Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 188
The girl sought for the ring amongst the flowers and toys and money and sweetmeats with which her skirts were full.
It was a very old seal ring — an onyx, cut with the heads of the Fates.
She looked at it long and curiously, with a dreaming look on her face; then thrust it into the bosom of her dress. Then she gathered closely up about her the heavy brocades of her garments, and turned to the boy.
“Let us run, ‘Ino. The people are not looking now. We shall lose the Gala, but Mariuccia is so cold at home.”
So they turned away from the square, and went back into the old, irregular, gloomy streets where even at mid-day there was no gleam of brightness.
But now they could not run; their fleet feet were powerless to bear them swiftly; they were too heavily laden with the spoils of their prosperous efforts; it was of no avail to try and move quickly; at every step they - trod upon a knot of violets, or trampled a bright narcissus under foot They were forced at last to go very tranquilly, with bent heads and with cramped limbs, along the cold and dreary passage ways.
“Oh ‘Ino!” the girl cried. “When we sang for love and goodwill, we were so light of heart and of foot. But now—”
She sank down upon a flight of steps, her skirts glided from her hands, her treasures rolled to the ground and were scattered. She sobbed as’ if her heart would break.
“That is ungrateful to the people, cara mia,” said the little lad softly. “Is it that stone with the Fates that has chilled you?”
“Nay she is right,” said a voice above them. “Count art by gold, and it fetters the feet it once winged.”
He who had given the ring spoke the words, passing swiftly in the shadow so as not to be delayed nor questioned.
After him ran a gay and giddy throng of masks, thrashing each other with coloured bladders, and chasing him with tumultuous shouts as of a band of mummers to their chief.
The shouts in their hoarse vibration filled the tunnel of the narrow twilit street as the parti-coloured group of the masquers reeled down it like a score of anemone leaves blown heedlessly upon an autumn wind.
They all cried one word:. — Pascarèl.
I, — the child who sat on the stone stair, weeping over my fallen violets and my scattered wealth, — treasured the name in my heart on which the carven Fates were resting.
The masquers reeled on out of sight, a cloud of misty and tangled hues; over the high grim roofs and the sculptured buttresses the name came back flying gaily in glad echo on the air —
“Pascarèllo! — Pascarèl!”
CHAPTER III.
By the broken Donatello.
THE first thing I remember is of how poor we all were; how horribly poor, how terribly poor!
When I went to take my first dancing lesson at four years old, I had holes in my little lace frock, and a pair of faded blue shoes nearly out at the toes. I cried bitterly for very shame sake.
“Never mind, carina,” said old Mariuccia, my nurse. “Never mind. If you dance away with a light heart, what does a tatter or two in the dress signify? It is better to have holes in the shoes, little one, than a leaden weight on the feet, believe me.”
Oh! and what a fool I thought her! Though she was sixty and I was not six.
But when my father’s man Florio came in and lifted me up before the old battered silver mirror, and murmured in his soft tongue, “Ah! what does a shabby frock matter when one has an angel’s face like the signorina’s? The other little ladies may be all hung with rubies and pearls if they chose; nobody will look at them if the signorina be there” — then, indeed, there seemed some sense in the argument, and Florio appeared to me a person so discerning that I consented to be pacified and to be led away to the vast bare frescoed dancing-hall, where one little shrill fiddle was piping and shrieking to a score of Lombardie babies, all more or less noble, I believe, in descent We were at that time in Verona. Poor old Verona! World forgotten, though having given so much to the world.
The city of Lesbia’s lover is but a sorry desolation now, despite its hidden treasures, that no man remembers once in a score of years.
Those narrow sun-baked streets, those grim dust-covered fortifications, those little lines of stunted sickly trees, those simooms of lime dust, those bitter piercing mountain winds, those pale grasses, all alive with brown lizards, those lofty desolate houses, palace and prison in one, those straggling vines choking the strangled maples, the dreary weary “waveless plain,” — how miserable it all is now, how miserable it all was then!
Verona never seemed like Italy to me. Perhaps because I saw it always under the dominion of those white-coated stranieri, who pampered its greedy priesthood and bribed its lazy proletariate, and who waltzed themselves into favour with me by swinging me round many and many a time to the gay measures of their regimental bands, and spending on me floods of sweetmeats and pretty phrases, although old Mariuccia, whenever she saw me thus polluted, would snatch me away from the barbarian’s arms with fiercest flashes of her still eloquent Tuscan eyes.
Mariuccia told me many a tale of the old grandeurs of the city of Can Grande; and I used to wander about it gazing at its amphitheatre and its acacia hedges, and its green Adige and its two Paladins at the door of the duomo, and dreaming of Marius and Theodoric, of Catullus, and Carolus Magnus, of Romeo, and Ezzelino, of Vitruvius, and Paolo Veronese, in the strangest confusion of fable and truth, in which my little brain floated as on a gorgeous, but misty, sea.
I never loved Verona.
The four first years of my small life had been spent with Mariuccia on a farm on the distant Romagna.
There I had lived in the open air, rolled in the grass, gleaned the gold of the millet, got drunk in my innocent fashion off the grapes at vintage time, and filled my hands with wild wood flowers all the whole year round. There I had owned all a child’s delicious riches of freedom and sunlight, of chains of daffodils, of fans of chesnut leaves, of friendships with birds and beasts, of long, happy, heedless days in which the sky seemed always blue, and the angels of God always near.
When at four years old I was taken and cooped up in the dusty duskiness of Juliet’s birthplace, I rebelled bitterly, and at first pined constantly, refusing to be comforted. I fretted for the free air and the glad light, as many a prisoner had done before me in the days when
“Death and sin played at dice with Eccelin.”
Of course after a while my sweet first memories paled a little, and I grew a little reconciled. But I never forgot that bright beloved Italy of mine, away there southward in the blue ocean of the distant Romagna; I never grew to care for these grim streets, these filthy courts, these parching heats, these frozen winters, these masses of frowning stone, these labyrinths of palaces and prisons, which seemed always to my fancy, as I grew older, to have still upon them the mark of the scourge of Attila, the grip of the gauntlet of Scala, the scorch of the crimes of Romano.
At the time when the little shrill fiddle played to me in my little shabby shoes, we were, I say, in Verona for no better, or lesser, reason than that having got in there we had not the means to get out again.
We had the second floor of an old palace; such a palace as you used to rent for a song in Italy, before Italy changed her proud “Farà da Sè,” from a boast and a dream to a heroism and a truth.
A palace with superb staircases reeking in filth; courts which would have held a troop of men, armed and mounted, given over to lizards and centipedes; chambers with tapestries of Rosts, from the cartoons of Bronzino, ancle deep in dust and dirt; and walls that were due to the designs of Fra Giocondo, hung with the padrona’s ragged garments, drying in the sun after their wash in the Adige.
“Peintures aux plafonds; ordures aux pieds.” It is Georges Sand, if I remember aright, who wrote that bitter line, or something like it, upon Italy. It is terribly bitter, for it is at times terribly true.
Our palace was no exception to the rule.
It was magnificent as a dream, even still abovehead, where some wondrous-eyed woman, worthy almost of Leonardo himself, laughed down from her frescoes of roses, or where some apotheosis or cenacolo by Gentile, or Pisanello, still kept its radiant colours, despite all ravages of time, and neglect, and fire, and dust. It was magnificent too from that beauty of proportion, in which, as by some almost unerring instinct of symmetry, so many Italian buildings have a beauty that cannot perish whilst one stone is left upon another, even as in so many Italian faces there is a perfection which, being born not of hue but of outline, is unharmed by age, and endures even after death itself, as did that golden loveliness of Faustina that was found a century after death unharmed in the dusky depths of Santa Croce.
But it was also unutterably dreary, dirty, ghastly, dismal, comfortless; bats rustled through its passages, and downy owls haunted its roof timbers. The upper rooms were all tenanted by working people, or rather by people who affected to work, and in reality lived on the Austrian doles; and the lower halls were the abode of the padrona and her eight children. She was a stout-built, black-browed, comely soul; the most good-natured creature in existence; and her children lay in the sun, or played boccetta, or fought for the chesnuts on the stove, or did whatever seemed best to them all day long in an endless strife and riot.
The padrona was poor enough; she beat her own linen in the river, and baked, and swept, and cooked unaided, and added to her scanty means by stuffing mattresses with grass and wool, at which she was an adept. But it was owing to the padrona very often, and to nobody else, that Mariuccia had a meal to give her beloved little illustrissimi.
There were four of us; the others were boys; beautiful boys, who might have come out of a Tiziano or Giorgione canvas; gay, kindly, saucy, daring creatures, popular with the people everywhere, and caring nothing how their linen blouses were torn, quite content to sit and eat polenta for their only dinner with the woman below and her dirty children.
My poor brothers! They were so bright and so bold, so mirthful on nothing, so full of goodwill to all the world; and they all died so young; mere children. One of fever in Verona itself; another of a knife-thrust in a street scuffle in Rome; the last in a white squall off Cagliari, that swamped the little felucca within sight of land.
But at the time of which I now write, whilst they were all three around me, they were the pride and torment of Mariuccia’s life, the delight of the padrona’s, and the wonder of all the town, for the skill with which they — bambini inglesi — poured quips and cranks upon the people in true Veronese tongue and fashion.
The padrona would stand in her great arched doorway, with her arms akimbo, rocking to and fro with laughter at their encounters, whilst her onions frizzled neglected in her frying-pan. They were quite happy teasing the market-women, riding in the bullock waggons, driving the ball at pallone, fishing with the boatmen, dancing the tarantella in the wine shops, playing at dominoes with Pepe and Zoto and Giàn, and all the rest of the padrona’s brood. It was only into my soul that the iron of our degradation entered.
With the male children in the market-place, they were still the young signori, whose shabby clothes could not lessen their distinction, so long as they threw the ruzzola unerringly, and had a lightning-like skill in morra: but for me it was otherwise; with the feminine aristocrats in embryo of the dancing-lessons I was only a little detestable forestiera, who had shabby shoes and a torn frock, and who had nevertheless the intolerable insolence not to be ugly in proportion to her poverty, and also to dance very much better than they did themselves.
“Look at the signorina, little ladies, all of you,” the old dancing-master would say a dozen times in an hour, suspending the screams of his fiddle to point at me with its bow. “Look at her! only a month in this room, only half the age of most of you, and look at her! What grace, what accuracy, what lightness; the sweep of the swallow, the poise of the sea-gull! And such a baby! It is wonderful. Are you not ashamed to carry yourselves as you do, with such an example as the little Uccello’s before you?”
Dear old Fortunato! He taught me, out of pure good will; having met me often in the street, and having at last succeeded in persuading Mariuccia that not to initiate a woman child into the ways and wiles of Terpsichore was to fly in the face of all the designs of Providence. He taught me from sheer love of his art, and some touch of love I think for me; but he did me an ill service with the little Lombard ladies by his praise.
They dared say nothing; for Fortunato could rap both feet and hands sharply enough with his bow, when he was irritated by contumacy or clumsiness; but they eyed me askance very evilly and munched their chocolate chicchi, grouped all together at the top of the room, muttering scornful things of me and mine in an offensive and defensive alliance.
Unhappily, there were few scornful things which could have been said of us that would not have been sufficiently true to hit us hardly. We were all of us handsome; in all times, they say, the race we came from had had the gift of the “fatal face;” but we had very little else.
It was the old, old story; I used to make Mariuccia tell it me as far as she knew it, over and over again, when she used to sit of an evening shelling beans on the great staircase, under a half ruined statue that they said was by Donatello.
I can see her now, — so plainly, — as she used to sit there, with a big round brass basin in her lap; she had a dark red skirt and a yellow kerchief; her costume never varied; she had a huge silver pin in her white hair; she had the noble frank face and the changeful kind eyes of her country people; she was weatherbeaten till she was as brown as a chesnut, though she had the broad flap hat of the country spreading its roof over her head to keep her from the blaze that streamed through the vines that hung over the grated casements.
The sunbeams and shadows used to play on the old marble stairs and the old grey statue; a passion flower had somehow thrust itself through the stones from without and blossomed there at her feet on that chill bed; the brass bowl used to glitter like gold in the light; above at a vast height there was a lunette with frescoes of the labours of Hercules; from below there rose a smell of garlic, of fried meats, of coriander seeds, of stabled cattle; the crack, crack, crack of the beans used to sound on the silence regular as the ticking of a clock; the huge straw hat would shake itself slowly and sadly as she spoke:
“Do I remember your mother?” she would say. “You ask me that so often, ‘Nella. Surely I remember her. I was with her at the birth of every one of you. I was an old woman then. At least as you children count age. She was beautiful, yes; — else your father had never looked at her. You are more like him. Oh, you are handsome enough; I do not deny that; you have a face like a flower, and you know it, though you are such a little thing. The people spoil you: they will turn your head with praise. You will end just like that wicked Speronella of Padua whom they sing about to this day in all Romagna. It was a name of horrid savour, of ill omen, for you; I always said so; but your poor mother would have it; it had been her mother’s, she said. It is no use teasing me to tell you more; I have told you all I know a hundred times, and none of it is any good. When I first went to your mother she had not been long wedded; she was happy then; they always are, — for a week! There were difficulties; that I saw the first hour; but they did not press much. He had met her in Florence; she was an opera singer; he was a great signore, in his own country, so they said; it is always a mistake. He was double her years; but he was so handsome, —
Milordo Maurice. You only see the wreck of him. But you may see that still—”
“And I am like him!” I cried where I sat at the feet of the mutilated Donatello, shedding my quota of beans into the brazen bowl.
Mariuccia nodded.
“Yes, you are like him,” she said gravely. “In more ways than one, signorina. When you get older, take care you do not throw your life away as he has thrown his. A noble in his own country; and I have to beg a meal for his children from the woman below!”
My father was not a nobleman, though Mariuccia, in the common continental incapacity to understand insular titles of courtesy, always called him so. He was only the fourth son of a northern marquis: — God help him! — but even so much as this I scarcely knew at that time.
Now I adored my father with very little reason for it, for I saw him perhaps six days in the year, and each time I saw him received about six careless words. But he was so handsome, so easy and good-humoured, so indifferent to every created thing or any possible fortune, that he seemed to me the very perfection of humanity.
I adored him, at a distance indeed, for it was chiefly when I was eating figs on the stairs or cracking walnuts in the court yard, that I #ever saw him at all; but adore him I did, and with the inconsistent ingratitude of human nature, I cared more for a slight or a reproof from him whenever he deigned to notice me by one, than I did for all the untiring goodness of Mariuccia.
She, dear soul, was very wroth against him always, and could not forbear letting out her wrath to me.
Mariuccia did not think very much of filial duties; her own parents had been a travelling cobbler and his paramour, who had rid themselves of her in her babyhood by the simple process of leaving her at the Innocenti; and she considered that she broke no moral canon when she inveighed against the shortcomings of her master to me on the old grey stairs. Indeed, I think she honestly believed she only did her duty in trying to turn me from my unreasonable worship of a false god; a god moreover who provided next to nothing, and left her to puzzle her brains as best she might how to find bread for three hungry, healthy boys, and how to turn my poor mother’s costly faded wardrobe into decent attire for my use.
“He broke your mother’s heart,” she used to say with a sharp crack of a bean; and I used to feel a certain pang, yet also a certain incredulity. My mother was a mere vague name to me; I had not even a portrait of her. “What did he do?” I used to persist, and Mariuccia would respond in anger:
