PIPISTRELLO.
I am only Pipistrello. Nothing but that—nothing more than any one of the round brown pebbles that the wind sets rolling down the dry bed of the Tiber in summer.
I am Pipistrello, the mime, the fool, the posturer, the juggler, the spangled saltinbanco, the people's plaything, that runs and leaps and turns and twists, and laughs at himself and is laughed at by all, and lives by his limbs like his brother the dancing bear and his cousin the monkey in a red coat and a feathered cap.
I am Pipistrello, five-and-twenty years old, and strong as you see, and good to look at, the women have said. I can leap and run against any man, and I can break a bar of iron against my knee, and I can keep up with the fastest horse that flies, and I can root up a young oak without too much effort. I am strong enough, and my life is at the full, and a day's sickness I never have known, and my mother is living. Yet I lie under sentence of death, and to-morrow I die on the scaffold: if nothing come between this and the break of dawn, I am a dead man with to-morrow's sun.
And nothing will come: why should it?
I am only Pipistrello. The people have loved me, indeed, but that is no reason why the law should spare me. Nor would I wish that it should—not I. They come and stand and stare at me through the grating, men and women and maidens and babies. A few of them cry a little, and one little mite of a child thrusts at me with a little brown hand the half of a red pomegranate. But for the most part they laugh. Why, of course they do. The street-children always laugh to see a big black steer with his bold horned head go down under the mace of the butcher: the street always finds that droll. The strength of the bull could scatter the crowd as the north wind scatters the dust, if he were free; but he is not, and his strength serves him nothing: the hammer fells him and the crowd laughs.
The people of this old Orte know me so well. Right and left, up and down, through the country I have gone all the years of my life. Wherever there was fair or festa, there was I, Pipistrello, in the midst. It is not a bad life, believe me. No life is bad that has the sun and the rain upon it, and the free will of the feet and the feel of the wind, and nothing between it and heaven.
My father had led the same kind of life before me: he died at Genoa, his spine broken in two, like a snapped bough, by a fall from the trapeze before the eyes of all the citizens. I was a big baby in that time, thrown from hand to hand by the men in their spectacles as they would have thrown a ball or an orange.
My mother was a young and gentle creature, full of tenderness for her own people, with strangers shy and afraid. She was the daughter of a poor weaver. My father had found and wooed her in Etruria, and although he had never taken the trouble to espouse her before the mayor, yet he had loved her and had always treated her with great respect. She was a woman very pure and very honest. Alas, the poor soul! To-day her hair is white as the snow, and they tell me she is mad. So much the better for her if she know nothing; but I fear the mad and the imbecile know all and see all, crouching in their hapless gloom.
When my father died thus at Genoa my mother took a hatred for that manner of living, and she broke off all ties with the athletes who had been his comrades, and, taking the little money that was hers in a little leather bag, she fled away with me to the old town of Orte, where my grandmother still lived, the widow of the weaver. The troop wished to keep me with them, for, although I was but five years old, I was supple and light and very fearless, and never afraid of being thrown up in the air, a living ball, in their games and sports.
Orte was just the same then as it is now. These very aged towns I think never change: if you try to alter them you must break them up and destroy them utterly. Orte has known the Etruscans: she can very well do without modern folk. At Orte my mother and grandmother dwelt together in one room that looked over the river—a large vaulted chamber with grated casements, with thick stone walls—a chamber in what had once been a palace. My mother was then still very young and beautiful—of a pale, serious beauty, full of sadness. She smiled on me sometimes, but never once did I hear her laugh. She had never laughed since that awful day when, in the full sunlight, in the midst of the people, in the sight of the sea, in Genoa, a man had dropped from air to earth like an eagle fallen stone dead from the skies, struck by lightning.
My mother had many suitors. She was beautiful of face, as I say, like one of the Madonnas of our old painters: she was industrious, and all her little world knew very well that she would one day inherit the strip of field and the red cow that my grandmother owned outside the gates of Orte. All these pretty suitors of course made a great fuss with me, caressed me often, and brought me tomatoes, green figs, crickets in wire cages, fried fish and playthings. But my mother looked at none of them. When a woman's eyes are always looking downward on a grave, how should their tear-laden lids be lifted to see a fresh lover? She repulsed them all, always. She lived, lonely and sad, as well as she could in our great garret: we ate little, our bed was hard, and she and my grandam labored hard to get a pittance. But when a rich bailiff sought her in honest marriage, she kissed me and wept over me, and said again and again, "No, no! To your father I will be faithful, let what will chance to us."
The bailiff soon consoled himself: he married a big country wench who had a fine rope of pearls and gold bracelets, and I continued to grow up by my mother's side where the Tiber is gilded with the gold of the dawns and rolls its heavy waves under the weeping boughs of its willows. My boyish strength increased in the heat of the summers, and I grew like a young brown stalk of the tall maize. I herded the cow, cut the rushes and hewed wood, and I was always happy, even when my mother would send me to the old priest to learn things out of books. She wished to make a monk of me, but the mere idea made me shudder with fear. I loved to climb the oaks, to swing in the maples, to scale the roofs and the towers and the masts of the vessels. What had I to do with a monkish frock and a whitewashed cell? Ouf! I put my fingers in my ears and ran away whenever my poor mother talked of the cloister.
My limbs were always dancing, and my blood was always leaping, laughing, boiling merrily in my veins. A priest? What an idea! I had never wholly forgotten the glad, bright days of childhood when my father had thrown me about in the air like a ball: I had never wholly forgotten the shouts of the people, the sight of the human sea of faces, the loud, frank laugh of the populace, the sparkle of the spangled habit, the intoxication of the applause of a crowd. I had only been five years old then, yet I remembered, and sometimes in the night I cried bitterly for those dead days. I had only been a little brown thing, with curls as black as the raven's wing, and they had thrown me from one to the other lightly, laughingly, like a ripe apple, like a smooth peach. But I had known what it was to get drunk on the "hurrahs" of the multitude, and I did not forget them as I grew up here a youth in old Orte.
The son of an athlete can never rest quiet at home and at school like the children of cobblers and coppersmiths and vine-dressers. All my life was beating in me, tumbling, palpitating, bubbling, panting in me—moving incessantly, like the wings of a swallow when the hour draws near for its flight and the thirst for the south rises in it. With all my force I adored my pale, lovely, Madonna-like mother, but all the same, as I trotted toward the priest with a satchel on my back, I used to think, Would it be very wicked to throw the books into the river and run away to the fields? And, in truth, I used to run away very often, scampering over the country around Orte like a mountain-hare, climbing the belfries of the churches, pulling off their weathercocks or setting their bells a-ringing—doing a thousand and one mischievous antics; but I always returned at nightfall to my mother's side. It seemed to me it would be cruel and cowardly to leave her, for she had but me in the world.
"You promise to be sensible and quiet, Pippo?" the poor soul always murmured. And I used to say "Yes," and mean it. But can a bird promise not to fly when it feels in its instincts the coming of spring? Can a young colt promise not to fling out his limbs when he feels the yielding turf beneath his hoofs?
I never wished to be disobedient, but, somehow, ten minutes after I was out of her sight I was high above on some tower or belfry, with the martens and the pigeons circling about my curly head. I was so happy on high there, looking down on all the old town misty with dust, the men and women like ants on an antheap, the historic river like a mere ribbon, yellow and twisted, the palaces and the tombs all hidden under the same gray veil of summer dust! I was so happy there!—and they spoke of making me into a monk, or, if I would not hear of that, of turning me into a clerk in a notary's office!
A monk? a clerk? when all the trees cried out to me to climb and all the birds called to me to fly! I used to cry about it with hot tears that stung my face like lashes, lying with my head hidden on my arms in the grass by the old Tiber water. For I was not twelve years old, and to be shut up in Orte always, growing gray and wrinkled as the notary had done over the wicked, crabbed, evil-looking skins that set the neighbors at war! The thought broke my heart. Nevertheless, I loved my mother, and I mended my quills, and tried to write my best, and said to the boys of the town, "I cannot bend iron or leap or race any more. I am going to write for my bread in the notary's office a year hence, for my mother wishes it, and so it must be."
And I did my best not to look up to the jackdaws circling round the towers or the old river running away to Rome. For all the waters cried to me to leap, and all the birds to fly. And you cannot tell, unless you have been born to do it as I was, how good it is to climb and climb and climb, and see the green earth grow pale beneath you, and the people dwindle till they are small as dust, and the houses fade till they seem like heaps of sand. The air gets so clear around you, and the great black wings flap close against your face; and you sit astride where the bells are, with some quaint stone face beside you that was carved on the pinnacle here a thousand years and more ago, and has hardly been seen of man ever since; and the white clouds are so near you that you seem to bathe in them; and the winds toss the trees far below, and sweep by you as they go down to torment the trees and the sea, the men that work, and the roofs that cover them, and the sails of their ships in the ocean. Men are so far from you, and heaven seems so near! The fields and the plains are lost in the vapors that divide you from them, and all their noise of living multitudes comes very faintly to your ear, and sweetly like the low murmuring of bees in the white blossoms of an acacia in the month of May.
But you do not understand, you poor toilers in cities who pace the street and watch the faces of the rich.
I was to be a notary's clerk—I, called Pipistrello (the bat) because I was always whirling and wheeling in air. I was to be a clerk, so my mother and grandmother decided for me, with the old notary himself who lived at the corner, and made his daily bread by carrying fire and sword where he could through the affairs of his neighbors. He was an old rascal, but my mother did not know that: he promised to be a safe and trustworthy guardian of my youth, and she believed he had power to keep me safe from all dangers of destiny. She wanted to be sure that I should never run the risks of my father's career: she wanted to see me always before the plate of herb soup on her table. Poor mother!
One day in Orte chance gave me another fate than this of her desires.
One fine sunrise on the morning of Palm Sunday I heard the sharp sound of a screeching fife, the metallic clash of cymbals, the shouts of boys, the rattle of a little drum. It was the rataplan beating before a troop of wrestlers and jugglers who were traversing the Marche and Reggio Emilia. The troop stationed themselves in a little square burnt by the sun and surrounded by old crumbling houses: I ran with the rest of the lads of Orte to see them. Orte was in holiday guise: aged, wrinkled, deserted, forgotten by the world as she is, she made herself gay that day with palms and lilies and lilac and the branches of willow; and her people, honest, joyous, clad in their best, who filled the streets and the churches and wine-houses, after mass flocked with one accord and pressure around the play-place of the strollers.
It was in the month of April: outside the walls and on the banks of Tiber, still swollen by the floods of winter, one could see the gold of millions of daffodils and the bright crimson and yellow of tulips in the green corn. The scent of flowers and herbs came into the town and filled its dusky and narrow ways; the boatmen had green branches fastened to their masts; in the stillness of evening one heard the song of crickets, and even a mosquito would come and blow his shrill little trumpet, and one was willing to say to him "Welcome!" because on his little horn he blew the good news, "Summer is here!" Ah, those bright summers of my youth! I am old now—ay, old, though I have lived through only twenty-five years.
This afternoon, on Palm Sunday, I ran to see the athletes as a moth flies to the candle: in Italy all the world loves the saltinbanco, be he dumb or speaking, in wood or in flesh, and all Orte hastened, as I hastened, under the sunny skies of Easter. I saw, I trembled, I laughed: I sobbed with ecstasy. It was so many years that I had not seen my brothers! Were they not my brothers all?
This day of Palm, when our Orte, so brown and so gray, was all full of foliage and blossom like an old pitcher full of orange-flowers for a bridal, it was a somewhat brilliant troop of gymnasts which came to amuse the town. The troop was composed of an old man and his five sons, handsome youths, and very strong, of course. They climbed on each other's shoulders, building up a living pyramid; they bent and broke bars of iron; they severed a sheep with one blow of a sword; in a word, they did what my father had done before them. As for me, I watched them stupefied, fascinated, dazzled, drunk with delight, and almost crazy with a torrent of memories that seemed to rain on me like lava as I watched each exploit, as I heard each shout of the applauding multitudes.
It is a terrible thing, a horrible thing, those inherited memories that are born in you with the blood of others. I looked at them, I say, intoxicated with joy, mad with recollection and with longing;—and my mother destined me to a notary's desk, and wished me to be shut there all my life, pen in hand, sowing the seeds of all the hatreds, of all the crimes, of all the sorrows of mankind, lighting up the flames of rage and of greed in human souls for an acre of ground, for a roll of gold! She wished to make me a notary's clerk! I gazed at these men who seemed to me so happy—these slender, agile, vigorous creatures in their skins that shone like the skins of green snakes, in their broidered, glittering, spangled vests, in their little velvet caps with the white plume in each. "Take me! take me!" I shrieked to them; and the old king of the troop looked hard at me, and when their games were finished crossed the cord that marked their arena and threw his strong arms about me, and cried, "Body of Christ! you are little Pippo!" For he had been my father's mate. To be brief, when the little band left Orte I went with them.
It was wickedly done, for my poor mother slept, knowing nothing, when in the dusk before daybreak I slipped through the bars of the casement and noiselessly dropped on to a raft in the river below, and thence joined my new friends. It was wickedly done; but I could not help it. Fate was stronger than I.
The old man did not disturb himself as to whether what he had encouraged me to do was ill or well. He foresaw in me an athlete who would do him honor and make the ducats ring merrier in his purse. Besides, I had cost him nothing.
From this time life indeed began for me. I wept often; I felt the barb of a real remorse; when I passed a crucifix on the road I trembled with true terror and penitence; but I fled away, always. I drew my girdle closer about my spangled coat, and, despite all my remorse, I was happy. When I was very, very far away I wrote to my mother, and she understood, poor soul! that there were no means of forcing me back to her. Children are egotists: childhood has little feeling. When the child suffers he thirsts for his mother, but when he is happy, alas! he thinks little and rarely about her.
I was very happy, full of force and of success: the men kept their word and taught me all their tricks, all their exploits. Soon I surpassed my teachers in address and in temerity. I soon became the glory of their band. In the summertime we wandered over the vast Lombard plains and the low Tuscan mountains; in winter we displayed our prowess in Rome, in Naples, in Palermo; we loitered wherever the sun was warm or the people liked to laugh.
From time to time I thought of my mother: I sent her money. I shivered a little when I saw a Madonna, for all Madonnas have the smile that our mother has for our infancy. I thought of her, but I never went home. I was Pipistrello the champion-wrestler. I was a young Hercules, with a spangled tunic in lieu of a lion-skin. I was a thousand years, ten thousand leagues, away from the child of Orte. God is just. It is just that I die here, for in my happy years I forgot my mother. I lived in the sunlight—before the crowds, the nervous crowds of Italy—singing, shouting, leaping, triumphing; and I forgot my mother alone in the old chamber above the Tiber—quite alone, for my grandam was dead. That I have slain what I have slain—that is nothing. I would do the same thing again had I to live my life again. Yes, without pause or mercy would I do it. But my mother—she has lived alone, and she is mad. That is my crime.
I was a tall, strong youth, full of courage and handsome to the eye of women: I led a life noisy and joyous, and for ever in movement. I was what my father had been before me. So they all said. Only I liked to finger a book, and my father never had looked inside one, and out of remembrance of the belief of my mother I uncovered my head as I passed a church or saw a shrine, and to do this had not been in my father's habits. In these years I made a great deal of money—a great deal, at least, for a stroller—but it went as fast as it came. I was never a vicious man, nor a great gambler or drinker, yet my plump pieces soon took wing from my pocket, for I was very gay and I liked to play a lover's part. My life was a good life, that I know: as for the life of the rich and of the noble, I cannot tell what it is like, but I think it is of a surety more gloomy and mournful than mine. In Italy one wants so little. The air and the light, and a little red wine, and the warmth of the wind, and a handful of maize or of grapes, and an old guitar, and a niche to sleep in near a fountain that murmurs and sings to the mosses and marbles,—these are enough, these are happiness in Italy. And it is not difficult to have thus much, or was not so in those days. I was never very poor, but whenever money jingled in my purse I treated all the troop and half the town, and we laughed loud till daybreak.
I was never aught save Pipistrello—Pipistrello the wrestler, who jumped and leaped, and lifted an ox from the ground as easily as other men lift a child. No doubt to the wise it seems a fool's life, to the holy a life impure. But I had been born for it: no other was possible to me; and when money rained upon me, if I could ease an aching heart, or make a sick lad the stouter for a hearty meal, or make a tiny child the gladder for a lapful of copper coins, or give a poor stray dog a friend and a bed of straw, or a belabored mule a helpful push to the wheels of his cart,—well, that was all the good a mountebank could look to do in this world, and one could go to sleep easy upon it.
When the old man died who had been my father's comrade the troop fell to pieces, quarrelling over his leavings. The five brothers came to a common issue of stabbing. In Italy one takes to the knife as naturally as a child to the breast. Tired of their disputes, I left them squabbling and struck off by myself, and got a little band together, quite of youths, and with them made merry all across the country from sea to sea. We were at that time in the south. I was very popular with the people. When my games were done I could sing to the mandoline, and improvise, and make them laugh and weep: some graver men who heard me said I might have been a great actor or a great singer. Perhaps: I never was anything but Pipistrello the stroller. I wanted the fresh air and the wandering and the sports of my strength too much ever to have been shut in a roofed theatre, ever to have been cooped up where lamps were burning.
One day, when we were in dusty, brown Calabria, parching just then under June suns, with heavy dust on its aloe-hedges and its maize-fields, a sudden remorse smote me: I thought of my mother, all alone in Orte. I had thought of her scores of times, but I had felt ashamed to go and see her—I who had left her so basely. This day my remorse was greater than my shame. I was master of my little troop. I said to them, "It is hot here: we will go up Rome-way, along the Tiber;" and we did so.
I have never been out of my own land: I fancy it must be so dark there, the other side of the mountains. I know the by-roads and the hill-paths of Italy as a citizen knows the streets and lanes of his own contrada. We worked and played our way now up through the Basilicata and Campania and Latium, till at last we were right near Orte—dull, old, gray-colored Orte, crumbling away on the banks of Tiber. Then my heart beat and my knees shook, and I thought, If she is dead?
I left my comrades drinking and resting at a wine-shop just outside the town, and went all alone to look for her. I found the house—the gloomy barred window hanging over the water, the dark stone walls frowning down on the gloomy street. There was a woman, quite old, with white hair, who was getting up water at the street-fountain that I had gone to a thousand times in my childhood. I looked at her. I did not know her: I only saw a woman feeble and old. But she, with the brass secchia filled, turned round and saw me, and dropped the brazen pitcher on the ground, and fell at my feet with a bitter cry. Then I knew her.
When in the light of the hot, strong sun I saw how in those ten years my mother had grown old—old, bent, broken, white-haired, in those ten years that had been all glow and glitter, and pleasure and pastime, and movement and mirth to me—then I knew that I had sinned against her with a mighty sin—a sin of cruelty, of neglect, of selfish wickedness. She had been young still when I had left her—young and fair to look at, and without a silver line in her ebon hair, and with suitors about her for her beauty like bees about the blossoms of the ivy in the autumn-time. And now—now she was quite old.
She never rebuked me: she only said, "My son! my son! God be praised!" and said that a thousand times, weeping and trembling. Some women are like this.
When the bright, burning midsummer day had grown into a gray, firefly-lighted night, I laid me down on the narrow bed where I had slept as a child, and my mother kissed me as though I were a child. It seemed to purify me from all the sins of all the absent years, except, indeed, of that one unpardonable sin against her. In the morning she opened the drawers of an old bureau and showed me everything I had sent her all those years: all was untouched, the money as well as the presents. "I took nothing while you did not give me yourself," she said. I felt my throat choke.
It was early day: she asked me to go to mass with her. I did so to please her. All the while I watched her bent, feeble, aged figure and the white hair under the yellow kerchief, and felt as if I had killed her. This lone old creature was not the mother like Raffaelle's Madonna I had left: I could never make her again what she had been.
"It is my son," she said to her neighbors, but she said it with pain rather than with pride, for she hated my calling; but Orte was of another way of thinking. Orte flocked to see me, having heard of Pipistrello, its own Pipistrello, who had plagued it with his childish tricks, having grown into fame amongst the cities and villages as the strongest man in all Italy. For indeed I was that; and my mother, with dim, tear-laden eyes, looked at me and said, "You are the image of your father. Oh, my dear, my love! take care."
She, poor soul! saw nothing but the fall she had seen that day at Genoa of a strong man who dropped like a stone. But I fear to weary you. Well! I had left my spangled dress and all insignia of my calling with my comrades at the wine-shop, fearing to harass my mother by sight of all those things which would be so full of bitter recollection and dread to her. But Orte clamored for me to show it my powers—Orte, which was more than half asleep by Tiber's side, like that nymph Canens whom I used to read of in my Latin school-books—Orte, which had no earthly thing to do this long and lazy day in the drought of a rainless June.
I could not afford to baulk the popular will, and I was proud to show them all I could do—I, Pipistrello, whom they had cuffed and kicked so often in the old time for climbing their walnut trees and their pear trees, their house-roofs and their church-towers. So, when the day cooled I drew a circle with a red rope round myself and my men on a piece of waste ground outside the town, and all Orte flocked out there as the sun went down, shouting and cheering for me as though Pipistrello were a king or a hero. The populace is always thus—the giddiest-pated fool that ever screamed, as loud and as ignorant as a parrot, as changeful as the wind in March, as base as the cuckoo. The same people threw stones at me when they brought me to this prison—the same people that feasted and applauded me then, that first day of my return to Orte. To-day, indeed, some women weep, and the little child brings me half a pomegranate. That is more remembrance than some fallen idols get, for the populace is cruel: it is a beast that fawns and slavers, then tears.
It was a rainless June, as I say. It was very warm that evening; the low west was vermilion and the higher sky was violet; bars of gold parted the two colors; the crickets were hooting, the bats were wheeling, great night-moths were abroad. I felt very happy that night. With us Italians pain rarely stays long. We feel sharply, but it soon passes. I had drowned my remorse in the glory and vanity of showing Orte all I could do by the sheer force of my muscles and sinews. We are not a very brave people, nor a strong one, and so strength and bravery seem very rare and fine things on our soil, and we make a great clatter and uproar when we ever find them amidst us. I had them both, and the people were in ecstasies with all I did. I put out all my powers, and in the circle of red rope exerted all my might, as though I had been performing before kings. After all, there is no applause that so flatters a man as that which he wrings from unwilling throats, and I know Orte had been long set against me by reason of my boyish mischief and my flight.
In real truth, I did nothing now in my manhood so really perilous as I had done in my childhood, when I had climbed to the top of the cross on the church and sat astride of it. But they had called that mischief and blasphemy: they called the things I did now gymnastics, and applauded them till the noise might have wakened the Etrurian dead under the soil.
At last I came to the feat which, though far from the hardest to me, always looked to the crowd the most wonderful: it was my old master's trick of holding his five sons on his shoulder. Only I outshone him, and sustained on mine seven men in four tiers, and the topmost had on his head little Febo.
The mite whom we called Phœbus, because we had found him at sunrise and he had such yellow locks—yellow as the dandelion or the buttercup—was a stray thing picked up on the seashore in Apulia—a soft, merry, chirping little fellow, of whom we were all fond, and to whom we had easily taught that absence of fear which enabled us to play ball with him in our spectacles. He always delighted the people, he was such a pretty little lad, and not, perhaps, more than four years old then, and always laughing, always ready. To him it was only fun, as it had been to me at his years. I never thought it was cruel to use him so, I had been so happy in it myself. All at once, as I stood erect sustaining the men on my shoulders, the topmost one holding on his head our tiny Phœbus—all at once as I did this, which I had done a hundred times, and had always done in safety—all at once, amongst the sea of upturned faces in the glowing evening light, I saw one woman's eyes. She was leaning a little forward, resting her cheek on her hand. She had black lace about her head and yellow japonica-flowers above her left ear. She was looking at me and smiling a little.
I met her eyes, full, across the dust reddened by the sunset glow as the dust of a battlefield is reddened with blood. I felt as if I were stabbed; the red dust seemed to swim round me; I staggered slightly: in another instant I had recovered myself, but the momentary oscillation had terrified my comrades. The seventh and highest, feeling the human pyramid tremble beneath him, involuntarily, unconsciously, opened his arms to save himself. He did not lose his balance, but he let the child fall. It dropped as an apple broken off the bough falls to the earth.
There was a moment of horrible silence. Then the men leaped down, tumbling and huddling one over another, not knowing what they did. The audience rose screaming; and broke the rope and swarmed into the arena. I stooped and took up the child. He was dead. His neck had been broken in the fall. He had struck the earth with the back of his head; he was rolled up on the sand like a little dead kid; his tiny tinsel crown had fallen off his curls, his tiny tinselled limbs were crushed under him, his blossom-like mouth was half open. It was horrible.
People spoke to me: I did not see or hear them. The crowd parted and scattered, some voluble, some dumb, with the shock of what they had seen. I lifted up what a moment before had been little Phœbus, and bore him in my arms to my mother's house.
She was sitting at home alone, as she had been alone these ten years and more. When she saw the dead baby in those glistening spangled clothes she shuddered, and understood without words. "Another life?" she said, and said nothing more: she was thinking of my father. Then she took the dead child and laid him on her knees as if he had been a living one, and rocked him on her breast and smoothed the sand out of his pretty yellow curls. "The people go always in the hope of seeing something die," she said at length. "That is what they go for: you killed the baby for their sport. It was cruel."
I went out of the house and felt as if I had murdered him—the little fair, innocent thing who had run along with us over the dusty roads, and along the sad seashores, and under the forest trees, laughing and chirping as the birds chirp, and when he was tired lifting up his arms to be carried on the top of the big drum, and sitting there throned like a king. Poor little dead Phœbus! It was true what my mother had said: the people throng to us in hope of seeing our death, and yet when they do see it they are frightened and sickened and sorrowful. Orte was so this night.
"Could I help it?" I cried to my comrades fiercely; and in my own soul I said to myself, "Could I help it? That woman looked at me."
Who was she? All through the pain that filled me for the death of the child that wonder was awake in me always. She had looked so strange there, so unlike the rest, though she was all in black and had the lace about her head which is common enough in our country. All the night long I saw her face—a beautiful face, with heavy lids and drooping hair, like that marble head they call the Braschi Antinous down in Rome.
Little Phœbus was laid that night in my mother's house, with lilies about him, while a little candle that the moths flickered into burnt at his feet. As I sat and watched by him to drive away the rats which came up in hordes at night from Tiber into the rooms that overhung the river, I only saw that face. It had been a bad home-coming.
I would play no more in Orte, nor go with these men any more. I disbanded my troop and let them pass their own ways. I had coin enough to live on for months: that was enough for the present. I felt as if the sight of the red rope and the spangled vest and the watching crowd would be horrible to me—those things which I had loved so well. Little Phœbus was put away in the dark earth, as the little Etruscan children had been so many hundred years before him, and I buried his little crown and his little coat with him, as the Etruscans buried the playthings. Poor little man! we had taught him to make Death his toy, and his toy had been stronger than he.
After his burial I began my search for the woman whose face I had seen in the crowd. My mother never asked me whence I came or where I went. The death of Phœbus had destroyed the trembling joy with which she had seen me return to her: happiness came to her too late. When grief has sat long by one hearth, it is impossible to warm the ashes of joy again: they are cold and dead for ever. My time passed sadly; a terrible calmness had succeeded to the gayety and noise of my life; a frightful silence had replaced the frenzied shouts, the boisterous laughter, of the people: sometimes it seemed to me that I had died, not Phœbus.
The constant hope of finding the woman I had seen but once occupied me always. I roamed the country without ceasing, always with that single hope before me. Days became weeks: I wandered miserably, like a dog without master or home.
One day I saw her. Having on my shoulder my girella, which gave me a pretext for straying along the river-side, I came to that part of Etruria where (so I had used to learn from the school-books in my childhood) the Etruscans in ancient times drew up in order of battle to receive Fabius. The country is pretty about there, or at least it seemed so to me. The oak woods descend to the edge of the Tiber: from them one sees the snow of the Apennines; the little towns of Giove and Penna are white on the Umbrian hills; in the low fields the vine and the olive and the maize and the wheat grow together. Here one finds our Lagherello, which I had heard scholars say is no other than the Lake Vadimon of which Pliny speaks. Of that I know nothing: it is a poor little pool now, filled with rushes, peopled with frogs. By the side of this pool I saw her again: she looked at me. Like a madman I plunged into the water, but the reeds and the lilies entangled me in their meshes: the long grasses and water-weeds were netted into an impenetrable mass. I stood there up to my waist in water, incapable of movement, like the poor cattle of which Pliny tells, who used to mistake all this verdure for dry land, and so drifted out into the middle of the lake. She looked at me, laughed a little, and disappeared.
Before sunset I had learned who she was from a peasant who came there to cut the reeds.
Near to the Lagherello is a villa named Sant' Aloïsa: about its walls there is a sombre, melancholy wood, a remnant of that famous forest which in the ancient times the Romans dreaded as the borders of hell. The Tiber rolls close by, yellow and muddy with the black buffaloes descending to its brink to drink, and the snakes and the toads in its brakes counting by millions—sad, always sad, whether swollen by flood in autumn and vomiting torrents of mud, or whether with naked sands and barren bed in summer, with the fever-vapors rising from its shallow shoals. The villa is dull and mournful like the river—built of stone, fortified in bygone centuries, without color, without light, without garden or greenery, all its casements closed like the eyelids of a living man that is blind.
This was and is Sant' Aloïsa. In the old times, no doubt, the villa had been strong and great, and peopled with a brilliant feudal pomp, and noisy with the clash and stir of soldiery: now it is poverty-stricken and empty, naked and silent, looking down on the tawny, sullen swell of the Tiber—the terrible Tiber, that has devoured so much gold, so much treasure, so much beauty, and hidden so many dead and so many crimes, and flows on mute and gloomy between its poisonous marshes. Of Tiber I have always felt afraid.
Sant' Aloïsa has always been a fief of the old counts Marchioni. One of that race lived still, and owned the old grounds and the old walls, though the fortunes of the family had long fallen into decay. Taddeo Marchioni was scarcely above his own peasants in his manners and way of life. He was ugly, avaricious, rustic, cruel. He was lord of the soil indeed, but he lived miserably, and this beautiful woman had been his wife seven years. At fifteen her father, a priest who passed as her uncle, had wedded her to Taddeo Marchioni. She had dwelt here seven mortal years, in this gloomy wood, by these yellow waters, amidst these pestilential marshes. Her marriage had made her a countess, that was all. For the rest, it had consigned her, living, to a tomb.
The lives of our Italian women are gay enough in the cities, but in the country these women grow gray and pallid as the wings of the night-moth. They have no love for Nature, for air, for the woods, for the fields: flowers say nothing to them. They look neither at the blossoms nor the stars. The only things which please them are a black mask and a murmur of love, a hidden meeting, the noise of the streets, the bouquets of a carnival. What should they do in the loneliness and wildness of the broad and open country—our women, who only breathe at their ease in the obscurity of their palco or under the shelter of a domino?
The travellers who run over our land and see our women laughing with wide-opened rose-red mouths upon their balconies at Berlingaccio or at Pentolaccia can never understand the immense, the inconsolable, desolation of dulness which weighs on the lives of these women in the little towns of the provinces and the country-houses of the hills and plains. They have the priest and the chapel; that is all.
In Italy we have no choice between the peasant-woman toiling in the ploughed fields, and growing black with the scorch of the sun, and bowed and aged with the burdens she bears, and the ladies who live between the alcove and the confessional, only going forth from their chambers by night as fireflies glisten, and living on secret love and daily gossip. What can these do in their gaunt, dull villas—they who detest the sough of the wind and the sight of a tree, who flee from a dog and scream at a tempest, who will not read, and whose only lore is the sweet science of the passions?
This I came to know later. All I saw that day, as I tramped around it wet and cold, was the gloomy evil shadow of the great place that had once been a fortress, the barred and shattered windows, the iron-studded doors, the grass-grown bastions. She had made me kill Phœbus, and yet I only lived to see her face again.
Sometimes I think love is the darkest mystery of life: mere desire will not explain it, nor will the passions or the affections. You pass years amidst crowds and know naught of it: then all at once you meet a stranger's eyes, and never again are you free. That is love. Who shall say whence it comes? It is a bolt from the gods that descends from heaven and strikes us down into hell. We can do nothing.
I went home slowly when evening fell. I had seen her eyes across the crowd in Orte once, and once across the pool that was the Vadimon, and I was hers for evermore. Explain that, ye wise men, who in your pride have long words for all things. Nay, you may be wise, but it is beyond you.
My mother and I spoke but little at this time. That home was a sad one: the death of the child and the absence of long years had left a chill in it. We ate together, chiefly in silence: it was always a pain to her that I was but Pipistrello the gymnast—not a steadfast, deep-rooted, well-loved citizen of Orte, with a trade to my hand and a place in church and market. Every day she thought I should wander again; every day she knew my savings shrank in their bag; every day she heard her neighbors say, "And your Pippo? will he not quiet down and take a wife and a calling?"
Poor mother! Other women had their sons safe stay-at-homes, wedded fathers of children, peaceable subjects of the king, smoking at their own doors after the day's work was done. She would have been so blessed had I been like them—I, who was a wrestler and a roysterer, a mere public toy that had broken down in the sight of all Orte. My father had never failed as I had failed. He had never killed a child that trusted in his strength: he had fallen himself and died. That difference between us was always in her eyes. I saw it when I met them; and she would make up little knots of common flowers and carry them to the tiny grave of Phœbus, my victim. Once I said to her, "I could not help it: I would have given my life to save him." She only replied, "If you had consented to bide at home the child would be living."
Nay, I thought, if she had not looked at me—But of that I said nothing. I kept the memory of that woman in my heart, and went night and day about the lake and the river and the marshes of Sant' Aloïsa. Once or twice I saw Taddeo Marchioni, the old count—a gray, shrunken, decrepit figure of a man, old, with a lean face and a long hard jaw—but of her, for days that lengthened into weeks, I saw nothing. There are fish in the Lagherello. I got the square huge net of our country, and set it in the water as our habit is, and watched in the sedges from dawn to eve. What I watched for was the coming of the vision I had once seen there: the fish came and went at their will for me.
One day, sick of watching vainly, and having some good fish in the net, I dragged them out into the reeds, and pushed them in a creel, and shouldered them, and went straight to the gloomy walls of Sant' Aloïsa. There were no gates: the sedges of the low lands went along the front of the great pile, almost touching it. Around it were fields gray with olives, and there was neither garden nor grass-land: all had been ploughed up that was not marsh and swamp.
The great doors were close fastened. I entered boldly by a little entrance at the side, and found myself in the great naked hall of marble, empty and still and damp. There was a woman there, old and miserable, who called her master. Taddeo Marchioni came and saw the fish, and chaffered for them with long hesitation and shrewd greed, as misers love to do, and then at last refused them: they were too dear, he said. I threw them down and said to him, "Count, give me a stoup of wine and they are yours." That pleased him: he bade the serving-woman carry the fish away, and told me to follow him. He took me into a vaulted stone chamber, and poured with a niggard hand a glass of mezzo-vino. I looked at him: he was lean, gray, unlovely. I could have crushed him to death with one hand.
These great old villas in the lone places of Italy are usually full at least of pleasant life—of women hurrying to the silk-worms and the spinning and the linen-press, of barefooted men loitering about on a thousand pleas or errands to their master. But Sant' Aloïsa was silent and empty.
Passing an open door, I saw her. She was sitting, doing nothing, in a room whose faded tapestries were gray as spiders' webs, and she was beautiful as only one woman is here and there in a generation. She looked at me, and I thought she smiled.
I went out with my brain on fire and my sight dim. I saw only that smile—that sudden, momentary smile whose fellow had brought death to little Phœbus. And I felt she had known me again, though she had seen me but once, in my spangled coat of velvet and silver, and now I had my legs bare to the knee, and was clad in a rough blue shirt and woollen jacket, like any other country-fellow upon Tiber's side.
As I was going out the serving-wench plucked my sleeve and whispered to me, "Come back a moment: she wishes to see you."
My heart leaped, then stood still. I turned back into the house, and with trembling knees went into that chamber where the dusky tapestry mouldered on the walls. She looked at me, sitting idly there herself in the bare, melancholy room—a woman with the face of our Titian's Venus.
"Did the child die?" she asked.
I stammered something, I knew not what.
"Why did you tremble that day?" she said, with the flicker of a smile about her lovely mouth: "you look strong—and bold."
How the words had courage and madness enough to leap to my lips I know not, but I do know I said to her, "You looked at me."
She frowned a moment: then she laughed. No doubt she had known it before. "Your nerves were not of iron, then, as they should be," she said carelessly. "Well! the people wanted to see something die. They always do: you must know that. Bring more fish for my husband to-morrow. Now go."
I trembled from head to foot. I had said this bold and insolent thing to her face, and she still bade me return!
No doubt had I been a man well born I should have fallen at her feet and sworn a midsummer madness: I should have been emboldened to any coarse avowal, to any passionate effrontery. But I was only a stroller—a poor ignorant soul, half Hercules, half fool. I trembled and was mute.
When the air blew about me once more I felt as if I had been drunk—drunk on that sweet yeasty wine of a new vintage which makes the brain light and foolish. She had bade me return!
That day my mother ate alone at home. When night fell it found me by the Lagherello. I set my nets: I slept in a shepherd's hut. I had forgotten Phœbus: I only saw her face. What was she like? I cannot tell you. She was like Titian's Venus. Go and look at it—she who plays with the little dog in the Tribune at Pitti: that one I mean. With all that beauty, half disclosed like the bud of a pomegranate-flower, she had been given to Taddeo Marchioni, and here for seven years she had dwelt, shut in by stone walls.
Living so, a woman becomes a saint or a devil. Taddeo Marchioni forgot or never knew that. He left her in his chamber as he left the figures of the tapestry, till her bloom should fade like theirs, and time write wrinkles on her as it wove webs on them. He forgot! he forgot! He was old and slow of blood and feeble of sight: she was scarcely beautiful to him. There were a few poor peasants near, and a priest as old as Taddeo Marchioni was; and though Orte was within five miles, the sour and jealous temper of her husband shut her up in that prison-house as Pia Tolomei was shut in the house of death in the Maremma.
That night I watched impatient for the dawn. Impatient I watched the daybreak deepen into day. All the loveliness of that change was lost on me: I only counted the hours in restless haste. Poor fools! our hours are in sum so few, and yet we for ever wish them shorter, and fling them, scarcely used, behind us roughly, as a child flings his broken toys.
The sultry morning was broad and bright over the land before I dared take up such fish as had entered my girella in the night and bend my steps to Sant' Aloïsa. Fever-mists hung over the cane-brakes and the reedy swamps; the earth was baked and cracked; everything looked thirsty, withered, pallid, dull, decaying: in the heats of August it is always so desolate wherever Tiber rolls. "Marchioni is out," said the old brown crone whom I had seen the day before. "But come in: bring your fish to Madama Flavia."
It was a strange, gaunt wilderness of stone, this old villa of the Marchioni. It would have held hundreds of serving-men—it had as many chambers as one of the palaces down in Rome—but this old woman was all the servitor it had, and in the grand old hall, with sculptured shields upon the columns of it and Umbrian frescoes in the roof, she spread their board and brought them their onion-soup and their dish of pasta, and while they ate it looked on and muttered her talk and twirled her distaff, day after day, year after year, the same. Life is homely and frugal here, and has few graces. The ways of life in these grand old places are like nettles and thistles set in an old majolica vase that has had knights and angels painted on it. You know what I mean, you who know Italy. Do you remember those pictures of Vittorio Carpaccio and of Gentiléo? They say that this is the life our Italy saw once in her cities and her villas: that is the life she wants. Sometimes, when you are all alone in these vast deserted places, the ghosts of all that pageantry pass by you, and they seem fitter than the living people for these courts and halls.
"Madama Flavia will see the fish," said the old crone, and hobbled away.
Madama Flavia! How many times has Tiber heard such a name as that breathed on a lover's mouth to the sigh of the mandoline, uttered in revel or in combat, or as a poisoner whispered it stealing to mix the drug with the wine in the goblet. Madama Flavia! All Italy seemed in it—all love, all woe! There is a magic in some names.
Madama Flavia! Just such a woman as this it needs would be to fitly wear such a name—a woman with low brows and eyes that burn, and a mouth like the folded leaves that lie in the heart of a rose—a woman to kneel at morn in the black shadows of the confessional, and to go down into the crowd of masks at night and make men drunk with love.
"Madama Flavia!" The name (so much it said to me) halted stupidly on my lips: I stood in her presence like a foolish creature. I never before had lacked either courage or audacity: I trembled now. I had been awake all the night, gazing at the dim, dusky pile of her roof as it rose out from the olives black against the stars; and she knew it—she knew it very well. That I saw in her face. And she was Madama Flavia, and I was Pipistrello the juggler. What could I say to her? I could have fallen at her feet and kissed her or killed her, but I could not speak. No doubt I looked but a poor boor to her—a giant and a dolt.
She was leaning against a great old marble vase—leaning her hands on it, and her chin on her hands. She had some red carnations in her breast: their perfume came to me. She was surrounded by decay, dusty desolation, the barrenness of a poverty that is drearier than any of the poverty of the poor; but so might have looked Madama Lucrezia in those old days when the Borgia was God's vicegerent.
At the haul of fish she never glanced: she gazed at me with meditation in her eyes. "You are very strong," she said abruptly.
At that I could do no less than laugh. It was as if she had said the ox in the yoke was strong or the Tiber strong at flood.
"Why are you a fisherman now?" she said. "Why do you leave your arena?"
I shuddered a little. "Since the child fell"—I muttered, thinking she would understand the remorse that made my old beloved calling horrible to me.
"It was no fault of yours," she said with a dreamy smile. "They say I have the evil eye—"
"You have, madama," I said bluntly, and then felt a choking in my throat, fearing my own rashness.
Her beautiful eyes had a bright scorn in them, and a cold mockery of me. "Why do you stay, then?" she asked, and smiled at the red carnations carelessly.
"Because—rather would I die of beholding you than live shut out from sight of you," I said in my madness. "Madama, I am a great useless fool: I have done nothing but leap and climb and make a show. I am big and strong as the oxen are, but they work, and I have never worked. I have shown myself, and the people have thrown me money—a silly life, good to no man or beast. Oh yes, that I know full well now; and I have killed Phœbus because you looked at me; and my mother, who has loved me all her life, is old before her time through my fault. I am a graceless fool, a mountebank. When I put off my spangles and stand thus, you see the rude peasant that I am. And yet in all the great, wide, crowded world I know there does not live another who could love you as I love—seeing you twice."
I stopped; the sound of my own voice frightened me; the dull tapestries upon the wall heaved and rocked round me. I saw her as through a mist, leaning there with both arms on the broken marble vase.
A momentary smile passed over her face. She seemed diverted, not angered as I feared. She had listened without protest. No doubt she knew it very well before I spoke. "You are very strong," she said at length. "Strong men are always feeble—somewhere. If the count Taddeo heard you he would—" Then some sudden fancy struck her, and she laughed aloud, her bright red lips all tremulous and convulsed with laughter. "What could he do? You could crush him with one hand, as you could crush a newt! Poor Taddeo! did he not beat your fish down, give you watered wine, the rinsings of the barrel, yesterday? That is Taddeo always."
She laughed again, but there was something so cruel in that laughter that it held me mute. I dared not speak to her. I stood there stupidly.
"Do you know that he is rich?" she said abruptly, gnawing with her lovely teeth the jagged leaf of one of her carnations. "Yes, he is rich, Taddeo. That is why my father sold me to him. Taddeo is rich: he has gold in the ground, in the trees, in the rafters and the stones of the house; he has gold in Roman banks; he has gold in foreign scrip, and in ships, and in jewels, and in leases: he is rich. And he lives like a gray spider in the cellar-corner. He shuts me up here. We eat black bread, we see no living soul: once in the year or so I go to Orte or to Penna. And I am twenty-three years old, and I can read my own face in the mirror." She paused; her breast heaved, her beautiful low brows drew together in bitter fury at her fate: she had no thought of me.
I waited, mute. I did not dare to speak.
It was all true: she was the wife of Taddeo Marchioni, shut here as in a prison, with her youth passing and her loveliness unseen, and her angry soul consuming itself in its own fires. I loved her: what use was that to her—a man who had naught in all the world but the strength of his sinews and muscles?
She remembered me suddenly, and gave me a gesture of dismissal: "Take your fish to the woman; I cannot pay you for them; I have never as much as a bronze coin. But—you may come back another day. Bring more—bring more." Then with a more imperious gesture she made me leave her.
I stumbled out of the old dark, close-shuttered house into the burning brilliancy of the August day, giddy with passion and with hope. She knew I loved her, and yet she bade me return!
I know not how much, how little, that may mean in other lands, but here in Italy it has but one language—language enough to make a lover's heart leap like the wild goat. Yet hope is perhaps too great a word to measure rightly the timid joy that filled my breast. I lay in the shepherd's hut wide awake that night, hearing the frogs croak from the Lagherello and the crickets sing in the hot darkness. The hut was empty: shepherd and sheep and dogs were all gone up to the higher grounds amongst the hills. There were some dry fern-plants in a corner of it. I lay on these and stared at the planets above me throbbing in the intense blue of the skies: they seemed to throb, they seemed alive.
A mile away, between me and the stars, was the grand black pile of Sant' Aloïsa.
Christ! it was strange! I had led a rough life, I had been no saint. I had always been ready for jest or dance or intrigue with a pretty woman, and sometimes women far above me had cast their eyes down on the arena, as in Spain ladies do in the bull-ring to pick a lover out thence for his strength; but I had never cared. I had loved, laughed and wandered away with the stroller's happy liberty, but I had never cared. Now, all at once, the whole world seemed dead—dead heaven and earth—and only one woman's two eyes left living in the universe, living and looking into my soul and burning it to ashes. Do you know what I mean? No? Ah, then you know not love.
All the night I lay awake—the short hot night when the western gold of sunset scarce fades into dark ere the east seems to glow luminous and transparent with the dawn. Ah! the sunrise! I shall see it once more, only once more! I shall see it through those bars, a hand's breadth of it above Tiber, no more; and when again it spreads its rosy warmth over the sky and reddens the river and the plain, I shall be dead—a headless thing pushed away under the earth and lime, and over my brain and skull the wise men will peer with knife and scalpel, and pour the plaster over its bones to take a cast, and say most likely to one another, as I heard them say once before a cast in a museum, "A good face, a fair brow, fine lines: strange that he should have been a murderer!" Well! so be it. Even though I lived for fourscore years and ten, the sun would nevermore rise for me as it rose before Phœbus died.
At that time I lived only to see a shadow on the barred windows, a hand open a lattice, a veiled head glide by through the moonbeams. I was wretched, yet never had I been so happy. The bolt of the gods stuns as it falls, but it intoxicates also.
I had been such a fool! such a fool! When she had said so much I had said nothing: that last moment haunted me with unending pain. If I had been bolder, if I had only known what to answer, if I had only seized her in my arms and kissed her! It would have been better to have had that one moment, and have died for it, than have been turned out of her presence like a poor cowardly clod.
I cannot tell how the long hot days went on: they were days of drought to the land, but they were days of paradise to me. The fever-mists were heavy and the peasants sickened. Tiber was low, and had fetid odors as its yellow shallows dried up in the sun, clouds of gnats hovered over the Lagherello and its beds of rushes, and the sullen wind blew always from the south-east, bringing the desert sand with it. But to me this sickly summer was so fair that I continued to live in the absent shepherd's empty hut. I continued to net the fish when I could, and now and again I saw her. I lived only in the hope of seeing her face. She had the evil eye. Well, let it rest on me and bring me all woe, so that only I might live in its light one day! So I said in my madness, not knowing.
I must have looked mad at that time to the few scattered peasants about the pool. I lived on a handful of maize, a crust of bread. I cast my nets in the water, and once or twice went up to Sant' Aloïsa with the small fish, and was sent away by the crone Marietta. August passed, and the time drew nigh for the gathering of the grapes, ripe here sooner than in the Lombard and the Tuscan plains. But the vintage of Sant' Aloïsa was slight, for the ground was covered with olives in nearly every part. When they were stripping what few poor vines there were I offered myself for that work. I thought so I might behold her. There was no mirth on the lands of Taddeo Marchioni: the people were poor and dull. Fever that came from the river and the swamps had lessened their numbers by death and weakened those who were living: my strength was welcome to those ague-stricken creatures.
The day of the gathering was very hot: no rain had fallen. The oxen in the wains were merely skin and bone: their tongues were parched and swollen in their muzzled mouths. The grass had been long all burnt up, and the beasts famished: the air was stifling, pregnant with storm.
Amidst the sere and arid fields, and the woods, black and gray, of ilex and of olive, the great old square house rose before us, pale, solitary, mysterious—a mausoleum that shut in living creatures: it terrified me.
Night fell as the last wagon, loaded with the last casks of grapes, rolled slowly with heavy grinding wheels toward the cellars of Sant' Aloïsa. With the wagon there were a few men enfeebled with fever, a few women shivering with ague. I walked behind the wagon, pushing it to aid the weary oxen. There was no moon: here and there a torch flickered in a copper sconce filled with oil. The courtyard and the cellar were of enormous size: in the old times Sant' Aloïsa had sheltered fifteen hundred men. In the darkness, where a torch flared when he passed, I saw now and then Taddeo Marchioni coming and going, giving orders in his high, thin voice, screaming always, swearing sometimes, always suspecting some theft. He did not see me. He was entirely absorbed in his vintage and in the rebukes he hurled at his peasants. I drew back into the shadow, leaning against the column of the gateway, a huge wall blackened with time and damp. The bell of the old clock-tower sounded the nineteenth hour of the night. All at once the servant Marietta muttered in my ear, "Go in: she wants to speak with you. Go in to the tapestry-room on the other side of the house: you remember."
My blood bounded in my veins. I asked nothing better of Fate. I glided along the old walls, leaving the central court and the master there absorbed in his work, and I found with some difficulty the little side-door by which I had entered the house before. I trembled from head to foot, as in that hour. I felt myself all at once to be ugly, heavy, stupid, a brute to frighten any woman—sweating from the labors of the day, covered with dust, poor and frightful in my rough hempen shirt, with my naked legs and my bare knees impregnated with the juice of the grapes. And I dared to love this woman—I! Loved her, though she had slain Phœbus.
My mind was all in confusion: I was no longer master of myself. I scarcely drew breath; my head was giddy; I staggered as I went along those endless galleries and passages, as I had done that day when Phœbus had fallen on the sand of my arena. At last I reached—how I knew not—the room of the arazzi, scarcely lighted by a lamp of bronze that hung from the ceiling by a chain. In the twilight I saw the woman with the fatal gaze, with the lips of rose, with the features of Lucrezia, of Venus, the woman who in all ages has destroyed man.
Then I forgot that I was a laborer, a peasant, a juggler, a wrestler, a vagabond—that I was clad in coarse linen of hemp—that I was dirty and filthy and ignorant and coarse. I forgot myself: I only remembered my love—my love immense as the sky, omnipotent as Deity. I fell on my knees before her. I only cried with stifled voice, "I am yours! I am yours!" I did not even ask her to be mine. I was her slave, her tool, her servitor, her thing, to be cherished or rejected as she would. I shivered, I sobbed. I had never known before, it seemed to me, what love could be; and it made a madman of me.
All the while she said nothing: she let me kiss her gown, her feet, the stone floor on which she stood. Suddenly and abruptly she said only, "You are a droll creature: you love me, really—you?"
Then I spoke, beside myself the while. I remember nothing that I said: she heard me in silence, standing erect above me where I kneeled. The light was very faint; the lamp swung to and fro on its bronze chain; I saw only the eyes of the woman burning their will into mine. She bent her head slightly: her voice was very low. She said only, "I have known it a long time. Yes, you love me, but how? How?"
How? I knew no words that could tell her. Human tongues never have language enough for that: a look can tell it. I looked at her.
She trembled for a moment as though I had hurt her. Soon she regained her empire over herself. "But how?" she muttered very low, bending over me her beautiful head, nearly touching mine. "But how? Enough to—?"
She paused. Enough? Enough for what? Enough to deny heaven, to defy hell, to brave death and torment, to do all that a man could do: who could do more?
"And I love you—I." She murmured the words very low: the evening wind which touches the roses was never softer than her voice. She brushed my hair with her lips. "I love you," she repeated. "For you are strong, you are strong."
Kneeling before her there, I took her in my arms. I drew her close to me: I drank the wine of Paradise—the wine that makes men mad.
But she stopped me, drew herself away from me, yet gently, without wrath. "No," she said, "not yet, not yet." Then she added, lower still, "You must deserve me."
Deserve her? I did not comprehend. I knew well that I did not deserve my joy, poor fool that I was, mere man of the people, with the trestles of the village fair for all my royal throne. But, since she loved me, a crowd of ideas confused and giddy thronged on my brain and whirled madly together. Up above in the belfries and the towers in my infancy, with the clear blue air about me and the peopled world at my feet, I had dreamed so many foolish gracious things—things heroical, fantastical, woven from the legends of saints and the poems of wandering minstrels. When she spoke to me thus these old beautiful fancies came back to my memory. If she wished me to become a soldier for her sake, I thought—
She looked at me, burning my soul with her eyes, that grew sombre yet brilliant, like the Tiber water lighted by a golden moon. "You must deserve me," she repeated: "you must deliver me. You are strong."
"I am ready," I answered. I was still kneeling before her. I had at my throat a rude cross that my mother had hung there in my childish years. I touched the cross with my right hand in sign of oath and steadfastness. "I am ready," I said to her. "What do you wish?"
She answered, "You must free me. You are strong."
Even then I did not understand. "Free?" I repeated. "You would fly with me?"
She gave a gesture, superb, impatient, contemptuous. She drew herself backward and more erect. Her eyes had a terrible brilliancy in them. She was so beautiful, but as fierce in that hour as the wild beast that I saw once at a fair break from its cage and descend amidst the people, and which I strangled in my arms unaided.
She murmured through her closed teeth, "You must kill him. You are strong."
With a bound I rose to my feet. In the burning night an icy cold chilled my blood, my limbs, my heart.
Kill him? Whom? The old man? I, young and strong as I was, and his wife's lover?
I looked at her. What will be the scaffold to-morrow to me, since I have lived through that moment?
She looked at me, always with her sorceress's eyes. "You must kill him," she said briefly. "It will be so easy to you. If you love me it will be done. If not—farewell."
A horrible terror seized on me. I said nothing. I was stupefied. The gloomy shadows of the chamber surrounded us like a mystic vapor; the pale figures of the tapestries seemed like the ghosts arisen from the grave to witness against us; the oppressive heat of the night hour lay on our heads like an iron hand.
A phantom parted us: the spectre of a cowardly crime had come between us.
"You do not love me," she said slowly. She grew impatient, angered, feverish: a dumb rage began to work in her. She had no fear.
I drew my breath with effort. It seemed as if some one were strangling me. Kill him! Kill him! These ghastly words re-echoed in my ears. Kill an old and feeble man? It was worse than a crime: it was a cowardice.
"You do not love me," she repeated with utter scorn. "Go—go!"
A cry to her sprang from my very soul: "Anything else, anything but that! Ask my own life, and you shall have it."
"I ask what I wish."
As she answered me thus she drew herself in all her full height upward under the faint radiance from the lamp. Her magnificent beauty shone in it like a grand white flower of the datura under the suns of autumn. A disdain without bounds, without limit, without mercy, gleamed from her eyes. She despised me—a man of the people, a public wrestler, a bravo, only made to kill at his mistress's order, only of use to draw the stiletto in secrecy at the whim and will of a woman.
I was Italian, yet I dared not slay a feeble old man in the soft dark of a summer night, to find my reward on the breast of his wife.
Silence fell between us. Her eyes of scorn glanced over me, and all her beauty tempted me and cried to me, "Kill, kill, kill! and all this is thine!"
Then her eyes filled with tears, her proud loveliness grew humble, and, a supplicant, she stretched out her arms to me: she cried, "Ah, you love me not: you have no pity. I may live and die here: you will not save me. You are strong as the lions are—you are so strong, and yet you are afraid."
I shook in all my limbs. Yes, I was afraid—I was afraid of her, afraid of myself. I shivered: she looked at me always, her burning eyes now humid and soft with tears.
"In open war, in combat, all you wish," I said to her slowly. "But an old man—in secret—to be his assassin—"
My voice failed me. I saw the light in the lamp that swung above, oscillating between us: it seemed to me like the frail life of Taddeo Marchioni that swung on a thread at our will.
She drew herself upward once more. Her tears were burned up in the fires of a terrible dumb rage. She cried aloud, "You are a coward. Go!"
I fell once more at her feet; I seized her by her gown; I kissed her feet. "Any other thing!" I cried to her in my anguish—"any other thing! But the life of a weak old man! It would be horrible. I am not a coward: I am brave. It is for cowards to kill the feeble: I cannot. And you would not wish it? No, no, you would not wish it? It is a dream, a nightmare! It is not possible. I adore you! I adore you! I am a madman. I am yours; I give you my life; I give you my body and my soul. But to kill a feeble old man that I could crush in my arms as a fly is stifled in wine! No, no, no! Any other thing, any other thing! But not that."
She thrust me from her with her foot. "That or nothing," she said coldly.
The sweat fell from my brow in the agony of this horrible hour. I was ready to give my life for her, but an old man, a murder done in secret! All my soul revolted.
"But you love me!" I cried to her; and a great sob rose in my throat.
"You refuse to do this thing?" she answered.
"Yes."
Then she threw me away from her with the strength of a tigress: "Imbecile! You thought I loved you? I should have used you: that is all."
The lamp went out: the darkness was complete. I stretched my hands out, to meet but empty air. If I were alone I could not tell: I touched nothing, I heard nothing, I saw nothing. A strange giddiness came upon me; my limbs trembled under the weight of my body and gave way; I lost consciousness. It is what we call in this country a stroke of the blood.
When my senses revived I opened my eyes. It was still night about me, but a pallid light shone into the chamber, for the moon had risen, and its rays penetrated through the iron bars of the high windows. I remembered all.
I rose with pain and effort: the heavy fall on the stone floor had bruised and strained me. A great stupor, the stupor of horror, had fallen upon me. I felt all at once old, quite old. The thought of my mother passed through my mind for the first time for many days. My poor mother!
By the light of the moon I tried to find my way out of this chamber—a chamber accursed. I gained the entrance of the gallery. Silence reigned everywhere. I could not tell what hour it was. The lustre from the skies sufficed to illumine fitfully the vast and sombre passages. I found the door by which I had entered the house, and I felt the hot air of the night blow upon my forehead, as hot now as it had been at noonday.
I passed into the great open court. Above it hung the moon, late risen, round, yellow, luminous. I looked upward at it: this familiar object seemed to me a strange and unknown thing. I walked slowly across the pavement of the courtyard on a sheer instinct, as you may see a wounded dog walk, bearing death in him. My heart seemed like a stone in my breast: my blood seemed like ice in my veins. All around me were the walls of Sant' Aloïsa, silent, gray, austere.
My foot touched something on the ground. I looked at it. It was a thing without form—a block of oak wood or a slab of marble?—yet I looked at it, and my eyes were rooted there and could not look elsewhere. The moon shed a sinister white light upon this thing. I looked long, standing there motionless and without power to move. Then I saw what it was, this shapeless thing: it was the body of Taddeo Marchioni—dead, horribly dead, fallen face downward, stretched out upon the stones, a knife plunged into the back of the throat, and left there. He had been stabbed from behind.
I looked, I saw, I understood: it was her act.
I stooped; I touched the corpse; I turned the face to the light; I searched for a pulse of life, a breath. There was none: he was dead. A single blow had been given, and the blow had been sure. A ghastly grimace distended the thin lips of the toothless mouth; the eyes were starting from their orbits; the hands were clenched: it had been a death swift, silent, violent, terrible.
I drew out the knife, deep buried in the bone of the throat below the skull. It was my knife, the same with which I had slashed asunder the boughs of the vines in the day just gone in the vintage-fields. She had taken it, no doubt, from my girdle when I had fallen at her feet.
"I understand," I said to the dead man: "it is her work."
The dead mouth seemed to laugh.
A casement opened on the court. A voice cried aloud. The voice was hers: it cried for help. From the silent dwelling came a sound of hurrying feet: the flame of a torch borne in a peasant's hand fell red on the livid moonlight.
She came with naked feet, with unloosed hair, as though roused from her bed, beautiful in her disarray, and crying aloud, "An assassin! an assassin!"
I understood all. She meant to send me to the scaffold in her place. It was my knife: that would be testimony enough for a tribunal. Justice is blind.
She cried aloud: they seized me, and the dead man lay between us, stretched on the stones and bathed in blood. I looked at her: she did not tremble.
But she had forgotten that I was strong—strong with the strength of the lion, of the bull, of the eagle. She had forgotten. With a gesture I flung far away from me, against the walls, the men who had seized me: with a bound I sprang upon her. I took her in my arms in her naked loveliness, scarcely veiled by the disordered linen, by the loosened hair, and shining like marble in the glisten of the moon. I seized her in my arms; I kissed her on her lips; I pressed against my heart her beautiful white bosom. Then between her two breasts I plunged my knife, red with the blood of her dead lord. "I avenge Phœbus," I said to her.
Now you know why to-morrow they will kill me, why my mother is mad.
Hush! I am tired. Let me sleep in peace.
And on the morrow he slept.
Ouida.