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By
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LONDON: BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
There was a bright moon above the old town where Fra Lippo once lived.
The shadows of walls, and gables, and toweres, and roofs, were black as
jet. The women and youths danced on the pavement, while somebody strummed a
guitar for them. Thre was a smell of spilt wine and dead
flowers. Some mountebanks, in scarlet and blue and silvery spangles, were coming down a lane, having finished their night's work, drum and fife sounding before them.
Bruno saw nothing of all this.
He only looked for a little, thin, pale face with big brown eyes as
bright as stars.
He stopped the pony before a little osteria that was open, because some
men were still playing draughts and drinking in its doorway, and bid them
put the beast in the stable; and asked if they had seen a little boy and a
girl somewhat younger, they boy having a fiddle with him, and long
hair.
The people did not know; they had not noticed; scores of children and
country-folks had been about Prato all the day.
Bruno left the pony and baroccino with them, and wandered out where
chance took him. He had no acquaintance in Prato. He had only come there a
few times to buy or sell, if there were a good chance to do either with
profit.
But he inquired of every creature he saw for the children.
He asked the girls dancing. He asked the old man raking up the
melon-rinds and fig-skins out of the dust. He asked the women
barring up their casements for the night. He asked the lovers sauntering in
the white, moon-lit midnight, with their arms round one another. He
asked the dusky monk, flitting like a brown shadow from one arched doorway
to another. But none could tell him anything; nobody had noticed; some
thought they had seen a little fellow with a violin, but were not sure; one
girl had, she knew, and had thought that he had played prettily; and
remembered there had been a crowd about him; but where the child had gone,
had no idea.
"He must be in the town," thought Bruno, and looked for him
in every nook of shadow--under arches or on the steps of shrines,
thinking to find them curled up asleep, like kittens after play.
He tramped through and through the town, not staying for any rest or
drink, footsore and heartsore, and putting away form him as best he could
the dark perplexity of how he should tell
the child the truth, without risking the loss of his affections; or, keeping his secret, save the boy from Lippo.
As he went pondering, with midnight tolling from the ancient bells above
him, one of the mountebanks came to him down a dim passage-way, a
rose-coloured and gold-bedizened figure, skipping in the
shadows with a mask on, and a bladder that it rattled.
"Are you looking for two children?" it said to him through
its grotesque visage. "I can tell you of him--a little lad with
a fiddle, and a pretty baby, white as a lily. They were here all day in
Prato. And this evening Giovacchini, whom we call the Ape, took them both
off with him to the sea. They went willingly!--oh,they went willingly!
The Ape's children always do; only they never know what they go to!
Do you understand? The Ape has such a pretty cajolery with him. He would
make the little Gesu off the very altars dance and play for him. But if you
are their father, as I take it, follow them to Livorno, the Ape will take
ship there at once. Follow them. For the Ape is--not so pleasant when
children once are out of sight of shore. You understand!"
And, singing, the mountebank, with his masked face grinning from ear to
ear, rattling his peas in his gilded bladder, skipped away as he had come,
too suddenly and swiftly for Bruno to stretch a hand to stay him.
"Is that true?" cried Bruno, with a great gasp. He felt as
if a strong hand had gripped his heart and stopped its beating.
An old man, raking the fruit skins that revellers had left on the
stones, looked up from his basket of filth.
"I daresay it is true," said he. "Why not? That man
they call the Ape seeks pretty children, and catches some, and takes them
off to strange countries, to go about and play and dance, or sell the
plaster casts, or grind the barrel organs. I have heard of him. It is a
trade, like any other. He always takes care that they go willingly. Still,
if you be their father, and have no mind to lose them, best be off. He
would be sure to go to sea at once."
"The sea! Where is the sea?" said Bruno.
He did not know, except that it was somewhere where the sun went every
night.
"Go to Livorno. They have gone to Livorno safe enough. The Ape
will be sure to ship with them, and he got a score more I warrant! Go to
Livorno."
"Livorno!" the name told hardly anything to Bruno; it was
where the fish came from, that was all he knew, and the river ran there;
and now and then from it to Signa there would come some seafaring fellow
home for a week to his parents or brothers, bringing with him tales of
strange coutnries, and weeds that smelt of salt, and wonderful large
shells; and such a one would put up in one of the chapels a
votive-offering, picturing a shipwreck, or a vessel burning on the
ocean, or a boat straining through a wild white squall, or some such peril
of deep waters from which he had been delivered--that was all Bruno
knew.
Except into the great towns to sell or buy seeds or oxen, Bruno had
never stirred from the hill he was born on, and to quit it had never
entered his imagination.
To him, Livorno was as Nova Zembia or the heart of Africa is to denizens
of wider worlds.
The contadino not seldom goes through all his life without seeing one
league beyound the fields of his labour, and the village that his is
registered at, married at, and buried at, and which is the very apex of the
earth to him. Women will spin and plait and hoe and glean within a half a
dozen miles of some great city whose name is an art glory in the mouths of
scholars, and never will have seen it, never once perhaps, from their birth
down to their grave. A few miles of vine-bordered roads, a breadth
of corn-land, a rounded hill, a little red roof under a mulberry
tree, a church tower with a saint upon the roof, and a bell that sounds
over the walnut trees--these are their world: they know and want
to know no other.
A narrow life no doubt, yet not without much to be said for it. Without
unrest, without curiosity, without envy; clinging like a plant to the soil;
and no more willing to wander than the vinestakes which they thrust into
the earth.
To those who have put a girdle round the
earth with their footsteps, the whole world seems much smaller than does the hamlet or farm of his affections to the peasant:--and how much poorer! The vague, dreamful wonder of an untravelled distance--of an untracked horizon--has after all more romance in it than lies in the whole globe run over in a year.
Who can ever look at the old maps in Herodotus or Xenophon without a
wish that the charm of those unknown limits and those untraversed seas was
ours?--without an irresistible sense that to have sailed away, in
vaguest hazard, into the endless mystery of the utterly unknown, must have
had a sweetness and a greatness in it that is never to be extracted from
"the tour of the world in ninety days?"
But Bruno was almost as simple and vague in belief as the old Father of
History, and the idea of the earth he dwelt on was hardly clearer to him
than to any Lake dweller in Lacustrine ages. Dangerous people called
Francesi were in great numbers beyond that sea whose west wind sent the
rain up, and the floods, and the fish; and in Rome God lived, or St. Peter
did--which was
the same thing: so much he knew; he did not want to know more; it would not have done him any good, the priests said so.
Therefore, when he heard now that the children were gone to the sea
shore, it was for him as if they had gone with any falling star into the
dusky and immeasurable depths of night. But being a man who thought little
but acted fast, and would have followed Signa into the fires of the
bottomless pit, he did not tarry a moment, but flung his cloak over his
shoulder, and prepared to go straight seaward.
"I will go get the pony," he said, stupidly, like a man
stunned, and was moving off, but the old man raking in the dust stopped
him.
"Nay: what good is a pony, forty miles if one? If the beast
were fresh you would not be in time. The Ape is there by this time. Go by
the iron way. So you wil get to the sea a little after sunrise."
"The iron way?" said Bruno, dully: the thought was new
and strange and weird to him; he saw the hateful thing, it is true, winding
every day through the green vineshadows underneath
his hill, but to use it--to trust to it--it was like riding the horned Fiend.
"To be sure," said the old man with the rake and basket.
"Come--I will show you the way--it is a good step--you
will give me something for charity."
"I might get a horse," muttered Bruno, and pulled his canvas
bag out and counted his coppers and his little dirty crumpled notes.
He had not very many francs; twenty or so, that was all; just what he
had taken in the market on the Friday before. He ahd never been away from
home. He had no idea what travel might cost.
"No horse that you could hire would get by day-break to the
sea," said the old man, who knew he would get nothing by his hiring a
horse, but thought he might turn a penny for leading him to the rail.
"Think--you want those children--and if you saw the ship
just out of port and could not reach her--would you forgive yourself?
You would never see them again then--never all the rest of your days.
The Ape would take care of that. But go by the quick way. They will
come through from Florence in a few minutes. I hear the clock striking."
Bruno shivered a little under his brown skin. Never to see the boy
again!--and what would he say to Pippa on the great day when all the
dead should meet?
"For the boy's sake," he muttered: there was no
peril or evil he would not have run the gauntlet of to serve or save the
boy.
"Show me the way--if it be the best way," he said to
the old man, with that curious and pathetic helplessness which at times
comes over men who, physically courageous, are morally weak.
"Yes, I will show it you. But you will give me something?"
stipulated the rag-gatherer, shouldering his basket. Bruno
nodded.
The old man hobbled on before him through a few crooked lanes and little
streets, throwing quaint black shadows on the moon-whitened pavement
with his rake and his rush-skip. Bruno followed; his brain in a dark
confusion, and his heart sick for the danger to the boy.
When they reached the place by the Bisenzio Gate, the iron horse already
was rushing in
through the cool white night, flinging foam and fire as it came.
It seemed to Bruno as if ten thousand hammers were striking all at once.
The showers of sparks seemed to him as from hell itself.
He would watch for thieves alone on the dark hillside in autumn nights.
He could break in wild colts to the shafts and fierce steers to the yoke.
He would stride through a hostile throng at a brawl, at a winefair,
careless though every man there were his foe. He had the blood in him that
has flowed freely from Monteaperto to Mentana. But he was afraid of this
unnatural and infernal thing. His fancy was bewildered, and his nerve was
shaken by it.
He was like a soldier who will face a mine, but shudders from a
spectre.
"It is horrible--unnatural--unchristian," he
muttered as the great black engine, with its trail of flame and smoke,
stood panting like a living animal.
"But we must use the devil's work when it serves us. All the
saints say that," said the old man, dragging him to the hole in the
wall, and
twisting his money out of the bag and getting him his pass in due exchange.
Bruno was like a sheep; he followed mechanically; dull with the ghastly
fear of what had happened to the boy, and the vaguer personal terror of the
unknown force to which he had to trust.
There were great noise, great shouting, hurrying to and fro; roaring of
the escaped steam; lights green and red flashing in the dark.
Confused and uncertain, Bruno caught his bag out of the old man's
hand, sprang in a hole that someone shoved him to; and felt himself moving
without action of his own, with the sparks of fire dancing past his
eyes.
"For the boy," he said to himself; and made the sign of the
cross under his cloak, and then sat down as he saw others do.
If he went to his death it was in seeking the boy: he would meet
Pippa with a clean soul.
The old man hobbled away chuckling. Bruno, true to his word, had given
him a penny; but in his palm he held four of the dirty notes, each of one
franc.
"I might have taken more," he said to himself, with
self-reproach. "He never would have known. The saints send one
folks in trouble!"
Bruno was borne on swiftly through the night.
With him there were a monk, a conscript, and two contadini with a basket
of poultry between them, and two melons in a handkerchief. An oil lamp
burned dully overhead, throwing yellow gleams on the young soldier's
boyish face, and the begging-friar's brown cowl, and the black
brows of the sleeping peasant woman, and the green wrinkled globes of the
fruit.
They rocked and thundered, and rattled and flew; the white steam and the
rain of sparks drifting past the wooden window.
Bruno was like a man in a nightmare. He only dimly understood the danger
assailing the boy. He had heard that men took children to foreign
countries; tempting them with fair promises, and then grinding their little
souls in the devil's mill. But it was all vague to him like
everything else that was outside the lines of his vines, or beyond the
walls of the Lastra.
Only a word of the rag-picker's haunted him like a
ghost.
The man would take ship; and he, himself, might reach too late and see
the ships sailing--sailing--sailing--and never be able to
overtake it or see the face of the child again.
The horror clung to him.
He sat gazing into the night; making the sign of the cross under his
cloak, and muttering ever and again an ave.
"You are in trouble my good son?" said the monk.
"Yes, father," answered Bruno: but he said no more. It
was not his way to take refuge in words.
A great dull tumult of horror was on him. The strange noise and swaying
motion added to it. All the ill that ever he had done in all his
life--and it was much--surged up over him. It was divine
vengeance on his sins, he thought; he had not clean hands enough to save
Pippa's child. He had been a wild, fierce man, and had never ruled
his passions, and had struck rough blows when he should have asked
forgiveness; and had been lawless in his loves, and had made more than one woman rue the day his wish had lit on her.
It seemed to him that it must be his sins which were pursuing him. For
the little lad was so innocent; why should this misery befall them
else?
His thoughts were all in disorder, shaken together, and whirling round
and confusing him, so that all he could think of was that ship sailing away
and he on shore, helpless:--only now and then, in the midst of
his pain, he thought too of his oxen, Tinello and Pastore:--were
they hungry?--would the man to whom he had left them have wit to give
them their suppers?--would they bellow with wonder at not seeing him
in their stable?--if he were a minute late they always lowed for him,
thrusting their great white heads over the wooden half-door.
So his thoughts went round and round, and the night train flew on with
him past the shining river in its thickets of cane and acacia, and the grey
hills silvery in the the moonshine, and the knolls of woodland with their
ruined fortresses,
and the vineyards that grew green where ruined Semifonte was levelled with the soil; and the silence of walled Pistoia holding the ghost of great Farinata; and Pisa with her cold dead beauty like a lifeless Dido on her bier; and so past the great dense woods and breezy heathery moorlands of the king's hunting grounds, till in the light of the moon a white streak shone, and the monk pointing to it said to them:
"There is the sea."
On the long, low sandy lines of the coast, and on the blue waters, the
moonlight was still shining. In the east the great arc of the sky; and the
distant mountains, and the plains, with their scattered cities, were all
rose-coloured with the flush of the rising day. Night and morning
met, and kissed and parted.
Bruno went down to the edge of the sea, as they told him, and looked,
and was stupefied. In some vague way the strange beauty of it moved him.
This vast breadth of water that was so new to him, sparkling under the
moon, with white sails motionless here and there, and islands, like clouds,
and, in face of it, the sunrise, awed him with its wonder as the familiar
loveli-
ness of his own hills and valleys had no power to do.
He forgot the child a moment.
He crossed himself and said a prayer. He was vaguely afraid. He thought
God must be there.
He stood motionless. The rose fo the dawn spread higher and higher, and
the stars grew dim, and the moon was bathed in the daylight. A boat put out
from the shore, and stole softly away across the gleaming blue, making a
path of silver on the sea.
Bruno, like a man waking, remembered the warning of the ship: for
aught he knew, the boat was a ship, and the child was borne away in it.
His heart grew sick with hear. He stopped the only creature that was
near him on the way; a fisherman going to set his pots and kreels in the
rock-pools to catch crabs.
"Is that a ship going away?" he asked.
The fisherman laughed.
"That is a little boat, going fishing. Where do you come from that
you do not know a ship?"
"Has one sailed yet, since night? Away?--quite
away?--not to come back?"
"What do you mean?" siad the fisherman. "If you mean
the mail-ships or the steamers to Elba or Genoa--no! Nothing
will leave port till night. Some will come in. Why do you ask? Do you want
to get away?"
The fisher glanced at him with some suspicion.
Bruno's eyes had a strange look, as if some peril were about
him.
"You are sure no ship will go away?" he asked
persistently.
"Not till nightfall," said the fisherman. "There are
none due. Besides, there is a dead calm: see how these rowers
pull."
And he trudged on with his lobster-pots and kreels. This man was
in trouble, he thought; it was best not to meddle with him, for fear of
getting into any of the trouble.
Bruno went on along the wharf.
The natural shrewdness of a peasant's habits of action began to
stir underneath the confusion of his brain and the perplexity of his
ignorance and his sorrow. In many things he was stupid,
but in others he was keen. He began to consider what he could best do. That great wide water awed him--apalled him--fascinated him; but he tried not to think of it, not to gaze at it; he looked, instead, up at the moon, and was comforted to see it was the same that hung over the hills of Signa, to light the little grey aziola homeward through the pines. It seemed to him that he was half a world away from the quiet fields where Tinello and Pastore drew the plough beneath the vines.
But he had to find the boy;--that he must do before ever he saw the
Signa hills again. He pondered a little, passing along the wharves, then
turned into a winehouse that was opening early for seafaring men, and ate
some polenta, and drank, and asked them tidings--if they could give
any--of a little lad with a violin, who had been stolen.
The tavern folks were curious and compassionate, and would have helped
him if they could have done, but knew nothing. Only they told him that if
the child had a pretty trick of melody, he would be nearly sure to be taken
to earn money
where the gay great people lived southward, along where he could see the tamarisk trees. If he did not find the children in the old town, it would be best to go southwards towards noon.
He thanked them, and wandered out and about all the old, ugly,
salt-scented lanes and streets and busy quays, piled with
merchandise and fish, and lines of fortifications, and dull squares and
filthy haunts, where there was the smell of salt-fish all day long,
and the noise of brawling sailors of divers coutnries, and screaming
foreign birds, and the strong odour of fishing nets and sails and
cordage.
He heard nothing of the boy; but learned that a ship would go away to
the coast of France at sunset.
So at noon, as they had told him it would be best to do, he went along
the seashore, southwards, past the lighthouse and through the green lines
of feathery tamarisks, that Titania of trees with its sweet breath, that is
flower and forest, and spice and sea, and feather and fern, all in one, as
it were.
To ask any public authority to aid him never
occurred to him. He had been to often at feud with it in his wild youth to dream of seeking it as any help. Bruno and the guardians of order loved not one another. When he saw them at street corners with their shining swords and their soldiering swagger, he gave them a wide berth; or, if forced to go by them, passed with a fiercer glance than common, and a haughtier step, as of one who defies.
His heart was sick as he went by the shining water. The horror came on
him that he had been misled. Neither mountebank nor rag-picker had
been sure that the children had come to the shore. At best, it had been
only a thought.
Bruno felt for his knife in his waistband, under his shirt. If only he
could deal with the man who had taken the boy; and with Lippo.
His soul was black as night as he went along in the full sunshine, with
the azure water glowing till his bold eyes ached to look at it.
He had never known till now how well he loved the child.
And if he had drifted away to some vile,
wretched, sinful, hopeless life--the life of a beaten dog, of a stage monkey, of a caged song bird,--if he lived so and died so, what could he say in heaven or in hell to Pippa?
The sweet tamarisk scent made him sick as he went. The play of the sun
on the sea seemed to him the cruellest thing that ever laughed at
men's pain.
When he came amongst the gay people and the music, and the colour and
the laughter of the summer bathers, and the beautiful women floating in the
water with their long hair and their white limbs, he hated them
all--for sheer pain he could have taken his knife and struck at them,
and made the sparkling blue dusky with their death. It was not only the
child that he lost; it was his power to save his own soul.
So he thought.
He went through the long lines of the tamarisks a brown straight figure,
with naked feet and bold eyes full of pain, like a caught hawk's, in
the midst of the fluttering garments and the loosened hair, and the
mirthful laughter and
the graceful idleness of the bathers, whom Watteau would have painted for a new voyage to Cytherea.
Bruno did not notice what he was amongst. The Tuscan blood is too
republican to be daunted by strange rank or novel spectacle. Whatever be
its other faults, servility is utterly alien to it, and a serene dignity
lives in it side by side with indolent carelessness.
Bruno went through these delicate patricians, these picturesque idlers,
these elegant women, as he went through the poppies in the corn. They were
no more to him.
He had come into the environs of the Ardensa, with the pretty toy villas
glittering on each side of him, and in front the Maremana road, with bold
brown rocks and sheep-cropped hills, going away southward to the
marshes and to Rome; and on the sea, boats with wing-like sails,
some white, some brown, and the coral fishers' smacks at anchor, and
in the sunlight the violet shores of Corsica.
All at once his heart leaped.
He heard the notes of a violin, quite faint and
distant, but sweet as the piping of a blackbird amongst the white anemones of earliest spring.
There were ten thousand violins and more in the world. He did not think
of that. To him there was but one.
He made his way straight towards the sound.
It came from a group of tamarisks and evergreens set round a lawn some
short way from the shore where the luxurious bathers, after their sea
plunge, were gathered in a little throng, with all the eccentric graces of
apparel that fashion is amused to dictate to its followers.
His heart leaped with surer joy as he drew nearer and nearer; he
recognised the song that was being sung, a rispetto of the people, strung
to an old grand chant of the sombre Neapolitan Traetta; which Signa, having
heard the air of it on the sacristan's organ, had played night after
night on his little lute, sitting outside the door of Tinello and
Pastore's stable, while the sun went down behind the hill.
Morirò, morirò, sarai
contenta
Più non la sentirai mia afflitta voce!
Quattro
campane sentirai sonare
'Na piccola campana a bassa
voce.
Quando lo sentirai 'lmorto
passare
Fátti di fuora, che quella son io
Ti prego,
bella, viemmi a accompagnare
Fino alla chiesa per l'amor di
Dio
Quando m'incontri, fallò il pianto
amare
Ricòdati di me quando t'amavo
Quando
m'incontri, volgi i passi indietro
Ricòdati di me
quand'ero teco.
I shall die, shall die; and thou wilt be content
Thou wilt
no longer hear my lamentation.
Four bells will ring upon thine ear
for me,
And one small bell much lower than the rest!
When thou
shalt learn the dead is passing by,
Come forth to see me, for that
dead am I.
I pray thee, love, come forth to come with me,
Come
to the church for the dear love of God;
And when thou see'st
me, gather bitter plants,
And think of me in our dead days of
love;
And when thou see'st me, turn thy steps
within,
Think of me in the time when I was thine.Tuscan
Rispetto
Bruno knew nothing of the name of the air, but he knew the words, and
with a great cry, he pushed his way into the brilliant circle.
The music ceased; the child looked up, he was standing in the midst of
the graceful women and idle men playing and singing, with big tears rolling
down his cheeks.
Gemma, with a scarlet riband in her short gold locks, and her hands full
of sweetmeats, was run-
ning from one to another of the listeners, taking all they gave.
"Signa!" cried Bruno.
The boy stopped a moment, lifting his great eyes in piteous uncertainty
of what was right to do; then the impulse of affection, and of habit, and
of home were too strong for his resolution of self-sacrifice; he
sprang into Bruno's outstretched arms.
"O take me back, take me back, and Gemma too!" he sobbed;
"and you will not hurt Lippo? promise me, promise me--because
they will hurt you; and that is why I ran away, for fear that I should
bring you harm. But I am so unhappy. Gemma laughs and loves it all; but
I--O take me back to the Lastra, and they will tell me there if I have
hurt Nita and ought to die. But promise me about Lippo first--promise
me!"
Gemma stood looking; the sea-wind blowing the scarlet riband in
her curls; she pouted sulkily, and ate a sweetmeat.
"I promise you," said Bruno; his eyes were blind, his lips
trembled; he held the boy in his arms and kissed him on the forehead. Then
he
set him down, and his hand went to his knife, and a sudden savage remembrance swept across his face, and darkened out of it all tenderness of emotion.
"Let me get at the brute--point him out," he said, in
his teeth, while his eyes glanced over the gathered people.
But there were only the languid idlers staring at him, and asking each
other if it were a concerted scene to enhance the charm of the little
fellow's playing. The man, Giovacchino, had disappeared at the first
glimpse of the stalwart peasant coming on his errand of vengeance.
Had Bruno known what his face was like, he would have had but little
chance of reaching him in the mazes of the tamarisk groves; as it was,
pursuit was impossible. He took the two children by the hand, "Point
him out, boy--show me him," said he, breathlessly.
But Signa, bewildered, stared around, and could see nothing like his
tempter.
"He is gone, I think," he whispered, clinging to
Bruno's cloak. "He was not a bad man; he was very
kind."
"He was very good, and I want him," said Gemma, with a flood
of tears. "He has promised me pink shoes, and a coral necklace, and a
little gilt carriage to ride in, and a harlequin toy that one can put on
the floor to dance."
"What is it?" said the loungers. "Is it a comedy scene
to make one admire the children in new parts?"
Bruno seized Gemma roughly, and took Signa by the hand.
"Let us get home," he said, and the rage died off his face,
and a great serene thankfulness came on it.
He had back the boy.
Pippa would know he tried to keep his word. The man might go
unpunished.
Signa clung to him mute and half out of his wits with the sudden wonder
of this deliverance from the fate he loathed. Bruno to him had been
Providence always--as other children see the strength of godhead in
their parent's care, so he in Bruno's. To feel that Bruno was
there was to Signa to be ransomed out of death. He was speechless and dizzy
with his joy.
The idlers under the tamarisks watched him, supposing it some portion of
the programme of these pretty children, who had come upon the sands that
morning; they boy, with a voice so sweet, that the child Haydn himself
never sang more divinely those famous trilli for the famous cherries that
in old age he loved to recall with such delight; and the girl with such a
little face of grace, that she might have steeped straight down from any
tryptich of Botticelli, or flown from any ceiling of Correggio.
"Where are you going to take him? Is the boy your son?" said
one of the gentle people, who had been giving their money and their pretty
trifles to hear Signa sing and play. "Do you know he is a little
Mozart? What do you mean to do with such a genius as his? Not bury it? Tell
me all about him. Where do you live?"
But Bruno flashed a dark glance of suspicion over the elegant throng,
and answered nothing, only moved his hat in half defiant courtesy of
farewell, and turned away, afraid that if he stayed some other means would
be found by some one to take the child away.
His hand gripped Signa's firmly.
"Let us get home," he said.
Signa smiled all over his little pale startled face.
"To the Lastra!" he said, with a little sigh of sweetest
self-content.
"What genius!" said the throng left under the tamarisk
trees.
"What is genius?" thought Signa. "But anyhow if I have
it, it will go with home with me. I did not get it here."
"Why do you cry, Gemma?" he said aloud.
Gemma hung back and stamped her foot, and sobbed with fury, letting all
her gilded sweets and pretty treasures of painted paper, fall on the sand
as she went.
"I will not go back; I will not go back," she said. "I
want the pink shoes and the gilt carriage. We have nothing to eat at home,
and you heard them all say I am so pretty. I want to hear them say it
again. I will not go back; I will not!"
"But I am going, too," said Signa.
Gemma pushed him away and struck at him
with her rosy little fists. But no one heeded her rage.
Bruno dragged her along without attention to her lament, and Signa for
once was indifferent to her; he clasped his violin close, and he was going
back to the Lastra; he was so happy, that it almost frightened him.
He seemed to have lived years since he had run along, with the
angel's gift, by the Greve water three nights before.
Bruno went back straight to the winehouse in the town.
He asked them if they were hungry. They were not. The man who had
decoyed them had fed them well; till they were out of sight of shore stolen
children had nothing but goodness at his hands; the mountebank in scarlet
had only said the truth.
There was a rough, kindly woman at the winehouse. Bruno gave her Gemma
to take care of for the few hours that had to pass before they could get
away to the Lastra.
Gemma was crying sullenly; she hated to go back; she wanted this pretty
gay world that she
had had a glimpse of, that was all ribbons and sweetmeats and praise of her prettiness; she hated to be taken to the bed of hay, to the crust of black bread, to the lonely garden, to the trouble of hunting hen's eggs, and killing grubs in the flowers, and beating sheets with stones in the brook with Palma.
Then he took Signa out into the open air. It seemed to him that what he
had to say had better be said there. Betwee four walls, Bruno,
hill-born and air-fed, felt stifled always.
The boy and he went silently down to the edge of the sea once more.
Signa was startled and subdued.
He felt as if he were a child no longer, but quite old.
He had known what it was to be adrift on the world, to gain money; to be
heartsick for home; to hear that he had some great gift that other people
wondered at; the contrast and conflict of all these varying emotions had
exhausted him. And he was sorry too about Gemma. Gemma, who cried for a
strange life, for a strange country, for
a strange man--Gemma, who cared more about a scarlet band in her curls, and a gilded box of sugar, than ever she had done for all his music or caresses.
Signa had had his first illusion broken.
He was no longer a child.
Fair faiths are the blossoms of life. When the faith drops, spring is
over.
Amidst his great mute happiness at his own home there was a dull pain at
his heart. He had found that beyond the mountains he was no nearer God.
Bruno watched in silence along the sea. They came at last along the
level shore to a little creek, where the brown rocks cast deep shadows,
where the water was in golden shallow pools, full of sea-weeds and
sea-flowers; where the town was sunken out of sight behind them, and
they were quite alone with the wide blue radiance before them in the
splendour of the noon.
"Sit here," said Bruno; and threw himself down upon the
rock. Signa obeyed him, letting his little brown leg hang over into the
pool, and feel the cool sparkling ripples break against them.
Bruno watched him.
Even now the boy was not thinking of him.
Signa with dreaming eyes was looking out to the sea and the sky, and his
hand was, by unconscious instinct, touching such soft minor chords on the
strings of his Rusignuolo.
"What are you thinking of?" said Bruno, abruptly. He was
jealous of theses far-away thoughts that he could never follow.
Signa hung his head.
"I do not know--hardly. Only I wondered--why does God
make the earth so beautiful and men so greedy?"
His own thoughts were sadder and wider than this, but they were dim to
him; he could not put them into better words.
"I supose it is the devil," said Bruno; he had no better
reason or consolation to give.
Religion gives no better.
Signa shook his head. It did not satsify him; but he could find no
better himself.
"It is the devil," repeated Bruno, who believed firmly in
what he said.
And he watched the child anxiously; he
was oppressed with his own secret; he hated himself because he had not had courage that night of the flood to bear poor dead Pippa to her grave, and tell the simple truth. The truth looked so simple now; so easy and so plain; he marvelled why he had been fool enough to hide it--truth always has this vengeance soon or late.
None desert without seeing that she would have been their noblest
friend. Only often it is too late when they do see it. Once driven away
with the scourge of lies she is very hard to call back.
"Lippo ill treats you?" he said, abruptly, having resolved
to rend the spider's web that he had let his brother weave about
him.
Signa withdrew his gaze from the sea with a sigh. On that world of
waters he saw such beautiful things: why must he be brought back to
the misery of blows and hunger and ill words?
"You have promised me not to hurt him," he said, anxiously.
"They said you would hurt him--if you knew."
"And that is why you never told me?"
"Yes. And why I ran away."
"Tell me everything now."
The boy obeyed. Bruno listened. His face was very dark. He did not look
up; he lay on the rock full length, resting his chin on his hands.
"I am sorry that I promised you."
That was all he said when Signa's little tale of childish woe and
wrongs was ended. But there was a sound in his voice that told the child
why they had said in the Lastra that Bruno, if he knew, would do that upon
his brother which would take him himself to end his days in the
galleys.
"But you have promised," said Signa,
softly.
Bruno was silent.
He was a fierce man, and in his passion, faithless, and in his ways wild
and weak at once, oftentimes. But he never broke a promise--not even
one made to the beasts in the yoke of his plough.
There was a long silence, in which the gentle ripple of the water
sounded clear; the intense silence of noon when all things are at rest.
After
a while Bruno rose and lifted the child up, and set him between his knees, sitting on a great brown heap of rocks.
"You have been very unhappy?"
"Sometimes," said Signa.
"And were silent for fear of evil I should do?"
"Yes:--for fear that they would harm you."
"You do love me then?"
"You are good to me."
"Would you love me if I did the evil?"
"Just the same."
"You would not be afraid of me?"
"No."
"How is that?"
"You would never harm me."
"But if I did a great crime?"
"I would hate that;--but I would love you."
"Who teaches you all this?"
"I seem to hear God say it--when I make the music--I do
not know."
Bruno was silent.
He put the boy from hm, and leaned his head
on his hands. Then suddenly he spoke, not looking up; very quickly and any how.
"Listen, I want to tell you the truth. I have hid it because I was
a coward--at first from fear of trouble and of people's
talk--and of late because I wanted you to love me, a little, and
thought you would not if you knew. Listen, dear. It was such a simple
thing. I was a fool. But Lippo put it so. I must have been a coward, I
suppose. Listen, I had one sister, Pippa, a young thing; pretty to look at,
and idle as a lizard in the sun. I was rough always, and too fierce and
quick. They tell you right to be afraid of me. I have done much evil in my
years. I was always a brute to Pippa. I had a sort of hate of her. When the
girl came my mother looked at none of us. I see her now--a little
brown baby laughing or crying all day long, and my mother thinking of
nothing but of her. I see her now in the sun under the Pieta in the house
door, her little red mouth sucking at her breast, and mother so proud and
singing, and talking of the time when she would want her
marriage-pearls. I hated her. No matter--I
knew it was a sin. I was rough and cruel with Pippa, grudging her all pleasure and all playtime, and when the mother died she had a hard time of it with me:--yes, I know. And at a winefair she would dance when I forbade her, and mocked me about a woman--never mind--and I struck my knife into her. I should have killed her only the people held me back, and the knife turned on the busk of her boddice, and only stabbed the flesh. You see I was a brute to her. That is what I want you to understand. Well--then--one day she went away. I cannot tell where she went to--no matter. And the years went by. And one night, the night of the great flood that you have heard us tell of--Lippo and I seeking the sheep, came on a woman in the field. She had fallen down over the height, from that road we go on from the town up to the hill. She was quite dead. She had a child. We saw that it was Pippa. Then Lippo urged to me--the sheep would drown; the girl was dead--the town might say that we had murdered her; he thought it best to say nothing till the morning. We took you; we took the child. We left her
there till morning. The river rose. It took her body with it. We never found it. Then Lippo urged again--why say that it was Pippa? It would do no good. People would think we were ashamed of her, and so had killed her. We could not prove we had not. What use was it to say anything. The river had her. So I let it be. I was a coward. Then there was the child. Lippo would send it to charity. He had too many mouths to feed. But that I would not have. For Pippa's son. I got Lippo to keep it with his own, giving him half of all I got. He has had half and more. His children have fattened like locusts off my land. You never told me. I did for the best. Lippo has cheated me. Dear--you are Pippa's son. I got to love you. I was afraid that you would hate me if you knew. I have been a coward. That is all. Will you forgive me?--Your mother does, I think."
Signa had listened with breathless lips and wide-opened,
startled, wondering eyes.
When the voice of Bruno ceased, he stretched his arms out with a
bewildered gesture;
glanced round at sea and sky one moment, then tottered a little, and fell in a dead faint:--the long fatigue, the tumult of emotion, the peril and the pain that he had undergone, the wild delight of rescue and the hope of home, and now the story of his mother and her death, all overcame his slender strength. He fell, quite blind and senseless, down at Bruno's feet.
When consciousness came back to him his hair and clothes were drenched
in the sea water; Bruno hung over him tenderly as a woman; Signa lifted
himself and gazed, and stretched his hand out for the violin, and saw
Bruno, and remembered all.
"That was my mother!" he said, bewildered, and could not
understand.
Bruno's eyes were wet with tears, salt as the sea.
"You do not hate me, dear?" he said, with a piteous entreaty
in his voice. "I have tried to do right by you since. I think she is
not angry, longer, if she knows."
"No," said Signa, dreamily; confused as though he had been
stunned by a heavy fall.
"That was my mother?" he repeated, dully; he did not
understand; the owls had never found him on the flood then; he had always
thought they had.
"Yes; you are Pippa's son. I have tried to do the best. You
do not hate me--now?"
Signa put his arms round Bruno's neck.
"No. I love you. Take me home."
The child walked beside Bruno, very pale, and still, and sorrowful.
"You will not hurt Lippo?" he said once.
"I have told you no," said Bruno.
Then once he asked:
"Had I a father too?"
"No doubt, dear!"
"And why have I not his name? The other children have their
father's name."
"How can we tell what it may be?"
He could not say to the child--"You have no claim on
it."
"And where is he?" persisted Signa.
"I cannot tell. I know nothing," answered
Bruno, impatient of the theme. "Pippa--your mother--went away to some strange country. We never knew anything more. Girls do these things, sometimes, when they are not happy."
"Then my father may be--a king?"
"A beggar more likely. Anyway a rogue. Why think of
him?"
"Why a rogue?"
Bruno was silent.
"Your mother came back very poor, by the look of her," he
said, after a while. "And sad she must have been, or she would never
have thought of her old home."
Signa was silent too. Then he said, musingly.
"Perhaps he would care to hear me play. Do you think so? When
Carlo Gerimino makes at home figures in wood,--dogs, and mice, and
birds, just what he sees--his father is so proud, and promises to have
him taught great things when he is old enough."
"Do not think of it, I tell you, dear," said Bruno, with
impatience. "You have me. I will do all I can. Think of your Holy
Child and your wooden bird; that is better far. He may
be dead, and so that and want together drove her here. Anyway, it is of no use to vex your heart for him. We can never know--"
"I thought the owls found me," said Signa, sadly, and
dragged his little tired feet along, bewildered; while the old violin
clangoured against him, and his head was bent, and his hair was hanging
over his eyes.
He would have sooner chosen that the owls had found him. This sudden
story, told in fragments, and never clearly, as was Bruno's way,
oppressed him with a sense of mystery and sorrow.
Pippa's son? What did that mean!
He did not understand.
But he understood that he would live with Bruno always, and with Tinello
and Pastore, and with the sweet wild hillside, all rosemary scented, and
dark with the cistus, and the myrtle, and the pine, and that made him
glad--that comforted him.
"What beautiful things I shall hear all the day long," he
thought; for when he was alone, where the leaves were, and the sky was
above
him, he heard such beautiful things, that it was the cruellest pity that they should ever be driven away by the rough noise of Toto's fretting, and Nita's rage, and the girls quarrelling, and the baby's screams, and the jar of the housework, and the creak of the pump-wheel, and the curses of old Baldo on the gnats and flies.
When they reached the sailors' winehouse by the wharf, the boy was
so tired that he had almost lost all consciousness of anything that went on
round him. But at a great rush of voices, and in the foul-smelling
doorway, his dreamy eyes opened, and his dulled ears were started to
attention, for he heard the woman of the place calling aloud:
"And who could have thought? a casement no wider than one's
thumb, as one may say? and how she could get through it passes me; the man
must have helped her from outside. As the saints live, I took every care. I
kept her in the little room at the back, that has the tamarisk in at the
window, and shells, and seaweeds, to amuse her, and a beautiful picture of
my husband's sister's son, of the Martyrdom of the
blessed Lorenzo. And she had a good bowl of soup, and a roast crab, and a handful of figs--eating for a princess--and ate it all, every bit, she did; and then she seemed tired and sleepy, and no wonder, thought I, and I laid her down on the bench with a pillow, and just locked the door on her, and went about my work, and thought no more, because my husband is always a poor thing, and there are so many men coming and going, there is more than one woman can get through--up at four, and to bed at past midnight, as I am. And then, looking out in the street , and seeing you coming with the little boy and the fiddle, I went to wake her up, and the room was empty, and some of the tamarisk twigs broken and tumbled down on the floor, so that, of course, through the lattice she must have gone, and the man must have been there to help her out. The window looks on a lane; there is nobody ever there; oh, he might have done it quite well, only so small as the hole is--that beats me. And it is no fault of mine, that Our Lady knows; and why must you be leaving her with me? and you will pay me for the soup, and
the crab, and the figs, because she has got them away in her stomach."
"Is Gemma lost!" cried Signa, with a piteous wail in his
voice, that stopped the woman's torrent of phrases.
"Yes, dear; it seems so," said Bruno, in perplexity.
"But we will find her for you. Do not cry, Signa, do not cry; you
hurt me when you cry."
But to find her was beyond Bruno's powers. He traced her to the
quay, led by a man; that was all he could hear.
They had gone in a smack that sailed away, bound for Gorgona, at three
in the afternoon. Some sailors on the wharf remembered noticing a
golden-headed, chattering, little child; she seemed so happy to be
off; the smack was some strange one from some of the islands; no Livornese
craft; it had come in the day before with pilchards; they supposed that the
man had got the owner of it to give him a lift over water; no one had known
that there was any need to interfere; they said that the father of the girl
had better come and see: no one else could have any right to
meddle.
That was all Bruno could learn.
They were quite certain the child with the red ribbon and bare feet had
gone to sea; they showed him the distant sail, speeding fast over the
waves, which were now freshened by a breeze that had sprung up; by the
direction she was taking, they did not think that she was going to Gorgona;
anyhow, no one would overtake her till long after nightfall.
Signa stood and sobbed his heart out by the sea.
Bruno pondered a little; he could do no good, and he had barely enough
coins upon him to get home, and had no credit in this strange town, nor any
friend; besides, who could tell, if Tinello and Pastore were well fed? They
might be stolen--heaven alone could tell; if the men threshing with
him were not faithful, no one could say what evil might not happen, nor
what ruin nor what blame the fattore might not lay upon him for his absence
without a word. To stay another night away was impossible; he could do no
good to Gemma, and would be penniless himself upon the morrow, and
powerless to return.
He pondered a little while, then paid the woman at the winehouse for the
crab and figs that she lamented over, and made his way back in the full red
sunset heat by the iron way he hated, half-leading,
half-carrying the boy into the waggon, where Signa wept for his
playmate, till he wept himself to slumber, as the train, groaning, started
on its way, leaving the brilliancy of the golden west and the blue sea, to
plunge across the marshy wastes by Pisa, and traverse the green vine
country, where the Ave Maria bells were ringing, and pause in the still
twilit ancient towns, and so reach the hills above the Lastra.
It was quite dark when they reached the hill of Signa.
Bruno, quite silent, looked up with a longing glance to the purple lines
of pine, where his vines were, and where Tinello and Pastore dwelt in their
shed under the great magnolia tree. But before he turned his steps thither,
he had to tell of Gemma's loss; he pressed money on her father, and
sent him seaward, on the vague chance that what they had heard might be
untrue; then
holding Signa by the hand, he went straight down into the Lastra.
It was eight of the night.
Bells for the benediction offices were ringing from many chapel towers
on the hills; single sonorous bells answering one another under the evening
shadows, and calling across the hills.
The people were all about, idling at their doors, or in knots of three
of four talking of the many little matters that make up the history of a
country summer day. There was hardly a lamp alight. The moon had not
risen.
But the men and women all knew Bruno as he came down into the midst of
them with the stately tread of his bare swift feet.
A stillness fell upon them. They thought he came to take his
brother's life most likely. They drew a little into their own doors,
and others came up from passages and houseways.
"Where is Lippo?" he asked of them.
No one answered. But by an involuntary unconscious glance that all their
eyes took, it was easy for him to see slinking away on the edge of the
throng the slender supple figure of this brother.
"Wait there!" cried Bruno. "I shall not harm
you--coward."
Lippo paused; by some such fascinated fear as makes the bird stay to be
done to death at the snake's will.
"People of the Lastra, I have something to say," said Bruno,
standing still; a tall, brown, half bare figure in the gloom, with the boy
beside him; all the people ran out to listen; men and women and children,
breathless and afraid; what could he be doing with words, he, whose weapon
was always straighter and swifter than any speech can be?
The voice of Bruno rang out loud and clear; reaching the open windows
and the inner courts, and the loiterers at the gateways.
"I have something to say. I am a rough man. It is easier for me to
use my hand, but I want to tell you,--it is just to the child. You
remember that I was bad to Pippa. I was cruel. I stabbed her, even; you
will remember. She was a gay girl, but no harm. She forgave it all; she
said so. We never heard of her: you remember that. She
went--that was all. That
night of the flood we found her dead, Lippo and I; quite dead, under the bank by the sea-road; just above there. There was a child with her: this child. I left her alone in the night out of fear, and because of the shame of it, and for the sake of the sheep, and because they might have thought that we had killed her--Lippo said so. At dawn I meant to go and tell the Misericordia, and go and bring her in and get her decent burial by holy church. I meant so: that I swear. But at daybreak the flood had got her. Now you know. It was of no use to say anything then--so Lippo said. It was as if one had murdered her. But the good God knows how it came. I got Lippo to take the boy. I said that I would pay for him; give half I got for him--always. I have done it. I thought the boy was happy and well fed. Sometimes I had words with him for the child's sake. But on the whole, I thought that all was well. For nine years Lippo has had my money and my money's worth. For nine years he has lied to me, and beaten and starved and hurt the child. For nine years he has lied to me, and cheated me. You know me.
I would kill a man as soon as a black snake in the corn; but I have promised the boy. I lost the boy and found him by the sea. The saints are good. The child ran away because he feared that I should do ill on his behalf, and fall into the power of the law. For him I will let Lippo be. If it were not for the child, I would kill him as one kills a scorpion--so! You know me. Go, tell him what I say. Though we live both for fifty years, let his shadow never fall between me and the sun; if he be wise. This is the truth. He has lied to me and cheated me. I do not forgive. Women and dogs may forgive. Not men. This very day the child might have perished body and soul. And what should I have said to Pippa before God's face when the dead rose? That is all."
He paused a moment to see if any one would answer there in Lippo's
voice or Lippo's name. But the darkening groups, half lost in the
night shadows, were all still; silenced by amazement and by fear.
Then Bruno turned, and with the boy's hand still in his, went
through the western gateway,
and up the road, beneath the trees towards the river and the bridge, homeward.
When he was quite lost to sight the outburst of tongues buzzed aloud,
like swarming bees under the stars.
Was this the truth, indeed? and hid so long!
Bruno went on his way over the cloudy waters to his hills.
And the Lastra, of course, after taking the night to consider, rejected
it as a fiction.
When truth in any guise comes up from her well, she has the fate of
Genevra, when Genvra rose from the tomb; every door is closed and bolted,
and friends look her in the face and deny her.
In the Lastra, after the first surprise of Bruno's speech had
passed away, there remained very few believers in his story.
Old Teresina, who had always said that he was the better man of the
twain; and Luigi Dini, who had seen him at a deathbed or two, and thought
he had a soft heart under a hard hide; and his friend Cecco, the cooper,
who made casks and
tubs under the line near the bridge, with the old workshop with the barred window, and the vine behind it; these three and a few women, who had loved Bruno in other years, and had sore hearts still, when they stopped working to think--these did believe; but hardly anybody else.
At the time of his speaking, no one had heard him without belief.
There was that strong emotion, that accent of truth, which always cleave
their way to the hearts of hearers, however hard those hearts be set in
antipathy or opposition.
But after a while, feeling his way by little and little, and stealing
softly into the minds of his townsfolk, Lippo, wandering about with his
sweetest voice, and tears in his eyes, sighed and murmured that he would
not speak; nay, let poor Bruno clear himself, if he would; he did not wish
to say anything. He could clear himself. Oh, yes: as easily as you
could split a melon in halves. People knew him. He was a poor man and of no
account, but he had tried always to do good. He had been wrong; yes, that
he felt; twice wrong in giving the shelter
of his roof to his brother's base-born one, and then, again, in letting the infirmity of anger master him about all that good gold squandered on a squeaking toy. But in nothing else, so far as he could judge himself--searching his heart. As for poor Pippa, heaven knew he had sought high and low, vainly, for years and years, and never could get tidings of any fate of Pippa's. There had been a dead woman and child found, but not by him; a woman Bruno had driven to her ruin; but, no, he would say nothing. The Lastra knew him and his brother both. Let it judge which spoke the truth. Only this, he swore by all the hosts of saints, no scrap of Bruno's money or morsel of food off Bruno's land had he or his ever touched in these nine years. The child he had taken in out of sheer pity, Bruno turning against his duty to it. But, there, he would say nothing. He was glad and thankful when some natural feeling had awakened in Bruno for the boy:--who knew what good it might not bring to that poor darkened soul? If he wanted witness, there was Adamo, the wineseller, who had seen him thrown brutally off the shafts of
Bruno's baroccino, and had heard his life threatened by him; but, there--no--he would say nothing. The neighbours knew him. As for gratitude, that no man might look for; but it was hard to be maligned after nine years' forebearance. But the saints had borne much more and never took their vengeance. In his own humble, poor little way, he would endeavour to do like them.
So Lippo, to the Lastra,--softly and by delicate degrees; and such
is the force of lying, a force far beyond that of truth at any time, that
two-thirds of the town and more believed in him and pitied him. For,
start a lie and a truth together, like hare and hound; the lie will run
fast and smooth, and no man will ever turn it aside; but at the truth most
hands will fling a stone, and so hinder it for sport's sake, if they
can.
Lippo jeopardised in credit a few days, recovered ground, and, indeed,
gained in the public estimation, with time; so very prettily did he
lie.
The parish priest took his part, and that went far; and the counsel of
the Misericordia did the same, and that went farther still.
Lippo, a good soul, who rarely missed early Mass, and often came to
Benediction; who never did anything on holy days, except lie on his face in
the full sun, and made his children do the same; who, if he was offended,
kept a tongue of oil and lips of sugar; and who was almost certain to have
all Baldo's savings, when that worthy should be gathered to his
father's: Lippo, plausible and popular, and always willing to
loiter and chatter at street corners and play at dominoes and take a
drink:--Lippo had a hold on public feeling that Bruno never
would have gained, though he had shed his life-blood for the
Lastra.
Most people knew, indeed, that Lippo was a liar; but then he was so
excellent a man that they respected him the more for that.
So Lippo recovered his standing, and even heightened it; and kept well
out of the way of his brother; and was browbeaten by his wife within doors
for the loss of all the gain the boy had been to them, but went to mass
with her all smiles, and on feast-days with his children was a
picture of felicity; and so no one was the
wiser for what quarrels raged under the tiles of Baldo's dwelling by the Loggia.
And only old Teresina and Luigi Dini and Cecco and such like obstinate
simpletons believed, or admitted they believed, that Pippa had been found
dead on the night of the great flood.
Why should they have believed it? It is dull work to believe the
truth.
Bruno in return bent his straight brows darkly on them, and kept his
knife in his belt, and let them shout evil of him till they were hoarse in
the market-place and wineshop.
He was hated by them just as Lippo was believed in; he was unpopular
just as Lippo was popular.
"Well, let it be so," he said to himself. He was
indifferent.
"Other folk's breath never made my soup-pot boil
yet," he would say to the old priest of his own hillside, who would
sometimes remonstrate with him on the misconstruction that he let lie on
him. "They believe in Lippo. Let them believe in Lippo. Much good may
it do to him and them."
But the old Parocco shook his head, having a liking for this wild son of
the church, of whose dark, fierce, tender, self-tormenting soul he
had had his true glimpses in the confessional, when Easter times came round
and men of their sins disburdened themselves.
"But it will do you harm," said he. "The
walnut-tree laughs at ants; but when the swarm is all over its trunk
and in its sap, where the tree then?"
But Bruno bent his delicate dark brows, that made him like a head of
Cimabue's drawing; and smiled grimly. If every man's hand were
against him, he cared nothing: he had his good land to till, and the
boy with him in safety.
If he could have wrung his brother's throat he would have been
happier indeed. As it was, having promised the boy, he passed Lippo in the
Lastra with such a glance as Paul might have given to Judas; and otherwise
seemed no more to remember that he lived, than if he had been a dead snake
that he had flung out in the road for the sun to wither.
"The same mother bore you," the priest
would urge sometimes, "and you honour the same God."
"What has that to do with it?" said Bruno. "Though he
were my father, I would do just the same. He cheated me."
"But forgiveness is due to all."
"Not to traitors," said Bruno.
And no one could move him from that faith. And Lippo would go a long way
round outside the gates rather than meet the glance of his brother's
in the narrow thoroughfares of the Lastra.
Though on the whole, good man, the neighbours pitying him, he was the
better for the wrath of Bruno, especially since he was quicker than ever to
answer to the Misericordia bell, and droned louder than ever his responses
of the mass, being wise in his generation.
He was not quite the same.
He would never be quite the same again, Bruno thought--and thought
aright.
The child's vision had widened, and his thoughts had saddened; and
he knew now that there was a living world outside his dreams; and he
doubted now that the skies would ever open to let him see the singing
children of God.
And alas! though he cried his heart out for her, Gemma never
returned.
Sandro came back without her, and cried a little for a week, but was not
disconsolate, and on the whole found his nutshell of a house more tranquil
without the little sulky, self-willed beauty. But Palma mourned her
long; and her playfellow likewise.
Palma was sure that Gemma was dead. "She fell in the sea and was
drowned: else she would come back," said Palma always,
powerless to comprehend that any deliberate choice could keep her sister
long away from her. She had loved Gemma with that extreme affection which a
profoundly selfish nature often begets on a very generous one. She had
sacrificed herself for Gemma twenty times a day with delight in the
sacrifice. Any little treat, any better food, any morsel of fruit, she had
always saved for Gemma; she had waited on Gemma as if she had been born a
little negro, and the other a little princess; she had always taken
Gemma's misdeeds on her own shoulders, and screened her, and served
her in all possible ways. Gemma had been the woe
and torment of her childish life; but she had never known it; Gemma had also been its idol. The shrewdness and the laziness of Gemma had taught her to make a scapegoat and a slave of Palma, when they had been mere babies. Palma had been happy in the servitude. She had firmly believed that Gemma had loved her in return; and so she had done, when she had wanted her.
"She is drowned; else she would be back," said Palma, to all
attempts of others at consolation, and she hid a little scrap of black
ribbon, all she could get, about her little brown throat, and having saved
up a penny, by great toil, with centime pieces, took it to the priest of
the church above Giovoli, and, sobbing, intreated him to say a prayer for
Gemma's soul. The old man put back her penny, and forbore to smile,
and said a mass for nothing--being touched.
What might be Gemma's fate, no one could tell; children were
kidnapped--so they said in the Lastra; and borne away to carry plaster
statues, or skip on a strained rope, or play in circus-tricks, or
wander with a monkey, and were beaten if they returned to their masters
with too few coins at
night--so they said; and the Lastra was sure that his would be the fortunes of lost Gemma. But Signa, full of agonized remorse for her, still felt in his own heart that it was likelier that some way Gemma would not suffer very much. "She will always suck the orange herself, and fling the peel in some one else's eyes," said Bruno, when he spoke of her; and Signa, though he resented the saying, and would not assent to it, knew in his heart that it was true.
"I was so wicked to let her go with me!" said Signa often,
in bitter self-reproach. But the good-natured Sandro did not
reproach him.
"My dear," he said, "when a female thing, however,
small, chooses to go astray, there is not the male thing, however big, that
could ever hinder her."
Sandro never looked beyond his pots of pinks and beds of roses; but he
knew so much human truth as that.
What Gemma had gone to, who could tell?--wandering with little
Savoyards and Roman image-sellers, or dancing with dogs and monkeys,
in rainy streets of northern towns, or under the
striped canvas of merryandrews' booths; that was what most of the children did who were tempted and taken over sea.
"Anyhow, wherever she is gone she is happy if she has got a bit of
ribbon in her hair and a sugar-plum upon her tongue, and she will
get them for herself, I will warrant, anywhere," said Bruno, who
could not have honestly said that he was sorry she was lost.
But Signa, when he said these things, cried so that he ceased to say
them; and gradually the name of the sunny-headed little thing
dropped out of memory except with Signa and Palma, who would talk of her
often in their leisure minutes, sitting under the wall by the fountain
watching the old speckled toads come and go, and the chaffinches preen
their white wings, and the cistus buds unfold from the little green knots,
and the snakes' bread turn ruby red till it looked like a
monarch's sceptre dipped in the bloodshed of war.
Whenever at night the storm howled, or the snow drifted over the face of
the hills in winter, Signa would tremble in his bed, thinking of his
poor lost playmate, as she might be at that very hour homeless and friendless on the cruel stones of some foreign town. His imagination tormented him with vision and terror of all the possible sufferings which might be falling to her lot.
"It was my fault--it was my fault," he said incessantly
to himself and everyone; and for a long time utterly refused to be
comforted. When the great day of his first communion arrived, and he went,
one of a long string of white-clad children, with his breviary in
his clasped hands, and little brown shabby Palma behind him with the other
girls, Signa felt the hot tears roll down his cheeks, thinking of the
absent, golden-headed, innocent-eyed thing, who would have
looked so pretty with the wreath of white wild hyacinths upon her head.
"The boy is a very lamb of God; how he weeps with joy at entering
the fold," thought the good old Parocco, from the hills, looking at
him.
But Signa was thinking of Gemma.
"Dear love, do not fret for her," said Tere-
sina, that very day, after the service of the church, in her own little room over the Livornese gate, "never fret for her. She is one that will light on her feet and turn stones to almonds always; trust her for that."
But Signa did fret; though he knew that they were right.
And he had lost his own mystery and wonder for himself. He was nothing
strange that the owls had found in the soft night shadows and dropped down
at the gates of Signa, as he had always thought.
He was only Pippa's son.
Poor Pippa! She was not dear to him. He could not care for her. When he
went along the sea road he had no instinct of remembrance of the night that
he had lain against her breast and had had his cries hushed upon its aching
warmth.
Just Pippa's son, as Toto was Nita's--this was all?
That the angels had breathed upon him and said to each other, "Let
this little soul see light," and then had dropped him softly on the
waters,
and so the white wise birds had found him and borne him to the Lastra, there to grow up and hear aobut him the music of the heaven he had been sent from--that had been intelligible to him, and had seemed quite natural and beautiful and true.
But Pippa's son, as Toto was Nita's!
This was pain to him and perplexity. It made all dark.
A child's feet are bruised, and stumble on the sharp stones of a
hard, physical, unintelligible fact.
He was much happier, in truth, than he had ever been: unbeaten,
unstarved, unpunished; with only the free, fresh, open-air toil to
do; and the man's strong affection about him for defence and repose;
and often allowed to wander as he would and play as he chose, and dream
unhindered as he liked;--his life on Bruno's hillside was,
beside his life in the Lastra with Lippo, as liberty by slavery, as
sunshine by rain.
And yet a certain glow and glory were gone out of his day for him;
because of the truth about himself which to himself was so much less easy
of understanding than the vaguest fable or wildest miracle would have been.
Pippa's son!--no brighter born or nearer heaven than
that.
It was his faith and fancy that were bruised and drooped like the two
wings of some little flying bird that a stone strikes.
The boy had something girlish in him, as men of genius have ever
something of the woman; and all that was gentlest and simplest in him
suffered under the substitution of this harsh, sad history of his birth,
for all his pretty, foolish faiths and fancies.
But in all the manner of his life he was much happier.
In the country of Virgil, life remains pastoral still. The field
labourer of northern countries may be but a hapless hind, hedging and
ditching dolefully, or at best serving a steam-beast with oil and
fire; but in the land of the Georgics there is the poetry of agriculture
still.
Materially it may be an evil and a loss--political economists will
say so; but spiritually it is a gain. A certain peace and light lie on the
people at their toil. The reaper with his hook, the plougher with his oxen, the girl who gleans amongst the trailing vines, the child that sees the flowers tossing with the corn, the men that sing to get a blessing on the grapes--they have all a certain grace and dignity of the old classic ways left with them. They till the earth still with the simplicity of old, looking straight to the gods for recompense. Great Apollo might still come down amidst them and play to them in their threshing-barns, and guide his milk-white breasts over their furrows,--and there would be nothing in the toil to shame or burden him. It will not last. The famine of a world too full will lay it waste; but it is here a little while longer still.
To follow Tinello and Pastor e as they ploughed up and down the slanting
fields under the vines, dropping the grain into each furrow as it was made;
to cut the cane and lucerne for the beasts, and carry the fresh green
sheaves that dripped dew and fragrance over him as he went; to drive the
sheep up on to the high slopes, where the grass grew short and sweet, and
the mosses
were like velvet under th esotne pines, and lie there for hours watching the shadows come and go on the mountians, and the bees in the rosemary, and the river shining far down below; to load the ass and take him into the town with loads of tomatoes or artichokes or pumpkins or salads, as the season chanced to be, and ride him back amongst the hills, dreaming that the "cucco" was a war-horse, and the pines the serried lines of spears, and he a paladin, like Rinaldo, of whom he had read in an old copy of the "Morgante Maggiore" that lay in the sacristan's chest in the Lastra, the sacristan holding it profane but toothsome versifying; to keep watch over the grapes near vintage time in the clear moonlit nights when the falling stars flashed by scores across the luminous skes, and see the day-dawn rise and the sun mount over the far Umbrian hills, and wake all the birds of all the fields and all the forests into song; to pluck the grapes when they were ripe, with the bronze leaves red and golden in the light, and load the waggon and dance on the wine-press till his feet were purple, while all over the hillsides and along
the fields by the water far and near the same harvest went on, with the echoes of the strife and the play and the laughter and the bursts of song making all the air musical from the city to the sea;--this was the labour that he had to do, with kindly words and with easy pauses of leisure, the passing of the months only told by the change of the seeds and the fruits and the blossoms, and by the violets and the crocuses in the fields giving place to the anemones and the daffodils, and they to the snow-flakes and the narcissus, and they to the scarlet tulip and the blue iris, and they to the wild-rose and the white broom, and they to the traveller's joy and the yellow orchid, and so on through all the year, with as many flowers as there were hours.
The life on the hillside was full of peace for him, and wholesome labour
and innocent freedom and all those charms of this country of sight and
scent and sound which either are utterly unknown, unfelt, incomprehensible,
or are joys strong as life and fair as children's dreams; for men and
women are always either blind to the things of
earth and air, or have a passion for them: there is no middle-way possible.
You shall know "the hope of the hills" in its utmost beauty,
or know it never.
Signa did know it, small creature though he was, and wholly untaught;
and the joy of the hills was with him day and night whilst he dwelt here so
high in air, with the deep mountain stillness round him and the sky seeming
nearer than the earth.
Weeks and months would go by, and he would not leave the hillside for an
hour, having no other companions than the little wild hares and the gentle
plough-oxen and the blue jays that tripped amongst the white
wakerobins, and the sheep that he would drive up under the beautiful
red-fruited arbutus thickets, while far down below the world looked
only like a broad calm lake of sunshine--like a sea of molten
gold.
The child was tranquillised, though he was saddened, by that perfect
solitude.
It was the most peaceful time also that Bruno's life, tempestuous
though monotonous, had ever known.
Since he had lost the boy, he had come to know as he had never done
before the full force of his great love for him. Signa was not to him only
a creature that he cared for with all the strength of his nature, but he
was like a soul committed to him straight and fresh from the hands of God,
by care of which, and by all means of self-devotion and self
sacrifice, he was to redeem his own soul and to secure an everlasting
life.
He did not reason this out iwht himself, because reasoning was not the
habit of his mind; but it was what he felt every time that he bowed his
head before an altar or knelt before a crucifix. He prayed, with all his
heart in the prayers, that he might do the best for the lad in all
ways.
Most days he went on bread himself that he might be able to give meat
twice a week to the growing boy. He went to the fairs in the early day, and
left them as soon as his traffic was done; so that he might not spend money
in roystering, and get fighting as of old. He looked away from women, and
strove not to be assailed by them; so as
to waste his substance on their tempting. He laboured on his fields even earlier and later than he had ever done, to make them produce more; and so have means to get little trifles of pleasure or better nourishments for the boy. He grew more merciless at bargains, harder in buying and selling; he gave no man drink, and flung no feast-day trinkets into women's breasts: all the Tuscan keenness became intensified in him--he laboured for the boy.
Folks said that, losing his open-handedness, he lost the one
saving grace and virtue he had had in him: he let them say
it--if he were pitiless on others he was no less so on himself. He
combated the devil in him--what he called the devil--because he
could not let the devil loose to riot in his blood, as he had used to do,
without lessening the little he had, and that little would be the all of
Pippa's son.
Now that Signa was under his roof and always present with him, his love
for the boy grew with each day. The sort of isolation in which his
ill-repute and evil tempers had placed him with his countryside,
made the companionship and the
affection of this little human thing more precious than it would have otherwise been.
And as Lippo's story obtained footing more and more in the Lastra,
and the taverner's tale of how he had struck Lippo off the cart under
the pony's hoofs spread and took darker colours, men and women looked
colder than ever upon him, and avoided him more and more. Why should they
not?--since now he never bought their absolution with a drink and the
cards for the one sex, and bold wooing and free money for the other.
So the years rolled quietly on, without incident and with no more
noteworthy memory in them than the excellence or the paucity of the
vintage, the large or small yield of the Turkish wheat, the birth and the
sale of a calf, the dry weather and the wet.
Only to Bruno a great aim had been set, a great hope had arisen.
Before he had worked because he was born to work, now he worked because
he had a great object to attain by every stroke that he drove into the
soil, by every heat-drop that fell from his brow like rain.
There was a little piece of ground on the hillside which was much
neglected--a couple of fields, a strip of olives, and a breadth of
wild land on which the broom and myrtle only grew. It ran with the land
which Bruno farmed, and he had often looked at it longingly.
It was allowed to go to waste in a great degree; but Bruno knew the
natural richness of the soil, and all that might be done with it; and it
had the almost priceless advantage of a water-course; a
mountain-fed rush-feathered brook, running through it. To own
a little bit of the land entirely is the peasant's ideal of the
highest good and glory, everywhere, in every nation. Nine times out of ten
the possession is ruin to themselves and the land too. But this they never
will believe till they have tried it.
It was Bruno's ideal.
All the other land of the hillside was the duke's, his
padrone's; that he never thought of possessing any farther than the
sort of communism of the Tuscan husbandry already accorded it to him. But
this little odd nook always haunted and tempted him to passionate longing
for it.
It belonged to a carver and gilder down in the city. It was said that
the man was poor and incapable, and often in difficulty. Bruno, who was not
a very good Christian in these matters, used to wish ardently that the
difficulty might drift as far as bankruptcy, and so the morsel of soil come
into the market.
For he had an idea.
An idea that occupied him as he drove Tinello and Pastore under the
vines, and looked across at those ill-tilled fields, where the
rosemary had it nearly all her own way, except where the bear's berry
and the wild cistus and the big sullen thistles, and the pretty little
creeping fairy-cups disputed possession. An idea that grew more
alluring to him every night as he smoked his pipe before sleeping, and
watched the first ripple of moonlight on the little brook under the
brush-reed, the gardener's rush, and the
water-star.
It so grew with him that one day he acted on it, and put on a clean blue
sht, and threw his best cloak over one shoulder with the scarlet lining of
it turned back; and, being thus in the most ceremonious and festal guise
that he knew of, he went
first to his own fattore, who was a good old man and his true friend, and then took his way straight down in to the city.
A few weeks later Tinello and Pastore were driven through the rosemary
and turned it upside down, and a pruning-hook shone among the barren
olives, and a sickle made havoc amongst the broom-reeds in the
little brown stream, and the gardener's rush was cut too to tie the
broom-reeds up in bundles.
There was no one there to see except a neighbouring peasant or two, who
knew Bruno of old too well to ask him questions; and the fattore, when he
rattled up-hill in his little baroccino, knew what was doing, and
stopped to look with approval.
But when rumours of it in time filtered down the hillside to the city
market-place--as rumours will, trickling through all obstacles
like water--and busybodies asked the carver and gilder in his dusky
shop in the shadow of the Saints of Orsanmichele, whether it were true that
he had sold the land or not, the man said, "No," and said it
angrily.
"How could any man," he asked, "sell any place or
portion of his own in this now-law- beridden country without
his hand and seal and all his goods and chattels and his price and poverty
being written up and printed about for any gaping fool to read?"
Which was true: so the busybodies had to be content with
conjecture; and Bruno, with whom the busybodies never meddled any more than
dogs do with a wasps'-nest, worked on the little nook of land
at his odd hours, till the rosemary dared show her head nowhere, and the
brook thought it only lived to bear brooms for the market.
This addition made Bruno's work more laborious than ever; but then
it was of his own chioce if he did so, and no affair of anyone's.
Besides, no one except its own peasants ever concerned themselves with what
went on upon this big, bold, lonely hill, with its lovely colours and
fragrant smells, that had the sunset blaze over it every night in burning
beauty in weather serene, or dark with storm. It was his fattore's
business only, and his fattore was content.
And the carver and gilder was so, down in the
city by Orsanmichele; for every month on a market-day he had a little roll of much-soiled bank-notes, and these were so rare to him thay they were thrice welcome. Whatever else Bruno's secret might be, he kept it--with a mountaineers silence, and a Tuscan's reticence.
Tinello and Pastore turned the first sod of this bit of land in the
month when Signa was found and Gemma lost; and Bruno always took an
especial pleasure in sending the boy to work on that little
brook-fed piece of the hill rather than on any other.
He himself never neglected his own acres; but he took a yet greater
pride in this small slope, which he had made golden with corn; and those
old rambling trees, which he had made bear as fine olives as any on the
whole mountain side.
On great feast or fast days--when even Bruno, who was not
altogether as orthodox as his Parocco said he should be, in being useless
on the hundred odd days out of the year that the Church enjoins, let his
plough, and spade, and ass, and ox be idle--he would, as often as not,
saunter down into this nook, taking the boy with him; and for hours would loiter through the twisted olive boughs, and sit by the side of the pretty, shallow, swift water running on under the sun and shade, with the tall distaff canes blowing above it, with a dreamy pleasure in it all, that he never took in the land, well as he loved it and cared for it, where his father's fathers had lived and died, ever since Otho's armies had swarmed down through the Tyrol passes, and spread over the Lombard and the Tuscan lands.
"You are so fond of the these three fields. Why is it?" said
Signa, one day, to him, when they walked through the green plumes of the
maize that grew under the olives.
"They were barren; and see what they are now. I have done
it," answered Bruno.
And the boy was satisfied, and cut the brook reeds into even lengths,
sitting singing, with his feet in the brook and his face in the sun.
He thought so little about these things: he was always puzzling
his brain over the old manuscript music down in the sacristy in the Lastra.
Whenever Bruno let him go off the hillside he ran
thither, and sat with his curly head bent over the crabbed signs and spaces, sitting solitary in the window that looked on the gravestones, with the ruined walls and the gateway beyond, all quiet in the sunshine.
The music which the old Gigi had most cared for and copied, and gathered
together in dusky, yellow piles of pages, was that which lies between the
periods of Marcello of Venice, and Paësiello, and which is neglected
by a careless and ingrate world, and seldom heard anywhere except in
obscure, deserted towns of Italy, or in St. Peter's itself.
There was no one to tell Signa anything about this old music, on which
he was nourished.
The names of the old masters were without story for him. There was no
one to give them story or substance; to tell him of Haydn serving Porpora
as a slave; of Vinci, chief of counterpoint, dying of love's
vengeance; of Paësiello gathering the beautiful, savage, Greek airs of
the two Sicilys to put into his operas, as wild flowers into a wreath of
laurel; of Cimarosa in his dungeon, like a blinded nightingale, bringing
into his
music all the gay, rich, elastic mirth of the birth country of Pasquin and Polichinello; of Leo marrying the sweet words of Metastasio to sweetest melody; of the dying Mozart writing his own requiem; of the little scullion, Lully, playing in the kitchen of the Guise the violin that the cobbler had taught him to use; of Stradella, by the pure magic of his voice, arresting the steel of his murderer on the evening stillness of San Giovanni Lateranno; of Pergolese breaking his heart under the neglect of Rome, while Rome--he once being dead--loved and worshipped him, and mourned him with bitter tears, and knew no genius like his; of Jacopo Benedetti, the stern advocate, leaving the world because the thing he loved was slain, and burying his life in the eternal night of a monk's cell, and as he penned his mighty chaunts, and being questioned wherefore, answering weeping, "I weep, because Love goes about unloved."
There was no one to tell him all these things, and make the names of his
dead masters living personalites to him. Indeed, he knew no more than he
knew the magnitude of the planets and
distance of the stars, that these names which he found printed on the torn, yellow manuscripts, a century old or more, were of any note in the world beyond his own blue hills.
But he spelt the melodies out, and was nourished on them:--on
this pure Italian music of the Past, which has embalmed in it the souls of
men who followed Raffaelle, and Mino, and Angelico, and Donatello, and who
breathed in all the mountain-begotten and sea-born greatness
of "il bel paese Ch'Appenninen parte e'l mar circonda, e
l'Alpi"--men who were as morning stars of glory, that rose
in the sunset of the earlier arts.
"The music is there, and Gigi will not let me bring it
away," said Signa.
"But what do you want with that music?" said Palma.
"You make it so beautifully out of your own head."
Signa sighed.
"I learn more--playing theirs. You like my music; but how can
I tell?--it may be worth nothing--it may be like the sound of the
mule's bells, perhaps."
"It is beautiful," said Palma.
She did not know what else to say. She meant very much more than
that.
Signa was fifteen now, and she was the same.
Palma was a tall, brown girl; very strong, and somewhat handsome. She
had her dark hair in great coils, like rope, round her head; and she had an
olive skin, and big brown eyes, like a dog's. She had a very rough
poor gown, far too short for her, and torn in very many places; she wore no
shoes, and she worked very hard.
She was only a very poor common girl; living on roots and herbs; doing
field work in all weathers; just knowing her letters, but that was all;
rising in the dark, and toiling all day long till nightfall, at one thing
or another. And yet, with all that, she had a certain poetry of look in
her--a kind of distant kinship to those old saints of Memmi's on
their golden grounds, those figures of Giotto's with the
fleur-de-lys or the palms. Most Tuscans have this
still--or more or less.
With the rest and food that Bruno allowed to him, and the strong hill
air, which is like wine, Signa, from a little, thin, pale child, had grown
into a beautiful youth: he was very slender, and not so strong as the
young contadini round him; but the clear, colourless brown of his skin was
healthful; and his limbs were agile and supple; and his face had a great loveliness in it, like that of Guercino's Sleeping Endymion. And his empress of the night had come down and kissed him, and he dreamed only of her; she was invisible yet filled all the air of heaven; and men called her Music--not knowing very well of what god she comes, or whither she leads them, or of what unknown worlds she speaks.
It was a noon, and Palma had snatched a moment of leisure to gnaw a
black crust, and to sit under the south wall, and to talk to Signa, who had
come for melon-seeds for Bruno.
She loved him dearly; but he did not care very much for her. All the
love he had in him outside his music he gave to Bruno.
Bruno he had grown to love strongly since the story by the sea; he did
not wholly understand the intense devotion of the man to himself, but he
understood it enough to feel its immeasurable value.
With Palma and him it was still the same as it had been on the night of
the white currants and green almonds. He kissed her carelessly and
she was passionately grateful. They had been playmates, and they were often companions now.
Only he thought so little about her, and so much of the Rusignuolo, and
the old manuscripts in the Misericordia Church.
And Palma knew nothing; which is always tiresome to one who knows
something, and wants to know a great deal more, as Signa did. The lot of an
eager, enquiring, visionary mind, cast back on it own ignorance, always
makes it impatient of itself and of its associates.
The boy felt like one who can see amongst blind people: no one
could under stand what he wanted to talk about; no one had beheld the light
of the sky.
Palma indeed loved to hear his music. But that did not make her any
nearer to him. He did not care for human ears.
He played for himself, for the air, for the clouds, for the trees, for
the sheep, for the kids, for the waters, for the stones; played as Pan did,
and Orpehus and Apollo.
His music came from heaven and went back
to it. What did it matter who heard it on earth?
A lily would listen to him as never a man could do; and a daffodil would
dance with delight as never woman could;--or he thought so at least,
which was the same thing. And he could keep the sheep all round him,
charmed and still, high above on the hillside, with the sad pines
sighing.
What did he want with people to hear? He would play for them; but he did
not care. If they felt it wrongly, or felt it not at all, he would stop,
and run away.
"If they are deaf I will be dumb," he said. "The dogs
and the sheep and the birds are never deaf--nor the hills--nor
the flowers. It is only people that are deaf. I suppose they are always
hearing their own steps and voices and wheels and windlasses and the cries
of the children and the hiss of the frying-pans. I suppose that is
why. Well let them be deaf. Rusignuolo and I do not want them."
So he said to Palma under the south wall, watching a butterfly, that
folded was like an
illuminated shield of black and gold, and with its wings spread was like a scarlet pomegranate blossom flying. Palma had asked him why he had run away from the bridal supper of Griffeo, the coppersmith's son,--just in the midst of his music; run away home, he and his violin.
"They were not deaf," resumed Palma, "But your music
was so sad--and they were merry."
"I played what came to me," said Signa.
"But you are merry sometimes."
"Not in a little room with oilwicks burning, and a stench of wine,
and people round me. People always make me sad."
"Why that?"
"Because--I do not know:--when a number of faces
are round me I seem stupid; it is as if I were in a cage; I feel as if God
went away, farther, farther, farther!"
"But God made men and women."
"Yes. But I wonder if the trapped birds, and the beaten dogs, and
the smarting mules, and the bleeding sheep think so."
"Oh, Signa!"
"I think they must doubt it," said Signa.
"But the beasts are not Christians, the priests say so,"
said Palma, who was a very true believer.
"I know. But I think they are. For they forgive. We never
do."
"Some of us do."
"Not as the beasts do. Agnoto's house-lamb, the other
day, licked his hand as he cut its throat. He told me so."
"That was because it loved him," said Palma.
"And how can it love if it have not a soul?" said Signa.
Palma munched her crust. This sort of meditation, which Signa was very
prone to wander in, utterly confused her.
She could talk at need, as others could, of the young cauliflowers, and
the spring lettuces, and the chances of the ripening corn, and the look of
the budding grapes, and the promise of the weather, and the likelihood of
drought, and the Parocco's last sermon, and the gossips' last
history of the neighbours, and the varying prices of fine
and of coarse plaiting; but anything else--Palma was more at ease with the heavy pole pulling against her, and the heavy bucket coming up from the water-hole.
She felt, when he spoke in this way, much as Bruno did--only far
more intensely--as if Signa went away from her--right away into
the sky somewhere--as the swallows went when they spread their wings
to the east, or the blue wood-smoke when it vanished.
"You love your music better than you do Bruno, or me, or anything,
Signa," she said, with a little sorrow that was very humble, and not
in the least reproachful.
"Yes," said Signa, with the unconscious cruelty of one in
whom Art is born predominant. "Do you know, Palma," he said
suddenly, after a pause. "Do you know--I think I could make
something beautiful, something men would be glad of, if only I could be
where they would care for it."
"We do care," said the girl gently.
"Oh in a way. That is not what I mean," said the boy, with a
little impatience which daily
grew on him more, for the associates of his life. "You all care; you all sing; it is as the finches do in the fields, without knowing at all what it is that you do. You are all like birds. You pipe--pipe--pipe, as you eat, as you work, as you play. But what music do we ever have in the churches? Who amongst you really likes all that music when I play it off the old scores that Gigi says were written by such great men, any better than you like the tinkling of the mandolines when you dance in the threshing barns? I am sure you all like the mandolines best. I know nothing here. I do not even know whether what I do is worth much or nothing. I think if I could hear great music once--if I could go to Florence--"
"To Florence?" echoed Palma.
It was to her as if it were a thousand leagues off. She could see the
gold cross, and the red roofs, and the white towers gleam far away in the
plain against the mountains whence the dawn came, and she had a confused
idea that the sun rose somehow out of the shining dome; but it was to her
like some foreign land: girls live and old women
die within five miles of the cities, and never travel to see them once; to the peasant his paese,--his hamlet,--is the world. A world wide enough, that serves to hold him from his swaddling bands to his grave clothes.
"To Florence," said Signa. "There must be great music
there. But Bruno will never let me go. If there be vegetables to take to
the city, he takes them himself. He says that cities are to boys as nets to
birds."
"But why?" began Palma, having eaten her crust, and with her
hands braiding the straws one in another.
But Signa pursued his own thoughts aloud:
"There is a score of a man called Handel in the church. It is part
of what they call an oratorio; a kind of sacred play, I suppose, that must
be. It is marked to be sung by a hundred voices. Now, to hear that--a
hundred voices! I would give my life."
"Would it be better than to hear some one singing over the
fields?" said Palma.
Signa sighed.
"You do not understand. The singing over
the fields, yes, that is beautiful too. But it is another thing. Some one has scribbled in old yellow ink on some of the scores. In one place they wrote, 'The Miserere of Jomelli, sung in the Sistine this Day of Ashes, 1752; fifty-five voices, very fine.' Dear! To hear that!-