grief on his son's account, we had an interval of peace. Il Rosso, whom
of course the fact reached, may perhaps have felt some remorse, for by
nature, as I have said, he was not bad-hearted, only his unfortunate
love had hardened and frenzied him. It really seemed as though he meant
to keep quiet during his year of mourning, and until midsummer we heard
no more of banditti. Whether they were at work further south, or how
they kept themselves alive during this holiday, God knows. But when we
took it for granted that our deliverance from them was final we
reckoned without our host. Our neighbourhood began all of a sudden to
be haunted again. My neighbour, Pizzicarlo, who had been one of us that
night at the villa, was captured by these villains while riding his
donkey to Nerni, dragged off into their haunts, and only released on
payment of a considerable ransom. And so with others, whom they sadly
maltreated. This could not go on. The gendarmes obtained
reinforcements, the razzia into the mountains began anew, but not with
much better success. At that time Barbarossa seemed to be everywhere
and nowhere, terrible as a basilisk, and slippery as an eel, and far
and wide mothers quieted their screaming children by saying: _Zitto_,
Barbarossa is coming! But other stories were told too, more to his
credit; how he behaved to the poor and defenceless like a knight in a
legend, intent mainly on righting the defective justice of the world,
though every now and then robbing the egregiously wealthy just to
supply his own needs. As I have before said, he was to be pitied, and
if he had not run up so heavy a score that the law could not possibly
wink at it, perhaps an amnesty would yet have changed him back into a
peaceable honest citizen.
"Under these circumstances we lived wretchedly enough, much like
shipwrecked sailors on a plank, with a shoal of sharks around. Thirteen
months had now passed since the captain's departure, and no one spoke
of him, at least no one said any good of him, fearing to be overheard
by somebody who might repeat it to Barbarossa. Imagine, therefore, my
horror one afternoon. I had just opened a bottle of castor oil, and was
thinking of nothing worse, when Signor Gustavo his own very self
entered my room as though nothing had happened. '_Corpo della
Madonna!_' I cried, 'What wind has blown you here? Are you so weary of
life that you determine to make your villa your mausoleum?' Then he
told me that he had not been able to endure either the East or West.
Nowhere had he found any flavour in the wine, everywhere the women were
tedious, and since he had fired at men, the chase of lions and hyenas
had become insipid. And always too he had been pursued by the feeling
that he had, like a contemptible coward, left the field to his foe,
instead of waiting to measure his strength against him. And a short
time back, when staying at some German Spa, he read a newspaper account
of the Sabine mountains being again ravaged by banditti, and of Papal
carabinieri having for months pursued the vagabonds, who seemed as
inexterminable as toadstools after rain: why then he had found the
monotonous elegant world in which he was living, simply intolerable,
and taking an extra post, he had travelled day and night without
halting, crossed the Alps, and got here. And now here he was again
settled in the vineyard. Maddalena had been actually wild with joy, and
he himself felt more at home than he had done for a year and a day.
'And what then was he going to do here?' asked I in horror and
amazement. 'Oh!' said he, 'I shall have no lack of occupation; I shall
join the patrol of gendarmes that are constantly on the mountains, and
so as a volunteer and dilettante face my man. When I come to consider
it, it was I who hung this mill-stone about your necks, and so it is
only fair that I should try to help you off with it. Good-day, Angelo,
pay me a visit in my mausoleum.'
"And away he went: he had grown so strangely restless--quite unlike his
former self--that he could not stay long in any one place. What I felt
about the whole affair, I leave you to imagine. Meanwhile it had never
been my wont to play the coward, and indeed here it behoved me to take
the initiative, on account of my old acquaintance with Signor Gustavo.
So I boldly visited him in the villa, and found everything just as
though he had never left it. Maddalena hobbling about as before, and
busy enough now, gathering the grapes with her long arms; the dog, who
had grown old and blind of one eye; and in the salon the marks of the
bullets still visible, but the holes in Erminia's portrait had been
carefully repaired. When I went in, the captain was walking up and
down, smoking and reading, but on seeing me he laid aside his book--as
usual verses by his English poet--and heartily shook my hand. He had
spent the whole night between the rocks and woods, lying out to stalk
his game, and only slept a little in the morning. At midnight he was
going out again with three stout fellows who did honour to the Pope's
uniform. If I liked I might go with him.
"I declined with thanks on this occasion, and did not remain long, for
his manner, half fierce and half reckless--as though he were playing a
game of chance--gave me an uncomfortable feeling. On my way home, I
laid a kind of wager as it were with myself--that if seven days passed
without his coming to a bad end, I would print my sonnets to Erminia at
my own expense; if otherwise I would leave them in manuscript. And an
end did indeed come, but whether it could be called good or bad, God
knows, and so to the present day I am in doubt whether I won the wager
or not.
"It was he himself who circumstantially related to me the way things
fell out, so that you can receive my narrative as though you had it
from his own lips. He began to wonder much, he said, that Barbarossa
did not confront him, for his return was nothing else than a direct and
open challenge. Twice when on his rounds with the gendarmes, he had
stumbled upon suspicious-looking characters, but they had not held
their ground--dived out of sight like frogs when the stork appears. He
fancied they did this with the intention of drawing him on further into
the mountains in order to attack him with less risk. So he was glad
when an expedition on a large scale into the Sabina was planned,
although not for the next night, but the next but one, for the soldiers
were determined to get their fill of sleep first, so as to be all the
fresher.
"But the captain could not remain so long inactive, and as he had no
companions--his usual escort preferring a good night to an aimless
ramble--he loaded his double-barrelled gun, called his dog, who seemed
disinclined to follow him, and left his vineyard just as the moon rose.
"Fool-hardy as he was, he yet guarded himself against any unnecessary
exposure. He wore a dark coat, and dark trowsers which he pushed into
his high boots, and also a grey hat, one of those called, you know,
_Comecipare_, in which attire, so long as he kept in the shadow of the
oaks and chestnuts, it would have been hard even in the day-time to
distinguish him from the trunk of a tree.
"Now it so happened that the night was still and beautiful, and he told
me he had never so much enjoyed the gloomy forest, and had never had
Erminia's form and face so vividly present and near to him as they then
seemed. The dog silently and wearily crept on after him, and he himself
was lost in dreams, having never hoped that on this occasion he should
meet with his enemy, but being led on and on merely for the sake of
exercise, and by the exquisite coolness of the night.
"He had he thought wandered thus--creeping and climbing
alternately--for more than an hour, when the dog suddenly stood still
and growled. Instantly the captain's hand was on his gun, but before he
could look round, two shots were fired close to him, and he felt that
he had received a wound in the leg. At the same moment he saw a fellow
stand out from behind a great ilex and level a pistol, but he was
beforehand with him, and took such good aim that he shot off the lock
of the pistol and two fingers of the hand that held it; whereupon the
villain took flight, and ran along the steep path with such speed that
neither the dog--who to be sure was no longer so agile as he had
been--nor the second barrel of the English gun reached him. The captain
had paid dear for his night walk. The wound in his leg bled so much
that the bandage he improvised with pocket and neck-handkerchief was of
little use. So having re-loaded both barrels, he set out homewards, but
contrived to lose his way, the moonlight confusing him, and it was only
after much fruitless wandering about that he saw the roof of his villa
shining above the vineyards, and he was then so exhausted with loss of
blood and fatigue, that he sank down on a stone, and was obliged to
rest awhile before he could rise and drag himself over the last hundred
yards.
"But one there was past rising, and that was the dog. The second shot
had wounded him more seriously than the first his master, and having
limped after him thus far without a whine of complaint, his strength
was spent, and he moaned away his faithful life. The captain told me he
felt his blood run cold when he saw his old ally feebly wag his tail
and then stretch out his four legs stiffly. He himself was hardly able
to stand, yet he could not find it in his heart to leave his dead
comrade there in the open plain where vultures would soon have found
him out next morning. He wished to give him the honourable burial he
had so well earned, in the vineyard at home, and so he took him up,
supporting the weight with the stock of the gun--that gun itself being
heavy enough for him in his present condition--and with tottering steps
he reached the vineyard, and found the iron gate as usual locked from
within. He opened it by a trick known only to him and Maddalena. But he
was surprised that the sound of his steps should not have roused the
wakeful creature: thought she had perhaps been drinking some strong
wine which he had just had from the village, and as he passed the door
of her room did not care to disturb her. The dog he laid down in the
kitchen, and covered with an old straw mat, then he tottered up the
steps that led to the upper room, feeling as if he should hardly live
to reach his couch, and re-bandage his burning wound.
"But when he opened the door of the salon, he stood motionless on the
threshold, turned to stone by what he saw. The moon was shining full
upon the balcony and through the windows, and lit up the stand of
fire-arms in the corner. In the middle of the room, his back to the
light, erect and stiff as a marble pillar, arms crossed, and
contemplating the picture of Erminia, stood Domenico Serone, Il Rosso.
He no longer deserved this nick-name, however, for he had cut off his
beard, and his long wild hair looked ashy grey against the old yellow
straw hat that so shadowed his face nothing was to be seen but the
white of his eyes. But Signor Gustavo knew him at a glance.
"They looked full at each other for a moment, those two deadly foes,
Domenico, however, without changing his position, while the captain
leant upon his gun, and called up his last remnant of strength to play
the man, spite of his wound.
"'You are come at last then,' said Il Rosso, and his voice trembled. 'I
have waited for you here, since I did not find you at home. You know
that I have sworn to reckon with you, and the time is fully come.
Tomorrow night you are going to make a great sally and surprise my
band. Bravo! Set to! Only what you and I have to settle could be better
done, I thought, by ourselves. Let your gun alone,' for the captain was
about to stand on his guard. 'If I had chosen, you would have drawn
your last breath long before this. Do you suppose I did not hear you
outside when you were opening the iron gate, and had I wished for your
blood I had but to shed it then and there. I own I was very near doing
so. But I was not able. _She_ would not suffer it,' and he hurriedly
pointed to the picture. 'If you have still the heart to love your life
you may thank _her_ for it.'
"'Domenico,' said the captain, 'let there be an end to this. You are in
my house, and I cannot tolerate your playing the master here, and
acting as if I was at your mercy. I will have no gift from him who
plotted to deprive me of the dearest thing I had on earth. You had no
right to the girl, none--that she herself assured me. And as
nevertheless you murdered her, and are now seeking after my life, why
you are nothing better than a wild beast, and whoever renders you
harmless does a good work. It is pure mercy on my part not to avail
myself of my advantage, and shoot you down before you can lift your gun
from the floor. But I feel sorry for you. I can understand how one
might lose one's reason for that girl's sake, and not recover it after
her death. Therefore I offer you honourable terms. Take up your gun.
When I have counted three--one or both of us will have ceased to live.'
"Domenico never stirred. 'Do as you will,' he said, 'I shall not fire.
If I were to kill you, what better should I be? I am a miserable man. I
have murdered the fairest woman in the world, like a wild beast that I
was; you do well to call me one. I thought I should be happier if I got
you too out of the world. I was a fool. If you were to meet her again
up yonder, rage and jealousy at not being able to part you any more,
would devour my heart till I went down to hell damned beyond
redemption. No, make an end of me as you said. See, I stand quite
still. This gun,' he pushed it away from him with his foot, 'I will not
touch. Fire, captain, and with my last breath I will forgive you. For
by God's holy blood the life I have led was purgatory, and now it would
be hell itself since I have seen _her_ again, and _you_ whom she
loved.' While so speaking, his strength seemed to fail him, he fell on
his knees before the picture, and hid his face in his hands, his whole
body, as it were, convulsed.
"At last the conflict ended. He sobbed aloud, wailed and writhed like
one mortally wounded, then trying to rise he groaned out, 'My God! My
God! She is dead! Lord have pity upon her murderer!' and down he fell
again as in a swoon and pressed his sobbing lips against the cold
flags, and seemed to have utterly forgotten that any one stood by and
saw it all.
"And meanwhile there was the picture on the wall standing silent and
stately, and in its bloom of bliss and youth looking down upon the poor
sinner.
"'Domenico,' said the captain, gently drawing near, binding over him,
and laying a hand on his shoulder, 'neither of us can call her back,
and what we have to do is to get through our remnant of life. If you
will take my advice you will leave this country and cross the seas.
There is war going on in Africa, and the French need brave men. Your
crime--I forgive it, and there is One who weighs with other scales than
we do, who sees your heart and knows how you repent and suffer. If I
can help you in any way to get off, and fling your past behind you,
tell me. You shall find a brother in me.'
"Il Rosso had meanwhile risen, and was now standing with face averted
from the picture, gazing hopelessly into the night. At these last words
of his rival he vehemently shook his head. 'It is over,' he replied.
'You and I are quits. The rest is my affair. You and I shall never meet
again, that I swear to you by her shadow. But leave this house in which
I can no longer protect you. With the others it is an affair of your
money and your fire-arms, they hanker after them. If they hear that it
was in my power to give you up to them, and that I have not done so,
they will never forgive me, and there are some of them who still carry
about the tokens of that first tussle we had. Take care of yourself,
and good night to you. Yon have seen the last of me.'
"He bent down, picked up his gun, and with one last look at the picture
that in serene beauty shone out in the moonlight, glided from the room.
"The captain heard him go slowly down the stairs, step by step, and
when outside, open the iron gate and lock it again. Then the night was
once more still as death. He required some time to collect himself. He
felt, he said, as though he had been thrown down from a high tower and
had reached the ground without broken limbs indeed, but unable to move
from sheer giddiness. For awhile he lay half fainting on his couch, but
the streak of blood on the moonlit floor reminded him of his wound. He
roused himself to call Maddalena to bring him water and help him with
his bandage. But no one answered, call as he would. So at last he
tottered down the stairs and entered her room. There in a corner he saw
the poor creature lying huddled up, bound hand and foot, and with a gag
in her mouth. When he had unloosed her she fell half dead at his feet,
and only recovered when he had sprinkled her well with water, and
poured a little wine down her throat, and then crying and laughing, she
began to kiss his hands and his coat. But there was no getting a single
rational word from her; her fright when Il Rosso surprised her, and
then her agony when she heard her master return and go up the steps at
the top of which his enemy was awaiting him--these upset her poor mind
completely, and during the remainder of her life, the years followed
each other without her being conscious of any alternation except of
heat and cold, hunger and repletion.
"I took the captain to my house, and nursed him for a week until his
wound had pretty well healed. The sortie against the banditti had to
take place of course without him, but nothing more decisive was
effected than the procuring us peace for about a couple of years. The
only prisoner taken was a small boy whose father was one of the
bandits, and who himself had sometimes joined them. Nothing could be
made of him, so he was let go again. However one fact he did have to
tell us: on the morning after the night in which Il Rosso had that
reckoning with his enemy, a quarrel arose, and some of the party
accused Domenico of being a traitor. At last knives were drawn, and
before the cooler-headed could interfere, Domenico lay dead on the bare
rock, the knife in his breast, almost on the very spot where he had met
Erminia.
"As for Signor Gustavo he went to Naples, and thence sailed to Greece.
Later I heard from an artist that he had been drowned there, swimming
in the open sea. Possibly the wound in the leg was imperfectly healed,
or it may have left some weakness behind it, for once he could, as he
told me, have swum a match against that great Lord himself. But as to
what became of the picture of Erminia, which the artist well remembered
to have seen, I could learn nothing. I would gladly have given half my
substance if only I could have got possession of it.
"And now, _amico mio_, you know the history of Barbarossa and Erminia."
END OF BARBAROSSA.
THE
EMBROIDERESS OF TREVISO.
THE
EMBROIDERESS OF TREVISO.
It was our third day of rain, and the wood and garden walks around the
country house we were staying at, were turned into water-courses. On
the first and second day, the party of guests had made it a point of
honour to be as inexhaustible in good humour as the sky in clouds, and
within the large five-windowed saloon, with the oleanders blooming
before it, jests rained, laughter rippled, and witty repartees flashed
uninterruptedly as the drops pattered on the terrace outside. On this
third day, however, even the most genial in our ark became dimly
conscious that the deluge might prove more persistent than their good
spirits. True no one ventured to break the vow of enduring this
visitation in common,--made the day before yesterday,--by slinking off
to his room and sulking there on his own resources. But general
conversation, games, spontaneous play of intelligence and wit, had
somewhat failed since the professor who passed for a great
meteorologist, had confessed that instead of the change to fair which
he had promised, his glass actually showed a fresh fall of the mercury.
He had procured a second barometer, and was now seriously investigating
the causes of this discrepancy between two prophets. His wife meanwhile
was silently painting in body colours on grey paper her sixth
water-lily; at a second table, Frau Helena was setting up her men for a
seventh trial of skill at chess, while Frau Anna sat in a corner beside
her baby's cradle, fanning away the flies from it, while trying to
guess the conundrums and charades in the old almanac open on her knee.
The young doctor with whom Frau Helena was playing chess, saw in this
interval of silence an opening for doing justice to a rustic anecdote,
but suddenly broke off, remembering that he had told it the day before.
The husband of Frau Anna, mindful of the elder Shandy's sagacious
dictum, that all manner of mental distresses and perplexities are best
endured when the body is in a horizontal position, had stretched
himself out full length on an old leather sofa, and blew the smoke of
his damped cigar up in slow blue circles to the ceiling.
In the midst of these more or less successful efforts to adapt oneself
to one's fate, the off-hand cheery way in which a middle-aged man with
arms locked behind, continued slowly pacing up and down the room,
naturally arrested attention. Sometimes he would stand for an instant
beside the chess-table, or look over the shoulder of the painter, or
gently wave his hand in passing over the little brow of the sleeping
child, but all this he seemed to do unconsciously, as if absorbed in
some train of thought quite unconnected with the rainy Present, and
fixed either on a sunny Past, or sunny Future.
"What can you be about, dear Erminus?" enquired Frau Eugenie, who had
just returned from a housewifely excursion into the kitchen and
store-closet. "Here we all are pulling faces in keeping with this
horrible wet, and on yours there is actual fine weather, nay even a
kind of sunshine, as though you had secretly got betrothed, or had
written the last page of a book, or felt a toothache of four-and-twenty
hours subsiding. Come now, confess at once what this means, or we shall
suspect that it is nothing but most unholy exultation over us who do
not--like you--come to the country for the exact purpose of shutting
ourselves up in a room with books."
"I can satisfy you on that point, my good friend," answered, with a
laugh, the one thus addressed. "This time there is no malice in the
case, although I am enjoying myself; and your other hypotheses are,
thank God, equally groundless, nay, one of them actually impossible;
since I could hardly show a cheerful face if, after so long a freedom,
I had pledged myself to submit once more to petticoat government. No,
that which keeps up my equanimity, spite of our condition, is neither
more nor less than a pretty story on which I accidentally lighted
yesterday as I was looking over my old papers, and which now haunts me
in the same way a favourite melody will sometimes dwell upon the ear,
and constantly repeat itself."
"A story and a pretty one too!" said the artist. "Then you must
instantly let us have it as a matter of course. Have we not agreed to a
community of goods of all kinds so long as the rain lasts, and would
you keep a pretty story all to yourself? That would be a pretty story
indeed!"
"Perhaps, however, it might not please you," replied Erminus, standing
still beside her and twisting the long stalk of a water-lily into a
loop. "I at least care so little for many stories that have a great run
now-a-days, that I came long ago to the conclusion that mine was an
old-fashioned taste, and that I did not advance with the age. But in my
character of historian, I can console myself for this. We are not
entirely dependent upon the latest novelty. And perhaps the sources I
apply to for _history_, have spoiled my relish for stories as they are
now-a-days written and admired. The difference between the wood-cut
style of an old city-chronicle, and the photographic, stereoscopic,
stippled minuteness and finish of a modern novel, is altogether too
wide. In the one, all is raw material, blocks seldom sufficiently hewn,
joints gaping, subjects so shaken together that only an expert or
genuine amateur can pick out what answers his purpose. In our
artificial modern days on the contrary, all is so smooth and polished,
so conscious and premeditated, so reduced to mere form and style, that
the subject often utterly vanishes, the _what_ is forgotten in the
_how_, and owing to the very psychological finesse of the narrator we
come to be almost indifferent to the human beings on whom he practises.
I for my part still occupy so obsolete a stand-point, that in every
story the chief interest for me lies in the story itself. One man may
tell it better than another, but for that I hardly care. If an incident
that has really happened or been evoked by imagination makes an
impression on me in the rough and incomplete version of an old
chronicle, I would rather not have it tricked out with any gewgaws of
style, but trust to my own fancy to supply omissions. But you moderns,"
and here he threw a sarcastic glance at the chess-player and the
smoker, "you are never satisfied till you have bestowed all conceivable
ornamentation and decoration on any and every story whatsoever, even
though it should be most fair when naked as God made it."