Delphi collected works o.., p.268
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 268
He was a great man, perhaps, and rich, no doubt, and far above them; but why should they be ashamed to break his bread with him?
They would have broken theirs with him.
As for him, now he had the face he wanted — the face that he had sought for high and low amongst the beautiful children of the Riviera, and always vainly — he did not care how soon they went nor where; and yet the boy had a wonderful voice — only children were so often wonderful in Italy that no one ever heard of when they were grown to men — a precocious, swiftly passing, universal genius, that burst to beauty like a rose laurel blossom, and dropped down without fruit. Still, this little barefoot boy, that sang to the dead bishop, had something in his face that surely would not die.
“If I took you with me to the big world they would make an idol of you, little lark,” he said, as the boy put down his white bowl of soup. “Would you come if I would take you?”
Signa looked up to Bruno’s face and across at the hills that hid his old town from his sight.
“No,” he said, simply, but his face flushed all over suddenly; a vague fancy, a dim possibility broke before him like the faint rose that is promise of the sunrise. Only he was too young and knew too little to be able to be sure of what he thought.
“No? Well, you are right,” said the great painter, smiling. “To a million blanks one prize, only the prize is a proud one, once got; though the men whose hands are empty deny it, to console themselves. But be content in your life, little fellow; it is a good one; you are not like a town child, ‘un brin d’herbe, sans soleil, entre deux pavés.’ You have the sun and the air and the country, the old painters knew the value of these; we do not. Look here, my pretty boy, take these pieces and buy what you fancy, and if you ever do wander far afield and want help, here is my name; come to me and remind me of the Certosa, and such influence as I have with other men I will use for you. But is you are wise you will not wander. The ox furrows are safer travelling than the city stones. Farewell.”
He gave the boy two gold pieces of France, and smiled at him. and went within to the dormitory. He would not have minded the child remaining all the day, but he was tired of seeing that black‐browed contadino stretched, listening and silent, on the bench. Besides, he wanted to go on with his landscape.
“Am I to keep them,” said Signa, looking down at the money in his palm.
“Money is money,” said Bruno, briefly. “It is forty francs. Francs do not hang in the hedges.”
Signa was silent in absolute amaze. He had never had a centime for his own in his whole life. He felt dizzy.
Then all at once he gave a ringing shout of rapturous joy.
“I could buy the violin!” he cried, till the vault of the chamber echoed.
It was to him as if could buy the earth and the sun and the planets.
“Yes; you can buy the violin,” said Bruno.
Signa laughed all over his little face as a brook does when the sun and wind together please it; he was beside himself with bewildered happiness. He shouted, he leaped, he sang, he raced, regardless of the silence and sanctity of the place, till Bruno hurried him away fearful that the good brethern might enter and be displeased.
“What did the paper say? you have forgotten the paper,” said Bruno, as they passed the pharmacy, where the monks were distilling their sweet odours and strong waters with a delicate fragrance of coriander and coromandel seeds, and of dried herbs and lemons and the like, upon the air.
Signa, giddy and breathless, unfolded the crumbled scrap on which the painter had written his name with a pencil, his surname — Istriel — curtly, as men write who know that the one word tells all about them to the world.
He spelt the name out slowly, but the line beneath it puzzled him; it was only an address in Paris, but then the little boy did not know what Paris meant.
He crushed the slip of paper together with the gold and ran out of the cool vaulted corridors, that were so still and hushed and grey, like twilight, into the path that runs down the vines.
“I can buy the violin!” he cried to the bright sky; he thought that the sky smiled back again.
After all the angels had thought of him.
“Oh this wonderful day!” he shouted. “Oh Bruno, are you not happy that we came?”
“I am glad if you are glad”, said Bruno. And that was the truth at all times. Half way down the hill Signa stopped and looked back to the monastery.
“I forgot to thank the Holy Child,” he said, with sharp contrition.
“Where? and for what?”
“The little Christ in the picture that they call Perugino — he sent me this to buy the violin. I am sure of that. He smiled at me all the while I sang, and I never said a prayer to thank him. Let me go back.”
“They would not let you in; say your prayers to him at home; he will be quite as pleased. But it was the painter who gave you the money.”
“It was the Holy Child sent it,” said Signa, who had seen so many frescoes of the heavenly host descending to mingle in the lives of men, and had heard so many miracles and legends, that the visible interposition of Perugino’s Gesu was only such a thing as he had looked for naturally.
Well, the Gesu might, why not? thought Bruno, the child was worthy even of such memory.
He did not know — it seemed presumptuous to think they could think in heaven of a child’s wish for a wooden toy; but still, who could tell? — it is such simple, humble, foolish hopes as these that keep the peasants’ hearts and backs from breaking under the burden of unending toil. Untiring intelligence may live best without a faith, but tired poverty and labour must have one of some sort. Called by what name it may be, it is the selfsame thing, the vague, sad, wistful hope of some far off, but certain, compensation.
To Bruno, indeed, it seemed that the Gesu had sanctioned the spending of a vast fortune on a mere plaything; it was the cost of a sheep or of a barrel of wine; but he could no more have denied the child than he could have cut his hand off — besides, if the saints willed it.
As for Signa, he had no doubt that heaven had sent it to him. He cried and laughed in his delight. He showed his gold to the birds, to the frogs, to the butterflies. He leaped from stone to stone in the water, laughing at his own image. He stopped to tell every contadino he met, and every fisherman throwing a net from the canes. He ran through the hedges of acacia and clematis, and told the spiders weaving silver in the leaves. He stopped to tell the millers at the mill‐house over the river, where the good men leaned out of a little square window with the yellow light of a candle behind them, and above the moss‐grown roof the apple boughs interlaced against a dreamy blue evening sky, like a Rembrandt set in a Raffaelle. He caught a big brown velvet stingless bee, and whispered it the story, and let it go free to carry the news before him to the swallows in the Lastra; and when he came to red cross that stands on a pile of stones, where the Greve is broad and green under the high woodlands, where they mighty Acciajoli once reigned, he knelt down and said the prayers he had forgotten, while the wind chased the shadows in the water, and the weir and the waterwheel sang to each other.
“Will it be too late to buy it to‐night?” he said, as he saw Venus rise above the mountains from the sea.
“Not if Tonino be not in bed,” said Bruno, who never could bear not to humour the child. So they walked on as fast as they could.
“You are tired?” said Bruno. “If you are tired get on my back.”
“I am not tired!” laughed the child, who felt as though he had wings, and could dart all the way home as swiftly and straight as a dragon‐fly. It was quite dark when they reached the Lastra.
It was a hot night. The mosquitoes and the little white moths were whirling round the few dusky lamps. There were lights behind the grated windows, and darksome doorways lit as Rembrandt loved.
The men stood about in their shirt‐sleeves, and the women lingered, saying good night as they plaited the last tress. There were groups in the archways, and on the high steps, and in the bakers’ and wine‐sellers’ shops, where the green boughs were drooping after the heat of the day. In uncurtained casements only lighted by the moon young mothers undressed their sucklings. There was a smell of ripe fruit, of drying hay, of fir‐apples, of fresh straw, of that sea‐scent which comes here upon the west wind, and of magnolia flowers from the villas on the hills.
Signa’s heart beat so fast he felt blind as he flew under the gateway, and looked to see if Tonino had shut his house for the night.
His heart leaped in him as he saw a light in the place, and the big keys magnified in the shadow till they were fit for the very keys of St. Peter, and in the door the locksmith himself, with bare arms and easy mind, chatting with his neighbour, Dionisio the cobbler.
Signa darted to him.
“Give it me! quick — quick — quick — oh, please, good Tonino!” he panted. “See — here are the forty francs — all beautiful real gold — and the fair child in the monastery sent it to me to‐day. Quick — quick, oh dear Tonino! You never have sold it while we were away?”
“The child pleased an artist to‐day, and sat for a picture, and so got the money. Let him have the toy,” said Bruno, following, to the astonished Tonino, who had stretched out a hand by sheer instinct to seize the boy, making sure that he had stolen something.
“I have not sold it,” he said, with wide open eyes. “But buy it — forty francs! — the like of you, you little bit of a fellow! It cannot be! It cannot be!”
“Oh, dear Tonino!” cried the child, piteously, and he began to tremble all over with dread, his colour went and came hotly and whitely in the yellow gleams of the locksmith’s brass lamp; and he could hardly speak plain for excitement, with both his hands clinging to the man’s bare arm. “Oh, dear, good Tonino, you never have sold it? oh say you have not sold it? Here is the gold — beautiful real money, and you never do have gold in Signa, and pray, pray do let me have it quick; I have longed for it so. Oh, you never will know how! Only I said nothing because you all scolded and laughed; and now, perhaps, you have sold it — do say you have not sold it?”
And Signa broke down, crying with a very rain of tears in the reaction from this immeasurable joy to fear.
Bruno’s hand fell heavily on the locksmith’s shoulder.
“It is good money. You cannot refuse your own price. Let the boy have the fiddle.”
“But a baby like that!” stammered Tonino. “And if there are painters about that pay so, there is my little Ginna, rich and rosy as a tomato, and how can you, even in conscience, let that brat squander such a heap of wealth, — the price of a calf almost, and a barrel of wine quite, and the best wine in the commune too; and sure he ought to be made to take it to that good soul Lippo, who has kept him, body and soul together, all these years, when any other man would have let such a little mouse drown in the flood where he came from; and I do not think I could in conscience let the lad throw all that away, and he a beggar one may say, unless I speak to Lippo and Nita first, and they be willing, because—”
Bruno’s eyes took fire with that sudden light which all the Lastra had dreaded since he had been a stripling, and his hand went inside his shirt, where, about the belt of his breeches, he was always believed to carry a trusty knife, notwithstanding all law and peril.
“Keep your conscience for your neighbours’ kettles and pans that you send home with new holes when you solder the old ones!” shouted Bruno. “Out with the fiddle, or as the saints live above us, choked you shall be, and dead as a doornail. Take the gold and fetch me the toy, and learn to preach to me if you dare!”
“But in conscience,” stammered the locksmith.
“Give the child the plaything,” he cried in a voice of thunder, shaking him as a dog does a chicken, “or it shall be the worse for you. You know me!”
“I would take the gold when I could get it, if I were you, Tonino,” whispered the cobbler, who was a man of peace. “Gold is a rare sight for sore eyes in Signa, and what is Lippo to you?”
“That is true,” murmured the tinman, frightened out of his wits, and thankful for any excuse to yield. “But it is only to‐day that I heard that the fiddle is worth quite double. There is a great singer come to stay at one of the villas who saw it — and to let a child have it who will break it — nevertheless, to please a neighbour—”
And having soothed himself a little with this elaborate and useless fiction, as his country folk will, always deriving a very soothing and softening effect from the pleasure of lying, Tonino went grumbling within, and poked about with his dim lamp, and came out slowly with the violin, and clutched the two gold pieces before he would let it go. Signa, who stood trembling with wild excitement, took the precious instrument in both his hand with trembling reverence, the tears falling fast down his cheeks.
“Beast! you have made him cry!” muttered Bruno, and kicked the tinman into his own doorway with a will, and laid his hand on the child’s shoulder, and strode up the street of the Lastra, glancing from right to left with mute challenge if any man should have the courage to stop his progress.
No one attempted to call him to account. Tonino was not a popular man, and the weight of Bruno’s wrath and the keenness of his knife had been felt by more than one of the eager, chattering audience who leaned out of the windows and crowded each other in the doorways, in breathless hope to see a pretty piece of stabbing.
Bruno went through them in silence. Signa trotted by his side, his hands clasping the violin to his chest, and his great eyes dewy with tears, yet radiant as jewels, in his joy.
Tonino grumbled that if a man made such a sweet morsel of his own bastard he should not be above the owning of it, and went to his bed with sore bones and a grieved heart that he had not asked double for the fiddle; though for more years than he could remember he had always thought it worthless lumber.
Bruno and Signa went up the street in the moonlight, with yellow flashes now and then falling across them from the lamps swinging in the doorways.
“Where will you play on it, dear little lad,” said Bruno, gently, “if you take it home?”
The child looked at him with the smile of a child dreaming beautiful things in its slumber.
“I will keep it at old Teresina’s. She will let me, and I will bring it to you when I come. Oh! is it really, really true that I have got it?”
“Quite true; and it is dearer to you already than the old lute, Signa?”
Signa was silent. Bruno had given him the lute.
They passed out of the Lastra and along the road into the street that curves towards the bridge; it was quite dark; but at the little café there which looks towards the river, several men were drinking and playing dominoes on the stones by the feeble light of the brass oil‐lamps. Bruno saw Lippo amongst them.
He put his own tall from with the dark cloud of his brown cloak between Lippo and the child, and strode on carelessly without stopping.
“Good night,” he called out, “I am taking the boy up with me. I want him to help stack wheat, and he will have to be up at four, so he had best sleep on the hill.”
Lippo nodded, and hardly looked up from his dominoes.
They went on over the bridge unquestioned.
They bridge had many groups upon it as on all hot nights; leaning against the parapets, and chatting in the cheerful, garrulous Tuscan fashion. The moon was bright on the wide reaches of the river. The sky was studded with stars.
On a summer night, Signa loses her scars of war and age, and is young as when Hercules shook her sunny waters from his sunny locks; resting from labour.
The child looked up at the stars. He wondered if ever in all the world there had been so happy a thing as he. And yet he could only see the stars through his tears; he did not know why the tears came.
An aziola owl went by with its soft cry, “Such as nor voice nor lute nor wind nor bird The soul never stirred, Unlike and far sweeter than they all.”
“Oh, dear Chiù!” said Signa to the owl, calling it by the familiar name that the people give it, “will you tell the little Christ how happy I am, and the old dead bishop too? They may think I am thankless because I cry. Do tell them, Chiù, you go so near the sky!”
“What fancies you have,” said Bruno; but the little brown hand was hot as it touched his own. “You are tired and excited,” he said more gravely. “You dream too much about odd things. The owl is hunting gnats and mice, and not thinking about the angels.”
“I am not tired,” said Signa, but he was walking lame, and his voice was weak and trembled.
Bruno, without asking him, lifted him up in his arms; he himself was a strong man, and the light burden of the thin little lad was a small one to him.
“Go to sleep, I will carry you up the hill,” he said, putting the child’s head down against his shoulder. Signa did not resist. He still clasped the violin to him.
Bruno went up the steep road where his mother had carried him through the darkness and cold before she stumbled and fell.
With fever and fatigue Signa dropped asleep, and not awaken all the way up the long lonely paths through the vines and the reapen fields.
“How he loves that thing already — as never he will love me,” thought Bruno, looking down at him in the starlight with the dull sense of hopeless rivalry and alien inferiority which the self‐absorption of genius inflicts innocently and unconsciously on the human affections that cling to it, and which later on Love avenges upon it in the same manner.
Bruno, nevertheless, was glad that he had it. Fierce and selfish in all his earlier life, he had taught himself to be gentle and unselfish to Pippa’s son. He carried him into the house, still sleeping, and laid him down under the crucifix on a pile of hay, and would have undressed him, but the child, murmuring, resisted, clasping the violin to him, as though in his sleep, afraid that anyone should take it from him.
So Bruno left him as he was upon the hay with his tumbled curls and his violin folded in his crossed arms, in the deep dreamless sleep of a great fatigue, and lit a lanthorn and went round to fodder to cow and see to the ass, and make sure that all had been safe during his absence, and then, with his loaded gun beside him, laid down to rest himself.
