Selvaggia nodded her head in her hands; she felt that she was blushing
all over her body.
Cino, at this new stab, struck his forehead a resounding smack. "This is
terrible indeed!" he cried out in his distress; whereupon Selvaggia
forgot to be ashamed any more, she was so taken by surprise.
"What do you mean, Cino?" she began to falter. "I don't understand you."
Cino plunged into the icy pool of explanation, and splashed there at
large. "I mean, I mean"--he waved his hands in the air--"it is most
difficult to explain. We must apprehend Love aright--if we can. He is a
grim and dreadful lord, it appears, working out the salvation of the
souls of poets, and other men, by great sufferings. There is no other
way, as the books teach us. Such love is always towards ladies; the
suffering is from them, the love for them. They deal the darts, and
receive the more devotion. It is not to be otherwise--could not
be--there can be no poetry without pain; and how can there be pain if
the lady loves the poet? Ah, no, it is impossible! Anciently, very long
ago, in the times of Troy, maybe, it was different. I know not what to
say; I had never expected, never looked, nor even asked--ah, Madonna,"
he suddenly cried, and found himself upon his knees, "what am I to say
to you for this speech of yours?"
Selvaggia, white enough now, froze hard. "Do you mean," she said slowly,
in words that fell one by one, like cuts from a deliberate whip, "do you
mean that you do not love me, Messer Cino, after all?"
"You are a light to my eyes and a lantern to my feet," Cino murmured:
but she did not seem to hear.
"Do you mean," she went on, "that you are not prepared to be--to be
my--my betrothed?"
It was done: now let the heavens fall! She could not ask the man to
marry her, but it came to the same thing; she had practically committed
that unpardonable sin; she had approached love to wedlock, a mystery to
a bargain, the rapt converse of souls in heaven to a wrangle over the
heeltaps in a tavern parlour. She was a heretic whom any Court of Love
must excommunicate. The thing was so serious that it brought Cino to his
feet, severe, formal, an Assessor of Civil Causes. He spread out his
hands as if to wave aside words he should never have heard. He had found
his tongue, for he was now contemplating the Abstract.
"Be very sure, most sacred Lady," said he, "that no bodily torment could
drive me to such sacrilege as your noble humility leads you to
contemplate. No indeed! Wretchedly unworthy as I am to live in the light
of your eyes, I am not yet fallen so far. There are yet seeds of grace
within me--of your planting, Madonna, of your planting!" She paid no
heed to his compliments; her eyes were fixed. On he hurried. "So far,
indeed, as those worldly concerns go, whereof you hint, I am provided
for. My wife is at Lucca in her father's house--but of such things it is
not fitting we should speak. Rather we should reason together of the
high philosophy of love, which--"
But Selvaggia was gone before he could invite her on such a lofty
flight; the wife at Lucca sent her fleeting down the mossy slopes like a
hare. It was too dark for men to see her face when she tiptoed into
Pitecchio and slipped up to her chamber. Safe at last there, she
shivered and drowsed the night away; but waking or sleeping she did not
cease her dreary moan.
Cino, after a night of consternation, could endure the hermitage no
more; the problem, he was free to confess, beat him. Next day,
therefore, he took horse and rode over the mountains to Bologna, intent
upon finding Dante there; but Dante had gone to Verona with half of his
"Inferno" in his saddlebag. Thither Cino pursued and there found him in
the church of St. Helen, disputing with the doctors upon the Question of
the Land and the Water. What passed between the great poet and the less
I cannot certainly report, nor is it material. I think that the tinge of
philosophy set here and there in Cino's verses, to say nothing of a
couplet or two which give more than a hint of the "Vita Nova," may
safely be ascribed to that time. I know at least that he did not cease
to love his beautiful and wild Selvaggia, so far as he understood that
delicate state of the soul which she, perverse child, had so signally
misapprehended. The truth may well be that he was tolerably happy at
Verona, able to contemplate at his ease the divine image of his lady
without any interference from the disturbing original. He was, it is
said, meditating an ambitious work, the history of the Roman Polity from
Numa to Justinian, an epic in five and twenty books, wherein Selvaggia
would have played a fine part, that of the Genius of Natural Law. The
scheme might have ripened but for one small circumstance; this was the
death of Selvaggia.
That healthy, laughing girl, Genius of Nature or not, paid the penalty
of her incurable childishness by catching a malaria, whereof she died,
as it is said, in a high delirium of some eight hours. So it seems that
she was really unteachable, for first she had spoiled Cino's martyrdom,
and next, by the same token, robbed the world of an epic in twenty-five
books. Cino heard of it some time afterwards, and in due season was
shown her tomb at Monte della Sambuca high on the Apennine, a grey stone
solitary in a grey waste of shale. There he pondered the science of
which, while she was so strangely ignorant, he had now become an adept;
there, or thereabouts, he composed the most beautiful of all his rhymes,
the _canzone_ which may stand for an elegy of the Lady Selvaggia.
"Ay me, alas! the beautiful bright hair,--"
Ay me, indeed! And thus he ends:
"Ay me, sharp Death! till what I ask is done
And my whole life is ended utterly,--
Answer,--must I weep on
Even thus, and never cease to moan _ay me_?"[2]
He might well ask. It should be accorded him that he was worthy of the
occasion: the poem is very fine. But I think the good man did well
enough after this; I know that if he was sad he was most melodiously
sad. He throve; he became a professor; his wife bore him five children.
His native city has done him what honour she could, ousted his surname
in favour of her own, set up a pompous monument in the Cathedral Church
(where little Selvaggia heard her dull mass), and dubbed him once and
for all, _L'amoroso Messer Cino da Pistoja_. That should suffice him. As
for the young Selvaggia, I suppose her bones are dust of the Apennine.