Signa, Vol. 1 (1875): a machine-readable transcription

Ouida (1839-1908)

Victorian Women Writers Project: an Electronic Collection

Signa, Vol. 1

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• French
• Italian
• Latin

• 13-Mar-1997
  Kathryn Benedict, contributing editor.
  
  • finished data entry.
  
  
• 3-July-1997
  Perry Willett, general editor.
  
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(front)

        

SIGNA. A STORY.

By

OUIDA.

Getto una palma al mare, e mi va al fondo.
Agli altri vedo il piombo navigare."--TUSCAN SONG.

I throw a palm into the sea: the deeps devour it.
Others throw lead, and lo! it buoyant sails.

VOL. I.

(front)

        LONDON: BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

SIGNA.

CHAPTER I.

        Only a little lad with brown eyes and bare feet, and a wistful heart driving his sheep and his goats, and carrying his sheaves of cane or miller, and working among the ripe grapes when the time came, like all the rest, here in the bright Signa country.

        Few people care much for our Signa and all it has seen and known. Few people even know

anything of it at all, except just vaguely as a mere name. Assisi has her saint, and Perugia her painters, and Arezzo her poet, and Siena her virgin, and Settignano her sculptor, and Prato her great carmelite, and Vespignano her inspired shepherd, and Fiesole her angel-monk, and the village Vinci her mighty master; and poets write of them all for sake of the dead fame which they embalm. But Signa has found no poet, though her name lies in the pages of the old chroniclers like a jewel in an old king's tomb, written there ever since the Latin days when she was first named Signome--a standard of war set under the mountains.

        It is so old our Signa, no man could chronicle all it has seen in the centuries; but not one in ten thousand travelers thinks about it. Its people plait straw for the world, and the train from the coast runs through it: that is all that it has to do with other folks.

        Passengers come and go from the sea to the city, from the city to the sea, along the great iron highway, and perhaps they glance at the stern, ruined walls, at the white houses on the cliffs, at

the broad river with its shining sands, at the blue hills with the poplars at their base, and the pines at the summits, and they say to one another that this Signa.

        But it is all that they ever do do; it is only a glance, then on they go through the green and golden haze of Valdarno. Signa is nothing to them, only a place that they stop at a second. And yet Signa is worthy of knowledge.

        She is so ancient and so wise, and in her way so beautiful too; and she holds so many great memories in her; she has so many faded laurel-boughs as women in their years of age keep the dead rose-leaves of their days of love; and once on a time--in the Republic's time, as her sons will still turn from the plough or rest on the oar to tell to a stranger with pride;--she was a very Amazon and Artemis of the mountains setting her breast boldly against all foes, and they were many, who came down over the wild western road, from the sea or from the Apennines, with reddened steel and blazing torch to harry and fire the fields, and spread famine and war to the gates of Florence.

        These days are gone.

        The years of its glory are done. It is a grey quiet place which now strays down by the water and now climbs high on the hill, and faces the full dawn of the day and sees the sunset reflected in the mirror of the river, and is starry with fireflies in midsummer, and at noon looks drowsy in the heat and seems to dream--being so very old. The buttressed walls are ruins. The mass bell swings over the tower roofs. The fortresses are changed to farms. The vines climb where the culverins blazed. White bullocks and belled mules tread to and fro the tracks which the free lances made; and the peasants sing at their ploughs where the hosts of the invaders once thundered.

        Its ways are narrow, its stones are crooked, its summer dust is dense, its winter mire is heavy, its hovels are many, its people are poor--oh, yes, no doubt--but it is beautiful in various ways and worthy of a scholar's thought and of an artist's tenderness. Only the poet does not come to make it quoted and beloved by the world as one

single line on the drifting autumn leaves has rendered Vallombrosa.

        Here where the ancient walls of its citadel rise hoary and broken against the blueness of the sky; there where the arches of the bridges span the river, and the sand and the shallows and the straw that is drying in summer shine together yellow in the sun; her where under the sombre pointed archways the little children play, their faces like the cherubs and the cupids of the renaissance; there where the cobblers and coopers and the plaiting maidens and the makers of the yellow rush brooms, all work away under lintels, and corbels, and carved beam timbers, four hundred years old if one; here where through the gate ways with their portcullises woven over by the spiders, there only pass the patient mules with sacks of flour, or the hay carts dropping grasses, or the waggons of new wine; there where the villas that were all fortresses in the fierce fighting times of old, gleam white in the light upon their crests of hills with their cypresses like sentinels around them, and breadths of corn and vineyards traversed by green grassy paths, that lead upward

to where the stone pine and the myrtle make sweet the air together. In all these Signa is beautiful; most of all, of course, in the long light radiant summer when the nightingales are singing everywhere, noon as well as night; the summer which seems to last almost all the year, for you can only tell how it comes and goes by the coming and the going of the flowers; the long-lived summer that is ushered in by the daffodils, those golden chamberlains of the court of flowers, and dies, as a king should, on the purple bed of anemones, when the bells of the feast of the saints sound its requiem from hill to hill. And Signa revels in all that brightness of the Tuscan weather, and all about her seems singing, from the cicala piping away all day long, through the hottest heat, to the mandolines that thrill through the leaves at night as the peasants go by strumming the chords of their love-songs. Summer and song and sunshine;--Signa lies amidst them like some war-bruised shield of a knight that has fallen among the roses and golds the nest of a lark.

        One day in summer Signa kept the Feast of

the Corpus Domini with more pomp and praise than usual. The bells were ringing all over the plain and upon the hill-sides, and the country people were coming in from all the villages that lie scattered like so many robins' nests amongst the olives and the maize plumes and the arbutus thickets everywhere around. They were like figures out of a Fra Bartolommeo or a Ghirlandajo as they came down through the ripe corn and the red poppies from the old grey buildings up above; in their trailing white dresses and their hoods of blue, with the unlit tapers in their hands, and the little white-robed children running before with their chaplets of flowers still wet from the dew. It was the procession of Demeter transmitted through all the ages, though it was called the Feast of Christ; it might have been the hymns of Ceres that they sang, and Virgil might have looked upon them with a smile of praise as they passed through the waving wheat and under the boughs red with cherries.

        The old faith lives under the new, and the old worship is not dead, here in the country of Horace and in the fields where Proserpine wandered.

The people are Pagan still; only now they call it being Christian, and mingle together Cupid and the Madonna in their songs.*

        It was fairest summer weather. There was sure harvest and promise of abundant vintage. The sweet strong west wind was blowing from the sea, but not too roughly, only just enough to shake the scent out of the acacia blossoms and fan open the oleanders.

        The peasantry were in good heart and trooped down to the feast of the Body of God from the loneliest farmstead on the highest hill-crest; and from every villa chapel set along the mountains, or amongst the green sea of the valley vines, there was a bell ringing above an open door.

        The chief celebration was at Signa, which had broken from its usual ways, and had music on
___________________

Si è partita una nave dallo porto,
Ed è lo mio struggimento.
Madre Maria, dategli conforto
Acciò vada la nave a salvamento.
Lo mare gli si possa abbonacciare
E le sue vele doventin d'argento.
E tu Cupido, che lo puo' aiutare,
Cogli sospiri tuoai mandagli il vento.Rispetto Toscano.

this great service because a mighty bishop had come on a visit in its neighbourhood, and all its roads and streets and lanes were swept and garnished and watered, and at many open casements there were pots of lilies, white and orange, and in many dark archways groups of little children on whose tiny shoulders it would have seemed quite natural to see such wings or rose or azure as Il Beato gave his cherubim.

        The procession came out from the white walls above on the cliff, and down the steep ways of the hill and across the bridge, and through the Lastra to the little church of the Misericordia. There were great silk banners waving heavily; gold fringe that shone and swayed; priests' vestments that gleamed with silver and colour; masses of flowers and leaves borne aloft; curling croziers and crimson baldacchini; and then came
___________________

A ship goes out from port,
And with it goes my own immense desire.
Oh, Mother Mary, lend it strength and comfort,
So that the ship may steer to sure salvation.
And all its sails become of silver pure.
And thou, dear Cupid, who canst aid it too,
Breathe froth thy sighs and waft it fairest winds.Tuscan Popular Song.

all the white-clothed contadini, by tens, by twenties, by hundreds, and the cherubic children singing in the sun; it was Signa in the Middle Ages once again, and Fra Giovanni might have stood by and painted it all in a choral book, or Marcillat have put it in a stained window, and have illumined it with the azure sky for its background, and the rays of the morning sun slanting down, like beams that streamed straight to earth from the throne of God.

        The procession came down the hill and across the bridge, with its irregular arches and its now shallow green water shining underneath, and on its sands the straw lying drying, and beyond it the near hills with their dusky pines, and the white streaks where the quarries were cut, and the blue haze of the farther mountains.

        All the people were chaunting the Laus Deo--chaunting with chests made strong by the mountain air, and lips made tuneful by the inheritance of melody; men and women and children were all singing, from the old white-haired bishop who bore the host, to the four-year-old baby that trod on the hem of its mother's dress.

        But above all the voices there rose one sweetest and clearest of all, and going up into heaven, as it seemed, as a lark's does on a summer morning. He was only a little fellow that sang--a little boy of the Lastra a Signa, poorer than all the rest; with his white frock, clean, but very coarse, and a wreath of scarlet poppies on his auburn curls; a very little fellow, ten years old at most, with thin brown limbs and a lean wistful face, and the straight brows of his country, with dark eyes full of dreams beneath them, and naked feet that could be fleet as a hare's over the dry yellow grass or the crooked sharp stones.

        He was always hungry, and never very strong, and certainly simple and poor as a creature could be, and he knew what a beating meant as well as any dog about the farm. He lived with people who thrashed him oftener than they fed him. He was almost always scolded, and bore the burden of others' faults. He had never had a whole shirt or a pair of shoes in all his life. He kept goats on one of the dusky sweet-scented hillsides above Signa, and bore, like them, the wind and the weather, the scorch and the storm.

And yet, by God's grace and the glory of childhood, he was happy enough as he went over the bridge and through the white dust, chaunting his psalm in the rear of the priests, in the ceremonies of the Corpus Domini.

        For the music was in his head and in his heart; and the millions of leaves and the glancing water seemed to be singing with him, and he did not feel the flints under his feet, or the heat of them, as he went singing out all his little soul to the river and the sky and the glad June sunshine, and he was quite happy, though he was of no more moment in the great human world than any one of the brown grilli in the wheat, or tufts of rosemary in the quarryside; and he did not feel the sharpness of the stones underneath his feet or the scorch of them as he went barefoot along the street, because he was always looking up at the brightness of the sky, and expecting to see it open and to see the faces of curly-headed winged children peep out from behind the sunrays as they did in the old pictures in the villa chapels.

        The priests told him he would see them for

a certainty if he were good; and he had been good, or at least had tried to be, but the heavens never had opened yet.

        It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.

        But he tried in his own small way. When he carried the bright blue plums to the market, not to taste even one when his mouth was parched with the dust and the sun; to let his reed-flute lie mute while he searched for a straying kid; to tell the truth, though it cost him a thrashing; to leave his black bread untouched on a feast morning, though he was so hungry, because he was going to confession; to forbear from pulling the ripe grapes as he went along the little grass paths through the vines;--these were the things that were so hard, and that he tried his best to do, because in his little dim mind he saw what was just, and in his loneliness endeavoured with all his might to follow it, that he might see the faces of the angels some day; and he wondered now why he could not see the cherubs through the blue smiling sky,

as the old fresco-painters had done who did not want it half so much as he did, because no doubt the painters were wise men and knew a great deal, and were very happy, and were not like him, who was always wanting to know everything, and could never get any one to tell.

        The old painters would have painted him, and would have made a cherub of him, with his wreath of poppies and his wondering eyes and his little singing mouth, and would have taken all the leanness out of his face, and the paleness out of his cheeks, and the darns out of his little coarse frock, and would have made his field-flowers roses of paradise, and would have glorified him, and made him a joy to the wondering world for ever.

        But he did not know that; he did know that the painters never saw any other little angels than just such foot-tired and sun-tanned little angels as he, which their genius lifted up and transfigured into the likeness of the children of God.

        He did not know that Fra Angelico would have kissed him, and Raffaelle would have put

him for ever in the internal sunshine of the Loggie, with gold rays about his head and the lilies of Mary in his hands.

        He only looked up--in vain--for the cherubs in the shining morning skies, and was sorry that he was not good enough to have the right to see them; and yet was glad at heart as he went carrying his taper in the rear of the silken banners and the silvered robes and the chaunting contadini, over the green sunlightened Arno water, with the midsummer corn blowing on all the hills around, and the west wind bringing the salt of the sea with it to strengthen the young bud-clusters of the vine.

        Glad--because he was so young, and because he was sure of one creature that loved him, and because the music thrilled him to his heart's delight, and because it was a happiness to him only to sing, as it is to the thrush in the depths of the woods when the day dawns, or to the nightingale when she drinks the dew in heats of noon off the snow of a magnolia flower.

        He had a little lute of his own, given to him by the only hand that ever gave him anything.

Where he lived he might not play it on pain of its being broken; but upon the hills he did, and along the country roads; and when people were asleep in their beds in Signa, they would be awakened by notes that were not the birds' rippling up the street in the sweet silent dark, and going higher and higher and higher--it was only the little fellow playing and singing as he went along in the dusk of the dawn to his work.

        In the Lastra no one thought anything of it. In any other country, lattices would have been opened and heads hung out and breaths of deep pleasure held to listen better, because the child's music was wonderful in its way, or at least would have been so elsewhere. But here there was so much music everywhere: nobody noticed much. It was no more than a hundred other lutes strumming at cottage doors, than a thousand other stornelli or rispetti sung as the oxen were yoked.

        There is always song somewhere.

        As the wine-waggon creaks down the hill, the waggoner will chaunt to the corn that grows upon either side of him. As the miller's mules cross the bridge, the lad as he cracks his whip will hum

to the blowing alders. In the red clover, the labourers will whet their scythes and sickles to a trick of melody. In the quiet evenings a kyrie eleison will rise from the thick leaves that hide a village chapel. On the hills the goatherd, high in air, amongst the arbutus branches, will scatter on the lonely mountain side stanzas of purest rhythm. By the sea-shore, where Shelley died, the fisherman, rough and salt, and weatherworn, will string notes of sweetest measure under the tamarisk tree on his mandoline. But the poetry and the music float on the air like the leaves of roses that blossom in solitude, and drift away to die upon the breeze: there is no one to notice the fragrance, there is no one to gather the leaves.

        The songs of the people now are like their fireflies in summer. They make night beautiful all over the dusky hills, and the seas of vine, and the blowing fields of maize, in a million lonely places of the mountains and the plains. But the fireflies are born in the corn and die in it; few eyes see their love-fires, except those of the nightingale and the shrew mouse.

        Theocritus cried aloud on his Sicilian muses,

and the world heard him and has treasured the voice of his sweet complaining.

        But the muse of these people now lives with the corncrake under the wheat, and the swallow under the house-eaves, and is such a simple natural home-born thing that they think of her no more than the firefly does of her luminance. And so they have no Theocritus, but only ever-renewing bursts of song everywhere as the millet grows ripe, and the lemon-tree flowers, and the red poppies leap with the corn.

        Often they do not know what they sing:--Does the firefly know that she burns?

        This little fellow did not know what he sang.

        He did not know what he was.

        At home he was always being told that he had no right to exist at all; perhaps he had not; he did not know.

        Himself, he thought God had made him to sing, made him just for that; as he made the finches and nightingales. But he did not tell any one so. At home they would have asked him what should the great God want

with his puny oat pipe. Toto could make as good a noise cutting a reed in the fields any day.

        Perhaps Toto could. He thought his own voice better, but he was not sure. He was only glad to sing, because all the world seemed singing with him, and all the sky seemed one vast space of sweetest sound--as, perhaps, it seems to a bird, who knows?

        When he went to bed in the hay he could hear the nightingales and the owls and the grilli singing all together in the trees behind the village and in the fields that stretched by the river; and in the dusk of the dawn when he ran out with his little bare feet, dripping with dew, there were a million little voices hymning in the day. That was what he heard. Other people, no doubt, heard cart-wheels, and grinding mills, and the scolding of women, and the barking of dogs, and the creaking of doors, and a thousand other discordant things; but to him the world was full of the singing birds and the humming insects, and the blue heavens teemed with a choir of angels: he could not see them, but he

heard them, and he knew they were near, and that was enough: he could wait.

        "Do you hear anything up there?" the other children would ask him, when he stood listening with his eyes lifted, and they could not see so much as a bird, and he would look back to them quite sorrowfully.

        "Do you not hear, too? You are deaf then!"

        But the children of Signa would not allow that they were deaf, and pelted and fought him for saying so. Deaf, indeed! when it was he who was the simpleton hearing a bird song where none was.

        Were they deaf? or, was his dreaming?

        The children of Signa and he never agreed which was which.

        It is the old eternal quarrel between the poet and the world; and the children were like the world, they were strong in numbers; since they could see no bird, they would have it there could be no music, and they boxed his ears to cure him of hearing better than his neighbours.

        Only it did not cure him.

        His angels sung above him this day of the

Corpus Domini, and he did not feel the sun hot on his bare head, nor the stones sharp under his bare feet, and he did not remember that he was hungry, and that he had been beaten that morning, until the music ceased suddenly, and he dropped to earth out of the arms of the angels.

        Then he felt his bruises, and the want of food gnawed in him, and he gathered up his little white acolyte's dress and ran as quickly as he could, the withering poppies shaking off his hair.

        He was only Pippa's child.

CHAPTER II.

        In these winters, if the harvests before have been bad, the people suffer much. They have little or no bread, and they eat the raw grass even sometimes. The country looks like a lake

in such weather when the floods are on; only for ships there are churches, and the lighthouses are the trees; and like rocky islands in all directions the village roofs and the villa walls gleam red and shine grey in the rain. It is only a short winter, and the people know that when the floods rise and spread, then they will find compensation, later on, for them in the doubled richness of grass and measure of corn.

        Still, it is hard to see the finest steer of the herd dashed a lifeless dun-coloured mass against the foaming piles of the bridge; it is hard to see the young trees and the stacks of hay whirled together against each other; it is hard to watch the broken crucifix and the cottage bed hurled like dead leaves on the waste of waters; it is hardest of all to see the little curly head of a drowned child drift with the boughs and the sheep and the empty hencoop and the torn house door down the furious course of the river.

        Signa has seen this through a thousand winters and more in more or less violence, and looked on

untouched herself; high set on her hills like a fortress, as indeed she was, in the old republican days.

        In one of these wild brief winters, in a drenching night of rain, a woman came down on foot along the high road that runs from the mountains, the old post road by which one can travel to the sea, only no one now ever takes that way. In sunshine and mild weather it is a glorious road, shelving sheer to the river valley on one side and on the other hung over with bold rocks and bluffs dusky with ilex and pine; and it winds and curves and descends and changes as only a mountain road can do, with the smell of its rosemary and its wild myrtle sweet at every turn. But on a winter's night of rain it is very dreary, desolate and dark.

        The woman stumbled down it as best she might.

        She had come on foot by short stages all the way from the sea some forty miles over hill and plain. She carried a bundle with her, and never let go her hold on it however wildly the wind seized and shook her, nor however roughly the

rain blew her blind. For the bundle was a child.

        Now and then she stopped and leaned against the rocks or the stem of a tree and opened her cloak and looked at it; her eyes had grown so used to the thick darkness that she could see the round of its little red cheek and the curve of its folded fist and the line of its closed eyelashes. She would stop a minute sometimes and bend her head and listen, if the wind lulled, to the breathing of its parted lips set close against her breast; then she would take breath herself and go onward.

        The child was a year old, and a boy, and a heavy weight, and she was not a strong woman now, though she had once been so; and she had walked all the way from the sea. She began to grow dizzy, and to feel herself stumble like a footsore mule that has been driven until he is stupid and has lost his sureness of step and his capacity for safety of choice. She was drenched through, and her clothes hung in a soaked dead weight upon her. Even with all her care she could not keep the child quite dry.

        Somewhere through the darkness she could hear bells tolling the hour. It was eight o'clock, and she had been in hopes to reach Signa before the night fell.

        The boy began to stir and cry.

        She stopped and loosened her poor garments and gave him her breast. When he grew pacified, she stumbled on again; the child was quiet; the rain beat on her naked bosom, but the child was content and quiet; and so she went on so.

        Sometimes she shivered. She could not help that. She wondered where the town was. She could not see the lights. In earlier years she had known the country step by step as only those can who are born in the air of it and tread it daily in their ways of work. But now she had forgotten how the old road ran. Her girlhood seemed so far away; so very, very far. And yet she was only twenty-two years of age.

        But then life does not count by years. Some suffer a lifetime in a day, and so grow old between the rising and the setting of a sun.

        She had gone over the road so many times in

the warm golden dawns and the white blamy nights, plaiting her wisps of straw, bare-headed in the welcome air, and with a poppy or a briar- rose set behind her ear for vanity's sake rather than for the flower's. But she had been long away--though she was so young--at least it seemed very long to her, and with absence she had lost all the peasant's instinct of safe movement in the dark, which is as sure as an owl's or an ass's, and comes by force of long habit and long treading of the same familiar way. She was not sure of her road; not even sure of her footing. The wind terrified her and she heard the loud surge of the Arno waters below; beating and foaming in flood. She was weak too from long fatigue, and the weight of the water in her clothes, and of the child in her arms, pulled her earthward.

        No one passed by her.

        Every one was housed, except sentries on the church-towers watching the rising of the waters, and shepherds getting their cattle upward from the low-lying pastures on to the hills.

        She was all alone on the old sea-road, and if

she were near the lights of Signa she could not see them for the steam and mist of the furious rain.

        But she walked on resolutely, stumbling often over the great loose stones. She did not care for herself. Life was over for her. She would have been glad to lie down and die where she was. But if the boy were not under some roof before morning, she knew he would perish of cold in her arms. For she could give him so little warmth herself. She shivered in all her veins and all her limbs; and she was soaked through like a drowned thing, and he was wet also. So she went on, growing frightened, though her temper was bold, and only keeping her courage to love by feeling now and then as she went for the fair face of him at her breast. But the touch of her hand made him cry--it was so cold--and so even that comfort ceased for her, and she could only pray in a dumb unconscious way to God to keep the numbness out of her arms lest they should drop the boy as she went.

        At a turn in the road there is a crucifix--a wooden one set in the stone.

        She sat down a moment under it, and rested as well as she could, and tried to think of heaven. But the wind would not let her. It tore the covering off her head, and tossed her long hair about; it scourged her with a storm of snapt boughs; it stung her with a shower of shrivelled leaves; it pierced through and through her poor thin clothes. She prayed a little as well as she could in the torment of it, but it went round and round her in so mad a whirl that she could not remember how the words should go. Only she remembered to keep the child warm, as a mother-sheep sets her body between the lamb and the drifts of snow.

        After a while she began to cry.

        Do what she would she could not keep a sense of chilliness and discomfort from reaching him; he wanted the ease and rest of some little cosy bed; her cramped arms held him ill, and the old shawl that wrapped him up was wet and cold.

        She murmured little words to him, and tried even to sing some scrap of old song; but her voice failed her, and the child was not to be

comforted. He cried more, and stirred restlessly. With great effort she bent her stiffened knees, and rose, and got on her way again. The rocking movement, as she carried him and walked on, stilled him a little.

        She wished that she had dared to turn up a path higher on the mountain that she knew of, which she had passed as the Ave Maria bell hand rung. But she had not dared.

        She was not sure who was there; what welcome or what curse she might get. He who was certain to be master there now had always been fierce with her and stern; and he might be married, and new faces be there too--she could not tell; five years were time enough for so much change.

        She had not dared go up the path; now that is was miles behind her she wished that she had taken it. But it was too late now. The town she knew, must be much the nearer of the two, now that she had come down so far; so she went onward in the face of the blinding rain-storm. She would go up in the morning, she thought, and tell him the truth; if he were

brutal to herself, he would not let the child starve; she would go up in the morning--so she said, and walked onward.

        Her foot had slipped a dozen times, and she had recovered her footing and gone on safe. Once again in the dark she slipped, her foot slid farther on loose wet earth, a stone gave way, she clutched the child with one arm, and flung out the other--she could not see what she caught at in the dark. It was a bush of furze. The furze tore her skin, and gave way. She slipped farther and farther, faster and faster; the soil was so drenched, and the stones were unloosed. She remembered the road enough to know that she was going down, down, down, over the edge. She clasped the child with both arms once more, and was borne down through the darkness to her death.

        She knew nothing more; the dark night closed in on her; she lost the sound of the ringing bells, and she ceased to feel the burden of the child.

CHAPTER III.

        As they went they stumbled against something on the ground, and lowered their lights to look.

        There was a broken bramble-bush, and some crushed ferns, and a thing that had fallen from

the height above the soaking soil. By their dim lanthorns they saw that the thing was a woman, and bending the light fuller on her as well as they could for the rain, they saw that she had been stunned or killed by the fall.

        There was a great stone on which the back of her head had struck. She lay face upward, with her limbs stretched out; her right arm was close round the body of a living child; her breast was bare.

        The child was breathing and asleep; he had fallen upon his mother, and so had escaped unhurt.

        The men had been born peasants, and they were used to wring the throats of trapped birds and to take lambs from their mothers with small pity. They lifted the boy with some roughness and some trouble from the stiffening arm that enclosed him; he began to wail and moan; he was very wet and miserable, and he said a little word which was a call for his mother, like the pipe of a little bird that has fluttered out of the nest, and lies cold on the grass and frightened.

        One of them took him up, and wrapped his cloak across the little sobbing mouth.

        The other knelt down, and tried to make his light burn better, and laid his hand on the woman's breast to feel for pulse of life. But she was quite dead. He did what he could to call back life, but it was all in vain; at length he covered her breast, and stared up at his fellow.

        "This looks like Pippa," he said, slowly, with a sound as of awe in his voice.

        The other lowered his light too and looked.

        "Yes, it is like Pippa," he said, slowly, also.

        Then they were both silent for some moments, the lanthorn light blinking in the rain.

        "Yes, it is Pippa; yes, certainly, it is Pippa," said the first one stupidly; and he ran his hand with a sort of shudder over the outline of her features and her form.

        The one who held the child turned his light on the little wet face; the baby ceased to cry, and opened his big, dark, wondering eyes at the flame.

        "And whose byblow is this?" said he.

        "The devil knows," said he who knelt by the mother. "But it is Pippa. Look here on her left breast--do you see? there is the little three-cornered scar of the wound I gave her with my knife, at the wine fair, that day."

        The other looked closer while the rain beat on the white cold chest of the woman.

        "Yes, it must be Pippa."

        Then they were both silent again a little, for they were Pippa's brothers.

        "Let us go and tell them in the Lastra, and get the bier." said the one who knelt by her, getting up to his feet, with a sullen, dazed gloom on his dark face.

        "And leave her here?" said the one who had the child.

        "Why not? nobody will run away with the dead!"

        "But this little beast--what can one do with him?"

        "Carry him to your wife."

        "There are too many at home."

        "She has one of his age; she can take him."

        "She will never touch Pippa's boy."

        "Give him to me, then, and stay you here."

        "No, that I dare not--the foul fiend might come after her."

        "The foul fiend take your terrors. Let us get into the Lastra; we can see then. We must tell the Misericordia, and get the bier--"

        "There is no such haste; she is stone dead. What a pipe this brat has! One would think he was a pig with the knife in its throat."

        "It is very cold. Who would have thought it could have lived--such a fall as that, and such a night!"

        "It lives because nobody wants it. She had no gold about her, had she?"

        "I do not know."

        The one who held the child stopped over the dead woman awhile, then rose with a sigh of regret--

        "Not a stiver; I have felt her all over."

        "Then she must have done ill these five years."

        "Yes--and yet so handsome, too. But Pippa never plaited even."

        "Nay, never--poor Pippa!"

        So they muttered, plodding over the broken heavy ground, with the sound of the swollen river in their ears and the lanthorn lights gleaming through the steam of the rain. In the noise of the waters the child sobbed and screamed unheard. The man had tossed him over his shoulder as he carried the new-born lambs, only with a little less care.

        They clambered up into the road and tramped through the slough of mud into the town. The woman had drawn nigh to the upper town by a dozen yards, when her foot had slipped, and she had reeled over to her death. But the feet of the shepherds were bare, and kept sure hold, like the feet of goats. They tramped on, quick, through the crooked streets and over the bridge; the river had run high, and along the banks, and on the flat roofs of the towers there were the lights burning of the men who watched for the flood. They heard how loud and swiftly the river was running as they went over the bridge and down in to the irregular twisting streets, and under the old noble walls of the lower village of the Lastra.

        The one who carried the child opened a rickety door in the side of a tumbledown house, and climbed a steep stairway, and pushed his way into a room where children of all ages, and trusses of straw, and a pig, and a hen with her chickens, and a black crucifix, and a load of cabbage-leaves and maize-stalks, and a single lemon-tree in a pot, were all together nearly indistinguishable in the darkness. He tossed the child to a sturdy brown woman with fierce brows.

        "Here, Nita, here is a young one I found in the fields. Feed it to-night, and to-morrow I will tell the priest and the others, and we shall get credit. It is near dead of cold already. No--I cannot stay--do you hear how the waters are out? Bruno is down below wanting me to help to house the sheep."

        He clattered away down the stairs, and joined his brother in the street.

        "I told her nothing of Pippa," he said, in a whisper. "If she knew it were Pippa's not a drop of milk would he get to-night. As it is, it is a pretty little beggar; she will let him share

with Toto. She knows charity pleases Heaven. And--and--see here, Bruno, why need we speak of Pippa at all."

        His brother stared at him in the murky gloom. "Why? --why we must fetch her in and bury her."

        "The waters will do that before morning if we let them alone; that will spare us a deal of trouble, Bruno."

        "Trouble--why?"

        "Oh, it is always trouble--the church and the law, and all the rest. Then you know the Syndic is such a man to ask questions. And nobody saw her but ourselves. And they may say we tumbled her over. She has come back poor, and all Signa knows that you struck her with your knife on the day of the fair, and that she has been a disgrace and a weariness always. We might have trouble, Bruno."

        "But the child?"

        "Oh, the child! I have told Nina we picked it up lost in the fields. Why should we tell anybody to-night about Pippa? The poor soul is dead. No worse can come. Men do not hurt

dead women. And there is so much to do to-night, Bruno. We should see for our sheep on the other side now, and then stay down here. The devil knows what pranks the Arno may not play to-night. In five hours I warrant you he will be out all over the country."

        "But to leave her there--all alone--it is horrible!"

        "How shall we show we did not push her there to her death?"

        "But we did not."

        "That is why they would all say we did. Everybody knows that there was bad blood with us and Pippa: and most of all with you. Let the night go over, Bruno. We want the night to work in, and if she be there at day dawn, then we can tell. It will be time enough."

        "Well--lie as you like," said the other, sullenly. "Let us get the sheep in anyhow."

        So they went out to the open country again, through the storm of the west wind that was blowing the river back from the sea, so that it could not get out, and was driven up again between the hills, and so overflowed the lands

through which it travelled. The men worked hard and in earnest, housing their own sheep and driving their neighbours' cattle on rising knolls, or within church doors, or anywhere where they were safe from the water; and then came down again into the street towards midnight, where all the people were awake and astir watching the Arno, and holding themselves ready to flee.

        "You have got the ague, Bruno," said the man at the wine-shop, for his arm shook as he drank a draught.

        "So would you if you had been up to your middle in water all the night like me," said the elder brother, roughly.

        But it was not the water, they were too used to that. It was the thought of the woman dead all alone under the old sea-road.

        The night became a bitter black night. Up the valley the river was out, flooding the pastures far and near. Boats went and came, taking help, and bringing homeless families. Watchfires were burning everywhere. Bodies of drowned cattle drifted in by scores. There were stories that the great city herself was in flood. In such

a time every breath is a tale of terror, and every rumour grows instantly to giant proportions.

        The upper town of Signa itself was safe. But was great peril for the low-lying Lastra. No one went to their beds. The priest prayed. The bells tolled. The men went to and fro in fear. The horrid loudness of the roaring waters drowned all other sounds.

        When the morning broke, sullen and grey, and still beaten with storm, the cold dull waste of water stretched drearily on either side of the great bridge. The two brethren went with the crowd that looked from it eastward and westward.

        The river had spread over the iron rails, and the grassy, broken ground, and the bushes of furze, and reached half way up to the rocks and the hill-road above. The wind had changed, and was blowing in from the eastward mountains. The water rolled under its force with furious haste to the sea like a thing long imprisoned, and frantic with the joy of escape.

        "It has taken Pippa," said the brothers, low to one another.

        And they felt like men who have murdered a woman.

        Not that it mattered of course. She was dead. And if not to the sea, then to the earth, all the dead must go,--into darkness, and forgotten of all.

CHAPTER IV.

        But they had lost sheep like other folks, and so like other folks were pitied as they went back into the Lastra to get a mouthful of bread, after the sickly vigil of the night.

        Bruno was an unwedded man, and could bear misfortune; but Lippo was a man early married, and having six young children to clamour round his soup-pot, and fight for the crusts of bread. He was pointed out amongst the crowd of sufferers, and was one of those who were pitied the most, and who was sure to get a good portion of the alms-giving and public relief.

        "Give Bruno a cup of wine and a crust, Nita," said he, going up the stairs into the house of his wife. He lived there with her because her father, who was a cobbler, owned the place, and he himself best liked the life of the Lastra. The wife, too, having been a cobbler's daughter and grand-daughter, had been always used to see life from the half-door of the workshop; she would not become a mere contadina, hoeing and weeding and plaiting and carrying dung in a broad-leaved hat and a russet gown--not she, were it ever so; and Anita was one those strong and fortunate women who always get their own way by dint of their power to make everyone wretched who crosses them.

        "Leave me to speak," said Lippo, with a glance of meaning to his brother.

        It was five in the morning, very cold, and still dusky. Anxiety was allayed, since the wind blew from the east, and the waters were sinking, though slowly.

        Nita, who had been up all night on the watch, like the rest of the women, was boiling coffee in a tin-pot, and fanning the charcoal. The chil-

dren lay about as they chose on the floor. None of them had been put to bed, since at any moment they might have had to run for their lives.

        Bruno looked round for Pippa's child. He did not see it.

        "An awful night," said Lippo, kicking the pig out of a doze. "They do say the Vecchio bridge is down in Florence, and that the jewellers could not get out in time. I wish the gold and silver and stones would drift down here. All the Grève country is swamped. St. Guisto sticks up on his tower like a masthead. The cattle are drowned by herds. Whole stacks of wheat are against the piles, making hungry souls' mouths water; rotted and ruined; fine last year's grain; the good God is bitter-hard sometimes. Where is the baby I brought you last night, my woman?"

        Nita pointed with her charcoal fan; her coffee was on the point of boiling.

        The brothers looked where she pointed, to a nest of hay close to the hen and her chickens. The child lay there sound asleep, with his little

naked limbs curled up; and close against him was Toto, a yearling child also.

        The elder brother turned away suddenly, and his body shook a little.

        "You have never dried your clothes, Bruno," said his sister-in-law. "What a baby a man is without a wife. Drink that, it is hot as hot. And what did you bring me that baby for--you and Lippo? You know whose brat it is, I suppose, and look out for the reward? I thought so, or I would not have given it house-room. Toto is more work than enough, so masterful as he is--and so ravenous."

        "Nay," said Lippo, as with a sheepish apology for his weakness. "I know nothing of whose brat it is--I was just sorry for it; left in the soaking fields there; and I picked it up as I should pick up a lame lamb. What do you think of it, my dearest? does it look like a poor child or a rich one, eh? Women are quick to judge."

        The black brows of Nita lowered in wrath.

        "Mercy of heaven! Who would have to do with such dolts as men? Just because the child was there you pick it up, never thinking of all

the hungry mouths half-fed at home! Shame on you. You are an unnatural brute. You would starve your own to nourish a stranger!"

        "Nay, sweetest Nita!" murmured Lippo, coaxingly. "On such a night--and a child taken down by flood, too--not a living soul but would have done as I did. And who knows but he may be some rich father's child, and make our fortunes? Any way, the township will give us credit, and he can go to the Innocenti to-morrow if we find no gain in him. Look what his things betoken."

        "Oh, his things are rough-spun enough, and vile as can be," said his wife, in a fuming fury. "And would a rich man's child be out on flood? It is only the poor brats that the weather finds loose for it to play antics with; the child is a beggar's son, and this thing linked round his neck by a little string, is a thing you get at the fairs for a copper-bit."

        The two men looked together at the locket that she held to them; it was of base-metal--a little poor round trumpery plaything. On it there was the one word in raised letters of Signa,

and inside a curl of soft light hair. That was all. They could none of them read, so the letters on the metal told them nothing. They stooped together over the sleeping child.

        He was pretty and well made; he lay quite naked in the hay, and beside brown Toto looked like one of the little marble children of old Mino. His lashes and his brows were black, but over his forehead hung little rings of soft, fair, crumpled hair.

        Bruno turned away.

        "She used to look just like that when she was a little child," he muttered to himself.

        Lippo glanced round to see if his wife heard. But she was busy with the hen, who had got into a barrel of rice, and was eating treble her own price at the market at one meal.

        "The brat must go," said she, turning and flogging the hen away. "As for a chance that it is a rich man's child, that is all rubbish. You make your bread with next year's corn. Chances like that are old wives' tales. What we have to do is to feed six hungry stomachs. You were a

fool to bring it here at all. But to dream one should keep it! Holy Mary!"

        "Holy Mary would say, keep it," said Bruno, munching his crust.

        "Maybe it is your own, Bruno. Those that hid can find," said his sister-in-law sharply. "The child shall pack to-day. I shall go and tell them at the guard-house. Toto is more than enough, and as for that locket, you can get such trash as that at nay fair for a couple of figs. That goes for nothing."

        "Well, well, keep the poor baby till noon, and I will see what the Curato says. It is always well to see what he says," her husband answered her hurriedly, and afraid of the gathering storm on Bruno's face.

        Bruno was passionate, tempestuous, and weak, and the quieter, subtler brother ruled him with ease whilst seeming to obey. But for turning the baby of dead Pippa's to public maintenance--Lippo had a foreboding in him that in this matter his brother would be too strong for him.

        He hurried away out of pretext of labour

awaiting them in the inundated country, not without misgiving that the darkest suspicions as to the fatherhood of the foundling were awakening in the jealous soul of his wife.

        They went straight to the edge of the river, and got out their old black boat, with its carved prow and tricoloured tiller, and pulled down the current of the now quiet water to see with the rest what could help so save from the flotsam and jetsam of the flood. Whole districts lay under water, and the river was full of dead cats and dogs, drowned sheep, floating pipkins and wine-casks, bales of hay, carcases of cows. and broken bits of furniture from many a ruined farmstead and peasant's hut laid low.

        "Listen," said the elder brother suddenly, when the boat was fairly out from the bank, and with his hooked pole he drew in a spinning-wheel with its bank of flax drenched like a drowned girl's hair. "Listen to me, Lippo. Pippa's son must not go to charity. Do you hear?"

        "I hear. But we are poor men, and Pippa was --"

        "That is neither here nor there," said Bruno, with his dark brows meeting. "She never asked alms of us, nor house-room, nor did anything except to go to her death just as sheep tumble over a rock. The baby must not go to the parish. We did faulty enough--letting her go down flood with never an office of church said over her. And who knows--who knows--she might not be quite dead, after all."

        "Nita will not keep him--that is sure," said the younger quickly. "Look, that is Barcelli's old red cow. You may know her by the spot on her side."

        "Would she keep him if she were paid?"

        Lippo's eyes lighted with joy, but he bent a grave face over his pole as he raked in a floating oil-flask by its wicker coat.

        "I doubt if she would. She has a deal of trouble with Toto. And who is there to pay, pray? We know no more than the cow there who the man was--you know that."

        "I will pay."

        "You!"

        "Yes; I will pay the child's keep."

        "Holy angels! And you who were for ever at words and blows with Pippa, and stabbed at her even for being too gay!"

        "I will pay," said Bruno.

        Lippo rowed on in silence some moments.

        "How much?" he asked at last.

        "I will give you half all I get."

        Lippo's white teeth showed themselves in a sudden smile. His brother gained a good deal in corn and oil and beans and hay and wine, being on good land, and being a man who worked and got the uttermost out of the soil that he shared with his master, and Lippo was often pinched by his father-in-law Baldo the cobbler, and half famished by his wife, and was a true son of the soil, and knew the worth of a hundredth part of a copper coin as well as any man between sea and mountain.

        "Half all you get, and we to keep the child?" he said absently, and as with reluctance. "But what can we say to Nita?"

        "You are never at a loss for good lying, Lippo."

        Lippo smiled; his vanity was flattered.

        "I never lie to Nita. She always finds one out. Only in the matter of Pippa's son I hid the truth to please you. She never would nurse the child if she guessed. Bust as for making her keep him, say what one will, it will be impossible--impossible, my dear."

        "It must be," said Bruno, withdrawing his hand from the tiller and bringing it down with violence on the boat's side, while his eyes flashed with blue fire as the lightning flashes most summer nights over the blue hills of his own Signa. "It must be. I will pay. I will give you half I get. Good harvests--you know what that is. But Pippa's child shall not go to parish while I have an arm to drive a plough through the ground or to guide over the field. Settle it with your wife your own way. But Pippa's child shall grow up amongst us."

        "Dear Bruno, to please you I will try," said gentle Lippo with a sigh. "But we have brats too many in the house, and you know what Nita's 'Nay' can be."

        "Nay or yea, the child stays," said Bruno.

        "The half of everything," murmured Lippo,

as he bent to his oars and passed by a dog howling on the top of its floating kennel to reach his pole to a butcher's basket of meat that was tossing amongst the rubbish.

        But Bruno, having the tiller, pushed first to reach the dog.

        "It is only a cur," said Lippo.

        Bruno pulled the dog into the boat.

        In the Lastra, and in the town, and in all the country round or near Signa, the brothers were known as well as the mass-bells of the churches. The Signa people thought that Bruno the contadino was a bad man enough, ready with his knife and often in a brawl, and too often seen at fairs and with other men's wives on feast-days. Lippo they liked and respected, and everybody spoke him fair; and he would keep the peace most beautifully when men got angry in the streets before his house-door.

        They were both handsome men, and could neither of them read, and believed in their priest and their paternoster, and had never been beyond the mountains around Signa, except now and then--Bruno with his bullocks, and Lippo in

a donkey-cart to buy leather--down the Valdarno into the Lily City.

        Bruno lived on the wild hillside, amongst the thyrne and the myrtle and the gorze and the grass-cropping sheep and the ever-singing nightingales. Lippo dwelt down in the street, doing as little as he could, and by preference nothing, in the smell of his wife's frying and in the sound of her father's little hammer; rowing out his boat when there was any chance for it to pay, and seeing after the few sheep that the shoemaker kept above the bridge. They had been born within a year of one another--sons of peasants and workers in the fields. Bruno stayed on the old land where his fathers had had rights of the soil uncounted generations. Lippo had loitered down love-making into the Lastra, and had married very early the daughter of well-to-do old Baldo.

        There had been several sons after them. Two had been killed as soldiers, and others had died in infancy by various strokes of evil chance; and the youngest of them all had been Pippa--Pippa, whose body was gone out on the flood

to the sea with never a prayer said over her. Beautiful, fierce, wayward, wilful, fire-mouthed Pippa, who had run over the hills like a lizard, and who had had saucy words on her tongue as a rose has its thorns, and who had had all Signa gazing after her for her beauty when she had walked singing like a cherub in the wake of the banners of the church.

        Not that she had ever cared much for the church,--poor Pippa.

        She had always been quarrelsome and self-willed and headstrong; and had flouted her lovers, and been petulant to her own hindrance, and as wild as a hawk, and provoking,--yes, provoking, past the endurance of any man who was a brother and nothing more. She would never sit quiet and spin; she would never keep her eyes on her tress of straw as other girls did; if she milked the cow she would upset the pail just out of wantonness, and would laugh and dance to see their rage when she let the pigs run in amongst her brother's plot of green peas. Yes, certainly, she was provoking; a bad girl, even though loving at heart; no one was to blame that

she had gone away without a word and come back so, with a child at her breast, to find her death the night of the flood.

        A self-willed foolish girl and with wrong-doing ingrained in her--as for patience, who could be very patient with a woman that let the pigs in amongst your peas just when green peas fetched their weight in silver? And then she had such a tongue too, the little shrew--true, she did not bear malice, and would not growl, growl, growl for hours together as Nita would, and Nita's mother, thinking it the only way to manage men; true, she was a generous soul, and would let a beggar have her dinner, though meals were meagre on the hills; and when one had beaten her till she was blue she would not tell, but say she had fallen from the ladder trimming the vines, or that the bees had stung her. Still a wilful, quarrelsome, pettish thing; no man could be blamed for her ill-hap nor for her end. So Lippo said to himself when his brother had gone up to the hills, and he himself left his boat to go down the narrow street homeward, pondering on Pippa's child and on what he should say to Nita.

        As he went up the stairs he settled the lie to his mind's content, and entered the room looking with his fairest faith out of his clear brown eyes.

        "I am going to be frank with you, Nita," he said, and then he sat down and lied so prettily, that if there be a Father of Lies he must quite have rejoiced to hear him.

        Nita listened as well as a woman can listen--that is, interrupting twenty times and getting up to do some irrelevant thing twice twenty.

        "Bruno's son!" she cried at last.

        "Hush! The children will hear," said Lippo. "It is as I tell you. Only Bruno must not know that you know, because he is so afraid that red-haired Roma whom he is courting should hear of it. But you see why I closed with him, Nita. It will be a good thing for us. We can eat like fatting pigs off Bruno's land. Nothing to prevent us. And it is hill land, you know, and his share comes to a good bit, taking fair weather and foul. And then, besides that, we shall have credit in the Lastra, for Bruno never will say a word, and the curato and all the place

may as well think the child a foundling as not. A good deed smells sweet in the neighbours' nostrils, and a good name is like a blest palm. We must tell your father, or he will grumble at the seventh mouth. But nobody else need know. The brat will grow up with the others, and we shall seem kind, that is all."

        "To think of its being Bruno's!" cried Nita, with a clap of her big brown hands. "Did I not say so, now? Did I not jeer him as he looked at it asleep? Oh--oh! Who can deceive me? Never you try, Lippo, more!"

        "You can see through a millstone," replied Lippo, with an embrace of her. "Only an ass can ever seek to blind you, and that is why I told you the truth, though Bruno would have screened it. He is so afraid of the creature he goes to now ever knowing--you understand."

        "The child will be a bother," said Anita, remembering the kicks and cuffs with whose best administration she could scarce manage to keep the peace amongst her brood or their hands ever out of the soup-pot.

        "Oh, no," said Lippo, shrugging his shoulders,

"where there are six there may as well be seven. He will tumble up with the others. We are to have half of all Bruno gets, and I can guess to a stalk, you know, what an acre of wheat is worth, or what an olive or a fig tree bears. No fattore would outwit me. I was not bred out on the fields for nothing. Half of everything, you know, Nita. That will mean a good deal in good seasons. I am very hungry, carina. Could you not fry something in oil, nice and tempting for one? An artichoke, now, or a blackbird?"

        Nita grumbled at the extravagance, but being in a good humour went downstairs and across the way and brought over some artichokes and fried them and ate them with her husband, the children being sent to make dust pies and castles in the sun on the stones below, old Baldo keeping an eye on them over his half-door.

        Lippo and his wife ate their artichokes, and drank a little wine with them.

        Pippa's son cried unnoticed in his nest of hay, and sobbed out his one little word for mother, which was like the moan of a little unfledged bird left in the snow.

        "We will bring him up to help himself," said Lippo, with his mouth filled with the fried eggs and oil.

        The child sobbed on, and felt for his mother's breast, and only had his small soft rosy hands torn with the thorns and pricked with the burrs and briars of the sun-dried hay.

CHAPTER V.

        Bruno went on his way, looking neither right nor left. He went over the ground so often, and he had seen it all from the year he was born; always this and never anything else; and long familiarity dulls the sense of beauty, even where such sense has been awakened, and

Bruno's never had been--except for a woman's looks.

        He strode on, not looking up nor looking back; a straight-limbed, swarthy, fine-built peasant, of thirty years or more, with the oval face of his country, and broad, black, luminous eyes, soft and contemplative, like the eyes of the ox, when the rage was not alight in them.

        He did not look round, because peasants do not look up from the soil; and he did not look back, because he had no care to see the spot where he had kneeled down in the wet grass by the broken bushes, with the noise of the river in his ears.

        He went up the sea-road some way, and then quitted it and ascended to the left. The estate to which he belonged was on the side of a spur of the mountains, that turns to Signa, and faces straight down the valley, and whose wine is named as famous in the Bacco in Toscana of Redi.

        There are beautiful hills in this country, steep and bold, and formed chiefly of limestone and sandstone, covered all over with gum-

cistus and thyme, and wild-roses and myrtle, with low growing laurels and tall cypresses, and boulders of stone, and old thorn trees, and flocks of nightingales always, and the sad-voiced little owl that was beloved of Shelley.

        Bruno's farmstead was on one of these hills; half the hill was cultured, and the other half was wild; and on its height was an old, grey, mighty place, once the palace of a cardinal, and where there now dwelt the steward of the soil on which Bruno had been born.

        His cottage was a large, low, white building, with a red roof, and a great arched door, and a sun-dial on the wall, and a group of cypresses beside, and a big walnut-tree before it. There was an old well with some broken sculpture; some fowls scratching under the fig boughs; a pig hunting for roots in the black bare earth; behind it stretched the wild hill-side, and in front a great slope of fields and vineyards; and far below them in the distance the valley and the river and the bridge, with the high crest of the upper Signa, and the low lying wall-towers of the Lastra on either side of the angry waters.

        Bruno did not look back at it at all. He saw the sun rise over it, and the beautiful pale light steal up, and up, and up, and up, wherever he rose to his work in the day-dawn. But is was nothing at all to him. When now and then a traveller or a painter strayed thither, and said it was beautiful, Bruno smiled, glad because it was his own country--that was all.

        He went into his cold, quiet, desolate house, and sat down for a minute's rest; he was tired. There was no one to greet him. He did everything for himself. He had no neighbours. The nearest contadino lived a mile down beyond the fields which in summer were a sea of maize and a starry world of fire-flies; and the old palace was some distance higher on the crest, where the gorze grew thickest, and the mountain moss clustered about the roots of the stone-pines.

        Here--in the long, low rambling dwelling, with the sun-dial on its wall, and the great archways underneath it, and the stacks of straw before it--there had been nine of them once. Now Bruno lived there alone.

        He sat down a minute on the settle, and thought. Thinking was new work to him. He never thought at all, except of the worm in the ripening wheat, or the ticks in the flock's fleeces. The priest did his thinking for him. What use was it to pay a priest for having opinions if one had to think for one's self as well?

        But he sat and thought now.

        Poor Pippa! what a little, ruddy, pretty thing she was, lying in her white swaddling bands, when he was a big rough boy twelve years old, with bare feet and chest, who used to come in from the fields hungry and footsore, and feel angry to the last-come child in his mother's arms, getting all her care and caresses.

        He bore Pippa a grudge from her birth.

        They were all boys, rough and tumble together, share and share alike; and then one summer morning the girl came, and their mother never seemed the same to them again--never any more. The little girl, with a face like the bud of the red rose laurel, seemed to be all she thought about--or so they fancied; and anything good that could be got, honey, or a drop of new milk, or a little

white loaf from the town, or an apricot from the fattoria, was always set aside for Pippa; pretty, saucy, noisy, idle Pippa, who was more often in mischief than they were, but never got, as they did, a thrashing, and a wish that the devil might come and fetch away all naughty children.

        There had been times when he had hated Pippa, hated her from the first day he saw her lying on her mother's bosom, with her little red mouth, clinging as bee does at a flower, to the night when he had scolded her for dancing with any fool that asked her, and then she had mocked him about a dead love, and he had struck at her with his knife, and the people had dragged him off her, all blind with rage and shame at his own misdoing; and the blood had sprouted up out from her neck, and stained the lace she wore as red as a goldfinch's feathers.

        He had hated her always.

        It seemed to him now that he had been like a brute to her--poor, pretty, brown-eyed, happy, self-willed thing, who had been spoilt from her babyhood upward.

        Lippo remembered how provoking she had been, and justified himself as he went home through the Lastra.

        But Bruno forgot it, and only reproached himself. He had always been rough and fierce and moody with her--oh yes, no doubt. If he had been patient with her--he twelve years older, too--she might never have run away from her home on the hill, and borne that nameless child, and gone to her death on the old sea-road.

        No doubt he had done wrong by her; had been too severe and tyrannous, and had helped to make the cottage distasteful to her after their mother had died and he had become master, and had tried to shut her in, as a thrush is shut in a wicker cage.

        He forgot all her faults--poor dead Pippa--and he remembered all his own. Liberal natures will err thus to themselves; and Bruno, with all his evil ways, was liberal as the sun and winds.

        Poor Pippa!

        He saw her as he had seen her standing out in the light on the hill, with her little brown hands

plaiting the straw all unevenly, and her bow-like mouth gay with laughter at some piece of mischief sweet to her as fig in summer. She had used to look so pretty, with her arch eyes shining under her great straw penthouse of a hat, and her supple, slim shape, in brown and red, like a firefly, standing up as a poppy does against the corn on the amber light of the evening sky, here where the hill was just the same, and only she was a thing that was gone for ever and ever and ever.

        Bruno shut his eyes not to see the hill. But he could not shut out his thoughts. He had been a brute to her. It stirred and grew in him; this mute remorse, which Lippo would have laughed out, and which had been awake ever since he had gone about his business as the river rose, and left the dead woman alone to drift down with the flood.

        She was dead, of course, and it could hurt her no more to be swept out to the salt sea-pools westward than to be lowered into the earth in a coffin. Still Bruno, if he had gone straight to the priest and told him, and had let the Church

sorrow over and bury her, would not have been tormented by the thought of her was he was now. Now, in a curious kind of half stupid way, he felt as if he had found her and had killed her.

        There had been war between him and Pippa always; and though it had shocked him a little to find her lying there lifeless in the dark, yet he had not cared much at first. But since he had forsaken her to the will of the waters, in the vague fear of that nameless trouble which his brother had threatened him with as possible, Bruno--a brave man all his days--felt a coward; and with the tingling shame of that new craven sense came a self-reproach in which any rough word and fierce act of his life against the lost creature rose in judgment against him.

        Poor Pippa!

        After all, what had her faults been? Only mirth and over-eagerness for pleasure, and a quick tongue, and a love of the sunshine idly spent amongst fruits and flowers whilst others were working. These were all.

        She had been truthful and generous of temper,

and never unwilling to forgive. Nay, though he had struck at her with his open blade that fair-night, she had called out to the people not to hurt him for it; and when she had left the hillside that very summer--no one knew for whither nor with whom--did she not tell an old woman, who alone saw her going through the millet at break of day with a bundle, "Say to my brothers I am not angry any more; they have been unkind to me, but I have been troublesome, and said hot words very often; and I will pray for them, if that will do any good: only tell them not to try to bring me back, because we never are at peace together"?

        Poor Pippa!

        He shut his eyes against the sunlight; but, shut them as he would with both hands, he saw her as he had seen her last, coming through the beanflowers, with the long evening shadows and the little golden fireflies seeming to run before her; when he had turned across the fields and avoided her because of the thrust with the knife, which she had never spoken of, and of which he was half ashamed and half defiant,

and which therefore he would never admit that he regretted, living on in silence with her under the same roof, trusting to chance.

        And chance came--the chance that one summer morning the bed of Pippa was empty, and old Viola, coming in with a sheath of green cane for her donkey, told them how she had met the girl, and of her farewell words.

        Shut his eyes as he would, he saw her so, amongst the purple beanflowers that night when his heart had swelled a little at sight of her, and he had been half inclined to tell her he was sorry for that blow, and then had felt the pride rise in him, and had said to himself that the girl had deserved it--disobeying him, and then jesting at him--and so had struck across the rustling corn, and let her go without a word.

        And now she was dead--gone out on the flood to the sea; and he had never told her that he had been sorry for the stab, and never could tell her now.

        Would God tell her? or any one of the saints?

        Bruno wondered. He felt as if that dead woman whom the river had got stood for ever between him and all the hosts of heaven.

        He was a strong man, and his emotions and his intelligence were both unawakened, and his life was much like that of his own plough bullocks; but he shuddered through all his limbs as he rose up from the wooden settle and faced the day. Work with the labourer is an instinct, as watching is the house-dog's; and pain may stifle it for a moment, but no more.

        He went out and unloosed the bar of the stable-doors, and brought out his oxen, and muzzled them and yoked them together, and drove them out over the steep slanting fields that ran upward and downward, and were intersected by lines of maples and mulberries with the leafless vines clinging to them, and by watercourses cut deep that the rain might be borne down the mountain side, and by wild hedges of briony and rose and arbutus, with here and there winter-red leaves of creepers that the winds had forgotten to blow away.

        It was a grey morning, with heavy white mists

lying over all the valley down below; and on the high hills it was very cold. Bruno drove his meek large-eyed beasts through the black earth with a heavy heart.

        He seemed always to see Pippa as she had used to come, when their father lived, and she was a child, with a black loaf and a flask of wine, out to them on the hill in the ploughing time, and stroked the bullocks, and put round their leathern frontlets gay wreaths of anemones, purple and red and blue, or the berries of the beautiful corbezzolo.

        And now she was dead--stone dead--like the mouse the share killed in the furrow.

        The bullocks, well used to goad and curse, turned their broad foreheads and looked at him with luminous fond eyes: he was so gentle with them--they were grateful, but they wondered why.

        Bruno ploughed all day, and the wind blew up from the sea, and he felt as if it were blowing her long wet hair against him.

        "I will do good by the child, so help me --, and perhaps they will tell her in heaven," he

said to himself, as he went to and fro up and down the shelving fields underneath the lines of the leafless trees.

        "Perhaps they will tell her in heaven?" he thought, as he went over the heavy wet clods in the mist.

CHAPTER VI.

        They had been vassals and spearmen in the old warlike times, and well-to-do contadini ever afterwards; giving their sons, when need arose, to die in the common cause of the native soil, but otherwise never stirring off their own hillside; good husbandmen, bold men, fierce haters, honest neighbours, keeping their women-kind strictly, and letting their males have as much license as was compatible with unremitting and patient labour in all seasons.

        They were a race remarkable for physical beauty--a beauty that is strictly national; the

dark straight-browed classic beauty which Giotto has put in his Garden of Olives, and Signorelli given to his noble Prophets.

        They had always intermarried with mountain races like their own, or taken wives from the Lastra households, where the ancient blood ran pure. The father of Brunone and Lippo had done otherwise; he had taken a work-girl of the city, a pretty feckless thing, whom he had seen one market night that he had strayed into the Loggia theatre, when a good harvest had put too much loose cash in his pockets, and the humours of Cimarosa's Nemici Generosi had been making him laugh till he cried.

        The girl had become to him a good wife enough, nobody had denied that; but she was not of the stern stuff that the Marcillo housewives always had been, with their busts of Ceres and their brows of Juno, their arms that could guide the oxen and their heads that could balance a wine- barrel.

        She was timid, and some said false, though that was never proved, and she had not the

hill-born strength of mind and body that these people who had lived nigh a thousand years in the same air possessed.

        Her second son, Filippo, or Lippo, inherited her constitution, and with it her supplicating caress of manner and her timidity--perhaps her falseness too; but the Lastra did not think so; the Lastra was fond of Lippo, though he had deserted the ways of his fathers, and dwelt in an idleness not altogether creditable and altogether alien to the habits of his race, who had always been used to labour together, father and sons, and often grandsons, all under the same roof and on the same fields, generation after generation.

        When the large family dwindled down to one man, it was out of custom to leave so much land to solitary labourer. But Brunone Marcillo was a favourite with his master, and one of the best husbandmen in the province; besides he was sure to marry and fill the house, they thought, so he was left undisturbed, and the land suffered nothing; for though he loved his pleasure in a wild lawless way, and took fierce fits of it at times, he was devoted to his home-

stead and his work, and loved his birthplace with that fast-rooted love of the Tuscan which makes the little red roof under the red waning skies, on the solitary upland, or in the silent marsh, or amidst the blue-flowered fields of the flax, or above the thyme-covered, wind-blown hills by the sea, more precious and more lovely than any greater fate or fairer gifts elsewhere.

        All alone on his little farm Bruno became a man well to do, and who could have put money by had he not loved women so well--so they said.

        It was a broad rich piece of land that went with the dwelling house he occupied. He grew wheat, and maize, and beans, and artichokes, and had several sturdy fig-trees that yielded richly, and noble olives that numbered their hundred years, and the vines that marched with his corn were amongst the best in the Signa country.

        The half of all its produce was his, according to the way of the land and the provisions of custom, and the house was a better one than most of its degree; and the fields that were his lay well on the open hillside, sun-swept, as was

wanted by vines and grain both, but sheltered from cold winds by the jutting out of the quarried rocks and the woods of ilex and pine that were above.

        Bruno was a laborious workman, and was skilled in field labour; he knew how to make an ear of barley bear double, and how to keep blight away, and the fly from the vine.

        He could not read; he could not write; his notions of God were shut up in a little square coloured picture, framed and hung up over the gateway into his fields to bring a blessing there; his idea of political duty was comprised in hating any one who taxed him, and being ready to shoot any one who raised the impost on grain; but he was a husbandman after Virgil's own heart; he wanted no world beyond the waving of his corn, and if a steer were sick, or when the grapes were ripe, he took no sleep, but watched all night, loving his cattle and his fruits as poets their verse or kings their armies.

        On the whole Bruno led a contented and prosperous life, and if he had not been so ready with

his wrath, might have been welcome in all households; and if he had not been over fond of those fairs in all the little towns where wandering players set up their little music booths, and of the women that he found there, and of the license that is always to be had by any man whose money-bag has its mouth open and its stomach filled, might also have become a very wealthy man in his own way. But he was fierce, and every one feared him, and he was improvident, and every one fleeced him. And he was lax and lawless in his loves, and had a dangerous name in the countryside amongst the mothers of maidens.

        So that he of all men had had no title to be hard upon Pippa: and yet hard he had been always.

        The most amorous men and the wildest are usually the most exacting of virtue and modesty in their own women.

        He had always hated her: yes, honestly hated her he told himself; and as she grew up into girlhood, and they were shut alone in the same house, always opposed on to another, Pippa's

idleness, and sauciness, and rebellion against homekeeping, and passion for dancing and straying and idling, infuriated him against her more and more with every day that dawned.

        Bruno, with all his excesses, never neglected or slurred over his labour. The land and its needs were always first with him. He would have had his sister one of those maidens, numerous around him, who asked nothing better than the daily round of household and field duties; who could reap as well as a man; who could harness an ox and guide him; and who were busy from dusk of dawn to nightfall hoeing, drawing water, spinning, plaiting, shelling beans, rearing chickens, drying tomatoes, setting cauliflowers, thinning fruit-trees, winding silk off the cocoons, and went to bed with tired limbs and a light conscience, never dreaming of more pleasure than a stroll on a feast-day with a neighbour, or a new white linen skirt for some grand church function.

        "Why was not Pippa like that?" he had asked himself, angrily, ten thousand times, instead of a girl that would hardly do as much

as tie up a few bunch of carnations or S. Catherine lilies for the market.

        The Marcillo women had always been reared in strong usefulness and in stern chastity. This handsome, buoyant, gay, insolent, idle thing offended him in every way and at every turn.

        He would have married her away willingly, and dowered her well, to the first honest fellow; but Pippa had laughed in the faces of all the neighbours' sons who had wanted her to wed with them. She was in no hurry, she said.

        She made all the countryside in love with her, and then turned her back on it with a saucy laugh, and the sunshine in her face was never merrier than whenever she heard that two young fellows had quarrelled about her, and drawn knives on one another, and set all the Lastra talking.

        So that when Pippa disappeared many were glad, and none very sorry. Bruno smarted with shame--that was all.

        Indeed, when she was gone away, the townsfolk talked of a foreigner, a student and painter, who had been seen with the girl at

evening on the road, or by the river, or in the shadow of the old Lastra bastions; a young man with a delicate face, and a playful way, and a gay tongue, who had wandered on foot, with his knapsack and colours, down from the Savoy country and into Tuscany, and had danced often with Pippa, and had been met with her after sunset, on the hillside.

        But none had told Bruno till too late, being afraid of his ready knife if a hint were taken wrong, and he had known nothing of these tales until Pippa had vanished, and even then the neighbours were slow to rouse his wrath by telling the scanty rumours they had heard.

        Even the young man's name the people had not known; a youngster lightly come and lightly gone, whom no one took account of, till of a sudden they noticed that he had been unseen since Pippa had been missing. He had lodged a little while above a wine shop, and gone up and down the river, and to and from the old white town, painting; and had danced at the fairs and learned to strum on a guitar, and eaten piles of fruit, and been restless and graceful as a firefly:

that was all; and only a few women had observed as much as that.

        It told nothing to Bruno; and, besides, if they had told him a hundred times as much, he could have done nothing; a contadino is rooted to the soil, and it no more would have seemed possible to him to travel into far countries than to have used his ploughshare for a boat, or driven his steers to turn the sea like sod.

        People had hardly ever though what Pippa's fate had been. If anything great had come to her, the countryside would have heard of it.

        In these little ancient burghs and hillside villages, scattered up and down between mountain and sea, there is often some boy or girl, with a more wonderful voice, or a more beautiful face, or a sweeter knack of song, or a more vivid trick of improvisation than the others; and this boy or girl strays away some day with a little bundle of clothes, and a coin or two, or is fetched away by some far-sighted pedlar in such human wares, who buys them as bird fanciers buy the finches from the nets; and then, years

and years afterwards, the town or hamlet hears indistinctly of some great prima donna, or of some lark-throated tenor, that the big world is making happy as kings, and rich as kings' treasuries, and the people carding the flax or shelling the chestnuts say to one another, "That was little black Lià, or that was our old Momo;" but Momo or Lià the village or the vinefield never sees again.

        If anything great had come in that sort of way to Pippa, Signa would have heard of it. There is always someone to tell of a success--always someone to bring word, so that the friends may gird up their loins, and go and smell out the spoil, claim the share of it, and remind Momo, as he comes out of a palace, of his barefoot babyhood, and call to Lià's mind the time when she, who now quarrels with princes, was glad of the day's bran-bread.

        But none had ever said anything of Pippa. She had dropped out of sight and remembrance, and no one had asked what had become of her, though the girl had been beautiful in her way, darkly, brightly, roughly, tenderly, capriciously beautiful,

like the barley blowing from shade to sun--only, no men ever would stand her temper, said the women.

        That had been conceded everywhere: and her brothers had been pitied.

        Between the day that she had gone over the fields with the farewell word to old Viola and the night that she had stumbled to her death, over the sea, in the dark road, no one had ever heard or known anything of Pippa.

        But it was not because her story was a strange one; it was only because it was so common. Mystery is to the tongue of the storyteller as butter to the hungry mongrel; but what is simple is passed over by human mouths as daisies by the grazing horse.

        Her tale was very simple.

        That fair-day in Signa she had been so resolute to go to the merry-making, because of the stranger, who would whirl to the thrum of the mandolin as a bat does when a lamp burns, and who would come through the beanflowers to see her plait straw when her brothers were out in the fields, and who was gay like herself, and

passionate, and young, and found but one song worth the singing when the sun went down and the fireflies burned.

        Then there had come Bruno's blow, and the stab in her breast--and all a man's natural passion of sympathy had been aroused, and all a girl's terror of her fierce brother's worse vengeance, if only the truth were known.

        And so her lover took her with him when he went back to France, while the beanflowers faded and died; and Pippa loved him like a dog:--poor Pippa! who always having been so saucy of tongue, and stubborn of neck, and proud, and full of petulance, clung like a vine, and crouched like a spaniel, and trembled like a leaf, when once she loved, as all such women do.

        Thus the broad shining Tuscan fields were changed for streets of Paris, and the hills of olive for the roofs of lead; and the song of the grilli for the beat of the drum; and the fires of the lucciole for the shine of the gas; and Pippa, a thing of sun and wind and seablown air, fresh as a fruit and free as a bird, was cooped up in

a student's attic, with the roar of the traffic for ever on her ear, and the glistening shine of the neighbour's house-roofs for ever before her casement.

        He did what he could for her.

        He was a landscape painter and a student of Paris. He had a beautiful face, great dreams, ardent passions, and no money, except such little pittance as an old doting mother, a widow in a little Breton hamlet, could send him, by pinching herself of oil and bread. For three months he worshipped Pippa; and this scarlet poppy from the Tuscan wheat glowed on a hundred canvases in a hundred forms; and then of course he tired. Then, of course, the poppy ceased to be a magical flower of passion and of sleep; it seemed only a red bubble, blowing useless in the useful corn.

        He thought he hid this from her; but she felt, before he knew, it. Women will always do so who love their lives out in a year, as Pippa did.

        The Mimis, and Bibis, and Libis around her were happy enough, with a pot of mignonette

for their garden, and a theatre for their heaven, and a Sunday in the woods now and then for their liberty. Besides, they could all chatter with one another, and change their lovers, if need was, and sing little triplets, like little canaries, as they sat sewing at rose-coloured ball-skirts, or twirling up their cambric mock-rosebuds.

        But Pippa was in exile. Pippa had the woman's worst crime of loving over much. Pippa had brought nothing with her but her own full, fierce, fond, little heart of storm. Pippa felt her heart break in this cage.

        Pippa could not read. Pippa knew nothing that he talked of, except when he told her that he loved her, and men get weary of saving this too long to the same woman. Pippa could only plait straw--and that not very well; and no one wanted it in Paris.

        Pippa, when in the dance-gardens, one night, struck with a knife at a man who would have kissed her, and wounded him sorely, and when hidden away from the perils that arose, could not be made to see she had done wrong, because Bruno had stabbed her, and she had borne him no

malice, and here she was on her just defence, and had done right, she thought. Then her lover grew wroth with her, and Pippa, whose spirit was broken, like that of all fiery creatures when they love, could only sob and kiss his feet; and then,--he went elsewhere.

        Then came hard winters, and a crying child, and the garret was cold and empty, and debt stole in like a ghost, and hunger with him, and Pippa sold her pearls--real pearls, fished up from the deep sea by coral divers, and worn at fairs and feasts by her with the honest pride of the true Tuscan peasant. Only she never let him know the pearls were sold. She made him think that it was one of his own pictures which had brought them that little heap of gold.

        But the money lasted very little time, and the child sickened and died, and the summer came; but that would not banish hunger; and Pippa lost her beauty, and her rich, round, radiant look, and her great brown eyes got a frightened look--because he so seldom kissed her now, and sometimes would give her a little gesture like that which a man gives when he sweeps away quickly

with his elbows some dead flower or dropped ashes. Yet still he was good to her--oh, yes--he was good. Pippa told herself so a thousand times a day. He never beat her. Pippa, once so saucy and so proud, was grateful. Love is thus.

        Then another winter came, the third one--that was hardest. They had nothing to eat for many days. They sold their clothes and their bed-linen, and even the copper pot in which their food was stewed; and she had no more pearls.

        Pippa had nothing either of her beauty left but her straight brows and her big, lustrous eyes. She was no longer even a bright bubble, as the field poppy was. She was a little dusky peasant, pale and starved, and blown amongst the snow like a frozen redbreast.

        "It is the pictures that he cares for," she had learned to say to herself. She had found his out. She got to hate them, the senseless things of wood and colour, that cost so much money, and now had all his looks, all his longings, all his memories, all his regrets.

        She hated even those canvas likenesses of herself, that had blossomed into being with the

purple beanflowers, under the summer suns of Signa, when their passion was new-born.

        Pippa loved her lover with the same love, fierce, and faithful, and dog-like, and measureless, as when he had first taken her small head within his hands, and kissed her on the eyes and mouth.

        But it was a love that could understand nothing; least of all, change.

        One day, in the bitterness of the mid-winter, after weeks of hunger, and the shameful straits of the small debts that make the commonest acts and needs of daily life a byword and reproach, she woke to find herself alone.

        There were twenty gold pieces on the bed, long stript of all its covering, and a written line or two. She took the paper to the woman of the house below, who read it to her. It hold her that he was gone to Dresden to copy a famous picture for a wealthy man; he sent her all the sum they had advanced him, and said a little phrase or two of sorrow and of parting, and of hope of better days, and of the unbearable pain of such beggary as they had

known. He spoke vaguely of some union in the future.

        Pippa cast the twenty gold pieces into the mud of the street, where the poor scrambled and clutched and fought for them. She understood that she was forsaken.

        All he had said was true; but the great truth was what he had not said. Pippa was ignorant of almost everything; but this she knew enough to know.

        That night they took her to a madhouse, and cut close the long brown braids of her hair, and fastened together the feet that had used to fly, as the wind flies, through the paths of the vines in summer.

        Poor Pippa! She had always plaited ill; the women had always said so.

        In half-a-year's time she gave birth to a child, and her reason came back to her, and after a time they let her go. She promised to go to her own country.

        But she cheated them, and went to Dresden. She had kept that name in her mind. She got there as best she could, begging on the way or

working; but of work she knew so little, and of workers there were so many. She carried the child all the way. Sometimes people were good to her; sometimes they were bad; oftenest they were neither one nor the other. Indifference is the invincible giant of the world.

        When she reached Dresden it was summer. The city was empty.

        With much trouble she heard of him. The copy was done, and he was gone back to France.

        "Perhaps he does not want you. If he wanted you he would not leave you," said a comely woman, who was sorry for her, but who spoke as she thought, giving her a roll of bread under a tree in the street.

        "Perhaps he does not want me," thought Pippa. The words awoke her memory. She had been left by him. He would not have left her unless he had been tired--tired of all the poverty and pain, and of the passion that had lost its glow, as the poppy loses its colour once being reaped with the wheat.

        There was a dull fierce pain in her. There were times when she wished to kill him. Then

at other times she would see a look of his face in the child's and would break into an anguish of weeping.

        Anyway, she set backward to find him.

        Carrying the child, that grew heavier with each day, and travelling sometimes with gipsies and vagrants, and mountebanks, but more often alone, and begging her bread on the way, she got back into France after many months. She had got stupid and stunned with fatigue and with pain. She had lost all look of youth, but she kept the child as fresh as a rose; and now and then she would smile, because his mouth laughed like her lover's.

        Back into Paris she went. The strange fortunes that shelter the wretched kept her in health and strength, though she rarely had a roof over her at night, and all she ate were the broken pieces that people gave her in pity.

        In his old haunts it was easy to hear of him; he had gone to study in Rome.

        "He will do well for himself, never fear," they said in the old house on the Seine water, where her dream of joy had dreamt itself away. Some

great person, touched by his poverty and genius, and perhaps by his beauty, had given him the means to pursue the high purposes of his art at leisure. Some said the great person was a woman, and a princess: no one knew for sure. Anyhow, he was gone to Rome.

        Pippa knew the name of Rome.

        People had gone through Signa sometimes, to wind away by the sea road, amongst the marshes and along the flat sickly shores, to Rome. And now and then through Signa, at fair time, or on feast days, there had strayed little children, in goatskins, and with strange pipes, who played sad airs, and said they were from Rome.

        But the mountains had always risen between her and Rome. It had always been to her far off as some foreign land. Nevertheless, she set out for Rome by the sole way she knew--the way that she had travelled with him--straight across France and downward to the sea, and along the beautiful bold road, under the palm trees and the sea alps, and so along the Corniche back to Signa.

        She knew that way; and toilsome though it was, it was made sweet to her by remembered joys.

        He had gone with her; and at every halting place there was some memory so precious, yet so terrible, that it would have been death to her, only the child was there, and wanted her, and had his smile, and so held her on to life.

        Her lover had been with her in the summer and autumn weather; and all the way had been made mirthful with love's happy foolish ways; and the dust of the road had been as gold to her, because of the sweet words he murmured in her ear: and when they were tired they had leaned in one another's arms, and been at rest; and every moonlit night and rosy morning had been made beautiful, because of what they read in each other's eyes and heard in the beating of each other's hearts.

        Pippa had forgotten nothing; she had only forgotten that she had been forsaken.

        Women are so slow to understand this always; and she, since that day when she had flung the money in the street, and fallen like a furious thing, biting the dust, and laughing horribly, had never been too clear of what had happened to her.

        There was the child, and he--her love--was lost. This was all she knew.

        Only she remembered every trifle, every moment of their first love time; and as she went, walking across great countries as other women cross a hayfield or a village street, she would look at the rose-bush at a cabin door, and think how he had plucked a rosebud there; or touch a gate rail with her lips, because his hand had rested on it; or lift the child to kiss a wayside crucifix, because he had hung a rope of woodbine there and painted it one noonday; and at each step would murmur to the child, "See, he was here--and here--and here--and here," and would fancy that the baby understood, and slept the sweeter because told these things.

        Poor Pippa!--she had always plaited ill.

        Women do, whose only strand is one short human love.

        The tress will run uneven; and no man wants it long. Still, it is best to love thus. For nothing else is Love.

        So she had walked on, till the golden autumn

weather lost its serenity, and stirred with strife of winter wind and rain; so she had walked, and walked, and walked--a beggar girl for all who met her, with no beauty in her, except her great, sad, lustrous eyes--until she found herself come out once more on that familiar road which she had trodden daily in her childhood and her girlhood, with her hank of straw over her arm, and a pitcher of milk, or a sheaf of gleaned corn, or a broad basket of mulberries balanced on her head.

        She thought she would see Bruno--just once. He had been rough and fierce with her; but once she could have loved Bruno, if he would have let her do so. She thought she would show him the child, and ask him--if she never got to Rome--

        Then her foot slipped, and she fell down into darkness, and of Pippa there was no more on earth--only a dead woman, that the flood took out, with the drowned cattle and the driftwood, to the sea.

CHAPTER VIII.

        Nay, it is not so very far away after all since the dove plucked the olive off the moun-

tains yonder, and no one sees anything strange in the stories that make the sons of Enoch and the children of Latona tread these fields side by side, and the silver arrows of Apollo cleave the sunshine that the black crucifixes pierce. Nay, older than tale of the Dove or legend of Apollo is this soil. Turn it with your spade and you shall find the stone coffins and the gold chains of the mighty Etruscan race whose buried cities lie beneath your feet, their language and their history lost in the everlasting gloom.

        This was once Etruria, in all the grace and greatness of her royalties; then through long ages the land was silent, and only heard the kite shriek or the mountain hare scream; then fortified places rose again, one by one, on the green slopes, and Florence set to work and built between her and the sea--between her and the coast, and all her many enemies and debts--the walled city of Lastra Signa; making it noble of its kind, as she made everything that she touched in the old time; giving it a girdle of the massive, grey mountain stone, and

gateways with carven shields and frescoes; and houses within, braced with iron, and ennobled by bold archways and poetised by many a shrine and symbol.

        And the Lastra stood in the green country that is called the Verdure even in the dry city rolls, and saw the spears glisten among the vines, and the steel head-pieces shine through the olives, and the banners flutter down from the heights, and the condottieri wind away on the white road, and the long lines of the pilgrims trail through the sunshine, and the scarlet pomp of the cardinals burn on the highway, and the great lords with their retinues ride to the sea or the mountains, and the heralds and trumpeters come and go on their message of peace or strife; and itself held the road when need arose, staunchly, through many a dark day, and many a bitter night, for many a tale of years, and kept its warders on the watch-towers, looking westward through the centuries of war. And then the hour of fate struck when the black eagle, who has "two beaks to more devour," flew with his heavy wing over the Arno; and the Republic had no help or

hope but in Gideon, as she called him:--frank Ferruccio.

        Ferruccio knew that the Lastra was the iron key to the gates of Florence. But he had no gifts of gods to make him omniscient, and he was rash, as brave men are most apt to be. With his five hundred troopers he wrought miracles from of valour and of relief, but in a fatal hour he, scouting the