Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 280
“There is a score of a man called Handel in the church. It is part of what they call an oratorio; a kind of sacred play, I suppose, that must be. It is marked to be sung by a hundred voices. Now, to hear that — a hundred voices! I would give my life.”
“Would it be better than to hear some one singing over the fields?” said Palma.
Signa sighed.
“You do not understand. The singing over the fields, yes, that is beautiful too. But it is another thing. Some one has scribbled in old yellow ink on some of the scores. In one place they wrote, ‘The Miserere of Jomelli, sung in the Sistine this Day of Ashes, 1752; fifty‐five voices, very fine.’ Dear! To hear that! — it must be to singing in the fields like the lightning on the hills to a glowworm.”
“The lightning kills,” said Palma, meaning simply what she said, and not knowing that she pointed a moral in metaphor.
“I must go back with the seeds, Palma,” said the boy, rising from under the old south wall.
He was not vexed with her, only no one understood — no one, as he said to the Rusignuolo, when he went home with the basket slung at his back, playing the violin as he went over the hills, as his habit was, while the little children ran down through the vines to listen, and the sheep stood on the ledges of the rocks to hear, and the hollowed crevices gave the sound back in faint, sweet, faithful echo.
Palma, plaiting as she walked, went to her father’s cottage, and laid her straw aside, and twisted her short skirt as high as her knees, and went down into the cabbage bed and worked; hard labour that made her back bend like an osier, and her brown skin wet with heat, and her feet cold and black with the clinging soil.
He lived in the air like a white‐winged fringuillo; and she in the clods like a poor blind mole.
“We are nothing to him, anyone of us,” she thought, and a dew that was not a raindrop fell for a moment on the crisp green cabbage leaves.
But she hoed and weeded and picked off the slugs, and scolded herself for crying, and laboured ceaselessly all the afternoon over the heavy earth; and then put a pile of the cabbages into a great kreel, and carried it on her back into the Lastra, and sold it for a few coppers; and then went home again to make her brother’s shirts, and draw the water that filled the troughs of bark that ran across the plot of ground, and clean her poor little hovel as well as she could with five boys and a pig and hens and chickens always sprawling on the floor; and when the sun set, washed the mud off her limbs, and climbed the rickety ladder into the hole in the roof, where her straw mattress was, with two bits of wood nailed in the shape of a cross above it.
Palma worked very hard. In winter, when the bitter mountain wind was driving everything before it in a hurricane whose breath was ice, she had to be up and out in the frosty dark before day, no less than in the soft dusk of the summer dawns. She had all the boys to attend to and stitch for; her father’s clothes to make; the cottage to keep clean as best she might: she had to dig and hoe, and plant the slip of ground on which their food grew: she had to help her father often in the great gardens: she had to stand on the square stone well, and draw the water up by the cord and beam, which is a hard task even for a man to do, long together; and, finally, in all weathers, she had to trudge wherever she was wanted, for the good‐natured Sandro was as lazy as he was cheery, and put labour on what shoulders he could, so only they were not his own.
If ever she had a minute’s leisure, she spent it in plaiting, and so got a few yards down a week, and a few coppers to add to the household store; for they were very poor, with that absolute poverty which is often glad to make soup of nettles and weeds; frequent enough here, and borne with a smiling patience which it might do grumbling northern folk, whose religion is discontent, some good to witness if they could.
This was Palma’s life always; day after day; with no variety, except that sometimes it was cabbages, and sometimes lettuces, and sometimes potatoes, and sometimes tomatoes; and that when the sun did not grill her like a fire, the north wind nipped her like a vice; and when the earth was not baked like a heated brick, it was a sodden mass that she sunk into like a bog. This was always her life.
Now and then she went to a festival of the saints, and put a flower in her rough black braids as her sole means of holy‐day garb; and twice a year at Ceppo and at Pasqua tasted a bit of meat. But that was all: otherwise her round of hours never changed, no more than the ass’s in the brick‐kiln mill.
Nevertheless she put up her cross above her bed, and never laid herself down without thanking the Heavenly Mother for all the blessings she enjoyed.
The State should never quarrel with the Churches. They alone can bind a band on the eyes of the poor, and like the lying watchmen, cry above the strife and storm of the sad earth, “All’s well! All’s well!”
Palma never thought for a minute that her lot was a hard one. Her one great grief had been losing Gemma. Under all else she was happy enough; a brave, and cheerful, and kindly girl, and with no evil habit or coarse thought in her; and pure as Una, though she had to stand on the well‐ edge with bare arms and legs, gleaming like a bronze in the sun, and the wind blowing her poor thin skirt like a leaf.
Meanwhile the boy went up the hillside thinking not at all about her.
He was thinking of an epitaph he ahd seen in an old book the day before — an epitaph from a tomb under an altar of St. Simon and St. Jude in Rome: —
“JOHANNES PETRUS ALOYSIUS, PALESTRINA MUSICÆ PRINCEPS.”
He was thinking how beautiful a thing it would be to die, if one were sure of having “Musicæ Princeps” written above one’s rest under the golden glory of St. Peter’s dome.
He was no longer content, like the boy Haydn, over a wormeaten clavecin — content with the pleasure of sound and of fancy, and pitying kings because they were not as he.
He was no longer content thus.
The desire of eternal fame — the desire of the moth for the star — had entered into him.
He had no thought to be unkind to those he lived with; but he became so, innocently and unwittingly.
All his mind and heart were with those crabbed manuscripts in the sacristy, and with the innumerable harmonies and combinations thronging in his brain. He wanted to learn; he wanted to understand; he wanted to know how others had been able to leave to the world, after their death, those imperishable legacies of thought and sound. He could only dream uselessly; puzzle himself uncertainly; wonder hopelessly: he thought he had power in him too something great, but how could he be sure?
Meanwhile he was only a little peasant riding out with the barrels of wine, pruning the olives, shelling the maize, driving the cow up to her pasture under the pines. And Bruno said always, “when you come after me”— “when you are a man grown and sell corn in the town market yourself”— “when you are old enough to go in on a Friday and barter” — and ten thousand other phrases like these, all pointing to one future for him as the needle points to the pole.
The boy was heavy hearted as he went up the hills.
Sometimes he was ungrateful enough to wish that Bruno had never followed and found him on the sea‐shore; that he had wandered away with Gemma into the dim tangle of an unknown fate. All his affections clave to the beautiful mountain world on which he lived; but all his unsatisfied instincts fluttered like young birds with longing for far flight.
Sometimes he wondered if there were any great man whom he could ask — and was vexed that he had lost the little bit of paper by the waterside the night he had run from the Lastra. It might have been of use — who could tell?
“Are you tired?” said Bruno, that evening. “You should not tire. At your age I could walk from here to Prato and back, and never a bead on my forehead nor a muscle weary.”
“I am not tired,” said Signa. “I was thinking.”
“You are always thinking. What good does it do?”
“I was thinking: — ever so many hundred years ago, down in the city, I have read that three men, a Corsi, a Bardi, and a Strozzi, found poet and composer, musician and singers, all themselves, and gave the city an opera in Palace Corsi; the second it ever heard. Are there any nobles like that now?”
“I do not know. And how can you tell what an opera is?”
“I can fancy it. Gigi has told me.”
“An opera is a pretty thing. I do not deny it,” said Bruno, too true a son of the soil to be deaf to the charms of the stage. “When I was a youngster; indeed always before — before I had more to do with my money — I was for ever going down to get a standing‐place in the summer theatre: the women round you, and the fine music, and the big moon overhead — oh, yes, I used to care for it very much; but after all they are follies.”
“Would you let me go — and hear one?”
Signa’s eyes lit, all the paleness and fatigue went out of his face, he looked up at Bruno as a spaniel at his master.
“What for?” said Bruno, sharply. “If you want merrymaking, they dance every night down at Fiastra, the girls and the boys.”
Signa’s face fell; he went without a word into his own little bedchamber.
To jump about in the droll Tuscan rigadoon, and to whirl round plump Netta or black Tina — that was not what he wanted. But how could Bruno understand?
He could hear the sound of the bell from the roof of the Fiastra farm, calling the dancers along the hillside, but he shut his door and sat down on his bed and took out his violin.
After all, it was the only thing that could understand him.
His small sqaure casement was open; clematis flowers hung about it; the vast plain was a vague silvery sea, full of all the beautiful mysteries of night.
He played awhile, then let the Rusignuolo fall upon his knee and the bow drop. What use was it? Who would ever hear it?
The fatal desire of fame, which is to art the corroding element, as the desire of the senses is to love — bearing with it the seeds of satiety and mortality — had entered into him, without his knowing what it was that ailed him.
When he had been a little child, he had been quite happy if only the sheep had heard his music, and only the wandering watercourse answered it. But now it was otherwise. He wanted human ears to hear; he wanted all the millions of the earth to sing in chorus with him.
And no one of them ever would.
The power in him frightened him iwth its intensity and its longing: his genius called on him as the Jehovah of Israel called on the lad David: and, at the summons of the solemn unseen majesty, all the childhood and the weakness in him trembled.
He sat quite quiet, with the violin upon his knee, and his eyes staring out at the starry skies.
The heavens were brilliant with constellations: Red Antares flamed in the south; the Centaur lifted his head; and radiant Spica smiled upon the harvest. The moon was at the full, and all the sky was light, but it did not obscure “the length of Orphiuchus large,” nor the many stars held in the Herdsman’s hand, nor the brilliancy of Altair and Vega.
Bruno, working out of doors under the house‐wall, heaving up the buckets from the tank, and watering his salad plants in the evening coolness, noticed the silence. He was used to hear the sweet sad chords of the Rusignuolo all the evenings through, outstripping the living nightingale’s song.
“Perhaps he is beginning not to care for it,” he thought; and was glad, because he was always jealous of that thing, for whose sake the boy was so often deaf and blind to everything around him.
“When he knows what I have done,” thought he, letting the bucket down in to the splashing water, that glittered like a jewel in the starlight. “When he knows all I have down, and sees his future so safe, and feels the manhood in him, and knows he will be his own master, then all these fancies will go by fast enough. Strong he never will be perhaps, and he will always have thoughts that no one can get at. But he will be so happy and so proud, and his music will just be a toy for him — nothing more: just a toy, as Cecco’s chitarra is when he takes it up out of work‐hours. He will put away childish things — when he knows the saints have been merciful to me.”
And he stopped to cross himself, before he took up the rope and drew up the pail and flung the water over the rows of thirsty green plants.
The saints had been merciful to him.
All things had thriven with him since the day he had told the truth in the Lastra. The seasons had been fair and prosperous. The harvests large. The vintage propitious. There had not been one bad year, from the time he had taken the boy home in the face of his neighbours. Everything had gone well with him. It seemed to him that every grain he had put into the earth had multiplied a millionfold; that every green thing he had thrust into the mould had brought forth and multiplied byeond all common increase.
He had laboured hard, doing the work of three men; sparing himself no moment for leisure or recreation; crushing out of himself all national inborn habits of rest, or of passion; denying himself all indulgences of the body; toiling without cessation when the hot earth was burning under the months of the lion and scorpion, as when the snows drifted thick in the ravines of the Apennines. And now his reward was almost at hand.
He almost touched the crown of all his labour.
He thanked the saints and crossed himself, then flung the last shower of water over his plants, and went indoors to his bed with a heart at ease.
“He is tired of his toy; he is not playing,” he thought, as he closed the household bars and beams against the sultry lustre of the night, and set his old gun loaded against his side, and threw his strong limbs on his mattress with a sigh of weariness and a smile of content.
After all he had done well by Pippa’s child: — in a very little while he would have bought the boy’s safe future, and housed it from all risks, so far as it is ever possible for any man to purchase the good‐will of fate.
The saints were very merciful, thought Bruno; and so thinking fell into sleep with the stillness and the fragrance of the summer night all about him in the quiet house.
CHAPTER VII.
FOUR months later, on a Sunday morning, Signa and he walked to their own parish church over the ploughed land for early mass.
The bells were ringing all over the plains below. Their distant melodies crossing one another came upward on the cool, keen air.
The church was exceeding old, with an upright tower, very lofty and ruddy coloured, and with an open belfry that showed the iron clapper swaying to and fro, and the ropes jerking up and down, as the sound of the tolling echoed along the side of the hill.
The brown fields and the golden foilage sloped above and below and around it. A beautiful ilex oak rose in a pyramid of bronzed foilage against its roof. The few scattered peasant who were its parishoners went one by one into the quietness and darkness and stillness. The old priest and a little boy performed the offices. The door stood open. They could see the blue mountain side and the vines and the tufts of grass.
Bruno this morning was more cheerful and of more gaiety of words than the boy had ever seen him. His character was deeply tinged with that melancholy which is natural to men of his country, where their passions are strong, and which lends its dignity to all the coutenances of Sarto’s saints, or Giotto’s angels, of Fra Bartolemmeo’s prophets, or Ghirlandaio’s priests, countenances that anyone may see to‐day in the fields of harvest, or in the threshing‐barns, anywhere where the same sun shines that once lit the early painters to their work.
Bruno kneeled down on the bricks of the old hill church with the truest thanksgiving in him that ever moved a human heart; one of the desires of his soul had been given him; going through the fields he had thought, “Shall I tell him yet? — or wait a little.” And told himself to wait till he should get the boy down to the borders of the brook quite in solitude.
With labour he had compassed the thing he wished. He had made the future safe by the toil of his hands. He was happy, and he blessed God.
Kneeling on the red bricks, with the moutain wind blowing over him, he said to himself:
“I think Pippas must know. The saints are good. They would tell her.”
He breathed freely, with a peace and joy in his life that he had not known since the dark night when he had let the dead boy drift out to the sea.
A sunbeam came in through a chink in the stone wall, and made a little glow of silvery light upon the pavement where he knelt. He thought it was Pippa’s answer.
He rose with a glad light shining in his eyes.
“We will not work to‐day,” he said, when the office was over.
Usually he did work after mass.
They went home, and they had coffee and bread. Coffee was a thing for feast days. He went outside and cut a big cluster of yellow Muscat grapes, growing on his south wall, which he had left purposely when he had taken all the others off the vine for market.
He laid them on Signa’s wooden platter.
“They are for you,” he said. “It is fruit for a prince.”
Signa wanted to share them with him, but he would not. He lighted his pipe and smoked, sitting on the stone bench by his door under the mulberry. Under his brows he watched the boy, who leaned against the table plucking his grapes with one hand, and with the other making figures with a pencil on the paper.
Signa’s lithe, slender limbs had a girl’s grace in them; his shut mouth had a sweet sereneness; his drooped eyelids had a dreamy sadness; his lashes shadowed his cheeks; his hair fell over his forehead; he was more than ever like the Sleeping Endymion of Guercino.
But he was not asleep. He was awake; but only awake in a world very far away from the narrow space of four walls in which his body was.
“You look like a picture there is in the city,” said Bruno, suddenly, who had stalked through the Tribune as contadini do. “The lad in it has the moon behind him, and he dreams of the moon, and the moon comes and kisses him — so Cecco, the cooper, said — and never of another thing did the boy think, sleeping or waking, but of the moon, which made herself a woman. Is the moon behind you? You look like it.”
Signa raised his head and his long dusky lashes; he had not heard distinctly; he was intent upon the figures he was making.
