by Ouida
No doubt she could, for her young brain was full of these things, as other maidens’ are of lovers’ tales and fortune-tellers’ follies.
So she had said all the winter before, and she was never changeable, but in all things only too steadfast.
It was her habit to go into the beautiful old gardens of the Vatican, or of the Albani Villa, or any other of the places where the interest of Maryx secured her free permission to enter, in the noisy boisterous days of Carnival; or to pass those hours, when all the world was masquerading, in the ilex avenues of the Villa Medici, whence you see St. Peter’s through a screen of ilex-leaves, and as you pace the cool, leafy, dusky aisles of the clipped box and arching arbutus, seem to be as far removed from all the life that is going on under the million roofs that lie beneath the terrace as though Rome were a thousand leagues away beyond the mountains.
She had always shunned all sights of the merry, motley life of Carnival, though it is pretty enough seeing the little children run through the old courts, clad in the old costumes of the bygone days, and the devils and harlequins and soldiers, scaramouches and crusaders and troubadours, sitting drinking in the wine-shops, or skipping with loud glee down the pavement in the many Teniers-like pictures, all color and stir, that every tavern, or bakery, or fruit-shop showed at that time through its arched entrance.
But she saw no beauty in it, and it hurt her like a discordant chord or a line out of drawing. She liked better to be left alone on the grass before the Renaissance house-front of the great Academy, or within-doors before the casts of the Braschi Antinoüs and the Capitoline Juno, or to pass the day in the Borghese Palace, where Raffaelle’s frescoes of Alexander’s Nuptials are (how pure and perfect are his frescoes! he should never have touched oils), and through the window in the passage-way you see the fountain upspringing, and through the arch beyond, the trees by Tiber, and know that within the other rooms close by you are Titian’s Graces and his Loves, and Albano’s sporting Seasons, and so many earlier painters’ sad sweet Saints and dying Christs, and that beautiful Presepio of Lorenzo Credi’s, of which the world does not know half enough, and that St. Cecilia of Domenichino’s, which they well call a Sibyl there.
Therefore, she surprised me much on one of the latter days of this Carnival, when I had gone with her, as my old habit was on such roistering afternoons, into the little garden of the Rospiglioso Casino, which is as sweet a place perhaps as any that we have: small as it is, it seems to have all mediæival Rome shut in it, as you go up the winding stairs, with all their lichens and water-plants and broken marbles, into the garden itself, with its smooth emerald turf, and spreading magnolias, and broad fish-ponds, and orange-and citron-trees, and the frescoed building at the end, where Guido’s Aurora floats in unchanging youth, and the buoyant Hours run before the sun.
Myself, I own I care not very much for that Aurora: she is no incarnation of the morning, and though she floats wonderfully and does truly seem to move, yet is she in no wise ethereal or suggestive of the dawn either of day or life. When he painted her, he must have been in love with some lusty taverner’s buxom wife busked in her holiday attire.
But, whatever one may think of the famed Aurora, of the loveliness of her quiet garden home, safe in the shelter of the stately palace walls, there can be no question: the little place is beautiful, and sitting in its solitude with the brown magnolia fruit falling on the grass, and the blackbird pecking between the primroses, all the courtly and superb pageant of the dead ages will come trooping by you, and you will fancy that the boy Metastasio is reciting strophes under yonder Spanish chestnut-tree, and cardinals and nobles and gracious ladies and pretty pages are all listening, leaning against the stone rail of the central water.
For this is the especial charm and sorcery of Rome, that, sitting idly in her beautiful garden-ways, you can turn over a score of centuries and summon all their pomp and pain before you, as easily as little children can turn over the pages of a colored picture-book until their eyes are dazzled.
Giojà, I say, startled me as we strolled there this latest day of February while all the city was alive with maskers, for abruptly, with her face quite pale, and a look as of tears in her eyes, she turned to me and asked me to take her to see the mumming of the streets. We had only been a few minutes in the garden, and were intending to go on and see the sun set from beside the ruins of the Temple of the Sun in the Colonna gardens, with the pretty pigeons strutting to and fro, and the mass of the Capitol looming beyond the cypresses and the pine boughs on that sunniest terrace, and the grand old war-worn tower of Santa Caterina lifting itself above the leaves, and far down beneath the ripple of all the falling water, and the glow of the scattered gold of the orange-trees.
Hence I was more amazed than by anything that could have happened, when, before the first great opening day of Carnival, she said to me, —
“Take me to see it; take me somewhere where I shall not be seen myself. You can do that? Say nothing to Maryx.”
I was speechless with surprise, but then, reflecting, was rejoiced that anything like a girl’s natural interest in merry, foolish things was waking in her.
It was not very easy for me to do; for every hole and corner of the Corso is of money’s worth on those days; but I had many friends, and among them one good soul, an old apothecary and herb-seller, who had a little old dark nook of a shop projecting into the Corso and looking straight up it into the great square where once senators and patrician women were burned at the stake to light the chariot of Nero, and up to the trees and shrubs upon the left where once Cæsar and Pompey were feasted in the Hall of Apollo.
The apothecary had once told me he would let me have one of his dusky, small, cabin-like windows, that were wedged in above a great noble’s scutcheon and that of a quattro-cento portico.
So there I took her before the festival had fairly begun, and there she could sit unseen behind the Pesaro gallipots and the big Faenza jars of sweet and bitter waters, such as might very well in the old times have held choice poisons for pious cardinals’ blessings or the salving of impatient heirs.
No one could see her, for the rich purple and Turkish stuffs of the carpets draping the balcony of the noble’s portico, next door, completely screened her from the view of any one.
What did she want to see? Her face was pale, her eyes were intent: it was not the face of a girl come for the first time to a merry spectacle.
My lean and learned old friend, who was like a leech of Molière or Goldoni, looked at her gravely.
“My dear, you look as if you came to some sad sight. Well, perhaps it is one, when one thinks that once the Scipii and the Antonines were applauded here.”
But even the allusion did not move her: she sat silent and abstracted, her beautiful eyes watching — for something — like a straining antelope’s, up and down the slowly-filling Corso.
Music began to sound, clarions to blow, gay colors to mingle together on pretty, foolish figures; all the swift shrillness of the Roman clamor began to rise, and the poor fluttering birds tied to the nosegays to be tossed from pavement to casement, and then back again, — for who should care for their sufferings here, poor little simple dwellers on the sweet honeysuckle and acanthus thickets of the wide Campagna, — here, where Zenobia, and Vercingetorix, and so many other noble souls, had been dragged before them, bound and captive, in the conquerer’s wake?
Giojà sat intent and silent, leaning her chin upon her hands, her arms upon the stone sill of the little window. The apothecary and I, old men and content to be silent, stood behind her, thinking of mirthful Carnivals of our youth, when to pelt foes and friends, and to toss the bladders, and to catch the flowers and sweetmeats, and to dance to the twang of our viols, clad in all the colors of the rainbow, was the finest sport of all the jocund year.
An hour and more went by, till the winding street was as fully crowded with trampling horses and jostling throngs as ever it had been on a day of the triumph of the armies returned from Asia or fro
m Africa under Scipio or Sulla.
She still watched, quite motionless. At last I saw a sudden color in her face, a sudden lightening under the drooped lids of her attentive eyes.
It was the day when the great equipages of the princes and the nobility came forth, gilded and glorious under a rain of flowers.
I looked down into the street. There was a very grand carriage just beneath, nearly smothered in camellias, red and white. Lying back in it under that foam of camellia-blossoms were Hilarion and the Duchess Sovrana; standing up before them in fanciful disguise was the boy Amphion. I fancied he looked sullen.
Giojà watched them, the color burning deeper and deeper in her face, then fading away utterly: she did not move or speak. The carriage stood still a little while, under the pressure of the crowd, and then moved slowly onwards towards Nero’s hill.
Amphion had looked up: he alone had found out her face, hidden in the little dark window under the carvings and the stuffs.
He kissed a cluster of camellias and threw it up to her: it fell short, and was trodden down under the many hurrying feet.
The carriage passed on. Giojà did not move: she had become white as the marble in which her Nausicaa likeness had been wrought.
I understood now why she had asked to be brought here.
No doubt Amphion had told her, for it seemed to me that he was playing his part in the pageant with an angry and reluctant grace. She never stirred; she might have been deaf, for anything that she appeared to hear of the gay vociferous tumult; and when I looked at her more narrowly I saw the lids were closed over the eyes that still seemed to watch the street.
She sat there throughout the afternoon, the carriage passing thrice. Amphion threw no more flowers; Hilarion never lifted his gaze to the little cabin-like window behind the great escutcheon; he was smiling and murmuring indolently in his companion’s ear, and casting camellias at the many women that he knew.
When the sunset began to burn red behind the trees of Lucullus’s gardens, she left the window with a sudden gesture, like one waking cold and numb from a bad dream.
“Can we go home by some by-street? I am tired.”
It was difficult, but out of the back door of the apothecary’s little dwelling we got into an open court or yard, thence by a turning into the Via di Ripetta, and so to the quay of Ripetta, where my friend the ferryman was drifting quietly in his ark-like covered boat, as though there were no mad world astir within a rood of him.
Here it was quite dusk; winter mists hung on the river; on the opposite bank the alders were blowing in a chill wind; oxen were dragging timber; some peasants were going on their way to the fields of Sant’ Angelo, where the messengers of the senate hailed Cincinnatus, “May it be well with the Republic and with you!”
“Let us go for a walk: it is a long time since I had one,” she said, feverishly, and her voice had a changed sound in it. “Let us go out there into the country.”
“But it is so cold, and nearly dark — —”
“What does that matter?” she said, — for her, almost irritatedly; for I had always seen in her a perfect sweetness and evenness of temper, not only in large things (where it is easy), but in small ones, which is far more difficult.
I was in the habit of always giving in to her. My old friend, the Charon of Ripetta, nothing loath, took us over the silent, dreary, misty water, and we were soon on the other bank, walking against the bitter wind, then tossing the leafless trees, and through the wet meadows of what used to be the old Navalia, where the galleys that took Rome out on the high seas to her conquests used to be laid up high and dry among the rushes and the yellow moly.
She did not speak; she walked straight on, with that swift, fleet, elastic walk which Maryx was wont to say was worthy of Atalanta.
It was very still and ghostly there; the damp curled up like smoke; the enormous masses of the Vatican and of Sant’ Angelo loomed dully through the partial darkness; in the grass of these flat meadows, once the Circus of Nero, frogs and night jars hooted; in the leaden dampness and chilliness one seemed to see the Christian virgins slain after passing through worse than death, as Pasiphaë, as Dirce, as Amyone, one seemed to see the Mercury coming and touching each naked corpse with his red-hot caduceus to test if any lingering life might yet make torture sweet, and, finding any, calling the masked slaves to drag the bodies out by their feet and end them with a mallet, Nero and the pretty painted dames smiling all the while.
“Let us go back,” I said to her. “This place is miserable at night; one seems to see ghostly things; all this earth was soaked through and through with blood. Come away.”
But she did not seem to hear: she was moving through the wet rank grass with her head bare to the wind.
“Is she a good woman or a bad?” she asked, suddenly.
“What woman, my dear?” Here it seemed to me as if one could only think of Poppea, poor, pretty, frail, imperial Poppea, who died by a kick like a street dog.
“The one with him,” she said, simply.
“Oh! — good? bad? those words are strong. Most men, and women too, are best described by neither: they fall betwixt the two. We are not in Nero’s times, when there was Nero, yet there was Paul also. Let us turn back: the night is very cold.”
“Is she good or bad?” she said, with her usual insistance.
“A great dame; a faithless wife; a princess and a jade; a common type of that world of theirs; not worth your thought; you are far off in higher air — —”
“A bad woman, then?”
“My dear, in their world they do not use these words. Were she a taverner’s or carpenter’s wife she would be called bad, no doubt, and her husband would use sharp steel, if only to be no more the laughing-stock of neighbours. But they have other logic in that greater world. With us a jade is a jade; but there their reasonings are more complex, as befits more cultivated folk. Why talk of any such matters? You do not understand the thing that a bad woman is, or high or low.”
“Yes, I understand. But why do men love them?”
“Ah! Let us call up the shades of the Antonines, and question them.”
She was silent.
“They do not always love,” I added. “Sometimes they hate; but that holds them just as well, or even better: men are made so. As for why, ask Hermes, or, as Christians say, the devil.”
She did not answer, but walked on through the wet fields where Cincinnatus had left the plow to serve his city, only that in a few hundred years Caligula and Caracalla might come after him and be masters of the world. Oh, grim derision that callest thyself History! Pondering on the bitterness of thy innumerable ironies, thy endless chronicle of failures, the bravest and the humblest soul might almost “curse God and die.”
The pains that men have been at to make mankind most miserable! and the little that heroism or virtue ever has been able to do to make them happy!
“Why speak of love at all, then?” she said, in a low voice that had scorn in it. “Love is not born so.”
“My dear, of love there is very little in the world. There are many things that take its likeness: fierce unstable passions and poor egotisms of all sorts, vanities too, and many other follies, — Apate and Philotes in a thousand masquerading characters that gain great Love discredit. The loves of men, and women too, my dear, are hardly better very often than Minos’s love for Skylla: you remember how he threw her down from the stern of his vessel when he had made the use of her he wished and she had cut the curls of Nisias. A great love does not of necessity imply a great intelligence, but it must spring out of a great nature, that is certain; and where the heart has spent itself in much base petty commerce, it has no deep treasury of gold on which to draw: it is bankrupt from its very overtrading. A noble passion is very rare, believe me, — as rare as any other very noble thing.”
“Yes, I can believe that.”
Her voice sounded tired and feebler than usual, and her steps grew slower.
“Yet Sospitra was happier,” sh
e added, “dying and having known love, than living loveless with all the knowledge that all the powers of the earth and air could bring to her.”
The accursed poem had sunk into her mind with that force which came from the great truth that it embodied.
“Sospitra is a mere fancy and figure,” I said to her, “and he who wrote it made the world weep with it, no doubt, but never spared a woman for its sake. He is like Phineus, whom Poseidon punished: he has the high gifts of prophecy and of golden wisdom, but two harpies are always with him that breathe on the sweetest and simplest food and taint it when he touches it. His harpies are Satiety and Disbelief.”
“The fresh winds drove the harpies away,” she said, softly,— “drove them away forever into their caverns in Krete.”
“Because Phineus prayed for the winds and the Argonauts. Hilarion does not pray; to him his harpies are welcome.”
She made me no reply; I heard her sigh; she walked on against the wind, baring her head to it with a sort of eagerness and letting it blow in among her hair.
You may walk thence straight on between the hedges and the fields until the road begins to rise, and climb the sloping side of what was once the Clivus Cinnæ: it is lovely there in the spring-time, or later, when all the grass is full of violets, and fritillaria, and the fragrant yellow tulip, and all the darkling blue of the borage tribe, whilst through the boles of the ancient cork-and ilex-trees you look and see the purple gleaming cupola of St. Peter’s lifted against the sky, and the dome of Agrippa, and the Alban hills; but at night the road is dull and dreary, dark, and not very safe.
I was glad when she did not notice that I turned back to cross the river, she not heeding where we went.
I stumbled on, taking a homeward way through the mists and the gloom, while across on the other side of the Tiber one could see the serpent-like curving of the line of light where Carnival was rioting, and some faint bray of trumpets and noise of drums came confusedly to us through the vaporous night. There were pyrotechnic showers of all colors going up into the darkness to please the crowds of Rome: they rose from the square by the tomb of Augustus, where Livia sat by the burning pile for seven nights and seven days disrobed and with her hair loose upon the wind, whilst the freed eagle cleft the air and rose above the flames.