by Ouida
THE SILVER CHRIST
I
Genistrello is a wild place in the Pistoiese hills.
Its name is derived from the genista or broom which covers many an acre of the soil, and shares with the stone pine and the sweet chestnut the scanty earth which covers its granite and sandstone. It is beautiful exceedingly; but its beauty is only seen by those to whom it is a dead letter which they have no eyes to read. It is one of the many spurs of the Apennines which here lie overlapping one another in curve upon curve of wooded slopes with the higher mountains rising behind them; palaces, which once were fortresses, hidden in their valleys, and ruined castles, or deserted monasteries, crowning their crests.
From some of these green hills the sea is visible, and when the sun sets where the sea is and the red evening glows behind the distant peaks, it is lovely as a poet’s dream.
On the side of this lonely hill, known as Genistrello, there dwelt a man of the name of Castruccio Lascarisi. He was called ‘Caris’ by the whole countryside; indeed, scarcely any knew that he had another patronymic, so entirely amongst these people does the nickname extinguish, by its perpetual use, the longer appellative.
His family name was of Greek extraction undoubtedly; learned Greeks made it familiar in the Italian Renaissance, at the courts of Lorenzo and of Ludovico; but how it had travelled to the Pistoiese hills to be borne by unlearned hinds none knew, any more than any know who first made the red tulip blossom as a wild flower amidst the wheat, or who first sowed the bulb of the narcissus amongst the wayside grass.
He lived miles away from the chapel and the hamlet. He had a little cabin in the heart of the chestnut woods, which his forefathers had lived in before him; they had no title which they could have shown for it except usage, but that had been title enough for them, and was enough for Caris.
It had been always so. It would be always so. His ideas went no further. The autumnal migration was as natural and inevitable to him as to the storks and herons and wild duck which used to sail over his head, going southward like himself as he walked through the Tuscan to the Roman Maremma. But his dislike to the Maremma winters was great, and had never changed in him since he had trotted by his father’s side, a curly-pated baby in a little goatskin shirt looking like a Correggio’s St. John.
What he longed for, and what he loved, were the cool heights of Genistrello and the stone hut with the little rivulet of water gushing at its threshold. No one had ever disturbed his people there. It was a square little place built of big unmortared stones in old Etruscan fashion; the smoke from the hearth went out by a hole in the roof, and a shutter and door of unplaned wood closed its only apertures.
The lichen and weeds and mosses had welded the stones together, and climbed up over its conical rush roof. No better home could be needed in summer-time; and when the cold weather came, he locked the door and went down with his pack on his back and a goatshair belt round his loins to take the familiar way to the Roman Maremma.
Caris was six-and-twenty years old; he worked amongst the chestnut woods in summer and went to the Maremma for field labour in the winter, as so many of these husbandmen do; walking the many leagues which separate the provinces, and living hardly in both seasons. The songs they sing are full of allusions to this semi-nomadic life, and the annual migration has been a custom ever since the world was young — when the great Roman fleets anchored where now are sand and marsh, and stately classic villas lifted their marble to the sun where now the only habitation seen is the charcoal-burner’s rush-roofed, moss-lined hut.
Caris was a well-built, lithe, slender son of the soil, brown from sun and wind, with the straight features and the broad low brows of the classic type, and great brown eyes like those of the oxen which he drove over the vast plains down in the Maremma solitudes. He knew nothing except his work.
He was not very wise, and he was wholly unlearned, but he had a love of nature in his breast, and he would sit at the door of his hut at evening time, with his bowl of bean-soup between his knees, and often forget to eat in his absorbed delight as the roseate glow from the vanished sunrays overspread all the slopes of the Pistoiese Apennines and the snow-crowned crests of the Carara mountains.
‘What do you see there, goose?’ said a charcoal-burner, once passing him as he sat thus upon his threshold with the dog at his feet.
Caris shrugged his shoulders stupidly and half-ashamed. He could not read the great book outspread upon the knees of the mountains, yet he imperfectly felt the beauty of its emblazoned pages.
The only furniture in the cabin was a table made of a plank, two rude benches, and one small cupboard; the bed was only dried leaves and moss. There were a pipkin, two platters, and a big iron pot which swung by a cord and a hook over the stones where the fire, when lighted, burned. They were enough; he would not have known what to do with more if he had had more. He was only there from May to October; and in the fragrant summers of Italian chestnut woods, privation is easily borne. The winter life was harder and more hateful; yet it never occurred to him to do else than to go to Maremma; his father and grandfather had always gone thither, and as naturally as the chestnuts ripen and fall, so do the men in autumn join the long lines of shepherds and drovers and women and children and flocks and herds which wind their way down the mountain slopes and across the level wastes of plain and marsh to seek herbage and work for the winter-time.
It never entered the head of Caris, or of the few who knew him or worked with him, to wonder how he and his had come thither. They were there as the chestnut-trees were, as the broom was, as the goats and squirrels and wood-birds were there. The peasant no more wonders about his own existence than a stone does. For generations a Lascaris had lived in that old stone hut which might itself be a relic of an Etruscan tomb or temple. No one was concerned to know further.
The peasant does not look back; he only sees the road to gain his daily meal of bread or chestnuts. The past has no meaning to him, and to the future he never looks. That is the reason why those who want to cultivate or convince him fail utterly. If a man cannot see the horizon itself, it is of no use to point out to him spires or trees or towers which stand out against it.
The world has never understood that the moment the labourer is made to see, he is made unhappy, being ill at ease and morbidly envious and ashamed, and wholly useless. Left alone, he is content in his own ruminant manner, as the buffalo is when left untormented amidst the marshes, grazing at peace and slumbering amidst the rushes and the canes.
Caris was thus content. He had health and strength, though sometimes he had a fever-chill from new-turned soil and sometimes a frost-chill from going out on an empty stomach before the sun had broken the deep shadows of the night. But from these maladies all outdoor labourers suffer, and he was young, and they soon passed. He had been the only son of his mother; and this fact had saved him from conscription. As if she had lived long enough when she had rendered him this service, she died just as he had fulfilled his twenty-third year; and without her the stone hut seemed for awhile lonely; he had to make his fire, and boil or roast his chestnuts, and mend holes in his shirts, and make his own rye loaves; but he soon got used to this, and when in Maremma he always worked with a gang, and was fed and lodged — badly, indeed, but regularly — at the huge stone burn which served such purposes on the vast tenuta where the long lines of husbandmen toiled from dusk of dawn to dusk of eve under the eye and lash of their overseer; and when on his native slopes of Genistrello he was always welcome to join the charcoal-burners’ rough company or the woodsmen’s scanty supper, and seldom passed, or had need to pass, his leisure hours alone. And these were very few.
His mother had been a violent-tempered woman, ruling him with a rod of iron, as she had ruled her husband before him; a woman loud of tongue, stern of temper, dreaded for miles around as a witch and an evil-eye; and although the silence and solitude which reigned in the cabin after her death oppressed him painfully at first, he soon grew used to these, and found the co
mfort of them. He brought a dog with him after his winter in Maremma which followed on his mother’s loss — a white dog of the Maremma breed, and he and the dog kept house together in the lonely woods in fellowship and peace. Caris was gentle and could never beat or kick a beast as others of his kind do; and the oxen he drove knew this. He felt more akin to them and to the dogs than he did to the men with whom he worked. He could not have expressed or explained this, but he felt it.
He had little mind, and what he had moved slowly when it moved at all; but he had a generous nature, a loyal soul, and a simple and manly enjoyment of his hard life. It did not seem hard to him. He had run about on his bare feet all his childhood until their soles were as hard as leather, and he was so used to his daily meal of chestnuts in cold weather, and of maize or rye-bread with cabbage, or bean-soup, in the hot season, that he never thought of either as meagre fare. In summer he wore rough hempen shirt and trousers; in winter goatskin and rough homespun wool. In appearance, in habits, in clothing, in occupation, he differed little from the peasant who was on that hillside in the times of Pliny and of Properticus. Only the gods were changed; Pan piped no more in the thicket, the Naiad laughed no longer in the brook, the Nymph and Satyr frolicked never beneath the fronds of the ferns.
In their stead there was only a little gaudy chapel on a stony slope, and a greasy, double-chinned, yellow-cheeked man in black, who frowned if you did not give him your hardly-earned pence, and lick the uneven bricks of the chapel floor when he ordered you a penance.
Caris cared little for that man’s frown.
He sat thus at his door one evening when the sun was setting behind the many peaks and domes of the Apennine spurs which fronted him. The sun itself had sunk beyond them half an hour before, but the red glow which comes and stays long after it was in the heavens and on the hills.
Genistrello was a solitary place, and only here and there a hut or cot like his own was hidden away under the saplings and undergrowth. Far away down in the valley were the belfries and towers of the little strong-walled city which had been so often as a lion in the path to the invading hosts of Germany; and like a narrow white cord the post-road, now so rarely used, wound in and out until its slender thread was lost in the blue vapours of the distance, and the shadows from the clouds.
Bells were tolling from all the little spires and towers on the hills and in the valleys, for it was a vigil, and there was the nearer tinkle of the goats’ bells under the heather and broom as those innocent marauders cropped their supper off the tender chestnut-shoots, the trails of ground ivy, and the curling woodbine. Caris, with his bowl of bean-soup between his knees and his hunch of rye-bread in his hand, ate hungrily, whilst his eyes filled themselves with the beauty of the landscape. His stomach was empty — which he knew, and his soul was empty — which he did not know.
He looked up, and saw a young woman standing in front of him. She was handsome, with big, bright eyes, and a rosy mouth, and dusky glossy hair coiled up on her head like a Greek Venus.
He had never seen her before, and her sudden apparition there startled him.
‘Good-even, Caris,’ she said familiarly, with a smile like a burst of sunlight. ‘Is the mother indoors, eh?’
Caris continued to stare at her.
‘Eh, are you deaf?’ she asked impatiently. ‘Is the mother in, I want to know?’
‘My mother is dead,’ said Caris, without preamble.
‘Dead! When did she die?’
‘Half a year ago,’ said Caris, with the peasant’s confusion of dates and elongation of time.
‘That is impossible,’ said the young woman quickly. ‘I saw her myself and spoke with her here on this very spot in Easter week. What makes you say she is dead?’
‘Because she is dead!’ said Caris doggedly. ‘If you do not believe it, go and ask the sacristan and sexton over there.’
He made a gesture of his head towards the belfry of an old hoary church, dedicated to St. Fulvo, which was seven miles away amongst the chestnut woods of an opposing hillside, and where his mother had been buried by her wish, because it was her birthplace.
The girl this time believed him. She was dumb for a little while with astonishment and regret. Then she said, in a tone of awe and expectation, ‘She left her learning and power with you, eh? — and the books?’
‘No,’ said Caris rudely. ‘I had all the uncanny things buried with her. What use were they? She lived and died with scarce a shift to her back.’
‘Oh!’ said the girl, in a shocked tone, as though she reproved a blasphemy. ‘She was a wonderful woman, Caris.’
Caris laughed a little.
‘Eh, you say so. Well, all her wisdom never put bit nor drop in her mouth nor a copper piece in her hand that I did not work for; what use was it, pray?’
‘Hush. Don’t speak so!’ said the maiden, looking timidly over her shoulder to the undergrowth and coppice growing dim in the shadows of the evening.
’Tis the truth!’ said Caris stubbornly. ‘I did my duty by her, poor soul; and yet I fear me the Evil One waited for her all the while, for as soon as the rattle came in her throat, a white owl flapped and screeched on the thatch, and a black cat had sat on the stones yonder ever since the sun had set.’
‘The saints preserve us!’ murmured the girl, her rich brown and red skin growing pale.
There was silence; Caris finished munching his bread; he looked now and then at his visitor with open-eyed surprise and mute expectation.
‘You have buried the things with her?’ she asked him, in a low tone, at length.
He nodded in assent.
‘What a pity! What a pity!’
‘Why that?’
‘Because if they are underground with her nobody can use them.’
Caris stared with his eyes wider opened still.
‘What do you want with the devil’s tools, a fresh, fair young thing like you?’
‘Your mother used them for me,’ she answered crossly. ‘And she had told me a number of things — ay, a vast number! And just in the middle uncle spied us out, and he swore at her and dragged me away, and I had never a chance to get back here till to-night, and now — now you say she is dead, and she will never tell me aught any more.’
‘What can you want so sore to know?’ said Caris, with wonder, as he rose to his feet.
‘That is my business,’ said the girl.
‘True, so it is,’ said Caris.
But he looked at her with wonder in his dark-brown, ox-like eyes.
‘Where do you live?’ he asked; ‘and how knew you my name?’
‘Everybody knows your name,’ she answered. ‘You are Caris, the son of Lisabetta, and when you sit on your doorstep it would be a fool indeed would not see who you are.’
‘So it would,’ said Caris. ‘But you,’ he added after a pause, ‘who are you? And what did you want with Black Magic?’
‘I am Santina, the daughter of Neri, the smith, by the west gate in Pistoia,’ she said in reply to the first question, and making none to the second.
‘But what wanted you of my mother?’ he persisted.
‘They said she knew strange things,’ said the girl evasively.
‘If she did she had little profit of them,’ said Caris sadly.
The girl looked at him with great persuasiveness in her face, and leaned a little nearer to him.
‘You did not really bury the charms with her? You have got them inside? You will let me see them, eh?’
‘As the saints live, I buried them,’ said Caris truthfully; ‘they were rubbish, or worse; accursed maybe. They are safe down in the ground till the Last Day. What can such a bright wench as yourself want with such queer, unhallowed notions?’
The girl Santina glanced over her shoulders to make sure that no one was listening; then she said in a whisper:
‘There is the Gobbo’s treasure in these woods somewhere — and Lisabetta had the wand that finds gold and silver.’
Caris burst into a loud laug
h.
‘Ah, truly! That is a good jest. If she could find gold and silver, why did we always have iron spoons for our soup, and a gnawing imp in our stomachs? Go to, my maiden. Do not tell such tales. Lisabetta was a poor and hungry woman all her days, and scarce left enough linen to lay her out in decently, so help me Heaven!’
The girl shook her head.
‘You know there is the treasure in the woods,’ she said angrily.
‘Nay, I never heard of it. Oh, the Gobbo’s? Che-che! For hundreds of years they have grubbed for it all over the woods, and who ever found anything, eh?’
‘Your mother was very nigh it often and often. She told me.’
‘In her dreams, poor soul!’
‘But dreams mean a great deal.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Caris seriously. ‘But what is it to you?’ he added, the suspicion always inherent to the peasant struggling with his admiration of the girl, who, unbidden, had seated herself upon the stone before the door. With feminine instinct she felt that to make him do what she wished, she must confide in him, or appear to confide.
And thereon she told him that unless she could save herself, her family would wed her to a wealthy old curmudgeon who was a cart-maker in the town; and to escape this fate she had interrogated the stars by means of the dead Lisabetta and of the astrologer Faraone, who dwelt also in the hills, but this latter reader of destiny would tell her nothing, because he was a friend of her father’s, and now the witch of Genistrello was dead and had left her fate but half told!
‘What did she tell you?’ said Caris, wincing at the word witch.
‘Only that I should go over the mountains to some city and grow rich. But it was all dark — obscure — uncertain; she said she would know more next time; and how could I tell that before I came again she would have died?’
‘You could not tell that, no,’ said Caris absently.
He was thinking of the elderly well-to-do wheelwright in the town, and he felt that he would have liked to brain him with one of his own wooden spokes or iron linchpins. For the girl Santina was very beautiful as she sat there with her large eyes shining in the shadows and the tears of chagrin and disappointment stealing down her cheeks. For her faith in her charms and cards had been great, and in her bosom there smouldered desires and ideas of which she did not speak.