Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  Drink never tempted him in the least, and his intolerance of those who were tempted by it was great. His brother was not often led to drink; indeed, had no means to be so, but now and then, when occasion presented, at funeral, wedding, feast, or fair, he had been seen with his fair face too flushed and his limbs unsteady, and at such times his father and mother had reproved him unsparingly, and Alessio had looked at him with pity and disdain.

  “To disobey father now he is dead!” thought he at the present moment; it seemed to him unworthy. Oneiro was too quick to shake off memory. Would he and Oneiro ever agree? He feared not; he thought the old roomy stone house would be too small to hold them both. But there was mother — he loved his mother. Not to return to her when his military service should be over would be impossible.

  He went to her room noiselessly to see how she was. He found her arisen, and sitting heavy and motionless, whilst one of the girls was spinning beside her; the two others were in the fields. Her mind was still not clear; her bony brown hands were clasped together on her knees; her head was sunk on her chest.

  “’Tis all over, ‘Lessi?” she said, with a certain embarrassment in her speech, as if her tongue obeyed ill the order of the brain.

  “No, mother; we must wait for the priest till the evening.”

  “Euh! euh!” she said, with a groan. “The tree’s down, for sure — eh?”

  “No, mother.”

  “Go, cut it down. Where’s Oneiro?”

  “He is tired, and is asleep. Why do you want the tree cut down, mother?”

  “No tree must live that kills a man.”

  Alessio was silent; he hesitated to say to her that it was his father’s own imprudence which had killed him.

  “No tree must live that kills a man’ “ repeated his mother doggedly. “Go you and cut it down.”

  Alessio was still silent.

  “If ‘twere left standing,” said his sister, who was spinning, “we should be the shame of the whole hillside.”

  “Nay,” said Cesira, with a sadden kindling of her stunned spirit; “if we could fail in our duty so, every living soul around would come and do our duty for us.”

  “Surely they would, mammy,” said the girl.

  Alessio still did not speak. “What was the use of speaking?

  “Why are you tongue-tied like that, ‘Lessi?” said his sister. “You can’t think otherwise, surely?”

  “Father loved that tree,” said Alessio slowly, with hesitation.

  “Then it was the blacker crime in it to slay him,” said his mother savagely. “His father planted it. It’ll come down to-night, ‘Lessi; mind you’ve cut it up for burning before the burial.”

  “It is in full fruit,” said Alessio.

  “Throw the fruit to the pigs,” said his mother, “and cut the trunk up for the hearth, and the boughs for the oven. Do you want twice telling? You are no son of mine. Call Oneiro.”

  “Let Oneiro rest; I will go, mother,” answered Alessio.

  “Why should they kill it?” ho thought. “It is innocent.”

  The doom of the tree distressed him; he loved it. In the depths of his soul the injustice to it hurt him as though it were an unjust thing done to himself. They said it had killed his father; but why had his father, a stout, big man, been so imprudent as to mount on to a rotten branch incapable of bearing his weight? How was that in anyway the fault of the tree?

  “Why should they kill it?” he thought. “It has no guilt. It is a fair thing, and bears well. “Why would poor father climb up on it? Why not have sent me?”

  He was slender, and agile, and light, and he would have sprung from branch to branch like a squirrel. Certainly the terrible disaster was poor father’s fault — not the tree’s.

  He went downstairs, passed his sleeping brother, and went out of the house into the courtyard, and through the gateway on to the grass path. Fronting him on the slope was the threatened tree; a spreading mass of light-green foliage shining in the bright afternoon sunlight as it had shone in the silvery moonbeams. Its branches were rich with ripe fruit; its roots were set deeply down into the shelving earth which was decked with seeding grass, with yellow tansy, and with blue borage. Alessio sat down on a moss-grown stone facing it, and looked at it as he might have looked at some boy-friend doomed to execution before the setting of the sun.

  The superstition which decreed the death of the tree seemed to him a grotesque and miserable thing; he had no patience with, or part in, it. He had read enough, and reflected enough, to have shaken off these follies, which cling to the rural mind as stone-crop clings to tiles and thatch. They were the religion of his kindred, and he felt afraid of his own impiety in his revolt against them; he broke idols which he had been used from his babyhood to see worshipped, and he feared greatly that he might be wrong. He was all alone in his opinion, and he was modest of temper, and had no self-assertion.

  But his axe lay unused on the grass at his feet; he could not bring himself to raise it against the tree. He had so many memories associated with it: of being held up in his mother’s arms to pull the first ripe fig when he was a little child; of sleeping in its friendly shadow in warm summer noons instead of going upstairs to his hot room under the eaves; here beside it he had first read his ragged, imperfect copy of Leopardi’s poems; here one day he had seen two orioles pecking at the fruit, and had held his breath in delight at their beauty, instead of casting a stone at them as his brother and sisters would have done; once, too, as he had slept at noonday, soundly and dreamlessly, a twig had fallen on him from the branches above, and had awakened him in time to see a dust-adder close to him in the grass, and to escape from it. He had owed his safety to the tree: so he had always thought.

  He sat there motionless, with the axe at his feet. The air was still, the sun was brilliant, the red roofs of the cows’ stables glowed above the vines; the pigeons pruned their plumage; now and then one of the cattle lowed; up above there were vines, and vines, and vines again, a pear tree or a cherry tree or an apple tree growing amongst them.

  Soon he would have to leave it all, the dear familiar place that he had known from his birth. Great tears filled his eyes and obscured the landscape.

  “Oh! father, father, why did you not send me to gather the fruit?” he cried aloud, and he sobbed bitterly.

  “Lazy loon! Have you not felled the tree in all these hours?” cried the voice of Oneiro, with something in it already of the authority of the master.

  Alessio started and looked up; the sun was slanting very low to the westward, and its roseate glow illumined the whitewashed walls of the cattle stable.

  Oneiro had his hatchet in his hand and a coil of rope. He had slept off his drink, but his face was still red, and his eyes were angry, and his hair and his clothes were in disorder. The chief thought which still dominated him was that he would marry, and become the head of the house. That consciousness intoxicated him more than the year-old Aleatico wine.

  “Let’s get this job done,” he said roughly. “You might have been half through it by this time. Why aren’t you?”

  The authority and arrogance in his tone irritated Alessio. There was but a year of age between them, and he was the elder, though it was his fate to go away, soldiering, against his will.

  “You are not master here yet,” he said. “Keep a civil tongue in your head. Mother’s over both of us at present.”

  That was true, and its truth stung Oneiro. Without his mother’s consent there would be no marriage for him with Erinna for five years to come.

  “Maybe she is, maybe she is not,” he said doggedly. “Anyhow, I mean to see this tree down before sunset. That’s mother’s will, as ’tis mine. Get you up and fasten the rope. If it isn’t hauled back when it’s cut through, it’ll fall on the stables, and crash on to the roof, and maybe hurt the beasts inside.”

  Alessio did not move off his stone. He did not mean to have any share in the murder of the tree, and he more and more keenly resented his brother’s tone
.

  “Get up,” said Oneiro. “You go behind. I’ll stand here.”

  Alessio did not stir. He was looking at the tree. A light wind, which at that moment arose, passed over it and made it look as if it shivered in all its foliage.

  “Damn you! don’t you hear?” cried his brother angrily to see his first command thus disregarded; and he swung himself up the trunk and made fast the rope, now to one part and then to another, knotting it firmly and letting its looped ends hang down to what would be the height of a man’s hands. Then he sprang back again on to the turf, and jeered at the tree, and called it by vile names, as though it had ears to hear his insults.

  Still Alessio, whose eyes were fixed on it, did not move.

  But, when his brother stooped and picked up the hatchet and, swinging the axe up above his head, struck at the tree and gashed the bark with its first wound, then a sudden shock, like an electric current, ran through the lad’s veins. He leapt to his feet, his hair flying hack, his eyes flashing, his olive skin grown pale as ivory, and set himself with his hack to the trunk, and stood between it and the raised axe.

  “Go away, Oneiro!” he shouted. “You shall not touch it while I live.”

  “Get out of my way, you madman,” shouted Oneiro. “Are you to rule the roost here? Go and pull at the rope, as it is your duty to do. Get out!”

  But Alessio did not obey, did not seem even to listen. He leaned his shoulders against the bark of the tree, and his face was resolute and stern.

  “You shall not touch it whilst I am on the land,” he said between his teeth. “’Tis an innocent thing. You shall not touch it.”

  “Get out!” screamed Oneiro, beside himself with rage. “May the saints grant me patience.”

  “You shall not touch it, I say!” said Alessio, and ho looked his brother full in the eyes. “You shall not. Put down your axe.”

  Oneiro, with a string of oaths, swung his steel hatchet once more above his head, and brought it with overwhelming force against the tree. But it did not strike the trunk; it struck the throat of his brother. It cut half through the slender, smooth, adolescent neck, and the blood of the great artery escaped, hot and terrible. The body of Alessio swayed and fell forward. He dropped, face downward, amongst the flowers.

  Oneiro flung his axe far from him with a scream, and fled; the curse of Cain upon him.

  Alessio was found by one of his sisters stretched upon the sod in a purple pool of blood. He was of course quite dead.

  Oneiro was never heard of again.

  Their mother, mad with grief, called all her neighbours, and with fire and steel, and screaming curses, tore the fig tree from its place, and hacked and burned its deepest roots, and left no trace of it except a deep charred hole in the blackened grass and piles of wood ashes on the earth.

  Alessio, like greater men, too clear of sight, too merciful of heart, had lost his life, for pity’s sake, in vain.

  Gerry’s Garden

  “COME out of the garden, Gerry. It is raining,” said an old woman to a little boy in a holland blouse and a sailor hat.

  “Oh, it doesn’t hurt one, granny,” said the little boy. “It kisses. It doesn’t wet.”

  “It will give you a bad cold all the same, my dear. Come out of the garden, Gerry,” she repeated; and Gerry, who was a good little man, with a sigh obeyed; took off his hat, and came off the gravel into the room, bringing his spade in with him, and beginning at once to clean it, as a gardener should do before putting it away to await better weather.

  “That’s being a good boy, Gerry,” said the old woman, and she stroked his fair, curly head.

  Gerry made a little sound, half sigh, half groan, and glanced wistfully under the arch of the small porch at his garden, where a fine April shower was falling.

  “There’s all the pansies to be planted still,” he murmured.

  “You shall plant them to-morrow,” said his grandmother. But to-morrow seems a hundred years away when one is only seven years old.

  It was a small and very old house in which he and his grandmother lived; one of a row of ancient almshouses, built and endowed in the reign of Elizabeth, solid, quaint, pleasant habitations leaning one against the other as the nests of the weaver-birds do; with gable ends, thatched roofs, low-arched doors, and latticed windows; all of them were nutshells in size, but clean as constant scrubbing and dusting could make them, and each dowered with a little garden, the gardens enclosing three sides of a turfed square. Here there dwelt eighteen old people and only one child, and that child was Gerry the gardener, as the old folks called him.

  By the rules of the foundation no one under seventy years of age could reside there, whether man or woman, married, or single, or widowed. Gerry owed his admittance to the fact that he had been a foundling, laid down by the sundial in the centre of the square, no one knew how or by whom. Mrs. Lane, who now called herself his grandmother, had found him early one morning among the daisies under the granite pedestal; and she, having been nurse during three generations in the family to which the foundation was due, had succeeded, by many prayers and many tears, in prevailing on those in power to break the rules, and leave him with her, instead of sending him to the workhouse, as the authorities wished to do.

  No one there had ever been cruel enough to tell him his history, and Gerry firmly believed that he was her grandson, and was called Gerald Lane in right of his birth.

  “Poor, pretty dear, why should he ever know otherwise?” said the old people; and, although they were terrible gossips, and liked to take away their neighbours’ characters as well as their betters like that pastime, no one of them was ever so unkind as to rob Gerry of his illusion; they would as soon have thought of robbing him of his violets or his moss roses. Truth to tell, they were also a little in awe of Mrs. Lane, who was in a manner the head person amongst them, by right of her association with the family of the founder. Besides, she was known to have a round sum put by in the savings bank; and money makes the man (and the woman) in a row of almshouses as well as in bigger communities.

  She who had brought up so many children, and loved them all, brought up Gerry well, and loved him. He was a pretty boy, with eyes the hue of his violets, and a delicate, fair face like one of the Noisette roses which grew in clusters against the door. He looked fragile, but he was always well, and stronger than he looked, and spent all his time in the garden, either in the little plot hedged in by clipped box belonging to Mrs. Lane’s habitation, or in one of the other little similar plots running round the square down to its bottom wall, which was of red brick and lofty, and had in the middle of it a tall gateway, through which all the pensioners were bound to pass whenever they walked abroad, for the little houses had no opening at their backs. All day long, when the weather allowed, Gerry laboured in one of these plots, and made the black earth glow with colour during eight months of the year. One of the old men had been a gardener, and though unfit for work from rheumatism, instructed the child as to seasons and manners of flower culture, and Gerry, very docile and intelligent, listened meekly and learned quickly. When another gardener from the town came, as he did from time to time, to mow the turf of the square, and trim the honeysuckle which covered the frontage, he also added his mite of instruction towards the child’s education in horticulture, and the seed fell upon good ground.

  Gerry seemed created by nature to be a gardener, and he learned his work with passion and perseverance. He did not pull up his plants by the roots to see if they were growing, or kill them with kindness, as children usually do; nor did he deluge them with water one day, and leave them to thirst vainly for a week afterwards, which is also a childish habit; but fed them soberly and prudently from his little red watering-pot filled at the rain-filled water-butt. His beds were full of pleasant, sweet-smelling, rustic things: many of them were roots dug up from country fields and hedges; sometimes they grew, sometimes they died, but field flowers were the most beloved of all his treasures to Gerry: dearer even than the spotted amber calceolar
ia and the violet and white double petunia given him by a florist. The latter were great persons that he was very proud to receive, but the former were homely friends, who talked to him of bees, and honey, and sheep, and singing birds, and all dear, fair country things — for Gerry’s active fancy was always wide awake, though never spent in words. He was a silent child, always willing and cheerful, but never talkative.

  “Drat it! I do believe Gerry hears the flowers talk, and is all taken up with answering ’em,” said Mrs. Lane; but if he heard the flowers talk they must have given him good advice, for he was never late, or rude, or ill-tempered, and never noisy or rough.

  The almshouses were in a busy commercial city of the English Midlands, called Milltown. There were many ugly sounds and brutal sights, roar of engines, and hiss of steam, and thunder of pistons in the borough; but Dame Eleanor’s Cots, as they had been called during three centuries, were in a quarter which still remained quiet and secluded, with the spire of a stately Tudor church rising above them, and old-fashioned streets and lanes and many trees around them. Here the air was still fresh and clear, and flowers could flourish, and the grass grow green; and the open country itself was near enough for Gerry to run out into it and come back laden with spoils of leaf and blossom.

  Sarah Lane was fairly well off, but she had afforded herself the luxury of the companionship and maintenance of Gerry, and, however shrewd and helpful a person may be, no one can keep a child without his making a hole in their purse, and she put aside for him in the savings bank much that, if he had not existed, she could have spent on her own ease and comfort.

  “But he’s worth it,” she said to herself with conviction, for she loved him tenderly, though he was too quiet and “too shut up in hisself” for her taste; her ideals remaining the saucy, rebellious, harum-scarum lads who had filled her nurseries of yore, and had fought like bull-calves with one another, and when the fray was over had kissed and made friends at her knee.

  Living amongst aged people always, and taught from infancy not to disturb them, it had become second nature to him to trundle his wheelbarrow gently, and play with his ball in silence and solitude, and spin his top noiselessly on the flagstones. The boys in the streets and lanes. round about Dame Eleanor’s asylum grinned at and jeered him, but Gerry did not care about that.