Delphi collected works o.., p.718
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 718
“Who cares for your mind or your heart? You have a handsome person, and that you will give where I tell you.”
“You had better go to your chamber. We can speak of these matters in the morning.”
“I will speak of them now,” said Cirillo, taking another draught of wine. “Things are in a bad way with me. I have no luck. I have played and lost. I have fought the city guards, and there is a hue and cry out against me, and I want to get to the coast and out of the country.”
Beldia listened with her face growing white and set.
“My father,” she said faintly, looking towards the door of the room, as though she saw her father’s form there.
“Oh, I do not want to see him, that you may be sure,” said her brother, with a fierce, short laugh. “You must give me all the money you have, and I will go to sleep in this chair for a few hours, and then take the earliest train to Livorno; there is one at five in the morning, I think. How much money can you get together?”
“I have no money,” she replied, “I have a few francs left of the house-allowance for the week. You know that I have nothing of my own.”
“And you would marry a penniless scholar? you fool! Querci would give you money if you asked him—”
“That is a shameful thing to say, Cirillo.”
“A fig for your fancies! Do you suppose a woman like you cannot get money if she wants it? Many men have come and gone here who would have asked nothing better than to open their purses to you. But you were always a stiff-necked jade.”
“For shame, Cirillo.”
He looked cunningly at her, out of his swimming and sleepy eyes.
“You are in love with your Lombard?”
She said nothing, but a wave of colour passed over her face and she turned away her head. It hurt her inexpressibly to have this coarse rude touch laid on her tenderest and most sacred feelings.
Cirillo laughed aloud.
“Very well, my saint. Then if you do not bring me out your pearls I shall go and knock up this Messer Odisio and tell him that I forbid the banns.”
“My pearls?”
The pearls had been her mother’s, and they constituted those vezzi or dowry jewels without which no Florentine maiden can be decently betrothed or wedded. These necklaces vary in value from the rare virgin pearls, large as cherries, of the young princess, to the seed pearls, small as grains of rice, of the girl of the populace or of the peasantry. Those of Beldia were of medium excellence; three strings of them, worth on the whole some three thousand francs. Cirillo knew their value to a centime, for they had often been in his hands.
“I could not give you my pearls,” she said stupefied. “You must be mad to ask it. Father would never consent.”
“No doubt he will never consent. If we were fools enough to ask him!” said Cirillo, with an ironical laugh in her face. “But you will go and get them, Madonna mine, or I will go and find your betrothed and tell him you are to wed with Pompilio Querci.”
“You may tell him what you like. He will not believe it.”
“I intend you to marry Querci.”
“You may intend what you please. I shall not do it.”
“We shall see. But first get me the pearls. I must be out of the country as fast as I can, for — I may as well tell you the whole. There was a quarrel, and the guards drew their swords, and I shot one, and I believe he is dead. The affair may be troublesome. The pater would not care to see the carabineers come in here after me. Yet that will be so if I be found at daybreak in Florence.”
Beldia said nothing: the callous carelessness of the confession froze her blood. It was worse than the crime itself to be thus indifferent in its narration.
“Oh, my father, my dear father!” she murmured with sobs strangling her breath. “Such a long and pure and honourable life — disgraced by you, disgraced by his own son!”
She was not a woman who ever gave way to emotion, but this horror overwhelmed her, she turned her face to the wall and her frame shook with the force of her weeping. She had been so happy such a little while before, dreaming her dreams under the starry skies!
“The old idiot is disgraced by himself,” said Cirillo, savagely. “He has his signatures out by the dozen. Querci could square all that; you must marry Querci. But for the moment get me your pearls. I can sell them to the Jew goldsmiths in Livorno very well. If you had sent me money when I wrote to you last I should not now be in this plight. It is all your fault. The men set on me because, when I lost, I had no money to pay, and I defended myself, and there was noise and fuss, and the guards came, and I shot one, I tell you. It was all your fault How can a man live without money?”
“He lives by the work of his hands or his brain,” said Beldia, thinking of Odisio, and in the trouble and confusion of mind scarcely noticing what her brother had said of their father’s signatures.
Cirillo swore a bad oath.
“I do not choose to do either,” he said sullenly. “Whilst I am young I mean to enjoy. When one is old, one can labour. Does my father work that you honour him so? All his substance goes in his one craze for old books. It were a harmless luxury in a rich old man, but in a tradesman it is a crime, a bigger crime than mine. But come, go and get me the pearls. I want to sleep while I can, and you will give me something to eat at four, and then I will get out of the house before anyone wakes. Even the charcoal men must not see me.”
Beldia did not speak: the sobs in her throat were stilled by a great effort, but she was bewildered and full of horror. Her longing impulse was to send for Odisio; he was so manly, so courageous, so loyal; her heart yearned for the comfort and support of his presence; she had that entire confidence in him, which is the joy and strength of love. But for his sake she did not dare to summon him. Her brother was already set against him; the two men might quarrel, if they met would almost surely do so, and Cirillo might use his revolver on him as he had done on the guard in Rome. No; she said to herself; no; Odisio should not be brought into danger by her; sooner would she suffer anything than run that risk.
“Listen to me,” she said, striving to steady her voice and combat all weakness of emotion. “There is no testimony that your tale is true. You have a strong imagination, when you need money. What guarantee have I that if I beggar myself at your request you will really leave this town and really cease to trouble those I love?”
“None at all,” said her brother jeeringly. “I do not offer you vows and proofs. You will bring me out your pearls, because if you do not I shall shake my father out of his sleep and get what I want, and I shall then go and find out your Brescian and pick a quarrel with him. There are plenty of knives in Florence. Come Madonna mine. Do not provoke me. Patience is not one of my many virtues.”
She was clear and firm in resolve when emergency arose, and through the confusion of her mind before the confession and demands of her brother these two necessities were beyond all imperative; her father must not know of Cirillo’s visit, and her betrothed must not be brought into any peril from it. Blood soon runs high she knew, and blows are given which often carry death with them almost before a word is said. She had not dwelt in a populous riverain quarter without knowing how hot and bitter men’s unbridled passions can become.
No; even in the painful stupor of her thoughts, she resolved that Odisio and Cirillo must not meet, nor must her father hear of his son’s ill-doing.
CHAPTER X.
WHEN THE FIRST rosy warmth of the daybreak came over the Apennines and smote the grey turrets of the tower, arousing the pigeons from their wooden cotes and sending the bats to roost in the belfry of Santo Spirito, Beldia sat alone in her own chamber and her brother was gone. She had not undressed nor had she slept a moment in the past night: she sat still and sorely troubled, the empty case, in which the pearls had been, kept lying on her lap.
Their loss oppressed her with the weight of a deadly calamity. It was not because they were jewels, or because she cared to wear them, but they had been her mother’s, and she had used to feel a kind of benediction in their cool, soft touch. And how could she account to her father for their disappearance? How could she reconcile him to the sight of her on saints’ days and on Sundays, without that three-stringed collar to which he was so used, and which seemed a very part and parcel of her own white throat?
She sat motionless, with the old leather box lying useless on her knees.
Cirillo had tossed it aside as clumsy and cumbersome, and had folded the pearls up in a sheet of paper and slipped them in his waistcoat pocket.
She sat and gazed at it as the cold roseate light of the earliest morning came through the narrow casement.
She had first worn them at her first communion: her father himself had clasped them about her throat and had said: “be your mother’s spirit with you ever.”
And now they were gone, the poor, pure pretty things, to be weighed in the oily hands of dealers, and might lie on the naked breasts of coarse indecent women! The tears fell from her eyes slowly one by one and rolled down on to the old black empty jewel case.
She could not keep a secret from her father. Although she had long been in the habit of keeping to herself all things which would have annoyed or troubled him in order to leave him to that intellectual quiet which he prized and need, she had never hidden anything of importance from him nor answered any question of his untruly or disingenuously.
She resolved that she would tell him that she had given her pearls to Cirillo to sell: but that she would spare him, if she could, the knowledge of his son’s offence against the law.
And when she met him in the forenoon she did tell him this much; and it seemed to her that her father took the news in a strange manner.
“You will not have even those, then?” he muttered in a sad and muffled voice. “Why, oh why! did you strip yourself for that leech, that knave, that hound? What use is it to give Cirillo aught? He is like the thirsty sea-sand which ever drinks and never has enough.”
He did not ask her how she had known of her brother’s demands; or how the pearls had been transmitted to him. He asked no questions; he was only pained and oppressed.
“Even your mother’s necklace! Even that!” he repeated. It afflicted him keenly; but he did not show any anger as she had feared that he would do, nor did he even blame her.
“What right have I to find fault?” she heard him murmur to himself. Had he heard of his son’s advent, like that of a thief in the night, and did he purposely avoid interrogation and explanation? She almost fancied that he did so, and that he knew of Cirillo’s secret visit; for he sent for a skilful locksmith of the Fondaccio and had the locks altered of those drawers and chests in which the Dante and the most precious of his manuscripts were lying.
To Odisio she said nothing. She could not bring herself to speak of her brother’s evil conduct to one who through poverty and temptation had always kept his head so high, his hands so clean, his honour so unsullied.
The days went on their quiet course; and the summer came and the city grew empty. Even the little tradesfolk in turn shut up their shutters and went out into the country hills or down to the seashore. The lemon-sellers wandered through vacant streets, and the barrows of melons and plums were rolled underneath deserted houses, and there seemed no living creatures left except the poor thirsty, muzzled dogs, and the hot, tired cab horses, and the flowers which hung their drooping heads at all the corners of the palaces, and found no buyers, and died of heat and thirst unpitied.
At this season of the year they were always used to go up to Antella, taking Veronica and Folko with them and leaving the care of the pigeons and plants to the cobbler who lived below, and who fulfilled his trust conscientiously, and was proud and elate when on her return Beldia praised the healthy appearance of his charges.
The fifteenth of July had never come and gone without Ser Checchi saying, often with regret, “It grows two hot for the city, pack your clothes and we will take the diligence to-morrow or next day.”
And Beldia was so used to the annual exodus that by this date all her arrangements were always already made, and there was nothing to do but to hand over the pigeons’ food and the gardening tools to the cobbler for the rest of the summer.
“My father will be sure to ask you to come with us to Antella,” she had said more than once to Odisio.
But the fifteenth of July came and went, and there had been no mention of moving to the country.
It became increasingly difficult, too, to obtain for him the money necessary for the agricultural outlay. On Tuscan lands the owner must purchase cattle, tools, seeds, and all such necessaries, and if the year be a bad one must maintain his peasantry as well. This especial year had been unusually bad: the rains had been too long withheld, and then had come out of season, the corn had been ravaged by storms, the vines were sickly, the show of olives was meagre, the foot and mouth disease had visited the district; and her father, who was always wont to take these caprices of nature with perfect philosophy, was now irritated and depressed by such losses and troubles to a degree wholly unlike himself. Yet they were no more than are constantly to be encountered and prepared for by those who have anything to do with land and its cultivation; and the year, though not likely to be a fruitful one, was not more disastrous than a similar one ten years earlier, when she had seen her fathers serene and gentle humour scarcely stirred even by a passing regret.
She waited a little while this day hesitating to worry him with those coarse, cruel needs; and then, as her father was about to return to his studies, she said timidly: “Ruggiero was here at noon.”
Ruggiero was the contadino at their little country place of Antella.
“Well?” asked Ser Checchi, pausing with some annoyance, his thumb and forefinger between the pages of the volume which he was longing to peruse. “What of that, my dear?”
“The red cow is dead.”
“Another cow! Cows are always dying. They are melancholy beasts.”
“She drank at the river, and she swallowed a small fish, and it stuck across her gullet, and killed her.”
“He must get another,” said Ser Checchi, opening his volume with some annoyance.
“But the yield of the corn is so poor. There are only fifty state.”
“They are producing new wheat by artificial fertilisation, but I am not sure that what is so produced will answer so well as the natural plant,” replied her father. “Do you not think the most wonderful secret of all in nature is how that germ lies hidden in the grain and sprouts when restored to earth? Those ears of wheat from the Pharaoh’s sepulchres which germinate after two thousand years, explain it scientifically how you will, the miracle and the mystery of it still remains the same. Man is dumbfounded before it. I once saw an Etruscan tomb opened away yonder by Volterra. There were some small kernels of wheat in a stone cippus. I planted them in a fresh turned furrow, and they grew and multiplied! That I saw with my own eyes. And in due time I ate bread from the harvest of those grains. They had lain there in the dark, in the bowels of the rock, for hundreds upon hundreds of years; they had been put there in the stone cippus before the birth of Cæsar, before the rise of Rome; yet life was still in them, dormant life, which awoke when they once again felt the moist, warm soil open to receive them, felt the dew, and the mould, and the showers. What is impossible in any resurrection after that? How should the human mind follow or grasp the living spirit which was at work within the dry husk?” She opened her lips to speak, but closed them again without speaking. His thoughts were happily far away with the Impersonal; she had not the heart to call him back to the sordid circumstances of the moment, to the poor harvest, to the dead cow, to the straitened purse.
On the morrow, Beldia, as she gave him his coffee she ventured to say; “It is very warm. Are we not going to Antella this year?”
“No,” said Ser Checchi harshly, looking away from her as he spoke. “We shall not go this year.”
Beldia controlled her disappointment with difficulty from any outward expression. She occupied herself with pouring water on the coffee grains and cutting slices of bread for the boy Poldo’s breakfast. She longed intensely to ask who would enjoy the summer beauty of her olive orchards and her pine woods, but she restrained the impulse, and kept respectful silence.
He pushed away his cup of excellent coffee half-drunk, and sighed. He was a man of tender heart, and it hurt him to deny or deprive anyone of anything; and he knew that to Beldia, to pass the hot months in the freedom and freshness of the hills, was a source of infinite rejoicing and benefit, and she had gone to the Casentino with every summer of her life.
“We cannot afford it,” he added in a tone of apology.
“It costs less than living in the town,” said Beldia in surprise, “and the city heats weaken you, father; all the doctors say so.”
“I am not weak,” said her father hastily, “we cannot go to Antella, I have let, — I have lent, — the house.”
“And never told me!” she cried involuntarily, with an unspoken reproach in the exclamation.
“Am I bound to ask your permission for my action?” said the old man with a severity and haste wholly unlike himself, and a flush on his face.
“No,” said Beldia meekly. “But I thought, I hoped, I had your confidence. I have always tried to merit it.”
“I never said that you did not merit it,” replied her father. “But it is tiresome to be obliged to explain.”
He was ashamed of his own silence and insincerity to her, and it made him irritable and sullen, with that ill-temper which is the result of suffering and contrition.
He beat impatiently on the table with his spoon, and looked away from his daughter’s inquiring eyes, which he felt ever and again turned on him.
With a violent effort at self-control, she did not even ask to whom he had let, or lent, their country retreat.
“I shall know in time,” she said to her self, “ill new always travel apace. All the gossips of the quarter will be screaming it out to each other soon enough.”
