Bimbi: Stories for Children

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D^ •/- ^0.

BIMBI.

8TOBTES FOB CHILDREN.

OUIDJ

PHILADILrHIA:

. LIPPINOOTT COMPANY.
1911

to

685388

COFTBIGHT, 1893,
BY

J. B. LiPPiaroQTT Compaht.

• ••••• .*--"*• ?

- • ••

«

pMflTtO W J. B. LiFWIIOOTT COMMNV, PMIUOflJMIA.

8. A. R.
\riTTOEIO EMANUELE,

PRINCIPE DI NAPOLL

SPERANZA dell' ITALIA.

QUESTS NOYELLB

DETTATE PER LUI

0OH8A0BA BIYEBENTB

OUIDA

CONTENTS

PAOB

MouppLou 9

A Provence Rose 43

Lampblack 99

The Ambitious Rose Tree Ill

The Child of Urbino : 131

Meleaqris Gallopavo 161

•

FiNDELKIND 175

MOUFFLOU

14 MOUFFLOU.

matting with busy fingers. But for the most part he
did as he liked, and spent most of his time sitting on
the parapet of Or San Michele, watching the venders
of earthenware at their trucks, or trotting with his
crutch (and he could trot a good many miles when he
chose) out with Moufflon down a bit of the Stocking-
makers* Street, along under the arcades of the Uffizi,
and so over the Jewellers* Bridge, and out by byways
that he knew into the fields on the hill-side upon the
other bank of Amo. Moufflon and he would spend
half the day — all the day— out there in daffodil-time;
and Lolo would come home with great bundles and
sheaves of golden flowers, and he and Moufflon were
happy.

His mother never liked to say a harsh word to Lolo,
for he was lame through her fault : she had let him fall
in his babyhood, and the mischief had been done to his
hip never again to be undone. So she never raised her
voice to him, though she did ofleri to the others, — to
curly-pated Cecco, and pretty black-eyed Dina, and
saucy Bice, and sturdy Beppo, and even to the good,
manly, hard-working Tasso. Tasso was the mainstay
of the whole, though he was but a gardner's lad,
working in the green Casciiie at small wages. But all
he earned he brought home to his mother; and he
alone kept in order the lazy, high-tempered Sandro,
and he alone kept in check Bice's love of finery, and
he alone could with shrewdness and care make both
ends meet and put minestra always in the pot and
bread always in the cupboard.

When his mother thought, as she thought indeed
almost ceaselessly, that with a few months he would

MOUFFLOa 15

be of the age to draw his number, and might draw a
high one and be taken from her for three years, the
poor soul believed her very heart would burst and
break ; and many a day at twilight she would start
out unperceived and creep into the great church and
pour her soul forth in supplication before the White
Tabernacle.

Yet, pray as she would, no miracle could happen to
make Tasso free of military service : if he drew a fatal,
number, go he must, even though he take all the lives
of them to their ruin with him.

One morning Lolo sat as usual on the parapet of the
church, Moufflon beside him. It was a brilliant morn-
ing in September. The men at the hand-barrows and
at the stalls were selling the crockery, the silk handker-
chiefs, and the straw hats which form the staple of the
commerce that goes on round about Or San Michele, —
very blithe, good-natured, gay commerce, for the most
part, not got through, however, of course, without
bawling and screaming, and shouting and gesticulat-
ing, as if the sale of a penny pipkin or a twopenny
pie-pan were the occasion for the exchange of many
thousands of pounds sterling and cause for the whole
world's commotion. It was about eleven o'clock ; the
poor petitioners were going in for alms to the house of
the fraternity of San Giovanni Battista ; the barber at
tie comer was shaving a big man with a cloth tucked
about his chin, and his chair set well out on the pave-
ment; the sellers of the pipkins and pie-pans were
screaming till they were hoarse, "C/ri soldo PunOy due
soldi trel'^ big bronze bells were booming till they
seemed to clang right up to the deep-blue sky ; some

16 MOUFFLOU,

brethren of the Misericordia went by bearing a black
bier ; a large sheaf of glowing flowers — dahlias, zin-
nias, asters, and daturas — was borne through the huge
arched door of the church near St. Mark and his
open book. Lolo looked on at- it all, and so did
Moufflon, and a stranger looked at them as he left
the church.

" You have a handsome poodle there, my little man,'^
he said to Lolo, in a foreigner's too distinct and careful
Italian.

"Moufflon is beautiful,^' said Lolo, with pride.
" You should see him when he is just washed ; but
we can only wash him on Sundays, because then Tasso
is at home."

" How old is your dog ?"

" Three years old.''

" Does he do any tricks ?"

" Does he ! '* said Lolo, with a very derisive laugh :
" why, Moufflon can do anything ! He can walk on
two legs ever so long ; make ready, present, and fire ;
die ; waltz ; beg, of course ; shut a door ; make a wheel-
barrow of himself: there is nothing he will not do.
Would you like to see him do something?"

" Very much," said the foreigner.

To Moufflou and to Lolo the street was the same
thing as home ; this cheery piazzeUa by the church, so
utterly empty sometimes, and sometimes so noisy and
crowded, was but the wider threshold of their home
to both tlie poodle and the child.

So there, under the lofty and stately walls of the
old church, Lolo put Moufflou through his exercises.
They were second nature to Moufflou, as to most

MOUFFLOa 17

poodles. He had inherited his address at them from
clever parents, and, as he had never been frightened or
coerced, all his lessons and acquirements were but play
to him. He acquitted himself admirably, and the
crockery-venders came and looked on, and a sacristan
came out of the church and smiled, and the barber left
his customer's chin all in a lather while he laughed, for
the good folk of the quarter were all proud of Mouf-
flon and never tired of him, and the pleasant, easy-
going, good-humored disposition of the Tuscan popu-
lace is so far removed from the stupid b'^ckram and
whalebone in which the new-fangled democracy wants
to imprison it.

The stranger also was much diverted by Moufflou's
talents, and said, half aloud, " How this clever dog
would amuse poor Victor! Would you bring your
poodle to please a sick child I have at home !*' he said,
quite aloud, to Lolo, who smiled and answered that he
would. Where was the sick child ?

"At the Gran Bretagna ; not far off," said the gen-
tleman. *^Come this afternoon, and ask for me by
this name.*'

He dropped his card and a couple of francs into
Lolo's hand, and went his way. Lolo, with Moufflon
scampering after him, dashed into his own house, and
stumped up the stairs, his crutch making a terrible
noise on the stone.

"Mother, moth^! see what I have got because
Moufflon did his tricks," he shouted. "And now you
can buy those shoes you want so much, and the coffee
that you miss so of a morning, and the new linen for
Tasso, and the shirts for Sandro."

18 MOUFFLOU,

For to the mind of Lolo two francs was as two
millions, — source unfathomable of riches inexhaustible !

With the afternoon he and Moufflon trotted down
the arcades of the Uffizi and down the Lung' Arno to
the hotel of the stranger, and, showing the stranger's
card, which Lolo could not read, they were shown at
once into a great chamber, all gilding and fresco and
velvet furniture.

But Lolo, being a little Florentine, was never troubled
by externals, or daunted by mere sofas and chairs : he
stood and looked around him with perfect composure ;
and Moufflon, whose attitude, when he was not romp-
ing, was always one of magisterial gravity, sat on his
haunches and did the same.

Soon the foreigner he had seen in the forenoon
entered and spoke to him, and led him into another
chamber, where stretched on a couch was a little wan-
faced boy about seven years old ; a pretty boy, but so
pallid, so wasted, so helpless. This poor little boy was
heir to a great name and a great fortune, but all the
science in the world could not make him strong enough
to run about among the daisies, or able to draw a single
breath without pain. A feeble smile lit up his face as
he saw Moufflou and Lolo ; then a shadow chased it
away.

" Little boy is lame like me,'' he said, in a tongue
Lolo did not understand.

" Yes, but he is a strong little boy, and can move
about, as perhaps the suns of his country will make
you do," said the gentleman, who was the poor little
boy's father. "He has brought you his poodle to
amuse you. What a handsome dog ! is it not?"

MOUFFLOU, 19

" Oh, bufflinsr said the poor little fellow, stretching
out his wasted hands to Moufflon, who submitted his
leonine crest to the caress.

Then Lolo went through the performance, and
Moufflou acquitted himself ably as ever; and the little
invalid laughed and shouted with his .tiny thin voice,
and enjoyed it all immensely, and rained cakes and
biscuits on both the poodle and its master. Lolo
crumped the pastries with willing white teeth, and
Moufflou did no less. Then they got up to go, and
the sick child on the couch burst into fretful lamenta-
tions and outcries.

" I want the dog ! I will have the dog ! '' was all
he kept repeating.

But Lolo did not know what he said, and was only
sorry to see him so unhappy.

"You shall have the dog to-morrow,'* said the
gentleman, to pacify his little son; and he hurried
Lolo and Moufflou out of the room, and consigned
them to a servant, having given Lolo five francs this
time.

"Why, Moufflou," said Lolo, with a chuckle of
delight, " if we could find a foreigner every day, we
could eat meat at supper, Moufflou, and go to the
theatre every evening ! '*

And he and his crutch clattered home with great
eagerness and excitement, and Moufflou trotted on his
four frilled feet, the blue bow with which Bice had
tied up his curls on the top of his head, fluttering in
the wind. But, alas ! even his five francs could bring
no comfort at home. He found his whole family
wailing and mourning in utterly inconsolable distress.

20 MOUFFLOU,

Tasso had drawn his number that morning, and the
number was seven, and he must go and be a conscript
for three years.

The poor young man stood in the midst of his weep-
ing brothers and sisters, with his mother leaning against
his shoulder, and down his own brown cheeks the tears
were falling. He must go, and lose his place in the
public gardens, and leave his people to starve as they
might, and be put in a tomfool's jacket, and drafted
off among cursing and swearing and strange faces,
friendless, homeless, miserable I And the mother, —
what would become of the mother ?

Tasso was the best of lads and the mildest. He
was quite happy sweeping up the leaves in the long
alleys of the Cascine, or mowing the green lawns under
the ilex avenues, and coming home at supper-time
among the merry little people and the good woman
that he loved. He was quite contented; he wanted
nothing, only to be let alone ; and they would not let
him alone. They would haul him away to put a heavy
musket in his hand and a heavy knapsack on his back,
and drill him, and curse him, and make him into a
human target, a live popinjay.

No one had any heed for Lolo and his five francs,
and Moufflon, understanding that some great sorrow
had fallen on his friends, sat down and lifted up his
voice and howled.

Tasso must go away ! — that was all they understood.
For three long years they must go without the sight of
his face, the aid of his strength, the pleasure of his
smile : Tasso must go ! When Lolo understood the
calamity that had befallen them, he gathered Moufflon

MOUFFLOU. 21

up against his breast, and sat down too on the floor
beside him and cried as if he would never stop crying.

There was no help for it : it was one of those mis-
fortunes which are, as we say in Italian, like a tile
tumbled on the head. The tile drops from a height,
and the poor head bows under the unseen blow. That
is all.

*^ What is the use of that?" said the mother, pas-
sionately, when Lolo showed her his five francs. '* It
will not buy Tasso's discharge."

Lolo felt that his mother was cruel and unjust, and
crept to bed with Moufflon. Moufflon always slept on
Lolo's feet.

The next morning Lolo got up before sunrise, and
he and Moufflou accompanied Tasso to his work in the
Cascine.

Lolo loved his brother, and clung to every moment
whilst they could still be together.

" Can nothing keep you, Tasso ?" he said, despair-
ingly, as they went down the leafy aisles, whilst the
Arno water was growing golden as the sun rose.

Tasso sighed.

"Nothing, dear. Unless Gresti would send me a
thousand francs to buy a substitute."

And he knew he might as well have said, " If one
could coin gold ducats out of the sunbeams on Arno
water."

Lolo waa very sorrowful as he lay on the grass in
the meadow where Tasso was at work, and the poodle
lay stretched beside him.

When Lolo went home to dinner (Tasso took his
wrapped in a hapdkerchief ) he found his mother very

22 MOUFFLOa

agitated and excited. She was laughing one moment^
crying the next. She was passionate and peevish, ten-
der and jocose by turns ; there was something forced
and feverish about her which the children felt but did
not comprehend. She was a woman of not very much
intelligence, and slie had a secret, and she carried it ill,
and knew not what to do with it ; but they could not
tell that. They only felt a vague sense of disturbance
and timidity at her unwonted manner.

The meal over (it was only bean-soup, and that is
soon eaten), the mother said sharply to Lolo, " Your
aunt Anita wants you this afternoon. She has to go
out, and you are needed to stay with the children : be
off with you."

Lolo was an obedient child ; he took his hat and
jumped up as quickly as his halting hip would let
him. He called Moufflon, who was asleep.

" Leave the dog," said his mother, sharply. " 'Nita
will not have him messing and carrying mud about
her nice clean rooms. She told me so. Leave him, I
say."

" Leave Moufflon !" echoed Lolo, for never in all
Moufflon's life had Lolo parted from him. Leave
Moufflon ! He stared open-eyed and open-mouthed
at his mother. What could have come to her ?

"Leave him, I say," she repeated, more sharply
than ever. " Must I speak twice to my own children ?
Be off with you, and leave the dog, I say."

And she clutched Moufflon by his long silky mane
and dragged him backwards, whilst with the other
hand she thrust out of the door Lolo and Bice,

Lolo began to hammer with his crutch at the door

MOUFFLOU, 23

thus closed on him; but Bice coaxed and entreated
him.

" Poor mother has been so worried about Tasso/'
she pleaded. "And what harm can come to Mouf-
flou ? And I do think he was tired, Lolo ; the Cas-
cine is a long way ; and it is quite true that Aunt
'Nita never liked him."

So by one means and another she coaxed her brother
away ; and they went almost in silence to where their
aunt Anita dwelt, which was across the river, near the
dark-red bell-shaped dome of Santa Spirito.

It was true that her aunt had wanted them to mind
her room and her babies whilst she was away carrying
home some lace to a villa outside the Roman gate, for
she was a lace- washer and clear-starcher by trade.
There they had to stay in the little dark room with
the two babies, with nothing to amuse the time except
the clang of the bells of the church of th6 Holy Spirit,
and the voices of the lemonade-sellers shouting in the
street below. Aunt Anita did not get back till it was
more than dusk, and the two children trotted home-
ward hand in hand, Lolo's leg dragging itself pain-
fully along, for without Moufllou's white figure danc-
ing on before him he felt very tired indeed. It was
pitch dark when they got to Or San Michele, and the
lamps burned dully.

Lolo stumped up the stairs wearily, with a vague,
dull fear at his small heart.

" Moufflon, Moufflou !" he called. Where was
Moufflon ? Always at the first sound of his crutch
the poodle came flying towards him. "Moufflou,
Moufflou !" he called all the way up the long, dark

24 MOUFFLOU.

twisting stone stair. He pushed open the door, and
he called again, " Moufflon, Moufflou 1"

But no dog answered to his call.

"Mother, where is Moufflou?'' he asked, staring
with blinking, dazzled eyes into the oil-lit room where
his mother sat knitting. Tasso was not then home
from work. His mother went on with her knitting ;
there was an uneasy look on her face.

" Mother, what have you done with Moufflou, my
Moufflou?" said Lolo, with a look that was almost
stern on his ten-year-old face.

Then his mother, without looking up and moving
her knitting-needles very rapidly, said, —

" Moufflou is sold V'

And little Dina, who was a quick, pert child, cried,
with a shrill voice, —

" Mother has sold him for a thousand francs to the
foreign gentleman."

" Sold him !"

Lolo grew white and grew cold as ice ; he stam-
mered, threw up his hands over his head, gasped a
little for breath, then fell down in a dead swoon, his
poor useless limb doubled under him.

When Tasso came home that sad night and found
his little brother shivering, moaning, and half deliri-
ous, and when he heard what had been done, he was
sorely grieved.

"Oh, mother, how could you do it?" he cried.
"Poor, poor Moufflou ! and Lolo loves him so !"

" I have got the money," said his mother, feverishly,
" and you will not need to go for a soldier : we can
buy your substitute. What is a poodle, that you

MOUFFLOV, 25

mourn about it? We can get another poodle for
Lolo/^

"Another will not be Moufflon/^ said Tasso, and yet
was seized with such a frantic happiness himself at
the knowledge that he would not need go to the army,
that he too felt as if he were drunk on new wine, and
had not the heart to rebuke his mother.

"A thousand francs !" he muttered ; " a thousand
francs ! Dio miol Who could ever have fancied any-
body would have given such a price for a common
white poodle ? One would think the gentleman had
bought the church and the tabernacle !"

" Fools and their money are soon parted/^ said his
mother, with cross contempt.

It was true : she had sold Moufflon.

The English gentleman had called on her while Lolo
and the dog had been in the Cascine, and had said that
he was desirous of buying the poodle, which had so
diverted his sick child that the little invalid would not
be comforted unless he possessed it. Now, at any other
time the good woman would have sturdily refused any
idea of selling Moufflon ; but that morning the thou-
sand francs wliich would buy Tasso's substitute were
forever in her mind and before her eyes. When she
heard the foreigner her heart gave a great leap, and
her head swam giddily, and she thought, in a spasm
of longing — if she could get those thousand francs !
But though she was so dizzy and so upset she retained
her grip on her native Florentine shrewdness. She
said nothing of her need of the money ; not a syllable
of her sore distress. On the contrary, she was coy and
wary, affected great reluctance to part with her pet,

26 MOUFFLOU,

invented a great offer made for him by a director of
a circus^ and finally let fall a hint that less 'than a
thousand francs she could never take for poor Mouf-
flon.

The gentleman assented with so much willingness
to the price that she instantly regretted not having
asked double. He told her that if she would take the
poodle that afternoon to his hotel the money should be
paid to her; so she despatched her children after their
noonday meal in various directions, and herself took
Moufflon to his doom. She could not believe her
senses when ten hundred-franc notes were put into her
hand. She scrawled her signature, Kosina Calabucci,
to a formal receipt, and went away, leaving Moufflon
in his new owner's rooms, and hearing his howls and
moans pursue her all the way down the staircase and
out into the air.

She was not easy at what she had done.

"It seemed," she said to herself, "like selling a
Christian."

But then to keep her eldest son at home, — what a
joy that was ! On the whole, she cried so and laughed
so as she went down the Lung' Arno that once or twice
people looked at her, thinking her out of her senses,
and a guard spoke to her angrily.

Meanwhile, Lolo was sick and delirious with grief.
Twenty times he got out of his bed and screamed to
be allowed to go with Moufflon, and twenty times hi^
mother and his brothers put him back again and held
him down and tried in vain to quiet him.

The child was beside himself with misery. " Mouf-
flou ! Moufflon !" he sobbed at every moment ; and by

28 MOUFFLOa

the aching hot little head that had got the malady with
the long name, and for the chief part of the time Lolo
lay quiet, dull, and stupid, breathing heavily, and then
at intervals cried and sobbed and shrieked hysterically
for Moufflou.

" Can you not get what he calls for to quiet him
with a sight of it f^ said the doctor. But that was not
possible, and poor Bosina covered her head with her
aj>ron and felt a guilty creature.

" Still, you will not go to the army," she said to
Tasso, clinging to that immense joy for her consola-
tion. "Only think ! we can pay Guido Squarcione to
go for you. He always said he would go if anybody
would pay him. Oh, my Tasso, surely to keep you is
worth a dog's life ! '*

"And Lolo's V^ said Tasso, gloomily. " Nay, mother,
it works ill to meddle too much with fate. I drew my
number; I was bound to go. Heaven would have
made it up to you somehow.''

" Heaven sent me the foreigner ; the Madonna's own
self sent him to ease a mother's pain," said Bosina,
rapidly and angrily. " There are the thousand francs
safe to hand in the cassone, and what, pray, is it we
miss ? Only a dog like a sheep, that brought gallons
of mud in with him every time it rained, and ate as
much as any one of you."

"But Lolo?" said Tasso, under his breath.

His mother was so irritated and so tormented by
her own conscience that she upset all the cabbage broth
into the burning charcoal.

"Lolo was always a little fool, thinking of nothing ^
but the church and the dog and nasty field-flowers,"

MOUFFLOU, 29

she said, angrily. " I humored him ever too much
because of the hurt to his hip, and so — and so ^^

Then the poor soul made matters worse by drop-
ping her tears into the saucepan, and fanning the
charcoal so furiously that the flame caught her fan of
cane-leaves, and would have burned her arm had not
Tasso been there.

" You are my prop and safety always. Who would
not have done what I did? Not Santa Felicita
herself/^ she said, with a great sob.

But all this did not cure poor Lolo.

The days and the weeks of the golden autumn
weather passed away, and he was always in danger,
and the small close room where he slept with Sandro
and Beppo and Tasso was not one to cure such an ill-
ness as had now beset him. Tasso went to his work
with a sick heart in the Casciue, where the colchicum
was all lilac among the meadow grass, and the ashes
and elms were taking their first flush of the coming
autumnal change. He did not think Lolo would ever
get well, and the good lad felt as if he had been the
murderer of his little brother.

True, he had had no hand or voice in the sale of
Moufflon, but Moufflon had been sold for his sake. It
made him feel half guilty, very unhappy, quite un-
worthy all the sacrifice that had been made for him.
"Nobody should meddle with fate,^^ thought Tasso,
.who knew his grandfather had died in San Bonifazio
because he had driven himself mad over the dream-
book trying to get lucky numbers for the lottery and
become a rich man at a stroke.

It wae rapture, indeed, to know that he was free of

30 MOUFFLOU.

the armj for a time at least, that be might go on un-
disturbed at his healthful lalx)r, and get a rise in wages
as time went on, and dwell in peace with his family,
and perhaps— perhaps in time earn enough to marry
pretty flaxen-haired Biondina, the daughter of the bar-
ber in the piazzetta It was rapture indeed ; but then
poor Moufflon ! — and poor, poor Lolo ! Tasso felt as
if he had bought his own exemption by seeing his little
brother and the good dog torn in pieces and buried alive
for his service.

And where was poor Moufflon ?

Gone far away somewhere south in the hurrying,
screeching, vomiting, braying train that it made Tasso
giddy only to look at as it rushed by the green meadows
beyond the Cascine on its way to the sea.

" If he could see the dog he cries so for, it might
save him,^' said the doctor, who stood with grave face
watching Lolo.

But that was beyond any one^s power. No one could
tell where Moufflon was. He might be carried away
to England, to France, to Russia, to America, — who
could say ? They did not know where his purchaser
had gone. Moufflon even might be dead.

The poor mother, when the doctor said that, went
and looked at the ten hundred-franc notes that were
once like angels^ faces to her, and said to them, —

" Oh, you children of Satan, why did you tempt me ?
I sold the poor, innocent, trustful beast to get you, and
now my child is dying !"

Her eldest son would stay at home, indeed ; but if
this little lame one died ! Rosina Calabucci would
have given up the notes and consented never to own

MOUFFLOU. 31

five francs in her life if only she could have gone back
over the time and kept Moufflon, and seen his little
master running out with him into the sunshine.

More than a month went by, and Lolo lay in the
same state, his yellow hair shorn, his eyes dilated and
yet stupid, life kept in him by a spoonful of milk, a
lump of ice, a drink of lemon- water ; always mutter-
ing, when he spoke at all, " Moufflon, Moufflou, dov^ ^
Moufflou?" and lying for days together in somnolence
and unconsciousness, with the fire eating at his brain
and the weight lying on it like a stone.

The neighbors were kind, and brought fruit and the
like, and sat up with him, and chattered so all at once
in one continuous brawl that they were enough in
themselves to kill him, for such is ever the Italian
fashion of sympathy in all illness.

But Lolo did not get well, did not even seem to see
the light at all, or to distinguish any sounds around
him ; and the doctor in plain words told Bosina Cala-
bucci that her little boy must die. Die, and the church
so near ! She could not believe it. Could St. Mark,
and St. Greorge, and the rest that he had loved so do
nothing for him? No, said the doctor, they could do
nothing ; the dog might do something, since the brain
had so fastened on that one idea ; but then they had
sold the dog.

"Yes; I sold him ! " said the poor mother, breaking
into fl()ods of remorseful tears.

So at last the end drew so nigh that one twilight
time the priest came out of the great arched door that
is next St. Mark, with the Host uplifted, and a little
acolyte ringing the bell before it, and passed across the

32 MOUFFLOa

piazzetta, and went up the dark staircase of Rosina^s
dwelling, and passed through the weeping, terrified
children, and went to the bedside of Lolo.

Lolo was unconscious, but the holy man touched his
little body and limbs with the sacred oil, and prayed
over him, and then stood sorrowful with bowed head.

Lolo had had his first communion in the summer,
and in his preparation for it had shown an intelligence
and devoutness that had won the priest's gentle heart.

Standing there, the holy man commended the inno-
cent soul to God. It was the last service to be rendered
to him save that very last of all when the funeral
oflSce should be read above his little grave among the
millions of nameless dead at the sepulchres of the
poor at Trebbiano.

All was still as the priest^s voice ceased ; only the
sobs of the mother and of the children broke the still-
ness as they kneeled ; the hand of Biondina had stolen
into Tasso's.

Suddenly, there was a loud scuffling noise ; hurrying
feet came patter, patter, patter up the stairs, a ball of
mud and dust flew over the heads of the kneeling
figures, fleet as the wind Moufflou dashed through the .
room and leaped upon the bed.

Lolo opened his heavy eyes, and a sudden light
of consciousness gleamed in them like a sunbeam.
"Moufflon!^' he murmured, in his little thin faint
voice. The dog pressed close to his breast and kissed
his wasted face.

Moufflou was come home !

And Lolo came home too, for death let go its hol<^
upon him. Little by little, very faintly and flicker-

MOUFFLOU. 33

ingly and very uncertainly at the first, life returned to
the poor little body, and reason to the tormented,
heated little brain. Moufflon was his physician;
Moufflon, who, himself a skeleton under his matted
curls, would not stir from his side and looked at him
all day long with two beaming brown eyes full of
unutterable love.

Lolo was happy ; he asked no questions, — was too
weak, indeed, even to wonder. He had Moufflon;
that was enough.

Alas ! though they dared not say so in his hearing,
it was not enough for his elders. His mother and
Tasso knew that the poodle had been sold and paid
for; that they could lay no claim to keep him; and
that almost certainly his purchaser would seek him out
and assert his indisputable right to him. And then
how would Lolo ever bear that second parting? —
Lolo, so weak that he weighed no more than if he had
been a little bird.

Moufflon had, no doubt, travelled a long distance
and suffered much. He was but skin and bone ; he
bore the marks of blows and kicks ; his once silken
hair was all discolored and matted ; he had, no doubt,
travelled far. But then his purchaser would be sure
to ask for him, soon or late, at his old home; and
then ? Well, then if they did not give him up them-
selves, the law would make them.

Rosina Calabucci and Tasso, though they dared say
nothing before any of the children, felt their hearts in
their mouths at every step on the stair, and the first
interrogation of Tasso every evening when he came
from his work was, " Has any one come for Moufflou ?''

34 MOUFFLOU,

For ten days no one came, and their first terrors lulled
a little.

On the eleventh morning, a feast-day, on which
Tasso was not going to his labors in the Cascine, there
came a person, with a foreign look, who said the words
they so much dreaded to hear : " Has the poodle that
you sold to an English gentleman come back to you?^'

Yes : his English master claimed him !

The servant said that they had missed the dog in
Rome a few days after buying him and taking him
there ; that he had been searched for in vain, and that
his master had thought it possible the animal might
have found his way back to his old home : there had
been stories of such wonderful sagacity in dogs : any-
how, he had sent for him on the chance ; he was him-
self back on the Lung' Amo. The servant pulled
from his pocket a chain, and said his orders were to
take the poodle away at once : the little sick gentleman
had fretted very much about his loss.

Tasso heard in a very agony of despair. To take
Moufflon away now would be to kill Lolo, — Lolo so
feeble still, so unable to understand, so passionately
alive to every sight and sound of Moufflon, lying for
hours together motionless with his hand buried in the
poodle's curls, saying nothing, only smiling now and
then, and murmuring a word or two in Moufflon's ear.

" The dog did come home," said Tasso, at length, in
a low voice ; " angels must have shown him the road,
poor beast ! From Rome ! Only to think of it, from
Rome ! And he a dumb thing ! I tell you he is here,
honestly : so will you not trust me just so far as this ?
Will you let me go with you and speak to the English

MOUFFLOU. 35

lord before you take the dog away? I have a little
brother sorely ill '^

He could not speak more, for tears that choked his
voice.

At last the messenger agreed so far as this : Tasso
might go first and see the master, but he would stay
here and have a care they did not spirit the dog away,
— "for a thousand francs were paid for him," added
the man, "and a dog that can come all the way from
Rome by itself must be an uncanny creature."

Tasso thanked him, went up-stairs, was thankful
that his mother was at mass and could not dispute with
him, took the ten hundred-franc notes from the old
oak cassoney and with them in his breast-pocket walked
out into the air. He was but a poor working lad, but
he had made up his mind to do an heroic deed, for
self-sacrifice is always heroic. He went straightway
to the hotel where the English milord was, and when
he had got there remembered that still he did not
know the name of Moufflou's owner ; but the people
of the hotel knew him as Rosina Calabucci's son, and
guessed what he wanted, and said the gentleman who
had lost the poodle was within up-stairs and they
would tell him.

Tasso waited some half-hour with his heart beating
sorely against the packet of hundred-franc notes. At
last he was beckoned up-stairs, arid there he saw a
foreigner with a mild fair face, and a very lovely lady,
and a delicate child who was lying on a couch. " Mouf-
flon! Where is Moufflou?" cried the little child, im-
patiently, as he saw the youth enter.

Tasso took his hat off, and stood in the door-way

36 MOUFFLOU.

an embrowned, healthy, not ungraceful figure, in his
working-clothes of rough blue stuff.

" If you please, most illustrious,* he stammered
*^ poor Moufflou has come home/^

The child gave a cry of delight ; the gentleman and
lady one of wonder. Come home ! All the way from
Rome!

*' Yes, he has, most illustrious," said Tasso, gaining
courage and eloquence ; " and now I want to beg some-
thing of you. We are poor, and I drew a bad number,
and it was for that my mother sold Moufflou. For
myself, I did not know anything of it ; but she thought
she would buy my substitute, and of course she could ;
but Moufflou is come home, and my little brother Lolo,
the little boy your most illustrious first saw playing
with the poodle, fell ill of the grief of losing Mouf-
flou, and for a month has lain saying nothing sensible,
but only calling for the dog, and my old grandfather
died of worrying himself mad over the lottery num-
bers, and Lolo was so near dying that the Blessed Host
had been brought, and the holy oil had been put on
him, when all at once there rushes in Moufflou, skin
and bone, and covered with mud, and at the sight of
him Lolo comes back to his senses, and that is now ten
days ago, and though Lolo is still as weak as a new-
born thing, he is always sensible, and takes what we
give him to eat, and lies always looking at Moufflou,
and smiling, and saying, ^ Moufflou ! Moufflou !' and,
most illustrious, I know well you have bought the
dog, and the law is w^ith you, and by the law you
claim it ; but I thought perhaps, as Lolo loves him so,
you would let us keep the dog, and would take back

MOUFFLOU, 37

the thousand francs, and myself I will go and be a
soldier, and heaven will take care of them all some-
how/^

Then Tasso, having said all this in one breathless,
monotonous recitative, took the thousand francs out of
his breast-pocket and held them out timidly towards
the foreign gentleman, who motioned them aside and
stood silent.

" Did you understand, Victor,^^ he said, at last, to
his little son.

The child hid his face in his cushions.

" Yes, I did miderstand something : let Lolo keep
him ; Moufflon was not happy with me.^'

But he burst out crying as he said it.

Moufflou had run away from him.

Moufflou had never loved him, for all his sweet
cakes and fond caresses and platefuls of delicate savory
meats. Moufflou had run away and found his own
road over two hundred miles and more to go back to
some little hungry children, who never had enough to
eat themselves, and so, certainly, could never give
enough to eat to the dog. Poor little boy ! He was
so rich and so pampered and so powerful, and yet he
could never make Moufflou love him !

Tasso, who understood nothing that was said, laid
the ten hundred-franc notes down on a table near him.

"If you would take them, most illustrious, and give
me back what my mother wrote when she sold Mouf-
flou,^' lie said, timidly, " I would pray for you night
and day, and Lolo would too ; and as for the dog, we
will get a puppy and train him for your little signorino ;
they can all do tricks, more or less, it comes by nature;

38 MOUFFLOa

and as for me, I will go to the army willingly ; it is not
right to interfere with fate ; my old grandfather died
mad because he would try to be a rich man, by dream-
ing about it and pulling destiny by the ears, as if she
were a kicking mule ; only, I do pray of you, do not
take away Moufflon. And to think he trotted all those
miles and miles, and you carried him by train too, and
he never could have seen the road, and he had no
power of speech to ask ^^

Tasso broke down again in his eloquence, and drew
the back of his hand across his wet eyelashes.

The English gentleman was not altogether unmoved.

"Poor faithful dog!^^ he said, with a sigh. "I am
afraid we were very cruel to him, meaning to be kind.
No; we will not claim him, and I do not think you
should go for a soldier; you seem so good a lad, and
your mother must need you. Keep the money, my
boy, and in payment you shall train up the puppy
you talk of, and bring him to my little boy. I will
come and see your mother and Lolo to-morrow. All
the way from Rome! What wonderful sagacity ! what
matchless fidelity !"

You can imagine, without any telling of mine, the
joy that reigned in Moufflon's home when Tasso re-
turned thither with the money and the good tidings
both. His substitute was bought without a day's delay,
and Lolo rapidly recovered. As for Moufflon, he could
never tell them his troubles, his wanderings, his diffi-
culties, his perils ; he could never tell them by what
miraculous knowledge he had found his way across
Italy, from the gates of Rome to the gates of Florence.

MOUFFLOU. 39

But he soon grew plump again, and merry, and his
love for Lolo was yet greater than before.

By the winter all the family went to live on an
estate near Spezia that the English gentleman had
purchased, and there Moufflon was happier than ever.
The little English boy is gaining strength in the soft
air, and he and Lolo are great friends, and play with
Moufflon and the poodle puppy half the day upon the
sunny terraces and under the green orange boughs.
Tasso is one of the gardeners there ; he will have to
serve as a soldier probably in some category or another,
but he is safe for the time, and is happy. Lolo, whose
lameness will always exempt him from military ser-
vice, when he grows to be a man means to be a florist,
and a great one. He has learned to read, as the first
step on the road of his ambition.

^ But Dh, Moufflon, how did you find your way
homef' He asks the dog a hundred times a week.

How indeed !

No one ever knew how Moufflon had made that
long journey on foot, so many weary miles ; but be-
yond a doubt he had done it alone and unaided, for if
any one had helped him they would have come home
with him to claim the reward.

And that you may not wonder too greatly at Mouf-
flon's miraculous journey on his four bare feet, I will
add here two facts known to friends of mine, of whose
truthfulness there can be no doubt.

One concerns a French poodle who was purchased
in Paris by the friend of my friend, and brought all
the way from Paris to Milan by train. In a few days
after his arrival in Milan the poodle was missing ; and

UtOUfFLQU,

• hard iir Vtvynx of liim until o
melci Itfvr hw qODDdun iMt-ocr \a Puis, on opening
liii Jour oac mortau^, ffumd the dog etntefaed dTJag
no (be tbresboJd ofliu otd biime.
Timt u iiae &c1 ; Dut s «t(iiT, mind ,roti,a/a<^.
Tlip Dtlicr M rclaml to mu b/ an Italum uohlemaii,
wbo in bu vuutli bcluai^ to tbo Guardk Nobile of
IWcan/. TbiKt brtUuuit nirjia of elicit gi'Dtl^mea
ownwd R K^neottti pet, a |h)odIi' aU», a tine mpny
and bandjuiiie du^ ai* ibi kiml ; aud tiic ^ilicei^ all
\a\fA sod mwie niiob of bim, fxeept, aliL't ! the eom-
mnadaiit of ibv rmtural, u-bit bated b'tm, bemuse
*ben tb(! affiom were on giarade or riding in escort
'■' fv jitiniHOg- and frisking abotit
liflimlt lo see where the harm
lixa old martinet vowed ven-
niid, b('in|t of course uil fww-
■ tiTrd tbt oxile from Florence
I 'v-w —'nt t» a fiirm at Prato,
' 'i-; but very s-iou be
Hit wtu tJit'ii Hent
'1 tl iTv!:'i< time liad
■.-., I..V ...riW
■-...1 orSar-
^H.ibr lie
■iiijuhI tliere
!■ the poor

I lin

,seir

's\\ yoii_
I I tbiaL

quite break yours to hear : alas ! the brute of a com-
mandant, untouched by such marvellous cleverness
and &ithfulDess, was bis enemy to the bitter end,
and, in inexorable hatred, had him shot! Oh, when
you grow to manhood and have power, use it with
teuderoess!

A PROVENCE ROSE

A PROVENCE ROSE.

L

I WAS a Provence rose.

A little slender rose, with leaves of shining green
and blossoms of purest white — a. little fragile thing,
but fair, they said, growing in the casement in a cham-
ber in a street.

I remember my birth-country well. A great wild
garden, where roses grew together by millions and
tens of millions, all tossing our bright heads in the
light of a southern sun on the edge of an old, old city
—old as Rome — whose ruins were clothed with the
wild fig-tree and the scarlet blossom of the climbing
creepers growing tall and free in our glad air of
France.

I remember how the ruined aqueduct went like a
dark shadow straight across the plains ; how the green
and golden lizards crept in and out and about among
the grasses ; how the cicala sang her song in the moist,
sultry eves; how the women from the wells came
trooping by, stately as monarchs, with their water-jars
upon their heads ; how the hot hush of the burning
noons would fall, and all things droop and sleep ex-
cept ourselves; how swift among us would dart the

45

46 ^ PROVENCE ROSE.

little blue-winged birds, and hide their heads in oar
white breasts and drink from our hearts the dew, and
then hover above us in their gratitude, with sweet faint
music of their wings, till sunset came.

I remember But what is the use ? 1 am only a

rose ; a thing bom for a day, to bloom and be gathered,
and die. So you say : you must know. God gave
you all created things for your pleasure and use. So
you say.

There my birth was; there I lived — in the wide
south, with its strong, quivering light, its radiant
skies, its purple plains, its fruits of gourd and vine.
I was young ; I was happy ; I lived : it was enough.

One day a rough hand tore me from my parent stem
and took me, bleeding and drooping, from my birth-
place, with a thousand other captives of my kind.
They bound a score of us up together, and made us a
cruel substitute for our cool, glad garden-home with
poor leaves, all wet from their own tears, and mosses
torn as we were from their birth-nests under the great
cedars that rose against the radiant native skies.

Then we were shut in darkness for I know not how
long a space ; and when we saw the light of day again
we were lying with our dear dead friends, the leaves,
with many flowers of various kinds, and foliage and
ferns and shrubs and creeping plants, in a place quite
strange to us — a place filled with other roses and with
all things that bloom and bear in the rich days of
midsummer; a place which I heard them call the
market of the Madeleine. And when I heard that
name I knew that I was in Paris.

A PROVENCE ROSE. 47

For many a time, when the dread hand of the
reaper had descended upon us, and we had beheld our
fairest and most fragrant relatives borne away from us
to death, a shiver that was not of the wind had run
through all our boughs and blossoms, and all the roses
had murmured in sadness and in terror, " Better the
worm or the drought, the blight or the fly, the whirl-
wind that scatters us as chaff, or the waterspout that
levels our proudest with the earth — better any of these
than the long-lingering death by famine and faintness
and tliirst that awaits every flower which goes to the
Madeleine/*

It was an honor, no doubt, to be so chosen. A rose
was the purest, the sweetest, the haughtiest of all her
sisterhood ere she went thither. But, though honor is
well no doubt, yet it surely is better to blow free in
the breeze and to live one's life out, and to be, if for-
gotten by glory, yet also forgotten by pain. Nay, yet :
I have known a rose, even a rose who had but one
kittle short life of a summer day to live through and
to lose, perish glad and triumphant in its prime because
it died on a woman's breast and of a woman's kiss.
You see there are roses as weak as men are.

I awoke, I say, from my misery and my long night
of travel, with my kindred beside me in exile, on a
flower-stall of the Madeleine.

It was noon — ^the pretty place was full of people :
it was June, and the day was brilliant. A woman of
Picardy sat with us on the board before her — a woman
with blue eyes and ear-rings of silver, who bound us
together in fifties and hundreds into those sad gather-

48 A PROVENCE ROSE,

iDgs of our pale ghosts which in jour human lan-
guage you have called " bouquets/* The loveliest and
greatest among us suiTered decapitation^ as your Marie
Stuarts and Marie Antoinettes did, and died at once to
have their beautiful bright heads impaled — a thing of
death, a mere mockery of a flower— on slender spears
of wire. I, a little white and fragile tiling, and very
young, was in no way eminent enough among my kind
to find that martyrdom which as surely awaits the
loveliest of our roses as it awaits the highest fame of
your humanity.

I was bound up among a score of others with ropes
of gardener's bass to chain me amidst my fellow-pris-
oners, and handed over by my jailer with the silver
ear-rings to a youth who paid for us with a piece of
gold — whether of great or little value I know not
now. None of my own roses were with me : all were
strangers. You never think, of course, that a little
rose can care for its birthplace or its kindred; but
you err.

O fool ! Shall we not care for one another? — we
who have so divine a life in common, who together
sleep beneath the stars, and together sport in the sum-
mer wind, and together listen to the daybreak singing
of the birds, whilst the world is dark and deaf in
slumber — we who know that we are all of heaven that
God, when He called away His angels, bade them
leave on the sin-stained, weary, sickly earth to now
and then make man remember Him !

You err. We love one another well, and if we may
not live in union, we crave at least in union to droop

A PROVENCE ROSE, 49

and die. It is seldom that we have this boon. Wild
flowers can live and die together; so can the poor
among you; but we of the cultivated garden needs
must part and di6 alone.

All the captives with me were strangers : haughty,
scentless pelargoniums; gardenias^ arrogant even in
their woe; a knot of little, humble forget-me-nots,
ashamed in the grand company of patrician prisoners ;
a stephanotlis, virginal and pure, whose dying breath
was peace and sweetness ; and many sprays of myrtle
born in Home, whose classic leaves wailed Tasso^s
lamentation as they went.

I must have been more loosely fettered than the rest
were, for in the rough, swift motion of the youth who
bore us my bonds gave way, and I fell through the
silver transparency of our prison-house, and dropped
stunned upon the stone pavement of a street.

There I lay long, half senseless, praying, so far as I
had consciousness, that some pitying wind would rise
and waft me on his wings away to some shadow, some
rest, some fresh, cool place of silence.

I was tortured with thirst ; I was choked with dust ;
I was parched with heat.

The sky was as brass, the stones as red-hot metal ;
the sun scorched like flame on the glare of the staring
walls ; the heavy feet of the hurrying crowd tramped
past me black and ponderous: with every step I
thought my death would come under the crushing
weight of those clanging heels.

It was five seconds, five hours — which I know not
The torture was too horrible to be measured by time.

50 A PROVENCE ROSE.

I must have been already dead, or at the very gasp
of death, when a cool, soil touch was laid on me : I
was gently lifted, raised to tender lips, and fanned
with a gentle, cooling breath — breath from the lips that
had kissed me.

A young girl had found and rescued me — a girl of
the people, poor enough to deem a trampled flower a
treasure- trove.

She carried me very gently, carefully veiling me
from sun and dust as we went ; and when I recovered
perception I was floating in a porcelain bath on the
surface of cool, fi-esh water, from which I drank
eagerly as soon as my sickly sense of faintuess passed
awav.

My bath stood on the lattice-sill of a small chamber :
it was, I knew aftierwards, but a white pan of common
earthenware, such as you buy for two sous and put in
your bird-cages. But no bath of ivory and pearl and
silver was ever more refreshing to imperial or patrician
limbs than was that little clean and snowy patty-pan
to me.

Under its reviving influences I became able to lift
my head and raise my leaves and spread myself to the
sunlight, and look round me. The chamber was [n
the roof, high above the traific of the passage-way
beneath : it was very poor, very simple, ftirnished with
few and homely things. True, to all our nation of
flowers it matters little, when we are borne into cap-
tivity, whether the prison-house which receives us be
palace or garret. Not to us can it signify whether we
perish in Sevres vase of royal blue or in kitchen pipkin

A PROVENCE ROSE. 51

of brown ware. Your lordliest halls can seem but
dark, pent, noisome dungeons to creatures born to live
on the wide plain, by the sunlit meadow, in the hedge-
row, or the forest, or the green, leafy garden-way;
tossing always in the joyous winds, and looking always
upward to the open sky.

But it is of little use to dwell on this. You think
that flowers, like animals, were only created to be used
and abused by you, and that we, like your horse and
dog, should be grateful when you honor us by slaughter
or starvation at your hands. To be brief, this room
was very humble, a mere attic, with one smaller still
opening from it ; but I scarcely thought of its size or
aspect. I looked at nothing but the woman who had
saved me. She was quite young ; not very beautiful,
perhaps, except for wonderful soft azure eyes and a
mouth smiling and glad, with lovely curves to the lips,
and hair dark as a raven's wing, which was braided
and bound close to her head. She was clad very
poorly, yet with an exquisite neatness and even grace ;
for she was of the people no doubt, but of the people
of France. Her voice was very melodious : she had
a silver cross on her bosom ; and though her face was
pale, it had health.

She was my friend, I felt sure. Yes, even when
she held me and pierced me with steel and murmured
over me, " They say roses are so hard to rear so, and
you are such a little thing ; but do grow to a tree and
live with me. Surely, you can if you try."

She had wounded me sharply and thrust mn into a
tomb of baked red clay filled with black ancf heavy

52 A PROVENCE ROSE.

mould. But I knew that I was pieroed to the heait
that I might — though only a little offshoot gathered to
die in a day — strike root of my own and be strongs
and carry a crown of fresh blossoms. For she but
dealt with me as your world deals with you, when
your heart aches and your brain burns, and Fate stabs
you, and says in your ear, " O fool ! to be great you
must suffer/' You to your &te are thankless, being
human ; but I, a rose, was not.

I tried to feel not utterly wretched in that little duU
day cell: I tried to forget my sweet glad southern
birthplace, and not to sicken and swoon in the noxious
gases of the city air. I did my best not to shudder
in the vapor of the stove, and not to grow pale in the
clammy heats of the street, and not to die of useless
lamentation for all that I had lost — for the noble
tawny sunsets, and the sapphire blue skies, and the
winds all fragrant with the almond-tree flowers, and
the sunlight in which the yellow orioles flashed like
gold.

I did my best to be content and show my gratitude
all through a parching autumn and a hateful winter;
and with the spring a wandering wind came and
wooed me with low, amorous whispers— came from
the south, he said ; and I learned that even in exile in
an attic window love may find us out and make for us
a country and a home.

So I lived and grew and was happy there against
the small, dim garret panes, and my lover from the
south came, still faithful, year by year; and all the
voices round me said that I was fair — ^pale indeed, and

A PROVENCE nOSE. 53

fiagile of strength, as a creature torn from its own
land and all its friends must be; but contented and
glad, and grateful to the God who made me, because I
had not lived in vain, but often saw sad eyes, half
blinded with toil and tears, smile at me when they had
no other cause for smiles.

" It is bitter to be mewed in a city," said once to
me an old, old vine who had been thrust into the
stones below and had climbed the house wall. Heaven
knew how, and had lived for half a century jammed
between buildings, catching a gleam of sunshine on his
dusty leaves once perhaps in a whole summer. " It is
bitter for us. I would rather have had the axe at my
root and been burned. But perhaps without us the
poorest of people would never remember the look of
the fields. When they see a green leaf they laugh a
little, and then weep — some of them. We, the trees
and the flowers, live in the cities as those souls among
them whom they call poets live in the world — exiled
from heaven that by them the world may now and
then bethink itself of God."

And I believe that the vine spoke truly. Surely,
he who plants a green tree in a city way plants a
thought of Gt)d in many a human heart arid with the
dust of travail and clogged with the greeds of gold.
So, with my lover the wind and my neighbor the vine.
I was content and patient, and gave many hours of
pleasure to many hard lives, and brought forth many a
blossom of sweetness in that little nook under the roof.

Had my brothers and sisters done better, I wonder,
living in gilded balconies or dying in jewelled hands ?

64 A PROVES CB ROSE,

I cannot say : I can only tell of myself.

The attic in which I found it my fate to dwell was
very high in the air, set in one of the peaked roofs of
the quarter of the Luxembourg, in a very narrow
street, populous and full of noise, in which people
of all classes, except the rich, were to be found — in
a medley of artists, students, fruit-sellers, workers in
bronze and ivory, seamstresses, obscure actresses, and
all the creators, male and female, of the thousand and
one airy arts of elegant nothingness which a world of
pleasure demands as imperatively as a world of labor
demands its bread.

It would have been a street horrible and hideous in
any city save Rome or Paris : in Rome it would have
been saved by color and antiquity — in Paris it was
saved by color and grace. Just a flash of a bright
drapery, just a gleam of a gay hue, just some tender
pink head of a hydrangea, just some quaint curl of
some gilded woodwork, just the green glimmer of my
friend the vine, just the snowy sparkle of his neighbor
the water-spout, — just these, so little and yet so much,
made the crooked passage a bearable home, and gave
it a kinship with the glimpse of the blue sky above Ob
pent roofs.

O wise and true wisdom ! to redeem poverty with
the charms of outline and of color, with the green
bough and the song of running water, and the artistio
harmony which is as possible to the rough-hewn pine-
wood as in the polished ebony. "It is of nowac/^'
you cry. O fools ! Which gives you perfume — ^we,
the roses, whose rich hues and matchless grace no

A PROVENCE ROSE. 55

human artist can imitate, or the rose-tr^mi^re, which
mocks us, standing stiff and gaudy and scentless and
erect ? Grace and pure color and cleanliness are the
divinities that redeem the foulness and the ignorance
and the slavery of your crushed, coarse lives when you
have sight enough to see that they are divine.

In my little attic, in whose window I have passed
my life, they were known gods and honored ; so that,
despite the stovepipe, and the poverty, and the little
ill-smelling candle, and the close staircase without,
with the rancid oil in its lamps and its fetid faint
odors, and the refuse, and the gutters, and the gas in
the street below, it was possible for me, though a rose
of Provence and a rose of the open air freeborn, to
draw my breath in it and to bear my blossoms, and
to smile when my lover the wind roused me from sleep
with each spring, and said in my ear, " Arise ! for a
new year has come/* Now, to greet a new year with
a smile, and not a sigh, one must be tranquil, at least,
if not happy.

Well, I and the lattice, and a few homely plants of
saxafrage and musk and balsam who bloomed there
with me, and a canary who hung in a cage among us,
and a rustic creeper who clung to a few strands of
strained string and climbed to the roof and there
talked all day to the pigeons, — we all belonged to the
girl with the candid sweet eyes, and by name she was
called Lili Kerrouel, and for her bread she gilded and
colored those little cheap boxes for sweetmeats that
they sell in the wooden looths at the fairs on the
boulevards, while the mirlitons whirl in their giddy

66 A PROVENCE ROSE,

go-Founds and the merry horns of the charlatans chal*
lenge the populace. She was a girl of the people:
she could read^ but I doubt if she could write. She
had been born of peasant parents in a Breton hamlet,
and they had come to Paris to seek work, and had
found it for a while and prospered; and then had fallen
sick and lost it, and struggled for a while, and then
died, running the common course of so many lives
among you. They had left Lili alone at sixteen, op
rather worse than alone — with an old grandam, deaf
and quite blind, who could do nothing for her own.
support, but sat all day in a wicker chair by the lat
tice or the stove, according as the season was hot or
cold, and mumbled a little inarticulately over her worn
wooden beads.

Her employers allowed Lili to bring these boxes to
decollate at home, and she painted at them almost from
dawn to night. She swept, she washed, the stewed, she
fried, she dusted ; she did all the housework of her
two little rooms; she tended the old woman in all
ways ; and she did all these things with such cleanli-
ness and deftness that the attics were wholesome as a
palace ; and though her pay was very, small, she yet
found means and time to have her linen spotless and
make her pots and pans shine like silver and gold,
and to give a grace to all the place, with the song of a
happy bird and the fragrance of flowers that blossomed
their best and their sweetest for her sake, when they
would fain have withered to the root and died in their
vain longing for the pure breath of the fields and tho
cool of a green woodland world.

A PROVENCE ROSE, 57

It was a little, simple, hard life, no doubt — a life one
would have said scarce worth all the trouble it took to
get bread enough to keep it going. A hard life, color-
ing always the same eternal little prints all day long,
no matter how sweet the summer day might be, or how
hot the tired eyes.

A hard life, with all the wondrous, glorious, waste-
ful, splendid life of the beautiful city around it in so
terrible a contrast ; with the roll of the carriages day
and night on the stones beneath, and the pattering of
the innumerable feet below, all hurrying to some pleas-
ure, and every moment some burst of music or some
chime of bells or some ripple of laughter on the air.
A hard life, sitting one's self in a little dusky garret
in the roof, and straining one's sight for two sous an
hour, and listening to an old woman's childish mutter-
ings and reproaches, and having always to shake the
head in refusal of the neighbors' invitations to a day
in the woods or a sail on the river. A hard life, no
doubt, when one is young and a woman, and has soft,
shining eyes and a red, curling mouth.

And yet Lili was content.

Content, because she was a French girl ; because she
had always been poor, and thought two sous an hour,
riches; because she loved the helpless old creature
whose senses had all died while her body lived on;
because she was an artist at heart, and saw beautiful
things round her even when she scoured her brasses
and washed down her bare floor.

Content, because with it all she managed to gather
a certain " sweetness and light" into her youth of toil ;

58 A PROVENCE ROSE.

and when she could give herself a few hours' holidayi
and could go beyond the barriers, and roam a little in
the wooded places, and come home with a knot of
primroses or a plume of lilac in her hands, she was
glad and grateful as though she had been given gold
and gems.

Ah I In the lives of you who have wealth and leis-
ure we, the flowers, are but one thing among many :
we have a thousand rivals in your porcelains, your
jewels, your luxuries, your intaglios, your mosaics, all
your treasures of art, all your baubles of fancy. But
in the lives of the poor we are alone : we are all the
art, all the treasure, all the grace, all the beauty of
outline, all the purity of hue that they possess : oflen
we are all their innocence and all their religion too.

Why do you not set yourselves to make us more
abundant in those joyless homes, in those sunless win-
dows?

Now, this street of hers was very narrow : it was
full of old houses, that nodded their heads close to-
gether as they talked, like your old crones over their
fireside gossip.

I could, from my place in the window, see right into
the opposite garret window. It had nothing of my
nation in it, save a poor colorless stone-wort, who got
a dismal living in the gutter of the roof, yet who too,
in his humble way, did good and had his friends, and
paid the sun and the dew for calling him into being.
For on that rain-pipe the little dusty, thirsty sparrows
would rest and bathe and plume themselves, and bury
their beaks in the pale stone-crop, and twitter with one

A PROVENCE ROSE. 59

anotber jo) fully, and make believe that they were in
some green and amber meadow in the country in the
cowslip time.

I did not care much for the stone-crop or the spar-
rows ; but in the third summer of my captivity there
with Lili the garret casement opposite stood always
open, as ours did, and I could watch its tenant night
and day as I chose.

He had an interest for me.

He was handsome, and about thirty years old ; with
a sad and noble face, and dark eyes full of dreams, and
cheeks terribly hollow, and clothes terribly threadbare.

He thought no eyes were on him when my lattice
looked dark, for his garret, like ours, was so high that
no glance from the street ever went to it. Indeed,
when does a crowd ever pause to look at a garret, un-
less by chance a man have hanged himself out of its
window ? That in thousands of garrets men may be
dying by inches for lack of bread, lack of hope, lack
of justice, is not enough to draw any eyes upward to
them from the pavement.

He thought himself unseen, and I watched him
many a long hour of the summer night when I sighed
at my square open pane in the hot, sulphurous mists
of the street, and tried to see the stars and could not.
For, between me and the one small breadth of sky which
alone the innumerable roofs left visible, a vintner had
hung out a huge gilded imperial crown as a sign on his
roof-tree ; and the crown, with its sham gold turning
black in the shadow, hung between me and the planets.

I knew that there must be many human souls in a

60 A PROVENCE ROSS.

like plight with myself^ with the light of heaven
blocked from them by a gilded tyranny, and yet I
sighed and sighed and sighed, thinking of the white
pure stars of Provence throbbing in her violet skies.

A rose is hardly wiser than a poet, you see : neither
rose nor poet will be comforted, and be content to dwell
in darkness because a crown of tinsel swings on high.

Well, not seeing the stars as I strove to do, I took
refuge in sorrow for my neighbor. It is well for your
poet when he turns to a like resource. Too often I
hear he takes, instead, to the wine-cellar which yawna
under the crown that he curses.

My neighbor, I soon saw, was poorer even than
we were. He was a painter, and he painted beautiful
things. But his canvases and the necessaries of his
art were nearly all that his empty attic had in it ; and
when, after working many hours with a wretched
glimmer of oil, he would come to his lattice and lean
out, and try as I had tried to see the stars, and fail as
I had failed, I saw that he was haggard, pallid, and
weary unto death with two dire diseases — ^hunger and
ambition.

He could not see the stars because of the crown, but
in time, in tho3e long midsummer nights, he came to
see a little glowworm among my blossoms, which in a
manner, perhaps, did nearly as well.

He came to notice Lili at her work. Often she had
to sit up half the night to get enough coloring done to
make up the due amount of labor ; and she sat at her
little deal table, with her little feeble lamp, with her
beautiful hair coiled up in a great knot and her pretty

A PROVENCE ROSE, 61

head drooping so wearily — as we do in the long days
of drought — but never once looking off, nor giving
way to rebellion or fatigue, though from the whole
city without there came one ceaseless sound, like the
sound of an endless sea ; which truly it was — the sea
of pleasure.

Not for want of coaxings, not for want of tempters,
various and subtle, and dangers ofl^n and perilously
sweet, did Lili sit there in her solitude earning two
sous an hour with straining sight and aching nerves
that the old paralytic creature within might have bed
and board without alms. Lili bad been sore beset in a
thousand ways, for she was very fair to see ; but she
was proud and she was innocent, and she kept her
courage and her honor ; yea, though you smile — though
she dwelt under an attic roof, and that roof a roof of
Paris.

My neighbor, in the old gabled window over the
way, leaning above his stone-wort, saw her one night
thus at work by her lamp, with the silver ear-rings, that
were her sole heirloom and her sole wealth, drooped
against the soft hues and curves of her graceful throat.

And when he had looked once, he looked every
night, and found her there; and I, who could see
straight into his chamber, saw that he went and made
a picture of it all— of me, and the bird in the cage,
and the little old dusky lamp, and Lili with her silver
ear-rings and her pretty, drooping head.

Every day he worked at the picture, and every night
he put his light out and came and sat in the dark
equftre of his lattice, and gazed across the street through

62 A PROVENCE ROSE,

my leares and my blossoms at my mistress. Lili knew
nothing of this watch which he kept on her : she had
put up a little blind of white net-work^ and she &ncied
that it kept out every eye when it was up; and often
she took even that away^ because she had not the heart
to deprive me of the few faint breezes which the sultry
weather gave us.

She never saw him in his dark hole in the old gable
there, and I never betrayed him — not I. Roses have
been the flowers of silence ever since the world b^an«
Are we not the flowers of love?

" Who is he?'' I asked of my gossip the vine. The
vine had lived fifty years in the street, and knew the
stories and sorrows of all the human bees in the hive.

" He is called Ren6 Claude," said the vine. " He is
a man of genius. He is very poor."

"You use synonymes," murmured the old balsam
who heard.

"He is an artist," the vine continued. "He is
young. He comes from the south. His people are
guides in the Pyrenees. He is a dreamer of dreams.
He has taught himself many things. He has eloquence
too. There is a little club at the back of the house
which I climb over. I throw a tendril or two in at
the crevices and listen. The shutters are closed. It
is forbidden by law for men to meet so. There Reu^
speaks by the hour, superbly. Such a rush of words,
such a glance, such a voice, like the roll of musketry
in anger, like the Jgh of music in sadness ! Though I
am old, it makes the little sap there is left in me thrill
and grow warm. He paints beautiful things, too ; sc

A PROVENCE ROSE, 63

the two swallows say who build aoder his eaves ; but
I suppose it is not of much use : no one believes in
him^ and he almost starves. He is young yet^ and feels
the strength in him, and still strives to do great things
for the world that does not care a jot whether he lives
or dies. He will go on so a little longer. Then he
will end like me. I used to try and bring forth the
best grapes I could, though they had shut me away
from any sun to ripen them and any dews to cleanse
the dust from them. But no one cared. No one gave
me a drop of water to still my thirst, nor pushed away
a brick to give me a ray more of light. So I ceased to
try and produce for their good ; and I only took just
so much trouble as would keep life in me myself. It
will be the same with this man."

I, being young and a rose, the flower loved of the
poets, thought the vine was a cynic, as many of you
human creatures grow to be in the years of your age
when the leaves of your life fall sere. I watched Ren^
long and often. He was handsome, he suflered much ;
and when the night was far spent he would come to his
hole in the gable and gaze with tender, dreaming eyes
past my pale foliage to the face of Lili. I grew to
care for him, and I disbelieved the prophecy of the
vine ; and I promised myself that one summer or an-
other, near or far, the swallows, when they game from
the tawny African world to build in the eaves of the
city, would find their old friend flown and living no
more in a garret, but in some art-palace where men
knew his fame.

So I dreamed — I, a little white rose, exiled in the

64 A PROVENCE ROSE.

passage of a city, seeing the pale moonlight reflected
on the gray walls and the dark windows, and trying
to cheat myself by a thousand fancies into the faith that
I once more blossomed in the old sweet leafy garden^
ways in Provence.

One night — the hottest night of the year — Lili came
to my side by the open lattice. It was very late : her
work was done for the night. She stood a moment,
with her lips rested softly on me, looking down on the
pavement that glistened like silver in the sleeping rays
of the moon.

For the first time she saw the painter Ben6 watching
her from his niche in the gable, with eyes that glowed
and yet were dim.

I think women foresee with certain prescience when
they will be loved. She drew the lattice quickly to,
and blew the lamp out : she kissed me in the darkness.
Because her heart was glad or sorry ? Both, perhaps.

Love makes one selfish. For the first time she left
my lattice closed all through the oppressive hours until
daybreak.

" Whenever a woman sees anything out of her win-
dow that makes her eager to look again, she always
shuts the shutter. Why, I wonder ?" said the balsam
to me.

" That she may peep unsuspected through a chink,'*
eaid the vine round the corner, who could overhear.

It was profane of the vine, and in regard to Lili
untrue. She did not know very well, I dare say, why
she withdrew herself on that sudden impulse, as the
pimpernel shuts itself up at the touch of a raindrop.

A PROVENCE ROSE 65

But she did not stay to look through a crevice : she
went straight to her little narrow bed, and told her
beads and prayed, and slept till the cock crew in a
stable near and the summer daybreak came.

She might have been in a chamber all mirror and
velvet and azure and gold in any one of the ten thou-
sand places of pleasure, and been leaning over gilded
balconies under the lime leaves, tossing up little paper
balloons in the air for gay wagers of love and wine and
jewels. Pleasure had asked her more than once to
come down from her attic and go with its crowds ; foi
she was fair of feature and lithe of limb, though only
a work-girl of Paris. And she would not, but slept
here under the eaves, as the swallows did.

" We have not seen enough, little rose, you and I,"
she would say to me with a smile and a sigh. " But it
is better to be a little pale, and live a little in the dark,
and be a little cramped in a garret window, than to
live grand in the sun for a moment, and the next to be
tossed away in a gutter. And one can be so happy
anyhow — almost anyhow ! — when one is young. If I
could only see a very little piece more of the sky, and
get every Sunday out to the dear woods, and live one
floor lower, so that the winters were not quite so cold
and the summers not quite so hot, and find a little more
time to go to mass in the cathedral, and be able to buy
a pretty blue-and-white home of porcelain for you, I
should ask nothing more of the blessed Mary — nothing
more upon earth."

She had had the same simple bead-roll of innocent
wishes ever since the first hour that she had raised me

66 A PROVENCE ROSE.

from the dust of the street ; and it would, I doubt not,
have remained her only one all the years of her life,
till she should have glided down into a serene and
cheerful old age of poverty and labor under that very
same roof, without the blessed Mary ever deigning to
hearken or answer. Would have done so if the
painter Ren6 could have seen the stars, and so had not
been driven to look instead at the glowworm through
my leaves.

But after that night on which she shut to the lattice
so suddenly, I think the bead-roll lengthened — length-
ened, though for some time the addition to it was writ-
ten on her heart in a mystical language which she did
not try to translate even to herself — I suppose fearing
its meaning.

Ren6 made approaches to his neighbor's friendship
soon afler that night. He was but an art-student, the
son of a poor mountaineer, and with scarce a thing he
could call his own except an easel of deal, a few plaster
casts, and a bed of straw. She was but a working-girl,
born of Breton peasants, and owning as her sole treas-
ures two silver ear-rings and a white rose.

But for all that, no courtship could have been more
reverential on the one side or fuller of modest grace on
the other if the scene of it had been a palace of princes
or a chateau of the nobles.

He spoke very little.

The vine had said that at the club round the comer
he was very eloquent, with all the impassioned and
fierce eloquence common to men of the south. But
with Lili he was almost mute. The vine, who knew

A PROVENCE ROSE. 67

human nature well — ^as vines always do, since their
juices unlock the secret thoughts of men and bring to
daylight their darkest passions — the vine said that such
silence in one by nature eloquent showed the force of
his love and its delicacy.

This may be so: I hardly know. My lover the
wind, when he is amorous, is loud, but then it is true
his loves are not often very constant.

Ken4 chiefly wooed her by gentle service. He
brought her little lovely wild flowers, for which he
ransacked the woods of St. Germains and Meudon.
He carried the billets of her fire-wood up the seven
long, twisting, dirty flights of stairs. He fought for
her with the wicked old porteress at the door down-
stairs. He played to her in the gray of the evening on
a quaint simple flute, a relic of his boyhood, the sad,
wild, touching airs of his own southern mountains —
played at his open window while the lamps burned
through the dusk, till the people listened at their doors
and casements and gathered in groups in the passage
below, and said to one another, " How clever he is \ —
and he starves."

He did starve very often, or at least he had to teach
himself to keep down hunger with a morsel of black
chafl^-bread and a stray roll of tobacco. And yet I
could see that he had become happy.

Lili never asked him within her door. All the
words they exchanged were from their open lattices,
with the space of the roadway between them.

I heard every syllable they spoke, and they were on
the one side mosi innocent and on the other most rev-
/

68 ^ PROVENCE ROSE.

erential. Ay, though you may not believe it — you
^ho know the people of Paris from the travesties of
theatres and the slanders of salons.

And all thia time secretly he worked on at her por-
trait. He worked out of my sight and hers, in the inner
part of his garret, but the swallows saw and told me.
There are never any secrets between birds and flowers.

We used to live in Paradise together, and we love
one another as exiles do ; and we hold in our cups the
raindrops to slake the thirst of the birds, and the birds
in return bring to us from many lands and over many
waters tidings of those lost ones who have been torn
from us to strike the roots of our race in far-off soils
and under distant suns.

Late in the summer of the year, one wonderful ftte-
day, Lili did for once get out to the woods, the old
kindly green woods of Vincennes.

A neighbor on a lower floor, a woman who made
poor scentless, senseless, miserable imitations of all my
race in paper, sat with the old bedridden grandmother
while Lili took her holiday — so rare in her life, though
she was one of the motes in the bright champagne of
the dancing air of Paris. I missed her sorely on each
of those few sparse days of her absence, but for her I
rejoiced.

" Je reste : tu H 'en vas/' says the rose to the butterfly
in the poem ; and I said so in my thoughts to her.

She went to the broad level grass, to the golden
fields of the sunshine, to the sound of the bees mur-
muring over the wild purple thyme, to the sight of the
great snowy clouds slowly sailing over the sweet blue

A PROVENCE ROSE. 69

fineedom of heaven — ^to all the things of my birthright
and my deathless remembrance — ^all that no woman can
love as a rose can love them.

But I was not jealous : nay^ not though she had
cramped me in a little earth-bound cell of clay. I en-
vied wistfully indeed, as I envied the swallows their
wings which cleft the air, asking no man's leave for
their liberty. But I would not have remained a swal-
low's pinion had I had the power, and I would not
have abridged an hour of Lili's freedom. Flowers are
like your poets: they give ungrudgingly, and, like all
lavish givers, are seldom recompensed in kind.

We cast all our world of blossom, all our treasury
of fragrance, at the feet of the one we love ; and then,
having spent ourselves in that too abundant sacrifice,
you cry, " A yellow, faded thing ! — to the dust-hole
with it y^ and root us up violently and fling us to rot
with the refuse and offal ; not remembering the days
when our burden of beauty made sunlight in your
darkest places, and brought the odors of a lost paradise
to breathe over your bed of fever.

Well, there is one consolation. Just so likewise do
you deal with your human wonder-flower of genius.

Lili went for her day in the green midsummer
world — she and a little blithe, happy-hearted group of
young work-people — and I stayed in the garret win-
dow, hot and thirsty, and drooping and pale, choked
by the dust that drifted up from the pavement, and
hearing little all day long save the quarrels of the
sparrows and the whirr of the engine-wheels in a
baking-house close at hand.

70 A PROVENCE ROSE.

For it was some great day or other, when all Paris
was out en /^, and every one was away from his or
her home, except such people as the old bedridden
woman and the cripple who watched her. So, at least,
the white roof-pigeons told me, who flew where they
listed, and saw the whole splendid city beneath them —
saw all its glistening of arms and its sheen of palace
roofs, all its gilded domes and its white, wide squares,
all its crowds, many-hued as a field of tulips, and its
flashing eagles golden as the sun.

When I had been alone two hours, and whilst the
old building was silent and empty, there came across
the street from his own dwelling-place the artist Ren4,
with a parcel beneath his arm.

He came up the stairs with a light, noiseless step,
and pushed open the door of our attic. He paused on
the threshold a moment, with the sort of reverent,
hushed look on his face that I had seen on the faces of
one or two swarthy, bearded, scarred soldiers as they
paused before the picinas at the door of the little chapel
which stood in my sight on the other side of our street.

Then he entered, placed that which he carried on a
wooden chair fronting the light, uncovered it, and went
quietly out again, without the women in the inner
closet hearing him.

Wliat he had brought was the canvas I had seen
grow under his hand, the painting of me and the lamp
and Lili. I do not doubt how he had done it ; it was
surely the little attic window, homely and true in like-
ness, and yet he had glorified us all, and so framed in
my leaves and my white flowers, the low oil flame and

A PROVENCE ROSE. 71

the fair head of my mistress^ that there was that in the
little picture which made me tremble and yet be glad.
On a slender slip of paper attached to it there was
written, " 11 n'y a pas de nuit sans 6toile."

Of him I saw no more. The picture kept me silent
company all that day.

At evening Lili came. It was late. She brought
with her a sweet, cool perfume of dewy mosses and
&esh leaves and strawberry plants — sweet as honey.
She came in with a dark, dreamy brilliance in her eyes
and long coils of foliage in her hands.

She brought to the canary chickweed and a leaf of
lettuce. She kissed me and laid wet mosses on my
parching roots, and fanned me with the breath of her
fresh lips. She took to the old women within a huge
cabbage leaf full of cherries, having, I doubt not, gone
herself without in ofder to bring the ruddy fruit to
them.

She had been happy, but she was very quiet. To
those who love the country as she and I did, and, thus
loving it, have to dwell in cities, there is as much of
pain, perhaps, as of pleasure in a fleeting glimpse of
the lost heaven.

She was tired, and sat for a while, and did not set^
the painting, for it was dusk. She only saw it when
she rose and turned to light the lamp : then, with a
little shrill cry, she fell on her knees before it in her
wonder and her awe, and laughed and sobbed a little,
and then was still again, looking at this likeness of
herself.

The Moitten words took her long to spell out, for lahe

72 A PROVENCE ROSE.

ooiild scarcely read^ but when she had mastered them,
her head sank on her breast with a flush and a smile,
like the glow of the dawn over Provence, I thought.

She knew whence it came, no doubt, though there
were many artists and students of art in that street.

But then there was only one who had wsCtched her
night afler night as men watched the stars of old to
read their fates in the heavens.

Lili was only a young oumi^e, she was only a girl
of the people : she had quick emotions and innocent
impulses ; she had led her life straightly because it was
her nature, as it is of the lilies — her namesakes, my
cousins — ^to grow straight to the light, pure and spot-
less. But she was of the populace: she was frank,
fearless, and strong, despite all her dreams. She was
glad, and she sought not to hide it. With a gracious
impulse of gratitude she turned to the lattice and
leaned past me, and looked for my neighbor.

He was there in the gloom : he strove not to be seen,
but a stray ray from a lamp at the vintner's gleamed on
his handsome dark face, lean and pallid and yearning
and sad, but full of force and of soul like a head of
Rembrandt's. Lili stretched her hands to him with a
noble, candid gesture and a sweet, tremulous laugh :
" What you have given me ! — it is you ? — it is you ?"

"Mademoiselle forgives ?'' he murmured, leaning as
tar out as the gable would permit. The street was still
deserted, and very quiet. The theatres were all open
to the people that night free, and bursts of music from
many quarters rolled in through the sultry darkness.

Lili colored over all her fair pale fiice, even as I

A PROVENCE ROSE. 73

have seen my sisters' white breasts glow to a wondrous
wavering warmth as the sun of the west kissed them.
She drew her breath with a quick sigh. She did not
answer him in words, but with a sudden movement of
exquisite eloquence she broke from me my fairest and
my last-bom blossom and threw it from her lattice into
his.

Then, as he caught it, she closed the lattice with a
swift, trembling hand, and left the chamber dark, and
fled to the little sleeping-closet where her crucifix and
her mother's rosary hung together above her bed.

As for me, I was left bereaved and bleeding. The
dew which waters the growth of your human love is
usually the tears or blood of some martyred life.

I loved Lili.

I prayed, as my torn stem quivered and my fairest
begotten sank to her death in the night and the silence,
that I might be the first and the last to sufi'er from the
human love bom that night.

I, a rose — ^Love's flower.

74 A PROVENCE ROSE.

U.

Now, before that summer was gone, these two were
biitrothed to one another, and my little fair dead
daughter, all faded and scentless though her half-
opened leaves were, remained always on Kent's heart
as a tender and treasured relic.

They were betrothed, I say — not wedded, for they
were so terribly poor.

Many a day he, I think, had not so much as a crust
to eat ; and there passed many weeks when the works
on his canvas stood unfinished because he had not
wherewithal to buy the oils and the colors to finish
them.

£.en6 was frightfully poor, indeed ; but then, being
an artist and a poet, and the lover of a fair and noble
woman, and a dreamer of dreams, and a man God-
gifted, he was no longer wretched. For the life of a
painter is beautiful when he is still young, and loves
truly, and has a genius in him stronger than all calam-
ity, and hears a voice in which he believes say always
in his ear, " Fear nothing. Men must believe as I do
in thee, one day. And meanwhile we can wait 1" And
a painter in Paris, even though he starve on a few sous
a day, can have so much that is lovely and full of
picturesque charm in his daily pursuits : the long, won-
drous galleries full of the arts he adores; the ^^rioLiU

A PROVENCE ROSE. 75

de FidiaC' around him in that perfect world ; the slow,
Bweet, studious hours in the calm wherein all that is
great in humanity alone survives; the trance — ^half
adoration, half aspiration, at once desire and despair
— before the face of the Mona Lisa; then, without,
the streets so glad and so gay in the sweet, living
sunshine; the quiver of green leaves among gilded
balconies ; the groups at every turn about the doors ;
the glow of color in market-place and peopled square ;
the quaint gray piles in old historic ways ; the stones,
from every one of which some voice from the imperish-
able Past cries out ; the green, silent woods, the little
leafy villages, the winding waters gardon girt; the
forest heights, with the city gleaming and golden in the
plain ; — all these are his. With these — ^and youth —
who shall dare say he is not rich — ^ay, though his board
be empty and his cup be dry ?

I had not loved Paris — I, a little imprisoned roa??,
caged in il clay pot, and seeing nothing but the sky-
line of the roofs. But I grew to love it, hearing from
Iten6 and from Lili of all the poetry and gladness that
Paris made possible in their young and burdened lives,
and which could have been thus possible in no other
city of the earth.

City of Pleasure you have called her, and with
truth; but why not also City of the Poor? for that
city, like herself, has remembered the poor in her
pleasure, and given to them, no less than to the richest,
the treasure of her laughing sunlight, of her melodious
music, of her gracious hues, of her million flowers, of
her shady leaves, of her divine ideals.

76 A PROVESCE ROSR

O worid ! when yoa let Paris die joa will kt your
last vouth die with her! Your ridi will mourn a
paradise deserted, but your poor will have need to
weep with tears of blood for the ruin of the sole Eden
whose sunlight sought th^n in their shadow, whose
music found them in their loneliness, whose glad green
ways were open to their tired feet, whose radianoe
smiled the sorrow from their aching eyes, and in whose
wildest errors and whose vainest dreams their woes and
needs were unforgotten.

Well, this little, humble love-idyl, which grew into
being in an attic, had a tender grace of its own ; and
I watched it with tenderness, and it seemed to me fresh
as the dews of the morning in the midst of the hot,
stifling world.

They could not marry : he had nothing but fiunine
for his wedding-gift, and all the little that she made
was taken for the food and wine of the bedridden old
grandam in that religious execution of a filial duty
which is so habitual in the French family-life that no
one dreams counting it as a virtue.

But they spent their leisure time together: they
passed their rare holiday hours in each other's society
in the woods which they both loved or in the public
galleries of art ; and when the autumn came on apace,
and they could no longer sit at their open casements,
he still watched the gleam of her pale lamp as a pil-
grim the light of a shrine, and she, ere she went to her
rest, would push ajar the closed shutter and put her
pretty fair head into the darkling night, and waft him
a gentle good-night, and then go and kneel down by

A PROVENCE ROSE, 77

her bed and pray for him and his future before the
cross which had been her dead mother's.

On that bright summer a hard winter followeil.
The poor suffered very much; and I in the closed
lattice knew scarcely which was the worse — the icy,
shivering chills of the snow-burdened air, or the close,
noxious suffocation of the stove.

I was very sickly and ill, and cared little for my life
during that bitter cold weather, whoji the panes of the
lattice were all blocked from week's end to week's end
with the solid silvery foliage of the frost.

Ken^ and Lili both suffered greatly : he could only
keep warmth in his veins by the stoves of the public
libraries, and she lost her work in the box trade after
the New Year fairs, and had to eke out as best she
might the few francs she had been able to lay back in
the old brown pipkin in the closet. She had moreover
to sell most of the little things in her garret : her own
mattress went, though she kept the bed under her
grandmother. But there were two things she would
not sell, though for both was she offered money : they
were her mother's reliques and myself.

She would not, I am sure, havp sold the picture,
either. But for that no one offered her a centime.

One day, as the last of the winter solstice was pass-
ing away, the old woman died.

Lili wept for her sincere and tender tears, though
never in my time, nor in any other, I believe, had the
poor old querulous, paralytic sufferer rewarded her
with anything except lamentation and peevish dLiv-
content.

78 A PROVENCE ROSE,

*^Now you will come to me ?'' murmured her lover
when they had returned from laying the old dead peas-
ant in the quarter of the poor.

Lili drooped her head softly upon his breast.

" If you wish it !" she whispered, with a whisper as
soft as the first low breath of summer.

If he wished it !

A gleam of pale gold sunshine shone through the
dulled panes upon my feeble branches ; a little timid
fly crept out and spread its wings; the bells of the
church rang an angelus ; a child laughed in the street
below ; there came a smile of greenness spreading over
the boughs of leafless trees; my lover the wind re-
turned from the south, fresh from desert and ocean,
with the scent of the spice groves and palm aisles of
the East in his breath, and softly unclosing my lattice,
murmured to me, *^ Didst thou think I was faithless?
See, I come with the spring !"

So, though I was captive and they two were poor,
yet we three were all happy ; for love and a new year
of promise were with us.

I bore a little snowy blossom (sister to the one which
slept lifeless on Rent's heart) that spring, whilst yet
the swallows were not back from the African gardens,
and the first violets were carried in millions through
the streets — ^the only innocent imperialists that the
world has ever seen.

That little winter-begotten darling of mine was to
be Lili's nuptial-flower. She took it so tenderly from
me that it hardly seemed like its death.

" My little dear rose, who blossoms for me, though

A PROVENCE ROSE, 79

I can only cage her in clay, and only let her see the
sun's rays between the stacks of the chimneys !" she
said softly over me as she kissed me ; and when she
said that, could I any more grieve for Provence ?

" What do they wed upon, those two ?" said the old
vine to me.

And I answered him : "Hope and dreams."

" Will those bake bread and feed babes ?" said the
vine, as he shook his wrinkled tendrils despondently in
the March air.

We did not ask in the attic.

Summer was nigh at hand, and we loved one an-
othe'%

Ren6 had come to us — we had not gone to him.
For our garret was on the sunny, his on the dark, side
of the street, and Lili feared the gloom for me and the
bird ; and she could not bring herself to leave that old
red-leaved creeper who had wound himself so close
about the rain-pipe and the roof, and who could not
have been dislodged without being slain.

With the Mardi Gras her trade had returned to her.
Ren6, unable to prosecute his grand works, took many
of the little boxes in his own hands, and wrought on
them with all the nameless mystical charm and the
exquisite grace of touch which belong to the man who
is by nature a great artist. The little trade could not
at its best price bring much, but it brought bread ; and
we were happy.

While he worked at the box-lids she had leisure for
her household labors : when these were done she would
draw out her mother's old Breton distaff, and would sit

80 A PROVENCE ROSE.

and spin. When twilight fell they would go foriih to*
gether to dream under the dewy avenues and the glis-
tening stars, or as often would wait within whilst he
played on his mountain flute to the people at the door-
ways in the street below.

" Is it better to go out and see the stars and the
leaves ourselves, or to stay in-doors and make all these
forget the misfortune of not seeing them?" said Lili
on one of those evenings when the warmth and the
sunset almost allured her to draw the flute from her
husband's hands and give him his hat instead ; and
then she looked down into the narrow road, at the
opposite houses, at the sewing-girls stitching by their
little windows, at the pale students studying their sickly
lore with scalpel and with skeleton, at the hot, dusty
little children at play on the asphalt sidewalk, at the
sorrowful, darkened casements behind which she knew
beds of sickness or of paralyzed old age were hidden —
looked at all this from behind my blossoms, and then
gave up the open air and the evening stroll that were so
dear a pastime to her, and whispered to Ren§, " Play,
or they will be disappointed,"

And he played, instead of going to the debatingclub
in the room round the corner.

" He has ceased to be a patriot," grumbled the old
vine. *' It is always so with every man when once he
has loved a woman !"

Myself, I could not see that there was less patriotism
in breathing the poetry of sound into the ears of his
neighbors than in rousing the passions of hell in the
breasts of his brethren.

A PROVENCE ROSE. 81

But perhaps this was my ignorance : I believe that
of late years people have grown to hold that the only
pure patriotism is^ and ought to be, evinced in the most
intense and the most brutalized form of one passion —
*" Envy, eldest born of hell/'

So these two did some good, and were happy, though
more than once it chanced to them to have to go a
whole day without tasting food of any sort.

I have said that Ben^ had genius — a genius bold,
true, impassioned, masterful — such a genius as colors
the smallest trifles that it touches. Ren6 could no
more help putting an ideal grace into those little sweet-
meat boxes — ^which sold at their very highest, in the
booths of the fairs, at fifty centimes apiece — than we,
the roses, can help being fragrant and fair.

Genius has a way of casting its pearls in the dust as
we scatter our fragrance to every breeze that blows.
Now and then the pearl is caught and treasured, as
now and then some solitary creature pauses to smell
the sweetness of the air in which we grow, and thanks
the God who made us.

But as ninety-nine roses bloom unthanked for one
that is thus remembered, so ninety-nine of the pearls
of genius are trodden to pieces for one that is set on
high and crowned with honor.

In the twilight of a dull day a little, feeble, brown
old man climbed the staircase and entered our attic
with Gambling step.

We had no strangers to visit us : who visits the
poor? We thought he was an enemy : the poor
always do think so, being so little used to strangers.

82 A PROVENCE ROSE.

Ben6 drew himself erect^ and strove to hide the
poverty of his garments^ standing by his easel. Lili
came to me and played with my leaves in her tender,
caressing fashion.

" You painted this, M. Ren6 Claude ?" asked the
little brown old man. He held in his hand one of the
bonbon boxes, the prettiest of them all, with a tam-
bourine-girl dancing in a wreath of Provence roscb.
Ren6 had copied me with loving fidelity in the flowers,
and with a sigh had murmured as he cast the box aside
when finished, " That ought to fetch at least a franc !"
But he had got no more than the usual two sous for it.

The little man sat down on the chair which Lili had
placed for him.

" So they told me where I bought this. It was at a
bootL at St Cloud. Do you know that it is charming V*

Ben6 smiled a little sadly : Lili flushed with joy.
It was the first praise which she had ever heard given
to him.

" You have a great talent/^ pursued the little man.

£.en6 bowed his handsome haggard face — his mouth
quivered a very little : for the first time Hope entered
into him.

" Grenius, indeed," said the stranger ; and he saun-
tered a little about and looked at the canvases, and
wondered and praised, and said not very much, but
said that little so well and so judiciously that it was
easy to see he was no mean judge of art, and possibly
no slender patron of it.

As Lili stood by me I saw her color come and go
and her breaet beave* I too trembled in all my leaves :

A PROVENCE ROSE, 83

were recognition and the world's homage ooining to
Bene at last?

'^ And I have been so afraid always that I had in-
jured^ burdened him^ clogged his strength in that
endless strife !" she murmured below her breath. " O
dear little rose ! if only the world can but know his
greatness P'

Meanwhile the old man looked through the sketches
and studies with which the room was strewed. " You
do not finish your things?" he said abruptly.

Een^ flushed darkly. "Oil pictures cost money/'
he said, briefly, " and — I am very poor."

Though a peasant's son, he was very proud: the
utterance must have cost him much.

The stranger took snuff. " You are a man of sin-
gular genuis," he said simply. " You only want to be
known to get the prices of Meissonier."

Meissonier ! — the Rothschild of the studios, the artist
whose six-inch canvas would bring the gold value of a
Raphael or a Titian !

Lili, breathing fast and white as death with ecstasy,
made the sign of the cross on her breast : the delicate
l)rown hand of Ren6 shook where it leaned on his
easel.

They were both silent — silent from the intensity of
their hope.

" Do yow know who I am ?" the old man pursued
with a cordial smile.

" I have not that honor," murmured Ren&

The stranger, taking his snuff out of a gold box,
named a name at which the painter started. It was

84 A PROVENCE ROSE.

that of one of the greatest art-dealers in the whole of
EurDpe ; one who at a word could make or mar ao
artist's reputation; one whose accuracy of judgment
was considered infallible by all connoisseurs, and the
passport to whose galleries was to any unknown paint-
ing a certain passport also to the fame of men.

^^ You are a man of singular genius/' repeated the
great purchaser^ taking his snuff in the middle of the
little bare chamber. ^^ It is curious— one always finds
genius either in a cellar or in an attic : it never, by
any chance, is to be discovered midway on the stairs —
never in the mezzo terzo I But to the point. You have
great delicacy of touch, striking originality, a wonder-
ful purity yet bloom in your color, and an exquisite
finish of minutise, without any weakness — a combina-
tion rare, very rare. That girl yonder, feeding white
pigeons on the leads of a roof, with an atom of blue
sky, and a few vine leaves straying over the parapet —
that is perfectly conceived. Finished it must be. So
must that little study of the b^gar-boy looking
through the gilded gates into the rose-gardens — it is
charming, charming. Your price for those?"

Rent's colorless worn young face colored to the
brows. " Monsieur is too good," he muttered brokenly.
" A nameless artist has no price, except '*

"Honor," murmured Lili as she moved forward
with throbbing heart and dim eyes. " Ah, monsieur^
give him a name in Paris ! We want nothing else-^
nothing else !"

" Poor fools !" said the dealer to his snuff-box. I
heard him — ^they did not.

A PROVENCE ROSE. 85

" Madame/' he answered aloud, " Paris herself will
give him that the first day his first canvas hangs in my
galleries. Meanwhile, I must in honesty be permitted
to add something moro For each of those little can-
vases, the girl on the roof and the boy at the gate, I will
give you now two thousand francs, and two thousand
more when they shall be completed. Provided ^^

He paused and glanced musingly at Ben^.

Lili had turned away, and was sobbing for very joy
at this undreamed-of deliverance.

Ilen6 stood quite still, with his hands crossed on the
easel and his head bent on his chest. The room, I
think, swam round him.

The old man sauntered again a little about the place,
looking here and looking there, murmuring certain ar-
tistic disquisitions technical and scientific, leaving them
time to recover from the intensity of their emotion.

What a noble thing old age was, I thought, living
only to give hope to the young in their sorrow, and to
release captive talents from the prison of obscurity !
We should leave the little room in the roof, and dwell
in some bright quarter where it was all leaves and
flowers ; and Een6 would be great, and go to dine with
princes and drive a team of belled horses, like a famous
painter who had dashed once with his splendid equi-
page through our narrow passage ; and we should see
the sky always — as much of it as ever we chose ; and
Lili would have a garden of her own, all grass and
foliage and falling waters, in which I should live in
the open air all the day long, and make believe that I
was in Provence.

86 A PROVENCE ROSE,

My dreams and my fancies were broken by ibe
sound of the old man's voice taking up the thread of
his discourse once more in front of Ben^.

" I will give you four thousand francs each for those
two little canvases/' he repeated. '^ It is a mere pinch
of dust to what you will make in six months' time if
— if — ^you hear me ? — ^your name is brought before the
public of Paris in my galleries and under my auspices.
I suppose you have heard something of what I can
do, eh ? Well, all I can do I will do for you ; for you
have a great talent, and without introduction, my friend,
you may as well roll up your pictures and burn them
in your stove to save charcoal. You know that?"

E.en6 indeed knew — none better. Lili turned on the
old man her sweet, frank Breton eyes, smiling their
radiant gratitude through tenderest tears.

" The saints will reward you, monsieur, in a better
world than this," she murmured softly.

The old man took snuff a little nervously. ^' There
is one condition I must make," he said with a trifling
hesitation — " one only."

"Ask of my gratitude what you will," answered
Ren6 quickly, while he drew a deep breath of relief
and freedom — ^the breath of one who casts to the
ground the weight of a deadly burden.

" It is, that you will bind yourself only to paint for
me."

" Certainly !" Ren^ gave the assent with eagerness.
Poor fellow ! it was a novelty so exquisite to have any
one save the rats to paint for. It never dawned upon
his thoughts that when be stretched his hands out with

A PROVENCE ROSE. 87

lach passionate desire to touch the hem of the garment of
Fortune and catch the gleam of the laurels of Fame, he
might be in truth only holding them out to fresh fetters.

" Very well," said the old man quietly, and he sat
down again and looked full in Rent's face, and un-
folded- his views for the artist's future.

He used many words, and was slow and suave in
their utterance, and paused oflen and long to take out
his heavy gold box ; but he spoke well. Little by little
his meaning gleamed out from the folds of verbiage in
which he skilfully enwrapped it.

It was this.

The little valueless drawings on the people's sweet-
meat boxes of gilded card-board had a grace, a color
and a beauty in them which had caught, at a fair-booth
in the village of St. Cloud, the ever- watchful eyes of
the great dealer. He had bought half a dozen of the
boxes for a couple of francs. He had said, " Here is
what I want." Wanted for what? Briefly, to pro-
duce Petitot enamels and Fragonard cabinets — ^genuine
eighteenth-century work. There was a rage for it.
Ren6 would understand ?

Rent's dark, southern eyes lost a little of their new
lustre of happiness, and grew troubled with a sort of
cloud of perplexity. He did not seem to understand.

The old man took more snuff, and used phrases
clearer still.

There were great collectors— dilettanti of houses
imperial and royal and princely and noble, of all the
grades of greatness — who would give any sum for bon-
bonni^res and tabati^res of eighteenlh-century work hy

88 A PROVENCE ROSE.

any ono of the few &mous masters of that time. A
genuine, incontestable sweetmeat bo:^ from the ateliers
of the Louis XIV. or Louis XV. period would fetch
almost a fabulous sui^ Then again he paused, doubt«
fully.

Ren6 bowed, and his wondering glance said without
words, ^'I know this. But I have no eighteenth-
century work to sell you : if I had, should we starve
in an attic?"

His patron coughed a little, looked at Lili, then
proceeded to explain yet farther.

In Rent's talent he had discerned the hues, the
grace, the delicacy yet brilliancy, the voluptuousness
and the d^nvotteure of the best eighteenth-century
work. Ren6 doubtless did other and higher things
which pleased himself far more than these airy trifles.
Well, let him pursue the greater line of art if he
chose ; but he, the old man who spoke, could assure
him that nothing' would be so lucrative to him as those
bacchantes in wreaths of roses and young tambourine-
players gorge an vent dancing in a bed of violets, and
beautiful marquises, powdered and jewelled, looking
over their fans, which he had painted for those poor
little two-sous boxes of the populace, and the like of
which, exquisitely finished on enamel or ivory, set in
gold and tortoise-shell rimmed with pearls and tur-
quoises or opals and diamonds, ^vould deceive the finest
connoisseur in Europe into receiving them as — what«
ever they might be signed and dated.

If Ren6 would do one or two of these at dictation
in a year, not more — ^more would be perilous — ^paint

A PROVENCE ROSE. 89

and sign them and produce them with any touches that
might be commanded ; never ask what beciime of them
when finished, nor recognize them if hereafter he might
see them in any illustrious collection, — if Ren6 would
bind himself to do this, he, the old man who spoke,
would buy his other paintings, place them well in his
famous galleries, and, using all his influence, would
make him in a twelvemonth's time the most celebrated
of all the young painters of Paris.

It was a bargain ! Ah, how well it was, he said, to
put the best of one's powers into the most trifling
things one did ! If that poor little two-sous box had
been less lavishly • and gracefully decorated, it would
never have arrested his eyes in the bonbon-booth at St.
Cloud. The old man paused to take snuff and receive
an answer.

Een6 stood motionless.

Lili had sunk into a seat, and was gazing at the
tempter with wide-open, puzzled, startled eyes. Both
were silent. "It is a bargain?" said the old man
again. " Understand me, M. Ren6 Claude. You have
no risk, absolutely none, and you have the certainty
of fair fame and fine fortune in the space of a few
years. You will be a great man before you have a
gray hair : that comes to very few. I shall not trouble
you for more than two dix-huiti^me si^le enamels in
the year — ^perhaps for only one. You can spend ten
months out of the twelve on your own canvases, mak-
ing your own name and your own wealth as swiftly
as your ambition and impatience can desire. Madame
here/' said the acute dealer with a pleasant smile —

90 A PROVENCE ROSE.

^* Madame here can have a garden sloping on the Seine,
and a glass house of choicest flowers — which I see are
her graceful weakness ere another rose-season has
time to come lound, if you choose."

His voice lingered softly on the three last words.

The dew stood on Bend's forehead, his hands clinched
on the easel :

" You wish me — to— paint — forgeries of the Petitot
enamels ?''

The old man smiled unmoved : " Chut, chut ! Will
you paint me little bonbonni^res on enamel instead of
on card-board ? That is all the question. I have said
where they go, how they are set : what they are called
shall be my aflair. You know nothing. The only
works of yours which you will be concerned to ac-
knowledge will be your own canvas pictures. What
harm can it do any creature? You will gratify a con-
noisseur or two innocently, and you will meanwhile be
at leisure to follow the bent of your own genius, which
otherwise "

He paused : I heard the loud throbs of Rent's heart
under that cruel temptation.

Lili gazed at his tempter with the same startled
terror and bewilderment still dilating her candid eyes
with a woful pain.

"Otherwise,'^ pursued the old man with merciless
tranquillity, "you will never see me any more, my
friends. If you try to repeat any story to my hinder-
ance, no one will credit you. I am rich, you are poor.
You have a great talent : I shall regret to see it lost,
but I shall let it die — so."

A PROVENCE ROSE. 91

And he trod very gently on a little gnat that crawled
Dear his foot, and killed it.

A terrible agony gathered in the artist's face.

" O God !" he cried in his torture, and his eyes went
to the canvases against the wall, ar:d then to the face
of his wife, with an unutterable yearning desire.

For them, for theniy this sin which tempted him
looked virtue.

"Do you hesitate?" said the merciless old man.
" Pshaw ! whom do you hurt? You give me work as
good as that which you imitate, and I call it only by a
dead man's name: who is injured? What harm can
there be in humoring the fanaticism of fashion ? Choose
— ^I am in haste."

Ren6 hid his face with his hands, so that he should
not behold those dear creations of his genius which so
cruelly, so innocently, assailed him with a temptation
beyond his strength.

" Choose for me — you !" he muttered in his agony
to Lili.

Lili, white as death, drew closer to him.

" My Ren^, your heart has chosen," she murmured
through her dry, quivering lips. "You cannot buy
honor by fraud."

E>en6 lifted his head and looked straight in the eyes
of the man who held the scales of his fate, and could
weigh out for his whole life's portion either fame and
fortune or obscurity and famine.

" Sir," he said slowly, with a bitter tranquil smile
about his mouth, " my garret is empty, but it is clean.
May I trouble you to leave it as you found it?"

92 A PROVENCE ROSE.

So they were strong to the end, these two famished
children of frivolous Paris.

But when the door had closed and shut their tempter
out, the revulsion came: they wept those tears of
blood which come from the hearts' depths of those who
have seen Hope mock them with a smile a moment, to
leave them face to face with Death.

** Poor fools !*' sighed the old vine from his corner
in the gray, dull twilight of the late autumn day.

Was the vine right?

The air which he had breathed for fifty years
through all his dust-choked leaves and tendrils had
been the air off millions of human lungs, corrupted
in its passage through millions of human lips, and
the thoughts which he thought were those of human
wisdom.

The sad day died; the night fell; the lattice was
closed; the flute lay untouched. A great misery
seemed to enfold us. True, we were no worse off than
we had been when the same day dawned. But that
is the especial cruelty of every tempter always: he
touches the innocent closed eyes of his victims with a
collyrium which makes the tappy blindness of content
no longer possible. If strong to resist him, he has still
his vengeance, for they are never again at peace as they
were before that fatal hour in which he showed them
all that they were not, all that they might be.

Our stove was not more chill, our garret not more
empty ; our darkness not more dark amidst the gay,
glad, dazzling city ; our dusky roof and looming
crown that shut the sky out from us not more gloomy

A PROVENCE ROSE. 93

and impenetrable than they had been on all those other
earlier nights when yet we had been happy. Yet how
intensified million-fold seemed cold and loneliness and
poverty and darkness^ all ! — for we had for the first
time known what it was to think of riches^ of fame^ of
homage^ of light, as poaaibley and then to lose them all
forever !

I had been resigned for love's sake to dwell among
the roofs, seeing not the faces of the stars, nor feeling

ever the full glory of the sun ; but now I had

dreamed of the fiiir freedom of garden-ways and the
endless light of summer suns on palace terraces, and I
drooped and shivered and sickened, and was twice cap-
tive and twice exiled ; and knew that I was a little
nameless, worthless, hapless thing, whose fairest chap-
let of blossom no hand would ever gather for a crown.

As with my life, so was it likewise with theirs.

They had been so poor, but they had been so happy :
the poverty remained, the joy had flown.

That winter was again very hard, very cold : they
suffered gi*eatly.

They could scarcely keep together body and soul, as
your strange phrase runs : they went without food some-
times for days and days, and fuel they had scarcely
ever.

The bird in his cage was sold : they would not keep
the little golden singing thing to starve to silence like
themselves.

As for me, I nearly perished of the cold : only the
love I bore to Lili kept a little life in my leafless
branches.

94 A PROVENCE ROSE.

All that cruel winter-time they were strong still,
those children of Paris.

For they sought no alms, and in their utteimost
extremity neither of them ever whispered to the other,
" Go seek the tempter : repent, be wise. Give not up
our lives for a mere phantasy of honor."

'' When the snow is on the ground, and the canvases
have to burn in the stove, then you will change your
minds and come to me on your knees," the old wicked,
foul spirit had said mocking them, as he had opened
the door of the attic and passed away creaking down
the dark stairs.

And I suppose he had reckoned on this; but if he
had done so he had reckoned without his host, as your
phrase runs : neither Ren6 nor Lili ever went to him,
either on knees or in any other wise.

When the spring came we three were still all living
— at least their hearts still beat and their lips still
drew breath, as my boughs were still green and my
roots still clung to the soil. But no more to them or
to me did the coming of spring bring, as of old, the
real living of life, which is joy. And my lover the
wind wooed me no more, and the birds no more
brought me the rose-whispers of my kindred in
Provence. For even the little pigeon-hole in the
roof had become too costly a home for us, and we
dwelt in a den under the stones of the streets, where
no light came and scarce a breath of air ever strayed
to us.

There the uncompleted canvases on which the painter
whom Lili loved had tried to write his title to the im-

A PROVENCE ROSE. 95

mortality of fame^ were at last finished — ^finished, for
the rats ate them.

All this while we lived — ^the man whose genius and
misery were hell on earth; the woman whose very
purity and perfectness of love were her direst torture ;
and I, the little white flower born of thu sun and the
dew, of fragrance and freedom, to whom every moment
of this blindness, this suffocation, this starvation, this
stench of putrid odors, this horrible roar of the street
above, was a moment worse than any pang of death.

Away there in Provence so many a fair rose-sister
of mine bowed her glad, proud, innocent head with
anguish and shuddering terrors to the sharp summons
of the severing knife that cut in twain her life, whilst
I — I, on and on — ^was forced to keep so much of life
as lies in the capacity to suffer and to love in vain.

So much was left to them : no more.

" Let us compel Death to remember us, since even
Death forgets us ?* Ben6 murmured once in his despair
to her.

But Lili had pressed her famished lips to his : " Nay,
dear, wait : (rod will remember us even yet, I think.''

It was her fidth. And of her &ith she was justified
at last.

There came a ghastlier season yet, a time of horror
insupportable— of ceaseless sound beside which the
roar of the mere traffic of the streets would have
seemed silence — a stench beside which the sulphur
smoke and the gas fumes of a previous time would
have been as some sweet fresh woodland air — a famine
beside which the daily hunger of the poor was re-

96 A PROVENCE RDSE.

membered as the abundance of a feast — a cold beside
which the chillness of the scant fuel and empty braziers
of other winters were recalled as the warmth of sum-
mer — ^a darkness only lit by the red flame of burning
houses — ^a solitude only broken by the companionship
of woe and sickness and despair — a suflFocatiou only
changed by a rush of air strong with the scent of
blood, of putridity, of the million living plagues-
stricken, of the million dead lying unburied.

For there was War.

Of year or day or hour I knew nothing. It was
always the same blackness as of night ; the same hor-
ror of sound, of scent, of cold ; the same misery ; the
same torture. I suppose that the sun was quenched,
that the birds were dumb, that the winds were stilled
forever — that all the world was dead : I do not know.
They called it War. I suppose that they meant — Hell !

Yet Lili lived, and I : in that dead darkness we had
lost Ren6 — we saw his face no more. Yet he could
not be in his grave, I knew, for Lili, clasping my
barren branches to her breast, would murmur, "Whilst
he still lives I will live — yes, yes, yes !"

And she did live — so long, so long! — on a few
draughts of water and a few husks of grain.

I knew that it was long, for full a hundred times
she muttered aloud, "Another day? O God! — how
long? how long?"

At last in the darkness a human hand was stretched
to her, once, close beside me. A foul, fierce light, the
light of flame, was somewhere on the air above us,
and at that moment glowed through the horrid gloom

A PROVENCE ROSE. 97

we dwelt in in the bowels of the earth. I saw the
hand and what it held to her : it was a stranger's, and
it held the little colorless dead rose, my sweetest blos-
som, that had lain ever upon Bend's heart.

She took it — she who had given it as her first love-
gift. She was mute. In the glare of the flame that
quivered through the darkness I saw her — standing
quite erect and very still.

The voice of a stranger thrilled through the din
from the world above. " He fought as only patriots
can/' it said softly and as through tears. " I was be-
side him. He fell with Regnault in the sortie yester-
day. He could not speak : he had only strength to
give me this for you. Be comforted : he has died for
Paris."

On Lili's face there came once more the radiance of
a perfect peace, a glory pure and endless as the glory
of the sun. " Great in death !" she murmured. " My
love, my love, I come !"

I lost her in the darkness.

I heard a voice above me say that life had left her
lips as the dead rose touched them.

What more is there for me to tell ?

I live, since to breathe, and to feel pain, and to desire
vainly, and to suffer always, are surest proofs of life.

I live, since that stranger's hand which brought my
little dead blossom as the message of farewell, had pity
on me and brought me away from that living grave.
But the pity was vain : I died the only death that had
any power to hurt me when the human heart I loved
grew still forever.

98 A PROVENCE ROSE.

The light of the full day now shines oa me ; the
flhadows are coolj the dews are welcome ; they speak
around me of the coming of spring, and in the silence
of the dawns I hear from the woods without the piping
of the nesting birds; but for me the summer can
never more return — for me the sun can never again be
shining — for me the greenest garden world is barren
as a desert.

For I am only a little rose, but I am in exile and
France is desolate.

LAMPBLACK

" • -

• • - '

• " • • •

•• • •

*•- • ;.•

.- \

LAHPfiLAGK.

A POOB black paint lay very anhappy in its tul>e
one day alone^ having tumbled out of an artist's color-
box and lying quite unnoticed for a year. "I am only
Lampblack/' he said to himself. " The master never
looks at me : he says I am heavy^ dull, lustreless, use-
less. I wish I could cake and dry up and die, as poor
Flakewhite did when he thought she turned yellow
and deserted her."

But Lampblack could not die ; he could only lie in
his tin tube and pine, like a silly, sorrowful thing as
he was, in company with some broken bits of charcoal
and a rusty palette-knife. The master never touched
him ; month after month passed by, and he was never
thought of; the other paints had all their turn of fair
fortune, and went out into the world to great acad-
emies and mighty palaces, transfigured and rejoicing
in a thousand beautiful shapes and services. But
Lampblack was always passed over as dull and coarse,
which indeed he was, and knew himself to be so, poor
fellow, which made it all the worse. " You are only
a deposit !'' said the other colors to him ; and he felt
that it was disgraceful to be a deposit, though he was
not quite sure what it meant.

" If only I were happy like the others I'' thought

101

102 IjAMPBLA(?K, ^: :, \y

.- IKMttr, /^DQtj '; L&mpbli^dk; •sorroWfiil in his comer.
/!!*Thei>B"i8' Bistre, now, he is not so very much better-
looking than I am, and yet they can do nothing with-
out him, whether it is a e^irl's face or a wimple in a
river!''

The others were all so happy in this beautiful,
bright studio, whose open casements were hung with
myrtle and passion-flower, and whose silence was filled
with the singing of nightingales. Cobalt, with a
touch or two, became the loveliness of summer skies
at morning; the Lakes and Carmines bloomed in a
thousand exquisite flowers and fancies; the Chromes
and Ochres (mere dull earths) were allowed to spread
themselves in sheets of gold that took the shine of the
sun into the darkest places; Umber, a sombre and
gloomy thing, could lurk yet in a child's curls and
laugh in a child's smiles ; whilst all the families of the
Vermilions, the Blues, the Greens, lived in a perpetual
glory of sunset or sunrise, of ocean waves or autumn
woods, of kingly pageant or of martial pomp.

It was very hard. Poor Lampblack felt as if his
very heart would break, above all when he thought of
pretty little Rose Madder, whom he loved dearly, and
who never would even look at him, because she was s^
very proud, being herself always placed in nothing lesR
than rosy clouds, or the hearts of roses, or something a?
fair and spiritual.

" I am only a wretched deposit I" sighed Lampblack,
and the rusty palette-knife grumbled back, " My own
life has been ruined in cleaning dirty brushes, and o&si
what the gratitude of men and brushes is !"

^' But at least you have been of use once ; but )

LAMPBLACK 103

nevtr am, — never!" said Lampblack, wearily; and
indeed he had been there so long that the spiders
had spun their silver fleeces all about him, and he
was growing as gray as an old bottle does in a dark
cellar.

At that moment the door of the studio opened, and
there came a flood of light, and the step of a man was
heard : the hearts of all the colors jumjied for joy,
lKX?ause the step was that of their magician, who out
of mere common clays and ground ores could raise
them at a touch into splendors of the gods and divini-
ties immortal.

Only the heart of poor dusty Lampblack could not
beat a throb the more, because he was always left alone
and never was thought worthy even of a glance. He
could not l)elieve his senses when this afternoon — oh,
miracle and ecstasy ! — the step of the master crossed the
floor to the obscured corner where he lay under his
spiders' webs, and the hand of the master touched him.
Lampblack felt sick and faint with rapture. Had rec-
ognition come at last?

The master took him up: "You will do for this
work," he said ; and Lampblack was borne trembling
to an easel. The colors, for once in their turn neglected,
crowded together to watch, looking in their bright tin
tubes like rows of little soldiers in armor.

" It is the old dull Deposit," they murmured to one
another, and felt contemptuous, yet were curious, as
Boomful people often will be.

" But I am going to be glorious and great," thought
Lampblack, and his heart swelled high ; for never more
would they be able to hurl the name of Deposit at him,

104 LAMPBLACK.

a name which hurt him none the less, bat all the mora
indeed, because it was unintelligible.

"You will do for this work/' said the master, and
let Lampblack out of his metal prison-house into the
light and touched him with the brush that was the
wand of magic.

"What am I going to be?" wondered Lampblack,
as he felt himself taken on to a large piece of deal
board, so large that he felt he must be going to make
the outline of an athlete or the shadows of a tempest
at the least.

Himself he could not tell what he was becoming:
he was happy enough and grand enough only to be
employed, and, as he was being used, began to dream a
thousand things of all the scenes he would be in, and
all the hues that he would wear, and all the praise that
he would hear when he went out into that wonderful
great world of which his master was an idol. From
his secret dreams he was harshly roused ; all the colors
were laughing and tittering round him till the little tin
helmets they wore shook with their merriment

" Old Deposit is going to be a sign-post," they cried
to one another so merrily that the spiders, who are not
companionable creatures, felt themselves compelled to
come to the doors of their dens and chuckle too. A
sign-post! Lampblack, stretched out in an ecstasy
upon the board, roused himself shivering from his
dreams, and gazed at his own metamorphosis. Hi
had been made into seven letters, thus :

B A N D I T A.

This word in the Italian (H)untry, where the £nglish

LAMPBLACK, 105

painter's studio was, means, Do not trespass, do not
shoot, do not show yourself here: anything, indeed,
that 10 peremptory and uncivil to all trespassers. In
these seven letters, outspread upon the board, was
Lamphlack crucified I

Farewell, ambitious hopes and happy dreams ! He
had l)een employed to paint a sign-board, a thing
atoned by the boys, blown on by the winds, gnawed by
the rats, and drenched with the winter's rains. Better
the dust and the cobwebs of his old corner than such
shame as this !

But- help was there none. His fate was fixed. He
was dried with a drench of turpentine, hastily clothed
in a coat of copal, and, ere he yet was fully aware of all
his misery, was being borne away upon the great board
out of doors and handed to the gardener. For the
master was a hasty and ardent man, and had been
stung into impatience by the slaughter of some favor-
ite blue thrushes in his ilex-trees that day, and so in
liis haste had chosen to do journeyman's work himself.
Lampblack was carried out of the studio for the last
time, and as the door closed on him he heard all the
colors laugiiing, and the laugh of little Rose Madder
was highest of all as she cried to Naples Yellow, who
was a dandy and made court to her, " Poor old ugly
Deposit I He will grumble to the owls and the bats
now !"

The door shut, shutting him out forever from all
that joyous company and palace of fair visions, and
the rough hands of the gardener grasped him and car-
ried him to the edge of the great garden, where the
wall overlooked the public road, and there fastened

106 LAMPBLACK,

aim lip on high with a band of iron round the tnink
of a troe.

That iiijrht it rained heavily, and the north wind
blew, uihI there was thunder also. Lampblack, out in
the storm without his tin house to shelter him, felt that
of all creatures wretched on the face of the earth there
was not one so miserable as he.

A sign-board ! Nothing but a sign-board !

The degradation of a color, created for art and artists,
could not be deeper or more grievous anywhere. Oh,
how he sighed for his tin tube and the quiet nook with
tlie charcoal and the palette-knife !

He had been unhappy there indeed, but still had had
always some sort of hope to solace him, — some chance
still remaining that one day fortune might smile and
he \)ft allowed to be at least the lowest stratum of some
immortal work.

But now hope was there none. His doom, his end,
were fixed and changeless. Nevermore could he be
anything but what he was ; and change there could be
none till weather and time should have done their
work on him, and he be rotting on the wet earth, a
shattered and worm-eaten wreck.

Day broke, — a gloomy, misty morning.

From where he was crucified upon the tree-trunk he
could no longer even see his beloved home the studio :
he could only see a dusky, intricate tangle of branches
all about him, and below the wall of flint, with the
Banksia that grew on it, and the hard muddy highway,
drenched from the storm of the night.

A man passed in a miller's cart, and stood up and
Bwore at him, because the people had liked to comp

LAMPBLACK 107

and shoot and trap the birds of the master's wooded
gardens, and knew that they must not do it now.

A slug crawled over him, and a snail also. A wood-
pecker hammered at him with its strong beak. A boy
went by under the wall and tlirew stones at him, and
called him names. The rain poured down again
heavily. He thought of the happy painting-room,
where it had seemed always summer and always sun-
shine, and where now in the forenoon all the colors
were marshalling in the pageantry of the Arts, as he
had seen them do hundreds of times from his lone
comer. All the misery of the past looked happiness
now.

" If I were only dead, like Flakewhite,'' he thought;
but the stones only bruised, they did not kill him : and
the iron band only hurt, it did not stifle him. For what-
ever suflPers very much, has always so much strength
to continue to exist. And almost his loyal heart blas-
phemed and cursed the master who had brought him to
such a fate as this.

The day grew apace, and noon went by, and with it
the rain passed. The sun shone out once more, and
Lampblack, even imprisoned and wretched as he was,
could not but see how beautiful the wet leaves looked,
and the gossamers all hung with rain-drops, and the
blue sky that shone through the boughs ; for he had
not lived with a great artist all his days to be blind,
even in pain, to the loveliness of nature. The sun
came out, and with it some little brown birds tripped
out too, — very simple and plain in their costumes and
ways, but which Lampblack knew were the loves* of
liie poets, for he had heard tlie master call them »

108

LAMPBLACK.

many times in summer nights. The little brown biiofl
came tripping and peeking about on the grass under-
neath his tree-trunk, and Ihen flew on the top of the
wall, which was covered with Banksia and many other
creei)ers. The brown birds sang a little song, for though
they sing most in the moonlight they do sing by day
too, and sometimes all day long. And what they sung
was this :

" Oh, how happy we are, how happy ! No nets dare
now be spread for us, no cruel boys dare climb^ and no
cruel shooters fire. We are safe, quite safe, and the
sweet summer has begun !''

Lampblack listened, and even in his misery was
toiK^hed and soothed by the tender liquid sounds that
these little throats poured oqt among the light-yellow
bloom of the Banksia flowers. And when one of the
brown birds came and sat on a branch by him, sway-
ing itself and drinking the rain-drops ofl^ a leaf, he
ventured to ask, as well as he could for the iron that
strangled him, why they were so safe, and what made
them so happy.

The bird looked at him in surprise.

" Do you not know ?" he said. " It is ytm ^

" I !" echoed Lampblack, and could say no more,
for he feared that the bird was mocking him, a poor,
silly, rusty black paint, only spread out to rot in fair
weather and foul. What good could he do to any
creature ?

"You," repeated the nightingale. "Did you not
see that man under the wall? He had a gun; we
should have been dead but for you. We will come
and sing to you all night long, since you like it; and

LAMPBLACK. 109

^hen we go to bed at dawn, I will tell my cousins the
thrushes and merles to take our places, so that you
shall hear somebody singing near you all the day long."

Lampblack was silent.

His heart was too full to speak.

Was it possible that he was of use, after all?

** Can it be true V* he said, timidly.

** Quite true," said the nightingale.

'^ Then the master knew best," thought Lampblack.

Never would he adorn a palace or be adored upon
an altar. His high hopes were all dead, like last year's
leaves. The colors in the studio had all the glories of
the world, but he was of use in it, after all ; he could
save these little lives. He was poor and despised,
bruised by stones and drenched by storms ; yet was he
content, nailed there upon his tree, for he had not been
made quite in vain.

The sunset poured its red and golden splendors
through the darkness of the boughs, and the birds
iang all together, shouting for joy and praising Gkxl.

THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE

THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREB.

She was a Quatre Saison Rose-tree.

She lived in a beautiful old garden with some charm-
ing magnolias for neighbors: they rather overshadowed
her, certainly, because they were so very great and
grand ; but then such shadow as that is preferable, as
every one knows, to a mere vulgar enjoyment of com-
mon daylight, and then the beetles went most to the
magnolia-blossoms, for being so great and grand of
course they got very much preyed upon, and this was
a vast gain for the rose that was near them. She her-
self leaned against the wall of an orange-house, in
company with a Banksia, a buoyant, active, simple-
minded thing, for whom Rosa Damascena, who thought
herself much better born than these climbers, had a
natural contempt. Banksisa will flourish and be con-
tent anywhere, they are such easily-pleased creatures ;
and when you cut them they thrive on it, which shows
a very plebeian and pachydermatous temper ; and they
laugh all over in the face of an April day, shaking
their little golden clusters of blossom in such a merry
way that the Rose-tree, who was herself very reserved
And thorny, had really scruples about speaking to them.

For she was by nature extremely proud, — much
prouder than her lineage warranted, — and a hard fate

113

114 THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE,

bad fixed her to the wall of an orangery, where hardly
anybody ever came, except the gardener and his men
to carry the oranges in in winter and out in spring,
or water and tend them while they were housed there.

She was a handsome rose, and she knew it. But
the garden was so crowded — like the world — ^that she
could not get herself noticed in it. In vain was she
radiant and red close on to Christmas-time as in the
fullest heats of midsummer. Nobody thought about
her or praised her. She pined and was very unhappy.

The BanksisB, who are little, frauk, honest-hearted
creatures, and say out what they think, as such plebeian
people will, used to tell her roundly she was thankless
for the supreme excellence of her lot.

" You have everything the soul of a rose can wish
for : a splendid old wall with no nasty chinks in it ; a
careful gardener, who nips all the larvsa in the bud
before they can do you any damage ; sun, water, care ;
above all, nobody ever cuts a single blossom oflP you I
What more can you wish for? This orangery is para-
dise!"

She did not answer.

What wounded her pride so deeply was just this
fact, that they never did cut off any of her blossoms.
When day after day, year after year, she crowned her-
self with her rich crimson glory and no one ever came
nigh to behold or to gather it, she could have died
with vexation and humiliation.

Would nobody see she was worth anything ?

The truth was that in this garden there was such an
abundance of very rare roses that a common though
beautiful one like Rosa Damascena remained unthoiight

THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE. 115

of; she was lovely, but then there were so many love-
lier still, or, at least, much more h la mode.

In the secluded garden-corner she suflPered all the
agonies of a pretty woman in the great world, who is
only a pretty woman, and no more. It needs so very
much more to be "somebody/' To be somebody was
what Rosa Damasoena sighed for, from rosy dawn to
rosier sunset.

From her wall she could see across the green lawns,
the great parterre which spread before the house ter-
race, and all the great roses that bloomed there, —
Her Majesty Gloire de Dijon, who was a reigning
sovereign born, the royally-born Niph6tos, the Priu-
cesse Adelaide, the Comtesse Ouvaroff, the Vicomt-
.esse de Cazes all in gold, Madame de Sombreuil in
snowy white, the beautiful Louise de Savoie, the ex-
quisite Duchess of Devoniensis, — all the roses that
were great ladies in their own right, and as far off
her as were the stars that hung in heaven. Rosa
Damascena would have given all her brilliant carna-
tion hues to be pale and yellow like the Princesse
Adelaide, or delicately colorless like Her Grace of
Devoniensis.

She tried a,ll she could to lose her own warm blushes,
and prayed that bees might sting her and so change
her hues; but the bees were of low taste, and kept
their pearl-powder and rouge and other pigments for
the use of common flowers, like the evening primrose
or the buttercup and borage, and never came near t<)
do her any good in arts of toilet.

One day the gardener approached and stood and
looked at her : then all at once she felt a sharp stab

116 THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE.

in her from his koifei and a vivid pain ran downward
through her stem.

She did not know it, but gardeners and gods ^' thia
way grant prayer.'^

^' Has not something happened to me ?" she asked
of tlie little Banksisa; for she felt very odd all over
her; and when you are unwell you cannot be very
haughty.

The saucy Banksisa laughed, running over their
wires that they cling to like little children.

" You have got your wish/' they said. " You are
going to be a great lady ; they have made you into a
Rosa Indica I"

A tea-rose I Was it possible ?

Was she going to belong at last to that grand and
graceful order, which she had envied so long and vainly
from afar ?

Was she, indeed, no more mere simple Rosa Damas-
cena? She felt so happy she could hardly breathe.
She thought it was her happiness that stifled her; in
real matter of fact it was the tight bands in which the
gardener had bound her.

" Oh, what joy !'' she thought, though she still felt
very uncomfortable, but not for the world would she
ever have admitted it to the Banksise.

The gardener had tied a tin tube on to her, and it
was heavy and cumbersome ; but no doubt, she said,
to herself, the thing was fashionable, so she bore the
burden of it very cheerfully.

The Banksisa asked her how she felt ; but she would
not deign even to reply ; and when a friendly black-
bird, who had often picked grubs off her leaves, cama

THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE. 117

ftnd sang to her, she kept silent : a Bosa Indica was
far above a blackbird.

" Next time you want a caterpillar taken away, he
may eat you for me /" said the blackbird, and flew oW
in a huff.

She was very ungrateful to hate the blackbird so, for
he had been most useful to her in doing to death all
the larvae of worms and beetles and caterpillars and
other destroyers which were laid treacherously within
her leaves. The good blackbird, with many another
feathered friend, was forever at work in some good deed
of the kind, and all the good, grateful flowers loved
him and his race. But to this terribly proud and
discontented Rosa Damascena he had been a bore,
a common creature, a nuisance, a monster, — any one
of these things by turns, and sometimes all of them
altogether. She used to long for the cat to get him.

" You ought to be such a happy rose !" the merle
had said to her, one day. " There is no rose so strong
and healthy as you are, except the briers."

And from that day she had hated him. The idea
of naming those hedgerow brier roses in the same
breath with her !

You would have seen in that moment of her rage a
very funny sight had you been there; nothing less
funny than a rose-tree trying to box a blackbird's ears I

But, to be sure, you would only have thought the
wind was blowing about the rose, so you would have
seen nothing really of the drollery of it all, which was
not droll at all to Bosa Damascena, for a wound in
one's vanity is as long healing as n wound from a
conical bullet in one's bodv. The blackbird had not

118 THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE.

gone near her after that, nor any of his relations and
friends, and she had had a great many shooting and
flying pains for months together, in consequence of
aphides' eggs having been laid inside her stem,— eggs
of which the birds would have eased her long before if
they had not been driven away by her haughty rage.

However, she had been almost glad to have some
ailment. She had called it aneurism, and believed it
made her look refined and interesting. If it would
only have made her pale ! But it had not done that :
she had remained of the richest rose color.

When the winter had passed and the summer had
come round again, the grafting had done its work:
she was really a Bosa Indica, and timidly put forth
the first blossom in her new estate. It was a small,
rather puny yellowish thing, not to be compared to her
own natural red clusters, but she thought it far finer.

Scarcely had it been put forth by her than the gar-
dener whipped it off with his knife, and bore it away
in proof of his success in such transmogrifications.

She had never felt the knife before, when she had
been only Rosa Damascena: it hurt her very much,
and her heart bled.

" II faut souffrir pour 8tre belle," said the Banksiao
in a good-natured effort at consolation. She was not
going to answer them, and she made believe that her
tears were only dew, though it was high noon and all
the dew-drops had been drunk by the sun, who by
noon-time gets tired of climbing and grows thirsty.

Her next essay was much finer, and the knife
whipped that off also. That summer she bore more
and more blossoms, and always the knife cut them

THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE. 119

4way, for she had been made one of the great race of
Uosa Indica.

Now, a rose-tree, when a blossom is chopped or
braken off, suffers precisely as we human mortals do
if we lose a finger ; but the rose-tree, being a much
more perfect and delicate handiwork of nature than
any human being, has a faculty we have not : it lives
and has a sentient soul in every one of its roses, and
whatever one of these endures the tree entire endures
also by sympathy. You think this very wonderful?
Not at all. It is no whit more wonderful than that a
lizard's tail chopped off runs about by itself, or that a
dog can scent a foe or a thief whilst the foe or the thief
is yet miles away. All these things are most wonder-
ful, or not at all so, — -just as you like.

In a little while she bore another child : this time it
was a fine fair creature, quite perfect in its hues and
shapes. "I never saw a prettier!" said an emperor
butterfly, pausing near for a moment ; at that moment
the knife of the gardener severed the rosebud's stalk.

'* The lady wants one for her bouquet de corsage :
she goes to the opera to-night," the man said to another
man, as he took the young tea-rose.

" What is the opera?" asked the mother-rose wearily
of the butterfly. He did not know ; but his cousin the
death's-head moth, asleep under a magnolia-leaf, looked
down with a grim smile on his quaint face.

"It is where everything dies in ten seconds," he
answered. "It is a circle of fire; many friends of
mine have flown in, none ever returned : your daughter
will shrivel up and perish miserably. One pays fof
glory."

120 THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE.

The rose-tree shivered through all her stalks ; bat
she was still proud^ and tried to think that all this was
said only out of envy. What should an old death's-
head moth know, whose eyes were so weak that a far-
thing rushlight blinded them?

So she lifted herself a little higher^ and would not
even see that the BanksisB were nodding to her ; and
as for her old friend the blackbird, how vulgar he
looked, bobbing up and down hunting worms and
woodlice I could anything be more outrageously vulgar
than that staining yellow beak of his? She twisted
herself round not to see him, and felt quite annoyed
that he went on and sang just the same, unconscious
of, or indifferent to, her coldness.

With each successive summer Rosa Damascena be-
came more integrally and absolutely a Rosa Indica,
and suffered in proportion to her fashion and fame.

True, people came continually to look at her, and
especially in May-time would cry aloud, "What a
beautiful Niph^tos!" But then she was bereaved of
all her offspring, for, being of the race of Niph^too,
they were precious, and one would go to die in an
hour in a hot ball-room, and another to perish in a
Sevres vase, where the china indeed was exquisite but
the water was foul, and others went to be suffocated in
the vicious gases of what the mortals call an opera-
box, and others were pressed to death behind hard
diamonds in a woman's bosom ; in one way or another
they each and all perished miserably. She herself also
lost many of her once luxuriant leaves, and had a little
scanty foliage, red-brown in summer, instead of the
thick, dark-green clothing that she had worn when a

THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE, 121

rustic maiden. Not a day passed but the knife stubbed
her; when the knife had nothing to take she was
barren and chilly, for she had lost the happy power
of looking beautiful all the year round, which onop
she had possessed.

One day came when she was taken up out of the
ground and borne into a glass house, placed in a lai^
pot, and lifted up on to a pedestal, and left in a delicious
atmosphere, with patrician plants all around hei with
long Latin names, and strange, rare beauties of their
own. She bore bud after bud in this crystal temple,
and became a very crown of blossom ; and her spirit
grew so elated, and her vanity so supreme, that she
ceased to remember she had ever been a simple Rosa
Damascena, except that she was always saying to her-
self, '* How great I am ! how great I am !" which she
might have noticed that those born ladies, the Devoni-
ensis and the Louise de Savoie, never did. But she
noticed nothing except her own beauty, which she could
see in a mirror that was let into the opposite wall of
the greenho'ise. Her blossoms were many and all
quite perfeec, and no knife touched them ; and though
to be sure she was still very scantily clothed so far ass
foliage went, yet she was all the more fashionable for
that^ so what did it matter ?

One day, when her beauty was at its fullest perfec-
tion, she heard all the flowers about her bending and
whispering with rustling and murmuring, saying,
"Who will be chosen? who will be chosen?"

Chosen for what?

They did not talk much to her, because she was but
a new-comer and a parvenue, but she gathered fn m

122 THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE,

them in a little time that there was to be a ball for a
marriage festivity at the house to which the greenhouse
was attached. Each flower wondered if it would be
chosen to go to it. The azaleas kpew they would go,
because they were in their pink or rose ball -dresses all
ready ; but no one else was sure. The rose-tree grew
quite sick and faint with hope and fear Unless she
went, she felt that life was not worth the living. She
had no idea what a ball might be, but she knew that
it was another form of greatness, when she was all
ready, too, and so 1)eautiful !

The gardener came and sauntered down the glass
house, glancing from one to another. The hearts of
all beat high. The azaleas only never changed color •
they were quite sure of themselves. Who could do
without them in February ?

"Oh, take me! take me! take me!" prayed the
rose-tree, in her foolish, longing, arrogant heart.

Her wish was given her. The lord of their fates
smiled when he came to where she stood.

"This shall be for the place of honor," he mur-
mured, and he lifted her out of the large vase she
lived in on to a trestle and summoned his boys to beai
her away. The very azaleas themselves grew pale with
envy.

As for the rose-tree herself, she would not look at
any one; she was carried through the old garden
straight past the Banksiae, but she would make them
n'^ sign ; and as for the blackbird, she hoped a cat had
eaten him ! Had he not known her as Bosa Dama>
(w«na?

She was borne bodily, roots and all, carefully

8

THE AMBITIOUS ROSE- TREE. 123

wrap]^)ed up in soft matting, and taken into the great
house.

It was a very great house, a very grand house, and
there was to be a marvellous feast in it, and a prince
and princess from over the seas were that night to
honor the mistress of it by their presence. All this
Ro&JL Indica had gathered from the chatter of the
flowers, and when she came into the big palace she
saw many signs of excitement and confusion : servants
out of livery were running up against one another in
their hurry-scurry; miles and miles, it seemed, of
crimson carpeting were being unrolled all along the
terrace and down the terrace steps, since by some pe-
culiar but general impression royal personages are sup-
posed not to like to walk upon anything else, though
myself I think they must get quite sick of red carpet,
seeing so very much of it spread for them wherever
they go. To Bosa Indica, however, the bright scarlet
carpeting looked very handsome, and seemed, indeed,
a foretaste of heaven.

Soon she was carried quite inside the house, into an
immense room with a beautiful dome-shaped ceiling,
painted in fresco three centuries before, and fresh as
though it had been painted yesterday. At the end
of the room was a great chair, gilded and pdnted,
too, three centuries before, and covered with velvet,
gold-fringed and powdered with golden grasshoppers.
"That common insect here!'* thought Bosa, in sur-
prise, for she did not know that the chief of the house,
long, long, long ago, when sleeping in the heat of noon
in Palestine in the first crusade, had been awakened by
a (i^rasshopper lighting on his eyelids, and so had been

124 THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE.

arou£>ed in time to put on his armor and do battle witb
a tr(X)p attacking Saracen cavalry, and beat them;
wherefore, in gratitude, he had taken the humble field -
creature as his badge for evermore.

Tliey set the roots of Bosa Indica now into a vase,
— H3uch a vase ! the royal blue of Sevres, if you please,
and with border and scroll work and all kinds of
wonders and glories painted on it and gilded on it,
and standing four feet high if it stood one inch ! I
could never tell you the feelings of Bosa if I wrote
a thousand pages. Her heart thrilled so with ecstasy
that she almost dropped all her petals, only her vanity
came to her aid, and helped her to control in a measure
her emotions. The gardeners broke oflF a good deal
of mould about her roots, and they muttered one to
another something about her dying of it. But Bosa
thought no more of that than a pretty lady does when
her physician tells her she will die of tight lacing ; not
she ! She was going to be put into that Sevres vase.

This was enough for her, as it is enough for the lady
that she is going to be put into a hundred-guinea ball-
gown.

In she went. It was certainly a tight fit, as the
gown often is, and Bosa felt nipped, strained, bruised,
suffocated. But an old proverb has settled long ago
that pride feels no pain, and perhaps the more foolish
the pride the less is the pain that is felt — for the
moment.

They set her well into the vase, putting green moss
over her roots, and then they stnitched her branches
out over a gilded trellis-work at the back of the vase.
And very beautiful she looked; and she was at the

THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE, 125

head of the room, and a huge mirror down at the
farther end opposite to her showed her own reflectioa
She was in paradise !

" At last/' she thought to herself, " at last they have
done me justice !"

The azaleas were all crowded round underneath her,
like so many kneeling courtiers, but they were not
taken out of their pots ; they were only shrouded in
moss. They had no Sevres vases. And they had
always thought so much of themselves and given them-
selves such airs, for there is nothing so vain as an
azalea,— except, indeed, a camellia, which is the most
conceited flower in the world, though, to do it justice,
it is also the most industrious, for it is busy getting
ready its next winter buds whilst the summer is still
hot and broad on the land, which is very wise and
prudent in it and much to be commended.

Well, there was Rosa Indica at the head of the room
in the Sevres vase, and very proud and triumphant she
felt throned there, and the azaleas, of course, were
whispering cnviouslv underneath her, "Well, after
all, she was only Rosa Damascena not so very long
ago."

Yes, (hey knew t What a pity it was 1 They knew
she had once been Rosa Damascena and never would
wash it out of their minds, — the tiresome, spiteful,
malignant creatures !

Even aloft in the vase, in all her glory, the rose
oould have shed tears of mortification, and was ready
to cry, like Themistocles, "Can nobody give us ob-
Uvionf'

Nobody could give that, for the azaleas, who were

126 THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE.

80 irritated at being below her, were not at all likely
to hold their tongues. But she had great consolations
and triumphs, and began to believe that, let them say
what they chase, she had never been a common garden-
wall rose. The ladies of the house came in and praised
her to the skies ; the children ran up to her and clapped
their hands and shouted for joy at her beauty ; a won-
derful big green bird came in and hopped before her,
cocked his head on one side, and said to her, " Pretty
Poll ! oh, such a pretty Poll !"

" Even tlie birds adore me here I'' she thought, not
dreaming he was only talking of himself; for when
you are as vain as was this poor dear Bosa, creation is
pervaded with your own perfections, and even when
other people say only " Poll !" you feel sure they are
saying " You !" or they ought to be if they are not.

So there she stood in her grand Sevres pot, and she
was ready to cry with the poet, " The world may end
to-night !" Alas ! it was not the world which was to
end. Let me hasten to close this true heart-rending
history.

There was a great dinner as the sun began to set,
and the mistress of the house came in on the arm of
the great foreign prince; and what did the foreign
prince do but look up at Rosa, straight up at her, and
over the heads of the azaleas, and say to his hostess,
" What a beautiful rose you have there ! A Niph^tos,
is it not?"

And her mistress, who had known her long as
simple Rosa Damasoena, answered, " Yes, sir ; it is a
Nii)h6tos."

Ob to have lived for that hour ! The silly thing

THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TRER, 127

thought it worth all her suflFeriug from the gardener'a
knife, all the loss of her robust health and delightful
power of flowering in all four seasons. She was a
Niph^tos, really and truly a Niph^tos! and not one
syllable hinted as to her origin ! She began to believe
she had been bom a tea-rose !

The dinner was long and gorgeous; the guests were
dazzling in jewels and in decorations ; the table was
loaded with old plate and rare china ; the prince made
a speech and used her as a simile of love and joy and
purity and peace. The rose felt giddy with triumph
and with the fumes of the wines around her. Her vase
was of purple and gold, and all the voices round her
said, " Oh, the beautiful rose !" No one noticed the
azaileas. . How she wished that the blackbird could
see for a minute, if the cat would gobble him up the
next!

The day sped on; the chatelaine and her guests
went away; the table was rearranged; the rose-tree
was le(l in its place of honor; the lights were lit;
there was the sound of music near at hand ; they were
dancing in other chambers.

Above her hung a chandelier, — a circle of innumer-
able little flames and drops that looked like dew or
diamonds. She thought it was the sun come very
close. After it had been there a little while it grew
very hot, and its rays hurt her.

" Can you not go a little farther away, O Sun ?" she
said to it. It was flattered at being taken for the sun,
but answered her, " I am fixed in my place. Do you
not understand astronomy ?"

She did noi know what astronomy was, so wv

128 THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE,

silent, and the heat hurt her. Still, she was in the
place of honor : so she was happy.

People came and went; but nobody noticed her.
They ate and drank, th«iy laughed and made love, and
then went away to dance again, and the music went
on all night long, and all night long the heat of the
cliandelier poured down on her.

" I am in the place of honor," she said to herself a
thousand times in each hour.

But the heat scorched her, and the fumes of the
wines made her faint. She thought of the sweet fresh
air of the old garden where the Banksise were. The
garden was quite near, but the windows were closed,
and there were the walls now between her and it. She
was in the place of honor. But she grew sick and
waxed faint as the burning rays of the artificial light
shining above her seemed to pierce through and through
her like lances of steel. The night seemed very long.
She was tired.

She was erect there on her Sevres throne, with the
light thrilling and throbbing upon her in every point.
But she thought of the sweet, dark, fresh nights in the
old home where the blackbird had slept, and she longed
for them.

The dancers came and went, the music thrummed
and screamed, the laughter was both near and far ; the
rose-tree was amidst it all. Yet she felt alone, — all
alone ! as travellers may feel in a desert. Hour suc-
ceeded hour; the night wore on apace; the dancers
ceavsed to come; the music ceased, too; the light still
burned down upon her, and the scorching fever of it
consumed ber like fire.

THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE, 129

Then there came silence, — entire silence. Servants
came round and put out all the lights — hundreds and
hundreds of lights — quickly one by one. Other ser-
vants went to the windows and threw them wide open
to let out the fumes of wine. Without, the night was
changing into the gray that tells of earliest dawn.
But it was a bitter frost ; the grass was white with it ;
the air was ice. In the great darkness that had now
fallen on all the scene this deadly cold came around
the rose-tree and wrapped her in it as in a shroud.

She shivered from head to foot.

The cruel glacial coldness crept into the hot ban-
queting-chamber, and moved round it in white, misty
circles, like steam, like ghosts of the gay guests that
had gone. All was dark and chill,-— dark and chill as
any grave I

What worth was the place of honor now ?

Was this the place of honor?

The rose-tree swooned and drooped! A servant's
rough hand shook down its worn beauty into a heap
of fallen leaves. When they carried her out dead in
the morning, the little Banksia-buds, safe hidden from
the frost within their stems, waiting to come forth
when the summer should come, murmured to one
another, —

" She had her wish ; she was great. This way the
gods grant foolish prayers, and punish discontent I''

THE CHILD OF URBINO

THE CHILD OF URBINO.

It was in the year of grace 1490, in the reign of
Guidohaldo, Lord of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, —
the year, by the way, of the birth of that most illus-
trious and gracious lady Vittoria Colonna.

It was in the spring of the year, in that mountain-
eyrie beloved of the Muses and coveted of the Borgia,
that a little boy stood looking out of a grated case-
ment into the calm sunshiny day. He was a pretty
boy, with hazel eyes, and fair hair cut straight above
his brows ; he wore a little blue tunic with some em-
broidery about the throat of it, and had in his hand a
little round flat cap of the same color. He was sad of
heart this merry morning, for a dear friend of his, a
friend ten years older than himself, had gone the night
before on a journey over the mountains to Maestro
Francesco at Bologna, there to be bound apprentice to
that gentle artist This friend, Timoteo della Vita,
had been very dear to the child, had played with him
and jested with him, made him toys and told him
stories, and he was very full of pain at Timoteo's loss.
Yet he told himself not to mind, for had not Timoteo
said to him, ^' I go as goldsmith^s 'prentice to the best
of men ; but I mean to become a painter'^ ? And the
child understood that to be a painter was to be the

133

134 THE CHILD OF URBINO.

greatest and wisest the world held ; he quite understood
thsty for he was Raffitelle^ the seven-year-old son of
Signor Giovanni Sanzio.

He was a very happy little boy here in this stately yet
homely and kindly Urbino^ where his people had oome
for refuge wlien the lances of Malatesta had ravaged
and ruined their homestead. He had the dearest
old grandfather in all the world; he had a loving
mother^ and he had a father who was very tender to
him^ and painted him among the angels of heaven, and
was always full of pleasant conceits and admirable
learning, and such true love of art that the child
breathed it with every breath, as he could breathe the
sweetness of a cowslip-bell when he held one in his
hands up to his nostrils.

It was good in those days to live in old Urbino. It
was not, indeed, so brilliant a place as it became in a
later day^. when Ariosto came there, and Bembo and
Castiglione and many another witty and learned gentle-
man, and the Courts of Love were held with ingenious
rhyme and pretty sentiment, sad only for wantonness.
But, if not so brilliant, it was homelier, simpler, full
of virtue, with a wise peace and tranquillity that
joined hands with a stout courage. The burgher was
good friends. with his prince, and knew that in any
trouble or perplexity he could go up to the palace, or
stop the duke in the market-place, and be sure of
sympathy and good counsel. There were a genuine
love of beautiful things, a sense of public duty and
of public spirit, a loyal temper and a sage contentment,
among the good people of that time, which made them
happy and prosperous.

THE CHILD OF URBINO. 135

All work was solidly and thoroughly done, living
was efaeap, and food good and plentiful, much better
and more plentiful than it is now; in the fine old
houses every stone was sound, every bit of ornament
well wrought, men made their nests to live in and to
pass to their children and children's children after
them, and had their own fancies and their own tradi-
tions recorded in the iron-work of their casements and
in the wood-work of their doors. They had their
happy day of honest toil from matins bell to evensong,
and then walked out or sat about in the calm evening
air and looked down on the plains below that were
rich with grain and fruit and woodland, and. talked
and laughed among each other, and were content with
their own pleasant, useful lives, not burnt up with
envy of desire to be some one else, as in our sickly,
hurrying time most people are.

Yes, life must have been very good in those old
days in old Urbino, better than it is anywhere in
ours.

Can you not picture to yourself good, shrewd, wise
Giovanni Sanzio, with his old father by his side, and
his little son running before him, in the holy evening
time of a feast-day, with the deep church-bells swaying
above-head, and the last sun-rays smiting the frescoed
walls, the stone bastions, the blazoned standard on the
castle roof, the steep city rocks shelving down into the
greenery of cherry-orchard and of pear-tree? I can,
whenever I shut my eyes and recall Urbino as it was ;
and would it had been mine to live then in that moun-
tain-home, and meet that divine child going along his
happy smiling way, garnering unconsciously in his in-

J86 ^^^ CHILD OF VRBINO.

FaDt soul all the beautiful sights and sounds aroand
him, to give them in his manhood to the world.

'' Let him alone : he will paint all this some daj/'
said his wise father, who loved to think that his brushes
and his colors would pass in time to Raffaelle, whose
hands would be stronger to hold them than his own
had Ijeen. And, whether he would ever paint it or
not, the child never tired of thus looking from his eyrie
on the rocks and counting all that passed below through
the blowing corn under the leafy orchard boughs.

There were so many things to see in Urbino in that
time, looking so over the vast green valley below : a
clump of spears, most likely, as men-at-arms rode
through the trees ; a string of market-folk bringing in
the produce of the orchards or the fields; perchance
a red-robed cardinal on a white mule with glittering
housings, behind him a sumpter train rich with bag-
gage, furniture, g >ld and silver plate; maybe the duke's
hunting-party going out or coming homeward with
caracoling steeds, beautiful hounds straining at their
leash, hunting-horns sounding merrily over the green
country; maybe a band of free lances, with plumes
tossing, steel glancing, bannerets fluttering against the
sky ; or maybe a quiet gray-robed string of monks or
pilgrims singing the hymn sung before Jerusalem,
treading the long lush grass with sandalled feet, com-
ing towards the city, to crowd slowly and gladly up its
rocky height. Do you not wish with me you could
stand in the window with Raffaelle to see the earth as
it was then ?

No doubt the good folks of Urbino laughed at him
often for a little moonstruck droamer, so many hours

THE CHILD OF URBINO, 137

did he stand looking, looking, — only looking, — ^as eyes
have a right to do that see well and not altogether aA
others see.

Happily for hira, the days of his childhood were
times of peace, and he did not behold, as his father had
done, the torches light up the street and the flames
^evou^ the homesteads.

At this time Urbino was growing into fame for its
pottery-work : those big dishes and bowls, those mar-
riage-plates and pharmacy-jars, which it made, were
beginning to rival the products of its neighbor Gubbio,
and when its duke wished to send a bridal gift, or a
present on other festal occasions, he oftenest chose some
service or some rare platter of his own Urbino ware.
Now, pottery had not then taken the high place among
the arts of Italy that it was destined very soon to do.
As you will learn when you are older, after the Greeks
and the Christians had exhausted all that was beautiful
in sha|>e and substance of clay vases, the art seemed to
die out, and the potters and the pottery-painters die<l
with it, or at any rate went to sleep for a great many
centuries, whilst soldiers and prelates, nobles and mer-
cenaries, were trampling to and fro all over the land and
disputing it, and carrying fire and torch, steel and des-
olation, with them in their quarrels and covetousness.
But now, the reign of the late good duke, great Fede-
rigo, having been favorable to the Marches (as we call
his province now), the potters and pottery-painters, with
other gentle craftsmen, had begun to look up again,
and the beneficent fires of their humble ovens had be-
gun to burn in Castel Durante, in Pesaro, in Faenza,
in Gubbio, and in Urbino itgelf. The great days had

138 ^^J^ CHILD OF URBINO.

Dot yet come : Maestro Giorgio was bnt a youngster,
and Orazio Fontane not born, nor the clever baker
Prestino either, nor the famous Fra Xanto ; but there
was a Don Giorgio even then in Gubbio, of whose
work, alas I one plate now at the Louvre is all we have ;
and here in the ducal city on the hill rich and noble
tilings were already being made in the stout and lustrous
majolica that was destined to acquire later on so wide a
ceramic fame. Jars and bowls and platters^ oval dishes
and ewers and basins^ and big>bodied, metal-welded
pharmacy-vases were all made and painted at Urbino
whilst Raffaelle Sanzio was running about on rosy in-
fantine feet. There was a master-potter of the Monte-
felt ro at that time, one Maestro Benedetto Bonconi^
whose name had not become world-renowned as Orazio
Fontanels and Maestro Giorgio's did in the following
century, yet who in that day enjoyed the honor of all
the duchy, and did things very rare and fine in the
Urbino ware. He lived within a stone^s throw of
Giovanni Sanzio, and was a gray-haired, handsome,
somewhat stern and pompous man, now more than
middle-aged, who had one beauteous daughter, by
name Pacifica. He cherished Pacifica well, but not
so well as he cherished the things he wrought, — the
deep round nuptial plates and oval massive dishes that
he painted with Scriptural stories and strange devices,
and landscapes such as those he saw around, and flow-
ing scrolls with Latin mottoes in black letters, and
which, when ihus painted, he consigned with an anx-
iously-beating heart to the trial of the ovens, and
which sometimes came forth from the trial all cracked
and bluired and marred, and sometimes emerged in

THE CHILD OF URBINO, 139

triumph and carae into his trembling hands iridescent
and lovely with those lustrous and opaline hues which
we admire in them to this day as the especial glory o^
majolica.

Maestro Benedetto was an ambitious and vain maui
and had had a hard^ laborious manhood^ working at
his potter's wheel and painter's brush before Urbino
ware was prized in Italy or even in the duchy. Now,
indeed, he was esteemed at his due worth, and his work
was so also, and he was passably ricli, and known as
a good artist beyond the Marches; but there was a
younger man over at Gubbio, the Don Giorgio who
was precursor of unequalled Maestro Giorgio Andreoli,
who surpassed him, and made him sleep o' nights on
thorns, as envy makes all those to do who take her as
their bedfellow.

The house of Maestro Benedetto was a long stone
building, with a loggia at the back all overclimbed
by hardy rose-trees, and looking on a garden that was
more than half an orchard, and in which grew abun-
dantly pear-trees, plum-trees, and wood strawberries.
The lancet windows of his workshop looked on all
this quiet greenery. There were so many such pleas-
ant workshops then in the land,— calm, godly, home-
like places, filled from without with song of birds and
scent of herbs and blossoms. Nowadays men work in
crowded, stinking cities, in close factory chambers; and
their work is barren as their lives are.

The little son of neighbor Sanzio ran in and out this
bigger, wider house and garden of Maestro Benedetto
at his pleasure, for the maiden Pacifica was always
((lad to see him, and even the sombre master-2)otter

140 ^H» CHILD OF VRBINO.

would unbend to him and show him how to lay thfl
color on to the tremulous fugitive unbaked biscuit.

Pacifica was a lovely young woman of some seven-
teen or eighteen summers ; and perhaps Rafiaelle was
but remembering her when he painted in his after-
years the face of his Madonna di San Sisto. He loved
her as he loved everything that was beautiful and every
one who was kind; and almost better than his own
beloved father's studio^ almost better than his dear old
grandsire's cheerful little shop, did he love this grave,
silent, sweet-smellingy sun-pierced, shadowy old house
of Maestro Benedetto.

Maestro Benedetto had four apprentices or pupils
in that time learning to become figvliy but the one
whom Rafiaelle liked the most (and Pacifica too) was
one Luca Torelli, of a village above in the mountains,
— ^a youth with a noble dark pensive beauty of his own,
and a fearless gait, and a supple, tall, slender figure
that would have looked well in the light coat of mail
and silken doublet of a man-at-arms. In sooth, the
spirit of Messer Luca was more made for war and its
risks and glories than for the wheel and the brush of
the bottega ; but he had loved Pacifica ever since he
had come down one careless holy-day into Urbino,
and had bound himself to her father's service in a
heedless moment of eagerness to breathe the same air
and dwell under the same roof as she did. He had
gained little for his pains : to see her at mass and at
meal-times, now and then tc» be allowed to bring water
from the well for her or feed her pigeons, to see her
gray gown go down between the orchard trees and
catch the sunlight, to hear tlie hum of her spinning-

THE CHILD OF URBINO. 141

wheel, the thrum of her viol, — this was the utteimoBi
he got of joy in two long years ; and how he envied
BaSaelle running along the stone floor of the loggia
to leap into her arms, to hang upon her skirts, to pick
the sumiuer fruit with her, and sort with her the
autumn herbs for drying I

" I love Pacifica I'^ he would say, with a groan, to
Raffaelle ; and Raffaelle would say, with a smile, '^Ah,
Luca, so do 1 1"

^^ It is not the same thing, my dear,'' sighed Luca ;
" I want her for my wife,''

" I shall have no wife ; I shall marry myself to
painting," said Raffaelle, with a little grave wise face
looking out from under the golden roof of his fair hair.
For he was never tired of watching his father painting
the saints with their branch of palm on their ground
of blue or of gold, or Maestro Benedetto making the
dull clay glow with angels' wings and prophets' robes
and holy legends told in color.

Now, one day as Raffaelle was standing and look-
ing thus at his favorite window in the potter's house,
his friend the handsome, black-browed Luca, who
was also standing there, did sigh so deeply and so
deplorably that the child was startled from his
dreams.

" Gkxxl Luca, what ails you ?" he murmured, wind-
ing his arms about the young man's knees.

"Oh, 'Faellol" mourned the apprentice, woefully.
'* Here is such a chance to win the hand of Pacifica if
only I had talent, — such talent as that Giorgio of
Gubbio has I If the good Lord had only gifted me
with a master'B skill, instead of all this bodily strength

142 ^^^ CHILD OF URBINO.

and sineWy like a wild hog of the woods, which availi
me nothing here I"

^^ What chance is it?*' asked Rafiaelle, ^'and what is
there new about Pacifica? She told me nothing, and
I was with her an hour/^

'^ Dear simple one, she knows nothing of it/' said
Luca, heaving another tremendous sigh from his heart's
deepest depths. "You must know that a new order
has come in this very forenoon from the duke; he
wishes a dish and a jar of the very finest and firmest
majolica to be painted with the story of Esther, and
made ready in three months from this date, to then go
as his gifts to his cousins of Gonzaga. He has ordered
that no cost be spared in the work, but that the painting
thereof be of the best that can be produced, and the
prize he will give is fifty scudi. Now, Maestro Bene-
detto, having known some time, it seems, of this order,
has had made in readiness several large oval dishes and
beautiful big-bellied jars : he gives one of each to each
of his pupils, — to myself, to Berengario, to Tito, and
Zenone. The master is sorely distraught that his eye-
sight permits him not himself to execute the duke's
commands ; but it is no secret that should one of us be
so fortunate as to win the dukie's approbation, the
painter who does so shall become his partner here and
shall have the hand of Pacifica. Some say that he has
only put forth this promise as a stimulus to get the best
work done of which his bottega is capable ; but I know
Maestro Benedetto too well to deem him guilty of any
such evasion. What he has said he will carry out; if
the vase and the dish win the duke's praise, they will
also win Pacifica. Now you see, 'Faello mine, why I

THE CHILD OF URBINO 143

am so bitterly sad of hearty for I am a good craftsman
enough at the wheel and the fumaoe, and I like not ill
the handling and the moulding of the clay, but at the
painting of the clay I am but a tyro, and Berengario or
even the little Zenone will beat me ; of that I am sure/^

Raffaelle heard all this in silence^ leaning his elbows
on his friend's knee^ and his chin on the palms of his
own hands. He knew that the other pupils were bet-
ter painters by far than his Luca, though not one of
them was such a good-hearted or noble-looking youth,
and for none of them did the maiden Pacifica care.

" How long a time is given for the jar and the dish
to be ready ?" he asked, at length.

" Three months, my dear,'' said Luca, with a sigh
sadder than ever. " But if it were three years, what
difference would it make ? You cannot cudgel the di-
vine grace of art into a man with blows as you cudgel
speed into a mule, and I shall be a dolt at the end of
the time as I am now. What said your good father to
me but yesternight ? — ^and he is good to me and does
not despise me. He said, ^ Luca, my son, it is of no
more avail for you to sigh for Pacifica than for the
moon. Were she mine I would give her to you, for
you have a heart of gold, but Signor Benedetto will
not; for never, I fear me, will you be able to decorate
anything more than an apothecarjr's mortar or a barber's
basin. If I hurt you, take it not ill ; I mean kind-
ness, and were I a stalwart youth like you I would go
try my fortunes in the Free Companies in France or
Spain, or down in Rome, for you are made for a sol-
dier.' That was the best even your father oould say
for me, 'Faello."

144 THE CHILD OF URBJNO.

"But Pacifica/* said the child^ — " Padfioa would not
frish you to join the Free Companies V^

" God- knows/' said Luca^ hopelessly. " Perhaps she
would not care.''

" I am sure she would/' said Rafiaelle^ "for she does
love you^ Luca, though she cannot say so^ being but a
girl, and Signor Benedetto against you. But that red-
cap you tamed for her, how she loves it, how she ca-
resses it, and half is for you, Luca, half for the bird I"

Luca kissed him.

But the tears rolled down the poor youth's face, for
he was much in earnest and filled with despair.

" Even if she did, if she do," he murmured, hope-
lessly, "she never will let me know it, since her father
forbids a thought of me ; and now here is this trial of
skill at the duke's order come to make things worse,
and if that swaggering Berengario of Fano win her,
then truly will I join the free lances and pray heaven
send me swift shrive and shroud."

Raffaelle was very pensive for a while; then he
raised his head and said, —

" I have thought of something, Luca. But I do not
know whether you will let me try it."

"You angel child I What would your old Luca
deny to you ? But as for helping me, my dear, put
that thought out of your little mind forever, for no
one can help me, 'Faello, not the saints themselves,
since I was born a dolt I"

Baffaelle kissed him, and said, " Now listen I"

A few days later Signor Benedetto informed his
pupils in ceremonious audience of the duke's command
and of his own intentions ; he did not pronounce his

THE CHILD OF URBINO. 145

daughter's name to the youths, but he spoke in terms
that were clear enough to assure them that whoever
had the good fortune and high merit to gain the duke's
choice of his pottety should have the honor of be-
coming associate in his own famous bott^a. Now^ it
had been known in Urbino ever since Pacifica had
gone to her first communion that whoever pleased her
father well enough to become his partner would have
also to please her as her husband. Not much atten-
tion was given to maidens' wishes in those times^ and
no one tliought the master-potter either unjust or cruel
in thus suiting himself before he suited his daughter.
And what made the hearts of all the young men quake
and sink the lowest was the fact that Signor Benedetto
offered the competition not only to his own appren-
tices but to any native of the duchy of Urbino. For
who could tell what hero might not step forth from
obscurity and gain the great prize of this fair hand of
Pacifica's? And with her hand would go many a
broad gold ducat, and heritage of the wide old gray
stone house, and many an old jewel and old brocade
that were kept there in dusky sweet-smelling cabinets,
and also more than one good piece of land, smiling
with corn and fruit-trees, outside the gates in the lower
pastures to the westward.

Luoai indeed, never thought of these things, but the
other three pupils did, and other youths as well. Had
it not been for the limitation as to birth within the
duchy, many a gallant young painter from the other
side of the Apennines, many a lusty vasaMno or ioooo-
Kno from the workshops of fair Florence herself, or
from the Lombard cities, might have travelled there

146 MTE CHILD OF URBINO.

in hot haste as fast as horses could cany tbeniy and
come to paint the clay for the sake of so precious a
recompense. But Urbino men they had to be; and
poor Luca, who was so full of despair that he could
almost have thrown himself headlong from the i*ocks,
was thankful to destiny for even so much slender
mercy as this^ — ^that the number of his rivals was
limited.

" Had I been you/' Giovanni Sanzio ventured once
to say respectfully to Signer Benedetto, '* I think I
should have picked out for my son-in-law the best
youth that I knew^ not the best painter ; for be it said
in all reverence, my friend, the greatest artist is not
always the truest man, and by the hearthstone humble
virtues have sometimes high claim.''

Then Signer Benedetto had set his stern face like a
flint, knowing very well what youth Messer Giovanni
would have liked to name to him.

" I have need of a good artist in my bottega to keep
up its fame,'' he had said, stiffly. " My vision is not
what it was, and I should be loath to see Urbino ware
fall back, whilst Pesaro and Gubbio and Castel-Durante
gain ground every day. Pacifica must pay the penalty,
if penalty there be, for being the daughter of a great
artist."

Mirthful, keen-witted Sanzio smiled to himself, and
went his way in silence; for he who loved Andrea
Mantegna did not bow down in homage before the
old master-potter's estimation of himself, which was in
truth somewhat overweening in its vanity.

" Poor Pacifica I" he thought : " if only my 'Faello
were but some decade old» !"

THE CHILD OF URBINO. 147

He, who could not foresee the future, the splendid,
wondrous, unequalled future that awaited his young
son, wished nothing better for him than a peaceful
painter's life here in old Urbino, under the friendly
shadow of the Montefeltro's palace-walls.

Meanwhile, where think you was Raffaelle ? Half
tije day, or all the day, and every day whenever he
could? Where think you was he? Well, in the attic
of Luca, before a bowl and a dish almost as big as
himself. The attic was a breezy, naked place, under-
neath the arches supporting the roof of Maestro Bene-
detto's dwelling. Each pupil had one of these garrets
to himself, — a rare boon, for which Luca came to be
very thankful, for without it he could not have shel-
tered his angel ; and the secret that Radaelle had whis-
pered to him that day of the first conference had been,
" Let me try and paint it !"

For a long time Luca had been afraid to comply,
had only forborne indeed from utter laughter at the
idea from his love and reverence for the little speaker.
Baby Sanzio, who was only just seven years old as the
April tulips reddened the corn, painting a majolica
dish and vase to go to the Gonzaga of Mantua I The
good fellow could scarcely restrain his shouts of mirth
at the audacious fancy; and nothing had kept him
grave but the sight of that most serious face of Bafia-
elle, looking up to his with serene, sublime self-confi-
dence, nay, perhaps, rather, confidence in heaven and
in heaven's gifts.

" Let me try !" said the child a hundred times. Hp
would tell no one, only Luca would know ; and if be
failed — well, there would oiily l)e the spoiled pottery

148 TBE CHILD or URBINO.

to pay for, and had he not two whole duoatB that the
duke had given him when the court had oome to be-
hold his father's designs for the altar-fresooes at San
Dominico di Cagli ?

So utterly in earnest was he^ and so intense and blank
was Luca's absolute despair, that the young man had
in turn given way to his entreaties. " Never can I do
aught," he thought, bitterly, looking at his own clumsy
designs. '^ And sometimes by the help of cherubs the
saints work miracles."

^^ It will be no miracle," said Rafiaelle, hearing him
murmur this : " it will be myself, and that which the
dear God has put into me."

From that hour Luca let him do what he would, and
through all these lovely early summer dayB the child
came and shut himself up in the garret, and studied,
and thought, and worked, and knitted his pretty fair
brows, and smiled in tranquil satisfaction, according to
the mood he was in and the progress of his labors.

Giovanni Sanzio went away at that time to paint an
altar-piece over at Citt^ di Castello, and his little son
for once was glad he was absent. Messer Giovanni
would surely have remarked the long and frequent
visits of Raffaelle to the attic, and would, in all like-
lihood, have obliged him to pore over his liatin or to
take exercise in the open fields ; but his mother said
nothing, content that he should be amused and safe,
and knowing well that Paeifica loved him and would
let him come to no harm under her roof. Paeifica her-
self did wonder that he deserted her so perpetually for
the garret. But one day when she questioned him the
4weet-faoed rogue clung to her and murmured^ ^'Ob

TBB CHILD OF VRBINO. 149

Pacifica^ I do want Luca to win yon^ because he loves
you so ; and I do love you both !'^ And she grew
pale, and answered him^ '^ Ah^ dear, if he could I'^ and
then said never a word more, but went to her distaff;
and Kaffaelle saw great tears fall off her lashes down
among the flax.

She thought he went to the attic to watch how Luca
painted, and loved him more than ever for that, but
knew in the hopelessness of her heart — as Luca also
knew it in his — that the good and gallant youth would
never be able to create anything that would go as the
duke's gifts to the Gonzaga of Mantua. And she did
care for Lucat She had spoken to him but rarely
indeed, yet passing in and out of the same doors, and
going to the same church offices, and dwelling always
beneath the same roof, he had found means of late for
a word, a flower, a serenade. And he was so hand-
some and so brave, and so gentle, too, and so full
of deference. Poor Pacifica cared not in the least
whether he could paint or not. He could have made
her happy.

In the attic Raffaelle passed the most anxious hours
of all his sunny little life. He would not allow Luca
even to look at what he did. He barred the door and
worked ; when he went away he locked his work up
in a wardrobe. The swallows came in and out of the
nnglazed window, and fluttered all around him ; the
morning sunbeams came in too, and made a nimbus
round his golden head, like that which his father gilded
above the heads of saints. Eaffaelle worked on, not
looking off, though clanc^ of trumpet, or fanfare of
cymbal, often told him there was much going on wortli

150 ^^^ VHILD OF URBINO

looking at down below. He was only seven years old,
but he labored as earnestly as if he were a man grown,
his little rosy fingers gripping that pencil which was to
make him in life and death famous as kings are not
famous, and let his tender body lie in its last sleep in
the Pantlieon of Rome.

He had covered hundreds of sheets with designs be-
fore he had succeeded in getting embodied the ideas
that liaunted him. When he had pleased himself at
last, he sec to work to transfer his imaginations to the
clay in color in the subtile luminous metallic enamel
that characterizes Urbino majolica.

Ah, how glad he was now that his father had let
him draw from the time he was two years old, and
that of late Messer Benedetto had shown him some-
thing of the mysteries of painting on biscuit and pro-
ducing the metallic lustre which was the especial glory
of the pottery of the duchy !

How glad he was, and how his little heart bounded
and seemed to sing in this his first enjoyment of. the
joyous liberties and powers of creative work !

A well-known writer has said that genius is the
power of taking pains; he should have said rather
that genius has this power also, but that first and fore-
most it possesses the power of spontaneous and exqui-
site production without effort and with delight.

Luca looked at him (not at his work, for the child
had made him promise not to do so) and began to
marvel at his absorption, his intentness, the evident
facility with which he worked : the little figure, lean-
ing over the great dish on the bare board of the table,
with the oval opening of the window and the blue sky

THE CHILD OF URBINO. 151

beyond it, b^an to grow sacred to him with more than
the sanctity of childhood. Raffaelle's face grew very
serious, too, and lost its color, and his large hazel eyes
lool^ed very big and grave and dark,

'^ Perhaps Signor Giovanni will be angry with me if
ever he know,^^ thought poor Luca; but it was too late
to alter anything now. The child Sanzio had become
his master.

So Raffaelle, unknown to any one else, worked on
and on there in the attic while the tulips bloomed and
withered, and the honeysuckle was in flower in the
hedges, and the wheat and barley were being cut in
the quiet fields lying far down below in the sunshine.
For midsummer was come ; the three months all but a
week had passed by. It was known that every one
was ready to compete for the duke's choice.

One afternoon Raffaelle took Luca by the hand and
said to him, "Come."

He led the young man up to the table, beneath the
unglazed window, where he had passed so many of
these ninety days of the spring and summer.

Luca gave a great cry, and stood gazing, gazing,
gazing. Then he fell on his knees and embraced the
little feet of the child : it was the first homage that
he, whose life became one beautiful song of praise, re-
ceived from man.

" Dear Luca," he said, softly, " do not do that. K
it be indeed good, let us thank Grod."

What his friend saw were the great oval dish and
tlie great jar or vase standing with the sunbeams full
upon them, and the brushes and the tools and the
(^ors all strewn around. And they shone with lustrous

152 THE CHILD OF URBJNO.

opaline haes and wondrous flame-like glories and gleam«
ing iridesoence, like melted jewels^ and there were all
manner of graceful symbols and classic designs wrought
upon them; and their borders were garlanded with
cherubs and flowers, bearing the arms of Montefeltro,
and the landscapes were the tender, homely landscapes
round about Urbino; and the mountains had the
solemn radiance that the Apennines wore at evening-
time, and amidst the figures there was one supreme,
white-robed, golden-crowned Esther, to whom the
child painter had given the face of Pacifica. And this
wondrous creation, wrought by a baby's hand, had
safely and secretly passed the ordeal of the furnace^
and had come forth without spot or flaw.

Luca ceased not from kneeling at the feet of Baf-
faelle, as ever since has kneeled the world.

" Oh, wondrous boy ! Oh, angel sent unto men V^
sighed the poor 'prentice, as he gazed ; and his heart
was so full that he burst into tears.

"Let us thank God," said little Raflaelle, again;
and he joined his small hands that had wrought this
miracle, and said his Laus Domini.

When the precious jar and the great platter were
removed to the wardrobe and shut up in safely behind
the steel wards of the locker, Luca said, timidly, feeling
twenty years in age behind the wisdom of this divine
child, " But, dearest boy, I do not see how your marvel-
lous and most exquisite accomplishment can advan-
tage me. Even if you would allow it to pass as mine, I
could ntrt accept such a thing : it would be a fraud, a
shame : not even to win Pacifica could I consent."

**Be not so hasty, good friend," said Raffaellei

f^E CHILD OF URSINO. I53

'^ Wait just a little longer yet and see. I have mj
own idea. Do trust in me.''

'^ Heaven speaks in you^ that I believe/' said Luca,
humbly.

Raffaelle answered not^ but ran down-stairs^ and
passing Pacifica, threw his arms about her in more
than his usual affectionate caresses.

"Pacifica, be of good heart," he murmured, and
would not be questioned, but ran homeward to his
mother.

^^Can it be that Luca has done well," thought
Pacifica ; but she feared the child's wishes had outrun
his wisdom. He could not be any judge, a child of
seven years, even though he were the son of that good
and honest painter and poet, Giovanni Sanzio.

The next morning was midsummer day. Now, the
pottery was all to be placed on this forenoon in the
bottega of Signer Benedetto; and the Duke Guido-
baldo was then to come and make his choice from
amidst them ; and the master-potter, a little because he
was a courtier, and more because he liked to affect a
mighty indifference and to show he had no favoritism,
had declared that he would not himself see the com-
peting works of art until the eyes of the Lord of
Montefeltro also fell upon them.

As for Pacifica, she had locked herself in her chamber,
alone with her i jtense agitation. The young men were
swaggering about, and taunting each other, and boast-
ing. Luca alone sat apart, thrumming an old lute,
Giovanni Sanzio, who had ridden home at evening
from Citt^ di Castello, came in from his own house
and put his hand on the youth's shoulder.

154 ^^^ CHILD OF URBtNO.

^ I hear the Pesaro men have brought fine things.
Take courage, my lad. Maybe we can entreat tht
duke to dissuade Pacifica's father from this tyrannous
disposal of her hand."

Luca shook his head wearily.

There would be one beautiful thing there, indeed,
he knew; but what use would that be to him?

"The child — the child " he stammered, and

then remembered that he must not disclose Raffaelle's
secret.

" My child V' said Signor Giovanni. " Oh, he will
be here ; he will be sure to be here : wherever there is
a painted thing to be seen, there always, be sure, is
Raffaelle."

Then the good man sauntered within from the loggia,
to exchange sahitations with Ser Benedetto, who, in a
suit of fine crimson with doublet of sad-colored velvet,
was standing ready to advance bare-headed into the
street as soon as the hoofs of the duke's charger should
strike on the stones.

" You must be anxious in your thoughts,'* said
Signor Giovanni to him. "They say a youth from
Pesaro brings something fine : if you should find your-
self bound to take a stranger into your work-room and
your home "

* If he be a man of genius he will be welcome,*'
answered Messer Ronconi, pompously. "Be he of
Pesaro, or of Fano, or of Castel-Durante, I go not
back from my word: I keep my word, to my own
hindrance even, ever."

" Let us hope it will bring you only joy and triumph
here," said his neighbor, who knew him to be an honesi

THE CHILD OF URBINO, 155

maa and a true, if over-obstinate and too vain of his
own place in Urbino.

" Our lord the duke !" shouted the people standing
in the street; and Ser Benedetto walked out with
stately tread to receive the honor of his master's visit
to his bottega.

Raffaelle slipped noiselessly up to his father's side^
and slid his little hand into Sanzio's.

*'You are not surely afraid of our good Guido-
baldo !" said his father, with a laugh and some little
surprise, for Raffaelle was very pale, and his lower lip
trembled a little.

" No," said the child, simply.

The young duke and his court came riding down the
street, and paused before the old stone house of the
master-potter, — splendid gentlemen, though only in
their morning apparel, with noble Barbary steeds fret-
ting under them, and little pages and liveried varlete
about their steps. Usually, unless he went hunting or
on a visit to some noble, Guidobaldo, like his father,
walked about Urbino like any one of his citizens ; but
he knew the pompous and somewhat vainglorious
temper of Messer Benedetto, and good-naturedly was
willing to humor its harmless vanities. Bowing to the
ground, the master-potter led the way, walking back-
ward into his bottega; the courtiers followed their
prince; Giovanni Sanzio with his little son and a few
other privileged persons went in also at due distance.
At the farther end of the workshop stood the pupils and
the artists from Pesaro and other places in the duchy
whose works were there in competition. In all there
were some ten competitors : poor Luca, who had set

156 ^SB CHILD OF URBINO.

•

his own work on the table with the rest as he wa«
oUiged to do^ stood hindmost of all, shrinking baok|
to hide his misery^ into the deepest shadow of the
deep-bayed latticed window.

On the narrow deal benches that served aa tables
on working-days to the pottery-painters were ranged
the dishes and the jars, with a number attached to
each, — ^no name to any, because Signer Benedetto was
resolute to prove his own absolute disinterestedness in
the matter of choice: he wished for the best artist.
Prince Guidobaldo, doffing his plumed cap courteouslyi
walked down the long room and examined eadi pro-
duction in its turn. On the whole, the collection made
a brave display of majolica, though he was perhaps a
little disappointed at the result in each individual case,
for he had wanted something out of the common run
and absolutely perfect Still, with fair words he com-
plimented Signer Benedetto on the brave show, and
only before the work of poor Luca was he entirely
silent, since indeed silence was the greatest kindness
he could show to it : the drawing was bold and r^n-
lar, but the coloring was hopelessly crude, glaring, and
ill-disposed.

At last, before a vase and a dish that stood modestly
at the very farthest end of the deal bench, the duke
gave a sudden exclamation of delight, and Signer
Benedetto grew crimson with pleasure and surprise,
and Giovanni Sanzio pressed a little nearer and tried
to see over the shoulders of the gentlemen of the
court, feeling sure that something rare and beautiful
must have called forth that cry of wonder from the
Lord of Moatefeltro, and having seen at a glance

THE CHILD OF URBINO. 157

that for his poor friend Luca there was no sort of
hope.

^^ This is beyond all comparison/^ said Guidobaldo,
taking the great oval dish up reverently in his hands.
" Maestro Benedetto, I do felicitate you indeed that you
should possess such a pupil. He will be a glory to our
beloved Urbino.*'

" It is indeed most excellent work, my lord duke,''
said the master-potter, who was trembling with surprise
and dared not show all the astonishment and emotion
that he felt at the discovery of so exquisite a creation
in his bottega. " It must be," he added, for he was
a very honest man, *^ the work of one of the lads of
Pesaro or Castel-Durante. I have no such craftsman
in my workshop. It is beautiful exceedingly T'

" It is worth its weight in gold !" said the prince,
sharing his emotion. " Look, gentlemen — look ! Will
not the fame of Urbino be borne beyond the Apennines
and Alps?"

Thus summoned, the court and the citizens came to
look, and averred that truly never in Urbino had they
seen such painting on majolica.

" But whose is it ?" said Guidobaldo, impatiently,
casting his eyes over the gathered group in the back-
ground of apprentices and artists. '^Maestro Bene-
detto, I pray you, the name of the artist ; I pray you,
quick !"

" It is marked number eleven, my lord," answered
the master-potter. " Ho, you who reply to that num-
ber, stand out and give your name. My lord duke hati
chosen your work. Ho, there ! do you hear me ?"

But not one of the group moved. The young men

158

THE CHILD OF URBINO.

looked from one to another. Who was this nameless
rival ? There were but ten of themselves.

"Ho, there!" repeated Signor Benedetto, getting
angry. " Cannot yon find a tongue, I say? Who has
wrought this work? Silenoe is but insolence to his
highness and to me !"

Then the child Sanzio loosened his little hand from
his father's hold, and went forward, and stood before
the master-potter.

"I painted it,'* he said, with a pleased smile: "I,
Eaffaelle."

Can you not fancy, without telling, the confosion,
the wonder, the rapture, the incredulity, the questions,
the wild ecstasy of praise, that followed on the discov-
ery of the child artist ? Only the presence of Guido-
baklo kept it in anything like decent quietude, and
even he, all duke though he was, felt his eyes wet and
felt his heart swell ; for he himself was childless, and
for the joy that Giovanni Sanzio felt that day he would
have given his patrimony and duchy.

He took a jewel hung on a gold chain from his own
breast and threw it over Raffaelle's shoulders.

" There is your first guerdon," he said : "you will
have many, O wondrous child, who shall live when we
are dust!"

Raflfaelle, who himself was all the while quite tran-
quil and unmoved, kissed the duke's hand with sweetest
grace, then turned to his own father.

" It is true I have won my lord duke's prize ?"

" Quite true, my angel !" said Giovanni Sanzio, with
trenuilous voice.

Rafiaelle lo<>ked up at Maestro Benedetto.

THE CHILD OF URBINO. 359

•* Then I claim the hand of Pacifica I"

There was a smile on all the faces round, even 011
the darker countenances of the vanquished painters.

" Oh, would indeed you were of age to be my son by
marriage, as you are the son of my heart !" murmured
Signer Benedetto. " Dear and marvellous child, you
are but jesting, I know. Tell me what it is indeed
that you would have. I could deny you nothing ; and
truly it is you who are my master,"

" I am your pupil," said Eaffaelle, with that pretty
serious smile of his, his little fingers playing with the
ducal jewel. " I could never have painted that majol-
ica yonder had you not taught me the secrets and man-
agement of your colors. Now, dear maestro mine, and
you, O my lord duke, do hear me ! I by the terms of
the contest have won the hand of Pacifica and the right
of association with Messer Ronconi. I take these rights
and I give them over to my dear friend Luca of Fano,
because he is the honestest man in all the world, and
does honor Signor Benedetto and love Pacifica as no
other can do so well, and Pacifica loves him ; and my
lord duke will say that thus all will be well."

So with the grave innocent audacity of a child he
spoke, — this seven-year-old painter who was greater
than any there.

Signor Benedetto stood mute, sombre, agitated. Luca
had sprung forward and dropped on one knee : he was
as pale as ashes. Kafiaelle looked at him with a smile.

**My lord duke," he said, with his little gentle
smile, " you have chosen my work ; defend me in my
rights."

^'Listen to the voice of an angel, my good Ben

IgO THE CHILD OF VRBINO.

edetto; heaven speaks by him/' said Ghiidobaldo^
gravely, laying his hand on the arm of his master-
potter.

Harsh Signor Benedetto burst into tears.

'^I oan refuse him nothing/' he said^ with a sob.
^ He will give such glory unto Urbino as never the
world hath seen I"

''And call down this fair Pacifica whom Bafikelle
nas won/' said the sovereign of the duchy, "and I
will give her myself as her dower as many gold pieces
as we can cram into this famous vase. An honest
youth who loves her i^nd whom she loves, — what
better can you do, Benedetto? Young man, rise up
and be happy. An angel has descended on earth tltis
day for you."

But Luca heard not: he was still kneeling al the
Teet of Raffiielle, where the world has knelt aver

MELEAGRIS GALLOPAVO

'■I

I

ll'

■4

I '

II

■■||

LT

r

MELEAGRIS GALLOPAVO.

A. TURKEY stood on a wall and saw a drove of black
and gray pigs go by on the high-road underneath. The
turkey was a very handsome gobbler, and his plumage
was of the most brilliant gray and white, and his
wattles were of the red of the carnation or the rose.
He was very proud, and as he looked down on the pigs
he stuck up his tail peacock-wise and fanned the air
with it, and strutted up and down on the stone ledge,
and said to himself, "What poor, dusty, hard-driven
drudges those are* in the road there ! And not a single
feather upon them ! Nothing to cover their bodies ex-
cept a few dingy-looking hairs ! And they can only
make an odd snuffing noise instead of gobbling ! What
a contemptible grunting; and grumbling ! And then
what a tail ! — a wisp of rope would be better !"

Then he spread his own tail higher and higher and
broader and broader, just to show the pigs what a tail
could be; and he gobbled loudly, that they might
know what intelligible and melodious speech was like.

The poor pigs went snuffling and shuffling along
in tlie mud and stones beneath the wall, and were
driven into the straw-yard of the turkey's own farm-
house.

Next morning, lo! the turkey was put in a coop

163

164 MELEAQRIS QALLOPAVO.

and was oarried off to market, with a number of ducks
and geese and cackling pullets, and who should be next
to him but a poor gray pig, with his heels tied together
so that he could not stir.

'^ What a wretched creature !" said the turkey in its
pride, for the coop had not taken down its vanity one
peg. '^ What a sorry animal ! and such a tail ! Of
course they are going to cut his throat. As for me,
this is a throne : I suppose I am going to the palace.
Perhaps the queen has never seen a beautiful turkey
before.''

Then he began again to spread out his tail-plume
and shake his rosy wattles, and began to gobble, gobble,
gobble with all his might. But the cart gave a lurch
and the coop tilted on one side, and the turkey tilted
up with it and lost his balance.

" Dear me ! what a price one pays for being of high
rank in this world !" he said to himself, as he clung to
the side of the wicker-work and tried to preserve his
dignity.

The poultry were all in flat baskets, and so were the
geese and the ducks.

" He'll be fine for killing three months hence, ma'am !"
his driver was saying, as he stopped the cart and held
up the coop to show our gentleman to a woman who
stood on the curbstone.

" For killing !" echoed the turkey ; and he swooned
away, and fell in a heap of ruffled feathers on the
bottom of the wicker-work prison.

For death had never occurred to him as a possible
fate for himself, though he saw other creatures go daily
to martyrdom.

MELEAQRIS GALLOP AVO. 165

" You will be sooner or later killed, just as I shall
be/' said the pig, with a grunt, as the turkey came tc
itself. *' What do you suppose they fatten you for ?
For love of you? Ough ! you silly vain thing !"

" I thought it was because — because — because I am
a turkey I'' sighed the poor prisoner in the coop.

" Because you are a turkey I*' echoed the pig. " As
if there were not five hundred thousand turkejrs in the
world ! That is all. You will be before Christmas
just as I shall be : a knife will slit your throat."

The poor turkey swooned again on hearing this, and
did not recover so rapidly as before : therefore the cart
had jolted on again and was standing in the market-
place, with the horses out of the shafts, before he
opened his eyes and regained his consciousness.

The master of the cart was away from it, and it had
been unpacked of most of its contents, and the pig
and the turkey were left alone.

Suddenly the pig gave a grunt, and the turkey
started, for his nerves were on edge and the least thing
frightened him.

" What a hideous voice you have !" he said, pettishly.
" You should hear mt V^

And he began to gobble with all his might.

" I don't see that your noise is a bit prettier than
ihine,'' said the pig. " But it is very silly to lose youi
time squabbling about voices. We could get out if
you would help me a little.''

The turkey was silent.

To get out would be delightful; but to go into
partnership with piggy hurt his pride so much that he
would not even ask in what way escape could be

166 MELEAQRIS QALLOPAVO.

accomplished. But the pig was in too much haste and
too much in earnest to staud upon etiquette.

" I can get my snout to your coop/' he said, eagerly ;
" and I will gnaw it asunder — it's nothing but wicker
— if you will promise to peck my cords to pieces when
you are out. Now, don't you see what I meany

The turkey was so enraptured that his pride all
tumbled down like a broken egg, and his wings began
to flap in a tremendous flurry.

" Make haste ! make haste !" he cried, and gobbled
till he was red in the face.

" Don't make such a noise, or they'll hear you," said
the i)ig, getting his teeth well on to the wicker, " and
then you and I shall go up as the alderman and his
chains on to some horrid man's table."

" Alderman ?" said the turkey.

"They call a roast turkey and its sausages so,"
explained the pig.

The turkey thought it very ghastly pleasantry.

The pig meanwhile was hard at work, and in a very
little time he had gnawed, and pulled, and bitten, and
twisted the coop on the side near to him in such an
efiectual manner that the turkey soon got his head
through, and then his throat, and then his body. He
gave a gobble of glory and joy.

" But undo me !" squeaked the pig.

Now, the turkey was in a fearful hurry to be gone ;
his heart beat and his wings flapped so that he almost
fell into convulsions; but he was a bird of honor and
good faith. He bent down and pecked with such
frantic force at the knots tying the pig's legs that he
tilled his beak with frayed (;ord, and in less time than

MELEAQRIS QALLOPAVO. 167

I take to write it piggy tumbled in his heavy fashion
off the cart on to the ground, — free.

" Now run," said the pig ; and nobody knows how
fast a pig can run who has not seen him put his mind
and his will into it. The turkey could not fly, be-
cause his wings were cut, and tame turkeys seldom
know much about flying; but, what with a stride and
a flutter mixal in one, he managed to cover the ground
rapidly, and kept up side by side with the pig, who, for
his part, knowing the country, kept steadily on down
the road, which fortunately for them was a solitary one,
and made straight for a wood which he saw in the dis-
tance. The wood was about a mile and a half off, and
the two comrades were in sore distress when they came
up to it ; but they did reach it unstopped, and sank
down on the grass under some larches with a sigh of
content.

" Such a useless tree the larch !'' murmured the pig;
** not an acorn on it once in all its days I"

For, of course, the pig viewed all trees only in rela-
tion to acorns.

" I can^t eat acorns,'* sighed the turkey, as soon as he
got his breath.

" You ungrateful creature," said the pig in re
proof. " Be content that you have escaped with your
life."

" Are you 8me\9Q have escaped ?"

" We have escaped for the time," said the philosophic
pig ; " and to be loose in a wood is heaven upon earth.
There must be grain, or berries, or something you can
pick up, if only you will look about for it"

Now it was easy for the good pig to be philosophic^

168 MBLEAQRIS QALLOPAVO.

because near at hand he had smelt out a savory spot in
the mossy ground, and he was right in the very middle
of a hearty meal of tru£9es.

^' I never thought to have to b^ my bread/' sighed
the turkey.

" Who do you suppose would take the trouble to feed
you if it was not to kill you ?' grunted the pig, with
his mouth quite full, " You need not beg your bread,
as you call it ; look for it, — as I do/'

The turkey, pressed by hunger, did b^in to look.
A tame turkey, you know, knows nothing about feed-
ing itself; food is thrown out to it; and our turkey, at
any rate, had always supposed that was an ordination
of Providence.

But little by little, watching the pig devouring the
truffles, natural appetites and instincts awoke in him :
no doubt his grandparents a hundred times removed
had been wild turkeys by the borders of the Missouri
or in the woods of Arkansas, and hereditary instincts
revived in him under the all-potent prick of hunger.
He did begin to look about, and spied a wild straw-
berry or two and ate them, and saw a blackberry-bush
and stripped it, and, finding a big grasshopper and a
small frog, found an apj)etite also for them.

" I never knew so much natural nourishment grew
about one," he remarked to the pig, who snorted, —

" There is food enough ; only men take it all. Your
people are all in America, but men can't let them alone
even there, so I have heard. Oh, there is a pretty hen-
pheasant ! Good-morning, Madame Phasiani.''

" Is that her name f^ asked the turkey.

"It is her family name; and your own is Meleagria

MELEAQRIS GALLOP AVO. 169

Gralloiiavo, and I don't suppose you knew that/' said
the pig, very snappishly.

The turkey was silent. Meleagris Grallopavo I That
really was a very fine name !

" Is one well off in this wood, Madame Phasiani?'*
asked the pig of the pheasant, who sighed, and replied
that the wood was very nice, and Indian corn waa
thrown out twice a day ; but then when there was the
trail of the beater over it all, who could be happy?

" There is the trail of the butcher over me,'' said the
pig, " but I enjoy myself whilst I- can. You mentioned
Indian corn, madam : is the keeper's cottage unfor-
tunately near us, then ?"

She said it was half a mile off, or perhaps not so
much.

" This is a preserve, then ?" said the pig.

She sighed again, and said it was, and sauntered
pensively away with her head on one side, as pheasants
always do.

" I hoped it was a bit of wild coppice," said the pig.
"Ah, here is a kingfisher. How do, Mr. Alced?"

But the kingfisher, who is the shyest creature upon
earth, skimmed away in silence.

"Why do you call them all those fine names?" said
the turkey.

" It costs nothing, and it pleases them," said the pig,
curtly. " It is part of men's tomfoolery," he added,
after a pause ; and then, seeing a turtle-dove, he grunted
in his most amiable fashion, " Sir Turtnr Auritus,
good-day. We are resting in your wood a little while ;
it is very cool, and green^ and pleasant. May I ask if
it be also sqfef^

170 MELEAQRIS QALLOPAVO.

*'8afe!" said the turtle-dove, sitting down on a
cranl)erry-bough. " There are guns, guiis, guns, from
morning to night."

" Surely not this time of the year ? No !"

" There are for us,'' said the turtle-dove, sorrowfully ;
** and when there are not guns there are traps. They
have no mercy on us. We only eat the pine-kernels,
the wood-spurge, grain, the little snails. We do no
harm. Yet they himt us down ; they put poisoned
colza for us ; tliey kill us by thousands ; and I have
heard — though it seems too terrible to be true — ^that
they pack us alive in hampers, keep us shut up one
atop of another for days, then pull our tail-feathers
out, and shut us up again in another box ; when that
box flies open they shoot at us, so I have heard."

" Oh, yes ; my gentlemen call that their ^poufes,' and
give each other prizes for doing it," said the pig, with a
grim sympathy. " They think it vulgar when the lads
at village fairs grease our tails and hunt us. Dear Sir
Turtur Auritus, is there such a gigantic sham, such an
unutterable beast anywhere as Man?"

" I should think there is not," said the turtle-dove.
" Myself I live out of the world, on the top of that
lime-tree you see there, and if I can only alight safely
to feed and drink twice a day, I ask no more."

A pretty partridge went tripping by at that moment,
with some finely-grown sons and daughters after her.
She was a charming and lovely creature, only she had
a sadly nervous manner.

"When it grows near the 1st of September," she
said in a tone of apology to the pig, who saluted her
as Lady Starnacineria, "every sound, the very slightest

MELEAQRIS QALLOPAVO. 171

sends my heart up into my mouth, and I take e\ery
stone for a dog. What is the use or the joy of bring-
ing these dear children into a world of shot? Their
doom is to be huddled alive into a game-bag, with
broken limbs and torn bodies, and my lord will think
himself a saint fit for heaven if he send a hamper of
them up to a hospital/'

" All men's hypocrisy, madam," said the pig. " 1
prefer the frank, blunt snap of the fox, who makes
no pretence of Christian charity, but only wants his
dinner."

"If it were only the fox," sighed the partridge,
" that would be very bearable ; and he likes a common
hen quite as well as ourselves, — ^and better, because the
poor vulgar creature is bigger."

With a sigh she devoted herself to laying open
an ants' nest, and <3alled to her young to devour the
eggs in it.

" This seems a very nice home of yours," said the
pig, to provoke conversation.

The partridge sighed as the pheasant had done.

"It is too charming among these turnips," she
said, " and there is most excellent fare all over these
fields ; but, alas ! for what a fate do I live and hatch
these dear children — ^the gun, the dog, the bag! Ah,
dear sir, life to a partridge, where man is, is only a
vale of tears, though led in the best of corn-fields !"

And she said " Cheep, cheep," and made a restless
little flutter of all her feathers, and crept under the rail
again back among the turnips.

At that moment a fine black rabbit; with a white tuft
for a tail, darted by too quick for the pig to stop him.

172 MBLEAORIS GALLOP AVO.

^^AXiy he has a sad life, — almost as sad as miner
said the turtle-dove. ^' He dwells in quite a humble
way under ground, but they never let him alone.
When they can shoot nothing else, they are forever
banging and blazing at him. And they put a ferret
through his hall door without even knocking to say
liiey are there. Have you ever seen the poor bunnies
sitting outside their warrens cleaning their faces like
pussy-cats in the cool of the early morning I Ah, such
a pretty sight ! But men only want them for their
|)elt8 or to put them in a pie."

" What is your opinion of men, dear lady ?*' said the
pig, as a red-and-white cow came and looked over the
fence.

" Oh, don't mention them I" said the cow, with un-
feigned horror. " Don't they massacre all my pretty
children, and drive me to market with my udders
bursting, and break my heart and brand my skin?
and when I am grown old will they not knock
me on the head, or run a knife through my spine,
and turn nie into a hundred uses, hide, and hoofs,
and everything? it is all written in their children's
lesson-books. * The most useful animal in the king-
dom of nature is a cow.' That is what they say.
Ugh !"

*^My dear friend," said the pig, turning to the
turkey, "you see that every living thing is devoured
by man. Why should you suppose you were to be
the exception ?"

'^No one has such a tail as I have," said the
turkey.

His fright over, he had come to the conclusion that

MELEAQRIS GALLOP AVO. 173

nobody would ever do anything except adore a being
with such a tail as his.

" What is your tail compared with the peacock's ?**
said the pig, with scorn. "You are only so vain
because you are so ignorant."

" Do they kill peacocks ?" asked the turkey.

"No; I don't think they do," replied the pig,
truthful, though truth demolished his theories, which
is more than can be said for human philosophers.

" Then why do they keep them ?" said the turkey.

" Because they have such wonderful tails/' said Ae
pig, incautiously.

" There /" said the turkey, triumphantly ; and out
he spread his own tail, making it into a very grand
wheel, and crying with all his might in that peculiar
voice which nature has given to turkeys, " I am Mele-
agris Gallopavo ! I am Meleagris Gallopavo !"

He had never known his new name till five minutes
previously ; but that made no difference : he was just
as vain of it as if he had borne it all his life. Ask
the Herald's College if this be uncommon.

He had stretched his throat out, and his rosy
wattles glowed like geraniums, and he turned slowly
round and round so that every one might admire him,
and he stuck his tail up on high as stiff and as straight
as if it had been made of pasteboard.

" I am Meleagris Gallopavo !" he cried, with a very
shrill shriek, and scattered the sandy soil of the wood
all about him with his hind claws.

Crack ! A bludgeon rolled him over, a mere ball of
rufiSed, crumpled feathers, on the ground, and a lurchei
dog ran into him and gripped him tight and hard.

174 MELEAORIS OALLOPAVO.

^ We're iii luck, mate !" said an ill-looking felloii*
who waa pro\i'ling along the edge of the field with
another as ill favored. '^ Mum's the word, and he'll
go in the pot worth twenty rabbits. Who'd ha' thought
of finding a darned turkey out on the spree?"

Then the cruel man rammed poor Meleagris Gallo-
pavo into a bag that he carried with him. He was a
village ne'er-do-weel, seeing if he could trespass with
impunity and knock over a bunny or two on the sly,
knowing that the keepers were away from that part of
the wood that day. The pig lay hidden among the
woodnspurge and the creeping moss, and looked so
exactly like a log of grayish-brown timber that the
ruffians never noticed him.

" I knew his tail would be the undoing of him !"
he said, sorrowfully, as his poor friend was borne off
dead in the poachers' sack.

He himself had never looked so complacently on his
own gray hairless wisp as he did now. How conven-
ient it was ! Anybody would take it for a bit of dry
grass or a twig.

I may as well add that the mistress of the wood came
thron^h it next day, and the pig followed her home,
and ate an apple which she gave him so cannily that
she sent him into her yard, and has kept him like a
very prince of pigs ever since. But he is always sorry
for his poor .friend's fate; and he has never since told
any turkey that its family name is Meleagris Grallopavo.

FINDELKIND

) II

111

if
}

It

i1

: I

i'i .

FINDELKIND.

Thebe was a little boy, a year or two ago, who lived
under the shadow of Martinswand. Most people know,
I should suppose, that the Martinswand is that moun-
tain in the Oberinnthal where, several centuries past,
brave Kaiser Max lost his footing as he stalked the
chamois, and fell upon a ledge of rock, and stayed there,
in mortal peril, for thirty hours, till he was rescued by
the strength and agility of a Tyrol hunter, — ^an angel
in the guise of a hunter, as the chronicles of the time
prefer to say.

The Martinswand is a grand mountain, being one of
the spurs of the greater Sonnstein, and rises predpi-
tously, looming, massive and lofty, like a very fortress
for giants, where it stands right across that road which,
if you follow it long enough, takes you through Zell to
Landeck, — old, picturesque, poetic Landeck, where
Frederick of the Empty Pockets rhymed his sorrows
in ballads to his people, — and so on by Bludenz into
Switzerland itself, by as noble a highway as any trav-
eller can ever desire to traverse on a summer's day. It
is within a mile of the little burg of Zell, where the
people, in the time of their emperor's peril, came out
with torches and bells, and the Host lifted up by their
priest, and all prayed on their knees anderne8.th the

177

178 FINDELKIND.

iteep gaunt pile of limestonei that is the same to-daj as
it was then whilst Kaiser Max is dust ; it soars up on
one side of this road, very steep and very majestic,
having bare stone at its base, and being all along its
summit crowned with pine woods; and on the other
side of the road are a little stone church, quaint and
low, and gray with age, and a stone farm-house, and
cattle-sheds, and timber-sheds, all of wood that is darkly
brown from time ; and beyond these are some of the
most beautiful meadows in the world, full of tall grass
and countless flowers, with pools and little estuaries
made by the brimming Inn River that flows by them ;
and beyond the river are the glaciers of the Sonnstein
and the Selrain and the wild Arlberg region, and the
golden glow of sunset in the west, most often seen from
here through the veil of falling rain.

At this farm-house, with Martinswand towering
above it, and 2iell a mile beyond, there lived, and lives
still, a little boy who bears the old historical name of
Findelkind, whose father, Otto Korner, is the last of a
sturdy race of yeomen, who had fought with Hofer and
Haspinger, and had been free men always.

Findelkind came in the middle of seven other chil-
dren, and was a pretty boy of nine years, with slenderer
limbs and paler cheeks than his rosy brethren, and
tender dreamy eyes that had the look, his mother told
him, of seeking stars in mid-day : de chercher midi dt
quatorze heurea, as the French have it. He was a good
little lad, and seldom gave any trouble from disobedi-
ence, though he often gave it from forgetfulness. His
father angrily complained that he was always in the
doudsy — that is« be was always dreaming, and so vei^

FINDELKIND, I79

often would spill the milk out of the pails, chop his
own fingers instead of the wood, and stay watching the
swallows when he was sent to draw water. His brothers
and sisters were always making fun of him : they were
sturdier, ruddier, and merrier children than he was,
loved romping and climbing and nutting, thrashing
the walnut-trees and sliding down snow-drifts, and
got into mischief of a more common and childish sort
than Findelkind's freaks of fancy. For indeed he
was a very fanciful little boy : everything around had
tongues for him; and he would sit for hours among
the long rushes on the river's edge, trying to imagine
what the wild green-gray water had found in its wan-
derings, and asking the water-rats and the ducks to
tell him about it ; but both rats and ducks were too
busy to attend to an idle little boy, and never spoke :
which vexed him.

Findelkind, however, was very fond of his books :
he would study day and night, in his little ignorant,
primitive fashion. He loved his missal and his primer.
and could spell them both out very fairly, and was
learning to write of a good priest in Zirl, where he
trotted three times a week with his two little brothers.
Wlien not at school, he was chiefly set to guard the
sheep and the cows, which occupation left him very
much to himself; so that he had many hours in the
summer-time to stare up to the skies and wonder —
wonder — ^wonder about all sorts of things; while in
the winter — ^the long, white, silent winter, when the
post-wagons ceased to run, and the road into Switzer-
land was blocked, and the whole world seemed asleep,
except for the roaring of the winds — Findelkind, who

130 FINDELKIND.

Btill trotted over the snow to school in Zirl, woald
dream still, sitting on the wooden settle by the fii^
when he came home again under Martinswand. Fcnr
the worst— or the best— of it all was that he was "Fin-
delkind.

This is what was always haunting him. He was
Findelkind ; and to bear this name seemed to him to
mark him out from all other children and to dedicate
him to heaven. One day three years before, when he
had been only six years old, the priest in Zirl, who was
a very kindly and cheerful man, and amused the chil-
dren as much as he taught them, had not allowed
Findelkind to leave school to go home, because the
storm of snow and wind was so violent, but had kept
him until the worst should pass, with one or two other
little lads who lived some way off, and had let the boys
roast a meal of apples and chestnuts by the stove in
his little room, and, while the wind howled and the
blinding snow fell without, had told the children the
etory of another Findelkind, — ^an earlier Findelkind,
who had lived in the flesh on Arlberg as far back as
1381, and had been a little shepherd-lad, ''just like
you," said the good man, looking at the little boys
munching their roast crabs, and whose country had
been over there, above Stuben, where Danube and
Rhine meet and part.

The pass of Arlberg is even still so bleak and bitter
that few care to climb there; the mountains around are
drear and barren, and snow lies till midsummer, and
even longer sometimes. " But in the early ages,^' said
the priest (and this is quite a true tale that the children
heard with open eyes, and mouths only not open be-

FINDELKIND, 181

cause thej were full of crabs and chestnuts), '^ in the
early ages/* said the priest to them, " the Arlberg was
far more dreary than it is now. There was only a
mule-track over it, and no refuge for man or beast;
60 that wanderers and peddlers, and those whose need
for work or desire for battle brought them over that
frightful pass, perished in great numbers, and were
eaten by the bears and the wolves. The little she|>-
herd-boy Findelkind — who was a little boy five hun-
dred years ago, remember,** the priest repeated, — " was
sorely disturbed and distressed to see these poor dead
souls in the snow winter after winter, and seeing the
blanched bones lie on the bare earth, unburied, when
summer melted the snow. It made him unhappy, very
unhappy ; and what could he do, he a little boy keep-
ing sheep ? He had as his wages two florins a year ;
that was all; but his heart rose high, and he had
faith in God. Little as he was, he said to himself, he
would try and do something, so that year after year
those poor lost travellers and beasts should not perish
so. He said nothing to anybody, but he took the
few florins he had saved up, bade his master farewell,
and went on his way begging, — a little fourteenth-cen-
tury boy, with long, straight hair, and a girdled tunic,
as you see them," continued the priest, " in the min-
iatures in the black-letter missal that lies upon my
desk. No doubt heaven favored him very strongly,
and the saints watched over him; still, without the
boldness of his own courage and the faith in his own
heart they would not have done so. I suppose, too,
that when knights in their armor, and soldiers in their
camps, saw such a little iell iw %ll alone, they helped

182 FINDELKIND.

him, and perhaps struck some blows for him, and so
sped him ou his way^ and protected him from robbera
and from wild beasts. Still, be sure that the real
sliield and the real reward that served Findelkind of
Arlberg was the pure and noble purpose that aimed
him night and day. Now, history does not tell an
where Findelkind went, nor how he fared^ nor how
long he was about it ; but history does tell us that the
little barefooted, long-haired boy, knocking so loudly
at castle gates and city walls in the name of Christ and
Christ's poor brethren, did so well succeed in his quest
that before long he had returned to his mountain-
home with means to have a church and a rude dwell-
ing built, where he lived with six other brave and
charitable souls, dedicating themselves to St. Christo-
pher, and going out night and day to the sound of the
Angelus, seeking the lost and weary. This is really
\vhat Findelkind of Arlberg did five centuries ago, and
did so quickly that his fraternity of St. Christopher
twenty years after numbered among its members arch-
dukes, and prelates, and knights without number, and
lasted as a great order down to the days of Joseph II,
This is what Findelkind in the fourteenth century did,
I tell you. Bear like faith in your hearts, my chil-
dren ; and though your generation is a harder one than
this, because it is without faith, yet you shall move
mountains, because Christ and St. Christopher will be
with you."

Then the good man, having said that, blessed them,
and left them alone to their chestnuts and crabs, and
went into his own oratory to prayer. The other boys
laughed and chattered; but Findelkind sat very quietly,

FINDELKIND, 133

thinking of his namesake, all the day after, and ior
manj days and weeks and months this story haunted
him. A little boy had done all that; and this little
boy had been called Findelkind : Findelkind, just like
himself.

It was beautiful, and yet it tortured him. If the
good man had known how the history would root itself
in the child's mind, perhaps he would never have told
it; for night and day it vexed Findelkind, and yet
seemed beckoning to him and crying, " Gro thou and do
likewise I"

But what could he do ?

There was the snow, indeed, and there were the
mountains, as in the fourteenth century, but there were
no travellers lost. The diligence did not go into
Switzerland after autumn, and the country-people who
went by on their mules and in their sledges to Inn-
spruck knew their way very well, and were never
likely to be adrift on a winter's night, or eaten by a
wolf or a bear.

When spring came, Findelkind sat by the edge of
the bright pure water among the flowering grasses, and
felt his heart heavy. Findelkind of Arlberg who was
in heaven now must look down, he fancied, and think
him so stupid and so selfish, sitting there. The first
Findelkind, a few centuries before, had trotted down
on his bare feet from his mountain-pass, and taken hi^
little crook, and gone out boldly over all the land on
his pilgrimage, and knocked at castle gates and city
walls in Christ's name and for love of the poor I That
was to do something indeed !

This poor little living Findelkind would look at tb€

184 FINDELKIND.

miniatures in the priest's missal, in one of which there
was the little fourteenth-century boy with long hanging
hair and a wallet and bare feet, and he never doubted
that it was the portrait of the blessed Findelkind who
was in heaven ; and he wondered if he looked like a
little boy there, or if he were changed to the likeness
of an angel.

" He was a boy just like me," thought the poor little
fellow, and he felt so ashamed of himself, — so very
ashamed ; and the priest had told him to try and do
the* same. He brooded over it so much, and it made
him so anxious and so vexed, that his brothers ate his
porridge and he did not notice it, his sisters pulled his
curls and he did not feel it, his father brought a stick
down on his back and he only started and stared, and
his mother cried because he was losing his mind and
would grow daft, and even his mother's tears he scarcely
saw. He was always thinking of Findelkind in
heaven.

When he went for water, he spilt one-half; when he
did his lessons, he forgot the chief part; when he drove
out the cow, he let her munch the cabbages ; and when
he was set to watch the oven he let the loaves burn, like
great Alfred. He was always busied thinking, " Little
Findelkind that is in heaven did so great a thing: why
may not I ? I ought ! I ought !" What was the use
of being named after Findelkind that was in heaven,
unless one did something great too ?

Next to the church there is a little stone lodge, or
shed^ with two arched openings, and from it you look
into the tiny church with its crucifixes and relics, or
out to great, bold, sombre Martinswand, as you like

FINDELKIND, 185

best ; and in this spot Findelkind would sit hour after
hour, while his brothers and sisters were playing, and
look up at the mountains or on to the altar, and wish
and pray and vex his little soul most wofully ; and his
ewes and his lambs would crop the grass about the
entrance, and bleat to make him notice them and lead
them farther afield, but all in vain. Even his dear
sheep he hardly heeded, and his pet ewes, Katte and
Greta, and the big ram Zips, rubbed their soft noses
in his hand unnoticed. So the summer droned away,
— the summer that is so short in the mountains, and
yet so green and so radiant, with the torrents tumbling
through the flowers, and the hay tossing in the meadows,
and the lads and lasses climbing to cut the rich sweet
grass of the alps. The short summer passed as fast as
a dragon-fly flashes by, all green and gold, in the sun ;
and it was near winter once more, and still Findelkind
was always dreaming and wondering what he could do
for the good of St. Christopher ; and the longing to do
it all came more and more into his little heart, and he
puzzled his brain till his head ached. One autumn
morning, whilst yet it was dark, Findelkind made his
mind up, and rose before his brothers, and stole down-
stairs and out into the air, as it was easy to do, because
the house-door never was bolted. He had nothing with
him; he was barefooted, and his school-satchel was
slung behind him, as Findelkind of Arlberg's wallet
had been five centuries before.

He took a little staff from the piles of wood lying
about, and went out on to the high-road, on his way to
do heaven^s will. He was not very sure what that
divine will wished, but that was because he was only

186 FINDELKIND.

nine jcars old| and not very wise; but Findelkind
that was in heaven had b^ged for the poor ; so would
be.

His parents were very poor, but he did not think of
them as in any want at any time, because he always had
his bowlful of porridge and as much bread as he wanted
to eat. This morning he had nothing to eat ; he wished
to be away before any one could question him.

It was quite dusk in the fresh autumn morning: the
sun had not risen behind the glaciers of the Stubaithal,
and the road was scarcely seen ; but he knew it very
well, and he set out bravely, saying his prayers to
Christ, and to St. Christopher, and to Findelkind that
was in heaven.

He was not in any way clear as to what he would
do, but he thought he would find some great thing to
do somewhere, lying like a jewel in the dust ; and he
went on his way in faith, as Findelkind of Arlberg
had done before him.

His heart beat high, and his head lost its aching pains,
and his feet felt light ; so light as if there were wings
to his ankles. He would not go to Zirl, because Zirl
he knew so well, and there could be nothing very won-
derful waiting there; and he "ran fast the other way.
When he was fairly out from under the shadow of
Martins wand, he slackened his pace, and saw the sun
come on his path, and the red day redden the gray-
green water, and the early Stellwagen froip Landeck,
that had been lumbering along all the night, overtook
him.

He would have run after it, and called out to the
travellers for alms, but he felt ashamed : his fathef

FINDELKIND. 187

had never let him b^, and he did not know how to
begin.

The Stellwagen rolled on through the autumn mud,
and that was one chance lost. He was sure that the
first Findelkind had not felt ashamed when he had
knocked at the first castle gates.

By and by, when he could not see Martinswand by
turning his head back ever so^ he came to an inn that
used to be a post-house in the old days when men
travelled only by road. A woman was feeding chickens
in the bright clear red of the cold daybreak.

Findelkind timidly held out his hand. '^ For the
poor I" he murmured| and doffed his cap.

The old woman looked at him sharply. ^^ Oh, is it
you, little Findelkind ? Have you run off from school?
Be off with you home I I have mouths enough to feed
here.''

' Findelkind went away, and began to learn that it
is not easy to be a prophet or a hero in one's own
country.

He trotted a mile farther, and met nothing. At last
he came to some cows by the wayside, and a man tend-
ing them.

"Would you give me something to help make a
monastery ?" he said, timidly, and once more took off
bis cap. The man gave a great laugh. " A fine monk,
you ! And who wants more of these lazy drones ? Not
L"

Findelkind never answered: he remembered the
priest had said that the years he lived in were very
hard ones, and men in them had no faith.

Ere long he came to a big walled house, with turrets

188 FINDELKIND.

and grated casements, — very big it looked to him, —
like one of the firot Findelkind's own castles. His
heart beat loud against his side, but he plucked up his
courage, and knocked as loud as his heart was beating.

He knocked and knocked, but no answer came.
The house was empty. But he did not know that ;
lie thought it was that the people within were cruel,
and he went sadly onward with the road winding be-
fore him, and on his right the beautiful impetuous gray
river, and on his left the green Mittelgebirge and the
mountains that rose behind it. By this time the day
was up ; the sun was glowing on the red of the cran-
berry shrubs and the blue of the bilberry-boughs : he
was hungry and thirsty and tired. But he did not give
in for that; he held on steadily; he knew that there
was near, somewhere near, a great city that the people
called Sprugg, and thither he had resolved to go. By
noontide he had walked eight miles, and came to a
green place where men were shooting at targets, the
tall thick grass all around them : and a little way
farther off was a train of people chanting and bearing
crosses and dressed in long flowing robes.

The place was the Hottinger Au, and the day was
Saturday, and the village was making ready to perform
a miracle-play on the morrow.

Findelkind ran to the robed singing-folk, quite sure
that he saw the people of God. " Oh, take me, take
me !" he cried to them ; ** do take me with you to do
heaven's work."

But they pushed him aside for a crazy little boy that
ipoiled their rehearsing.

" It is only for Hotting folk," said a lad older tlian

FINDELKINV. 189

himself. "Gret out of the way with you, lAebchen/'
And the man who carried the cross knocked him with
force on the head, by mere accident ; but Findelkind
thought he had meant it.

Were people so much kinder five centuries before,
he wondered, and felt sad as the many-colored robes
swept on through the grass, and the crack of the rifles
sounded sharply through the music of the chanting
voices. He went on, foot-sore and sorrowful, thinking
of the castle doors that had opened, and the city gates
that had unclosed, at the summons of the little long-
haired boy whose figure was painted on the missal.

He had come now to where the houses were much
more numerous, though under the shade of great trees,
— lovely old gray houses, some of wood, some of stone,
some with frescos on them and gold and color and
mottoes, some with deep barred casements, and carved
portals, and sculptured figures; houses of the poorer
people now, but still memorials of a grand and gracious
time. For he had wandered into the quarter of St.
Nicholas in this fair mountain-city, which he, like his
country-folk, called Sprugg, though the government
calls it Innspruck.

He got out upon a long gray wooden bridge, and
looked up and down the reaches of the river, and
thought to himself, maybe this was not Sprugg but
Jerusalem, so beautiful it looked with its domes shining
golden in the sun, and the snow of the Soldstein and
Branjoch behind them. For little Findelkind had
never come so far as this before. As he stood on the
bridge so dreaming, a hand clutched him, and a voice
flaid| —

190 FINDELKJND

" A whole kreutzer, or you do not pass !*'

Findelkind started and trembled.

A kreutzer ! he had never owned such a treasure in
all his life.

"I have no money I" he murmured, timidly, "I
oame to see if I could get money for the poor/'

The keeper of the bridge laughed.

"You are a little beggar, you mean? Oh, very
well I Then over my bridge you do not go."

" But it is the city on the other side?"

" To be sure it is the city ; but over nobody goes
without a kreutzer."

"I never have such a thing of my own! never!
never !" said Findelkind, ready to cry.

"Then you were a little fool to come away from
your home, wherever that may be," said the man at
the bridge-head. " Well, I will let you go, for you
look a baby. But do not beg ; that is bad."

" Findelkind did it !"

" Then Findelkind was a rogue and a vagabond,"
said the taker of tolls.

" Oh, no—tio — no !"

" Oh, yes — ^yes — ^yes, little sauce-box; and take that,**
said the man, giving him a box on the ear, being angry
at contradiction.

Findelkind's head drooped, and he went slowly over
the bridge, forgetting that he ought to have thanked
the toll-taker for a free passage. The world seemed
to him very diflBcult. How had Findelkind done
when he had come to bridges? — and, oh, how had
Findelkind done when he had been hungry?

For this poor little Findelkind was getting very

FINDS L KIND. 191

hungry, and his stomach was as empty as was hi.
wallet

A few steps brought him to the Goldenes Dachl.

He forgot his hunger and his pain, seeing the sun
shine on all that gold, and the curious painted galleries
under it. He thought it was real solid gold. Real
gold laid out on a house-roof, — ^and the people all so
poor! Findelkind began to muse, and wonder why
everybody did not climb up there and take a tile off
and be rich? But perhaps it would be wicked.
Perhaps God put the roof there with all that gold to
prove people. Findelkind got bewildered.

If God did such a thing, was it kind ?

His head seemed to swim, and the sunshine went
round and round with him. There went by him, just
then, a very venerable-looking old man with silver
hair : he was wrapped in a long cloak. Findelkind
pulled at the coat gently, and the old man looked down.

" What is it, my boy ?" he asked.

Findelkind answered, ^^ I came out to get gold : may
1 take it off that roof f '

" It is not gold, child, it is gilding.^'

"What is gilding?"

" It is a thing made to look like gold : that is all."

" It is a lie, then V

The old man smiled. "Well, nobody thinks so.
If you like to put it so, perhaps it is. What do you
want gold for, you wee thing?"

" To build a monastery and house the poor."

The old man's face scowled and grew dark, for ha
was a Lutheran pastor from Bavaria.

" Who taught you such trash ?" he said, crossly.

192 FINDELKIND.

^ It is not trash. It is faith/'

And Findelkind's face began to bom and his blue
ejros to darken and moisten. There was a little crowd
b^inning to gather, and the crowd was beginning to
laugh. There were many soldiers and rifle-shooters in
the throng, and they jeered and joked, and made fun
of the old man in the long cloak, who grew angry then
with the child. " You are a little idolater and a little
impudent sinner !" he said, wrathfully, and shook the
boy by the shoulder, and went away, and the throng
that had gathered round had only poor Findelkind left
to tease.

He was a very poor little boy indeed to look at, with
his sheepskin tunic, and his bare feet and legs, and his
wallet that never was to get filled.

"Where do you come from, and what do you
want?" they asked; and he answered, with a sob in
his voice, —

" I want to do like Findelkind of Arlberg.*'

And then the crowd laughed, not knowing at all
what he meant, but laughing just because they did not
know : as crowds always will do. And only the big
dogs that are so very big in this country, and are all
loose, and free, and good-natured citizens, came up to
him kindly, and rubbed against him, and made friends ;
and at that tears came into his eyes, and his courage
rose, and he lifted his head.

"You are cruel people to laugh,*' he sdd, indig-
nantly : " the dogs are kinder. People did not laugh
at Findelkind. He was a little boy just like me, no
better and no bigger, and as poor ; and yet he had so
much faith, and the world then was so good, that he

FINDELKIND 193

left bis sheep and got money enough to build a church
and a hospice to Christ and St. Christopher. And 1
want to do the same for the poor. Not for myself, no;
for the poor ! I am Findelkind too, and Findelkind
of Arlberg that is in heaven speaks to me."

Then he stopped, and a sob rose again in his throat.

" He is crazy !" said the people, laughing, yet a little
scared ; for the priest at Zirl had said rightly, this is
not an age of faith. At that moment there sounded,
coming from the barracks, that used to be the Schloss
in the old days of Kaiser Max and Mary of Burgundy,
the sound of drums and trumpets and the tramp of
marching feet. It was one of the corps of Jagers of
Tyrol, going down from the avenue to the Rudolfplatz,
with their band before them and their pennons stream-
ing. It was a familiar sight, but it drew the street-
throngs to it like magic : the age is not fond of dream-
ers, but it is very fond of drums. In almost a moment
the old dark arcades and the river-side and the passages
near were all empty, except for the women sitting at
their stalls of fruit or cakes, or toys. They are won-
derful old arched arcades, like the cloisters of a cathe-
dral more than anything else, and the shops imder them
are all homely and simple, — shops of leather, of furs,
of clothes, of wooden playthings, of sweet and whole-
some bread. They are very quaint, and kept by poor
folks for poor folks ; but to the dazed eyes of Findel-
kind they looked like a forbidden paradise, for he was
so hungry and so heart-broken, and he had never seen
any bigger place than little Zirl.

He stood and looked wistfully, but no one offered
him anything. Close by was a stall of splendid purple

194 fINDELKIND.

j^rapee^ but the old woman that kept it was busy knit
ting. She only called to him to stand out of her light

^' You look a poor brat : have you a home ?" said
another woman, who sold bridles and whips and horses
bells, and the like.

" Oh, yes, I have a home, — ^by Martinswand," said
Findelkind, with a sigh.

The woman looked at him sharply. ^^ Your parents
tiave sent you on an errand here?''

" No ; I have run away."

" Run away ? Oh, you bad boy I — unless, indeed, —
are they cruel to you ?"

" No ; very good.'*

" Are you a little rogue, then, or a thief?"

'^ You are a bad woman to think such things," said
Findelkind, hotly, knowing himself on' how innocent
and sacred a quest he was.

" Bad ? I ? Oh ho !" said the old dame, cracking
one of her new whips in the air, " I should like to make
you jump about with this, you thankless little vaga-
bond. Be off!"

Findelkind sighed i^in, his momentary anger pass-
mg ; for he had been born with a gentle temper, and
tliought himself to blame much more readily than he
thought other people were, — as, indeed, every wise
child does, only there are so few children — or men —
that are wise.

He turned his head away from the temptation of the
bread and fruit-stalls, for in truth hunger gnawed him
terribly, and wandered a little to the left. From where
he stood he could see the long, beautiful street of Teresa,
with its oriels and arches, painted windows and gilded

FINDELKIND. 195

sigiis^ and the steep, gra,y^ dark mountains closing it in
at the distance ; but the street frightened him, it looked
so grand, and he knew it would tempt him : so he went
where he saw the green tops of some high elms and
beeches. The trees, like the dogs, seemed like friends.
It was the human creatures that were cruel.

At that moment there came out of the barrack gates,
with great noise of trumpets and trampling of horses, a
group of riders in gorgeous uniforms, with sabres and
chains glancing and plumes tossing. It looked to Fin-
delkind like a group of knights, — ^those knights who
bad helped and defended his namesake with their steel
and their gold in the old days of the Arlberg quest.
His heart gave a great leap, and he jumped on the dust
for joy, and he ran forward and fell on his knees and
waved his cap like a little mad thing, and cried put, —

"Oh, dear knights! oh, great soldiers! help me I
Fight for me, for the love of the saints ! I have come
all the way from Martinswand, and I am Findelkind,
and I am trying to serve St. Christopher like Findel-
kind of Arlberg."

But his little swaying body and pleading hands and
shouting voice and blowing curls frightened the horses :
one of them swerved and very nearly settled the woes
of Findelkind forever and aye by a kick. The soldier
who rode the horse reined him in with difficulty : he
was at the head of the little staff, being indeed no less
or more than the general commanding the garrison,
which in this city is some fifteen thousand strong. An
orderly sprang from his saddle and seized the child,
and shook him, and swore at him. Findelkind was
frightened ; but he shut his eyes and set his teeth, and

196 FINDELKTND.

to himself that the raartyrs must have had verv
much worse than these things to suffer in their pilgrim-
age. He had fancied these riders were knights, — such
knights as the priest had shown him the likeness of in
old picture-booksy whose mission it had been to ride
through the world succoring the weak and weary, and
always defending the right

" What are your swords for, if you are not knights ?'
he cried, desperately struggling in his captor's grip,
and seeing through his half-closed lids the sunshine
shining on steel scabbards.

"What does he want?" asked the oflBcer in com-
mand of the garrison, whose staff all this bright and
martial array was. He was riding out from the bar-
racks to an inspection on the Rudolfplatz. He was a
young man, and had little children himself, and was
half amused, half touched, to see the tiny figure of the
little dusty boy.

" I want to build a monastery, like Findelkind of
Arlberg, and to help the poor," said our Findelkind,
valorously, though his heart was beating like that of
a little mouse caught in a trap ; for the horses were
trampling up the dust around him, and the orderly's
grip was hard.

The officers laughed aloud ; and indeed he looked a
poor little scrap of a figure, very ill able to help even
himself.

" Why do you laugh?" cried Findelkind, losing his
terror in his indignation, and inspired with the courage
which a great earnestness always gives. " You should
not laugh. If you were true knights, you would not
laugh : you would fight for me. I am little, I know.

FINDEL KIND. 197

— ^I am very little, — but he was no bigger than I;
and see what great things he did. But the soldiers
were good in those days ; they did not laugh and use
bad words "

And Findelkind, on whose shoulder the orderly^s
hold was 6till fast, faced the horses, which looked to
him as huge as Martinswand, and the swords, which
he little doubted were to be sheathed in his heart.

The oflBcers stared, laughed again, then whispered
together, and Findelkind heard them say the word
"crazed." Findelkind, whose quick little ears were
both strained like a mountain leveret's, understood
that the great men were saying among themselves
that it was not safe for him to be about alone, and
that it would be kinder to him to catch and cage
him, — the general view with which the world regards
enthusiasts.

He heard, he understood; he knew that they did
not mean to help liim, these men with the steel weapons
and the huge steeds, but that they meant to shut him
up in a prison ; he, little free-born, forest-fed Findel-
kind. He wrenched himself out of the soldier's grip,
as the rabbit wrenches itself out of the jaws of the
trap even at the cost of leaving a limb behind, shot
between the horses' legs, doubled like a hunted thing,
and spied a refuge. Opposite the avenue of gigantic
poplars and pleasant stretches of grass shaded by other
bigger trees, there stands a very famous church, famous
alike in the annals of history and of art, — the church
of the Franciscans, that holds the tomb of Kaisei
Max, though, alas! it holds not his ashes, a? his dying
desire wa«« that it should. Tho church stands here, a

198 FINDELKIND,

ooble, sombre place, with the Silver Chapel of Philip-
pina Wessler adjoiniug it, and in front the fresh cool
avenues that lead to the river and the broad water-
raeadows and the grand Hall road bordered with the
painted stations of the Cross.

There were some peasants coming in from the
country driving cows, and some burghers in their
carts, with fat, slow horses ; some little children were
at play under the poplars and the elms; great dogs
were lying about on the grass ; everything was happy
and at peace, except the poor throbbing heart of little
Findelkind, who thought the soldiers were coming
after him to lock him up as mad, and ran and ran as
fast as his trembling legs would carry him, making
for sanctuary, as, in the old bygone days that he loved,
many a soul less innocent than his had done. The
wide doors of the Hof kirche stood open, and on the
steps lay a black-and-tan hound, watching no doubt
for its master or mistress, who had gone within to
pray. Findelkind, in his terror, vaulted over the dog,
and into the church tumbled headlong.

It seemed quite dark, after the brilliant sunshine
on the river and the grass ; his forehead touched the
stone floor as he fell, and as he raised himself and
stumbled forward, reverent and bareheaded, looking
for the altar to cling to when the soldiers should enter
to seize him, his uplifted eyes fell on the great Tomb,

The tomb seems entirely to fill the church, as, with
its twenty-four guardian figures round it, it towers up
in the twilight that reigus here even at mid-day.
There are a stern majesty and grandeur in it which
dwarf every other monument and mausoleum. It is

FINDRLKIND, 199

grim, it is rude^ it is savage, with the spirit of the
rougli ages that created it ; but it is great with their
greatness, it is heroic with their heroism, it is simple
with their simplicity.

As the awe-stricken eyes of the terrified child fell
on the mass of stone and bronze, the sight smote him
breathless. The mailed warriors standing around it,
so motionless, so solemn, filled him with a frozen
nameless fear. He had never a doubt that they were
the dead arisen. The foremost that met his eyes were
Theodoric and Arthur ; the next, grim Rudolf, father
of a dynasty of emperors. There, leaning on their
swords, the three gazed down on him, armored,
armed, majestic, serious, guarding the empty grave,
which to the child, who knew nothing of its history,
seemed a bier; and at the feet of Theodoric, who
alone of them all looked young and merciful, poor
little desperate Findelkind fell with a piteous sob, and
cried, ^^I am not mad I Indeed, indeed, I am not
mad !"

He did not know that these grand figures were but
statues of bronze. He was quite sure they were the
dead, arisen, and meeting there, around that tomb on
which the solitary kneeling knight watched and prayed,
encircled, as by a wall of steel, by these his comrades.
He was not frightened, he was rather comforted and
stilled, as with a sudden sense of some deep calm and '
certain help.

Findelkind, without knowing that he was like so
many dissatisfied poets and artists much bigger than
himself, dimly felt in his little tired mind how beauti-
ful and how gorgeous and how grand the world miut

200 FINDBLKTND.

have been when heroes and knights like these had
gone by in its daily sunshine and its twilight storms.
No wonder Findelkind of Arlberg had found his pil-
grimage so fair, when if he had needed any help he
had only had to kneel and clasp these firm, mailed
limbs, these strong eross-hilted swords, in the name of
Christ and of the poor.

Theodoric seemed to look down on him with benig-
nant eyes from under the raised visor ; and our p<x)r
Findelkind, weeping, threw his small arms closer and
closer round the bronze knees of the heroic figure,
and sobbed aloud, ''Help me, help me! Oh, turn
the hearts of the people to me, and help me to do
good !"

But Theodoric answered nothing.

There was no sound m the dark, hushed church ;
the gloom grew darker over Findelkind's eyes; the
mighty forms of monarclis and of heroes grew dim
before his sight. He lost consciousness, and fell prone
upon the otones at Theodoric's feet ; for he had faints
from hunger and emotion.

"When he awoke it was quite evening ; there was a
lantern held over his head ; voices were muttering
curiously and angrily; bending over him were two
priests, a sacristan of the church, and his own father.
His little wallet lay by him on the stones, always
empty.

"Boy of mine! were you mad?" cried his father,
half in rage, half in tenderness. '' The chase you have
led me! — and your mother thinking you were drowned!
— and all the working day lost, running after old
women's tales of where they had seen you I Oh, little

findi:lkind. 201

tbol^ little fool ! what was amiss with Martins wand, that
you must leave it?''

Findelkind slowly and feebly rose, and sat up on
the pavement, and looked up, not at his father, but at
the knight Theodoric.

" I thought they would help me to keep the poor,''
he muttered, feebly, as he glanced at his own wallet
"And it is empty, — empty."

*' Are we not poor enough ?" cried his father, with
natural impatience, ready to tear his hair with vex-
ation at having such a little idiot for a son. " Must
you rove afield to find poverty to help, when it sits
cold enough, the Lord knows, at our own hearth? Oh,
little ass, little dolt, little maniac, fit only for ,a mad-
house, talking to iron figures and taking them for real
men I What have I done, O heaven, that I should be
afflicted thus ?"

And the poor man wept, being a good affectionate
soul, but not very wise, and believing that his boy was
mad. Then, seize<l with sudden rage once more, at
thought of his day all wasted, and its hours harassed
and miserable through searching for the lost child, he
plucked up the light, slight figure of Findelkind in
bis own arms, and, with muttered thanks and excuses
to the sacristan of the church, bore the boy out with
him into ^he evening air, and lifted him into a cart
which stood there with a horse harnessed to one side
of the pole, as the country-people love to do, to the
risk of their own lives and their neighbors'. Findel-
kin<l said never a word ; he was as dumb as Theodoric
had been to him; he felt stupid, heavy, half blind;
his father pushed him some bread, and he ate it by

202 FINDELRtND.

sheer instinct, as a lost animal will do ; the cart jogged
on, the stars shone^ the great church vanished in the
gloom of night.

As they went through the city towards the riveiv
dide along the homeward way, never a word did his
father, who was a silent man at all times, address to
him. Only once, as they jogged over the bridge, he
i|X)ke.

'*Son," he asked, "did you run away truly thinking
(0 please Grod and help the poor?''

*' Truly I did I" answered Findelkind, with a sob in
bis throat.

" Then thou wert an ass !" said his father. " Didst
nc^ver think of thy mother's love and of my toil? Look
at home,"

Findelkind was mute. The drive was very long,
bai*kward by the same way, with the river shining in
th€ moonlight and the mountains half covered with
tlie clouds.

It was ten by the bells of Zirl when they came once
more under the solemn shadow of grave Martins wand.
Tliere were lights moving about his house, his brothers
and sisters were still up, his mother ran out into the
road, weeping and laughing with fear and joy,

Findelkind himself said nothing.

He hung his head.

They were too fond of him to scold him or to jeer
at him ; they made him go quickly to his bed, and his
mother made him a warm milk posset and kissed Kim.

"We will punish thee to-morrow, naughty and cruel
one," said his parent. "But thou art punished ennugh
Already, for in thy place little Stefan had the sheep.

FINDELKIND. 203

and he has lost Katte's Iambs, — the beautiful twin
lambs! I dare not tell thy father to-night. Dost
hear the poor thing mourn ? Do not go afield for thy
duty again."

A pang went through the heart of Findelkind, as
if a knife had pierced it. He loved Katte better than
almost any other living thing, and she was bleating
under his window childless and alone. They were
such beautiful lambs, too ! — lambs that his father had
promised should never be killed, but be reared to swell
the flock.

Findelkind cowered down in his bed, and felt
wretched beyond all wretchedness. He had been *
brought back; his wallet was empty; and Katte's
lambs were lost. He could not sleep.

His pulses were beating like so many steam-hammers ;
he felt as if his body were all one great throbbing
heart. His brothers, who lay in the same chamber
with him, were sound asleep ; very soon his father and
mother snored also, on the other side of the wall. Fin-
delkind was alone wide awake, watching the big white
moon sail past his little casement, and hearing Katte
bleat.

Where were her poor twin lambs?

The night was bitterly cold, for it was already far on
in autumn ; the rivers had swollen and flooded many
fields, the snow for the last week had fallen quite low
down on the mountain-sides.

Even if still living, the little lambs would die, out on
such a night without the mother or food and shelter of
any sort. Findelkind, whose vivid brain always saw
everything that he imagined as if it were 1km ug acted

204 fTNDELKIND.

before his eyes, in fancy saw his two dear lambs float-
ing dead down the swollen tide, entangled in rushes on
the flooded shore, or fallen with broken limbs upon a
creit of rocks. He saw them so plainly that scarcely
oould he hold back his breath from screaming aloud in
the still night and answering the mourning wail of the
desolate mother.

At last he could bear it no longer : his head burned,
and his brain seemed whirling round ; at a bound he
leaped out of bed quite noiselessly, slid into his sheep-
skins, and stole out as he had done the night before,
hardly knowing what he did. Poor Katte was mourn-
ing in the wooden shed with the other sheep, and the
wail of her sorrow sounded sadly across the loud roar
of the rushing river.

The moon was still high.

Above, against the sky, black and awful with clouds
floating over its summit, was the great Martins wand.

Findelkind this time called the big dog Waldmar to
him, and with the dog beside him went once more out
into the cold and the gloom, whilst his father and
mother, his brothers and sisters, were sleeping, and
poor childless Katte alone was awake.

He looked up at the mountain and then across the
water-8wept meadows to the river. He was in doubt
which way to take. Then he thought that in all like-
lihood the lambs would have been seen if they had
wauvlered the river way, and even little Stefan would
have had too ranch sense to let them go there. So he
crossed the road and began to climb Martiuswand.

With the instinct of the born mountaineer, he had
brought out his crampons with him, and had now fi»-

FINDELKIND. 205

tened them on his feet ; he knew every part and iidge
of the mountains, and had more than onoe climbed
over to that very spot where Kaiser Max had hung in
peril of his life.

On secxiiid thoughts he bade Waldmar go back to
the house. The dog was a clever mountaineer, too,
but Findelkind did not wish to lead him into danger.
'* I have done the wrong, and I will bear the brunt,"
he said to himself; for he felt as if he had killed
Katte's children, and the weight of the sin was like lead
on his heart, and he would not kill good Waldmar too.

His little lantern did not show much light, and as
he went higher upwards he lost sight of the moon.
The cold was nothing to him, because the clear still aii
was that in which he had been reared ; and the dark-
ness he did not mind, because he was used to that also;
but the weight of sorrow upon him he scarcely knew
how to bear, and how to find two tiny lambs in this
vast waste of silence and shadow would have puzzled
and wearied older minds than his. Garibaldi and all
his household, old soldiers tried and true, sought all
night once upon Caprera in such a quest, in vain.

If he could only have awakened his brother Stefan
to ask him which way they had gone ! but then, to be
sure, he remembered, Stefan must have told that to all
those who had been looking for the lambs from sunset
to nightfall. All alone he began the ascent.

Time and again, in the glad spring-time and the
fresh summer weather, he had driven his flock upwards
to eat the grass that grew in the clefts of the rocks and
on the bix>ad green alps. The sheep could not climb
to the highest points ; but the goats did^ and he with

I

206 FINDELKIND.

them. Time and again he had lain on his back in
these uppermost heights, with the lower clouds behind
him and the black wings of the birds and the crows
almost touching his forehead, as he lay gazing up into
the blue depth of the sky, and dreaming, dreaming^
dreaming.

He would never dream any more now, he thought
to himself. His dreams had cost Katte her lambs,
and the world of the dead Findelkind was gone for-
ever : gone were all the heroes and knights ; gone ali
the faith and the force ; gone every one who cared for
the dear Christ and the poor in pain.

The bells of Zirl were ringing midnight. Findel-
kind heard, and wondered that only two hours had
gone by since his mother had kissed him in his bed.
It seemed to him as if long long nights had rolled
away, and he had lived a hundred years.

He did not feel any fear of the dark calm night,
lit now and then by silvery gleams of moon and stars.
The mountain was his old familiar friend, and the ways
of it had no more terror for him than these hills here
used to have for the bold heart of Kaiser Max. In-
deed, all he thought of was Katte, — Katte and the
lambs. He knew the way that the sheep-tracks ran ;
the sheep could not climb so high as the goats ; and he
knew, too, that little Stefan could not climb so high as
he. So he began his search low down upon Martins-
wand.

After midnight the cold increased ; there were fenow-
clouds hanging near, and they opened over his head,
and the soft snow came flying along. For himself he
did not mind it, but alas for the lambs ! — if it covered

FINDELKIND, 207

»

them, MOW would he find them ? And if they slept iii
it tliey were dead.

It was bleak and bare on the mountain-side, tliough
there were still patches of grass such as the flocks liked,
that had grown since the hay was cut. The frost of
the night made the stone slippery, and even the irons
gripped it with difl&culty ; and there was a strong wind
rising like a giant's breath, and blowing his small horn
lantern to and fro.

Now and then he quaked a little with fear, — ^not fear
of the night or the mountains, but of strange spirits and
dwarfs and goblins of ill repute, said to haunt Martins-
wand after nightfall. Old women had told him of
such things, though the priest always said that they
were only foolish tales, there being nothing on Grod's
earth wicked save men and women who had not clean
hearts and hands. Findelkind believed the priest;
still, all alone on the side of the mountain, with the
snow-flakes flying round him, he felt a nervous thrill
that made him tremble and almost turn backward.
Almost, but not quite ; for he thought of Katte and
the poor little lambs lost — and perhaps dead — through
his fault.

The path went zigzag and was very steep; the Arolla
pines swayed their boughs in his face; stones that lay
in his path unseen in the gloom made him stumble.
Now and then a large bird of the night flew by with a
rushing sound ; the air grew so cold that all Mart^ns-
wand might have been turning to one huge glacier.
All at once he heard through the stillness — for there
is nothing so still as a mountain-side in snow — a little
pitiful bleat. All his terrors vanished ; all his mem-

208 FINDELKIND,

oiieB of ghost-tales passed away ; his heart gave a teap
of joy ; he was sure it was the cry of the lambs. He
stopped to listen more surely. He was now many
score of feet above the level of his home and of Zirl ;
he waSy as nearly as he could judge, half-way as high
as where the cross in the cavern marks the spot of the
Kaiser's peril. The little bleat sounded above him,
and it was very feeble and faint.

Findelkind set his lantern down, braced himself up
by drawing tighter his old leathern girdle, set his
sheepskin cap firm on his forehead, and went towards
the sound as far as he could judge that it might be.
He was out of the woods now ; there were only a few
straggling pines rooted here and there in a mass of
loose-lying rock and slate ; so much he could tell by
the light of the lantern, and the lambs, by the bleat-
ing, seemed still above him.

It does not, perhaps, seem very hard labor to hunt
about by a dusky light upon a desolate mouutain-side ;
but when the snow is falling fast, — when the light is
only a small circle, wavering, yellowish on the white,
— when around is a wilderness of loose stones and
yawning clefts, — when the air is ice and the hour is
past midnight, — the task is not a light one for a man ;
and Findelkind was a child, like that Findelkind that
was in heaven.

Long, very long, was his search ; he grew hot and
forgot all fear, except a spasm of terror lest his light
should burn low and die out. The bleating had quite
ceased now, and there was not even a sigh to guide
him ; but he knew that near him the lambs must be,
and he did not waver or despair.

FIJ^DELKJND, 209

H(j diM not pray ; praying in the morning had Dceu
no use ; but he trusted in God, and he labored hard,
toiling to and fro, seeking in every nook and behind
each stone, and straining every muscle and nerve, till
the sweat rolled in a briny dew off his forehead, and
his curls dripped with wet. At last, with a scream
of joy, he touched some soft close wool that gleamed
white as the white snow. He knelt down on the
ground, and peered behind the stone by the full light
of his lantern ; there lay the little lambs, — ^two little
brothers, twin brothers, huddled close together, asleep.
Asleep ? He was sure they were asleep, for they were
so silent and still.

He bowed over them, and kissed them, and laughed,
and cried, and kissed them again. Then a sudden
horror smote him ; they were so very still. There they
lay, cuddled close, one on another, one little white head
on each little white body, — drawn closer than ever to
gether, to try and get warm.

He called to them; he touched them; then he caught
them up in his arms, and kissed them again, and again,
and again. Alas ! they were frozen and dead. Never
again would they leap in the long green grass, and frisk
with each other, and lie happy by Katte's side ; they
had died calling for their mother, and in the long,
cold, cruel night, only death had answered.

Findelkind did not weep, or scream, or tremble; his
heart seemed frozen, like the dead lambs.

It was he who had killed them.

He rose up and gathered them in his arms, and cud-
dled them in the skirts of his sheepskin tunic, and cast
his staff away that he might carry them, and so, ihiM

210 FINDELKIND.

burdened with their weight, set his face to the snow
and the wind once more, and began his downward
way. •

Onoe a great sob shook him ; that was all. Now he
had no fear.

The night might have been noon-day, the snow--
storm might have been summer, for aught that he
knew or cared.

Long and weary was the way, and often he stumbled
and had to rest ; often the terrible sleep of the snow
lay heavy on his eyelids, and he longed to lie down and
be at rest, as the little brothers were ; often it seemed
to him that he would never reach home again. But he
shook the lethargy off him and resisted the longing, and
held on his way : he knew that his mother would
mourn for him as Katte mourned for the lambs. At
length, through all difficulty and danger, when his
light had spent itself and his strength had wellnigh
spent itself too, his feet touched the old high-road.
There were flickering torches and many people, and
loud cries around the church, as there had been four
hundred years before, when the last sacrament had been
said in the valley for the hunter-king in peril above.

His mother, being sleepless and anxious, had risen
long before it was dawn, and had gone to the childnin's
chamber, and had found the bed of Findelkind empty
once more.

He came into the midst of the people with the two
little lambs in his arms, and he heeded neither the out-
crias of neighbors nor the frenzied joy of his mother :
his eyes looked straight before him, and his face waa
white like the snow.

FINDELKIND, 211

^^ I killed them/' he said; and then two great tears
rolled down his cheeks and fell on the little cold bodies
of the two little dead brothers.

Findelkind was very ill for many nights and many
days after that.

Whenever he spoke in his fever he always said, " I
killed them !"

Never anything else.

So the dreary winter months went by, while the deep
snow filled up lands and meadows, and covered the
great mountains from summit to base, and all around
Martinswand was quite still, and now and then the
post went by to Zirl, and on the holy-days the bells
tolled ; that was all. His mother sat between the stove
and his bed with a sore heart; and his father as he
went to and fro between the walls of beaten snow, from
the wood-shed to the cattle-bjrre, was sorrowful, think-
ing to himself the child would die, and join that earlier
Findelkind whose home was with the saints.

But the child did not die.

He lay weak and wasted and almost motionless a
long time ; but slowly, as the spring-time drew near,
and the snows on the lower hills loosened, and the
abounding waters coursed green and crystal-clear down
all the sides of the hills, Findelkind revived as the
earth did, and by the time the new grass was springing
and the first blue of the gentian gleamed on the alps,
he was well.

But to this day he seldom plays &nd scarcely ever
laughs. His face is sad> and his eyes have a look of
trouble.

Sometimes the priest of Zirl says of him to otheni|

#
212 JINDELKIND,

*^ He will be a great poet or a great hero some day/'
Who knows ?

Af eanwhile, in the heart of the child there remaina
always a weary pain, that lies on his childish life as a
stone may lie ou a flower.

^' I killed them !'' he says often to himself, thinking
of the two little white brothers frozen to death on Mar-
tinswand that cruel night ; and he does the things that
are told him, and is obedient, and tries to be content
with the humble daily duties that are his lot, and when
be says his prayers at bedtime always ends them so :

^^Dear Grod, do let the little lambs play with the
other Findelkind that is in heaven.''

To avoid fine, this book should be retomed on
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