Delphi collected works o.., p.234
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 234
And so I saw and heard him — I — once more; I who had felt his kisses there on the far hillside beneath Fiesole that unforgotten night before the Feast-day of the Dead.
And yet I sat quite quiet, and only drew a little into shadow where the gaslight would not find my diamonds. Women are liars, say you? Well, they need be.
There was silence, tumult, silence, tumult again; then the people streamed away out into the moonlight I was left all alone. I could hear them going down the hills playing on their mandolines. The lights were blown out There was only the white light of the full moon.
Near at hand there was laughter and singing. They sounded strangely, waking all the echoes in the great silent amphitheatre. My life thrilled with sharp sickly pain, as though a snake had bitten me.
I heard the clear vibration of the laugh of Pascarèl, that Italian laugh, like the ring of silver upon stone, which is like no other upon earth. The light merriment of women crossed it, and a burden of a love song followed.
I rose to my feet, and felt my way blindly through the rows of seats to the open doorway, round which the coils of wild vine were blowing in the wind from the mountains.
He was standing on the hillside; his lips laughed, the moonlight fell about him; his mandoline was slung with a scarlet ribbon; against him leaned a beautiful wanton thing with laces trailing in the damp grass, and a white hand that stretched over his shoulder and touched the strings of the lute.
I knew her face; she came of Venice; they called her in her world Poppea.
I went by them, noiseless and shapeless, a dark shadow against the white magnolia blossoms. He started, and a false note shivered sadly from the mandoline.
This was how he remembered! Ah, God! what is it that stays with me still? — it cannot be love — for very shame’s sake it must now be hate?
And yet, — and yet, — I envy that peasant girl who goes yonder through the olives with her lover’s hand in hers!
CHAPTER III.
The old Sea Queen.
IT IS NOT an army that goes out to war. It is a whole people that rises in arms. My birth country alone sends out many thousand Tuscans; all made of the same steel as those who, in the old day held their villa on the Murello slopes there, against all assaults from the stoutest chivalry of England and of Germany.
I come down to Genoa in the fresh May days; along this beautiful sea road that my knapsack and I travelled so long long ago with the French comedians, eating their cherries and singing their songs, with the blue sky overhead and the blue sea at their feet.
I remember how we came into Genoa then — they and I — in the glad Easter weather, with the white dust on our feet and the ready jest on our mouths. Genoa was in festà that day; and all the ladder-like streets were ablaze with flags, and all the many-coloured flints of the old sea palaces glowed in the fervid noon heats from the sapphire water. And we ate fruits in the quaint old galleries along the sea line; and laughed and chattered down the steep ways where the Doria and their fellows fought so often, knee to knee and knife to knife; and then, at nightfall, we played to a thousand odd sailors and traders of every clime from off the vessels in its harbour, and the theatre over and done with, we strayed out into the moonlight along the sea again, slaking our throats with pomegranates, and waking the echoes of the palaces of the old Sea Queen with the thrill of the mandoline until the dawn broke away there across the waves where Africa was lying.
Ah, Dio mio! — those were goodly days, and gracious in their folly, and sweet in the mouth as the red water melon, if also as swift to melt away and leave no taste, and as little fit for life’s real sustenance.
And here is Genoa again in the May time, and this time its music is of drums and bugles, and the roll of cannon and the tramp of soldiers; this May time its waters and skies and air are grey, and full of storm; the rain falls, the shadows of the hills close darkly round; the old palaces lean together, and the streets are dark as night; there are only the golden oranges and the tricoloured banners that have colour in them, and laugh a little through the gloom.
The city seems to tremble where she sits by the sea, that she wrested in the old old days from bereaved Pisa.
Through her streets and down her mighty quays there tramp, all day long, thousands and tens of thousands of tired feet — all Italy and half France are here.
Through the mists that hang on high, over the olive woods, there come half muffled cheers. Though the rain falls the bouquets fall too; fall in showers on the shining lines of bayonets from the balconies above. Through the white vapour from the Mediterranean the sounds of the salutes from the frigates roll heavily and echo down the mole. The old archways and the dim cavernous galleries along the sea line are all full of the troops, that pause there in a little breathing space to taste the wine and press the fruits into their burning throats. Little children glow here and there out of the fog like little knots of flowers; the smallest of them have the three colours somewhere on their dress, and their small shrill voices are all crying vivas for the King and Italy.
Genoa is for the moment the mouthpiece of the whole roused nation.
The rain falls — falls all day long; and at night dims the cressets and clusters of lights that glitter down the terraces in the old palaces, and puts out the broad flame of torches that glow down the terraces and flare on the sculptured fronts and the varicoloured carvings in all the sloping streets. The rain falls as though the sky were sold to Austria. But for once it cannot drive the people in; for once, though the flags droop, the hearts do not: for once the eager steps race, and the loud huzzas rise, and the millions of flowers are thrown through the grey sad mist as through the lost gold of the sunshine.
The clouds may gather and the storms may beat as they will, and do their worst; there is a fire alight in Italy that no rain can quench; — nay, not even a rain of blood.
Genoa for the moment is the meeting place of the whole roused nation.
I sit here in the covered places in the galleries fronting the sea.
It is full of many-coloured fruits, and flasks of wine, and piles of polenta. Oil-lamps swing above, shedding a dim light A handsome brown-faced woman chaffers at the counter, her great gold earrings flashing with each movement of her head. Soldiers come and go by scores, by hundreds; Zouaves with the African sun on them, Neapolitans still in their fishing shirts; Tuscan conscripts with the first down on their lips; Cuirassiers with flashing chains and plumes; Italian nobles with Titian faces and slender stately forms in the simple tunic of the volunteer, all coming and going, drinking and jesting, clashing their sabres against the great brass scales, tilting the straw covered flasks to their mouths, tossing their sashes against the baskets of oranges, making, all unwittingly, a thousand studies for Meissonnier, with the dusky light on the white crosses of Savoy and the silver medals of France, whilst out there, beyond the quay, the sea is murmuring, and the vessels are looming like phantom ships in the shadows.
The French laugh and chatter endlessly, and our people will not be outdone in lightness of heart; but every now and then the Italian faces grow very grave and pale a little under their olive brows as their eyes go seaward; here it is not a question of a campaign lost or won, it is a nation’s life or death that is in the balance.
I have come from the Caffè of the Concordia.
It is grander there and stiller amongst its orange groves and throngs of staff officers; but I like better to be here in this dusky archway with my musket at my knee, and, around, the strong salt smell of the sea.
As I sit here thinking thus, there comes noiselessly into the crowded place a slight small figure, travel-stained and very weary, with a beautiful pale little face under curls of reddened gold. The figure comes to me shyly through the noisy soldiers, and takes my hand.
“Dear friend, am I too late? May I go with you?”
It is Raffaellino.
For a while I cannot speak to him, I am so much amazed. I left him safe in Florence with his genius, in the quiet and the sunshine, springing to goodly stature like the prophet’s gourd.
“You!” I cry to him, making way for him on the window settle. “You; — Merciful heaven, you? to face this war? We shall have women and children next!”
It is brutal of me, but I am rough with him. I am angered to see him there; a lad no stronger than any reed that blows in Arno water.
“The women and the children will arm, I think, if the men fail,” he said, with a gentleness that shames me. “Did you not say yourself — it is not an army; it is a nation in arms?”
I sit silent; I cannot chide him for any love that he bears to Italy, but in my heart I think that the first hour’s march under the summer sun under his knapsack will stifle the life and music in him, as a stone will crush a skylark.
As the oil flames flicker in the wind I see that he is very pale, paler even than is his wont.
“Can we not go elsewhere?” he murmurs to me. “It is so full of noise here, and the smell of wine so strong. And I have a thing to tell you!”
It is hard to find quiet in Genoa that night. Every house is full of feasting soldiers, and all along the streets there come bands of them singing and clanking down the precipitous old world ways.
The rain has lifted a little; there is only a sea mist; I go along the mole with him, and when we have got a little away from the clamour we sit down in the shadow of an old boat that is high and dry there up on the flags. The rain does not touch us; and we have the sea in front, with a captured schooner of Galatz at anchor in the gloom.
Then Raffaellino turns his shining eyes on me, and his eager voice trembles.
“Oh, dear friend, she is living after all! I have seen her, I have spoken with her — there in Florence — and she was in the Arte that night and we never knew!”
The grey sea eddies and heaves before my sight. For a moment the schooner’s solitary light flashes out of the darkness like a million suns. The ground grows unsteady beneath my feet.
I have no need to ask him whom he means.
The boy leans his head on his hands, silent; the wind blows in from the sea; the lights in the captive ship die out; from the terraces above, where the hills are, there comes a loud sweet echo of men’s voices singing; they are chanting the Hymn of Garibaldi.
Then —
“Your donzella?” I say quietly, for it is her secret and must be kept, and the lad knows nothing. “Your donzella? Well! she is not dead, then. But she is dead, no doubt, in another fashion — by all kinds of change.”
He looks at me a little bewilderedly. Perhaps I speak too coldly — men do when they are in pain.
“She is changed, and yet she is not,” he murmurs; “a hundred times more beautiful, yet quite the same, I think, as when we ran together through Verona. But she is very great, you know — very great and rich, and of high estate, and her own mistress. Changed so; but not in any other way. I think, except — Well, a great countess, you know, and a poor child singing in the Carnival for bread, they are so wide asunder. Yes, you are right — change is a sort of death. Perhaps a sadder one for those it leaves.”
“She is married greatly?” I say to him. The words have no sense or reason to me as I say them. I think of my child with the loose golden cloud of her hair blowing in the fresh hill winds, and her hands full of the purple glory of the wild anemones as she came down on the day of the Saints towards the old brown Badià.
I lost her, as one may miss a firefly in a myrtle thicket, one hot June night, in the Florence gardens, and I find her as one may find, it another night, set to shine on high in a woman’s hair in the palace of a Florence duchess.
The firefly, gathered to play the part of a diamond, and gleam in a palace masque, dies of the honour; the little soul goes forth in fire like other souls of greater martyrs; but what woman ever died of exaltation? They leave such thankless follies to the lùcciole.
It cannot be a second ere he answers me, but it seems a horrible endless space and silence that follows on my own voice; the noise from the city and from the sea blending into a strange dull roar that surges at my ear.
“She is not wedded,” says the boy, at last, and my heart leaps like a loosed deer that springs from hunters’ nets to woodland liberty — and yet what can it be to me! — to me more than to any one of those careless lads in the streets up yonder, who will find his grave in the ripening wheat of the wide Lombard fields! “No! It is some great title of her father’s. Our folk call her contessa, because he is now so noble. I do not know much. I did not listen. I could only think of her. There was some wondrous change of fortune for them — she did tell me, I forget. She was in the Arte that night and — then she saw me in the street and sent for me, and I went — it was the day you left, — she had the great villa under Sta. Margharità on the hill. I went, in courtesy and wonder, to a stranger as I thought, not dreaming — then, when she stretched her hands to me, and cried, ‘‘Ino, ‘Ino! — is Verona all forgotten?’ she laughing a little, and yet weeping too, then I knew her, though it was all so changed, and I fell at her feet, and I forget the rest.”
After that he is silent a long time — poor little tender Raffaellino.
I am silent too.
The rain falls faster, and the wind drives against the boat, blit neither he nor I heed that As for me I do not ask another thing. He has seen her, and the world has gone by just the same, — and she is there in my own city, — and I am here a common soldier with my musket, bound in honour not to turn back and look upon her face. For we are to march at dawn.
I sit still looking into the grey mist of the waters; in the town they are shouting and gathering and singing and drinking, and all the lines of the palaces and streets glitter in zigzags of light fretfully through the fog, but no one disturbs us under the black shadow of the old fishing boat.
Raffaellino, after a time, speaks again, his head still bent upon his hands.
“I do not think she is changed at heart,” he murmurs. “The same generous, imperious, tender, wilful, capricious thing, I think, that used to run with me in the winter snows and the summer noons, hungry and happy, about in old Verona. She laughed and wept with me; she forgot all her greatness, — she called me her brother, her playmate, her friend — she, a princess, as it were, in the north land of her father’s. She is a proud, graceful, noble woman now, — a little haughty of speech and swift in scorn, I fancy, but to me most tender. ‘Oh, ‘Ino!’ she cried, ‘if only I were now that merry, naughty, wayward child that ran with you in the old carnival days amongst the merry people!’ And then I think she would have fairly wept — only she turned her head and was too proud — but there went a sort of shiver over her, like that which shakes the glacier just before it falls.”
I let the boy talk on, the broken phrases of his speech filled in with the fall of the rain, and the sough of the sea in the harbour. I ask no questions. I seem to know it all.
“It was late in the day when I saw her,” he goes on after a pause. “She made me stay the evening with her. She lives like an empress. We went out into the gardens as the sun set Then she would hear my story. Did ever you see her in the world, I wonder?”
I look straight at the sea, and answer “Never, — Why?”
If one be a man, and have a shred of honour, one must lie so often; so seldom is there any other way that serves a woman.
“Only, because, when I spoke of you, and without you I should have no story, she grew quite pale, I thought, and listened with a strange look in her eyes. And when I told her how you had kept me with you all these years, and won your gold and fame for me; her tears fell into a knot of oleanders that she held, and she murmured to herself, ‘So like him! — Oh, God — so like!’ And when I asked her if she knew you, then she turned all coldly and suddenly, and answered, ‘ — I know what the world says of him, no more — a great genius — wild and generous — what can he see in those laughing painted women? But they say he loves such best’ And then she would hear no more of you, and then she would hear of nothing except of you; and when she asked if you were still in Florence she trembled, or I thought so — perhaps it was only the flicker of the trees, for it was twilight then — and when I said that you had thrown up fame and fortune, and gone off to join the troops at Genoa, she flashed on me her great proud starry eyes with such a scorn — it scorched me like a flame — Ah, heaven! I shall see till I die. ‘And you wait here!’ she cried, ‘you let him go alone! You! — who but for him would have died in the Florence streets of hunger like a dog!’ She did not know how much she hurt, nay, I am sure she did not mean to hurt at all. I murmured something of the only strength I had lying in music. But her eyes flashed fire on mine, though they still were dim. ‘What!’ she cried, ‘does genius then claim cowardice as its first privilege and exemption? It was not Lelio Pascarèl who taught you that!’ She did not mean to hurt — oh, no! she never meant to hurt at all. That I am certain. But only spoke out her quick proud passionate thought as was her habit when a little child. But one would not wait to hear a woman say that twice. And she was right too, very right, I know. I left her very soon, and said that I would go to her again. She gave me both her hands, in our sweet frank Italian fashion, — she is not changed in any thing of that; I kissed them, and I left her. And when the morning came, I offered myself for service with the volunteers, and they took me, though I am weakly and girlish, as you say, and they gave me the rough dress and the heavy musket, and I came to-day to Genoa with a thousand others. I shall be of little use; but she was right, you know. If one can only die — one ought at least die for Italy.”
So she cannot have forgotten that sweet year long Tuscan summer?
And it was she masked on the hillside that night; and I — I laughed like a fool with Astra and Poppea. What could she think but that I loved those “painted women?” Ah, heaven! how sweet that jealous word to me!
Nay — I know how base my joy is.
What right have I to be glad that my memory lies like a deep evening shadow across the brilliancy of the morning of her life?
