Pascarèl Vol. 2

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HAPSA,/S
A

HARVARD
COLLEGE
LIBRARY

COLLECTION

OF

BRITISH AUTHORS

TAUCHNITZ EDITION.

VOL. 1316.

PASCAREL BY OUIDA.

IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. L

TAUCHNITZ EDITION.
By the same Author,

IDALIA . + « « «© © © « « 2VOls.
~ TRICOTRIN . «© « «© «© « « « 2vols.
~ PUCK . 2. 6 © © «© « « « « 2vols,
-» CHANDOS ... +s... 2vols,

STRATHMORE . ..... . 2vols,
. UNDER TWO FLAGS ... . 2vols.
“SA FOLLE-FARINE «.« .... . 2vols
.~A LEAF IN THE STORM... 1vol.

CECIL CASTLEMAINE’S GAGE . 1 vol.

MADAME LA MARQUISE .. . Ilvyol.

SS)

PASCAREL.

ONLY A STORY.

BY

) , —
O U I DA, poe oe | re ~y TE

AUTHOR OF “‘TRICOTRIN,” “‘CHANDOS,” ETC.

f Ly
CL, 2? . cc? .

COPYRIGHT EDITION.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

¥

LEIPZIG
BERNHARD TAUCANITZ

1873.

The Right of Translation ts reserved,

224 52,/93

A RASYARD COLLEGE 1

TE. 20,
Wratie “E obi Ne
| 6 wo » D.

| (76.u 1876)

Vorb. 1, & »
of
ve
yin

Se
Aon Ami
Firenze,

Muesto Libro
Gi
Mojera,”

** LOVE IS ENOUGH; though the World be a waning,
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover,
The gold-cups and daisies fair blossoming thereunder,
Though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder,
And this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over,
Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter ;
The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter,
Those lips and those eyes of the loved and the lover.”

TO THE READER.

WirH feminine obstinacy the Donzella sacrifices
truth to pictorial effect, and justice to high-coloured
contrast, touching Rome.* The love that Rome
begets is different to that which Florence inspires; but
it is never less strong and is even more reverent; less
familiar, and more close on awe; as tender, but more
solemn. In Rome, Art and Nature strain together in
perpetual conflict for supremacy; a struggle of a Titan
with a God that holds mortal onlookers breathless: in
Florence, Art and Nature clasp hands and smile on
men, and even the Mercury Agoreus, being in Florence,
borrows the flowers of Dionysus to deck his scales of
barter. But who, with any power of vision or soul of
artist in them, can live a day blind to the vast and
sublime beauties of the Capital of the World?—who
can fail to grow at once the humbler and the greater
by dwelling on that sacred soil!—who will not draw
. nearer to God himself as they see how mighty human
} genius can be?—who will not yield to Rome a

* Vol. I, p. 165.

8 TO THE READER.

homage that is a passion as well as a ieligion? I
any such there be, let them see the sun fall once on
the face of the Faun, let them see the moon shine
once on the Palace of the Czesars:—and surely they
will repent.
OUIDA.

RomE, Fed. 12, 1873.

- CONTENTS
OF VOLUME I.

see

BOOK I.

THE CITY OF CATULLUS.
King Carnival he
The Bird and the Fates. .
By the Broken Donatello
With the Popolani.
The Peacdck’s Plumes.
Mater Dolorosa . . . ° °
A Twilight Tale . . . .
The Little Red Box . . .

_ BOOK II.
THE CITY OF LILIES.

The Gifts of Gala . . .
The Veglione Masquer : . °

The Last Sleep . . . . °
At Ave Maria, . . .
The Feast of Faustino. . .
Fuori . . . . . ° .

Under the Garisenda .

The Maidenhair,. . . «

Page

92
101
113
115
122
129
140

148

10

CONTENTS OF VOLUME Tf.

CHAPTER IX. The Snow-flower ° ° . ° :

X. La Reine du Moyenage . . . :

XI. The Midnight Fair . . . . .
XII. With the Wild Crocus ° . .

XIII. The Great Magician. . 1. © ~-s

~ BOOK IIL.
THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES.

I. Under the Red Lily . . . .
II. The Rose and the Florins . . . .

III. The Golden Celandine ° ° ry e

IV. Beside Dead Fires. ° .
V. Giudentu dell’ Anno . . . .
VI. The Old Star Tower . . . es
VII. Due Amori. . . : .
VIII. The Lily-queen . . . e

BOOK IV.
THE WANDERING ARTE.

I. Il Bianco Aspetto . ° . . .
II. Etoile quifile . . . .
III. The Riband and the Mandoline
IV. The Poets’ Country . .

V. Fuma di Gloria . . . . . °

206
220
242
251
263
264
268
279

288

204 .

304
310

320

PASCAREL.

BOOK I.

THE CITY OF CATULLUS.

CHAPTER I.
King Carnival.

Ir was the first.day of Carnival.

The populace was out all over the city in a many-
coloured and ever-changing swarm of human life.
The gay masque reeled madly round the marble iron-
| bound flanks of the Duomo, and flung its hail of toys

and flowers against the frowning masses of the old
palaces and prisons; and surged in its foam of mirth
and mischief all along the length of the green Adige
in the light of the winter noon.

For a month King Carnival would reign supreme
in mockery and merriment over the lives of men; his
path strewn with violets, his sovereignty shouted over
wine, his dynasty proclaimed far and wide—every-
where, by high and low, from the cobbler who pranked
himself in the guise of Stenterello to, the great lady
who laughed through her velvet mask of Venice.

And at the month’s end, at nightfall, just as the
moon should rise, with music and many a jest and
ound of horn and drum, and rioting of Arlecchino

12 PASCAREL.

and Pulcinello and all their immemorial brotherhood,
at nightfall the fickle people would lead the old King
out to his funeral pyre in the great square, and there
would burn him in all pomp and cruelty until the
flames should redden grim Roland standing at his
vigil at the cathedral doors, and be seen afar off,
where the last outposts of the great Alps kept watch
and ward in the quiet of the silence and the chillness
of the snow.

Burn him,—a monarch yesterday, to-day a scape-
goat, in grimmest ironic symbol of all human histories.

Poor King Carnival!

His rule has lasted longer than any other dynasty ;
for though his nations burn him one year, he rises
from his ashes, and they cry All hail! to him the next.

But the axe is at the root of his t®rone. The old
glad days of his mumming are numbered, and the
pomp of his pageant is shorn. The world is old and
very weary.

Here “nel aer dolce, che del sol s’allegra,” life is
brighter and more buoyant than elsewhere.

Here the people still laugh from clear throats, and
the hours still reel away, marked with flowers; here
they sit in the sun, and still know the priceless plea-
sures and true uses of leisure; and here the heart
of a child still beats in the war-scarred breast of the
nation.

Yet even here the world is older, greyer, sadder
than of yore; and even here the day is close at hand
when King Carnival will ride his last ride round the
city walls, and be burned for the last time, in all the
. panoply of his historic robes, upon a pyre whence his
ashes shall never rise again.

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 13

The world is too wise to be foolish—so they say.

Or is it too foolish to be wise?

King Carnival might tell us if he would. Perhaps
he would answer:—

“In the days when men were so great that they
did not fear to stoop, and were so strong that their
dignity lost nothing by their mirth, they rode in my
train and followed me—Carnivale, the old King—and
laughed as children laugh—those men of those days
of Dante, of those days of Lionardo, of those days of
Shakspeare. Are you wiser than they? or weaker? or
only more weary, perhaps? No matter. I have held
high feast with the giants, and they were not ashamed
to be glad. But you, who blush for your mirth be-
cause your mirth is vice, bury me quickly. I ama
thing of the Past.”

. And the old King would speak sadly aright; for
his name is almost emptiness, and his earth-swaying
orb is but now an empty gourd in which the shrivelled
beans of the -world’s spent pleasures are shaken in
fruitless sport and sound.

For in the old days,—when he reigned supreme,
over all men’s lives, ‘from sovereign’s to serf’s, for
afew weeks’ span of full feast and fair folly,—in the
old days men lived greatly great lives to great ends.

Their faith was ever present with them—a thing
of daily use and hourly sweetness. Their households
were wisely ruled and simply ordered. They denuded
themselves of their substance to give their gold to the
@ising of mighty works—vvs lapidibus—which to this
do live and speak.

--Great artists narrowed not thems€lves to one
agre phase of art, but filled with all its innumer.

14 PASCAREL.

able powers the splendid plenitude of their majestic
years.

And that art was in the hearts of the people who
followed it, and adored its power and were nourished
by it, so that it was no empty name, but an ever-
vivifying’ presence—a divinity at once of hearth and
temple that brooded over the cities with sheltering
and stainless love.

Therefore in those days men, giving themselves
leave to be glad for a little space, were glad with the
same sinewy force and manful singleness of purpose
as made them in other times laborious, self-denying,
patient, and fruitful of high thoughts and deeds.

Because they laboured for their fellows, therefore
they could laugh with them, and because they served
God, therefore they dared be glad.

In those grave, dauntless, austere lives the Cartiival’s
jocund revelry was as one golden bead in a pilgrim’s
rosary of thorn-berries.

They had aimed highly and highly achieved;
therefore they could go forth amidst their children
and rejoice.

But we—in whom all art is the mere empty Shib-
boleth of a ruined religion whose priests are all dead;
we—whose whole year-long course is one Dance of
Death over the putridity of our pleasures; we—whose
solitary purpose it is- to fly faster and faster from
desire to satiety, from satiety to desire, in an endless
eddy of fruitless effort; we—whose greatest genius
can only raise for us some inarticulate protest of
despair against some unknown God ;—-we have strangled
King Carnival and killed him, and buried him in the
ashes of our own unutterable weariness and woe.

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 15

t
For the old King is heartsick to hear the manful
laughter that he heard in -his youth; and we—we
cannot laugh; all we can give is a sneer—and a sob.

CHAPTER II.
The Bird and the Fates.

NEVERTHELESS in Verona this first day of Carnival
men made believe to be glad. |

In the deep wintry gloom of the old sad city the
gold of the alien tyranny had been scattered broad-
cast that the people might wear at least the mask of
contentment; and on the whole they wore it, nothing
loth, grinning gleefully from ear to ear.

The old stone balconies were draped with amber
and rose and silver; the beautiful trecento windows
were filled with eager faces; the dusky crypt-like
streets were full of colour amd tumult; the great
marble tombs, looming white in the darkness of their
sepulchres, were flecked with the pretty pallor of
violets from Rome.

Verona under her taskmasters took holiday.

Under a deep porch, sculptured with vine foliage
and the heads of griffins, two children stood looking
on the pageantry, and not thinking very much about
it; for one of them—the girl,—was full of trouble, and
the boy tried his best to solace her.

“Do look at Stenterello!” the little lad murmured.
“How nimble he is—look, look! the boys have caught
him. No!—he slips through like an eel. Ah, ah! do
look! There is Arlecchino angling for a priest’s hat
with a gilded fishing-hook. Oh, carina mia! to think

5 you have no heart to laugh to-day—”

16 PASCAREL,

The tears brimmed over in his companion’s eyes.

“How can I laugh? We have nothing—absolutely
nothing. We must sell those poor little jewels of my
mother’s, or Mariuccia will starve. It must not be,
you know; she is so old, so old! And yet to sell the
jewels! See here, "Ino. I have a voice, and I am
fifteen years old, and I am good to look at, you all
say. Why should I not sing in the choruses? You
know how often we have laughed at them—the fat
ugly women with the crowns that would always tumble
off. Now I am as thin as a cane, and am handsome,
and could wear a crown as one should be worn. Why
might I not sing an the chorus?”

The pretty boy looked perplexed, and his little bare
foot traced nervously an arabesque on the stone of
the dusty stair.

“That would never do, dear donzella! Your father
is too illustrious—-—”

“But one cannot live on being illustrious. One
wants to eat—somehow. And there is nothing to eat.
Nothing. We have not heard of my father for more
than a year, and Florio even does not send now.
Why should I not sing in the chorus? It is quite
easy, all that sort of music.”

He shook his pretty, curly, golden, Venetian head,
in grave concern.

“Oh no, dear donzella; it would never do. Ma-
riuccia would never allow it. It is so late at night,
and the women are not fit for you: it would never
do.”

“Then the jewels must go? And they are all
that I have of my mothers—the only, only, little
thing!”

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 17

The words ended in a sob; and the whirling,
many-coloured procession of the Carnival was hid-
den from the child’s sight by a haze of sudden
tears.

At home there were an empty cupboard, a cold
hearth, and an old woman of eighty years, who had
not broken her fast. Such things seem hard to bear
when one is very young; and it is the first day of
Carnival; and beneath there, in the street, all the mad
and merry masque is flaunting on its way.

The boy listened wistfully, with a tender and
anxious face.

“See here, dear donzella,” he murmured, after a
pause. “I have a thought. Sing in the chorus you
must not; but why not sing in the streets? The people
are all happy and good-tempered to-day. I have got
my lute here, and we will sing, and then ask them
frankly to help us. Why not? We have made music
for them often out of pure love and goodwill. They
will certainly give us a little money now, and no harm
done.”

“Qh, "Ino! You never sang for money yet, nor I.
It is so different——” |

“We have not sung for it, because we have not
wanted it. But if we do want it, where is the
harm——”’

“It is shameful!”

“Shameful! How shameful? When the great
singer Lillo went through here last spring, do you
not remember that the least atom of standing room
in the theatre was worth gold, and the people took
the horses from ‘his carriage, and drew him through

Paxaréti. 1. -

18 _ PASCAREL,

the streets, shouting and smothering him with Easter
lilies?”

“That is very different.”

“Not at all different. Except that they pay Lillo
by millions and we only want a few florins.”

“But why, then, will you never take money when
you play yourself? You never do.”

He crossed himself, and glanced gratefully at an
old battered, black-faced Madonna that hung behind
an iron grating high up above in the doorway.

“Our Lady has been so good to me, and I have
never wanted for anything. And the people who
would have paid me have always been so poor—so
poor. But I would play for money rather than sell
a thing of my mother’s. Perhaps your mother up
there says to Our Lady,—‘Look at my donzella; she
is proud: take that sin out of her heart’ And Our
Lady says,—‘ We will prove her: she must love you a
little, though she never looked on your face.” And
so Our Lady sets this thing in your way. And your
mother up there waits, watching and trembling, to see
if indeed you do love her, or only care for your
pride. For mothers never forget. That I am very
sure. No, not though they sit on the right hand of
God with His angels.”

The boy’s voice was very sweet and solemn, and
murmured with a strange softness and clearness
through the riotous laughter and uproar that rose
from the Carnival crowds in the street below. He
looked no longer at the antics of Stenterello and the
pranks of Arlecchino, but up at the breadth of blue
serene sky which stretched above where the gabled

roof Parted.

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 19

His companion listened, with the colour coming
and going, fleeting and burning, in her downcast face;
then suddenly she caught his hand and sprang down
the first stair. |

“Let us go, Ino—let us go!”

_And hand in hand they ran down, and were
mingled with the hundreds who were streaming in
frolicsome humour, through the narrow tortuous street
towards the great Piazza. |

A few minutes later they also were standing in the
Cathedral square.

They were a picturesque little pair—the girl taller
than the boy by full a head.

He was barelegged and barefooted—a child of the
populace; he wore the loose shirt and the red waist-
and of the Venetian gondoliers; and slung round
him by another bit of scarlet was an old ebony
mandoline. She was clad in quite another guise, so
that she looked like some silky-leaved flower growing
out of the grey stone pavements; she had a hood of
dark velvet over her head, from which great, bright,
trustful eyes looked out wonderingly upon the world;
her skirts were of heavy amber satin, that seemed to

have been fashioned out of some brocaded train; her
hands were full of flowers that she had picked up
from the ground as the people of the balconies flung
them downward.

As they stood together, hand in hand, the con-
rast of colour and the grace of attitude made a
victure against the dusky pile of the Duomo and in
he crisp whiteness of the sunny frosty air. Many
wople passing paused to look at them; the little

2*

20 PASCAREL.

lad whispered to her, and then unslung his man-
doline.

There was a lull in the sports of the day. Some
sporting of a band of mummers headed by a scarlet
Mefistofelo and a gorgeous Dulcamara was over and
done with: the commencement of the traditional Gala
was delayed; the crowd was unoccupied and willing
to be amused, but not impatient nor out of temper,
because it was a crowd of Italy.

The boy judged his time accurately, and touched
the cords of his lute. The girl wavered a moment with
the colour hot in her face; then with a sudden gesture
threw the hood back off her curls, and lifted up her
voice and sang.

Her song was an old familiar street-song of the
Lombard population.

Far and wide on the clear wintry air, keen with
the hard breath of the mountains, the strong pure
notes of a voice in its earliest youth rang out like a
bell over the muttering and shouting of the people.
Those nearest to her listened, and hushed down the
noise around them; the silence spread and spread
softly like the circles in the water where a stone is
thrown; the boisterous gaiety dropped to a quieter
key; in a little while all the square was still.

The hood fell back wholly upon her shoulders;
the sun shone upon the little group; the amber of her
skirts, the violets in her hands, the scarlet wool of
the boy’s sash, all glowed in the light; above all
hum and buzz from the other quarters of the city the
song rose on the air clear as only the tones of child-
hood can be.

“L’Uccello!” the people shouted. “Go on, go on!”

THE CITY OF CATULLUS., 2t

A smile rippled over her face, as at some familiar
word of greeting: she sang on at their bidding song
after song of the sweet unwritten melodies of the
nation. Now and then the boy struck a chord or two
from his mandoline, but seldom; her voice was rich
enough and strong enough to fill the square without
aid, and it leaped aloft in the wintry air with the
eager, straight, upward flight of a hawk that is loosed
from its holdings.

When at length it ceased, the throng in the great
Square screamed, laughed, almost cried with delighted
applause; the people in the balconies clapped their
hands, the loungers at the caffé dashed their hands on
the marble tables till their glasses rang, the masquers
and merry-makers shrieked a hundred times,—“ Viva
l'Uccello! Viva ’'Uccello!”

The boy marked the propitious hour. He took
the red berretta off his curly head, and advanced
amongst the multitude, and with the infinite grace of
his nation, the grace which is so perfect because so
utterly unconscious of itself, stretched out his hand to
them for charity.

“Some little thing, signori, for the love of God.
There is an old woman at home who wants bread.”

He was generous, and he sought to bear all the
shame of the alms-seeking for his own portion. But
his companion saw his purpose, and sprang to his
side. Her cheeks were flushed, the tears were bright
on her lashes, the winds blew the heavy gold of her
hair and the snow off her courtly skirts; her voice had
lost its strength, and trembled a little.

“It is not for him, signori!” she cried. “VW is for

me, or himself, when he plays and the peop\s

°
“=

22 PASCAREL.

would give him coins or cakes or confetti, he will
never take payment for his music. He says it is God’s
gift, not his. The money that he begs now is for me.
I am illustrious; oh yes! but I am very poor. I have
an old nurse at home who wants bread, and sits by a
fireless hearth. She is so old, so old. And we have
nothing to sell but a few little jewels, and they were
my mother’s, who is dead. Will you give me some
little thing, if my songs pleased you?”

The answer came from a hundred hands at once
—from above and around, on every side.

Paper money fluttered to her feet; loose silver rolled
like sugar-plums; here and there a piece of gold flashed
like a star through the air; flowers and toys and gilded
horns of sweetmeats, and ribboned playthings of the
pageantry were all showered upon them from the bal-
conies above and from the throngs around, until their
arms ached with stretching for the gifts, he his red
berretta, and she her amber skirts.

Great ladies, leaning in the draped galleries of old
palaces, cast down money with lavish hands; white-
coated soldiers, laughing over their wines at the marble
tables, tossed bright florins to swell the store; a child-
noble in his gala-costume of white and gold and powder
and jewels, ran down some palace steps and shyly
thrust a roll of notes into the singer’s hand, and hastily
lifted his soft smiling mouth to kiss her cheek; the
poorest of the people sought in their leathern pouches
for some copper pieces to give.

In vain the boy and girl, being honest, protested,
laughing and crying both at once—“Basta, basta!—
enough, enough!”

In vain; the golden shower did not cease until, in

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 23

the distance, as the first of the patrician pageantry ap-
peared on the entrance of the square, there rose a glad
shout,—“The Gala! ghe Gala!”

And the populace, kindly of heart, but fickle of
temper, turned jo the new pastime, and the little noble
ran to his pebble, and_ the great ladies looked the
other way, and the golden chariots rolled under the
historic walls, and the sea of the bright masque surged
outward; and the children were forgotten where they
stood.

Then to them there came one who had listened
and watched all the songs and all the payments where
he had leaned in the shadow of the cathedral wall.

He uncovered his head as he approached, and the
sun fell full on his face—the dark, poetic, historic face
of Florence.

“Ah, cara donzella,” he murmured softly with a
smile. “Money I have none to give you, until I make
some more to-night. I too am an artist; and so—it
goes without words—I too am poor. Nevertheless, let
me thank you.”

He dropped a ring into her amber skirts, amongst
the violets of Parma and the daffodils of Tuscany, and
turned away and vanished in the throng.

The girl sought for the ring amongst the flowers
and toys and money and sweetmeats with which her
skirts were full.

It was a very old seal ring—an onyx, cut with the
heads of the Fates.

She looked at it long and curiously, with a dream-
ing look on her face; then thrust it into the bosom of
her dress. Then she gathered closely up about her the
heavy brocades of her garments, and turned to the boy.

24 PASCAREL.

“Let us run,’Ino. The people are not looking now.
We shall lose the Gala, but Manuccia is so cold at
home.”

So they turned away from the square, and went
back into the old, irregular, gloomy stggets where even
at mid-day there was no gleam of brifhtness.

But now they could not run; theirefleet feet were
powerless to bear them swiftly; they were too heavily
laden with the spoils of their prosperous efforts; it was
of no avail to try and move quickly; at every step they
trod upon a knot of violets, or trampled a bright nar-
cissus under foot.

They were forced at last to go very tranquilly, with
bent heads and with cramped limbs, along the cold
and dreary passage ways.

“Oh ’Ino!” the girl cried. “When we sang for love
and goodwill, we were so light of heart and of foot.
But now——”

She sank down upon a flight of steps, her skirts
glided from her hands, her treasures rolled to the ground
and were scattered. She sobbed as if her heart would
break.

“That is ungrateful to the people, cara mia,” said
the little lad softly. “Is it that stone with the Fates
that has chilled you?”

“Nay she is right,” said a voice above them. “Count,
art by gold, and it fetters the feet it once winged.”

He who had given the ring spoke the words, pass-
ing swiftly in the shadow so as not to be delayed nor
questioned.

After him ran a gay and giddy throng of masks,
thrashing each other with coloured bladders, and chas-

-

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 25

ing him with tumultuous shouts as of a band of mum-
mers to their chief.

The shouts in theirhoarse vibration filled the tunnel
of the narrow twilit street as the parti-coloured group
of the masquers -geteled down it like a score of ane-
mone leaves blown heedlessly upon an autumn wind.

They all cried one word:—Pascarél.

_ I,—the child who sat on the stone stair, weeping
over my fallen violets and my scattered wealth,—
treasured the name in my heart on which the carven
Fates were resting.

The masquers reeled on out of sight, a cloud of
misty and tangled hues; over the high grim roofs and
the sculptured buttresses the name came back flying
gaily in glad echo on the air—

“Pascaréllo!—Pascarél!”

CHAPTER III.
By the broken Donatello.

‘Wwe first thing I remember is of how poor we all
were; how horribly poor, how terribly poor!

When I went to take my first dancing lesson at
four years old, I had holes in my little lace frock, and
a pair of faded blue shoes nearly out at the toes. I
tried bitterly for very shame sake.

“Never mind, carina,” said old Mariuccia, my nurse.
“Never mind. If you dance away with a light heart,
what does a tatter or two in the dress signify? It is
better to have holes in the shoes, little one, than a
kaden weight on the feet, believe me.”

Oh! and what a fool I thought her! Though she
is sixty and I was not six.

26 PASCAREL.

_ But when my father’s man Florio came in an
lifted me up before the old battered silver mirror, an
murmured in his soft tongue,“Ah! what does a shabb
frock matter when one has an angel’s face like th
signorina’s? The other little ladies may be all hun
with rubies and pearls if they chose; nobody will loo.
at them if the signorina be there”—then, indeed, ther
seemed some sense in the argument, and Florio ap
peared to me a person so discerning that I consente
to be pacified and to be led away to the vast bar
frescoed dancing-hall, where one little shrill fiddle wa
piping and shrieking to a score of Lombardic babie:
all more or less noble, I believe, in descent.

We were at that time in Verona. Poor old Verona
World forgotten, though having given so much to th
world.

The city of Lesbia’s lover is but a sorry desolatio
now, despite its hidden treasures, that no man remer
bers once in a score of years.

Those narrow sun-baked streets, those grim dus:
covered fortifications, those little lines of stunted gick]
trees, those simooms of lime dust, those bitter piercin
mountain winds, those pale grasses, all alive with brow
lizards, those lofty desolate houses, palace and priso
in one, those straggling vines choking the strangle
maples, the dreary weary “waveless plain,’—how mi:
erable it all is now, how miserable it all was then!

Verona never seemed like Italy to me. Perhay
because I saw it always under the dominion of thos
white-coated stranieri, who pampered its greedy pries
hood and bribed its lazy proletariate, and who waltze
themselves into favour with me by swinging me roun
many and many a time to the gay measures of the

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 27

. regimental bands, and spending on me floods of sweet-
meats and pretty phrases, although old Mariuccia,
whenever she saw me thus polluted, would snatch me
_ away from the barbarian’s arms with fiercest flashes of
| her still eloquent Tuscan eyes.

Maniuccia told me many a tale of the old gran-
deurs of the city of Can Grande; and I used to wan-
der about it gazing at its amphitheatre and its acacia
hedges, and its green Adige and its two Paladins at
the door of the duomo, and dreaming of Marius
and Theodoric, of Catullus, and Carolus Magnus, of
Romeo, and Ezzelino, of Vitruvius, and Paolo Vero-
Rese, in the strangest confusion of fable and truth, in
which my little brain floated as on a gorgeous, but
Misty, sea.

I never loved Verona.

The four first years of my small life had been
spent with Mariuccia on a farm on the distant Ro-
Magna.

There I had lived in the open air, rolled in the
grass, gleaned the gold of the millet, got drunk in my
innocent fashion off the grapes at vintage time, and
filled my hands with wild wood flowers all the whole
year round. There I had owned all a child’s delicious
niches of freedom and sunlight, of chains of daffodils,
of fans of chesnut leaves, of friendships with birds
and beasts, of long, happy, heedless days in which the
tky seemed always blue, and the angels of God always
Bear.

_ When at four years old I was taken and cooped
im the dusty duskiness of Juliet’s birthplace, I re-
led bitterly, and at first pined constantly, refusing
be comforted, I fretted for the free air and the

28 PASCAREL.

glad light, as many a prisoner had done before me t
the days when

‘‘Death and sin played at dice with Eccelin.”

Of course after a while my sweet first memorie
paled a little, and I grew a little reconciled. But
never forgot that bright beloved Italy of mine, awa
there southward in the blue ocean of the distan
Romagna; I never grew to care for these grim street:
these filthy courts, these parching heats, these froze:
winters, these masses of frowning stone, these laby
rinths of palaces and prisons, which seemed always t
my fancy, as I grew older, to have still upon ther
the mark of the scourge of Attila, the grip of th
gauntlet of Scala, the scorch of the crimes of Romane

At the time when the little shmill fiddle played t
me in my little shabby shoes, we were, I say, in Veron
for no better, or lesser, reason than that having gc
in there we had not the means to get out again,

We had the second floor of an old palace; suc
a palace as you used to rent for a song in Italy, be
fore Italy changed her proud “Fara da Sé,” from
boast and a dream to a heroism and a truth.

A palace with superb staircases reeking in filtt
courts which would have held a troop of men, arme
and mounted, given over to lizards and centipede:
chambers with tapestries of Rosts, from the cartoor
of Bronzino, ancle deep in dust and dirt; and walk
that were due to the designs of Fra Giocondo, hun
with the padrona’s ragged garments, drying in the su
after their wash in the Adige.

“Peintures aux plafonds; ordures aux pieds.”
is Georges Sand, if I remember aright, who wrote thi

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 29

bitter line, or something like it, upon Italy. It is ter-
-xibly bitter, for it is at times terribly true.
Our palace was no exception to the rule.
It was magnificent as a dream, even still above-
head, where some wondrous-eyed woman, worthy
almost of Leonardo himself, laughed down from her
frescoes of roses, or where some apotheosis or cena-
colo by Gentile, or Pisanello, still kept its radiant
colours, despite all ravages of time, and neglect, and
fre, and dust. It was magnificent too from that
beauty of propqrtion, in which, as by some almost
merring instinct of symmetry, so many Italian build-
ings have a beauty that cannot perish whilst one stone
is left upon another, even as in so many Italian faces
there is a perfection which, being born not of hue but
of outline, is unharmed by age, and endures even
after death itself, as did that golden loveliness of
Faustina that was found a century after death un-
harmed in the dusky depths of Santa Croce.

But it was also unutterably dreary, dirty, ghastly,
dismal, comfortless; bats rustled through its passages,
and downy owls haunted its roof timbers. The upper
rooms were all tenanted by working people, or rather
by people who affected to work, and in reality lived
on the Austrian doles; and the lower halls were the
abode of the padrona and her eight children. She was
a stout-built, black-browed, comely soul; the most
good-natured creature in existence; and her children
hy in the sun, or played boccetta, or fought for the
nuts on the stove, or did whatever seemed best to
mm all day long in an endless strife and riot.
'’“he padrona was poor enough; she beat her own

n the river, and baked, and swept, and cooked

30 PASCAREL.

unaided, and added to her scanty means by stufi
mattresses with grass and wool, at which she was
adept. But it was owing to the padrona very of
and to nobody else, that Mariuccia had a meal to g
her beloved little illustrissimi.

There were four of us; the others were bo
beautiful boys, who might have come out of a Tizi:z
or Giorgione canvas; gay, kindly, saucy, daring cr
tures, popular with the people everywhere, and car
nothing how their linen blouses were torn, quite c
tent to sit and eat polenta for their.only dinner w
the woman below and her dirty children.

My poor brothers! They were so bright and
bold, so mirthful on nothing, so full of goodwill
all the world; and they all died so young; mere c
dren. One of fever in Verona itself; another o:
knife-thrust in a street scuffle in Rome; the last
a white squall off Cagliari, that swamped the li
felucca within sight of land.

But at the time of which I now write, whilst t
were all three around me, they were the pride and 1
ment of Mariuccia’s life, the delight of the padron
and the wonder of all the town, for the skill v
which they—bambini inglesi— poured quips i
cranks upon the people in true Veronese tongue ;
fashion.

The padrona would stand in_ her great arc’
doorway, with her arms akimbo, rocking to and
with laughter at their encounters, whilst her oni
' frizzled neglected in her frying-pan. They were qi
happy teasing the market-women, riding in the bull
waggons, driving the ball at pallone, fishing with
boatmen, dancing the tarantella in the wine shx

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 31

slaying at dominoes with Pepe and Zoto and Gian,
and all the rest of the padrona’s brood. It was only
mto my soul that the iron of our degradation entered.

With the male children in the market-place, they
were still the young signori, whose shabby clothes
could not lessen their distinction, so long as they
threw the ruzzola unerringly, and had a lightning-like
shill in morra: but for me it was otherwise; with the
fminine aristocrats in embryo of the dancing-lessons
Iwas only a little detestable forestiera, who had
shabby shoes and a torn frock, and whg had never-
theless the intolerable insolence not to be ugly in
proportion to her poverty, and also to dance very
much better than they did themselves.

“Look at the signorina, little ladies, all of you,”
the old dancing-master would say a dozen times in an
hour, suspending the screams of his fiddle to ppint at
me with its bow. “Look at her! only a month in this
room, only half the age of most of you, and look at
her! What grace, what accuracy, what lightness; the
sweep of the swallow, the poise of the sea-gull! And
sech a baby! It is wonderful. Are you not ashamed
fo carry yourselves as you do, with such an example
% the little Uccello’s before you?”

Dear old Fortunato! He taught me, out of pure
‘good will; having met me often in the street, and
having at last succeeded in persuading Mariuccia that
aot to initiate a woman child into the ways and wiles
‘f Terpsichore was to fly in the face of all the de-
fins of Providence. He taught me from sheer love
@ his art, and some touch of love I think for me;

the did me an ill service with the little Lombard

es by his praise.

32 PASCAREL.

They dared say nothing; for Fortunato could raj
both feet and hands sharply enough with his bow
when he was irritated by contumacy or clumsiness
but they eyed me askance very evilly and munchec
their chocolate chicchi, grouped all together at the
top of the room, muttering scornful things of me anc
mine in an offensive and defensive alliance.

Unhappily, there were few scornful things which
could have been said of us that would not have beers
sufficiently true to hit us hardly. We were all of us
handsome; in all times, they say, the race we came
from had had the gift of the “fatal face;” but we had
very little else.

It was the old, old story; I used to make Mariuccia
tell it me as far as she knew it, over and over again,
when she used to sit of an evening shelling beans on
the great staircase, under a half ruined statue that
they said was by Donatello.

I can see her now,—so plainly,—as she used to
sit there, with a big round brass basin in her lap; she
had a dark red skirt and a yellow kerchief; her costume
never varied; she had a huge silver pin in her white
hair; she had the noble frank face and the changeful
kind eyes of her country people; she was weather-
beaten till she was as brown as a chesnut, though she
had the broad flap hat of the country spreading its
roof over her head to keep her from the blaze that
streamed through the vines that hung over the grated
casements. |
. The sunbeams and shadows used to play on the
old marble stairs and the old grey statue; a passior
flower had somehow thrust itself through the’ stone:

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 33

from without and blossomed there at her feet on that
chill bed; the brass bowl used to glitter like gold in
the light; above at a vast height there was a lunette
with frescoes of the labours of Hercules; from below
there rose a smell of garlic, of fried meats, of corian-
der seeds, of stabled cattle; the crack, crack, crack of
the beans used to sound on the silence regular as the
ticking of a clock; the huge straw hat would shake
itself slowly and sadly as she spoke:

“Do I remember your mother?” she would say.
“You ask me that so often, ’Nella. Surely I remember
her, I was with her at the birth of every one of you.
Iwas an old woman then. At least as you children
count age. She was beautiful, yes;—else your father
had never looked at her. You are more like him.
Oh, you are handsome enough; I do not deny that;
you have a face like a flower, and you know it, though
you are such a little thing. The people spoil you:
they will turn your head with praise. You will end
just like that wicked Speronella of Padua whom they
sing about to this day in all Romagna. It was a name
of horrid savour, of ill omen, for you; J always said
80; but your poor mother would have it; it had been
her mother’s, she said. It is no use teasing me to
tell you more; I have told you all I know a hundred
times, and none of it is any good. When I first went
to your mother she had not been long wedded; she
was happy then; they always are,—for a week! There
were difficulties; that I saw the first hour; but they
did not press much. He had met her in Florence;
she was an opera singer; he was a great signore, in
his own country, so they said; it is always a mistake.
He was double her years; but he was so handsome,—

Paggpeti. 1. 3

34 : PASCAREL. ~

Milordo Maurice. You only see the wreck
But you may see that still——”

“And I am like him!” I cried where I sat
feet of the mutilated Donatello, shedding my q
beans into the brazen bowl.

Mariuccia nodded.

“Yes, you are like him,” she said gravel
more ways than one, signorina. When you ge
take care you do not throw your life away as
thrown his. A noble in his own country; and
to beg a meal for his children from the wor
low!”

My father was not a nobleman, though M:
in the common continental incapacity to unc
insular titles of courtesy, always called him :
was only the fourth son of a northern marquis
help him!—but even so much as this I scarce
at that time.

Now I adored my father with very little re:
it, for I saw him perhaps six days in the ye
each time I saw him received about six careles
But he was so handsome, so easy and good-hu:
so indifferent to every created thing or any
fortune, that he seemed to me the very perfe
humanity.

I adored him, at a distance indeed, for
chiefly when I was eating figs on the stairs o
ing walnuts in: the court yard, that I ever saw
all; but adore him I did, and with the incc
ingratitude of human nature, I cared more for
or a reproof from him whenever he deigned t
me by one, than I did for all the untiring goo
Maruccia. iat

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 35

She, dear soul, was very wroth against him always,
and could not forbear letting out her wrath to me.

Mariuccia did not think very much of filial duties;
her own parents had been a travelling cobbler and his
, paramour, who had rid themselves of her in her baby-
hood by the simple process of leaving her at the In-
hocenti; and she considered that she broke no moral
canon when she inveighed against the shortcomings of
her master to me on the old grey stairs. Indeed, I
think she honestly believed she only did her duty in
trying to turn me from my unreasonable worship of a
fale god; a god moreover who provided next to no-
thing, and left her to puzzle her brains as best she
might how to find bread for three hungry, healthy
boys, and how to turn my poor mother’s costly faded
wardrobe into decent attire for my use.

“He broke your mother’s heart,” she used to say
with a sharp crack of a bean; and I used to feel a
certam pang, yet also a certain incredulity. My mo-
ther was a mere vague name to me; I had not even
a portrait of her. “What did he do?” I used to per-
sist, and Mariuccia would respond in anger:

“What did he not do, rather? He as he does
now. He went and amused himself, and threw away
the little he had in gambling, and left us for weeks
and months to starve in some hole, whilst he feasted
In gaming-towns and winter-cities, and spent such gold
as he might win on creatures as bad and as useless
as himself. Oh, it is no good your curling your lips
and getting on fire like that, signorina. It is the truth,
, you will know to your cost one-day. Why do you
‘ ak me of your mother if you’do not believe what I

_ my? You are-always angry that you are so poor; pray
| 03 ”

. 3°
ae

36 - PASCAREL.

whose fault is it if not your father’s, and how shc
he be worth anything, I would be glad to know, w
not a soul of all his own people ever takes notice »
he lives, but every one of them leaves him alone
men pass by a trodden fig, or a dead dog on
causeway.”

That used to silence me, for I knew it was t
and I could only sit in mute rebellion shelling
beans with a swelling heart, while the bright gol
lizards darted to and fro on the stairs, and the
diant sunset lights poured down from the fresc
lunette.

Then Mariuccia, whose temper was as clos
mingling of sour and sweet as the core of a |
pomegranate, would relent, and would suspend
bean-shelling to lay her hand on my head.

“Carina,” she would say tenderly, “why will
vex yourself about your father? Little one, he ci
as much for that lizard as for you. Do your duty
him; that 1s proper, of course; but do not mak
god of him. Fret yourself for some good love,
for a foolish one. It is all very well for the mapk
be choked for the vine’s sake; but it is rubbish
the maple to die for the nightshade.”

Which hard saying she left for me and the li:
to digest as best we might, whilst she went into
cavernous gloomy little crypt which served her fc
kitchen to fry her beans in oil, or set them to :
with a cabbage. That, or something like it, was
daily meal; dainty little birds and tempting little |
of chocolate went in for my father when he was th
procured and prepared by Florio, who was a sor
universal genius; but we children never tasted of s

ie

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. . 37

‘fare. We thought ourselves in-wondrous luck if we
got a big dish of eggs and macaroni in the Pasqua
Week, or could have a handful of sweet ciambelle or
a lump or two of pan giallo for the Befana night.

As for envying my father his quails and thrushes
and mullets, I should have thought it as blasphemous
as Mariuccia would have thought it to envy the Ma-
donnas in the churches their weight of jewelled gar-
ments and crowns of. beaten gold.

At such times as Florio was with us, which was
but seldom, I had more success in my endeavours to
hear good of my idol.

Florio, in Italian fashion, had attached himself to
us, and having once done so was not to be separated
from us by anything that adversity could do to him.
Once on the staircase I heard the padrona ask him
how he could waste his years in service, so little lu-
crative, so often indeed, actually only repaying him
by privation.

Florio shrugged his shoulders with the most ex-
pressive pantomime in the world.

“Eh! what would you?” he replied to her. “I
have got to love them,—it is all said.”

Florio would acquiesce in all my enthusiasm for
his master, though he looked a little grave sometimes.
But when I would fain have learned from him how
my father spent those innumerable long absences of
bis, Florio would tell me nothing. He would pretend
to laugh and show his white teeth.

“No, no, no,’ he would cry. “In good time the
i toazella will see for herself how men live; but she
| ld not understand it yet;—no, no, no.”
| Once again also I overheard him say to Mariuccia,

38 PASCAREL,

“Tt is almost always such bad luck with him r
sometimes he has a good vein, and then we live
quails in the fattening coops; but it is very sel
now. They are all scared of him. At Nizza this ©
winter they warned him privately from the Mass
And to be too bad for the Masséna——!”

Florio threw up his hands in the air with a
ture that concluded his sentence more eloquently 1
any speech. .

Florio was about forty years old at that time
little plump man, as round as a ball, with merry «€
and the frank, tender smile of his nation.

He was a charming creature. There was very |]
he could not do. He could put on a white apron
cook’ to perfection; he could talk most languz
more or less correctly; he could draw inimitable «
catures; he did not disdain to wax a floor, and :
on it with brushes for skates; on occasion he
woven Machramme as well as any woman lacem
along the Riviera; he could string a lute and sin;
it in a very pretty tenor; and he would go to ma
with a big basket and bargain for butter and ch
with a terrible acuteness that was feared by the st
est shrew that ever sat under a green or crimson
brella on a sunny piazza, with her live hens scre
ing in her old mule’s panniers.

As far as his principles went, looking back to
time, I should say he was absolutely innocent of «
knowing the existence of such things.

He would lie with the sweetest smiling serenit
all the world, and he would cheat—in our servic
least—with the most exquisite dexterity. Yet in c
ways he was as frank as a babe, and if moved to

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 39

he gave with both hands, withholding nothing from
any thought of self interest. Yes,—Florio was a charm-
ing creature; the most perfect mixture of intense
shrewdness and entire simplicity that I have ever met;
and wholly and entirely devoted to a service in which
his multifarious talents were utterly lost and almost
utterly unrequited. And yet even Florio blamed my
er!

It was a terrible perplexity to me. What evil could
my father do?

Night after night I used wearily to wonder over
the problem, lying awake on my truckle bed, in a vast
toom painted with the loves of Orpheus and Eurydice,
while the bats beat against the lofty windows and the
beautiful white moon sailed past them backed in
clouds.

_ To the condemnations upon him I attached no
idea of gambling, despite Mariuccia’s invectives.

I saw everybody gamble; the children in the court
below, the people in the streets and at the public
‘lotteries, the men in the coffee houses and taverns, the
boys in the market-places, the old beggars on the
church steps: they all gambled, with cards, or dice, or
balls, with nuts, or little cheeses, with dominoes on
the pavement, with the gay painted cards at taroc, or
by means of their fingers alone, at morra, if they had
no other method available. That a pastime so universal
in the broad daylight could be in any one criminal
hever occurred to me.

And having a strong and entirely reasonless ado-
tation of my father, who fascinated me into love for
him by his mere look and gesture, as he fascinated

' Flotio into his service by a mere surface kindness and

40 PASCAREL.

gracious trick of manner, I came to the conclusion
I watched the clouds and the moon, that my fatl
was a man deeply wronged by his world and |
relatives. It was very easy for me to solace myself th
for I knew nothing of either one or the other.

He was called Milordo, and our name was Tempe!
—as the Italians had it—that was all I knew: anc
had mingled my ideas of him vaguely and odc
enough with that great Tempesta, who has left |
sign on so many frescoes and canvases throughc
Italy, and who fled to Isola Bella with his fatal lo
and all its crime upon his soul, and dwelt there t
tween sea and sky.

Such small obstacles as centuries and probabilit
were nothing to me, lying awake under the smile
Eurydice, and watching the bats in the moonlight bi
their wings against the painted casements.

One winter in Verona he stayed longer than usu
He was not well in health Florio told ‘us; and he h
found some Austrians who amused him. He used
go out every evening and return at dawn; that I kne
for I could tell his step and listened for it. I do1
think he rose all day; for Florio was perpetually
and out of his master’s rooms, with some frothing c
of chocolate, some sparkling cool drink, or some d
of dainty flavours, compounded by his skill.

One evening I was upon the stairs as he ca
down them.

Our stairs were very dark. One little poor
lamp burning under a hapless Madonna who had |
her nose and hands was all that illumined the i
mense depth of it from hall to dome. I had been
my lesson with Fortunato; it was cold; I was muff

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 41

in a little purple-velvet hooded cloak that Mariuccia
had made me out of one of my mother’s dresses; my
cheeks were warm with the run home; I had in my
hands a silver laurel-wreath—Fortunato’s yearly prize
—with which he had just presented me, for the fourth
time, in all solemnity and honour.

In the deep shadows I saw my father descending
the steps; involuntarily I paused; my heart gave a
great bound; if he should notice the laurel-wreath, I
thought?

By a miracle he stopped likewise.

“Is it you, "Nella? Let me look at you.”

He drew me up under the lantern which was hung
a step or two above, and bent his eyes in studious
scrutiny upon my face; I trembled from head to foot;
I was a bold child enough, but I was afraid of him
because I loved him, and because he was to me such
a Majestic mystery, unapproachable, and inscrutable.

He looked at me long; my hood had fallen back;
my hair was blown about me by the wind; I felt
my cheeks changing in colour every second under
his gaze.

“Heavens! how like you look to your mother,” he
mumured. “And yet you are like us too;—how old
are you?”

I told him that I was nearly ten years old—at
deast so Mariuccia said. A

“I daresay, I daresay,” he said, carelessly. “You
have grown very much of late. You will be a beauti-
ful woman, ’Nella. Do they tell you so?”

“Many people do,” I murmured; my limbs shook

under me; my face was scarlet; my heart beat like a
wild bird’s:—he had praised me!

42 PASCAREL.

He laughed a little, wearily. |

“Already? Very well! Good-night, little one.”

He slipped a little gold piece into my velvet mufflers,
and, for the first time in my life, touched my lips
lightly with his. As he went out of sight into the
gloom below, I sat down on the filthy marble stair
under the Madonna and her poor dull lamp, and burst
into tears,—tears of passionate joy.

When Mariuccia found me, she found me sobbing
bitterly, the laurel-wreath neglected on the stones.

CHAPTER IV.
With the Popolani.

TuaT small gold piece I treasured ever afterwards;
piercing it, and hanging it round my neck. I used to
be often hungry in those days, but no temptation of
coriander cakes, or anchovy pastries, of Neapolitan
confetti, or Florentine dolez, ever allured my little
precious five-franc from its hiding-place.

The next day Florio summoned Martuccia into my
father’s room; he gave her a sum of money, and bade
her get me with it such education as she best could
in Verona. She had taught me to read;. Fortunato
had taught me to dance; Florio had taught me to sing
ritornelli to a mandolin; but these were all my ac-
quirements; at ten years old I was barbarously ignorant,
and knew nothing, except such quaint old stray pieces
of knowledge as I had gleaned from some odd volumes
of Vasari and Ammirato, of Villani and Muratori, and
the like, which I had found left by some former tenant
in our chambers, and which made me conversant with
some art-lore and with the heroical histories of

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 43

**Le donne, i cavalieri, le armi, gli armor,
Le cortesie, le aydaci imprese”

of the by-gone centuries.

“It is the Tedeschi’s money,” grumbled Mariuccia,
with her face dark, and full of reluctance.and of ab-
horrence.

Florio showed his white teeth.

“What is that to you?” he responded. “All your
business is to spend it. That is enough.”

Florio theoretically hated the Tedeschi as much as
she did, but practically he thought the best use Te--
deschi could be put to was that of spoliation.

“They are foreigners; they are hateful; they are
our tyrants and our oppressors; and we will make
them fly one day,” he would say. “But while they are
here, we may as well get what we can out of them.
That is the true patriotism.”

It was the true philosophy, at all events; and one
that served its professor exceedingly well.

As for me, I could not understand how my father’s
money could be said to be the Austrians’ also.

“It is not much, anyhow,” I heard Mariuccia say,
when she busied herself over her pots and pans while
Florio plucked a Piedmontese partridge as plump as
himself. “As I had the chance to see the signore, I
spoke up the truth a little. When he had given his
commands for ’Nella, I said to him, “And the boys,

excellenza? What of them? ‘They are growing tall,
strong, dauntless lads, and they live with Pepe, and
Zoto, and Gian, and the children of the people; and
they are as ignorant as so many young mountain bulls.
Will vossignoria deign to say what is to be done
about them?”

44 PASCAREL.

“He only laughed a little. ‘They must do as they
can,’ he answered me. ‘When they are old enoughs
your Tedeschi friends will give them rank in some
regiment, I daresay; and there is very little learningg
wanted for that.’ Did ever you hear such an answers»
Florio? As if the blessed children would ever draw &
sword against Italy? But he would not say anythings
better; he bade me begone in that gentle way of his
which, as you know, there is no gainsaying. But was
it not hornble?” she went on lifting the lid off her
stewpan. “The noble lads! I am sure they would be
cut in a thousand pieces before they would wear the
white, and help to enslave Italy, who has been a
foster-mother to them from the very days of thei
birth.”

Florio smiled, as having plucked, he proceeded to
truss his partridge.

“To be sure; to be sure. Of course we none of
us would. Nevertheless, the Vienna beer tastes very
light and good in the caffés, they say; especially when
it costs nothing; and I have seen a good many of our
people with their noses buried in the tankards.” =

Mariuccia poured her stew into a dish with a
charitable wish that an ‘“‘acc¢dente” might strangle for-
ever all Italians who so far forgot themselves as ever
to drink the horrible barley brew of the accursed
stranieri; it was to be as vile a traitor as Judas, she
averred, when God himself had given the Italians the
juice of the vine.

So it came to pass that I had such teaching as
Verona could afford, whilst my brothers ran wild like
young colts.

Mariuccia locked the sum my father had given her

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 45

away in a stout bronze coffer, and eked it out, with
religious fidelity, as long and to as good purpose as
she was able. Every atom of it she spent loyally, as
she had been bidden; and shrewdly as became her
Florentine citizenship.

She wanted many things direfully, for he and
Florio went away with the first months of spring, and
left her but a miserable pittance for all household
purposes. But to take the smallest note from that
money to procure rice, or wood, or onions, or flour,
or oil for her daily needs, would have been a false-
hess to the trust of her stewardship which I am certain
never even tempted in imagination that good, sturdy,
honest soul of hers. |

She laid it out to the last in the culture of my
worthless little brain; if I did not profit by it as I
might have done, it was no fault of hers. It was the
fault of the saucy impatience of restraint, and the in-
dolent love of basking in the sun, doing nothing,
which the country and its habits had fostered in me.
For I was decidedly a naughty child; I loved my own
way and generally took it; and my sins of omission
and commission were sO many and various that with
every Eve of Epiphany I listened in fear for the
tinkling bell in the streets, and dreaded the bag of
ashes and the long cane with which the black-faced
Befana punishes the wilful.

Mariuccia went very wisely to work; she would
have nothing to do with women t€achers or schools;
there were many old professors, old scholars, in the
town whom she knew were terribly poor, and yet full
of erudition, and not too grand to take something for
imparting it. To these men she went, and so she

46 PASCAREL.

secured me the means of getting a knowledge much
more worth the having than the convent-culture which
the children of my sex ordinarily obtain; that I pro-
fited too little by it was, as I say, no fault of my dear
old nurse.

For the only teacher amongst them all to whom I
really gave attention and obedience was my singing-
master.

I adored music; it is impossible, I think, not to
care for it, if you are reared in Italy. Everything
seems to sing, from the cicale upwards. All that un-
written music of the populace whose scores no hands
have ever penned, is exquisite; and every now and
then in the streets, or from some high casement in
the roof, you hear the notes of a divine voice, and
you seek it out through filthy courts, up cut-throat
stairways, into dark, dismal, foul-smelling chambers,
and you find that it is only Pasqua the washerwoman
singing at her tub, or Gillo the facchino amusing him-
self as he carries up the wood.

I had my mother’s voice—so Mariuccia said. It
seems that she had been of infinite promise as a
singer when my father, desperately enamoured of her
for the moment, bore her off from the stage in the
second season of her public appearance, and the first
of her performances at the Pergola. What my voice
was to others, I do not know; I only know that all
my life long song has been as natural to me as to any
thrush or bullfinc? ~

The Veronese used to call me L’Uccello, the bird;
and where there were so many uccelli, all more or.
less musically-throated, the name was in itself a dis-
tinction, Many and many a time, in Verona, when [

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 47

have been out alone, I have found myself the centre
of an eager little crowd, which followed me because
I was singing aloud as I went; and to pacify them,
Thave vaulted on a parapet or a ledge, or anything
that was convenient, and repeated the stornelli to an
enthusiastic circle of blacksmiths, and horse-boys, and
porters, and fruit-sellers, and beggars;—Mariuccia
knowing nothing.

And then they would escort me homeward, hum-
ming the choruses of the songs themselves, delighting
m me with that mingling of charming familiarity, and
yet perfect respect, of which the Latin nations alone
seem to know the secret; and saying nothing to me,
that a little princess might not have heard, but waving
their caps to me, and tendering me, by the hands of -
some old butcher, or some young ostler, a knot of
china roses, or a plume of lilies and verbena, with
the prettiest grace, and the sweetest smiles in all the
world.

Ah! dear people, dear people! when I think of you,
[ repent me that I have said I hated your ugly town;
for of a truth I loved you, and you me.

My music-master was an old man, by name Am-
brogid Rufi; he was most wretchedly poor; he lived
m a little square den in the roof of a tumble-down
nouse; he was very dirty, very shabby, very ugly; the
world had never heard of him, and he got a bare
lwing as first violinist at the theatre. In his youth he
aad created things that the world would never listen
lo; and he had become instead the interpreter of
“her men’s creations.

He was inexorable as a master; but he was also
Mmirable. His severity had an enthusiasm, and even

48 PASCAREL.

a tenderness, underlying it which made it endurable.
One knew that he was only harsh, because he would
allow of nothing slight, or mean, or slurred, to be put
forward in the guise of his art. Himself, he was a
great master;—yes;—though he had never made a
name, and had barely wherewithal to get a daily meal.
I have seen the sums of a princely fortune, and the
homage of a fastidious society, poured out upon
artists who were not fit to hold a candle to my old
master for him to read his score.

Circumstance is so odd and so cruel a thing. It
is wholly apart from talent.

Genius will do so little for a man if he do not
know how to seize or seduce opportunity. No doubt,
in his youth, Ambrogié had been shy, silent, out of
his art timid, and in his person ungraceful and un-
lovely. So the world had passed by him turning a
deaf ear to his melodies, and he had let it pass, be-
cause he had not that splendid audacity to grasp it per-
force, and hold it until it blessed him, without which
no genius will ever gain the benediction of the Angel
of Fame. .

Which is a fallen Angel, no doubt; but still, per-
haps, the spirit most worth wrestling with after all;
since wrestle we must in this world, if we do not care
to lie down and form a pavement for other men’s
cars of triumph, as the Assyrians of old stretched
themselves on their faces before the coming of the
chariots of their kings.

Ambrogid had a few pupils—not many. Most of
them were young choristers of promise, whom he had
sought on hearing them at some office in the S.
Zanone; and whom he taught for pure devotion to

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 4g

his art, as Fortunato had taught me to dance. His

method of instruction was wonderful, strict, and in-
F exorable, as I have said, and giving infinite labour,
F infinite repetition to the scholar, but it was of an un-

approachable excellence, and sifted the grain from the
chaff amongst his aspirants with unerring accuracy.

There was—there is—an academy of music in the
old city of Catullus, but such was the blindness of its
direction, or such the rabid envy of its professors,
that no effort was ever made to secure for it the
inestimable value of Ambrogio’s lessons. Mariuccia’s
payments for myself were, I verily believe, almost all
the remuneration that he ever received. All the rest
were so poor; the children of coppersmiths, and
coopers, and vine-dressers, and pottery-painters; boys
and girls who had fair voices, and who sang in the
choirs of the churches.

We used to stand in a semi-circle before him,
dozen children or so, and sing the scale simply hour
by hour. You had to be far advanced before he would
permit you to leave that first arduous exercise.

It used to be bitterly cold in winter in that little
den of his, with its cold stove and its brick floor; and
stiflingly hot in summer there amongst the red and
grey roofs, the cupolas, and the towers. There was
nothing picturesque or poetic in it; it was all hard
work in a wretched little place before an ugly old
man who flashed fury upon you through his spectacles
if you dared to torture his ear with a false note. And
yet we all went to him faithfully; and seldom or never
rebelled.

There were in him the sincerity and the excellence
which impress themselves upon children long before

Paxaril. I. 4

50 PASCAREL.

those children are old enough to reason on what the
are awed by and admire. I tormented my othe
masters sadly enough: but I am thankful to thjnk thi
I never added to the many pains and the infinite dis
appointments of Ambrogio’s life.

I was a favoured pupil with him—I and Raffae
Baptista.

Raffaello was the son of a coppersmith in th
town, who lived hard by the cathedral, in a quai
old vaulted place filled with coppers of all sorts am
sizes, which used to blaze quite red in the sunset.

It was the workshop as well as the dwelling-houx
and was full all day of the clash of hammers on mef
as well as the discordant noises of the church bell
and the people’s cries.

Yet amidst all that clangour and uproar, the chil
had been born with the most subtle and perfect it
stinct for melody. One would have thought that a
that clanging and clashing of copper and iron all th
livelong day, from the time he had cried in his cradb
would have deadened his ears to all perceptions (
harmony; but it seemed as though it had produce
the contrary effect, for he detected an incorrect not
and shivered under it as quickly and-as painfully !
the Maestro himself.

Raffaelino. as we called him, when I met him fir
-at our music lessons, was just eight years old when
was ten; his mother came of a Venetian race, and |
had the Venetian look and accent; he was a sma
slender lad, with eyes full of dreams and a mouth ft
of smiles; his fair hair clustered thickly round t
head; he had dark, straight brows and a curious ha
shy vivacity of expression that. changed twenty tim

a

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 51.

an hour. He was the most picturesque figure in
our little group, with his brown legs bare, and his
t loose about his throat, and a scarlet woollen sash
in Venice fashion round his loins.

It was not in song that the little Baptista excelled,
s voice was pure and true, but of no great compass.
was for the violin that he showed the extraordinary
mt which won old Ambrogio’s heart to him, and
e day when he had played on his own little viol a
uming little capriccio full of life and grace, and I
ted him whence it came, he hung his head and
lured, and confessed at last that it was of his own
rention.

He implored me not to tell the Maestro; he was
ite sure that Ambrogid would look up with that
wo through his terribje spectacles which we all
aded, and bid him in tones of thunder go back to
scale practice, and not tempt the wrath of dead
narosa and Palestrina, and all the immortal brother-
2d with such impious audacities. I thought different-
but Raffael had a right to his own secret, so I did
; betray him. Which was unfeminine I suppose;
; the only two women I had ever had aught to do
h had been the padrona and Mariuccia, both Simple
ple as the world went.

I liked Raffaello the best of all the childten in
rona; he had an infinite tenderness for his mother,
9 was blind and whom he tended with untiring
lence; and by had a profound homage for myself,
he donzella’ as he called me,—and would never
et me without some spray of roses, some bough of
wn, some knot of violets, or some cluster of ches-

eo .

~~"

52 PASCAREL.

nuts, for which he had rifled the hedges or had begged’
some neighbour.

In my way I was very proud; Mariuccia continually
reproached me for it; but I was not the least beset
by that sort of pride, which would have made me
regret Raffael Baptista’s companionship, because his
father was a coppersmith, and he ran about the streets
without shoes. I had lived too much amongst the
people; and I had too much of the bohemian in me
for that.

Indeed I enjoyed vastly, when I left Ambrogid’s
attic, drawing my little velvet hood over my curls and
running home hand in hand with Raffaelino, past the
dancing hall, at the hour when Fortunato’s pupils, of
whom I no longer needed to be one, were coming
forth from his lessons.

The little feminine respectabilities,—my born foes,
—glorious in starch and ribbons, and coral and sil
stockings, would recognise me by a solemn stare and
a general drawing together of themselves for mutual
protection, and I would laugh in their faces and flash
by them holding ’Ino’s hand the tighter, arid shaking
the rose petals all over my little wedther-stained
purples, which like all purples fared ill when brought
down into the streets.

Mariuccia never objected to my complaisance for
Raffael. There was much of the old genuine, sturdy
Florentine democrat in her. His mother, too, was a
gossip of her own.

“It is a rare good lad,” she used to say; and that
he ran the streets with bare feet was rio social sin in,
her eyes. an

At such rare times as Mariuccia allowed herself a

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 53

‘spare hour from her incessant baking and washing,
spinning and sewing, she used to cross the piazza to
the coppersmith’s workshop, under the sign of the
Spiked Mace, and drink a cup of black coffee with
_ the blind woman, not losing her time, but whilst she
gossipped going on with her weaving of rough linen
gaments for us from the little distaff which in true
dd Tuscan fashion was seldom absent from her, being
hing round the waist with its hank of flax in readiness
for any unfilled moment of her rare leisure.

I used to go with her, and Raffaelino and I used
to sit on the threshold and play dominoes on the
bottom of some big copper turned downwards to serve
‘ts as a table; or at other times he would bring out
from its corner his little old quattrocentiste viol, which
he had found amongst some lumber, and we would
play and sing stornelli whilst the white moonlight was

g the pavement, and the marbles of the build-
ings turned to silver in its lustre: Mariuccia beating
time with her spindle, and his blind mother nodding
her head to the measures.

One of the young painters then in Verona made a
ttle picture of Raffael and of me, playing and sing-
ing thus in the moonlight, with the background of the
huge arched doors and the innumerable coppers with
just the glimmer of a brass oil-lamp behind us where
Mariuccia sat and span.

It was a pretty little bit of genre; he was delighted
sell it for twelve gulden notes to a German Jew
er. I have seen it since in a great collector’s
‘leries; and the holder of it told me he had given
it some fifteen thousand francs.

One of the saddest things perhaps in all the sad«

54 PASCAREL.

ness of this world is the frightful loss at whicl
much of the best and strongest work of a man’s
has to be thrown away at the onset. If you desi
name amongst men, you must buy the crown of
such a costly price!

True, the price will in the end be paid bac
you no doubt when you are worn out, and what
do is as worthless as the rustling canes that blow
gether in autumn by dull river sides: then you sc
your signature across your soulless work, and it fet
thrice its weight in gold.

But though you thus have your turn, and
laugh at your will at the world that you fool, 1
can that compensate you for all those dear c
darlings; those bright first fruits, those precious ear
nestlings of your genius, which had to be sold
bondage for a broken crust, which have drifted a
from you never to be found again, which you k
well were a million fold better, fresher, stronger, hig
better than anything you have begotten since tl
and yet in which none could be found to believe, «
because you had not won that magic spell which
in—being known?

I was great friends with all those youthful az
who lived in nooks and corners all over the t
and who got their living by copying or by cow
feiting the old masters.

From the time that I had been old enougl
climb up their steep stairs unaided, they had mai
pet of me always, and often a model. I liked not!
better than to be perched on a table in any on
their big barns, arrayed in peacock’s plumes, or
Jaces, or ancient brocades, or any other of the

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. &5

turesque useless dusty lumber: and I think the dealers
and buyers in the old town must have got very tired
of my dark-eyed, golden fringed little face, which
fhese students were wont to use for every allegory or
childish subject that was ordered of them.

But painters, if one chance to please them at all,
always see sO many types in one’s face, all more or
. ls contradictory of each other, that one comes to
‘the irresistible conclusion that it must after all only
‘be typical of the poor human nature which makes us
all akin, when it does not set us all at strife.

They were very good to me all those poor lads;
gh they quarrelled often enough amongst them-
, and not seldom got into trouble for fierce
wangle with the invader. They all of them lived
high up in the air, amongst the open rafters of the
tnceiled roofs; with wondrous lights streaming in
through the vast bare garrets and magnificent views
of limitless horizons, southward to the plains and
Rorthward to the mountains.

They used to be very good to me. They would
dance with me unweariedly at the open air balls; they
would take me to laugh my heart out over the dear
delicious rheumatic burattini; they would play me all
torts of sweet little mad canzon?, rippling all over
with a very phrenzy of mirth; and when I sat to them
they would run out at noonday down six pairs of
stairs into the street to fetch me a noonday meal of
coffee, simmering in its brass pipkin, and little patties
in their white papers. I fear they must often
ve spent on me the only coins they had for their
m dinners, for they lived on about three soldi a day,

56 PASCAREL,

two of which would go for the theatre and the nig
smoke at their clubs.

To my coming and going with them, Mariu
having once satisfied herself that they were ho
lads, offered seldom any opposition. The Italians
not a’ people who think evil of every trifle,
Mariuccia had a good deal in her of the stanch,
compromising republicanism of old Florence.

We amused ourselves; that seemed to Mariu
the right and proper thing for childhood and yo
and moreover, as she used to say, with a laugh
a frown together, the “signorina is proud enough
six; how she queens it over them, the little imper
thing.”

No doubt a nurse duly reared to a sense of
duties would have thought the judgment of he:
would have fallen on her had she allowed a |
“ilustrissima” of ten years old to clamber up
- the roof of houses to sing stornelli amongst pi
and pots, and cans and lumber, with a circk
bearded bohemians, or clamber down again in c
pany with some stout-limbed peasant in gold ear-r
and scarlet kirtle, with a grand head like the D:
tello Judith’s, and a profession which was frankly
undesignedly that of a model.

But the songs had never a line in them for w
I could have been the worse, and the model w.
good gentle soul who had babies at home that
loved, and whose only care was to get broth
polenta enough for them. And dear old Mariu
was too straight and simple a soul to be on the w
for evil; besides, as she sometimes mumbled to
self as she unlaced her bodice at night before con

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 54

: to her small straw bed in my chamber, she thought it

' might be well if I should take to the people alto-
gether, and be happy and marry amidst them in due
tme, for of a surety money there would be none for
me, and my father’s people made no sign.

But when I heard her breathe these wishes for me,
she standing over me perhaps with her dull oil lamp
and fancying me asleep, I used to laugh her to scorn
in silence under the rough hempen sheet.

“Never, never, never!” I used to say in my heart.

Mariuccia used to close her soliloquies by kneeling
down to a picture of the Mother of Many Sorrows,
and praying to her for my future; but I, silent beneath
the sheets, used impiously to think, “what use is it to
be handsome if one cannot do for oneself without the
Madonna?”

The Madonna was all very well no doubt, for
these poor lean old folks who had not a friend in the
world, or those pale foolish lovesick girls who could
not keep their lovers, but could only kneel down and
pray for them in the chapels; it was very well to have
a Madonna, no doubt, when one was ugly or old,
and when with one’s life all was finished: but for me!
—there was a little triangular mirror hung in the
corner of my room to which I am afraid I said many
more orisons than I ever offered to Mary.

I loved the people: who would not in Italy?—the
dear, graceful, sunny-natured people, whose very selfish-
ness Is more engaging than other nations’ virtues.

Where else but in Italy, when you give a franc for

-@n armful of roses will the seller cast to you in free
t of pure good will his choicest magnolia flower? .;;
. Where else will the old porter to whom you offer

—- wa

¥

58 PASCAREL.

two sous for his trouble in hobbling up and down th
stairs for you, limp off to his snuggery and bring yoi
thence a bough from his lemon tree with a courtes
and a smile that courtiers might envy!

Where else will the facchino who has toiled afte
you on a summer’s day with a heavy load, put hi
hands behind his back and shake his curly head, an
steadily refuse reward, crying:—

“No, no, no! it is pleasure enough just to see th
signora!”

Where else, if you pause at a little music shop u
a bye street, will the master of the shop come out an
hum you the songs that you seek harmoniously in :
mezza-voce, whilst your coachman turns round t
correct a change to the minor, and the baker-bo'
pauses to join in the refrain, and a girl, mending he
shoe at a window, chaunts her share in the measure
and every mortal leaves off his or her occupation t
loiter out and join the chorus with sweet singin,
rhythm, till the whole narrow street is filled with th
melody?

Where else, indeed?

True, if you fail to buy roses next day, the selle
may petulantly wish you an accidente. True, th
porter next week may keep you languishing for you
letters while he gossips over your affairs in the stree
and allots you more lovers than there are days in th
year. True, the facchino may expect you to nod an:
smile and be duon amico with him all the rest of you
life. True, the music-seller may feel not the smalle:
scruple in giving you imperfect copies at six time
their due value.

But all the same how genuine were the grace an

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 59

the courtesy and the vivacity and the kindliness! how
genuine they will be again a million times over! how
they smooth and illumine the rough and dark path-
ways of life! how easy they render the cordial inter-
course between far-sundered classes! how pleasantly
they make melody amidst our rude human nature,
like the singing flower-sown brooks amidst the hillside
stones!

“Italians cheat one as much as other nations do,”
said a shrewd Frenchman to me, the other day. “Oh,
yes, no doubt; some say they cheat one a little more.
But then they alone know how to do it amiably; they
alone save one’s self-respect.”

Such was his verdict (a very superficial one, for,
except Stendahl, where is the Frenchman who ever
could understand the Italian?); but myself I would go
farther than he did.

I would much sooner say, and surely more justly,
that the Italian, to the fine subtleties of civilisation
and the keen astuteness of his natural intelligence,
unites a rare simplicity and a joyous frankness which
he alone of all people has retained amidst the artifice
of modern life.

No, I loved the people; I had enough soul in me
for that; but all the same, even in my happiest hours,
Inever dreamed for an instant, as Mariuccia dreamed
for me, of being content to dwell amidst them for
ever.

And happy hours I had; though my brothers and

_I sat at night reading Vasari, or old Pulci, or the

Chronicles of Compagni, or Ferreto, or the wonderful
stories of Croce, that Bolognese “Homer of Children,”
by the light of one poor little miserable lamp; and

60 PASCAREL.

though in the winter sometimes we had barely charcoal
enough to heat the small brown jars, and though even
on most summer days we had little else to eat than a
roll of bread and a broth of herbs, a few ripe figs

from the old tree in the court, or a slice of the pa-.

drona’s polenta.

CHAPTER V.
The Peacock’s Plumes.

We were happiest when we were alone with
Mariuccia.

We were children, and strong and well, and there
was the bright, broad, living sunlight about us, and
all things were possible for us in the future. But
when my father came and Florio it was different. We
did not reason on it, but we were vaguely affected by

their presence, vaguely depressed by it. Some breath .

from a world we knew nothing of blew in on us, and
chilled us in our bare old home in the mellow Lom-
bardic heats.

“Oh, Dio mio! but it is terrible!” Florio would
say, lifting his hands as he peered into the faggotless
cupboard, the empty stewpans, the ill-furnished bread
pot, and then we became sensible of the privations
which we had scarcely perceived before, and alive to
that vital truth of the old Condottieri, that “Sessa
soldi non possono fare.”

“Tt is terrible,’ Florio would say, cooking a couple
of little larks and some toadstools out of the woods
in such magical fashion that they would have deceived
any epicure in the country into belief in them as
ortolans and mushrooms. “It gets worse, you see,

—w -

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 61

every year; of course it gets worse. He wins less
often; and he takes more brandy when he loses. It
is always the way. It is-a puzzle to live at all, and
half the cities are shut to us. Debt—debt—debt. It
slaps the gates in our faces. There is hardly any-
where that they will trust him now. It will end in
that—some day,—and soon.”

With “that” he gave a gesture as though he drew

* knife across his bare throat. Mariuccia shook her
ead.

“End in that? {End?” she echoed. “And, say

you, Florio, what pmay will then begin for them? For
the dear little ones?\ It is very fyell to say ‘end,’ as
ifhe were the only on&concernel in the matter. Four
ofthem: and not a farthing” except the few notes he
kaves with me whiten he comes and goes, which the
Holy-Mother knows woutd be hardly enough to feed
up a goose for San Giovanni’s day, let alone feeding
four big hungry children from one Lent on to an-
other.”

Such discourse as this we used to hear between
them in stray fragments; and they left on usa subtle, in-
distinct sense of some impending evil; and even I, de-
spite the innumerable illusions and indestructible faiths
in which the name of my father was involved for me,
grew by degrees dimly sensible that he only returned
to us at such times and seasons as it had become im-
possible for him to live elsewhere.

The old barren dusky palace was the cheapest roof
that we could have found all the world over to cover
our heads, and when he came thither for a temporary
refuge, the fidelity of his two servants still contrived
#9 sustain around him some show of ceremonial and

62 *PASCAREL.

some sense of comfort. How they did it I cannot!
tell, nor even at this day can I imagine; but do it they
did; with surpassing patience and with unwavering
self-sacrifice.

An Italian can subsist on almost as little as an
Arab; and if he only offer you but a couple of dates
he can serve them on a majolica plate with a few len-
tiscus leaves and a little myrtle in such fashion that
they will lack nothing in grace of service that any
king could desire at his banquet.

Such a man as my father was could not be any-
where wholly without companions.

The native nobility and gentry never came nigh.
him; but the Austrians used to flash their white uni-
forms on our dark staircase many and many a night.
They used to pass within the doors of his room and
remain till daylight; and all night long Florio used to
be gliding to and fro with glass jars of chartreuse, or
fresh flasks of brandy.

They were my old Tedesco acquaintances who:
had waltzed me round a hundred times to the swell
of their military bands; but as I grew older my father:
sternly bade Mariuccia take heed that I was never
about upon the stairs at evening, and she kept me:
imprisoned by her side under the lamp, weaving the
‘lace, which I hated, or studying the scores of Ambrogid
Rufi, which I loved.

Other of my pleasures came to an end too about
this time.

It was a lovely spring in Lombardy, mild even as
though amidst the Sorrentine orange woods. !

Everywhere the meadows were white and hya-
cinthine-hued with a million crocuses. The violets

b
THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 63

, followed them in 4 ess hordes amongst the grass
tufts underneath the Vines. The maple and mulberry
trees were pushing forth their tender leaflets, and in
the dark old city there were soft blushes of colour
where the yellow daffodils and the home-reared carna-
tions blossomed in the casements and the balconies.

And away to the northward was the silvery cloud
of the Alps, and the students would go outward thither
and come back with the fresh winds blowing in their
hair, and with their hands full of blue gentian flowers,

In the spring, even, our level plain of the Adige,
which had not the beauty either of the mountain or
the valley, had a certain charm of its own under the
budding vine boughs and amongst the delicate acacias;
Tused to be in the fields all the day long, with my
brothers and Raffaelino, playing till we were tired,
and then, lying down to rest, watching the blue sea,
of those immeasurable distances beyond whith lay the
world. .

One day when I had filled my arms with masses
of wood violets, I clambered up the™staits to the bot-
tega of one of the students. He was very fond of

| flowers, and introduced them in all his sketches, and
Iwas accustomed to take him a share of my field-
spoils. He was a swarthy, large-limbed, tender-hearted
creature; a son of peasants of an Aquillian village,
whom we always called Cecco.

One day, when I was about twelve years old, I
went my round as usual amongst my friends the

_ painters. It was a fine bright day in February; I had
been out in the woods by daybreak with my brothers
nd the padrona’s boys gathering violets; the great
dorous purple violets that, like so many other flowers,

64 PASCAREL,

smell surely sweeter in Italy than ever they do elses
where.

We came home by noon laden with them; the
padrona’s lads went out to stand with their share of
the forest plunder at the corners of the streets, and
see if they could get a penny to play with at boccette;
I filled Mariuccia’s pots and jugs with some of mine,
and took the rest to my friend Cecco, who loved
flowers, as I say, and so often introduced them in his
pictures that the students nicknamed him II Squarcio-
nino, or the Little Squarcione, from that old Padovan
who was the first of the Early Masters to paint flowers
and fruits in arabesque.

He lived at the top of a lofty old house in a
gloomy bye-street.

I climbed the hundred and odd stairs with labour,
for they were rotten, twisting, and slippery from oyer
much dirt; and, with my arms full of violets, purple
and white, darted into his painting room, that was as
bare as a barn, and not half as cleanly.

With Cecco there were three or four other lads,
smoking and laughing, and talking as they worked.
He had an admirable light in his great, ugly work-
room; and those comrades of his who were not so
fortunate in that respect were wont to set up their
easels beside his, and labour together all in their vari-
ous manners.

They welcomed me with enthusiasm, went on their
knees to me and my violets, and abandoned their
work that they might sketch me.

“Just as you are, signorina!” they called to me.
“No! do not touch a thing; it is perfect. Look at
her now, with the light on all that ruffled hair, and

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 65

the little gay skirt full of the violets, and the colour
all hot in her face from the wind: ah, bellina, bel-
, lina!” .
So they cried around me in twenty different
forms of admiration—the artists’ admiration, which is
so curiously compounded of fancy and of fact, and
which they were accustomed to pour out on me as
unthinkingly as though I had been a porcelain figure.

I was so accustomed to it, that it hardly hurt me
more than it would have done the china; I knew
Nature had made me good to look upon and pic-
turesque. Altro! I used to shrug my shoulders and
thnk no more about it except to give a passing
pity to the unfortunate ones who were not similarly

So that day they hoisted me up upon the wooden
dais where their models were accustomed to stand, and,
with their four easels in the four corners of the room,
set to work to paint me as I was, with my load of
violets, and my hair all blown from the rough moun-
tain breezes.

In a couple of hours they had all contented them-
selves more or less thoroughly with a first sketch, and
simultaneously laid down their brushes.

“I have made her the Genius of Spring,” said
Bernardino Scalchi, surveying his workmanship with
his head on one side, like a robin’s.

“And I have made her ‘La Primavera della Vita,
La Gioventi dell’ Anno,’” said Beppo Lavo, who
wrote very pretty verses, and could sing them, too,

not ill.

| “And I have made her the Renaissance of Italy;
the type of the Dawn of Freedom, the Symbol of the
Pascarél. 1. 5

66 PASCAREL.

Future,” said Neri Castagno, who was a patriot a
a red republican.

Old, swart, clumsy Cecco laughed a little as
turned round to them:

“I am very prosaic after you. I have only m:
her what she is—a child.”

And yet, when all the sketches stood side by s'
in the dying light of the late afternoon, it was Cecc
they frankly admitted, which had the true poetry;
it, after all.

A child with a skirt full of violets, with a ro
wintry sky behind her, with a fresh wind tossing
hair, and with her feet gaily flying over the wet e:
already green with the coming of spring: that was
that Cecco had made of it; but beside his picture
others looked false in sentiment, strained in fai
and garish in grandiloquence.

Their work over, they made me jump from
throne; they thrust the violets in a bowl of wa
they insisted that I should stay and have a little f
with them. Cecco had been in luck that day
small panel of his, a girl’s face in a garland
roses, had sold for the enormous sum of twe
florins; he was a millionaire, at least, for a day, in
own estimation.

He ran downstairs into the street, and in a
minutes came back in gay triumph with a couplh
flasks of chiante, with a pan of steaming chesr
with a round sweet-almond cake, and a big bund}
cigars. .

Then he thrust me in an old oak chair dra
with dusky tapestries; he cast over me a magnifi
old brocaded robe that the Jews would have bot

4

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 67

" him to cast in the fire for its gold to melt out of
e threads, but which he would never part with, be-
use it had belonged to his father, who had been an
tist before him; he gave me a sceptre of peacock’s
lumes, and a diadem of silvered paper with which
1iodels were crowned when they had to sit for Ma-
onnas; and then our feast began.

How we enjoyed ourselves! how we chattered! how
‘e laughed! how rich the wine tasted! how crisp were
1e chesnuts! how we shouted the “Fuori gli stranieri!”
Ow we sang every song that occurred to us, from
notives of Rossini’s and Bellini’s to the last chorus of
he newest street song!

We were merry at heart, and full of zest, in the
deepening twilight and the clouds of smoke, while a
ruddy light from the setting sun glanced on the swarthy
face and kindling eyes of Cecco, and lit up the pea-
cock’s plumes of my thyrsus and the gold stitches in
the brocade: so merry, indeed, and so full of zest, that
we never heard the door unclose or perceived that
anyone besides ourselves had entered the painting-
room.

Only at the sound of a strange voice did Cecco
tumble hurriedly up from the floor where he was
Sttetched, and, with eager apologies and bewildered
haste, strike light to a lamp and welcome three strangers,
who, going the round of the ateliers, had come in its
turn to his.

I, seated on my brocaded throne, with my Ma-
donna’s crown on my tumbled hair, and my pewter
late of chesnuts on my lap, paused in my singing,
ind looked up; two of the strangers were Austrians,
he third was my father.

5*

Reo

68 PASCAREL.

Trembling, I slid down and stood like a.
culprit, with the folds of the brocade curled like m
coloured serpents round my feet: it was not that I
any sense of doing what was wrong, it was only
he was to me a mystery so full of awe, and wor
and attraction, that to see him suddenly there
palled me.

It was the first time in my life that I had ever
him in Verona out of our own old home.

His eyes glanced across me and he knew m
a moment; that I saw; but he gave me no recc
tion.

As chance would, however, have it, one of
Austriaci looked at me by the flickering lights of
lamp and the sunset.

“A charming little figure!” he cried. “Fant
but very charming. A model, of course, in all
tinsel and brocade.”

Dumb and perplexed, and glancing at my f:
in a vague terror, I stood still, with the silver ci
upon my curls, and wished to sink into the deptt
the old brocades; but he, hearing his friend st
came forward and looked at me coldly.

“A pretty little beggar,” he said, with a cold,
glance of his eyes. I knew his meaning in a mon
he chose to affect to avoid all recognition of me.

My face burned, my heart rose, my fear of
was forgotten. I threw off my silver diadem and
old robes, and stood up straight before him, the
neglected peacock sceptre trailing on the bricks.

“If I be a beggar, it is not my fault, nor
Mariuccia’s,” I said, boldly, with a scorn for him
thrilled me with a horrible sense of guilt and of hu

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 69

ation. “We are very hungry and very cold—all of
us—very often. They do not dare to tell you. But
it is true. And if I can forget it a little while laughing
here, where is the harm? I am not ashamed.”

My father’s face, haggard and cold though it was,
flushed deeply, whether with anger or any more tender
sense of shame, I cannot tell. He thrust me from the
room.

“Whatever else you be, you are too young to rant

$0 glibly,” he said, as he closed the door upon me.
_ Tran down the street to fling my woes at Mariuc-
ca's feet, and sobbed as I ran, the poor bedraggled
Peacock’s plumes still trailing from my hand, and
gathering in their course the dust and ordure of the
uneven and uncleanly stones. |

I fled along under the darkling shadows of the
grim fortresses which overhung the pavement, burning
all over with a sense of outrage and of indignant
scorn.

My father was not ashamed to starve me, but he
was ashamed to acknowledge me because I sat and
lughed and sang, and was glad in a garret, in a
paper diadem, over a horn of cheap wine, and a hand-
ful of chesnuts, and a bowl of wood-violets.

I had a passion of scorn for such shame: and yet
the weight of it was heavy on my child’s heart, for I
had a vague, shapeless, unreasoned-on sense of fore-
boding that, as my father had judged, so would the
world judge likewise.

Mariuccia comforted me in her tender, homely

- fashion, and washed clean the peacock’s plumes, and
* set them up over the stove with a palm-sheaf blessed
. for good luck in Holy Week.

70 PASCAREL.

But at evening-time she told me sadly that 1
father had forbidden her to allow me ever again
visit any of the students.

The loss of that cheery, good-natured, chivalro
riotous companionship of theirs cost me many a
many an hour of rebellious tears, and from that m
ment I ceased to be loyal to my father.

I would look at the peacock sceptre again a
again, and think to myself—

“If you had been of gold and ivory, he would ha
praised you.”

And I loved my feather-thyrsus all the more te
derly for other’s neglect of it; and for my father
settled scorn fired itself in me, and killed love.

CHAPTER VI.

Mater Dolorosa.

So things went on, until I reached my fifteer
year. I was tall, but I was still,—for I had the, ope
air life which develops the limb and strengthens t
body,—I was still in my ways and my tastes quite
child.

Raffaelino grew apace, too, and his people talk
of his entering the priesthood; they did not know wk
to do with him; he had no taste for any hand trac
he was for ever haunting the churches; and to ]
mother, who was a religious soul, there seemed no |b
more beautiful or blessed than life amidst the sile
marble cloisters, and the perpetual calm of Certosa
Camaldoli.

One of my brothers long before had died of fev
in one of the hot, nauseous, pestilential summers

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 71

, the uncleanly town; another had gone of his own
will off with a Genoese sea-captain, whom he had met
by chance, and who had dazzled him with stories
of the sea, and he had been drowned on his first
voyage; a-third had kissed us, and clung round
Mariuccia’s neek, and confessed, shamefacedly, that
his heart was breaking with monotony and inaction,
and so had also gone his way to see the outer world
with some other young students, as poor and hope-
‘@ {ulas himself, who talked of immortality and starved
- Won a dream; and of him, also, we had heard that
autumn that a knife-thrust in a students’ scuffle had
peed his short life just as it had opened into man-

d.

She and I were left alone in the old home.

We closed the great rooms, and lived through a
dreary winter in one little chamber abutting on her
kitchen, and looking down into the stone court where
the fountain that year was frozen, and the cold killed
even the hardy bitter-orange-trees.

We had not heard of my father since the previous
- Easter-term.

Twice or thrice, Mariuccia had gone to the little
dark den on the piazza, where the letter-writer of the
poor people sat, ready to indite an amorous effusion
or a summons for rent, a proposal of marriage or a
| butcher’s bill, according to his clients’ requirements;
| and thence she sent a letter each time to Florio or to

ber master.
I suppose she did not care for me to know of it,
she did not avail herself of my aid to pen them.
vice or thrice, in answer, Florio sent a little money,
from my father; but I have had many doubts since

e

72 PASCAREL.

that Florio had contrived to gain it by sc
of his innumerable talents, and robbed him
our sakes. From my father, directly, we rece
,word.

The winter was ternbly dull.

Mariuccia was getting very old, and wey]
and often for the loss of her boys.

They had been as the very apple of her ¢
had toiled for them from the very days |
births; she had spent many a sleepless ni,
weary day beside their sick-beds in their \
infancy; she had gone without her morsel |
many a time to feed better with it the you
cubs she loved; and now—one was dead, :
other two had thrown their arms about he
and laughed, and talked of the future, and go
away, thinking only of the worlds they ha
seen, and of the dreams they were sure woul
true.

That was all her reward: it was hard.

I saw those firm-shut lips of hers quiver
she sat and spun by the dull lamplight; and
her many a night murmur on her knees to th
' Dolorosa, “Do not forget them, thou Blesse
They will forget thee—children will—but mot
not angered for that.”

“What has made you stay with us, Mar
I asked her once, smitten suddenly with some 1
ful consciousness of the enormous debt we «
her. “Why have you stayed with us? It has
hard life always; and we have been only a tr
you and no reward?”

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 73

She looked at me with a steady look that had a
ertain pathetic sadness in it.

“One must love something,” she said, simply.

I pondered darkly on the saying.

CHAPTER VII.
A Twilight Tale.

Tue winter was very dull. My father’s forbid-
tice had taken from me many of my old pleasures;
id the failure of funds had arrested all continuance
my education. There was only Ambrogio Rufi to
om I still went, and in whose attic I was solaced
the strains of Cherubini and the melodies of
lick.

It was bitterly cold there. ;

The snow was thick on the roof, and the wind
nthe mountains poured through and through the
otected place. The old man could afford no
1luxury as a stove; and the bare brick floor was
ice to the feet. I used to shiver as I sang.

And yet when I think of the sweet sigh of the
in melodies through the white winter silence; of
aelino’s eager, dreamy eyes, misty with the
ent’s unutterable sadness and delight; of old
‘rogiO, with his semicircle of children round him,
g their fresh voices at his word; of the little
1 that came every day upon the water-pipe, and
red, and trilled in harmony, and ate joyfully
‘rumbs which the old maestro daily spared to it
his scanty meal—when I think of those hours,
ems to me that they must have been happiness

74 PASCAREL.

“Could we but know when we are happy!” sighs
some poet. As well might he write “Could we but
set the dewdrop with our diamonds! could we but stay
the rainbow in our skies!”

During this sad time of privation, I saw a little
way into the closed past of my old music-master.

Verona perceived nothing in him but a meagre
old man, who took his toilsome way noon and night
to the theatre; who chaffered in the market for 4
pinch of charcoal and a bit of goat’s-milk cheese;
who wore his clothes so long that they fairly dropped
asunder; and who made their boys and girls cry bit-
terly at many a sharp word and blow of his fiddle-
bow when they sung not to his liking.

But I had always felt or fancied—fancy is so much
feeling with every child—that there was something
sadder, wiser, nobler in Ambrogid than the townsfolk
credited.

Perhaps he liked me better than he did the others,
or he liked my voice better; all human creatures
were only counted as so many voices by him; at any
rate he now and then let fall, in my hearing only,
brief sentences which seemed to me born of a mind
higher than most of those with which I came in daily
contact.

Mariuccia would not listen to any idea of the
kind. She was a little jealous of my regard for him.

“Those music-mad people,” she would say, “are
just like that big sea-shell the dear lads brought me
from Genoa. The sea-shell sings all day long if you
put it to your ear. Why does it sing? Just because
it is empty. Just because the heart that used to beat
in it is dead and gone. It is just so with them. They

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 75

ntlody because everything else born in them
ed up—che-e-e!”

night, as it grew dark, I ventured, contrary to
go and see my old maestro.

dissatisfied with my tiresome fate; I was ill
ad impatient; I wanted I knew not very well .

ibed up his dark staircase, and found him in
er.

s a night when there was no performance
2atre of which he was one of the orchestra.
one in the cheerless, fireless attic scanning
scores by the light of a miserable little oil

oked up as J entered; I think that he was
id to see me, though he said nothing in wel-
iny time.

late for you to be out,” was all his greeting.
him the Ave Maria had only just then rung;
| him to explain again some obscure instruc-
ounterpoint which had been hard for me at
‘SSson.

snt through and through the passage lucidly
he was always willing to smooth difficulties
ent student, and in music I had patience,
nothing else. |
the point was so clear to me that I had no
cuse to linger over it, I still loitered by him,
re at the old bare table, leaning my elbows
d my face on my hands, and gazing at the
wick of the ill-fed lamp.

to me a little, maestro!” I said, suddenly.

76 PASCAREL.

Ambrogio took off his spectacles slowly,
at me in stupefaction.

“Talk!” he echoed: it never happenec
be asked for words; such things as he ha
to say he said through the strings of his v1

“Ves! Talk,” I repeated, with the
of a spoilt child, — for poor Mariuccia |
me sadly, despite all her warnings. ‘
have seen the world sometime. Tell r
about it.”

“The world!”

He said the words with a startled, he
He looked like one who hears the long,
name of some dead thing.

“Yes. The world,” I said again. “
like?”

“Go in a convent, and never know,” hi
with a bitter brevity.

“Is it so bad, then?” :

He looked at me across the deal table
yellow lamplight; a dreary, grey, shrun
very old, very ‘poor, very hopeless, with hi:
low eyes burning bright with the fires of
memories.

“Bad? Good? Pshaw! Those are phras
uses them but fools. You have seen th
cage in the beast-garden here. That is the
is not strength, or merit, or talent, or rea
of any use there; it is just which monkey |
to squeeze to the front and jabber throug
and make his teeth meet in his neighbou
they shriek and leave him free passage-
monkey which gets all the cakes and the

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 77

folk on a feast-day. The monkey is not bad; it is
only a little quicker and more cunning than the rest;

‘that is all.”

Isat silent; it seemed to me but a dreary pros-
pect, this monkeys’ cage which I should be doomed
to enter when once I should be across the mountains.

“Tell me a little more,’ I urged to him. “You
fnust have seen so much when you were young.”

“No,” he answered me. “I never saw very much.
The man who is poor can only look out of a garret
window. He sees the skies, and the sun, and the
moon, and the changes of the clouds, better than
anyone else; but it is all he does see.”

“But he can walk abroad?”

“Can he? Shoeleather costs money; and though
bare feet might safely tread the sands of deserts in
the days of saints, they go but ill upon the flints of
the king’s highways—now.”

This I felt was true; indeed I knew it by many a
painful moment when my little worn-out shoes had
dick-clacked sorrowfully over the scorching stones of
Verona in midsummer.

I grew cold with a sort of sickly fear of this new
world into which a second earlier I had been all
eagerness to plunge.

“But you must have seen so much to what I have
seen,” I urged, after a pause, again with a child’s
persistency. “Do tell me something—some story I
mean—of your old life?”

His eyes were full of pain beneath his shaggy

as they met mine across the dim light.

“Child, you should never open dead men’s graves,”

¢ said, drearily, with a sort of shudder. “I tell you

78 PASCAREL.

I was always poor. It is a kind of blindness—pc
We can only grope through life when we are
hitting and maiming ourselves against every ang

“But you had genius?}——”

He shrugged his shoulders in a pathetic, ho
gesture of resignation that went to my heart th
all my thoughtless selfishness.

“I have been most unhappy,” he answered si
“Yes; you are right.”

I felt that I knew his meaning, vaguely thou;
words shadowed it.

“And how then,” I said under my breath,
then—not great?”

He smiled a little, very wearily.

“How? Well, I loved Art, and not the °
and, in my way, was honest. Time was, when
young, that I dreamed a little of being, as yor
it, great. At twenty-five, I was—yes, even I-
happy. , a

“TI was poor indeed; in winter I had to kee
bed lest I should die of cold, and in summer
glad to dispute the acorns with the swine. But
happy. I had my Art, and I had a friend close:
a brother.

“He was a German, Karl Rothwald; togeth
studied music at Milano. He had no strong 1
only a graceful taste. I—well, I had genius,
help me, and of the most arduous study I was
tired.

“At twenty-five I trusted myself to commen
first great work—an opera upon the theme of Al
I was two years engaged upon it. They were th
happy years of my life.

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 79

“Rothwald and I dwelt in the same chambers to-
gether; we walked abroad in the daybreak and the
evening times, and we sat up late into the nights, I
all the while dreaming of Alkestis, and giving shape
to the creations that haunted me, and calling on his
sympathy and joy each time when my composition
was good on my own ear and satisfied my own de-
sire. He never was fatigued, nor ever failed to rejoice
with me.

“Often and often as we went through the millet-
fields at sunrise, or sat in our garret through the long
moonless nights, and the power of song that was in
me broke forth and arose triumphant, and filled me
with its own exultant strength, he—my friend—would
laugh and weep in his boyish fashion and fling his
ams about my shoulders and cry out how beautiful
and strong my music was, and prophesy I should rank
with Bach and Gluck and Palestrina.

“Those two years I was quite happy,—quite,—
though I was but a starving scholar, and had often to
0 without bread to be able to buy paper for my
Scores, :

“All the world was full of hope and of beauty to
me; everywhere I heard delicious melodies in leaves,
and waters, and bells, and winds, and all the things
that moved, and my friend was with me,—close as a
brother, dear almost as a mistress. I wanted nothing
More, and was sure of fame.

“My opera was barely finished when Rothwald
was summoned from my side; some illness in his
northern home, he said.

“I begged him to return swiftly; I pledged my
word to him not to submit my opera to the direction

80 PASCAREL.

of La Scala until he should return. ‘My triu
would be robbed of half its joy if thou wert not
me to rejoice in it;’? so I spoke to him as we |
each other our farewell. It was then autumn.

“The delay was sad for me, for I had hope
have seen the Alkestis produced that winter; b
never thought of putting it forward in his abse
I loved him only second to my work; and I
pledged him my word that he should be present wl
ever it should be given to the public.

“The first months of winter are bitter in Mila
they were very cheerless and desolate to me; bt
had many tender letters from him to. keep warm
heart, and I occupied myself fondly in touching
refining the creation on which all my future hung.

“No one had ever heard a chord of it, exc
himself, but I had not much fear that it would not
accepted. At the great Scala, they knew me; and
conductor of orchestra, who was powerful with
direction, had a liking for me, because of my ext
tion upon the violin.

“Rothwald had been gone four months; tl
were snow and ice in Milan; one day I sat shive
in my garret, yet with my heart warm still, becaust
much hope abode in it. The chief of orchestra }
me a visit; he was, as I say, good to me; I could
have maintained my life at all without the place
gave me amongst his musicians.

“He spoke to me of myself this day. ‘Ambro;
he said, ‘it seems to’ me that you have too m
genius to sit behind my baton all your life. I]
that you have attempted original composition. I
true? Then let me see your score. It should

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 81

something great. You are a master of counterpoint.’
He argued with me so kindly and so long, that in the
end he prevailed, and I drew out my Alkestis, and
bade him judge of it.

“‘Alkestis? Alkestis?? he murmured, as he heard
the name. ‘Is that your theme? It is unfortunate.
There is a new opera this very week produced in
Vienna on that same old story.’

“I was pained to hear that I had been forestalled;
I asked him by whom it was composed.

““Nay, that I forget, and am not sure if I have
heard” he answered me. ‘But, anyway, you had best
go thither and judge of it for yourself. If it be poor
and fail, you can still produce yours; but if a triumph,
aslam told, we must needs fit your music to some
other narrative. Ah! I know how you love your first
thought—your first poem,—but still we might manage
fo alter the libretto without much injury. Well, go
you to Vienna—nay, nay, do not be so proud. Take
my gold for the journey, and we will leave the matter
a&adebt to be paid me when La Scala first brings
out your opera. Nay, do not argue. Go. You must,
of necessity, judge your rival for yourself.’

“So I took his gold and went through the bleak
White winter over the mountains at peril of my life.

“It was night when I reached Vienna.

“The gay city was all ablaze with light. I had
travelled far and fast; I was exhausted. Nevertheless,
before I changed my clothes, or broke my fast, I made
ey to the opera-house. There they played Al-

“I paid my entrance-money, and went into the
wat and glare and stood and listened. The house

Paxaril, I. 6

82 PASCAREL.

was shaking with thunders of applause. Wher
clamour ceased, the music rose again—it Was my

“Phrase after phrase, chorus on chorus, solo
septuor, and recitative, I heard them all like one 1
stupid by a blow. ‘They were all mine.

“The curtain fell; the rapture of the people «
aloud, ‘Rothwald!’ ‘Rothwald!’ ‘Rothwald!’

“Then I understood;

“T fell like a stone; so they say; they took m
as dead.

“He had stolen it all—all—all: stored up ir
notes and his copied score.

“It made him a great name. You may hes
him now in the world. He has done nothing ;
since; the world wonders; but it is possible to sti
one triumph over a lifetime so that it covers ¢
after failure. To make a name is hard; but |
made, to live on it is easy.

“As for me—I say—I was dead. My heart,
brain, my genius were all killed. It is only my |
that has dragged on life ever since.

“I never denounced him—no. For I had 1
him. And if I had denounced him, where had >
my proof? None would have been found to
lieve.”

As the last words died on his lips, his head
on his chest; a film overspread the weariness o
hollow eyes; the silence of the innumerable years
he had passed, mute and alone, amidst his kind,
afresh over him.

In vain I knelt before him; in vain I caresse
withered hands; in vain I spoke to him, beggin;
forgiveness for my thoughtless cruelty which had

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 83

tom open rudely this deadly wound so long concealed
from every human glance.

In vain: he answered nothing; he heard nothing;
his dulled eyes only gazed at the gleam of the lamp;
his hands only moved vaguely as though straying
over the chords of some half-remembered music; his
lips only muttered now and then under their breath:

“He betrayed me; yes; he stole all,—all,—all.
But could I denounce him? He had been my friend.”

And this he said again, and again, and again,
Imany times; not knowing rightly what he said; and
murmuring between whiles softly to himself sweet
_ broken snatches of sad melodies—the melodies, doubt-
less, of his lost Alkestis.

I stole away, awed and afraid, for I was but a
child, and went out into the flood of moonlight, into
the bath of cold and luminous air, and there in the
steets I sat down and wept bitterly for a woe not
my own—for a life that was ended.

On the morrow he did not seem to remember the
confession he had poured out to me, nor ever again
did any allusion to it pass his lips, or mine. But he
had become sacred to me; every time that I stood be-
fore him I could have kissed his hands for very love,
and reverence, and pity.

From that hour I loved and honoured, and never
dared be wayward with him.

He was only an old withered man, very bent and
broken and poor, ill clad, and taking snuff with
fembling hands in the bitter cold of his fireless attic,
but to me from that night onward he was a hero and
amartyr, and whilst he lived I never told to anyone
what he had told to me, not even to Raffaelino.

6*

84 . PASCAREL.

When a man’s eyes meet yours, and his
trusts you and his heart upon a vague impulse is
bare to you, it always has seemed to me the t
treachery the world can hold to pass the gold of
fidence which he pours out to you from hand to
as common coin for common circulation.

It was Mariuccia who had reared me in that
ner of thinking.

“Child,” she used to say, “if they gave a diar
in trust to your safe keeping, would you run w:
to the goldsmith’s shops in the public streets?
is not human faith of more sanctity than diamo!

She thought so; being an old stanch republic
Florence and a woman very poor always, who
little of the world or of its ways.

CHAPTER VIII.
The little red Box.

At this time the winter set in with an almos
exampled severity.

All over Italy it was cold; so they said; and
Verona lying in her open plain receiving full
her defencelessness the strokes of the alpine :
winds, seemed to crouch and perish under the di
of the hurricanes; her huge old houses were
through and through with cold, and her high le:
walls whose shadow was so precious in the sw
noons, seemed now like barriers of ice.

That winter was a very terrible one to Mari
and to me.

Poor we had always been, but that winter we
absolutely nothing. Of my father we had not ]

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 85

for nearly twelve months, and the last of Florio’s let-
ters was already half a year old.

Mariuccia earned a little, a very little, by spinning
and by selling the work, but this was all. We lived
on the very barest food that could keep life in any
human creatures. | |

Of clothing there was no absolute need, for my
poor mother’s wardrobe had been costly and almost
indestructible. But even in this we had come to the
very last, and I was forced either to wear rustling
silks and lustrous velvets, which made me look like a
figure out of a masked ball, or else go without cover-
ing in the bitter alpine blasts.

Happily it did not matter so much in Italy as it
would have mattered any where else; yet I used to
feel absurdly and cruelly out of keeping with my fate
as I wove lace to get a pennyworth of bread to stand
between me and starvation, whilst all the time my
brocaded skirts swept the brick floor, and a boddice
sown with gold thread and seed pearls imprisoned my
aching and hungry heart.

I was fifteen; and old enough to know that it was
Very terrible to be without friends or money in the
world; and very bitter to sit endlessly crossing and
knotting the threads of my lace all the while wholly
Powerless to untwist one of the threads of fate.

If I could only escape from Verona, I used to
think—it seemed to me it would all be quite simple
then, once beyond the gates:—just once.

The Christmas week came, and kept the bells of
all the churches ringing all day and night.

The dark, black-faced Befana had her feast day,
and the people rejoiced and ate and drank and sang

86 PASCAREL.

at the midnight mass, and exchanged complin
and confetti, good will and generous wimes.

And all this time Martuccia and I had no
much as a log of wood for the hearth, or a sli
meat for the soup pot; we were cold, poor, alone.

We went to mass all the same; and no one |
ing at her in her ruddy serge kirtle and her ;
Tuscan hat, and at me in my satin skirts and
velvet hood, would ever have dreamed we wer
want of anything. For Mariuccia in her way
very proud; and so was 1 in mine. Nevertheless
utterly did we want that we besought the Madc
humbly to send us a crust of bread.

But no doubt the Madonna hears this cn
“bread, bread, only a little bread,” so very often
she has got deaf to it.

Be that how it may she sent us nothing; and
little while it came to pass that for one whole
we did not even break our fast, and must have
supperless to our chill beds, had not the padr
from whom we could never quite conceal our
needs, toiled up the stairs in the dark with a smo
pan of maccaroni lentil flavoured, and besought u
partake of it for the love of God.

Mariuccia accepted it with tears in her fea:
old eyes, which for more than eighty years had n
failed to open at dawn to the day’s labour. Mar
cla would take a gift as frankly as she would
one; yet to eat the meal of charity was very b
to her; she had done her best so long to live v
out alms; it seemed to her, I think, hard not to ]
died a little earlier, so as to have escaped this de
dation.

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 87

‘ That night she prayed very long to her Mother
of Many Sorrows; I sobbed myself to sleep shivering
and without a prayer.

In the morning, when we rose, there was not a
thing in the house for our hunger; not a drop of milk
for our thirst. Mariuccia set out the cups and plates
by sheer habit, but they remained empty; there was
not so much as a dust of charcoal with which to heat
any water.

It was a very cold day, but very bright. The sun
was shining. The bells were ringing. Already in the
streets below there was a crowd of quickly moving
feet and of laughing voices. The Carnival had come.
It was the first day of the corso di gala.

Mariuccia and I looked at one another with the
dry eyes of an absolute despair.

After a little space she went to a drawer in an old
walnut-wood press, and took out a little red box. She
brought it to me where I sat with the pillow of my
work lying idle in my lap. She took out of it a few
tnnkets; corals and mosaics.

“These were your mother’s,” she said tenderly.
“She had a great mass of jewels when I went to her
first. After her death your father took them away,
and sold them all no doubt. I have never seen them
again, He kept these few little things; they are not
of much value, though they are good of their kind.
Thave kept them for you. I could not think it right
fo sell them. But now it is a question whether they
§0 or you starve. You are old enough to choose;—
Say.”

I held them in my hand whilst she spoke; there

88 PASCAREL.

were earrings and lockets and a bracelet, all
mosaic.

My poor young mother! I-had never felt
pity for her, such nearness to her as I felt then.

My eyes grew wet with a rush of tears. It
my arms about Mariuccia’s throat.

“Keep them to-day,” I murmured. “Dear,
Mariuccia!—just to-day. I have thought of somet
I am going to Ambrogid.”

I had flung my velvet hood over my head,
was out of the chamber and down the stairs
the street before she had time to question
moreover she had no fear; I went every other dé
Ambrogio.

The sun was shining radiantly upon the f
pavements as I went out upon them. It was
fourteenth day of the new year and the first o!
carnival.

In the teeth of the cold people were all ;
hugging close their charcoal braziers, and wrap
their faces to the eyes in their cloaks; and alth
it was scarcely noon, in many a dark doorway |
flashed some gay mummer’s disguise.

The chimes of all the churches were rir
madly; there were bursts of music here and the
set of the Tedeschi flashed by me, driving in
Tirol fashion; muffled ‘with scarlet rugs and b
sables, their horses in belled harness stretched
greyhounds; from a balcony above, there fell on
as they galloped by a shower of house-reared vi
and roses, a woman laughed gaily as she cas
flowers; their Tirolean postilions roused the echo

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 89

the old gateways with a tarantarratara upon their tas-
selled bugles—how pretty and bright it all was!

It was the first gala of Carnival, and although the
procession had scarcely commenced all the city was
out in holiday attire, and in holiday humour.

There was a wonderful glow everywhere of many
various colours.

In the great multitudes that thronged every square
and street and passage-way, and shelved upward like
banks of flowers against the huge stones of the palaces
and prisons, there were beautiful half tones of crim-
sons and greys and ambers, with here and there a
broad flash of white from a woman’s coif, or a glisten
of golden spangles from a mummer’s gear.

Here and there about in the throngs ran Sten-
ferello or Arlecchino, or some other of their quaint,
gay, bespangled and beribboned brotherhood.

Now and again the ranks of the people parted
with shouts to let through some group of masks
in all the colours of the rainbow, or some conjuror
all aglow in scarlet, striking at 'them with his magic
rod.

Through the swarming masses there began to
sweep the gorgeous equipages of the patriciate,
ushered forth in all the old-world pomp of Carnival;
with the child-nobles clad in the costumes of their
ancestors, powdered and jewelled with their rapiers at
their side.

The draped balconies and the deep embrasures
of the casements were filled with bright-eyed children,
“wk browed women, and old men with grey and
ble heads, like a painter’s studies for Prospero or

flincion Berti.

go PASCAREL,.

Sometimes there was a burst of music, sometim
some glittering troop of cavalry clanged and clatter
through the press, sometimes there rose the bla
of trumpets, the tinkling of mandolines, the cries
the vendors of confetti, the shouts of little lads ba
ing the pantomime; and above it all, the laughter
the populace was always murmuring like an unresti
sea.

I ran eagerly through the twisting passages |
Ambrogio’s. I had an idea that he might get nm
some employment in the chorus of the opera hous
I found his attic empty; the people of the place tol
me he was gone to a rehearsal at the theatre of Dc
Pacheco.

I ran then not less quickly to the coppersmith
under the Spiked Mace; I thought I would ask Ra
faelo’s mother to take a little coffee and bread f
pity’s sake to her poor old gossip and frend. B
there was not a living creature in the workshop: eve
the blind woman had gone forth with her ch
dren to hear the echoes of the festivities she cou
not see.

I thought of poor Cecco, who would I know sha
his last soldi with me, but he and all his heedle
tribe would be I knew as surely out in the tow
busily helping or hindering the preparations of t
mumming and the harlequinade, and all the gay stre
shows with which the Carnival would be welcomed
its royal pomp.

Broken-hearted and hungry, and with my chee
wet with tears, I wandered carelessly about the stree
unwilling to return; the time stole on, the people k
gan to pour out in throngs that grew merrier ai

THE CITY OF CATULLUS. or

ger with every moment; even the very cripples and
eggars looked glad and triumphant, and had garlanded
heir crutches or adorned their rags with wreaths of
eaves or knots of ribbons.

I only was all alone and most unhappy.

All at once a flute-like voice called out to me:

“Oh, dear donzella, come up here, come up here.
Thave looked for you everywhere. My mother is
gone with my big brothers, and I have been to the
house to look for you, and you had been out quite an
hour and more, so the padrona said. Come up here;
itis such a good place. One sees everything, and the
crowd is getting large.”

It was little Raffaelino who called to me, standing
oa the topmost edge of a flight of marble steps in
oe of the arched doorways of an old palace.

I joined him where he stood; and so it came to
pass, that day, that I sang to the people in the great

lzza in my violet hood and my amber skirts, and
that I heard the band of the maskers and scaramouches
mianing down the street, with their coloured bladders,
crying, in eager chase:

“Pascaréllo!—Pascarél!”

92 PASCAREL.

BOOK ILI.

THE CITY OF LILIES.

CHAPTER I,
The Gifts of Gala.

“Wuart is Pascarél?” I asked of Raffaelino :
passed away, and I gathered my fallen treasur
rose to go homeward to poor Mariuccia.

The little lad did not know; he said tl
would ask his brothers. He thought that i
be the name of some new-fashioned game
Carnival.

At the entrance of my dwelling, Ino pow
his own spoils into my arms, and before I cor
fuse them or arrest him, he had fled off doy
street again as fast as his fleet, brown, bare
could carry him.

He wanted to avoid being pressed to take a
and, moreover, altogether to lose seeing th
would have been a trial too bitter for his pk
loving Italian temper to endure to contemplat
loved me, and had sacrificed himself to serve m
now that he could no longer benefit me, the g
sumed all its supremacy.

The tears were still wet upon my cheeks, |
heart bounded joyously against the grim, grave1
of the Fates as I crossed the courtyard and fl
the staircase.

THE CITY OF LILIES. 93

The house was quite empty; everyone was gone to
see the Corso; there was no sound but the drip, drip,
drip of the water in the stone fountain, and the wail-
ing of little Zoto and Tito, the padrona’s youngest
children, who being too small to go out by them-
selves without being trampled on, and too trouble-
some for their mother to spoil her festa by looking
‘after them, had been locked in, in the lower part of
the house, and left to console themselves as they
could with a few chesnuts and some curls of wood
shavings for playthings.

I ran like a greyhound up the stairs and across
the bare chambers to the little inner den where
Mariuccia always sat and span under the high turret
window that was stained in many colours with the
life and miracles of S. Bruno.

I was covered with violets and confetti; they had
lodged everywhere, in my hood and my curls, in my
skirts, in my gathered-up dress which held, like a great
yellow pannier, the heaps of rosettes and bouquets,
and crisp bank-notes, and florins, gold and silver, and
sweetmeat-papers, and knots of carnations.

My old nurse glanced up, startled, as I appeared
before her like the very genius of the Carnival in-
camated and filled with gifts, for, as I threw open
the door, a flood of high noonday sunlight streamed
in with me, and danced upon the yellow daffodils and
the rosy knots of the other flowers, and the bright
bands of the ribbons that streamed away from me in
all directions.

Breathless and wordless, I poured my gleanings
isto her lap before she had fully seen that I stood

fore her.

\ 94 PASCAREL.

__

“Here is enough for weeks and weeks and we
I cried to her. “You need never be cold any |
and the stew-pots shall always .be full. Just a
minutes in the square, and it is done! We shall:
want to sell the mosaics!”

Mariuccia looked, stupefied, down upon the
fused heap of gold and of silver, of bank-notes
of cakes, of fruits, and of sugared dainties. I dro
down on my knees before her and laughed in
face with delight; a delight to which tears lay cl

“Are you so astonished, Mariuccia? You 1
thought the people would care so much? It was
thought, not mine. He would not take a thin;
himself, not so much as a candied chesnut. Bu
you not glad, Mariuccia? Only think how we
live now! Just a song or two in the streets, an
are rich!”

Mariuccia’s strong old frame shook with a su
emotion that vaguely awed me; a glance that
stern and yet piteous flashed on me from her
eyes; a quick sad-stricken cry escaped her:—

“In the streets!” she echoed; “in the streets
money? And for me? ‘O child, O carina! '
shame !——”

“Shame?”

I rose to my feet chilled, silenced, mortifie
had used the one little gift with which Nature
dowered me, and the people had only given me
they would in return for the song that I gave 1
Where was the harm? It was simple and fair,
honest; how could it, then, bring any shame?

So I pondered, being but a child.

Meanwhile Mariuccia covered her face wit

THE CITY OF LILIES. 95

hem of her garment, and, rocking herself to and fro,
wept bitterly.

“In the streets? for money?” she murmured again
and again. “Oh, carina! the shame of it, the
shame!”

Isaid nothing; I felt the tears swell to my eyes,
but I would not let them fall.

I took up my poor treasures from the floor, on
to which they had fallen in a disordered heap, and
carried them to the head of the stairs and sorted

The notes and money I put away in the little old
oak coffer that always held our riches when we
eamed any: then I leaned over the deep well of
the stairease and called the names of Zoto and Tito.

The poor little lonely babies came tumbling and

lottering to me at the summons from their old play-
ground in the snow-filled court; I filled their little
dity.eager hands with all the ribbons and roses, and
sweetmeats, and pretty painted toys, which no longer
had any beauty in my sight, or flavour to my
mouth.
_ “Take them—all, all, all!” I cried to the aston-
shed children who stood before me open-eyed at
my sudden wealth and their good fortunes: they
wanted no second permission to seize on all they
saw; in another moment I had nothing left, and they,
Tapturous and shouting loudly in over glee, toddled
Own again in the court below, keeping high carnival
amidst the snow.

As for me, I sat cold and still and sorrowful ex-
ceedingly beside the broken Donatello. Against my
heart I still held the Fates.

96 PASCAREL.

I was wrong when I was proud, so they said; ¢
now, when I had conquered pride for honesty’s sa
I was wrong too;—the perplexity was a knot I co
not unravel.

Mariuccia, the dear tender soul, soon found 1
sitting there, and came to me, and laid her ha
upon my shoulder and kissed me between the eyes.

“Nella mia, I was wrong to be so quick w.
you,” she said, whilst her voice still shook. “You d
for the best, dear, and it was good of you to think
me at all. But, all the same, it must not be; y
must never go out in the streets again — new
never.”

I sat silent upon the marble stairs; I was paine
angered, mortified, perplexed. She spoke to me,
thought, as if I had robbed in the streets instead
simply using the gifts with which Nature had dower
me, and taking nothing but what the goodwill of t
people had joyously cast to me.

Mariuccia kept her hand on my shoulders whe
she stood before me, trying to see down into 1
dropped veiled eyes.

“Promise me you will never do such a thing aga
’Nella!” she said, anxiously; “I love you for it, carir
dearly, dearly. But it is so shameful!”

I shook her hands off me, and rose. I felt 1
face burn with anger; anger that was not perhaps
very unjust after all, for I had tried honestly to
right.

“Shameful!” I echoed. “I see nothing shame
in it. You speak to me as though I were a thief.
think it is much more shameful to sit still and :
you starve of cold and hunger, and live myself

¥.° "gre aqr-w" =

THE CITY OF LILIES, 97

the padrona’s charities. - Sell the mosaics, if you like,
if you think that better. But they will not last long,
and what shall we do then? Altro! I am not a baby
now. I know we have no money at all, and that you
cannot tell where to write to my father. Are we to
die of famine like caged rats, then, because you will
not let the people pay me of their own goodwill for
Pleasing them? I am fifteen now, Mariuccia; and
something or other I will do with my life; I will not
mope and moulder for ever in this old prison-house.
I will go away, as my brothers have gone.”

My heart smote me as soon as the words had
passed my lips. I saw her sturdy old frame shrink as
if I had struck her a blow.

No doubt it was hard—harder than in my thought-
less youth I realized—to have given so many years,
sO much patience, such long unchanging care to the
teating of us motherless things, only to have us all
48 we reached our strength and stature impatient to
escape her hold and pass from out her sight.

She was silent, and so was I; down in the court-
yard the children played with their spoils in riotous
glee; a sound of trumpets and of laughter came,
deadened, through the closed casements from the
distant streets.

“Do you hear them?” I cried to her at last in
lMpotent impetuous pain. “Everywhere there are
Mirth and riches, and ease and pleasure; why am I
Not to have my share? I am handsome, so you all
say; I have a voice; I am not a fool; I could do
Mething in the world, I think. Anyway, can one
do worse than die of cold and of want of food here?

Paxaril, I. 7

98 PASCAREL.

Let me go, as my brothers have gone. Whatever the
worst may be, it cannot be worse than this.”

Mariuccia grew very pale, with that strange terrible
pallor of age when the emotions come and go s0
slowly and with so much pain.

She looked down into my eyes which now met
hers speaking, no doubt, the longing that possessed
me with more eloquence than my words could hold.

Her strong withered hands shook where they still
rested, on my shoulders.

“Wait a little,’ she said, at length, “wait, and let
me think.. The boys, at the worst, can only die; but
you—-— Pd

She left the phrase unended and went from me,
and passed away into the gloom of the passages.

Where I sat, under the broken Donatello, a shiver,
that did not come from the chillness of the marble
solitudes, or from the winds that blew from over the
mountains and the snow, ran through and froze the
bright current of my warm young blood.

What was this calamity, worse than death, which
could not come to my brothers, but to me alone!

The rest of that day Mariuccia and I spoke not
at all to one another; we sat silently as two strangers
in the little square dark room with its smell of dried
rose leaves and of the onions that keep off the evil
eye.

She sat and span on at the distaff at her girdle;
for she came of the class that cannot lay aside its
daily work however much it may endure or may
lament; but I sat aimlessly doing nothing, leaning my
forehead against the grated window and watching the

THE CITY OF LILIES. 99

varnival throngs far down beneath me in the white
Nazza.

Once as the twilight closed in, Mariuccia called
ne to her; her voice sounded a little feeble. I could
10t see her very plainly, the shadows were so dark.

I bent to her to hear what she would say; her hand
went up to my forehead, and passed over my hair in
her old familiar gesture. .

“Bambina mia,” she said, eagerly, quite in a whisper,
as she held me there; “promise me you will not sing
in the streets again. Promise me! What should I say
to your mother in heaven?”’

“I will promise,” I answered her, for there was an
accent in the words that vaguely awed me, and almost
panquished the angry rebellion that was astir in my

Cart.

“Our Lady be with you ever,” she muttered, softly
and wearily, like one who is half asleep from fatigue,
and speaks but on unconscious instinct. I went back
to my place by the grated casement and fretted my
soul in mute repining. :

Now and then people flung up at me crowns of
¢vergreens or showers of sweetmeats, but these all struck
against the barred panes and fell back again into the
Steet below.

I did not care to reach my hand and open the
lattice so that they might enter.

The day went dully on its course; the duller in
that little room of ours because of the mirth and mis-
chief in the town below. It was the first day of the
ftst Carnival in which Mariuccia and I had not clothed
ourselves in the best and brightest apparel that we
could and gone down to wander through the crowded

7*

100 PASCAREL.

ways laughing at every step, giving gay greetings, a
lingering until with the grey of night the lamps h
glittered by their tens of thousands all over the lu
and domes of the green old city.

It was the first day in which we sat within and
the rejoicing throng flash by without us.

The hours were very slow, very cold, very dreai
there was no charcoal in the stove; there was no bre:
in the pot; the padrona and all her flock had gol
forth to the popular mirth-making; in the old hou
all was dark, and still, and melancholy.

The twilight came early; there was no oil for 0
lamp; no food for our hunger; it was night very soo
we sat quiet in the darkness, which was only brok
when some torch-lit procession or some blaze of fi
works flashed a fitful reflection into the chamber frc
the streets and squares of Verona.

We should go, cold to the bone and supperless,
our chill beds; yet neither she nor I stirred to ta
the money I had gained in the morning from its plz
in the oak coffer.

I looked at Mariuccia. She was still asleep.

At length, the rebellion and the weariness in |
vanquished every other feeling. Why should I not
and enjoy with the rest? Why should I sit and mc
here like an owl in the market-place, because a fool
old woman had quibbles and foibles about the go
blood in my veins and the dangers of girlhood?

So I reasoned in the wickedness of my heart w
the revolt in me ripened.

I stole again a glance at Mariuccia. She did 1
stir nor seem to hear. I stole noiselessly across

THE CITY OF LILIES. IO!

, trimmed the lamp afresh, reached down my
od, and went out on to the stairs.

There was no one to say me nay. Every soul in
the house was out that night, except the two bambini,
Who were fast asleep curled together on a heap of
me shavings, the emptied sugarplum-horns and the
mroken toys strewn all around them.

I was soon in the streets and squares, that were all
alive with throngs of people, bent hither and thither,
laughing and talking, some singing, others dancing
down the gloom of the solemn passage ways.

It was quite late.

Time had glided away unperceived as I had sat in
that monotonous vexation and quietude. They were
wetting fireworks in the cathedral square, and the great
3 were ringing the tenth hour of the night.

CHAPTER II.
The Veglione Masquer.

Lone familiarity with the Veronese ways had made
me quite able to take care of myself in a crowd; and
the Italian crowds, though often riotously mirthful, are
never rough or rude.

I got in a coign of vantage just under the grim
old stone Roland, and seated myself comfortably and
carelessly to see the girandola.

The fireworks were very fine, and shot upward in

streams and clouds of glory on the frosty night air,

edding their many colours on the sea of upturned

“es, and flashing over the darkness of the Duomo
» I yielded myself eagerly and with utter zest to
enjoyment of them. |

102 PASCAREL.

I was very hungry, to be sure, and cold still
it was much better to be hungry and cold but
amused than to suffer the same thing in lonelines:
gloom. I had not been born in Italy without |
born to as much philosophy as lay in this sj
reasoning.

So I gave myself up to the girandola sitting
under the paladins, laughing, and shouting “Bellissi
and “Brava!” with the throng around me, and fo
time utterly oblivious that I had wept such bitter
under the Donatello, and, alas, equally forgetf
shame to say, that Mariuccia sat at home alone u
sadness and her patience.

The bands of the Austrian regiments were pli
in the piazza, to keep the Veronese in good hun
and the music, the fireworks, the picturesque c
oscuro of the thronged square, as the various
illumined it, all combined to make me forget my '
and to rouse me into an exhilaration which wa
the more excited and unreal because I had faste
so many hours.

I was in no mood to go home and creep to b
the cold supperless. It was now midnight, I knev
I was indifferent. Mariuccia would scold; but th
had she not done so when I had tried to please
help her in the forenoon?

So I hardened my heart; and when the last
of coloured flames had died out, and the strear
people began to pour outward, this way and th
strolled on also, looking to see if by any chance
might be other amusements still forthcoming.

The Stranierl spent their gold lavishly in ¢
sions for the populace; and the Veronese Carniy

THE CITY OF LILIES. 103

;, the time of that foreign dominance, if its mirth were
;. hollow, was, at least, as brilliant in festivity as any in
Italy.

Mariuccia would scold, of course, when I went
home, but what of that? Words break no bones.

So I said to myself, in my wilfulness and revolt.
Alas! that hour has been a remorse to me ever since.

As I have said before, I was never very good and
often very bad in those days, so far as waywardness
and daring went. As a child—and I was still no
more than a child—I was affectionate always; and
. courageous, when my imagination was not affected by
fear; I told the truth, and I would give anything I
possessed, however much I might want it myself.

But there my virtues ended. I was disobedient to
aheadlong rashness; and I was in a mood to be so
to-night.

As I went out of the piazza, there was a little
laughing group of sightseers, cloaked and hooded in
; an odd fashion. They looked lke monks, but they
were waltzing down the pavement, and singing a
tavern song very popular then in Verona.

“Pascaréllo! Pascarél!” they screamed at the top
of their voices, as a flash of red went by under an
old archway; and they set off running swiftly, their
monkish robes showing beneath them women’s little
feet with rosetted ribbons flying.

This mystical name fascinated me; the desire to
| know its meaning grew stronger and stronger.

I flew in their wake, and ran too. The gleam of
scarlet had vanished into the gloom of the arch.

Soon I came upon a throng of people standing
efore some columned steps and some wide entrance

104 PASCAREL.

doors. Above, many lamps glittered, and against |
wall there fluttered on a scroll, in great white lett
on a scarlet ground, the word of Veglione.

From the belfries of the city midnight was soun
ing. The stream of people was passing within t
building; they looked very strange to me; they ma
me think of an old painting that hung in our o
palace entrance-hall, and that was called the “Gat
of Hell.”

But I pressed on to enter with them; I was n
afraid; it was the Veglione by the writing on t
wall.

I had heard strange and wonderful things of th
saturnalia, and I imagined many more; moreover, he
had entered those veiled figures who had been see
ing Pascarél.

I ran eagerly up the steps, and was carried by t
press of the pleasure-seekers into the body of t
hall. There was a barrier at which they stopped 1
for payment. |

I stood helpless, with the rushing sound of t
many footsteps on my ears; a man’s hand, stretch
over my shoulder, cast down the money for me, a
a man’s voice laughed in my ear, “So handsome, a:
not masked? Pass in, pass in, carina.”

The pressure of the onward moving throngs swe
me through the barrier, and away from my deliver
I was borne into the very midst of the strange torre
of colour and tumult, of laughter and of music.

I stood still and looked, the blaze of the light h
blinding me; my face was uncovered; my hood f
back; my feet were bare; my yellow skirts were stain
with many a crushed fruit and bruised flower, in t

THE CITY OF LILIES. 105

da glad days of my wanderings; my little. hot hands
eld between them the onyx ring against my breast.

There was a broad piece of mirror before me in
he entrance-hall; I saw my reflection in it, and was
charmed and yet ashamed.

My cheeks burned like wild poppies; my hair was
m a lustrous tangle: my eyes looked like great burn-
ing lamps in the thinness of my hunger-worn, small
face; my mouth was scarlet and parched with excite-
ment; and yet I knew so well I looked handsome—
‘&0 well that the people would look at me and cry,
“Bellina!”

I was frightened, and yet I was fascinated. There
‘seemed some horrible evil about me, and yet it was
vivacious, and so gay, and so full of pictures, that
could not help being allured by it.

Pascaré] I did not discover, and, truth to tell, I
forgot all about that mystery.

I was too absorbed in it all to be conscious that I
was singular in going thus bareheaded and unmasked
amongst the dominoes.

It was a pageantry to me, nothing else; and I
moved on as I should have done in the streets; the
people supping at their little snowy tables in their
boxes; the quaint, glittering costumes that leaned over
the panels; the stir and colour of it all, the headlong
fight of the mad waltzers, the white mousquetaires
wringing the champagne from their long moustaches;
lhe gorgeous eighteenth-century dresses crowned with
powdered hair; the crowd of black monk-like figures
et served only to intensify the gaiety of colour—all
hese were so many pictures to me.

T wandered on enchanted, and unheeding the ob-

106 PASCAREL.

servation that I gathered in my course; the o:
that I noticed was the intentness with whi
followed by the eyes of a Florentine Florin
wore that traditional dress with an easy gr
was In a manner familiar to me. But the
did not approach me, and I soon ceased
about him in the midst of the masquers.

For me, I never doubted that it was pande
itself; and yet the fantastic charm, and the h
liancy of it bewitched me. It was horrible, a
was beautiful.

The women’s eyes, as they glittered like
eyes through the blackness of the masks; tk
and flutter, and tumult of colour; the furio'
of the dancers whirling, stamping, shouting, r
all the maddest ecstasies of folly; the sombre
of the gliding dominoes passing silently w:
low, sneering laughs, as the arrows of their w
speech hit some blot or some wound in men’s
or women’s weakness; the intoxication of t
gay music crossed every second by the wild w:
of the revellers; the dazzle of innumerable |]
shine of countless jewels in the great semic!
from floor to roof, whilst here and there so
quer, ablaze with diamonds, flung her flow
above, and some noble, powdered and jewellec
down to pledge a dishevelled, panting dancer,
foaming wine; the wonder, and chaos, and g
tumult of the scene bewitched me as I gazed

It was only the masked ball of the Carni
to me it was beautiful as paradise and ho
hell.

THE CITY OF LILIES.. 107

It all swam giddily before my sight, and the music
rolled like thunder above my head.

As I stood, a dancer, in the dress of the Louis
Treize musketeers, flung his arms about me, and swept
me into the circle of the waltzers with a force that
bore me off my feet.

“Cara mia,” he cried in my ear, “you are in
strange guise for the Veglione, but what matter that?
I paid for you at the doors. You shall reward me up
yonder.” .

He never ended his phrase. I struck him on the
mouth blindly with both hands on the mere instinct
for freedom, and broke from his hold, and ran through
the maze of the dancers without sense or sight of
what I did.

Shrill cries rose round me; the people parted
hastily to let me through, and many fled from me in
terror; a shout arose that I was mad, and had broken
loose from the hospital. The sense of the outcry
came to me dully as voices ring over water from a
far shore to a drifting boat.

_ Suddenly I stopped, and flung my head upward
like a beaten stag, and looked across the blinding
blaze of colour, vaguely seeking help.

_Fronting me was the red glow of drooping cur-
lains, a great knot of carnival camellias, a little group
of men and women, like a picture from the Decame-
fone, a medley of violet and gold, and scarlet and
black, and diamonds and pearls; it was an opera-box,
11 which five dominoes leaned and laughed, and drank
and jested.

The central figure of them all stood erect, with a
' Ted plume tossing in the light; he was in a flash of

108 PASCAREL.

ruby colour and of white; he wore the dress of #
Florentine Florindo, and had a dark oval face ll
that of an old picture; his hand was on his swor
hilt; he laughed gaily with the masked and mirthf
women.

I do not clearly remember what ensued.

A band of debardeurs surrounded’me; a hideot
cock crowed at me; a clown grinned and gabberec
a set of black masks hooted and threw their lim
hither and thither in wild contortion.

The Mousquetaire seized me afresh; lifted m
from the ground, and plunged into the wild gallopad
that was rushing down the boards like a troop ¢
riderless horses on San Giovanni’s day in Florence.

I shrieked for help and release.

My tormentor, screaming with laughter, held m
the tighter. There was a moment’s pause; then
crash of sound, a loud outcry, a tumult of the ma
quers, and the Florindo with the scarlet plume ha
sprung from the box above, had struck or tossed tt
arms away that. held me, and had hurried me throug
the maze of the dancers out of the heat and the gla:
into the cool white moonlight that was streamir
through the darkness of Verona.

“Pascaréllo—Pascarél!” the people had shoute
as he came; and there was no pursuit, and no offen
taken against him.

He stood and looked at me in the silvery ligh
a bright and many coloured figure, flashing with t
grace and glitter of the old dead centuries under tl
gloom of the walls of the Scala.

“Well, my singing bird,” he said, with a smi
in his eyes, “what were you doing there, may I as]

THE CITY OF LILIES. 109

It is a place for kites and hawks, and all manner of
evil birds; but not for nightingales. You did not seem
as if you liked the air?”

The voice was the voice of the giver of the onyx.
I burst into tears, and told him what had drawn me
_ thither. ,

) He heard me with a gentle amusement in his
eyes; dark eyes, tender and poetic, such as Sordello’s
might have been here in this very same Verona.

“The best thing I can do for you is to take you
homeward quickly,” he said, moving onward, and
bidding me show him the way to my home. “To be
abroad on a Veglione night is not the best thing for
you, donzella. Courage is very admirable, but a little
prudence is needful too in this world.

“It is to make your cake all of coriander-seeds—
fo make life up of rashness only.

“Tell me—why were you singing in the streets
this morning? You look like a little princess, Sig-
Worina Uccello. Nay; never mind. You shall tell
me to-morrow. You will let me come and see you
to-morrow.

“You want to get out of Verona? Oh, fie, for
shame. That is not poetic at all. To get away from
the Stranieri is always good, I admit, but surely
- Verona has a charm of her own still, if only you will
look for it.

“She is not like my Florence, indeed; it is not
given to every city to be born out of fields of lilies,
and keep their sweetness with her for ever, as Florence
does; a woodland fragrance always amidst the marble
and the gold.

“But Verona,—oh, yes,—Sordello’s song is here,

110 PASCAREL.

if only you listen, and it is the same moon that
Giulietta saw from the balcony, and those great Scali
—they:seem to daunt and to awe the place still,—
and do you not see Adelaida ever bending her termble
brows in the shadows?

“Nor Cunizza, the faithless, with her ‘strong, cruel
star, that ruled her life so ill, and her lovely eyes
burning with the madness of the Romano, and at her
side her gentle Troubadour, Ser Folco? Do you never
see them? They lived and loved here in this old
Verona that you despise because you are so ignorant
of all its beauties.

“And then, far away,—so far away in the dawn
of the poets—the pretty Lesbia twisting the roses i
her lover’s locks in their gardens yonder, while at 4
bow-shot in the circus the citizens shouted, ‘Ad
leones?’ Oh, you should not hate Verona. It is s0
ancient, and it was so mighty once, though it never
used its might for any very good purpose.”

He talked on thus merely of course for the pur-
pose of banishing my fear, and reconciling me to the
strangeness of my position, in wandering the streets
thus at night, with an unknown masquer in the dress
of Florindo. There was that true and kindly delicacy
in him which would not to prolong his own amuse
ment, and gratify his own curiosity, increase my em
barrassment, or cause me pain.

His voice was so beguiling, his eyes so frank and
tender, his whole bearing so full of a certain gentle
ness and carelessness, that’ I was attracted into a?
irresistible sense of confidence in him.

He was an utter stranger; he was one of thosé
mad carnival mummers who had imbued me with 4

THE CITY OF LILIES. Il!

Vague sense of unspeakable, intangible evil; he was
only a Veglione masquer, gay and grotesque in his
van-coloured disguise in the white Veronese moon-
light; and yet I trusted him, and felt a sense of
security in his presence, and spoke to him as simply
and as naturally as I could have done into the ear of
litle Raffaelino. |

“But this was very naughty of you,” he said, still
with the smile in his eyes, as he heard my sins.

“Iam never good!” I confessed very piteously.
“Iam like that wicked Speronella of Padova, whose
namesake I am—so my nurse says, at the least.”

He laughed indulgently.

“Oh come! not quite so bad as that, I trust. And
you will grow wiser in time. Let us hope rather that
you will end like that good Nella whom her husband,
even in a better world than this, if poets may be
credited, quoted as a priceless perfection. But what
Possessed you to go to that place to-night? A freak
of mischief no doubt, but what promoted it?”

“I wanted to see what Pascaré] was! That was
all. That was all indeed!”

He paused a moment in the silent street, and
laughed outright.

“Well,” he asked, “did you find out?”

“No! Do you know? Pray tell me.”

“Lhave tried to find out too,” he said, with the

ugh on his lips. “Tried all my life, and never suc-
ceeded yet.” '

“Is it something so wonderful?”

“Oh, dear, no. No wonder of any sort in it.”

“Is it an enigma then?”

“Well—yes—a little, Probably the answer lies

112 PASCAREL.

in nothing deeper than in the one word with wh
(Edipus answered the Sphinx. Do not trouble yc
head after it. It is not worth your while.”

“Why? The people seem to care.”

A tender and saddened shade swept over his fa

“Ay! the people, perhaps, a little.”

“What is it then? Do tell me.”

In my eagerness I paused midway in the stre
the snow lay lightly on all the roofs and stones a
balconies; the icy Alpine air had frozen it into :
sorts of lovely and fantastic shapes.

The masquer broke off one of the pretty sn
flowers off an iron scroll, and held it in his hand.

It slowly melted and vanished.

“That is what Pascarél is; nothing more!”
said, lightly. “Do not talk of it; tell me about yol
self.”

I had not space to tell him much, for the ¢
palace was at a stone’s throw from the opera-hou
and he and I stood in a few moments’ time befc
our huge, cavernous, arched portals, whose nail-studd

“@ancient doors stood forever wide open, night a
day, for we were all too poor there to have fears
theft, having naught amongst us all to lose. -

At the entrance he paused and uncovered °
head.

“T will bid you good-night, donzella, and go ba
to my pranks and my follies. To-morrow, if you ¥
let me, I will come and see you. Gratitude? (¢
altro! you have no cause for that. It is I rather w
am grateful to the Fates. By-the-way, I wish tha
had had something brighter and fairer to give y
than the old grim onyx; they are an ugly porten

THE CITY OF LILIES. Ii3

afraid, those stern sisters. Never mind, I will try
md get you some roses to-morrow. They will be.
Yry much fitter for you. Nightingales and roses have
onged to one another ever since the days of para-
fise. Addid!”

He kissed my hand with easy grace, and turned
away down the deep shadows of the street; in the
hoonlight the red and white of his dress—colours of
ce—glistened as the moon-rays caught them; he
went singing, half aloud, the catalogue of the Loves
fom the Giovanni.

- I watched him until he was lost to sight in the
darkness that fell from the lofty palaces, half fortress
and half prison, the twisted galleries, the marble bal-
Cpnies, the frowning stones of Romeo’s city; it was a
little scene from the Tre Cento, from the Decamerone,
from Goldoni;. the old dead amorous poetic life
@eemed suddenly to breathe and move. again amidst -
the decay and the despair of old Verona.

I went slowly up the staircase, past the ruined

tello, and fancied that the broken, dust-strewn
irs were the steps of the Capulet palace, and that.
was Giulietta in that tender daybreak, when the lark
tang all too soon.

CHAPTER ITI.
The Last Sleep.

AS Ientered the chamber where I had left Mariuccia,
groping for a match lit the little lamp, I saw that
was still in her oak chair by the fireless hearth.
hands were folded, and her chin had sunk upon .

I knew that she was used to allow herself.
wearel. I. 8

114 PASCAREL.

a little rest and slumber after her long day o;
and ¥ imagined that she had dozed on and on
noticing my absence, nor the flight of time.

I slid down quietly upon the floor at her feet
did not speak lest I should waken her.

I was glad that she could in sleep forge
hunger and the cold. I was glad, too, to
escaped the reproaches and rebukes that my co!
merited.

I leaned my head against her knee as I had
so often in my babyhood, and sat there, very ¢
with her hands resting heavily against my should

It was deadly cold; my limbs were frozen
brain swam 4a little from long fasting and exciter
it was quite dark; from the streets below there |
the hum and outcry of a city in its holiday; Mari
did not waken.

I think that I also must have slept a little
the least lost consciousness of time, for I start
one starts when suddenly roused from a bad d
- as the last fireworks of the night’s pageantry
with a rushing sound above the roof, against the n
less sky.

A great girandola shot its fountain of many-cok
fires up above the black outline of the Duomo,
most likely by the last revellers of the Veglione
the reflection from it fell, golden and reddened, thi
the little grilled window into the chamber; its ligt
upon Mariuccia’s face.

Something in the look of its closed eyes
silent mouth made my heart tighten with a br
less fear. _

THE CITY OF LILIES. 11g

“Mariuccia!” I cried to her. “Mariuccia! You
fnghten me! dear Mariuccia—are you still asleep?”

She was indeed asleep.

The brief and fitful fires of the girandola died
away, and left behind it the blank of an utter dark-
ness; the dense impenetrable darkness that precedes a
Winter's dawn.

Upon the old quiet patient face there was a look
of rest, and the withered hands on which I rained my
kisses were yet warm. Yet I, who never before had
looked on death, knew well that death was here, and
that whilst Verona laughed on her first night of Carnival,
I sat in the silence of the old palace, alone with the

dead body of the sole friend I had on earth.

CHAPTER IV.
At Ave-Maria.

THREE days: from that time Mariuccia had gone to
her last home.

The wooden shell had been jostled in the common
hearse and buried in the common resting-place where
the poor lie. The padrona and Raffaello and his
blind mother and I had toiled after it through the
driving cold of the early morning, and heard the
heavy clods fall on it one by one.

It was all over—all over: the strong, pure, honest,
tireless life had gone, spent in obscurity and toil, un-
recognised and unrecompensed to the last.

I was but a thoughtless, wayward, and selfish child.
I had been heedless always, cruel often. I had taken
he countless sacrifices that she made to me with all
a child’s reckless, tyrannous, unconscious egotism. [

§*

L116 PASCAREL.

scarcely even: now knew the immeasurable debt.I h
owed to her.

Yet a vague heavy pain, that was almost remor
weighed on me, and on some insufficient yet pregnz
sense.

I realised all that this one lost life, old as it w.
and humble and poor, had yet been to me from 1
birth, with its buckler of stanch fidelity held ever t
tween me and the evils of the world.

The dreary weeks went by; to all the rest of Vero:
they were gay with all the zest of Carnival.

Night after night the fireworks would blaze again
the skies, and the music would roll through the s
old streets, and the mad and merry maskers wou
scamper and frolic under the shadow of prison ar
fortress and monastery.

The echoes and the reflections of the noise ar
the lights would come to me where I sat in my di
mal little chamber, but that was all the share I hs
in them.

The padrona, though so poor, would have son
friends to laugh with her in her dim old kitchen, ar
would find some copper pieces to give her a sight
the puppets and the shows that enlivened for Vero1
those long and chilly days when the winds swe
down like dragons whose breath was ice from t
deep Tirol valleys and the desolate Dolomite range

But I was all alone, except when Raffaellina car
and tried to while away my sorrow by his innoce
fanciful talk and the tender strains of his viol.

With the sad morrow my Romeo of the Veglio
never returned. :

THE CITY OF LILIES. 11?

Even in my passionate remorse and grief I could
not but think often of him that day.

When we returned from our dreary errand in the
| snow, there was awaiting me a great cluster of roses,
red and white, that must have come from Tuscany or
Rome.

Little Gian, who had been upon the stairs when
they arrived, said that a boy about his own age had
brought them, saying nothing whence they came.

I knew.

I set the beautiful things before me against the
dismal grated window, and wept my heart out over
them. The grief was most for the loss of dear dead
Mariuccia; but a little also for the broken faith of the
Florence masquer.

What could I dot

I knew no more whither my father was gone than
whither the crows flew when they passed in a black
Cloud over the Adige; and though the good padrona
served for me, cooked for me, and bade me be as
welcome under her roof as were the rains in summer,
I was too proud to think a moment that such depen
dence on another could ever long endure.

The desire to escape from Verona grew stronger
on me with every hour. I had no notion of what I
should do elsewhere: but all good things seemed pos-
sible to me if once only I could cross the dreary plain
and seek the sunrise of the south.
| I said nothing; for I knew that Raffaello would

weep and protest and the padrona take fright, and the
' priests would be spoken with, and some means per-
haps be found to detain me, if ever they knew that I
wished to take wing.

118 PASCAREL.

But all those winter days, when the Corso wa
its gayest and the streets were full of masks and m
mers, I sat in my dull little stone chamber and
volved again and again a thousand schemes for
freedom.

As the first step towards liberty, I went out
day at the close of the Carnival to see the scri
whom Mariuccia had been wont to employ for
communications to Florio.

A certain sense of reluctance to trench on :
thing that seemed like a secret of the dead had :
me back from asking this letter-writer any questi
but as the weeks of silence succeeded one anoth:
argued that not to try and find my father would |
folly and a fault, and in the last hours of one wi
day I crossed the square to where Maso Sasso |
his councils at his little worm-eaten desk.

I thought sadly as I went of the homely old fi
that had always been at my side spinning and tal!
as she hobbled over the stones; I thought a little
of that gay red and white masker whose eloquent
had smiled on me in the moonlight of Juliet’s cit;

Why had he not followed his roses?

He was not a man to me, nor a stranger; he
a poem, a picture, a thing of grace, a shape of
cinque cento; Sordello, only not so sad; Romeo, |
not so boyish; Ariosto, perhaps, that gayest of lo
and poets; or one of those patrician improvisatori
spent half their lives in a court and the other hal
the marketplace.

I was thinking of him still as I crossed the pi
to the hole in the wall where Maso Sasso sat.

When the Ave-Maria was rung he used to ¢

THE CITY OF LILIES. “119g

his office by a bronze wicket and his day’s work was
done. Then he would puss methodically across the
piazza to his favourite trattoria; and in front of it,
taking his- frugal repast, would make himself amends
for the long silence of the day by detailing to an in-
terested audience such of the sayings and doings of
his clintela as he deemed it proper to reveal.

He was known to be a miracle of propriety and
discretion; nevertheless he was a good companion
when the sun was set.

Indeed, they were used to say if you brewed him
a bibita to his liking, there was very little that you
might not hear concerning your neighbour in Verona.
But a public that has to recount its joys and sorrows
aloud to its penman cannot be very scrupulous about
sectesy, and the popularity of Maso Sasso never waned
on that account.

He had his office in a little dark stone loggia;
cuniously black and still in the midst of the changeful
life of the piazza.

He was a little meagre, yellow, shrivelled old man,
who sat all day long in his den and heard all the
comical comedies and tearful tragedies of the city, and
hever seemed to be touched at all by any one of the
innumerable idyls and the pathetic obscure heroisms
which came hourly before him, as the citizens and the
contadini flocked around his stall-eager to have had |
Some good tidings sent to some absent one, or to un-
fold some stiff and blotted scrawl from over the moun-
lains and the sea.

There was a crowd of people around the loggia in
Which his desk was placed when I drew near it; it
Was nearly four, and it was known that no press of

“ 120 PASCAREL.

public necessities would ever make him prolong 1
sittings after the Ave-Maria.

I had to wait patiently my turn.

A broad-shouldered crimson -kertled contadh
wanted a love-letter sent to a soldier away in Pie
mont; she did not care what was said so that it w
all as sweet as sugar.

A poor wife held out a dirty miserable scrawl, an
fell down in a loose lifeless heap upon the stones, :
she heard that her husband had been drowned ¢
Ischia. |

A jager of the Tirol, with his green plumes danglit
in his saucy black eyes, dictated an offer of marriag
giggling and grinning as the pen flew.

An old meek, timid creature tendered a pap
with a trembling hand, and turned away with a hear
stricken moan as the slow changeless tones of t
scrivere read aloud to her that her only son was sel
tenced for life to the galleys far away in the Regno.

What an epitome was Maso Sasso’s den of hums
nature and of human fate!

I stood and listened with my hood drawn ov
my face: when my turn came I had forgotten my ov
SOITOWS.

“Oh how can you bear it—every day and all d:
long—like this?” I cried to the wizen, immovable, I
different old man.

He spread his palms outward over his desk in
gesture of silent contempt.

“Signorina—it is life!” .

“But the sorrow—the joy—one against the ott
—the comedy—the tragedy—it is horrible!”

The old man smiled grimly.

THE CITY OF LILIES. 121

“What does that matter to me?—joy or sorrow—
tragedy or comedy—lI get my scudo for my trouble.”

“But how can you bear it?” I cried again, “day
after day, year after year—always those terrible things,
side by side with all this laughter.”

The old man shrugged his shoulders and took off
his horn spectacles to wipe them free of dust.

“Signorina—whether it is woe or laughter, what
does it matter to me? I get my scudo, and have
something to gossip about. That is all that con-
cers me.”

In later years I have found that the world is very
much of opinion with the scrivere. It scans the mass
of human life through its spectacles, and whether it
reads a fiat of death or dishonour, or a jest-story of
love and of lightness, it cares nothing so that only it
can take out of both its scudo’s worth of scandal.

He asked me for the third time what I needed; I
was Keeping more profitable customers from his stall.
linquired of him whether Mariuccia had addressed
her letters to. my father. Maso Sasso shrugged his
Shoulders again, and sought in the full stores of his
memories. :

“The letters were to be left at the post, any-
Where,” he said at last. “Sometimes Nice—Paris—
Vienna—the last time, I think, Florence. Yes; Flo-
Ténce, But always the post-office. Nothing more.”

“You are sure it was Florence the last time?” I
ned, entreating him tremblingly.

“Yes, quite sure. But the last time was eight
Months ago. Will the Signorina please to move aside?
Feople are waiting, and the sun will soon set.”

I moved aside mechanically, and walked dreamily

122 PASCAREL.

across the square and sat down on the steps of a great
church, where the beggars were wont to sit.

F lorence seemed a long way off; and the chance
but a very slight one. Nevertheless, it was all I had. {

The evening was cold still, but bright and wind-
less.

It was at the end of February; there were lovely.
roseate lights in the sky, and all fresh mountain scents,
on the air. Women went by with large baskets full |
of crocuses and daffodils.

In the beautiful pearly hues of the late day the
old gaunt city was transfigured.

Its roofs and domes gained a spiritual light, and
vast dream-like shadows swept its plains. It was for
once possible to believe in Giulietta and to muse on
Catullus.

At least, so it seemed to me; but perhaps it was
only lovelier that night because I knew that so soon!
should look my last on it,—perchance for ever.

“4

CHAPTER V.

The Feast of Faustino.

An hour passed away with me sitting there, dreamily
watching Verona.

I could see my old home; the dark gruesome stone
pile of it rose sheer as a rock against the blueness of
the sky, unchanged since the days when Henry the
Seventh had slept beneath its roof, and the bright
Conraddin ridden forth from its court yard.

I had never loved the place. Indeed, it had been
as a prison to me all my years. And yet my heart

THE CITY OF LILIES. 123

1ed now to leave it. We are so bitterly ungrateful
the present, so blindly grateful to the past,—always.

The Ave-Maria slowly swung from all the bells of
| the churches; the bronze gate of the loggia was
wt with a clang, the scrivere hobbled across the
yuare to his place of gossipry; lamps were set one
yone in the doorways; the oil wicks were lighted in
v iron sconces of the streets; the little charcoal
toves of the chesnut sellers began to glow ruddily in
he coming gloom.

As I turned away from the sunset to go home-
rard, whilst those colours of glory faded over the
ilent city, a hand touched me, a voice startled me.

“Pregiatissima Signorina! have the Veronese no
yes that you are left to stray their streets alone?”

It was the voice of the Mousquetaire, from whom
he Florentine Florindo had rescued me at the Veglione;
tvoice with a strong and harsh foreign accent. The
ihudder of disgust and dismay with which I recognised
im made an impatient and displeased shadow sweep
cross his face.

“Wait. Hear me a little,” he said eagerly as I
umed my back on him and went with quicker steps
ut of the piazza. “I am a friend of your father’s.
_ have spent many an hour with him. You have
lothing to fear. I have pitied you many a time,
loverina, sitting up there, all alone, at that grated
vindow; so fair a singing bird in so dark a cage.”

I twitched my purple mantle from his grasp.

“I do not want your pity. Let me be.”

But he kept step with me.

“Nay, why do you bear me such ill will?” he said,

124 PASCAREL,

with a petulance in his laugh that served ill to ref
sure me.

“Listen, carina mia; you are a beautiful chill
Did no one ever tell you so before? I have seen yal
golden head at that grating many a day, and bed
sorely tempted to enter your door; only that diref
dragon whom you have happily buried for good a
all, sat on guard so very grimly.”

I shook him off as best I could. |

“Respect the dead at least, and leave me!”
cried to him; I hated the sound of his voice, the loo
of his eyes, and the street into which we had passe
was so empty, and now that the after-glow had fade
the city was so dark.

He laughed lightly and pursued his way.

“Oh no, cara mia! I let you go that night b
cause I liked you too well to raise a scene aroul
you. But I mean soon or late to have all that I the
surrendered out of chivalry to you. See here, #
pretty signorina, you were out on a freak, and no ol
knew, of course, and it was I who passed you in!
the Veglione. Well, that is very harmless if you tru
in me; I shall be silent, that you may be sure. B
otherwise, if you provoke me—if you carry that han
some sunny head of yours aloft in that fashion, wl
then—— ”

I paused and faced him,

“Well?—What then?”

“What then? Why then—every one will kn
that the little Tempesta stole at midnight to the ope
ball with me, and she will be very glad to gives
whatever I please to take—”

He threw his arms about me, and bent his face

THE CITY OF LILIES. 125

nine; but with all the strength I had I struck him on
he mouth, poured on him all the epithets of injury
and of disgust with which my knowledge of the Ve-
fonese streets supplied me, and shaking myself free
of him, ran as swiftly as a hare through the twisting
passages to my home.

The insult of this stranger had decided me. I did
not dare to stay another day longer in Verona; I was
pursued with the dread of him, and the disgust that
he inspired was the last touch of impulsion needed to
make me take wing into the unknown lands—into the
unknown world.

Ireached my own room unobserved; and put to-
gether the few clothes I possessed and counted my
httle store of money. I had changed all that I had
gained on the day of Gala into gold with a childish
idea that notes were of little comparative value; and
%0 liberal had been the people to me, that when
Mariuccia’s funeral and my own expenses for the last
weeks had been paid, I had left me sixteen broad
gold Austrian florins.

I put the money with my mother’s mosaics into a
leathem bag, and strapped it about my waist. The
onyx Fates were round my throat. I had a fancy that
they would bring me fair fortune.

I took too a little dead rosebud from the great
clusters that the Florentine masquer had sent me; and
hed it with the onyx close about me. I had a fancy
that it would propitiate the Fates. __

My purple and amber costume was an absurd one
for travel, but I had no other that had any warmth
against the mountain winds, and I was forced to
Wear it.

126 PASCAREL.

I looked longingly around the long, fam
chambers, dusky and grim, with grated windows
deep vaulted roofs and floors of marble; desolate .
prison-like though they had been, they were yet a
knew of Home.

- With sobs that choked me I kneeled and pra’
to the Mother of Many Sorrows, where her pict
hung above Mariuccia’s bed, then with a last look
farewell I drew the velvet hood over my head 4
stole down the stairs.

I met little Zoto and Tito, and kissed them.

I could see the padrona in her kitchen wring!
out washed linen by the light of a little oil lan
under a picture of S. Sulpitia. A contadina from |
plains sat chatting with her and plaiting straw as tl
talked.

My eyes filled with tears, and shut out the lit
picture. In another moment I had crossed the thre
old, and was running hard and fast towards the sot
gate in the twilight.

On my way, I passed of necessity the copp
smith’s workshop under the Spiked Mace. I glanc
wistfully through the open entrance.

The light of a large wood fire was leaping ab
all the brazen and copper vessels. ‘The blind won
sat in its warmth. The coppersmith moved to and
with bare sinewy arms. Little Raffaellino sat read
a score, with his lithe limbs twisted under him,
his lute by his side on the bricks. I dared not
him know that I was going away, lest he should ra
far and near, opposing clamour.

I prayed mutely, in my heart, to the Madonna

THE CITY OF LILIES. 127

nem, then went on my way to the dull crooked pas-
age in which Ambrogié Rufi dwelt.

I dared not bid anyone farewell, lest they should
ind means to stop me in my course. I knew well
that they would all say I was too young to stray
alone over Italy. I dared not speak to anyone else,
but I could not bring my heart to quit the city with-
out some word, some look upon the face of my old
master.

I stole upward to the desolate garret, and entered
it unheard by him.

He was sitting leaning over the little brazier, which
was all that he could afford to warm him in the bit-
lerest weather.

It was the feast of the Martyr Faustino, and all the
thurches were calling to vespers.

The attic was quite dark.

The moon had not yet risen. It was so high in
he air, that all the metallic clash and clangour of
Ihe bells seemed to beat through its silence like the
tlamour of a thousand hammers on a thousand anvils.

I went and kneeled down by him without his hear-
ing me. I ventured to touch him gently.

“Dear master, does not the noise of all these bells
ire you sometimes?”

He did not lift his head from his chest.

“I am always tired,’ he muttered. “What of
that?”

“But if you lived where it is quieter?—here it is
to close to all the belfries.”’

“Jt does not matter,” he answered me, absently.
"They drown the music in my brain. I am glad of

metimes,”

128 PASCAREL.

“But if you wrote the music down?”

He shivered a little where he leaned ove
brazier.

“To feed the stove? Not I—not I.”

I dared not urge him farther. The utter hop:
ness, the terrible apathy of this lost genius, whic
its life long had woven beautiful things to whicl
world was forever deaf. What could I say to tl
—I, a child, to whom every sun that rose was
promise and a smile from God?

I waited a little while, kneeling before the bi
at his side. My heart was very sore to leave
though he so seldom seemed to note my presenc
_ “Maestro,” I murmured, at the last, “speak t
a little. I am going away.”

“Ay, ay!” he echoed, drearily. “To be sure
be sure. You all go away. Why not?”

I was silent.

How many hundreds of us he must have seen
away, bright-eyed, flute-voiced children, who —
around him for:a little space, and then driftec
of sight, out of knowledge, into the darkness o
unknown world; while he, the old man, chang
nothing, but remained always by his cheerless h
under his lonely roof.

I pressed a little closer to his side, timidly.

“Maestro,” I murmured again, “I have no o
the world, and I am going away. Will you
me once—just once, for fear I never see your
again?”

He roused himself from his lethargy with a s
shudder. He looked at me a moment with a sta
awakened look in his dim eyes. He laid his

THE CITY OF LILIES. 129

upon my head, and, as it rested there, it trembled
greatly. 7

“I dare not bless you—I have doubted God; but I
wish you well, poor child. That is—I wish you with-
out a heart, without a soul, without a conscience, so
that you may deal unto men as surely they will deal
unto you.”

His hand sunk from my head; his chin dropped
égain upon his chest. He had fallen once more into
his old dreaming stupor over the charcoal fumes under
the roar of the bells,

I rose to my feet sorely afraid. It was a dread
benediction with which to commence my pilgrimage.

In another moment I was again on my way to the
south gate of the city. I looked back once. The
Old palace was black and full of gloom against the
clearness of the skies. I shivered a little, and set my
face again to the south-east.

Who could say how the sun might rise for me
here?

CHAPTER VI.

Fuori.

HaLF-AN-HOUR later I was rolling underneath the
one vault of the gate which faced towards Tuscany,
1 the old heavy, cumbrous, leathern-curtained dili-
enza, which thrice in every week droned on its way
» Padova and Bologna.

Rich people travelled otherwise, I knew; but I
ad only sixteen florins in the world.

The soldiers at the gates looked hard at me, but

Pascarél. I. 9

130 PASCAREL.

said nothing. The man with the horn, on the
the clumsy vehicle, took my money and asked n
tions. I was safe on the road to Florence. It s
a terribly long way off, across those unknown
tains; but the name of the City of Lilies allur
with a strong sweet spell.

Mariuccia had told me many glories of the
of her birth; and my young mother I knew hac
won her bright brief fame. And with what Ic
Florentine masker had spoken of it,—he who:
derest little rose I had saved when dead wi
rest, and had brought away with me where the
Fates were hidden.

It was a queer, capacious, ill-scented old v
—this conveyance, which was dignified by the
of diligenza.

There were three peasant women, smelling si
of garlic, and hugging great baskets of woollen
of pizzicheria goods, and of live hens that th
purchased in the town. There were two old.
a burly fattore, and a young Tirolese in the
resque garb of the Unterinnthal.

The vehicle was as full as it could hold, ;
one looked with much favour on me as I enter
cept the young mountaineer.

No doubt I had appeared to them, starting
the heavy gloom of the night, strange enough :
had thundered slowly over the stones in the ga
all alone at my age, and dressed as I was in m
i of velvet, and my most absurd yellow sl

ich brocaded satin fit for the wearing of any q
They made place for me, however, with p.
-humour.

THE CITY OF LILIES. 131

The old waggon settled heavily on its way over
the plains.

It was a dark, moonless night. An oil-lamp hung
in the roof, which gave us very little light. We rolled
on with a creaking droning noise, only varied by the
crack of the whip.

The contadina and the priests went to sleep; the
&ttore took out his accounts and reperused them; the
good-looking Unterinnthaler and I were alone wide
awake, being young, and on a journey that was strange
fo us.

They had told me that it would be day and night
again before we reached Bologna; and to Bologna, as
the farthest stage of all, I had said that I would go.
The others were to be set down midway at Padova
and other places on the route.

I had never been out of Verona since our resi-
dence had begun there in my fourth year.
‘My head was in a tumult, my brain was in a whirl,
with the strange movement, the throbbing noise, and
that odd sense of jumbling on into the darkness of
the night which was but too true an emblem of the
becurity of my fate.
I could with difficulty keep my sobs quite silent
I thought of the old deserted, familiar chambers,
the old bronze lamp swinging by the broken
natello, of the little quiet, nameless grave in the
ry of the poor; of the homelike nook amongst
coppersmith’s huge, shining vessels, where Raffael-
would still be sitting with his blind mother,
ning some ancient score by the dim light of his
ze lucernata.

9*

132 PASCAREL.

It was all gone—all gone forever, never to con
back.

Yet I felt with it all a curious sense of liberati
and of exultation. If I had been alone I would haw
laughed and cried aloud.

The pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat of the horses’ feet on th
hard road seemed to me to beat out an everlastin
trisyllable,—“ Fuori, fuori, fuori!’ Yes, I was “fuon’
now,—fairly out of the gates and away. So I tok
myself again and again, and took an odd, unsatisfac
tory, remorseful and yet intoxicating pleasure in th
freedom of it all.

I must have looked very strange, doubtless, as
sat there with my cheeks changing to red and whi
in my excitement, and my lips twitching in my longiw
to cry, and my hair all ruffled by the haste wil
which I had run, and the ridiculous yellow skir
crushed up between the tattered black robe of a pre
and the grey woollen petticoat of a contadina.

We thundered on in perfect silence for a tim
with a little light flashing in upon us now and the
from some village post-house or some lamplit waysic
Calvary.

The nights were still cold, being so early in tl
spring. Sitting there, I grew very stiff and chilly. T
priest was stout and so was the contadina. Bo
were soundly sleeping, and sometimes swayed heavi
against me.

My heart began to sink. The sense of the “fuor
to be more pain than glory. I thought wistfully
the little bed where I had slept for so many yea
under the sheltering shadows of Mariuccia’s Mat
Dolorosa.

THE CITY OF LILIES. 133

I was roused by a sheepskin being placed about
my knees, and by the gentle rustic voice of the young
Tirolese, who prayed me to accept its covering. He

' Was sure, he said, the signorina was very cold.

I looked up and thanked him. In the dull light
of the lamp I saw his gentle honest eyes fixed on me,
whilst he blushed hotly at his own temerity.

' Itook his sheepskin. It was roughly dressed, but
ban and emboldened, he asked me if I was all
ne.

“Yes,” I told him, glad to hear his voice in that
horrible gloom and that unceasing gallop. “And you
too?”

“I too, signorina? Yes—but then for a man it is
wthing,” he answered. “Besides, I go to people I
now in Este—an uncle of mine married and settled
there. But the signorina, does she go to friends
too? ”

“Oh, yes,” I assured him, being too proud to say
otherwise. But my heart rose in my throat at the little
le. I knew how far, far away was the only hope to
which I clung.

The young Unterinnthaler looked at me wistfully.
I think he knew that what I said was not very true. .

“It is cold to-night, signorina,” he said, gently.

“VYes—very.”

“And you go far?”

“To Bologna.”

“Your friends meet you there?”

“No.”

' “Then you go farther still?”

“I am not sure.”

F- Do what I would the great tears brimmed over

134 PASCAREL.

in my eyes; his questions made me realise my de
lation.

With kindly courtesy he busied himself with r
bing off the mist of our breaths from the glass wind
nearest him, so that we might see the dark maple-tt
fly by us in the shadows of the night.

“Do you know my country, signorina?” he as
me, to divert my thoughts, no doubt. “My coun
across the mountains. I am a farmer in the Unter
thal. No? Ah, that is such a pity!”

“Is it so beautiful, then?”

“Beautiful? Ay, God knows it is beautiful.
flat like this, with nothing but these weary olives;
all so great, so superb, so wonderful; all pine fo
and endless alps, and then the waters that flash
so much light, and the snows that lie so high;
then the clouds that are always about the mount
and the rich green woods and the yellow maize-fi
all below—beautiful? Ah, indeed!”

“Vou would not leave it, then?”

“To live inEste? The holy saints forbid. I sh«
be a dead man in a year, signorina. Away from
mountains? I will tell you who did that. It was Ani
Zafur; he was older than J, but I knew him. He
kapellmeister in our burgh. When he led the cho
was enough to make one weep; it was like the sin
of the angels in heaven. Well, some day some pe
came who persuaded him that his voice might |
mine of gold to him if he would only leave the m
tains and go into the world along with them. I
evil hour Andrea listened. He was poor, you see,
they told him fine things; so he went. Whether
world cared much for him or not I never heard;

THE CITY OF LILIES. 135

'Iknow that they shut him up in cities over there,
German cities and French. And one day, two years
later, they came for his old mother, and told her that
Andrea was dying and prayed to see her. She went
aonce; but even then she was too late. She found
him in Paris, but he was out of his mind; he did not
know her at all; and all he kept saying forever was
‘Take me back to the mountains! take me back! take
me back!’ He had made a great deal of gold; the
old mother was rich when she returned; but he died,
crying aloud to see the mountains once more. Nothing
had been any joy to him; he had always been cramped
and stifled, and sick to death away from the moun-
tains. It must always be so. Love them once, you
tan never leave them—and live.”

His voice was very hushed and quiet as he spoke,
and there came a dreamy look into his eyes—the far-
away look that men always get who dwell amidst the
heights.

I hardly understood him well; for, though he spoke
Italian it was not our Italian; yet there was something
so gentle and simple in him that it pleased me to hear
him talk.

I was glad to have him to speak to in that op-
pressive endless gloom, with the surging noise of the
horses’ gallop always on my ears, and only now and
hen some break in it when a lantern flashed its red
are in upon us, and hoarse, shrill voices piped dis-
ordant orders at the doors of some roadside posting
ouse.

Finding that I listened to him, he went on to tell
te all about himself—how his name was Marco Rosas;
pw he was of Italian race; how he was left fatherless

136 PASCAREL. °

in infancy; how his twin-brother and himself lived to-
gether on the little farm on the green slope of the
Berg; how he was twenty-two years old, and well-to-
do in his own way, and indeed quite rich for a farmer
of the Tirol.

He described all his treasures to me; his chalet of
pinewood, shingle-roofed against the hurricane and
avalanche, in autumn hung over with the great yellow
ears of the millet; the herds of small dun cattle, with
their antelope-like eyes, and flocks of silvery hill goats;
his stout little horse, with its peal of musical bells; his
vines, that yielded such sweet huge purple grapes as
were never ripened save in that clear, lustrous, buoyant:
air; the painting of the Holy Trinity that was fastened
in his wall, over his house door, in an iron grating,
to be a blessing on the place; his orchard, and his
pastures that stretched in such perfect vivid green up
the hillside, whilst above all the great snow slopes
towered. P

Most of all he talked of his mother—a woman ;
whom, if all he said were true, must have been one °
of those who are far above rubies. A tender, homely,
noble soul as this mountaineer sketched her, such, in-
deed, as those great silent hills produce not seldom—
a woman with the life of a saint and the heart of a-
hero, though she neither read nor wrote, but span her
own linen, milked her own herds, and had had the
sweet strong breath of her own mountain air upon het |
all her years.

So we journeyed on our way, and, like Conraddin
before us, passed “per Lombardia e per la via di Pavia,”
into the Romagna country.

The day was one long bright flood of sunshine with

THE CITY OF LILIES. 137

autiful flakes of clouds floating before a fresh moun-
ain wind.

The broad plains that have been the battleground
of so many races and so many ages were green and
peaceful under the primitive husbandry of the con-
tadini.

Everywhere under the long lines of the yet un-
budded vines the seed was springing, and the trenches
of the earth were brimful with brown bubbling water
left from the floods of winter, when Reno and Adda
had broken loose from their beds.

Here and there was some old fortress grey amongst
the silver of the olive orchards; some village with
white bleak house-walls and flat roofs pale and bare
against the level fields; or some little long-forgotten
tity once a stronghold of war and a palace for princes,
tow a little hushed and lonely place, with weed-grown
famparts and gates rusted on their hinges, and tapestry
weavers throwing the shuttle in its deserted and dis-
mantled ways.

But chiefly it was always the green, fruitful, weary,
endless plain trodden by the bullocks and the goats,
md silent, strangely silent, as though fearful still of
ts tremendous past.

Day came and night again, and all the heavy,
hill, bitter, lonely hours jumbled themselves away in
ome dreary chaos. The journey had become horrible
ome. I was stiff and cold and miserable. I lost all
wart to look out at the spaces between the leathern
wrtains on to the country beyond. I had lost all
ower to watch for the first outline of Tasso’s “grand’
pennino.”

' We had passed through Padova in the darkness.

138 PASCAREL.

and I had not noticed the young Tirolese descen
there. But I found the sheepskin left about my knee
and was touched by this little gentle wayside flow
of kindness.

I suppose I must have slept some portion of t
time, but the beat of the horses’ hoofs never cease
to thunder through my brain.

There were red flashes of lights on my eyes as ¥
stopped to change at a posting-house; wonderfi
purple and rose sunsets and sunrise; a sense of em
less gliding green distances that never grew any Of
whit the nearer; a confusion of cruel noises; a COI
tinual sense of pain and of unrest; and then at lengl
the cumbrous vehicle paused under an immense vaulte
gateway; a sentinel challenged; a guard looked i
holding up a lantern; the gates unclosed and clos€
again; and as we rolled over the stones I heard t
tired travellers mutter the name—“Bologna.”

I trembled, and felt afraid as the tired hors
toiled wearily over the pavement underneath the in
black shadows of those vaulted footways.

It seemed to me as though they would never en
their silence, their gloom, their architecture, 1
enormous height of the walls, the vista of the i
terminable arches, the hollow echo of the stones th
had been trodden for fifteen hundred centuries |
the feet of men and beasts—all terrified me wi
a vague poetic awe which yet was, in a sense, d
lightful.

Every old Italian city has this awe about it—hol
close the past and moves the living to a curious sen
that they are dead and in their graves are dreamin
for the old cities themselves have beheld so mu

THE CITY OF LILIES. 139

perish around them, and yet have kept so firm a hold
tpon tradition and upon the supreme beauty of great
arts, that those who wander there grow, as it were,
bewildered, and know not which is life and which is
death amongst them.

To enter Bologna at midnight is to plunge into
the depths of the middle ages.

Those desolate sombre streets, those immense dark
wrches, dark as Tartarus, those endless arcades where
warce a footfall breaks the stillness, that labyrinth of
marble, of stone, of antiquity; the past alone broods
over them all.

As you go it seems to you that you see the gleam
of a snowy plume and the shine of a straight rapier
striking home through cuirass and doublet, whilst on
the stones the dead body falls, and high above over
the lamp-iron, where the torch is flaring, a casement
uncloses, and a woman’s hand drops a rose to the
slayer, and a woman’s voice murmurs, with a cruel
little laugh, “Cosa fatta non capo ha!”

There is nothing to break the spell of that old
world enchantment.

Nothing to recall to you that the ages of Benti-
voglio and of Visconti have fled for ever.

The mighty Academy of Luvena Juris is so old,
8 old, so old!—the folly and frippery of modern
life cannot dwell in it a moment; it is as that en-
chanted throne which turned into stone like itself
Whosoever dared to seat himself upon its majestic
For fifteen centuries Bologna has grimly watched
tad seen- the mad life of the world go by; it sits
amidst the plains as the Sphynx amidst her deserts.

140 PASCAREL.

CHAPTER VIL.
Under the Garisenda.

I SEEMED to awake roughly from some mai
dream, when the vehicle stopped at a post-hou
a great gilded sign of a golden boar projecting
in the dull lantern light across the shadow of
the narrow streets.

The entrance to it was through a deep ¢
into a paved court; from within there was thi
light of oil wicks burning in iron sconces; bi
could see the kitchen, with the glimmer of its
and pewter and the sturdy padrona in a k
orange and green, who was sending her peop
and left in her eagerness to retain for the n
travellers by the stage.

The diligence stopped for good at the
d’Oro, and I thought that I could do no bette
inn folk came round me eyeing me with some
ment and with some suspicion; but an Italia
impulse is always one of ready kindness; the vo
padrona softened her voice for me, her ho
smiled on me, and when I asked them for a li
where I could sleep in peace, a black-browed
showed me up a wooden stair to a little bare ¢
with a radiant gleam of her white teeth and |
of her dusky eyes, such as might fairly hav
sunshine in the shadiest place.

That sunny smile of Italy!—it has in it
youth of the earth’s golden ages—all the faith «
first dreams of God.

My little chamber was very bare, very narr<

THE CITY OF LILIES. 141

a floor of red brick and a casement that looked only
on to a pigeon-house in the roof. But I had been
used to simple ways of living, and I was very tired;
I wanted nothing but rest; and being young, rest came
tome as soon as I stretched my limbs out and closed
my eyes upon the hard grass mattress.

I slept all night dreamlessly; and when I awoke
with the sun shining full on my face, and the pigeons,
white and grey, pluming themselves upon the roof
outside, I sprang up refreshed and fearless; eager to
begin again this strange new story of life, whose first
chapter I had read and turned down for ever when I
had looked my last at sunset on Verona.

There is nothing in any after times, however radiant
with pleasure or success those latter times may be, so
perfectly happy as the buoyant and fearless ignorance
of the creature who has just left childhood for youth,
Just first thrust out its head from the shell of dependence
and ventured alone to survey with dazzled and de-
lighted eyes the illimitable domain that lies in the
mere Possible.

To any other than myself it would have seemed,
as it had done to the Tirolean, that nothing in the
whole range of human fate could be more desolate or
More appalling than my fate; there was a child of
fifteen years let loose upon the world with a dozen
gold florins for her solitary possession, without a friend,
Without a refuge, and with no relative in all humanity,
xcept a father who had abandoned her, and of whom
the knew not even so much as whether he were living
or were dead.

Nothing could well have been more lonely or less

tobe envied surely than I; and yet when I had flung

142 PASCAREL.

the cold water over myself and tossed the h:
over my shoulders, and looked out of the wi
say good morrow to the pigeons opposite, I
quite happily in the face of the bright day :
not afraid.

It seemed to me that nothing could long
ill in that fresh spring air, in that warm livi
in that pleasant murmur of birds’ wings, and oi
bees, that rose upward on the stillness of the c
the little garden court below.

It was early as I unslid the wooden ba
door and ran downstairs in the mirthful sunli;
the padrona was up and about, and all h
damsels at work with her, coming and going
many-coloured garments to and fro in the br
and the shadows of the open court and the
archways.

Great turkeys were ruffling and _ struttin,
the passages, hens were squatting by the stove
white owl blinked his eyes on a butter tub, a
rabbits ran between the swiftly flying feet of
maidens as they vied in haste to obey the shr
mands of their mistress.

In the square court they had set out the

housed store of lemon trees.

There was a thread of water bubbling
sculptured Medusa’s mouth into a huge
amphora; on the door sill an old woman wa
carrots; above her in the carved lintel was .
della Robbia worth its weight in gold: it w
a scene as might have stayed there unchang
Guido had first dipped his brush in oils.

I had all the forenoon before me, and n

THE CITY OF LILIES. 143

fo take up room there in that busy tavern, I wandered
out to look a little at the city.

A winding passage-way led from the court-yard
straight out in front of the two leaning towers, with
ther coppersmiths’ workshops beneath them and above
fe clear blue sky of the Romagna.

It was about nine o’clock and a market day, and
all the town was astir; throngs of busy, laughing hur-
ing people were crying their goods aloud, or lustily
dtaffering for the goods of others; whilst around them
were those old sun-burned walls, those dim gigantic
fescoes, those austere arcades, those mighty stones
hat had borne the fires and the furies of a thousand
years of sack and siege.

Mules brayed, dogs barked, poultry cackled, the
tharlatan screamed his sing-song recitative, the hawkers
Yaunted their dried pumpkin seeds, their little fried
alardi, or their barrowful of many-coloured woollen
socks and kerchiefs; the bells clanged sonorously,
the old scriveri held solemn court within their dens,
the peasants rode in on their asses laden with
cabbages or with poultry; the ringing hammers of
the countless coppersmiths and pewterers resounded
from a hundred workshops; and it was all life, mirth,
tumult, business; and amidst it all rose the old un-
fmished mournful pile of the Duomo, the ancient
palaces with beggars’ rags fluttering from the balconies,
the slanting shafts of the twin towers, the arched foot-
vays brown and sear with the passing of a thousand
renerations.

In the gay sunlight it was not so terrible as in the
larkness of night; but it was perhaps more melancholy
ill. ,

144 PASCAREL.

I wandered on and on, looking now at
tention of some buyer and seller under the
awning of a market-stall, and now at the gra
some decaying fresco dying slowly of neglect
above on the sculptured houses.

I stood gazing up at the Garisenda,
leaned above against the delicate blue of the
Romagna skies, whilst beneath in their dus)
shops the brawny bare-armed coppersmiths
ruddy metals, their hammers rising and fall
steady and deafening rhythm.

I stood gazing at the Garisenda and the
that in their day had seen the slender f
Properzia de’ Rossi at work upon the mor
marbles; and had heard the last Bentivogli
from his workshop to a crown; and had wat
scholars come from all far countries—from °
land, away in the mists of the northern seas,
fountain filled Damascus rose-girt on the edg
desert,—trooping by thousands and tens of tl
to pace the stones and learn the lore of t
Academy.

I loitered long in the old stone labyrintt
Bentivoglio’s city. It awed me, it oppressed
it allured me.

The Past is very gaunt and grim in
University, but it is noble for all that. It is
lofty skeleton of a dead knight wrapped in t
cloak of the Misericordia.

The people chattered with me gladly; ;
me where to find the Raffael, the Guido, thi
nichino, the Tarini, above all their darlin:
Carraccl.

THE CITY OF LILIES. 145

_ InVerona I had felt but little the genius of the place.
‘ona had forgotten so much; the foe’s heel had
out her brain; and besides, her great
fatolo, ages ago, was stolen utterly from her by wan-
ton Venice.
.. But here in Bologna it was beautiful to find how
and living to them their three Brethren were.
. Stendahl was astonished to find his cobbler in
able to tell him all sorts of traits of the
Varracci, and really full of sorrowful reminiscences,
because Luigi had died of grief at some bad drawing
@ his own in the angel of the Annunciation. Sten-
Whl adds that a cobbler in Paris would have had a
gt chair in his shop, but would have told you nought
m@ Greuze or of Gros.
: It is just this tenderness of the past and knowledge
a it, which make the Italian populace unlike any
wher under the sun:—in these peoples’ eyes there are
always dreams, and in their memories there is always
greatness.

Wandering full of these thoughts, vivid and yet
confused in my brain, the hours sped away uncounted

me.

That there was pain or danger or singularity in
wy position, I had utterly forgotten. I was only glad
lo be free and to be amidst these places which had

so long for me only in the light of imagination
and of history. .

I was standing under the Garisenda picturing that
td academic life and thinking how good the days of
student must have been in those times when the
ing of scholarship had just touched the world
“h its light; I was just standing there, when the
Paxaril, I, 10

146 PASCAREL.

voices of men and women beside me caught my ez
speaking of an opera which had been given the pr
vious night with unusual pomp before all the grea
people of the Romagna.

Its name arrested me; for it was the Alkestis.

“A German opera!” said one with a shrug of his
shoulders. “We have to swallow it.”

“Nay, it is fine music; music that has held all the
stages of Europe forty years,” said another. “And #
is more Italian than anything; the man studied always
in Milan——”

“But what good thing has he written since?”

“Mere roda,” grumbled the first speaker. “It i
that which beats me; and he gets such prices!—h
is as rich as all the Ghetto— whilst look at ow
Rossini.”

“Those German hogs get all the truffles of Europe,
said the other with a sigh. “But there is this Roth
wald, the guest of the Grand Duke, to-day, and to
morrow of the Cardinal, and what not, and goo
Italians starving their naked bones over a pinch ¢
charcoal in their garrets, with more melody in thei
do, re, me, as they sing to themselves as they saunte
about, than this fellow in all his long lifetime.”

“Caro, caro, be just,” laughed the others. “Th
Alkestis is perfect, quite perfect; our fathers settle
that long ago; but then of course it is due to Mila
since he studied there. Rothwald is a great old ma
that we are bound to confess, and his music is :
fresh to-day as though some youngster had just penne
it. The chorus people sang his great Cora degli De
under his window in the Palace this morning earl
He was quite touched; he came out into the balcon

THE CITY OF LILIES. 147

and there threw down a handful of gold whilst they
tossed him carnival flowers.”

I heard, and my cheek burned, and my heart beat
high with hatred: I thought of Ambrogid Rufi as I
ud left him stooping over his wretched and solitary

arth.

“They honour Rothwald-like that?” I cried to
the students, heedless who’my hearers were, as it was,
my careless childish fashion to be, everywhere and
always.

They looked at me in. surprise, and no d abt I
had a strange enough aspect, glowing in purple
and yellow against the darkness of-the coppersmiths’
dens, and above me the quaint Garisenda.

“Why not, signorina?” they cried gaily to me, pos-
sbly amused at the rage of disdain that doubtless
quivered over all my face. “Because he is a Tedesco?
—a good reason, we grant.”

“Because he was a traitor!” I said to them, and
then could say no more, but turned away with a
buming face and a swelling heart, for there seemed
fo rise before me the broken- hearted, weary, death-
stricken form of my dear old master, and the thought
of this man who had betrayed him was unbearable to
Me; this man, who dwelt in princes’ palaces, and
icattered gold broadcast, and received the songs and
he flowers of the nation he had robbed.

In the fury against injustice and the passion of
onging to redress it, which are part and parcel of all
outh that is at all generous or at all unworldly, I felt
rong enough to force my way to the palace itself
p high on the hill there amongst the cypresses, and
ng the truth in the face of this perjurer whose lie

10*

148 PASCAREL.

had been for forty years fair and fruitful before ta
world.

“Oh! why does God let such things be?” I cnec
in the rebellion of my heart against the cruelty o!
creation, as I dropped down under a little shrine in 4
twisting passage-way out of the public square.

Bologna had lost its charm for me; it seemed
only a great dark, dusty, noisome, cruel place, with
its strange city of the dead walled up beyond it
gates.

What was it to me that my old master sat alone
by a wretched hearth whilst the man who had be-
trayed him was feasted by cardinals and honoured
by nations? What was it to me?

Nothing indeed.

And yet I sobbed bitterly as I turned from the
streets into an old dark church, ashamed that the
people should see the tears upon my cheeks.

CHAPTER VIII.
The Maidenhair.

Tue church was quite empty: an immense naked
marble desolation, with a white Christ looming vas!
. and sad above the altar.

I sat down on an oaken bench and cried my hearl
out, as the children say: most for the cruelty of Am-
brogid’s fate, but also a little for the utter loneliness
of my own.

I had little hope of finding my father; and if |
found him, how could I tell he would not disown
little travel-stained penniless wanderer, as he had dis

THE CITY OF LILIES. 149

owned the child with the peacock’s plumes in the
panting chamber of the Veronese students?

I dreaded his calm cold smile; I dreaded his icy
incredulous response; I resolved within myself, if I
fond him not at Florence, to seek him no more, but
to go on and try my fortunes at Rome.

For once, when I had sung in the streets to a
little knot of people in Verona, an old man had come
tp to me and had told me he was the director of the
Corea, and had bidden me, if ever I had a mind to
spear in public, to betake myself to him there in the
Eternal City. |

“Might I not help you a little, illustrissima?” said
agentle, timid voice. I started, and saw the young
Taolean, the bright colour in his costume glowing in
the gloom of the dusky aisles.

I was not sorry for companionship, yet I was
wounded to be seen in my sorrow. I stared at him
stupidly through my tears.

“You did not stay at Padova, then?” I asked
hm at length, seeing that he seemed more ashamed
than J,

“No, signorina,” he answered shyly, and then was
still. |

“You have business in Bologna?”

“No.”

He spoke with downcast eyes, and swept the dust
of the pavement with the long plumes in his hat.

“T was sorry for the little eccellenza,” he stam-
mered humbly. “And it seemed so terrible for her
to be alone; so young, and with such a face as that;
and so I dared to travel on with her. I was on the

_ wof of the diligenza all the way from Padova.”

f

150 PASCAREL.

Then he was silent; lifting, timidly, his brown,
honest, dog-like eyes, that were wistful like a dogs
that dreads a beating.

But I was too used to the comradeship of I ;
Squarcionino and all his boyish brethren to be m ;
any whit embarrassed by this act of the young moun-
taineer. I took it as a kindly piece of thoughtfulness, -
no more.

“It was very good of you,” I said, brightening @
little, “and—and—it is true, I am all alone. But
no one would hurt me—why should they? I am not
afraid.”

“The little illustrissima is hardly more than 4
child,’ murmured Marco Rosas, with a pity in his
look I did not comprehend. “It is so damp and cold
in this church. Would the signorina come a little in
the country? There is a great Madonna here to see,
they say, and the day is long.”

I hesitated a moment, then consented. What
harm could there be? And anything was better than }
being alone; and the young man was so gentle, 50 |
simple, and so frank, that he seemed to me only like
a bigger Raffaellino.

So out of the gates I went into the white wide —
country, with the sun on its dusty roads, along which -
the bullock waggons were crawling.

Anywhere else I should have been stared at—in
my yellow and violet, with the hood lying on my
shoulders and my hair uncovered to the sun, and the
young Unterinnthaler in his picture-like dress of velvet,
and broad red sash, and hat with the drooping myrtle-
green plume.

But in Italy—blessed Italy—no one noticed.

THE CITY OF LILIES. I51I

There is such immunity from observation in a
Country where colour is a household fairy brightening
every rent and ruin, in lieu of an unknown god at
xe dreaded and derided.

So I went on in the sunshine along the road that
7 to the Madonna of S. Luca high on her green

We made our obeisance at her shrine, and gazed
rough the wonderful breadth of the plains with
their countless cities and towns, and the low lines of
ithe circling mountains lying curve on curve in endless
undulation. :

Then we came down from the height and wan-
dered whither we knew not exactly amongst fresh-
turned fields and vines just set with leaf, and orchards
of olive and mulberry, where many a little quiet paese
nestled with white-walled houses and red-roofed dove-
cotes. At one of these poderi there was a woman
mith a merry handsome face and a scarlet, kirtle sit-
ing spinning on the top of a flight of steps.under a
lark archway hung with convolvulus. :

Marco Rosas asked her if she could give us a
raught of milk. .

She assented joyfully, and brought out not only
ulk but honey and pomegranates and black sweet
read, and set them out on a stone bench on the top
f the step under the convolvulus; and would have us
at there and then, she spinning all the while and
ling us her own history and her grandmother’s be-
we her, looking across the great sunny plains that
etched away like the sea-green ocean, some white
gwer rising here and there out of the sun-mist like a

tagull on the wing.

152 PASCAREL.

She was a cheery, good-hearted creature; she lived
on the most wondrous battle-field of all Europe, but
she knew nothing of that; she only knew that her
eggs sold well in Bologna market, and her bit of land
was fruitful, and her husband was a good man though
careless, and her olive-trees had been bit by the frost
and would bear ill that summer.

We had a pleasant hour with her there on the
sunny steps facing the low tumbled crests of the
Apennines, hyacinth-hued in the clear spring weather.

We bade her farewell with many good wishes on
either side, and went on our way to the city. The
sun was not far from its setting.

During those long sauntering walks the Unterinn- !
thaler had told me still more about himself and his
birthplace in the high mountains.

As we drew under the city walls he began t°
speak again, and a little confusedly, of his country, ©
his home, of his people. His millet-fields and 15
mountain cattle were dearer to him than all the de
glories of Bologna.

“The chalet is large,” he told me, “and Asto™,
my brother, is a good, gentle lad. There is a great
store of linen, for my mother and her mother befor
her were great spinners; and there is some little sive!
in the plate chest, for our people have been there £OF
generations. It is not so very cold in the winter-tim &
for everywhere we have double windows, and we caP
afford to burn as many oak logs as we like. Am
then in the spring it is so beautiful—all the waters
leaping as though they were mad, and the loose snow’5
rushing, thundering down, and the cattle lowing witb
delight to get once more up on their pastures, a2

THE CITY OF LILIES. 453

' the hyacinths and gentian springing up everywhere—
oh, signorina, you do not know how beautiful it is
on our mountains then!” |

“No doubt,” I answered him, dreamily, my thoughts
not being with him.

“Much more beautiful than all this!” he said,
wih a sweep outward of his hand to the country.
“Here it is just maple and mulberry, mulberry and
maple, over and over again, and those endless vine-
yards everywhere—so flat, so pale and tiresome.”

“No doubt,” I said again to him, indifferent,
watching the white bullocks come through the gates
with an open waggon of the past year’s hay.

He was silent a little while; then he spoke again;
his voice was swift and low.

“Signorina, did ever you hear of a tale that our
priest told us once? ‘There were terrible times across
the mountains, amongst the Francesi, I think, and
the peasantry rose against the aristocrats, and every-
where they slew the nobles; and at one place the
nobles were drowned by thousands in a river. Do
you know?”

“You mean the Noyades of Nantes?”

“It may be. I cannot tell the name. It was in
some time of revolution, and they did not spare even
the women. All the wives and daughters and mothers
of the nobles were bound and flung into the water.
There was only one way that anyone of those young
noble maidens could be spared; it was if one of the
men of the populace asked and took her in mar-
Rage——”’

He stopped abruptly. I, gathering some tufts of
Maidenhair off the city wall, laughed a little.

Ui

154 PASCAREL.

“The waters were better, I should think. Well?”

“Signorina,” he began once more, and as I looked
up, astonished at the tremulous sound in his voice,
I saw his eyes fastened on me in pathetic entreaty,
still as of a dog that prays of you not to beat him.
“Signorina, I have been thinking. It is almost as ill
with you as with those young noble Francese maidens.
You are all alone, and you have no home and no
friends—you have told me so; and surely your father
cannot be amongst the living, or he had never been
silent so long. Now, I am only a mountaineer, I know
that, and ignorant, and altogether beneath you, and
yet if you would let me give you my home so long as
ever—as ever—you want one. The world is bitter
and bad for a motherless child.”

He paused and grew very red, then hurried on
with his explanation.

“I meant—if you would come to us—my mother
is so good: the little illustrissima would get to care for
her; and the place is humble indeed, but sweet and
wholesome—and safe. I would go straight back with
the donzella, and not rest till she was safe with my
mother on the mountains. And IJ—-I know well the
donzella would never look at me, never think of me
—I should never dream of it. But if she would only
let me be of use to her, only let me put a roof over
her head, I should be so thankful! I would serve her
like a dog. For—for—in this one. little short day I
have got to love her so well!”

Then he stopped abruptly, and grew very white,
and I could hear his quick hard breathing as we stood
together outside the gates of Bologna in the red sun-
set light.

THE CITY OF LILIES. 155

My first impulse was that of ungrateful wayward-
YORE.

What! escape from Verona only to end my gor-
geous dreams in a peasant’s shieling on northern
mountains! JI, who had set my face to the golden
.%uth, dreaming of my Sordello of the winter’s masque,
of my Romeo of the fairy roses.

. lam ashamed to say that, like a spoilt and cruel
child as I was, I flashed on him a contemptuous glance
and laughed aloud.

_ The moment my laughter had struck on the even-

Ig silence I was sorry. I shall never forget the look
on the frank fair face of Marco Rosas.

“The donzella is right and I was mad—no doubt,”
he murmured, humbly; then he fell behind, and fol-
lbwed me in silence through the gates into the grim
od town.

My heart smote me a little as I went. He had
meant so well; perhaps it was cruel in me to wound

I heard his slow firm tread behind me until I had
Passed into the open’ court of the Cignale d’Oro.
|, Then he stopped, and his voice—quite changed
tone—muttered in my ear—

“Signorina, I will never see your face again. Say
You forgive me once?”

I turned and looked at him, relenting a little. It
was so absurd; and yet some sense of his thorough
goodness, of his perfect simplicity and sincerity, stole
mm me and moved me despite myself.

I stretched my hand out to him with the little
haking maidenhair as a peace-offering.

“You were very good,” I said to him, half laugh-

156 PASCAREL.

ing, half crying. “I thank you very much indeed; -
only, it was so absurd, you know;—-go away and forget
me; pray, pray do, or I shall be so sorry!”

He took the little tuft of grasses and looked at
me with a wistful sadness in his eyes that haunted
me for many an hour after.

“I shall never forget, dear signorina. Never—till
I die.”

Then he bent his head very low, and turned away
and left me.

One little short day, and a life was won!

I felt a strange thrill of conscious power, yet 4
sense of some wrong thing done by me, as I w
him pass wearily through the entrance passage and
disappear into the blackness of the shadow.

I let him go in silence, and went upstairs to BY
little room under the eaves. a

CHAPTER IX.

The Snow-flower.

I was pained and yet incensed.

It seemed as though all the cares and sorrows of
mature years crowded in on me in one moment —
had been so happy in my heedless goodfellowship
with any one who smiled on me, and was willing
be idle and mirthful with me for an hour.

I do not know how others have been moved by ©
the first utterance of love to them; but to me #
brought a weary sense of burdensome power and 0
lost liberty. All the golden hazy glory of my future -
seemed to have faded suddenly. The future was only

THE CITY OF LILIES. 157

fow fo me a blank uncertainty, which might hold
g—or nothing.

All the gny elastic hopefulness of the previous day
was gone from me. I leaned on the edge of my little
casement, tired, and with an aching heart.

It was another red and gold evening.

_, The voices were merry in the cortile below. The
litle boy of the house played dominoes with his
;fanddam on the stone steps. The padrona and her
maidens hurried in and out, for the inn was full of
travellers passing through towards Padova and Venice
and Milan. | °

The whole was a little bright busy picture in the
tombreness of this great old city, which had seen so
much bloodshed, so much genius, so much woe, so
mich splendour, and now lived onj on its past, as
dildless greybeards do alone amidst (their palaces.

I had no heart any more that day for the streets
Bologna. I shut myself in my little. chamber and
watched the pigeons plume themselves upon the roof,
and heard the chattering, laughing voices down be-
low, and vexed my soul as young things will over the
Perplexities and the cruelties of human life.

The warm sunset was just tinging the solemn
@reys of the city into all manner of tender hues, when
! @bove the clatter of the voices I heard the little shrill
‘Voice of the child of the inn crying as he ran out
into the court,—

“Oh, mother, mother! give me a scudo-—just one

spend to-night.”

“Fie, you naughty soul!” grumbled the mother;
are always spending money. You will come to

good, Berto. The Frate says you do not know

158 PASCAREL.

your alfabeto, and you with those blessed Scolopl
Fathers over two years!”

“Give me a scudo, mother!” pleaded the litte
lad. “Only one! I will win it back at ruzzola to
morrow.”

“Oh, I daresay,” sighed the padrona; “all my dear.
little cheeses bowled away down the streets. You:
are a wicked one, Berto, and you my only child, and
I a widow; seven years old too, as you are!”

“Give me a scudo!” cried Berto, clinging to bee
skirts, and, in fine, helping himself without more ad0
from the leathern pouch that hung at her girdle. ~

“What is it for, Berto?” she asked, catching the
child by his long hair.

“Pascarél, mother mine!” shouted the little scape-
grace, who might have seven years at the uttermost
“To-night—just to-night—and then on to Florence:
Will you come too? Do, mother!”

“I do not mind if I do,” said the padrona, cast-
ing her lace veil about her head. “There is only
that little donzella in the house, and two traders from
Ferrara. I do not mind if I do. Pascarél is as
as a winning number at lottery. Here, Pasqua, Gilla
Marta,” —

She called her maidens round her, and set then
“their tasks of cooking, spinning, poultry- -feeding ant
the like, standing in a circle of red light in the blac
and white paved court under my casement, and thei
went out with her little son down into the dusky tur
nel of the passage-way.

Pascarél! the name bewildered and yet comforte
me. What would it be, I wondered; a game, a shov
a dance, or the name of a living creature?

THE CITY OF LILIES. 159

The name of the man who had chosen the bright
nelting snow as its emblem?—the snow-flower that
littered a day in the light, and then vanished?

Anyway, it had a solace for me when I leaned
there in the red evening, while the place grew quite
still as the pigeons went to roost, and the old chimes
called to vespers, and the inn maidens ran to chatter
within-doors to the Ferrarese as soon as their mistress’s
back was turned. ,

Whatever it might be, this mystical Pascarél, it
went before me southward to Florence. If it were
only a snow-flower that would melt at a touch, it
seemed to me better than all the deathless flowers of
Paradise.

As I leaned there watching the silvery birds fly
against the reddened sky, I thought—why I do not
know—of Properzia de’ Rossi.

I knew her story. I had often pondered over it,
and looked at the delicate sad face of her, with its
drooped lids asd its Madonna’s eyes. She had dwelt
here, in this mighty Bologna; and Bologna had made
her its saint and sovereign whilst her short life lasted,
and in her death had mourned her almost as Rome
Raffaelle.

A slender, dainty, girlish thing, she had a name of
power even in that age of giants. She dared to wield,
ind to wield well, the chisel and the burin in the
lays when Michaelangelo and Marcantonio held them
their sceptres. Her city honoured her, and the
“ivy and injury of Amico gave her the surest warranty
€ triumph.

And yet,—she had no joy in any of it; she won
be by one all the laurels only to find them bitter on

160 PASCAREL.

her lips; the marbles chilled her as though t
dead children, and the shouts of the Rc
homage was dull and without music on her e
why? for this;—so little and yet all. That
in the city’s width, saw no beauty in her, and
der in her deeds: and this one,—alone of the
she loved.

And he, not knowing, and when knowin;
nothing, but turning away his beautiful cold
the light of others’ smiles, Properzia grew °
her work, and changed to hate her lavish
nature; and left undone the public sculptures
sought so eagerly; and would not for all |
wooing use her power again, but drew hersel
life and light like a sea-flower that is th
tempest on the rocks. And so, when Clem
into Bologna to crown great Charles, and a
the first of all the wonders of the place, for -
perzia whose fame had spread from sea t
Italy, the Bolognese, weeping Ditteriygyaoulc (
him to the hospital to look upon tHe fair de
of a girl.

I thought of her wistfully as the tawny
colours spread themselves like an emperor’s
the desolate city.

I only saw the beauty and the sadness of '
What there was of evil in it passed by me; th
and the shame shadowed out in that terrible s
which was the last her genius wrought, had 1
ing for me; of the poison of unrequited desi
had burned up and ruined all the delicate g
innocent loveliness of her nature and her lif
no sense or suspicion. ’

THE CITY OF LILIES. 161

I was only sorry for her—dead all those centuries
fore—here in the city of Guido. And a strange
ew wonder awoke and thrilled in me;—what could
tbe, this marvellous thing called Love which had thus
ulled her?

And then I thought,—I knew not why,—of the
dark and tender eyes of the Florentine Masquer.

The owl had awoke from his watch-tower on the
tub, and had begun to boom to and fro hunting bats
through the shadows of the angles and roofs.

The deep bell of the Misericordia boomed over
Bologna in the stillness. The old woman, spinning
at her wheel, stopped to cross herself and say a prayer
or two for the poor passing soul.

I saw the stars come out, and thought of how they
were shining there away across the plains on those
lowly graves beneath the shadow of the Alps; and
then I threw myself wearily on the little bed, and cried
myself to sleep.

At daybreak I rose and went down and paid my
slnder score. Then I bade them farewell, and went
out into the white and glistening light that heralds
Morning in the Italian plains.

An hour later I was on my way across the wild
gorges of the hills to Florence.

CHAPTER X.
La Reine du Moyenage.

ALL day long, and all night long, the heavy dili-
mza creaked and rolled upon its course over the
wy heights, and through the dusky ravines of the
pennines.

‘sacartl. I. Il

162 PASCAREL.

I slept and dreamed, and woke and gaz
slept and dreamed again; it was all blent t
a confused tumult of light and darkness, 1
pain.

It was again daybreak, when, with a shoc
dull crash, the great vehicle reeled over on
and fell broken and crushed upon the stony |
poor beasts struggling under their entanglec
of leather, rope, and links of brass. It had bec
too swiftly down a steep and angular slope.

I rose with a confused sense of pain, bt
received no hurt.

There were stir and strife and lamentation
some one told me that it would be hours
vehicle could be again upon the road, anc
were better to go on foot to Florence: we wer
hill-side, not a league away, and very soon nig:
have fallen. They pointed me the way; I foll
a rough road winding between high stone w;
scending always abruptly, and without beaut
with dust, and rugged to the feet; above, a w
sky; sapphire blue in the zenith, all to westwa
ing with a million cloud-flecks of intensest r
rose of the deep carnation buds when they bl
life with the spring of the year.

I followed patiently the windings of the ]
ways between the pale stone walls, a little
figure, purple and yellow, as though the vio
crocuses of the woods had dressed me.

Suddenly, with a sharp bend, the road
downward into a wide valley, white and grey
blossoming woods of the olive. In the mids

THE CITY OF LILIES. 163

silvery sea was stretched the fairest city of all the em-
pires of the world.

The sun was setting.

Over the whole Valdarno there was everywhere a
faint ethereal golden mist that rose from the water and
the woods.

The town floated on it as upon a lake; her spires,
and domes, and towers, and palaces bathed at their
‘base in its amber waves, and rising upward into the rose-
hued radiance of the upper air. The mountains that
encircled her took all the varying hues of the sunset
on their pale heights until they flushed to scarlet,
glowered to violet, wavered with flame, and paled to
whiteness, as the opal burns and fades. Warmth,
fragrance, silence, loveliness encompassed her; and in
the great stillness the bell of the basilica tolled slowly
in the evening call to prayer.

Thus Florence rose before me.

A strange tremor of exceeding joy thrilled through
me as I beheld the reddened shadows of those close-
lying roofs, and those marble heights of towers and
of temples. At last my eyes gazed on her!—the
daughter of flowers, the mistress of art, the nursing
| mother of liberty and of aspiration.

I fell on my knees and thanked God. I pity
those who, in such a moment, have not done like-
wise.

My eyes were dim, but my heart was strong, and
beat high with hope as I rose and stumbled down the
imigged way, onwards, to the entrance of her gates;
“ways with the great dome shining before me in the

Iden haze; always with the clouds light as a breath,

11*

164 PASCAREL.

scarlet as a flame, hovering above me in the win
less alr.

The afterglow was still warm in the heavens whe
I reached the city walls and entered the shadows ¢
her historic streets.

I wandered all the evening, unconscious of fatigus
until the streets were all ablaze with lights, and al
astir with people. I remembered then, for the fis
time, that it was the last Domenica of the year’
Carnival.

The great white Seasons of the Santa Trinita ros
like snow against the golden air. Monte Olivet
towered dark against the rosy glory of the wes
There was a sweet sea wind blowing which fannet
out as it went all the spiced odours of the pharma
cies, and all the scents of the budding woods. Tp
shops of the goldsmiths, and mosaic sellers, and ala
baster workers gleamed and sparkled in the light
Everywhere there was some beauty, some fragrance
some treasure; and above it all rose the wondrot
shaft of the campanile, glancing like gold and ivory
in the sun.

Where lies the secret of the spell of Florencel-
a spell that strengthens, and does not fade with time

It is a strange, sweet, subtle charm that make
those who love her at all love her with a passionate
close-clinging faith in her as the fairest thing that met
have ever builded where she lies amidst her lily
whitened meadows.

Perhaps it is because her story is so old, and he
beauty is so young.

Behind her lie such abysses of mighty memorie
Upon her is shed such radiance of sunlight and (

a
THE CITY OF LILIES. 165

life. The stones of her are dark with the blood of
* $0 many generations, but her air is bright with the
blossoms of so many flowers; even as the eyes of her
' people have in them more sadness than hes in tears,
whilst their lips have the gayest laughter that ever
made music in the weariness of the world.

Rome is terrible in her old age. It is the old age
of a mighty murderess of men. About her there is
ever the scent of death; the abomination of desola-
tion, She was, in her days of power and of sorcery,
a living lie. She called herself the mother of freed
men, and she conceived but slaves. The shame of
her and the sin cling to her still, and the blood that
she shed makes heavy and horrible the air that she
respires. Her head is crowned with ashes, and her
lps, as they mutter of dead days, breathe pestilence.

But Florence, where she sits throned amidst her
meadows white with lilies, Florence is never terrible,
Florence is never old. In her infancy they fed her
on the manna of freedom, and that fairest food gave
her eternal youth. In her early years she worshipped
lgnorantly indeed, but truly always the day-star of
liberty; and it has been with her always so that the
ight shed upon her is still as the light of morning.

Does this sound a fanciful folly? Nay, there is a
real truth in it.

The past is so close to you in Florence. You
touch it at every step. It is not the dead past that
Men bury and then forget. It is an unquenchable
thing: beautiful, and full of lustre, even in the tomb,
like the gold from the sepulchres of the Aitruscan

gs that shines on the breast of some fair living

166 PASCAREL.

‘woman, undimmed by the dust and the length of the
ages.

The music of the old greatness thrills through all
the commonest things of life like the grilli’s chant
through the wooden cages on Ascension Day; and,
like the song of the grilli, its poetry stays in the
warmth of the common hearth for the ears of the
little children, and loses nothing of its melody.

The beauty of the past in Florence is like the
beauty of the great Duomo.

About the Duomo there is stir and strife at all
times; crowds come and go; men buy and sell; lads
laugh and fight; piles of fruit blaze gold and crimson;
metal pails clash down on the stones with shrillet
clangour; on the steps boys play at dominoes, and
women give their children food, and merry maskess
grin in carnival fooleries; but there in their midst 1s
the Duomo all unharmed and undegraded, a poem
and a prayer in one, its marbles shining in the uppef
air, a thing so majestic in its strength, and yet 9
human in its tenderness, that nothing can assail, aD
nothing equal it.

Other, though not many, cities have histories 48
noble, treasuries as vast; but no other city has them
living and ever present in her midst, familiar as house-
hold words, and touched by every baby’s hand and
peasant’s step, as Florence has.

Every line, every rood, every gable, every towel,
has some story of the past present in it. Every tocsin
that sounds is a chronicle; every bridge that unites
the two banks of the river unites also the crowds °
the living with the heroism of the dead.

In the winding dusky irregular streets, with the

ee ee ee me oe

ee

THE CITY OF LILIES. ¥67

outlines of their logge and arcades, and the glow of
“eglour that fills their niches and galleries, the men
who “have gone before” walk with you; not as else-
where mere gliding shades clad in the pallor of a
misty memory, but present, as in their daily lives,
thading their dreamful eyes against the noonday sun
a setting their brave brows against the mountain
‘wind, laughing and jesting in their manful mirth and
.eaking as brother to brother of great gifts to give
the world. All this while, though the past is thus
Close about you the present is beautiful also, and does
not shock you by discord and unseemliness as it will
ever do elsewhere. The throngs that pass you are
‘the same in likeness as those that brushed against
Dante or Calvacanti; the populace that you move
amidst is the same bold, vivid, fearless, eager people
with eyes full of dreams, and lips braced close for
war, which welcomed Vinci and Cimabue and fought
ftom Montaperto to Solferino.

And as you go through the streets you will surely
see at every step some colour of a fresco on a wall,
some quaint curve of a bas-relief on a lintel, some
vista of Romanesque arches in a palace court, some
dusky interior of a smith’s forge or a wood-seller’s
shop, some Renaissance seal ring glimmering on a
trader’s stall, some lovely hues of fruits and herbs
lossed down together in a Tre Cento window, some
gigantic mass of blossoms being borne aloft on men’s
shoulders for a church festivity of roses, something at
every step that has some beauty or some charm in it,
some graciousness of the ancient time, or some poetry
of the present hour.

The beauty of the past goes with you at every

168 PASCAREL.

step in Florence. Buy eggs in the market, an
buy them where Donatello bought those whi
down in a broken heap before the wonder
crucifix. Pause in a narrow bye-street in a crow
it shall be that Borgo Allegri, which the peo]
baptised for love of the old painter and the nev
art. Stray into a great dark church at evening
where peasants tell their beads in the vast r
silence, and you are where the whole city fh
weeping, at midnight to look their last upon th
of their Michael Angelo. Pace up the steps :
palace of the Signoria and you tread the ston
felt the feet of him to whom so bitterly was |
‘“‘com’ é@ duro calle, lo scendere el salir per 1
scale.” Buy a knot of March anemoni or April
lilies, and you may bear them with you throu;
same city ward in which the child Ghirlandajo
played amidst the gold and silver garlands th
father fashioned for the young heads of the R
sance. Ask for a shoemaker and you shall fir
cobbler sitting with his board in the same old tw
shadowy street way, where the old man Tos
drew his charts that served a fair-haired sai
Genoa, called Columbus. Toil to fetch a

through the squalor of San Niccold, and there
fall on you the shadow of the bell-tower whe
old sacristan saved to the world the genius |
Night and Day. Glance up to see the hour

evening time, and there, sombre and tragica
loom above you the walls of the communal pal:
which the traitors were painted by the brush of
and the tower of Giotto, fair and fresh in its ]
grace as though angels had builded it in the

THE CITY OF LILIES. 169

just past, “ond’ ella toglie ancora e lerza e nona,”’ as
‘in the noble and simple days before she brake the
' “cerchia antica.” .

Everywhere there are flowers, and breaks of songs,
and rills of laughter, and wonderful eyes that look as
if they too, like their Poets, had gazed into the heights
of heaven and the depths of hell.

And then you will pass out at the gates beyond

the city walls, and all around you there will be a
‘fadiance and serenity of light that seems to throb in
its intensity and yet is divinely restful, like the passion
and the peace of love when it has all to adore and
hothing to desire.
. The water will be broad and gold, and darkened
‘kere and there into shadows of porphyrine amber.
Amidst the grey and green of the olive and acacia
foliage there will arise the. low pale roofs and flat-
topped towers of innumerable villages.

Everywhere there will be a wonderful width of
amethystine hills and mystical depths of seven-chorded
ight, Above, masses of rosy cloud will drift, like
tose leaves leaning on a summer wind. And, like a
magic girdle which has shut her out from all the curse
of age and death and man’s oblivion, and given her a
youth and loveliness which will endure so long as the
earth itself endures, there will be the circle of the
mountains, purple and white and golden, lying around
Florence.

Who, having known her, can forsake her for lesser

' loves?

. Who, having once abode with her, can turn their
faces from the rising sun and set the darkness of the
hifls betwixt herself and. them?

fd

170 PASCAREL.

CHAPTER XI.
The Midnight Fair.

So beautiful was it all, so strange, so wild,
fantastic, that all hunger, fatigue, and fear were f
gotten by me in its curious delight. I wandered
and on, asking nothing, only for ever looking a
looking and looking. I thought that I had stray
over the border land that parts us from the past, a
was amidst the breathing burning life of the Cing
Cento.

By many and various streets—all made noble w
frowning fortress, carven statues, walls massive a
lofty as alpine slopes, ornament delicate and wond
ful as frost on woven aspen boughs,—I came at len,
into a great square, which I needed none to tell
was the place where the soul of Savonarola had be
sent forth on fire. For there the standard of |
people rose on the tower of the Commonwealth, a
the lustrous moonlight lay calm and broad about |
feet of the bronze Perseus.

The Hercules and the David stood white a
serene against the darkness; the battlements of |
magisterial palace were set like jaws of iron hi
against the night; the moonshine caught the colo
on the blazoned shields that edged the walls; .
beautiful Judith knit her brows against the world fr
under the black arch of her loggia. How still it 1
there, where only the shapes of marble and of bro:
kept watch and ward in the gathering-place of
Republic.

Yet—a stone’s throw, and all Florence laugt

THE CITY OF LILIES. 171

and danced, and reeled, and sang, and gamed, and
shouted in the open gallery of the Uffizi. A stone’s
throw, and in the very shadow of the Vecchio
standard, under the very gaze of the Donatello,
Florence in her wildest gaiety held her riot and her
revelry,

It was the midnight Fair of the Carnival.

All the length of the arcade was filled with the
bright and motley throng. In open spaces on the flag-
stones the people were dancing to shrill clamour of
fife and drum. Here a white Filatrice with powdered
face was whirled down by a scarlet Mephisto, and here
an Arlecchino all ablaze in squares of colour, spun
tound a black domino ready masked for the Veghone.
There a débardeur, sunny-faced and stout-limbed, toyed
with a Neapolitan Pulcinello; and there a lithe conta-
dina, with eyes of jet, galloped like a Friuli filly down
the pavement, tiring out a panting and piteous Sten-
terello,

On either side in the niches between the marble
figures were ranged the little gay canteens and stalls
of the traders; wines and straw work, and flowers and
Woollen goods, and all the merchandise of the whole
Contado, were decked out with coloured lamps and
Painted devices, and streaming ribbons, and all fanci-
ful follies of gay ornamentation.

Aloft on a barrel, the charlatan, in a flourish of
Scarlet cloth, screamed forth the praises of his phar-
macy and of his life-pills; whilst his compeer of the
Ottery, in tissue of silver and a conical hat an arm’s
length high, with flaunting peacock’s plumes, rattled
his dice and shouted forth the winning numbers. Peasant
gtls with penthouse hats of straw, grave fattori watch.

172 PASCAREL.

ing the selling of their wares, little children huggij
loads of stracciataunta, maskers flying in a blaze «
crackers, the people everywhere, in crowds, pushin;
shouting, anticking, sporting, but always in glee am
always in good humour, while here and there amids
them some patrician idler sauntered with some mistres
of the hour, masked, upon his arm, smiling togethe!
as they- watched the humours of the fair.

Amidst it all stood the white statues; here the quie
face of Arretino,—there the bold brows of the Uberti
here the austere sadness of Dante,—there the old man’
smile of Sant’ Antonino.

And away at the far end of the great gallery th
white arches crossed each other high above against th
blackness of the night; and in the gleam of the tossin;
lamps the drooping banners of the Lost Liberties hung
crimson as the blood of Campaldino and Custozza
and out further in the stillness beyond the stone parape
rolled the broad moon-lightened Arno water; and abov
all were the clear skies, breathless as in summer, th
eloquent luminous purple skies of a Florence night.

This is how I saw the city first; this is how sh
will lie in my heart and in my memories for ever.

I was but a child; I was entranced by the good!
chaos of mirth and colour, by the beautiful outlines, t
the zestful masking, by the gaiety and the grotesqu
ness that were framed in that stately setting.

I found a quiet nook under the marble shelter «
the figure of old Taddeo Gaddi, and rested there ar
watched the whims and vagaries of the Florentines.

It had grown quite late. JI heard all the chim
of the belfries striking and ringing the twelfth hour
the night.

La

THE CITY OF LILIES. 173

Acrobats were tumbling, musicians were braying,
the dancers were flying faster and faster, the swift
qackers were running along the stones like stars, the
buyers and sellers were raising shriller and shriller their
clamour, the winners at the lottery were darting hither
and thither triumphant, hugging their prizes of wines
and capons and kerchiefs and sugar-loaves; and every
now and then, amidst the noise and uproar, there would
come a sweet, short ripple from a lute that broke in
the air like sea spray; or there would pass through the
cowd young, barefooted, with dreaming eyes that saw
heaven afar off, and were blind to all the stir around
him, some monk, with the head of Fra Angelico.

For'in Italy life is all contrast, and there is no
laugh and love-song without a sigh beside them; there
B no velvet mask of mirth and passion without the
marble mask of art and death near to it. For every-
Where the wild tulip burns red upon a ruined altar,
and everywhere the blue borage rolls its azure waves
through the silent temples of forgotten gods. |

As I stood against the stone figure of old Taddeo,
aman went by me swiftly, laughing, and chased by the
People. He was clad in the gay and many-coloured
dress of the Neapolitan Pulcinello, bound, no doubt,
ter on, for the Veglione.

_ He had a scourge of bladders and little gilded bells
im his hand, and he struck his pursuers deftly, casting
amongst them wild words of the shrewd Tuscan wit
that is sharp and silver like the leaf of the Tuscan
olive,

The people flew after him, laughing, tumbling, shout-
' ing, frolicking, and as they chased him called out,
“Pascarello! Pascarél!”

174 PASCAREL.

_ It was he who had given me the onyx. It wasn
Romeo of Verona, my Florindo of the scartet plus
and unconsciously I sprang forward and tried to tou
him as he flew.

Alas! it was in vain. —_

He passed me like the wind, and caught a gitl
the Casentino about the waist, and whirled her m
the maze of the waltzing. He did not notice me whe
I leaned in the grey shadow of old Gaddi; and I so
lost him from sight in the mass of blending hues, a
the strange chiaroscuro of that shadowy ballroom, wi
its torch lights flaming amongst its banners and #
blue night sky for its roof.

A sense of deadly chillness and of blank disappoir
ment stole over me.

He was but a stranger, and I had seen his face b
twice, and yet I was stung to a passionate grief a
humiliation to think that he had passed me by a
gone to fling about in the wild dancing that blac
browed, red-kirtled contadina.

The beauty and the frolic of the fiera were all ov
for me.

CHAPTER XII.
With the Wild Crocus.

I LEFT it with my eyes dim and my heart beati
fast with a sickening pain; left it in the height of
revelry, the people streaming in faster and faster
join the merriment and take their chance at the lotte

I had no knowledge whither to go or where b
to rest the night. I moved across the piazza with
quite well knowing where I went, and casting one k

s

THE CITY OF LILIES. 175

me at the Judith where she knit her dark brows
1 against the folly of it all, I left the square by
dusky passage way.
ie man accosted me as I turned into the gloom,
irried on, my hood well over my face, and he
haste to reach the Uffizi and let me pass. #In
‘et that is named of the vine I saw a little
looking hostelry called the Silver Melon. I was
2d and sad now that the excitement of my entry
city had passed by. I asked them if I could
bed there, and when they assented I crept up
ittle chamber that they offered me, and, after
space, cried myself to sleep with the shouts of
ulace and the strains of the music in the gallery
keeping the air astir all night and mingling
’ dreams.
nthe daylight came, a certain hope and glad-
ne to me with it.
re was so much to see in this wondrous city,
was so young,—and, after all, things would
o well with me.

people had always said that I was fair to see;
se who knew had told me that I had a fortune
oice. After all, I was in Florence, and I had
broad florins in gold, and I was a child, and
ot afraid.

n I had broken my fast, I left my little load
as in pledge of my return, and went.

‘“Where, white and wide,
Washed by the morning’s water-gold,
Florence lay out on the mountain side.”’

is past ten by the clocks and belfries, and a
sunlight streamed on the Valdarno, In its

176 PASCAREL.

delicious brilliance I moved on and on and on, en
thralled, entranced, in rapture of the present, in med!
tation of the past.

. “River, and bridge, and street, and square,
y Lay mine, as much at my beck and call,
Through the live translucent bath of air,
a» As the sights in the magic crystal ball.”

And of my magic crystal I was never tired.

All the town was astir, eager to make the utter
most of the last days of Carnival. The bells wet
ringing madly, in as much tumult and confusion of
metal tongues as ever called the Trades together in
the old days for a raid upon Oltrarno. The long
covered gallery of the Medician tyranny hung in the
air like a black cloud. I thought of the day when
build it they had pierced through the cobblers
dwelling, and had laid bare to the tyrant’s eyes the
beauty of Camilla Martelli: One seems to see he
sitting there in the little, dusky den, with the smell of
the leather and the tic-tac ofthe shoemaker’s hammée,
her only companionship all through the weary hours j
until the crash of the axes and mallets broke dow) :
the wall of the chamber, and, with the flood of the —
daylight, let in so wondrous a blaze of changed for _
tune. Beneath it, on the old bridge, the penthouses
of the jewellers and of the workers in gold and silver
sparkled with colour and glistened with treasure,
whilst the men and the mules pushed by, and to right
and left through the arches shone the sunny stretch of
the river, the trireme-like group of the boats cutting
sharply and darkly against the gold. I thought of
that awful morning when over that bridge there had
ridden the gay young bridegroom of Buondelmonte,
with the white garland on his golden locks, whilst at

THE CITY OF LILIES, 177

the feet of the statue of Mars the avengers had waited
mth naked blades and souls set hard on the slaughter.
One seemed to hear the shiver of the steel against the
marriage jewels, and to watch the Easter glilies fal,
trampled on the blood-red stones. y
Everywhere the people were about, they kid
danced till daydawn at the Vegtione and the Fiera,
what of that?—they tossed down a little red wine, and
fistened new signal ribbons to their shoulders, and
swept out in troops into the sunshine, ready again for
the masquing and motley. There were bursts of
music; notes of mandolines; ripples of laughter; chat-
tering at all street corners; great clusters of scented
toses torn from castello walls beyond the gates; sweet
dusters of rosy cyclamen blushing faintly like sea-
thells; baskets of yellow muscat grapes and great
black figs, and the red hearts of cut pomegranates.
And above all the warmth, and stir, and glare, and
mirth, and tumult, there rose the spiritual beauty of
lowers and spires, such as sculptors see in cities of
heir dreams, and on the high standards there
lashed the scarlet cross of Florence that once had
bumed triumphant above even the walls of Rome
erself,
_ It was past noon as I came out on to the river’s
de, and saw to right and left of me, far as the eye
ould strain, the lovely reaches of the sun-burnished
later, the near hills silver with olive, dark with ilex
od cypress, and, far, far away, the green plains, the
nes of Lombard poplars, the golden sea of light, the
mple shadows of the mountains, sown with their
matless villages and villas as a lake with the white-
#8 of its summer lilies.

‘escarél. i. 12

178 / PASCAREL,

So near they looked, so ethereal, so worthy to be ; |
some mystic border land of Paradise, those soft Apea-
nine and Carrara ranges, lying fold on fold in thet
loveliness, that my steps. were irresistibly drawn to ,
wards them until I had passed out through one of the °
city gates, and was in a wooded place upon the rivet
with deep ilex shadows above my head, and near me::
thickets of acacia, with their budding branches quiver: -;
ing in the light; and in the distance always those sof -
dreamy hues of the Carrara marble flashing in th:
noonday sun.

Then, being tired and warm, I sat down upon a:
stone bench where the trees grew very thickly and
bordered a meadow sown at every step with cro
cuses, until the grass was pale and purple with
them.

I did not think what was likely to become of mé,
nor of how little probable it was that I should find
trace of my father and of Florio. I was only dreamily
happy, half-stupidly conscious of the charm of the
soft southern air and the spell of the stretching
mountains.

All was quite still: a rabbit scudded swiftly:
amongst the crocuses, nibbling here and there: #
hawk flew by: beyond the canes that grew thick by
the water there were some sweet bells ringing away
there where the grey shadows of Monte Murello
sloped upwards against the sun.

After a while an old creature, with a basket full
of Roman lilies and Parma violets, came across the
place where I sat. She cast some lilies into my lap,
and called me her dear signorina, and begged of me
a coin for the love of God.

THE CITY OF LILIES, 179

“What bells are those?” I asked her, lifting the
lilies, with their long green leaves, doubtfully, for I
was too poor to buy them.

“Perretola, dear signorina,” she said, sadly. “I was
born there eighty years ago. It is hard to live eighty
years only to sell flowers for a bit of bread. It is a
little place. Step out, and you can see it across the
vines. Yes, the bells are fine. They rang when I was
married, JI thought marriage a fine thing. He was a
Worker in stone. He got into trouble in the old
Duke’s time when the French were about the place;
and was in prison, and what not; as if married men
should do aught but find charcoal to boil the soup-
pot—but it was the way of them all at that time. And
now he is dead; dead a matter of twenty-five year,
and we are no nearer all the fine free things he used
to be mad to talk of, at least so they prate; and I
sell lilies for a bit of bread. It was better in the old
Duke’s time—better in the old Duke’s time—so I
Say,”

_ Poor soul! It was “better in the old Duke’s
time” to her. To her, nothing the liberties of Italy,
the rise of the People, the expulsion of the Gaul, the
rebound from bondage into aspiration and free- drawn
breath. It was “better in the Duke’s time”—when
she had had youth and health, and love and dreams,
away there where the bells were ringing in the white
lage just across the vines.

I felt sorry for her, she was so old, so old: and to
stand in the sun when one was as old as that, and
the very bells that once rung in one’s bridal
and find no music in them, but only desire to

12*

180 “ PASCAREL.

mumble a crust in one’s toothless jaws—it seeme
horrible to me, very horrible.

“Give me something—some little something, dea
signorina,”’ she murmured, holding out her withered
hands. “The lilies die so soon in the sun, and I have
walked in from Perretola without bit or drop!”

Wisely or unwisely, my heart was won. I slid my
hand into the little leathern pouch bound round ny
waist by a thong, in which all my little worldly store
was kept. Oh Dio! the horror of that moment. The
purse was empty!

In lieu of touching coin either of gold or of cop-
per, my fingers slid down the bag, meeting nothing m
their way. I sprang to my feet with a scream; I tore
the pouch off my girdle; I pulled it inside out with
the hornble vehemence of a deadly terror; not #
much as a brazen scudo fell upon the ground. In the
chamois leather there was a straight slit, as though
cut through by a knife: the pouch was empty. No
doubt I had been robbed the previous night in the
press of the Carnival Fair.

I did not cry out; I stood like a frozen thing, 2
cold, gazing at my empty hands. The. sunshity
country reeled before me; the white road seemed’t0
heave to and fro like a sea. Everything was sickly,
and blinding, and unreal.

I knew the meaning of poverty too well not tO
measure in one moment the whole extent of the min
that befell me. The old contadina stood still and
looked at me, appalled, no doubt, by the despair of
my face and of my attitude.

“The signorina has nothing?” she stammered
thinking, doubtless, poor wretch, of her own empty

THE CITY OF LILIES. 181

hearth and her own aching hunger. The words broke
the spell of the terror that kept me motionless and
silent.

“Nothing!” I echoed, and I know I laughed aloud
—laughed wildly, in riotous hilarity, in my unutter-
able horror. ‘“Nothing—nothing—nothing in all the
whole world. My God!”

Then I threw myself down prostrate at the foot of
the marble bench, whilst the old peasant, aghast and
bewildered, stood and looked on, silent and appalled.
I could not speak nor weep; I felt as though some
huge stone had been flung on me and had stretched
me half dead beneath its weight..

With my little store .of golden florins, I had felt
myself strong enough and hopeful enough to meet all
accidents of life and vanquish them, but penniless, I
Was nerveless, hopeless, homeless. The extremity of
my dire despair stifled me, as though some suffocat-
ing hand were at my throat.

Alone, without a coin in the world to get me
bread! I thought how much more mercy the robber
of my little all would surely have shown to me if only
he had drawn his knife across my throat.

I do not know how long I lay there, crushed and
stunned, down on the beautiful crocus-filled grass of
the pasture.

The old woman stooped and touched me gently.

“Have you, indeed, nothing, signorina? Is it stolen,
ot what? Do not lie like that—you frighten me.”

I raised my head, and looked at her. A mist swam

fore my eyes. The whole green expanse of the
Meadow eddied giddily about me like a whirlpool.
Ut in the midst of my misery a vague remembrance

182 PASCAREL.

of how bitterly I must have disappointed her aros
me: she was not poorer than I was now; but then
was so old.

“I am sorry,” I murmured, brokenly, “sorry
you; but they have robbed me—lI have nothing in
world.”

The poor old creature sighed; to her also
blow was heavy. She had argued from my face
my youth some liberal gift. But the generous
tender heart of her country beat in her with
breast.

“Never mind, dear signorina,” she said, so
“you wished to give; Our Lady will remember i
you just the same—just the same. And you love
lilies.”

She laid another cluster. of the flowers on my
as she turned away. Poor soul! I hope that act
been remembered to her likewise.

How Italian it was! the little simple sunny k
ness done in all the darkness of poverty and
and pain.

I could not speak to her again; vacantly I watc
her figure, brown and crooked, pass across the |
soming meadow in the full blaze of the shadow
light. No doubt she went to sell her lilies at
gates.

On the road, which ran through trees beyond
field with all the vast panorama of the Apenn
unrolled along its length, I saw a bullock-wag
creeping towards me, and farther yet a little cl
of people, bright against the sun as gold-winged
moizelle.

Instinctively, to avoid sight or sound, I rose

THE CITY OF LILIES. 183

wndered into the wood which bordered the meadow;
was of ilex and pine, dusky even at noon. I plunged
to its shadow, holding the lilies to my aching heart.

I moved on and on through the trees, unconscious
f what I did, until I struck my breast against the
unk of a tall fir with a shock that brought me to
harp consciousness of where I was. I sat down beneath
ts shade, wounded by the momentary pain.

I was all alone. I looked around me with a
turious sense at once of apathy and desperation. I
knew not what I feared; but I feared everything—I in
whose daring eyes, a moment earlier, all heaven and
earth had seemed to smile in the smile of Florence.

I dropped my head upon my hands, and crouched
there at the foot of the pine. I sobbed as though my
very heart would break.

As I sat thus there came the little white scudding

figure of a scampering dog; he ran before a little
toop of people: they all stopped at some distance
from me at the end of one of the aisles of pine.
. They were talking and laughing gaily. 1 could
hear the indistinct bubble of their mirthful chatter;
they had three dogs with them and a monkey; .they
threw themselves on the grass, and took some food
and wine from a basket, and one of them built up a
fre with dry sticks; all the while the dogs frisked, the
men laughed, the woman sang little fresh passages of
song; they were all so glad and so gay, it seemed to
make my misery unendurable.

The sun came down on them where they were
stetched upon the turf; I sat alone in the shadow. I
faw them; they seemed not to see me.

184 PASCAREL.

They had no doubt come out to breakfast in the
Cascine woods, as Florentines will do on spring and
summer days. ,

They seemed gay as the grilli in the grasses, and
their dress was light and full of sunny hues; and from
the broad hats of the men long scarlet ribbons floated.
They had only bread and herbs, and some purple
wine; but their laughter all the while was like a np-
pling brook, and they seemed not to know nor to
want any better or fairer thing under heaven than thus
“in sweet Valdarno to forget the day in twilight of
the ilex.”

They had a lute with them, and now and then
one of them, the one who seemed leader amongst
them, sang to it. His voice had the clear, sonorous,
far-reaching vibration, like the chords of some stringed
instrument, that belongs alone to Italian voices.

I sat there in a sort of stupefaction, listening to
them, wondering dully how much longer the sun would
only fall on other people and the gloom alone be
mine. The slow tears dropped down my cheeks; my
sobs had ceased; I had passed into the passive ex:
haustion of a great grief.

After awhile I think they. caught sight of me, fo!
they whispered together in lower tones. The womar
with them rose and came towards me—a little pretty
figure, plump as a little rabbit, blue, light, and gay
with twinkling feet and a small brown face under th
lace headgear of Genoa, that seemed to me as brigh
and rosy as any tulip-bell amongst the wheat in May
time.

She came towards me with a fresh charming grace
and paused before me.

THE CITY OF LILIES. 185

signorina does not seem happy,” she said,
ly. “Has anything gone ill?”

d not speak to her; I was ashamed and full
I tried for her not to see the tears that were
my face.

sure there is something ill,” she persisted.
zella is weeping, and all alone; if she would
thaps we might help?”

2d my face to the trunk of the pine; but I
keep from her sight the great mute sob that
from head to foot as I leaned there.

's it frightened her, for she was silent some
gh she did not move away; then, turning a
called to her companions.

1 the step of a man brush through the grasses
ach her. .

: to her, caro mio,” said the girl, in a low
“here must be something amiss with her, I
and she so young too!—only a child!”

2 signorina will not speak we can do no-
d the voice of the man. It was very rich
ike. It was he who had sung the songs to

quered my pride. I turned and answered
oking at him.

l only twelve gold florins in all the world,”
1 the despair of my heart. “And they have
n, every one—every one!” "
have taken them?”

ef—how can I tell? In the fiera, last night,
rely have been. They were safe when I came
nce, and now—-see here!”

34 and showed them my poor little slit pouch,

186 PASCAREL.

I did not look up im the face of the speaker, {oF
eyes were blinded by their rain of tears:

He took the bag and examined it.

“Cut through with a knife, no doubt,” he $4
after awhile. “And you are very sad for the los5
this money, signorina? Someone will scold you if yt
go home without it, is that it?”

“Oh no!” I cried, with a fresh passion of wee
ing that I could not repress. “If it were only thal
It is all I have in the world, I tell you—all—all—alll

“But your friends?”

“IT have none.”

“What! You were adrift on the world with twelt
florins—you?”

“Yes. Why not? I have no one to give me an’
thing. I made that money honestly; it was all min
It would have lasted me till I should have got |
Rome. And now I have not a farthing in the world-
not one—not one. I can sing a little, indeed, but th
I promised Mariuccia never to sing in the streets, al
I dare not break my word, for she is dead, you kno
And I am all alone here in Florence. I do not knc
a soul. And my brothers are all dead; and no 0:
can tell where my father is. But nothing of th
frightened me so long as I had the money. But 1
I am frightened, oh Mother of God! for I have notht
in all the world, you see; I must just starve and d
perhaps even they will not believe what I say, but w
take me for a thief, when they find that I have nothis
And if I had only died in Bologna!”

The passionate stream of the words had cour
from my tongue unbroken when once my pride |
given way and found a refuge in speech; when.

THE CITY OF LILIES. 187

voice dropped in very weariness I stood before them
heart-broken and striving with my piteous sense of
shame; my cheeks burned dry my scorching tears, and
my sobs died silent in my throat.

The man standing above under the ilex leaves
laughed, but the laughter was tender and gentle.

“All nonsense, nonsense, cara mia!” he cried
lightly, “No one ever dies in Bologna that can help
it It is not pleasant, you see, to be walled up in a
square of bricks, and labelled dismally in the lump,
with a thousand other ‘vagabondi,? or ‘ladri,’ or ‘bric-
cont” just as it may please the good town complimen-
tanly to classify you. Take heart, signorina, and come
and breakfast with us. Your gold florins, after all,
may perhaps have been left at the house you slept in
—who knows? You may mistake, or the thief may
repent, or be found out, which is indeed the same
thing. Come along and see my dogs, and taste my
wine, if there be any left. Do not be afraid of us;
we are none of us very respectable perhaps, except
the dogs, but we will do you no harm.”

_ Something in his voice and laugh, something of
Silvery resounding clearness, “com’ 1 dolce suonar @una
ira,” ringing on a metal plate, thrilled through my
heart familiar and full of solace. I dashed the blind-
ing mist from my eyes and my falling hair from my
forehead, and gazed up at him breathless and en-«

ced.

_ “And you never came the next day!” I cried to
him in passionate reproach. “And you never saw me
last night! Do you not know me now? I have kept
One of the roses—look!”

I took out of the folds of my dress one of the

188 | PASCAREL.

dead white roses of Verona. His face flushed dar
he laughed; but his beautiful eyes looked dim.

How had I been a moment without knowing h
partly, because absorbed in the terror of my gri
had paid hardly any heed to anything around
chiefly, because on the two nights when I had s
him he had been disguised in the gay masquerad
the carnival costumes.

And yet his was a face not commonly seen,
once seen lightly forgotten; the Cinque Cento f
the face of the old Renaissance when the feature
men bore the reflex of the artistic and heroical
which was in its full flower in their midst. The |
with aquiline outline, dreaming lids, thoughtful bre
profoundly melancholy in repose, and in mirth gai
a young child’s; with eyes sad as death, and a si
frank as sunlight; the face which is the most histor
and purely idealic of all human countenances.

Be the reason what it may, he as it will in clim
race, or breeding, it is a fact that the Italian ph
Ognomy retains as no other nation’s does, the
pression of the past upon it.

The noble comes to you down the bare st
galleries of his old palace, and it is still the nobl
Tintoretto and Tiziano that salutes you with that ¢
and lofty grace, which can change at will to the :
ous and caressing softness of a woman. ‘The pea:
of the contado flings his brown mantle across
mouth to screen himself from the mountain blas
the market place, and it is still the model of An
and of Sarto that laughs aloud from those glan
teeth, and saunters through the braying mules

THE CITY OF LILIES. 189

bleating kids with those supple and sinewy limbs, and
that unconscious harmony of gesture.

Were it not too fanciful one would say that those
great centuries, while they gave an immortal soul to
the pagan graces of art and produced human genius
in its most complex and complete form, had so
entered into the blood and bone of these people that
their influence is deathless. The sun of that wondrous
summer noon of art has set indeed; but the after-glow
of its rays shines still in the regard of the living sons
of Italy.

_ Such a face was this which had laughed on me

in the moonlight in the streets of Verona, and now

tien compassion was before me in the City of
es,

CHAPTER XIII.
The Great Magician.

I stip the rose back into its hiding-place a little
shyly. The black-eyed girl was gazing at me with
wide parted, astonished lips, and a little jealous won-
der in her eyes.

“And you never knew me, last night?” I mur-
Mured to him. “Last night I almost touched you,
and you never saw——”

“Last night! no;” said he, frankly. “When I go
mad at the Carnival fair, I know nothing and nobody.
But to-day, donzella, oh yes, I recognised you the
instant you sat down under the cypress. That you

ve a genius for adventure is self-evident. How
Come you here all this way over the mountains?”

190 PASCAREL.

“But you never kept your promise!” I cried té
him, intent on my one especial wrong.

“But you never came to me!” I cried to him,
“You only sent the roses!”

“No, for the best of all reasons, signorina,” said
he, with a smile. “I had talked sedition that day, or
so the stranieri construed it. I had lashed thy people
with more than bladders, and had salted their soup
with more than jokes; and to crown it all, in the
Veglione, after I left you that night, I made am
harangue which to Austrians’ ears savoured of down
right treason. So, in the grey of the daybreak, as L
went home singing and dreaming no evil, the good
Tedeschi seized hold of me, and marched me out of
the gates, and gave me not a second to pack mj
knapsack or send a word to my people, but set of
with me for the frontier in the sleet and the teeth of
the wind. They were fifty to one, so there had bees
no sense in resistance. Hard by the gates I spied s
flower shop, just opening its shutters; I asked the
soldiers to let me stop and light my sigaretto. Ther
I picked out a knot of roses, the best I could see, ane
paid for them, and bade them take them to you. .
am glad they did so honestly. It was very cold tramp
ing across Lombardy, at a horse’s tail, in that Florind
masquing dress, which looked absurd enough in th
midst of the grey and white plain; and it snowet
hard, and the tramontana blew like a knife, but th
sharpest thing about it to me was the thought ths
you would believe I had broken my promise.”

He smiled a little as he spoke, that wondrov
Italian smile which has so much mirth in it, so muc
tenderness, so much pathos, Surely that smile ¢

THE CITY OF LILIES, IQI |

taly is the loveliest thing left in all the width and
veariness of the world!

Something in his accent made me turn and gaze
t him. I breathed quickly in a happy excitation.

“Then you had not forgotten me really?” I cried.
‘I thought you had; I quite thought you had last
night.”

He laughed. . _

“Certainly not. I knew you, cara mia, at my first
glance at you under the cypress yonder. You sang
too well in Verona that day to be forgotten, and that
wonderful black and gold dress, and your hands full
of the Carnival roses, and that hair of yours with all
the yellow lights in it;—yes, I saw you, and a pretty
picture you made, that I grant I should have stayed a
ttle to find you out; but your Tedesco friends and I
have no love for one another. They say I excite the
people. So I was fain to go out of Verona, not know-
Ing your name, signorina.”

“They have not stolen the onyx,” I cried, breath-
less, standing still with the red sun in my eyes, whilst
[ tore the little silk cord from about my throat and
drew the ring from its hiding place.

A flush of pleasure swept, like light, over his ex-
pressive face.

“Ah-ah! you kept that stupid thing? Too large
and clumsy for your pretty little fingers, and no use
to you at all. What did you do with the rest of the
Measures} You had a fine lapfull that morning.”

“I gave them away,” I said,. dreamily, not very
well knowing what he said, gazing at him in the lustre
of that crimson flash of the red and fading light in
which we both were standing.. |

192 PASCAREL.

The little plump brown rabbit of a maiden peeped
with her pretty, shy, raven-like eyes over my shoulder.
she saw the ring with the Fates.

“Why, Pascarél, that is your onyx,” she cried &
him; “the onyx you lost in Verona that first day of.
the Carnival when I was not with you, you remem
ber?”

Pascarél looked a little impatient.

“Did I ever tell you I lost it? At any rate the
donzella found it, and it is hers now by every law 0
possession. Cara mia, those dismal old immutable
Parce do not look fit dispensers of the Future
you.”
“Would you not have it again?” I murmured
seeing that he now wore no ring.

He repulsed it with a sort of gentle impatience. |

“Would you insult me because I am poor? Kee
it, signorina; though it be a grim and gloomy fashias
of gift to you.”

_ I hardly heard him, I was so bewildered at his
recognition of me. I slipped the onyx fondly bad
within my dress. I looked at him, glad and asto
nished.

“How strange it is!” I murmured.

“Forse il destino!” hummed Pascarél, in a sof
mezza voce, as if in answer.

“Do you believe in destiny?” I asked him, wist
fully, in a little awe.

“To be sure!” he answered me. “But it is alway:
feminine, cara mia, whatever our grammarians ma’
say to the contrary. And, now, will you tell me you
story a little?”

“What could he be, I wondered, ceaselessly; ©

THE CITY OF LILIES. 193

what grade, what habits, what pursuit? A scholar in
every accent, a gentleman in every gesture, with the
pure inflexions of voice, with the slender delicacy of
form, with the indescribable ease and indifference of
manner which only come of birth and of breeding, he
lived solely, as it seemed, amongst the populace; his
white linen garments were worn and threadbare; his
meal was of the simplest and most frugal; and his
companions were nothing more than populace, little
more indeed than vagrants.

Perhaps he caught and understood the speculative
wonder in my gaze at him. At any rate, what could
he be, I wondered. He did not leave me. long in
doubt.

“We are strolling players, at your service,” he
said, with his bright laugh, casting himself down be-
side me. “She who was so terrified about you is
called Brunotta; that short lad with the round head is
little Toccd ; and the other one owns the time-honoured
name of Cocomero. The three poodles are Pepito,
Pepita, and Toto. The monkey is Pantagruel. Toto
M especial is the star of my troop. Now you know
us all. As for me, I am Pascarello or Pascarél. If
you are not afraid of such disreputable companion-
ship, will you narrate us something of your own his-

tory, signorina?”

He had made me drink a little of his red Chiante
Wine and break a crust of bread; it was a solace only
to be able to speak of my immense calamity; I told
him willingly all my story, warming to the. recital of
My woes and of my wrongs.

He listened, stretched on the grass and leaning on
One elbow; the girl Brunotta lent an eager ear, her

Panay, I. 13

194 PASCAREL.

little round brown face flushing and growing pale it
sympathy; the two lads leaned against a tree opet-
mouthed and breathless; flattered by my _ interested
and reverential audience, I grew a little calmer under
my loss, and waxed more and more fluent in the nar-
rative of my sad adventures.

My tale ended, Pascarél sent the youth, whom
he had called Cocomero, into the city to acquamt
the guardia with the theft, and make enquiries at the
locanda; that done, he threw himself again upon the
turf. I wondered if he were sorry for me—he had
not said so. All the ejaculations of sorrow and com-
passion had been Brunotta’s.

I was full of passionate sorrow for myself; the
sight of these light-hearted people only made my sense
of utter desolation weigh the heavier upon me; when
the excitement of the relation of my miseries had
passed away, a very horror of despondency possessed
me; and, without reasoning very much upon it, to
find my Romeo of the Veglione nothing more than 4
hedge-comedian cast a shadow of bitter disappoint:
ment over the romance of my vague dreams.

“So you are absolutely all alone, cara mia?” said
Pascarél, bending his luminous eyes down on mine.

“All alone—yes!”

“And if we cannot find this thief, have not a cop-
per paul in all the world?”

“I have told you so!” I cried with a desperation
of pain at being driven to repeat my degradation.

“Altro!” he said, breathing gently that wonderful
expletive which comprehends i in itself every shade and
variety of human emotion.

“Do you know what it is to be all alone and pet

THE CITY OF LILIES. 195

iless in this best of all possible worlds?” he said,
lowly, cruelly, as I thought. I almost burst out sob-
ving afresh under the torture of the question.

“If I do no harm, can I be hurt?” I asked, wist-
ully looking in his face.

He laughed, in a kindly compassion.

“Ah! if one does no harm, it goes very ill indeed
mith one in this world. We are suspected—for ever!”
. In the stupefaction of my sorrow the irony was
loo fine to reach me.

“Is it right to do wrong, then, ever?” I asked, be-
mideredly; for I knew that Mariuccia had been my
mly teacher, and that she, poor soul! had known no-
hing of the world. Besides,—in Ambrogio’s story,
rag it not Rothwald who had done the wrong, yet
mo had thriven?”

“There is only one thing wrong in the world—
overty,”’ answered my new friend briefly.

“It is much the same in the country too,” the little
runotta murmured.

“Assuredly,” said the player, stretched on his back

the sun. “The country is only human nature
ished in buttermilk; the town is human nature soaked
brandy.”

“Why will you talk as though you were a cynic,
iscarél?” said Brunotta in petulant expostulation.

He held up the ragged sleeve of his old white
ket; it had been, I saw, of finest and silkiest thibetti.

“Every one is a cynic who has a hole at his
yow,” he answered her.

“But—as if you cared!”

He laughed, and pinched her pretty rosy ear.

“We do not care; but then we are very disrepu-

13*

196 PASCAREL.

table. All respectable people care. It is only scampe
who smile.”

“A smiling scamp is better than a frowning miser,”.
said the girl; and she set the two white dogs, Pepite,
and Pepita, to waltz round with each other, whilst she;
waltzed too, singing a dance tune, down the avenue.

Pascaré] sprang up and caught her round the waist;
and set himself whirling likewise; the boy with the!
fiddle struck out a wild waltz measure: the dogs ce:
pered, the monkey chattered loud, the man and the:
girl span round and round laughing, with their hands
on each other’s shoulders, and their feet flying like;
leaves blown in circles by ‘the wind.

The fiddle grew louder and wilder and faster; oe
ape screamed in chorus; the dogs jumped over each
other and sank panting on the ground. Pascarél
Brunotta danced and danced and danced, with the
grass beneath them and the leaves above, and every
now and then a blaze of sunshine catching the blue
tassels at her skirt and the scarlet ribbons on his hat

Then, at last, exhausted and laughing, and panting
like their dogs, they cast one another aside, and
dropped down on the turf in the shadow.

“How well it is to be poor!” cried Pascarél. “If
we were dukes and duchesses we could not scampet
like that in a wood! we could only go masked, in the
gas, to an opera ball.”

As he spoke he laughed, and fanned himself and
her with a sheaf of chesnut leaves. I, sitting alone.is
the depth of the shadow from the cypress, watched
them, wondering, and envying their glad content.

Brunotta of the bird-like eyes seeing me sitting

a ae he

THE CITY OF LILIES. 197

there alone in the dark, rose and crossed to me, and
touched me again gently.

“Pascarél says it is always well for those who love
to be poor?” she whispered.

I shivered a little. The double trouble was mine,
to be poor without any love to help me under it.

“If both are content, perhaps,” I murmured aloud.
But I was very doubtful.

“He is;—I don’t say I see it so myself,” said the
litle player, as she dropped down by me and wove a
plait of grasses, and talked in a cheery, quick, bab-
bling voice like the tinkling of a brook; “we are poor
—s0 poor—but then we are so merry. Pascarél was
not always so poor. He is a great comedian; only
the people are all he will play to, and he does not ~
care to be great. Coco’s father was a Harlequin and
hever had any money; and they used to travel much
aswe do now. He danced for his own bread when
he was three years old; and then, when he grew older,
he played. He is eighteen now. Pascarél has a talent
—such a talent: I have none. I never did anything
intil three years ago, except milk the goats and take
he insects off the vines, and plait straw, and spin, of
ourse. I can only hop about. We have travelled
vith three or four companies, but Pascarél never could
set on with the directors; one director made love to
he; and another one was cruel to poor little Toto;
ind a third one failed and ran away in debt to all
US troop, and so on and so On; so we are as we are,
nd we have a merry life. The two lads and the ani-
tals love us, and we go about where we like; and
'ascaré] can always make the people laugh, and we
lways get enough to live upon; and it is much better

198 PASCAREL,

than being at any tyrant’s beck and call; a
and then we have a holiday in the woods—l
In the winter it is a little harder, of course; t
then the little towns are bight and warm,
people are always glad to be made merry; am
one has romped through Carnival—presto!—th
is gone! A hearty laugh makes one forget t
could eat more maccaroni, and when one’s °
cold in the snow a dance warms them quick
anything. Sometimes I am sorry Pascarél c:
thing at all to make himself great, because
such a talent; and if he were great one wot
such good things to eat every day, and fine
and real jewels; but he says one should not :
such things—but then to be sure he does not
his head whether he eats a ciambello or a cu
a swan or a sparrow! But how selfish I am to
so!—you are unhappy?”

The little actress saw the whiteness that ca:
the face above her, and paused in the weavin,
braid of grasses, and said softly again:—

“You are so unhappy?”

“Of course; but it does not matter.”

“Yes, it does. Everything seems so unl
except just Pascaré] and myself, and the dogs
is such a pity, in a sunshine like this, when ev
ought to live like the crocuses, being glad an
no thought. You are unhappy because you ar
no doubt. Will you come with us? I am s
caré] would be glad! It will be so much bett
we will not teaze you to know what you do 1
to tell—if there is anything

“But you know nothing of me——”

THE CITY OF LILIES. 199

The girl laughed.

“Ah bah! We are not great people that dare not
ste a pear till they know what stem it was grafted
1. We are only poor players; we have nothing to
we; and if we take a liking to a face we are not
fraid of its fellowship. There is so much liberty in
eing poor, you see!”

“Is there?”

I could not see it; it appeared to me that poverty
vas an ass’s hobble, with which one was tied miser-
ibly to one place that we had long browsed bare.

“It is the difference between an old shirt and a
new,” said Pascarél, rising and lounging near. “The
sew is embroidered perhaps, and very white and hand-
some, no doubt, but it is tight and the stitches gall;
that shirt is respectable, admirable, and fit for a
palace; but comfortable—no. The old is ugly maybe,
and looks bad, and in it you will not be asked to a
noble’s table or a bishop’s feast; but it 1s so easy to
wear, and it has so many recollections, that dear old
shirt: you pawned it here, and you danced in it there,
and pretty fingers darned it in one place, and a rosy-
cheeked laundress cobbled it in another; it is pictu-
fesque, it is memorial, it is venerable; above all, it
never scratches. ‘Those two shirts are Wealth and
Poverty.”

“Will it not be much better?” said Brunotta,
ragerly interrupting him,—“much better, if the signo-
fina come with us for a little space?”

Pascarél swept the turf with his ribboned sombrero,
ind declared his willingness in flowery phrases.

“Only—only,” he said, at the end of his graceful
ind gracious sentences, “you forget one thing, Brunotta,

200 PASCAREL.

The signorina is gentle-born and gentle-bred; our
mode of life would be but a sorry one for her.”

“But what can she do?” cried the little Brundtta

“Ah! what, indeed?” I thought; and I threw ny-
self down face downwards on the earth in a very
paroxysm of despair.

Pascarél threw one gentle look on me, then tumed
and walked up and down under the trees in medita-
tion.

“Brunétta!” I heard him call; she went to him,
and I heard their voices, low and earnest, in conversa-
tion at some distance from me, too far away for their
meaning to be intelligible.

Then they ceased, and all was quite silent in the
wood except the joyous and wild bark of the dogs as
they chased a bird or a rabbit.. I lay still there with
my face pressed on the dry, hard earth.

“If they would only kill me,” I thought, “and
make an end of it all!”

A little picture rose before my memory of Raffael-
lino sitting at the coppersmith’s door at sunset playing
on his mandoline, while his mother and Mariuccié
gossiped within over the lamp, and the light shone or
the huge red coppers, and the stars came out ové!
the dark quiet piazza.

“Oh, why! oh, why!” I thought, “cannot we know
when we are happy!”

I would have given away twenty years of m)
young unspent life only to have been back once mor
in that old, despised, safe home in the city of Ca
Grande!

Pascarél aroused me, touching me on the shoulde

“Rise up, cara mia,” he said, gently. “That!

THE CITY OF LILIES. 201

%t the way anyhow to get back your florins, or to
in yourself new ones.”

I rose as he bade me, and looked him in the
ace; my own face I felt was white with pain and
Jesperation.

“I have been very foolish,” I said to him, “and
you have been very good; you are all strangers, and
‘ean care nothing for me. I will go now; I thank you
"very much—you and yours.”

T put out my hands to him in farewell; his eyes

I were so beautiful, and he had been so kind, I could

L hardly keep the tears from flooding my own eyes as I

poke to him, and yet I knew I must not trouble them
tay longer—all strangers as they were.

Pascaré] took my hands and kissed them lightly
with the easy grace-of all his actions.

He looked troubled and almost embarrassed.

“Not so fast, donzella,” he said, gently; “wait
awhile; Coco is not back yet with any news, and even
if he find your florins, it cannot be said that you are
in very fair case for wandering over the country all
ane. See here, we are not of your grade in life;
We are poor strolling Bohemians; we are not, as I tell
you, very reputable people, and we are poor as the
devil—altro!—and yet, if you would like to stay with

'Us as—as—Brunotta said, it might be safer at any
tate for you than to stray about Italy by yourself as
heipless as my little Toto would be if I lost him. We
ae a sorry resort, I know, but perhaps we are better
than nothing, and I may be more able to find your
father than you. Say, will you wait with us a little?”

Ere I could answer him, the youth Cocomero burst

~~

202 PASCAREL.

through the bushes breathless from having ru
from the town.

“There is no news,” he panted, gloomily.
knew nothing at the Silver Melon, and the gu
there have been many foreign cutpurses in
of late. They have had a score of such 1
this winter.”

Pascarél shrugged his shoulders and li
hands with that indescribable gesture in wv
Italian expresses consummate disgust and res

“Tt is destiny!” he murmured, resting his
me with a look I did not understand. “Well, s
mia, will you stay with us?”

“TI should be glad!” I said, with a little
my voice. “It is so horrible—so very hon
be alone!”

“Of course it is horrible,” he echoed, as
my hands afresh within his own, and cast
down upon his knees before me where I s
that easy unstudied abandonment of himself
impulse and emotion of the moment whic.
grace of posture as natural to an Italian as 1
deer or an antelope.

“You will stay?” he murmured, still ligh
ing my hand in his. “That is well—at least
it shall be well; that I swear. Riches we h
and glory we have not, and the ways of our
be hard—for you. But all that we can do-

“You are very good!” I said to him,
knowing what indeed to answer him.

He was a stranger, seen but half an hou
and yet already he seemed like a familiar frie

THE CITY OF LILIES. 203

A shade of sadness and impatience swept over
his speaking face.

“Che-che! Wait to praise us till you know us.
We are good for very little, cara mia. We will make
you laugh sometimes, that I can promise, and perhaps
that is much in this life.”

“But if I stay with you?” I said, a sudden fear
and remembrance striking me with its shame, “if I
stay—I have nothing; I will not be a burden to you;
never, never! Is there nothing I can do to get my
bread? My voice is good——” |

“Yes! You sing like all the angels.” 7

“About the angels—I do not know. But any-
thing;—always.”

“But you are so young——”

“Not too young for that—only I promised dear
dead Mariuccia But I will not stay with you
unless you tell me of some way to get my bread.”

“Bread? Nonsense! You eat, I daresay, as much
4 one flings to the swallows. But, if you are in
famest, you might be one of us.”

“A player! 9”

I echoed the words half in affront half in delight.
My pride rebelled, my fancy was allured.

“Why not?” said Pascarél. “Do you know aright
What it is to be one?”

“Surely!” I answered him, with a little gay con-
lempt—had I not seen them scores of times in Verona?
‘It is to be no longer a man or a woman, but only a
Mere wooden durattino that has to dance or die, to
wagger or shrink, just as its master chooses to make
eople laugh for a copper coin. A fine thing, cer-

ainly!”

204 PASCAREL.

Pascarél released my hands and sprang to his fee
erect. His mobile face flushed darkly; his changeful’
eyes flashed fire.

“Is that all you know?” he cried, while his voice
rang like a trumpet-call. “Listen here, then, little
lady, and learn better. What is it to be a player! It
is this. A thing despised and rejected on all sides; a
thing that was a century since denied what they call
Christian burial; a thing that is still deemed fora
woman disgraceful, and for a man degrading and
emasculate; a thing that is mute as a dunce save when,
parrot-like, it repeats by rote with a mirthless grin or
a tearless sob; a wooden doll, as you say, applauded
as a brave puppet in its prime, hissed at in its first
hour of failure or decay; a thing made up of tinsel
and paint, and patchwork, of the tailor’s shreds and
the barber’s curls of tow—a ridiculous thing to be
sure! That is a player. And yet again,—a thing
without which laughter and jest were dead in the sad
lives of the populace; a thing that breathes the poet's
words of fire so that the humblest heart is set aflame;
a thing that has a magic on its lips to waken smiles
or weeping at its will; a thing which holds a people
silent, breathless, intoxicated with mirth or with awe,
as it chooses; a thing whose grace kings envy, and
whose wit great men will steal; a thing by whose ut:
terance alone the poor can know the fair follies of 3
thoughtless hour, and escape for a little space from
the dull prisons of their colourless lives into the sunh
paradise where genius dwells;—/Aa/ is a player, too!’

His voice trembled a little over the closing word:
and, ashamed of the passionate eloquence into whic
the sting of my idle slighting phrase had hurried hin

THE CITY OF LILIES. 208

“he tumed away and began to romp and laugh and
‘ gambol with Pepito and Pepita.

- IT listened; ashamed myself; moved, I knew not
“very well why; and regretful to think that I had
‘wounded him.

I waited a little while; then I went up to him
‘where he stooped over his dogs, and laid my fingers
; On his arm.

- I spoke idly,” I murmured. “I did not think.
' And—and—lI will try and be a player too.”

He lifted his head, with a flash of light over all
his face, and touched my hand caressingly with his

OWN, :
| “Altro!” he said. “It is a fate. ‘Come with us.
But as for being a player;—wait and see. You must
tot choose your future in blind haste.”

Then he bade me sing to him, which I did, and
Toced touched his violin in quaint accord with me;
and Pascarél himself raised the echoes of the wood
with half the popular songs of Italy.

So, laughing and singing, and pausing to watch the
dogs at play, we idled time away under the black pines
and the budding chestnut trees.

I was only a child; I was almost happy again.
iometimes I started and wondered if indeed I had
een so wretched, there, in that very place, an hour
efore.

Was he a magician, I wondered, this Pascareél?

I was ungrateful to the supreme magician— Youth.

206 PASCAREL.

BOOK III.

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES.

CHAPTER I.
Under the Red Lily.

THE day rolled onward, growing chill something |
early, for it was still but the very first commencement
of the spring.

I seemed to have known them all my life long— ‘

this little gay, good-humoured band; and the poo '

ae el -

i
{

dles frisked and fawned upon me as impartially as on:

Brunotta.

She—this pretty little brown thing—was not iealous

of their sudden transference of caresses; she was about
six years older than I—a girl of the people, no
doubt, but with something so good-natured, so con-
fiding, and so gay about her that one could not
choose but trust in her and like her. She was so fond,
too, of her brother, that one could see at a glance, and
very proud of him, and a little afraid of him also.
He was very different in mind and manner to her;
though a strolling player, as he said, he had the tone
and the temper of a scholar: whilst little Brunotta con-
fessed to me, half in glee, as one who had escaped a

gruesome penalty and peril, that, like the padrona’s:

son at the Golden Boar, she knew not her alfabeto.
What did that matter to me?

Raffaellino only knew it just enough to carry him:

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 207

gh the offices of the Church: it never seemed to
science indispensable in people ere I took them
ty friends, which, no doubt, was a grave error on
yart, and due to my running loose in my baby-
amongst these Bohemians at Verona.
“he shadows and the cold came early in that
y wood; we were almost in darkness, whilst the
and the plain were still in full sunlight. Pas-
. gave the signal for moving towards the city.
Ne emerged from the ilex groves on to the high-
—Brunotta and I, Pascarél and his dogs, and the
lads following us with the monkey and the
ie. °
‘You have seen good players?” he asked me, as
walked on towards Florence, whilst the silver bells
erretola and the deep toll of the city churches
sed each other ringing the Ave-Maria. |
‘I have seen the Burattini hundreds of times, and
Personaggi too, in melodrama,” I answered him
tly, proud of my experience, which was due to
co and the rest of the students.
Pascarél] gave his charming gesture of ineffable
ain.
“Fantoccini and melodrama! Oh, cara mia! how
h you have to learn,—and to uwnlearn,—which is
h the harder of the two at all times! No wonder
think little of the stage.”
[ thought that I was willing to be great as Lillo
great, who had had the showers of gold and of
}in Verona; but I could see no possibility of any
tness in a strolling player, as we passed over the
e dry road, out of the rosy reflex of the sunset, on
‘the shadow of the Florentine walls.

208 PASCAREL.

“Even Destiny loses the light out of her
here,” said Pascarél, with a laugh, as we passec
the deep gloom of the Borgognissanti.

He looked as if he meant to call me Destiny
how could I be that, I wondered—I who was |
poor little stray leaf blown and buffeted by the ha
of every breeze of fate?

As we crossed the Carraia bridge and entere
heart of the city, into the twisting streets that |
all around the red dome of the Santo Spirito, an
frowning front of the Pitti, we passed by a cob
stall planted against the roadway; the old man,
was stitching at his leather by the aid of a dim lar
called out gladly to him:—

“Che-che! is it you, Pascarél? You are welcor
figs in summer!”

Some urchins standing idly near caught uy
name; the street became quite noisy with the c
“Pascarél! Pascarél! eccé il Pascarello!”

The people were all sitting in their doorway
half out in the street, after the manner of Italian «
lers and traders, with little lights burning before |
pile of faggots, some stall of chestnuts, some tri
amaretti, some stand of pizzicheria fare, or some 1
of San Giovanni. They incontinently left their t
and their pastimes and clustered round him in '
ferous homage—whom would he sup with?—w
would he drink?—did he play to-night beyond
Prato Gate? Beppe and Pippo had been fightin
the Sdrucciolo, he had been wanted badly ;-—ha
heard!—who was that pretty purple and yellow |
he had got with him?!—a new dancer? So their st

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 209

"questions poured out rapid and mellifluous as olive
] from a tilted flask.

But he shook himself free of them, and leaving the
ghing, clinging, delighted crowd as best he might,
e took me into the little tavern where they tarried in
he town. It was a smaller place, and humbler than
he Golden Boar; a great fig-tree climbed over it, just
ming into leaf, and on an iron stanchion swung its
ign of two crossed halberds, a relic, no doubt, of old
Bianchi and Neri strife. But it was clean, and its
people worshipped Pascarél; and their laughter and
their welcome, and the colour and pleasantness of the
little place made it bright and cheerful in the midst
of the dusky old age of grim Oltrarno.

There we dined frugally, as became Italians, whilst
fhe brass stands of the licernati threw a feeble light
over the pretty black head of Brundtta, and the golden
folds of my poor Court dress, and the Florentine face
of Pascarél. |
' It was only a poor hittle tavern; the chamber we
dined in was only parted from the kitchen by an open
arch.

We saw the food stewed and fried ere it came to
ts, and near at hand to us were some smiths and ta-
bestry-workers playing dominoes and drinking inno-
tent bibiti; and yet—I do not know how it might
lave been in other countries—but in Italy it was not
rilgar, was not even common, but was only a homely,
picturesque, pretty scene, full of colour, and move-
Weft, and mirth; a noble might have shared in it, an
@Gst would have been happy in it.

.*'They have suffered so much, these people, and yet
Riough all they have kept their hold on so much; for

» PasggrQl, 1. 14

210 PASCAREL.

they have kept the smile on their eyes and they hat
kept the grace in their limbs, and they have kept tl
poetry in their hearts.

When our meal was over, the clocks chimed th
half-hour after six. Pascarél rose, and we went ot
into the clear and cold evening, where the youn
moon was rising above the immense dark masses ¢
the city buildings.

“You play to-night, caro mio?” cried the smith
and the weavers, and they flung their dominoes in
heap, and rose and followed us, talking and laughin
with him.

I gathered from their talk that it was his habit t
stroll through the country, taking the large towns an
the little as they came, sometimes even pausing in th
smallest villages, and setting up for himself a litt
theatre of canvas and wood, in the midst of any brees
pasture on the plain or sheltered nook upon the hil
that took his errant fancy.

Brundtta and he and the two lads were all t
little company which wandered as it would, subject |
no dictation except that impulse of the moment, whit
was always law to Pascarél.

By the enthusiasm displayed to him, he seemed |
have a strange power to charm, or, at any rate, |
amuse the people; and as I listened, the seduction |
this nomadic, changeful, careless, adventurous li
bewitched me, as it has bewitched so many in the
youth.

From their discourse and the confidences of Br
nétta I gathered that Pascarél was always a bohemia
often a beggar; he led an idle, roving life, and pr
ferred it to any other.

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 211

His stage had often been any plank across a cart
w any board in a fair booth that might offer to him;
he wrote the pieces he played that they might serve
for his little troop, of which the dogs and the parrot
were the stars; he rarely knew one night where he
would lay his head another; he often ate his supper at
§ trattoria, trusting to his skill that same evening to
Pay off the score; when he made money, as sometimes
happened—for he was popular everywhere, except with
the directors of theatres—he spent it royally in a min-
ging of revelry and charity that left him as poor as
ever on the morrow.

He was a.stroller and a vagabond, so far as social
tatus went, an idle rogue, and a dissolute; but at his

he was a great artist; and in many a little vil-
ge, and township, and country fair, and wayside
favern the people had found it out, and the. cry of
“Pascarél” brought men and maidens, old women and
Young children, poor students and day-labourers, in a
great eager crowd round any place where his change-
fil face, with its speaking eyes and its flexile lips,
lughed out its mirth upon them.

_ “He studies nothing; he outrages all traditions; he
Wolates every precedent and canon,” said the directors
Yhom he quarrelled with.

The people did not care for that; they only knew
that Pascarél, with a dog for his sole supporter, and
&tag of carpet or a broken bough for all his scenery,
could make them laugh or cry, hate or love, be miser-
able or be in ecstasy, whichever he chose in the irre-
‘Metble dominance of genius.

: Ata stone’s throw from the Cascine woods was an
‘Open space; the moon was already shining clearly

14"

212 PASCAREL.

upon it; a large tent, braced with timbers, wa:
in the centre of the place; the canvas was fl
in the cool evening breeze.

“There is my theatre, donzella,” said F
“Oh, your Burattini have finer abodes; I knc
When one only hangs on wires and has wood
one must have a fine house, or who will co.
look at one? But an artist, if he be worth |
can make his temple in the minds of his at
if he have only the roof of a barn over his he
theirs.”

These were not the golden showers and
lilies of Lillo! and a httle contempt for this 1
drama rose up in me.

It stood on a breadth of meadow land out:
Prato Gate, with the shadow of the mounta
behind it, and around it the scents of growing
from the fields that had been sown for hay.

The people were trooping to it eagerly; tc
ef all trades and crafts, cobblers, tinkers, smi
baster workers, mosaic workers, conscripts, cara
market women, mule drivers, heaven knows w
and in from the villages of the Val de Gréy
were coming in the opposite direction many
women who plaited their straw as they walk
contadini who had stuck a flower behind thei:
evening dress.

It was a pretty little wooden house, li
cleverly put together; sometimes its walls we
to the sky like the old Basiliche of the Latins
times its canvas roof fluttered over spectators
packed and as eager as ever the canvas roo!
Coliseum shaded, .

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 213

It had the flag of Florence with the red lily flying
lerrily above it, and above its entrance place was
ainted in gay letters the words “Dell’ Arte.”

I asked Pascarél what the name meant.

“Oh, I broke a flask of wine against it, and named
tso ages ago,” he answered me. “Why? Because
he first wooden home of Pulcinello and his brethren
ras called so when it rolled one fine Carnival day
ato Venice. :

“A presumptuous name? Oh, I don’t see that.
We are all the arts in one, if we are worth anything
a all. '

“And besides, when they grew up in Italy, all that
yous band,—Arlecchino in Bergamo, Stenterello in
Florence, Pulcinello in Naples, Pantaleone in Venice,
Dulcamara in Bologna, Beltramo in Milan, Brighella
m Brescia, masked their mirthful visages and ran to-
gether and jumped on that travelling stage before the
World, and what a force they were for the world, those
impudent mimes!

“‘Only Pantomimi?’ When they joined hands
with one another and rolled their wandering house
before St. Mark’s they were only players indeed; but
their laughter blew out the fires of the Inquisition,
their fools’ caps made the papal tiara look but paper
oy, their wooden swords struck to earth the steel of
the nobles, their arrows of epigram, feathered from.
ese and from falcon, slew flying the many-winged
dragon of Superstition.

* “They were old as the old Latin land, indeed.
_ “They had mouldered for ages in Etruscan cities,
‘With the dust of uncounted centuries upon them, and
*n only led out in Carnival times, pale voiceless

214 PASCAREL.

frail ghosts of dead powers, whose very meaning the
people had long forgotten. But the trumpet call 0
the Renaissance woke them from their Rip Van Winkle.
sleep.

“They got up, young again, and keen for every |

frolic—Barbarossas of sock and buskin, whose hel-
mets were caps and bells, breaking the magic spell
of their slumber to burst upon men afresh; buoyant
incarnations of the new-born scorn for tradition, of

the nascent revolts of democracy, with which the air |

was rife.

“<Only Pantomimi?’ Oh altro! :

“The world when it reckons its saviours should
rate high all it owed to the Pantomimi,—the privileged
Pantomimi—who first dared take licence to say i
their quips and cranks, in their capers and jests, what
had sent all speakers before them to the rack and the
faggots.

“Who think of that when they hear the shrill
squeak of Pulcinello in the dark bye-streets of
northern towns, or see lean Pantaleone slip and
tumble through the transformation scene of some
gorgeous theatre?

“Not one ina million. — .

“Vet it is true for all that. Free speech was first
due to the Pantomimi. A proud boast that. They
hymn Tell and chant Savonarola and glorify the
Gracchi, but I doubt if any of the gods in the world’s
Pantheon or the other world’s Valhalla did so much
for freedom as those merry mimes that the children
scamper after upon every holyday.

“And we players are all their sons and their suc
cessors; and so I baptize my house after them ‘Dell’

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 215

Why not? If we be not artist we have no
ess to profane a stage at all.”
nd therewith he bade mé adieu, and ran in his
to dress.
fe entered the booth—for in truth it was hardly
—as the Florentine clocks tolled the quarter
2 seven. The people were already gathering
y in the meadow, and he could only break free
elr vociferous welcome by reminding them that
xy kept him there without, he could not play
1; a sober fact which they recognized at last,
th with some reluctance.
ascarél drew me to a place where I could see
actors and audience, unseen by the latter; the
yn of the tent where the stage was made was
ed from the public part of it by a curtain; be-
this I was stationed.
hey all left me and disappeared; Tocco ran
1 to light the oil wicks which were to illumine
verformance. In an incredibly short space, so
that it seemed to me Pascarél must first have
ed a sorcerer’s wand to change them all, Brunotta
ort skirts of tinsel, and white and rose, and Co-
ro in the vari-coloured dress of Arlecchino, and
logs in quaint little brilliant coats—Toto pre-
snt by cap and plume—all bounded pell mell on
> boards together.
he curtain swung aside, the violin of Tocco
imed a gay melody, whilst a drum, ingeniously
n by his foot, rolled now and then its deeper
ly.
hey commenced one of those pretty and unin-
ble dumb dramas of gesture, which are so popu-

' 216 PASCAREL.

lar in Italy, and hold the stage longer than oper,
or tragedy, or comedy of voice, whether in their grat
der form of ballet at the Pergola or the Fenice, or in
their humblest species such as that in which Brundtta
and Cocomero now danced.

Brunotta danced with all the agility and vivacity
of a girl who had spun round in the fairs and feste
from the earliest days of her existence; Cocomero
was a comic and untiring harlequin, and the quaint
tricks and astounding intelligence of Maestro Toto
were beyond all praise and would baffle all descrip-
tion.

The spectacle was received with glee and good
humour by an audience which was by far too large .
for the limits of the theatre, and stretched far out into
- the open air in a sea of out-stretched throats and
eager faces, in a curious chiaroscuro from the dark
without and the oil lamps within, whilst they hummed
the melody of the dance tunes all the way through
themselves—a detestable mode of testifying musical
delight, from which the most patrician musical audi-
ences of Italy unhappily are not free.

The curtain fell, Toto as primo-uomo was thrice
summoned and received a shower of sweet cakes and
sugar, plaudits which were to his comprehension.

Then loud and imperious rose the cry:

“Pascarél! Pascarél! Il Pascarello!”

Pascarél soon obeyed the summons, amidst the
tumult of delight that greeted him from the throngs
of coppersmiths, and carpet-weavers, and craftsmen of
all kinds, and students, and beggars, and idlers of
every sort who made up his motley clientela.

The little piece he played in was called “Le

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 217

‘aculose fortune e gli amori pietosissimi de] Calzo-
»e del Conte.”

Jt had been written by himself, to suit the re-
Irces of his scanty company; a thing of the slightest
d the simplest, in which he played himself the two
lef parts, those of the cobbler and the count.

It was only a trifle; but it abounded in wit; it
arkled with irony, it contained epigrams worthy of
¢ palmy days of Pasquin, and every now and then,
tidst the rippling exuberance of its play of non-
nse, it deepened and had an exquisite pathos hidden
\it; it was like a blue forget-me-not that the rains
we just dashed where it lifts its blue eyes in the
inshine.

With the utmost ingenuity, the play was con-
tucted so that the old man and the young, the
bbler and the noble, whilst rivals throughout for the
we of a contadina, never met one another in all the
tcidents of their fortunes.

His transitions from age to youth, from youth to
ge, were so sudden, so marvellous, so perfect, each
lits kind, that none who had not known him could
ave told which years were the real with him or which
be assumed.

Other actors in their youth have counterfeited as
tonderfully the age of Richelieu or of Louis XL; but

y have been elaborately prepared by costume and
¥ paint, and have sustained the one part unbroken;

here Pascarél] changed from youth to age with
Karce breathing time between the phases, and made

Pétsonification a vivid living fact by no aid but

of his own consummate powers.

' [twould have been impossible to say with which

218 PASCAREL.

impersonation the sympathies of the public were
stronger; each won them in its turn.

The youth of the young noble was so charm
so full of happy insolence, of generous impulse,
audacious ease, of irresistible assurance, of gay, go
tempered grace.

The age of the old cobbler was so full of
genuine irony, of wistful loneliness, of pathetic fea
mockery, of trembling tenderness that scarcely da
be uttered; no slippered pantaloon, no palsied dot
shrunken target for the gibes of fools, but Age—fa
ful, venerable, true to its own self-respect; but Ag
unutterably sad because—alone.

It was a trifle, unaided by any scenic decept
or any delusion for the senses; but it was perfect
only the exquisite delicacy, the unerring truthfuln
and the supreme histrionic instincts of a great get
could make it; and as such it swept away to its
with the rush of the storm wind, all the pity and
the passion that throbbed in the countless hearts
its audience.

When it was over, and the “Fuori! fuori! fuol
of the enraptured people had brought him for the |
time before their hurricane of applause, he came
me where I stood.

“Well?” he said, with the smile in his eyes.

I trembled before him, burning, breathless,
tranced, amazed; so wondrous did his power seem
me, I could have cast myself at his feet and ¥
shipped him for the divine force of the Art that»
in him.

“Well?” he said again; but his voice shook a li

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 219

though it had a laugh in it. “Well?—say— is it bet-
ter than the Burattini?”

I could not answer him; but I burst into tears.

‘ When we left the wooden Arte that night where it
stood, with its flag dropping in the quiet air, and its
gay scroll facing the line of the Apennines, we were
escorted in royal honour homeward by a half hundred
or so of sturdy popolani, singing, laughing, shouting,
dancing in universal acclaim and fellowship, as only
Italians can sing, and laugh, and shout, and dance,
when the moon is high, and a mandoline is making
tinkling melody before their steps.

It was late, and a beautiful, lustrous, cold night,
full of the smell of the young spring, as the breeze
blew in from over the budding contado.

We passed through the Porta al Prato, and glanced
up at white Fiesole, and went on under the limes of
the piazzone and along the edge of the glancing
Water,

_The music of the mandoline drew the steps of the
loiterers, of whom there were many about in those
Uminous, tranquil night-hours.

A youth with a guitar slung across him joined us,
and a man with a violin ran out from under an arch-
Way, and caught the strains, and skipped before us in
Many grotesque capers; some people above, on a
lighted balcony, threw some violets and daffodils at
US as we went by; the moonlight lay broad and white
Upon the river; all the towers and spires rose clear
against the stars; the music passed on, glad as the
Singing of Pan.

So we went homeward through Florence,

eee ee ee ere

220 PASCAREL.

CHAPTER II.
The Rose and the Florins.

WHEN we reached the little tavern, our escort u-
terly refused to let him enter it.

They claimed Pascarél as theirs by every humana
right, and insisted on bearing him off amidst them
supper to a noted wine-house, where the alabaster
workers that night were about to hold high revelry.
Pascarél laughed and consented to go with them, but
before he turned away, he swept the earth with bis
sombrero in a good-night to me, and murmured some
parting counsel in the ear of his sister.

Then off he went; the rapture of his comrades ™
longer restrained by the presence of the “donzella,’ |
at whom they had glanced as a new and not altogether
welcome addition to his little party.

They lifted him fairly off the ground and bor
him along aloft on the shoulders and backs of half 4
dozen sturdy craftsmen of Florence, the mandolise
twanging cheerily before them, and all their far-readr
ing voices blending together.

It was not the white lilies of Lillo; but it was4
homage full as genuine in its way.

I stood in the doorway and watched them pas
down the sombre, darkling ancient street; the moos
shone whitely here and there upon their path, the grim
arcades and the mighty walls were upon either side;
above, between the roofs, was the dark blue sky*o
night. Their riotous glee died softly in the distant
as they turned out of sight by the base of the old
Guadagni Palace, and the last echo I heard was the

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 221

t of their homage, “Viva il Pascarello! Pascarél!

arél!”

iow long I stood there, lost in a dream of this

ge and. wonderful life which had opened upon

I cannot tell; Brunotta touched me in kindly im-

nce :—

‘Do not dream in the moonlight like that, signo-
It makes people mad, they say. I have some

soup here; come and drink it, and let us get to

33

‘When will he be back?” I asked, as I followed
withindoors.
‘Pascarel? Oh! not till daybreak, I daresay. He
ften out all night long. Come, do not let the
» get cold. And so you thought him wonderful,
you? Ah! did I not tell you only the truth?”
She sat opposite me, with the little brass soup-
le between us, toasting her feet on an earthen
dino; she had not changed her pretty short white
rose skirts; she had still her little starry crown on
forehead. She was a little gay, rosy, cheery soul,
yet I thought she seemed hardly worthy to be of
same race as this marvellous Pascarél.
“I never could have dreamed of anything like
1” I said, under my breath, for I had been too
ply moved to be able to talk of it easily: “but the
le world ought to know it; he ought to play be- -
: kings!”
“He likes this best,” said Brundtta, keeping her
'gheirts off the hot charcoal of her footstool. “He
B-free, you see. He does just as he likes: in the
fame would be bondage. So he says, and no
Wie is right. Besides, I do not think he cares

222 PASCAREL.

so much as this brown pot would care for eitha
riches or fame. He loves his freedom, and he loves
the people, PascaréL”

“But he wrote that piece himself?”

“Oh, yes. He writes everything that he plays.”

“But that is genius!”

“I do not know what you mean. He is vey
clever, no doubt, wonderfully clever; there is no om
like him. But then he is a great scholar, you kno¥;
he took his degree at Pisa.”

“At Pisa? And you do not know how to read!’
I cried, forgetful in my astonishment of all laws d
courtesy.

“No. I cannot read,” said Brunotta, with a litte
confused laugh.

“But a degree at Pisa, and not to know the ali
beto—that is a great difference.”

Brunotta coloured; perhaps she was vexed.

“Yes. No doubt it is a good deal of differenc
But then I was always a very lazy little thing, an
never cared to do anything but to dance in
streets, whilst Pascarél,—oh, you cannot imagine wha
wonderful things he has it in him to do. He might
be very great—very great—there is no doubt, if bt
liked.”

“Tt is odd he should not like?”

“He has no ambition, I suppose—that is it: bf
likes to be free.”

“But who can be free if they be poor?”

“Anybody, signorina,” laughed Brunctta, with the
philosophy which she had acquired from Pascardl;
“that is, if they do not try to be rich, you know. 0
course, if you be always struggling to be somethin

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 223

yu are not, you never can be at ease—rich or
por.”

There was a profound wisdom in this, no doubt;
‘ut it was too profound for me.

“Pascarél might have made an enormous deal of
money, no doubt,” pursued the little dancing girl,
‘but he would never bind himself; that is where his
fault is; and people will not pay you, ever, unless
you will put yourself into harness for good and all.
He is happier as he is; playing just as the fancy
moves him.

“And you cannot think the good that he does, for
all he looks so careless. That poor little Tocco
there; he was the son of one of the brigands at
Pastum. The law took the father and the whole
gang. They shot some, and sent some to the galleys,
poor wretches! and little Tocco they turned adrift on
the streets, for he was only twelve, and nothing proved
against him. Of course, in time, he would have been
a thief like his father, but Pascarél got hold of him
and kept him; and now there is not an honester or
better little soul in the whole length of Italy than
Toced; and I am sure he would be cut in a million
Pieces for Pascareél.

“At the great flood, too, two winters ago, in
Tuscany, when the whole land was under water and
the bullocks and sheep drowned by thousands, and
the people were only saved here and there by getting
Up on the tops of the towers, and the great stacks of

y and corn, and the trees, and often the roofs and
very bodies of the houses were tossing down the great

w sea of the flood like so many little cockle-
thells in a gutter, you should have seen Pascarél that

224 PASCAREL.

day: we happened to be up high on the hills v
the flood did not reach, but he heard of it at sw
and down he went and he got a boat, and he n
about hither and thither on the white horrid fa
the torrents, shaming the cowards that dared not
of whom there were hundreds and hundreds; and
so many times he was within an ace of being s
to his grave, and not a whit did he care—not he

“He worked on and on till the night fell ant
force of the waters abated, and the men and we
and children, and the flocks and the herds th:
saved, you would never believe if I told you.

“There was much talk after that of some p
reward for his goodness and courage, and som
the towns wanted to make great feasts in his ho
and have jubilees in their churches, and give
money.

“But when Pascarél heard that, he fled out o
country as though the black death itself were
him, and went along the Corniche into France,
would not return into Italy till time had gone
long enough for the people to forget what they c
to him. It does not take very long for peopl
forget a benefit, you know, signorina.

“But it is nearly midnight, donzella mia,”
Brundtta, rising after a pause in her chatter,
shaking the embers in her earthen pot, “and
care] said ,you were to sleep early and wake
because you were tired and not used to our
Let me show you your room; it is a very poor
small place, but it is clean; and I hope you will
mind it.” :

Then she led the way witlt a lantern, and

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 225

climbed a rickety ladder-like stair, and I found my
little chamber—a mere nook in a wall as it were, and
bare of comfort, but still clean, as she had said, and
on the little hard bed was cast a cloak of skins.

“That is Pascarél’s; he thought you might be
cold; the nights are chilly, and so he told me to put
it there,” said Brunotta, busying herself in a hundred
aly girlish fashions after my comfort as well as she
could.

After she had bidden me thrice good-night, she
stood, with her light in her hand, looking at me
wonderingly as I unloosed my bodice and shook down
all my hair, and took my shoes and stockings off my
fred feet. = *

“The donzellina is beautiful to look at,” she said,
meditatively, with a sort of astonished inquiring plea-
sure in her voice: “and what white little feet, though
she is so tall, and what a white skin!—it is wonder-
ful! I wish Pascarél could see you now. He says
€ never saw anything like you. He says you would
do for the Angelica in that poem he is so fond of,
you know? He is always running his head on that
kind of rubbish, as if it would do one any good.”

_ “You are very flattering, Brunotta,” I said, laugh-
ing, as with some vanity, I fear me, I displayed to
her all the thickness of my hair, which always de-
lighted Italians, because of the yellow lights it had
lM it, which never darkened with the sun as their

Own did.
_“Tonly say what is just true. Is that generous?”
Said the good little honest soul, as she turned at last
ly away with her lantern, and drew my door close

d her.

Pascard], 7. *

15

226 PASCAREL.

For myself, I was so confused, so excited, so full
of a mingled pleasure and pain, that, though I threw
myself at once on my bed, it was long before I could
sleep.

When I did at length fall asleep, the grey streak
of the dawn had already begun to stray through the
narrow casement across the bricks of my floor; and
I dreamed feverishly of rushing floods, of drowning
cattle, of dancing harlequins, of the onyx with the
Fates, of old forsaken Verona, and of Pascarél.

It was broad day when I awoke; the iron rod on
a wall opposite, which served for a sun-dial, showed
that it was ten o’clock. I heard a voice that I knew
—-a voice with a clear, careless laugh in it. |

“Oh, good little soul,” it said, as in a mirthful
expostulation, “what possessed you to go aside in that
wood yesterday? We were so well as we were; and
women will never let well alone. ‘They will always
paint their lilies, and, of course, the poor lilies die of
it. We were content as we were, and now—. What
possessed you to bind up with our hedge-row flowers
a stray hothouse rose like this?”

“You saw it before ever I saw it,’ the voice of
Brunotta replied to him. “And you must have liked
the look of the rose, Pascarél, or you never had given
away for it your onyx.”

I heard him laugh, self-convicted:

“That was for the pure love of music, carina
Don’t you believe that? Oh, little sceptic! Nay!
will make no bones of it; I will say the truth. The
donzella is too noble for us; it is that which troubles
me. When I saw her standing first in the square of
Verona, I said to myself: What can she be, that young

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 227

princess, with her golden skirts, singing in a crowd
for a few baiocche? JI could not understand it; and
it troubles me now. She is too good for our life, and
we have no other.”

“Let her go her own way, then, and go we ours,”
sud Brundtta, with tranquillity.

' “No, by heaven, never!” retorted Pascaré!, with
a fiery force in his voice. “What! Leave a beautiful,
fearless, innocent thing like that adrift by itself in the
world? Fie for shame, little Brundtta!”

Brundtta laughed; but there was a little sadness
in the ripple of the mirth.

“Do you remember, Pascarél, in the great flood
that winter, when everyone was safe, as far as one
could know, and it had grown quite dark; you could
just see the outline of a young bull drowning far off;
and nothing would do but you would launch the
boat afresh, and ride the flood again, and go for it?
And you got to it as it was sinking, and dragged
it into the boat, and came to land with it with such
a struggle that everyone thought all was over with
you, and you were indeed half dead. Do you re-
member?”

“Yes. What of that?”

“Well, do you not remember, too, that as soon
a8 the bull had strength enough to stagger up on to
his legs alondhe rushed at you, and struck you in
the breast with his horns, and scampered off to the
hills as fast as he could go? And you were very
Ml for many days; and they said if the blow had

een an inch nearer to the heart, you might have
died of it?”

“Well?” said Pascarél.

15°

228 . PASCAREL.

“Well,” answered Bruncétta, “I was only thinkmg
—if the signorina should be like the bull!”

Then their voices ceased, and I heard a casememt
shut; they seemed to have been speaking in the
chamber next to mine.

I sprang off my bed, a little indignant and a little
touched, too.

Like the bull! I thought—no, never, never.

Brunotta seemed a traitress to me only to hw€
breathed the possibility of such a parallel.

I dressed quickly, threw my hair back loose ove*
my shoulders, and ran down the stairs into the cona-
mon room. Pascarél was there alone, standing by th©
window, looking thoughtfully out into the open als
with Toto at his feet.

It was the Berlingancio—the Mardi gras—ithe
maddest madness of Carnival; all the fury and frola<
already were ringing all over the city with deafenra
clash and clangour.

He turned swiftly, and saluted me with that cordial
and easy grace which characterised all his move="
ments.

“Ah, good day, my donzella. I have good new” >
to shine on you with the sun. We have got yous?
golden florins.”

“My florms!” I echoed, doubting my own jo”:
“My florins! How?— when?— wheg? Can it D©
possible?”

“Very possible,” he said, gaily, and he proceede A
to count out on the stone seat of the window a doze ™
round, bright, golden Austrian florins. “How? OF
never mind how. It is always an ugly story—a thief7>
You know I told you the rogue would repent as 00?

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 229

he should be found out; they always do. You see
€ guardia of the town went to work: in earnest for
u. But you must be more careful of your wealth
future.”

Iwas too enraptured to heed much what he said.
> might have told me the most improbable ro-
mces, and I should have credited them at that
ment, sO supreme was my ecstasy over my re-
vered treasure.

He watched me with a certain melancholy in his
ndsome eyes. |
“So now—you are free again, you see,” he said,
eta pause. “You can go away from us when you
e, cara mia—if you like; what do you- say?
relve florins, even when they are of gold, are not a
ge patrimony with which to scour the earth. But
I, you thought them enough for you rashly to run
ay from Verona on the strength of them alone.”
His words clouded the heaven of my restored hap-
less, I had been kissing my florins, laughing and
Qost crying over them. As he spoke I stopped,
d looked him full in the face.

'“Signor mio,—I ought to tell you, —I heard
at you said this morning in the room next mine to
undtta.”

His face flyhed hotly.

“By heaven you did! How much did you hear?
hat about? Tell me quickly.”

“I heard you from the time that you called me a
thouse rose to the time when your sister said that
should be like the bull you saved out of the flood.”

Pascaré] laughed; his face was a little flushed still,
it he looked relieved.

230 PASCAREL.

“Ts that all, carina—honour bright?” ©

“Quite all. But—you seemed sorry she spoke tO
me in the wood yesterday; you seemed to think that
I should be some trouble or burden to you. If that
be so indeed, tell me the truth; I will go.”

Pascarél stood before me, with the lights and the
shadows swiftly succeeding each other on his change-
ful countenance.

“You do not wish to go, then, signorina}” h©&
asked at length. “I thought you might, now yout
have back your florins.”

“No, I do not wish to go; I wish to be one o£
you, and to learn your art.”

I could not trust my voice to say more, for nw
heart was full at the idea that I should be aga: =
adrift by myself with those poor florins, which m<&”
longer seemed to me the brilliant safeguard and th <&
omnipotent possession which they had done ere I ha <td
lost them.

Pascarél rolled towards me a little table spread
with a white cloth, on which coffee and wheaten rol BS
were set ready.

“Breakfast first, cara mia; then we will tak. D<&
you mind my smoke? No? that is right.”

' ° Therewith he stretched himself out on the stoom ©
sill of the window embrasure, and regted at his ease
sending the smoke into the air in ost absolut <
silence, glancing now out into the street, alread
filling with processions of the Berlingancio foolerie =>»
now glancing back at me where I broke my fast wif
pleasure, knowing that I could pay for what I took.

The radiance of the sunshine came through tt» <
open casement and bathed the large square red bridke= >

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 231

Of the floor; from without there came the smell of
tossed flowers, and the noise of many bells, and the
sound of countless feet pacing over the stones of the
, Streets: above everything, there was the sweet, youth-
ful scent of the Spring that dreamily breathed itself
from the vineyards and fields, even through the dark
and blood-stained old age of the Medicean streets.

When his spagnoletto was smoked out, and my

Coffee ended, he came across the room, and sat
astride on an old walnut-wood chair, with his arms
crossed on its back, and so gazed at me long and
gravely.

“What do you wish for most in this world, cara
mia?” he asked, at last.

“Money, of course,” I answered him, with widely
opened eyes and a little impatient laugh of wonder.
Was it not what I had missed and wanted all my life
lom g—always}

“You have no genius in you, then!” he said, with

a dash of scorn.
__ My answer had offended all the artist’s instincts
im him. No doubt it seemed half puerile and half
vile to him—so true an artist in every pulse and fibre
of his being, that so long as his audience laughed or
Wept with him, he could not bring himself to consider
Whether gold pieces or copper bits filled the box at
the door of hisyplay-house.

“Perhaps not,” I said, in my own turn a little
offended. “But——”

h I glanced at the queer little bit of mirror which

"ng on the rough stone wall between a waxen
“su and a portrait of the last brigand known in the
Valdamo.

232 PASCAREL.

He followed the gesture and laughed.

“Oh, you have the best genius for a woman, ™
doubt. I would not deny that. But I thought you
might, perhaps, have a touch of the other too.”

“It is a large word,” I said, more humbly. “And
no one ever seems to know very well what they meat
by it.”

“No. Some people say it is all your days to
carry about with you a torch which illumines every-
one’s path except your own.” ;

“Perhaps. My old music teacher used to say that
to have genius was to be a fool.”

“That I deny. It is to be alone amidst fools—
a thing much more bitter. And such fools! Dio
mio! But, after all, what does it matter? If the
world were only human, it would matter hideously;
but, thank heaven, the world is so much else besides.
When one is choked up to the throat with fools, one
can always get away to the woods, to the mountains,
to the birds, to the beasts, to the hills in the rain
mist, to the sea when the sun breaks. If it were not
for that, one would go mad straightway, no doubt.
And even with that one feels small sometimes —
choked, fenced in,—Do you not know? One wants
to push back the clouds, to thrust away the skies, to
see beyond the horizon, to look close at the sun. If
one only had wings!—but let us talk of yourself. You
want money, you say; well, that certainly will not
come to you on the stage for a long time. To many
—to most it never comes at all; and myself, I always
think that whether it does or not matters very little,
after all.”

“But money is everything!” I cried to him—TI, who

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 233
‘

well by the want: of it all that its possession
rly.

‘$$ Well, no doubt, to those who think so it
ing: I am not amongst them. But you are
child; I am a man. We shall never think
that theme.

an, be he bramble or vine, likes to grow in
air in his own fashion; but a woman, be she
> weed, always thinks she would be better
ass. When she gets the glass she breaks it
lly; but till she gets it she -pines.

or my art, the art of the stage needs much
ough, I dare say, to you, as to all lookers
ing seems easier than to rattle through a

actor must be born, like the poet, the painter,
tor, no doubt; but also, hke them, he must
perfect by study. Gesture, glance, feeling,
-all these come by nature: but accent, know-
‘atory, effect—all these are the mechanical
the whole, which only long application will

the art of the stage, as to every other art,
two sides: the truth of it, which comes by
n—that is, by instincts subtler, deeper, and
than those of most minds—and the artifice
which it must clothe itself to get understood
-ople.

this latter which must be learnt; it is the
harness in which the horses of the sun must
. they come down to race upon earth.
I talk nonsense? Never mind, if you know
ean.”

& O+ TASVANRLG Ls

I think my face showed him I knew, for he went
on without pausing for my reply.

“We Italians have always needed less of this he
ness than men of other nations. The French and t
Italians are the only great actors that the world
sees. The northern races cannot act, just as they calgy
not paint.

“After all, both acting and painting are a maiq
of colour, and the northern peoples have no feek
for colour, no sense of it. Perhaps because it ist
about them in their daily lives, nor visible in th
landscapes. They are great in very much, but fh
are not great in art.

“The French are great, but they are three-patt
artifice; it is a very perfect study, but it is a stuq
always. With us we do hold closely that ars 4
celare artem; and we are infinitely more natural tl
the French are upon the stage. This is national §
us, no doubt; we are always ourselves at home a
abroad, and we concern ourselves very little as t
what other people may think of us. We carry ti
happy immunity on to the stage with us, and the resum
is, that on the stage Italians are without rivals.

“But, with all this, it is not the happy-go-luck
hit-or-miss sort of thing that you may fancy it.
art can be good unless into it be brought somethiz
of all other arts.

“A man may be a passable actor if Nature he
given him the trick of it; but he will not be a greaf
one unless he study the literature of his own and othe
nations, unless he know something of the intricacie
of colour and of melody—above all, unless he ca

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 235

obe and analyse human nature, alike in its health
id in its disease.

“To be a great artist one must be a student, and
sincere and humble one, at the foot of every great-
ets—ay, and every weakness—which has preceded us.

“The instrument on which we histrions play is
hat strange thing, the human heart. It looks a little
matter to strike its chords of laughter or of sorrow;
bat, indeed, to do that aright and rouse a melody
which shall leave all who hear it the better and the
braver for the hearing, that may well take a man’s
lifetime, and, perhaps, may well repay it.”

He paused, while a dreamy thoughtfulness cast its
shadow over his features; he had been speaking rather
to himself than to me, I saw. I thought of what
Brundtta had said of him, that he had been a great
student of many sciences once, away there in old

And yet he had no ambition: it seemed to me
very strange.

“You are a great artist, surely,” I said, slowly.
“And yet—yet you play only for the people.”

He looked up with the quick, contemptuous flash
of his eloquent eyes.

“Only for the people! Altro! did not Sperone
-and all the critics at his heels pronounce Ariosto only
it for the vulgar multitude? and was not Dante him-
self called the laureate of the cobblers and the bakers?

“And does not Sacchetti record that the great man
took the trouble to quarrel with an ass driver and a

ith because they recited his verses badly?

“If he had not written ‘only for the people,’ we

236 PASCAREL.

might never have got beyond the purisms of Virgl
and the Ciceronian imitations of Bembo.

“Dante now-a-days may have become the pod
the scholars and the sages, but in his own time
seemed to the sciolists a most terribly low fellow
using his mother tongue; and he was most essenti
the poet of the vulgar—of the vulgare eloguto, of
vulgare illustre; and pray what does the ‘Comme
mean if not a canto villereccio, a song for the rus
Will you tell me that?

“Only for the people! Ah, that is the error. C
how like a woman that is! Any trash will do for
people; that is the modern notion; vile roulade
music, tawdry crudities in painting, cheap balder
in print—all that will do for the people. So the;
now-a-days.

“Was the bell tower yonder set in a ducal ga
or in a public place? Was Cimabue’s master
veiled in a palace or borne aloft through the th
of the streets?

“fam a Florentine, donzella; and I have en
of the blood of my fathers in me to know tha
higher and truer the art, the more surely shou
belong to the people.

“It is the people that make your nation gre
vile in the sight of the universe. Shall you no
them, then, on the garbage of ribald feebleness, :
the pure strong meats of the mind? As you
them, so will be their substance and sinew; as
graft them, so will be the fruit that they bear.

“How would it have been with Florence if sh
not perpetually borne that vital truth even as the
marrow of her bones?

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 237

r great men gave their greatest—not to the
not to the pope, not to princes only, whether
l‘or spiritual, but into the very midst of the
2, into the very hands and hearts of the people,
through the blackest ages of oppression and
ion, through the deadliest losses of liberty
veace, she was still as a shining light in the
the nations, and still held fast, to bequeath
others, the unquenchable fires of freedom and

rapid words coursed like fire off his lips in
te enthusiasm; then, as his habit was, he
at his own emotions.

give my vehemence, cara mia,” he said, as
other spagnoletto. “As I told you, I come of
1e race.” .

at were your people?” I asked him, expecting
nm any one of the great names of the great

father was a tinker,” he said brusquely, but
shadow of a laugh about his mouth.

inker! Impossible!”

aughed outright at the accent of my voice.

> impossible at all. An Italian tinker, mind
it is something very different to a tinker any-
se. You know us; we are never vulgar.”

. a tinker!” I murmured, in unconquerable
ntment.

arél laughed on, radiantly and inextinguish-
d busied himself with his little paper roll of

it is why Brunétta cannot read, I suppose?”
after a pause, trying to shake off the curious

238 PASCAREL.

coldness of disenchantment which this anno
of his cast upon me.

He got up, and walked to and fro about §
room.

“Of course! A poor devil of a tinker has to
several millions of stew-pans and braziers before
can solder the alphabet to the empty heads of
children.

“TI went to Pisa? Yes: who told you that!

“Poor blind old Pisa! She was very glad to
rid of me, I fear. I won all her honours, but
played her very sad pranks.

“Poor old widowed Pisa! she always seems te
lamenting, Dido-like, her lost lover the Sea. She
unutterably sad; and yet I am never abroad on’
moonlit night without wanting to watch it shine
her wonderful palaces, on her empty desolate sq
on her perfection of desolation.

“Do you remember how the Florentines went
in arms to guard the gates of her, when her wa
were weak because her sons were all away on the
seas subduing Minorca? She was their old heredi
foe, but they defended her honour for her in her
of weakness. I doubt if there be anything 1 in all
tory manlier than that Is. a 7

“But to talk of yourself, mia bella.

“Is it indeed true that, lacking -all better fn
you would like to wander awhile with us? Nay, 1
fair words. Let us speak honestly. I know that it
not the least likely that if you had any other sort:
protection you would seek that of a set of strollit
players. But you have no other, and so—”

He came back, and cast aside his cigar, and st

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 239

r the table looking down on me; his eyes grew al-
ost melancholy, and his voice was very grave when
e spoke.

“See here, donzella; you are but a child, as one
may say, and know nothing of life but its dreams. It
is but fair to warn you; to be a player for the popu-
lace with us may hurt you in time to come. I told
you yesterday we are not over reputable people.

“We are honest, and we hurt no one, it is true;
we may, perhaps, even do some little good in our
way; but in the very nature of things we cannot be
respectable. We could not be if we wished, and I
am afraid we don’t wish. Well, all this may hurt you
in some time to come. I dare not say it will not.

At any rate, it is only fair that you should know so
much.

“You are much above the life that we lead; you
heard me say so; above it in temper, and tastes, and,
no doubt, by your birth. On the other hand, friend-

and lonely as you are, worse may easily befall
you than to stay with us.

“You shall hear no evil, and shall see none that
Tcan keep you from; that I swear.

“We owe no man anything, and we do the best
we can that no creature shall go out from our little
house of canvas baser than he entered by even so
much as a licentious thought. We are poor, indeed,
but, as you have seen, we are none the less glad and
gay for that; and we find, perhaps, a fairer side to
daily life and human nature than do those whose
honey of gold draws the thieves and panders and liars
lick them over with tongues false and foul. As

240 PASCAREL,

you are now, your fate is a very terrible one for your
sex and your age.”

His voice had a sweet, persuasive force in it, and:
lulled me into a dreamy silence; I did not answer to
him; I listened as to some delicious music.

“T have been thinking, donzella,” he pursued,
a while, “that it may be ill for you to associate your
self with us. Association, you know, is like a but
off the hedges; it clings ere we know it, and we ca
scarcely free ourselves of it without losing something,
be it only a shred.

“The life of the stage—it is only fair you should
know—at its best has a certain slur in it. You spoke
thoughtlessly, but you spoke as the world speaks
when you uttered your scorn for us living Burattim
At its greatest the life of the player has only false.
glitter in it, and never true honour. We are toys for’
the rest of mankind ; and the world, having done with
us, laughs and then breaks us.

“Why not? We are only its playthings.

“Yesterday, when you said this, I rebuked you,
for you wounded me more than you knew. But, to
be frank with you, as it is only just I should be, I
confess that your gay disdain had its grim root in
fact, whilst my reproaches were baseless and worth-
less, because they were only the fanciful utterance of
a fanatical enthusiasm. Sincere, indeed, in its way,
but, for all that, self-deceiving.

“Perhaps we never so fatally deceive others a&
when we are ourselves the first dupes of our false-
hoods.

“Altro! I love the life that I lead, but I will not
wrong you by saying that it is a fit one for you

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 241

evertheless, perhaps a broken crust is better than no
zad whatever at all. You must choose for yourself.
have said all there is now to say.”

I stood and thought bewilderedly, withheld from
m by my pride, drawn towards him by the name-
$s seduction which existed in all his words and
ays.

The brightness of the sun shone across us; the
wazen tumults of the bells filled all the air; the people
treamed past the casement, laughing, chattering,
lressed in their best, and eager to enjoy.

The fulness and gladness of human life was all
about me; I had not courage enough to turn away
from them and go out into the darkness and the loneli-
bess by myself. Iwas but a child, and I was afraid
of gloom, of solitude, of misfortune. This man, with
his passionate tones, with his radiant courage, with
his eloquent eyes, had an influence over me that I
hardly attempted to resist, and attempted not at all
to dissect.

What matter if he were only a bohemian, an ad-
venturer, a strolling player, a tinker’s son; he was an
artist, a poet even; it was surely better to laugh with
him than to perish miserably all alone in the very
onset of my warfare with the world.

So the thoughts drifted vaguely and _ restlessly
through my brain; self-centered as the thoughts of all
young creatures are. He spoke of my future, but it
bay not of that I then thought; the present was enough
‘for me.

“If I remain with you, can I earn enough to pay
my way?” I asked him, suddenly.

He gave a gesture of impatience,

Pascartl, I. 16,

342 PASCAREL.

“Certainly. Your florins will last for all eternity
in so simple a life as ours; and even if they do not
we can find a place for you, no doubt.” 3

“Then I will stay,” I said, on an eager impulse
that I did not dream of defining; and I remember thst
I held my hands out to him with a little triumphant
laugh.

That wonderful luminance, which gave so subtle 4:
charm to his face at such times as it lightened ther,
flashed over his features. |

He caught my hands and touched them lightly
with his lips, as one may brush with a kiss the leaves
of a rose or the curls of a child.

. “Altro! So be it!” he cried, with a laugh which
covered, I thought, a deeper emotion. “Ah, deat
donzellina, did I not give you the Fates? For met
was ill, very ill, I fear; but for you it shall be well, if :
the will of a man count for aught in this world.”

“Does it not count for much?” I asked him.

And he answered sadly:

“TI have lived to think not; for in this world there
is— Woman.”

CHAPTER III.
The Golden Celandine.

My future being thus determined, Pascaré! said 10
more about it; it was a thing resolved on and done
with; his sunny temper threw off its momentay
shadow, and he gave himself up, as his habit was, t0
the easy, light-hearted, debonair enjoyment of the
present. .

All that day we enjoyed Berlingancio, and the next

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 243

: sauntered about Florence with me, whilst Brunotta
ayed in to mend her torn kirtle. He was bent upon
aking me happy, and he succeeded. That day lives
ow, golden, and long, and clear, in my remembrance
~a very king of days.

Thé weather was so radiant with the coming of
he spring that even in those deepest shadows of the
vals it was bright with the sweet youth of the year.

There were great. masses of violets and of the
mow-white wood anemoli selling at all the corners of
be streets. The people sat out before their door-
ways, working and talking, laughing and chaffering,
vad of heart because the winter was gone for nine
300d months, in which they would be free to live at
pleasure in their heaven of the open air.

Between the grey grim piles of the war-worn stone,
looking up, one saw the smile of the blue blue skies;
beyond the gates there was the silver gleam of the
loosened waters, of the budding fields, of the fruitful
olives, of the far-off hills.

All the day long we sauntered there, he talking
often of the city’s past, with phrase so teeming with
the colour of language and the poetry of history, that
one listened in enchanted breathlessness as to some
sorcerer’s tale.

Lelio Pascaréllo, whom one and all called Pascarél,
was artist in every fibre of his temperament. Pas-
Sonate, sensitive to external influences as any woman,
full of poetic thoughts and impulses, he joined to
this the vivid Florentine energy and the gay Florentine

There was much in him of the bright vivacious
demour which was in Buffulmaco and Bramante; of
16°

244 PASCAREL.

that love of sport and of ready jest which laughs like
so much sunlight over the great memories of Giorgione
and Da Vinci. |

Linked to an incapable companion he would have |
rid himself of the burden with the same witty skill as
Brunelleschi, and locked in his study by an éxacting
patron, he would have escaped by the window ®
enjoy his pleasures in the streets, in the same ardent
and amorous determination as Fra Lippi’s.

He seemed to have just left those wise, fearles,
gay, tumultuous times when the great sculptors went
laughing to buy their eggs and cheese in the market; ;
when the great painters challenged each other to gay 3
duello with pencil and with chisel; when the great {
artists held their rapiers no less ready than their ,
brushes; when men worked and loved, and fougtt |
and jested, and swept all the Arts within the ont
magic circle of their universal genius in that ea -
strength which looks the miracle of saints to this
weakling world.

He loved light, and air, and indolence, and mirth;
the mere sense of living sufficed for him with 4
voluptuous content which those of northern lands caf
never know; to lie and dream on a grassy slope, and
watch the lithe brown arms of a girl as she washed
linen in the brook below; to go singing through the
luminous moonlight with a dozen comrades, waking
the echoes of old, dim, marble streets;-to laugh and
jest round the charcoal fires in the winter vegd/e, or ly-
ing in the deep corn on the moonlit threshing-floors
at harvest time; to toss a draught of wine behind the
thick screen of a pergola foliage, whilst bright eyes
Jaughed at him and bright sunbeams darted on him

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 245

h the leaves, and made his year as one long
y, from the Beffano to the feast of Ognissanti—
were enough for Pascareél.

ynetimes, as we went that day, he stopped before
cobbler’s stall or some stove where the last
wits of the year were toasting, and exchanged
he Florentines presiding over them fantastic pas-
of drollery and wit. Sometimes he encountered
barrow rolling on its way with woollen stuffs
ilken handkerchiefs, or some truckful of oranges
emons, and took the sale of these out of the
.and the mouths of their vendors, and made the
| around them split their sides with his quaint
subtle —Tuscan humour. Sometimes he would .
some old dusky church where some world-
is picture made a glory in the darkness, and,
ing before it, would let his thoughts and his
; roam dreamily over the deepest meanings of
id the remotest mysteries of history in all that
ict meditation which is the most precious indul-
of the scholar.

alf a hundred times a day his mood and his
er altered with that ardent vitality in every phase
‘ir countless changes which was the life and soul
‘man himself. Not for one whole half hour to-
: was he the same throughout; and yet, grave or
riotously laughing with the crowd, or dreamily
oning the lost secrets of the old masters, selling
ow bandana to a housewife at a fair with buoyant
y, or straying through the dim arcades of the old
mies tenderly recalling the heroism and the
ag of their earliest ages, he was always, in all his
sts, Pascarél,

246 PASCAREL.

He was like the child’s toy of the kaleidos
with every moment his moods changed their sh
with unpremeditated caprice; but the hues which r
them did not alter. .

“Were you truly a tinkers son?” I asked
late in that day, when we were stretched again u
the grass of the Cascine woods.

“Che diamine!” he cried, in the expressive Tw
affirmative. “Utterly and simply a tinker’s son.
to console you, though tinkers we had become,
were of a race that yielded in ancientness of bloo
none. I think old Malispini even accounts for u
amongst those who, on coming out of the Ark:
. the Deluge, bestirred themselves in the buildin;
Fiesole. In the old, old days, my people were of
territorial nobility beside which the Medici are 1
rubbish of yesterday. We were Ghibellines, am
their ruin fell, of course. Our utter destruction c
when one of us would have a palace fashioned by
cagna, to pay for which his descendants in the t
generation had to sell nearly all their worldly gc
and lands, like that hapless fool Luca dei Pitti. ]
of the Oltrarno got the little there was left in t
Old races die hard with the load of long debt ro
their necks; but—they die. For two centuries we
been poor, poor, poor. Poor as the devil. At lasi
worked for our daily bread. Old races have ¢
worse. My grandfather toiled to and fro as a facc
in the country where his forefathers had sco
defiance on Carlo di Valois, and mowed down
burghers round the red Carroccio on that terrible:
‘che fece l’Arbia colorata in rosso.” From a face
to a tinker is hardly a fall; perhaps it is even @

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 247

for a2 tinker must own some little stock in trade of
tools, whereas the facchino only toils underneath the
goods of other people. At any rate, a tinker my father
was, God save his soul! and a man of most infinite
humour. I know he scratched a prince’s coronet on
his smelting pot. Coronets have been in worse places.
He was weak enough, I am ashamed to say, to be
ever proud of his lineage, and fed me when IJ was a
little fellow on all sorts of dead glories out of Dino
Compagni and Villani. But I ran about with bare
legs over Tuscany, and cared nothing that I ran over
the graves of my ancestors, At any rate it was more -
harmless than to run about with a bare sword as those
Pascaré] princes did. It was queer, perhaps, to blun-
der into some old church in some little hill-town or
city of the plain, and see a great white statue, and
read the record of some mighty Pascaréllo; and all the
while one was a Pascaréllo too, though only a little
mischievous dog, ragged and hungry, scouring the
country for saucepans to mend. It set one thinking,
no doubt. But, after all, what did it matter?”

“It would have broken my heart!” I cried, where
I sat beside him amongst the crocuses.

Pascarél laughed.
_ “It was likelier to break my head. For, being a
little fool, and strong for my years, I would get fight-
ing for that coronet on the smelting-pot times out of
Rumber with half the boys of half the villages we
entered. They thought a coronet on an old iron pot
Mdicwlous, and they surely were right; but I was reso-
lute to have both pot and coronet respected, being
my father’s; and perhaps I was right also. At any rate,
> Mad the courage of my opinions, and got half killed

248 PASCAREL.

for them over and over again, as all people rash
enough to keep such ticklish possessions as opinions
invariably do. A princely couronne and a travelling;
tinker! Supremely ridiculous, that is certain; bt
would they have been less so if I had whimpered and
had not fought? It is stupid to have a bad cause,
doubt; but afterall, as far as we ourselves go, perhaps
it is not the cause that matters so much as it is on’?
way of upholding it. The Carroccio was a sorry chit
dish emblem in itself enough; but does that take from ¢
the grandeur of the deaths of the Tornaquinci round ;
it? My Carroccio was my father’s old tin pot; but!
am glad even now to think how many sucking Tut :
cans I in my babyhood thrashed for sheer love and
honour of that sacred household god. Not love of te.
coronet, mind you, but love for what he had put there;
if he had scratched a cat’s head on the pot, and the .
had laughed at it, it would have been the same
me, and I, Pascarél, should have been bound to. fight
for it.”

“Did you ever work with him?” I asked, glancing
at those long, slender, brown hands of his which were
weaving some rushes together.

“Altro! of course I did. Tinkered many an old
woman’s copper kettle all along the country, east
west, from Livorno to Venice. But I never took 0
the work. J had a natural genius for making holes,
not for mending them. The people used to call me the
Marchesino, in derision of the leaves and balls on the
tin pot. But they dropped that after they found by
frequent experience that I could make holes in ther
sons’ skulls past all power of apothecary’s solderi
Not that I was a bully, believe me; but when th

(
‘

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 249

yuted their ‘Marchesino’ in derision I thought of
» marble Pascarélli in the churches, and hit out—a
tle too straight home sometimes. I was a little lad
, that time, trottimg on bare legs after my father’s
arrow from house to house all over the land. It is
li forgotten now. I buried his tin pot in his coffin
nth him, as his forefathers were buried with their
plden crowns, and I have buried all the old follies
With it. I was fifteen years old when he died.”

“And you are the last Pascaréllo?”

“The very last. Much good may it do me. The
people, God bless them! have forgiven me all the
broken heads of my boyish time, and have learnt to
love me—well. I am afraid the Ghibelline Pascarélli
who live in marble in the churches could never say as
much.”

--“And you are content with that love?”

“Eh, Dio! I should blush for myself if I were not.”

A great darkness stole over his face as he spoke
—that melancholy of an Italian face which is as in-
fense as is the sunlight of its happiness.
_ “Oh, cara mia, when one has run about in one’s
fme with a tinker’s tools, and seen the lives of the
poor, and the woe of them, and the wretchedness ot
tall, and the utter uselessness of everything, and the

ible, intolerable, unending pain of all the things
hat breathe, one comes to think that in this meaning-
ess mystery which men call life a little laughter and
: ttle love are the only things which save us all from
madness—the madness that would curse God and
ie”

A little laughter and a little love! Across the
illiant fancies of my supreme ignorance the words

250 PASCAREL.

fell with a pathetic meaning. Was this all, indeed,
that the wide world could offer? And was it worth
while to wander so far to reach so little?

“Yes, cara mia,” he said, with his quick divination
of another’s thoughts. “Yes. They are all that ar
really worth the having in this world; and they lie s9:
close to us sometimes, and we flee away from them, °
not knowing, and perhaps we never meet them face
to face or have them in our reach again. For neither ,
of them will come for the mere asking.”

“How, then, shall we gain either?” I asked.

He smiled.

“There was once a youth who was a shepherd.
He was all alone in the world, and sorrowful. Ne
man tarried with him, and no woman found his
comely.

“A fairy took pity on him, and gathered a yellow:
blossom of celandine, and put it in his hand. ‘Breath
on the flower, and wish thrice,’ she said. ‘Three times .
you shall have your desire.’

“He breathed once on the golden flower, scarcely ‘
believing in his own good fortune. ‘Let me laugh a
other men do,’ he wished. Immediately he laughéd
on and on, not pausing, over a flagon of wine tha”
was never emptied; but there was no joy in his mirth,
and he grew sick of it.

“He breathed a second time on the flower. ‘Lé
me love as other men do,’ he wished. Instantly a
young maiden kissed him on the mouth, and he toyed
with her, and yet was not content; it seemed to him.
that her lips were cold and her eyes without any
light.

“Then he breathed the third time on the flower

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 25!

nd cast it down weeping, and crying, ‘Let others
augh and others love. Joy is not for me, I see.’

“Then, strange to say, all at once his heart grew
light, and he was glad, and sang aloud with rapture,
and the maiden rejoiced beside him, and the kisses
of her lips were warm and sweet as the suns of
simmer.

“The fairy took from him the golden flower.
‘Now laughter is yours and love,’ she said. ‘For the
wish that you wished was for others, and pure of the
greeds of self.’

“Do you know what the story means? No; you
have only just got your yellow celandine, and have
scarcely breathed upon it.” ;

But I knew what it meant enough to know that
he himself used his golden flower for the gladness of
others—always.

CHAPTER IV.
Beside dead Fires.

Unper the financial government of Pascarél my
florins seemed endlessly to expand. As yet I did not
appear upon the stage with any of them, though he
tained me for it sedulously with all the skill and
subtlety that were given to him by the unerring in-
stincts and the long practice of his art.

We were completely happy; Brundtta was a little
humble merry soul, quick as a mouse, bright as a
bird, honest, I thought, as the day. Cocomero and
cd worshipped the ground that their chief even

on, and would have laid their lives down wulingly
) do his bidding in the merest trifle. Whilst Pas-

252 PASCAREL.

carél himself, the life and soul, the alpha and omegs
of the small community, governed it with that gentle
sway which lends to obedience as sweet a charm a
lies in liberty.

He inquired everywhere, as best he could, br
tidings of my father and of Florio. But either th
people knew nothing, or those who knew anything hsé.
been bidden not to reveal it; we learned no wr
telligence of any sort, and at the post in the Uffizi be
heard that letters from Verona had been addressed #®
the name of Tempesta, and were still lying there uw»
claimed. Doubtless, these neglected things were
which old Maso Sasso had penned for Mariuccia i”
the den of his loggia.

Pascarél sought, honestly and unweariedly, on my’
behalf; but he did not affect to be sorry for te
result.

“No one who has once caught hold of destiny
likes to lose that slippery sovereign,” he would say,
with a laugh; and so I remained with him and his
through the cool weeks of the Quaresima.

At times, indeed, he spoke to me—like one who
does an unwelcome duty—of seeking shelter for me!
in some convent’s safety and stillness; but my pas,
sionate terror of the captivity disarmed his wiser re-
solves; and, indeed, to have won the money necessary
to secure such a refuge was as impossible to me as to
draw down the moon; and to take it from him, as he
sometimes hinted,—for he said he had a few hundreds |
of lire laid by in the hands of a goldsmith of Florence, -
lest any evil should befall him and leave his troop:
adrift,—would have been a debt from which, child
though I was, all the instincts in me revolted.

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 253

Befgre we left Florence on the springtide wan-
derings, he betook himself to Verona, to see, for his
own satisfaction, what could be learned of my father.
Theard long afterwards that he went at great peril to
hmself, and in disguise, from the hatred of the
Austriaci against him; but of this he said nothing to
me at that time. Of danger to himself he never
spoke. This was only a week or so after I had first
fallen in with the merry little party in the ilex woods,
and I was vaguely startled to feel how deadly a blank
his absence caused to me. The skies lost all their
vat and the city all her golden and transfigured

uty.

He placed me, whilst he went, at a house on the
other side of the river, where a good friend of his,
Orfeo Orlanduccio, a master worker in mosaic, dwelt.

Orlanduccio was a widower, with one little, pretty,
merry child called Bicé. They were very good to me
In the dusky ancient house, through whose grated
casements one looked out, like prisoners, on the world,
and whose massive chambers were all rich with carv-
ing, and scented with that curious old world incense-
a aromatic odour of which the Florence streets are

It was in the Via de la Pergola, not far off the
house that the Duke gave to Cellini; and as I leaned
‘against the barred windows I used to think of the
ronze-workers in that little garden, and of the fierce
Molten metal seething out under the flame from the
Oak timbers; and of the stream, hot and red, like

from a murdered man’s throat, crushing in to
all the beautiful mask of the Perseus, and of the
#ist—breathless, agonised, torn betwixt hope and fear,

254 PASCAREL.

rent by the noble rashness of genius and the, feeble
human dread of accident—coming out under the day
hanging fig-leaves with armsful of his household god
of silver and pewter and copper and gold, and castinj
them all into the furnace, as children were cast #
Moloch, so that his Thought might arise from ti
fires and live for all time in men’s light. f

Orfeo Orlanduccio was a grave, melancholy, stettl
good man; he had been lamed in the wars of Caf
Alberto, and was subject to suspicion for his advanctt
political creeds; he had a noble grey head like Lue
della Robbia’s, and it was a picture to see him in lf
dark workshop piecing the tiny fragments so deft
into all manner of delicate arabesques and daist
flowers with his lithe slender fingers that had used &
grasp a sabre to hard purpose, they said, in eari
days. }

I stayed with him and the little, saucy, smiling
rosebud of a Bicé whilst Pascarél went northwatt
Brunotta did not come with me there; indeed the
mosaic maker seemed to me to know little or nothing
of her existence. F

On the fourth day of my stay with them, the goo€
Orfeo, coming from the market-place, was arrested
and borne to the Bargello under some accusation &
conspiracy. I know not what, but all liberal thinker
were under suspicion in those days.

His apprentices brought word of. his misfo
and little Bicé, a merry babyish thing, of nine or
cried her pretty eyes red with weeping for her fath
and in the evening time her foster-mother, a pe
of the Casentino, came in and bore her off to dw

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 2858

in the country till her parent should be set free, which
might not be for many months, they said.

I remember the sense of desolation, of belonging
to no earthly soul or thing, that shivered over me
that night as the little heedless child went, laughing
through her tears to hear the mule bells ring, and
the apprentices took down their caps and stared at
me stupidly, and the woman who did the housework
there in the daytime, having cleaned her pots and
pans and swept up the kitchen, came and looked at
me with her arm in her side, and asked me, medi-
tatively :—

“The signorina will betake herself to her friends?
the lads sleep out, and then I will bar the place up
safe. Orfeo has been in this sort of trouble before.
Men are such fools;—they will craze their heads for
thngs that have no concern for them. Will the
Signorina go; I want to bar the doors; it is dark
how.”

I begged her to let me stay a little. I had pro-
mised Pascaré] not to leave this house until he came
for me, and no force m Florence, I think, would have
availed to make me disobey him.

A rebel to all other authority since my babyhood,
I took a passionate delight in obeying this stranger’s
Mere glance and gesture.

The donna di fatica, moved by my loneliness and
My supplications, lit me a lamp and left me, promising
return in an hour, when go I must, she said, for
the had served Maestro Orfeo twenty years and more,
aid was not going to leave his bottega open to
relia for all the yellow-haired signorini in Christen-

256 PASCAREL.

Her heavy steps trod slowly out of the ;:
passages, and the massive nail-studded door cl
behind her. My heart sank as I was left alon
the empty house with its unfinished mosaics st
over the floor, and its dreamy aroma from the
lions of pine cones and oak logs that had burner
those old hearths in the fires of five hundred centu

It was one of the oldest dwellings in Flore
Its massive stones and iron stanchions had s
against sack and siege, flame and mob. It was |
antique and strange with the ’prentices’ merry fee
the stairs and Bicé’s rosy round face at the gr
casements, but when one was alone in it, at n
there seemed dim clouds of ghosts in every di
chamber.

My heart leaped with the sweetest gladness it
ever known as I heard a light swift footstep on
stairs, and the clear sweet ring of a Tuscan voice.

“My donzella!” it called, in the gloom, “are
all alone here?”

I sprang to him in joyous welcome, and did
notice till he had sat down beside me on the os
settle by the fireless hearth that his face looked ¥
and weary.

“Yes, Orfeo is imprisoned,” he said, impatie
“There is nothing to be done. He is known to b
the confidence of Mazzini, and papers have |
found—do not let us talk of it. His child is
and he will come back to his old place in a yea
less. He is a good man and true. We must
patience.”

He was silent. The lamp burned dully. The
house was silent around us,

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES, 257

“I am vexed for him—and for you,” he said, after
tL long pause. “I thought, dear signorina, that it would
be better for you to stay with little Bicé than to roam
with us. Orfeo is the only man whom I can trust.
My friends lie amongst poor people—very poor—or
men honest, indeed, but reckless and given over to
wild work, who can be of no sort af good to you.
jOrieo, indeed, I could have trusted. He would have
even you a safe home, though a poor one. But it
‘seems willed otherwise.”

“But I am to go with you/” I cried, aghast at this
disposal of me.

He smiled gently, but a darkness and impatience

passed like a mist over his face. He was silent, trim-
‘Iaing the wick of the oil-lamp.
' “Well, so it seems, dear donzella,” he said, after
awhile, with a certain hesitation not natural to his
frank, free, rapid modes of speech. “Well, I will do
my best by you—God help me, and forgive us sinners!
Nevertheless, if Orfeo had not fallen on this evil
chance, it had been better.”

“If I be any trouble to you,” I began--—

He stopped me with a tender gesture. ;

“Never say that—it is not that I mean. It is—a
afe and quiet home were better for you. But since
ate wills it otherwise, oh, cara mia! credit me, you
ball be as sacred to me as though my dead mother
wed to care for you.”

I looked up at him in wonder at the emotion in
is voice; his thoughts were in nowise clear to me.

There was a long silence in the dark old house.

He leaned against the wall, lost in meditations that
ay imagination failed to follow.

Pascaril. 1. 17

258 PASCAREL.

He looked down suddenly, and spoke:

“J have learned nothing at Verona,” he sai
a certain tone of sadness that wounded me.
seemed as though he were regretful not to be
me. “No one has seen your father, nor could
give me any news of him. Nor do they ap
know any more of who or what he really is tl
do. But there is one sad story that I heard |
and that is of your old master.”

“Ambrogio?” I cried, and all my heart we
to the poor old lonely man whom I had f
in a child’s eager desires for fresh fields and |
new.

“Ves, dear donzella,’ answered Pascarél.

I sprang to my feet eagerly; he answered |
a slight, hopeless gesture of the hands that chi
into a great awe.

“He died the night you left Verona. The
him dead over his empty brazier in his gai
alone. The children saw him first; going
their lesson in the morning. He is buried by

The simple words seemed to pierce my he
heard them.

My poor dead master!

I saw the place —the still lone garret,
curtained lattice, the robin singing on the >
dreary roofs, and the snow mountains far beyc
miserable home, with the grey ashes of cold
the earthen brazier; the children at the half
door, peeping with pale scared faces, and wh
together, and pointing at the figure on the hes
the sad, dreary, colourless picture, drawn in tl

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 259
te of Age and Death, arose before me as I

k down on a bench, and cried bitterly, as for
[ my own.

this the end—the only bitter end —of all
ars of wrong and want? One other name-
e in the snow under the bleak blasts in old

irél let me sob on, and did not seek to con-
but I poured out all the history to him in
w, and he listened gravely, there, in the old,
iely room, heavy with the scent of the long-
fires that had warmed so many faces and
it were now dust in the crypts and sepulchres
Ly.
| must never tell the tale but to me, my
ie said, at length. “The secret belongs to
He chose to keep it in his life; you must
for dim in his death. Rothwald is rich
ous? Yes; why not? Justice is not of this

why does God permit such things?” I cried,-
‘spair of my poor lost master’s wrongs.
el gave an impatient sigh. |

child! Has the human race solved that
in all these many thousand years since the
dwelt in the first lake-cities? We shall never
it till our souls leave our bodies——”

for no punishment to fall!” I cried, and
fresh, weighed down with the burden of all
g, lone fruitless years, whose end was a beg-
ve in sad Verona.

if the bolts would smite, and the heavens

17*

260 PASCAREL.

would open, life would be so much easier, and hopes
so much easier too,” said Pascarél; “but, perhaps, ¢vé
in this world, there may be more ‘punishment than we
can know.
“Listen, donzella,” he pursued. “Did never yo
hear the story of Andreé dal Castagno, who lived hett
in the street hard by? No? Well, then—
“He and the bright Venetian Domenico dwe
together in great and close friendship; so much sj
that they shared the same chambers, painted in the
same studio, were inseparable in pursuits and ple
sures, and aims and endeavours, and were cited
through the city as the very symbol of faithful com
radeship.
“Well, one night, the Venetian went forth @
usual, with his lute under his cloak, to serenade hi
mistress in the moonlight; and there, in the dam
archway of the street, a dark figure lay unseen &
wait for him, and he was stabbed through and through
and his love-song was stifled in his throat, and he wi
slain.
“Who had killed him?
“The city could not tell.
“Andredé was found painting quietly by lamy
light when they bore the dying man home; and h
tore his hair and rent his garments in agoniseq
lamentation over the bleeding body of his dear des
friend.
“Vet Andreéi was the murderer.
“For greed of the secret of the oils and vamishey
some say; some say for envy of the woman’s lovei
Which no one ever rightly knew. ’
“Andre& lived in honour all his days. He was 4

|

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 261

‘eat artist, and all men spoke well of him. Sus-
cion never fell on him. Had not Domenico breathed
} death-sigh in his arms, blessing him to the last?
ly, the State even employed him to paint the traitors
pg on the city walls by their heels—and his brush
. not falter.

“He had long life, I say, and everything to make
zyood and even glorious. Yet, though he had
es, and fame, and, as men call it, happiness, he
er once in all that time could ever quite forget.
never once forgot; he never ceased to see the
dly faithful face dead there in the lustre of the
mer night; he never ceased to hear the familiar
ce in the last love-song ere he had stifled it in its
th-struggle; he never ceased to be pursued night
| day by the remembrance of his guilt; never,
t we are sure; for, though he kept his secret
re all his life long, he could not keep it to the
ry end. On his death bed he confessed his crime,
_ Florence, though at the tenth hour, despoiled
, and dishonoured him, and gave him a felon’s
re.”

I shuddered as I heard.

The tale told in that old dark Florentine room,
in a stone’s throw of the place of murder, had
errible ghastly awe in it. I shrank closer to
carél, and he stretched his hand out and took
e. |
“Did I tell you too frightful a story?” he said,
ssingly.

"No, no,’ I murmured, “it is not that. But my
r old master! And see here: if Andrei were

262 PASCAREL.

chastised, what did that compensate Domenico!
could not give him back his life and love——”

“Of compensation to Domenico there was non
said Pascarél, sadly. “But of chastisement to A
drei I think there was enough. I told you the ta
to show you that, where we think glory and gain a
most abundant, there sometimes burns the fire th
quenches not, which men call remorse. Your mast:
left his vengeance with his God. We must so lea\
it likewise. And now, donzella mia, you shiver i
this cold dark room. Come out, and let us gett
the light and warmth again, and forget all thes
weary meditations. You must wander with us; thos
Fates on the onyx so will it. Well, I swear to yo
carina, that you shall never repent your trust in me.’

He touched my hands lightly with his lips, and ©
went down the stone staircase, and out of the da
and lonely house of the mosaic-worker.

I clung close to him as we went through the no
gloomy streets, and I was glad when we reached tl
little bright archway of the locanda in Oltrano, whe:
Brunétta met us with many exclamations, and wi
the ruddy flame of a wood fire she had lighted glo"
ing on her little plump figure and her gorgeous silv
ear-rings.

The Arte was shut that night, for it was the Domeni
di Passione.

She had a little supper ready for us of shint
brown alardi, crisply fried, and stewed rice wi
pears. She, like Pulci’s Margutte, was given to swe
ing “neither by black nor blue, but only by a go
capon, whether roast or boiled,” and had no notion
starving even on the gravest fast of the Church.

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 263

It was all quiet in the quarter of the Silver Dove.

Bells were sounding for the vespers, that was all;
ancl as we sat at our little meal people streamed by
the open door, going in flocks to pray in the great
white vaulted stillness of the Santo Spirito.

Pascarél and I were silent that night.

He thought of his friend Orfeo; and I of my old
dead master.

Nevertheless, we were both glad, I think, that the
mMOrrow was not going to part us; and whilst Brundtta
and the boys played together at tardc, I sat and looked
every now and then at the delicate profile of Pascarél
against the shadows from the oil-lamp, and felt no
trouble or fear for the future.

CHAPTER V.
Giudentu dell’ Anno.

We stayed in Florence through the long, cool,
sunny weeks of the Quaresima, broken here and there
With the mad frolic of the Mi-Caréme, and the fun of
the Fairs of the Innamorati and the Curiosi and the

Closie at the Gates of the City.
. he great lilies, white, and azure, and purple, were
JUst beginning to bloom everywhere round the city,
aad the streets and the woods seemed to shine as
2Ow with the clusters of the stainless anemoli.
of ‘There is Rothing upon earth, I think, like the smile

Italy as she awakes when the winter has dozed it-
Self away in the odours of its oakwood fires.
"The ‘whole land seems to laugh.

tir "The springtide of the north is green and beau-

Ql but it has nothing of the radiance, the dream-

264 PASCAREL.

fulness, the ecstasy of spring in the southern co
The springtide of the north is pale with the
colourless sweetness of its world of primros
springtide of Italy is rainbow-hued, like the pr
of anemones that laugh with it in every hue c
under every ancient wall and beside every
stream.

Spring in the north is a child that wake
dreams of death; spring in the south is a chi
wakes from dreams of love. One is rescued ar
comed from the grave; but the other comes :
on a sunbeam from heaven.

All the Quaresima we abode in Florence;
made glad and perfect to me each lenten hot
glided by; and when the sun set, it left me
tired, happy, thoughtful, full of peace.

CHAPTER VI.
The old Star Tower.

One day, I remember, we strolled slowly
the Romano gate towards the hills as the day d
its close.

The old frescoes on the house wall were br
the afternoon light; there was a group of s
drinking; there were some asses laden with str
the plaiters’ market on the morrow; a bare-foot, '
frocked monk went by amongst the ‘soldier
cypress and ilex road stretched up into the di:
coming down the Stradone was an old white
with a pile of fruit upon his back, and a la
yellow shirt at his bridle; about the base of t
broken statues of Petrarca some children player

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 265

ow very little that is!” said Pascarél. “And
s all a picture. It is a pity ever to do anything
r; the country is made just to lie still in and
in, with the body half asleep and the mind
wake, but lost in fancies. Italy soothes us as a
’s arms lull a wayward child, if only we will let

it: but if we struggle from her naturab in-
s, and try to spend our lives in strife, then .her
igs, and her dust blinds us, and all her charm

talking whilst we passed the people, and fol-
closely by the three dogs, he took me up to the
ywer of Galileo amongst the winding paths of
s, with the grey walls overtopped by white fruit
1, and ever and again, at some break in their
ts of stone, the gleam of the yellow Arno
yr the glisten of the marbles of the City shining
ar beneath, through the silvery veil of the olive

vas just in that loveliest moment when winter
ito spring. fo
rywhere under the vines the young corn was
ig in that tender vivid greenness that is never
ice in a year. The sods between the furrows
arlet with the bright flame of wild tulips, with
d there a fleck of gold where a knot of daf-
odded. The roots of the olives were blue with
pimpernels and hyacinths, and along the old
lis the long, soft, thick leaf of the arums grew,
their yet unborn lilies.

air was full of a dreamy fragrance; the bul-
rent on their slow ways with flowers in their
| frontlets; the contadini had flowers stuck be-

a

266 PASCAREL.

hind their ears or in their waistbands; women ss
the wayside, singing as they plaited their yellow cu
lengths of straw; children frisked and tumbled
young rabbits under the budding maples; the p
trees strewed the green landscape with flashes of 1
like newly fallen snow on alpine grass slopes; 4
ande again amongst the tender pallor of the :
woods there rose the beautiful flush of a rosy alm
tree; at every step the passer-by trod ancle dee
violets.

The air was cool, but so exquisitely still, and
and radiant, that as the old people came out of |
dark, arched, stone chambers, and sat a little n
sun, and made up into bunches for selling the t
soms which their children gathered by the mil
without seeming to make the earth the poorer, one
as if the sun shining on them as it did must.o
them young again—as if no one could very lon
very old or very sad in Italy.

It was the thought of a child, and of a hs
child. When one is old it must surely be bette
creep away under the mists, into the darkness of §
chimney-corner, in the chill, short twilight of the |
less and bitter North, than to behold this divine |
cloudless and endless, which seems to beat witl
the pulses of passion, and to laugh with all the s
soft, foolish ecstasies of love.
| Who was it that called Italy the country of
‘( dead? Not they surely who have beheld her
days of spring.

About the feet of the Tower of Galileo, ivy
vervain, and the Madonna’s herb, and the white sexs
of the stars of Bethlehem grew amongst the gr

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 267

s paced to and fro with pretty pride of plumage;
slept on the flags; the cool, moist, deep-veined
rs climbed about the stones; there were peach
n all the beauty of their blossoms, and every-
about them were close-set olive trees, with the
| between them scarlet with the tulips and the
»se bushes.

m a window a girl leaned out and hung a cage
st the ivy leaves, that her bird might sing his
3 to the sun.

10 will may see the scene to-day.

little changed—-so little, if at all, from the time
he feet of the great student wore the timber of
ver stairs, and the fair-haired scholar, who had
2d from the isles in the northern sea, came up
n the olive stems to gaze thence on Vallom

e world has spoiled most of its places of pil-
‘e, but the old Star Tower is not harmed as yet,
it stands amongst its quiet garden ways, and
rown slopes, up high amongst the hills, with
; of dripping water on its court, and wild wood-
; thrusting their bright heads through its stones.

nerations have come and gone: tyrannies have
and fallen: full many a time the plain below
en red with the invader’s fire, and the curling
has burned the fruitful land to blackened bar-
5; full many a time the silence of the olive
s has been broken by the tumult of war and
ion, and the dead bodies of men have drifted
as leaves in the blood-stained current of the

Ey

268 PASCAREL.

But nothing has been changed here, where the ol
square pile stands out amongst the flowering vines. |
It is as peaceful, as simple, as homely, as close
-girt with blossoming boughs and with tulip-crimsone
grasses, now as then, when from its roof, in the sim
midnights of a far-off time, its master read the secrel
of the stars.
You can see it to-day—any day that you wil
this quiet shadowy hill-side place amongst the fields.
But come up softly between the old gnarled olive
stems; tread noiselessly the winding pathway ¥
the wild hyacinth shakes its blue bells on the wi
be reverent a little—if reverence in this age be po¥
sible—as you climb the narrow wooden stair, ang
through the unglazed arches of the walls look west
ward where the sea lies, and southward towards Rome
, Be reverent a little, for a little space at least:
here Galileo learned the story of the sun; and here§
Milton, looking on Valdarno, dreamed of Paradise. _

CHAPTER VII.
Due Amori.

WE scattered the pigeons that day as they pi
their way amongst the rose trees, and we went a
the sombre quiet court, and up the wooden stairs,
to the square roof where the great Tuscan had sat Sa
many and many a night with his listening pupils round:
him, and, beneath, the dark stillness of the sleeping’
plains.

“How fair she looks down there!” said Pascardlj
resting his eyes fondly on the City. “I have se —
pretty well all the world, but I have never seen anys

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 269

ig that can make one forget her. I am of the same
y of thinking as was Visino;—better a flask of
bbiano and a berlingozzo of Florence than all the
gs and queens and courts and camps in Christen-
m. Look at her now; she lies like a golden galley
old upon a silver moon-lightened sea.”
aVery fair indeed she was, the Lily Queen, that ©
ming. - -.

There had been shadows all day, and in the west
me were masses of cloud, purple and blue-black,
reading away into a million of soft scarlet cirri that
ited before a low wind from the southward, tender
d yet rich in tone as any scattered shower of carna-
® leaves.

Through that vast pomp of dusky splendour and
radiance of rose, the sun itself still shone; shone
] upon the City.

Leaning on the broken edge of the watch-tower
d gazing down below, all Florence seemed like the
rs dream of the New Jerusalem; every stone of her
med transmuted; she was as though paven and
it with gold; straightway across the whole valley
etched the alchemy of that wondrous fireglow, and
the broad level lands of the Valdigreve were trans-
ured likewise into one vast sheet of gold, on which
silver olives and the dim white villages and villas
ated like frail white sails upon a sunlit sea.

Farther—still farther yet, beyond that burnished
ean—the mountains and the clouds met and mingled,
Iden likewise, broken here and there into some
Werest rose-leaf flush, miraculously lovely, as a poet’s
ams of nameless things of God.

We stayed long, and watched it high above on the

270 PASCAREL.

wooden roof of the tower; watched it until the sf
had set, and the glow had died, and the stilnes of
evening had fallen over the hills and plain, and pa
our faces flew a little grey downy owl.

“Your fathers saw Galileo?” said Pascarél to i
bird as it went, “and thought what a fool he was, ™
doubt, to sit mooning there with his face turned 6:
the stars instead of hunting moths in the night air ant
slaughtering mice under the olive stems as they did
To be sure:—the owls and the world, no doubt, wett
quite of one mind concerning him. - When there 88
nice, plump, black mouse to be killed down on tht:
clay, what greater folly can there be than to stay @
high staring at stars?) Who would not be an owl ta
times sooner than a Galileo?”

“Are you serious?” I asked him, when we leaned
against the wooden rail. I had not then learned t
disentangle his thoughts from his language.

“Altro!” he cried, sending a pebble down into the
olive foliage beneath. “Who would not be an owll
To escape all the toil and moil of the day, asleep
a cosy ivy hole; to doze all the hours away, and only
awake to kill and eat; to be able to swear there is #
such thing as a sun, because we are too blind to st
it—what can be finer than that? It is such a popula
type, too; ten thousand times more popular than §
Galileo!”

I looked at him where he leaned with his arms of
the parapet of the roof, and his profile, clear and dat
against the delicate silvery greys that had followed
the rose glow in the heavens.

He had more interest for me than Galileo or th™
owls; in no way could I reconcile the grace of hit,

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 271

t of him, and- the look of his face with the mode
_ life, which was scarcely above the grade of
its and of mountebanks.

seemed to me so strange that any man of such
8 learning and such ironical perception should
nllingly pass away his years in the homely and
que career of a strolling player.

+ + +

Vhat could ever first make you take this life you
'I asked him, incredulously, when we stood to-
on the top of the star tower.

fell in love "Wsaid Pascarél, promptly, leaning
he roof-wall to watch the shadows steal over the
‘ypress stradone, and come slowly upward and
d to the heights whereon we stood, “not for the
or the fifth time, of course, but truly enough for
iatter. A set of French comedians came to stir
ately silence of old Pisa. They were merry,
happy-go-lucky people who played their way all
the Riviera. Clever people, too—French players
} are.
imongst them there was a girl whom we called
inzara, because of her pungent tongue. I am
ire that she was handsome, but she had a dzadle
‘ps, you know—no, you don’t know—no matter!
[o see the Zinzara play Phedre in the first, and
the cancan in the afterpiece, was a revelation.
always maintained that women could not pos-
enius, but I gave in before her. Her renderings
cine were miracles, and so were her soups and

the would scare your very soul out of you with
hirlwinds of passion, and her whisper was like

- 272 PASCAREL.

the hiss of a snake, and her eyes seemed a blaze ¢
fire and passion, axd then half-an-hour after you wouk
see her in her one poor little room, with her cuff
turned back from her long white hands, and she wo
mix you oil, and lettuces, and beet-root, or toss
a herb omelette over her stove with a skill that
the cooks of Paris could not have equalled. She
a true Frenchwoman, the Zinzara. I have never
her like since.

“Tt was she who made me an actor. I had alwaj
had a taste for it, but when I saw this Paris mosqu
the die was cast. I had finished all my course
Pisa. For that matter I had swept all before me,
won all there was to win. Indeed, they actually o
me a professorship of mathematics. Never say that
have not rejected greatness. .

“I was two-and-twenty; I was an Italian; |
Pascarél; and they imagined that I should settle
to lead all my life in old Pisa like an owl in a
till I grew as old, and as grey, and as silent, and
forgotten of God and man as Pisa is herself!
they meant well;(only they knew nothing of the fi
of things. Academies never do.

“If I had meant to stay, the Zinzara would
swept my intentions to the winds. I had a room
was very fond of, high up in a tower, with the rive
washing against the walls far away down below. Thes
were scores of cobwebs, and legends, and ghosts af
tached to it, but I slept too soundly in those days 1
take heed of any one of them. I had hundreds ¢
books there, and my tubes, and prisms, and telescope
and I had passed seven years there after the fashia
of Faust, only that I had all my life before me, an

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 273

being young broke up my learning and science with
tights of nonsense and days of pleasure that needed
bo devil’s cordial.

“I loved my room, and was loth to quit it, and al-
most it tempted me to stay in Pisa; but one fine
moming, as I read my Plato for the thousandth time,
; [heard a merry noise and laughter in the street at
the foot of the tower; and looking out I saw a little
- Set of people all ready for long travel, and going gaily
on their way. It was the Zinzara and her brethren
going back towards their France.

“They had the sun all about them; they had
great clusters of cherries in their hands; they were
eating, and laughing, and singing; they were dusty
already, but what of that? they were going to the
green country, to the blue sea, to the charm of
change, to the tumult and merriment and variety of
life.

“The spell of the Wanderjahre was cast on me, to
say nothing that I was really in love with that poor
Zinzara.

“An hour after I had made over my room and
my books and my instruments to my best friend, Ezio
Luccone, and I had caught up the mosquito and her
friends on the high road for Livorno, just as the sun
reached to noon. From that day I was a player.

“I stayed about two years with that troop, all that
time on the Riviera or among the little mountain
towns of Savoy.

“The Zinzara taught me all she knew. For the
matter of that I had found my vocation, which assur-
edly did not lie in a professorial tribune.

“I used to write comedies and ‘revues’ for them,

Pascarél, |, 18

274 | PASCAREL.

No! I have not a scrap of what I wrote left.
does that matter? If one have any ord sodd
one at all, either mental or moral, one never
‘what shreds of the good metal one drops alc
roads. If others pick it up, let them. To be
so little use is all one can hope for in this wo)

“At the end of two years the troop broke

is a miracle amongst actors when any set c
holds together half as long, and I went by m
Paris, where, too, I played.
But I never cared much for Paris. One
open one’s mouth when one talks that languag
amongst those shining zinc roofs, and that t
white paint and of gilding, I grew thirsty for 1
great dark palaces, and still historic garden-wa
moonlit plains song-haunted, and measureless d
only swept by clouds and wind. Do you not
Oh, yes; anyone who has once breathed in Italy
And to anyone who had not, there would be
in talking.”

“What of the Zinzara}

“Oh, the usual thing of the Zinzara. Sh
me very dearly for a time, and then she pick«
Marquis out of Monaco—only a Marchese di
dino I am afraid, poor thing—and flung the
bowl at my head.

“Women always fling something at you wh
are angry with themselves for having been
with you; a great genius flings a stinging ‘
‘Lui;’ a poor actress can only fling a kitchen
that comes handy. Perhaps the latter is the
- It is not so disagreeable to be forcibly remiz
the radishes and endive of the past, as it is to

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 275

one’s old follies and passions served up with pepper
and mustard.

“The poor Zinzara! I have not a notion what
became of her. She had genius of a sort indisputably,
both for tragedy and cookery. But she never fastened
her mark on the world, though she had the making
both of a Rachel and a Vatel in her.

“Peace be with her wherever she be; she enlivened
two bright summers for me; she taught me the tricks
of the stage; and she only broke her wooden supper-
bowl, and not either my head or my heart.”

I was silent as he ceased speaking; I had only the
most vaguely innocent notions of what this his pas-
sion for the Zinzara might mean; but I had a vague
and restless impatience at hearing him speak of any
love for any creature at all. :

His gaze went westward as he spoke.

Close at hand, on its own quiet hill-side, stood

the little convent-church of Sta. Margherita, the highest
Point of all, bowered close amongst olive and fruit-
tree foliage, with the village slanting away from it in a
dusky line of roofs downward to where the Pazzi
tfyrannicide was planned amongst the villa gardens.
_ Pascarél looked across to it. It is not changed
since its beautiful novice left its saintly peace and
stole down through the amorous olive shadows to the
lawless love of Fra Lippi.

“Do you not see Fra Filippo,” said he, “gathering
his monk’s frock about him, and speeding up there to
teal a glance at Lucrezia through the convent grat-
lug, if chance favoured? What grace was there in
fat scamp of the Carmelites, that Rabelais of paint-
tg, that Falstaff of the fine arts, that a woman, young

18*

a

2749 >aSCAREL.

gncd rich acd teaccsl. shone leave all for him, nd
clave 12 == st ig¢::="y!) Some heart and sors 3
there mix Sav2 teza «Tae cry saw in him a wid,
froicsome. mic mens. imer to worship Silenus thax
Carist Brot there max have teen some soul in hm
—some sGc_ tencer, ritrc® spiritual, profound,—or he
had never rained bis S. Xefano of Prato til it mde
the derce me= cof his own day weep, and he would
never have loved those green, wide, laughing countnes
which mace him greaier than Masaccio, and the first
of the Florence paincers of landscape. Perhaps that
soul in him the young nan saw. Are we ever nly
read. save by the one that loves us best? Love iS
blind, the phrase runs; nay, I would rather say Love
sees as God sees, and with infinite wisdom has infint©
pardon.”

His voice grew very sweet and still, and the
dreamy look came into his eves as he leaned there
gazing across at the little red roof of Sta. Margherit#t»
whose solitary bell was tolling the Ave Maria over itS
silent woods.

His thoughts were far beyond me; I was but #
heedless child, and of where his mind had wandere A
I knew nothing; and of the greatness of such a low©
-as he was wishful for, doubtless, in his heart evre®
then, I had no more conception or measurement tha™
I had of that baser passion such as he had been lure
with by the Zinzara.

* + * * +

He spoke no more; the night had fallen quickly
and completely, as it does in Valdarno when once
the sun’s disc has dropped behind Carrara.

We went slowly together down the stairs and

\

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 277

across the court and through the olive downward to
the City, and we passed within the gates again as the
sas began to burn, and the sheets of moonlight to
lie white and wide on river and piazza. /The world,
$0 tired though it be with fruitless pain, so dull in
‘towsy apathy, so weary of for ever giving birth to
what for ever perishes when touching on its prime,
the world is once more young again when the moon
shines on Italy.

To my fancy,” said he, softly, as we paused a
moment on the bridge of the Graces to see the silver
width of the stream shine away on either side into the
sweet tremulous darkness of the hills, “to my fancy,
when the gods of the golden age were driven from
tath and walked no more amongst men, they looked
hack once, and said, ‘that we may be remembered a
little in this land—we, the old banished gods of the
old, fair, dead faiths,—let Paradise return to earth
when the moon wakes above Italy.’ Her nights are~
gifts of the gods that she has, this Italy of ours; jes
8 trite to say so—ay, because it is so true.”

Florence was very still that night as we went
through her streets from the old Star Tower.

It was the Holy week.

Here and there, from some low open door, a

isetere was pealing. Here and there the shadow of
4monk fell across’ the broad white stones. Here and
there 2 lamp burned before some street shrine hung
with those scentless flowers that are the joyless Chris-
fan symbol of immortality.

_ But Florence never can be very sad. Her tears
fad smiles lie close together. If she draw the saintly
fowl about her, her fair eyes laugh from beneath the

“
©

278 PASCAREL.

folds, so that you half shall swear the robe of penance
is a masker’s domino.

She tells her beads with one hand, but she touches
her lute with the other.

Even this night as we went, though it was the
season of the saintly Quaresima, there was a mando-
line trilling from some high casement in a palace
tower; in an old dusky doorway there was the glisten
of a girl’s white dress and a cuirassier’s flashing breast-
plate; from a fretted balcony of stone fashioned with
lilies and fawns’ heads a beautiful dark woman, gather-
ing about her a mantle of black and gold, dropped 4
single rosebud to a lover who waited below for the
pretty symbol; far, far away, across the great white
luminous piazza, there came the sound of voices, in
chorus, laughing to light scorn the lenten lamenta-
tions; some men and maidens had been in the
meadows and were bringing home sheaves of the
lilies, they danced as they came in the moonlight, and
a young boy played a viol before them.

Pascaré] looked and listened, then went onward
with a smile.

“Is not my Florence perfect?” he murmured.
“Some say I talk of her as though she were a city 0
fairie. Well, a fairy city she is to every poet aD
every lover. Was she not builded in a night by Het-
cules as a pleasure toy for Venus and Flora, made
with the stones from the golden Arno water, ‘and set
up in a meadow of lilies? Hercules gave her bis
strength as a birthright, and Flora being content
touched the soil and said, ‘All the year long flowers
shall blossom here, and their smile shall not cease
any season;’ and Venus, being well pleased likewiS%

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 279

alled her son to her, and said, ‘When you dart your
xrows hither wreathe them with roses, and wing them
rom the eagle and the dove.’”

CHAPTER VIII.
The Lily-queen.

_ He did indeed love Florence with a tender pas-
sion,

Paris is the Aspasia of cities, but Florence is the

oise; upon the brilliancy of her genius and her

uty there lie always the shadow of the cloister,
always the divinity of a great sacrifice.
en, with any soul in them, love Florence reve-
rently; for tuneful and thoughtless though her laughter
be now, and although now the strangers of northern .
les and western worlds coarsely intrigue in her
Pleasure-places, and basely cheapen her treasures in
ler streets, Florence cannot be changed or lowered,
for in her day she suffered much and failed often,
and aspired greatly, and set her seal with a pure hand
‘1 much of the noblest work of the world.

To Pascarél she was as a living thing.

Not a stone of her but had a tongue for him. Not
adark nook in her quietest ways but for him was
filled with some figure of the past standing out in the
gold and colours of idealised tradition, like some form
that a monk had drawn upon his missal vellum.

Gay and idle, and buoyant and amorous indeed
been the tenour of all his days in Florence;
ed away to the tinkle of mandolines, the chink

of Wine-glasses, the riot of carnival mirth, the twitter-
glove chirp of women quickly won and lightly lost.

a
J

280 PASCAREL.

But beneath this life of his there ran another vem,
deeper and truer, and filled with the strong hercical
blood of the past; and he would go through the
Florence ways many and many a time, lost to all the
daily stir around him, and seeing nothing but the
wistful spiritual eyes of Angelico, or the white bare
feet of Ginevra, or the flicker of the torch in the
hand of the Black Gian, or the dread of destiny on
the face of Luisa Strozzi.

He would laugh at himself for his joy in it, for he
would say that he was a citizen of the world, and
entered no narrower classification; but at heart the
love of Florence was always warm with him, continual
wanderer from her olive valleys though he was.

He knew the story of her every stone and spaz-
dril; he would trace the steps of all her heroes and
prophets inch by inch along the narrow ways; for him
her paven courts were eloquent with a thousand
tongues; and all the curling leaves and shining traceries
of her sculptures had a million whispers of the great
workshops where great men had wrought at them
amidst the eager reverent eyes of pupils who, in ther
turn, took up the glorious tale, and told it to the
nations. .

And now and then, coming out of the Bargello
into the broad silvery sunlight, or leaning on the old
Rubaconte parapet, looking far, far away, to the snows
of Vallombrosa, now and then he would bestir himself
and speak of Florence, with that swift rush of that
mellow Tuscan which has the war clang of the clarion
and the love-note of the lute together in it.

‘‘Hfer riches?” said he, in one of those moments,
answering some thoughtless word of mine.. “No. It

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 281

as not the riches of Florence that made her power
-it was her way of spending her riches; a totally
ifferent thing, cara mia.

“Amidst all her commerce, her wars, her hard
tork, her money-making, Florence was always do-
ninated and spiritualised, at her noisiest and worst,
$y a poetic and picturesque imagination.

' “Florentine life had always an ideal side to it;
pnd an idealism, pure and lofty, runs through her
Markest histories and busiest times like a thread of
pd through a coat of armour and a vest of frieze.
“The Florentine was a citizen, a banker, a work-
man, a carder of wool, a weaver of silk, indeed; but
me was also always a lover, and always a soldier; that
; , always half a poet. He had his Caroccid and his
minevra as well as his tools and his sacks of florins.

pe had his sword as well as his shuttle. His scarlet
Rylio was the flower of love no less than the blazonry
;a battle on his standard, and the mint stamp of the
eommonwealth on his coinage.
* “Herein lay the secret of the influence of Flo-
ce: the secret which rendered the little city,
petched by her river’s side, amongst her quiet mea-
Wows white with arums, a sacred name to all genera-
ons of men for all she dared and all she did.
“‘She amassed wealth,’ they say: no doubt she
dd—and why?

“To pour it with both hands to melt in the foun-
mes of Ghiberti—to bring it in floods to cement the
aitar that joined the marbles of Brunelleschi! She

ys spent to great ends, and to mighty uses.

“When she called a shepherd from his flocks in
een valley to build for her a bell-tower so that

282 PASCAREL.

she might hear, night and morning, the call to t
altar, the shepherd built for her in such fashion th
the belfry has been the Pharos of Art for five ce
turies.

“Here is the secret of Florence—supreme aspin
tion.

“The aspiration which gave her citizens force
live in poverty, and clothe themselves in simplicity
so as to be able to give up their millions of florins:
bequeath miracles in stone and metal and colour
the Future. The aspiration which so purified her sa
red with carnage, black with smoke of war, troddé
continuously by hurrying feet of labourers, riotes
mercenaries, and murderers, that from that soil they
could spring, in all its purity and perfection, the p
radise-blossom of the Vita Nuova.

“Venice perished for her pride and carnal lus
Rome perished for her tyrannies and her blood-thin§
but Florence,—though many a time nearly strangie
under the heel of the Empire and the hand of &
Church—Florence was never slain utterly either ®
body or soul; Florence still .crowned herself will
flowers even in her throes of agony, because she k¢
always within her that love—impersonal, consecrals
void of greed—which is the purification of the indi
dual life and the regeneration of the body polit
‘We labour for the ideal,’ said the Florentines of ok
lifting to heaven their red flower de luce—and to this
day Europe bows before what they did, and canm
equal it.”

“But she had so many great men, so many might,
masters!” I would urge, whereon Pascarél would glance
on me with his lightest and yet uttermost scorn.

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 283

Oh wise female thing, who always traces the root
e branch and deduces the cause from the effect!
her great men spring up full-armed like Athene,
as it the pure, elastic atmosphere of her that
: her mere mortals strong as immortals? The su-
e success of modern government is to flatten
1 all men into one uniform likeness, so that it is
by most frightful, and often destructive, effort
any originality can contrive to get loose in its
shape for a moment’s breathing space; but in the
monwealth of Florence a man, being born with
yenius in him, drew in strength to do and dare
ly with the very air he breathed.

Moreover, it was not only the great men that
» her what she was.

It was, above all, the men who knew they were
reat, but yet had the patience and unselfishness
» their appointed work for her zealously, and with
' possible perfection in the doing of it.

It was not only Orcagna planning the Loggia, but
r workman who chiselled out a piece of its stone,
put all his head and heart into the doing thereof.
is not only Michaelangelo in his studio, but every
painter who taught the mere a, b, c, d of the
to a crowd of pupils out of the streets, who did
hoever came before them to do mightily and with
ence.

Im those days all the servants as well as the
reigns of Art were penetrated with the sense of
wliness.

[t was the mass of patient, intelligent, poetic, and
re servitors of art, who, instead of wildly con-
wg their souls in envy and desire, cultured their
t or

é

284 PASCAREL.

one talent to the uttermost, so that the mediocrity
that age would have been the excellence of any othy
“Not alone from the great workshops of the grqj
masters did the light shine on the people. Fro
every scaffold where a palace ceiling was being ded
rated with its fresco, from every bottega where {
children of the poor learned to grind and to minj
the colours, from every cell where some solitary
studied to produce an offering to the glory of
God, from every nook and corner where the you
gathered in the streets to see some Nunziata or &
Homo lifted to its niche in the city wall, from ew
smallest and most hidden home of art—from the #
under the eaves as well as from the cloud-res
temples,—there went out amidst the multitudes
ever-flowing, ever-pellucid stream of light, from t%
Aspiration which is in itself Inspiration.
“So that even to this day the people of Italy bs
not forgotten the supreme excellence of all beas
but are, by the sheer instinct of inherited faith,
capable of infidelity to those traditions; so that €
commonest craftsman of them all will sweep his c
and shade his hues upon a plaster cornice with a pe
fection that is the despair of the maestri of other §
tions.”
So he would talk on at divers times, as we pag
the twisting lines of the streets, or paused on sd
white olive slope to look backward on the tumult:
the roofs, with the battlements of the Vecchio te@
rising out like some old sea-galley from the waves.
the rippling sunshine. And I grew quickly to a
this tender, fantastic, filial affection of his for the
of the Lilies. '

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 285

who could do otherwise who has once dwelt
\e magic circles of her storied walls?
xome day at noontide you feel a little weary

it is midsummer, and the strong Leone sun is
t every stone; and the very cicale have hushed
itter, and have gone to sleep.

is nearly dry; grass grows between itspebbles,
w is laid to bleach on its deserted bed. The
5 are scorched and colourless; the olives are
. the heat; the cypresses strain thirstily upward
the sky, as though seeking a rain-cloud and
10ne in all the shadowless wide blue.

for once you are almost a renegade to her.
tari have been troublesome, and the sun beats
che blinds, and will not be denied. Your eyes
h the radiance as they do when you throw off
sk after the opera ball.

, for once in a way, are tired of the city, and
u will arise and go to that old, cool marble
‘the villa amongst the hills, where the vine
play all the day long, and the waters drip in
9 acanthus shadows. Or else you dream a
remembrance of clear green alpine rivers,
in greenest meadows; of Tirol pine-slopes,
' the snow with deep blue shadows asleep on
kes; of Swabian woods or of Thuringian for-
;, Still, and full of song of birds, into whose
‘-kness no daylight ever comes.

aps in the blazing Tuscan noon you think of
such as these that you have known, and that
ring there across the dreamy flush of the rosy
2S.

m the daytime you are thus, for once perhaps,

286 PASCAREL.

faithless,—yet with the nightfall she will take up ai
her supremacy.

The long bright day draws to a close. The:
is in a blaze of gold, against which the ilex and
acacia are black as funeral plumes. The innumer
scents of fruits and flowers and spices, and troy
seeds, and sweet essences, that fill the streets ate
step fxgm shops and stalls, and monks’ pharma
she fanned out in a thousand delicious odours on
cooling air. The wind has risen, blowing softly {
mountain and from sea across the plains through
pines of Pisa, across to the oak-forests of green
sentino.

Whilst the sun still glows in the intense ambe
his own dying glory, away in the tender violet hue
the east the young moon rises.

Rosy clouds dnft against the azure of the z¢
and are reflected as in a mirror in the shallow!
waters.

A little white cloud of doves flies homeward agt
the sky.

All the bells chime for the Ave Maria.

The evening falls.

' Wonderful hues, creamy, and golden, and pu
and soft as the colours of a dove’s throat, spread tl
selves slowly over the sky; the bell tower rises li
shaft of porcelain clear against the intense a:
amongst the tall canes by the river the fire-flies spa
the shores are mirrored in the stream with every
and curve, and roof and cupola, drawn in sharp
shadow; every lamp glows again thrice its size i
glass of the current, and the arches of the bridges
their own image there; the boats glide down the'
that is now white under the moon, now amber tv

THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 287

ts, now black under the walls, forever chang-
ht draws on, then closes quite.

it is night as radiant as day, and ethereal as
never be; on the hills the cypresses still stand
nst the faint gold that lingers in the west; there
dour of carnations and of acacias everywhere.
ieless footsteps come and go.

le pass softly in shadow, like a drearp

lean down and bask in this sweet air that is
reath of paradise.

inst your hand there are great clusters of the
inder, that burn against the gleaming snowy
f the half-opened magnolia flowers. The voice
learest to you on earth is low upon your ear.
a some other casement open like yours there
he distant cadence of a mandoline. A sheaf
is flung from a balcony with a laugh. A wo-
*s by with a knot of pomegranate in her dark
break of song floats down the silence.

lio, gioja mia, addio!” drops tenderly down
1 like leaves shaken from a rose.

the parapet of the river two lovers lean and
le stream as it glides to its grave in the grey
» as their own passion glides to its grave of
sire.

smile, and know there is no grave for yours;
so at the least, and you believe.

night in Italy.

night in Florence.

1 the width of the world is there aught so per-
where? With a glad heart you will answer, no-
perfect anywhere.

ich a night why cannot the lips we love kiss
r—~forever—forever—into the dreams of death?

288 PASCAREL.

BOOK IV.

THE WANDERING ARTE.

. CHAPTER I.
Il bianco Aspetto.

Do you know the delicate delights of a:
morning in Italy!—morning I mean between fi
five of the clock, and not the full hot mid-d
means morning to the languid associations of thi
century.

/ The nights, perfect as they are, have scarce
veliness than the birth of light, the first 1
laughter of the early day. _
The air is cool, almost cold, and clear a
There is an endless murmur from birds’ thro:
wings, and from far away there will ring from
or city the chimes of the first mass. The deer
shadows lie so fresh, so grave, so calm, that b
the very dust is stilled and spiritualized.

Softly the sun comes, ‘striking first the lofti
and then the blossoming magnolias, and las
green lowliness of the gentle vines; until all a
in a glow of new-born radiance, whilst all bene
leaves still is dreamily dusk and cool.

The sky is of a soft sea-blue; great vapour
float here and there, iris coloured and snow-whil
stone parapets of bridge and tower shine agai
purple of the mountains, which are low in tor
look like hovering storm-clouds. Across the fiel

THE WANDERING ARTE. 289

zen pass to their labour; through the shadows peasants
ro their way to mass; down the river a raft drifts slowly
with the pearly water swaying against the canes; all is
‘lear, tranquil, fresh as roses washed with rain.

In such a daybreak in the soft spring weather we
eft Florence by the gate that was once in the old days
xroken down for the mule of the Vicar of Christ to
pass through into the city.

Pascarel was too inveterate a wanderer by instinct
mad habit to remain long in one place, even when that

was circled by the hills so dear to him; and he

looked for eagerly with the spring and summer in

the towns and villages through Tuscany and Umbria,

the flowering Romagna and the drear sea-washéd
a.

The Arte, which was light and cleverly constructed,
at such times sent onwards on the back of mules,
en the flat cart of a contadino, on the top of a hay-
Waggon, on the shoulders of sturdy hill peasants, or
pay manner of conveyance which best served the mo-
ment, and the sight of the red and white flag fluttering
the pile of canvas and wood was a signal for a
ong rush and a shout of joy from the whole po-
tion over the face of all the country.
As for ourselves we walked always where there was
beauty, whether along the river-shores, or through
fhe fields and vineyards, or along the brown sides of
the hills, or beside the play of the tideless sea, on the
Ki yellow sands, or across the plain from one little
walled town to another.
x: Pascarél and his little troop had never been extra-
lagant enough to take any other mode of travel than

‘Peccavti, I. 19

, a
290 ‘PASC AREL.

that which their own limbs afforded, except when they
needed to get quickly from one province to another.

They always sauntered on from town to town, from
village to village, staying on the road as fancy more
them. They had gone on in this way all across Ital,
and half across Europe; and as for me I liked nothing
better than to do as they had done.

As soon as the sun showed his red disc where ht
rose above the southern seas and the eastern deserts
far away, we used to rise ourselves and set out upo
our pilgrimage for the day, so that each portion of
was accomplished before the heats of noon. Or #
other times, if they had not played anywhere that night,
we set forth when the moon showed herself, and wes
on our way through the wonderful lustre of her, whid
seemed to throb everywhere like so much consciou
life.

In these wanderings I learned for the first time hor
beautiful is the beauty of Italy.

In the old town of Verona, I had been nothing bi
a passionate little rebel, hating my poor, pale prisot
house for its poverty and monotony, whilst the peopl
with whom I had dwelt had seen no wonder in thi!
which had been about them from their birth, and had
found their vital interests lie in the scantiness of tht
oil for their lucernate, and the uncertainty of th
measure of the soup for their morrow.

With Pascarél, and wandering thus through th
length and breadth of the Romagna and of Tuscally
a surer and higher perception awakened in me, ai
my heart and my mind alike stirred into sympath)
with that.ethereal loveliness of air, of distance, and 0

_°
. .
THE WANDERING ARTE. : 291
o
ich is, as it were, the very soul of all Italian

n plains have a certain likeness, whether in
or Bavaria, or Britain. A row of poplars
ry in the light looks much alike in Flanders or
andy. A rich wood all aglow with red and
ultumn sunsets is the same thing after all in
d as in Devon.
[taly has a physiognomy that is all her own;
ke nothing else, which to some minds is sad,
ige, and desolate, and painful, and which to
beautiful, and full of consolation and deli-
a dream; but which, be it what else it may,
; wholly and solely Italian, can never be met
where, and has a smile on it, and a sigh in
make other lands beside it seem as though
e soulless and were dumb.
not the intensity but the ethereality of its
hich is its charm; for it reflects every colour
derful “bianco aspetto” of Dante.
irless itself it takes by turn every hue, and
very gift of the sun’s rays so exquisitely, that
10 single tone which is not by it purified and
sed.
inrise and at sunset most especially, but more
throughout the entire day, this wondrous
; beams and blushes into the million hues of
: opal.
h it from one year to another and you shall
d it twice the same.
2 the blue mists of daybreak drift across it;
» clouds duskily cast their violet shadows on
the tremulous wood smoke curls up in the

19*

292 PASCAREL.

rosy air; when the whole mountain side is
like apple-blossoms, darkening here and the
the pines grow into softest amethyst; here a
lightened where the sun strikes into such gl
like love it becomes “tanta rossa che app
dentro al fuoco nata,” in all these changes
thousand others that sweep each other aw
and again in endless succession throughout e
of the twenty-four, this “bianco aspetto” is
liest thing that the world holds.

It is the loveliness of a dream world;
loveliness which all other poets as well as Da
beheld in their imparadised vision of a life
and compared with it the denser colours
stronger contrasts of more northern lands a
coarse, and seem to have no soul in them, a
no message from the gods to man.

Indeed all lands are soulless where the o
not lift its consecrated boughs to heaven.

Noble and fruitful though the face of tl
be, a certain pathos and poetic meaning will
ing in them, if on their hills and in their v:
olive do not hover like a soft rain-cloud shi
to silver with the light.

For the olive is always mournful; it 1
trees as the opal amidst jewels; its foliage,
flowers, and its fruits, are all colourless; 1
softly as though it were cold even on th
bathed hills; it seems for ever to say
peace,” when there is no peace; and to be v
cause that whereof it is the emblem I}
banished from earth because men’s souls ¢
war.

THE WANDERING ARTE, 293

landscape that has the olive is spiritual as no
re can ever be from which the olive is absent;
e is there spirituality without some hue of

this spiritual loveliness is one for which the
‘reature that is set amidst it needs a certain
on as for the power of Euripides, for the
of Phedrus, for the strength of Michelangelo,
ymphonies of Mozart or Beethoven.
mind must itself be in a measure spiritualised
t it can receive it.
too pure, too impalpable, too nearly divine,
‘asped by those for whom all beauty centres
- heats of colour and great breadths of effect;
over the senses like a string of perfect
in music; it has a breath of heaven in it;
m the earth it is not of the earth; when the
is young, ere men had sinned on it, and gods
it, it must have had the smile of this light
ars here.
beauty, the beauty of perfect outline, of faint
‘nt hues, of immeasurable horizons, of wondrous
ffulgence in which the eyes seem to range
sh until the mere sense of sight grows into
uous rapture, all this became known to me
dered through those old old lands by the side
él.
: instinct towards it had been with me al-
t through him I learned to know what it was
't; and lesser things than this became through
eloquent to me and beautiful.
fruitful soil where flowers rose at every step,
h the sods still felt the touch of the divine

204 PASCAREL.

thyrsus. The sad cypress rising straight against the?
sky’s pale gold with stars of cyclamen white about ts
feet.

The vast, dim, cavernous churches, dark as night
save where the lamps of the high altars burned. The.
lonely aisles where tired feet of peasants wore that.
way across the marble pavement where great me
were laid forgotten in their tombs.

The radiant glad dawns when through the a
came ringing the clear sounds of countless bells
across the fields to wake the sleeping world. The
old bruised shrine set at the dusky corner of some
populous streets, so that men looking upwards sa¥;:
and remembered, and went the better for a fleeting
thought of God on to the daily labours of thet
humble lives.

The moonlight, magical, mystical, unutterable:
with the dense ebon shadows making but the more
lustrous the wondrous silver world on which they
slept. All these he gave me eyes to see, and, whilst
I saw, taught me why they filled me with such sof
delight.

CHAPTER II.
Etoile qui file.

We wandered all over the hills and the plains,
along the course of the rivers and through the wide
and rich champaign of the Valdarno; pausing here,
pausing there, as the whim of the moment served,
now setting up the wooden theatre on the hillside,
amongst the olive woods, now letting it find its
momentary resting-place amidst the fortresses and
monasteries of some old God-forgotten city.

THE WANDERING ARTE. 295

Sometimes up amongst the mountains we had
eed to make our home with the peasants, for there
vas no inn to go to, and no fare but onions and
lack bread. Sometimes in the cities the harsh laws
which still prevailed at that time in some districts
wooped down like vultures on the free discourse of
Pascaré], and drove him forth from the gates, leaving
his gains behind him.

Sometimes it happened to us to lose our way, or
to kave night down on us ere we knew where we
were, and we had to camp there where we found
ourseves, on some hillside, under the chestnut
trees, and raise a bonfire with the dead _ leaves,
and sleep around it as best we could until the sun
tose,

But all this was little hardship in that gracious
weather of the springtime, and above us there was
always the brilliance of the deep blue sky, and around
us there was always the gay good humour of the hardy
and gentle people.

The life was quite beautiful to me, and would
have been so, I think, to any one with anything of
the child o: anything of the poet in them. The people
Were so fond of us, or, at least, of him, that all the
Way we roaned was strewed with endless little acts of
tendemess and of goodwill that blossomed like the
cyclamen along our path.

Quaint od women in huge straw hats and with
smiling, brown, shrivelled faces, would bring us little

feses or gclden honeycombs wrapped up in vine
faves, Girls, with lovely dreaming eyes like the San
Sisto Madonnas, would come out from the sun-baked,

‘toofed howes with gifts of eggs packed cosily in

296 PASCAREL.

rose leaves, or strewn over, for luck’s sake, with Our:
Lady’s herb. :

Sometimes from the white villages with theit'
watch towers in their midst, there would ring ott,
for us alone, in the golden silence the sweetes
melody of chiming bells that seemed to ripple like 9
much laughter over the low-lying roofs amongst Ue,
vines. .
We were always amongst the people. Pasciil.
played for no one else. |

The opera-houses, where the sweet notes of nen's
throats were hired with gold and diamonds, were for
the rich and well-to-do, for the dainty masked dames
in the carnival time, and for the noble lovess whe:
wove their intrigues under the shelter of roulede and
fioritura.

Pascarél’s little theatre was for the populace alone;
for the bronzed vine-dressers, who laughed herculean
laughter in their broad bare chests; for the tanners
and coopers and smiths, who came with the heat and |
the smirch of their labours upon them; for te peasant
women who had worked weeding in the fidds all day, |
and sat in the tent with their big brown children
sleeping at their breasts; for any and all whose lives .
were hard, and whose bodies were brused by toil, |
and who were glad to forget with him : little while ‘
the tax that emptied their bread-pot, -anc the hunger -
that gnawed at their vitals.

Give an Italian a copper coin, and though it be
the sole thing that he owns in the world, he will spend
four-fifths of it on the playhouse.

Pascarél knew his countrymen’s fable; and he.
loved best of all to play for those wha had not even

THE WANDERING ARTE. 297

copper piece, and who must have stood all night
ide the longed-for paradise had it not been for
oyous summons which rang out to them from his
- Crying,

‘Come in—come in; you can pay me with a laugh
prove worth it. Not a soldo in any one of your
‘ets?—oh, my friend, you must be either the ut-
t fool or the honestest man in all the universe.
> mever mind. Come in—come in; laugh or hiss
ou like, but come.”

And they did come by thousands; it was the au-
ce that he preferred—he who surely by his gifts
graces might have done with the world almost
ever he might have chosen.

‘You have no ambition!” I said to him one

Te answered me, with his bright laugh, “None—
lutely none!”

We were resting on the slope of a hill in the
mtino in the sweet maytime.

lt was late in the day. The land beneath us was
e with the delicate, sad pallor of the endless olive
ds. Above, the west was all one soft flame-
ance of that miraculous rose which is to all the
t hues of heaven as the ethereal grace of Petrarca
eside all other odes of love.

“But that is very strange?” I reasoned to him.
here would the world be if all men thought as
: dot”

“Much where it is, no doubt,” he answered me,
unstained, moreover, by the bloodshed of war.
‘you think that the world owes anything that is

298 PASCAREL.

worth keeping in its Arts to so personal a pass
ambition? You are very wrong.

“No true artist ever worked yet for ambitio1
does the thing which is in him to do by a fo:
stronger than himself.

“The first fruits of a man’s genius are alway
of greed.

“In time, indeed, the world gets at hin
tempts him, and if he be not strong, will brit
weaken him. That is one reason why the cre
of an artist’s maturity seldom realise the pron
his youth.

“But no mere ambition ever raised the pi
Brunelleschi, shaped the gates of Ghiberti, creat
Inferno and the Hamlet, or gave us the Conce
C minor of Felix Mendelssohn.

“In these days men are governed by pe
ambitions, and, as a consequence, they have ¢
to produce greatly. In these days no man w
content to chisel humbly, but to his very b
corbel or a spandril for another man’s St. Peter’
a whit; every one will have his own building
himself, be it only a gaze-a-bo or a magnified c
ber-frame.

“After all, it was not only that Michelangel
Lionardo were greater men than we, it was al:
cause their pupils were content to grind the c
and prepare the earths with uttermost perfectn
their simple share of the great work. Now-a-day
you ask a young artist to grind your colours, he
tell you with scorn that he was not a shopboy.

“When we can get back that single-hearte
sorption into Art which characterised the me

THE WANDERING ARTE. 299

of Italy, then we shall get back with it great-
execution in Art.
u remember I] Parmeggiano, who never heard
ult of the sack of Rome go on in the streets
him because he was so engrossed with painting
ime? The soldiers broke into his studio and
im, brush in hand, and ignorant that the city
n stormed.
‘11, nothing less than that makes a great artist,
is just that vital absolute absorption of ail
lity of which there is nothing— absolutely
—in the modern mind. It is always outside
creations; vainly or coldly always outside

modern priest of art does not believe in his
id—and in art, above all other religions, who
s not faith can work miracles? Art is the
‘ rod that will blossom like the almond-tree;
rill be bare and barren if the magician himself
ff and wholly doubt.”

it, surely,” I reasoned with him, wistfully, “surely
en dreamed that they were doing what would
eir memories fresh in the thoughts of men for
ges?”

doubt it,” said Pascarél. “I doubt very much
ey ever thought at all about it in that light.
le artist does his work because he loves it—
‘ he cannot choose but do it. Do you suppose
hitect of Cologne Cathedral would have torn
as up if he had foreseen his name would have
rgotten?”’

t surely an immortality of remembrance——
xe immortality!” quoted Pascarél. “Napoleon

9

sa 2asCaze.

rete St Ss sce & coe Tizmmo = Immomtiliy!
al) the tret ccenéss 2 cocrion fhes take to ack
22 2 dead eaze. S=mecractr—te so good as totell m,
Copel 2 W424, = wor cect. wo were Eugeean of Sana,
Bion ar@ D-sec==s. Ezcemecs of Paras, Lampsacts
Damastes. Narchos <f Sarc:s. cr Phericydes of Leros!’
~I rewer hearc of any one of them.”

“No? Ard plerty cr pecpie. more learned ts
you, are in the sare plight And vet they were al
auttors of Asiatic Greece who. in their day, looked
ior a5 mach *immoriacty as Herodotus. To com
into our own country—tell me who Trissino was, a
what he did!”

I confessed that the name of Trissino sad
more to me than the name of any one of the lite
flowers that sprang up by millions underneath ti
vines.

“Do you know who Trissino was?” he repeated.

“No.”

“There again!—why, he believed that he had rt
stored the epic to Italian verse in all its most herr
proportions, and sneered at his contemporary, Ario#™,
as only good for the vulgar. Did never you hem,
then, of Tito and Ercole Strozzi?”

“No.”

“Heavens! And yet they were, or were thought
famous poets; but the world is like you, and only
members Luisa Strozzi because men were
her face, and she made a picturesque figure comm
down the hill by San Miniato that night of the fair #
the Feast of the Pardon. But to descend a centwy
or so;-—what, pray, were Chauvelin, Daunou, Rioufie
Ganilh, Ginguéne, Larromiguiére}?”

THE WANDERING ARTE. 301

wféssed my ignorance, looking across at the
lights on the Carrara mountains.

againt And yet those men, with the rest of
lred Frenchmen of the Tribunal of Ninety-
eamed, surely, of imperishable renown. ‘A
an universal history!’ as my wise Napoleon
in after Cairo. True, he arrived later on at
. whole page for himself; but to print such a
u must distil seas of human blood to make
ink that will not rub out with the wear of
: and even then, as soon as a greater con-
omes, you will have your page blotted and
nto a palimpsest. You remember how, in
| Verona, there is a rude, dusky, nameless
the mausoleum of the Scala, and above it a
squestrian in marble, with three stages of
d saints and prophets all to himself in might
y; the first, the tomb of the assassinated; the
the tomb of the assassin? Believe me, Fame
orld allots things very much like the Scala’s

; silent; I thought of poor old wronged Am-
lying by his fireless and childless hearth,
we had passed through Florence the names
rald and Alkestis had loomed large upon the

des—ambition for a player!” laughed Pas-
t waiting for my answer, “you might as well
he dog-grass blowing there try to root itself
v like that stone-pine. ‘Ci-git le bruit du
mur only fit epitaph.

itle-down, smoke, soap-bubbles, ‘les étoiles qui

302 PASCAREL.

filent, qui filent, qui filent et disparaissent,’ those are
all our emblems.

“They reproach us that we only live to laugh an
to love, and take no thought for the morrow. Why
not? There is no morrow for us.

“The player can leave nothing behind him; mt
even a memory. ‘You should have heard him, sy
the old people to the young of the dead actor. ‘Yo
should have heard him; he was great, indeed, if you
like.’ But what do the young believe of that? Ther
is no proof,

“Such greatness as the dead man had, went ott
with his breath like a lamp that was spent.

“We live in the present; we live for the presest
Why not, I say?

“We are straws on the wind of the hour, too fral
and too brittle to float into the future. Our little day
of greatness is a mere child’s puff-ball, inflated by
men’s laughter, flaated by women’s tears; what breest
so changeful as the one, what waters so shallow as th
other ?—the bladder dances a little while; then sinks:
and who remembers?

“Ambition for such a thing as that?

“Grow oaks from the thistle-down; weave ships
cables from the smoke; change the soap-bubble into
a prism for astronomers; arrest the falling star as #
fixed planet in the spheres; and then, if you will, tak
of ambition for a player!”

He had risen as he spoke, and walked to and ff,
brushing the tall foliage of the undergrowth of acac#
and cane; he spoke with passionate scorn, and though
he laughed, there was for once some undertone of bit-
terness in his easy mirth.

THE WANDERING ARTE. 303

le jeered at the thing he himself was; no man’s
is wholly. free of care and doubt when he
hes on the semi-suicide of any self-contempt.
But players have been great,’ I said to him, not
ing well what to say. “Great in their lives at
And rich?”
Rich, oh yes!” he echoed, breaking down with
nand a head of iris. “A million francs a week
mean, and diamond snuff-boxes from a prince’s
—oh yes—if that be greatness. Good heavens!
e you have fairly entered on a woman’s years,
thoroughly a woman® heart beats in you!”
What do you count greatness, then?” I asked,
ring, as I rested on my arms, face downward on
rass, the clusters of the white anemoni, and all
right spring flowers of the hills.
ascarel, standing beside me, looked away to the
adiance of the west with that strange introspec-
nusing look in his eyes which comes so suddenly
italian eyes, and has so intense a melancholy in
id also so much of that spiritual beauty which
country has.
There is an old legend,” he made answer to me,
id monkish tale, which tells how, in the days of
‘Clovis, a woman, old and miserable, forsaken of
nd at the point of death, strayed into the Mero-
in woods, and lingering there, and harkening to
irds, and loving them, and so learning from them
xd, regained, by no effort of her own, her youth;
tved, always young and always beautiful, a hun-
years; through all which time she-never failed to
the forests when the sun rose and hear the first
of the creatures to whom she owed her joy.

304 PASCAREL,

Whoever to the human soul can be, in ever so fi
sense, that which the birds were to the woman i
Merovingian woods, he, I think, has a true grea
But I am but an outcast, you know; and my wi
is not of the world.”

Yet it seemed the true wisdom, there, at least
the rose light shining across half the heavens, ar
bells ringing far away in the plains below ov
white waves of the sea of olives.

CHAP Ty R III.
The Riband and the Mandoline.

Not many weeks after, whilst the year wa
young, the old city of Pisa came in our way }
wanderings; and Pascarél would fain turn aside
the bright sea-road, and stay within its walls a ]

I saw the ruined rival of Florence, the city “
fede,” once the mart of the world and now a ¢
I saw, too, the scholar Luceone, a gentle, mee)
man, with the brow of Ghiberti and the mouth ¢
Giovanni. I saw the old Faustus-like room 1
tower, with the owls in its broken masonry, anc
the Arno washing its base at one side, and o
other the narrow darkling street that the come
had gone through with jest and song on that ]
morning which had decided the fortunes of Pasc

The old city was sad and sombre with Orc:
Death reigning over its solitudes as the only sove
left to it out of all the arrogance and plenitude
years of power.

So still it was, so unbroken the shadows
upon its grass-grown stones, so dully the yellow

THE WANDERING ARTE. 305

gged its way through the yellow sand, one might
re thought that it was only that very day that the
thblow had fallen on it away there where the
ston sea abandoned it to kiss and serve Genoa.
“Do you not see Margharité of France?” said
garél to me in Pisa one evening, as we strayed
ig, “leaning there out of the old palace window in
; such a stormy red and gold night as this, perhaps,
: to despair of the gilded captivity, and planning
a the gipsies to escape? I wonder no one has
r painted that scene; the delicate wanton royal
d stretching out in the crimson dusk to hold
ncil with the black-browed vagabonds. Can you
‘fancy the fret of her, and the fever and the revolt,
t made a barefoot liberty seem sweeter than all the
dicean pomp?”

Bat I shook my head, and told him no, which
dened him a little as we went. <A barefoot liberty
) well in its way, no doubt, but to be a princess,
}not that better?

It seemed to me that Marguerite must have been
; jesting with the gipsies when she schemed thus
h them here in dead old Pisa.

So thankless are we to Fate when it is fair for us.
‘I had all for which the heart of Margaret had
fgered, beating itself like a caged bird under its
iled bodice; I had it all as I went along the sad,
Miless, unpeopled streets, which his voice filled with
jetest music for me, and the red sun burnished
b ancient pomp and panoply; I had it all and but
F valued it—alas! alas!

‘At Pisa, as I say, I saw that old college friend of
Wanél, the scholar Luceone. He was a gentle,

wal, 7. 20

THE WANDERING ARTE. 307

to him for awhile at least. He would have
of it and gone on his own ways in time, no
, but he would have liked to have had it, for he
these rooms of his, and at that time, for all he
Oo gay and even riotous, he had a passion for
e, and for all manners of abstruse study, which
ald pursue at his ease and leisure here. -
but he knew that I was very poor, he knew that
an old mother and a sister to keep, he knew
pinched myself of bread and oil, and that I was
to pick up the leavings off the dishes of the
er students, so what does he do?
Ie goes straightway to the authorities, and he
o them in his careless fashion, ‘Illustrissimi, I
you for your offer, and the honour you would
2, but do not take my meaning ill if I tell you
ou have made a great error. I am only a reck-
y0d-for-nothing, a scamp at heart, a riotous free
who, as your excellencies know, have had the
shut against me scores of times, and black
against my name always. Do not give your
Chair to me; but give it to one who is as good
hematician as I am, as sound a scholar as J am,
ho, unlike me, will furthermore do you credit
2 simple and blameless life that he leads. Give
4zio Luceone, and I, Pascarél, will hold myself
holden to your Signoria, as though I filled the
myself.’
“hat is what Pascarél said to them, and they
so struck that they gave it to me, and I have
t ever since that time.
fe told you he surrendered it to follow that
ywoman and her comedians. Oh! no doubt.
20*

308 PASCAREL.

That is just like him. But he relinquished the pre
fessorship in the month of March, and the Zinzasg
and her people only came into the town at Easteg
time, which fell, as I well remember, towards th
middle of April in that year.

“It has been a wonderful thing for me, .
wonderful. The stipend is quite enough to keep my
mother in perfect comfort; and my heart and souls
in my work; and the college lads love me and I lon
them; and I ask no better life of God or man.

“But it is Pascarél I owe it to most surely; only
pray of you do not tell him that I have told you, «
he will never forgive me, never. I came to know
through one of the Signoria, which vexed him s
he had always tried to make me believe that it
only just the reward of my own merit. But it
all his own doing—all.

“I was the gainer, you see; but nevertheless m
heart ached when I saw him go for ever out of &
sea-gate with his pack on his back and his mandolit
slung from his shoulder; the mandoline he has now:
yes. The Frenchwoman put a scarlet riband to it,
remember, sitting just there down in the street in fi
sun as they ate pomegranates one warm Easter day.’

“He does not know what has become of her, !
he says; but he was wild about her then; a hang
some woman, I remember, with great burning bl
eyes and beautiful feet.

“She did with Pascarél what she liked; if it hag
not been for her I think the world would have hea
of him. For he had some ambition in those dayg
and he is the last of the Pascarelli, you know. /

THE WANDERING ARTE. 309

y were really princes once? oh, yes! you may read
in Malespini and Villani.”
So the gentle scholar would murmur on, and I
d listen, leaning my body over the grated sill,
watching the narrow street far down below, where
‘other days the Frenchwoman had sat, and wound
scarlet riband about the stem of the mandoline,
the lights of the sun and of Pascarél’s eyes
ing on her.

I hated to think of it; I hated to think of that
tr-away love-lightened past of his, in which I had no
kemory and no share.

‘ Every woman, at all young and innocent of life,
felt the feeling that I mean when she has loved.
' Pascarél came behind me that day, having heard
e latest words of his old friend.

“Ah, yes, cara mia,” he murmured, softly, while

y- “So many hands have tied so many ribbons

the mandoline—yes, I shame to say so—and the

ns have all fluttered away God knows where,

e to the dust-hole, some to the carnival-ball, some

deck other men’s guitars, some to lie amongst the

ers in the ragpicker’s basket. But after all what
that matter? the mbands never touched the
ds of the mandoline; the ribands were only for
and feast-days and follies; it takes something
ger and better than a riband to get music from

strings.” .

I understood him a little though not wholly, and

s comforted, leaning there out of the grated window
‘Marguerite had leaned when she had communed
the gipsies, and thought their liberties and love

be better than the gilded palle of the Medici.

310 PASCAREL.

CHAPTER IV.
The Poets’ Country.’ |

WE did not wait very long in Pisa.

The laughter of the Arte wakened its holog
echoes, and the Florentine pennon fluttered among
its haunted ways for a brief space only. And whi
it was still springtime—late spring—we left its gat
and went over the ghostly plain that had been so
through and through with the blood of so ms
centuries of warfare, and so back into the Val
Greve and between the mountains along Arno’s s

Only to one place was he always constant 4
his inconstancy; wander away from it perpetually gm
he would, no less surely would he ever again
back to where the Vecchio battlements were set sh
as lion’s teeth against the sky.

He would always come back thither; and Sal
John’s Day, and the Beffana, and the Pasqua, and #
Berlingancio, and the Ceppo, and the Capo d’Ang™-
and the Anna feast, when the flags of the Trades we
set round the church, and all the other giorni fah
that are as many as the golden eyes in a child’s strit
of daisies, would have been robbed of much mi
and life to the populace of Florence, if they &
failed to bring through the gates Pascarél. |

All that lovely May time we were afoot throug
Tuscany.

Is there anything in all the world so beautiful
the springtide greenery of Italy?

The gold of her sunsets, the wonder of her orang
groves, the rose of her evening skies, the grandeur ’¢
her sterile mountains, on these and on their like wo

THE WANDERING ARTE. ~ 311

of adoration have been lavished by the million; but
who has stayed to bethink themselves of her homelier
and humbler charms?

And yet, of these also, she has so many—so
many.

Come out here in the young months of summer
and leave, as we left, the highways that grim walls
fence in, and stray, as we strayed, through the field-
paths and the bridle-roads in the steps of the con-
tadini, and you will find this green world about your
feet touched with the May-day suns to tenderest and
most lavish wealth of nature.

The green corn uncurling underneath the blos-
soming vines. The vine foliage that tosses and climbs
and coils in league on league of verdure. The breast-
high grasses full of gold and red and purple from the
countless flowers growing with it.

The millet filled with crimson gladioli and great
scarlet poppies. The hill-sides that look a sheet of
rose-colour where the lupinelli are in bloom. The
tall plumes of the canes, new born, by the side of
every stream and rivulet.

The sheaves of arum leaves that thrust themselves
Out from every joint of masonry or spout of broken
fountain. The flame of roses that burns on every
handsbreadth of untilled ground and springs like a
Taihbow above the cloud of every darkling roof or
Wall The ocean spray of arbutus and acacia shed-
ding its snow against the cypress darkness. The sea-
Steen of the young ilex leaves sdattered like light
Over the bronze and purple of the older growth. The

tamy blue of the iris lilies rising underneath the
Olives and along the edges of the fields.

312 PASCAREL.

' The soft, pretty, quiet pictures where 1
sweep down with their scythes the reedy gras
the river banks; where the gates of the villas
wide open with the sun aslant upon the grassy
beneath the vines; where in the gloom of the
archways the women sit plaiting their straw, the
shining fields before them all alive with the s
the grilli; where the grey savage walls of a {
tower on the spur of the mountains, above the c
green of young oaks and the wind-stirred fans
fig-trees; where the frate, in broad-leaved hat of
brushes with bare sandalled feet through the
acanthus, beaming a Rabelaisian smile on th
tadina who goes by him with her brown water-ja
her head: where deep in that fresh, glad tun
leaf and blossom and bough the children a:
goats lie together, while the wild thyme and t
foil are in flower, and the little dog-rose is
amongst the maize; where the sharp beak of t
ley-like boats cuts dark against the yellow c
and the great filmy square nets are cast o
where the poplar shadows tremble in the strea
these, and a thousand like them, are yours
sweet May season amongst the Tuscan hills and
The earth can be no greener even away ©
in the pine valleys of the Alps; and for the
what air can be like this that wanders from A
to Mediterranean across a land of flowers t
lightly on its every breath and breeze the bur
love songs, the sighs of nightingales, the odk
budding fruits, the warmth of amorous suns?
Poets of every nation have celebrated th:
and the gorgeous scenery of this land that

THE WANDERING ARTE. 313

ative land of every artist; its magnificence of out-
ime, its riot of hue on sky and earth, its voluptuous
ielights and violet seas, its classic ruins, and its dryad-
lmunted groves; these have been over-painted and
prer-hymned till half the world is weary; but of its
wweet, lowly, simple loveliness that lies broadcast on
pvery hillside and under every olive orchard, amongst
iris lilies in the meadows, and along the loose
grasses where the sleepy oxen slowly tread their
t path—of these, I say, not one in a thousand
wanderers thinks, perhaps not one in ten thousand
éven knows.

All that time we wandered about according to
bur whim and will, from the blue waters of Spezzia
bb the green fields of the Casentino, and from the
Wpires of Milan to the shadows of St. Mark.

' We never tarried long in any place; the true
homadic temper was in Pascarél.

The flag of our wooden Arte seldom fluttered
longer than two or three evenings under the same
knot of chestnut trees, or on the same hillside. A
tertain restlessness always impelled its owner to fre-
quent change and movement, and though he would
fe and dream for hours together in the sun, he pre-
ferred that the sun when it rose should seldom find
him in the same spot where it had shone on him at
its last setting.

We went through all the historic country that the
Apennines girdle with their broad belt of vine leaves
and marble; the country of the poets that has heard
heir “sweet singing” through so many centuries, from
he love-notes of Catullus to the death-sigh of Tasso.

Beneath Peschiera, that still “sits a fortress” as

314 PASCAREL.

in Dante’s time, to denote the old Teutonic Ty
ways.

On the stones of the sad City of the Lake, buik
above the bones of that “cruel virgin” who wande
from far Thebes to lay her down to rest amidst
“thousand fountains.”

Through the Reggio district at the mountains’ {
where Boiardo had sung, and laughed, and loved, :
fought his graceful life away.

By sad Ferrara, repenting in widowed lonelir
the crimes of her lord of Este against the poet ¥
dared to plead in the teeth of pride “per amor mi

Far northward as Cremona, where the seeding g1
and the wild barley grew above that dreadful dil
once filled up with the bleeding and stifled peasa
thrust into a living death that the knights might s
their horses in safety over the chasm whilst C:
Malatesta’s golden mantle fluttered in all the pr
of war.

Southward within the sound of Santa Lucia’s b
in saintly Assisi, when the morning dews were wet
the ivy-grown bridge of the Clausura, and the linr
sang in the same old boughs that had sheltered
birds that once had chaunted their Easter litanies
S. Francis. |

To strange San Leo, mighty watch-tower of nati
towering over the wide wild waste of up-tossed ro
and barren mountains.

Along the treacherous moonlit waters of the
where the bridal barge had floated to the moat tov
whilst Lucrezia in her albernia of woven gold b
before her lord, and the torches glowed on the plu

THE WANDERING ARTE. 315

of the Moorish dancers, and the Bacchides was played
to the sound of Mantuan music.

On the high hills, once the eyrie of the Eagle of
the Montefeltro, where Dante dwelt with the great
Ghibelline chieftain, and the hazel eyes of the baby
Sanzio opened to the light.

In the green gay country where merry-hearted
Pulci strung together his “heaps of sonnets big as the
clubs they make of cherry blossoms for May-day.”

Amidst the Lombard fields and garden where
Ariosto, “’twixt the April and the May” of his life,
had loves as many and as roseate as pomegranate
blossoms in a July noon.

By old Urbino, in whose gaunt silence the silvery
echoes seemed to come of Raffael’s laugh, and Tiziano’s
wooing, and Bembo’s wit, and the voices of Vittoria
and Veronica, and the applause of that gay and
gracious court as it listened to the cantos of the
“Furioso” and the pages of Il Cortegiano, in the
mosaic-chamber, whilst the sea-winds blew over Monte
Carpegna, and the stars rose above the iron-stone of
Nero’s mountain.

“If I had been any famous personage at all, I
think I should have chosen to be Boiardo,” said he
One day as we sat under the shadow of a fig-tree in a
little village of the plains, whilst the white oxen trod
Slowly under the blossoming vines, and the shallow

fads of water were all blue with hyacinth and iris.

“Boiardo’s life,” said he, “must have been worth

¢ living from first to last in that pleasant and thrice-
“Mous Reggio country, green with the vines as this
i. A beautiful life—bold, free, gracious, loving, and
Well loved; a life full of the deeds of a soldier and

316 PASCAREL.

the dreams of a poet, a life made sweet and fresh by
the open air, heightened by passion and battle, but
chiefly absorbed in the ideal, for did he not set the
bells of Scandiano all a-ringing until the people all
thought a new saint had been canonised, when it was
only his joy at having found a fit name for his herol
Boiardo was to be envied, I admit: much maybe for
having begun the ‘Orlando,’ but much more for hav-
ing his name pass into a proverb for a fair fortune.
‘Heaven send Boiardo to your house!’ So the country
folk of all the Reggio district say still when they wish
you well. How a man must have been adored by his |
countryside to be transmitted so down the stream of
tradition!” .

He spoke thus of Boiardo, nothing arrogating to
himself; yet it was hardly less love that was won by
him through all his birth country.

The fame of him was not indeed spread like that
of the courtly rhymester of the “Orlando Innamo-
rato” amidst nobles’ palaces and in kings’ circles, but:
there was not a lowly capanna betwixt the two seas
that was not the lighter and the gladder for the fall
of his footstep on its threshold, and not a peasant
from Alp to Abruzzi that would not bring forth to
honour his coming the last shred of the goat’s flesh
and the last drop of the rough red wine.

Money he had not to give them, but he gavé
them all the riches he had—mirth and music af
goodwill, and a strong hand to part them in thelr
quarrels, and a tender patience to aid them in thet
wants, and a sunny wit to beguile them in their so!
rOWS.

There was, indeed, always that about him which

THE WANDERING ARTE. 317

de one think of Ariosto and of Gabriello’s lines on
t great Lombard:—
“*Credere uti posses natum felicibus horis
Felici fulgente astro Jovis atque Dionis.”

At his coming the people trooped out from all
ir villages and towns in wildest welcome. The
mut of “Pascarél, il Pascarello!” from some shepherd
the fields or some lads playing pallone on the
tskirts, brought the whole population of any place
ich he approached rushing helter-skelter towards
nh, running and singing before his footsteps, and
nest fighting for the coveted honour of giving him
‘Iter for the night.

He might have drunk a hundred stoups of wine,

might have kissed a hundred women, he might
ve supped at a hundred tables within any gates he
tered.

The poorest hamlet got together some little show
riches in his honour, and the best of everything,
poor that best might be, was dragged forth and
read out in delighted homage before him under
e fig-trees or the cork-trees in the mellow evening
tht.

I grew to understand how and why he was so
py with his life, and how and why he would have
en loth to leave it for any other. There were in it
ich perfect liberty, such continual change; and what
ached him most, I think, so great a love for him
terywhere.

It was perhaps only a sunshiny form of selfishness,
* laughing and indolent life that this man of fine
owers and of fine culture led from village to village
Nee the face of his native land.

318 PASCAREL.

Yet it had a great influence over me that |
and ennobled my faults and my follies, and_I
had often the same over the populace amongst
he dwelt. |

For once in a hamlet on the plains, when
raged, I saw Pascarél welcomed as though |
been an angel who had brought them healing
wings; and once in a turbulent street riot in V
he controlled a furious and death-dealing mo
the mere charm of perfect courage and trick of
and skilful wit.

I think the earnestness that lies in the
character is altogether overlooked.

Its indolence, its gaiety, its love of pleas
on the surface, and are steadily measured; t
depths of it are graver—very grave indeed-
even to a profound melancholy.

The Italian character is made up of co
more strongly marked and vividly opposed th:
of any other nation; and these contrasts are
not seldom into as perfect harmony as is pos:
human nature; for an Italian is melodious even
discord, and is symmetrical even in his contrat

See the country in a time of flood, of pes
of fire—she is heroic, and the woe of one is t
of all, with an unanimity of action and a stre!
emotion that can alone arise out of a nationa
acter at once tender and full of force. North
tions have nothing, for example, comparable fi
sacrifice to the Misericordia. For consolidatic
devotion to duty, for all the deepest and purest
of charity, the Order has no equal in Europe.

Where else will you see, as you can see all t

THE WANDERING ARTE. 319

‘uscany, the nobleman leaving his masked ball, the
over his mistress, the craftsman his labour, the foeman
us vengeance, to go at the sound of the tocsin, and
ud the poor and the sick and the dying?

Superficial commentators wonder that the dis-
tiples of Savonarola could come from the same
eople as the debauchees of the Decamerone, but the
wonder is very idle.

A passionate sadness underlies in silence the gay
aid amorous temperament of the Italian; and not
only in metaphor, but in fact, will the hair shirt of a
silent sorrow be worn by him under the ribboned
domino that he carries so airily in his life of intrigue.
_ No one will ever see it except one woman out of
his many loves who is near enough to him to touch
his heart as well as stir his passions;—no one else will
ever see it, but there it is—and his sword is there too.
_ This earnestness was in Pascarél beneath all the
vivacity and lightness of his temperament; and it pro-
duced in him that mingled strength and tenderness
which endeared him to the people.

Often when we have been in the city he has left
my side as we laughed at some winestall in the
market or played dominoes before some sunshiny
Tattond, and has vanished in obedience to the bell of
he Misericordia.

Often when we have gone through some village
n which pestilence was raging, or where some sudden
Cod of water had washed away the little wealth of
he contadini, he has taken his place by the sick beds
T beside the bereaved and homeless peasantry, with
skilful gentleness and brotherliness that was more

to the sufferer than herbs or gold.

320 PASCAREL.

I think that his laughter was all the richer ove
the cards and the wines in the little vine-hung loggt
of the bettolini, because his eyes were dim many (
time over a suffering and penniless stranger wil
would have died unaided and unshriven but for tk
pity of the player of the Arte. And I am sure thi
the salterello and the stornello were all the gayer asl
the sweeter on his mandoline, because he could toud
the strings of it into melody that would soothe &
death-bed of a child with visions of the angels.

CHAPTER V.

Fumo di Gloria.

Tuts wandering life was to me perfect. I wished
for nothing better than all that laughter at the wim
fairs; than all that merriment at the village festival
than all those stories told in the great threshing barns,
than all that gay chit-chat with the women layitl
their straw to bleach on the shores, or the ma
spreading their river nets where the leaves thrillet
in the wind; it was all perfect to me, as it woul
have been to any other creature young and of healthy
body, and a soul not spoiled by the world and its ways

And as for the people;—the dear people!—t
more I dwelt amongst them the more I loved re
There is no other people on the face of the earth
entirely loveable even with their many faults as tht
Italians. But what is known of them by other #
tions}!—hardly anything at all.

That the Italian patrician may be little undet
stood outside the pale of his own immediate ass
Ciates, it is not difficult to conceive. His confidene

THE WANDERING ARTE. j2t

is rarely bestowed: and the pride which fences him
in is at once the most delicate and the most im-
penetrable that a man can place betwixt himself and
the outer world,

But it is passing strange that the Italian popo-
lano, open to whosoever will to study him at their
leisure, the Italian of the people, as seen in his
streets and fields, by his hearth, and his market stall,
s as little understood and as invariably misrepresented.

French vivacity and ease have passed into a pro-
verb; yet, in reality, the French people are studied
and conscious compared to the Italian, who is the
most absolutely unstudied and unself-conscious of all
God’s creatures.

True, the Italian, even in the lowest strata of
social life, has a repose and a dignity in him which
befit his physiognomy and evince themselves in his
calm and poetical attitudes. See a stone-breaker, or
4Mmason, or a boatman asleep in the noonday sun,
and you will surely see attitudes which no sculptor
could wish bettered for his marble.

_ True, too, you will do ill to make a mock of

n; high or low, it is the one unpardonable sin
Which no Italian will pardon; he is given also to the
ImMmMoveable obstinacy of that animal which he will
hever name save under the delicate euphuism of “the
little black gentleman;” and he has a lightning-like
Passion in him which may smite his neighbour to the
farth in a trice about a cherry-stone, or a broken
Toom, or any other casus delle of the hour.

But, then, lo! how bright he is, how gregarious,
OW neighbourly, how instant and graceful in courtesy,

eager and kindly in willingness; how poetic his
Parcpril, I. 21

422 : PASCAREL.

glee in song and dance, and holy day and pageant}
how absolute his content upon the most meagre fate
that ever held body and soul together; how ceftam
his invariable selection of a pleasure for the ee
and the ear rather than one for the mouth and the
stomach. )

See the gay, elastic grace of him; the mirth thi
ripples all day long about him like the sunlight, th
laughter that shows his white teeth, the tumultuos
shouts in which his lungs delight, the cheery sociabit
ity that brings him with a knot of his own kind a
the street corners and under the house archways 0
talk the hours away with tireless tongue and shrewdesl
wit, and say, is there a creature kindlier or more mir}
ful anywhere in the width of the world?

And he will always have some delicate touch 4
the artist in him too, and always some fine instinct 0
the gentleman—let him be poor as he will, ill clad
half-starved, and ignorant even of the letters that make
his name, let him feel the summer dust with bare feet
and the mountain wind through a ragged shirt, nay
let him be the veriest scamp and sinner in the worl
—but he will wear his tatters with a grace; he wil
bring a flower to a woman with the bow of a king
and he will resent an insolence with an air to whic
no purples and fine linen could lend dignity.

With the people I was happy all through tha
sweet season of the spring and the summer; and t
pleasure Pascarél, there was nothing they would no
do to smooth the hardness of their modes of Irfe t
the donzella.

Not that such hardships counted for much with me

From my infancy I had known what hunger meat
to the full.as well as any beggar child, and my yea

THE WANDERING ARTE. 323

in old Verona had been bare of all save the sternest
necessities of existence. °

Pascaré] was-true to his word.

‘It was always well with me. I never saw or heard
anything that dear old dead Mariuccia would have
deemed unfit for me had.she been living then to
shield me. Full of mirth indeed we were; mirth, end-
less and unstrained, babbling like a brook amongst
the flowers and weeds of daily acts and words; but
amongst it all there was not so much as a coarse word
which could have harmed me; and when we were with
the populace, who were apt to be coarse enough them-
Selves in their jests and songs, Brundtta, at a sign
from him, would slide her hand in mine and draw me
gently away up to some little attic in the roof, or aside
under some leafy pergola, and keep me there talking,
always, as my habit was, of the miracles and the per-
fections of the life and ways of Pascarél. ;

I was always to her the donzella; she was always
a little shy with me and a little humble.

“Tanta bellina, tanta bellina!” she would murmur
often, looking at me with a soft puzzled wistfulness
In her bird-like eyes: and all that I could do availed
nothing to induce her to set herself upon an equality
with me. Day by day, instead of growing more fa-
Miliar with me, she seemed to feel the difference that
Was between us with a clearer perception, and treated
me with a wondering homage, of which my natural
Vanity was well contented to avail itself.

Nothing in the way of worship came much amiss
fo me at that time. |

Thad ceased to be troubled about the tinker’s pot;

was consoled by the memories of the great race

he came.
au*

aS,

324 PASCAREL.

I had got in my mind a little picture of hima
he must needs have been in those days: a slender,
lithe brown child with beautiful eyes; full of mischief
and of tenderness; of odd fancies and of loyal im-
pulses; running along the white sun-baked roads of hs
beloved country with a little clattering burden of kettles
and flagons, and stewpans slung behind his shoulders

And his father, too; I pictured him also, a manof
much humour, as he said, telling strange, marvellow
stories as he sat in the dust of the wayside tinkering
his pots; a man who never could utterly forget thst
his people in old remote times had been great in the
land, and who was always a little grave, with a littl
touch of the old arrogance, though a good kindly soul
and a boon companion when the wine went round
after the village games.

For those vanished grandeurs and powers of hs
race, which were almost mythical to him, Pascarél
himself never once cast a sigh down the wind. What
his father had told him in childhood many an evening
sitting under a wayside crucifix mending the copper
pots and pans of the countryfolk might be true o
might not.

The perished nobility of his forefathers woke 00
envy from him.

“It had bean certainly a great race once; yes,” ht
was wont to say, while half sceptical of the fact hm
self, “at least, so my father would have it; and Male
spini, if that old liar may be believed about anything,
which is doubtful. Traces of it crop up here aad
there in quaint old places; here a tomb, there a fortress
here a bronze knight that the children aim at in thet
games; there a manuscript, that some old monk unearths
from his chapter rolls for want of something to do.

THE WANDERING ARTE. 325

“Oh, I believe it was all true enough.

“There were mighty Pascarélli in the olden days.
at Iam very glad that I was not of them; except,
deed, that I should have liked to strike a "blow or
ro for Guido Calvacanti and have hindered the merry-
wking of those precious rascals who sent him out to
ie of the marsh fever.

. “Great?

+ “No; certainly I would not be great. To be a
eat man is endlessly to crave something that you
wre not; to kiss the hands of monarchs and lick the
et of peoples. To be great? Who was ever more
wat than Dante, and what was his experience?—the
lterness of begged bread, and the steepness of
lace stairs.

“Besides, given the genius to deserve it, the up-
hot of a life spent for greatness is absolutely uncer-
tm. Look at Machiavelli.

“After having laid infallible rules for social and
Mblic success with such unapproachable astuteness
lat his name has become a synonym for unerring
Wlicy, Machiavelli passed his existence in obedience
lad submission to Rome, to Florence, to Charles, to
amo, to Leo, to Clement.

“He was born into a time favourable beyond every
wher to sudden changes of fortune—a time in which
ly fearless audacity might easily become the step-
Nag-stone to a supreme authority ; and yet Machiavelli,
the world still holds as its ablest statesman—1in
mMciple—never, in practice, rose above the level of
fervant of civil and papal tyrannies, and, when his
‘came, died in obscurity and almost in penury.
“Theoretically, Machiavelli could rule the universe;
practically he never attained to anything finer than

326 : PASCAREL: = -

a more or less advantageous change of masteis.* Ti
reign doctrinally may be all very well, but whenj
only results in serving actually, it seems very mu
better to be obscure and content without any troul
‘Fumo di gloria non vale fumo di pipa.”
“], for one, at any rate, am thoroughly conv
of that truth of truths.”
I hearkened to him sorrowful; for to my ignorag
eyes the witch candle of fame seemed a pure and pe
fect planet; and I felt that the planet might have !
his horoscope had he chosen.
“Is there no glory at all worth having, then!” |
murmured.
He stretched himself where he rested amongst if
arum-whitened grass, and took his cigaretto from
mouth:
“Well, there is one, perhaps. But it is to be |
about once in five centuries.
“You know Or San Michele? It would have be
a world’s wonder had it stood alone, and not be
companioned with such wondrous rivals that its o
exceeding beauty scarce ever receives full justice.
“Where the jasper of Giotto and the marble
Brunelleschi, where the bronze of Ghiberti and t
granite of Arnolfo rise everywhere in the sunlit air t
challenge vision and adoration, Or San Michele fa
of its full meed from men. Yet, perchance, in all t
width of Florence there is not a nobler thing.
“It is like some massive casket of silver oxydist
by time; such a casket as might have been made f
hold the Tables of the Law by men to whose fpif
Sinai was a holy and imperishable truth.
“T know nothing of the rule or phrase of Archit
ture, but it seems to me surely that that square

THE WANDERING ARTE. 327

igth, as of a fortress, towering against the clouds,
catching the last light always on its fretted para-
and everywhere embossed and enriched with foli-
and tracery, and the figures of saints, and the
lows of vast arches, and the light of niches gold-
red and filled with divine. forms, is a gift so perfect
he whole world, that, passing it, one should need
a prayer for great Taddeo’s soul.
“Surely, nowhere is the rugged, changeless, moun-
' force of hewn stone piled against the sky, and
luxuriant, dreamlike, poetic delicacy of stone
ren and shaped into leafage and loveliness more
fectly blended and made one than where Or San
hele rises out of the dim, many-coloured, twisting
ets, in its mass of ebon darkness and of silvery
t.
“Well, the other day, under the walls of it I stood,
. looked at its Saint George where he leans upon
shield, so calm, so young, with his bared head and
quiet eyes.
“<That is our Donatello’s, said a Florentine beside
—a man of the people, who drove a horse for hire
he public ways, and who paused, cracking his whip,
tell this tale to me. ‘Donatello did that, and it
ed him. Do you not know? When he had done
t Saint George, he showed it to his master. And
‘master said, “It wants one thing only.” Now this
ing our Donatello took gravely to heart, chiefly of
Because his master would never explain where the
lay; and so much did it hurt him, that he fell ill
ft, and came nigh to death. Then he called his
Mer to him. “Dear and great one, do tell me be-
mT Jie” he said, “what is the one thing my statue
' The master smiled, and said, “Only—speech.”

La
i /.
} ver

328 PASCAREL.

“Then I die happy,” said our Donatello. And he—
died—indeed, that hour.’

“Now, I cannot say that the pretty story is true;
it is not in the least true; Donato died when he was
eighty-three, in the Street of the Melon; and it was
he himself who cried, ‘Speak then—speak!’ to his
statue, as it was carried through the city. But whether
true or false the tale, this fact is surely true, that it is
well—nobly and purely well—with a people when the
men amongst it who ply for hire on its public ways
think caressingly of a sculptor dead five hundred years
ago, and tell such a tale standing idly in the noon-
day sun, feeling the beauty and the pathos of it all.

“<Our Donatello’ still to the people of Florence.
‘Our own little Donato’ still, our pet and pride, even
as though he were living and working in their midst
to-day, here in the shadows of the Stocking-maker’s
Street, where his Saint George keeps watch and ward.

“‘Our little Donato’ still, though dead so many
hundred years ago.

“That is glory, if you will. And something more
beautiful than any glory—Love.”

He was silent a long while, gathering lazily with
his left hand the arum lilies to bind them together for me.

Perhaps the wish for the moment passed over him
that he had chosen to set his life up in stone, like to
Donato’s, in the face of Florence, rather than to weave
its light and tangled skein out from the. breaths of
the wandering winds and the sands of the shifting
shore.

END OF VOL. I.

————— =

PRINTING OFFICE OF THE PUBLISHER.

COLLECTION

OF

\RITISH AUTHORS

TAUCHNITZ EDITION.

VOL. 1317.

PASCAREL BY OUIDA.

IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.

PASCAREL,

ONLY A STORY. -

BY

/

OUIDA, 4 eticctiv oe:

ees -

AUTHOR OF ‘‘TRICOTRIN,” 5 SHANDOS,” ETC.
. HL
L 9, C¢ wt be. Aan Ae ee Oa

COPYRIGHT EDITION.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. II.

q
LEIPZIG

BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ
1873.

The Right of Translation is reserved.

pid

CONTENTS

LUME Il.

OF VO

BOOK IV.

(CONTINUED.)
THE WANDERING ARTE.

Gwyn Araun .« 2 « .
Olivet... « «© 0 of ¢
Ecole Buissonnitre .+ 2...
The Feast of St. John ° . .
On the Hills. . *

The Hobble of Lead . . .

The Legend of the Lucciole

The Tomb of the King. e

The Gold of Etruria .

The Sceptre of Feathers . . .

BOOK V.

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD.

The Fountain of the Pine .
The Night of All Saints
Sunrise. .

Sunset .

Nightfall’. 2. 2...

92
106
113
IIs

133

CHAPTER VI.
VII.

—

CONTENTS OF VOLUME Ii.

Along the Mountains . ° e e .

The Church of the Cross . ° . . .

BOOK VI.
THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE.

Oltrarno 2. .e« « ° ° -

At Boccaccio’s Window . . . . .
By the Mouth of the Lion . ° . . °
Dead Roses . . ° .

Under the White Lion

BOOK VII.
THE FIELD OF FLOWERS.

His Story .. « «o« «+« -« 7 6
Her Story. .. - . . . ee e
The Old Sea Queen . .
In the Land of Virgil : . . . .
The Song of the Grill °

Red and Gold . . .

The Broken Bubble . . . . °

The Lily and the Laurel . . . . oe

Love is enough . . - ° *

ce ee te

136

HSRBG RSS S

PASCAREL.

BOOK IV. (Continued.)

THE WANDERING ARTE.

CHAPTER VI.
Gwyn Araun.

“Wruart life then would you really like?” I asked
tim once, in bewilderment at his utter scorn for all
manner and degree of aggrandisement, and the touch
»f impatience at his own mode of existence which
20w and then escaped him.

“Gwyn Araun’s!” he responded, promptly; “I think
that is the only perfect one that ever was known upon
eart ”?

“«Gwyn Araun?” I asked, in amaze. “He was not
a Florentine.” |

“No; he was not a Florentine. He comes of a
race called Fable. We have never been famous for
harbouring his kind. They loved shade; and we are
all light. Gwyn Araun and his race are ferns that
grow where it is moist and dark. They belong to the
primzeval ages of the world. Gwyn Araun, to begin
with, had a horse that could transport him anywhere
im an instant—to the moon if he wished. He could
converse with the stars and the flowers, the clouds and

8 PASCAREL.

the trees, the gods and the butterflies, turn by tum
He could wander invisible, and take any shape that
he desired. He had absolute omniscience, and he
used his power always to save and to soothe and to
pleasure mankind. Finally he had an ivory hor, at
whose note of enchantment all melancholy fled. That.
is the only perfect existence I ever heard of, and he |
lived in the golden age of Myth, in the depths of the
Scandinavian woods or Teuton forests, I do not quite
remember which.”

“And what became of him?”

“He disappeared. That is another perfection of
Gwyn Araun’s species. They never die, they disappear.
If we did the same it would be much more agreeable;
it is difficult to retain much idealism, when one knows
one must end in a wooden box, and have the flies
buzzing about one as about a sheep’s trotters on 4:
butcher’s stall. Gwyn Araun vanished because he fel
in with a sage of prosaic mind, who, being bidden by
him to a feast of spiced meats ‘and ambrosial draughts
in jewelled dishes and cups of gold, saw with the eyes
of the flesh only, and stubbornly maintained that there |
was no food or drink at all in all the place, but only |
dead forest-leaves and brook-water. Which so dis-
gusted Gwyn Araun that he fled from earth for ever-
more. But he comes back sometimes even still in the
shape of a poet, invisible to men, and riding on his
winged horse that can circle the sun in five seconds;
and then he spreads the divine feast again; and again
the prosaic sage which calls himself the World repeats
the same scoff at it; and, again, Gwyn Araun flies
away in sorrow and disdain. That is, as the World
phrases it—the poet perishes broken-hearted.”

THE WANDERING ARTE. _ 9

This was the manner in which Pascarél would talk
© me when the mood was on him, lying under the
fmes in the noon heats, lazily touching a chord of
his mandoline, or wandering down some hill-side
when the moon was high amongst the trembling stalks
of maize.

And the charm of the quaint, fantastic, half-spirit-
tal, sportive, pathetic, whimsical discourse of his so
grew upon me, little by little, that it acted like a spell.
All my rebellion against my fate, my desires for riches,
my feverish dreams of strange fortunes and of high
estate, sank away into an absolute contentment. Beside
a dreamer who only thought a life like the Genius
Gwyn Araun’s worth the envying, all mere ambition
looked meretricious and empty; and beside a philo-
topher who broke his dry bread contentedly under a
peasant’s house-vine, after a half day’s march along
the mountains, one becomes ashamed to yearn after
such pitiful things as pearls and rubies and fine
vraiment.

CHAPTER VII.
Olivet.

PaSCAREL believed in genius. It was his religion.
‘or mediocrity his contempt was boundless.

Genius he had himself, and of the rarest sort. The
ountless trifles which he flung away with such lavish-
ess amongst the populace were gems of the utmost
erfection in their kind. ~°

The brightest wit, the subtlest philosophy, the most
‘acious charms of poetry and symmetry characterised
ese ephemeral creations which he composed one after

10 PASCAREL.

another, without effort, almost, one could have said,
without thought, and which, when they had served
their turn for a few nights, he remembered no longer,
and which would have been thrown away and lost for
ever had not little Toccd, who worshipped him, been
wont tenderly to collect the scattered scraps and ends
of paper on which Pascarél wrote down these fancies
in a careless stenography which served him and baffled
all others.

My own dreams that I might have any touch of
genius in me he dismissed with unutterable contempt
half gay, half tender.

“Genius!” he cried. “Cara mia, when you sa0g
in the Market-place of Verona, you were a perfect
picture, that I grant. But a dog leapt on you with
muddy paws, and you paused in your singing to brush
the snow off your yellow skirts. If you had had any
genius, singing as you sang, what would you have
known though fifty dogs should have soiled your gowal
You have no genius. Be thankful. What do women
want with it when they have as fair a face as you!
At your best you will never be more than a mandolin
which will answer in true chords to the touch of 4
fine player. You will never originate a cadence ont
whit more than the mandoline ever does.”

_ “And what shall I be at my worst?” I cried, nd
well pleased at his verdict.

“Oh, at your worst, of course, you will be te
mandoline with every string broken, like everything
else at its worst. But what is more probable is, th#
you will fall into the hands of some musician wh
will just get out of you all the vile flourishes aM
ornate fioriture which go down as good music in this

THE WANDERING ARTE. 11

all the while believing the bungler who runs
2s on you to be a great maestro.
women’s way. They always love colour better
, rhetoric better than logic, priestcraft better
sophy, and flourishes better than fugues. It
said scores of times before I said it.
’ “he pursued, thinking he had pained me,
: a bright wit enough, and a beautiful voice,
u sing without knowing very well what you
3ut genius you have not, look you; say your
ng to the Madonna at the next shrine we
genius you have not.”
t is it?”
, it is hard to tell; but this is certain, that it
unboiled into the shoes of every. pilgrim
r gets up to its Olivet.
us has all manner of dead dreams and sor-
st loves for its scallop-shells; and the palm
rries is the bundle of rods wherewith fools
en it for calling them blind.
us has eyes so clear that it sees straight
» the hearts of others through all their veils
try and simulation; and its own heart is
ften to the quick for shame of what it reads

as such long and faithful remembrance of
ds and other lives which most mortals have
, that beside the beauty of those memories
of earth seem poor and valueless.

call this imagination or idealism; the name
matter much; whether it be desire or re-
ce it comes to the same issue; so that genius,
xr beyon@ the thing it sees in infinite longing

12 PASCAREL.

for some higher greatness which it has either lost @
otherwise cannot reach, finds the art, and the humanity,
and the creations, and the affections which seem
others so exquisite most imperfect and scarcely to
endured.

“The heaven of Phzedrus is the world which
Genius—where there shall not be women but Womag,
not friends but Friendship, not poems but P
everything in its uttermost wholeness and _ perfecti
so that there shall be no possibility of regret nor any
place for desire. |

“For in this present world there is only one
which can content it, and that thing is music; becaus
music has nothing to do with earth, but sighs alwa
for the lands beyond the sun.

“And yet all this while genius, though sick
heart, and alone, and finding little in man or in womay
in human art or in human nature, that can equal wht
it remembers—or, as men choose to say, it imagine
—is half a child too, always: for something of the
eternal light which streams from the throne of Gods
always shed about it, though sadly dimmed and broken!
by the clouds and vapours that men call their atmo|
sphere. :

“Half a child always, taking a delight in the frok
of the kids, the dancing of the daffodils, the playtime
of the children, the romp of the winds with the waters,
the loves of the birds in the blossoms. Half a chilé
always, but always with tears lying close to its laughter,
and always with desires that are death in its dreams

“No; you have not genius, cara mia. Say yow

grazie at the next shrine we pass.” bad

THE WANDERING ARTE. 13

heard him with humiliation and a sense of my
littleness.

‘hough he had never cared to make gold or fame
it, there was in everything that this man did or
the indefinable charm of that originality and that
y which are called for want of a better definition
e name of genius.

nd I had dared to think my poor little trick of
which I shared with the blackbird on the cherry
h, had been genius likewise!

felt ashamed of my presumption. I had only
»—a facile and delicate talent enough, but no-
that was higher. My song was pure and flexile,
sould reach with wonderful ease high and far, as
troke of a bell sounded on high over a sunny,
ountry.

ut it was no more than the bird’s gift as it sings
: the pink cherry-blossom.

CHAPTER VIII.

Ecole Buissonniére.

f won me much love, however, amongst the
e.
mongst the people and the little troop of Pascarél
most often spoken of by my old Veronese name
Uccello.

Ithough he would never let me act, he now and
permitted me to sing to his audiences.

"henever he did give his consent, which was but
, I used to run on to the little stage with rap-
and look down on the multitude of swarthy,

PASCAREL,

ONLY A STORY. -

BY

O U I D A, A ule ¢ Tete : - se +
bd .
AUTHOR OF ‘‘TRICOTRIN,” “CHANDOS,” ETC.

Cos rte. “Me Aan bac .

COPYRIGHT EDITION.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. II.

n 7
LEIPZIG

BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ
1873.

The Right of Translation is reserved.

16 PASCAREL,

skirts, when there was no one there to hear but the

coptadini off the farms, or the straw-plaiters, and

stone-cutters of the village. These were my nights of
triumph.

But all the same, I aspired to some wider sphere.
I wanted to be heard in the cities. I wanted to take
my share in amusing the larger crowds, when we
paused in the alpine shadows of Milano, or amidst the
Romanesque wonders of Ravenna, or beneath the
aérial and gorgeous pinnacles of S. Marco.

But of this Pascarél would not hear.

“No, donzella, it is not for you,” he would answer;
and I found it of no avail to urge my cause; for
Pascarél was too Italian not to have a woollen thread
of obstinacy running here and there through the sof
bright-coloured velvets of his temperament.

“Why is it not for me?” I said, one day, as we
came down from San Marcello and went on our way
towards the little town of Pistoia.

We were that day at Gavinana, I remember; hav-
ing gone up under the chestnut trees, over the rocky
road, in the bright coolness of early morning.

The heavy June rains had swelled the mountain |

streams that were tumbling and foaming with delicious
sound far below in the Rio Gonfio. The broad green
lawn of the Vecchetto under its deep chestnut shade
was lonely and wet and fragrant, as though it had
never been steeped red in the blood of the last Re
public, and in the grove of the Doccio the thrushes
were singing where once there had shivered the lances
of Florence.

We had been talking .of those times when the
tower chimes of the little castello had all rung loudly

- THE WANDERING ARTE. 17

formo, and where the shady grass-grown market-
se, that now only echoed with the tinkle ofsa
le’s bell and the splash of its quiet fountain, had
rd the savage shouts of Spain, as great Ferruccio
pierced with a thousand wounds from pike and
aebuse, and thinking to the last of Florence.
We had been talking of all these times as we sat
our simple meal of bread and wine and melons,
ler the ancient chestnuts, and Pascarél had been
ling, as was his wont, that his lot had not been in
¢ vivid and virile days.
“There was so much more colour in those days,”
had said, rolling a big green papone before him
1 his foot. “If, indeed, it were laid on sometimes
roughly. And then there was so much more play
character. Nowadays, if a man dare go out of
common ways to seek a manner of life suited to
1 and unlike others, he is voted a vagabond, or, at
it, a lunatic, supposing he is rich enough to get the
tence so softened. In those days the impossible
$ possible—a paradox? oh, of course. The perfec-
1 of those days was, that they were full of para-
ces. No democracy will ever compass the im-
of Hope, the vastness of Possibility, with
ich the Church of those ages filled the lives of the
Orest poor. Not hope spiritual only, but hope ter-
trial, hope material and substantial. A swineherd,
id to gnaw the husks that his pigs left, might be-
me the Viceregent of Christ, and spurn emperors
tatrate before his throne. The most famished student
© girt his lean loins to pass the gates of Pavia or
Wenna, knew that if he- bowed his head: for the
ure he might live to lift it in a pontiff’s arrogance

‘ecore. LI, 2

bese ene eee ace Caney weseeeee seer ewes
great in those years, when men were fre:
heart to feel emotion and not ashamec
Think of Petrarca’s entry into Rome;

superb life of Ratfacl; think of the crow
on the lips of the Improvisatori; think of
of S. Bruno, of S. Bernard, of S. Francis;
enormous power on his generation of I
And if one were not great at all, but or
brute with stronger sinews than most |
fearless and happy brute one might be,
Hawkwood’s Lances, or fighting with the
Whilst, if one were a peaceable, gentle
turn for art and grace, what a calm, te
might lead in little, old, quiet cities, pail
saints on their tiptoes, or moulding marri
majolica! It must have been such a g
live when the world was still all open-eyed
at itself, like a child on its sixth birthday
science makes a great discovery; the tired

feels its pockets, and only asks, ‘Will it y
ran the risk of the ctake and Ginrdanc

NDERING ARTE. 2t

stinct of coquetry which comes
an in whose face men ever care
head over my shoulder, and
the eyes.

I; “I am a head taller than
‘ou seem to think me woman

to mine a regard so sudden, so
the languor and the fire of it
me like a sirocco.

oment, and caught my hands
wn were burning.

curving course of the torrent,
el of that day was done.

gus days!

them, for they were lightened
tht of my life. Never since for
omed, and fruits ripened, and
_ grasshoppers and grilli sung,
mmer of that wondrous time.
he world was flushed with the
dawn; to go through the breast-
h scarlet poppies clasping the
purple wraith of rain haunting
he hills; to watch the shadows
= dusky purple of the mountain-«
light of the cloudless day beat
6 all around; to go out into the
me with lucciole, until the dark
phosphorescent sea; to breathe
“ the first kisses of men’s love,
2 strong odours of a world of

20 PASCAREL,

singing within, and had cheered and applauc
half through the night.

I begged to be seen on the stage there, but P
was, as on all other occasions, inexorable.

‘“‘Why is not for me?” I argued with him. ‘
it is good enough for your sister, why is it nc
enough for me?”

His face flushed, and as we walked alo
road, by the foaming water, he cut impatiently
tall canes that grew by the side of the stones.

“What has that to do with it?” he answer
“Brunotta is a silly little thing, whose feet :
cleverest part about her; she cannot read, she
be harmed, she is happy in her humble estate
you—in time to come—be a great singer, if yc
There will be nothing to hinder you. But yo
not do your future such an ill-turn as to be s
my stage whilst you are too young to know
risk you would run, and all the tarnish you
gain. Besides, your father lives, no doubt, thor
find no tidings of him. I do not choose to t
chance of one day being upbraided by him for
allowed his daughter to show herself in a
amongst strolling players, whilst she was too m
a baby to dream of the life-long injury that she w
herself.”

I walked silently beside him with a swelling
and a pride sorely wounded.

A baby!

I consumed my soul in muteness and bitt
while watching the canes bend and break unc
petulant strokes, whilst the Gonfio flashed b:
amidst the pebbles of its precipitous bed,

THE WANDERING ARTE. a1

| with that instinct of coquetry which comes
to every woman in whose face men ever care
I turned my head over my shoulder, and

at him full in the eyes.

vaby!” echoed I; “I am a head taller than
, and you—you seem to think me woman

sometimes!”

ayes flashed into mine a regard so sudden, so

o ardent, that the languor and the fire of it

0 sweep over me like a sirocco.

stood still a moment, and caught my hands
2d them; his own were burning.
vent on by the curving course of the torrent,
‘nt till our travel of that day was done.
lad and gracious days!
e to linger on them, for they were lightened
sweetest sunlight of my life. Never since for
flowers blossomed, and fruits ripened, and
1urmured, and grasshoppers and grilli sung,
spring and summer of that wondrous time.
ise when all the world was flushed with the
of the earliest dawn; to go through the breast-
n at speed, with scarlet poppies clasping the
eet; to see the purple wraith of rain haunting
ry fairness of the hills; to watch the shadows
sunrays on the dusky purple of the mountain
feel the living light of the cloudless day beat
1 million pulses all around; to go out into the
the night aflame with lucciole, until the dark
ns blazed like a phosphorescent sea; to breathe
lrous air, soft as the first kisses of men’s love,
as wine with the strong odours of a world of

THE WANDERING ARTE. 23

n ironing out her dancing skirts, or standing
ring over all the gossip of the town at the well
market place with the young men and the old
TS.
unotta, with all her homage for Pascarél, was
$ averse as might have been wished to the coarse
liments of the youngsters of the places we passed
th, and on more than one occasion at our com-
nexpectedly upon her had shot round the corner
garden wall, or through the portals of a public
ng with suspicious swiftness and shyness, leaving
nfront us some sturdy contadino in his brown
and red shirt sleeves, cracking his whip over his
3 head with a sheepish look of conscious guiltiness.
undtta was certainly only a little plump brown
m pipkin of commonest clay, and had nothing in
ion with the fine porcelain of her brother’s na-
but she was a little cheery tender soul, full of
will to all living creatures; and if Pascarél saw
aults in her he never chid them, but treated her
che habitual indulgence and good-humoured ob-
| that he might have shown to a child too much
purite ever to be rebuked, but too ignorant to be
consulted or considered.
held her in sincere affection: she was very good
2, and observed with me always that wondering,
ential homage which she had from the first blended
her cordial familiarity.
You are a donzella, and Pascarél says you are
8 we are,’ was her formula always in answer to
xpostulations against the services she rendered
nd the distance which she would occasionally re-
ber to set between herself and me.

THE WANDERING ARTE. 25

igh altars were dressed with masses of roses and
ilies, and all the city was waking up to one of those
days of mingled masses and mirth which are the de-
light of the Italian popolani.

Our Arte stood brave on the green meadow, where
the grass was high along the little stream where Calan-
drino once searched for the magical stone of invisi-
bility, and that day the theatre had many rivals for the
popular favour.

All the lines of the buildings were threaded with
gay coloured lamps, to be lit when the night should
fall, and all down the cascine woods, under the oaks
and the ilex, the canvas of mountebanks’ booths,
and the bright colours of itinerant shows, and the
little dainty bell-tents of the vendors of bibiti and ber-
lingozzi were ranged one on another in a pretty plea-
sure camp.

All the day long the people were threading the
steets and the woods with that pleasure in the simple
nse of sunshine and of sociability which is charac-
teristic of the Tuscan temperament.

All the day long we wandered and laughed, and
hattered and sang songs, and ate and drank under
the trees, and watched the humours of the crowds.

‘Now big Brindellone rolled on his old historic
way; now a squadron of cavalry swept through the
‘unlight; now a bespangled acrobat turned somer-
Mults above the pines; now the athletes raced each
ther round the circle; now a negro climbed into the
Ughest foliage to set the lamps amongst the boughs;
low a troop of children danced, with great bouquets
8 their hands, to the music of some piping flute and

26 PASCAREL.

fluttering lute that heralded some saltimbank’
formance.

And everywhere the grass blew, and the ile:
dows flickered, and the magnolias opened pal
cool in the heat, and the lovers wandered away
the dim green aisles, and the mountains were dr
blue, like the ins in Maytime.

San Giovanni’s day—old as the walls of Fic
dear to her since the earliest time that she cea
be a pagan, and was baptised a Christian qui
the old basilica that is still sacred to the seer
Syrian Desert.

San Giovanni’s day,—it was the very heat
core of Florence life,—the very pearl of the pr
traditions.

Its lines of fire trace the battlements no
and no more glitter on the moonlit water; it is
slowly away, and the city instead is bidden ©
Feast of the Statute. But the Feast of the Sta
not the same thing to the people, and the he
Florence is not in it as it was in the old glo
their own St. John.

But on this day when the Arte stood benea
Apennines, and we laughed and sang under tl
shade, San Giovanni’s day was in the height
power, and had no rival, save in old King Ca
whose kingdom lay buried in the winter snow:
never clashed with the rose garlands and si
sovereignty of St. John.

It was a pagan way of deifying her patron
no doubt; but Florence is always half a pas
heart—she, the daughter of Hercules, who saw t

THE WANDERING ARTE. 2”

ig feet of Atalanta shine upon her silvery hills, and
eard the arrows of Apollo cleave her rosy air.

She cannot ever altogether forget the old cultus,
hat laughter of hers is still heathen, an echo of the
oyous ages when the symbol of immortality. was the
dutterfly on the brow of Psyche.

Pascarél, who was all pagan, laughed his glad way
hrough the day, enjoying and scattering enjoyment
droadcast; telling fortunes, selling wares in the fair,
pelting the children with confetti and ciambellini;
playing dance tunes on his mandoline; leading the
songs over the barrel of chiante broached in the shade
of the ilex, whilst half a kid smoked by a gipsy fire,
and purple plums and cherries of Prato tumbled out
of dusky rush baskets, and the great Cavolo, who is a
itular divinity in Italy, slept in rotundity and benignity
in the smoking soup-pot with his court of garlic and
of beans around him.

Italy has three kings—Cavolo, Carnivale, and Co-
comero,—and between them the reign of the seasons
Is joyous all over the land.

But Pascarél would not have been Italian soul
and body as he was if, with all his gay good-humour,
and his sunny elasticity of temper, passion, fierce and
swift as the lightning’s play, had not slumbered in

m to be roused when occasion served.

Though I had wandered with him these four
months and more, I had seldom seen him out of
temper— never ‘seen him fairly angered. But St.
Giovanni’s day showed me a little what his wrath
could be.

Little Brunotta excited it early in the morning,
When she tripped like a little sparrow down the green

28 PASCAREL.

glades of the woods in her brightest holyday gear,
with heavy silver ornaments about her, and the glories
of a new rose-coloured kirtle flashing in the sun.

“One loves the very name of the day,” said Pascartl
as we walked along under the limes that were all in
flower, with here and there shining a white rose-laure, ;
and here and there glowing a red pomegranate-tree
all in blossom. “One loves the very name of the day,
if it were only for Ariosto. It was on a St. John's
day that he saw Alessandra Benucci, with the vine
leaves on her robes, and the laurel on her golden hair,
coming through these very streets of Florence with
the strong June sun bright upon her, as the town west
mad with joy because Leo and the Palle had won the
triple crown. The dear Ariosto was a swift lover, 20
doubt, and a bold, and a most inconstant; we have
his own word for it. How could a man be otherwise
who saw in fancy that face of Angelica asleep under
her bower of wild roses? She must have paled all
living women —that perfect creature who brought
Sacripant from the Circassian hills, and Agrican from
the Caspian seas, and made a fool of even the grett
Paladin himself.”

“What is the. good of talking so about a creature
in a poem that never existed at all?” said Brundtts
who had so little imagination in her that it was bh
at times to believe in her nationality. “We, 100
met on St. John’s day; you remember that night
Pascarel?”

“Do you remember this day three years?” sh
cried to Pascarél, who had remained silent. “Wh#
weather it was! — and all that press of people on tht
bridge—and how frightened I was because the fit

h

THE WANDERING ARTE. 29

' Works hissed—and how you came behind and took

OO Fe Fre wr ray

me by the waist and lifted me down into your boat—

| andI took you for some great lord, Pascarél; do you

Femember, because you spoke so softly, and your
White coat was so fresh and clean——.”

“I remember!” said Pascarél, with petulance, cut-
ting the leaves with his cane as he went.

“Took him for a lord!” I cried. “What, did you
not know him, then?—did you not recognise him?—
how was that?”

Brunotta laughed gleefully.

“Why, it was the first time I saw him!” she cried,
and then stopped short in the middle path of the green
stadone, and stood blinking at him and me with

half-shut, frightened, shy, cunning, pretty brown eyes..

Pascarél stifled a half-dozen oaths under the droop

. Of his moustaches.

“I had been a wanderer so long,” he said, coldly,
“and Brundtta had never left her foster-mother and
her village away there in the Casentino, and knew
nothing except the names of her goats and the trick
of her straw-plaiting. Come on quicker, donzella, or
We shall miss the start of the Barberi.”

I hurried on at his desire, and Brunotta followed,
Penitently murmuring into the ear of Cocomero. I felt
that there was some secret connected with this day of
St, John.

The little scarlet-mantled, brown, saucy thing fol-
lowed us, sulkily, like a scolded child; and by the

ce of her, restless and cunning, I saw that she had

€ something amiss of which she was conscious;
but I was too happy to weary myself much with con-

. ture; what did anything really matter after all?—

30 PASCAREL.

the sun of Florence was shining above head, an
Pascarel laughed beside me.

Now, as we went along, her silver and coral
glimmered bravely on her brown throat and arms, ant
the band that she had given me caught the sunlight
in the avenue as it glistened beneath the lace veil,
which, to pleasure Pascarél, was always cast about my
head in Genoese fashion, in preference to any other
head-dress.

Pascarél’s eyes flashing uneasily from her to meas
we hurried to see the riderless horses start from the
gates, caught for the first time the perception of some
new Ornament upon us both.

He paused suddenly in the midst of the greea
walk, whilst the other pleasure-seekers streamed 08
unnoticed.

“Where did that trinket come from, donzella!
he asked me, the swift Italian anger lighting up his
eyes.

“Brunotta gave it me this morning,” I answered
him, attaching no import to the answer. .

But he apparently attached much, for he tum
sharply round upon her as she followed us with the
two lads.

“And who gave it to you, Brunotta?” he asked
“And how came you by those silver and coral get
gaws that are all new on you I see?”

Brunotta flushed under her sun-burnt skin, and
shifted herself uneasily on to one foot like a litt
ruffled duck ill at ease.

“Rossello Brin gave them to me,” she muttered. |
- Rogsello Brin! And who, pray, may that bel
asked Pascarél, pausing there under the ilex shadow

THE WANDERING ARTE. 31

he angry light increasing in his eyes, and a
Ss impatience betraying itself on all his flexile
28.
‘nnunziata Brin’s brother, the sailor. He is
is people a little while, in the Sdrucciold,” mur-
. Brunotta, with her heart fluttering in her
“TJ had a bit and drop with ’Nunziata yester-
hen you were in the botteza with the signorina
ull that ugly pottery; and Rossello is a fair-
1, honest man, and he had just come from Sicily
rought the things; and he had seen the donzélla
street with you, and thought her handsome, and
s been friends with me for ever and ever so
And the corals and things were for me, and
Iver fillet for the signorina. And where is the
I am sure there is no harm. Other women
ll they can lay their hands on——”
nd since when have you been in the practice of
ng them?” asked Pascarél.
hould not have thought that his voice could
sounded so sternly, or that his eyes could
iad so fierce a flame in them as they had now
he stood before the palpitating and frightened
ta.
[ave you taken gifts before?” he asked at
» when he had waited some time for her to

unotta shifted herself on to the other foot, and
ne little plump finger in her rosy mouth like a
2n baby.

Not often,” she muttered at last; but it was easy
: fhe denial was a lie, and a lie not easy to tell

*

32 PASCAREL.

with that full sunlight and those searching eyes falling
relentlessly upon her.

Her glances were roving restlessly from place to
place, going in every direction, rather than encounter
the gaze of Pascarél; and suddenly the sullen, emba-
rassed trouble on her face cleared; a look of eager
relief lightened it; she espied an object upon whicht
divert the anger of the moment from herself.

“There is poor Rossello!” she said, with the cooks
treachery in the world. “Go and scold him—his 8
the fault; not mine!”

With a true woman’s justice she surrendered het
accomplice to cause a diversion in her own favour.

She pointed out as she spoke a brown, loftily-bak
man in a sailor’s dress, who stood amongst a troop of
people round a pole, on which a spangled acrobt
was climbing; the sailor affected to be absorbed in tt
gymnastics, but his restless, glittering eyes roved ert!
and again from the meadow where he stood to tht
avenue in which we were pausing. '

Pascarél, without a word, lightly loosened tt
trinkets off Brundtta’s throat and wrists, and invited
me, by a gesture, to unfasten the band from my hal;
with all the ornaments in his hands, he swept out of
the stradone and across the pasture on which th
tumblers and climbers were performing hard agaist
the old pozzo of Narcissus.

We stood motionless, and following him with ou
eyes; a vague fear fell upon us all, and Brundtta, wh
always wept easily, began to shake her little shouldes
and sob.

“He will kill him, as like as not,” whispered Cocr
mero, to whom it seemed the passions of his

THE WANDERING ARTE. 33

e not unknown terrors and tragedies. “Do you
remember, Brunotta, that day two years ago when
was angry at’Ravenna!—nhe as good as murdered
count for kissing you in the fair, and throwing
ta gold piece for payment?”

Brunotta sobbed aloud that she remembered only
well, and that the count had meant nothing but
irtesy, and that it was terrible to have to deal with
man all lightning and gunpowder as Pascarél was
mly a word went wrong.

Meanwhile, across the sunny green meadow, strode
carél, with that habitual action of his, which was
swift as a bird’s, and as light as a woman’s.

We stood and watched, powerless and breathless.
ere was the lofty pole of the acrobat, the climber
ft in a blaze of spangles, a particoloured crowd
fing upward, a belt of green boughs, and in the
Ist of it all the figure of the marinaro.

Pascarél cut through the throng as a sickle through
eat, and went straight to where the sailor was, and
sed the trinkets into his face.

The chattering of the eager crowd drowned every
rd he spoke, but a space between the gymnast and
spectators left the forms of Pascarél and of Ros-
lo Brin plain before us in the sunlight.

The Sicilian stood like one stupefied for a moment,
wildered, no doubt, by the sudden flash of the
taments in his eyes; then the silver and the coral
l together in a little heap on the turf, and the sailor
tched a long knife from his girdle.

We saw the naked blade of it, like a snake’s
Dgue, glitter in the hot keen air.

The people did not see; they were staring upward

Pacer, II, 3

34 | PASCAREL.

at the acrobat, and discussing furiously with one |
another the chances there were that the pole would

break beneath him, and the pole was at that instant
bending like a reed, and the poor clown was in
jeopardy; and the Florentines had neither eyes nor
_ ears for any other thing than that reeling mast against
the trees, and the gambling that they were rejoicing
their hearts with on its hazards.

We alone, left in the stradone, saw that deadly
flash of the southern steel.

Brundtta screamed, and hid her eyes, and fell upon
her knees, crying to the Virgin; but I said nothing.

I stood and gazed with wide-opened eyes, ut
blenching, like one turned to stone.

Before the dagger could sheath itself in his breast
Pascarél, with one of his lithe and subtle movements,
sprang and caught the sailor’s arm in the air, and
held it there fixed as in a vice. Then, throwing his
other arm round Rossello, he wrestled with him and
flung him backwards on the turf with a dull, hollow
crush that resounded above all the glad tumult of the
people’s wagers.

He twisted the knife out of the Sicilian’s hand,
snapped it across his own knee, and tossed the frag-
ments across the meadow.

Then he walked back to us through the sunshine,
calm and colourless, and with no trace of anger 00
his face, singing half aloud to himself as he came the
burden of one of my songs. :

“Do not take things again, Brundtta,” he sald,
gently. “It 1s bad for those who give them to you
That pole there will not break, though the people

THE WANDERING ARTE. 35

ld give their souls it should. Let us go and see
Barberi.”

“But you might have killed him!” I murmured
athlessly, clinging to his arm in terror still.

He smiled down into my face.

“Altro! Of course I might have done, and I ‘shall
bably be very sorry that I did not before the sands
life are run out with me. But you see, signorina
” laughed Pascarél, “Florentines were always
gnanimous, that is well known. Don’t you remember
great Asses Bell that tolled day and night for a
oth before we went to war ‘for greatness of mind,
t the foe might have full time and warning to
pare himself.’ To be sure, Semifonte, and the
bona, and a few other little trifles are to be set
against our generosity; but what would you!—
n Florentines are human.”

No one had interfered.

To an Italian combat seems the natural issue of
‘quarrel, and a murmur went through the crowd
‘iealousy!” which explained the action to the satis-
ion of all.

Rassello Brin accepted his beating quietly, if he
ylved in himself to take vengeance some dark night
a lonely passage-way; and Pascarél’s passion, as
wsient as it was violent, left no trace on him to
r his sunny and good-humoured enjoyment of the
Jealousy?

As I heard the whispered word pass from mouth
mouth in the laughing sightseers, I felt my cheek
nm and my heart beat high. No man is jealous of
givter; so then his wrath had been for me?

3°

36 PASCAREL.

It was pleasant for me to think so; pleasant with
a sweet, tumultuous, unrestful wonder that I could
not altogether understand, but that made the rest of
San Giovanni’s feast hours burn brighter than any that
had gone before.

I remember in the fair under the trees Pascarl
that afternoon bought Brundtta, to console her, 4
gorgeous necklace of silver and great amber beads,
with a medallion of the Madonna, gleaming in majy
colours, suspended from the chain. But for mek
only bought a beautiful ivory-white magnolia, jut
opened, with all the spices of Asia in its breath.

“It is a cup fit for the King of Thule,” said be
as he handed it to me.

The necklace cost several lire, and the flower but
a copper piece; but I would not have changed ny
magnolia for all the jewels that ever gleamed in Gol
conda.

CHAPTER X.
On the Hills.

SOMETIMES there would be brought a message
Pascarél from some old rambling white castello st
on a hill slope, with all its treeless mountain side bar
and brown as a man’s hand—a message bidding bw
come up thither and amuse its duca or cavalier
where he yawned through the listless day, in the
vast stone chambers, with no sound to break the
monotony of the hot hours, except the shrill saw
the cicala and the fall of the water in the fountain ®
the court.

But Pascarél never would obey that sort of summom

THE WANDERING ARTE. 37

‘The signore can come to me,” he would arswer
1e messenger, and send him back as he had come,
g the blinding bleak ascent to the old villa where
ood with blistered walls in the midday sun.
‘Dio! Not I, if I know it!” he would say to |
16tta, who always would fain have gone up to the
t house, as she urged that there was sure to be
i chiante and savoury messes steaming and stewing
ewhere towards three o’clock in the day; and
16tta was of opinion with the Giant Morgante that
er at least was no dream.
‘Toil up that hill in the sun,” he would reply, “to
e a bow to Don Antonio or Ser Lorenzo, as he
out of his siesta after a surfeit of quails!—what!
and fuss oneself before sunset over French drol-
s and Florentine oddities in the face of his Illus
imo, to be rewarded with a yawn and a conces-
that one is not so very poor, after all, for a
ling player, and a little pitiful wonder that one
never tried one’s fortunes at the Logge theatre?
I, if I know it. If illustrissimi want to crack their
s with laughter, let them come down into the
xy to my little wooden house, and see if I can
ie them do it there. I shall never go to them,
is certain.”
And he never did: having a good infusion of
inacy in his disposition, and, along with his Flo-
Ine republicanism, some lingering reluctance, no
bt, more or less strong in him, for the last of the
2 mighty Pascarélli to bend his body as a comedian,
tune his mandoline in old houses in which his
ers had feasted as equals or harried as con-
OFS,

38 PASCAREL.

The Pascarélli had been cut down, root and branch,
stem and twig, centuries before, in one of those rut
less and complete destructions by massacre, and exik,
and confiscation with which so many of the histones
of the old territorial races end abruptly, like great
hardy oaks uprooted and smitten through and through,
and blackened to the youngest crown of leaf by 4
thunderbolt.

It was all a thing of the past—such a far, far away
past, too; it was all emptiness, rubbish, weakness—
anything contemptible and absurd that you mt
choose to call it. So he said.

But all the same, Pascarél, who had fought for
the coronet on the smelting-pot when he was a litte
bare-legged rogue, ,scouring the country from fair
fair, Pascarél had something of the pride of race
him; and he would not go up to villa or castello, ™
not if it were ever so, to pleasure the noble yawnig
there among the vine shadows on the marble floors, 2
the long, hot days when the very lizards seemed
pant in the cracks of the earth, and the very stoné
seemed to shiver in their whiteness and their naked:
ness because no moss would cover and no dew would
cool them.

Sometimes the “illustrissimi,’ nothing daunted 90
offended, did come down from their hill fastnesses
their olive thickets to the fair or the festa, where thel
peasant folk were laughing their hearts out in the
little wooden house of Pascarél, and they would pay
their money and enter and laugh too, which they wer
welcome to do, as far as he was concerned, though
the populace would as soon have been rid of them.

Life was very dull, no doubt, in those long sui

THE WANDERING ARTE. 39

ners to those noble people in those vast dusky, silent
wellings up there on the bare-swept side of some
pur of the Apennines or the loneliness of some
tiulian or Emilian hollow, lined grey with olives, as
bird’s nest with sheep’s wool.

Life was very dull, no doubt, to them, watching
¢ waste amongst their vines, or chronicling the cones
‘their silkworms, there in the old places where their
thers had rioted with Ezzelino as the slaughter went
1 in the cells of St. George, and had ridden love-
ids in Sicida with the Biandrati.

Life was very dull, no doubt; and now and then
me one of them would find his way into the little
satre glimmering brightly with its oil lights under
2 silvery moonlit leaves on the edge of some moun-
n village or hamlet of the marches, and there
1ongst the stone-cutters, and the vine-dressers, and
> goat-herds, would sit and smile at the pasquinades
Pascarél, and call for him as vociferously as the
st, “Fuori! fuori!” when the curtain fell.

Amongst those now and then there would be some
scure lordling with a face like an Attavante minia-
re, or some young Sordello, fretting his soul in the
motony of his war-wasted and tax-shaven fief; and
ese would surely find their way behind the little
ige to us, and offer to Brundtta many gay compli-
ents, and to me very graceful phrases, backed most
ely on the morrow with flasks of montepulciano
d great clusters of camellias or magnolia flowers.

Pascarél was wont to break the necks of the good
ne with an angry twist of his wrist, and pour it out
a headlong fashion to all the country folk of the

40 PASCAREL,

place, touching none of it himself. He always dealt
in this mode with any gifts from the villas.

“Let them leave us alone,” he would say, imps
tiently. “They paid their coin at the door, I suppose:
there is nothing more needed of them. The wine!
want to drink I can buy; and when I can afford t
buy it no longer, there is always a public well m
every square for any ass to drink at, heaven be
praised!”

“Che—e—e—e!” murmured Brunotta, wonder
ingly, at such outbursts. “That is odd indeed. You
were not like that in the old times, Pascarél. When
the hke of those noble lads came, they were welcome,
and you would laugh and drink with them just a
well as with the others. What is your quarrel nov!’

Pascarél would toss a wrinkled pomegranate p
into the sunshine.

“What does it signify? None that I know of: th
good townsfolk of Bergamo yonder cut the throats of
a hundred odd Calabrians, as you may have heard,
because they carved the wings of the fowls in a wrong
fashion at supper. We Italians are an unaccountable
people. We take our likes and our dislikes hot and
strong, and neither gods nor devils can change us.”

After which profanity he would slake his this

with the pomegranate.

One day only he broke through this rule.

At one time, when we were wandering through
the hills that lie round the plain in which the little
brave walled city of Lucca stands, there came to him
many urgent messages from a villa on the mountails
praying him to go up thither, because the heir aad
only son of the house was a child and a cripple,

THE WANDERING ARTE. 41

t stir from his threshold to gain any amuse-
distraction of his pain.
rél resisted long, then gave way to the im-
compassion, which was always stronger with
any prudential or personal consideration.
the sun went down, we left our village where
len Arte had been set up under a clump of
trees, and we took our way along the face of
to where the great villa had stood long be-
he old days when Lucca had hung upon her
: chains of her freed Castracani.
él had been inclined to leave me in the
2’s cottage which served us for an inn; but I
red and besought him to let me go with them
y, that he who seldom found the force to re-
let me have my way, and I walked beside
ugh the thick, rough herbage full of blue
nd the white stars of Bethlem, and the many-
cups of wild anemones, Brunodtta and the
following in our wake, along the side of the
ere the little, brown, bare mule track wound
up, and up into the heights.
wel had the lute slung across him; and as we
> sang to it staves of contadini choruses, of
ys, and the like, such as the peasants sang as
led the oxen through the fields or searched
phis in the vine leaves.
and then the kids scampered from our path;
then a puff of blue wood-smoke rose through
thes from some charcoal-burner’s cabin; now
, some great magnolia flower shivered its rosy
itt our feet; far away down below, we could
Ave Maria chiming from the church towers

UiCalilis Vi ALIS.

We looked up at it through the trac
boughs of the cistus, and the ilex, and
and we thought of the skies of Raffac
changed the gay allegro of the popular so1
thoughts of great Palestrina and antique
of Lasso; and so went along the hill-path
cate light, and were glad of heart becau:
was beautiful like this, and we were fr
hither and thither in its soft air as we wo

No northern landscape can ever have
change of colour as the Italian fields and I
mer. Here the fresh vine foliage, hangi
climbing, in all intricacies and graces tk
tered the fancies of green leaves. There
let, towering like the plumes of warriors, v
their stalks the golden lizard glitters.
swathes of new-mown hay, starred over wi
of every hue. There a thread of water
with waving canes. Here the shadowy ar
wheat, rustled by wind and darkened by pa:

THE WANDERING ARTE. 43

tis only the common country where the oil and
: and corn are pressed and reaped; it goes for
ues and leagues and leagues, over many a perished
and unrecorded battle field, everywhere where the
is tilled between the mountains and the sea; it is
le and lowly enough, and no poet that I know of
sung it; but it is beautiful exceedingly, and its
; would be the despair of any painter.

The villa was high upon the mountain side—vast,
cy, crumbling, desolate without, as all such places

and within full of that nameless charm of free-
|, Space, antiquity, and stillness, that does no less
retually belong to them.

Where these old villas stand on their pale olive
es, those who are strange to them see only the
ing plaster, the discoloured stone, the desolate
ts, the grass-grown flags, the broken statues, the
ying vines, the look of loneliness and of decay.

But those who know them well love them and
n otherwise; learn the infinite charm of those vast
%t halls, of those endless echoing corridors and
sters, of those wide wind-swept, sun-bathed cham-
t, of those shadowy logge, where the rose glow of
oleander burns in the dimness of the arches; of
© immense windows wreathed with sculpture and
d with the glistening silver of olive woods, and
intain snows, and limitless horizons; of those great
wdths of sunlight, of those white wide courts, of
tangled gardens, of those breezy open doors, of
wild rose trees climbing high about the A¢trurian
0, of those clear waters falling through acanthus
es, into their huge red conche; of that sense of

44 PASCAREL.

infinite freedom, of infinite solitude, of infinite light,
and stillness and calm.

A stranger will see but the nakedness of the place,
and the sadness thereof, by reason of its impovensh
ment and of its age; but let him wait a little in that
marble silence where the cicala rings from dawn to
eve, let him wander a little in those peaceful ways
where the lemon boughs are golden against the mo-
nastic walls, let him live a little in that liberty of ar
and sunshine where the vines uncurl in the drowsy
warmth and the tulips spread a thousand colours to
the sun, let him rest a little in it all, and after awhle
all other places will seem surely to him dark and nat
row, and gaudy and full of noise, and in their hue
and substances soulless and meagre, and a litte
coarse, beside the old white villa on the silent olive
hills.

It belonged.to a great family, and the old chat
bers were still full of ancient and costly treasures;
though the outside walls had long been peeled bare
by the sun and the winds, and weeds might grow 4
they. would amongst the oleanders and camellia trees
on the stone terraces.

Italy cannot be trim and smirk in modern ws
and modern gear; half muse, half mzenad as she
with the thyrsus and the calliope in her hands, and
her feet scorched by the smoke of war, she can nt
ther deck herself with theatric paint and power, no
gird herself with a housewifely care and prudence.

The wild vine on her blown hair, the old Etruscaa
gold on her bare breast, the tangle of knotted ivy a
about her loins, the snow of the field-lilies wreathing

THE WANDERING ARTE. 45
tiful bruised arms,—these are her only orna-

1er alone with them.
'S best so.

CHAPTER XI.
The Hobble of Lead.

went into the great open court of the villa
he last sun rays died away behind the hills;
flicking his mandoline into harmony with the
e song which he was humming to himself.

' brought us wines and meats in the great
oggia, where the fig leaves curled around the
ny gold of the traventine cornice.

moon rose; all ate and laughed and jested;
servants stood and looked on and gossiped
thed too; great puffs of odour were blown, by
rreeze, from the magnolias.

is how one lives in Italy, sauntering, talking,
dreaming, always in the open air, always
the flowers, always finding the people ready
their arms on an old wall and exchange some
moured chit-chat while the lizards run in and
stones and the nightingale sings in the ilex

1 we went within to the central hall, where
ed platform built for musicians was to serve

stage. When all was ready we saw that
the lad of the house was a cripple, indeed,
3 carried in on his couch by a servant, the
s at that moment full of gay people strayed

é

46 PASCAREL.

over from the baths in the hills above Lucca and from
the sea places of Spezzia and Livorno.

As Pascarél watched the hall fill with them from
behind the screen that was drawn across our stage, @
dark displeasure flushed his face; he saw that he had
been tricked into coming thither to arouse a set of
idlers. But there was no help for it; he had agreed
to play, and play he did in two of his own briefest
wittiest, gayest, most sparkling and most satirical
pieces.

“But you shall not sing for them, donzella,” he
said with an oath in his throat. “You shall not sm
a note for them, that I swear.”

I who was proud of my talent in that way, and
had set my heart on displaying it to those brilliast
looking persons, was sorely chagrined at his decisios,
and had I loved him less I should have rebelled
against it. :

As it was, I sat in mute unwilling submission on
a stool behind the screen, through the chinks of which
I could see the great dim hall, the oil-lamps, th
group of noble people at the farther end, the door
ways filled with the eager faces of the household, th
high windows open to the night, and the pale flood of
moonlight that poured through them across the marble
floor.

Perhaps in the solitude of those chesnut woods
idlers ceased to be critical; or perhaps the genius of
Pascarél and the mirth of him swept languor af
apathy before it, as fogs are swept away by sé
winds.

Whichever it was, as he played to them, they wert
stirred to almost as much enthusiasm as though they

THE WANDERING ARTE. 47

e his general audience of vine-dressers and pewterers
. cobblers and shepherds; first in his comedietta,
‘re the irony bit as sharply as aquafortis, and then
t bright, airy, satirical grotesque, graceful sort of
que, in which all his little troop were concerned
. in which he was wont to improvise the most
ging verses that would suit the humour of the
ment, with all the skill and all the salt that ever
enzo Cavelli himself could have displayed when
lampooned the Tedeschi from under the old three-
nered hat of Tuscan Stenterello.

And yet very bitter were his rhymes that night;
wered in profusion from his flexile lips like
ond blossoms shaken downward in an April
bze.

Very bitter;—I was not sure why;— perhaps
ause he had been thus entrapped into beguiling
lazy hours of a few rich people, or perhaps because
truck him a little hardly that he should come as a
lling player into old feudal places where the Pas-
‘li Princes would have only come with a herald’s
e ‘of defiance and a flutter of the Red Lily on a
te standard in the sun.

Whichever it was, or whether both in one, it gave
additional burnish to the gold coinage of his wit
;night; he had never been keener, subtler, swifter,
. he strung his glittering pasquinades together on
finest silken chord of decorous derision.

“A clever rogue,” I heard one of the villa people
when they leaned on their couches in the shadow
the great vine-canopied windows, and another
nting, murmured back:

“Beaumarchais and Lemaitre in one; what does

48 PASCAREL.

he do here strolling with a wooden booth? T!
' might make his hundred francs a night in Paris

Then, the thing being over, they called him
and again upon the platform before the screen
had served for all his scenery, and yet agai
satisfied, summoned him by a servant to go
hall and speak to them in person.

But thereto Pascarél gave point blank refus:

“Go and tell your illustrissimi,” said he, ‘
bow to them upon the stage because I belong
public whilst I am in my art; but the moment
cease to play I cease to be an artist; and wi
personally they have no more to do than w
holiest Holiness the Pope.”

And when the servant having delivered thi
sage, or more probably having translated it int
politer guise, they sent again and yet again w
happier result; and in the end the illustrious ;
themselves being curious as to who could thus
amuse them without any adjuncts of scenery
coration, came down the hall to visit this contun
stroller who deliberately refused to obey the inv
which he should have construed humbly into :
mand.

Pascarél received them with the frank noncl
of his habitual manner, which never varied
time for prince or peasant. Being a Florenti
was a little curter, a little cooler with the fin
with the last; that was all.

The great persons essayed in all ingeniou
to discover his history and his reasons for s
across the country like a mountebank when |
a talent that would make him welcome on th

THE WANDERING ARTE. 49

ous boards of Europe. But Pascarél was too truly
an not to be as impenetrable at some moments as
was transparent at other.
“Tuscan eyes can say everything, or can say no-
ig,” and Pascarél’s eyes as well as his lips and his
tures and his inflections of voice were truly Tus-
in this sense.
Had he cared, he could have been as fine and as
tle a master of craft as ever was he who studied
a and their motives under the boughs of the Ru-
ai gardens. But it would have been too much
ible for him, and the rule of his temper was
ikness.
Whilst they talked with him they gazed at me
le I leaned against the screen.
As I had come to a great house my vanity had
_me, careless of the heat, to take out my old
us dress of amber satin and purple velvet, which
tept for feast days and high holyday, loving its
hness, its weight, its very incongruousness; treasur-
fit too a little because I had worn it that day
en he had given me the ring of the Fates.
,One of the villa guests, a man young and hand-
me, with a look that was familiar to me in his eyes,
id me many graceful compliments, and gleaned
mme much more about the life we led than his
could gather from Pascarél. Hearing that I
pines sang in our theatre, and was called l’Uccello
ithe people, he brought the mandoline from a corner
fe it had been cast down, and eagerly entreated
one song at least.
elanced at Pascarél; his face grew very dark.
u sing to villagers, why not to us?” urged the

& ff. 4

50 PASCAREL.

foreigner with that look on his face which startled me
with some vague remembrance. “It seems to me that
your impresario keeps the fairest constellation in his
histrionic heaven for his own especial pleasure; that
is scarcely just to his audience;—or to the star her-
self.”

The boldness of his eyes and the insolence of his
accent gave more meaning to his words than shone
upon their surface. Pascarél listening keenly, though
affecting to be in converse with the seigneur of the
place, Pascarél swung round, his changeful eyes flashing
and stormy in his wrath; and took the answer from
me in hot haste.

“My histrionic heaven does not open its gates for
gold. I came to-night thinking to pleasure a sick lad
I find that I was tricked into whiling the empty hous
of a herd of idlers. I have given you what I choos,
and you shall have nothing that I do not choose. Put
the money you would pay me in the poorbox of your
chapel, and learn for once, oh, most illustrious, that
we of Florence never were docile to dictation yet’

With that sole sudden outbreak of the anger which
had been gathering in him all the evening through
since he had first seen that lie had been decoyed
thither on an exaggerated pretext, he swept the mat
doline from my lap, signed to the two lads to follow
him, and with a salutation to the owner of the vila,
took my hand with his gravest grace and led me from
the hall. -

The people he had thus suddenly abandoned welé
too amazed or too incensed to follow him. We wet
out unmolested into the moonlight.

Their servant indeed -was sent after him with 4

THE WANDERING ARTE. 51

sent in money, and even a silver box em-
1 the count’s own arms; but Pascarél tossed
ck again with so impetuous a disdain and
x a torrent of fiery words, that the bearer
or, crying aloud that he never had thought
2d to see the day when a Florentine would
d a payment.

iat we went on in silence down the white
s and under the avenues of ilex and cypress,
| the rear, and shaking her little plump
1 pitiful sobs, because she would have had
supper if only Pascarél had not been so
she had seen it all laid out on the table
a, and she had even smelt it too; for the
unotta found their paradise in

(< ‘Un’ oca beurica piu che burre,” }

' juicy dainties, and she had all Pulci’s

**Qualche fratta frutta,” )

ke poor stuff for supper; being hardly
ll in her tastes, except so far as her love
nd of dancing may be counted to her

for once did not attempt to console her,
on apace through the gardens. He did
his steps nor speak until he was out of
f their vineyards, and once more on the
long the side of the hills.
‘ turned to me, for him a little roughly.
nade you look so much, donzella, at that
1 who bade you sing? You were half in-
» his bidding—too!”

4*

52 PASCAREL.

“He had a look of my father in his eyes,” I at-
swered him dreamily, still haunted by the vague and
shadowy resemblance. .

“Ah! what, was that all?” laughed Pascarél, with
a contented sound in his voice.

All! it seemed to me that it was very much.

I was always pursued by the fancy that perchance
some day or another those very great people to whom
my father undoubtedly belonged would somewher
arise and claim me.

In the old time I had wished it fervently, and
spent upon the vision of it many golden hour d
fancy, but now it made me shudder a little. No lift
could seem more perfect to me than the one I led
Even my father himself I had some fear rather that
much strong desire of meeting.

“Why were you so angered against them!” |
asked him in counter question. “They meant wel,
I think; and I heard one of them say that with you
genius you would make a hundred francs a night 0
Paris?”

In the moonlight, as he walked beside me, I s¥
the quick disdain smile on his mobile lips.

“If I could make a thousand—still I should los
my liberty.”

“But you would be famous?”

“Famous? Oh yes! About as much so as the bull
they decorate for Mardi Gras, and léad about with
music, and eat afterwards in stews and _ steaks.
day’s carnival of flowers, and then the chopping-blo&
of the critical butchers, and then annihilation in thé
teeth of the world’s oblivion;—a player’s fame |as®

THE WANDERING ARTE. 53

; as long as the bull’s. But perhaps—if you wish
donzella,—perhaps——” |

“Perhaps what?”

“Perhaps—one day I will go up for my Mardi
as and risk my murder afterwards, if you have a
icy to handle my paper laurels in those soft little
gers of yours. Perhaps?—Who knows?”

So we went on along the rough hill-side, and
scaré] recovered the serenity of his temper, and
ain strains of Pergolesi and of Lasso were heard
the moonlight as we went down through the glisten-

' herbage with the smell of the flowering vines
ng up to us from the plains below.

It was midnight when we reached the little village
a cleft amongst the rocks and chestnut woods where
* temporary home had been made.

All its small world was asleep. There was no light
rept where a knot of fireflies burned under the
at leaves of the gourds and the pumpkins in the
itadina’s gardens.

Where our wooden Arte was planted, its red and
ite flag drooped in the moonlight and the clear
Ywsy air, as though it were sad to think how in
ier times its scarlet giglio had been borne in victory
ft over clumps of spears along that plain beneath
rere Lucca lay.

Pascarél glanced up at his flag as he passed his
eatre.

“I told you truly, donzella,” he said, with a cer-
tn sadness in his voice, “truly, the night I saw you
mt, that Art, being once weighed by the gold it
Fings, changes the Hermes’ wings it lent you for an
t's hobble of leather and lead. Like the ass, you

54 PASCAREL.

can graze so shackled, but it is all that you can do.
Unhappily women always prefer grazing to Aying.
Sarto’s wife has many sisters.”

With that he bade me go within, for we had to
rise with the sun on the morrow; and as I undressed
by the light from the gleaming skies I could hear the
little shrill voice of Brunétta still piping its laments
tions over the savoury meats she had lost, and through
the casement screen of the vine leaves I could see the
shadow of-Pascarél passing slowly to and fro along
the slip of turf in front of the porch, thinking his own
thoughts, no doubt, of the paper laurels and the
~ hobble of lead. |

And all the while the living fires of the licciole
burned above the green seas of flax and maize, and
shone like clusters of fallen stars along the side of
Shelley’s Serchio.

CHAPTER XII.
The Legend of the Licciole.

“THE pretty licciole; one cannot wonder that the
poets love them, and that the children believe thet |
to be fairies carrying their little lanterns on thet
road to dance in the magic circle under the leaves 2
the woods.

“But you know what the licciole really are? No!
Oh, for shame!

“T heard it when I was a boy from a dark-eyed
woman, with a mouth like a rose, who leaned dow®
from her loggia in the summer-time, and gle
them from the acanthus coils to set them in her hast

THE WANDERING ARTE. 55

“The lucciole are just this: they are all the love
rords that are spoken in Italy.

“For these are so eager and tender and burnin
hat no other land hears their like, as they fall fron
fhe lovers’ lips in the lustrous moonlit midnights, '
when the mask is thrown down with the knots of
roses, and the ball is left far away and forgotten, and :
dhe hands are folded fast in one another, and the |
waft sighs tremble to silence in the softer warmth of)
ifaresses.
| “Now, long, long ago, the god Eros, who has
always reigned supreme in this land, the god Eros,
foating one summer night, as is his wont, from bal-
fony to balcony, from breast to breast, breathing
through mortal mouths those amorous ardours, be-
thought himself that it was sad that things so beauti-
ful should perish with a breath, and to himself, thus
musing, said:—

“«These murmuring and burning words,—surely
they should be deathless, for they are so old, so old,
and yet they are so new, and no man’s mouth is
weary of them, and no woman’s ear is tired. They
Ought surely to live for ever. They are too perfect to
die with a breath. See—I whom men call Love—I will
\give these sweet words wings, and let their fire burn
in them like the stars, and fling them out upon the
simmer nights, and let them live their lives in glory
there amongst the dewy darkness of the myrtle and
the blush flowers of the wild pomegranate. And so
0 love word shall be ever lost, but shine amidst the
flowers as a lucciola.’

“As Eros said so did he; wherefore the lucciole
Bam in millions all through the months of summer

|

we Ie:

* Same,

56 PASCAREL.

whilst the magnolias shed their rose-flushed arrows on -
the balconies, and the vine shadows dreamily darken 1
the logge wherever the lovers lean.

“Year after year they burn, tender and fitful fires,
along the green garden ways and under the women’s.
casements—deep in a lily’s white heart, or high where:
the rose-laurels climb. |

“Some say they die in a day; some say they live
on for ages. Who shall tell? They look always the

“For are they not winged words of passion—the
same yesterday, to-day, and for ever?

“And this is the truth of the lucciole.

“Let him who doubts, walk abroad in the gorgeous
nights of the midsummer, when ‘they make pale the
red oleander, and light to flame the magnolia white
ness, while the notes of the lute thrill the stillness,
and under the shade of the ilex two shadows lean one
on the other.

“He will doubt no more then—if he love.”

* * % % %

I heard Pascarél tell this legend a few nights later
on in the sultry June weather, when the licciole were
bright over all the land; sparkling in the grasses,
dancing in the boughs, clustering around the cort-
stalks, and lighting the chestnut forests.

We were in a little village in the mountains, 4
little beautiful green nook in a deep gorge with one
of the many hill-torrents bubbling and foaming head: |
long down its rocks. The people had clustered round .
him at sunset, and had caressed him, and clamourté ;
for a song, a story, a personation, anything; and kk
with a touch or two of the mandoline, and leaning by, |

|

THE WANDERING ARTE.. 57

k against a great castagno tree, had rhymed for
m, in the quick improvisation that was at once
ure and habit with him, and strung together for
s knot of charcoal burners and of quarry workers
ngs of golden fancies and pearls of wit and wis-
n.

All kinds of poetic imaginations and of quaint
iceits fell lightly into rhythm off his lips with all

tender, gay, sympathetic humour of Puléi and of
ni in them. He had refused to pleasure the noble
rs in the white villa above the Serchio, but he
tudged nothing to this little community of rough
‘sters as they gathered about him under the
dow of the chestnuts with the warmth of the after-
w and the dreamy obscurity of the descending
ht upon their upturned faces.

Many things that he said may have been obscure
them, for when the mood for speech was on him
forgot all except the thoughts which thronged upon

fertile and lavish fancy. Yet they in a manner
lerstood it all, for the Italian peasant is quickly
ched to “fine issues,” and has a poetic pathos in |
a1 which utters itself in his rhymed rispetti and
melli.

He had chosen the better part, no doubt, since he
S so content; in wandering thus amongst his country
ople he was free as any swallow on the wing. But

had said truly, Sarto’s wife has many sisters; to
men the crowns of Francis seem ever better than
ace of conscience and immunity from care. As I
cked at him where he stood under the broad green
isdows of the chestnut, with the starlight of the early

upon his face, and the musical, sonorous Tuscan

58 PASCAREL.

rhythm coursing off his tongue, I could not but
that the world knew him as I knew him; tha
great people of the great cities should be his au
rather than these labourers of the mountains an
forests.

I wanted to fasten the gilded string round
foot and draw the broidered hood over the ey
my free and fearless hawk, in leu of leaving hi
lean on the wild west wind and spread his win
the sun in full liberty: that is to say, child thor
was, I was a woman.

A little later, when he had shaken himself |
from the people, and we were sitting under the c
nuts alone on the edge of the hillside with
lucciole-lightened plain before us, far, far down b
I returned to the old story with which in those
I must sadly and often have teazed him. I trie
hard, I know, to persuade him that the hobble of
was a golden band that fastened only more firml)
pinion of Hermes. But he shook his head and laut
and would not be convinced.

“What would you?” he said, almost impatie
the last. “I am not the great genius you think
I am only a wandering idler with a trick of
tongue, that half the peasants in the country §
with me, and a whole knapsack of droll, quaint,
of-the-way fancies as jumbled and, perhaps, as wi
less as the odds and ends of a curiosity dealer's
row.

“T promised you last night to go up for the p
laurels? Nay, ‘promise’ I never did. I saidIm
to please you. But not even to please you, I #

THE WANDERING ARTE. 59

I ever bring myself to go into harness. The
dic life is what suits me.

Women do not see the beauty of it—no! They
or ever breaking bounds and roaming in imagina-

but it is always into some land flowing with
and honey, and abounding in creature comforts.
. my divine Angelica never forgot a banquet.

I do not care for banquets, and I care very
1 for liberty.
You cannot alter me, my donzella. Nature cast
in her gipsy mould so many years before ever
were born. It may sound very shocking to say
yut between ourselves I have very little doubt, I
e you, that Menighella’s life was a great deal
ier than Michelangelo’s.
You know that cheery, simple, merry wanderer
on Michelangelo loved so well? straying over the
try with his sketches that the contadini bought at
and market; his S. Francesco, that the peasants -
d have frocked in gay colours in utter defiance
ct and the frate; his quaint little saints in paste-
d, and his waxen Christs, for which his illustrious
d gave the models.
‘Think of the fanciful pleasant days he had in
he little towns and castella, with his light load of
ttles in terracotta and martyrs in millboard; wel-
e for all the baptisms and weddings and feasts
fairs; and bidden to sup here, drink there, laugh
1 this one, sorrow with that, according as the
ple bought a S. Anna to bless a baby’s birth, or a
to guard a mother’s grave.

*Oh, take my word for it, roving, humble, merry
wichela must have been much happier than his
i

S

“ALL

60 PASCAREL.

mighty friend, badgered by Pope and coun
hunted by patrons from city to city; besic
ambulant artist can have been no fool, and m
had a soul in him, or he had never been so
Michelangelo.”

I listened to him, glad as 1 was ever of h
ing to the swift sweet music of his voice. I
perfect night: the forests were still as death; tl
moon hung yellow and lustrous as gold ab
dark edge of the high mountains.

“But men you honour did not disdain fa
said, a little timidly, to him, for I had always
that soft sweet fear—which yet is not fear—
which no woman’s or girl’s love is worth <¢
chestnut husk. “Look at your Anosto! and
you are as great a poet as he, only you ne
write down a word.”

He laughed gently.

“As great a poet as Ariosto, because I ca
the terza rima at times as an old woman reels
off her distaff? Oh, my child, you would m
as vain, if I believed you, as the dauber |
Soggé when he dared to challenge Del Sarto.

“It is national in us, that is all, that ki
verse. Jules Janin says somewhere, ‘to say an
poet, is needless; say an Italian, and the pc
matter of course.’ Now I would not go as far
but there is a certain truth in his pretty com
We are always poets at heart and Romeos w
moon rises.

“Tt always seems as if that well-spring of
and art which arose in Italy, to feed and ferti
world when it was half dead and wholly barre:

THE WANDERING ARTE. 61

e tyrannies of the Church and the lusts of Feu-

lism; it would always seem, I say, as though that

ater of life had so saturated the Italian soil, that the
ywliest hut upon its hills and plains will ever nourish
nd put forth some flower of fancy.

_ “The people cannot read, but they can rhyme,
cannot reason, but they can keep perfect rhythm.
cannot write their own names, but written on

ir hearts are the names of those who made their

fountry’s greatness. They believe in the virtues of a

rag tied to a stick amidst their fields, but they

e tenderly the heroes and the prophets of an

rgotten time. They are ignorant of all laws of
ience or of sound, but when they go home by
nlight through the maize yonder alight with luc-

‘ole, they will never falsify a note, or overload a

armony, in their love songs.

“The poetry, the art, in them is sheer instinct; it

‘not the genius of isolated accident, but the genius

f inalienable

inal; : is an Easter egg that lies
of ntle and simple ; not a Roc’s
gg, that fall fioa?"the skies once in a thousand
‘ears. Being thus diffused it has ceased to produce
ndividual and conspicuous achievement: but it is this
iiffusion which—bringing with it a perpetual ideality
snd an eternal youth—will render possible for us our
Rediviva.”
_ As he ceased to speak, as though in answer“o
im, there came from the distance the sound of a
ol singing. Down below, through the maize, there
going a little knot of peasants; they carried
& bundles of green canes on their shoulders; the

a

adees.

62 PASCAREL.

lucciole flashed from their feet as they passed away
into the darkness where their little homes were
gathered round a campanile; the voices, softly sigh-
ing, died away in the wild sweet love songs that echo
all over the land unwritten by any human hand, only
passed from mouth to mouth, from age to age, telling
the one eternal story.

We listened till all was silent.

He turned to me and smiled.

“Does all poetry want to be written to live Ab,
no! cara mia—not so long as men love.”

” A soft strange trouble, that yet was infinitely
peaceful, stole on me. I sat quiet in the white moor
light and put my hand into my breast and felt for the
stone Fates. They were quite warm where they rested
against the beating of my heart.

The tears filled my eyes suddenly; sweet tears,
and glad; I could not have told whence nor why they
came.

“Ah! you are right, you até“tight,” I murmured

“What does fame matter? yor Hie, slg Go beautiful a
It is!”
He stretched his hand out ise dal mine closely,
and sighed a little as he answered. His moods weft
so swift in variation; his fancy was so vivid and 9
fast; one could never quite be certain whether any
mood would last with him much longer than a but
terfly may rest upon a flower.

“Ah, dear donzella!” he said, with a sigh, “pe
haps, that is too much to say. I am afraid so. Its
hard to find a beautiful life in these days; riches at
not hard to come by; even success, if one is ne
too particular as to the roots of it, is moderately ea

THE WANDERING ARTE. 63

se; luxury, there is no doubt, was never at any
so general. But beauty——
Perhaps there was never any kind of life so
beautiful as that of the improvisatore in the
le ages; such as Bernardo Accolti’s for example.
a life that must have been: the sun can never
set on it.
Roaming the length and breadth of the land, the
of all that that was most brilliant and
ful in each city; everywhere the streets gar
he shops closed at his coming; everywh
: people, from princes to beggars, gather
ast squares, in the breathless sunlight, hushed
ittle listening children at the first words that fell
his lips. so
All the pageantry, all the warfare, all the genius,
ie tumult of the age, spread like a wondrous
threaded tapestry before him for him to tread
as he chose. All the passion and the poetry. of
ra close 3 mand like flowers to be wéven
his own # eath as he would. AI! the
n, from als to its contadini, like so
‘chords ¢ eolian harp, that the breath of
touth could thrill like the winds of the summer.
The mountain lord, the brigand chief, the fierce
lance, the begging friar, the weaver and the
urer, the prince-bishop and the Ghetto Jew, the
ei at her lattice, and the page in his satin hose,
mistress above in her silk-hung balcony,
trooper’s leman below with a wound in her
*d breast—all the vast motley of the century his
aint and to sing as he would in the great sun-
t piazza, with the swallows wheeling against the

64 PASCAREL.

blue sky, and on the edge of the listening crowd—
who knows?—perhaps the angel face of Raffaele.

“And then always for rest, Urbino, with the

breath of the Adrian sea and the breeze of the Aper-
nine hills blowing through its palace chambers, and
the night waning on Bembo’s tireless wit, and th
morning breaking above the Monte del Cavallo be
fore the Court of Love had solved one half its
problems. A beautiful life that, a beautiful life that,
es will.
Boe:wmg am not sure that I do not envy Bernardo evel
mie than Boiardo, though the fire of his words wa
quenched with the ashes of his body, and when ¥e
read him now, we find him dull as dust, and wonde
what the spell was that once held all Rome speechles
as he spoke.

“Well, there is a compensation in all. things. Bet:
nardo had his life: a perfect life surely, if a whole
people’s applause, and years that were as one Jong
feast day, count for anything. ....ugBernardo’s is a
empty name now to all save # few | $obolars who only

hold him as a poor stilted s(@filqr fsglg and where is
the child that has not heard Ege"
worn, and heartsick, and exiled, alone in Gothic Re
venna}?”

His voice sank dreamily into silence.

We stayed there both silent a little while under the
chestnut shadows; the wind from the south blew ove
us on its way to wander over the country of the poets
Then, silently still, we arose and went homeward; ti
moonlight white about our lingering feet.

I leaned long at my little lattice that night, watch °
ing the licciole where they shone amidst the waves af

THE WANDERING ARTE. 65

llet dnd amongst the tendrils of the vines; rocking
the bough of a rose, or glancing in clusters where
: leaves of the arum grew thickest.

I stretched my hands out and caught one as it went
my casement, and held it, half gladly and half
idly, as a child holds a ladybird that it deems a

Had it been a love word once on any woman’s
Had Romeo breathed it, or Paolo? Had it died
its own sweetness, as love will? Had it life etg
he said, amongst the roses? en.

It told me nothing, but burned there; a littl(Qiigamts
ytured in the hollow of my hand.
-I looked at it a little while, then let it go and dance
on the wind.

“What do I want with you?” I murmured to it;
you be living fires, yet you are dead words. And
ave his—all his—for me alone.”

Then half ashamed that even the licciole should
gr me, I shut the lattice, and, whilst my face grew

as with some noonday fervour of the sun,I stole
my bed and slept and dreamed.

| CHAPTER XIII.
The Tomb of the King.

‘From the date of St. John’s Day, Brunotta treated
‘with coldness and with something that was almost
iaversion. Her gifts and goodness to me ceased,
| nothing that I could do or say would win a smile
p her. |

{had noticed sometimes before that when we were
f Brundtta he treated me differently, with more

ine JT. 5

66 PASCAREL.

deference, but with far less tenderness. Befo———a™
notta he never kissed my hands, nor let his eye ==
on me fondly, nor called me all the pretty c=m—
names that he lavished on me when we were 2 Fe

Sometimes, too, I noticed the bright merry <J
the little Tuscan watch me with a keen, hard SS
cion, and at times she would turn away from us }
some little sullen, petulant phrase that was only 4
satirical because her powers were not equal to mm
a childish sulkiness.
t the only result of this change of manner 2
yas to send her more to the companionship *
er favourite Cocomero, who was a good, silly, laughter
loving lad, always comically afraid of the flail of bt
tongue; and to leave Pascaré] and me more free #
wander by ourselves through the vine-shadows of
country sides and the dim arcades of the ancient citi
And I was too glad of this to give the cause mof
thought.

Coecomero and Brunotta were so well suited to oft |
another, they loved to wrangle for a lean poulet, @
gossip at a village well, to cheapen trumpery at
fairs, to tussle with the tavern keepers, to cheat tht
guards at the town gates by bringing in a smugg
snipe or water melon.

These were their daily joys; whilst to them Pascal
and I seemed utter fools, dreaming through the fields
content with a bird’s song, or wandering for hours 8
some old silent grass-grown place abandoned by #
world, but to us memorable for the sake of some
life that there had opened to the light in the dead ag

“If it were not for me you would all go withot
bit or drop from dawn to moonrise,” Brunétta W

THE WANDERING ARTE. 67

, displaying some booty from the farms that she
| borne into the town under the very noses of the
uspecting guards at the gateway, and which was
de tenfold more sweet to her by the falsehoods and
is which she had incurred in its transit. “A beauti-
plump peahen—eating for a prince—and spinach
1 herbs to garnish it—all for three soldi—worth
king out four miles for any day—things are so dear
the markets. Spinello lived and died here?—and
1 two have been dreaming over him and Petrarca
day? The Saints help us! What fools are clever
c! And who was he when all is said? A dauber in
our? Oh, I know; his paintings are in the little church
whitewash would look as well, and it kills insects
A Madonna one must have, of course, but Our
ly I know is quite content with a wax figure of her,
| those pretty paper flowers and some coloured
ers—they look much better than the frescoes—Che-
‘! how fat the hen is!—and all for three soldi, Pas-
ait”
Pascaré] would shrug his shoulders with silent in-
ible disdain, and go out into the archway of the house
| stand under the vine-leaves, sending smoke into
air with a troubled and impatient contempt upon
face.
They were as far asunder as the poles these two
» travelled together, played together, lived and
thed together, and yet never caught sight one mo-
it of each other’s souls.
That day he and I let the fat peahen stew on
lected amongst its herbs over the little charcoal
, and wandered about the old, old streets of Arezzo,
ing of Mzcenas and Petrarca and the merry Bacco

5°

68 PASCAREL.

in Toscana and thinking wistfully of that noble old
cathedral that was levelled with the dust for the war
lust of the Medici.

He was sad at heart that day; the contact of Bre
notta’s low little soul seemed to have jarred on him;
his hours of melancholy were not frequent, but the
gloom, when once it settled there, was deep. Some
times he was curt and full of scorn in it; this day he
was gentle, and his eyes dwelt on me with a soft pain
in them.

We searched, and vainly, for Spinello’s tomb; like
the cathedral, it was lost in the summer dust.

There was a tired looking, humble olive, that by
its look had grown there beneath the walls five hundred
years if one; but all the pomp and beauty of the pagas
temple had dissolved like a dream of the night. We
sat in the shadow of the olive, and in our fancies
builded the temple.

It was full midsummer.

The Tuscan sun was burning in a cloudless heaven
A cloud of swallows were silver in the light. The
mountains were soft in hue as rose-leaves. Everywhere
in the plains of maize the shrill cicale were loudly
singing their rude love odes. Above the grey walls
there was a flush of pomegranate flowers, and amongst
them there hummed the yellow porselline that the people
so prettily say bring happiness wheresoever they rest

The city so great in Etruscan, in Latin, and in Re
naissance days, was very quiet in cloudless sunshine.

It was all bright and hot, northward over thé

Tuscan olive valleys, and southward, where tawo/
Tiber dragged his way, deep bosomed in the Umbna®
oakwoods.

THE WANDERING ARTE. 69

“It is just the same country,” said Pascarél,
ncing down north and south. “Just the same
ne as when Mezcenas was born here, and Pliny
tdered beneath the garden-trees upon the hills
ider.

“The city has crumbled to dust twice, and been
uilded in new fashions, though the new is now so
that we cannot find Spinello’s tomb, but I doubt
the district has changed a whit since Livy wrote
it.

“What a great book a great student might write
m Arezzo! What an epitome in this single town
the Etruscan, of the Roman, and of the Medieval
! And of the Renaissance alone what countless
| various types!

“Fighting ecclesiastical Tarlati; shrewd, gay, merry
di; our idealic Petrarca; good heavens! one could
ng great Arezzan names until the sunset!

“The history of this one town might be the history
Italy, and of all its wonderful complexities and con-
feties of character and of circumstance.
“By-the-bye I hear they have found a new Etrus-
i tomb in that olive orchard where you see the little
ud of people. The tomb of a king they say by his
aments. Myself I should like to know something
he ornament-makers.

“What manner of men were they those earliest
i-workers whose art is the despair of modern gold-
hs |

“Did they sit in the sun as we do now and hear
cicale chatter? Did they labour for love of the
or greed of the shining metal? Did their hearts

70 PASCAREL.

go down to the grave with those chains on those fair
dead women?

“What a sad tender grace there is about that old
Etruria! A whole nation swept off the face of the
soil, and leaving only a few placid dead that melt
to dust as the air touches them, and a handful or
two of golden chains that neither rust nor time can
alter.

“Their temples, their palaces, their laws, their
armies, their very history, all have perished; and only
these golden toys of theirs live and shine in the mo-
dern daylight.

“Ah, Dio mio! how full the world is of wonder!
Only its wonders are all the children of Death, and
chill us when we touch them.”

So he spoke his fanciful thoughts aloud, lying
stretched on the hillside, under the walls of the city.
His meditations often clothed themselves in that facile
and picture-like speech which is national with the
Italian; for amongst these people who have all mor
or less in them of the improvisatore abundant detal
and fluent expression are natural as the breath of the
lungs and the lips is to others.

“We will go and look when the shadows lengthen
at that Etruscan tomb,” he said, taking a little lizard
in the hollow of his hand. “We shall not find old
Spinello’s if we hunt all the week.

‘ Appena i segni
De lalte sue rume il lido serba.
Muoiono le citt&’; muoiono i regni:
Copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba:

El ’uom d’esser mortal par che si sdegni.
Oh nostra mente cupida e superba!’

“His tomb is gone,” he pursued, and his voict
sounded hushed and sad in the dreaming silence 0

THE WANDERING ARTE. 71

ry plains. “And that great Latin inscription
em somewhere underneath those clods that the
are treading. What does it matter? He had
life here for ninety years.

nust have been such a good life—a, painter’s
se days; those early days of art. Fancy the
of it then—modern painters can know nothing

en all the delicate delights of distance were
If perceived; when the treatment of light and
was barely dreamed of; when aerial perspective
breaking on the mind in all its wonder and
when it was still regarded as a marvellous
; to draw from the natural form in a natural
—in those early days only fancy the delights
ater!

nething fresh to be won at each step; some-
‘w to be penetrated at each moment; some-
autiful and rash to be ventured on with each
f colour,—the painter in those days had all
thless pleasure of an explorer; without leaving
place he knew the joys of Columbus.

1 then the reverence that waited on him:

was a man who glorified God amongst a
hat believed in God.

at he did was a reality to himself and those
him. Spinello fainted before the Satanas
ayed, and Angelico deemed it blasphemy to
feature of the angels who visited him that
zht live visibly for men in his colours in the

all men the artist was nearest to heaven, there-
ull men was he held most blessed.

72 PASCAREL.

“When Francis of Valois stooped for the brust
he only represented the spirit of the age he lived n'®
It is what all wise kings do. It is their only form ff:
genius. )

“Now-a-days what can men do in the Arts? No
thing.

“All has been painted—all sung—all said.

“All is twice told—in verse, in stone, in colou
There is no untraversed ocean to tempt the Columba
of any Art.

“It 1s dreary—very dreary—that. All has bee
said and done so much better than we can ever Sf
or do it again. One envies those men who gathert
all the paradise flowers half opened, and could ws
them bloom.

“Art can only live by Faith: and what
have we} | |

Science is very sad, for she doubts all things ané
would prove all things, and doubt is endless, ang
proof is a quagmire that looks like solid earth, and #
but shifting waters.”

His voice was sad as it fell on the stillness 0
Arezzo—Arezzo who had seen the dead gods come
and go, and the old faiths rise and fall, there whert
the mule trod its patient way and the cicala sang its}
summer song above the place where the temple of
the Bona Dea and the Church of Christ had alike
passed away, so that no man could tell their place. _

It was all quiet around.

The black and gold demoizelle hummed above iff
the red pomegranate flowers. The long curling leaves
and auburn feathers of the maize were motionless in

THE WANDERING ARTE. 73

ss air. Beneath the vines great pumpkins
gold, and little lizards glanced like emeralds
t.

all so bright, so quiet, so full of sweet sum-
ere, where a whole nation had passed away
ace of the earth, leaving but a few crumbled
he sum of its story.

ld rather have been Spinello than Petrarca,”
1, after awhile. “Yes; though the sonnets
; long as men love: and the old man’s work
; every line of it crumbled away.

yne can fancy nothing better than a life
vinello led for nigh a century up on the hill
ting, because he loved it, till death took
all lives, perhaps, that this world has ever
lives of painters, I say, in those days were
verfect.

nly the magnificent pageants of Leonardo’s,
e’s, of Giorgone’s: but the lowlier lives—the
en such as Santi, and Ridolfi, and Benozzo,
ia, and Timoteo, and many lesser men than
ers in fresco, and grisaille, painters of minia-
iters of majolica and montelupo, painters
never great, but who attained infinite peace-
d beauty in their native towns and cities all
ice of Italy.

let places, such as Arezzo and Volterra, and
ad Urbino, and Cortona and Perugia, there
w up a gentle lad who from infancy most
‘and and gaze at the missal paintings in his
ouse, and the ccena in the monk’s refectory,
he had fulfilled some twelve or fifteen years,

74 PASCAREL.

his people would give in to his wish and send him to
some bottega to learn the management of colours.

“Then he would grow to be a man; and his town
would be proud of him, and find him the choicest of
all work in its churches and its convents, so that all
his days were filled without his ever wandering out of
_reach of his native vesper bells. @

“He would make his dwelling in the heart of his
birthplace, close under its cathedral, with the tender
sadness of the olive hills stretching above and around;
in the basiliche or the monasteries his labour would
daily lie; he would have a docile band of hopeful
boyish pupils with innocent eyes of wonder for all he
did or said; he would paint his wife’s face for the
Madonna’s, and his little son’s for the child Angel's;
he would go out into the fields and gather the olive
bough, and the feathery corn, and the golden fruits,
and paint them tenderly on grounds of gold or blue,
in symbol of those heavenly things of which the bells
were for ever telling all those who chose to hear; he
would sit in the lustrous nights in the shade of hs |
own vines and pity those who were not as he was;
now and then horsemen would come spurring in acros
the hills and bring news with them of battles fought
of cities lost and won; and he would listen with the
rest in the market-place, and go home through the
moonlight thinking that it was well to create the holy
things before which the fiercest reiter and the rudest
free lance would drop the point of the sword asd
make the sign of the cross.

“It must have been a good life—good to its clos
in the cathedral crypt—and so common too; theft
were scores such lived out in these little towns of Italy,

THE WANDERING ARTE. 75

monastery and half fortress, that were scattered
hill and plain, by sea and river, on marsh and
ntain, from the daydawn of Cimabue to the after-
of the Carracci.

‘And their work lives after them; the little towns
all grey and still and half-peopled now; the iris
rs on the ramparts, the canes wave in the moats,
shadows sleep in the silent market-place, the great
rents shelter half 2 dozen monks, the dim majestic
ches are damp and desolate, and have the scent
1e sepulchre.

‘But there, above the altars, the wife lives in the
onna and the child smiles in the Angel, and the
: and the wheat are fadeless on their ground of
. and blue; and by the tomb in the crypt the
istan will shade his lantern and murmur with a
ed tenderness:

‘“Here he sleeps.’

«‘He,’ even now, so long, long after, to the people
uis birthplace. Who can want more of life—or
h?”

So he talked on in that dreamy, wistful manner
was as natural with him in some moments as his
yant and ironical gaiety at others.

Then he rose as the shadows grew longer and
ed down a knot of pomegranate blossom for me,
we went together under the old walls, across the
te fields, down the slope of the hills to the olive
ard, where a peasant, digging deep his trenches
mst the autumn rains, had struck his mattock on
sepulchre of the Etruscan king.

Phere was only a little heap of fine dust when we
h the spot.

76 PASCAREL.

When they uncover the dead faces — the faces
dead two thousand years—they are always perfect in
these Etruscan tombs; but at the first touch of light
they seem to shiver; they cannot bear the day; ina
moment they dissolve like a snow flower that the
sunrays strike; there are only left the golden cha
lying in the grey soft dust.

The violated grave yawned under the olive tree;
the coffin had been broken open; the peasant had
eagerly rifled its jewels; a little throng of people from
Arezzo were standing looking at the mound of ashes;
the sad silvery olives were all around; above, in the
city, there were bells ringing.

We looked too: then went away in silence along
the edge of the ripening maize. .

The dead king had reigned here on the hills agts

ere Rome had been; ages ere Horace had_ sung of

Soracte; ages ere the chariots of Augustus had rolled
through the broad amber seas of the Umbrian harvests
ages ere the marshes by Trasinone southward, yondef
across the fields, had been red with the slaughter
of consul and cohort, and strewn with the fasces and
eagles.

The dead king had reigned here; and after two
thousand years his nameless dust was rifled for the
greed of peasants, and lay friendless in the sun ther
beneath the olive branches.

We went through the gates in silence.

At our resting-place in the Via dell’ Orto, whet
the eyes of Petrarca had opened to the light, Br
notta met us in the arched entrance, in the roy
evening stillness, with shrill rebuke for her peahet
overstewed and spoilt by waiting. |

THE WANDERING ARTE. 77

CHAPTER XIV.
The Gold of Etruria.

PascaREL played that night in Arezzo. But a
ttrange fancy came to him.

At the last moment, as his turn came for the
tage, he flung off his gay dress and abandoned the
lesting little piece he was prepared for, and flung the
grave Florentine lucco about him, and went before
he lamps with only his mandoline.

He struck a few chords of it, tender and far-
aching, that made silence fall on the little crowd of
Tuscans and Umbrians that filled the Arte, which
i unroofed that night to the breathless summer

es,

_ Then he began to speak to them, quite quietly at
ist, with his luminous eyes drooped and full of
‘etrospection, his voice as clear as a bell on the great
thllness,

_ A certain fire of improvisation fell on him, and
us words dropped naturally into the swing and
neasure of the terza rima. Verse to the Italian is
latural as laughter to the child or as tears to the
¥Oman.

The dust of the dead king under the olive trees
witside their gates was his key-note; a note grave
ind tender, on which his redundant fancy strung
‘very variety of meditation and of metaphor.

All the life of the dead ages revived in his words
ind gestures.

The lost people of unknown -Etruria lived again
@ his passionate fancy.

78 PASCAREL.

“There was a gold worker in Etruscan Arez;
the delicate metal bent to his hand finedrawn as the
thread of a spider’s web; he was poor and alone,
but quite happy; an old olive grew by his door aul
he worked in its shade all the day; the gold wasm
his hands like a maiden’s hair, and he talked to tt
and wove it, and loved tt.

“One day the king’s daughter went by, and be
-horse sought a drink at his well. She rode on aa
took no thought of him; but his olive was no mor
the tree of peace by his threshold.

“He haunted the steps of her temples and palacs
until the king’s people beat him away with rods. He
could work no more for his masters, and he fell mw
great wretchedness, and the olive tree pined for hm
and withered away grey and useless as the silvt
beard of an old dead man. .

“Now it came to pass that there was a famine
the land—in these broad plains of Tuscany at
Umbria, where the yellow waves of the wheat spre
so far and wide: and all the people besought tt
Bona Dea whose curse was on the black and barré
land.

“And the oracle of the temple spake and sit
‘Let a sheaf of corn be made of gold and bound #
with twelve thousand gossamer threads in gold, fmt
than the web of the spider, and the lands shall
blossom and bear full harvest.’

“Etruria was full of gold workers, and hundred
on hundreds essayed the task, but all failed; fo
who should work gold so that the spider’s spinnilg
should be less fine and less frail?

“Then he who had loved the king’s daughter re

THE WANDERING ARTE, 79

from his wretchedness, and remembered his ancient
learning, and said, ‘Give me gold, I will try.’

“At first they mocked him; a poor naked out-
cast, crawling feebly in the sun. But the famine in-
creased; all the city was full of lamentation by day
and night; mothers slew their children not to hear
their piercing cries.

“The king came down from his weary throne and
taid, “Let the beggar have gold, and try; it can be no
worse with us if he fail, since thus we perish.’

“So they gave him gold, and he shut himself alone

for six days, and on the seventh he opened the door
and came out into the sunshine amongst the multitude
of the breathless people, and in his hands were the
golden webs of twelve thousand threads, so fine that
the spider’s gauze beside them seemed coarse.
_ “The people were silent; the passion of a great
joy and fear was on them; by tens of thousands they
dragged their fleshless limbs after him, always in
silence, to the temple of the Bona Dea.

“There was a great blight everywhere; the black
earth sickened under it; the famished people watched
with bloodshot ravenous eyes; was the weaving fine
fRough? Would the goddess accept the offering?

“There was silence in the temple; the strong sun
thone on the web of twelve thousand threads.

“Then the oracle spoke, and said, ‘By gold shall
Etruria live. Let the earth rejoice and bear.’

“And in one moment, on all the earth whereon

ia held dominion, the green blades broke through

€ parching soil, and grew and ripened in a second’s
Pace in every valley and on every hill.

' “Then the multitude cried with one voice, ‘Bear

80 PASCAREL.

him to the palace, crown him on the king’s right
hand. Let him have his will in all the land. From
the bonds of death he has set us free!’

“But he, still on his knees on the threshold of the
temple, looked up, and said, ‘Nay, I want nothing;—
has it made her smile?’

“And with that he stretched his hands gently out-
wards to the sun and died.

“The king’s daughter never knew that it was for
her the golden web was woven.

“But the gods knew, and said, ‘By its gold:
workers let Etruria live. For this man’s love was
great, and its witness shall endure when the nation
has perished from the earth and its very records
have passed away as the clouds dissolve before day-
hght/

“So to this hour, through all the Etrurian land,
the vanished people are ever to be traced by th
golden links that shine through the dust of the tombs;
and the Etrurian gold is without speck or flaw, of
equal anywhere, but rises from its burial ever and
again where the olives shiver in the summer winds
and the maize feathers blow above the buried cities’

It is nothing as I say it now, this tale of bis
that fell from his lips that night instead of jest
laughter: but as he spoke it, with the deep blue skies
over our heads, with the sweet, cool, acacia-scented
air streaming in from the open doors, with the ms
and fall of his wonderful voice that could sigh like 4
sea-shell and sound defiance like a clarion, with thi
old Etrurian land around lying white beneath tbe
moon, with the mighty Tiber rolling there away be
yond the oak-woods, with the dust of the dead king

THE WANDERING ARTE. 8I

near, under the olive-tree on the side of the hill;—
th all these—with the shadows on the Florentine
bes and the Florentine face of Pascarél, in the
wny half-lights of the dim Arte, the tale had a
fange poetry and pathos that moved the passionate
‘ple as they heard it to tears.

And when, as it drew to a close, the swift facile
ords came faster and faster from his lips, falling
thout strain or visible consciousness into the
morous rhythm of the Petrarcan sonnets;—when he
sed from the past to the present and spoke of
e living Italy which had become the inheritrix of
tuscan grace and Latin power, and was the daughter
such mighty dead, that her descended nobility be-
me a divine obligation;—when, with all his soul
idling at the fire of his thoughts into a poet’s faith
d a prophet’s inspiration, he stood, with outstretched
ns and flashing eyes, calling on the treasures of
* past to become the weapons of the future, and the
rided children of the nation to bind themselves into
e bond of brotherhood by the chain of a perfect
rpose woven fine and indestructible as the gold
ain of Etruria by the force of love;—when his im-
tuous and impassioned improvisation swept like a
ym-wind over the listening people, the moonlight
m the cloudless skies shining full upon his face,—
ma greater force than that of the player fell upon
n, and he who held them thus silent in Arezzo,
led them by the strength of the patriot and the
oll of the poet.

The people streamed out quite quiet when his
ice had ceased, and went quietly along their various .
ys through the haunted streets of Petrarca’s city.

exarél, Il. 6

82 PASCAREL,

In many eyes there was the gleam of tears.

They did not dare to cluster round him wih
shout and song that night, and bear him off as wa
their wont to some wine feast within the walls. They
left him alone, as one who was their master and apat
from them.

Only some lads, quite young, whose fathers had
died with Carlo Alberto and with Ugo Bassi, drew
near him timidly, and gently kissed his garments 3s
in homage.

These were all his thanks in grey Arezzo. But
could any greed of pomp or storm of plaudit have
been greater?

He himself said never a word, but left us to g0
indoors to our rest in the street of Orto, and went
away outward through the gates into the shining
country where the moon was white upon the fields of
olive.

CHAPTER XV.
The Sceptre of Feathers.

I REMEMBER that night, that sweet hot August night
I sat sleepless at the open window, watching dow!
the moon-lightened street for the sheer sake of seeiD§
Pascarél pass through its shadows when he should
come homeward.

The hours went slowly by, and he did not come.
The old street was silent as a grave; beneath me, be,
fore the entrance of an old palace, two Italians stoo
talking together. They looked gentle people, and the
accent was pure and scholarly.

‘What genius has that stroller Pascarél!” said one of

~

THE WANDERING ARTE. §3

‘and what a sway: over the people, and what a
f words, and what a choice of powers!
Trecento he would havéd been at the head of
1
1, altro!” assented the other, heartily. “But in
dern days it is not the men of genius who are
t; it is the men of talent. All the earth over,
reful and cautious combination which now suc-
and it is exactly this of which the nervousness,
etuosity, the impressionability, the force and
ukness of men of genius, are incapable. This
ascaré] might have led High Italy when she
group of art-cities, that could be grasped to-
like a bundle of divining rods or firebrands,
rled at church or empire by a hand that was

enough and able enough not to let them
it. But what place is there for a man of his
Capricious inspiration, and poetic temper, in
rt of modern Europe? What Europe crowns
2—drill-sergeants and accountants.”
1 the Tuscan having said so much, sauntered
1 his friend through the high, dark archway
the acanthus was clinging about the old
red bosses of some race whose very name had
1 in Arezzo.
they disappeared, there came into the street
ire of Pascarél; his white dress caught the
of the moonbeams, and he passed thought-
ywn the grey stones, through the cool brown
3.
: church clocks .of Arezzo were tolling four
' in the east there was the first tremulous
of the skies that heralds daybreak.

6*

84 PASCAREL.

He came slowly down the street, very slowly, under
the leaning antique walls that had heard the first fral
wail of Petrarch’s opening life.

Looking up, he saw me where I leaned above
There was a trecento stone gallery to my casement,
and in it was growing, set in a great red conca, &
gum-cistus, all white with flower.

I looked down to him through the leaves.

“Ah, donzella! up so very early?” he said
me. “That is not wise when we are not upon t&
road. What! not been to bed? Oh, that is ver
wilful.”

“You have not been to bed yourself,” I said t
him. “What did you find in those fields? I thought
you would never come back.”

“You have been watching for that? I shall bk
very angry if you ruin your health in such nor
sense.”

He did not look very angered. There was a smile
on his mouth, and the beautiful sudden light in bit
eyes that I loved so well.

“But what did you find in the fields?” I cried 0
him. ‘Have you been to the king’s tomb again!”

He paused a moment, then glanced down tht
street to see that it was empty.

“Well, no, donzella,” he said, hesitatingly, with 4
little flush on his face. “I may as: well tell you—#
will give you pleasure. You were sad to-day for tha
poor contadino, with his old sick people and bs
seven children, who had had nothing to eat all the
summer, the worm being at his wheat, and his padrone
a hard man? Well, I went to take him half the Ares
receipts. It was so full I could easily spare him

THE WANDERING ARTE. 85

thout begrudging ourselves another fat peahen.
id I went to-night—well, because walking at night
pleasanter than by day in this time of the year, and
hought I should meet the poor heart-stricken wretch
t going out across his fruitless fields—as I did.
sides, the old woman, without food, would not have
od long past noon. It is no use talking to people
yut a chain of gold for Italy, unless one does one
le miserable mite towards forging a lilliputian link
it.”

“Oh, I am so glad, so glad!” I cried, in my
uightless delight in him, leaning down through
: cistus flowers of silver. “It is so good of you, so
e you. What did the contadino say? Was he not
apy?”

“Ah, we will not talk about what he said,” mur-
red Pascarél, lightly. “When you have seven. chil-
¢n and ah old father and mother all wailing for
ead, and a hard padrone who will screw you down
the letter of the Mezzadria, and, if the soil be
ipty, lets your mouth be empty too,—of which hard-
ss there is very little in this Tuscany of ours, God
: praised,—when you are in this sort of plight, of
uurse any little gift brings gladness to you, and you
e apt to talk a very great deal too much about
atitude, as this poor fellow did, until I was fain to
n away from him, and leave him weeping over his
‘0 lean bullocks, who look the worse for no pro-
mder themselves, poor beasts! But get to bed,
mbina mia; these old streets are not too healthy
the moonlight. Good night, and dream of Pe- —
wea.”
‘But I dreamed, instead, of Pascarél.

86 PASCAREL.

. He might have ruled Tuscany in the old days
of Gian della Bella,*‘or,.the Uberti—so they said.
Well, like enough. But was it not better as it
was! ”

_ I thought nothing could be freer or gladder than
this life he led.

It was like the old sceptre of peacock’s plumes
that Mariuccia had set on high, with the blessed
palm-sheaf; in emblem of so many simple joys, of
laughter in a garret, of a bowl of field-born violets,
of jests over a pan of chestnuts, of a dusty brocade
brought down from high estate to embellish a child's
masking. ;

The world would have contemned, like my father, ‘
the sceptre of feathers.

But could the world have given aught better in
exchange?

I thought not,—sinking to sleep, while the day-
break stole over the dusky stillness of Arezzo.

And I was sure that the poor contadino, hurrying
homeward at sunrise to his capanna, in the midst:
of his barren fields, bearing food and oil to his
famished children, and wine to his old dying people,
would have thought not likewise could one have
asked him.

The gold was rare and costly that had bees
found in, the tomb of the king that day; but t
seemed to me that all the gold in Etruria could né
have outweighed that impulse which had sent the
feet of Pascarél on their errand through the moonlit
olives.

. We wandered awhile about old Umbria. The
mighty oak woods were welcome in the hot syns of|

THE WANDERING ARTE. 87

it, and there was no sweeter place for a Mid-
er dream than where the birds were singing
: flower-sown shadows about S. Francis’s quiet
ri.

e loitered in Gubbio, thinking of Maestro
io and of his wondrous rainbow hues; and we
. the stony slopes where Pliny’s villa once stood
2 thread of hill-fed water; and we watched the
; colour burn on the Spoleto mountains, with
rainclouds waiting the fall of night to break
the marshes; and we sauntered in the clear
: dawns, over the sites of the buried cities, where
at cropped herbage above the sunken altars, and
10ke of the charcoal-burners curled up amongst
k boughs where the incense had once risen to
r Feretrius, or Venus Pandemos.

id thence we strayed into Tuscany for the
e month, and laughed to our heart’s content .
rst the vines, and saw the wines pressed in the
asteful, classic fashion, and the children tumble
‘unk amongst the reddening leaves, and the
gorge themselves on grapes unstinted, and the
wains roll homeward laden with purple wealth
th the narrow paths where the crocuses were all
again in millions, till the earth was like one
amethyst with them, and across the vast, still,
ig valleys, where the sun was still hot, and the
homesteads were all hung with the golden ropes »
t year’s millet.

e worked and laughed and feasted on grapes
he rest all the shining days through, and at
g the Arte was thronged with the lusty Con-
their mirth the readier for a plenteous vintage,

88 PASCAREL.

and their strong brown limbs grape-stained like the
limbs of Bacchus.

The recolta, which was of abundance, except in
some few places, as about Arezzo, where the fly and
worm had ravaged, made Tuscany all glad and gay,
gladdest and gayest of all the Val di Gréve, and tht
Mugellino, and the Val di Chiana, and the other
Pianuré lying close about Florence.

We paused in all the little towns one by one, and
October passed away, golden and sultry, and ruddy
with jest and song about the great wine vats; and the
gardens full of the strong sweet smell of damask
autumn roses and the waxen tuberosa, and the grass
filled at every step with the vari-coloured cups of the
wild anemones.

On the first day of the new month, which is ded
cated to all the saints—in imitation of the old great
Latin feast of all the gods in the times of “gli de
falsi e bugiardi,” we came down from the heights
where we had been amongst the forest farms of th
Casentino and of Vallambrosa.

For the weather had grown chill there on th
mountains, and we had come slowly downward with
intent to go into Florence and rest there through the
winter frosts, until the time of Carnival should have
come round again, and have again passed away, killed
with the cannonade of the Confette.

Before he should enter the town, however, Pas
carél had taken a fancy to set the Arte a little while
under Fiesole, so that the scattered people in the little
paesi along the hill sides should have their hours
mirth under the Red Lily without being driven to take
a long tramp for it down the stony slopes. And th

’ THE WANDERING ARTE. 89

Nace he chose for the Arte, and got permission to use

rom the owner, whom he knew, was a narrow piece

grassland amongst the stripped vineyards, with the

By bleak slopes rising above, and making sunrise
and sunset very early to the few who dwelt in
ravine of the mountain-shed Mugnone.

The Feast of the Saints rose a cloudless and ra-
Want day, in which the scent and the warmth of the
lmmer were sure to prevail, so soon as the first chill
fispness of the early morning on the heights should
ave. disappeared before the sunrays.

I remember how we came over the mountain side
ithe clear cold of the early day.

How we heard the matins bells ringing in the
usky depth where Florence was lying.
How we watched the white mists lighting little
y little as the sun came over the edges of the hills.
How the libeccio was blowing keenly as we crossed
v square of Fiesole, but fell into a mere soft breeze
8s we went down the winding road between the grey
tone walls and the wild green hedges, with ever and
un some scarlet glimpse of roses burning above a
gate.
It was only cold enough to make the air free and
dastic and inspiriting as a sea air.
All the hillside was in a pomp of scarlet and
purple, and gold and bronze, with great masses of
green where the ilex and acanthus grew, and
tof pale greys where the olives were. Everywhere
were clouds of autumn flowers. At times, as we
lesed some wine-presses under the trees, the people
buted us a gay good-day. At times a kid, browsing

go PASCAREL,

amongst the stripped vines, bleated a tender little nots
upon the silence.

I remember how we went down the shelving a
zag ways,’the mules having passed before us at day
break with the Arte in charge of a peasant lad. Pag
carél and I were foremost; he had his mandoline st
about him, and struck it now and then so that ¢
sound, sweet and fine as the call of a thrush, cam
from it, and seemed to drift away down amongst &
wreaths of the mist. |

At some little distance Brundtta followed, talking
eagerly with Cocomero of a quarrel she had had wild
a contadina about some duck’s eggs in the plac
where we had slept. Little Toccd ran hither and tM
ther at his fancy, now chasing a lizard, now pluck
a rose that nodded over a wall, now stopping to ch
ter with the women plaiting the straw.

I remember how we went down the hill ligt
hearted in the morning air, pausing reverently as §
priest passed by with the Santissimo for some sid
creature, a white-frocked chorister going before hi
ringing the little bell along the peaceful ways.

I remember how we strolled on silenced for a mo
ment or two, and then talked of the winter in Florenc@
and fell softly, as people will who have learned
love one another, into recollection of the first day wé4
had met in the City of Lilies; and so, with the wes
wind in our faces, came down above the bridge of th¥
Badia, where the old brown monastery stood, russ¢
with age, amongst the olive and the mist.

I remember how we broke our fast whilst the sus)
was still low in the east, at a little dwelling-house
mile above the village, where Pizzichiria was scrawle

THE WANDERING ARTE. g!I

, chalk along the wall, and the green bough above
ve doorway told that the tenant of the house sold
ime as well.
. I remember how we sat out under the pergola
there some grapes still hung, and brake our bread
drank sweet foaming draughts of milk, the cow
heanwhile, in her shed hard by, gazing at us with her
of Héré over a great green dew-wet mound of
F oil; and below, amongst the olives, the sacred So-
fudine, rising gaunt and bare, and brown and sombre
ith innumerable memories.
;; I remember how we sat there, and laughed and
red gaily, and then took up the mandoline afresh
sang all sorts of follies and of fancies, and then
and strolled away down the hills to see where
would s¢f up the Arte, and soon found a broad
a few rdGods above the Badia itself, where the
, knowing us, had given eager acquiescence for
e throne of our hedgerow Thespia to be erected.
Ah, yes; I remember it all so well—so well—that
day of that glad, poetic, fanciful, careless life
ich was fated to be broken off suddenly and for
Per, as the pomegranate flower is snapped from its
tik by the mistral.

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 93

rises over it quaint and grey; at this time, before
.oods of winter had come down, it was still shal-
and a man was wading it with a fishing-net upon
ack.
iouthward, above us, rose the old Etrurian slopes,
the walls and towers of the city that perished for
ig to aspire to be rival of the Scarlet Lily.
Vestward towered the great Salviati pile amongst
ines and olives: and lower down was the smaller,
bler villa set in a sea of roses, and girt with wil-
and lemon and magnolia, whither the great nobles
wont to come down in the hush of the fruit-
ted nights to their love trysts; directly at our feet
the gloom of the Solitudine; away there in the
centre, betwixt the lines of hills, Florence was
ched as a white swan may spread her wings to
» upon her river nest. Yet not so far but what
ieard each note of her warning chimes; for it was
feast-day of the saints, as I have said, and the
: of her countless churches were calling to one
her. .
4ll about us were the vine lands and the olive
ds, the rich rank vegetation sown thick with wild
nones. And so we resolved that there the theatre
lid stand, and then we threw ourselves down
ist the thick grass and the trefoil with the delicate
Is of the cyclamens about us in tens of thousands.
‘No theatre was ever better placed,” said Pascarél,
‘ at my feet amongst the olives. “Not even where
2 deep in thyme the Latins laughed over the roar-
un of Plautus. It is a little profane, I fear, to set
tyhouse so near the Badia!
When one thinks how often those great sad eyes

94 PASCAREL.

of Dante’s have gazed through this same mist of olivd
leaves away to the doine of the Duomo yonder. It i
very profane, I am afraid.

“When one thinks of all those monks, too, of .
Marco-in-Urbe, who used to come up here to the
mountain Badia to rest their eyes and souls a littl
out of hearing of the city riot:—Savonarola who, i
all his life of storm and prayer, and triumph and to
ment, had time to cherish a damask rose-tree :—anq
that bravest of brave souls, Domenico, whom ofié
loves, I think, almost better than any other saint 6
hero of them all:—Fra Bartolomméo must have worke
here too; though there is not his mark upon the walk
——and the divine Angelico sometimes left the dim 0!
convent down in Florence to come hither and pait
for the Solitudine.

“They must have been amongst his most blesse
days—alone here with his pure thoughts and visiong
and the precious colours waiting on his hand;
about him the solitude of the cloisters, and the count
silence of the hill sides. How wise he was,—how vety
wise,—to put away from. him the proffered mitre an
the possible tiara!

“Yes; this is every inch of it haunted ground
sacred ground, though the bullocks tread it with thé
ploughshare and the reapers strip the vines.

“Do you ever think of those artist-monks who havéj
strewed Italy with altar-pieces and missal miniatureg
' till there is not any little lonely dusky town of het
that is not rich by art? Do you often think of then
I do.

“There must have been a beauty in their lives
great beauty—though they missed of much, of mort

6

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 95

they ever knew or dreamed of, let us hope. In
os of the Madonna they grew blind to the mean-
»9f a woman’s smile, and illuminating the golden
wreath above the heads of saints they lost the
ywter of the children under the homely olive trees
rut.

‘But they did a noble work in their day; and lei-
for meditation is no mean treasure, though the
ern world does not number it amongst its joys.

‘One can understand how men born with nervous
es and spiritual fancies into the world when it
one vast battle-ground, where its thrones were
by steel and poison, and its religion enforced by
1 and faggot, grew so weary of the never-ending
oil, and of the riotous life which was always either
geant or a slaughter-house, that it seemed beauti-
o them to withdraw themselves into some peace-
lace like this Badia and spend their years in study
in recommendation of their souls to God, with
green and fruitful fields before their cloister win-
3, and no intruders on the summer stillness as
painted their dreams of a worthier and fairer world
pt the blue butterflies that strayed in on a sun-
a, or the gold porsellini that hummed at the lilies
ie Virgin’s chalice.”

Tis voice dropped in its dreamy melody down the
fuil air joining the hum of the insects, the chimes
re distant bells, and the splash in the shallow
zone as the fisher waded over its stones. Stones
% were now so dry that a rabbit could have
ed from one to another of them without wetting
hite feet; although in winter time the little moun-

96 PASCAREL.

tain stream so often rages in tempest and wrecks the
homesteads, and deluges stalls and byres.

He shifted his attitude a little, and his hand played
amongst the anemones; the lights and the shadows
changed on his face as the boughs above were blow
to and fro by the fresh sea wind.

“I am not sure,” he went on, “that if I had bee
born then I should not have been a monkish painter
myself; though I fear I should have worn a cums
like fighting Fra Benedetto, and scaled the walls lke
libertine Fra Lippi. The Angel Monk would have
found no fraternity, I fear, with me.

“Will he be angered, think you, that we set the
Arte so near to his altar-piece?—and Savonarola,
said to all gaieties Retro Satanas?—or Dante, wh
had small patience with any puppets or pleasut
seekers? He was so much here, or so they say, whet
he would withdraw from Guelph and Ghibelline, and
be at peace a little while. One can believe he wmtt
better here, in the quiet of the hills and with si
Fiesole so near, than down in the street by San Ma
tino where it was all so cramped and dark.

“VYes;—I am troubled about that;— it is irreverttl
to set the little lily flag of the Arte flying here. As
the villagers of Marco Vecchio are lusty of lung,
will laugh loud and trouble the stillness of the old
Solitudine. Yet it must have heard worse in its tum:
many a shriek as the Salviati steel went through é
peasant’s breast for daring to breathe against seignetr
ial rights; many a crash and clamour of crossed ame
down there in the defile as the lances of Haw
swept from the mountains; many a groan stifled ther
in the waters as the Imperial reiters clattered with

98 PASCAREL.

irrelevant and oddly strung together—Dante and the
ducal diamond?

“If you did?” I echoed. “Well?—what if you
did? Tell me?”

He laughed a little.

“Nay, the face of the world would be changed fot
me. That is all.”

“Changed! And can you want that? Are yo
not happy?”

“Six months—and all my life before—I ws
Yes.”

My eyes filled with a sudden rush of tears tht
blotted out the sight of Florence. For the first time
I thought him cruel.

“That means—before you found me! If I torment
you, let me go? And yet sometimes you seem so glad
to have me!—”

I was but a child, and I spoke as a child: but the
fire that swept over me from the momentarily uplifted
eyes of Pascarél, scorched the word to silence on DY
trembling mouth.

He caught my hands and kissed them with eagéf
and tremulous tenderness, as his habit often ws
with me.

“Do not jest about that. You are the life of mY
life,” he murmured, holding my hands against his lips
the while. Then he was silent too.

“But,” I whispered to him, wistfully, perplexed
strangely, and vaguely touched to apprehensiot—
“but, if I gave you pleasure indeed, why should you
be so much less gay than when you knew me firs
Then, all things contented you; you laughed,
were never troubled. And now you seem to be {or

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 99

wistful for some fate you have not; you, who
used to say that you would hardly change with
do or Bernardo!”

lis face was turned from me as he listened, and
oved a little restlessly.

Cara mia,” he said, endeavouring, I thought, to
: more jestingly, with but little success, for he
oo frank of nature to counterfeit well the gaiety
in happy moments was so natural to him—“oh,
mia, you have read—or I have recited to you—
)rlando Innamorato many and many a time. Do
10t remember how, when Rinaldo found himself
‘den, the single garden-lily struck him to earth—
‘aladin though he was—and the blows of the
: and red roses left him more dead than alive,
made the sharp edge of his good sword Fusberta
> more strength or worth than a straw? Every
comes, soon or late, to that unequal flower-
at in the enchanted forest; and the armour that
been proof against the dragons, and the shield
has been undinted by the giants, are of no avail
‘Ip him, once by the Fountain of the Pine.”

fy cheeks grew warm and my heart throbbed
dy in wild tumult as I heard; I said nothing; I
. sweet dreamy happiness steal over me.

‘or was not the garden-lily that struck down
Ido the weapon of the youth who was’ called
3

ind was not the Fountain of the Pine the one
which Rinaldo, drinking after the wounds of
ily, grew blind to both the worlds of truth and
c, and saw only “la dolce vista del viso sereno”
e Sister of the Lion, of the Rose of Pentecost?

7°

100 PASCAREL.

If he said so much, why not yet a little more the
dim wonder of it drifted vaguely over me, but it was
only vaguely, for I was happy in the knowledge tha
I was dear to him, and I was too young to question
of what sort or of what strength this half silent and
half eloquent love might be.

“Let us talk of what we would do if we found
another Lemon Stone in the market,” he said gaily,
with a certain impatience in his voice. “Ah, you ar
ashamed of me for hankering after riches at the last
like this? Well, I am ashamed of myself, but if!
found it I doubt if I should keep it. Whatever I own
in the evening is always gone before the next day's
sunset. But only think how odd it must be, to go
through the market poor as Job; hungry perhaps, and
with the hot pavement scorching your feet through
the holes in your boots; and then to see a quetr-
shaped bit of glass, and give a copper-piece for it
because you are sorry for that poor old wretch, whos
only stock in trade is that stall of miserable Robs,
and then to go home to your garret with it, and be
struck by some strange look in it as the sun’s rays
catch it so, that you take it over the way to youl
friend at the little pharmacy, who is a man of sciene
in his small way, under his bunches of herbs and bis
glass retorts: and then all at once to know that by
that shining thing no bigger than a walnut, you al
become all in a minute the master of a kingdom—
only think of it all; I could almost talk myself mad
with the very fancy of it. But in those stories of
diamonds they never tell us what becomes of that firs
buyer of it, who has all the real sorcery and music °
its history. One would like to know if he ever wet

a;

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. IOI

ack to the market-stall and shared his gains. One
vould Aope he always did; but human nature being
what it is, that 1s doubtful, very doubtful, I am afraid.”

I listened to him in some wonder; Pascarél, the
man of all the world to whom riches were most in-
different and who had resisted all manner of tempta-
ions and refused to turn his genius into gold—to
@ream thus of the treasures locked in a cube of
carbon! I struck him on the lips with a scourge of
feeding grasses, and scolded him for his new-born
avarice.

“Dear donzella,’ he made answer in his caressing
Wice, and with more warmth on the darkness of his
fice than the sun brought there, “you must have read
athousand and one eastern tales in your time. Did
never you read of the shepherd who was quite happy
guarding his flocks in the wide Persian plains, and
foaming at will with no thought but where to find a
fresh watercourse when his beasts were athirst, or a
(ool grove of palm and date wherein to lay him down
When the stars arose—quite happy all his years, until
One day the king’s daughter rode by and her shadow
ell betwixt him and the sun? And he was never
gain content; never, never again. “Have you not
‘ead of him?”

“But I am not a king’s daughter!” I cried, and
then was silent; there on the hillside that was sown
with cyclamen, close above the Badia.

He laughed a little; a low, soft, sad laugh that

more tenderness in it than tears have:—doubtless
at the unconscious ingenuousness with which I took
to myself the Persian tale.

,
nd

102 -PASCARELs

He drew me down close to him where he leaned
at my feet amongst the grass.

“You come of great people, I suppose; people
who would scarcely care to see you on a strolling
player’s booth. And you have a higher kingdom than
any; the kingdom of innocence;—wherein I have 10
right to trespass.”

He was silent a long while, whilst the chimes rug
slowly from above, where Fiesole was calling her scat-
tered flock to the fold:

“You have heard of Alaran,” he said, abruptly.
“Alaran, of Acqui, who bore off the daughter of Ea
peror Otho, and having nothing in the world but two
horses, kept one to convey her away with, and sold
the other to buy a hut in the forest, where he tumed
charcoal-burner. Legend says that the imperial Alax#
was happy as the birds in the woods in this humble
estate, and that one day great Otho going hunting B
all his pomp, after he was summoned to the Romal
crown, called for a cup of water to a peasant-git
and looking down on the face of the woman wh?
brought it, saw the face of Alaxia gladder, and not
whit less proud than it had been in his own palact
What do you say to the story? do you wonder thi
the princess was content with the hut in the oa
glades?”

His eyes sought mine with eager wistfulness. |
laughed a little happily, and thought I knew why si
had been so glad there in the charcoal-burner’s cab

“No; I do not wonder,” I said, softly, more
myself than him. “Once I should have wond
but now—I understand.”

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 103

He did not ask me why, but his hand closed fast
nd warm on mine.

“Ah! my donzella,” he said softly and very sadly,
fier a little time. “So you think—so you think, being
, child, But you might repent. See here,—I am
ontent with my life—it is good enough in its way,
hough nameless and fruitless also perhaps. But I
annot disguise from myself that it is not a fit life for
Pou.

“You are truly a ‘donzella’; you have the hands,
nd the feet, and the voice and the ways, and all the
metty imperious graces that belong to those gentle
om.

“You were reared hardly? Yes, I know.

“But you have the instincts of a baby princess for
ll that. '

“Could you be content always to go a-foot in all
eathers, to sleep in little humble places, to eat homely
we as we do, to live with the people—the Italian
eople, it is true, but still the people only?

“And that is why I wish for the Lemon Stone.

“Do you understand now?” *

I half laughed and half cried as I heard him, with
he glad golden morning all around, and my hand
olded close in his.

It was only a sceptre of peacock’s plumes that we

I knew that; but it seemed to me better than the
winged sceptre “of gold and ivory that symbolled the
empire of the world.

I tossed a shower of anemone cups above our

as I cried to him,—

“I do not understand! I do not want to under-

104 PASCAREL.

stand! I shall be content anyhow, anywhere, any
time—always—with you!” |

He let go my hands—for him almost roughly—and ,
rose quickly to his feet, and paced to and fro quickly |
under the trees silently, with the broad flap of his hat
drawn down over his eyes. He brushed and trampled
the anemones ruthlessly as he went; I could not tel.
what moved him, whether anger ‘or pain.

I loved him: well—indeed,—loved him with all th:
ardour and simplicity of a child who had never be
fore had any great affection for any living thing; but
I missed that subtle sympathy, that perfect passion
and patience which alone enable one heart to feel
each pang or each joy that makes another beat.

His moods were as changeful as the winds, and at
times there was a restless impatience and depression:
on him which was far beyond my understanding.

I did not comprehend now what I had said amiss;
the idea had occurred to me that he was growing tired
of me, and it made me sad; in the early days he had
never been capricious thus. I did not go to him
therefore, but sat’still amongst the grasses and the
fruitless boughs of the vines.

Ah, Dio mio! if I had gone to him and asked him
why he was so grave, he might have spoken—who
knows?—and the face of the world would have been
‘changed for us. For what would I not have pardoned
had he asked me?

After a little while, he mastered whatever emotion
had moved him, and came to me again. He spoke in
his old gentle, caressing way, a little colder, perhaps,
if anything, and less gay.

“Dear donzella, you are very good to care t

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 105

ider with me,” he said softly. “But I fear it is but
orry mode of existence for you; and I fear your
oscope contained something better for your future
n a strolling player’s homeless career. The clear
net that presided over your birth cannot have been
tinsel star on the painted foreheads of the Panto-
ni. But, altro! we have had enough, and too much,
such serious chatter. Some day we must talk
ously indeed, and I must—but never mind now.
is All Saints Day, and, perhaps the last day of
omer. There was frost at sunrise. Let us be happy
le we can, carina. Such a morning as this,” he
1, after a pause, laughing himself back into that
ety of soul which lived side by side in his nature
h a certain passionate and poetic sadness: “and all
ired gold of autumn ours, and a whole long sunny
'in which to wander as we like, it is infamous to
melancholy, or to be athirst for lemon stones, or
anything more than the good that we have got.
in backward to be in the shade of that tree; and
your hand lie quiet in mine—so; and now I will
you a story.”

I loved his stories; I had the insatiable delight in
m of a young mind to which romances were un-
wn; and his skill in telling them was marvellous.
The heroical absurdities of the Morgante Maggiore,
I the Furioso, the grotesque fairyland, and miraculous
rentures of Basile; the feuds and love-tales of the
mlace, as Cortese sang them fresh from the market-
ce of Masaniello; the narratives of Boccaccio; the
s of Berni; the comedies of Goldoni—all these and
r like were stripped of all coarseness and harmful-
s which they might possess, and served to me de-

106 PASCAREL.

corated by all the grace and playfulness of his ows
fancy added to them.

I was readily consoled: when he was gay and good
to me, no shadows had power to rest on me. ,

No lemon stone could have added anything to my
perfect peace and gladness as I lay there under th
golden-fruited pear-tree amongst the cyclamens, witi
my hand in his, listening to the sweet, sonorous cadence
of his voice, while the Lily of Florence floated on the
flag of the wooden theatre, and the robins
amongst the many-coloured autumn blossoms, and th@
sun was high, and the radiance was cloudless above
the Solitudine.

I was a child; I needed nothing more than th
joy of the moment; and whatever darkness he migt
see in the future it was all light to me; for did it nq
lie in the sweet sunshine of his smile? i

It was All Saints Day; we could hear the bell
ringing in the city all the morning long; we lean
there on the hillside, and took no thought for th
morrow—the morrow that was the Feast of the Des

CHAPTER IL
The Night of All Saints.

THAT evening he did not play at his Arte, and ¥
strolled down the hillside into Florence as the saa
set.

Brunotta elected to stay behind; she had
shirts to iron, as she said, and wished to sup afte
wards with a blacksmith’s wife in Marco Vecchi
Coco was missing when we left the hills, and lit
Toccd alone ran beside us, throwing his ruzzola

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 107

ully as though he had been six years instead of
en.

t was a beautiful warm red and gold evening,
using to be stormy on the morrow, but splendid
, as the sun set, and full of odour from the full
-presses where they stood beneath the trees, and
slow of roses that burned over every villa wall.

Ve went into the city on the carretta of a con-
10 piled with fresh hay; for we cut hay all the
round in Italy.

[he old mule stumbled down the stony ways; I
midst the flower-sown grasses, and drew the dead
es in it through my fingers; Pascarél walked beside
the boy ran on before; the contadino told us
*s of his crops and vines, and of the prices he
made by his wife’s home-woven linen; sometimes
ad to draw up against the wall and wait to let a
on-load of grapes go by; all along the road the
le were sitting out at their doors.

t had been a good vintage time, and all the world
content; at the gates even the soldiers who took
sustom dues were in good humour, laughing over
3 of new red wine.
“he city was all life and light. It was a beloved
of the people, and the streets were full.
\ll the bells were pealing; there was music every-
e. Women leaned from the casements with roses
eir hands. Over all the place there was a curious
my golden hue, deepened here and there into
bronze shadows, at times broken by a flush of
et, as a wood fire glowed through an open door-
at times paled into a pearly coolness when the

chaunting praises at the vespers, wan
river side, or gambling at morra at the
streets.

We ate black figs and drank black «
the old palace of the Strozzi, with t
Cronaca still catching the sunrays, wk
below were black as night, and the p:
illumined by lantern and lamplight she
way and casement, and little bright sp
like glowworms sparkled as the stands of
sellers wandered from place to place, ar
of amaretti and brigidini shouted frc
corner.

Then having long before lost little |
some street-tombola for toys and fruits
him, we too wandered away, and stray:
up the stairs of the little Logge theatre,
medieval granary, and laughed our he
the merry melodies of Don Bucefalo, ai
out again into the streets into the starlig

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 109

will, gioja mia. Do you not see her, on just such
ght as this, flying down this very place?

‘There is no story so perfect as the Ginevra tale.
‘The dreadful loneliness of the great dome as she
ke beneath it; the vast haunted stillness, with here
there the whiteness of a moonbeam; these quiet
my streets at midnight; the black shadows; these
ning archways, like the gates of tombs; the trem-
g, hunted, heart-sick thing, with her bare feet
nded on the stones, and the grave-clothes falling
t her shivering limbs; everywhere denial, incredu-
horror, superstition; everywhere the closed wicket
the cry of terror as at some unearthly appari-

‘Then at last the lover’s threshold, the timid sum-
3 of despair, the open door, the instant welcome;
2 doubt, not a question, not a fear—What matter
her living or dead, of heaven or of hell?

What matter whence she came?

What matter what she brought?

Welcome, thrice welcome, as flowers in the May-

Welcome and precious—since the face was hers!”
is voice had a thrill of passion in it that seemed
| my ear, in the silence of the deserted street,
t as the song of the nightingales in the ilex
ts in the nights of Midsummer. I felt—without
knowing what I felt—that it was not of Ginevra
he was thinking.

And it was all true too, here in this Via della
e,” he said, very softly and sadly, after awhile,
ing me closer against him as we went under the
m shadow of the leaning walls; and he uncovered

110 PASCAREL.

his head reverently in the moonlight, as though the
had passed by him all those dead, for whom h
Florence on the morrow would beseech her God.

We went on in silence until we had passed throug
the Gate of San Gallo to go homewards towards
hills.

“That cost us in all just four soldi,” laughed Pa
carél, as the city barriers closed behind us. “Figs ai
coffee and music, and all for the price a rich
gives for one cigar, or one peach, away in P
What do we want with a Lemon Stone? Our
would be in eggshell china, to be sure, and wes
have red velvet arm chairs at the Pergola; but shor
we be any the happier really? tell me, donzella, sh
wet”

“How could we be any happier?” J answe
him dreamily.

It had only cost four soldi, that sweet starli
evening, amongst the laughter of the people and
ringing cadence of the Bucefalo; but what of that!

The gladness was with us that never comes
in a lifetime, and our hearts had an echo for
music that made it sweet as the voices of angels.

He did not answer.

As I glanced at his face, there was a certain
disquietude upon it that stole there all suddenly,
his eyes beamed on mine in the shadows, with
look that had made silence fall between us that
beside the Rio Gonfio.

“Ah, carina, you do not know, you do not
he murmured softly.

What was it that I did not know? That los

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. Tit

res made my heart beat in a strange tumult, and
not ask him.
'e went in silence up the hilly road, with the
shining overhead. He passed his arm around
» aid me in the toilsome way, and drew my hand
o palace floor strewn with roses was ever softer
» sandalled feet of an eastern queen than seemed
tony dreary way to me.
he road was quite deserted at that hour. The
rays made it white and calm.
he dust of it was changed to silver, and its jagged
seemed like ivory where the light touched them,
ike malachite and porphyry where the green ivy
he golden vine leaves crossed each other.
‘om the wine-presses full of juice of the grapes
came strong fruitlike odours.

the stillness we could hear the goats browsing
e grass under the stripped vines. There were
scents of roses, of pasture, of grazing cattle, as
ussed the villa gates. Away in the city below
was a sound of men singing to the chords of a
Above, against the lustre of the skies, rose the
outlines of sad Fiesole.
e paused a moment to rest within the garden
of a villino. Cypresses were swaying plume-like
wind; wild roses were blowing, half-closed, with
‘ews shut in their hearts; a stream of water
ed slowly into a marble shell; clusters of yellow
s hung about a broken statue of dead Hyacinthus.
e stood there close together, with the stars above
d on the cool night air the scent of the crushed
} and fallen leaves,

112 PASCAREL.

In the soft gloom, his eyes burned into mine
arms drew me closer; his lips touched my hand:
cheeks, my throat. )

Are there any who have not known these hou:
they have heard but half the language, have see
half the sun.

We spoke but little. What need were ther
words.

We went slowly, after awhile, homeward up
road, which at another time would have seemed s
and dreary enough, but to me was beautiful as
earth can only be once in the length of any life.

There were no lights in Marco Vecchio, nor in
little humble place where we had made our dwel
There was only the moonlight glistening on the
vent walls above upon the heights, and a falling
that ran swift and bright until it dropped in the
of the olive woods.

I went up to my little bare chamber, where
brick floor was white from the rays of the moon.

He stayed without, walking to and fro beneatl
bronzed leaves of the walnuts.

I was sleepless and full of those dreams bor
memory, which are sweeter than all the drear
fancy.

The small square casement of my chamber
hung round with thick acanthus coils; beyond !
the stars of Orion gleamed in the deep blue of
skies.

All the hillside sloped away dimly towards
rence, pale under the moon, and only black wi
the cypress grew. The worn marbles and dulled !
coes of the old historic villas gleamed like silver, '

| THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 113

t the valley the lights of the city glowed as a
of lucciole glows in the harvest amidst the
maize.

roof of the house was low; the upper cham-
‘e underneath the eaves, some broken blocks
gno, grown over by a fig-tree, were beneath
low. He, looking upward, saw me leaning

yaused a moment; then, lithe as a deer, swung
by the boughs of the fig until he could touch
re he stood.

great dark leaves were all round him; the
ht was upon his face. He drew my hands
is neck, and murmured the sweetest words of
that lie in the tongue of Tasso, of Romeo, of
~a. |
perfect night was all around us. We. were
eneath the throbbing stars, amidst the burn-
S.
re, in the old Badia, men, dreaming of heaven,
sed the heaven that we entered by a touch, a
breath.

CHAPTER IIL
Sunrise.

y awake for very happiness that night, and
soon as the sun came over the hills and
the broad screen of the fig foliage.

as a beautiful wet, cool dewy world into which

yous and bare-headed from out the little lowly

1 on to the misty side of the hills.

is a child in my joy; I was full of the present;

» &f. 8

114 PASCAREL.

I had no thought beyond; I reasoned on nothing; I
reflected on nothing; I only wanted to hear him sy
once more he loved me.

Life was not more real to me than if we had bees
genii, like the Gwyn -Araun he envied}; it was a wot
derful perfect flowerlike thing that I held in eagennell
and ecstasy, doubting not that it came from God.

I ran into the sweet, cold, rosy, misty morhit
with the bronze of the reddened vine leaves about my
feet, and looked up at the blue sky and laughed s
little gladly and low, and then felt my eyes fill with
delicious tears, and stood still, wondering if ever any
creature had been so blessed as I.

About me was all the gold and crimson of the et
tumn foliage; the whole hill-side seemed to burh with
it up to the brown walls of the old Badia; but awsy.
in the valley there was a dense white fog in which
Florence was hidden from sight; even the golden cross
of her cathedral was no longer visible.

I dropped on to a stone bench in the olive orchard
of the cottage, and sat and dreamed, and listened for
the footfall of Pascarél. But all was quite silent :
round me. |

My heart fell a little. I had thought that he would
have been watching as eagerly for the dawn as I was

After a while bells began to ring in the city under.
the pale shadows of the fog. I could hear them where
I sat on the hill-side; but they sounded muffled and
sad.

A woman came through the olives to cross the
bridge of San Marco. She passed me closely; she
was weeping quietly.

I looked. at her in a sort of wonder; in this world

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 115

my beautiful, wonderful fairy world—how was any
row possible?

“I go to pray for my lost children,” she said,
tly, im answer to the look upon my face. “It is
Feast of the Dead. May you never know grief,
‘pretty signorina.”

She went on under the olives. I shivered a little
ere I sat, with the red vine coils bright about my
ts the mists dense as clouds in the valley.
Florence was veiled in her white shroud; she was
uming her dead.

I had forgotten what the day was.

I gave a swift thought to the lonely nameless
ves in cold Verona.

What had happened? Nothing.

And yet in the stead of my perfect joy there stole
me a vague fear.

CHAPTER IV.

Sunset.

ALL was quite still on the hill-side.
A few peasants went through the trees to matins
the old monastery church.
The bells rang on wearily and mournfully, echoing
sugh the fog.
Lattle Toccd ran down to me with a ruzzola in his
id.
“He went into the town before the sun was up; he
me this for you.”
On it Pascarél had written, “I must go into Flo-
se, but will be back ere sunset.”

8*

116 PASCAREL.

A great darkness fell on me. ‘The bells seemed
to be wailing for the dead.

It was only a day, indeed; but then I had dreamed
such perfect dreams of this single little day amongt
the red autumn leaves, hearing of his love forever am
forever and forever, and yet never enough. lox
with him on these haunted sacred hills.

A lattice was thrown sharply open; a shrill voice:
called—

“He is gone into the town, and _never let me
know; and I want coffee, and pins, and a shoestring
and the saints know what not! and nothing is to be
had in this beastly place, be it ever so. Toccd, nm
in the village and see if you can buy aught worth
the eating. He would never care if he lived on
acorns!”

It was Brundtta making her daily lamentation

I rose, and wandered away out of hearing; thé
little sharp voluble voice jarred upon me.

Little Toccd passed me, running with a few scudi
to do her errand.

I stayed him a moment on the hill.

“Do you know why he is gone?” I asked hm
wistfully.

Tocco shook his curly head.

“Not I. But I think—at least the cowherd said
so—that he seemed troubled as he left the house #
day-dawn. Perhaps he is gone to pray for someon
dead. It is the day of the dead, you know. But I
must make haste, signorina, or Brundtta will box my
ears, surely.”

The lad flew down the slope and across the bridgt
to the village. I strayed away amongst the oli

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 117

yosing hunger in that peace and stillness rather than
counter the perpetually ringing chimes of Brunotta’s
\tter.

Under the wall of the Villa of Mario a dairy-
man gave me a draught of milk and a crust, and I
ndered by myself all the morning, dreaming, dream-
, dreaming always of him. Of him alone.

Had he gone to pray for any dead that he loved?

My heart for a moment was heavy at the thought.
was jealous even of a memory that might be dear
him; but not for very long. He loved me now.

What matter the rest?

So«many hands had touched the mandoline—yes,
‘doubt. But I had a sweet, vague sure instinct that
e chord had been reached by me alone.

When the day had passed the meridian, all my
irits rose again. He had said that he would be
ck before sunset. I might hope for him every .
oment.

I returned through the fields and orchards linger-
gly and happily; the mists had all lifted by noon.

It was another clear summer-like day. The gol-
cross of the duomo glittered in the hollow where
€ city lay.

In the village, the people, having prayed for their
‘ad, were out in their holiddy gear; they were talking
terfully of the abundant vintage, and some of them
sre dancing under the red vine foliage to the sound
"a flute and a fiddle.

I saw, afar off, Brundtta, brave in a scarlet kirtle
id white bodice, with the amber beads of St. John’s
&y round her throat, merrily footing the salterrello
tth a brawny blacksmith of San Marco. Her white

118 PASCAREL.

teeth shone, her little rosy face laughed, her small
plump feet twinkled ceaselessly, the sunshine fell -
about her, the gold and bronze of the dying me
leaves hung above her head; she was as happy as
grillo in the grasses.

I went into the garden of the capanna we had
lodged at and sat down in a green nook of it, whence
I could see the bridge and the white road beyond
it shelved down towards Florence.

I lost sight of the dancers under the vines, but!
could watch him come up from the city, or fly to meet
him if no one looked.

The little garden was gay with all kinds of autumn
flowers; for the daughter of the house was one of the
flowersellers of Florence. There were great bands of
scarlet salvia blossoming, and many yellow heads of
gourds and pumpkins.

A pergola stretched from the threshold to the ga
den wicket; grapes still hung on it, and the leafage
was a brilliant tangle of red and green and gold |
sat on a bench in one corner of this, whence I could
see the shallow sunlit river; children were wading 8
it with many joyous cries, and a grey mule was drinkig
at the ford.

I was shut in by the green leaves.

Now and then a great lustrous bee or moth west
humming through the bean blossoms. I could
through the vine foliage the white wall of the hou
and the open window of the kitchen; the padros
went to and fro past the window in a white coif 2
a red petticoat, with copper vessels in her hands.

Lazily, every now and then, I lifted my arm ov
my head, and drew down one of the grapes of tit

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. Ikg

Wusters that hung above there: A grey cat was walk-

mg slowly through the maze of the pumpkins on the

ound. Beyond the garden walls there were the

‘elds and the vineyards, and beyond all these again,

Hesole and the mountains.

|. Ave Maria bells. were ringing dreamily down in the
oO.

It was five of the clock in the afternoon; there
Was no light on the sun-dial on the wall, but a tawny
flow like molten gold was shed over every thing from
he western skies above the hills.

The rabbits were scudding with bustle and glee
‘Mongst the cabbages. Far away at the other end of
he garden two little children were gathering great
‘ellow pears off the side of a shed, eating and laugh-
ng as they filled the rush baskets with the fruit.

A white pigeon spread silver wings against the
leep cloudless blue of the sky. The houseleek on
he red sloping roof turned to vivid gold. The wo-
man of the house hummed to herself fragments of
long as she went to and fro past her open window;
and J could hear the merry music of the flute where
the villagers were still dancing.

Why do I think of all these things? I do not
know: only the leaves and the flowers, and the beasts
and the unconscious people that have all been about
One in any great misery seem to become a portion of
M, and burn themselves into one’s brain—forever.

The sadness of the daybreak had passed away
from me with the vanished mists. My future seemed
to glow before me— golden, beautiful, indistinct,
Mered, as the cross of the cathedral glowed down in
the valley..

120 PASCAREL.

I sat and dreamed over the tender music of his
voice, which could lend to the simplest phrase o
commonest greeting all the eloquence of a caress.

For the last time in my life I was happy with that
perfect happiness only possible in extreme youth,
which is only half conscious of itself, and does nt
awaken to question either its wisdom or its here
after.

After a while there was a rustle and a step, and
Brunotta, hot and tired, pushed her way through th
leaves.

She stopped short as she saw me.

“I thought you were on the hills, signorina,” sh
said, sullenly, and stood posed on one foot, like 4
little sulky bird, as her habit was when not quite #
her ease.

I looked up and smiled on her. I loved ever
living thing that day, and though she had bee
capricious and out of temper with me recently, I had
never forgotten all the goodness she had shown me
the early days of my wanderings with the Arte.

“Have you had a good dance, Brundtta?” I asked
her. “I saw you in the village with that big black
Domenico.” |

“There is no harm in stretching one’s limbs awhile”
said Brunotta, sulkily, as though I had accused her of
some fault. “I went to mass in the morning, of cours.
Of course one always prays for the dead. They neve
haunt you if you do. Though, for the matter of tha
I knew a good soul in Casentino who paid a doz
masses every Quaresima to keep her husband quiet ®
his grave, and it was all not one bit of use; he was?
pedlar, and was thought murdered for good and

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. I2!I

brigands, but just when she was married to a rich

ulterer, and comfortable, he came to life again, and
. the church money was wasted that she had paid for
« years and more;—if that was not enough to try a
yman!—still, I always say prayers for them, for they
m do one a great deal of hurt if they like. And I
n always afraid my old father may come any night,
w there was a matter of fifteen soldi for goat’s
alk that we quarrelled about the very day he fell
own in a fit; and his very last words were, ‘If I get
ut of my grave, I will have those soldi, you wicked
‘ench” He said that even with L’Olio Santo upon
im.”

And Brunotta paused, overcome with her recollec-
ions, looking vaguely and still sulkily at me, as she
ested one foot on the other.

I listened with a little wonder; it was the first time
be had ever spoken of her father, though she had
Mten told me of the cruelties of her foster-mother in
vasentino; and this dying thought of the soldi seemed
© me wholly unlike the gay, ironical, humorous and
whimsically proud man whom Pascarél had so often
lescribed to me as the graver of the prince’s coronet
apon the old tin tinker’s pot.

Moreover, if Pascarél had been fifteen when his
father had died, how could Brunctta, who was so
Many many years younger than he, remember the dead
man at all?

“You mean your foster-mother’s husband?” I said,

g away down the white road and thinking little
of her, only eagerly watching for the shadow so
and so dear to me to fall across the sunny

122 PASCAREL.

“T mean my father,” said Brunotta, stubbornly, and
was silent, with the guilty, conscious, cunning lok
upon her face that she had worn on the day of t¥
San Giovanni.

I did not think much of her.

My eyes went across the bridge to that little white:
glimpse of road on which with every second I hoped
to see the elastic slender figure, the white dress, th
dark oval face, like an old picture, that I had »
often watched for in such happy hours, but nevet
watched for with such a beating, eager, tremulous
heart as now.

When at last I looked at her she was still in the
same position, looking like an angered chidden child,
but with a certain apprehensive cunning on he
ruddy face.

“Why, Brundtta, how you stare at me!” I cried,
growing a little tired of her gaze. “Is there anything
strange in me to-day?”

In answer, her lip fell, her plump shoulders heaved,
and she began to sob aloud.

My heart stood still with terror. My fancy fev
to every kind of evil that might have befallen him.

“What is it?” I cried, breathless with fear. “Any
accident—any sorrow—to him?”

Brundtta dropped at my feet in the dust, a litte
ruffled heap, like a gay-plumaged bird that is beaten
down by the rain.

“He is well enough! Or I daresay he is,” sb |
muttered, sitting there upon the sand. !

She caught hold of my skirts with both hands, and °
hid her face, and began to sob aloud.

“No, no, he is well enough. It is you, signorins.

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 123

| you go away, and let us be happy once more?
were so happy before you came. I have been
ing him so, ever so many days past, but it is al
use. You have bewitched him, and he cares no-
ig for me. Will you be generous and go away?
i are so handsome, and men care so much for you.
mill be sure to be well with you anywhere.”

“Go away!” I echoed, stupidly. I thought I could
| fairly be awake.

“I was so sorry for you in the wood that day,” she
nt on, pushing my skirts aside, and speaking in
ulant passion, while her round black eyes swam in
ts. “Ah, Holy Gesu! It is always one’s good deeds
t turn round and sting us like wasps. It is very
‘d to do right in this world. It costs one so much.
dI was fond of you, donzella; oh yes! I am fond
you still, if only you will go right away. I will
y for you night and morning to our own black
donna of Impruneta, and she will look after you,
i see you want for nothing. I am sure she will if
sk her; for I never miss mass on her feasts—not
e; and whenever I have owed her a candle for any
id that she did me I always have paid it, in the
y finest wax, too. She will care for you, that I
‘sure; and, besides, what will you want for, any-
re? You can do as you will with men. There
no strength like that strength. It comes to one
e and there, in tens of millions, they say; and you
e it. I do not grudge you it. Ohno. I would
have you think that——”

“Think what?” I cried to her, still amazed and be-
lered, and not dreaming the truth.

“That lam jealous of you. Oh no, I am not jealous,

124 PASCAREL.

But if you would just go away. We were so well til
you came. That first night he was wise and I the
fool. He said to me, ‘Why bind up with our hedgerow
flowers this beautiful stray hot-house rose?’ And |,
like a fool, only laughed at him, and saw no ham
Though, of course, I might have known full well what.
the end would be. He will kill me, I daresay, for:
speaking to you. So he must. I would rather die.”

I rose and drew away the hem of my dress with
which her hands were nervously playing. I looked
down on her in incredulous amaze.

“Are you mad, Brundtta? What is it you mean!
How can I hurt you? Cannot you speak simply and
straightly, and say what it is that you want?” ;

She cast a scared glance down the long green aise
of the pergola to make herself sure she was not over
heard: there was only at the farther end the white wall!
of the house and the open casement, with the woman
still moving to and fro and still singing.

“I mean you to go away,” she muttered, under
her breath, with a certain sound almost of fiercenes
in her voice. “To leave him. Cannot you under
stand?”

“No, I do not understand. Why should you watt
me away? You were the first who asked me to stay.
You mean something more, Brundtta. Speak out——’

“I know I was the first to ask you to wait with us,"
she cried, with a great sob, half of pain, half of pat
sion. “Have I not said it is always what we do bet
that most hurts us. It is always so. I speak as plainly
as I can. I tell you to go.

“He will kill me, no doubt; so he must. From
the very first you bewitched him.

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 125

“I might have known a man as poor as Pascarél
Mts not give away twelve gold florins, making believe
bey were got back from a thief, without love having
lomething to say in it. He worked very hard to make
tp those florins; he did all kinds of coopers’ and cop-
Yersmiths’ work ever so long, and you never knew.

. “You were so glad to get back your florins you
believed any follies he told you.

- “He has loved you from the first, that I am sure.
That day when he half killed the Sicilian it was out
Mf rage for you, not for me. And only look at him
sow!

“Before he saw you, there was not such a gay-
earted, mischief-loving, careless creature in all the
country. He loved his wine, and his wit, and his
somrades, and his nonsense, and he had kisses and
ests for every woman he met. I was never jealous of
i

“And now not once in ten times will he sup with
the men when they ask him: as for the women, he
never looks at one; and when he is alone—I mean
when you are not there—he just sits dreaming,
dreaming, dreaming, and never a word to throw at
a dog!” -

She paused, breathless from the rapidity and
Vvehemence of her words, and I stood as breathless
before her. My face burned; my heart beat; my brain
Whirled. All wonder, all offence, all amazement, were
drowned in me under the flood of my own delicious
happiness—he loved me.

I did not think to answer her. I was thinking only
of that perfect sympathy, this unutterable gladness,
Which bound my life to his with silver cords.

126 PASCAREL.

A strolling player! I could have laughed aloud in.
delicious mockery of my old dead pride. A tmkec’s
son! What matter? I cried in my heart; I knew him
a king amongst men.

The little shrill, petulant voice of Brundtta came
strangely on my ears, as though from far, very &
away.
“He will kill me if ever he know!” she was cryitg:
“For he said to me that first night when we had found
you in the wood, ‘Not a word, Brundtta, never a worl
—as you value my love and your life. And I pro
mised him; nay, I swore by all the saints that I would
never tell.

“No doubt they will burn me belgw, sometime, for
that; though if they put women in hell for just break-
ing their word, I cannot think how they find room 1
the place.

“Tt is bad to break a promise, I know. But I have
begged Pascarél to send you away from us, and le
will not. And so at last I must speak, and I will I
is three years ago last San Giovanni’s day since
said to me, ‘Piccinina, will you wander with me?’

“We were at the fireworks on the Carraia bridge,
you know, and I was frightened and screamed becaus¢ |
a rocket fell near me; and he lifted me down intoa |
boat he had got on the river; and there were young
men with him, and coloured lanthorns, and wines
sweetmeats, and they sang; and it was all so meny
and good, that when he asked me I thought the life
would be one big feast day always. |

“And I was so sick of the casentino, and the goals
and the straw-plaiting; and one had to tell a thousand
lies to get a scudo for oneself, the old people were ®

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 127

7p and so mean; and then all one’s savings went in
slution, of course; and such a fuss to get leave to
off to a fair as never was, and such a rage if a
npster kissed one! I remember being beaten black
blue by the old woman after this very fair up
2 at Fiesole because I went to have my fortune
| at the Buda, and there was a brave-looking boy
o Prato who was full of money, and——”
She stopped and coloured all over to the brown
's of her pretty hair, and glanced at me with cun-
z eyes, whilst I listened, comprehending nothing
; she said, and waiting in astonished silence to
r the purport of her words.
“So you see, signorina,” she went on, breathlessly,
hought to myself, when Pascarél in his boat, said
ne, half joking, ‘Pretty bird, will you fly away with
' I thought to myself I would jump at it, and get
y once and for all from the goats and the plaiting;
_ then, you know, Pascarél looks like a marquis;
. I knew I should dance as much as ever I liked;
. ‘who could tell that he had it in him to be such a
mt, and would make such a fuss about taking a
ket?
“Ever since that Giovanni’s night I have been true
him, quite true to him, that I vow; and if I have
| a neckkerchief here and an earring there from a
n or two, what does it signify?
“J have never given anything back for it, that I
ar by all the saints—scarce a fair word even, for
carél is so fierce. And how can one live in a
yhouse as if one were in a convent? It is ridiculous
say such things; and if one may not laugh and
sip, whatever is life worth having?

128 PASCAREL,

“And I have put up with all that, though at my @.
age one does not like to be cooped up like an abbess;
and I have borne with his temper—and it can bé8
horrid one, as you might see that day with poor Ro-
sello Brin—and I have always had a care that he
should have a good supper, though for himself he nevet
knows whether he is eating a capon or a crow.

“And then all in a minute it is the donzella this
the donzella that, and one is set aside in everythin
—a stranger, who has not even so much as a silve
bodkin for her hair that she can call her own.

“But if you will go away it will be well again. .

“It is your face bewitches him; and that pretty,
proud, saucy way you have with you. But if you wil
go away he will think nothing about you in a month
He forgets very soon, does Pascarél.”

I heard her in perfect bewilderment, my thoughts
too astray in their own sweet confusion for me to kt
able fairly to seize the sense of her words.

“But, Brunotta, I cannot understand,” I murmured
“Why should you not have come with your brothe
when you found him on Giovanni’s night? and why
should I be asked to go away now that he——”

I stopped abruptly. My face burned, and I turned
a little away from her. I remembered that the affec
tion between us was his secret, and must not be givet
to the winds by me. _

Brunotta’s hands clutched nervously at the scarlet
fringes of her dancing skirt; her face paled a litte
under its ruddy brown; her eyes glanced slyly through
the leaves; she strained her throat to see that there
was no hearer in the little garden or at the wicket ia
the acacia hedge; then she dropped her head sullenly, |

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 129

with a little cunning laugh, like a child when it
broken sone precious toy, muttered beneath her
th— |
‘Signorina, he is not my brother!”
‘Not your brother?” I echoed, vaguely.
fer meaning did not dawn on me. I had never
deceived by any creature; so far as I knew, no
had ever told me an untruth; to give and receive
| faith had always seemed to me a law of life as
ral as to draw the breath.
ind of any evil I had but the most shadowy con-
on. ‘There were women in the world who were
ed; so much I knew; but of what shape or mean-
heir wickedness took I had but the vaguest im-

ng.
‘No! Nobody but a baby like you would ever
believed that folly,” said Brunotta, still crouched
ly feet in the dust, her fingers plucking at her
et fringe. “How you should ever have believed
cannot think. There have been thousands and
sands of things that ought to have told you if you
not been as blind as an owl in the daylight. But
u will just go away, it will be as if it never had
You must never say that I told you; he would
ler me. Go away quietly. You will come to no
- You have a face that is your friend anywhere.
I will pray to our Lady for you, I will, honestly,
she will have a care of you. Whenever I have
ised her anything I have always paid it faithfully.
ell in with a horrible storm off Catania once, and
ved her three pounds of candles if we got out of
e, and I bought them in the very finest wax and

eovl. Il. 9

130 PASCAREL.

offered them up at San Frediano the moment I
foot in Florence——”

“Not your brother?” I echoed, dreamily watchi
the grey cat straying amongst the pumpkins. “Yi
mean you were only his foster-sister. I am n
astonished at that.”

“He is no brother of mine at all,” she retorte
sullenly. “I tell you he is no kith nor kin of mine.
only saw him for the first time that San Giovanni
day three years and more ago. I had never set eyt
upon him before. You might have guessed at once-
only you are such a baby. And I never would har
told you, only I know you love him yourself, andh
loves you.”

I listened with a strange sound like rushing wate
beating at my brain. I did not understand, and y
the green fields, the red vine-leaves, the evening
that had grown grey as the sun had sunk behind t
hills—all eddied round me in a dizzy maze.

A man—any man, however base, I think—woul
have had pity on my innocence and _ bewildermet
But a woman who is jealous has no pity, and Brundt
had none.

She laughed, a forced little laugh, hard, cunnin
and cruel—a laugh of envy and vengeance together.

“How strange you look, signorina! I am sur
never dreamt you half believed that story. Wh
that had eyes in their heads cou/d think he was
brother?”

“Not your brother?” I,echoed the words mechan
cally. :

"That falsehoods were daily human food, that ab
was the small brass coinage in which the interchang

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 131

ff the world was earried on to the equal convenience
f all, was a truth of which I had no suspicion.

“Not your brother!” I repeated again. “What do
you mean? What is he, then?”

A deadly coldness clutched at my heart as I spoke.
I did not know what I feared or what I thought, but
a great woe seemed suddenly to gather close about me.

Brunotta threw herself on her knees at my feet in
the chequered shadows from the foliage overhead. She
sobbed convulsively in a passion of repentance and
Of tears.

“I had sworn to him never to tell you. And now
Ihave told; and he will kill me if ever he know.

“When we met you in the wood that miserable
day, and I, like a fool, asked you to join your life with
ours, he took me aside, and he said to me, ‘What does
the donzella think that we are to each other?’ And I
answered him that you had taken it into your head
that I was his sister, and that I had not contradicted
you—that was all. ;

“Then he said to me, ‘So let it rest, then. Mark
my word; I will not have her ears soiled with the
tuth. She is innocence itself. If she go with us she
must never know. It is a sorry sort of protection, but
the might fall under worse.’ And that night he made
me solemnly promise him—nay, I swore to the saints
~that I would never tell you the truth of my relation
vith him.

“IT meant to keep my word; I did, indeed. I never
ras tempted to break it till that storm about Rosello
irhin. That made me feel mad against you.

“At first I had thought, ‘She is a donzella; she
rill find her own great people; it will only be for a

g*

132 PASCAREL.

little space. And I felt a sort of love for you; I did
indeed. You were so different to me.

“But after that my eyes were opened, and I have
watched him, and I have seen that it was you whom
he loved, and not me any longer; and then I have
thought and thought, ‘If I let her stay with him, soon
he will not so much as cast a look at me,’ and that
made me mad; and I said to myself, ‘Why should!
be so coy with her, and not tell her the truth, when
it is easy to see she would ask nothing better than t0
be in my place.’

“The people do nought but talk of him and you
They know what such amicizia means, if you do nd;
and very nice it is for me to hear their jokes at DY
expense.

“And then to hearken to him, always—the don-
zella this and that, and such care had of you as if
you were a princess born, when all the while you art
a lesser thing than I, for what, pray, do you ever d0
to get your bread? But I wash, and bake, and stew,
and mend his linen, and do all manner of things—t
say nothing of my bringing in money for him by my
dancing; while you lead a life like any cockered-up
peacock on a villa terrace, though all the time, 4
everyone knows, it costs Pascarél half the theatre’s re
ceipts to keep you and to pay your lodgings.

“And yesterday I saw him look at you—just with
that look in his eyes that it is like a sorcery for one;
and I would not wait any longer. I said, ‘She shall
know to-day, and I will see if she will go, or if she
will wait and oust me and take my place. It is best
to know the worst straight at once.”

I stood and heard.

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 133

CHAPTER V.
Nightfall.

I REMEMBER Staring at the russet leaves and the
ue sky, at the children under the pear-tree and the
mey cat that walked amongst the yellow pumpkins.
\nd that it could be the same world, that it could be
‘ong on in the same light and laughter, seemed to
1¢ horrible, hideous, incredible.

For me the world was dead.

I did not speak; I did not move.

Brunotta grovelled, frightened and sobbing, at
y feet. The beautiful vine foliage, the drooping
rapes, the shimmering of sunrays through the dark-
ess of the leaves, the blaze of sunset light on the
thite wall beyond, the gleam of scarlet from the wo-
ian’s kerchief moving to and fro in the window, the
Iver glisten of the earrings in the bowed head at my
‘et—they went giddily round, and round, and round
1a sickening whirl of colour before my blinded eyes.

For many and many a month afterwards, when-
ver I closed my eyes at night, I saw them still.

“You will not tell him, donzella?” whispered the
Oor, little, treacherous, cowardly creature on the
ath before me, clutching closer the hem of my skirts.
You do not know what his passion can be. He
ould kill me. He would kill me surely. If you do
ot care for him, go away; go straight away, and I
all be happy again; he so soon forgets. But if you
we him, as I think, best say so to me straight out. I
il make an end of my life some way; it does not
art much. And I could not live to stand by and see
ou take my place ”

134 PASCARELs

“Your place!” | .

The outrage broke the spéll that held me parr
lysed. Poor, little, foolish, ignorant, coarse-fibred soul!
How could she: know the shame she did me? How
could she tell the unbearable torture to me of that
level with herself to which all ignorantly she dragged
me.

But in the pain and desperation of my wound!
was incapable of excuse or justice for her.

I was stunned and maddened by the shock of the
first sense of falsehood, the first perception of evil
the first horror of treachery. that had ever touched me.

Some indescribable unknown guilt seemed to ms
around me, like noxious fumes of baleful fires, and
stifle all the young life in me. Of the sin of the
world I knew nothing; of the treason of it I knew a
little.

That I had been betrayed, insulted, outraged, was
rather an instinct with me than any reasoned knov-
ledge. He had deceived me; that was all I knew, and
all I cared to know. -

She grovelled in the sand before me, clutching 1yY
skirts, bathing my feet with her tears, beseeching m¢
not to reveal her broken troth to him.

When I thought that he had loved her, and thet

- ——_ —=

loved me—oh God! how wretched, base, and poor? ‘

thing I grew in my own sight!

I loathed myself as much as I loathed her; and
yet, great heavens! how I hated her, because his lips
had touched hers; because she, too, had known that
touch, that smile, that kiss which, child as I was, !
would have given my life away to win one hour!

And he loved fer/ this timorous, treacherous, bas¢

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. £35

n, base-bred fool, who was not even true to him,
» had not even-such poor, simple, natural virtue in
as lies in loyalty. and in good faith.

All the blood in me burned like a flame. I drew
skirts from grasp, and thrust her away with
foot. Looking back on the unutterable passion
| horror of that aime, I wonder now I did not
ke her.

I understand how men strike women—men who
not cowards either.

“You will not tell him?” she moaned, dragging
self upon her. knees again to me. “You will not
him? You do not know how violent he can be
his rage. You will not tell him? He would kill
”

I thrust her again from me with an unutterable
thing. He had loved her! loved this craven thing
ch could dare betray him, and yet not dare to
ve his vengeance.

“No; I will not tell him,” I ‘answered her; the
‘ds seemed to suffocate me as I spoke.

She had been good to me once; in her way she
| shown me hospitality and good will; she was safe
n any revenge of mine.

A sudden fear seemed to fall on her with my an-
r; not fear for herself, but fear of me. No doubt
face looked strange to her—there, where I stood
the vine shadows, with the golden sunset world
ling around me, and all the beauty of my young
struck dead in me at one blow.

“Are you going away?” she muttered, under her
ath. “How you look! I wish now I had not told
L -If you love him indeed so much——”

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 137

had heard, and the shame of it, seemed to have
orched and shrivelled all the life in me. I was little
ore than a child. I was all instinct; I had no reason.
sbandoned myself without meditation or analysis to
fy impulse of the moment.

My love for him had been one of the noblest,
reetest, purest impulses of my life. It had been
‘ter than myself. All love, if it be worth anything,
higher than the nature that begets it.

My love had subjugated all weaker and vainer
ings in me; it had vanquished my pride, and my
Ifishness had been subdued and destroyed by it.

It had been passionless because quite childlike; it
ad been quite happy only to see him come and go,
» have the clasp of his hand, to listen to his fancies
nd his dreams; it had possibly irritated him often by
§ unconsciousness and its contentment in so little;
nd yet it had been intense with all its innocence,
nd, in its way, perfect.

Had I been older I should have paused and
veighed awhile these cruel doubts that had fallen on
ne, like drops of scalding lead upon an open wound.

Wad I been truer and more faithful I should have
Known that the love of a woman to be worth aught
Must be dog-like, and take good and evil alike in
ret faith, and kiss the cherished hand that deals

low.

Had I been wiser in the world’s wisdom I should

been able to measure the emptiness and the
Weariness of these mindless ties, of the soulless
e woven that fatal night, when, for sake of a
"Osy face and a smiling mouth, he had said, “will you

138 PASCAREL.

wander with me?” as the boat shot away in the moon-
light.

But I was only a child, and I loved him witha
child’s ignorance and a woman’s narrowness, and I
was only alive to the one intolerable unutterable
shame which seemed to fall on me with the coarse
invective of this creature, who begrudged her place
to me.

And with it all, a nobler despair, a deadlier woe,
smote me in the sense—so slow to dawn on me, 9
blasphemous, as it still seemed to me—that he could
have told a falsehood to me, that he could have let
me live on and on and on, unthinking and unsuspec-
ing, in the tainted sunshine, in the plague-smitten
beauty, of a paradise of lies.

Since then I have known passions that beside t
were as the rushing stream of lava beside the limpid
mountain burn; yet I doubt if I have ever known 4
love, more purely and perfectly love, than this I thea
bore to Pascarel.

And it was all dead—worse than dead; struck
the eyes, as it were, with all the insult of a blindig
blow. At a stroke, the words of this poor false fool
had dragged it down from the heaven of its innecett
exaltation, and levelled it with all that was poor
basest, meanest, coarsest, in the acrid jealousies
women and the amorous infidelities of men.

Her jealousy degraded me in my own sight.

Beyond every other thing I was proud. Tl
evil had been subdued by his influence, but newt
uprooted; beneath the sting of torture it rose up
tenfold strength.

“Take her place—take her place!”

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 139

| said the words that had outraged me a thousand
S over and over again between my locked teeth.
re were times when the ferocity of a beast awoke
xe, and I was on fire to spring at her throat and

For he had loved her once: so I believed, at least;
210 knew nothing of men or women either.

Nothing of the brevity of the mere desire of the
es. Nothing of the leaden weight of a sensual
jage. Nothing of the languid reluctance of a sated
y ‘to strike and free itself. Nothing of the in-
nt impulses and mindless passions with which the
t of a man may be drawn hither and thither with-
once touching or sighting the goal of its ideal.
uing of all which might have given pardon to him,
er, to myself.

Ihe innocence of youth is cruel, because it is of
ssity also ignorance, and ignorance is cruelty
ys.
{ did not stir, my eyes were never wet, no cry
ped me; but where I lay, face downward, as I had
g myself, I bit through and through, like a wild
nal that is trapped, the woollen coverture of my
2 pallet bed.
The time went on; the robins ceased to sing, the
23 blew against the window frame; when I looked
it was quite dark, and there were stars shining.
I heard the pressure of a foot upon the woodwork
the old, ricketty, worm-eaten door, a feeble, little,
ing voice began to mutter through it to me of a
msand selfish terrors. The sound of it stung me
blind fury; he would be home at sunset; home to

140 | PASCAREL.

her and me; one at the least I vowed to heaven he
should not find there.

I had no space for hesitance, no time for thought;

there was but one way—I was young and supple as
a willow bough, and mad with pain—lI sprang on
the stone coping of the casement, turned and grasped
the network of the rose-stems, and the boughs of the
fig, knotted and tough from half a century of sun and
storm.
Then holding by that hazardous support, I let my
body drop along the surface of the leaf-covered wall
dragging a ruin of rose leaves as I fell. The house
was very old and low: I touched the grass beneath
with a dull shock, but without violence; as I reached
the earth I heard above the crash and _ splinter of
the panels forced and driven in before the blows
of some one whom Brunotta had summoned mm he
affright.

It was quite dark; the garden was deserted; I
paused an instant to draw my breath; with the sof
shower of ‘the rose leaves still like tears upon DY
face.

I felt bodily pain, but that only served to maddea
me, as the lash maddens a beast already bruised; !
leaped the low stone wall of the garden and flew like
a lapwing into the dusky shadows.

Little Toccd leaned over the wall that parted
the garden from the olive orchards. He was singig
clearly a sweet merry melody, and gazing dow
through the gloom to try and see who passed acrs
the bridge. I crept up to him and slid into his hasd
the onyx with the Fates.

“Give it to him when he comes,” I murmured.

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 141

boy started and stared, no doubt at the
| sound of my voice; but dreading lest he
detain me, I thrust the stone into his hold and
ay through the shadows before he well knew
1 spoken to him.
ind me I heard a noise of many voices, and
household of the little place roused itself to
rona’s summons. ‘Turning my head once I
hts flash in its windows and underneath the
f its pergola. I held straight onward, running
inged feet where the grass lands allowed my
, stumbling and slipping where the maples and
*s woven together opposed my progress.
times I fell into the trenches cut in the hard
zinst the hill floods of winter. At times I
myself on the tangled sticks of dying vines.
times I lost myself amongst the thickets of
hining white as the winding-sheets of ghostly
ons. At times I sank over my feet in shallow
that rippled from the mountains, and went on
y garments heavy-weighted with the moisture.
times I crouched in some shed or under some
of maize to get my breath, and then I saw
d over the country, close about the little
ops, the lights of lanterns that flickered fitfully
out amongst the foliage; and then I gave
no rest, but gathered my skirts close and ran

length—it may have been one hour, it may
een three or four, by the look of the stars it
ite night—one of the vineyards that I crossed
abruptly and without fence upon a highway on
[ heard the sound of a horse’s feet.

142 PASCAREL.

Looking behind I saw no lights; there was
the great brooding darkness of the deserted cov
with here and there a silvery gleam as some ra
the young moon caught a belt of olives, or a bri
of water.

I went into the road and waited there. T
beyond their reach I knew I must not pause to
amidst my flight. I knew, too, that I was nea
the end of all my force.

Through the gloom there came towards 1
white horse, with a red woollen covering spread
it in the Tuscan fashion, dragging slowly a contad
cart.

As it drew near me I saw, by the light o
lantern which hung at the shafts, that the peasant
an old man of seventy or eighty years.

His cart swayed heavily backward on its wh
it was filled with straw and earthenware; he doze
he went, and the horse picked its own way am
the stones at will.

I called to him and stopped him; he awoke, tl
ing of roadside robbers, and began to mutte
coherent prayers to a leaden saint in the band of ht

I made him, with difficulty, understand that I
harmless and alone and tired, and that if he w
give me a lift for a league or two I would pay
well. When he had recovered his alarm, he told
that he was going with his pottery to a fair at
tignano; that to get a good place amongst the §
it behoved traders to be there whilst the dawn
grey; that he never hurried or harassed his beast,
so had started at nightfall to make his journey
easy stages.

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 143
Ie hesitated some time over my offer, then

"he cart was a light one, he said, and my weight
light too; it would not harm the horse; I
t get in amongst the straw if first he saw my

ey.
gave him the little gold piece that my father
given me on the stairs in Verona; it had been
r round my neck with the onyx. He let me
) up amidst the rough pottery of his trade stock,
the patient beast set forward again upon its
; the old man settled himself again to doze at
the cart creaked onward down the steepness
1e slopes, the lantern glimmering redly in the

n.

[e paused a long time in the desolate grey piazza

esole.

ili the town was asleep upon its high hills, but
was some friend he knew dwelling by the

*h who at his rap hung out a lantern on a hook

ie wall, and brought him a flask of wine, over

h they talked long together in the darkness.

‘hen the horse jogged on again along the stony

my roads, on and on and on into the oak woods

orgunto, where the great masses of wooded hills

>d away, above and below, in an intense stillness,
broken by the cry of an owl.

t is a winding and difficult road that passes along

tide of the mountain from the town of Fiesole to

old fortress of Poggibonzi, and the agony of the

‘Qnd weary way seemed endless.

After awhile the clouds broke and the moon shone
through the oak leaves one could see the vast

144 PASCAREL.

silent valley stretched far, far below, and the am
theatre of the endless hills encircling it. Even i
stupor and misery I had some vague sense of its |
derful, solemn, mystical shadowy beauty.

Only a week or two before we had gone up
road on our way from Casentino to the annual fa
S. Francis at Fiesole, and we had talked of Mas:
and Desiderio as we saw their little white tow
the slopes, and had gathered the wild anemones
covered the ground with bloom, and had sung:
to the mandoline, passing under the acacias b
fortress walls, and mounting higher and higher
higher with a gay good-morrow to the smith a
mountain forge.

Only a week or two before! And now!

The hours passed in a horrible nightmare fo
The cart shook, jolted, rattled on the stones
body was bruised and lacerated by the thicket:
the vines; the palms of my hands were bleeding
the thorns of the rose-trees; the night was very
as autumn nights are, north of the Abruzzi. Bt
misery of my thoughts killed in me all sense of
pain.

All I heard was the sweet music of his voice.
music‘lost to me for evermore.

The night seemed endless.

The horse often paused to rest and crop a
of the wayside grass or drink at some stone tank
monastery wall.

The old contadino awoke now and then tos
word to it, or to trim his lantern, then slept 4
while the rope of the reins dropped idly from
wrists.

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 145

The road seemed interminable, going down, down,
mn, along the face of the hills, always with the
2 stretches of olives and vines on either side, al-
; with the dark vapours of the plain spread like a
beneath. Now and then an owl flew by with a
croak; now and then there shone a little gleam
t some lamp at a roadside shrine—that was all the
ye there was.

The cart crawled on under the boughs and past
dusky stone walls, still down, down, down into the
rg wood, where the oak is changed for the fir tree,
the path becomes sharp and sheer and bent into
es that make the stoutest mule stumble.

The first grey of daybreak had scarcely lightened in
skies when the horse paused at a turn in the descent.

old pottery dealer woke for the first time with ,
wide opened, shook himself, and descended from
‘eat.

rhe old man roused me roughly.

‘Signorina, you had best get out here if you want
ence. I go to Settignano, and that will be out
our road. Keep straight on, and go down, down,
lys, and you cannot miss to come to the Croce
Pe)
The cart jolted on its way to Masaccio’s birthplace,
I staggered, blind, and sick down under the stone-
8.
I felt feeble, broken, aged by ten years. My head
giddy, and the sunshine swam around me in
ht rings of amber. I felt numb, and, when I
fed, the earth seemed hollow and tremulous be-
th my feet.
warel. IT, 10

146 PASCAREL.

So, like one blindfolded, I stumbled down into the:
City that is called Beautiful.

CHAPTER VII.
The Church of the Cross.

Ir was full sunrise.

The light was streaming from the east, gold
and glistening as it came gleaming across the desert
In the streets deep shadows still slept. Lithe brows:
hands were unloosening the wooden lattices, and
flowers pent in casements thrust their heads out to
the air.

All was very quiet.

There was only the sound of the bells tolling for
the first mass of the churches, tolling everywhere,
north and south, east and west, over the wide val-
darno. Here and there a priest passed to some holy
office; here and there a sun-belated reveller went gaily
home touching a mandoline; here and there a womat
with brown bare arms swept down her steps or hung!
her linen out of window, gossiping the while to neigh: '
bours across the passage-way. )

It all went giddily and dimly round before my
sight. I was faint, and my limbs shook as I dragged
them over the stones. :

There was a’sound of footsteps and of outcries
behind me.

On the sheer instinct of the hunted deer, I paused
and shrank into the shade, and gazed around fo
shelter. Close against me the doors of the S. Cre
stood open. The vast, dark, solemn church yawned
like a grave. I crept into the shadow of its porch

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 147

4 its altars they were saying the first mass.

. lady, all lace and jewels, as she had come from
palace ball, was on her knees in the dusk and

olitude praying, while the voices of the priests

:d dully under the vast vaulted roof that shelters

ust of Michelangelo and Giotto.

ehind me were the darkness, the coldness, the

: of the great church, the lights burning dimly

way, the sepulchral undertones thrilling the still-

efore me, in the open air, there came, swift as
rind, a rush of feet, a clamour of angered voices,
wer of weapons, a tramp of horses, a cloud of
a flash of daylight, and, in the midst, a gleam of
iful bold eyes that last had looked at me in the
moonshine underneath the leaves away on the
ide by Dante’s Solitude.
‘he crowd went by like a whirl of dust and of
s on a day of scirocco. I sprang and caught the
of an old man who had uncovered his head
ently as it went by the church.
What is it? Oh, nothing,” he said, with a
ywwy smile. “Nothing. They broke on the wheel
y time. How scared you look, you pretty child.
only the ducal guard who are taking Pascarél to
‘argello; and the people want to rescue him, that
Done? No, he has done nothing that I know
ut the town cares for him, and he tells awkward
3, and it has been easy to seize the salt in his
h and tax it. There was a sort of riot yesterday,
he quelled it; but they made that an offence
st him. A player and a populano! What nght
1e to power$—to such power as Love gives and
10°

148 PASCAREL.

gets? So they arrested him last night, and they
him now to the Podesta for judgment. I daresay
will give him three months in prison. For the Bar;
is strong and the people are weak as yet.”

The old man, still with that subtle wintry s
upon his face, shook my hold off him, and went fe
along the street. :

The crowd in its cloud of dust had passed {
sight. I lost all sense of where I was, and fell,
one dead, upon the stones of Florence.

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 149

BOOK VI.

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE.

CHAPTER I.
Oltrarno.

You know the old old quarter, whose emblem on
: banners that were borne in war around the red
rxroccio, was the Silver Dove? The church is there,
sugh flame has ravaged it thrice; but the standard
ut bore the bird of the Holy Spirit over the reek
d carnage of the plains has crumbled away none
iow whither in some closet or crypt of the city.

Yet the quarter is barely changed at all, since in
e days of the Republic the men of San Lorenzo
ad of San Giovanni crossed the river to sack it from
nd to end under the storm of arrows and the rain of
re.

It is dark, and dull, and noisy, and noisome there
in the old historic quarter of the Silver Dove: and
yet it is so full of story, so sacred, with so many
Rhames and memories, that there is a charm about its
twisting gloomy streets, its high walls shutting out

sun, its dungeon-like chambers, its iron-bound

es, grim and firm set as sea-washed cliffs, its

e archways dark as Erebus, its narrow passage-
Ways where two mules can scarce pass one another
Wer the slippery and uneven stones.

It is all haunted ground in old Oltrarno. Come

150 PASCAREL.

to it in a summer morning. There is no’ sw
except in some square-walled garden behi
frowning front of some antique, coronetted
where stray sunbeams make a glory on shining
boughs and broken water-cisterns. It is all dé
the houses are so high, and the walls lean s
It is full of the strange, dreamy old-world Fk
odour, that smells always as though some king
had been freshly opened, and the spices and |
fumes of the cere-clothes lately loosened on
The people are walking, leaning, gossiping, 1é
quarrelling, all in the open street, and at tl
threshold. The cobbler is at his stall; the t
his barrow; the huckster at his board of clo
linens; the melon-seller at his truck of green
In every one of the great dusky interiors the
etching worthy of Rembrandt. In every one
sculptured, unglazed windows, there is a s
colour fit for Velasquez. It is all dark, am
and noisy, and noisome, I say, and yet in its
‘beautiful—the place is so gruesome, and the
are SO gay.

And then—so many steps are echoing afte
so many faces look at you from the grated wi

See—in that dim street there is old Tos
white head bending over the charts busy wil
dreams of the unknown world across the seas;-
enters a saucy, airy, ribboned, plumed cavalie
sings a stornello as he goes, and fingers the
box with which he is playing the Lenten lov
begun in Carnival with the original of Madan
pinet;—away behind the Carmine church, whe!
Masaccio came and painted in his title-deed:

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE, 15!

‘tality, runs a little barefoot, ragged imp, his mouth
lof stolen convent cherries, whom poor old Mona
\paccia tries to catch and lead to the good friars to
| fed and clothed, and made in his due time into
a Lippi;—under the deep shadows of the walls
tte goes to his sombre and frugal home the finest
t and keenest logician of the Rucellai Gardens,
using on sore straits of personal poverty, and fore-
ting, perhaps, with a certain delicate, cynical sad-
ss, that he who lives with clean hands the honestest
men in Florence will so pass down to posterity that
2 name of Machiavelli will be used, to all time, as
anonym for Prince of Rogues.

See there—who comes down hither in the gloam-
g of the last night of Carnival? by the corner that
called of the Lion, under the shade ‘of the Carme-
es church? Handsome and reckless still, as when
+, Benvenuto, hurled defiance at Diane de Poitiers
ym the Tour de Nesle,—prince of craftsmen and
ng of egotists—since his eyes opened to the light in
e little house in the Chiara street, full of its flutes
1d clavecins and harpsichords, its mirrors of silver
id its viols of ivory, wherein, in the winter nights,
ie old father sat “singing all to himself” by his brave
ak fires for pride and gladness of heart, because a
mn was born to him and to the city. He is come to
ek the recreant Tonino,—he has left his workshop
t the Mercato strewn with grotesques in gold and
canthus leaves in silver, and blazonries in enamel,
ad lilies in diamonds, and poniards in damascened
tal;—tne sword that hangs by his belt was red a
ttle whie ago in the sack of Rome;—the gold
fowns in his pouch are payments for Fontainebleau

152 PASCAREL.

from King Francis—he is in anger and in haste
going thus through the darkness to the ingrate
he thinks a hittle wistfully, great artist and re
liver though he be, of the old days when h
Michelangelo, and Piloto, the goldsmith, us
saunter hither on summer eves to listen to the 1
gals when all the dim night world was dewy wi
scent of roses.

See there, yet again,—through the gloaming
a white-frocked Dominican, with bent head and
tative eyes; of all the many thousand mon
Florence, he is “Il Frate” to the people. Wt
scourges himself in the crypt, and sees the p
and the sculptures feed the flames, does he eve
for that old bright vine-hung bottega where he
with the sunrise and worked till the evening
when he was only Baccio della Porta, the p
dwelling just outside the gate here, where tl
presses guard the entrance of that glad green c
whose smiling beauty gained it its gentle na
Verzaja even in the dry grim records of the
rolls? |

Down the old street of the Augustines there
a group of merry-makers fresh from the laught
the wine-cups of the supper at the tavern i
Tower of the Amidei away by the Jewellers’ E
They loiter in the moonlight to hearken to the
singing of the street-choristers, and note with 9a
eyes one beautiful, gentle, golden curled yout
whom many a white hand undoes a casemen, ¢
drop a lovescroll tied with a tress of hair. The
men who are called Michelangiolo, and Cellini,
Bugiardini, and Albertinelli, and Manzuolini

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 153

little while, and Michelangiolo paces the stones
, With his cloak wrapped about him and his hand
‘to his sword-hilt, and his heart heavy for the
of free Florence; for the bell of the people has
rung a stormo, and his cannon bristle and his
ms rise on the old monastic heights, and the fire
urnt black the shady gardens of Gicciardini, and
» them, on the hills where Corsini built the
ers for the Augustines to dwell in all their days
ace, there the fierce Spaniards are crying, “Lady
nza, bring out your brocades, and we will mea-
chem at the pike’s length;” and there, too, floats
yanner which has been for ever the malediction
aly, on whose yellow folds there is blazoned

Che per pia divorar due becehi porta; ”
1 the morning when the birds are singing in the
tey gardens behind the old grey palaces, and the
lean together and frown against the sun, you,
ing of all these who have trodden the stones
= you, shall stray slowly down the Via Maggio—
treet of the Maytime—the street named from the
. season of the lilies and the lovers in the old
gus days of free Florence, when, with the first
ing of May, the youths of the city went forth
the gates by the sunrise, and came back with
soils of the woods and the fields to the sound of
ute and the viol, and at every grated casement
up the branch of hawthorn, and the knot of
n, and the scroll of love words, each wooer for
wn innamorata, so that under the green wreath
uf and blossom the dark iron-bound walls looked

154 PASCAREL.

like the helmet and hauberk of Rinaldo flower-decked
by the rose trails of Armida on the amorous banks
Orontes. And so musing, you shall pass out by the
gates and feel the sweet winds blowing fresh again
over the vine-lands of the Vald’ema, and you shall
meet a woman carrying white roses with her to lay
upon some tomb upon the hill there; and you shall
think of the night feast of Pardon, when all Florence
was wont to flock up hither under the stars to wash
their souls clear before the fall of Pentecost; and sd
quiet of heart, and yet glad for the beauty of dead
days, and of the living summer time, you will go up
and up higher and higher till you reach the stillness
of the olive-woods upon Arcetri.

Shall you be dull and weary in dark Oltrarno—
now!

Nay, not if you have eyes that see, and ears that
hear.

But the world is full of deaf and blind.

CHAPTER ITI

At Boccaccio’s Window.

I was both blind and deaf in that horrible time.

I think a flower, when they break it off its stalk
and throw it down to sicken in the sun, must feel a8
I did all those weeks and months. Only the flowet
faints and dies, and is so far at peace; but I lived of,
though all my youth, and heart, and soul, and hop?
were killed in me.

It seems so long ago; so very, very long ago; and
yet at times near, as though it were only yesterday;

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 155

feat I saw the people sweep past the great gaunt
lor of the Santa Croce, his face in their midst
thin the reddening light of dawn. The vast yawn-
mag dark—the woman with her jewels at her prayers
—the gleam of the silver at the altars—the sweet
ill voices of the singing children—the rush of the
d—the ghostly gleam of day—how near they all
fe, and yet so far. Sometimes I fancy they were
Maly dreams—dreams, too, all that one glad summer
yar of wandering—and then I go slowly over the
Inks that bind me to the time, as other women in
their pain tell beads.

The links are clear enough, but I can say no
Prayer to them. My beads are full of thorns, and
hurt me—still.

There must be good people, though one doubts
so. A woman saw me fall thrice on the stones be-
fore the Florentine Pantheon, and had me borne up-
Stairs to her little chamber before the Misericordia
bell could boom for me. She was an old woman,
4nd quite poor; she got her living darning the silken

of dancers and of ladies; she lived in that little
fooked passage-way under the shadow of the Pitti,
Where old Toscanelli dreamed his way across the
tnknown waters to the unknown land, and gay Boc-
accio, with his cynical fine smile, loitered to see the
es of Florence pass in their gold-fringed litters
ind their gemmed zibelliné to the feasts in the Palaces
f Bardi and Frescobaldi.

She was a little brown, crisp, clean woman, seventy
‘ears old; she had a wide, bare, stone chamber under
he unceiled roof; all day long she darned at the
kockings, looking now and then out of the window,

156 PASCAREL.

as Boccaccio had done before her, but seeing 1
fringed litters and jewelled dames, but only th
mules, and the pushing people, and the pedk
of cloth and linen, and the cobbler at his w
the way.

In that barren chamber I lay sick unto d
weeks, talking in so strange a confusion of ci
villages and flowers and singing birds, and tl
of lutes and the shine of the moon on th
fields, that none who heard could make sens
medley. There she kept me; there I slowly
hold again on life as youth will even when :
luctantly; there I recovered in a dull, hopeles:
stupid way; and there the dreamy days wc
away with gleams of the beautiful rose-flecked
left to madden one above the frowning palaci

The old creature would sit in her garret
sewing on at the silken hose; there was delic:
ing all about the window, and a great shiel
marquis’s crown above; it had been a palac
old days when the San Lorenzo men had se
trarno ablaze from the Niccolo gate to the I
There she would sit and sew; chirping to
deaf ears in her Tuscan; she had stories fo
stockings that used to lie in a great mixed h
rush basket—the needy duchessa’s with the
lerina’s.

“See!” she would say, holding one after
up to the strong light. “See! what a little a
is—just worn in the ball of the foot with dan
fairy might put it on, and for certain a lover
glad to stroke it, many and many an hour v
dance was over and done with, and the fire

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 157

mps out ere the sun rose, and in the balcony
those little feet were, it was all so still—so

id then again,” she would go on, diving down
stocking thrice the size, “a big one this, no
in it; broad as a pumpkin leaf and thick as
2lon—worn in the toes—you know what that
Pirouettes by the dozen on the Pagliano
; standing strained on tip-toe as a Lotus Lily ©
een of Night. No story in it that is pretty
2 lover’s to the little fairy feet. And yet, per-
you know, some poem after all; some homely
ung to a baby’s cradle and a shuittle’s swing,
e weaver’s bare garret where the meal-pot would
yty and the stove be empty too, if the young,
brown mother did not run out into the cold
rip her kirtle and dress herself in clouds and
to dance for a silver coin before the gay
lights? Ay—-who knows? A big, square, ugly
‘hose, no doubt, but worth the better darning
than those dainty ones of the pretty marche-
after all.”
she would chirp to herself, driving her long
deftly all the day; a poet who could not read,
ily feel, like many millions of her country

icarél would have talked with her for the hour
und her histories for all the stockings tumbled
rush basket on her feet. But I—her chirping
my heart more sick, my brain more dull, my
ore desolate. I was thankless, so utterly and
and unremorsefully thankless, as only very
‘outh can be.

158 PASCAREL.

For in later years we throb all over with so mam
wounds, that we have learned to value the hand th
plucks a dockleaf for our nettle sting, though we kna
well no balm can heal the jagged rent in the brea
that no man sees.

Old Gitdetta darned her hose under the scul
tured shield, and trotted to and fro between the lal
tice and my bed of sacking in the corner where
had laid me, and prayed for me every chilly mormn
in the great white silence of the Sta. Spirito, an
begged her own brass-framed red and blue picture |
the Madonna to have a care for me, though I seeme
but a sad little pagan to her, where I lay and sobbe
and moaned wearily through all the sickly hours.

How good she must have been, a woman so 0
as that, and so poor that she sewed stockings fro
the first peep of the sun to the last flare of the o
wick. Yes; she must have been good indeed. SI
died after one day of sickness only, a year later, so
heard; her needle in her old worn, tired hand, sm
ing, they say, and wondering if the Madonna wou
ever let her darn a little there in heaven for mere 0
remembrance sake.

I told them, when I heard that, to set her up #
whitest, fairest cross that ever shimmered in the lg
above there under the cypresses on the dusky Minta
slopes. Cold gratitude, you say#—but am I wor
than nations when I measure my debt by a stom
height and breadth?

There is nothing so ingrate as a great grief; am
mine was bitterly thankless, utterly apathetic. I ta
what she did for me indifferently as a right; I hadt

thought of her; all the thought I had was with th

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 159

eet dead hour when the vintage moon had shone
ve Fiesole.
' She would sit and chirp all day in her sonorous
Fiscan; she had darned stockings all her life, she
laid, drawing her threads so fine no one could tell
thé silk once had gaped.
She was most good to me, and I most thankless.
She was very poor; but she pinched herself in her
ure of oil and her handful of meal to tempt my
ing indifference with the rosy heart of some
Hickly southern fig, or fresh pomegranate. She was
less and cheery, and loved by her neighbours,
had no need of me: yet hardly could a mother
e been more patient with my ingratitude and fierce
air than she was. I was so young, and friendless,
hd unhappy, it was plain to see. That touched her,
Ind she kept me. Ah, you who say there is no hon-
est fruit of love and grace beneath that sweet wide-
Bpened sun-swept flower, of an Italian smile—how
e way you see, and how you lie!
' Did ever you hear of Signa Rosa? Nay—not you.
' She lived forty years in widowhood on the sea-
thore by Nizza; a small, slender, beautiful old woman,
Wry beautiful, they say,—I never saw her, for she
Bed in my babyhood, but I have heard this from
Rany tongues,—well, she bound the peasant’s coif
bout her head, and did her homely service daily for
erself, and never stirred across her threshold except
hen early mass was ringing over the orange thickets;
ut her country folk sought her from far and near for
Snsolation and for counsel; in her the dove’s gentle-
égs and serpent’s wisdom were blended; peace-mak-
ig was her office; and none sought her who did not

160 PASCAREL.

leave her simpler, purer, better for her words
solace; so she dwelt for near half a century, the sa
tity of the cloister about her, yet in her the 1
of human sympathy, the sweetness of widowed fideb
and the passion of maternal love; so she dwelt whet
the palms of the riviera rise against the blue ‘sea sk
‘and when she died ten thousand Italians followed
to the grave, and to this day the country numbers
with its holiest names.

For Signa Rosa was the mother of Garibaldi. |

Without such women, think you that Italy would
ever have such sons? ;

Indifferent to, insensible of, anything that moved
around me, I listened and answered with no sense d
what I heard or said. I used to lie and watch thf
figure of Giidetta, brown against the golden sunsd
lightened panes; and wonder feebly why I could no
die—that was all.

It was the winter season of pleasure and pomp.

One morning lying there face downward on my
mattress of grass, I heard gay, tumultuous shouts and
bursts of music, and the shrill pipe of eager voices
and the sun was shining yellow and broad across thé
floor.

Another little old woman, a gossip of Gitdetta’s
came and stood by me awhile; she had a new dat
kirtle, and a scarlet ribbon in her white hair,
some. brave silver rings in her ears. |

“J wish you could get up and come, poverina,
she said kindly. “You are so young to lie and dé
like a motherless kid there; and they are bringing ®
the Carnival, and it is good to see. I have nevé
missed once for seventy-two years!”

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 161

shivered and turned farther from her sight, and
1d my face in darkness.

“he familiar merry welcome name of the old Ca-
> king struck like a knife into my aching heart.
ll the day long I lay there shrinking from the
rays, and striving to hide from the sounds and
shouts of the streets. The chiming bells, the .
ring voices, the furious fun, the blaring trumpets,
ame in a dull echo across the river into the cham-
where I lay; and I shuddered and cowered down
ose do who, in the dead of night, believe that
behold the risen ghosts of their lost and buried
Aercifully for me, Carnival reigned and rioted on
other side of Arno, and in the old still dusky
ter of the Silver Dove silence and solitude only
dominion as the people flocked across the bridges
left it to the coming of the chilly twilight.
xilidetta stayed with me, and sat at her work in
~asement.

‘We are always dull in old Oltrarno,” she said.
_ was thankful. I shivered where I lay, when on
nights of Dominica across the river from the
es by the Vecchio Bridge there floated to us the
int tumult of the Midnight Fairs.

The Carnival went by, and all the coolness of
resima, and the bright brevity of Pasqua, followed
od in their turn passed by and dropped into the
zs that were.

[ heard the shrill gala shouts and the clamour of
Berlingaccio; I heard the Lenten bells swing in
otonous measure from dawn to eve; I heard the
us cries of the lovers and the children tossing

cavéel. Il. II

162 PASCAREL.

their Easter eggs into each other’s breasts, or bearing
home their sheaves of palm. I heard it all telling the
passage of the feasts and seasons as chiming clocks
ring away the dying hours. I heard it all sittug
against the empty stone hearth, heart-sick, and weav-
ing the threads to and fro, to and fro, to and fro.

For me, every one of those fasts and feasts had
voice, and the dead days lived in them, as a dead
child lives for its mother in the tones and the glanet
of every laughing yearling that creeps out to catd
her black skirts in rosy fingers. She shudders from
the tender touch;—-so I shuddered from the sunny
hours.

CHAPTER III.
By the Mouth of the Lion.

Tue cold had gone; it was the balmy, cool, spring
weather united with the golden Tuscan noons
the roseate Tuscan twilights that had welcomed m
when I had first passed the gates of Florence. I had
been three months with Giidetta, and had not left my
bed. I was a wan, shrunken, tired thing, with it
mense startled eyes and short clipped curls; few would
have recognised in me the child that had wandered
in the wake of the Arte through all the blossoms o
the year from the bright crocus to the tremulous
cyclamen.

One day I was lying listless and feeble in my dak
room, where no ray of light could come from th
narrow grated casement, when suddenly there aro*
upon the noonday quiet a rush of many feet, and’
wide echo of deep voices that seemed to rend asundé
the old walls.

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 163

sitting by the window, thrust her stocking off
1, and leaned as far out as the grating would
er; a little, bent, eager, curious figure with the
‘the noon light catching the silver rings in her

e, che!” she cried. “What a clamour and
—all the town is out,—they have those free
loured flags, too, that the lads got shot so
or, years ago, and that the priests say will
bring on us poison in the wells and pestilence.
s little Tista, the baker’s son, amongst them;
ways a bit of tinder. Ah, Tista, Tista, tell me
_is all about. Are the people mad?—or is
; gold cap put atop the campanile?—or is the
yme? Che, che! Stop a bit, Tista, and say a
oy.”
re was a shrill boy’s voice, clear as a silver
; upon Easter day, that pierced above the din
‘ous uproar and came through the darkness of
mber to me.
is Pascarél set free of the Bargello, and we
high holiday. Dress your casement, good
, and at sunset bring a light there, or we will
; sure to-night.”
orang from my bed—J whose wasted, fever-
| limbs for three long months had never known
ight,—I bruised my bare arms and my hollow
iainst the iron grating; I beat my aching breast
the bars like any fresh caged bird. But all I
s the gay glad tumult of the crowd heaving
shering under the broad sunshine, with the three
of free Italy tossing high against the scarlet
f Florence. Then, too weak to stand, my feet
- 11*

164 PASCAREL.

gave way beneath me, my hands loosed their hold
“pon the stancheons, the bright multitude in th
narrow, dusky street was blotted into utter darkness;
I fell moaning and bruised upon the garret floor.

At night she hung her light within her windov,
as Tista, the baker’s son, had bidden her; and wel
quietly herself to vespers, as was her wont. Eve
since I had heard the one name ring down the street
I had leaned there, pressed against the grating, t
watch the return of the people through Oltrarno.

I loved him so—dear Heaven! and yet almost!
hated him. He had deceived me! He had deceived me.

This was the iron in my soul. It is an error
common! Men lie to women out of mistaken tender
ness or ill-judged compassion, or that curious fear d
yecrimination from which the highest courage is 0d
exempt. A man deceives a woman with untruth, 00
because he is base, but because he fears to hurt he
with the truth; fears her reproaches, fears a painfd
scene; and even when she is quite worthless, is relat
tant to wound her weakness. It is an error so colt
mon! But it is an error fatal always.

Night fell quiet; the oil-lamp glimmered in ti
casement. I forgot the light it shed upon my face
but crouched there, watching with wide beaming ey
the coming of the crowd.

The eighth hour echoed from the Vecchio as there
rolled in on the silence—the deep sea-like sound of
a rejoicing people. The tramp of many feet cas
distinctly over the bridges. The swell of song vib
against the massive walls.

Strained against the grating, I watched and listened

Then, after a little space, they poured

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 165

narrow passage by the Lion’s Mouth, they came,
= people of Oltrarno—artizans, painters, mosaic-
» wood-cutters, cobblers, traders, all in a con-
moonlight struggle, with banners above them
shouts rising from them; and in their midst my
ling, with the white moonlight on his dark straight
ic brows and on his dreamful eyes.
¢ Breathless I pressed against the iron bars—breath-
iss I gazed, as only any creature can who, for months
¥ silence and of absence has never once looked upon
tie face it loves.
« I forgot the light shed on me—he looking up at
he eager people that filled every illumined casement,
me where I leaned, and with one great cry,
the cry of a drowning man, he sprang down from
ie height on which they bore him aloft upon their
fhoulders, and forced his way up the ink-black slope
MW the steep stairs, and thrust his foot against the
fastened door, and broke into the room.

Then with a great cry he caught me in his arms,
and held me close there in the great darkness, as a
Ran will hold some dear thing dead. How many
oments went I know not; as there are years in which
me does not live a moment, so there are moments, I
dink, in which one lives a lifetime.

The moonlight went whirling by; the darkling
hadows swam round me like eddying waters; the
laors trembled; then my eyes closed beneath his
isses, my sense grew faint, the world was dark—all
lark. But it was the sweet, hot darkness of a summer
ight; and even then I know I prayed, so far as I
euld pray, that I might die in it.

The trance of passion passed,

166 PASCAREL,

After a while, whether the time was short or
cannot tell, the cloud upon my senses seemed
denly to lift; the deathlike trance of passion pastel
I lifted my head, and strained myself backward fros

his hold, and shivered where I stood.

For I remembered.

He, with a quick vague fear awakening in his ey@
held me against him.

“Why look at me like that?” he cried, and the
was still.

What I answered I cannot tell. All madness ¢
reproach that ever any tongue could frame, I kno
left my own lips in that blind, cruel hour. All excu
for him and all goodness in him I forgot: ah, G
forgive me, I forgot! He had deceived me; that wi
all I knew or cared to know.

, I had longed for his touch, his look, his word,
prisoners for liberty, as dying youths for life; and yt
now that he was there, all the pride in me flame
afresh, and burned up love. All that I poured ¢
him were hot upbraiding, and broken bitter scorn.

“You shall not touch me, you shall not tow
me!” I cried to him, wrenching myself from his ho
as we stood there, in the paleness of the moonligl
with the shouting of the baffled and impatient cre
filling the air with its strange tumult; in the noise,
the flashing light, in the sudden passion of joy a
terror, of love and hate, my brain was gone. I bs
only this one memory left, and with it the instinct!
wither him with his shame.

I do not know either what he said in answer.
knew he kneeled there in the moonshine, kissing #
hands, my dress, my feet, pouring out to me 14

»
THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 167

ager fervid eloquence of his nature the rapture,
roe, the wonder, the sorrow, the shame, and the
rse that turn by turn had their sway over him.
Loved her!” he cried, as I flung the word back
m again and again and again in the fury of my
ry instinct. “Loved her! Oh, God! do not pro-
the word—oh, child! how should you know?
$ What has love to do with the mindless follies
the soulless vagaries of men? One catches the
1 pear that falls with golden skin across one’s
1er path; but what fruit of thought, what flower
acy, what fragrance of heart or soul can there be
$ Another passer-by had had it, coming. first.
gioja mia! oh, anima mia! listen, listen, listen,
yelieve! If you love me, be jealous as you will
e wind that touches me, of the sun that shines
e, of the air I breathe, or of the earth I tread,
rever be jealous of a soulless love. There is no
thing in its cold corruption that a man can ever
e as he loathes that!”

shut my ears to the sweet pleading of his heart.
‘nched my hands from him. I struggled from his

Ah! so you say, ah! so you say,” I said to him.
why should I believe you? You deceived me

p>?

lis head bowed itself down upon my feet; he was

+a moment, then he raised his face quite blood-

as the dead are in the chill moonrays.

Oh, my darling! I know, I know!” he murmured

7 “But be gentle, have patience; what else then

iI do? I was frank with you—as frank as I

ibe; not to lay evil bare beneath your guileless

-—

168 PASCAREL.

eyes. I told you from the first we were unfit for you;
only you pleaded so to stay, and my heart pleaded
for you. You were so young, so helpless, so utterly
lonely in your defenceless ignorance; and I tried to
get better shelter for you, and I failed. And you were
happy, and you heard no harm. It was a shame to
love you, and let one’s-self be loved. Ah, yes! I
know, but it was all so natural, so innocent, so u-
foreseen; ah, light of my eyes! I sinned to you,
indeed. But all the while I strove so hard to do my
duty to you,—such poor and feeble duty as I could
Can you not forgive me that I erred in weakness!”

Almost I yielded as I heard; the crowd, astonished
and impatient, surged with loud outcry through the
narrow street below; but all that I had ears for was
that sweet, sonorous, passionate voice that had made
its music for me in the old dead days in the moor
lightened fields, whilst the maize was all ablaze with
the love fires of the lucciolei. Almost I yielded: al
the life in me was yearning for his life; for the sof-
ness of silent kisses; for the warmth of folded hands
for the gladness of summer hours spent side by side
in the ilex shadow, for the passion and the peace of
mutual love that smiles at the sun, and knows that
heaven holds no fairer joys than those which are tt
own, at the mere magic of a single touch!

Almost I yielded, held there by his close-clasped
arms, his face looking upward as he kneeled thet
where the moonrays fell.

A moment—a word—and it was mine again; mitt
for evermore; mine a thousandfold more strong 2
sweetness, and more sweet in strength than I had
known it whilst the wild libeccio blew the fragranc

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 169

n the trampled grasses and the trodden grapes and
tossing roses on the hillside on the night of,the
its beneath Fiesole. A moment, and it was mine.
1 I, ob fool! oh poor,’ vain, proud, half-hearted
e fool! I shut my heart to him, and shuddered in
m from the deep dreamful delight that stole upon
like a trance.

Should the lips that had touched hers seek mine
in? should the man who could sink to that base-
s of a sensual bondage kneel at my feet and pray
ne for union of my soul with his?

I dared not trust myself to look on him; I flung
head back, and strained against the all-compelling
‘e of his embrace.

“You talk—you talk—you talk—as poets do!” I
‘d to him, in my vain, bitter, childish rage. “It is
w art, your trade! You string the terza rima for a
zierfull of contadini’s pence—any night they ask
i—at a village fair. A poet—you, who for three
rs could find companionship in such as she; who,
all those seasons could stay unshamed and show
self upon your stage beside her like your own
ncing dog beside its chained and collared mate! I
J not hear you—no! It is too late. Go to her—
! Since once you found your level with her, keep
It is too late, I say:—words?—oh, yes! They are
ur art; I know. You can make men weep, and
igh at them in your sleeve. You can make children
igh; and you all the while as weary and sad as
th. That is your trade, to lie. A little he or two
One more or less—what does it signify? You dupe
"oman—what of that? It is your art to fool the
tld with the sham artifice of every counterfeit emo-

170 PASCAREL.

tion. Practise on every fool that loves you—her a
me, or any other—what does it matter? you are stl
upon your stage!”

He loosed his arms from round me and re
slowly, staggering a little in the dusky shimmer of ti
shadows and the moonbeams. There was a look upoa
his face that I had never seen there. God forgive mel
So, I think, must a man surely look who gets his
death-blow straight through flesh and bone, and live
a second’s space to look death in the face.

“You say that—you?” he murmured; and the
was still, resting his eyes upon my own in an ur
spoken reproach, that pierced me like a knife thrus
through my heart.

“Yes, I say it—I—why not?” I cried to hin, stuy
by remorse at the pain I dealt, and yet driven on
what I deemed my wrongs. “Have I not seen you
heard you, watched you a hundred times if onc
playing at any passion that you would? Of course t
was so easy to cheat me, a child that trusted ey
and took your every word as a fixed law of God's!
From first to last you know that you deceived mé;
from the day you gave me the gold florins, to fhe
night you said you loved me. If you had loved m4
would you have let me live in that paradise of false
hoods for one single hour? Would you not rather
have sought for me my father and my kindred? !
come of a great race; I told you so; somewhere #
the world live people who would own and shelter m4
people who would lift me up into some light of fai
repute and of known dignity. If you had loved m4
that is the thing you would have done; I being
young, and poor, and simple, and ignorant to be evé

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 171

o it for myself: you boast of honour; you
ire the last of a once mighty line, though
a wandering player; if it were so, if you
hy of the loyalty and love those people in
; give to you for their country’s sake, would
let your feet rest or your eyes close until
d have given me some firm, straight place in
hold upon my kith and kin, some knowledge
itage? For me it is impossible; but for you
one that, how easy! Zhen, indeed, I might
you loved me.”
as quite quiet as he listened. Men are so
—oh, heaven, yes, how generous—for only
vy rare it is that ever a man will strike a
And they, themselves, daily, hourly, inces-
ing, and bit, and galled, and chained by
words and adder kisses! Men are so gener-
was so. He never once lifted up his voice
as he might have said so justly: “And what
I to serve and save you? Why did I not
| as I found you, a beggar in the ilex wood

as quite quiet. All the glow and eagerness
ur of passion had died off his face; it grew
| colourless, and still, with the impenetrable
if an Italian face that masks all pain.

doubt you are right,” he said, gravely. “It
wwe been better had I done so. But,—you
oved you,—I?”

u of such a gentle word as that, why did he
r me down under his feet, and cast on me
1ess and his grace, his tender thoughtfulness
mt care of me, like coals of fire on my vain,

172 | PASCAREL.

foolish cruel head? If men set their heel more often
on what is weak and worthless, I think women might
be better than they are; God knows.

All my old perfect love for him, all my old perfec
faith in him, welled up in my faint heart and almost
broke the forces of my bitter vanity and greed. Al
most, but not quite; for what I knew, might he not
have come to me fresh that very night from the bab
bling lips and the brown hands of his old toy?

I was passionate with woman’s passion; I was
cruel with children’s cruelty.

“Why should I believe you?” I cried to hm
“Vou have let me believe a he-—once!”

His face flushed crimson, then grew very pale
under its olive darkness. I think he looked as a dead
man must do. He shrank a little as though one had
struck him a blow, a blow that he could not retum

“Vou have a right to reproach me as you will’
he said very gently. “And how should you know,
how should you know?”

A heavy sigh ran through the words and made
them barely audible. He looked at me very long
very wistfully, with no passion in his eyes, only 4
despair, that was so great that it chilled me into
speechless terror. For it was so unlike himself, or a
least I thought so in my ignorance. He paused 4
moment, looking so.

A convulsion of longing seized me to throw myself
into his arms and cling to him for ever, for ever, for
ever, forgetting all and all forgiving. But I was 3
child; I was fierce, I was ignorant, I was wayward
and I had been wounded in the one sweet,
perfect faith of my short life. I stood there silent and

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 173

ielding; my burning eyes were tearless, my scorn-
mouth was mute.

There must have been that in my attitude, or in
look, or in my silence, that stung him like some
it, for the blood flashed back into his face, and
raised himself with his old dauntless and grand
ure.

“Even you shall not say that twice,” he murmured.
will serve you in other ways, God willing, but you
J not see my face again. Farewell.”

Before I had measured the force of what he had
| he had gone; turned away and passed from
it.

A single step, a single cry would have called him
k. But I stood motionless and silent still; and let
. go: O God!

The clamorous people thronging the staircase and
stairs, filled the night with their loud outcries.
alled him back, but all in vain; my voice was
wned in the tumult as a child’s death-cry in a
™ at sea.

CHAPTER IV.
Dead Roses.

THIS was in the week that followed upon Pasqua.
The summer months went by, and I neither
nted them nor knew what they were bringing.
The days and nights passed by in an agony, at
*s fierce and at others dull, but always agony like
of a gunshot wound which burns like a flame one
r and aches like a bruise another.

The face of Pascarél I never saw; and once when

174 PASCAREL.

little Tista went by and Gibdetta asked him what was
become of the wild fellow for whom he had made
her burn her lamp all night, Tista called up to her
sadly, “He is out of the city, mother; and we are flat
as ditch water—all of us.”

I never stirred out;—never once.

I thought that it would make me mad to see the
sun shine upon his Florence—and I did not fea
death, but I feared madness.

I had seen it once, in a beautiful dark woman in
old Ferrara, whose lover-had been swept down in the
winter floods and drowned before her eyes, and she
was forever walking to and fro along the water's edge
and calling to it to give up her Dino; I had seen het
pacing there crying forever the one name when the
sun was up, as when the moon was high; she wa
sacred in Ferrara; the rudest ruffian of the streets
would not have touched dead "Dino’s “Pazza” And
sometimes I feared—in the hush of the night I oftea
feared—that I should be just like her. For all I said
ever, and ever, and ever, was just one name, as she
did,—only I said it in my heart,—and no one heard.

I never stirred out—as I say.

Often Gitdetta strove to take me with her to St
Spirito, and draw me out to see the humour of the
streets; but week by week, and month by mont
dragged on, and I stayed there by the cold hearh
and saw the hand’s breadth of blue sky burn abort
the palace roof, and prayed—as far as I ever pra
—to have an end made to my pain in death.

But death, like other gifts, comes not for of
asking.

One morning, as I lay there upon my bed, old

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 175

rew her stocking off her arm, put down her
and looked at me with her brown Tuscan

yu know that it is the Ascension week, and
vw in June?” she asked me suddenly.

k my head wearily; what to me was the
ne, or the advent of summer?

e seen sixty-eight summers come and go,”
fter a pause.

tot answer.

eight summers,” she said again. “There
e with me when the sight of the sun and
f the flowers made me sick—soul and body
ire.”

| her, but her words were nothing to me.
ot have heeded in these days, I think, the
mes, or thunders of a flood.

1 to me a little,’ said. Gitdetta, and she
round on her oaken stool and sat with the
ng the grated panes above her old white
e was a little tender old soul, forever
n her lonely hearth like a little brown grillo,
good and patient with me, and I all the
illy thankless. “Listen a little. You young
1k no one was ever born before you; it
iew to you, all you suffer. You are wrong.
Then I was fourteen I was a dancer at the
e here;—like these girls I mend for, only I
‘r feet than they. I was a simple, honest,
g; dancing for my bread and my mother’s,
ng no harm, and doing none. I danced a
years; heart whole and content, though I
n the front, or made over half a paul a-night.

176 PASCAREL.

People all said I was pretty. Perhaps I was, a 4
robin is. One Carnival night, as I ran home in te
snow, I slipped and fell down on Carraria bridge; ##F
was very bad in those days. A passer-by picked m
up and carried me home, for I was light of weight
and had sprained my foot, so I could not stand
There was no dancing for me for weeks. He came 0 [F
see how it fared with me; came often; he was 4jc
nobleman, and a soldier; a Francese, too. Before tt #
vines were in flower we had got to love one anothe.
Some people shook their heads at me, but that did #
not matter; no man had touched so much as my han
till he kissed it. That year—well, I thank the good FF
God for it. One can live on a year. He would have
given me all manner of great and rich things. But!
said, ‘No, no, no; if I take a paul of yours, what shall
I be better than the rest?’ And all he ever gave mt
was a few knots of roses. I have got them. They wil
be put in my coffin with me. When the year wa
lived out,—I thank the dear God for that year,—ther
were war and trouble, and that great one they called
Napoleone was in his death-struggle, so they talked.
Then my love came to me and said, ‘See, he was DY
chief, and I owe him much, and I cannot let him fal
and I not there. You are the light of my eyé
Giidetta, but what can I do when my honour speaks!’
I tried all I could to speak to him. For honour
that sounds so hard to us women. We do not see tt;
and it is always set against us; and we have no shaft
with it; and we hate it, I think. But all I could d
did not stir him. ‘If I come not back ina y

space I am dead in battle,’ he said. Then he ki

me for the last time and went. Napoleone was rul

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 177

ad put.in chains; that they said; but he—he never
ame back—not at that year’s end, nor any other’s.
md never a word have I had. It is near fifty years
iow. Never a word—dear God. People made a
rock of me, and cried, ‘A fine lover!—he was only
tred, and fooled thee!’ But I never answered them
pack. I knew he was dead, or he would have come.
What use was it to have loved him if one had not
such little faith as that?”

Her voice shook a moment, and dropped into
Silence; it was all still in the chamber; the gold sun-
beams shone through the gratings and cast an aureole
on her old bent head.

After awhile, she took up her tale again.

“There were times I was mad, and was nigh
throwing my body in the river, and making an end,
but I thought the good God would not let me meet
him in Paradise if I did that. So I went on and on,
and bore with my life. I never danced again—no,
n0o,—it was not for others to look on what he had used
to call fair. I took to mending the maglié and the
hose, as I do now, just getting bread; that was all.

Y poor old mother lived a long while. She used to
fret herself, and curse me. I was good to look at,
and there were many men of our quarter here wanted
mMe—all in marriage and honesty. And my mother
“Ould not see why I shook them off ‘all for a bad
Nan, and a dead one, or as good as dead,’ she would
‘a@y—she did not know. She lived a long while here;
yes, here;—I was born in this room. I shall die in

He used to want me to change to some fine villa
B in the orchards and gardens; but I always said no;
“if I had taken an ounce of silver from him, I should

Pgscarél. 1. 12

178 PASCAREL.

have felt he had bought my kisses. I only took the
roses,—I have them safe,—they will put them in ny
coffin with me. So many, many, many years I used
to look out at this window to watch for him coming
down the street, as he used to do, just at nightfall, as
the moon came up over the old palace there. I go
and look still—still—and I always think I shall see |
him just the same, just as young and light of foot as
he was then. And it is fifty years ago—fifty years this
Carnival.”

She was silent; the sunbeams fell through the
grating on to the stone floor. She drew her stock
ing on her arm again, and worked on and on, 0
and on.

I shivered where I lay.

Fifty years! and always alone thus!

My life looked ghastly to me, seen by the light of
this corpse candle that shone over these buried lives

Should I live to be as old—always alone—always
alone—live to tell my tale calmly, sitting in the ever-
ing light?

If I had had strength, I think, in that moments
agony, I should have yielded to the temptation tha
had in her youth beset Gitdetta, and have gone out
into the streets, and flung myself into the full flood of
the mountain-shed Arno water.

Swift death! fierce death! how fair and pitiful t
looked beside these fifty lonely years passed in poverty
and pain under the strong summer suns and all the
driving winter blasts!

' “And did you never doubt him—never doubt that
he lived and was faithless to you?” I asked her, ro

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 179

f my apathy and isolation into a faint passing
of some human interest.
he looked at me with eyes a little angered and
surprised, and paused in her work, the stocking
'r arm.
Doubt him! But, bambina mia, you have not
‘stood. I had loved him and belonged to him;
could I ever doubt him—after that?”
he answer burnt me with a hot, sharp shame. _
he was an old ignorant woman—one of the very
she could not read or write; she had no know-
of any sort; she had a child’s eagerness for
x feasts and pastimes; she would gossip by the
with the people in the street about any passing
of the town; she was a little homely, harmless,
working body, who went to pray in great white
| Spirito in a dumb, dog-like, wistful, pagan sort
th; she was the gossip of the washerwoman over
ay, and the crony of the cobbler at his stall in
»ad below; she was only old Gitidetta, the mender
e dancers’ magli¢; and yet, shut up, unseen in
ude, wrinkled, weather-worn rind of her rough
here was hidden the pure white heart of this
and deathless faith!
eside her I seemed in my own sight to fall away
less and rootless—with neither love nor faith.
his was such love as he had dreamed of, there
e star tower, in the days of spring—the love that
ts God sees, and, has pardon and pity, wide as
idth of heaven.
had not been in me; young, with the years Love
/and dreaming with glad eyes against the sun,
eet fect, light as a blown leaf upon a world of
12°

180 PASCAREL.

flowers. It was in her, poor, old, and utterly alone;
—whose solitary hope on earth was that a dead ros
should lie with her in her grave:—a rose dead fifty
summers.

CHAPTER V.
Under the White Lion.

GrupETTA found time betwixt the mending of the
maglié to do many a little helpful act for her poo
brethren and neighbours. She was always moving
about at such times, as the hose she had to mend
were not so many that they occupied all her tim
from sunrise on to midnight. But one August day,
going down the seventy odd stairs of the old hous
she dwelt in, she slipped and twisted her foot undef
the brass pail that she was carrying for water to th
well below. '

She was a helpful, stout-hearted soul, and bore tt
well, and contrived to do for herself and me, and
even to make the little frugal meals all the same. But
she could not move beyond the church to which she
went nightly at vespers; and her neighbour's child
had to run hither and thither over the town to fetch |
and carry home the stockings that were her only
source of income.

I should have done this, no doubt; but I was too
deeply sunk in the apathy of pain to notice any duty.
Nevertheless, one day, when the little lad was later m
than usual, she so begged of me to take homeward
some maglié, without which the poor dancer waiting
for them would be unable to make her appearance a
the summer theatre that night, that a vague sense of

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 181

shamefulness of my own absorption stirred in me;
lL the hour being close on evening-time, and the
‘ets already dusk, I wrapped myself closely in an
dark-hooded cloak of hers, and for the first time
3ix months and more, went out into the air.

It made me stagger and feel sick.

The owner of the maglié lived beyond the Fre-
no Gate. The streets seemed all in a tangle of
inge unknown curves to me—lI, who had known
city, as a child his father’s garden-ways, was adrift
it as in a foreign desert place. There was the red
ming light everywhere, burning’ on the black
dows and the grey housewalls. Bells were be-
ning to toll for vespers. There was the scent of
hards from great mounds of ripe and rotting fruits.
ere was a loud gay chatter of voices and hurry of
t everywhere. A girl, about my years, leaned from
asement, and threw down a knot of carnations, and
ited, and shook her head ruefully at a young man
iding below in a grey shirt and a scarlet cap.

“No chance of a stroll to-night, Agnolo;—mother
| not let me stir from the treccia.”

She thought it such a hard fate, leaning there, tied
her task of straw-plaiting, with her lover in the
‘et below, unable to get out in the cool summer
ht, to stray into the woods, and see the lucciolé
iten, and count the nobles’ carriages in the wide,
onlit piazzone. She thought it such a hard fate,
y able to toss down the carnations—Oh God! she
not dream how hungrily I below there envied her
shelter and the tyranny against which she thus
elled.

Out by the Frediano Gate there was more light.

182 PASCAREL.

The after-glow came in full from the west, across the
valdigréve. The cypresses of Oliveto were standing
out against a wonderful. sky; rose-purple, like the
heart of a dahlia flower. The Strozzi lion couched
white amongst the hanging woods. Along the road
that wound at their base there were some contadim
going homewards to the outlying villages.

One of these came towards me on a black mule.
She was a little round red-and-brown figure; her pat-
niers were full of market merchandise; before her
strutted slowly a flock of young turkeys; she helda
long switch, with which she struck at them; the old
mule hobbled slowly in their wake; the grey plumes
of the birds spread fanlike over the dust of the high-
way, as they rose and rustled in their wrath.

“Our Lady grant me patience, oh you diavolini!”
cried the shrill, swift voice of the market-womat.
“The sun is down, and, surely as one lives, you wil /
all go to roost in the hedges—you always do;—just
wherever you find yourselves, like the stupid boobies
of birds that you are! And what can one do with
you, you wretched simpletons?—sit and watch you i0
the hedge oneself all night, or else not a wing feather
of you will there be to be seen in the morning! Such
thieves as they all are in this city. That is what
comes of buying you of that Pratoese by the barracks.
If ever I buy poultry in the street again, may all ny
eggs be addled! And go to roost you wzl/;—and
we all these kilometres off home: you must have the
tempers of a herd of gipsies in you, you nasty beasts
or you would never squat in any hedge like that, i
stead of waiting to get to proper perches like good
God-fearing fowls—-—”

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 183

"The shrill, scolding tones dropped suddenly; then
little frightened shriek broke the silence; her switch
ll in the dust, her bridle on the mule’s neck. In the
arm ruddy light, under the dusky wood, amidst the
‘ey fluttering feathers of the birds, the little round,
isy face of Brundtta looked down into mine, blanch-
g with sudden fear and wonder. Her hands sought
e ring of amber beads about her throat, and her
9s began to mutter prayers.

Perhaps I looked the ghost of my dead self to
2r, there, in the shadows and the warmth, perhaps;
-I was so changed. And the long, dusky folds of
te cloak covered my shape loosely from head to foot,
nd all she saw were my wide opened, feverish-
artled eyes. I did not move. I sat on the stones,
nd looked up at her. I felt no wonder, no surprise,
0 passion of any kind; only a dreary desolate dis-
ust and sickliness of great humiliation. He had
ved her—this little shrill, scolding, petulant, coarse
ol, striking at her turkeys with her switch—that was
UI thought of: what better did I know?

The birds fluttered to right and left of her; the
tule stood still; the other people had gone on round
ie bend of the wall; it was quite quiet; there was
ily the sound of a fisher’s feet wading in the river
slow the bridge.

“Is it you?—is it you, indeed, donzella?” she mur-
ured, timorously, her hands clasping and counting
e beads all the while. “I thought you were dead;
always thought so. You look dead now; only your
es burn. Are you angry? Are you very angry still?
1, holy Gest! how you frighten me!”

I made her no answer.

184 PASCAREL.

I gazed at her in a sort of dreamy contemplation,
in which my disgust of her was lost in deeper scom
for him and for myself. This was the thing that had
shared his heart with me; this was the toy that he had
dallied with ere he had turned to play mm my tum
with me! So I thought, poor little, weak, faithless,
ignorant soul that I was, knowing nothing of the fol-
lies and fancies of men, knowing nothing of how ther
passion floats over an ocean of froth, that it skins
curlew-like till it dives for its one pearl of price
the depths that the storm stirs and opens.

“J was sorry as soon as I had done it,” she began
to whimper. “But who was to know he was in the
Bargello? And who could tell that. you would tear
away and kill yourself like that? You were hand-
some, and you said you were illustrious. I thought
all would go well with you. And the very next day
I went and vowed a necklace to the Virgin, and]
gave it, too; a beautiful thing, all real silver, witha
moonstone, that that big black Dominic hung round
me all for love—he swore it was his mother’s; but!
believe he pilfered it. Anyway, handsome it was, and
the Madonna had it, and she ought to have had
care of you. But if you are not dead, you must kt
very, very poor—are you poor? * Will you not sayé
word? Look you; now it is all over, I am not ont
that bears ill-will. I would give you a bed and a bit
and drop—yes, I would; for Cocomero, he never sa¥
any good looks in you; you were too thin for him;
he likes 2 woman like a juicy apple, all round
rosy, just as I am. And if you like to come homt
with me, come. You shall be welcome. It is all ov
with Pascarél and me, you know; and I have a tidy

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 185

tle place out here, Signa way, and I always was a
indy one with poultry——”

“All over!”

I echoed the words, not knowing what I did.
Mhat! a creature lived there, rosy, and young, and
il of health, and quite content with all her days, who
*t could say thus coolly all was over with her love,
ad could think and know that she would see his
<e and hear his voice no more, and yet, a moment
lier, had had no care but to drive her grey birds
ODmeward ere the evening fell!

The sound of my voice banished her strange fears
[ me as an unreal thing. She ceased to cling against
fr mule, and stepped a little forward in the dust.
he sun had set, it was growing quite dark under the
1adow of Mount Olivet.

“It zs you, then——donzella?” she cried aloud;
and you are here still? and in great straits, I think;
by where are your yellow skirts, and your sunny hair,
nd your proud pretty toss of your head like a prin-
Wess born? One would think you were a beggar, sit-
mg on those stones there., Yes, it is all over with
im and me, After you weft gone I did not seem to
are—somehow—I had been jealous,—and when he
vas in prison—it is as if a man were dead, you know.
Ine gets to forget—quite. And I had always liked
soco: he was such a goodnatured simpleton, and just
ike a baby to manage, and as merry as a dog ina
air. So, when Pascarél found us out one day in
Yriuli and offered us this farm here, and said we
night go before the priest and syndic and make all
traight and right, as if one were a duchess, why, what
ould one do better? Coco was all for taking no-

186 PASCAREL.

thing—men are such fools; but I, I said, ‘never tum
your back on a neat little podere, and a mule, anda
poultry-house; when the Madonna sends such things
we should sin indeed not to take them.’ And, after
all, dancing about in tinsel is merry and good enough
in its way, but one cannot do it for ever, and its
well to have a roof over one’s head, and a fair name
for fat fowls in the mercato; and, after all, say wha
you will, it is something to be a wedded wife—
wedded before syndic and all,—and if you only had
seen the old mother’s face the first day I walked into
the hovel in Casentino, and held my hand up to het
with the yellow ring! It was worth anything just to
spite her, for she had always sworn I should come to
no good, but die in a ditch; and now she would
give her ears for one of my turkeys to fat for Capo
d’Anno.”

So her tongue ran, standing there in the white dust
and ending with a little gleesome laugh that showed
her white teeth from end to end between the ruddy
lips, like daisies set in poppies.

The dusky trees and pyrple skies, and all the deeper
ing shadows in the bronzW and gold of the night, swam
round me in circles of darkness and light.

Brunétta slid herself from the back of the muk
and stood leaning against the animal with one am
over his neck; a little ruddy figure, scarlet and brow,
with black braids shining, and silver earrings glistet-
ing in the sunset, just as I had seen her first of all 38
the day had died and the crocus flowers had closed
in the ilex woods to the sounds of the mandoline.

“Are you angry still?” she muttered, piteously. “AS
soon as I had told you, I was sorry—yes, I was. I am

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 187

. a bad little thing—only I was sick to see him
ved for you, and I wanted you to know—out of
te—yes, out of spite. But as soon as I had done
I wished it undone. I hammered at the door to

, you so, but you would not listen. You went away |
Ough the window, and such a fuss as the padrona
de about her rose trees, that were all dragged down
i trampled, never was! But how you look! You must
‘dead, I think. And if you are dead, I will have a
las said for you—two or three masses, if only you
1 be quiet, and not walk at night!”

She began ta sob as her wont was in any fear, or
y extremity; her finger in her mouth like a sulking
Ud, and her shoulders shaking against the broad neck
the patient mule.

I did not speak to her; I did not even rise and
ve away. I sat and looked at her vacantly; while,
‘ough the stupor of my thoughts, a shiver of the old
wrnful, bitter hate began to steal upon and stir in me.

“A wife!” I echoed, dully. “A wife! whose wife?”

I had only one thought. I had gathered no defi-
‘e sense from her words.

She looked like a humbled chidden child who finds
gilded toy he boasted of is only rag and patchwork
er all. Some sense and tinge of shame came on
r; she shifted her feet in the dust. There was a sort
exultation and mortification struggling in her as she
swered,—

“I am Coco’s wife; why not? He is just such a fool
he seems; and he dares not say his soul is his own
I look at him. That is the stuff one wants in a hus-
nd. And I always had been fond of him,—that I
w,—always. And when Pascarél was in prison,—it

188 PASCAREL.

was as if he were dead, you know. Of cour
not mean him to find out, but he overheard
and then he gave us the farm; and Coco, like
blind barbaggiano as he is, went and told hi
driven you away. And then he was in such :
—such rage—the saints forgive him! I never
like. And we have never seen him since, »
passed him once on this very Sjgna road, and
his eyes would have withered me up like as
leaf—he can look so, you know. But I bear nc
no, not I; and if you want a roof over you,I
it you, donzella—oh, yes, willingly; and wi
bygones be bygones, and be good friends, jt
used to be; and though you are useless enou
remember well, still there are things that you c
and if you could not, I, for one, should neve
you anything, and Coco,—whatsoever I tell
thinks good, or says he does, which comes to
thing; and you could see the house was safi
come into the mercato, which one must do m
or else lose credit with the buyers: You se
no malice—no, not I,—why should I? I h
want. So, if you like to come—come;—anc
more about it.”

She put her hands out: as she spoke—roug
chubby, rosy palms—in token of fair faith a
amity. She meant well—oh, heavens, yes! sl
well, poor little soulless, mindless, empty th
had no force to love or force to hate.

Why did I not strike her? Why did I not

I moved where I stood in the dust: a c
shudder of longing shook me to hurl her back

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 189

St and strike her insult dumb upon her mouth as
’m may do with one another.

But some strain of an old proud race still ran in
> and helped me to keep silence, and gave me force
Ough to rise quite quietly from the heap of stones

: which I crouched, beggar-like as she had said, and
ok down into her pretty, cunning, timorous eyes, in
lich the red light was shining.

“You mean no harm,” I said to her, “may things
' well with you. But, if you are wise, do not let me
er see your face again.”

And so I left her, and went back under the olive
adows to the city, and she stayed there, a little
ghtened ruddy figure, in the glory of the after-glow,
id ere I had gone far I heard her calling to her birds
at had nestled down by the wayside and folded their
sset pinions for their rest, like feathered gipsies and
<dgerow philosophers, as their kind have ever been.

The turkeys would roost in the road—that was her
ouble; she had forgot all other.

Who will may see her any day sitting underneath
er green umbrella, with her fowls clucking loud around
er, hard by the old Strozzi pile, and not a stone’s
ow from what was once the bottega where Ben-
enuto shaped his Hercules on its field of lapis lazuli,
nd fashioned in gold, and bronze, and silver, his
riffins and cherubs, his lilies and fauns, his wild
canthus wreaths, and his love-legends for his daggers’
ilts,

Ah, dear foolish folk that weep for women! to one
metchen on her prison-bed there are a million, Bru-
6tte at their market stalls.

Some pluck, like her, their speckled hens for a few

190 PASCAREL.

soldi; some pluck their golden geese in the great mer-
cato of the world; but their end is all the same, and
they are quite content.

I went on past the bridge, where men were wading
with great cloud-like nets, and underneath the little
church of Santa Maria, whose mellow bells were ring-
ing across the silent water.

The sun had quite sunk; but there was a deep hot
glare upon the sky that burnt the water red, the trees
that stretch away towards the country were black, and
from the full moon that hung in breathless purple skies,
a lovely whiteness touched the river here and there,
and gleamed upon the old pale walls of Signa, where
she crouched to sleep under her feudal hills, scarce
changed at all since the days of her many martyrdoms,
when she was ever the first and surest mark for steel
and torch from every foe who came across the mout-
tains to violate the fruitful and serene loveliness of the
olive-wreathed Verzaja.

I paused and looked back at all that evening calm
——once—just once. I could still hear the voice of
Brundtta screaming to the birds beneath the mons
tery. I thought of one day, one golden day of th
late summer, that we had loitered away in Signa; how
we had strayed amongst the tossing millet, and wandered
amidst the old monastic walls, and cut reed pipes from
the canes by the Greve stream, and quenched our thins
with the sweet green figs as we watched the cloud
shadows come and go on the shallow gold of the Amo
water, where Hercules had cast down the rock that in |
later days served to save the fair jewel-hung throat of
Fiorenza from the brutal blade of her ravisher Cas
truccio.

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 19!

_I groped my way senselessly through the Fre-
ite, the gate of the green country, as the old
ed it.

s night, though the red tinge was so slow to
> west. The bells were tolling everywhere.
rere passing through the doors of the churches
‘Ss.

t, still, and white the vaulted basilica of the
’ked like a palace of peace. There were a few
ts at its east end. Scattered in its solitude
»zen women, poor and old, kneeled in prayer,
vent forms against the marble pillars.

zered a moment on its steps, wishful to enter
' likewise.

shuddering, I looked and turned away—how
pray when all one cares for on earth and in
is dead and gone?

ned away and dragged my weary feet across
za where the moonlight was softly spreading,
er the shadow of the Guadagni Palace, where
rst night that I had laughed in the Wandering
alabaster workers of Florence had borne away
upon their sturdy shoulders to the sound of
uting and singing.

n I had groped my way by the Mouth of the
» to the garret of Gitdetta, her lamp was
here were swift eager voices in the chamber;
-old woman sitting on her settle gave a little
cry of joy; a shadowy figure sprang to me
It at my feet, and kissed my poor dust-covered

dear donzella!” cried the voice of Florio, “is
4 Is it indeed, you? How I sought you, all.

192 PASCAREL,

northward—all on a false trail, and you in wr
ness like this the while! And such news, signon
mia—such news! The lord, your father, is a gre
noble, and a rich one too—this very Capo d’Anng™,
only; such strange accidents, so many deaths, and bg.
whom none would own or look at, called at last 0,
his fathers’ place. Oh you never, never heard—it!
a wonder-story for a child at Ceppd. And then to #

—when we were all in the black north, taking croway.
and kingdom as it were—for it is all so great—themg.
to us all of a sudden when I, amidst our grande
was still thinking and praying for you, though | h#
given up all hope—why, all of a sudden, comes tot
a week ago, a light witted, reckless, wandering scz

and playactor, who had made me split my sides mau
a night in his booth in years gone by in towns as
villages. And he, all travel-stained and tired, wi
that wayward, capricious lordly fashion he has wih
him—for Pascarél was always as proud in his ways #
a prince, hedge-stroller though he has been from bs
boyhood up—he, I say, my darling signorina, force
his way to audience with your father, do all om
would, and then and there told him where to i
you; and what more passed between them the saints
only know, but certainly high words of some sort; fot
the fellow when he came from your father swudf
through us all mute and fierce and with such a scot
on his face that I was like to strike him, only of
knows he is so very apt to strike back. And a voy
little later milordo sent for me and bade me seek yt:
out here, and I am come, and no empress, oh, Bf’
blessed little lady, shall ever have been greater th
you shall be—if only it had pleased the Domini

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 193°

t dear dead Mariuccia see the day—and have
lever a word to cast to your old faithful Florio;
an you only stare at one with those sad blind
ye eyes that it half breaks the very heart in one’s
t to see?”
stood and listened: the flicker of the oil-lamp on
ice, and on my ear the eager headlong torrent of
ld friend’s words.
ittle by little—very slowly—the truth dawned
ic.
[y bidding had been done; and fortune came
‘hen, in a passion of weeping, I wrenched myself
Florio’s hands and cast myself face downwards
ie bare stones of the floor.
rreat? great?
Yh, God! what use was that?
ynly to wander once again light of heart and of
in the sweet Tuscan summer when the magnolias
med on the wide hillside and the lilies were blue
e vine-shadowed grasses—only to wander so once
1 with my hand held in his and his kiss on my
k! What use were the greatness of kings to me?
was left that night and day with old Gitdetta,
Florio went and came a hundred times, bringing
ilks and satins, and jewels, and sweetmeats, and
y painted toys, and all manner of rich dainty
ss, to be a surety to me of my new-won wealth;
he, good merry soul, full of joy and glory to the
| at the wondrous fortunes of the man to whom
ad clung through every evil chance of penury and
xe, he could not comprehend, but was sorely
nded because I would not look on any of the

sarel, Il. 13

194 PASCAREL.

treasures, but turned my face to the wall and kept
crying: “Take me back to dear Mariuccia—take me
back.”

For it seemed to me, a brave glad child by nature,
and therefore the more utterly unnerved and passion-
beaten under my great pain, that the only real good
that life could do me would be to take me back again
to that old innocent despised home, where the lizards
had sported under the broken Donatello, and the
crack of the bean shells had struck sharp on the
silence.

All that I could have any sense to hear was when
he spoke of Pascarél, and this he did often; because
the story seemed strange to him.

“Tt is odd,” said he, “that you have chanced on
that wild-living fellow. Ah, dear donzella, J knew
him:so long long ago—when you were not born—a
clever rascal, playing with French people who strolled
through Savoy. They used to say, even then, that
he might be a famous artist, and a rich ane, if he
chose.

“But he never chose. He is a vagabond at heart
That is certain. But I suppose he dealt with you as
well as he could; for my lord, your father, let him go
without rebuke, nay—seemed to be rebuked by him,
if one might say so without disrespect.

“And of a surety he showed judgment and honour
in never letting you be seen on his wandering stage.
I suppose he did as well by you as he cauld, since
you do not complain. But it was a terrible fate for
a little illustrissima like you. And your father says
that you are not to breathe one word of it.

“If you could have seen that fellow Pascaréllo

THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. 195
‘eping through us all as light and as swift and as
ce as a panther, all dusty and travel-stained, and
y pale, and with a strange light in his eyes, and
ling aloud to see your father, with all haughtiness
1 insistance as though to be sure he were a prince
aself, as some folks say his ancestors were in this
scany.

“Yes, to be sure it was strange: to see that clever
rue, last in his booth, in a little sea town on the
miche making a hundred fisher people split their
les with laughter; and then next to find him a dozen
us later calling out like a king to have speech with
ur father, all that way away in the northern islands
it is strange enough surely.

“And the people were so terrified at him because
his imperious way and his language, that was all
known to them. But it was good of him, that I
ll always say, and I think only an Italian would
ve done it; to take all that pains and trouble to
ce your father; and it was no slight work, such a
ange having come to our fortunes. A selfish man,
ar donzella, would have been tempted to keep that
‘tty face of yours to deck his stage for him; and a
‘an one would have looked for some vast recom-
nse, But Pascaré]l—your father is a great noble
w and has been a very bold person always, but I
nk he would no more have dared to offer a reward
Pascaréllo than a boy would have dared to face the

Satana. |

“And it is very piteous to see you with your little
ite handsome face always shivering and weeping,
ugh it is bright sunshine like this.

“Pascarél said, I think, that he lost you when he

13*

196 PASCAREL,

got caged in Bargello; and I suppose, though this
good soul has done her best by you, still you have
been half starved and very wretched.

“Never mind, carina; you will be so great now—%-

very, very great, and when we have got the roses back
into your cheeks again you will have all the world a
your feet. For even miserable as you look, my dat-
ling, you are very handsome still—beautiful, if one
could get that haunted look out of your eyes.”

So he would speak, and I would listen, my heat
breaking as I heard. And I could see it all,—so well
so well,—in that dreary misty land that I had neve
trodden, in those towering castles of my father’s rac,
that were set seawards against the clouds and billows
of the vexed Gaelic water. I could see it all, the
steel-hued waves, the grey bare country, the towerig
skies, the heavy pomp, the sullen northern crowds, and
amidst it all the proud and wayward grace, the rapid
voice, the lustrous eyes, the fearless eloquence of the
Italian, dropped amidst them in utter unlikeness like
a pomegranate flower shaken down on winter-withered
bracken.

I could see it all, and broke my heart with vail
spent weeping at the thought of it.

In face of all my cruel words he had left his countty
and his people, and his free and simple life, and ha

gone northward in my service, maintaining himself

doubtless by hard toil—for he was poor.

And I had driven him away, and said that I would
never see his face again,—for what? For that pod
little fickle traitorous thing who had screamed to he
roosting birds there at sunset on the Signa road.

.. When Florio had left me that night in GitdettS —

we

._THE QUARTER OF THE DOVE. “197

t to sleep my last hours under its kindly shelter,
vhich I had been so thankless always, I sat and
ght, and thought, and thought,. till I was mad
ng at the blue summer sky above the piled black
of dark Oltrarno.
xiudetta came and looked at me and put her
ls gently on my bowed head.
‘You are going to great people and great things,
little lady,” she said gently; “well, no doubt the
d must be very fine for those who are rich and
of might in it. As for me I cannot tell, I have
ed magli¢ here by the Bocca di Lione all my
But I do not know rightly what is amiss with
You have never ‘spoken. But if you have ever
1 one man do not ever try to love another. No.
if it be ever so. So only can you ever live and
pure of heart and pure of body. That I know,
gh I have only mended maglié all my years in
nce.”
[hen she bade the Mother of God bless me, and
me in the twilight and went to her vespers in the
rch of the Dove as her wont had ever been for
nty-years at evening-tide, when there was no longer
light to draw together the silken threads.
. was alone, in the shadows that deepened and
ened till the brown front of the palace grew black
the streets had only little gleaming stars of flame
fe the people’s oil lamps flickered.
When it was quite night there came a little knock
1¢ door; a pretty barefooted child stood there with
eat knot of roses.
She crossed the floor and brought them to me.
They were the same sweet snowy beautiful things

198 PASCAREL.

that had come to me at day-dawn after the V
Round them was a roll of paper, and on it was
only: “Be happy. Farewell.”

I crushed them to me as mothers crush the
children in their arms, and my hot tears burn
like dropping fire.

This was the end? the end of all? Was
sweet life of that Tuscan summer dead and go
for evermore? . Should never I see a blue lil;
in its lowly grass nest without this sickness
upon me? Should never I smell the fresh scen
vines and drink the magnolia breaths on a mi
night, without this madness of memory that |
than all death. Was this the end? the end of

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 199

‘BOOK VIL.

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS.

CHAPTER I.
His Story.

villa stands amongst the hills.

four hundred years old. The broken
s on the terrace walls are all the shields of
race that once reigned here. The chapel is
into the chief reception room; it is long and
d has a high vaulted ceiling, painted with
of the Paradise; through its one vast window
id there is a mass of silver shining; it is so
and luminous and strangely white that no-
ild compare with it except newly-fallen snow
Alps,—yet, go closer and look, it is only the
2s in blossom there, beyond the wall, above
lled grasses.
ronder in the rough simple gardens, where all
eness shines, you can see the towers of the
x amongst the olives far below; nearer glisten
les of the old Monte Croce Church amongst
‘sses; farther than all, away there in the north
Vallombrosa; the pinewoods at that distance
001 blue shadows, and above them there is
', white as these fruit blossoms that the wind
rainst your hair.
‘at artist has made his dwelling here; there

- 200 - PASCAREL.

under those roof arches of green leaf is his open arr
studio. On the old stone terrace there is a litter of
brushes and sketches, and books open at a verse of
Dante or a page of Boccaccio. Beneath, in vidlet
clusters, lies a mandoline. Under the ilex darkness
stands a contadino; he has a wreath of golden tinted
laurel in his hand; he has been a model for a study
from the Decamerone. A window is half open into
chamber within; through the space there gleams tl
deep rose of a velvet curtain, and the ebony of a
old cinquecento portrait frame. Within doors a swet
strong voice is singing half aloud a fishing song of
Naples. Who sings like that? oh, only little Gilli,
the gardener’s lad, who is plucking the dead leaves
off the trellis work in the open court there, beyond
the doors.

Save for Gillino’s singing and a little tremuloss
note from the mandoline, as a lizard runs acros its
strings there is not a sound on the sunny stillness of
the day.

The artist paints on in silence under the tle

shade; the contadino erect before him with the su .

full on his yellow jerkin and his black straight brows,
and the tawny leaves of the winter-gilded laurel.

I, Pascarél, come up through the fields wher
thousands of yellow daffodils are blowing and the
peach blossoms are scattered by millions on t¥
grass; come through the fields and vault the low wals
and stand by the painter’s side.

“You would make a much better Panfilo,” said
the artist, looking up with a smile of welconm
“Take Giacone’s place and let him go to his vines

The peasant goes, nothing loth to be liberated,

|

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. “201

e up the laurel bough and stand with the
' eyes.
not young enough for Panfilo.”
are young enough for anything,” says the
You will never be old.”
: painter paints on, and his Pamffilio stands
le the golden daffodils blow in the fields,
ity shines far down below, beyond the light
the olive foliage.
I never be old?—I, Pascaréel? I felt very
y before I came up here amongst the white
s. I felt very old as I walked through the
Gate this morning, across the Gréve river,
igna, for where the red roses were nodding
ield walls, I met a little woman on a black
a great crate full of cackling poultry, and
as plump as a guinea-pig, and was hung
h big cabbages in nets, and she screamed
her mule as she beat him. And she
me and started a little and crossed herself,
her mule afresh to hurry onward. Then I

he other day it seems she was a little round
ang thing in the boat on the river, when the
fashed red against the blue night sky; then
d to dance the saltarello with the frolic of
d her lips were like two cherries—only the

—on the Feast of the Dead that November
I was heavy of heart as I went along down
nce. For what could I say, I thought, to
g whom I had wooed and won? It seemed
t for an honest man who had tried his best

202 PASCAREL.

to do right I had come as near to looking like @.
scoundrel as might be. I would never judge m
again, that I swore to myself; for there was |
had suffered more than I cared to confess to mys
for the fair face of that child, and had curbed am
controlled myself in a way altogether novel to mgm;
here was I who had endeavoured with all my mgil
to do well by her, here was I, I say, become as neaiy,
like a rogue, turn it which way I would, as a ms
can well become through the love of woman. !
what a large latitude that is, all men know witht
my telling them.

And how I loved her! dear God! Well, what os
was that?

I saw my way none the clearer for it as I stumbiet
down the stony road from Marco Vecchio, not beitg
willing to see the donzella’s two soft radiant eye
until I had faced the perplexities before me am
solved them.

For how could I-tell her the truth? And how
could I tell her what was not the truth? One wa,
as hard as the other.

Chance solved the question for me as it dos
often for most of us.

For when I got down into Florence that day thert
was a storm in the air. All about old bronze Por
cellino, and in the square of the Signoria the people
were clustering with dark words and darker brovs |
and it wanted but a touch of the match to the tinder
to have had a day of darkness and bloodshed. Ther .
had been aggression and irritation, and they wet |
sharp on the edge of revolt; and I knew the time #8
not ripe, and that they would only fill the graveyard

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 203

ison, and I took their leadership, for they al-
loved me, and one must do one’s best for
ce, and I spoke to them from the old Loggia
thier men than I had done in older times; and
d them in hand all that day, and saved, as [
ay without boasting, their bodies from shot and
and the city herself from feud and from flame.
t sunset for my pains I was arrested and borne
‘© the Bargello Tower, and whenI asked my crime
id that I had harangued the people and incited
oO tumult.

d Porcellino knew better, but being of bronze
ild not bear witness, and the people who could
10t listened to; so in the Bargello I lodged that
amongst thieves and murderers, not able even
id so much as a word to the Capanna above
' Vecchio, and fretting my soul bitterly because
> trouble I knew must be there on account of
.explained absence.

1e only thing I could hope was that some noise
‘tumult and of my own arrest would be taken
2 hills by some villager or another going home
che market in Florence.

1 the morrow, quite early, they moved me from
irgello for judgment; and the people wanted to
: me, and were wild for a little space; but I
d of them to keep quiet, for the soldiery were
, and I wished no Tuscan blood shed about me
traw, a bubble, a player. The tribunal con-
2d me to three months of prison.

was not the first time by half-a-dozen. I had
he solitudes of Spielberg,. and I had heard the
wash the dungeons of Venice, and I had been

204 PASCAREL.

quartered with’ the rats ini old Vicenza, and b
a few dreary weeks behind the fortress of
high above the rent and rocky land, on the b
against the blaze of the skies. For I had ne
behindhand wherever the people had bee
against the Princes, and for many a rash wor
in my Arte the feeble Dukes and the

Tedeschi had alike been adverse to me.

But that day the sentence fell on m
thunderbolt. Before, it had been only m
had suffered when the prison gates had c
me; I was without a tear, without a pang; |
when I went in, I laughed when I came ou
was I that I should complain of what Boet
Tasso had endured? But now—now I fear
that they hurt me, for what could my song
homeless and friendless in the snows of th
that were so soon to drive down through
gates of the Apennine gorges?

I was heartsick that day as they took m
the old familiar streets in the noon-day sun
the Bargello Tower, and for the moment -
morseful that I had not allowed those stree
with blood at daybreak when the peo
clamoured for me.

For it is a bitter thing—perhaps as bitt
holds—when you hear the bolts grate in thei
shutting you out from the living world, a
that for want of you that world may be w
hell itself to some helpless female thing tl
adrift in it like a young bird in a storm, |
you are in your iron cage, and your bird

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 205

breast till death release her, and you cannot touch
through the bars.
For many days I heard nothing and could send
word, and so fretted my soul in sickly desperation,
many worthier men had done before me.
Somewhere about the twelfth day little Tocco
te, having wrenched down a lamp-iron and done
le other naughtiness to get taken to prison and
e a chance to be near me—poor dear little lad—
this was his notion of loving one, and a notion
loyal that one could hardly believe that he had
r been born of a woman.

Tocco delivered me many messages from Bru-
ta, and weeping and frightened brought out from
nd his little brown throat my old onyx ring with
Fates.

Then I knew what I had lost; I knew before he
| told me that the child had fled away, none
ywing why nor whither, in the dusk of that very
r when they had arrested me in the Loggia of the
e Lances.

What had driven her away? I could not tell.
r for one moment did I dream that the sin was
mdétta’s—men are such fools. I thought that in
ne manner she must have heard of my peril and
re flown down the hillside in her wild innocent
Idish impulse to aid me, and so had come to some
rible woe in the city; and been killed perhaps—or
rse. Who could say?

A child like that—sixteen years old—and fearless
sause knowing no evil, and beautiful in her way as
flushed flowers of the rose-laurel.

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 207

can know. Misery to me meant famine of the
and the soul and the senses. For if I could no
r laugh at Fortune, I must feel her buffets as the
1 jade the lash. And if I had not my light heart
utder with, what wealth had I on the face of the
*—for it is only by gaiety of heart that one can ™
ie the thorns of the rough hedge-school which 1s
mirthful in one’s Maytime when the hawthorn
are fresh in blossom.
Vell, they sent me out of Florence that night and
de me the city. My friends tried to find trace
ie child for me in Florence, and.I tried hard in
‘country. But it was all of no use—no use. Some
'~plaiters in Settignano thought that they had seen
ang girl in an amber skirt go down the oakwood-
towards the town one feast-day at early dawn.
that was all; and this slender clue broke in our
s and led us no further than those old oaks un-
‘he war-seared Vincigliata.
\nd the truth of the matter never dawned upon
-never once. All I could think of was that she
heard of my seizure in the Loggia and had tried
2x rash innocent fashion to help me, and had so
2 to some horrible ending by some crime done to
hat the guilty doers smothered.
believe I was quite mad for the time, ranging
2 and south to find her. But that Brunotta had
t to do with her flight I never thought. Men are
fools.
Jne day in the spring-time I rested a little in a
ge in Friuli, whilst I was ranging Lombardy and
stia in the vague hope to hear or find something
y darling.

208 PASCAREL.

Brunotta was nothing to me, but how cou
her adrift—a little helpless, ignorant creature
She had loved me very much that San Giova
and every other day afterwards, or at lea
swore twenty times in as many hours. I did 1
the truth of it; perhaps I was too vain anc
too well of myself to imagine that a littl
headed rogue out of the Casentino, who cou
her life have read or written her name, woul
tired of me; of Pascarél. Anyhow, could ]
adrift? A poor little simpleton whom I had
my whim and fancy away from her straw-pl:
her goat tending, and could do nothing in
except hop about on her little plump feet,
too clumsily for any greater theatre than mu

I had always winced atthe sight or the
her since I had seen that child’s eyes in the
square in Verona; but I would not be cru
I had had so many pleasant sunny heedle
days with her, going over the length and |
the land in our idle gladsome fashion. Me:
der to women for remembrance’s sake long
love has died out of them. Brundtta to m
a little round brown bird out of the woods
not wring the bird’s neck just because its ho
song had lost all music to me; I could ha
fling it down the wind to go its own gait <¢
me. It was such an innocent little thing, :
and if it fell into the fowler’s snare through
donment, things would go ill with me.

I joined her and the boys where of their |
they had set up the Arte in a Friulian \
wandered carelessly, stupidly, wretchedly, se

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 209.

thing, and that always vainly. I had ceased to
; the laughter choked me; I did field work when
orked at all, and for the rest I had some few
lred pieces laid by with an old goldsmith in Flor-
‘+; so that I could keep together the poor little
p, of which the lads and dogs—and the brown-
| dancing girl too, as I thought—were all de-
lent on me for every mouthful of bread.

Pepito and Pepita had been poor stray brutes that
d saved from drowning; Toto had been sentenced
eath as dangerous when I had cut his halter one
in Pisa, and showed the Guardia that his madness
nothing more than thirst; Tocco I had taken out
1e hell of the galleys; Cocomero had been per-
} the most utterly desolate of all when I had found
in the streets; his father had been a clown, called
‘eolet, who travelled with a French circus, and had
1 killed by a horse’s kick in the ring that very
aday, leaving his son—without a coin in the world
leagues away from his birth-country—to weep his
: cowardly heart out in the burning sun of grim
Rimini.

We waited the night in a little place where a green
th above the door told us we could get wine and
d. It was only a little mountain village, too poor
small to have any regular place of resting. . All
li is sad and unlovely; if it were not for the
pses of the Alps away there towards Venice it
ld be hateful, that desolate historic land that had
y rood of it stamped bare by the iron heel of
‘arossa.

Chis little village lies flat on the grey slope with
ing to break its melancholy and its barrenness

cared, Il. 14

210 PASCAREL.

where it is swept by the sharp sea winds. The people
were poverty-stricken and scraped the arid soil assidu-
ously to get a bare subsistence from their wines and
millet. It has been incessantly a battlefield in the
times of the episcopal wars and of the aggrandizement
of Milan, and it seems still as if the torch of war had
scorched it sear forever.

Still even here the vine leaves were thick and
green, and the grapes were budding in the little per-
gola, which the poor house that entertained us had
managed to stretch out between doorway and garda
wall in the teeth of the keen breezes that blow fron
the lagunes and the chain of the Tirol. In the heat
of the noon I sat there, glad of the shelter of the
leaves; bitterly sad at heart and tortured with a thow-
sand imaginings of all that might have chanced to thit
young and pretty thing adrift by herself in the width
of the world. I had tried all I knew to trace her and
had failed; the madness and the suspense of it were
eating away all the life of me. I reproached myself
for a million things that I had done and had said and
for a million things that I had not done and had nd
said. I seemed to myself such an utter fool; no bette
than a man who holds a diamond fit for kings in bs
hands and lets it slip through his fingers into a foul
ditch where the toads can swallow it.

I sat there in the scirocco that blew like a furnace
blast over the nakedness of the land; the insects weft
buzzing and booming in the thickness of the vit
leaves; it was two o’clock in the day and quite quitt

Presently in the drowsy stillness there came 4
murmur of voices; one was Brundétta’s. I was so
to hear it humming all the hours through without oF

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 21f

‘ion about millions of little odds and ends that
‘ved her for endless discourse, that I heeded it no
sre than a man who lives on a millstream heeds the
ise of the churning water.

The sense of what she was saying drifted to me
thout my being aware; I heard as it were without
aring; I was so used to the sound of all her little
rill notes piping on by the hour over a mislaid rib-
m or a smoked dish of macaroni.

“Pray take more care,” it was saying now with a
tle stifled terror in it like a scolded child’s. “He
ould beat me, perhaps, or you, if he got to know.
e can be so violent when he is cheated.”

‘Why not let us run away?” whispered another
vice, and this time it was the voice of my eighteen-
var-old Coco. “You are afraid of him—afraid of
yur ears of him since that dreadful night the donzella
ent, and we do cheat him, as you say, and, when
ne thinks, it is not well—why not let us run away,
ght away?”

“How could we live? We have not a bit of talent
ardly, you and I, and it would be very bad to starve,”
aid Brundtta. The practical objection always comes
fom the woman.

“But then if you love me?” murmured Coco; the
aan, you see, is always such an enthusiast, and always
hinks that love is meat and drink.

“Oh, I love you best a thousand times,” cried
rundtta. “I used to think I loved him, and so I did,
nd specially whilst I was jealous of the donzella. But
eu see Pascarél is too great for me. He is always
King and saying some wonderful thing, and all that
everness tires one; it is like walking on the tight

14*

212 PASCAREL.

rope—don’t you know? I can do that; but I am a-
ways so glad to jump down, so sick of being up 9
high. Pascarél is just like the tight rope to me. But
you are such another simpleton as myself, as one may
say; and you are just my age, and you hike to romp
about and stuff your mouth with fruit and make an
ass of yourself just as I do, and besides you have
sworn you would go before the priest with me, and!
should like to show my old foster-mother the ning on
my finger—just to spite her—and besides I do love
you, Coco mio!”

And with that she kissed him where these loves
stood together upon the other side of the vine leave

I thought it time to rise and walk out of the per
gola. Brundtta screamed and dropped upon he
knees. Coco was as white as his ghost, and his limbs
trembled under him.

I soon put them out of their misery.

“My dear children,” I said to them quietly, “it
stead of cheating me, why not have trusted me! Ir
stead of deceiving me behind my back, why not have
said all this to my face? You are two little fools, #
Brunotta has sensibly said, and you have succeeded
in tricking a man who thinks himself no fool Th
wiseacre is always served quite rightly in such casé
How long has this been going on—some months! 1%,
I might have guessed that you had learned too maby
comedies by heart not to act them to your own Pp
some day. I might have wished indeed that it
been anybody but Coco—but after all, that is i
merest sentimentality. You owe me so much? All
what of that? Ever since the world began, that bs
been only a reasgn for the debtor to pay his debts by

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 213

aking a dupe if he can. If you wish to marry this
sor lad, Brundtta, pray do, I will not stop you. It
ell be very bad for him, but that is his affair—not
ine. I have a thousand lire in Florence put by, that
always intended for you whenever we should wish
! part company. Set up in life with it as best pleases
yu both, and only take my advice in one thing—
ever talk secrets close to a pergola in full leaf.”

And they did as I told them, and went before the
fiest, and bought a little piece of land with my
ioney, two leagues beyond the Frediano Gate by
lorence.

Coco indeed crawled at my feet and wept and
ursed himself, and was all for not touching one of
1¢ thousand pieces. Men have so much more con-
rience and so much less common sense than women.
ut Brunotta persuaded him out of those scruples,
nd chose the little bit of ground herself, and selected
s the mission and fulfilment of her life the fatting of
he finest turkeys in all Valdarno, which had indeed,
he confessed, been all her life-long the secret and
hief ambition of her dreams.

No doubt it is a thing to be duly thankful for
then a little girl who has helped one to filer le par-
at amour for a few foolish seasons takes to so deco-
ous an end for herself as marriage and fat turkeys. It
8a much more agreeable reflection than the water-
lies of Ophelia or the prison bed of Marguerita are
9 their lovers; and rids one of all responsibilities
learly. It would be manifestly absurd to reproach a
tan with having broken his mistress’s heart or blasted
ar youth and her peace, when who will may see her
lump and busy jogging on the Pisan road upon her

214 PASCAREL,

mule and selling poultry under a green wi
against the Strozzi pile any market day
Still—such is the vanity of man, I sy
scarcely likes a little brown egg-wife to
tress to one with a poor scamp like Cocom:
have lost all that I lost through that littl
tongued thing is bitter—very bitter—som

For, when they were fairly married
body’s power to part them, and when the
land had been. made their own where tl
over the high dusty walls as you go up
where Arno’s fury overthrew Castruccio’s
old times whilst all the glad Valdarno wi
ruin, when all, I say, was quite safe a
them, Coco, who was not a bad lad at k
timorous and deceitful, as it proved, can
himself at my feet and lay there on the
beaten spaniel might, and bemoaned hir
had got a thing to confess to me.

“Say on,” I said to him. “If it be a
make a clean breast of it. My dogs will
but they are the only things whose life
without bemg made to rue for it.”

That was a harsh saying of mine, no
was mad with pain of which I could sa
any creature, at not finding any trace of
and even this little miserable treachery
Coco, whom I had befriended as far as
able ever since I had found him sobbin;
in Rimini, had cut me a little; one is alv
in those things. |

And then Coco, weeping like a child,
me with sore terror that it was no fault

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 215

he had now to tell, but one of Brundtta’s which
id known long before, but had never dared to
‘until she was surely bound to him, being foolish-
id of her, poor lad, and having set his silly heart
aving her for his wife and dwelling with her on
lusty rood of land towards Signa. But now that
vas fairly his own, and could no more fly away
him than his land could, and he was sensible
re was seeing the last of me, and had broken our
rship by a piece of ingratitude for which he was
r repentant, plucked up his heart and told me
he knew, and of how she had betrayed me that
an evening under the vines below Fiesole. And
earned at the last why it was that I had received
my onyx. Coco, I think, was terrified at the
on me of his revelation; for when I came to my-
le was grovelling at my feet and beseeching me
» kill Brundtta; and indeed in that moment if she
come before me I could not have answered for
f very surely. These foolish vile things sting so
—so deep—and then we are to let them alone
‘e they are foolish and vile, forsooth! It is hard
ld one’s hand sometimes. e

e told me word for word as he had overheard it
hat scene under the vine by the Badia; and I
d no more to tell me the reason that the Fates
ome back to me. And I had never once in the
st of my fancies imagined that Brundtta had
to blame. I had never once in my sharpest pain
cted that Brundtta had been lying when she had
‘eeping out of the Fruilian shadows to lament to
yr the loss of the donzella. No, I had never
1ed that her jealousy had been at work, and that

8 PASCAREL.

Yes, I am glad.

For, though one be but a strolling player, a
never saw one’s crown engraven save on .aztravelll
tinker’s old tron pot, still, when one bears a om
mighty name of Florence, one must needs try to
worthy of it by some poor shred of honour, at |
least. Only for me, look you, all the world: seem
dead.

God knows what I might have done in the we
days when I had sent her my farewell in flowers, :
knew that every year of her life would only serve
make her higher and higher, farther and farther, a‘
from me for evermore.

They were long burning days of drought and ¢
The land was white with long thirst, and within
city the clouds of zanzari hooted all night long. !
the first time in all my years of love for her the f
of my Florence looked without beauty. Is not
beauty of all things so much within us, and der
so little from without?

God knows, I say, what evil or mad end to
life I might not have been tempted to put, in
heart-sickness and haste, had there not chanced to
a strange accident.

One blazing eveningtide, just as the sun was cl
on its setting, I was walking wearily down the Sto
ing-makers’ Street, thinking of nothing in partict
~hen I came upon a little group of people gathe

fore the door of a Cantina.

It is a quaint, odd, many-coloured, pictures
street, as all the world knows; and what with its pr

crowded gay wares, and its narrowness, and
popularity, it is a street that will always talk to ¢

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. S

E has done so much; the blood of Florence has
moursed so often down it: and it has been a channel
bf the full Florence life ever since the Arts and Trades
marched along it to set their flags round San Michaele
that brave day when Duke Walter was hounded out
hrough the gates.

Calzaioli will always talk if you will listen—here
Mm the stones that are still called the Song of the
Lily it has heard the soft footfall of Ginevra’s bare
and trembling feet; here, where Guardamorta rose, it
taw the Lion tremble before a mothggig love; here in
its workshop the Bronzino dw here, in its
church, his bones were laid to 1 rest; here Dona-
tello and Michelozzo laboureggor the love of arts and
men hard by yonder again e little Bigallo; here
flame and steel ravaged th@ worst after red Arbia;
here the White Bands shiv¥@i—d and fled before their
old hereditary foes; here, on Ascension Day, the Sig-
Noria went up with the gi and purple of ripe fruits,
to lay them at the feet of that Madonna of Ugolino
Whose manifold miracles sustained the soul of Florence
beneath the Devil’s Jiggme; here, on the Feast of Ann
t saw Walter of Afgggs@eriven out of the city, and all
yood men and true trooping thither to render her
hanksgiving, and all the Arts raising in memory the
ttatue of their patron saint and the shields of their
llazonries—ail these things, and a million more, has
Yalzaioli seen since its old towers and cas
rowded hard on one another, and the destriers an
mlfreys champed below in the logge, and the paintt _
nd sculptors worked high above in the turrettuuc ©
oofs, worked amidst the challenge of silver clarions,
nd the clangour of brazen bells, the fret of horses’

y PASCAREL.
a

hoofs, and aH clash of crossing swords, the saucy
laugh of the playing pages, and the sturdy tramp of
the marching Trades.

Calzaioli will always talk to you, if you have eas
to hear, and it was talking to me then, and I was
heeding not at all the lwing throng around me, when
my ear was caught by an air that was being played
on a violin where the knot of people stood before the
wineshop. I think I have heard most music that has
ever rejoiced the earth; and at Pisa, amongst other

“hings, I studigg@ music as a science; but this air struck
me at once as Wnlik@anything else that I knew—quaint,
delicate, fanciful, rnful, charming, and altogether

+ new. I paused to listgm with the rest.

A boy of about foateen was playing, sitting on a
old barrow that stood gihe kennel of the street. He
was very small and agp ond pretty as a child; hs
clothes were ragged, and he was very pale. It grows :
dark in Calzaioli long bef@te the light has died in the
open contado; there was a lamp lit in the doorway
above his head; the great silvery pile of San Michaele

@oomed beyond, with the i - prophets white

in the darkness. I stayed e rest of them and
listened.

The air had enchanted the people; they were
humming it to themselves as it was played; and two
country girls had caught it, and were singing to it4

mars id a second as they plaited on at their hanks of
| It was just one of those melodies made to be
yeated on every lip, and handed from town to tow! |

. every land: not because it was catching and com
mon, but because that true divine spirit of music wa

in it which has an universal tongue and a life eternal

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS.

All of a sudden, as I listened, thgymusic of the
lin ceased—snapped, as it were, and ceased; there
s a little movement in the group; the tan had
en backward in theegutter, and the “Violin had
ipped out of his hand.

I pushed the people aside and lifted his head on
knee. By his looks I thought he had fainted from
iger.

The people, looking frightened, began to edge
ty, still humming fragments of his melody.

“He does not belong to any >. ov said, with ”

e shrugs of their shoulders.

He did not belong to any o oor lad; he had
m seen in Florence for the @@st time for what any-.
ly knew, playing along Arno side for pence

t day at noon. The beauymof his airs had drawn
ittle crowd aftér him, e people will wander
‘xr any harmony hour by,hour anywhere over Italy.
Down in the gutter the lad lay, and if one lie
re in Calzaioli, one is as sure to have a horse’s hoof
one’s face as Maytime is sure to bring cherries. @
The wineshop id not much like to let
Lin; but, neverth@i@ss, as they knew me well, and
the old days of my fooling I had had many an

> night over their chiante, they gave way; and after
rhile, in their inner chamber, the lad came to him-

» and opened great dark bewildered eyes on us.
was as handsome and small as a girl, with curls
Venetian gold lying soft and thick about his throat.
“I was playing—a moment ago?” he murmured,
ing up into our faces, “It was in a street—what
happened?”

WA,
y . PASCAREL.

hoofs, and : clash of crossing swords, the saucy
laugh of the playing pages, and the sturdy tramp of
the marchypg: Trades.

Calzaioli will always talk to you, if you have ears
to hear, and it was talking to me then, and | was
heeding not at all the lwing throng around me, when
my ear was caught by an air that was being played
on a violin where the knot of people stood before the
wineshop. I think I have heard most music that has
ever rejoiced the earth; and at Pisa, amongst othe

“hings, I studigg music as a science; but this air struck
me at once as WMlik@anything else that I knew—quaint,
delicate, fanciful, rnful, charming, and altogether

# new. I paused to listgm with the rest.

A boy of about fo@teen was playing, sitting on al
old barrow that stood gihe kennel of the street. He
was very small and agp end pretty as a child; bs
clothes were ragged, and he was very pale. It grows
dark in Calzaioli long bef@€e the light has died in the
open contado; there was a lamp lit in the doorway
above his head; the great silvery pile of San Michaek

@oomed beyond, with the we: prophets whit?

in the darkness. I stayed e rest of them and
listened.

The air had enchanted the people; they wert
humming it to themselves as it was played; and two
country girls had caught it, and were singing to it
£ da second as they plaited on at their hanksof

It was just one of those melodies made to bt

ated on every lip, and handed from town to tow
every land: not because it was catching and com
mon, but because that true divine spirit of music ¥
in it which has an universal tongue and a life eters

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 223.
x drinks all day, and old Ambrogio, even, was
; and so I thought to myself, no one wants me
and I am kicked about like a useless little cur,
I am quite old now, thirteen come the Day of
; and I will go and try and find out the donzella,
IE am sure Mariuccia and the Mother will pray for
And so off I came the very end of Quaresima,
I have been wandering, wandering, wandering
since then, and never a sight of her face. Only
, in a hamlet, in the Romagna country, I heard
girl who was singing, with hair all gold, like the
tt in summer, and the people spoke of her as
cello; and then I took heart of grace to hear the
jear Veronese name, and I said, ‘There cannot
vo like that,’ and I kept on and on till I came
Florence. Her brothers are all dead, and she is
: illustrious, you know, only so poor, so poor!
she and I were friends always, and always so
y together. And she has nobody at all but me;
yld nurse died in the last wintertime, and of her
le nobody knows. Have I money? Oh no. How
ld I? You see my legs are bare, and I have only
little pack—one shirt in it—and my little viol.
I have wanted ey Nothing, nothing.
I have come on foot ver the plains and the
ntains. What of that? as only been cold the
few months, and the people have always been
|. Ihave played for them at feasts, at fairs, at
als, at vintage dances, anywhere, always; and they
: always given me a supper and a bed, and very
s much more than that. Oh, I have not suffered
ll—sometimes just a little, perhaps, from being
» or out in the storms; and once some pifferari

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 225

h to find his donzella in that innocent, foolish,
dish faith and loyalty.

Now when I found Raffaellino in Calzaioli that
ht I was very little better off in the world than he;
1 the lad being very ill and altogether destitute, I
i need to cast about me for some surer manner of
intenance, or let him drift away to the hospitals
1 the sepulchre. It seemed to me that the boy
ne in my way like a duty there was no means of
aping. My own faulty fashion of living had cost
much anguish to the child that had gone with me
ough all the fresh green Tuscan summer; “and it
med to me now that to do my best by her favourite
ymate was the only sort of poor atonement that
ry would lie within my reach.

So whilst Raffaello was stretched on the sacking
an attic amongst the roofs in the Street of the
cking-weavers, I took thought as to a means of live-
od.

Now I had absolutely nothing.

The little I had saved had gone for that bit of
din the Valdigréve. I could always gain my day’s
ad and lodging by a turn amongst the vines, or
ew hours in the modelling shops, or by taking a
ller’s place in the little opera houses, or by show-
the trick of the clay To some young sculptor; for
ave a sort of desultory universal talent, which is
a manner the most general curse of my countrymen
i over fertility of invention that is very apt to
lin absolute sterility of achievement.

Little Toccd had gone as a pupil and ’prentice to
io Orlanduccio, and was thought of good promise
the art, so that-I had no soul in the world to work

weardl. I. 15

226 PASCAREL.

for; and where is the Italian who will work for mere:
work’s sake? ,

It is not possible to us. Give us an end and¥.,
will labour as well as other men; but without som
impetus we will not serve that grim and ghostly
Northern Thor whose hammer has struck down al
the wild roses and tossing hawthorns and sweet sky
larks of the world’s soft smiling, useless, leisurely,
heaven-sent joys.

If we are happy, let us lie in the sun and dream
of it; and if we are unhappy, what else better caa
we do. For Italians do not kill themselves; why, !
cannot say; perhaps from fear of Dante’s Circles, of
perhaps from sheer love of the mere plant-like sense
of living: why, I will not say, but they do not.

The fifth night after I had found him, I went up
the dreary Sdrucciold by the Pitti to get a little frut
for him, and I had nearly resolved to go to Carrara
as soon as he should prove able to be moved. The
mountain air might do him good, and there was
always work enough for any one who knew how to
chip marble; and the life there, where all-the sculptor
dreams take shape, amidst the white desolation of the
quarries, with the keen mountain solitudes all around,
was most unlike (and therefore least painful to me
of any) the life that I had led with my gay litte
Arte.

I was known there. It had even happened no¥
and then that, finding some artist struggling with 3
fine fancy that he could not to his liking embody 8
the clay, I had had the luck, by a fitful night’s work
to call up the Andromeda or the Spartacus that
escaped him, and the figure has gone forth—mine,

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 227

d cared to claim it—and now and then, I have
heard, has made the other man’s fortune. What
it matter? it was only an accident, a knack, a
of the hand, more or less happy, that chanced to
fire into a soulless model. What matter who
aed the statue in its city market-place} When
love Art for Art’s sake, we are pained by a line
tj a note discordant, a colour misplaced; but we
not pained by a name being lettered in gold in-
i of our own?

fo Carrara, therefore, I thought I would go. But
ite would have it, as I thus resolved, I ran against,
drucciold, a little plump, oily Piedmontese, by
e Luca Pestrd, who had rolled a good deal of
together, as the men of Piedmont have a knack
oing, and was the director of the Goldoni Theatre
is city and of another larger one in Turin.

. knew Pestro very well, he having been a gay,
il soul before he had taken to money-making,
we had had some merry days together years
years before in France, where he was travelling
a choice company of marionettes, whose joints
' as stiff and as dire a trouble to him as the
ers of any living troops of actors.

estrd flew across the narrow passage to me, and
his arms about me, with tears in his eyes and
lress all disordered. I had not met with him for
ast five years.

‘Pascarél! oh, Pascarél! What ever good angel
dropped you here?” he cried, in hot haste, still
ing me by both arms, whilst the men and the
‘s pushed by us. “Do you know Ferraris 1s
g—struck speechless up at his villa only an hour

15*

228 PASCARELs

ago—and he to play to-night to all the Princes, and
I at such expense as never was;—and now all ruined;
unless indeed you would take the character you!
self?”

I told him I had heard it as I came wp the
Sdrucciold; people were heavy of heart for it; for
Ferraris, though in the decline of his years, was the
greatest player that the stage of Italy then numbered
amongst its actors.

Well, in a word, he so besought me and wrought
on me to take Ferraris’s place, that I, thinking of
Raffaellino, at last assented.

The doors of the Goldoni opened at eight of tht
clock. But I needed little preparation; the costumé
of Ferraris were about my measure, and for the pat
I knew it ali well: in the old times, with the Zinzi
and her people, we had played the “Don Marzio ali
Bottega del Caffé” many and many a time in tt
little sea and mountain towns of the Riviera and
Basque country. A glance, and all the old eloquent
came back to me. I heard, as though it had bet
yesterday, the sonorous roll of the Zinzara’s voice 4
she had first taught me the part by the light of!
single candle, in her little attic, with her slender fe
bare on the bare bricks, and a red japonica-flowt
thrust into her rough hair, and a great brown sausag
hissing itself solemnly into readiness for supper ov
the charcoal stove, and through the broken lattice 6
the garret always the glimmer of the moonbeams 4!
always the shimmer of the sea.

Poor woman! Was she dead? I wondered. It!
strange how suddenly they flash into our lives, a
how utterly they drift out of it, all these women!

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 229

thought of the Zinzara—of nothing else—as I
the place of Ferraris, and, for the first time
-Ihad played with her in those old dead days,
‘:d on to the stage of a theatre “with a roof to it,”
y Piedmontese’s phrase had run.
‘hat night was one of the strange accidents which
the force of gods-——-or devils—to change the
ir of men’s lives.
Vhen the curtain fell, my fame was crowned in
mce. I—the people’s Pascarello—had the ball
y foot to play with it as I would.
‘he whole city seemed to go mad for me; they
me home to my garret in riotous homage, and
d under my window half the night singing my
iomphe.
fuch was due to the time, no doubt. I had
me to them a sort of incarnation of Free Italy,
I always love to believe that it is less Pascarél
"layer they care for than it is Pascarél the Patriot;
if indeed it be so, how little, how very little, it
srs that one is not likewise Pascarél the Prince.
rom that night my fame spread, and spread, not
in this country but in all others, like circles on
: from a well flung stone. In a few months’
> every hour of my art could be counted by gold
diamonds. And for Raffaellino I accepted it and
ed; the little angelic lad saved my reason cer-
r, my life perhaps.
or the winter, any or all of the cities hire me,
they bid much higher for me, one against another
often, than I am surely worth; but, when the
are in blossom, I always come back under the
; and the Lily, and play all the summer through

230 PASCAREL.

to my own people in this dear city of mine, a Floren-
tine once more and nothing else.

For the other cities I am the Pascaréllo of the
kings, and the wits, and the great ladies, and the
pleasure seekers, and I have as many gold boxes
and honied words as Marzzoco in the old days had
kisses from captives. But here I am the Pascarél
of the people who come trooping to me out of the
scorching streets and burning squares, that are even
hot when the moon is high, and in from the sun-
baked contado, where the grapes burn black in the
fierce scirocco.

Here I am myself once more, and I have my own
populace about me: and the foreigners seek me with
bribes in their hands and say, come with us to Baden,
to Monaco, to Belgium, to Russia, to heaven knows
where not, and I will not go; I stay here in the
summer and play as I choose in the open air theatres
with the wings of the swallows over my head, and the
eager brown faces of my own people around me.

If half the year I did not hear that deep chested,
sonorous vibration of Italian laughter that is like the
metal tones of great melodious bells, I should lose
heart and manhood. It has been about me all my
life, I cannot do without it. It is to me as the
trumpet call to the trooper’s horse. And there is no
laughter like it under the sun; just, so I often think,
must the young gods have laughed when Pan piped
to them.

And so [ have played on from that time until
now, for sake of the little tender lad who dreams
his days away in music in a little home that I have
made for him looking on an old green convent garden

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 231

‘behind the Palace of the Torrigianni. Besides, one
‘must do something, or go mad.

And going up under the pale walls where the field
‘roses are nodding, in the sunny road towards Signa,
I meet Brunotta on her mule, going to sell her birds
in Florence. She is plump, and brown, and cheery:
she thrashes her beast, and shrieks shrilly to the fowls
an her panniers. And I once cared to caress that
little foolish sulky face! Oh God, what fools men
look to themselves when they see themselves in the
mirrors of their old dead loves! I feel chilly and
grown old.

The crickets sing in the canes by the shallow
Gréve water, and the little red roses are bright on
the edge of the grey dusty wall; but for me—I feel
old, I say.

What brought me this way to-day?

——

THERE I stand with the laurel wreath in my hand.
The laurel is not green, it is yellow from the passing
of winter: laurels should always be painted so, for
who gathers them in his spring time?

The daffodils blow to and fro by millions, in the

- fields; the vines are everywhere thrusting out their
little tender buds; down there, beneath the shimmer
of the olives, lies my City of the Lilies.

My friend paints on at his study of Panfilo, and
tells me that I shall never be old; he will have it
that artists never are. Perhaps there is some truth in
it. In a sense we are children to the end—children
who are ready to laugh even in our tears, and whose

232 PASCAREL,

gayest laughter has always a sob in it; children »,
no doubt. Children who after all know that the only
real good that can come to them will be to be lulled
into forgetful sleep in the arms of the great nursing
mother, Death.

The painter rises and breaks off a bough of laure
fully budded, and brings it to me.

“Take this instead,” he says; “your laurels are nt
tarnished nor faded.”

For the matter of that I differ with him.

“I prefer those wrinkled ones flaked and crumpled
with the winters frost. They are very much mor
true, I say. ,

“Vet I have nothing to do with laurels of any
sort, unless I hold them as deputy for Madama
Pampinea. Get me those dandelion heads, blow
balls as the old poets call them, they are my pr
totypes, for they are light as feathers, and arrov
headed, and all the four winds of heaven toy with
them, and no one marks where they fall. If a player —
is painted with any emblem, he should be painted
with those puff balls. Their place in creation is very
much about what his own is.”

So I say. But he will not paint me with my puff
balls; he paints his Panfilo holding a branch of amber
tinted laurel. He tells me that I always look as if!
had stepped out of the Decamerone; I tell him that
every Florentine does the same. We have our fathers
faces, if not our father’s force and our fathers
florins.

It is absurd to paint me with even a dead laurel}
I Pascarél, a player. I have a sort of fame now, it is
true, but what is the fame of a player? I said long

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 233

, the mere breath of a breeze that drives the
iets of man’s wonder a little before it for. one
r, and with the wind sinks to utter silence, and
not stir so much as a baby’s paper windmill were
ver so.
I used to be so happy in the old life of mine. I
k few men, if any, lived so long as I and had so
2 care. Merriment, freedom, air, and pleasure; I
them all, the petals of the four-leaved shamrock,
ch here and there one in a million finds and gathers,
ing the wit to know where to look for it, not in
ss’ gardens, but in little cool, green, darkling nooks
ife, that bubble with the waters of content.
I had always been happy from the time that I first
bare-legged and bare-headed in the Tuscan sun
r my father’s barrow. I was really and truly the
of the Pascarél princes; so he said, my poor
er, if he were not crazed, and indeed I suppose it
rue enough. But what was that to me? It was
-h more to me that I had the lithest limbs in the
errello of any one north of Abruzzi; much more to
that the girls leaning across the rails of the loggia
the summer nights had ripe red lips that always
led on me. I was happy tinkering the old pots
pans, from the Aquilean marsh to the Sorrentine
nge woods; I was happy studying all lore, virtuous
: Miquitous, in the sad old ways of Pisa, and follow-
even into» occult paths, the steps of Paracelsus and
ippa; I was happy when I went seaward with the
zara and her people, to make sport and laughter
along the bright sea road from Savoy to Basque;
| happiest of all when, with no master but my own
m and fancy, I sauntered through the world and

234 PASCAREL.

then came home this side the Alps, and set up, year
after year, wheresoever I would, my little wooden
theatre in some silent, shadowy grass-grown square of

any old forgotten city, or amongst the hyacinths, and .
the poppies, and the asphodels of any sunny hillside |

field; the time when I lived with the country folk and
the craftsmen, and when the very best that could be
said of me was, “There goes that vagabond; some
wit? Oh, yes; over his wine cups, so they say; but
only a stroller, that goes a-foot from place to place
and carries his baggage like a pack horse, nothing
more.”

Life was a merry and gladsome frolic, if a sigh
ran under it on occasion; so it seemed to me, I say,
then, when the brown contadina grinned at my mirth,
and the young coppersmith hid his tears at my woe.
But now, when they call me a great genius, and des
pots laugh and their consorts weep at the things that
I say and the things that I do on the stage of the
world’s great theatre, now I feel myself no better and
no wiser than any soap bubble that a child’s breath
floats upwards on the air. The heart is gone out of
the jest for me; and as for the pain—well, it lies too
close to me now; so close, that when I make them
laugh at it, I seem to make them mock my own. Can
you understand?

Nay—who should understand an artist? We do
not understand ourselves. °

They call me great. Well, so be it, if it please
them. But for me, I know that I was nearer greatnes
under my old torn canvas roof. For the artist és only
great when he lives in the ideal life of his imagins-
tions, and when his own heart aches, how can he d

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 235

well? When the rack of the Real holds him tight
ts iron jaws, how shall he sport and sleep and
e, in the arms of the Dream Mother?

‘Have you seen Pascarél, the great Pascarél?” they
ay; and all the world runs to stare.

At times I play my own pieces, and then they say
“What a genius he has!”

Nay, it has even so happened that a king has called
to his seat to give me a diamond box, and that a
t princess has cast to me her own bouquet of or-
s in a band of jewels. They run after me in the
ts, and they sell my portrait betwixt the newest
tezan and the last murderer. Who can want more
| that of Fortune?

Nay, nothing that I know of: only where is the
; heart with which I used to toss down the poor
intain wine after I had acted to an audience of
ecutters and vinedressers away there on the grey
nnines? Ah, light hearts do not tarry with laurels.
; artist friend of mine does rightly to paint the
el with edges sear and torn. That laurel that Pan-
held, though gathered in the gardens of delight, it
t surely have borne the taint of the plague some-
re about it. Did the laughter on their lips never
e those storytellers shudder?—-I shudder some-
‘8, NOW, at mine.

[am a fool: oh, I know that well. What was a
1 with a sheen of yellow hair and a voice like a
that she should change the face of the world and
laughter of men to me?

Nothing in reason, I know, but then reason has
ttle to do with one’s life, and when one cannot

236 PASCAREL.

so much as tell whether the thing one cares fo
living or dead;—that is hard, you see.

Pascaréllo! Pascarél. When a village ran at
heels with welcoming clamour sending my name
the budding vines and the crimson glow of the
tulips, how well it was with me; I asked nothing
ter of heaven or earth, than just to laugh on i!
own fashion through the careless spaces of the h
years. But now, though all the cities cry it out,
men come to me with gold in their hands, whe
the charm? I felt old to-day, I say, as I went b
grey Gréve water, where the little red roses wel
alive and glad in the living sunshine.

And yet it is April too; and I am here in my
of Lilies.

“You waste half your year,” said a Frenchm
me the other day. “You fling away on your
entines in the summer all the fortune you mal
the winter in Russia, and Paris, and Rome.”

Well, if I do: I love my Florentines better
Russia, or Paris, or Rome: and, what do I want
a fortune? |

Besides, I like to be free in the glad summer
ther, when the fireflies flash all along the grounc
the magnolia trees are all white with flower.

Perhaps I am idle by nature, an Italian 1s
_ to be.

One fierce summer noon I espied a letter-c
going out for a day’s pleasuring at a fair in the
tado, and stowing the post-bags of a whole d
away in a cupboard behind his house door to
his return on the morrow. I asked him how h

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 237

iciled the dereliction to his conscience. He looked
me with wide open innocent eyes of surprise.

“Che diamine, signore! The fair will not wait; if
oO not go to-day, I go never. But, as for the letters,
y will wait very well. No one knows what is in
m, sO no one is expecting anything; and, no doubt,
y are all bad news, letters always are, and the poor
yple will be all the better for having another day in
ace.”

With which he turned the key on the post-bags,
d jogged happily off on his donkey with red ribbons
ing from its ears.

So on in like manner, I being idle and always at
art a vagabond, shut the gold bags out of sight and
me to the fairs in the summer, only instead of sure-
sted Dapple I have a shying Pegasus; and there are
‘red ribbons at its ears, but only the frayed ends
tattered fancies; and when I get to the fair, the fun
it is flat and jarred to me now like a bell that has
acked in a fire.

It is odd too. In the old time, when I made a
ore of woolcarders weep like children, or a handful
‘stonecutters laugh in their dry dusty throats under
at canvas roof of mine, that blew with the winds,
id rocked with the rains, and shone yellow with the
nshine; in that time it always seemed to me that
e Player after all was the greatest artist of them all,
ice turn by turn he was a breathing statue, a moving
cture, a poet who spake aloud, and a musician whose
tinx was no less a thing than the million-chorded
ssions of mortals, strung on the echoing shell of
man sympathy. So it always seemed to me in the
1 times.

238 PASCAREL,

It used to be pleasure enough just to be in te
sun and hear the cicale’s zig-zig, and watch the bg
black fortuna buzz amongst the magnolia flowers, and
beckon a brown-faced buxom girl up the path under
the vines with her arm full of peaches and her lp
ready for kisses. It used to be pleasure enough, all
that; but now, there is wit enough in the cities, and
there aré women, handsome enough and ready enough
with their laughter, and it is a gay, mad, zestful life,
this life in the gas glare, and the masqueing, but still
there is not much flavour in it. Perhaps it is because
I have won all such graces and glories as there are
win—graces of a string of glass beads, glories of a
truncheon of rushes.

Well, say I am great in my fashion, say I wmte
what I please and I say what I please, and I am tre
to the duties of the Pantomimi and the Pasquin, whom
every player worth his salt represents, in thrashing the
tyrants with my scourge of asses’ tails, and in showing
the great world its ridicule in my triangular fools
mirror. Say I am great, so far,—pretty much as 5
the barber’s brass basin which reflects its audience
with their faces so lengthened or widened, that they
perceive for the first time all that is grotesque in ther
features. Well, the brass basin only holds soapsuds,
and sometimes I think I myself hold nothing better. ;
But whether I am great or little the flavour has gone
out of my life.

That is thankless enough. Yes, I know. They
call me a wit and a poet, they call me Martial and
Plautus, they say I am a Boccaccio in motion, and
an Ariosto in motley. Well, it is all very pretty, if tt
be not all very true; and they know that once dows

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 239

: in the cheerless spring of Novara, it was not
a sword of lath that my blows were given; they
y that in Pascarél the Player there is also a little
st by that saving grace, a little—of Pascarél the
jot. And that last title I hke much better than
old one my forefathers owned of Pascarél the
ce. But still the flavour is gone somehow.
Now and then, when the lads are around me and
yo by moonlight through the streets, and some
strikes a chord from his mandoline and the shrill
» voices rise, raising the echoes from palace and
m, the old spirit comes over me, and I drive them
words of fire, and I make them laugh, just such
mus, endless, rippling laughter as the torrent laughs
1e sunshine, springing from stone to stone. Then
t the Pascarél that the people knew, who was gay
lay long like a grillo. But it will not last now,
when I am quite alone it seems to me that the
d is weary as it seemed to me only to-day down
2 by the grey Gréve water.

‘Ir is the idle hour,” says Varko, the painter,
g into his room, which is heavy with the scent
| great sheaves of mughetti that fill a score of
telupo bowls and Majolica dishes. “Lie here a
: while and smoke, and Ninetta will bring fruit
wine; meanwhile do you look at my winter’s work,
Mona Lisa.”

‘You are profane,” I tell him; but he is indifferent
ie thunders of heaven that in justice should smite
for thus taking in vain the name of a god. He

240 PASCAREL.

pushes me gently back into the shadow and then goes
across the room and draws back the velvet curtain
that is catching the full light on it. As the purple
cloud sinks away, the light shines instead on a picture
set in a dark frame of cinquecento carving, that 1s
heightened here and there with a gleam of smalto in
heralds’ devices, and is surmounted by a ducal crown.
It is only a woman’s portrait. |

Behind her there is a scarlet frame of oleander;
she leans on a trecento balcony; her dress is of a
curious dead gold, it is open at the throat and breast,
and against the white skin a knot of vermilion-coloured
carnations glow; there is a broken lute at her feet;
she does not smile; one would say that she knows
why the cords are snapped, why the music is still.

Red and gold! how the picture burns! And the
woman’s face is beautiful in the midst of all the fire;
and one would say that the last love-song she vill
ever care to hear has been sung on that shattered
lute.

Somehow, though it is summer with her, and gitl-
-hood with her, and those oleanders are “flowers of
Florence; somehow you know well that there is 3
great silence round her, a silence as of things that ar
dead.

It is a strange picture.

I stand before it blinded and confused. Whats
it I see? I hardly know. In impatience, he asks me
what I think; what I think?

Who knews so little as I?

Rudely I tell him that his oleander should no
beam so radiant-red as that, Tiziano always painted
his summer roses in dull semitones; Tiziano’s—beside

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 241

.woman’s cheeks—are cool and pale, and have no
th on them. So I say to Varko; and all the while
reyes gaze into that oleander glory; and the wo-
m’s eyes look back at mine, and all manner of
ad dreams raise their heads like little snakes around

Varko is speaking to me, that I know; but the
ise Of what he is saying is vague and imperfect to
. Perhaps.he is telling me the history of the por-
it. What need of that?—there is the broken lute.

“And her name?” I ask him suddenly.

My heart stands still as it were, and-a rush of heat
d life seems to throb through those Fates, that have
2 so heavy and so chill on it so long. I ask under
‘breath, as one speaks of the dead; I know that I
. afraid of the answer. Afraid as I never was of
t fiery sea of slaughter, down there by the field of
vara.

Varko laughs aloud: a laugh that seems to me to
10 jarringly through the stillness of the lily-scented

“Have you heard not a word of all I have been
ing?” he cries to me. “It is scarcely a portrait:
re you not heard me, indeed? And yet it is her-
f, just as I saw her in the last summer in Florence;
hanged nothing. Nay, the oleanders burned as red
that behind her in the sunset. I know the Titian
es are all pale; but still, I have painted as I saw.
always seems best to me to do so, or try and do
at the least. All that red, all that gold, they would
any other woman’s face, but they do not kill hers.
an old Florentine dress of cloth of gold, you see.

wcavel. Il. 16

242 ' PASCAREL, —

She was ready for a costume ball. She came out on
to the balcony —just so,—the sun was setting. I |
sketched the scene, and showed it to her on the mor-
row. So the picture grew. And, now, what shall I
call it? Not her name, she will not have it. It might
be the ‘tanta rossa’ of Dante: or, I thought, of the
mistress of Giorgione; she might have looked just so |
upon his balcony in Venice; and the lute is broken
—there will be no more music in her life,—a little
space, and the red oleander leaves will be falling like
rain upon her grave and his. The picture would tell
all that Giorgione story, not ill, I think. You see,
under that lowest blossom to the left I have put the
little arrowy head of an asp that will serve for the
symbol of the plague. I asked her once .if I might
call it so, and she said: ‘As you like; only Giorgione's
mistress would smile, I think; she would know that
death was about to be merciful to them both. But,
as you like,’ she said; ‘as you like.’ So I can call tt
so. And it is more Venetian than Florentine in
colour after all. Her name? I wonder that you have
to ask. The world knows you both so well. She 1s
often in Florence, but she is not here now. She
is the daughter of a great personage, a very great
personage.”

Then he lets the purple cloud of the curtain fall
again over that fire-glow of the flowers, a little angered
with the doubt that Titian’s roses being pale, he per-
chance is wrong. But I stand looking at the shadow
that had fallen and see still the oleander, and the
broken lute, and the eyes of the woman which have
no smile in them as the eyes of Giorgione’s mistress
would have had.

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 243

or the face of the picture is to me as the face of
isen from the dead.

great personage, so he says, leaning there with
old tissues falling all about her on the marble,
he Florentine carnations in her breast, and the
| of jewels on her throat and forehead, and at
2et the lute, whose broken chords she, with all
reatness, could not heal again so that they would
preathe forth the old, sweet, simple, tender notes.
‘at personage: yet surely also the child that had
gone with me through the lily-whitened grasses
he moon-lightened fields of maize, singing as the
sang and careless of the morrow.

feel chilly and grown old, as I felt by the side
e grey Gréve water, where the sun had flashed
it the canes. For there is no ghost whose breath
cold, as the ghost of a love that is dead; and [
met two this day, this’ April day, when the
s all yellow with daffodils, and all the earth is

ould it be better to know her under the dusky
es of some aisle of graves, in the mouldering
of some world-forgotten city, or to find her great
his, with jewels in her breast, and that strange
ed look in her eyes?
he lute is broken: does she remember, I wonder?
as she forgotten the days on the sunny hillsides,
e shallow brook waters, and the leaves of the
, and beneath the murmuring poplars? Has she
ten? Has she forgiven? What can it matter—
ty—if she be great like this?
1e must be dead to me, you know.
nd that living death is worse than the death of
16*

244 PASCAREL.

the grave, they say; that living death when the voice |
speaks still to all others, and only is silent to you
And yet the world is full of these things! One won-
ders the sun still drags on its way; one wonders all
men are not mad.

The seeding grass was wet with torrents of blood:
down there on the March day of Novara, and the
cannon balls, as they swept through the rising com,
did the work of the harvest sickle. How came Fate
to miss me amongst the slain? I wonder;—and
grow old.

I have tried to love other women; I have told
other women I did love them; but I do not think
they believed me, and I know I did not believe my-
self.

And now that I have seen that picture—yes, that
is, of course, how she must be; a great lady, witha
knot of diamonds in her breast. There is not much
left in her of the bold, shy, pretty, saucy child that
I walked through Verona with, that night of the
Veglione. Nothing left probably, not even perhaps a
regret.

A flush of shame at most, perhaps, when this
brilliant illustrissima remembers how she roamed the
fields and hills with a troop of strolling comedians;
remembers too, maybe, now and then, that one of
those wandering players set his lips to her cheek and
held her little hand in his in the autumn hour, when
the wild anemones were all aglow beneath the brown
Badia.

Well, no one will ever know that I remember #
too. She last and least of all; if ever I should meet
her.

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 245

There are things one is bound to forget, or, at
st, that bind one to live as if they were wholly for-
‘ten.
And what is Oblivion if it be not Age? I feel
l, I say, as I felt at noon where the little red roses
d by the Gréve stream.

“You are sure there is never a scorpion?” says
tra, the actress, to me this April day, when at sun-
; we go up together to the great open-air theatre
at draws all Florence to it on summer nights where
stands under the pine woods on the hillside beyond
* Gate of the Cross.

“You are sure there is never a scorpion?” says
tra to me, bathing her fair face in the lilies and
ng breast downward in the grass with the vine-
adows playing, as if in love with her, over her soft,
Jolent, wanton limbs.

I tell her no; but alas! grow the lihes ever so
hly there is always a scorpion somewhere for me.

That is just because a man ever desires the thing
has not, you see; most surely desires it of all when
it thing is called woman. For the lilies are yellow
soon as gathered, but the scorpion stings on and
, on and on.

I talked with a scorpion once; an old, old scor-
m, long as my hand, and hoary as Esau with length
years. I found him, and made his acquaintance in
yrison in Venice long, long ago, where the Stranieri
lged me three months or so for having spoken
mis too strong and too seasoned one riotous Carni-

246 PASCAREL.

val time, when I had rolled my first little Arte under |

the wings of the Lion.

|
{

The old scorpion never hurt me but would lash .

his tail and talk by the hour together. He had heard |

the sad tale of the wild Lagoon waters and the sigh
of the Gondolier’s Stali! for ages and ages and ages
there in his sea-girt chambers; since first he had come
from the East, no bigger then than a _ scarabeus,
hidden in a fold of gold tissue that one of Dandolo’s
men had brought with him from mighty Byzantium,
and thrown on the couch of his mistress one amorous
night in August. The scorpion stung her and she
died—why not? there is always a sting in all love,
and perhaps the quickest death to it is the kindliest.

He had seen many things and many centuries this
old wise bearded scorpion of Venice, and one day
when he sat in his chink,—a black blot in a line wih
the sun,—I asked him to tell me, since we were good
friends together, what was the secret and source of
that mystical power for which my human kind was
wont to curse him and his; and slay them and em-
balm them in oil as dead Pharaohs were buried in
perfume.

The old scorpion made me answer; he who had
lived in the beautiful wanton breast of that Venice,
which men have called the harlot of Italy; the old
scorpion made me answer.

“What do we slay with? And what is the death
in our sting? A venom that is as that fire which no
water quenches, and as the grave-worm that no feast
of flesh can slake? What is that, you fool, with which
we arm ourselves and strike where we will and never
fail? Listen here then, and know that this for whic

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS, 247.

pu all curse us is born of yourselves, not of us. For
» the beginning of time when Death came forth
om the gates of hell on the bloodless white horse
nd was set free to pace to and fro the world, and
catter desolation as he would, Death scattering him-
21f broadcast in many shapes and fashions, Death
ne night made us the scorpions and set us to run
ver the earth.

“The first scorpion was only a harmless big beetle
t the beginning, ugly, of course, but quite innocent,
ut Death took it up and steeped it in two human
earts that all bleeding and smoking lay in the hollow
f his hand. And from the man’s heart the first scor-
ion sucked desire, and from the woman’s heart it
ucked jealousy; and when it had sated itself of these
o the full, Death set it down on the ground.

“Now be fruitful and multiply,” he bade it. “And
lo your work on the human race, for you have a
renom in you that never will die while the world rolls
yn round the sun.”

So the old scorpion talked, blinking at the light
from the sea walls in Venice.

And now,—bloom the blue lilies ever so brightly,
shere is always a scorpion somewhere for me.

For Astra and Poppea there is a great supper
spread this April night, under a tent at midnight when
our play is over. They have acted superbly, and they
have had all the glory their souls could desire, and
they laugh 4 gorge déployée, their red lips parting
over their snowy teeth, playing with flowers in bands
of jewels that some of the nobles have flung to them.
They are famous, and spoilt, and capricious, and

248 PASCAREL.

cruel sometimes, and jealous always; and like children
in their mirth, as all artists are all the world over.

The white folds of the tent flutter, the torches
flicker in their brass sconces, the young actors have
dressed the canvas with boughs and pennons and
fluttering scrolls; where the curtains open there shines
the white radiance of magnolia trees that grow just
there on the hillside, and whose closed cups are silver -
in the moon.

There are laughter and jesting, and such amorous
follies as women like Astra and Poppea await when-
ever their eyes may beam upon the sons of men
They lie there like Tiziano’s women, and their jewels
gleam and their pretty hands crush the bursting fruits;
and without, down the hills, the people troop away
shadowy, cloud-like, singing as they go, the sweet
sounds grow fainter and fainter as they stream farther
away under the low stone pines.

We ourselves go down the hill together a little
later; it is the fancy of Astra and Poppea to leave
their horses champing by the gates and use their own
pretty listless lightsome feet.

Their silken skirts shiver over the grasses, sweeping
down the lilies; the young men go before them with
flute and mandoline singing the Invitation of Paesiello;
there are gleams of blue where the iris are growing,
the air is full of magnolia fragrance, the night is as
clear as the day, it is past one of the clock, Florence
sleeps silvery and very still.

A shrouded figure passes us masked, Astra and
Poppea shrink a little; it looks dismal in the noon;
they take it for some brother of the Misericordia !

\

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 249

ee that it is a woman. But why masked, and on the
wlls too? It is not even Carnival.

We go on through the gates into the silent city,
the sleepy guards let us through, the music and the
singing wake all the echoes as we pass along the dark
old streets and under the Church of the Croce.

The lads sing more sweetly as they go by and
their voices drop to a tender minor key; they remem-
ber that Michelangelo and Leonardo lie there. Now
and then a woman drops a rose to us from her
lattice; now and then a lover comes out from some
vaulted doorway, looking warily to see if any tale-
bearer be lurking near; now and then a stream of
light falls from some balcony where two shadows lean
one on the other.

So we go on through the silent city, on into the
Square of the Signoria, and here, late though it is,
there are men grouped together in little knots, mur-
muring eagerly, with their cloaks cast about them and
their faces flushed and dark.

We have left Astra and Poppea at their palace;
the youths have ceased their singing; we pause by
the Cathedral and look up; someone has set against
the bronze Judith a flag of three colours; the red in
tt glows like blood in the silver glistening cool

rence night.

“What is it?” we ask; we have lost our memory
Up there on the hills in music, and have forgotten for

moment the storm that hovers northward where
the city of Virgil lies,

“What is it?” we ask, whilst the Judith bends her

against the moon.

250 PASCAREL.

They answer us in one word.
“War.”

War again away there in the North.

As I go homeward by myself I am glad.

I am tired of Astra and Poppea, of the masquing
and the folly, of the paper laurels and the hobble
of lead, of the showers of gold and the laughter of
fools.

I come upstairs to the broad tapestried chamber
where the moonrays lie so white upon the marble
floor, and I go to an old chest and I take out the old
knapsack and the old musket that I carried years ago
over the Lombard fields.

After all, they are the truest friends a man has;
after all, when one is a Florentine, one is a soldier
before one is anything else.

They lie there in the moonlight, old battered
moulded war-worn things; on the barrel of the musket
there is red rust, it was a fellow-student’s life blood:
I never had the heart to touch it. How shabby and
broken the knapsack is, too; it was nearly new that
day in Pisa when I saw the Zinzara and her people
troop by under the old grey walls, and went after
them on the same sea road and caught them as they
travelled along in the dust, singing and eating their
cherries.

There are the cherry stains now on the leather,
for she would fill it with fruit, I remember; the stains
are black,—a dying man leaned his head on it amongst

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 251

crushed grass whilst a burning village smoked in
midst of the millet fields, as Carlo Alberto’s hopes
| down with the setting sun.

[ sit in the moonlight with the old pack in my
ds and the musket at my feet, thinking of all the
1 years that seem to drift by me one by one as
clouds go by past the casement.

Some friends of mine break into the room, and
me there, the musket at my feet.

They are all breathless and excited talking of the
3.

“You are not going, Pascarél?” they cry to me.

I tell them yes.

“But you are mad!” they say in chorus.

I shrug my shoulders. It is very possible.

“But, with your fame?” they cry.

“Qh, altro! my poor paper laurels—a plaything for
[ardi Gras—what more?”

“But you will be ruined!” they urge.

“That is very possible, too.”

“But just when you are great,” they cry; “just
m the world catches your words as if pearls fell
n your mouth—to thrust that all away into a com-
n soldier’s knapsack—it is lunacy.”

“That is as it may be. Italy wants Venice and
rona.”

I rub the old cherry stains on the old knapsack,
{ think how strange it is that all we students
amed of in the gloom of Pisa,—and were called
d and worse for so dreaming of as we marched
lve abreast by night through the sombre streets,
tinting sonnets of Manzoni,—should now be come

252 PASCAREL.

and be coming to pass with a precision, and romance,
that together make it like the work of magic.

They stay till the day breaks arguing with me—
what is the use? The old musket lying there on
the marble, seems to suit me better now than the
painted bladder and gilded bells of the pantomime.
To care for the follies of the carnival fair, one must
have a heart as light as the bladder, and mirth that
rings like the bells.

Well, I had these longer than most men. If the
bladder be weighted with lead and the bells are
jangled and out of tune now, at least my measure
lasted longer than it lasts for most men.

At length my friends go away; they go sorrowful,
and they think me a fool.

The chamber is black and grey around me. The
dawn breaks, but breaks slowly.

I felt old to-day as I went by the shallow Gréve
water.

I felt weary’as Astra laughed amongst the lihes.

How still it is!—here,—high amongst the roofs.

I am left alone in the chilly light of the dawn.
The shadows are black on the marble floor. A
mouse creeps up and smells at the musket where
the blood of the dead soldier is crusted on the steel
The knapsack still lies on my knee. I think of Pisa

How prettily and innocently jealous she was, the
donzella, leaning out of the old grated window, be-
cause she had heard how, in the student days, the
Zanzara had wound a red ribbon to my mandoline.
Yet I remember too, how as we went underneath the
old palaces, and spoke together of Margherita of
France, she marvelled how the princess could wish to

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 253

rander with gipsies, and to leave all the pride and
1e pomp of her royalty for mere freedom and mirth
nd the fresh air of heaven. She marvelled, yes,
x10ugh she had wandered with the Arte and me. She
rould not have been happy with us in other years;
o doubt she is best as she 1s.

And yet,—does she never, I wonder, think of the
ours when we went together through the trailing
ines light of foot as of heart in the warmth of the
un?

Oh, those old fair dead days! they were so glad
nd so innocent and so simple. Why could they not
ast for ever beneath those blue Tuscan skies?

The city is still asleep.

The first chimes ring muffled through the shadows
f night that still lingers. Good women will rise
rom their beds and will go out into the darkness of
he churches, and will break their hearts in prayer
wer the sons and the lovers who are going out to
var, on the old Lombard battle-fields, where the maize
ind the vine are green.

I have no one to pray for me.

It is always so, when one has loved too many.
Ne gather the roses too quickly, and the wind blows
he leaves away hither and thither, and our hands are
eft empty. |

Well, the musket lies there; and, there is always

y-

If the lute be broken and the fool’s bells be
angled it is time to die as my fellow-students died
wmongst the trampled corn.

254 PASCAREL.

CHAPTER II.
Her Story.

Do you know Sta. Margharita’s? the little brown
square church with its bell clanging in the open tower,
above in the sweet air on the hills?

There is level grass all about it, and it has a cool
green garden shut within walls on every side except
where a long parapet of red dusky tiles leaves open
the view of the Valdarno; underneath the parapet
there are other terraces of deep grass and old old
olive trees, in whose shade the orchids love to grow,
and the blue iris springs up in great sheaves of sword-
like leaves.

There are trees of every sort in the cloistered
garden, the turf is rich and long, the flowers are
tended with the tenderest care, the little sacristy glows
red in the sun, an acanthus climbs against it; the
sacristan’s wife comes out to you plaiting her straw
and brings you a cluster of her roses; you sit on the
stone seat and lean over the parapet and look down-
ward, birds flit about you, contadini go along the
grass paths underneath, and nod to you, smiling; @
delicious mingled loveliness of olive wood and ilex
foliage and blossoming vineyards shelve beneath you;
you see all Florence gleaming far below there in the
sun, and your eyes sweep from the snow that still hes
on Vallombrosa to the blue shadows of the Carrara
range.

It is calm and golden and happy here at St
Margharita’s, high on the fragrant ‘hill air, with the
gueldre roses nodding above head, and the voices of

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 255

he’ vinedressers echoing from the leaf-veiled depths
elow.

To live here and dream the years away and only
core the time by the colour of the vines, it would be
rell, I think; very well. Only for such a life one
aust needs be so happy. Happy as one is for an
our, for a day, for a month, but never for longer.
Iappy as one can only be when a great passion is
lose about us, and is past, and present, and future,
3; world, and sun, and God.

Sometimes I come up here for quiet’s sake and
ean my arms on the red ledge, and wait to watch
he sun sink down behind the deep azure of Carrara
md change the broad green valley to a sea of molten
‘old. .
I used to come here with Pascarél—many times,
nany times.

One day in especial I remember. The wooden
Arte had been reared in the village yonder; it was a
riorno di festa; it was in the April time; we came up
long the narrow road between the high walls, over-
opped with china roses and hawthorn; we came into
he garden by the church and sat down, he on the
yarapet, I on the little stone bench in the corner
inder the aloe.

Mass was over; in the sacristan’s house they were
yoing to the mid-day meal; they brought food out to
1s and would take no denial. We shared the simple
‘east of soup and bread and salad, there amongst the
zreen leaves and the flowers; we paid them for it
with the mandoline and many songs of Florence.

We stayed there all the afternoon till the sun set,
and we heard the Ave Maria ringing from all the

256 PASCAREL.

belfries in the valley as we strolled backward along
the grass paths of the hills; he gathered the dainty
orchids for me under the olive trees; we laughed and
jested and made music as we went.

To-day the same scene lies before me in the sun;
the old bell in the little square tower strikes the
quarters with the same sound; the garden and the
church are nowise changed; the sacristan’s wife comes
out smiling, plaiting her straw, and holding to me a little
knot of flowers; she calls me the most illustrious, she
gazes with gentle awe at the jewels on my hands; she
does not look aged and her husband is stooping over
the dark moist fresh-turned earth binding carnations
just as we left him on that day.

It is just the same, just the same, only the music
is silent.

Only!

I lean on the red edge of the wall and look down;
two contadini go by under those old gnarled olives;
they ere young; he laughs and her cheeks grow red.
I would give the world to be the girl, bareheaded
there in the sun, poor, plaiting her straw as she goes
along over the grass-grown furrows.

For the music is not silent for her. It may only
indeed be a homely little pastoral song, only a per
sant’s stornello, rhymed to the hum of the spinning
wheel and the bleat of the goats in the meadow. But
it is the song that makes blythe her heart in the
ragged bodice and light her feet in the ox-ploughed
ways. It is perfect to her, and lips that are eagef
and tender murmur it low in her ear; she is blessed
amongst women, I say. But to me the green earth
silent.

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 257

ko, the painter, made my portrait the other
[ stood in the sunset one night in a court-dress
zased him. He brought me an old trecentisto
id asked me to sing him some Florence song
worked. As I stretched out my hand the lute
d broke in two on the marble floor. “Paint it
said to him; he did not know why, but so it
| fittest to me.
d the lute is there on the picture, broken—
| the cunning of men to mend. He calls the
g Giorgione’s Mistress. It seems an ill-chosen
ome. For she must have been happy always;
. glad life in Venice that was one long golden
crowned masque, and then the short sharp
that did not divide them but wedded them
for all time, together forever in the quiet of
ve and in the memory of the world.
s so few years, and yet it seems so many ages
ae white roses came to me in farewell.
2re followed on that time a space of absolute
ciousness. It is all blank, all dark to me.
en I awoke again there were no more around
-bare Florentine walls, the aromatic pungent
ine odours, the gay vibrating Florentine street
I saw no more the old carved window and
le brown figure of the stocking mender with
1 on her silver earrings and the silken hose at
t.
had all faded away as though it had never

woke with gold and silver and fine linen and
tes about me; I awoke with great wide windows
me, through which there gleamed gilded rails

“% £4. 17

If the donzella like to eat gold sh
easily as grapes in vintage time!
you will live, you will’ try a little
not?”

I looked at him stupidly, pushin
my aching forehead; live? why shoul
lilies were all dead in Tuscany.

One day they set before me gr
phires and diamonds and other preci
were heirlooms, they said.

“You are too young for them,”
“but they will become you, as those
purple velvets used to do in old
yourself your handsomest to-night,
you.”

I had no choice but to obey.

The world saw me and made itse
the great dazzling lawless world of P
my hands to it thankfully, it gave m
getfulness; anything was better thar
the chesnuts bud in the cool sunligh
with longing for the deep vine shado
mountain stillness of my Tuscany. An

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 259

One day I saw an iris behind a gilded garden-pale;
n iris as blue as my lost heavens—the iris of Dante
yat blooms in millions down the olive slopes and
mongst the maize in Tuscany with the first wakening
f the spring-time sun.

I thought that Dante in his hell had misséd the
4atpest torture of it all. Why did he not set a little
lian nieadow hly to grow in the darkness of Caina
nd Ptolomea and smile with its azure eyes at the
espair of those for whom the sun of Italy had for-
ver ceased to shine?

Am I not mad? as mad as dead ’Dino’s Pazza,
alling on the waters to give up her lover by sad
errara? I call on the dead days, and they are
rowned and mute like ’Dino.

My father is good to me, in his cold idle manner.
fe is proud because the world calls me so handsome,
nd he fills my hands with riches; I spend in a day
rhen I like what would make this little paese on the
ills here a fairyland for all its people. Men love
1e—or vow they do,—and I play with them, and
hey say I have no heart. Women envy me as I pass.
yy, and hate me with that hate which is a woman’s
ross of honour. What more can any female creature
rantf —

And yet you see one is so thankless. I, who
lreamed ceaselessly of all this greatness, and thirsted
or it lying wide-awake on my truckle bed, and
yatching the moon rise over the Scala’s palaces, and
ight the painted loves of Orpheus on the vault above,
_ often shake the jewels off my aching head and
ling myself down weeping as "Dino’s Pazza weeps be-
ide the riverside, for the time when the wild poppies

17*

APULL AAU TY MLR eee ULeRaLE oro WaAU
a dead rose to my heart that no one see
Gitidetta held hers fifty long years in silen
faith.

I have no faith; if I had had faith, never
so poor and vile a thing as his dead amo!
stand betwixt me and my belief in him. .
know; too late, too late.

But so much faith as this I have. He }
there, on the dark hillside on the night of
under Fiesole. No other shall ever touch
much faith as this I have.

A woman who carries lips un-virgin to
band, what better is she than the adulteress?

So I think at least; old Mariuccia would
I could rouse her from her hard-won rest a
where the alpine storm-winds lash the sullen
of the Adige into foam.

There is one who torments me more
others to be faithless to this single poor
human fealty that I treasure.

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 261

1 that I saw that night was no chance resemblance.
times I wonder if he recognizes in me the child
t leaned against the screen in the great hall with
' strange masquerade dress of violet and gold: I
mot tell. He never talks of it; he is a man full of
ce and courtliness, and to all people my father
‘aks of me as having been reared in a convent of
rthern Italy. No one doubts: why should they?
ly sometimes I think my cousin doubts; sometimes
hink he knows full well that I was once the little
ndering Uccello of the Arte.

He loves me, or pursues me at the least with a
ong ardour and with delicate wiles and ways. My
her favours his suit, so far at least as he ever
ises himself from his voluptuous apathy to urge
on me anything. The man is sole heir to all his
2-come greatness and he would be glad that I
yuld bear the mighty name and wear the honour of
always.

So they talk; so they talk; and my cousin woos me
only men skilled in the world as he is can; he has
‘ fathers beauty and my father’s grace and ease;
t I—whilst his words are most eloquent upon my
, all I can hear is one voice murmuring in its sweet
iorous Tuscan, “Oh, gioja mia!” in the dreamy
itrous midnight when the falling stars dropped over
ite Fiesole.

For how can I forget? how shall I ever forget till
im dead?

What woman forgets the first kisses that have
rned on her cheek. and throat, unless she grow
ht enough and foul enough to lend her lips to
sh caresses? And that I am not;—nay, thank God;

262 | PASCAREL.

—sq much of womanhood there is in me, though in
so much else, 1, the great lord’s daughter and the
great world’s darling, am so far sunk beneath the
little simple wayward, fear-innocent less, Uccello.

' Yet there must be something more, for in the
world there where they sing my praises, they always
say “a beautiful thing—but wild—and with an up-
tamed look;” and when [ shake off my rich velvets
and my priceless laces at the end of the long nights
of pleasure, I shiver a little, and in my soul long for
the old simple dusty skirts stained with the juice of
the trodden grapes, and the play of the bleating kids
and the dew of the wind-blawn acacias where I ran
bareheaded and happy in the summer sun jn the wake
of the wandering Arte.

For I am so young still, and yet I feel so old;
and all that one sweet buried summer time has all my
dead youth with it in its grave of withered rose leaves.

“What would Mariuccia say if she came before us
now!” cries good, merry, blissful Florio, a thousand
times if once: ah, yes! I have all the greatness and
the glories that I sighed my soul out for in my uD
gratefy] babyhood, sitting at her feet under the broken
Donatello, And what good is it to me? so little good
that when I see a little white anemule shine under
those olive trees my heart js sick with longing and I
am weary unto death.

Is it three years? only three years? It seems
eternity since there, by the Mouth of the Lion, the
crowd of Oltrarno bore him away on the wild rejoicing
night?

Men talk of him; I hear his name and see it 08
the walls of cities.

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 263

“A great genius,” they say, “fitful and never to be
ntrolled, but of wit keen as the needle’s edge, and
powers varied as the sunset’s hues.” The fame of
n has leapt into sudden light before the world; “a
tyers fame!” says my cousin with a sneer, “a
tyer’s fame! a mushroom’s fungus growth that will
2 down with the first day of rain!”

Does he remember,—my cousin? When he says
se things, I think so.

Can I be glad that he has those paper laurels, as
used to call them?

No, for art is a rival longer lived than any woman.
1, dear heaven! I should have known that a woman’s
ve is worth nothing unless it be doglike and takes
od and evil alike uncomplaining? Yes, perhaps;
it as it is my heart burns with love still.

Last night, only last night, I was weak enough to
sh to see his face again there on the hillside where
e great open-air theatre stands, and I left my horses

the base of the slope, and put my mask and
ymino on, and went upward on foot where the red
id white flag fluttered high above the oak woods.

How still the night was; and the great golden
oon hung in the silvery air, and the white magnolias
eamed hke lamps, and a cloud of rosy oleander
aves was blown in my face by the wind.

Do you know what the night is in Italy? No?
hen you do not know how near heaven your earth
in be.

It is a great place without a roof, a summer theatre
x the people. The grass grows up to the walls and
ie oak woods are all above. It was quite quiet; there

264 -PASCAREL.

was a sound of dreamlike music sighing everywhere
upon the silent and leafy sides of the hills.

There were many doors all open to the air. In
one a group of pifferari leaned; next to them was a
peasant girl with a bulrush in her hand; next her
again a woman who rested her basket of melons ona
rail and held a child to her bare breast.

Behind, the little wandering pifferari strayed near
the entrance without paying, their eyes aglow under
their tangled hair; the metal workers and perfume
pressers and mosaic makers from the town leant to-
gether with bended brows; the noble stooped his
delicate dark head to hearken yet more surely; the
proud duchess at his side beat the measure softly with |
her broad black fan, so they listened, the Tuscan —
people, with the shadow of the great roofless walls
around them and above their heads the blue night
skies. And the genius of what they had heard had
entered into them, and the sweet sounds of it were
sighing in echo from all their mouths, and they laughed
aloud in pleasure, while their eyes kindled and flashed
through the shadow, and a great shout went up from
three thousand voices to the quiet stars where the
clouds were floating.

They all cried one name;—“Pascarél!”

I glided in and stood in the press between a
cobbler in his leathern apron who had brought a‘shoe
to sew there and a contadino with his brown cloak
tossed over one shoulder and behind his ear a knot of
asphodels.

The light and shadows played about them; the oil
flames burned clear, the smell of the fresh herbs and
grass drifted from the hills without; above head were

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 265

purple clouds with the moon a globe of gold, and
yreat dusky hawk winging his slow way across the
e of the sky.

Ah, God! the familiar sweetness of it all! I lost

sense of time and place. I was once more the
le wandering Uccello of the Arte, happy because

_ breeze blew, happy because the sun would rise,
»py for every trifle of the day and night, happy as

' flowers in the fields.

The people made a little way for me and I sank

‘the seat that the old cobbler rose to surrender to

They looked but little at me, they were absorbed
what they had heard, and a woman masked is not
strange in Italy as elsewhere. I sat quite still.

The great circle went round and round before my
ht, the lights wavered in the dusky shadows of it,
+ music sounded like the swell of some far-off sea.

Whether it were harmony or discord I had no per-
ption, nor how long it lasted after my entrance there
cannot tell.

I could feel the wind blowing in my eyes, I could
> the hawk hovering above with outstretched wings,
could smell the sweet familiar scents of the wild
Iside; that was all.

My consciousness was with the old dead days.

The silence around me was broken by tumultuous
outs; the music had ceased, the people were send-
g the thunder of their applause up to the quiet
kness where the stars were; the hawk had soared
ray.

It was all vague and full of fury, like a storm, to
e; the waves of sound beat on my ears but I did
%t hear them. e

AYES
Paice

266 PASCAREL.

Then—lightly as a leopard in its own deserts,
Pascaré] leaped on the stage with a bound, and thunders
of homage echoed through the house, and his eyes
flashed over the sea of faces and the clear resonant
vibrations of his voice thrilled through the murmuring
welcome of the hushing house.

And so I saw and heard him—IJ—onc >]
iho RadTeW his Kisses there on the far hillside benea
Fiesole that unforgotten night before the Feast-day of
the Dead.

And yet I sat quite quiet, and only drew a little
into shadow where the gaslight would not find ny
diamonds. Women are liars, say you? Well, they
need be. ~ :

There was silence, tumult, silence, tumult again;
then the people streamed away out into the moon-
light.

I was left all alone. I could hear them going down
the hills playing on their mandolines. The lights were

'”* blown out. There was only the white light of the full

moon.

Near at hand there was laughter and singing. They
sounded strangely, waking all the echoes in the great
silent amphitheatre. My life thrilled with sharp sickly
pain, as though a snake had bitten me.

I heard the clear vibration of the laugh of Pascarél,
that Italian laugh, like the ring of silver upon stone,
which is like no other upon earth. The light mer-
riment of women crossed it, and a burden of a love
song followed.

I rose to my feet, and felt my way blindly through
the rows of seats to the open doorway, round which

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 267

> coils of wild vine were blowing in the wind from
2 mountains.

He was standing on the hillside; his lips laughed,
2 moonlight fell about him; his mandoline was slung
th a scarlet ribbon; against him leaned a beautiful
wnton thing with laces trailing in the damp grass,
.d a white hand that stretched over his shoulder and
uched the strings of the lute.

I knew her face; she came of Venice; they called
‘r in her world Poppea.

I went by them, noiseless and shapeless, a dark
adow against the white magnolia blossoms. He
arted, and a false note shivered sadly from the man-
dline.

This was how he remembered! Ah, God! what is

that stays with me still?—it cannot be love—for
2ry shame’s sake it must now be hate?

And yet,—and yet,—I envy that peasant girl who
des yonder through the olives with her lover’s hand
hers!

CHAPTER III.
The old Sea Queen.

Jr is not an army that goes out to war, Itisa
thole people that rises in arms, My birth country
lone sends out many thousand Tuscans; all made of
he same steel as those who, in the old day held their
illa on the Murello slopes there, against all assaults
rom the stoutest chivalry of England and of Ger-
aany.

i come down to Genoa in the fresh May days;
long this beautiful sea road that my knapsack and

268 . PASCAREL.

I travelled so long long ago with the French come-
dians, eating their cherries and singing their songs,
with the blue sky overhead and the blue sea at
their feet.

I remember how we came into Genoa then—they
and I—1in the glad Easter weather, with the white dust
on our feet and the ready jest on our mouths. Genoa
was in festa that day; and all the ladder-like streets
were ablaze with flags, and all the many-coloured fiints
of the old sea palaces glowed in the fervid noon heats
from the sapphire water. And we ate fruits in the
quaint old galleries along the sea line; and laughed
and chattered down the steep ways where the Dona
and their fellows fought so often, knee to knee and
knife to knife; and then, at nightfall, we played toa
thousand odd sailors and traders of every clime from
off the vessels in its harbour, and the theatre over and
done with, we strayed out into the moonlight along
the sea again, slaking our throats with pomegranates,
and waking the echoes of the palaces of the old Sea
Queen with the thrill of the mandoline until the dawn
broke away there across the waves where Africa was
lying.

Ah, Dio mio!—those were goodly days, and gracious
in their folly, and sweet in the mouth as the red water
melon, if also as swift to melt away and leave no taste,
and as little fit for life’s real sustenance.

And here is Genoa again in the May time, and
this time its music is of drums and bugles, and the
roll of cannon and the tramp of soldiers; this May
time its waters and skies and air are grey, and full of
storm; the rain falls, the shadows of the hills close
darkly round; the old palaces lean together, and the

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 269

eets are dark as night; there are only the golden
anges and the tricoloured banners that have colour
them, and laugh a little through the gloom.

The city seems to tremble where she sits by the
a, that she wrested in the old old days from bereaved

sa.

Through her streets and down her mighty quays
ere tramp, all day long, thousands and tens of
ousands of tired feet—all Italy and half France are
re.

Through the mists that hang on high, over the
ive woods, there come half muffled cheers. Though
e rain falls the bouquets fall too; fall in showers on
e shining lines of bayonets from the balconies above.
hrough the white vapour from the Mediterranean the
rands of the salutes from the frigates roll heavily and
sho down the mole. The old archways and the dim
vernous galleries along the sea line are all full of
e troops, that pause there in a little breathing space .
) taste the wine and press the fruits into their burn-
g throats. Little children glow here and there out
f the fog like little knots of flowers; the smallest of
1em have the three colours somewhere on their dress,
ad their small shrill voices are all crying vivas for
1e King and Italy.

Genoa is for the moment the mouthpiece of the
hole roused nation.

The rain falls—falls all day long; and at night
ims the cressets and clusters of lights that glitter
own the terraces in the old palaces, and puts out the
road flame of torches that glow down the terraces
nd flare on the sculptured fronts and the varicoloured
arvings in all the sloping streets. The rain falls as

270 PASCAREL.

though the sky were sold to Austria. But for once it
cannot drive the people in; for once, though the flags
droop, the hearts do not: for once the eager steps
race, and the loud huzzas rise, and the miillions of
flowers are thrown through the grey sad mist as
through the lost gold of the sunshine.

The clouds may gather and the storms may beat
as they will, and do their worst; there is a fire alight
in Italy that no rain can quench;—nay, not even a
rain of blood.

Genoa for the moment is the meeting place of the
whole roused nation.

I sit here in the covered places in the galleries
fronting the sea.

It is full of many-coloured fruits, and flasks of |
wine, and piles of polenta. Ojl-lamps swing above,
shedding a dim light. A handsome _ brown-faced
woman chaffers at the counter, her great gold ear-
rings flashing with each movement of her head. Sol-
diers come and go by scores, by hundreds; Zouaves
with the African sun on them, Neapolitans still in thei
fishing shirts; Tuscan conscripts with the first down
on their lips; Cuirassiers with flashing chains and
plumes; Italian nobles with Titian faces and slender
stately forms in the simple tunic of the volunteer, all
coming and going, drinking and jesting, clashing ther
sabres against the great brass scales, tilting the straw
covered flasks to their mouths, tossirig their sashes
against the baskets of oranges, making, all unwittingly,
a thousand studies for Meissonnier, with the dusky
light on the white crosses of Savoy and the silver me-
dals of France, whilst out there, beyond the quay, the

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 27!

is murmuring, and the vessels are looming like
intom ships in the shadows.

The French laugh and chatter endlessly, and our
ypté will not be outdone in lightness of heart; but
‘ry now arid then the Italian faces grow very grave
1 pale a little under their olive brows as their eyes
seaward; here it is not a question of a campaign
t or won, rt Is a nation’s life or death that is in the
lance.

I have come from the Caffé of the Coricordia.

It is grander there and stiller amongst its orange
wes and throngs of staff officers; but I like better
be here in this dusky archway with my musket at
‘knee, and, around, the strong salt smell of the
L

As I sit here thinking thus, there comes noiselessly
o the crowded place a slight small figure, travel-
ined and very weary, with a beautiful pale little
e under curls of reddened gold. The figure comes
me shyly through the noisy soldiers, and takes my
id.

“Dear friend, am I too late? May I go with you?”
It is Raffaellino.

For a while I cannot speak to him, I am so much
azed. I left him safe in Florence with his genius,
he quiet and the sunshine, springing to goodly sta-
e like the prophet’s gourd.

“You!” I cry to him, making way for him on the
dow settle. “You;—Merciful heaven, you? to
© this war? We shall have women and children
t!”,

It is brutal of me, but I am rough with him. [

272 PASCAREL.

am angered to see him there; a lad no stronge
any reed that blows in Arno water.

“The women and the children will arm, I tl
the men fail,” he said, with a gentleness that :
me. “Did you not say yourself—it is not an
it is a nation in arms?” .

I sit silent; I cannot chide him for any lo
he bears to Italy, but in my heart I think that t
hour’s march under the summer sun under hi
sack will stifle the life and music in him, as :
will crush a skylark.

As the oil flames flicker in the wind I see
is very pale, paler even than is his wont.

“Can we not go elsewhere?” he murmurs
“It is so full of noise here, and the smell of v
strong. And I have a thing to tell you!”

It is hard to find quiet in Genoa that night.
house is full of feasting soldiers, and all al
streets there come bands of them singing and
ing down the precipitous old world ways.

The rain has lifted a little; there is onl;
mist; I go along the mole with him, and w.
have got a little away from the clamour we si
in the shadow of an old boat that is high a
there up on the flags. The rain does not to
and we have the sea in front, with a captured sc
of Galatz at anchor in the gloom.

Then Raffaellino turns his shining eyes on r
his eager voice trembles.

“Oh, dear friend, she is living after all!
seen her, I have spoken with her—there in F
_-and she was in the Arte that night and w

knew!”

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 273

The grey sea eddies and heaves before my sight.
»r a moment the schooner’s solitary light flashes out
’ the darkness like a million suns. The ground
ows unsteady beneath my feet.

I have no need to ask him whom he means.

The boy leans his head on his hands, silent; the
ind blows in from the sea; the lights in the captive
ip die out; from the terraces above, where the hills
‘e, there comes a loud sweet echo of men’s voices
nging; they are chanting the Hymn of Garibaldi.

Then——

- “Your donzella?” I say quietly, for it is her secret
1d must be kept, and the lad knows nothing. “Your
onzella? Well! she is not dead, then. But she is
2ad, no doubt, in another fashion—by all kinds of
lange.”

He looks at me a little bewilderedly. Perhaps I
yeak too coldly—men do when they are in pain.

“‘She is changed, and yet she is not,” he murmurs;
a hundred times more beautiful, yet quite the same,
think, as when we ran together through Verona. But
re 1S very great, you know—very great and rich, and
[ high estate, and her own mistress. Changed so;
ut mot in any other way. I think, except Well,
great countess, you know, and a poor child singing
1 the Carnival for bread, they are so wide asunder.
‘es, you are right—change is a sort of death. Per-
aps a sadder one for those it leaves.”

“She is married greatly?” I say to him. 4@ae
ords have no sense or reason to me as [ say them.
think of my child with the loose golden cloud of her
air blowing in the fresh hill winds, and her hands
ill of the purple glory of the wild anemones as she

Pascarél. I. 18

274 PASCAREL.

came down on the day of the Saints towards the old
brown Badia. ;

I lost her, as one may miss a firefly in a myrtle
thicket, one hot June night, in the Florence gardens,
and I find her as one may find it another night, set
to shine on high in a woman’s hair in the palace of
a Florence duchess.

The firefly, gathered to play the part of a dia-
mond, and gleam in a palace masque, dies of the
honour; the little soul goes forth in fire like other
souls of greater martyrs; but what woman ever died
of exaltation? They leave such thankless follies to the
liicciole.

It cannot be a second ere he answers me, but it .

seems a horrible endless space and silence that fol-
lows on my own voice; the noise from the city and
from the sea blending into a strange dull roar that
surges at my ear.

“She is not wedded,” says the boy, at last, and
my heart leaps like a loosed deer that springs from
hunters’ nets to woodland liberty—and yet what can
it be to me?—to me more than to any one of those
careless lads in the streets up yonder, who will find
his grave in the ripening wheat of the wide Lombard
fields? “No! It is some great title of her father’s. Our
folk call her contessa, because he is now so noble. |
do not know much. I did not listen. I could only
think of her. There was some wondrous change of
fine for them—she did tell me, I forget. She was
in the Arte that night and—then she saw me in th
street and sent for me, and I went—it was the day
you left,—she had the great villa under Sta. Marghs
rita on the hill. I went, in courtesy and wonder, 0

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 275

stranger as I thought, not dreaming-—-then, when -she
retched her hands to me, and cried, ‘’Ino; Ino!-——is
erona all forgotten?’ she laughing a httle,.-and_ yet
seping too, then I knew her, though it was all so
ianged, and I fell at her feet, and I forget the: rest.”

After that he is silent a long time—poor: little
nder Raffaellino. a ee

I am silent too. ts

The rain falls faster, and the wind drives agains
e boat, but neither he nor I heed: that. .

As for me I do not ask another thing. He. has
en her, and the world has gone by: just the same,—
id she is there in my own city,-+and I am here a
mmmon soldier with my musket, beund in honour
»t to turn back and look upon her face, . “For we
‘e to march at dawn.

I sit still looking into the grey mist. of the. waters; ;
1 the town they are shouting and gathering and: sing:
ig and drinking, and all the lines of the palacés and
reets glitter in zigzags of light fretfully through: the
ig, but no one disturbs us under the black shadow
f the old fishing boat.

Raffaellino, after a time, speaks again ; his head
ill bent upon his hands. —-:

“I do not think she is changed. at heart,” ‘he mur-
1urs. “The same generous, imperious, tender, wilful,
apricious thing, I think, that used to run with me in
1e€ winter snows and the summer noons, hungry and
appy, about in old Verona. She laughed and @@pt
ith me; she forgot all her greatness,—she called me
er brother, her playmate, her friend—she, a. princess,
s it were, in the north land of: her father’s. - She is
proud, graceful, noble woman now,—a httle haughty

18°

276 PASCAREL.

of speech and swift in scorn, I fancy, but to me most
tender. ‘Oh, ’Ino!’ she cried, ‘if only I were now
that merry, naughty, wayward child that ran with you
in the old carnival days amongst the merry people!’
And then I think she would have fairly wept—only
she turned her head and was too proud—but there
went a sort of shiver over her, like that which shakes
the glacier just before it falls.”

I let the boy talk on, the broken phrases of his
speech filled in with the fall of the rain, and the
sough of the sea in the harbour. I ask no questions.
I seem to know it all.

“It was late in the day when I saw her,” he goes
on after a pause. “She made me stay the evening
with her. She lives like an empress. We went out
into the gardens as the sun set. Then she would
hear my story. Did ever you see her in the world, I
wonder?”

I look straight at the sea, and answer “Never,—
Why?”

If one be a man, and have a shred of honour, one
must lie so often; so seldom is there any other way
that serves a woman.

“Only, because, when I spoke of you, and with
out you I should have no story, she grew quite pale,
I thought, and listened with a strange look in her
eyes. And when I told her how you had kept me
with you all these years, and won your gold and fame
fo@Pmne; her tears fell into a knot of oleanders that
she held, and she murmured to herself, ‘So like
him!—Oh, God—so like!’ And when I asked her if
she knew you, then she turned all coldly and su¢
denly, and answered, ‘—I know what the world says

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 277

‘him, no more—a great genius—wild and generous _
-what can he see in those laughing painted women}
at they say he loves such best.’ And then she would
‘ar no more of you, and then she would hear of
xthing except of you; and when she asked if you
gre still in Florence she trembled, or I thought so—
haps it was only the flicker ofthe trees, for it was
rilight then—and when I said that you had thrown
» fame and fortune, and gone off to join the troops
. Genoa, she flashed on me her great proud starry
res with such a scorn—it scorched me like a flame
-Ah, heaven! I shall see till I die. ‘And you wait
ere!’ she cried, ‘you let him go alone! You!—who
ut for him would have died in the Florence streets
f hunger like a dog!’ She did not know how much
1e hurt, nay, I am sure she did not mean to hurt at
ll. I murmured something of the only strength I
ad lying in music. But her eyes flashed fire on mine,
1ough they still were dim. ‘What!’ she cried, ‘does
enius then claim cowardice as its first privilege and
xemption? It was not Lelio Pascarél who taught
ou that!’ She did not mean to hurt—oh, no! she
ever meant to hurt at all. That I am certain. But
nly spoke out her quick proud passionate thought as
ras her habit when a little child. But one would
ot wait to hear a woman say that twice. And she
ras right too, very right, I know. I left her very
oon, and said that I would go to her again. She
‘ave me both her hands, in our sweet frank Italian
ashion,—she is not changed in any thing of that; I
dissed them, and I left her. And when the morning
same, I offered myself for service with the volunteers,
und they took me, though I am weakly and girlish,

278 PASCAREL.

as: you. say, and they gave me the rough dress and
the. heavy musket, and I came to-day to Genoa with
a ‘thousand others. I shall be of little use; but she
was: right, you know. If one can only die—one ought
at least die for Italy.”

So she cannot have forgotten that sweet year long
Tuscan summer! .
1, And it was she masked on the hillside that night;
and I—I laughed like a fool with Astra and Poppea.
What could she think but that I loved those “painted
women?” Ah, heaven! how sweet that jealous word
to me!

Nay—I know how base my joy is.

What right have I to be glad that my memory
lies like a deep evening shadow across the brilliancy
of the morning of her life?

Of course she cannot forget.

What woman forgets kisses that have burned upon
her lips, unless she grow light enough and base enough
to lend her lips in loves swift-chosen “td quick
changed?—and that she will never grow to be my
proud innocent lost treasure.

I know that gladness is base in me.

Yet glad I am—fiercely, madly, heedlessly glad,
though I sit mute here by the sea, and listen with a
cold face lest the lad should think any thought that
may come near the truth. For all I can ever do m
this world for my darling now is to keep her secret
for her—better than she would keep it for herself,
perhaps, if she be indeed so little altered.

After awhile, Raffaellino looks up at me wistful,
“Are you angered with me that I come?—you are 80
still, One could not let a woman say that twice.”

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 279

“That is as one may feel,” I answered him, roughly.
f you did not fight for the sake of Italy, what use

fight for the gibe of a woman?”

It is brutal in me, I know that, but I cannot sit
tietly here and hear him talk of her. I rise from
e boat’s rest and shake him a little as he leans with
s head upon his hands.

“Dio! you are wet through. Do you want to die
fore you see a battlefield? Get up; you have done
lly enough for one day’s work.” ,

He gets up, as I bid him; there is a startled pain

his eyes that moves me with remorse for wounding
m.
I laugh a little that he may see no change in me.
“Nay, ‘Ino, you were my nightingale, and belong
' me; I am angered to see you come to be shot
9wn with all the sparrow-hawks and vultures. A
rl might as well stay a breach with her slender arm
; you come out to feed the cannon. Besides, the
usic in you! You should have had pity on. your
enius—”

“It was not by pity on their genius that your
lorentines made Florence great in the old days you
ive,” he murmured. “And, on your own, what pity
ave you.had?”

“Mine! Oh, altro! A trick of imitating any other
reature that I see; and being able to play a little
ith words upon the hearts of a people who laugh or
ry without knowing why when I tell them! A fine
1ing. But you—who speak in music, that is the very
pice of God Himself amidst men!——Well, now you
re here you cannot turn back. We must do our
est for you. Rise up, and come out of this wild

280 _ PASCAREL.

weather. If you would serve Italy, you must keep
your strength.”

A gleam of moonlight trom a rift in the clouds
falls on his face as he lifts it. |

“If they kill me, it does not matter,” he said softly.
“You know I have loved the donzella ever sipce we
sang together in my father’s workshop amongst the
clank of the hammers; and always, wherever I wandered,
I thought of finding her; and always, when I have
dreamed of my music, I have heard her voice as tt
used to sound in the still old square in the summer
nights; and when they praised my music, and talked
of a great future for me, I thought to myself, perhaps
she is in pain and in poverty somewhere, or even
perhaps in shame, and I shall lift her up and crown
her with my crown, and give her all that men give
me; but now it is over—all over for ever! And now .
she is set on high there, and she can never be any:
thing ever again to me; and I feel as if I should never
bear to hear a note of music; and my music was al
my soul, you know. And it is dead.”

Ay, indeed, I know; know but too well. When
you can solace a mother for her first-born’s death,
then, and then only, shall you solace an artist for the
death in him of his Art.

Then the lad rises up and walks a little feebly
along the grey sea line: and we go in silence—pt
fect silence, backward into the heart of the town.

The rain has lifted a little. The fires of torché
and of illuminations light the grim stone heights of the
old palaces; we tread on laurels as we mount i
steep and crowded streets; from the terraces, whee

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 281

orange boughs toss in the wind, distant voices
e chanting still the “Fuori il Stranier!”
Raffaellino turns to me a moment with his tender
face in a sudden glow from the warmth of the
lened lights in.a gallery above.
“You hear them?” he says, softly. “Nay, she was
t—so right. What can one ask better than to lay
in one’s life for Italy?”

CHAPTER IV.
In the Land of Virgil.

It is not an army, I say, that goes out to war, it
nation in arms that sweeps across the Mincio to
ple with the old hereditary foe. When one heart
ts in the million breasts of a nation, the nation is
ncible. Man cannot hurt her, and God will not.
Every square inch of this soil, through whose
len harvests the child Virgil once ran with fleet
. chanting strophes to the great Ceres Mammosa,
been thrashed through and through by the iron
_of man for twice a thousand centuries.

The struggle is so old, so old—older than the old
1 crown of Lombardy. Down from the dreary
nesses of the Dolomite, the imperial eagle has
oped so many times to fasten beak and talons
he fair eyes of our Italia.

Against the empire! It is the old old war-cry.
No doubt it was grander work going out across
green Valdarno, with the red Carroccio and the
twhite oxen, and the banners of the Silver Dove
the Silver Temple; no doubt it was grander; but
laps we are not altogether unworthy our forefathers

stacked, and our tents set up wher
grey crumbled ramparts just on the
lake. Some young soldiers, who wi
Ravenna and comrades of mine, cz
things, and spent their leisure in tra
of the fortifications beneath the re
wild tulip roots that grew so thickly
where the castello with its village
it had stood in the bygone times «
Avvocati. And amongst other mar]
on the fallen stones they found mos
coronet, and two hawks fighting, <
old old time, when the Lake-city yor
of its melancholy waters, had qui
velvet hands in their gloves of stee
Matilda.

I said nothing to the lads as
grass away with their swords off th
two hawks, but I knew the cogniz
been carven in many a razed fortres
over the Tuscan fields and the Aan

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 283
iidens that only summoned me to dance whilst they

As it is, I go the next day into Alessandria, and

officer, seeing me, and wanting his horse held,
‘ows me the bridle, with a word of command.

I walk up and down with the horse over an hour.
hen the general comes out of the house he had
tered he looks over me with a steady glance: “A
lunteer?”

I salute, and assent.

““What do you get?” he asks.

“A musket and twenty-five centimes a day.”

“You are a noble?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“A vagabond.”

He smiles and throws me, instead of the bridle, a
ido, and so rides away. I keep the coin.

A copper coin for holding a horse; well, the Pas-
réllo Princes in their graves there, under the ruined
rtress, could not be ashamed.

In its way that copper coin is worth the ducal
own.

It is ‘fierce and dark work here in this fruitful
nd of Virgil. The world has got so tired; it has
en so much of heroism and carnage; it has grown
d and dull, and would scarcely open its drowsy
xs at a noble deed, though the note of it were loud
_ that bugle blast of Orlando which made the birds
‘op dead in all the forests of Roncesvalles.

Else the world has seldom seen anything finer
an this fiery torrent of national life rushing to the
ains of the Mincio as fast and as furiously as Mincio

284 | PASCAREL.

in time of flood can rush from her Mother of
The noble fights beside the populano. The
marquis leaves his marble villa, as the cobl
board at the street corner. The prince strides
the millet, shoulder to shoulder with the copy
and the mosaic-maker. This is the reason
are so strong in this summer-season; stron
chain of which every link has been proved in

The men who march and fight with n
laughed and frolicked with me a thousand t
the masquerades and sweetmeat showers of th
val, and I can do them some little good. E
lians find it hard to raise a jest sometimes, p
through the rain-soaked earth in autumn witl
muddy blood-stained brook to drink at, and’
settling by the score in the gaps of half-healed
Even Italians feel their hearts a little heavy, s
under the weight of rifle and knapsack o
parched ground in the scorch of noon, with «
after comrade falling out of the ranks from su
and the mosquitos buzzing horribly where the
slash is still unclosed. I can do some littl
perhaps, raising their courage with a strain of L
or Giusti, or taking them back to their villag
the vines by some burden of a country-ni
sweetening their hard black bread with a tale
Boccaccio, and making them forget their ague
marshy ground by some one of the infinite
the old comedies, of which my brain is full, a1
ears are never tired.

I strive to keep up my mirth for their sak
night lying round the fires that we light to k
the marsh fever, or by day tramping along t

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 285

ite, tiresome roads with the clouds of gnats at our
cching throats.

But it is hard to do it, sometimes. War is sickly
xk at its best; and life, I say, is weary. So it seems
me as I go to-day—alone, for once,—through the
aling country where the maidens pluck the mul-
try leaves as though no such things as flame and
el were as near them as the vines are near.

My heart is heavy as I pace between the lines of
ves and watch the runlets of water glisten in the

ASS.

Poor little Toccd has died here.

He volunteered with me, poor dear little lad, only
venteen then, and merry as a lark; leaving the bot-
za and the work he loved, and the fun and frolic

the Florentine street life; and in the very heart of
agenta, as we marched through the standing corn,
ider the hail of iron, a bullet struck him, and he fell.

I could not stay to see for him then; the sea of
ood swept.me away, a league away, as it seemed, in
second, and all the day long it was as much as we
mld: do to keep our feet amidst that trampled wheat
ider that fierce red sun.

But when old Mars, who ever loved Florence, had
rned the balance in our favour, and the carnage

as over and done, and the sun was gone down west-
ard, there beyond the Apuleian Alps, then I had
me to seek for him, and after long search I found
1m; one amongst so many other simple brown-eyed
ds in their rough coats of blue, and their little
eaked caps, and their straps and their belts, lying
mn and crushed and nameless and forgotten, down
rere amongst the summer harvest.

286 PASCAREL.

He was not quite lifeless.

_ He took a drop of water, and lifted h
and smiled; he knew me, though it was q
and he was nearly dead.

“It is a great thing—to die for Italy,
gently, with a light like morning on his littl
sad face; then a shiver shook him, and his ]
to fold itself in mine, and he stretched his
and all was over.

He was only a sod of clay that cuml
harvest field. |

Ah, Dio mio!—the world is weary after

I go through the green glad country.

Who could tell that death in its mo
shapes walked here with every day and nigt

It is all so peaceful.

The white road runs straight and shini
sun. The red roofs of the farmhouses glo
chestnut woods and olive orchards. The m
glistens here and there where a break in
shows its course. Away in the shadows are
of Pavia; and, beyond, the beautiful snow
surge of the Alpine crests where Milan 1
me girls are putting mulberry leaves into gre
chatting the while; and through the vineya
white oxen drag the lumbering waggons.

Only now and again there is some headl
in the grass, or the dogroses blossom abo:
warhorse; ora cherry tree, red with fruit, ]
ground, its stem broken under a rain of bul

I walk on, and think of another sad tt
saw yesterday. a

It was by the wayside in a little villag

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 287

d been a short sharp struggle between Tuirolese,
10 held the street, and Bersaglieri who wanted to
reep it clear. The Bersaglieri won, and carried the
‘sition. The little narrow road all green and golden

th fruit trees, where the women were wont to sit °

itt at their thresholds at evening spinning and sing-
g in unity, was strewn with dead and dying.

I had helped the Bersaglieri—being in the way;
id when all was over tried to help the wounded.

I carried one Tirolean into a cottage. He was a
ll, strong, and very handsome man; a mountaineer;
id he had been shot through the head, and had but
lf an hour to live.

I soothed that half-hour for him as well as I was
le; he lying on the mud floor of the hovel with
e door wide open, and through it shining the glory
' the afternoon sun, and the whiteness of a late
ywering peach-tree. He had been unconscious since
e time the shot had struck him; before death his
ason came to him—it 1s often so.

His hand sought his chest feebly and uncertainly,
ce the hand of a blind man.

“Do not take it away,” he muttered, with his wist-
il beautiful frank eyes looking with passionate prayer
ito mine—his enemy’s. “Do not take it away—it is
1 I have. She laughed, you know—but she did not
1ean to hurt—oh, no, oh, no. Look at that white—
that snow?* We must bring the cattle down from
1e mountains. Yes—I am in pain; a little pain. Do
ot tell my mother—nor Anton. Lift me a little, so
can tee the hills —she laughed, you know, but then
1e did not mean to hurt. Do not take it away—it is

1e Only little thing I have.”

288 PASCAREL.

And so gazing at the whiteness of the fruit blo a
soms in the open door, and thinking it the lustre d
the virgin snow upon his own eternal hills, he shut’
dered a little and turned wearily on his side, and 9
looking up at me like a dog in pain, drew his breath
with a sigh and died.

When we stript to bury him his right hand ws
on his chest, and on it was a little tuft of the wid
grass that is called the maiden’s hair.

We laid him to rest in the little garden under the
fruit trees, with his face turned to his own mountaims

His name I never knew.

His is one of the many million nameless gravé
that strew all that green country betwixt Alp and!
Apennine. But I have no doubt that if it could be
known we should find it to be—Marco Rosas.

Away in a chalet of Unterinnthal the good mothe
will sit and spin and pray; and the cattle will com
from the grass lands in autumn, and the sun and t&
clouds will play on the broad snow fields, and it
calves will low at the barred byre door, and th
seasons will come and go till the Alps are once mot
smiling blue as the eyes of a northern child, with the
gentian flowers and the hyacinths of the spring.

But always in vain will the old mother pray, 4!
never again will the feet of her first-born come ov
the mountains. :

CHAPTER V.
The Song of the Grilli. ’
I wave kept the dear little Raffaello beside me as
much as possible.

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 289

very soul treats him tenderly, as if he were a
There are hundreds of lads as young as he;
here is something in his pretty innocent face with
ils of Giorgione’s gold, and its clear, wondering,
il eyes that wins the heart out of the toughest
an and wildest trooper.
he boy looks so astray in it all.
fis soul is in music. This thunder of cannonade,
screams of dying horses, and clash of crossing
and falling trees and burning houses, must be a
o him. He has always a startled look.
‘et he is brave in his way, this little dreamer, who
the other day was a barelegged child, singing
the robins sang in the garret of Ambrogio

[e is brave in his way, though he clings so closely
e, and will hardly quit my shadow.

ine day I found him hidden by the high yellow
listening—listening—listening with an intent and
lering face. I spoke and roused him, and forced
away; for a battery of the Austrians commanded
very fields, and their fire was raking through the
ing wheat not ten yards off him.

What were you doing there?” I asked him in
wrath.

I was hearing what the grilli said,” he answered
and then he got out his little trecento viol which
always in his knapsack; and began to echo out
; the story of the grilli; the little brown grilli
ng so happily here in joy of the sun and the
ner, amongst the yellow corn stalks and the flame
e tossing poppies; the poor little grilli caged for.
i’s sake on Ascension Day, and singing still on
aret. I. 19

290 . PASCAREL.

and on in the little prisons till their life grows out of
them, whilst every hut and homestead on the olive
hills and in the vine-lands sets bread and wine on its
threshold and hangs out a lanthorn to guide the steps
of Christ who walks that night on earth.

Raffaellino played the plaint of the grilli that day,
whilst a score of rough soldiers stood round, he
nothing noting them, and not a few of them had their
fierce eyes dim with tears. Then all in a moment he
broke it off suddenly,. and thrust the viol behind him,
and went away by himself into the little bare plaster
cottage, where a dozen of us were quartered.

When I followed him he was crying like a child.

“What is it?” I asked him.

He hid his face shyly, as a girl may do.

“Only—only—I have loved my music for itself,
you know, and it was quite enough for me. But now
I do not know—I think the things and feel them, and
I can make others feel them too, but all the harmony
is gone out of it for me. In all I do, I only see her
face, I only hear her voice. My music is like the
grilli’s in the cage; it is my nature—and so it will not
leave me—only I am faithless to it, so I die. She
will never be anything to me, you know; how should
she? great like that, and 1 a little beggar? Oh, I know,
I know it is my folly; but you see in old Verona she
had no one else but me, and so——”

And so the gentle heart of the little lad is half
broken; a childish love and as innocent as ever this
impure earth ere saw, but still one that has killed art
in him, and made the adder of memory hiss in every
sweet note that was once his solace.

He is no more fit for the fiery furnace of war than

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 201

are those delicate heads of the millet, that blow like
a girl’s auburn curls upon the summer wind. Never-
theless, the battle does not spare the frail maize
feathers, but sweeps them aside, and treads them
down, and tramples them in blood. Nor does it
spare Raffaellino.

The next day after he has listened to the grilli’s
chaunt in the cornfields, there is bitter struggle over
all this fertile smiling land, with its festooned vines
and its leaf-hidden watercourses, that is like one vast
sheet of.verdure enrolled between the far mountains.

It is a struggle that is called, later on, the Field
of Montebello.

‘‘We go in black with powder; we shail come out
red with carnage,” says one of its soldiers, and it is
true that we do. We dip the scarlet lilies of Florence
and the white cross of Savoy in blood till they are
both of one colour. We strangle the black eagle that .
day, down there amongst the tangled vines and the
full-eared corn in the country of Virgil.

It is a hot and blinding day.

The sun hes heavily on all the white roads. The
bruised vines, and trodden corn, and ruined orchards,
are sad to see.

At intervals here and there, on the green face of
the country, there are dusky clouds of smoke and
dark small masses slowly moving. ‘There is a battle
scattered over the great plain. The fine ethereal lines
of the mountains are delicate as gossamer against the
summer sky. So they looked when Theodoric and
Otho fought here. They have seen so many millions
of men slaughter one another here, since the far ages
when men were not, and all this laughing land of the

19*

292 PASCAREL.

vine and the pomegranate was only a primeval valley
of ice.

How the battle goes elsewhere I cannot tell. Where
I am, we hold a villa and its courts and gardens
against the Austrians.

It is a rambling old place, with great walled gar-
dens, and great echoing chambers, and great disco-
loured frescoes peeling in the sun. Its owners have
fled long before.

There is only an old man, a gardener, who sits by
a well in the central court while the struggle goes on
round him, and stares and looks stupid, as though
his wits were gone.

God knows how we fight—I do not. There are
some fifty of us and a handful of Bersaglieri—that
is all; and the Austrians are very numerous. They
held the position early in the day, and we took it
.from them at noon; and we have held it against the
worst that they can do until it 1s now four by the
sun-dial on the wall where the great mulberry grows
and a cherub’s head 1s painted.

The musketry rolls; the smoke is thick; the dead
men fall down the broad stone steps, and lie under
the red oleander flowers. The staircase is disputed
step by step. The pavements are all wet with blood
The din is horrible. Amidst it all I know I hear, in
a moment of stillness, a little bird singing. I look up
and see it above my head, on a tendril of a vine that
comes through the large unglazed window.

There is a young face lifted to listen to it. It is
innocent and heavenly looking, like the cherub’s on
the frescoed wall. It is terribly out of keeping with
the ghastly scene around. It is quite white, even to

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 293

the lips; but they are firmly closed, although so pale,
and Raffaellino has not left my side to-day.

The sun-dial points four in the afternoon.

We have looked for reinforcement, but none comes.
How the battle goes elsewhere we cannot tell. The
enemy are strong here still and keep pressing upward
through the courts and gardens.

All the later half of the bitter burning day our
own men seem to close round me, and look up to me
as their leader. I do not think how or why it is—
whether all those in command are dead or not. I lead
them because it comes naturally—lI, a mere volunteer,
a common soldier, like the rest of them, with nothing
but my musket.

As the bird sings, and a little lull comes in the
strife, as such a pause will, even in the fiercest
struggle, I look around me anxiously. My clothes
have been shot through and through, but, strangely
enough, nowhere is the flesh grazed or the bone
broken. Yet men have fallen round me like chestnuts
in the autumn forests.

We are very few.

However the day go elsewhere in the plain, here
it goes against us.

Jagers have joined the Whitecoats, and are press-
ing up through the ilexes.

We hold the staircase and the inner court still ;—
but for how long?

If I could send word to the head of the bridge, a
mile off, the Sardinians are there, and might spare
men. Raffaellino, watching my face, in that one little
moment as the bird sings, reads my thoughts, and
whispers to me through the din—

294 : PASCAREL.

“If I crept through the laurels and ran, the poplars
would shelter me; once by the river-side, to the bridge
is not far?”

I do not answer him.

The lad is dear to me. Did I not see him first,
the pretty child, touching his little viol that carnival
day in the cathedral square where grim Roland keeps
watch and ward?

The passage to the bridge is possible; but whoso-
ever makes it—being seen—will surely meet his death.
For all the way is set thick with Tirolese, who mark
their men as on the hills they mark their chamois.

“No, it 1s too dangerous,” I say to him abruptly.
“No; I forbid you.”

Raffaellino lifts his golden head; the sun coming
through the open window makes an aureola round it.
A little feverish flush comes on his cheeks.

“And I—disobey you!” he said quickly. “Even
before you—lItaly!”

And then he runs out swiftly, and through the
window I see him in the open air, and then I lose
him underneath the leaves, and have only space to
breathe for him that half-unconscious prayer which
the most reckless men will cling to by an instinct;
for the lull is over, and the Jaégers are in the inner
court, and a ball has struck down the old man sitting
at the well, and I-have to draw my comrades closer
round me, and hold the hall as best we can witha
raking fire that makes the Tedeschi reel and scatter
as they come.

Then follows the fiercest, hottest, darkest, dreadest
moments of my life.

The shadow on the sun-dial creeps on; # is a

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 295

warter past four and more. My little troop is only
alf in numbers what it was when the bird sang. The
tape-shot falls like hail. Unless the Sardinians come
wickly————__-

The shadow on the dial creeps onward.

It is no longer mere firing and counter-firing; it
ta hard, devilish, hand-to-hand, throat-to-throat
truggle on the marble stairs and pavement that is all
lppery with carnage.

Some of the Jagers have found a second stairway
nthe other side of the villa, and so have crept up
nseen by us, and pour out on to the head of the
reat staircase, and thrust us downward, so that we
te between two forces, as in a vice. We are some
lirty men in all—not more; and many of us arc
‘cunded, and very weak from long thirst and the
eat of the day.

Caught between these two, the Jagers pressing on
3 from behind, the Tirolese forcing us backwards on
' their comrades’ steel, we struggle, God knows how,
.a horrible crush and medley, across the court and
to the green grass-lands of the gardens, where
€ ripening grapes are hanging on all the trellised
nes,

Here, if the Sardinians do not come, we must be
utchered like so many sheep. Yet all the while it is
ardly of the Sardinians that I think; it 1s of the dear
ttle lad making his perilous way through the canes
aderneath the poplars; and every now and then, even
\the fellness and ferocity of the struggle, I turn my
2ad to look beyond the laurels to the grassy stretches
toss which he must return.

The brutes hem us in on both sides, The men

296 PASCAREL.

go down like corn under the sickle. I and the few
who remain contrive to force a little breathing space,
so that we have our backs to the villa gates and get
clear a moment of one half the pressure.

At that moment I see Raffaellino.

He is running, not creeping fox-like, as he should
do, for the canes to shield him; but running erect, his
feet are bare as in his childish days over the stones
of Verona, that he may speed himself the quicker; his
fair tangled hair is blowing back from his face.
He has picked up a shattered standard somewhere,
and the colours of Free Italy float from him as he
comes.

He waves it and cries aloud to me, the dear, rash,
impatient, unselfish little lad; because he knows that,
in such straits as ours, hope, being a moment delayed,
may be too late forever.

He cries to me, the little dear, brave lad—

“Hold out ten minutes, and they are here.”

Then, as he speaks, there is a shower of green
leaves above his head; he throws his curls back with
a strange dizzy gesture; then he stops short there in
the grassy path, with all the vines and the rose-laurels
close about him; then down he falls, face forward, on
the turf.

They have shot him from behind the laurel-hedge.

What it does to me I know not; I only know tha
all the rage of desert lions wounded, and all ther
strength with it, seems to pour into me.

Seeing the child fall there, I only know that I
pierce the storm of shot, and cleave the pressure of
the Austrians with a fury before which all is bome
down as before the rush of a mountain tempest.

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 297

I only know that so do the agony and vengeance
n my soul set light to the passions of every Italian
nth me in that hour, that, ere the ten minutes are
pent, ere the Sardinians are with us, we—not thirty
nen in all, and faint and bleeding, and far out-
iumbered—have driven the foe out from the courts
nd gardens, and hurled them on to meet their death .
inder the hewing steel and trampling hoofs of the
iardé horsemen as they sweep up to aid us by the
iver’s course.

And then—when it is all over, and the place is
lear, and over the broad plain all men know that
taly has won—then I go and find the dear child,
here where he fell, with the torn flag under him, and
he rosy laurel flowers hanging their clusters over his
retty head.

Is he quite dead?

Not quite. When I lift him, his heavy, blue-veined
ids raise themselves, and his eyes smile. But I, who
ave seen sO many men die, know that this is Death,
hough the strong sun still shines so clearly and the
ose-laurels blow in the wind.

“Give it me,” he says softly; his voice is barely
uudible.

They have shot him in the chest, and he bleeds
o death internally.

I know what he means.

I unstrap his knapsack and take out the little viol
hat he used to play on in the moonlight in the arch
»f the coppersmith’s door in sad Verona.

He thanks me with his sweet, wistful, shining eyes,
ind tries to touch the chords.

It is of no use; he has no strength left. He tnes

-298 PASCAREL.

no longer; his hand falls, and he sighs a little, whilst
the rose-laurels brush his curls.

_ “Take it to her from me,” he murmurs. “Perhaps
she will remember a little—now and then.”

Then he lifts his face, like a tired child, and kisses
me on the cheek, and smiles against the sun.

“Do the dead grilli sing where God is?” he says;
and then the breath quivers a moment on his mouth,
and the eyelids fall, and I know that he sees the sun
no more.

* % % + *

At evening on that day all men praise me, and
they speak great things of my leadership whereby the
villa was won; and even my king gives me brave words
upon the field; and I, Pascarél, the player, have won
a name as a soldier of Italy that is not unworthy the
dead Pascarélli who live in stone in the crypts and
the cloisters.

But I hear it all as in a dream; I see it all as
through half-blind eyes.

What I hear is the song of the grilli that is silent
for evermore with all the rest of the sweet wild music
that lived in that innocent soul. What I see is the
tender body of Raffaellino, where we have laid it m
the silent hall of the villa, with the moonbeams shin-
ing white about his head, and on his breast a knot of
the red rose-laurel.

Ah, God! it is as cruel as to wring the throat of
a bird in full song. Ah, God! the fair dawn that wil
have no noon; the sweet blossom that will have no
flower!

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 299

CHAPTER VI.
Red and Gold.

. My father tells me to put on that cinquecento
‘ess of red and gold, and set the rose-diamonds he
tve me in my breast and hair, and be ready for a
eat masque at a great palace to-night, when all
lorence is mad and drunk with joy.

Here in the stillness of the villa gardens, up where
ta. Margharita lifts her little bell-tower to heaven,
ven here, though so high in the hills, the sound of
ve people’s rejoicing comes to me all the day long,
; the heavy sough of a distant sea rolls up to those
ho sit on the cliffs above.

I have told them I am tired and so cannot see the
ty in her festivity to-day. But it is not true. The
uth is, that I shudder from the shouts of homage
nd the sight of mirth.

_ For he is not dead; -he has even done great things
pon those terrible plains—so rumour says; giving
im the green bay of the patriot in lieu of the paper
wrels of the player. But I cannot go down into his
‘lorence, this the first day her troops return to her.
cannot risk to see his face as strangers see it, and
90k upon him in the press of the glad streets, maimed,
erhaps, war-worn, dust-covered, lame with long
aarches in. the summer suns—as heaven knows I
nay.

And little "Ino; my rash words must have sent him
o the front, for they know nothing of him in that old
ool cypress-shaded chamber behind the Torrigianni
alace; and J can hear nothing of him—a mere little

300 PASCAREL.

lad, a mere grain of dust in the great plains, a mere
drop of blood in the vast sea of carnage.’

Men make no account of him. I cannot hear if
be living or dead; my poor little bright playmate, who
stood and sang with me that day of carnival in old
Verona. And whatever his fate be, I sent him to it

Ah! why do we frail, foolish, fire-filled things that
they call women live only to hurt and kill?—all heed-
lessly as children catch at flies?

My heart is heavy as I sit within all the log
luminous Tuscan day, and hear the echo of the peopk’s
mirth, the thunder of the guns, the tramp of marc
ing columns, the roll of beaten drums that comes
dulled by distance up the olive slopes upon my ear.

But when the day is dead I cannot have the sad
luxury of solitude longer. My father and cousin wil
not be denied. I put on the masque dress with the
diamonds that Varko painted, and I make ready for
the festa of the night.

It is a wonderful and costly thing, this dress; I
have not worn it yet in public. The train is cloth of
gold, and the scarlet skirts beneath are sown with
little diamonds. It was my father’s fancy, copied from
some old Florentine picture that he has.

It is very beautiful and rare, and lights me like
robe of flame, and makes my eyes gleam black as
night, and my rebellious hair all shine like crisp new
gold.

And yet—and yet—lI fancy I looked better in the
old yellow and purple skirts, with my hands full of
poppies and my curls caught with the wild vine.

I lean on the terrace balustrade, and, despite my
wealth of diamonds, am sick at heart.

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. jor

My cousin joins me: he is courtly and full of
ace; but a great distrust of him is always on me,
dd some memory that I hate, yet cannot disentangle,
ises in me always with the sound of his voice—a
"ice ever harsh, however skilfully modulated.

This evening, while the sun is sinking over Car-
ra, he urges, for the twentieth time, his love upon
e.
He is in earnest, that I think. He seeks me with
ission and purpose; and my father has more than
ice sought to persuade me that the destiny of my
ture years lies here, in all this man can give.

This evening, while the sun is red, my cousin
esses his prayer on me until I turn in weariness and
bellion. |

“Once for all,” I say to him, with a tired im-
utience of his honied phrases that sound so poor
id pale beside the memory of those words amongst
e golden vines under Fiesole. “Once for all, will
yu not take my answer? I have said it often—no!
»! no!”

“T am then quite hateful to you?” he asks, very
'W.
I look him full in the eyes, and answer straightly.
“Well, you are.”

No milder way will end his importunity.

Then the veiled evil in him wakes.

“That is your last word?” he asks.

“My very last.”

“Well then,” he says, and smiles a little cloudy as
e speaks. “Well then, I have a tale to tell you. I,
raying about in this dear Italy of yours, found
iyself, of a winter’s night, in old Verona. There

302 , PASCAREL.

was a masked ball. I went to it. Amongst the crowd
there was a beautiful wild, naughty thing who had
broken loose from home and took her pleasure there.
I paid her entrance-money; so I know—”

He checked with a gesture the cry that escaped
mé, as the memory which had pursued me in the
sound of his voice rose clear.

“Nay, hear me. I will make my story bref |!
had no thought who the girl was—a pretty, foolish,
feather-brained fierce thing; but as time went I found
she bore, rightly or wrongly, the name I bore myself.
I lost her in Verona, and in the summer of the self-
same year I saw her wandering with some strolling
players, and let her go, for what was she to me? A
little while, and, through many deaths and strange
accidents in my family, the lands and the titles fell
on one who had been disowned by all his race for
his loose living—a worn-out gambler, to whom fortune
came at last in much magnificence. I came to know
him, since I was next of kin, and in his daughter!
discovered my waif and stray of the Verona carnival.
And then,—foolishly, no doubt,—I grew to love her.
Ay, I do love her, that I swear; and all a gentleman
can offer to the woman he loves I offer now to het.
But if she turn against me, if she say me no in her
haughty, pretty fashion, that is half wild still, then let
her beware. For, though she holds herself so royally,
she is but a bastard born. For, though none knows
it but myself, her mother, the Florentine singer, was
no wife.”

The blood leaps into my face, and seems to sting
me like a thousand vipers. Not knowing what 1 do

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 303-

‘strike’ him hotly in the eyes with a bough of the
omegranate that I hold broken in my hand.

“It is a lie!” I cry against him.

He recoils a2 moment, pale as death. Then,
owing low, he says,—

‘‘Go,—ask your father.”

“You dare me to that!”

“Go,—ask,” he says to me calmly, with a quiet
nile.

I go.

My father is there in the great dusky white room
iat the sunset is touching to all kinds of tender
ues, like those that fall through the painted case-
rents of great churches.

I go to him swiftly across the vast glistening floor,
ery silently; yet he looks up with a startled glance
» his cold clear eyes.

Perhaps I look strangely; I do not know; my
1outh burns and my face is flushed. I feel lost, and
mazed, and feverish, and vaguely frightened, as I
id when I was astray in the press and fury of the
eglione.

“Ts it true?” I ask him.

He looks me full in the face, and smiles a little—
owly.

“Is what true?”

“That my mother was not your wife?”

The smile lingers on his mouth. It is very cruel
sough so slight.

“What does it matter? Mariuccia thought her so;
tink you so if you like.”

My own voice seems to choke me as I say—

304 PASCAREL.

“Mariuccia thought so? Yet it was a lie. Is that
your answer?”

He looks at me coldly, full in the eyes—

“She was a singer. I never married her. Why
should I? You had never known it, had you been
wiser and listened to your cousin. These things can
be kept unseen in the same family. But with another
there would be trouble; one would need to tell the
truth. What can it matter? You have all you want
You are called a great lady, and no one has looked
too closely—yet. Some money I can leave you, and
you are rich in jewels. For, in a way, I love you,
’Nella; you are beautiful, as a picture is, and your
wild grace is charming, and you fool men with true
woman’s skill. But if you be wise, you will wed with
your cousin. No questions then, and the old name
your own, with no bar sinister. Mariuccia was a
poor old purblind fool; she thought your mother was
a wedded wife, and who should undeceive her!
Pshaw! why look at me like that? I never told you
any lie—not I. Go and marry with your cousin, and
who will know it then? It rests with you.”

I am silent.

My father rises, with a certain trouble on his face
that for once clouds its cool serenity. He tries to
touch my hair, but I avoid him by a gesture that
makes him shrink a little.

“Nay, ’Nella, why take it to heart like that?” he
says, with a tone in his voice that is half pity and
half derision. “You thought your mother married;
well, that was Mariuccia’s fault, not mine. [I never
told you so. And, indeed, to quiet her, she passed
as my wife, to others, for most of the few short years

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 305.

he lived. What had you to complain of?—nothing
irely. Most men would have put you in a convent
r had you taught some useful trade, or left you as a
10del to your friends the painters. But I have dealt
ith you as though you were my heiress. And I—I
romised your mother when she died—I have told
o one, have told no one: not even your friend the
agabond player, when he upbraided me for my
eglected duties with a furza only possible to a flame-
ongued Italian. No one knows it, save your cousin;
nd he, you should be told, found it out long, long
go, from following you one night in old Verona,
yhen you broke away from home and ran in mischief
o the Veglione. You never saw his face that night,
tut he remembered yours. Now see you this, ’Nella,
f you be wise, your secret is his; wed with him. He
las a great passion for you, and is sincere,—so far, |
—but if you cross him what can I do for you!—
VYothing. He can stnke you with that sole sure
veapon—truth, And you will feel your fall. For you
1ave wasted wealth as though you were an empress
sor; and you are one of those wild, wayward, grace-
ul, useless, pretty things, with nothing but a picture
»f a face and a bird’s trick of song. You are one of
hose who will not like the world, carina mia, unless
ts soil be velvet to your foot. Be wise while there is
ime, and rest a great lady always. Wed your cousin.”

And with that my father mses and leaves the
chamber, already weary of a theme that has no
yleasure in it. I stand in the red sunset light, look-
ng out blankly on the glory of the oleander flowers
hat fill the open casement with their fire.

Is all the world a lie?

Pascaréel. Il. 20

306 ‘ PASCAREL,

CHAPTER VII.
The broken Bubble.

Wuat is it I feel?

I scarcely know. I act without knowing— only
stung into a bitter, burning, all-corroding shame, that
drives me like a whip of scorpions.

Oh, poor little fool, who sat upon the broken
stairs shelling the beans at Mariuccia’s feet, and
prattled of a great past and a great future alike
allied to me by the golden and magic chain of birth!
Oh, poor vain, baby dreamer, idler than the child
that blows soap bubbles in the sun, who had come
hither across the mountains, with my golden florins
for all my store, doubting not that the purples of
some mighty destiny would enfold me as soon as!
should open the gates of the south!

Was ever anything more pitiful, more foolish,
more pathetically lonely, more grotesquely fooled than
I? Was ever any hapless idiot, thinking himself the
sovereign of the world, under a crown of straw, more
deluded and more desolate than I have been when!
have played at greatness?

. A withering shame consumes me; the humiliation
clings to me like Glauce’s web of firg.

My poor poor mother too! In the scorch and
fury of my own wretchedness tears well into my eyes
as I think of her—think no blame; ah no! heaven
forbid! Doubtless her fault of love was purer and
more innocent by far than my rank greed of self.

My cousin’s hand puts asunder the oleander
flowers. He comes and looks me in the face.

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 307

“Well?” he asks, softly. “You see I told you

ith. Is it now yes or no?” -

I turn on him as a leopardess turns on her pursuer.
2 longing thrills in me to strike him in the eyes,

E had done that winter’s day at dusk in the Verona

:: “Nol” I cry to him. “No! a million times!
What! you think my fear is greater than my hate?
r,—you ‘mistake, then. No, I say. No, no, no.
e-you ‘heart No—if I die for it.”
= that moment I am all again the passionate
A ahild who had fied from him in the Veronese
The years, the dignities, the tranquil scorn of my
fe ‘life drop from me; I become again only the
, fearless, thoughtless, haughty little waif and
7 ‘whom ‘Pascarél had rescued on the Veglione

ae him standing there against the red oleander,
msed, as it were, with the fire of my eyes and
@epecch; then, ‘without another word, I sweep to my
_ own chamber, lock myself in from him and every
Lother, and tear off, like a frantic creature, the gold
and red of my perfect masque-dress. The shining
dkirts fall in a crushed heap; the costly train is
crumpled up like wind-blown leaves; I shake the
from my ‘breast and hair; I pluck the great
‘ g0se-diamond ‘from above my ear.
The things are to me hateful, horrible, vile: my
- father’s gifts, indeed—ay, and so far justly mine; but
' they are accursed to me like the wages of my mother’s
| . sliame and death.
I do-not reason; I can only feel.
20°

Terns oe Ss wee
. 2

308 | PASCAREL.

As my father denied me when I stood before him
with my poor little sceptre of the peacock’s plumes,
so I deny him now.

There is no tie between us.

As the law yields me no rights on him, so I will
yield him no rights on me.

My heart burns that I have ever eaten his bread

and ever spent his gold.
A madness of determination comes to me. I will
not stay for the smile and sneer of the women I have
reigned over, of the men I have made my slaves. |
will not stay an hour more in this, the second paradise
of lies, that has lulled me to sleep sweet as the lotus,
deadly as the upas.

I am useless; ay, indeed; but still I have my
voice. It can charm courts, let it charm nations
I can be once more the people’s Uccello.

Ah, no! never again that. Never again the light-
hearted and thoughtless child that sang to the listening
Tuscans when the lucciole lit the plains. The best
that can be before me, if a life of triumph, yet must
be a life of utter loneliness.

My heart grows sick with dread and longing.

I do not reason; I can only feel.

Between my father’s life and mine there is a deep
gulf fixed. It is the darkness of my mother’s grave.

It is evening. The sun is gone. The shadow
of night is here, even on these heights by Santa
Margharita,

I leave aside every coin, every gem, every trifle of
luxury or cost I ever have possessed. I leave aside
all my splendid costumes and my priceless diamonds.
I wrap myself in a dark cloak, and cast a veil about

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 309

my head, and, without the value of a copperpiece
upon me, I undo the bar of a side door that looks
upon the gardens and pass out. On the threshold I
linger and look back.

Lights are burning in the wide chamber. The
glittering things I have thrown down catch the re-
flection; sumptuousness, grace, ease — all are sym-
bolised in them.

Am I unhappy because I leave them? No.

My whole hfe is on fire with shame, and my
whole soul is sick with falsehood. But amidst it all
a strange sweet thrill stirs; for I am free.

It has been but a gilded slavery, this grand and
gorgeous pageantry of the great world.

I long for the breezy downs, and the wild hillsides,
and the sweet liberty of untrammelled movement, and
the peaceful sleep of healthful tired limbs. And yet
—oh, God! I shudder as I think—my life will be
alone, all alone always. ;

What beauty will the daybreak smile on me?
What fragrance will the hill-side bear for me as I
roam? :

I shall see the sun for ever through my tears.
‘Around me on the summer earth there will be forever
silence. For Love has left me.

CHAPTER VIII.
The Lily and the Laure.

I uNBAR the door and pass into the coolness of
the early night. Down there where Florence lies it
seems alive with fire. The people rejoice for their
heroes.

310 PASCAREL.

Without any thought or measure of what may
befall to me, or whither I, penniless and defenceless,
may hereafter go,—I leave the gardens by the path
that passes through the olive woods, and once more
drifting like a snapped flower on the wind, I set my
face towards the city.

The night is perfect.

All the hillside is hushed to an intense stillness.
The olive woods upon Arcetri are white as silver in
the moon. The hills are steeped in radiance. The
roses underneath the vines are bright as in the day.

From the depth where the massed lights of the
town are shining there come sounds of music, outcries
of the populace, deep shouts that rise and lose them-
selves like echoing thunder amongst the mountains
lying round. Florence rejoices in her strength; to her,
as her dower, Hercules gave the dragon’s teeth, and
she has sown them on her sacred soil, and they have
sprung up armed men who have held her own again
- and again against the world, and have not failed her
now.
I go down the old green familiar ways; the field-
mice run from my feet amongst the tulip roots; just
so, down this very path stole Lucrezia to Fra Lippi,
but I am alone—all alone.

They will think I am safe in my chamber. They
will not seek for me to-night. And by morning |
must be away somewhere; away seeking for work.

I have nothing even to buy bread with on the
morrow.

It is no worse with me than it was in this very
city when under the old trees I had sat and wept my
heart out because I was a beggar. And yet how

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 311

auch poorer I am! for then I had all my dreams,
md all things were possible to me. But now I have
thing, not even a hope, only a dead rose on my
Wart that I shall ask them to bury with me as old
hiidetta asked.

Fifty years she lived with one memory shut in her
aul, darning the dancers’ maglié, and thinking of the
bve of her youth. Oh, God!—is that all the Future
Qids for me?

I tremble and grow sick with fear as I thread the
lives and vines to the city.

But I never pause and look back, not once; I
sem to hear Mariuccia say in the still cool night,
Live on the shame and the sorrow of your mother?
ay, anima mia, be strong and die first.”

Is it a folly that?—I do not know. I do not
rink, I say; I only feel; and I keep my face straight
» the city.

The masque dress I threw aside was put on for a
alace festa. The whole town is wild with jubilee.
‘he shouts roll deep like the war-cry of lions.

All down the water side the lamps and the torches
urn by millions. The bridges are lines of fire.
‘reat Vecchio glows like a lighted beacon against
1e clouds. The river is a sea of flashing colour,
‘om the many-hued globes of the illumined boats.
aughter and music, and the ring of choruses, and the
all of trumpets, and the surge-like sound of an ever
loving mass of men grow nearer and nearer, as I
ass through the gates, and into the Street of the
[aytime.

Everywhere the night is bright as the day. Long
arlands swing from one side of the street to the other

312 PASCAREL.

The old grim iron-bound houses are hidden in flowers
and foliage. Under.the feet are dropped blossoms,
and above head is a maze of roses. Not a single
casement, not the poorest, but has hung out its basket

of flowers; great lilies, wild poppies, tuberoses, coils of _

vine, trails of ivy, leaves of arums, everywhere in the
streets they are shedding their sweet woodland dews
on the stones.

The reign of feasts and of flowers has followed the
season of death. All Florence is out to-night, drunk
with freedom and crowned with victory.

Everywhere the great arched house doors stand
open. Everywhere groups of soldiers are drinking or
dancing. Arms are piled in the squares. Women
waltz down the grim passage-ways singing.

Conscripts war-stained and dust-covered tell tales
to a wondering crowd.

Tables are spread under the stars; under the
garlands that the wind tosses hither and thither.

Bells are pealing; cannon are firing; great sheaves
of coloured fires are launched to the clouds. In the
churches they chaunt orisons. In the palaces they
will dance till the dawn.

In the woods by the river the troops are bivouacked;
and there in the fields the men and the maidens reel
and spin, and leap and laugh, to the wildest mirth
and melody.

For in the Field of Flowers, for the hundredth time,
they have planted the Laurel.

The gladness makes me colder and wearier as |
go. The light and laughter would drive me home-
ward in desolation, had I a home to shelter me.

Vaguely I feel that the people look upon me m

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 313

wonder. I, a dark, veiled, shivering thing, a blot on
the endless radiance—Ginevra, in her cere-clothes,
amidst the mad masquing of an universal Carnival.

But they part in reverence before me, and are a
little quiet as I pass them; they think that I mourn
some dead soldier lying in the maize-fields beneath
the shadow of the Alps. I mourn the dead, indeed;
dead days, dead love, dead liberty.

But my dead I slew with my own hand, all witting
what I did. That I am now alone is just—dquite just.

But justice is hard.

It presses on my life like lead. I shut my eyes
to shut out from me the frolic and the brilliancy
around, and stumble on with little thought or purpose
across the river and into the heart of the city.

What can I do? I know no more than knew
Ginevra; homeless and denied, with every heart and
every house closed against her. But Ginevra had one
refuge—I have none. |

As I go the throngs grow thicker, they push more
eagerly. Their passionate dark faces glow; their
voices pour forth torrents of joyous words; their holi-
day dresses gleam gaily against the shadows and the
stone fronts of the buildings; they dash the tears from
their eyes for the dead; they laugh with proud joy in
the living. And from mouth to mouth, as in the night
of the Carnival Fair, one name runs more audible
than any other:—

“Pascarél! —Il Pascaréllo!”

I catch the flying skirts of a woman as she hurries
by me.

“He is here! Pascarél?”

314 PASCAREL.

She twitches her garments from me in good-
humoured haste. |

“Ay! He talks to the people on the Place of the
Signoria. He has done great things in the war, they
say.”

Without well knowing what I do, I too follow
with the pressing crowds who are hastening under
the Arches of the Uffizii, where the red and white
banners are tossing as in the midnight of the Carnival
Fair.

As we go under the arcades we pass a little con-
tadina in all the bravery of festal ornament; great
beads glitter at her throat; golden pins shake in her
hair; all colours vie as in the rainbow in her skirts;
she laughs, and shows her white .teeth, grinning as
she sets them in the velvet skin of a peach; she
pushes a young slim stripling before her, and scolds
him with shrill laughter, mocking at a tremor that
. shakes his limbs, and a pallor that blanches his cheek.

“To let a look at his face unman you like that,
you simpleton!” she cries; and drives him before her,
crushing out the juice of the peach between her rosy
lips.

It is Brundtta.

So well goes life with the Unfaithful.

I draw my veil closer about my head, and am
borne by the strong swift tide of the hurrying crowd
into the Place of the Signoria, by the Loggia of the
Lances, under the Palace of the People, where the
baby Cellini used to sit throned on his servant's
shoulders, to sing his little song and pipe his little
carol to the grave ears of the great Gonfaloniére.

The square is packed close with a listening

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 315

people. Their faces are all upturned like the ears of
Wheat that a strong wind lifts to heaven. All the lines
mM the mighty building are traced out by running
wenes of fire, Jets of flame, and garlands of flowers,
mmd blazonries of shields, and folds of standards, all
meine together against the moon.
wr.On the steps of Orcagna’s Loggia, whence of old:
ee magistracy were wont to harangue the city, with
faces set to the mountains, and the keen hill
pwinds blowing their robes of office, on the steps be-
pewix the two lions, Pascarél stands, and speaks to the

a There ; is the red-cross banner above his head; he
m@eara the simple garb of the Tuscan volunteer, on
Bttis chest there is the cross of valour, and on the
¥ Stones at his feet there lie laurel crowns and clusters
-@f lilies that the people have flung to him.
The moon shines upon his delicate dark face;
' “his straight, poet-like brows; his dreaming eyes, that
k: have at once the scholar’s sadness and the Soldier’s
The multitude is hushed to perfect stillness, They
Jove him too well to lose a single word.
~ _He is telling them a legend in that fantastic
humour which has flashed for so many centuries
fram beneath the tri-cornered hat of Tuscan Sten-
terello.

Dear to them before, he is now to them sacred;
he who has come forth from the heat and the dust
of those fields of bloodshed with the splendour of
great and daring deeds to lend their lustre to his

: same, and twine the bay-leaves of the patriot round
the harlequin’s wand of the player.

cer oe

316 -PASCAREL.

I crouch down in the deepest shadow on the
lowest step, and gaze upward at him, and drink in
the sweet and silver sounds of his voice, until the
love I bear him, and the loss of him, make me mad
as ’Dino’s Pazza was, calling for ever on the grave to
yield her dead.

He was all mine;—all mine;—dear God! Mine
all the rich, glad, fearless freedom of his life; mine
all the rapturous caressing, priceless passion of his
love;—mine all! And I have lost them.

The war has left him life, but he is dead to
me.
And yet I listen as he speaks to the people. |,
athirst for the mere echo of his step as dying men in
deserts for the fountains of lost lands.

“You know how S. Michael made the Italian?”
he is saying to them, and the clear crystal ring of the
sonorous Tuscan reaches to the farthest corner of the
square. “Nay?—oh, for shame! Well, then, it was in
this fashion; long, long ago, when the world was but
just called from chaos, the Dominiddio was tired, as’
you all know, and took his rest on the seventh day;
and four of the saints, George and Denis and Jago
and Michael, stood round him with their wings folded
and their swords idle.

“So to them the good Lord said: ‘Look at those
odds and ends, that are all lying about after the
earth is set rolling. Gather them up, and make them
into four living nations to people the globe. The
saints obeyed and set to the work.

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. | 317

“S. George got a piece of pure gold and a huge
Iump of lead, and buried the gold in the lead, so
that none ever would guess it was there, and so senrit
it rolling and bumping to earth, and called it the
English people.

“S. Jago got a bladder filled with wind, and put
in it the heart of a fox, and the fang of a wolf, and
whilst it puffed and swelled like the frog that called
itself a bull, it was despatched to the world as the
Spaniard.

“S. Denis did better than that; he caught a sun-
beam flying, and he tied it with a bright knot of nb-
bons, and he flashed it on earth as the people of
France; only, alas! he made two mistakes, he gave it
no ballast, and he dyed the ribbons bloodred.

“Now S. Michael, marking their errors, caught a
sunbeam likewise, and many other things, too; a
mask of velvet, a poniard of steel, the chords of a
lute, the heart of a child, the sigh of a poet, the kiss
of a lover, a rose out of paradise, and a silver string
from an angel’s lyre.

“Then with these in his hand he went and knelt
down at the throne of the Father. ‘Dear and great
Lord,’ he prayed, ‘to make my work perfect, give
me one thing; give me a smile of God.’ And God
smiled.

“Then S. Michael sent his creation to earth, and
called it the Italian.

“But—most unhappily, as chance would have it—
Satanas, watching at the gates of hell, thought to him-
self, ‘If I spoil not his work, earth will be Eden in
Italy” So he drew his bow in envy, and sped a

318 PASCAREL,

poisoned arrow; and the arrow cleft the rose of para-
dise, and broke the silver string of the angel. |

“And to this day the Italian keeps the smile that
God gave in his eyes; but in his heart the devil’s ar-
row rankles still.

“Some call this barbed shaft Cruelty; some Super-
stition; some Ignorance; some Priestcraft; maybe its
poison is drawn from all four; be it how it may, itis |
the duty of all Italians to pluck hard at the arrow of
hell, so that the smile of God alone shall remain with |
their children’s children.

“Yonder in the plains we have done much; the
rest will lie with you, the Freed Nation.”

A shout from the people drowns his voice and
stays it for a moment, the shout of assent and of
homage, of love for him and of love for the
country.

For a while I hear nothing.

I weep as women must weep by the grave of
some noble dead thing they have lost. All my soul
goes forth to him on fire. All the passion that he
taught me that night of the saints, amongst the golden
vines beneath Fiesole, burns in me and consumes me
with its longing and despair. Not knowing what!
do, I stretch my arms to him and moan aloud;—none
hearken.

For a little space I fail to see or listen; I hear
only a dull sound, as a drowning thing may hear the
sighing of waters that devour it; ‘when sense comes
back to me he is still speaking to the people; but far

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 319

more gravely now; his eyes kindle, his face flushes,
his voice has in it all the yearning of a mighty love;
his words fall without thought into the cadence of
the terza rima. .

He speaks thus:

“All greatest gifts that have enriched the modern
world have come from Italy. Take those gifts from
the world, and it would lie in darkness, a dumb, bar-
baric, joyless thing.

“Leave Rome alone, or question as you will
whether she were the mightiest mother, or the
blackest curse that ever came on earth. I do not
speak of Rome, imperial or republican, I speak of
Italy.

“Of Italy, after the greatness of Rome dropped
as the Labarum was raised on high, and the Fisher
of Galilee came to fill the desolate place of the
Ceesars.

“Of Italy, when she was no more a vast do--
minion, ruling over half the races of the globe, from
the Persian to the Pict, but a narrow slip bounded
by Adriatic and Mediterranean, divided into hostile
sections, racked by foreign foes, and torn by inter-
necine feud.

“Of Italy, ravaged by the Longobardo, plundered
by the French, scourged by the Popes, tortured by the
Kaisers; of Italy, with her cities at war with each
other, her dukedoms against her free towns, her ty-
rants in conflict with her municipalities; of Italy, in a
word, as she has been from the days of Theodoric

320 PASCAREL.

and Theodolinda to the days of Napoleon and Francis
Joseph. It is this Italy—our Italy—which through all
the centuries of bloodshed and of suffering never
ceased to bear aloft and unharmed its divining rod of
inspiration as S. Christopher bore the young Christ
above the swell of the torrent and the rage of the
tempest. ;

“All over Italy from north to south men arose in
the darkness of those ages who became the guides
and the torchbearers of an humanity that had gone
astray in the carnage and gloom.

“The faith of Columbus of Genoa gave to man-
kind a new world, The insight of Galileo of Pisa
revealed to it the truth of its laws of being. Guido
Monacco of Arezzo bestowed on it the most spiritual
of all earthly joys by finding a visible record for the
fugitive creations of harmony ere then impalpable and
evanescent as the passing glories of the clouds.
Dante Alighieri taught to it the might of that vulgar
tongue in which the child babbles at its mother’s
knee, and the orator leads a breathless multitude at
his will to death or triumph. Teofilo of Empoli, dis-
covered for it the mysteries of colour that lie in the
mere earths of the rocks and the shores, and the mere
oils of the roots and the poppies. Arnoldo of Breccia
lit for it the first flame of free opinion, and Amatts
of Breccia perfected for it the most delicate and ex
quisite of all instruments of sound, which men of
Cremona, or of Bologna, had first created, Maestro
Giorgio, and scores of earnest workers whose names
are lost in Pesaro and in Gubbio, bestowed on #
those homelier treasures of the graver’s and the por
ter’s labours which have carried the alphabet of at

or a

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 32!I

'; into the lowliest home. Brunelleschi of Florence left
it in legacy the secret of lifting a mound of marble
~ to the upper air as ‘easily as a child can blow a
fbubble, and Giordano Bruno of Nola found for it
f; those elements of philosophic thought, which have
me heen perfected into the clear and prismatic crystals
Sof the metaphysics of the Teuton and the Scot.

: “From south and north, from east and west, they
q ‘rose, the ministers and teachers of mankind.

aA “From mountain and from valley, from fortress
ae amoking under battle, and from hamlet laughing under
Bs g.vines; from her. great wasted cities, from her small
ce Rerce walled towns, from her lone sea-shores ravaged
7 Sep the galleys of the Turks, from her villages on hill
Sand. plain that struggled into life through the in-
bwaders’ fires, and pushed their vineshoots over the
Blosiibs of kings, everywhere all over her peaceful soil,

-; “Not men alone who were great in a known art,
S ssosight, or science, of these the name was legion; .
but men in whose brains, art, thought, or science took
kwew forms, was born into new life, spoke with new
-v¥oice, and sprang full armed a new Athene. _
*.. - “Leave Rome aside, I say, and think of Italy;
: ineasure her gifts, which with the lavish waste of
{geftius she has flung broadcast in grand and heed-
Seals sacrifice, and tell me if the face of earth would
| aut: be. dark and drear as any Scythian desert without
C Rheeet
u#She was the rose of the world, aye—so they
gised and trampled her, and yet the breath of.
wem.was ever in her.
4$he was the world’s nightingale, aye—so they
we. Il. 21

322 PASCAREL.

burned her eyes out and sheared her wings, and yet
she sang.

“But she was yet more than these: she was the
light of the world: a light set on a hill, a light un-
quenchable. A light which through the darkness of
the darkest night has been a Pharos to the drowning
faiths and dying hopes of man.”

His voice rings like the call of a trumpet over the
hushed and awe-touched multitude.

Then it sinks low as a summer wind that steals
over a tideless sea; and falls upon the silence with
a sound in its gentleness and its solemnity that moves
men like a prayer.

“We are Italians,” he says, slowly. “Great as the
heritage is, so great the duty likewise.”

Then he uncovers his head and stands a moment
silent in the moonlight. The people are silent too,
and many kneel and pray.

CHAPTER IX.

Love is enough.

- He comes down from the highest steps of the
Loggia, his hands full of the lilies and the laurels.
A mighty shout goes forth from all the city, such
a shout as a populace can only give when a great
faith beats in ten thousand breasts with the same
pulses.

As he passes me, I catch his hand and touch it
with my lips. |

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 323

< . I worship the greatness in him; I know it all too

' Yate; when he was mine, I had cast him from me, now

-Ftthat I am nothing, less than nothing, I cannot even

' lift my eyes to his. I cannot claim a memory;—that

“would be charity.

.. So many touch him as he goes, he does not note
my kiss from any other’s; a dark veiled figure crouch-
-ing at his feet; how should he see me in the blaze
‘and stir, and tumult and triumph of this festal night
in Florence?

' Ginevra was happier than I.

He passes by, not knowing; ah, dear heaven!—
‘can one be so near to any man one hour, and then
‘go utterly a stranger, and more alien to him than the
-stray dog that brushes by him in the street?

g. He passes by me; and the crowds seize him,
‘weeping and laughing, and lift him up on their
shoulders, and bear him across the great piazza,
shouting, with the white cross flags tossing above
their heads and women raining roses in the moon-
light.

He has his art; his eloquence; his power of the
tongue and sword; and all his city’s love and loyalty.
How natural it is he should forget!—most natural.

But I!— |

I crouch down where I first dropped to rest, on
the lowest step of the Loggia. The bright bold

_ Perseus keeps watch above, and the black brows of
the Judith frown against the stars.

The square is left quiet. The people have flocked
elsewhere. The sounds of music and of mirth are
still loud over all the town, and the coloured fires
flame against the sky. There is a sweet odour heavy

21°

324 PASCAREL.

on the air; the stones are strewn with flowers, and
they lie dying underneath the moon.

I am half conscious of it all; and yet it all seems
far away, SO very very far.

I am so young, and yet my life is dead.

The deep chimes toll the hour more than once; it
is near midnight; Florence is still light as at noon-
tide. Still the noise and the mirth of the people are
at thei height. It is only the flowers that fade; the
flowers that are trodden on the stones.

I sit with my head on my hands, crushed, and
broken, and bruised, like one of the trampled lilies.

I do not think of my fate or my future. All I
hear is the echo of his voice; all I see is the life
lost forever. If I had been patient, if I had been
true, if I had been faithful!—but I thirsted for great-
ness, and it has failed and fooled me. And I have
touched his hand, I have looked on his face, I have
been close to him, as the dust beneath his feet; and
yet Ican never claim a look or word again from him.
Never,—whilst our lives shall last. For what would
any love of mine seem now save like the prayer for
alms of any homeless beggar?

The night flies on; the square is almost empty;
the flowers are dying fast. I sit there, stupid with
my wretchedness; the laurels lie scattered on the steps
above.

A footfall comes near.

I shiver and look up; I see him in the moon-
light, as so many times I saw him in that glad sum-
mer time coming through the silent streets of old
forsaken cities, or the poppy-sown breadths of the
cornlands.

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 325

be But now his head is drooped; his face is pale
‘and dark: and, as he goes, instead of the notes of
the mandoline there is the clash of his sword on the
STONES.

He comes across the piazza; he is all alone. As
2 passes me he pauses and looks; it is his nature
as F be pitiful to all things. He only sees a human
thin, bowed down and solitary, mourning where all
others feast. a

He stops before me, deeming me a stranger.
“What ails you,” he asks, “that you sit so while
all the town rejoices?”

_ IT cannot answer him. I would rise and flee from
Him, but my feet feel chained to the marble.

He touches me with gentle compassion.

“Are you a woman and young?—you sorrow for
me dead soldier?”

_ With a great cry I clasp his knees, and lean my
Mead against him.

I sorrow for the dead indeed.

By some instinct or thought of the truth he tears
ute = veil from me, and lifts my face to the light of the
| Then—ah, then!-—I hunger no more for the sweet
ide on the night of the saints under white Fie-

‘

1]
~~
aude

tt I am nothing—nothing—nothing?” I mur-
him, an hour afterwards, as his embrace enfolds
bm all my tale is told.

mswers me with a smile.

326 PASCAREL.

“And I have nothing! So we are equal, my trea-
sure! Ah, donzella mia! you have learned then to
think with me that these are the fairest things, after
all, that the world can give us,—a little laughter and
a little love?”

I wind my arms about him where we stand, and
lean my cheek on his:

“ Say rather only, a little laughter—and a great
love.”

This is enough indeed: enough, here and here-
after. A love greater than death, great as eternity
itself; a love that shall leave earth with us when ou
souls leave our bodies, and reach its uttermost per-
fection in other lives, in other worlds; a love that
time cannot chill, nor any woe appal, nor God hi
self umsever. -

THE town is white against the shadows of the night.
The river breaks with sea-like sound against the piles
of the old grey bridges. The red cross banners slowly
swing their white folds on the wind; the populace has
grown quieter.

The shields of the old republic brighten their bla-
zonries in the moonbeams. The lions, white amidst
a green wealth of forest laurel, guard the place of the
public liberties,

The roses and the lilies lie on the stones as on 3
palace-floor. By the water the people are singing, uD-
tired with joy and with triumph.

Is it not ever with such things that one thinks of
Florence?

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 327

A cloud of blossoms, the notes of a lute, the ripple
of a little laugh; the deeper joys of sighs that die in
a caress; the far-off echo of a gay glad nation’s mirth;
a sea of yellow moonlight, broad and cool; the stone
faces of fauns and griffins coiled about with acanthus
foliage; the sculptured shapes of saints and prophets
reigning over a frolic of masquers; the fragrance of
sea and mountain blown on fresh winds through sha-
dowy marble ways; and in the sacred stillness of the
night, in gardens where the fountains fall, or case-
ments where the licciole are gleaming, the soft fast
throbs of quickened pulses, the touches of. lovers’ lips
in the silence—these things are its breath and its life,
the City of Lilies, the Amorous City; built in a field
of flowers, on a midsummer night, by the Slayer of the
Lion, for the mother of Eros; Florence, the daughter
of gods and the queen of the freedom of men; Flo-
rence, the poetess and paradise of

LOVE.

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The Martins of Cro’ Martin 3¥.
The Fortunes of Glencore 2 ¥.
Roland Cashel 3 v. Davenport
Dunn 3 v. Con Cregan 2%.
One of Them 2 v. Maurice Tie-
nay 2v. Sir Jasper Carew 2¥.
Barrington 2 v. A Day’s Ride:
a Life’s Romance 2 v. Luttrell
of Arran 2v. Tony Butler 2¥.
Sir Brook Fossbrooke 2 v. The
Bramleighs of Bishop’s Folly 2¥.
A Rent in a Cloud 1v. That Boy
of Norcott’s 1 v. St. Patrick's
Eve ; Paul Gosslett’s Confesstoss

Lv. Laon Mischa 24,

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Collection of British Authors Tauchnits Edition. 9

G. H. Lewes:

pe iv. The Physiolagy
non Life 2 v.
Longfellow:

Works (w. portrait)
[he Divine Comedy of
\lighieri 3 v. The New-
. Tragedies 1 v. The
Tragedy I v.

Lutfullah:
graphy of Lutfullah, by
crv.
ord Macaulay:
of England (w. portrait)
Critical and Historical
v. Laysof Ancient Rome
2eches 2 v. Biographical
v. William Pitt, Atter-

xge MacDonald:
bes of Howglen 2 v.
of a Quiet Neighbour-
' David Elginbrod 2 v.
ar’s Daughter 2 v.

rs. Mackarness:

1 Stories 1 v. A Peerless
| A Mingled Yarn 2 v.
rman Macleod:
Lieutenant and his Son

Irs. Macquoid:

', Miriam’s Marriage 2 v.

demoiselle Mori,”
Author of—

iselle Mori 2 v. Denise

dame Fontenoyryv. On

2 of the Storm I v.

Lord Mahon: ode Stanhope.

R. Blachford Mansfield:
The Log of the Water Lily 1 v.

Capt. Marryat:
Jacob Faithful (w. portrait) Iv.
Percival Keene1v. Peter Simple
Iv. Japhet rv. Monsieur Violet
Iv. The Settlers 1 v. The Mission
1v. The Privateer’s-Man 1 v.
The Children of the New-Forest
Iv. Valerie v. Mr. Midshipman

Easy iv. The King’s Own 1 v.

Florence Marryat
(Mrs. Ross-Church):
Love’s Conflict 2 v. For Ever
and Ever 2v. The Confessions of
Gerald Estcourt 2v. Nelly Brooke
2v. Véronique 2v. Petronel
2v. Her Lord and Master 2 v.
The Prey of the Gods ry. Life

of Captain Marryat 1 v.

Mrs. Marsh:
Ravenscliffe 2 v. Emilia Wynd-
ham 2 v. Castle Avon 2 vy.
Aubrey 2 v. The Heiress of
Haughton 2v. Evelyn Marston
2v. The Rose of Ashurst 2 v.

Whyte Melville:

Kate Coventry 1 v. Holmby
House 2v. Digby Grand 1 v. Good
for Nothing 2 v. The Queen’s
Maries 2v. The Gladiators 2 v.
The Brookes of Bridlemere 2 v.
Cerise 2 v. The Interpreter 2 v.
The White Rose2v. M. or N.
rv. Contraband; or A Losing
Hazard 1 v. Sarchedon 2 v.

he price of cach volume is 44 Thaler = 2 Francs.

10 Collection of British Authors Tauchnits Edition.

Meredith (Hon. R. Lytton):

Poems 2 v. ;
Milton:
Poetical Works I v.

Miss Florence Montgomery:
Misunderstood Iv, Thrown To-

gether 2 v.
Moore:

Poetical Works (w. portrait) 5 v,

Lady Morgan’s
Memoirs 3 v.
My little Lady 2 v.
New Testament [v. 1000.]

Mrs. Newby:

Common Sense 2 v.

Dr. J. H. Newman:
Callista I v.

“No Church,” Author of—
No Church 2v. Owen:—a Waif

2Vv.
Hon. Mrs. Norton:

Stuart of Dunleath 2v. Lost and
Saved 2 v. Old Sir Douglas 2 v.

Not Easily Jealous 2 v.
Mrs. Oliphant:

Passages in the Life of Mrs.
Margaret Maitland of Sunnyside
The Last of the Mortimers
2v. Agnes 2v. Madonna Mary
2v. The Minister’s Wifezv. The
Rector, and the Doctor’s Family
1v. Salem Chapel2v. The Per-
petual Curate 2v. Miss Marjori-
banks 2 v. Ombra 2v. Memoir

I v.

of Count de Montalembert 2 y.
May 2 v.

Poems 1 v.
Ouida:

Idalia2v. Tricotrinav. Puck2y,
Chandos 2 v. Strathmore 21.
Under two Flags 2 vy. Folle
Farine 2v. A Leaf in theStom;
A Dog of Flanders & other Stories
Iv. Cecil Castlemaine’s Gage
Iv. Madame la Marquise Iv.
Pascarél 2 y.

Miss Parr
(Holme Lee):

Basil Godfrey’s Caprice 2 1,
For Richer, for Poorer 2 v. The
Beautiful Miss Barrington 2 ¥.
Her Title of Honour ry, Echoes
of a Famous Year ry. Kathe
rine’s Trial 1 v.

Mrs. Parr:
Dorothy Fox 1 v.

“Paul Ferroll,” Author of

Paul Ferroll 1 v. Year after
Year 1 v. Why Paul Ferro
killed his Wife 1 v.

Miss Fr. M. Peard:
One Year 2v. The Rose-Gardes
tv. Unawares I v.

Bishop Percy:
Reliques of Ancient Englisl
Poetry 3 v.

Pope:
Select Poetical Works (w. por
trait) 1 v.

The Prince Consort’s
Speeches and Addresses I v.

The price of each volume is Y¥z Thaler = 2. Franca,

Collection of British Authors Tauchnits Edition. II

Charles Reade:
¢*Tt is never too late to mend”
2v. ‘*Love me little, love me
long” rv. The Cloister and the
Hearth 2v. Hard Cash 3 v. Put
Yourself in his Place2v. A

Terrible Temptation 2v. Peg

Woffington 1 v.

Recommended to Mercy:
Author of—

Recommended to Mercy 2 v.
Zoe’s ‘Brand’ 2 v.

Richardson:
Clarissa Harlowe 4 v.

Rev. W. Robertson:
Sermons 4 v.
Charles H. Ross:
The Pretty Widow rv. A London
Romance 2 v.
J. Ruffini:
Lavinia 2v. Doctor Antonio Iv.
Lorenzo Benoni rv. Vincenzo
2v. A Quiet Nooki1v. The

s on a Visit to Paris I v.
Carlino and other Stories I v.

G. A. Sala:

The Seven Sons of Mammon 2v.

Katherine Saunders:
Joan Merryweather and other
Tales I v.

Sir Walter Scott:
Waverley (w. portrait) rv. The

Antiquary 1 v. Ivanhoe I v.
ilworth rv. Quentin Dur-
ward rv. Old Mortality 1 v.

Gay Manneringtv. RobRoyrv.

The Pirate rv. The Fortunes
of Nigel rv. The Black Dwarf;
A Legend of Montrose rv. The
Bride of Lammermoor rv. The
Heart of Mid-Lothian 2 v. The
Monastery rv. The Abbot 1 v.
Peveril of the Peak 2 v. The
Poetical Works 2 v. Woodstock
Iv. The Fair Maid of Perth 1 v.
Anne of Geierstein I v.

Miss Sewell:
Amy Herbert 2 v. Ursula 2 v.
A Glimpse of the World 2v. The
Journal of a Home Life 2 v. After
Life 2 v.

Shakespeare:
Plays and Poems (w. portrait)
compl. 7 v. (Second Edition. )

Shakespeare's Plays may also be
had in 37 numbers, at #/s0 Thlr.
each number.

Doubtful Plays 1 v.
Shelley:

A Selection from his Poems I vy,

Nathan Sheppard:

Shut up in Paris I v.

Sheridan:

Dramatic Works I v.

Smollett:
The Adventures of Roderick Ran-
dom tiv. The Expedition of Hum-
phry Clinker rv. The Adven-
tures of Peregrine Pickle 2 v.

Earl Stanhope:
History of England 7 v.
Reign of Queen Anne 2 v.

The

The price of cach volume is ¥% Thaler = 2 Francs.

12

Collection of British Authors Tauchnits Edition.

Sterne:
The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandytrv. A Sentimental Jour-
ney I v.
“Still Waters,” Author of—

Still Waters rv. Dorothy I v.
De Cressyrv. Uncle Ralphrv.
Maiden Sisters rv. Martha Brown
Iv.

Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe:
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (w. portrait)
2v. <A Key to Uncle Tom’s
Cabin 2 v. Dred 2 v. The
Minister’s Wooing 1 v. Oldtown
Folks 2 v.

Swift:

Gulliver’s Travels 1 v.

Baroness ‘Tautphoeus:
Cyrilla 2 v. The Initials 2 v.
Quits 2v. At Odds 2 v.

Colonel Meadows Taylor:
Tara: a Mahratta Tale 3 v.

H. Templeton:
Diary and Notes I v.

Tennyson:
Poetical Works 7 v.

W. M. Thackeray:
Vanity Fair 3 v. The History of
Pendennis 3 v. Miscellanies 8 v.
The History of Henry Esmond
2v. The English Humourists I v,
The Newcomes 4 v. The Vir-
ginians 4.v. The Four Georges;
Lovel the Widower 1 v. The
Adventures of Philip 2v. Denis
Duval 1 v. Roundabout Papers
2v. Catherine 1 vy. The Irish
Sketch-Book 2 v,

Miss Thackeray:
The Story of Elizabeth 1 v. The
Village on the Cliff rv. Old
Kensington 2 v.

A. Thomas:
Denis Donne 2 v. On Gnard2v.
Walter Goring 2 v. Played oat
2 vy. Called to Account 2 v.
Only Herself 2 v.

Thomson:
Poetical Works (w. portrait) Iv.

F. G. Trafford

(Mrs. Riddell):
George Geith of Fen Court 2 v.
Maxwell Drewitt 2 v. The Race
for Wealth 2v. Far above Rubies
2.

Trois-Etoiles:
The Member for Paris 2 v.

Anthony Trollope:
Doctor Thorne2v. The Bertrams
zv. The Wardentv. Barchester
Towers2v. Castle Richmond 2yv.
The West Indies 1 v. Framley
Parsonage 2v. North America
3 v. Orley Farm 3v. Rachel Ray
2v. The Small House at Alling-
ton 3 v. Can you forgive her?
3v. The Belton Estate 2 v. The
Last Chronicle of Barset 3 v. The
Claverings 2 v. Phineas Finn3v.
He knew he was Right 3 v. The
Vicar of Bullhampton 2 v, Sir
Harry Hotspur of Humble
thwaite tv. Ralph the Heir 2 v.
The Golden Lion of Granpere Iv.
Australia and New Zealand 3.

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Collection of British Authors Tauchnits Edition. 13

T. Adolphus Trollope:

“TheGarstangs ofGarstang Grange
av. A Siren 2v.
The Two Cosmos Ir Vv.
“Véra,”
Author of—
Véra 1 ve The Hotel du Petit

St. Jean I v.

Eliot Warburton:
The Crescent and the Cross 2 v.
Darien 2 v.

S. Warren:
Passages from the Diary of a late
Physician 2 v. Ten Thousand
a-Year 3 v. Nowand Then I v.
The Lily and the Bee I v.

Waterdale Neighbours 2 v.

Miss Wetherell:
The wide, wide -World 1 v.
Queechy 2v. The Hills of the
Shatemuc 2v. Say and Seal 2v.
The Old Helmet 2 v,
A Whim
and its Consequences I v.

Mrs. Henry Wood:
East Lynne 3 v. The Channings
2v. Mrs. Ealliburton’s Troubles
2v. Verner’s Pride 3 v. The
ShadowofAshlydyat3v. Trevlyn
Hold2v. LordOakburn’s Daugh-
ters2v. Oswald Cray2v. Mildred
Arkell 2 v. St. Martin’s Eve 2 v.

Elster’s Folly2v. Lady Adelaide’s
Oath 2 v. Orville College 1 v. A
Life’s Secret iv. The Red Court
Farm 2 v. Anne Hereford 2 v.
Roland Yorke 2v. George Canter-
bury’s Will2 v. Bessy Rane 2 v,
Dene Hollow 2v. The Foggy
Night at Offord etc. rv. Within
the Maze 2 v.

- Wordsworth:
Select Poetical Works 2 v.

Lascelles Wraxall:
Wild Oats I v.

Edm. Yates:
Land at Last 2 v. Broken to
Harness 2 v. The Forlorn Hope
2v. Black Sheep 2 v. The Rock
Ahead 2v. Wrecked in Port 2v.
Dr. Wainwright’s Patient2 v. No-
body’s Fortune 2v. Castaway 2v.
A Waiting Race 2v. The Yellow
Flag 2 v.
Miss Yonge:

The Heir of Redclyffe2v. Hearts-
ease 2v. The Daisy Chain 2 v.
Dynevor Terrace 2v. Hopes and
Fears 2v. The Young Step-
Mother 2v. The Trial2v. The
Clever Woman of the Family 2 v.
The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest 2v.
The Danvers Papers; the Prince
and the Paget v. The Chaplet
of Pearls2v. The two Guardians
1v. The Caged Lion 2 v. The
Pillars of the House v. 1 & 2.

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Series for the Young. — Tauchnits Edition.

Series for the Young.

Kenneth; or, the Rear-Guard of | A Book of Golden Deeds.

the Grand Army. By M/tss Yonge
(Author of ‘‘the Heir of Red-
clyffe”). With Frontispiece, I v.

Ruth and her Friends. A Story
for Girls. With Frontispiece,
Iv.

Our Year: A Child’s Book, in
Prose and Verse. Bythe Author
of ‘John Halifax, Gentleman.”
Illustrated by Clarence Dobell,
Iv.

Ministering Children. A Tale de-
dicated to Childhood. By Maria
Louisa Charlesworth, With
Frontispiece, I v.

The Little Duke. Ben Sylvester's
Word. By Miss Yonge (Author
of ‘“‘the Heir of Redclyffe”).
With a Frontispiece by B.
Plockhorst, I v.

The Stokesley Secret. By Mess
Yonge (Author of ‘‘the Heir of
Redclyffe”). With a Frontis-
piece by B. Plockhorst, I v.

Tales from Shakspeare. By
Charles and Mary Lamé, With
the Portrait of Shakspeare I v.

Countess Kate. By A@ss Yonge
(Author of ‘‘the Heir of Red-
clyffe”). With Frontispiece, I v.

Three Tales for Boys. By the

Author of ‘‘John Halifax, Gen-

tleman.” With a Frontispiece

by B. Plockhorst, 1 v.

By
Miss Yonge (Author of ‘‘the

Heir of Redclyfie”). With a
Frontispiece by B. Plockhorst,
2 v.

Moral Tales. By Mariza Edge
worth, With a Frontispiece by
B. Plockhorst, 1 v.

Friarswood Post-Office. By Mass
Yonge (Author of ‘‘the Heir
of Redclyffe”). With Frontis-
piece, I v.

Cousin Trix and her welcome
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Craik. With a Frontispiece by
B. Plockhorst, 1 v.

Three Tales for Girls. By the
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tleman.” With a Frontispiece
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Henrietta’s Wish; or, Domineer-
ing. A Tale. By Afiss Yonge
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clyffe”). With a Frontispiece
by B. Plockhorst, r v.

Kings of England: A History for
the Young. By Jfss Yonge
(Author of ‘‘the Heir of Red-
clyffe’’). With Frontispiece, I v.

Popular Tales. By Maria Edge-
worth. With a Frontispiece by
B. Plockhorst, 2 v.

The Lances of Lynwood; the
Pigeon Pie. By Ass Yonge
(Author of ‘‘the Heir of Red-
clyffe”). With Frontispiece, Iv.

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Collection of German Authors Tauchnits Edition.

Collection of German Authors.

leights. By B. Auerbach.
ated by F. E. Bunnett.
| Authorized Edition,
ghly revised. 3 v.

ear °13: By fritz Reuter.
ated from the Platt-
‘th by Charles Lee Lewes,

by Goethe, From the Ger-
rJohn Anster, LL.D. Iv.

Sintram and other Tales.
muqué, Translated by
Bunnett, 1 v.

iata and other Tales. By
Yeyse. From the Ger-
y M. Wilson, Iv.

1cess of Brunswick- Wol-
‘el and other Tales. By
hokke, From the Ger-
ry M. A. Faber, 1 v.

he Wise and Emilia Ga-
By G. £. Lessing. The
translated by W. Taylor,
er by Charles Lee Lewes,

he Counter [Handel und
1]. By % W. Hacklén-
From the German by
Towitt, I v.

ales by W. Hauff. From
rman by M. A. Faber,

von Kamern and Diary
oor young Lady. By
Nathusius. From the

German by Miss Thompson,
Iv.

Poems from the German of
Ferdinand Freiligrath, Edited
by his Daughter. Second
Copyright Edition, enlarged.
Iv.

Gabriel. A Story of the Jews in
Prague. By S. Kohn. From
the German by Arthur Milman,
M.A., Iv.

The Dead Lake and other Tales.
By Paul Heyse. From the Ger-
man by Mary Wilson. 1 v.

Through Night toLight. By Xar/
Guiskow. From the German
by M. A. Faber, I v.

An Egyptian Princess. By Georg
L£bers, Translated by E. Grove,
2 V.

Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces:
or the Married Life, Death, and
Wedding of the Advocate of
the Poor, Firmian Stanislaus
Siebenkds. By Sean Paul
Friederich Richter, Translated
from the German by E. H.
Noel, 2v.

Ekkehard. <A Tale of the tenth
Century. By 7. V. Scheffel.
Translated from the German
by Sofie Delffs, 2 v.

The Princess of the
[das Haideprinzesschen].
£. Marlitt, 2v.

Moor
By

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Dictionaries.

Dictionary: of the English and German languages
for general use. Compiled with especial regard to the elucida-
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Twenty-third Stereotype Edition, thoroughly revised and great!
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Dictionary of the English and French languages
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