words; he smote wildly like a blind man in the midst of foes.
Istriel listened; the wrath that rose in him was daunted by a vague trouble, a restless uncertain shame.
“Whom do you speak of?” he said, with a wonder that held his wrath in check. “Your boy I is it possible that you mean the musician that they call Signa?”
Bruno made a gesture of assent.
Istriel was silent. In his soul he hated the young lover of his Innocence; the beautiful boy who had youth, who had fame, who had her.
“What have I to do with that?” he said, bitterly. “She takes a whim for him; a fancy of a month; he thinks it heaven and eternity. She has ruined him. His genius is burned up; his youth is dead; he will do nothing more of any worth. Women like her are like the Indian drugs, that sleep and kill. How is that any fault of mine? He could see the thing she was. If he will fling his soul away upon a creature lighter than thistle‐down, viler than a rattlesnake’s poison, poorer and quicker to pass than the breath of a gnat — whose blame is that except his own? There was a sculptor once, you know, that fell to lascivious worship of the marble image he had made; well, — poets are not even so far wise as that. They make an image out of the gossamer rainbow stuff of their own dreams, and then curse heaven and earth because it dissolves to empty air in their fond arms — whose blame is that? The fools are made so—”
He spoke with fierce curt scorn; he too had loved this worthless loveliness that he had christened Innocence.
“It is as bad as that with him?” muttered Bruno. “It is true then all they say?”
Istriel laughed.
“Most true. All Rome can read it. Her fancy is done; and now his hell has come. It is always so. But what can it be to you? What is he to you?” he said, abruptly.
Bruno smiled; a smile of the pale passion which is bitter as death, and deep as the bottomless sea.
“I have given him all my life,” he said, simply. “All my life. And you and your wanton have destroyed him.”
“He is your son?” said Istriel.
“No. They all thought so, but they were wrong. He was Pippa’s son,” said Bruno, whose mind was clouded with the lores and fury of his pain, and who at all times had the peasant’s optimism opticism , and believed that every one must know, without need of explanation, who he was, and what he meant, and why he spoke.
“Pippa!” echoed Istriel. His memories were wakened by the name, and went back to the days of his youth, when he had gone through the fields at evening, when the purple beanflower was in bloom.
“What is your name then?” he asked, with a changed sound in his voice, and with his fair cheek paler.
“I am Bruno Marcillo; I come from the hills above the Lastra a Signa.”
Istriel rose, and looked at him; he had not remembered dead Pippa for many a year. All in a moment he did remember: the long light days, the little grey‐walled town, the meetings in the vine‐hung paths, when sunset burned the skies; the girl with the pearls on her round brown throat, the moonlit nights, with the strings of the guitar throbbing, and the hearts of the lovers leaping; the sweet, eager, thoughtless passion that swayed them one to another, as two flowers are blown together in the mild soft winds of summer; he remembered it all now.
And he had forgotten so long; forgotten so utterly; save now and then, when in some great man’s house he had chanted to see some painting done in his youth, and sold then for a few gold coins, of a tender tempestuous face, half smiling and half sobbing, full of storm and sunshine, both in one; and, then at such times had thought “Poor little fool! she loved me too well; — it is the worst fault a woman has.”
Some regret he had felt, and some remorse when he had found the garret empty, and had lost Pippa from sight in the great sea of chance; but she had wearied him, importuned him, clung to him; she had had the worst fault, she had loved him too much. He had been young and poor, and very ambitious; he had been soon reconciled; he had soon learned to think that it was a burden best fallen from his shoulders. No doubt she had suffered; but there was no help for that — someone always suffered when these ties were broken — so he had said to himself. And then there had come success and fame, and the pleasure of the world and the triumphs of art, and Pippa had dropped from his thoughts as dead blossoms from a bough; and he had loved so many other women, that he could not have counted them; and the memory of that boy and girl romance in the green hill country of the old Etruscan land had died away from him like a song long mute.
Now, all at once, Pippa’s hand seemed to touch him — Pippa’s voice seemed to rouse him — Pippa’s eyes seemed to look at him.
This was Bruno, then? — the great, dark, elder brother, whom she had feared, and had often pointed out to him in the fading evening light from afar on the hillsides, and had begged him never to meet, lest there should be feud about her and bloodshed.
This was Bruno.
All in a moment the past leaped up to him, and grew fresh as yesterday.
This was Bruno — and what, then, was the boy?
He mastered the horror and the emotion which possessed him; but his mouth was dry, and his voice was unsteady, as he asked,
“She was your sister — Pippa?”
“Yes.”
“Is she dead, then?”
“Yes.”
“When did she die?”
“On the night of the flood, in the dark, we found her dead, Lippo and I. The child was at her breast. She had fallen from the edge of the road. She could tell us nothing. What is it to you? Why do you want to know?”
Istriel was silent a moment — a shiver as of some great cold went over him. Then he spoke suddenly,
“Because I was her lover. I took her from your country. That lad, if he be hers, is mine. She loved me too well to be faithless. There are women so.”
Bruno stared at him stupidly. The sense of what he heard was long before it reached him, or brought perception of its truth. Then all at once he understood.
“It will kill him!” he muttered, at last; “it will kill him! Do you not see?”
With a shudder, Istriel looked him slowly in the face.
Remembering the boy, their mutual thoughts dulled passion, numbed rage, and struck them mute.
Bruno’s hand, raised to strike the lover of dead Pippa, fell to his side nerveless and strengthless as a reed that is plucked upward by the roots.
CHAPTER XVIII.
“LET me think — let me breathe!” said Bruno, and he staggered farther out into the darkness, gasping for air.
The horror of an inevitable and irrevocable destiny closed in on him like a cage of iron.
There are hours in the lives of men when the old Greek sense of being but the sport of an inexorable Fate, from which there is no possible escape, sweeps away all hope and power of self‐help, and strikes all courage blinded to the dust.
What could he do?
The powers of heaven and hell were alike against him‐so he thought.
He was no god to struggle with this ghastly curse of risen years — these poison‐mists of perished passions.
It was no fault of his.
His hands were innocent — his soul was free of guilt; yet he suffered as the guilty do not. It is often so.
There was a sound as of many waters in his ears; the white moon and the curled palm leaves went round and round; the great stones seemed to heave beneath his feet.
He saw the face of the man before him as in a mist — blood‐red.
“Get you gone,” he muttered, “get you gone. You have no share with him. For you, he would have drowned, like any lamb that the flood took. He is mine — mine — mine. My hands worked for him; my bread fed him; my roof sheltered him. He was naught to you. You have lived your life and never thought. He is naught to you; he is mine. Get you gone!”
And he struck at the
air — blindly.
The other shrank away before that great just passion — shrank, palsied and awed, in all his proud vain manhood, as though old age had seized him. He had dropped the serpent’s tooth of a careless love by the wayside, and thought no more; and now an armed host sprang on him.
“But — to save him?” he murmured, and was still.
Bruno stood erect, and in the changing shadows his form seemed to tower and dilate, and grow to giant’s stature.
“Leave him to me!” he cried; and his voice rolled like thunder down the deserted ruined ways of Rome. “He is mine; he is mine! My soul for his — that I have said — always — always — while you feasted and were famous, and kissed your wantons, and took no thought. Get you gone; get you gone. You gave him your life; but I gave him my soul.”
The other shrank back into the shadows.
Bruno stood silent, with his face to the stars.
“Is there a God, there?” he cried to them. “Is there a God, that he lets the innocent suffer for the guilty?”
The serene star‐covered heavens seemed chill as any vault of ice. What cared they for his pain!
It was no blasphemy in him that cried thus, and thus doubted; it was faith in its death agony; the faith of Peter’s “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”
He was alone in the pale night.
The lover of dead Pippa, who had never feared anything in life, feared him.
“Is it all of no use?” muttered Bruno to the silence; and silence answered him. Was it all of no use? — the long years of toil; the patient sacrifice; the unceasing resistance of selfish desire; the bitter winters; the burning summers; the effort; the anxiety; the prayers; the love?
Was it all of no use? Did neither men nor God care anything?
That unutterable and terrible loneliness which comes to all in their death‐hour, and comes to some in their full height of life, encompassed Bruno now.
It seemed to him as if he stood solitary amidst the wreck of the whole world.
He had tried to build up in safety the temple of this young life, so that every fair and pure thing might be garnered therein, and no foul spirits ever enter; he had been willing to cement its corner‐stone with his heart’s blood; and by the sweat of his labour, and by the pain of his perishing hopes, purchase a blessing upon it. And now it burned and crumbled before his sight, blasted with the lightning of a hideous passion. And he stood by, with bound hands.
“My soul for this,” he muttered. That he had said always; that he would give still; only it seemed to him that there was no way to force on fate such barter.
It is not given to any life to be the providence of another — so the old man had told him in the sacristy of the Lastra, and he found the truth now.
A great sickness came on him; a loathing of life and of the hopes with which he had cheated himself through these twenty long years of vain sacrifices.
He seemed to feel the long wet hair of dead Pippa, and the cold of her lifeless breasts. Was it an hour ago that they had found her by the old sea road, or was it twenty years?
He stood stunned and stupid in the silent ways of Rome.
A great darkness was over all his mind like the plague of that unending night which brooded over Egypt.
All the ferocity of his nature was scourged into its greatest strength; he was sensible of nothing except the sense that he was beaten in the one aim and purpose of his life.
Only — if by any chance he could still save the boy.
That one thought — companion with him, sleeping and waking, through so many joyless nights — stayed with him still.
It seemed to him that he would have strength to scale the very heights of heaven, and shake the very throne of God until He heard — to save the boy.
The night was far gone; the red of the day‐dawn began to glow, and the stars paled.
He did not know how time went; but he knew the look of the daybreak. When the skies looked so, through his grated windows at home, he rose and said a prayer, and went down and unbarred his doors, and led out his white beasts to the plough, or between the golden lines of the reaped corn; all that was over now.
The birds were waking on the old green hills and the crocus flowers unclosing; but he —
“I shall never see it again,” he thought, and his heart yearned to it, and the great hot slow tears of a man’s woe stole into his aching eyes and burned them. But he had no pity on himself.
He had freedom and health and strength and manhood, and he was still not old, and still might win the favour of women, and see his children laugh — if he went back to the old homestead, and the old safe ways of his fathers. And the very smell of the earth there was sweet to him as a virgin’s breath, and the mere toil of the ground had been dear to him by reason of the faithful love that he bore to his birthplace. But he had no pity on himself.
“My soul for his,” he had said; and he cleaved to his word and kept it.
In his day he had been savage to others. He was no less so to himself.
He had done all that he knew how to do. He had crushed out the natural evil of him, and denied the desires of the flesh, and changed his very nature to do good by Pippa’s son: and it had all been of no use; it had all been spent in vain, as drowning seamen’s cries for help are spent on angry winds and yawning waters. He had tried to follow God’s will and to drive the tempter from him, for the boy’s sake; and it had all been of no avail. Through the long score of years his vain sacrifices echoed dully by him as a dropt stone through the dark shaft of a well.
Perhaps it was not enough.
Perhaps it was needful that he should redeem the boy’s soul by the utter surrender and eternal ruin of his own — perhaps. After all it was a poor love which balanced cost; a meek, mean love which would not dare take guilt upon it for the thing it cherished.
To him crime was crime in naked utter blackness; without aught of those palliatives with which the cultured and philosophic temper can streak it smooth and paint its soft excuse, and trace it back to influence or insanity. To him sin was a mighty, hideous, hell‐born thing, which, being embraced, dragged him who kissed it on the mourn, downward and downward into bottomless pits of endless night and ceaseless torment. To him the depths of hell and heights of heaven were real as he had seen them in the visions of Orgagna.
Yet he was willing to say, “evil be thou my good,” if by such evil he could break the bonds of passion from the life of Pippa’s son.
He had in him the mighty fanaticism which has made at once the tyrants and the martyrs of the world.
“Leave him to me,” he had said, and then the strength and weakness, and ruthless heat, and utter self‐deliverance of his nature, leaped to their height, and nerved him with deadly passion.
“There is but one way,” he said to himself; — there was but one way to cut the cords of this hideous, tangled knot of destiny, and let free the boy to the old ways of innocence.
“He will curse me,” he thought; “I shall die — never looking on his face — never hearing his voice. But he will be freed — so. He will suffer — for a day — a year. But he will be spared the truth. And he is so young — he will be glad again before the summer comes.”
For a moment his courage failed him.
He could face the thought of an eternity of pain, and not turn pale, nor pause. But to die with the boy’s curse on him — that was harder.
“It is selfishness to pause,” he told himself. “He will loathe me always; but what matter — he will be saved; he will be innocent once more; he will hear his ‘beautiful things’ again; he will never know the truth; he will be at peace with himself, and forget before the summer comes. He never has loved me — not much. What does it matter — so that he is saved. When he sees his mother in heaven some day, then she will say to him— ‘It was done for your sake.’ And I shall know that he sees then, as God sees. That will be enough.”
And he refused to have pity on himself; and hardened his heart,
and faced the red of the breaking day with his resolve stronger and firmer in his soul, till he seemed to himself to be no more a man with nerves to wound and heart to suffer, but a thing of iron set to vengeance as a clock is wound to strike.
There was no other way, that was what he thought; no other way to turn the boy to innocence, and spare him ever any knowledge of the truth.
The same terrible sense of crime as duty which of old nerved the hands of Judith and of Jael, came on him now. In the great blindness that was upon him it seemed to him that to shrink from this act set to him, would be the feeblest cowardice. It seemed to him that all the forces of Satan were at war with him, and that not to strike them down and crush them out, would be to pander to and aid them, and shrink, a craven, from their path.