by Ouida
They were sweethearts in an innocent calm fashion; they had neither of them anything in the world, but that did not trouble them; Carmelo could always work at his father’s mill, and Viola had no fear of poverty. The spouse of St. Francis had always been her guest, and was no terror for her.
Men and maidens marry improvidently enough in this country, but most of them are happy in their marriages, and the children tumble up, round and blithe as little rabbits, and all goes well; or does go well, till the shadow of the Law falls like the shadow of death across the sunny thresholds.
These two were not to marry yet awhile, nay, they had scarcely spoken of it; the courtship was timid and reverent on Carmelo’s part, rather than impassioned, for Viola had a saint’s look about her, and saintly thoughts and ways, and old Pippo was a man not to be gainsayed in his own household, and he had said, ‘adagiò, adagiò,’ meaning that they were young and there was no great hurry. Demetrio Pastorini, the father, said the same, and so their lives went gently on in a sweet pastoral that was happier, and less troubled, than even triumphant passion.
This evening, however, in the twilight Carmelo waxed bolder.
‘Why should we not marry as the others do!’ he whispered, and Viola smiled ever so little, and old Pippo spoilt it all by waking up suddenly, and shouting: ‘Not cut the osiers in the Rosa? Everybody’s always cut them, for twice then thousand years. Who’s that new meddlesome fool with his rules and his rates and his rubbish?’
‘Hush,grandfather!’ said Viola, timidly, for she remembered the death of old Nanni, and from their window she could see across the river on to the piazza, and the desolate place where the fountain had been, and also could see Messer Gaspardo Nellemane playing dominoes on his green iron chair before the caffè with thin Tonino losing to him, and fat Maso looking on at the game. Messer Nellemane across the river also could see her; and when Carmelo had been sent away at eight o’clock, and they had eaten their bit of supper, and she had lighted a lamp for her grandfather to have a glimmer by which to finish a reed‐bottomed chair wanted by the priest on the morrow, he could see still the better the bent brown head of the girl, and studied it critically, as a virtuoso might have studied a canvas of candlelight effect of Ostade or Van Steen. It was almost as beguiling and delightful to him as the guard Bindo’s list of misdeeds and misadventures.
Viola was beyond dispute the loveliest girl in the place. Those onyx‐coloured eyes, those dreamy lids, those curved red lips, those elastic and symmetrical limbs, would have made her a beauty anywhere at a court or in a studio, and had enough of physical exuberance, combined with maiden‐ like simplicity, to touch the inmost heart of a man who would, with all his will, have been a voluptuary had it not cost so much, and had he not loved his place still better than his passions. Still there was no harm in looking at her, he thought; and look he did, until her grandfather’s piece of plaiting being done she put her light out, closed the shutter, and left only a little dark stone house facing the great man of the commune.
Then Messer Nellemane flung the end of his cigar away with a lordly air, pushed back his iron chair, and strolled homeward.
‘One could marry her to Bindo,’ thought this very prudent person, as he walked away through the white moonlight past the glancing Rosa water.
CHAPTER III.
THE next day was the last day of April, and in the remote villages above which the Apennines brood, as in those upon the mountains themselves, there still prevails the old gracious fashion of the Calen di Maggio : the ‘bringing in the May,’ as England called it when it was merry England, and not money‐grubbing and machine‐ground England, with its hedgerow timber felled, and its songbirds starved and mute.
In the cities and in the little towns the old custom has quite passed away, and even in many villages the wedding‐night of April nd May goes by without remembrance or celebration. But in the simpler and more remote country places ‘Ben venga Maggio’ is still said as Guido Calvacanti said it, and the time is one of harmless feasting and of tender song. In Santa Rosalia it still lingered thus, and on the memorable night the lads of the borgo went along the Rosa banks and out amongst the fields from house to house, bearing the May, and called themselves the Maggiaioli; singing the ancient song: Or è di Maggio e fiorito è il limone, Noi salutiamo di casa il padrone, Or è di Maggio e gli è fiorito i rami, Salutiam le ragazze co’suoi dami. Or è di Maggio che fiorito è di fiori, Salutiam le ragazze co’suoi amori.
Lo! Now the lemons are all in flower in May, Come too are we; we give the house and host good‐day. Now is the month of May, with blossoms on the boughs; We salute the maidens, salute their lovers’ vows. Here is all the Maying, bud, and fruit, and flower, We salute the maidens, their love and all its power!
This year Carmelo carried the May, a green sapling hung with flowers and lemons, and his next brother, Cesarellino (little Cæsar), bore the traditional basket of nosegays to throw to the maidens. Other youngsters were with them, with red and yellow tulips in their hats, and gay‐coloured shirts, and mandolines slung on their shoulders, and they went from door to door with their salutation and song, and in turn received wine and cakes garnished with red ribbons, and now and then money, which, making the sign of the cross, they put aside to be spent in prayers for the poor souls in purgatory.
Messer Nellemane, as he sat in the window of his room in the communal palace, saw the group of youths as they came along by the water, and he recognised the face of Carmelo, as the young man bore aloft the lemon‐hung tree and shouted with a fresh and mellow voice the Or è di Maggio che fiorito è di fiori and stopped before the little Casa della Madonna, where they tossed their flowers through the open window, and Viola, smiling, brought them out the sweet cakes. The brow of the spectator of this innocent pastime grew dark.
‘What pagan folly!’ he muttered as he saw. ‘What childishness and benightedness in this age of reason!’
Surely it need not be allowed?
It could be put down under the head of disturbance, or unauthorised festival, or public meeting without permission of the council.
The law has smitten almost all these innocent revellers to the dust; carnival is scarce more than a name; on Ognissanti indecent crowds push laughing and jostling over the dead; the Feast of St. John is suppressed, and replaced by the Feast of the Statute, and almost every procession of the Church is smothered by a dirty, jesting, brawling mob, impatient for fireworks and drink.
Messer Nellemane impatiently consulted his law‐books and his own code, and found at least fifty‐five different rules and regulations, any one of which would serve, and suffice to break down the leafy crown of the offending Maio.
Until ten o’clock of the night the peace of his evening was disturbed by the chanting of the old serenade, no near, now far, the vibration of the guitar, the sounds of laughter, the unpleasant knowledge that people were enjoying themselves without having applied for and paid for legal permission.
‘Next year!’ he muttered vengefully, as the singing died away and the village grew dark with night and slumber. Carmelo went to his bed drowsy and happy, with the Maio tree set up outside the mill‐door in the starlight.
On the morrow was the weekly council of the Seven presided over by the One; and as Messer Nellemane was the mainspring and central lever, the brains and the heart and the nerves of this council‐chamber, he was too much engrossed to give a thought to the little house with the china Madonna.
He had to exercise great tact at these meetings, for he was only a secretary, and was only supposed to take notes and read reports. But with an air of extreme deference and unimpeachable modesty he knew how to make his views adopted, and how in the presence of the Syndic to prompt him, and in his absence to replace him. Ostensibly the famous rules for the Polizia Igiena e Edilità of Santa Rosalia were a product of the minds of the Thirty, filtered through the Seven, and delivered as pure essence by the One, to the Prefect of the province, and ratified by him and by the Minister of the Interior. Bu
t actually these laws had all flowed from that fount of wisdom, the mind of Messer Nellemane. He had spent laborious days and wakeful nights in the gestation and production of them; they had cost him months of anxious thought; for when your problem is how to wring pence out of penniless pockets it requires meditation and deliberation; and Messer Nellemane being anxious not to leave a loophole unwatched by the law, passed as many vexed and studious hours as a mathematician or a physiologist. When accomplished, he had to see his work accredited as that of his masters: but this he bore patiently, knowing that most of the fruits of it would be his.
This day the council was long.
The Guinta consisted of two nobles, of two small gentry, of one lawyer, one doctor, and one usurer, the latter a rich person who had purchased a house on the Pomodoro road outside Santa Rosalia, one by name Simone Zauli. This day the usurer, who in power outweighed all his six colleagues, as he had the notes‐of‐hand or the mortgages of each of them in his pocket, was absent. In his stead the nobles were angry about the state of the roads and had come in person to the meeting, a thing they did not do once in a twelvemonth. Their horses were hurt and their bodies were shaken by the state of the roads, and they appeared at the council irascible. It cost Messer Nelle‐ mane a whole morning of invention and adulation to appease them and bring them back to their old belief that his friend Pierino Zaffi was the first engineer in the world.
Having succeeded at last in doing this by great ingenuity and infinite lying, the meeting broke up: the Cavaliere Durellazzo said ‘Va bene, va benissimo,’ which he always did, as if he were a cockatoo; and Messer Gaspardo Nellemane had far too many minutes to make, and entries to write, and letters to dispatch, to have any thought of Viola or Carmelo.
But the next morning he was free, and excused himself even from his habitual noon‐day attendance at the Palazzo Communale by alleging an errand to the city; under pretext of which he had himself shaved, oiled, and curled by the barber, and then, dressed in his best, wended his way to Pippo’s house, having seen old Pippo wending his to the priest’s with the rush chair.
The door stood open and he entered with a polite ‘Scusi, signorina mia.’
Viola was washing lettuces and herbs.
Of course she was a poor, unlettered, and almost ragged girl, but she had beautiful arms which were shown by her rolled‐up sleeves; she had a beautiful bust which her kerchief, loosely pinned, adorned; she had a lovely face with a great cloud of raven hair; and even thus, seen at a tub with her lettuces, a painter would have fallen at her feet, and perhaps some great princes would too.
She coloured all over her face beholding Messer Gaspardo Nellemane, dressed like a marquis, curled, perfumed, and gloved.
‘Scusi tanto, signorina mia,’ he said again, and wished her a good‐day with many fine phrases. Viola laid down her lettuces, and pushed him a chair and stood before him, very shy, timid, and afraid.
‘I called to speak to your father,’ said Messer Nellemane, rejecting the chair with many flourishes. ‘I wished to explain to him that this cutting of osiers in the river—’
‘Ah!’ said Viola, with a gasp; and she grew very pale, and her great eyes were like a frightened doe’s. Her visitor hastened gallantly to explain farther; and added:
‘Is in direct violation of our civic laws. But I came to say the Messer Filippo being so old a resident, and, having heard that his forefathers, as he said, always enjoyed that privilege, I think a point may be stretched in his favour and exception. I myself will see the Syndic on the matter, and — well, ahem! I will see that he is not troubled about this thing; indeed I will give him a permission myself if he will call for it, free of charge, any day at noon in the municipality.’
Viola murmured something quite unintelligible: but her eyes thanked the gracious tyrant who promised to spare her humble home, and he thought himself repaid. She was mute, indeed, and shy, even to stupidity; but Messer Nellemane was not ill‐pleased at that; he deemed it a tribute of simplicity to his own greatness and attractions; and his bold, bright, black eyes, round like a bird’s fastened on her with such ardour that the maiden felt bewildered, and wished vaguely that her grandfather were at home.
Messer Nellemane, however, was in no haste to be gone; leaning on the back of the chair that he refused otherwise to occupy, he wove grandiloquent phrases and sugared flatteries into a medley such as had never astounded the ear of this simple maiden, and confused her sadly.
Carmelo never talked like that; and Viola saw with surprise, and a vague apprehension, that her guest had shut the door behind him on his entrance.
Messer Nellemane, nevertheless, did not quite declare his passion, but he paid her compliments that made her cheeks glow like a damask rose, and set her brain spinning; his hand touched hers, and pressed it and he murmured, with his moustache brushing her wrist:
‘Fear nothing for your grandfather, carina. With such a face as yours you would get him grace for far heavier transgressions than robbing the river of its reeds.’
At that moment a dog dashed in chasing the pig; the pig frightened the hen; the hen flew into the flour‐bin; and Messer Nellemane’s eloquence and courtship came to an undignified end, as Viola, grateful for the interruption, hurried to the harried sow, and drove it to its quarters in an inner closet. Messer Nellemane looked on with a troubled brow. A pig in a dwelling‐house! It was Contravention of Art. 3 of Rule CCCL. of the Regulations!
The author of the rules for the Polizia Igiena, e Edilità of the commune could not fail to feel every fibre of his being morally offended and set up on edge like a porcupine’s quills, and yet — he was in love. He bent hurriedly before Viola and the pig, and left the house in the confusion of public duty met and routed by personal inclination.
‘If it were not for her — good heavens! they transgress every law!’ he thought, as he put on his hat and walked to where the diligence waited, and, entering the shaky vehicle, rolled through the sea of olive foliage along the narrow roads towards the city which lay afar off in the sunshine, against the opal and pearl of the morning skies; its domes and towers gleaming in the golden mist like a New Jerusalem.
When Pippo returned, his granddaughter told him of the visit. With the suspiciousness that is so oddly rafted into these easily pleased and docile natures, Pippo stared and swore a little and scratched is head, and said, ‘What can he be a’wanting?’
Viola turned away because she felt her cheeks were hot; be a maiden ever so innocent, she feels the approach of a coarse passion, and trembles at it though unconsciously.
‘Leave to cut the reeds? Give me leave?’ cried the old man with great contempt. ‘Lord! they’ll talk of leave to let the grass grow, leave to let one’s lungs breathe — leave to see, and speak, and cough, and laugh next! Lord! The whole world’s crazed.’
Viola set his soup before him; hot water with bread in it, some garlic, and a little parsley.
‘Will they let us drink our soup, I wonder?’ grumbled the old man. ‘Shall we have to pay a tax for that next? Don’t you let that prying jack‐in‐office come spying here again. The saints above us! In my young days he’d have been knifed before he could have turned the place into a nest of wasps and snakes like this. Leave to cut the osiers! You’ll have to ask leave to wear your own hair next!’
And he scalded himself with his broth in his haste and his wrath.
Viola went away inside their little back kitchen and cried a little, with a vague dread and pain upon her. She could not forget the bold admiration of Messer Gaspardo’s black eyes, and she was afraid.
She did not say anything of her fears to her grandfather, nor to the young man Carmelo; she was of a reticent, prudent, serene nature, and she thought it could do no good to tell anyone, but might produce danger and dissension.
Meanwhile her old grandfather, having scalded himself with his soup, cooled himself with a draught of watered wine, acid as vinegar, and, after giving himself his wonted midday sleep, went outside, taking some rushes to pl
ait, and sat on the threshold with his chair on the pavement, disregardless of the municipal rules and the fate of law‐breaking Nanni.
It was a lovely afternoon, and waned into a lovely evening in the village; the swallows were coming home, the shadows were lengthening, the sweet smell of the rosemary and the vine flowers was fresh on the wind. The people had ceased working, and stood and leaned against their doors, or out of their windows, and gossiped; all was as peaceful as a pastoral: only along the sunny dust a dark shadow went, and the people looked askance at it, and it took all mirth out of the jests, drove all tranquility from the hearts; it was the shadow of the oppressor rusticorum; it was the figure of Bindo the guard, walking to and fro with a carabinier and looking for contraventions.
To the rich it may seem nothing: this going of the guard to and fro, this system of inquisition and condemnation that comes up with the sun and never ceases with the fall of the merciful night. To the rich it is nothing; it scarcely ever touches them: they live behind their own gates, and if ever they are fined send their lawyers to pay the fine. But to the poor — with their threshold, their cradle, and their club, with their dogs and their babies tumbling together on the pavement, with their hard‐gathered gains hidden under a brick or in a stocking, with all their innocent bewildered ignorance of the powers of the law, with all their timid patient helplessness under oppression, with all their unquestioning submission to great wrong in fear lest resistance should bring them wrongs still greater — to the poor this figure of the poice‐spy for ever in their midst, observing their coming and going, seizing on every industry and pittance, watching the lighting of their candles, the gambols of their children, the usage of their tools, the frolics of their dogs, the trailing of their house‐creepers, all to one single end and object— ‘Contravention’ — to the poor I say this figure of the tyrant of the tribunal darkens the light of the sun in this our Italy, hushes the laughter of the home and fills the leisure moment of the toilsome day with a weariness and carking care never to be thrown aside. The rich make these petty laws, and the parasites of the public offices carry them out; they are as thorns in flesh already bruised; they are as the gadflies’ bite in wounds already open. In vain do the poor suffer these things: no one cares.