Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 278
Bruno in return bent his straight brows darkly on them, and kept his knife in his belt, and let them shout evil of him till they were hoarse in the market‐place and wineshop.
He was hated by them just as Lippo was believed in; he was unpopular just as Lippo was popular.
“Well, let it be so,” he said to himself. He was indifferent.
“Other folk’s breath never made my soup‐pot boil yet,” he would say to the old priest of his own hillside, who would sometimes remonstrate with him on the misconstruction that he let lie on him. “They believe in Lippo. Let them believe in Lippo. Much good may it do to him and them.”
But the old Parocco shook his head, having a liking for this wild son of the church, of whose dark, fierce, tender, self‐tormenting soul he had had his true glimpses in the confessional, when Easter times came round and men of their sins disburdened themselves.
“But it will do you harm,” said he. “The walnut‐tree laughs at ants; but when the swarm is all over its trunk and in its sap, where the tree then?”
But Bruno bent his delicate dark brows, that made him like a head of Cimabue’s drawing; and smiled grimly. If every man’s hand were against him, he cared nothing: he had his good land to till, and the boy with him in safety.
If he could have wrung his brother’s throat he would have been happier indeed. As it was, having promised the boy, he passed Lippo in the Lastra with such a glance as Paul might have given to Judas; and otherwise seemed no more to remember that he lived, than if he had been a dead snake that he had flung out in the road for the sun to wither.
“The same mother bore you,” the priest would urge sometimes, “and you honour the same God.”
“What has that to do with it?” said Bruno. “Though he were my father, I would do just the same. He cheated me.”
“But forgiveness is due to all.”
“Not to traitors,” said Bruno.
And no one could move him from that faith. And Lippo would go a long way round outside the gates rather than meet the glance of his brother’s in the narrow thoroughfares of the Lastra.
Though on the whole, good man, the neighbours pitying him, he was the better for the wrath of Bruno, especially since he was quicker than ever to answer to the Misericordia bell, and droned louder than ever his responses of the mass, being wise in his generation.
CHAPTER V.
SO the child went up to the hills with Bruno, and stayed there for good and all, with Tinello and Pastore, and the big magnolia tree, and the old gilded marriage coffer, and the hens and the chickens, and the terra‐cotta annunciation, and the drying herbs and beans, and the big white dog from the Maremma marshes, and the palm blessed on Easter day.
He was not quite the same.
He would never be quite the same again, Bruno thought — and thought aright.
The child’s vision had widened, and his thoughts had saddened; and he knew now that there was a living world outside his dreams; and he doubted now that the skies would ever open to let him see the singing children of God.
And alas! though he cried his heart out for her, Gemma never returned.
Sandro came back without her, and cried a little for a week, but was not disconsolate, and on the whole found his nutshell of a house more tranquil without the little sulky, self‐willed beauty. But Palma mourned her long; and her playfellow likewise.
Palma was sure that Gemma was dead. “She fell in the sea and was drowned: else she would come back,” said Palma always, powerless to comprehend that any deliberate choice could keep her sister long away from her. She had loved Gemma with that extreme affection which a profoundly selfish nature often begets on a very generous one. She had sacrificed herself for Gemma twenty times a day with delight in the sacrifice. Any little treat, any better food, any morsel of fruit, she had always saved for Gemma; she had waited on Gemma as if she had been born a little negro, and the other a little princess; she had always taken Gemma’s misdeeds on her own shoulders, and screened her, and served her in all possible ways. Gemma had been the woe and torment of her childish life; but she had never known it; Gemma had also been its idol. The shrewdness and the laziness of Gemma had taught her to make a scapegoat and a slave of Palma, when they had been mere babies. Palma had been happy in the servitude. She had firmly believed that Gemma had loved her in return; and so she had done, when she had wanted her.
“She is drowned; else she would be back,” said Palma, to all attempts of others at consolation, and she hid a little scrap of black ribbon, all she could get, about her little brown throat, and having saved up a penny, by great toil, with centime pieces, took it to the priest of the church above Giovoli, and, sobbing, intreated him to say a prayer for Gemma’s soul. The old man put back her penny, and forbore to smile, and said a mass for nothing — being touched.
What might be Gemma’s fate, no one could tell; children were kidnapped — so they said in the Lastra; and borne away to carry plaster statues, or skip on a strained rope, or play in circus‐tricks, or wander with a monkey, and were beaten if they returned to their masters with too few coins at night — so they said; and the Lastra was sure that his would be the fortunes of lost Gemma. But Signa, full of agonized remorse for her, still felt in his own heart that it was likelier that some way Gemma would not suffer very much. “She will always suck the orange herself, and fling the peel in some one else’s eyes,” said Bruno, when he spoke of her; and Signa, though he resented the saying, and would not assent to it, knew in his heart that it was true.
“I was so wicked to let her go with me!” said Signa often, in bitter self‐reproach. But the good‐natured Sandro did not reproach him.
“My dear,” he said, “when a female thing, however, small, chooses to go astray, there is not the male thing, however big, that could ever hinder her.”
Sandro never looked beyond his pots of pinks and beds of roses; but he knew so much human truth as that.
What Gemma had gone to, who could tell? — wandering with little Savoyards and Roman image‐sellers, or dancing with dogs and monkeys, in rainy streets of northern towns, or under the striped canvas of merryandrews’ booths; that was what most of the children did who were tempted and taken over sea.
“Anyhow, wherever she is gone she is happy if she has got a bit of ribbon in her hair and a sugar‐plum upon her tongue, and she will get them for herself, I will warrant, anywhere,” said Bruno, who could not have honestly said that he was sorry she was lost.
But Signa, when he said these things, cried so that he ceased to say them; and gradually the name of the sunny‐headed little thing dropped out of memory except with Signa and Palma, who would talk of her often in their leisure minutes, sitting under the wall by the fountain watching the old speckled toads come and go, and the chaffinches preen their white wings, and the cistus buds unfold from the little green knots, and the snakes’ bread turn ruby red till it looked like a monarch’s sceptre dipped in the bloodshed of war.
Whenever at night the storm howled, or the snow drifted over the face of the hills in winter, Signa would tremble in his bed, thinking of his poor lost playmate, as she might be at that very hour homeless and friendless on the cruel stones of some foreign town. His imagination tormented him with vision and terror of all the possible sufferings which might be falling to her lot.
“It was my fault — it was my fault,” he said incessantly to himself and everyone; and for a long time utterly refused to be comforted. When the great day of his first communion arrived, and he went, one of a long string of white‐clad children, with his breviary in his clasped hands, and little brown shabby Palma behind him with the other girls, Signa felt the hot tears roll down his cheeks, thinking of the absent, golden‐headed, innocent‐eyed thing, who would have looked so pretty with the wreath of white wild hyacinths upon her head.
“The boy is a very lamb of God; how he weeps with joy at entering the fold,” thought the good old Parocco, from the hills, looking at him.
But Signa was thinking of Gemma.
“Dear love, do not fret for her,” said Tere‐ sina, that very day, after the service of the church, in her own little room over the Livornese gate, “never fret for her. She is one that will light on her feet and turn stones to almonds always; trust her for that.”
But Signa did fret; though he knew that they were right.
And he had lost his own mystery and wonder for himself. He was nothing strange that the owls had found in the soft night shadows and dropped down at the gates of Signa, as he had always thought.
He was only Pippa’s son.
Poor Pippa! She was not dear to him. He could not care for her. When he went along the sea road he had no instinct of remembrance of the night that he had lain against her breast and had had his cries hushed upon its aching warmth.
Just Pippa’s son, as Toto was Nita’s — this was all?
That the angels had breathed upon him and said to each other, “Let this little soul see light,” and then had dropped him softly on the waters, and so the white wise birds had found him and borne him to the Lastra, there to grow up and hear aobut him the music of the heaven he had been sent from — that had been intelligible to him, and had seemed quite natural and beautiful and true.
But Pippa’s son, as Toto was Nita’s!
This was pain to him and perplexity. It made all dark.
A child’s feet are bruised, and stumble on the sharp stones of a hard, physical, unintelligible fact.
He was much happier, in truth, than he had ever been: unbeaten, unstarved, unpunished; with only the free, fresh, open‐air toil to do; and the man’s strong affection about him for defence and repose; and often allowed to wander as he would and play as he chose, and dream unhindered as he liked; — his life on Bruno’s hillside was, beside his life in the Lastra with Lippo, as liberty by slavery, as sunshine by rain.
And yet a certain glow and glory were gone out of his day for him; because of the truth about himself which to himself was so much less easy of understanding than the vaguest fable or wildest miracle would have been.
Pippa’s son! — no brighter born or nearer heaven than that.
It was his faith and fancy that were bruised and drooped like the two wings of some little flying bird that a stone strikes.
The boy had something girlish in him, as men of genius have ever something of the woman; and all that was gentlest and simplest in him suffered under the substitution of this harsh, sad history of his birth, for all his pretty, foolish faiths and fancies.
But in all the manner of his life he was much happier.
In the country of Virgil, life remains pastoral still. The field labourer of northern countries may be but a hapless hind, hedging and ditching dolefully, or at best serving a steam‐beast with oil and fire; but in the land of the Georgics there is the poetry of agriculture still.
Materially it may be an evil and a loss — political economists will say so; but spiritually it is a gain. A certain peace and light lie on the people at their toil. The reaper with his hook, the plougher with his oxen, the girl who gleans amongst the trailing vines, the child that sees the flowers tossing with the corn, the men that sing to get a blessing on the grapes — they have all a certain grace and dignity of the old classic ways left with them. They till the earth still with the simplicity of old, looking straight to the gods for recompense. Great Apollo might still come down amidst them and play to them in their threshing‐barns, and guide his milk‐white breasts over their furrows, — and there would be nothing in the toil to shame or burden him. It will not last. The famine of a world too full will lay it waste; but it is here a little while longer still.
To follow Tinello and Pastor e as they ploughed up and down the slanting fields under the vines, dropping the grain into each furrow as it was made; to cut the cane and lucerne for the beasts, and carry the fresh green sheaves that dripped dew and fragrance over him as he went; to drive the sheep up on to the high slopes, where the grass grew short and sweet, and the mosses were like velvet under th esotne pines, and lie there for hours watching the shadows come and go on the mountians, and the bees in the rosemary, and the river shining far down below; to load the ass and take him into the town with loads of tomatoes or artichokes or pumpkins or salads, as the season chanced to be, and ride him back amongst the hills, dreaming that the “cucco” was a war‐horse, and the pines the serried lines of spears, and he a paladin, like Rinaldo, of whom he had read in an old copy of the “Morgante Maggiore” that lay in the sacristan’s chest in the Lastra, the sacristan holding it profane but toothsome versifying; to keep watch over the grapes near vintage time in the clear moonlit nights when the falling stars flashed by scores across the luminous skes, and see the day‐dawn rise and the sun mount over the far Umbrian hills, and wake all the birds of all the fields and all the forests into song; to pluck the grapes when they were ripe, with the bronze leaves red and golden in the light, and load the waggon and dance on the wine‐press till his feet were purple, while all over the hillsides and along the fields by the water far and near the same harvest went on, with the echoes of the strife and the play and the laughter and the bursts of song making all the air musical from the city to the sea; — this was the labour that he had to do, with kindly words and with easy pauses of leisure, the passing of the months only told by the change of the seeds and the fruits and the blossoms, and by the violets and the crocuses in the fields giving place to the anemones and the daffodils, and they to the snow‐flakes and the narcissus, and they to the scarlet tulip and the blue iris, and they to the wild‐rose and the white broom, and they to the traveller’s joy and the yellow orchid, and so on through all the year, with as many flowers as there were hours.
The life on the hillside was full of peace for him, and wholesome labour and innocent freedom and all those charms of this country of sight and scent and sound which either are utterly unknown, unfelt, incomprehensible, or are joys strong as life and fair as children’s dreams; for men and women are always either blind to the things of earth and air, or have a passion for them: there is no middle‐way possible.
You shall know “the hope of the hills” in its utmost beauty, or know it never.
Signa did know it, small creature though he was, and wholly untaught; and the joy of the hills was with him day and night whilst he dwelt here so high in air, with the deep mountain stillness round him and the sky seeming nearer than the earth.
Weeks and months would go by, and he would not leave the hillside for an hour, having no other companions than the little wild hares and the gentle plough‐oxen and the blue jays that tripped amongst the white wakerobins, and the sheep that he would drive up under the beautiful red‐fruited arbutus thickets, while far down below the world looked only like a broad calm lake of sunshine — like a sea of molten gold.
The child was tranquillised, though he was saddened, by that perfect solitude.
It was the most peaceful time also that Bruno’s life, tempestuous though monotonous, had ever known.
Since he had lost the boy, he had come to know as he had never done before the full force of his great love for him. Signa was not to him only a creature that he cared for with all the strength of his nature, but he was like a soul committed to him straight and fresh from the hands of God, by care of which, and by all means of self‐devotion and self sacrifice, he was to redeem his own soul and to secure an everlasting life.
He did not reason this out iwht himself, because reasoning was not the habit of his mind; but it was what he felt every time that he bowed his head before an altar or knelt before a crucifix. He prayed, with all his heart in the prayers, that he might do the best for the lad in all ways.
Most days he went on bread himself that he might be able to give meat twice a week to the growing boy. He went to the fairs in the early day, and left them as soon as his traffic was done; so that he might not spend money in roystering, and get fighting as of old. He looked away from women, and strove not to be assailed by them; so as to waste his substance on their tempting. He laboured on his fields even earlier and later than he had ever done, to make them produce more; and so have means to get little trifles of pleasure or better nourishments for the boy. He grew more merciless at bargains, harder in buying and selling; he gave no man drink, and flung no feast‐day trinkets into women’s breasts: all the Tuscan keenness became intensified in him — he laboured for the boy.
Folks said that, losing his open‐handedness, he lost the one saving grace and virtue he had had in him: he let them say it — if he were pitiless on others he was no less so on himself. He combated the devil in him — what he called the devil — because he could not let the devil loose to riot in his blood, as he had used to do, without lessening the little he had, and that little would be the all of Pippa’s son.
Now that Signa was under his roof and always present with him, his love for the boy grew with each day. The sort of isolation in which his ill‐repute and evil tempers had placed him with his countryside, made the companionship and the affection of this little human thing more precious than it would have otherwise been.
And as Lippo’s story obtained footing more and more in the Lastra, and the taverner’s tale of how he had struck Lippo off the cart under the pony’s hoofs spread and took darker colours, men and women looked colder than ever upon him, and avoided him more and more. Why should they not? — since now he never bought their absolution with a drink and the cards for the one sex, and bold wooing and free money for the other.
So the years rolled quietly on, without incident and with no more noteworthy memory in them than the excellence or the paucity of the vintage, the large or small yield of the Turkish wheat, the birth and the sale of a calf, the dry weather and the wet.
Only to Bruno a great aim had been set, a great hope had arisen.
Before he had worked because he was born to work, now he worked because he had a great object to attain by every stroke that he drove into the soil, by every heat‐drop that fell from his brow like rain.
