ADVENTURES OF VITTORIA AND ANGELO
Nothing was distinguishable for the flying couple save the high-road
winding under rock and forest, and here and there a coursing water in the
depths of the ravines, that showed like a vein in black marble. They
walked swiftly, keeping brisk ears for sound of hoof or foot behind them.
Angelo promised her that she should rest after the morning light had
come; but she assured him that she could bear fatigue, and her firm
cheerfulness lent his heart vigour. At times they were hooded with the
darkness, which came on them as if, as benighted children fancy, their
faces were about to meet the shaggy breast of the forest. Rising up to
lighter air, they had sight of distant twinklings: it might be city, or
autumn weed, or fires of the woodmen, or beacon fires: they glimmered
like eyelets to the mystery of the vast unseen land. Innumerable brooks
went talking to the night: torrents in seasons of rain, childish voices
now, with endless involutions of a song of three notes and a sort of
unnoted clanging chorus, as if a little one sang and would sing on
through the thumping of a tambourine and bells. Vittoria had these
fancies: Angelo had none. He walked like a hunted man whose life is at
stake.
'If we reach a village soon we may get some conveyance,' he said.
'I would rather walk than drive,' said Vittoria; 'it keeps me from
thinking!
'There is the dawn, signorina!
Vittoria frightened him by taking a seat upon a bench of rock; while it
was still dark about them, she drew off Camilla's silken shoes and
stockings, and stood on bare feet.
'You fancied I was tired,' she said. 'No, I am thrifty; and I want to
save as much of my finery as I can. I can go very well on naked feet.
These shoes are no protection; they would be worn out in half-a-day, and
spoilt for decent wearing in another hour.'
The sight of fair feet upon hard earth troubled Angelo; he excused
himself for calling her out to endure hardship; but she said, 'I trust
you entirely.' She looked up at the first thin wave of colour while
walking.
'You do not know me,' said he.
'You are the Countess Ammiani's nephew.'
'I have, as I had the honour to tell you yesterday, the blood of your
lover in my veins.'
'Do not speak of him now, I pray,' said Vittoria; 'I want my strength!
'Signorina, the man we have left behind us is his enemy;--mine. I would
rather see you dead than alive in his hands. Do you fear death?'
'Sometimes; when I am half awake,' she confessed. 'I dislike thinking of
it.'
He asked her curiously: 'Have you never seen it?'
'Death?' said she, and changed a shudder to a smile; 'I died last night.'
Angelo smiled with her. 'I saw you die!
'It seems a hundred years ago.'
'Or half-a-dozen minutes. The heart counts everything'
'Was I very much liked by the people, Signor Angelo?'
'They love you.'
'I have done them no good.'
'Every possible good. And now, mine is the duty to protect you.'
'And yesterday we were strangers! Signor Angelo, you spoke of sbirri.
There is no rising in Bologna. Why are they after you? You look too
gentle to give them cause.'
'Do I look gentle? But what I carry is no burden. Who that saw you last
night would know you for Camilla? You will hear of my deeds, and judge.
We shall soon have men upon the road; you must be hidden. See, there:
there are our colours in the sky. Austria cannot wipe them out. Since I
was a boy I have always slept in a bed facing East, to keep that truth
before my eyes. Black and yellow drop to the earth: green, white, and
red mount to heaven. If more of my countrymen saw these meanings!--but
they are learning to. My tutor called them Germanisms. If so, I have
stolen a jewel from my enemy.'
Vittoria mentioned the Chief.
'Yes,' said Angelo; 'he has taught us to read God's handwriting. I
revere him. It's odd; I always fancy I hear his voice from a dungeon,
and seeing him looking at one light. He has a fault: he does not
comprehend the feelings of a nobleman. Do you think he has made a
convert of our Carlo in that? Never! High blood is ineradicable.'
'I am not of high blood,' said Vittoria.
'Countess Ammiani overlooks it. And besides, low blood may be elevated
without the intervention of a miracle. You have a noble heart,
signorina. It may be the will of God that you should perpetuate our
race. All of us save Carlo Ammiani seem to be falling.'
Vittoria bent her head, distressed by a broad beam of sunlight. The
country undulating to the plain lay under them, the great Alps above, and
much covert on all sides. They entered a forest pathway, following
chance for safety. The dark leafage and low green roofing tasted sweeter
to their senses than clear air and sky. Dark woods are home to
fugitives, and here there was soft footing, a surrounding gentleness,--
grass, and moss with dead leaves peacefully flat on it. The birds were
not timorous, and when a lizard or a snake slipped away from her feet, it
was amusing to Vittoria and did not hurt her tenderness to see that they
were feared. Threading on beneath the trees, they wound by a valley's
incline, where tumbled stones blocked the course of a green water, and
filled the lonely place with one onward voice. When the sun stood over
the valley they sat beneath a chestnut tree in a semicircle of orange
rock to eat the food which Angelo had procured at the inn. He poured out
wine for her in the hollow of a stone, deep as an egg-shell, whereat she
sipped, smiling at simple contrivances; but no smile crossed the face of
Angelo. He ate and drank to sustain his strength, as a weapon is
sharpened; and having done, he gathered up what was left, and lay at her
feet with his eyes fixed upon an old grey stone. She, too, sat brooding.
The endless babble and noise of the water had hardened the sense of its
being a life in that solitude. The floating of a hawk overhead scarce
had the character of an animated thing. Angelo turned round to look at
her, and looking upward as he lay, his sight was smitten by spots of
blood upon one of her torn white feet, that was but half-nestled in the
folds of her dress. Bending his head down, like a bird beaking at prey,
he kissed the foot passionately. Vittoria's eyelids ran up; a chord
seemed to snap within her ears: she stole the shamed foot into
concealment, and throbbed, but not fearfully, for Angelo's forehead was
on the earth. Clumps of grass, and sharp flint-dust stuck between his
fists, which were thrust out stiff on either side of him. She heard him
groan heavily. When he raised his face, it was white as madness. Her
womanly nature did not shrink from caressing it with a touch of soothing
hands.
She chanced to say, 'I am your sister.'
'No, by God! you are not my sister,' cried the young man. 'She died
without a stain of blood; a lily from head to foot, and went into the
vault so. Our mother will see that. She will kiss the girl in heaven
and see that.' He rose, crying louder: 'Are there echoes here?' But his
voice beat against the rocks undoubted.
She saw that a frenzy had seized him. He looked with eyes drained of
human objects; standing square, with stiff half-dropped arms, and an
intense melody of wretchedness in his voice.
'Rinaldo, Rinaldo!' he shouted: 'Clelia!--no answer from man or ghost.
She is dead. We two said to her die! and she died. Therefore she is
silent, for the dead have not a word. Oh! Milan, Milan! accursed
betraying city! I should have found my work in you if you had kept
faith. Now here am I, talking to the strangled throat of this place, and
can get no answer. Where am I? The world is hollow: the miserable
shell! They lied. Battle and slaughter they promised me, and enemies
like ripe maize for the reaping-hook. I would have had them in thick to
my hands. I would have washed my hands at night, and eaten and drunk and
slept, and sung again to work in the morning. They promised me a sword
and a sea to plunge it in, and our mother Italy to bless me. I would
have toiled: I would have done good in my life. I would have bathed my
soul in our colours. I would have had our flag about my body for a
winding-sheet, and the fighting angels of God to unroll me. Now here am
I, and my own pale mother trying at every turn to get in front of me.
Have her away! It's a ghost, I know. She will be touching the strength
out of me. She is not the mother I love and I serve. Go: cherish your
daughter, you dead woman!'
Angelo reeled. 'A spot of blood has sent me mad,' he said, and caught
for a darkness to cross his sight, and fell and lay flat.
Vittoria looked around her; her courage was needed in that long silence.
She adopted his language: 'Our mother Italy is waiting for us. We must
travel on, and not be weary. Angelo, my friend, lend me your help over
these stones.'
He rose quietly. She laid her elbow on his hand; thus supported she left
a place that seemed to shudder. All the heavy day they walked almost
silently; she not daring to probe his anguish with a question; and he
calm and vacant as the hour following thunder. But, of her safety by his
side she had no longer a doubt. She let him gather weeds and grasses,
and bind them across her feet, and perform friendly services, sure that
nothing earthly could cause such a mental tempest to recur. The
considerate observation which at all seasons belongs to true courage
told her that it was not madness afflicting Angelo.
Near nightfall they came upon a forester's hut, where they were welcomed
by an old man and a little girl, who gave them milk and black bread, and
straw to rest on. Angelo slept in the outer air. When Vittoria awoke
she had the fancy that she had taken one long dive downward in a well;
and on touching the bottom found her head above the surface. While her
surprise was wearing off, she beheld the woodman's little girl at her
feet holding up one end of her cloak, and peeping underneath, overcome by
amazement at the flashing richness of the dress of the heroine Camilla.
Entering into the state of her mind spontaneously, Vittoria sought to
induce the child to kiss her; but quite vainly. The child's reverence
for the dress allowed her only to be within reach of the hem of it, so as
to delight her curiosity. Vittoria smiled when, as she sat up, the child
fell back against the wall; and as she rose to her feet, the child
scampered from the room. 'My poor Camilla! you can charm somebody,
yet,' she said, limping; her visage like a broken water with the pain of
her feet. 'If the bell rings for Camilla now, what sort of an entry will
she make?' Vittoria treated her physical weakness and ailments with this
spirit of humour. 'They may say that Michiella has bewitched you, my
Camilla. I think your voice would sound as if it were dragging its feet
after it just as a stork flies. O my Camilla! don't I wish I could do
the same, and be ungraceful and at ease! A moan is married to every note
of your treble, my Camilla, like December and May. Keep me from
shrieking!'
The pangs shooting from her feet were scarce bearable, but the repression
of them helped her to meet Angelo with a freer mind than, after the
interval of separation, she would have had. The old woodman was cooking
a queer composition of flour and milk sprinkled with salt for them.
Angelo cut a stout cloth to encase each of her feet, and bound them in
it. He was more cheerful than she had ever seen him, and now first spoke
of their destination. His design was to conduct her near to Bormio,
there to engage a couple of men in her service who would accompany her
to Meran, by the Val di Sole, while he crossed the Stelvio alone, and
turning leftward in the Tyrolese valley, tried the passage into
Switzerland.
Bormio, if, when they quitted the forest, a conveyance could be obtained,
was no more than a short day's distance, according to the old woodman's
directions. Vittoria induced the little girl to sit upon her knee, and
sang to her, but greatly unspirited the charm of her dress. The sun was
rising as they bade adieu to the hut.
About mid-day they quitted the shelter of forest trees and stood on
broken ground, without a path to guide them. Vittoria did her best to
laugh at her mishaps in walking, and compared herself to a Capuchin
pilgrim; but she was unused to going bareheaded and shoeless, and though
she held on bravely, the strong beams of the sun and the stony ways
warped her strength. She had to check fancies drawn from Arabian tales,
concerning the help sometimes given by genii of the air and enchanted
birds, that were so incessant and vivid that she found herself sulking at
the loneliness and helplessness of the visible sky, and feared that her
brain was losing its hold of things. Angelo led her to a half-shaded
hollow, where they finished the remainder of yesterday's meat and wine.
She set her eyes upon a gold-green lizard by a stone and slept.
'The quantity of sleep I require is unmeasured,' she said, a minute
afterwards, according to her reckoning of time, and expected to see the
lizard still by the stone. Angelo was near her; the sky was full of
colours, and the earth of shadows.
'Another day gone!' she exclaimed in wonderment, thinking that the days
of human creatures had grown to be as rapid and (save toward the one end)
as meaningless as the gaspings of a fish on dry land. He told her that
he had explored the country as far as he had dared to stray from her. He
had seen no habitation along the heights. The vale was too distant for
strangers to reach it before nightfall. 'We can make a little way on,'
said Vittoria, and the trouble of walking began again. He entreated her
more than once to have no fear. 'What can I fear?' she asked. His voice
sank penitently: 'You can rely on me fully when there is anything to do
for you.'
'I am sure of that,' she replied, knowing his allusion to be to his
frenzy of yesterday. In truth, no woman could have had a gentler
companion.
On the topmost ridge of the heights, looking over an interminable gulf of
darkness they saw the lights of the vale. 'A bird might find his perch
there, but I think there is no chance for us,' said Vittoria. 'The
moment we move forward to them the lights will fly back. It is their way
of behaving.'
Angelo glanced round desperately. Farther on along the ridge his eye
caught sight of a low smouldering fire. When he reached it he had a
great disappointment. A fire in the darkness gives hopes that men will
be at hand. Here there was not any human society. The fire crouched on
its ashes. It was on a little circular eminence of mossed rock; black
sticks, and brushwood, and dry fern, and split logs, pitchy to the touch,
lay about; in the centre of them the fire coiled sullenly among its
ashes, with a long eye like a serpent's.
'Could you sleep here?' said Angelo.
'Anywhere!' Vittoria sighed with droll dolefulness.
'I can promise to keep you warm, signorina.'
'I will not ask for more till to-morrow, my friend.'
She laid herself down sideways, curling up her feet, with her cheek on
the palm of her hand.
Angelo knelt and coaxed the fire, whose appetite, like that which is said
to be ours, was fed by eating, for after the red jaws had taken half-a-
dozen sticks, it sang out for more, and sent up flame leaping after flame
and thick smoke. Vittoria watched the scene through a thin division of
her eyelids; the fire, the black abyss of country, the stars, and the
sentinel figure. She dozed on the edge of sleep, unable to yield herself
to it wholly. She believed that she was dreaming when by-and-by many
voices filled her ears. The fire was sounding like an angry sea, and the
voices were like the shore, more intelligible, but confused in shriller
clamour. She was awakened by Angelo, who knelt on one knee and took her
outlying hand; then she saw that men surrounded them, some of whom were
hurling the lighted logs about, some trampling down the outer rim of
flames. They looked devilish to a first awakening glance. He told her
that the men were friendly; they were good Italians. This had been the
beacon arranged for the night of the Fifteenth, when no run of signals
was seen from Milan; and yesterday afternoon it had been in mockery
partially consumed. 'We have aroused the country, signorina, and brought
these poor fellows out of their beds. They supposed that Milan must be
up and at work. I have explained everything to them.'
Vittoria had rather to receive their excuses than to proffer her own.
They were mostly youths dressed like the better class of peasantry. They
laughed at the incident, stating how glad they would have been to behold
the heights all across the lakes ablaze and promising action for the
morrow. One square-shouldered fellow raised her lightly from the ground.
She felt herself to be a creature for whom circumstance was busily
plotting, so that it was useless to exert her mind in thought. The long
procession sank down the darkness, leaving the low red fire to die out
behind them.
Next morning she awoke in a warm bed, possessed by odd images of flames
that stood up like crowing cocks, and cowered like hens above the brood.
She was in the house of one of their new friends, and she could hear
Angelo talking in the adjoining room. A conveyance was ready to take her
on to Bormio. A woman came to her to tell her this, appearing to have a
dull desire to get her gone. She was a draggled woman, with a face of
slothful anguish, like one of the inner spectres of a guilty man. She
said that her husband was willing to drive the lady to Bormio for a sum
that was to be paid at once into his wife's hand; and little enough it
was which poor persons could ever look for from your patriots and
disturbers who seduced orderly men from their labour, and made widows and
ruined households. This was a new Italian language to Vittoria, and when
the woman went on giving instances of households ruined by a husband's
vile infatuation about his country, she did not attempt to defend the
reckless lord, but dressed quickly that she might leave the house as soon
as she could. Her stock of money barely satisfied the woman's demand.
The woman seized it, and secreted it in her girdle. When they had passed
into the sitting-room, her husband, who was sitting conversing with
Angelo, stretched out his hand and knocked the girdle.
'That's our trick,' he said. 'I guessed so. Fund up, our little Maria
of the dirty fingers'-ends! We accept no money from true patriots. Grub
in other ground, my dear!'
The woman stretched her throat awry, and set up a howl like a dog; but
her claws came out when he seized her.
'Would you disgrace me, old fowl?'
'Lorenzo, may you rot like a pumpkin!'
The connubial reciprocities were sharp until the money lay on the table,
when the woman began whining so miserably that Vittoria's sensitive
nerves danced on her face, and at her authoritative interposition,
Lorenzo very reluctantly permitted his wife to take what he chose to
reckon a fair portion of the money, and also of his contempt. She seemed
to be licking the money up, she bent over it so greedily.
'Poor wretch!' he observed; 'she was born on a hired bed.'
Vittoria felt that the recollection of this woman would haunt her. It
was inconceivable to her that a handsome young man like Lorenzo should
ever have wedded the unsweet creature, who was like a crawling image of
decay; but he, as if to account for his taste, said that they had been of
a common age once, when he married her; now she had grown old. He
repeated that she 'was born on a hired bed.' They saw nothing further of
her.
Vittoria's desire was to get to Meran speedily, that she might see her
friends, and have tidings of her lover and the city. Those baffled
beacon-flames on the heights had become an irritating indicative vision:
she thirsted for the history. Lorenzo offered to conduct her over the
Tonale Pass into the Val di Sole, or up the Val Furva, by the pass of the
Corno dei Tre Signori, into the Val del Monte to Pejo, thence by Cles, or
by Bolzano, to Meran. But she required shoeing and refitting; and for
other reasons also, she determined to go on to Bormio. She supposed that
Angelo had little money, and that in a place such as Bormio sounded to
her ears she might possibly obtain the change for the great money-order
which the triumph of her singing had won from Antonio-Pericles. In spite
of Angelo's appeals to her to hurry on to the end of her journey without
tempting chance by a single pause, she resolved to go to Bormio. Lorenzo
privately assured her that there were bankers in Bormio. Many bankers,
he said, came there from Milan, and that fact she thought sufficient for
her purpose. The wanderers parted regretfully. A little chapel, on a
hillock off the road, shaded by chestnuts, was pointed out to Lorenzo
where to bring a letter for Angelo. Vittoria begged Angelo to wait till
he heard from her; and then, with mutual wavings of hands, she was driven
out of his sight.