by Ouida
“I came very far to see one who is innocent.”
“Innocent? What does that matter? Anybody who is in there is condemned. That is what matters.”
“But I have got his knife.”
“You had best not say so. Knives are forbidden.”
Then he went on sweeping his leaves. She lingered on the piazza as long as daylight lasted; then some one ordered her to go away, and she went down the rock stairs, and found a place of lodging, in the little town below.
By this time she had sold her armlets and her coral, and had only a pittance left; but she was buoyed up by the hope that she would see Rizzardo, soon or late. The next day, and the next, and the next she went up on to the rock and tried to ask and hear something, but she was only answered roughly, and began to be looked on with suspicion. The piazza was open to the public during the hours of daylight, but a poor person who loiters about, and seems to have no real business or errand, is, in these timorous times, always regarded with doubt or worse.
The old sweeper took fright at her, and was not to be persuaded into more speech. She might, he thought, get him into trouble.
But she was so quiet, so sad, so patient, that none could find any excuse actually to forbid her to come up thither; and on the fifth day she had better fortune. A little child between two and three years old had climbed along the stairs on hands and knees, and had reached out too far to pluck some late yellow snap-dragon which tempted his childish fancy, He hung by his woollen skirt on a projecting iron clamp in the rock, and screamed for his mother. But before any one else had seen the danger, Letta reached him, and clutched him, and carried the little terrified creature, in her arms, on to the solid ground above. The mother embraced, the people present praised, the infant clung to and kissed her.
“She is a stranger, but she is good,” they said; and the mother, weeping, cried:
“Anything I can do! Anything!”
Then, hesitating, Letta said:
“There is one Rizzardo Lazzare confined in there. Could you get me speech with him? I have got his knife, and it was stolen from him at the fair, as he declared, and so he never could have done what they said be did!”
“There are no men in there,” murmured the child’s mother. “There are only numbers. What was his crime?”
“He is Rizzardo Lazzare,” repeated Letta; “and he must be in there, because the Vicar himself wrote down the name of this place. Look! They said he killed a man. But he cannot have done so, because his knife was stolen. Here it is.”
The woman took the crumpled piece of notepaper, and saw that the titles of the town and of the Mastia were indeed written on it in a clerkly hand.
“Yes; it is here,” she said. “But myself I know nothing, and they lose their names; they become numbers, they count for nothing any more. But you saved my child. I will do what I can. I know one of the warders. Come home with me and break your fast. Poor soul, you look starved and worn out.”
“Surely they would let me see him if they knew I brought his knife?”
“Eh, no one sees them. They are men no more,” answered the woman. “But I will do what I can. Come and break your fast.”
“I want nothing,” said Letta. “I only want to see Rizzardo, because now we know he told the truth.”
“And he is in yonder for murder?”
“For stabbing Fulvio Nestio; yes. But I said he did not do it, and he did not.”
“It is no use to come here for that. You must begin with men of law, and what not. If he has been wrongfully sentenced perhaps something may be done, but it will be hard, hard, hard—”
I have got the knife, and it was a pedlar who robbed him, who could not die easy without telling us.”
“That is all no more use than these weeds,” said the child’s mother, shaking the little yellow flowers still held in the baby’s rosy fist; but I may get you some news of him through the warders, for my man works here sometimes: he is a plumber.”
“Our Lady and the Saints be with you,” said Letta.
Three days passed, and the woman had nothing to tell her, but she made up a mattress in her house in the town, and would have Letta sleep under her roof, seeing how poor and miserable the stranger was, and how friendless she seemed, and how lost in this northern province.
Every day Letta went up on to the piazza with the great gaunt fortress round its three sides, and on the fourth side the Pennine Alps, shining silver white in the daylight.
“Can the prisoners see those mountains?” she asked her friend.
“Lord, they see no more of aught than toads see under stones!” said the woman.
Letta shuddered.
She seemed to feel that great fortress lean over, and on to her, like a huge black bird. She sat on the parapet of the wall and made a grass wreath for the little child and thought of Rizzardo, so near her on the other side of those walls, and yet so far away. What was the use of keeping him shut up there? Even if he had been guilty, of what use would it have been? And he was not guilty. She slipped her hand inside her shift and felt for the old horn knife.
On the fifth day the child’s mother came to her and said, “I have seen the warder, the one I know; he will be in the church below at three o’clock. He does not care to be seen, for they ought not to speak of the prisoners. But he will tell you what he knows.”
The church immediately below the rock was a dark, gaunt place, of the same date as the fortress; it was rarely visited, though Mass was celebrated there and vespers, and Dominican Fathers officiated.
It was dark as night when Letta entered it, and let the ponderous black leathern curtain fall behind her. A strong, lean, close-shaven man was waiting for her near the entrance. He was one of the guards of the cells; it was a rare hour of leisure, and he grudged it. He kept his hand on a revolver which was invisible under his cloak.
“Rizzardo?” said Letta with a gasp, and she dropped down on her knees on the stones before this man, who seemed to her omnipotent as God. “Rizzardo Lazzare? Oh tell me, sir, tell me for mercy’s sake!”
“He stabbed a comrade as they came home from a fair, and got twenty-one years?”
“No! he had no knife! Listen, oh listen — —”
She writhed in agony at his feet.
“It does not matter whether he had, or had not,” said the warder. “I am sorry for you, but the man is dead; he died more than twelve months ago, of fever and dysentery. But he was imbecile some time before that. He got stupid in the solitary cell. The family must have been informed. Are you not one of the family?”
Letta was mute.
“Do you not understand?” said the man.
The little child’s mother laid her hands on the kneeling figure, and tried to drag her up from the stones.
“Do you not understand?”
Then the warder added: —
“Notice of the decease must have been sent in its due course.”
Letta was still silent.
She had never thought of the possibility of death.
She put out her hand, and caught the other woman’s skirt.
“Ask him — the grave — let me go there.”
“There is no grave,” said the warder, with impatience. “The surgeon here had the brain; the body was put in the ditch with quick-lime. Good day to you.”
Then he touched his cap and went with a martial step, which rang loudly on the stone pavement, out of the aisle of the church.
Letta swayed to and fro twice or thrice where she knelt, then fell face downwards, the horn knife bruising her breast.
One evening, as the red sun of early winter was going down behind the hills, she returned home, a toil-worn, discoloured, stooping, slow-moving figure, which the dog was the first to recognize.
The old man had come in at that moment with a load of faggots just cut in the woods. He dropped them, and screamed: “Wife, wife! Here’s Letta at last, or ’tis her ghost!”
Then together they both ran to her, and clutched her, and shook her to make su
re she was real.
“Rizzo, Rizzo!” they shrieked. “Have you seen him? How is he? What did he say? Did the gaolers believe? Will they let him out?”
Letta put them aside, and dropped down on the bench outside the house, and covered her face with her hands, which the dog fondled.
“He is dead,” she said in a low tone.
“He died more than a year ago — and he has no grave.”
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A Little Thief
It was a warm night in February; there was the scent of narcissus and violets already on the air, and the Arno was silvered by the light of a full moon as it flowed under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio.
A small boy was leaning over the parapet and gazing at the water when he ought to have been in bed. But his bed was only a bit of sacking, with some dead maize leaves underneath it; and he liked better the radiant moonlight, and the movements of the fresh, clear, pungent night air. It was past midnight by an hour, and except a few carriages, there was little traffic on the northern quay, where he stood wishing and dreaming in a vague, half-unconscious way, for he was a child who had once been happy. That time seemed far away.
His father’s name had been a fine and ancient one, but he was only called Lillino. His parents were dead; he had only an old great-grandmother, bedridden in the one room in Oltrarno, where he lived with her. He kept her and himself by selling matches, and he was as thin as a match himself, but he was a pretty boy, with his great brown eyes and his loose auburn curls, and such a wistful, pleading smile, that hardly any girl or woman passed him without buying, and no dog without a kindly dab of the tongue.
He was not like the town monello, who trades and traffics, and begs, and teases, and skips and shouts, in the Italian streets. He was always shy and silent, and shrank from his noisy fellow vendors, and never said a word to those who bought of him, hut only lifted his heavy, long-lashed eyelids and, if the gaze which met his in return was a kind one, smiled.
His boisterous companions jeered, and joked, and nicknamed him “the signorino;” but even they were not very rough with him. There was something in him which checked their tongues and tied their hands, a subtle difference which impressed respect on their rude tempers. One of them called him “Il bimbo Gesù.”
His mother had died at his birth, and his father had shot himself after losing all he possessed at a gambling club; the offspring of a secret love intrigue, the child had been left to his foster-mother, a good woman, who cultivated a little farm on the hills above the Val d’Ema.
She and her spouse maintained him for seven years; then the husband deserted her and emigrated, and a year later she was killed by the steam tram near the Gelsomino, and there was only her old mother left, the aged creature whom he called his “Nonna.”
She was turned out of their little farm, and, clinging to the child, and the child to her, they had come down into the city to live; she mended silken and woollen hose, and he sold matches.
It was only in this last year, his tenth year, that the veins of her legs swelled so much that they kept her bedridden, and her sight failed her also, and the matches became their only support. One by one all their little objects that his Nonna had brought with her into the town were sold, and there remained nothing but the ragged clothes which covered them both, and a few miserable necessary things. They would have died of hunger and of cold but for the charity of those who were not much better off than themselves, and for the occasional alms which ladies, passing in the streets, arrested by the pathetic beauty of Lillino’s face, put into his small thin hand. This was not begging, for every one took a box of matches, knowing that if they did not they would cause him trouble with the police, for in theory begging is forbidden. Lillino’s body was in the streets, but his soul was in the country. It was three years since he had seen it, but he had never ceased to think of it.
“Let us go hack, Nonna. Let us go hack,” he said continually. But the poor old bedridden woman could only cry feebly, and answer:
“Oh, my dearie, who would take us there? Who would keep us when we got there? We are here, and here we must abide. Perhaps if the saints would kill me outright somebody would be kinder to you and carry you out of this cruel place — all, all stones and noise and clatter, and full of food and drink for those whose bellies are full already, and never a bit or drop for those who starve in it.”
“Do not die, Nonna,” said Lillino, clasping his arms about her. “Do not die and go away into the earth. Pray, pray, do not. I have only you.”
“My poor little one, and what good am I?” she murmured, laying her hand in blessing on his head. “An old log, not even good for burning, for I have no sap left in me. Alas! alas!”
But she was all he had to care for, this bundle of rags under her rugged coverlet, and he had known her all his life; she had been always exceedingly good to him, and in that time, though already aged, had been a strong and hearty woman; and his earliest memories had been of merrily running beside her, with his hand on her skirt, to gather water-cresses in the ditches, or drive the ducks to the rivulet, or gather olives, chestnuts, blackberries, wood-strawberries, or do any one of those other lighter labours which occupy the old people and the young children in the fields and woods, and make everybody useful from three years old to ninety.
Now Nonna was of use no more, and Lillino tried with all his might to do his utmost to be of use enough for two. He never doubted that he belonged to her, or rather he never, thought about it; he had always seen her near him, and he had always heard Mamma Rosa, whom he had been taught to believe was his mother, call her grandmother. No one had ever told him that he had patrician blood in his veins. Mamma Rosa had always intended to tell him the story of his parentage when he grew older, but death had come to her in crushing suddenness, grinding her spine under the accursed iron wheels, and, like so many others of her class, she had not set her house in order whilst yet there had been time.
And if he had known of his birth it would have made but little difference to him in his helpless childhood; he would not have been less poor, less hungry, less friendless, and a certain pride and virility which were underneath his feeble ignorance and impotence would have kept him from seeking out those by whom he had been disowned and abandoned.
This poor old creature, scarcely alive, except in the warmth of her affections and the pains of her limbs, was all he had on earth, and he clung to her with the tenacity of a tender and timid nature! And his idea was that if only he could get Nonna back to the country she would become well and strong once more, and able to walk out in those green places and amongst those grassy streamlets which neither she nor he had ever forgotten.
“I am sure she would get well,” he thought, as he leaned over the stone parapet and watched the river glide away under the moon.
But how to carry her there? She was like a log, as she said, with limbs which were wholly useless, without power to move any part of her except her lips, dependent on her neighbours for every bit and drop. Nothing but a miracle could ever raise her again on her feet; but Lillino believed in miracles, or, more truly speaking, miracles seemed natural to him — a constant part of daily life.
True, he saw them no more in the streets and the homes, but he saw them in the frescoes, in the sculptures, in the carvings in the churches, and he thought the halt and the blind and the sick could all be cured if some one unseen and unknown was good enough to do it. But all he saw and heard in the unkind streets began to make him feel that the real meaning of miracles was money; that strange, dirty, ugly paper thing which was, he saw, so powerful in such amazing ways.
What was it, if not a miracle, that a scrap of soiled paper, crumpled and dog-eared, could procure bread for the hungry and wine for the weak? Even those black-rimmed bronze coins — how much they could do, only passing from hand to hand! Who gave so much money to some people, and left others with none at all? This disparity seemed as strange to Lillino as it has seemed to so many seers and sages through so many
centuries; an injustice which can never be repaired, try how the seers and sages may to redress the uneven balance.
Lillino had not much understanding, and Mamma Rosa had been too busy herself all day long to attend to his education, either moral or mental. He groped his way as he could to his few ideas, and his thoughts were confused and tangled. But these two were clear to him. Nonna would get well if she went back to the country, and with money she could be taken there, carried, he was not sure how, but in some way, back to those vineyards and pastures and running brooks where his babyhood had been spent, and her whole life had passed. But the extremely scanty means he ever gained did not even suffice to keep life in himself and her, and pay for their one room under the roof.
This night, as he leaned over the river wall, the moon was at the full, and the water was high; it had a strange attraction for him as it flowed towards the weir, reflecting the long double lines of the lamps. He came away from it reluctantly, not to be scolded by the person of the place they lived in for being out too late. He went up the Vua Serragli and into the Vua dei Caldaie, one of the oldest in Oltrarno, and towards a black, grim house of stone, opposite the wall and the trees of a part of the Torrigianni Gardens. This was where he lived, with many others as poor, and the garret he and the old woman rented was a mere nook under the eaves.
On the moonlit flags of the street he saw an object shining; his feet touched it, he picked it up; it was a little bag of golden chain-work with a gold snap; he opened it, he saw it was full of coins — such coins as he had never seen in his life, except in little bowls in money-changers’ windows.
The Madonna or Mamma Rosa had sent it!
Nothing else occurred to him. It was a miracle! An answer to his prayer!
He slipped his hand, which had closed on it, into his ragged shirt, and took his homeward way, his ears singing and his brain turning, and his heart throbbing, in his persuasion that Some one in heaven, Some one, had heard and answered his prayer! Surely it was Mamma Rosa, sitting now beside the Madonna!
He thought he heard her saying as she sat on the Madonna’s right hand: “Dear and Holy One, let me send something to my little Lillino.” Oh yes, he felt sure that it was Mamma Rosa. Had she not always given him all she had, and did she not know how much he wanted to take Nonna back to the country? Mamma Rosa had always taught him, indeed, that what was other people’s he must never touch nor take, but this thing was no one’s; it was lying in his path; it was plainly put there by some merciful hand; it was a miraculous gift, a gift of the heavenly host, who were so much kinder than those on earth.