Delphi collected works o.., p.267
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 267
Who first called the lilies of the valley the Madonna’s tears; the wild blue hyacinth St. Dorothy’s flower? Who first called the red clusters of the oleander St. Joseph’s nosegays, and the clematis by her many lovely titles, consolation, traveller’s joy, virgin’s bower? Who gave the spiderwort to St. Bruno; the black briony for Our Lady’s Seal; the corn‐feverfew to St. Anne; the common bean to St. Ignatius; the bane‐berry to St. Christopher; the blue valerian to Jacob for his angel’s ladder; the toywort to the shepherds for their purse? Who first called the nyctanthes the tree of sadness; and the starry passiflora the Passion of Christ? Who first made dedication of the narcissus to remembrance; the amaranthus to wounded, bleeding love; the scabius to the desolation of widowhood? Who named them all first in the old days that are forgotten?
It is strange that most of these tender old appellatives are the same in meaning in all European tongues. The little German madchen in her pinewoods, and the Tuscan contadina in her vineyards, and the Spanish child on the sierras, and the farm‐girl on the purple English moorlands, and the soft‐eyed peasant that drives her milch cows through the sunny evening fields of France, all gathering their blossoms from wayside green or garden wall, give them almost all the same old names with the same sweet pathetic significance. Who gave them first?
Milton and Spenser and Shelley, Tasso and Schiller and Camoens — all the poets that ever the world has known, might have been summoned together for the baptism of the flowers, and have failed to name them half so well as popular tradition has done, long ago in the dim lost ages, with names that still make all the world akin.
Meanwhile the man and boy came to a wooden bridge that bullocks were crossing, with flowers in their frontlets and red tassels. There was a broken arch beyond of a bridge that Greve had thrown down in flood. The reaped wheat was lying on the hills. The long cool grass tossed about to the water’s edge. Children were fishing in the shallows.
Up above there was an open space, with a house that had a green bough over its door, and men drinking, and mules resting with their noses in fresh cut cane leaves. Here they left the bed of the stream, and went up on the high path that goes along the wooded heights with the bold green bluffs on either side, and the vines below, and the river under the aspens between them.
They went along the path which is hardly more than a mule and ox track, rising higher and higher, with the blue mountains behind them, through the blackberry brambles and the starry clematis, and the wild myrtle, and the innumerable hill flowers of all hues, and past a rambling farm‐house called Assinaria, with old arched doorways, and a boy drawing water by a rope, standing in a high unglazed window, with blue shirt and brown limbs, against the dark behind him, like a figure painted upon an oaken panel; and then ancle ankle ‐deep through the sea of yellow corn strewn all about around the place awaiting threshing, and out on to a knoll of rock set thick with rosemary, and so on in view of the Certosa.
The Certosa, afar off, above the stream with the woods in front beneath it, so that it seemed lifted on a forest throne of verdure against the morning splendour of the east; as he saw it, Signa was still a minute, and drew a deep, long breath.
Approached from the Roman road the monastery is nothing; a pile of buildings, irregular, and only grand by its extent, on a bare crest of rock; but approached from the Greve river, when the morning sun, shining behind it, shrouds its vast pile in golden mist, and darkens the wooded valley at its feet, the monastery is beautiful, and all the faith and the force of the age that begot it are in it: it is a Te Deum in stone.
“It looks as if the angels fought there,” said Signa, with hushed awe, as he stood on the sward and made the sign of the cross; and indeed it has a look as of a fortress, Acciajoli, when he raised and consecrated it, having prayed the Republic to let him make it war‐proof and braced for battle.
“Men fight the devil there,” said Bruno, believing what he said.
The chimes of the monastery were ringing out for the first mass; deep bells and of sweet tone, that came down the river like a benediction on the day.
Signa kneeled down in the grass.
“Did you pray for the holy men?” Bruno asked him when they rose, and they went on under the tall, green, quivering trees.
“No,” said Signa, under his breath. “I prayed for the devil.”
“For him!” echoed Bruno aghast, “what are you about, child? are you possessed? do you know what the good priests would say?”
“I prayed for him,” said Signa, with that persistency which ran with his docile temper. “It is he who wants it. To be wicked there where God is, and the sun, and the bells.”
“But he is the foe of God. It is horrible to pray for him.”
“No,” said Signa, sturdily. “God says we are to forgive our enemies and help them. I only asked him to begin with His.”
Bruno was silent. He did not know what to say to the boy. The devil to him was a terrible reality; had he not seen him with his black, foul deformity and flame‐vomiting jaws on the frescoed walls, whenever he had entered any church in the heat of noon, to sit a little and turn his face to the pillars, and hear the murmurs of low mass in some side chapel?
The devil lived in the flesh for Bruno; the devil had made him stab Pippa; the devil was always in the fire of his tongue, and in the haste of his hand; and these holy painters of the church had surely seen the devil in the flesh, or how could they ever have portrayed him?
“Pray for those the devil enters, carino,” he said, sadly. “When you have done with them it will be time to pray for him, and they count by tens of thousands.”
“It is best to pray for him, himself,” said Signa, with his docile determination to keep his own ideas which Nita so constantly endeavoured to thrash out of him. “Perhaps men made him bad, because they would not leave him any hope of being better.”
“Do no talk of those things, the priests would not like it, Signa,” said Bruno, to whom such a manner of speaking of Satan seemed impious — only the child was so young — heaven, he trusted would not be angry.
Signa was silent; he obeyed an order always; only he kept his own ideas; it was as a dog obeys a call, but keeps its instincts.
But his joyous chatter was subdued. He kept looking up at the great monastery above the woods, that was all in a glow of sunlight, and where men fought the devil, and, perhaps, saw God.
“I would not fight him,” he thought to himself. “I would just bring him out, and tell him to look down the river, and I think he would take no more pleasure in hell then.”
And he fancied he saw golden‐haired Michael and the angel that was called Gabriel leading the dark incarnate Sin out there, into the light, till the sun changed his sable wings to silver.
Satan was as real to him as to Bruno; only he felt sorry for him, always sorry, when he heard the priests talk of him and saw the old terrible pictures on the walls of all the woe he wrought and the devouring flames.
Signa had thought a great deal about all these things — sitting in the dusky aisle with his hand telling his beads and his little hot feet on the cold pavement, while they droned out the mass.
There were other country people waiting to go in; the peasants love these places; you will see them very often in little groups, hushed and yet happy, wandering very quietly through the aisles of the churches or monasteries, or sitting against the columns or in the shade on the altar steps. Though they are a mirthful people at times, and like their lotteries and dominoes and whirling dances and gossiping jokes, there is something in the solemn rest, in the serious dusky stillness, that suits them strangely; the houses of God are really to them abodes of rest; they take their tired limbs there and get repose actual as well as figurative; perhaps they do not think about anything, but sit in a sort of day sleep when their prayers are done; but the influence of the place is with them and their love for it is true.
A white‐frocked brother met them in the long vaulted passage‐way, looking as though he had stepped out from some canvas of Del Sarto’s, and they went in with the five other contadini waiting there; Bruno, with his brown cloak on one shoulder and a clean shirt, and the child in rough white linen with a carnation at his throat; a flower in the ear or at the throat is seen here so often with bare legs and feet.
Signa, awe‐stricken and full of the beauty of the place, was mute as they strayed through its cloisters and crypt, and followed the white‐frocked brother, and passed other monks kneeling wrapt in prayer or meditation. Only when he came to where the old bishop was asleep in the wonderful marble of Fracesco di San Gallo he was moved by a sudden impulse, and plucked the end of Bruno’s cloak.
“I should like to sing him something,” he whispered.
“Sing? to whom?”
“To that old man,” said Signa, and then coloured, ashamed of himself.
“His soul is in heaven, he would be angered,” said Bruno in dismay. “He hears much better singing than yours. Look! the padre is shocked at you, and in this holy place!”
Signa hung his head.
“Are you fond of singing, little fellow?” asked a stranger, who had been looking at the Perugino on the wall.
Signa nodded shyly.
“And why do you want to sing to the dead bishop?”
“Because he is only asleep,” said Signa, timidly, “and it might give him pretty dreams. Old Teresina says she always had good dreams towards morning, because I go under the house singing.”
“Sing, then,” said the stranger, and turned to the monk with some words of entreaty.
“If it be a holy song,” said the monk, with reluctant consenting.
“He sings well,” said Bruno, with an outbreak of the tender pride in Signa, which he endeavoured to conceal, but could not always.
Signa was shy and silent for a minute; he wished he had not spoken of doing it, with this grand strange signore there; but the old dead man’s face smiled at him, and the Holy Child in Perugino’s picture seemed to look down in expectation; he forgot the living people; the bishop and the Gesu were all he saw; he joined his hands as if he were at prayer, and sang a sacrament hymn of Pergolesi that they sang in his own church.
Whether the good bishop dead five hundred years, or hard‐hearted honest Perugino sleeping under the wayside oak in Frontignano, heard or not, who shall say till the secret of the grave be loosed? But the contadini standing reverently by, and the white‐robed monk, and the listening stranger heard, and held their breath. The monk turned his head a moment to Perugino’s picture to see if it were not some miracle being wrought there, and the Angels of the Nativity singing instead of this peasant child.
Signa sang on as larks do, forgetting everything when once his voice was loosened on the air, and without knowing what he did, left the hymn of Pergolesi, and sang on and on and on cadences that were to be traced to no written score, and that came to him, he never could tell how — just as they came upon the mountain side, with not a creature near. The words were the words of the Latin services, but the cadences were his own as much as the thrush’s are its own in the hawthorn time.
He might have sang on till sunset if two other monks drawn by the unwonted sounds had not come near and looked on through the half open door. The sound stopped him; he paused startled and half ashamed; and not another note could be got from him.
“He is not angry,” he whispered to Bruno, looking at the statue. “He is smiling still.”
“You would make marble smile, if it had frowned through ages, till you sang,” said the stranger, while the monks murmured something of a gift of God. “My pretty little boy, you may make the world hear of you, your mouth will drop gold.”
Signa glanced at him bewildered; he understood nothing of this kind of language.
“Come with me where I am painting,” said the stranger, “I should like to hear who taught you your perfect phrasing — who taught you to sing, I mean? Come with me a few minutes. Is that your father with you?”
“That is Bruno,” said Signa. For the first time it occurred to him — why had he no father? Was he born out of the old town from the stones and ivy as the owls were?
“Not your father? What is he to you then?”
“He is always good. I keep his sheep sometimes.”
The artist did not ask any more; the boy was some peasant’s son; it did not matter whose. “But who taught you to sing?” he pursued.
“I sing in the churches at home.”
“But have you had no teacher?”
“No,” said Signa; then added, after a pause, “The birds do not have any.”
“But much that you sang — it is no known music — is it composed by some village genius of whom no one has heard?”
Signa was very puzzled.
“I sing the music that I have in my head,” he said, after a little while.
“Then it is you who have the genius — a second Mozart?”
Signa could not understand those words at all. Perhaps he was something wicked. Nita was always saying so.
“A genius? that is a sin?” he asked softly.
The artist laughed. “Yes; unless you can sell it well. A sin sold well is half forgiven.”
The child did not understand, but was a little frightened. To speak of sin at all was eerie in this great place, where men all day long and all night long fought the fiend.
“I should like to paint your face,” said the stranger: “as Perugino did the Holy Child’s that you look at so — oh, a few lines will do, but I fancy your face will be well known to a great world one day, and you have a look in your eyes that is beautiful — can you wait?”
The child asked Bruno. Bruno was displeased, but an Italian has a respect for art and artists; he muttered unwillingly that it was a feast day, the boy might do as he liked for him; it was a folly, but it would not hurt; it was not as if it were a girl.
The child went willingly into the room that is sacred to the Popes, and where dread Leo frowned on him. In the wide window, looking to the north on to the purple mountains, there stood an easel and other things of a painter’s work; the artist being a great man, and bringing authority of governments with him, was painting that glorious view, and living in retreat there for a few days.
Bruno followed them; he would rather have preferred that strangers should leave the boy alone; he was jealous over him, and he thought that praise would make him vain.
So Signa stood in his little white shirt, with his dark curls that had the gold light in them touching his throat, and the painter painted his head and shoulders with his chest half bare, and the carnation bright against the skin.
He swept the likeness in with the fast, broad, true touches of a great artist, who with a dozen strokes can suggest a whole picture, as Rembrandt drew Jan Six’s Bridge.
In half an hour he had what he wanted ; a little face full of sadness and joy together, and most purely child‐like, with a look in the eyes that would make women weep.
He had been waiting for such a face in his great picture of the child Demophöon in the sacred fire; for whose scene he had come to these purple hills and dreamful plains as all the old painters — and Rafaelle, in his days of wisdom — had come to these or such as these.
To move the boy to wondering interest and wake the eager, rapt look in his eyes, the painter talked to him, with easy graphic language, simple, yet eloquent, such as the child had never heard.
He told him about the flowers he loved; about the mountains; about the dead Acciajoli, whose marble effigies were in the crypt below; about Donatello, who had carved the stone warriors in their mighty rest; about Guiliano, who had sculptured the fruits and flowers there to take away all terrors from the tomb; about S. Bruno the founder, and of the far lone Alps, where he had dwelt, forbidding the sight of woman for many a mile around; about the builder of this charter‐house, gentle Orgagna, that good old man, who loved to paint Cupids frolicking with young maidens under orange boughs, and brave youths hawking under sunny skies, and yet could draw Black Death as if he feared her not, but sent her upward through the air as though, by allegory, not to leave men without hope; one of those mighty workers who could write sculptor on their canvas and painter on their marble; one of those great, rich, wise lives that make the best of our own look so barren, spent in raising great piles and colouring beautiful things, and dwelling in peace and honour, and closing tranquilly when their course was run. Orgagna was writing sonnets when he died to a young lad he loved. Sixty years old, and yet with strength and youth and faith enough, and enough freshness of heart and soul, to write a sonnet that should please a boy! These men had never been bitten in the heel by the snake of Satiety; the wound which kills the Achilles of Modern Art.
Bruno, stretched on a bench, lay still as a felled tree and listened.
“If I could talk like that to Signa he would love me better,” he thought; but how was he to talk like that — a man who knew how to make barley grow, and how to drive bullocks over the land, and how to cleanse the vines with sulphur, but no more.
He wished the painter would not tell the child the world would know of him — what use was there in that. Valdarno and the hills were world enough — and were he to sing and the great unknown cities hear him, he would have to go away for that, and Bruno hoped to keep him always — always — always, and see him safe for all the future after him on that good piece of land on the hill‐side, where Pippa had come through the beanflowers at sunset.
What better life was there than that, with the meek beasts on the corn‐lands, high in the air amongst the vines?
Kings no doubt were higher, and great lords; but Bruno pitied them.
Two o’clock came, and the monks had their simple dinner in their refectory, and the same fare was brought to the artist as to any laity who may dwell there in retreat, and he made them bring portions for the contadino and the child, and added wine of his own getting, rich and rare.
Bruno and Signa took it without ado, and with the single animal‐like grace which is bred in Italian blood as in the limbs of the chamois or the wings of the swallow.
