THE LAST
There is hard winter overhead in the mountains when Italian Spring walks
the mountain-sides with flowers, and hangs deep valley-walls with flowers
half fruit; the sources of the rivers above are set about with fangs of
ice, while the full flat stream runs to a rose of sunlight. High among
the mists and snows were the fugitives of Brescia, and those who for love
or pity struggled to save them wandered through the blooming vales,
sometimes hearing that they had crossed the frontier into freedom, and as
often that they were scattered low in death and captivity. Austria here,
Switzerland yonder, and but one depth between to bound across and win
calm breathing. But mountain might call to mountain, peak shine to peak;
a girdle of steel drove the hunted men back to frosty heights and clouds,
the shifting bosom of snows and lightnings. They saw nothing of hands
stretched out to succour. They saw a sun that did not warm them, a home
of exile inaccessible, crags like an earth gone to skeleton in hungry
air; and below, the land of their birth, beautiful, and sown everywhere
for them with torture and captivity, or death, the sweetest. Fifteen men
numbered the escape from Brescia. They fought their way twice through
passes of the mountains, and might easily, in their first dash Northward
from the South-facing hills, have crossed to the Valtelline and Engadine,
but that in their insanity of anguish they meditated another blow, and
were readier to march into the plains with the tricolour than to follow
any course of flight. When the sun was no longer in their blood they
thought of reason and of rest; they voted the expedition to Switzerland,
that so they should get round to Rome, and descended from the crags of
the Tonale, under which they were drawn to an ambush, suffering three of
their party killed, and each man bloody with wounds. The mountain
befriended them, and gave them safety, as truth is given by a bitter
friend. Among icy crags and mists, where the touch of life grows dull as
the nail of a fore-finger, the features of the mountain were stamped on
them, and with hunger they lost pride, and with solitude laughter; with
endless fleeing they lost the aim of flight; some became desperate, a few
craven. Companionship was broken before they parted in three bodies,
commanded severally by Colonel Corte, Carlo Ammiani, and Barto Rizzo.
Corte reached the plains, masked by the devotion of Carlo's band, who
lured the soldiery to a point and drew a chase, while Corte passed the
line and pushed on for Switzerland. Carlo told off his cousin Angelo
Guidascarpi in the list of those following Corte; but when he fled up to
the snows again, he beheld Angelo spectral as the vapour on a jut of rock
awaiting him. Barto Rizzo had chosen his own way, none knew whither.
Carlo, Angelo, Marco Sana, and a sharply-wounded Brescian lad, conceived
the scheme of traversing the South Tyrol mountain-range toward Friuli,
whence Venice, the still-breathing republic, might possibly be gained.
They carried the boy in turn till his arms drooped long down, and when
they knew the soul was out of him they buried him in snow, and thought
him happy. It was then that Marco Sana took his death for an omen, and
decided them to turn their heads once more for Switzerland; telling them
that the boy, whom he last had carried, uttered "Rome" with the flying
breath. Angelo said that Sana would get to Rome; and Carlo, smiling on
Angelo, said they were to die twins though they had been born only
cousins. The language they had fallen upon was mystical, scarce
intelligible to other than themselves. On a clear morning, with the
Swiss peaks in sight, they were condemned by want of food to quit their
fastness for the valley.
Vittoria read the faces of the mornings as human creatures base tried to
gather the sum of their destinies off changing surfaces, fair not meaning
fair, nor black black, but either the mask upon the secret of God's
terrible will; and to learn it and submit, was the spiritual burden of
her motherhood, that the child leaping with her heart might live. Not to
hope blindly, in the exceeding anxiousness of her passionate love, nor
blindly to fear; not to bet her soul fly out among the twisting chances;
not to sap her great maternal duty by affecting false stoical serenity:--
to nurse her soul's strength, and suckle her womanly weakness with the
tsars which are poison--when repressed; to be at peace with a disastrous
world for the sake of the dependent life unborn; lay such pure efforts
she clung to God. Soft dreams of sacred nuptial tenderness, tragic
images, wild pity, were like phantoms encircling her, plucking at her as
she went, lest they were beneath her feet, and she kept them from lodging
between her breasts. The thought that her husband, though he should have
perished, was not a life lost if their child lived, sustained her
powerfully. It seemed to whisper at times almost as it were Carlo's
ghost breathing in her ears: "On thee!" On her the further duty devolved;
and she trod down hope, lest it should build her up and bring a shock to
surprise her fortitude; she put back alarm.
The mountains and the valleys scarce had names for her understanding;
they were but a scene where the will of her Maker was at work. Rarely
has a soul been so subjected to its own force. She certainly had the
image of God in her mind.
Yet when her ayes lingered on any mountain gorge, the fate of her husband
sang within it a strange chant, ending in a key that rang sounding
through all her being, and seemed to question heaven. This music framed
itself; it was still when she looked at the shrouded mountain-tops. A
shadow meting sunlight on the long green slopes aroused it, and it hummed
above the tumbling hasty foam, and penetrated hanging depths of foliage,
sad-hued rock-clefts, dark green ravines; it became convulsed where the
mountain threw forward in a rushing upward line against the sky, there to
be severed at the head by cloud. It was silent among the vines.
Most painfully did human voices affect her when she had this music;
speech was a scourge to her sense of hearing, and touch distressed her:
an edge of purple flame would then unfold the vision of things to her
eyes. She had lost memory; and if by hazard unawares one idea was
projected by some sudden tumult of her enslaved emotions beyond known and
visible circumstances, her intelligence darkened with am oppressive dread
like that of zealots of the guilt of impiety.
Thus destitute, her eye took innumerable pictures sharp as on a brass-
plate: torrents, goat-tracks winding up red earth, rocks veiled with
water, cottage and children, strings of villagers mounting to the church,
one woman kneeling before a wayside cross, her basket at her back, and
her child gazing idly by; perched hamlets, rolling pasture-fields, the
vast mountain lines. She asked all that she saw, "Does he live?" but
the life was out of everything, and these shows told of no life, neither
of joy nor of grief. She could only distantly connect the appearance of
the white-coated soldiery with the source of her trouble. They were no
more than figures on a screen that hid the flashing of the sword which
renders dumb. She had charity for one who was footsore and sat
cherishing his ankle by a village spring, and she fed him, and not until
he was far behind, thought that he might have seen the white face of her
husband.
Accurate tidings could not be obtained, though the whole course of the
vale was full of stories of escapes, conflicts, and captures. Merthyr
learnt positively that some fugitives had passed the cordon. He came
across Wilfrid and Count Karl, who both verified it in the most sanguine
manner. They knew, however, that Major Nagen continued in the mountains.
Riding by a bend of the road, Merthyr beheld a man playing among
children, with one hand and his head down apparently for concealment at
his approach. It proved to be Beppo. The man believed that Count
Ammiani had fled to Switzerland. Barto Rizzo, he said, was in the
mountains still, and Beppo invoked damnation on him, as the author of
those lying proclamations which had ruined Brescia. He had got out of
the city later than the others and was seeking to evade the outposts,
that he might join his master--"that is, my captain, for I have only one
master;" he corrected the slip of his tongue appealingly to Merthyr. His
left hand was being continually plucked at by the children while he
talked, and after Merthyr had dispersed them with a shower of small coin,
he showed the hand, saying, glad of eye, that it had taken a sword-cut
intended for Count Ammiani. Merthyr sent him back to mount the carriage,
enjoining him severely not to speak.
When Carlo and his companions descended from the mountains, they entered
a village where there was an inn recognized by Angelo as the abode of
Jacopo Cruchi. He there revived Carlo's animosity toward Weisspriess by
telling the tale of the passage to Meran, and his good reasons for
determining to keep guard over the Countess Alessandra all the way.
Subsequently Angelo went to Jacopo for food. This he procured, but he
was compelled to leave the man behind, and unpaid. It was dark when he
left the inn; he had some difficulty in evading a flock of whitecoats,
and his retreat from the village was still on the Austrian side.
Somewhat about midnight Merthyr reached the inn, heralding the carriage.
As Jacopo caught sight of Vittoria's face, he fell with his shoulders
straightened against the wall, and cried out loudly that he had betrayed
no one, and mentioned Major Weisspriess by name as having held the point
of his sword at him and extracted nothing better than a nave of the hand
and a lie; in other words, that the fugitives had retired to the Tyrolese
mountains, and that he had shammed ignorance of who they were. Merthyr
read at a glance that Jacopo had the large swallow and calm digestion for
bribes, and getting the fellow alone he laid money in view, out of which,
by doubling the sum to make Jacopo correct his first statement, and then
by threatening to withdraw it altogether, he gained knowledge of the fact
that Angelo Guidascarpi had recently visited the inn, and had started
from it South-eastward, and that Major Weisspriess was following on his
track. He wrote a line of strong entreaty to Weisspriess, lest that
officer should perchance relapse into anger at the taunts of prisoners
abhorring him with the hatred of Carlo and Angelo. At the same time he
gave Beppo a considerable supply of money, and then sent him off, armed
as far as possible to speed Count Ammiani safe across the borders, if a
fugitive; or if a prisoner, to ensure the best which could be hoped for
him from an adversary become generous. That evening Vittoria lay with
her head on Laura's lap, and the pearly little crescent of her ear in
moonlight by the window. So fair and young and still she looked that
Merthyr feared for her, and thought of sending her back to Countess
Ammiani.
Her first question with the lifting of her eyelids was if he had ceased
to trust to her courage.
"No," said Merthyr; "there are bounds to human strength; that is all."
She answered: "There would be to mine--if I had not more than human
strength beside me. I bow my head, dearest; it is that. I feel that I
cannot break down as long as I know what is passing. Does my husband
live?"
"Yes, he lives," said Merthyr; and she gave him her hand, and went to her
bed.
He learnt from Laura that when Beppo mounted the carriage in silence, a
fit of ungovernable wild trembling had come on her, broken at intervals
by a cry that something was concealed. Laura could give no advice; she
looked on Merthyr and Vittoria as two that had an incomprehensible
knowledge of the power of one another's natures, and the fiery creature
remained passive in perplexity of minds as soft an attendant as a
suffering woman could have:
Merthyr did not sleep, and in the morning Vittoria said to him, "You want
to be active, my friend. Go, and we will wait for you here. I know that
I am never deceived by you, and when I see you I know that the truth
speaks and bids me be worthy of it Go up there," she pointed with shut
eyes at the mountains; "leave me to pray for greater strength. I am
among Italians at this inn; and shall spend money here; the poor people
love it." She smiled a little, showing a glimpse of her old charitable
humour.
Merthyr counselled Laura that in case of evil tidings during his absence
she should reject her feminine ideas of expediency, and believe that she
was speaking to a brave soul firmly rooted in the wisdom of heaven.
"Tell her?--she will die," said Laura, shuddering.
"Get tears from her," Merthyr rejoined; "but hide nothing from her for a
single instant; keep her in daylight. For God's sake, keep her in
daylight."
"It's too sharp a task for me." She repeated that she was incapable of
it.
"Ah," said he, "look at your Italy, how she weeps! and she has cause.
She would die in her grief, if she had no faith for what is to come.
I dare say it is not, save in the hearts of one or two, a conscious
faith, but it's real divine strength; and Alessandra Ammiani has it.
Do as I bid you. I return in two days."
Without understanding him, Laura promised that she would do her utmost to
obey, and he left her muttering to herself as if she were schooling her
lips to speak reluctant words. He started for the mountains with
gladdened limbs, taking a guide, who gave his name as Lorenzo, and talked
of having been 'out' in the previous year. "I am a patriot, signore!
and not only in opposition to my beast of a wife, I assure you: a
downright patriot, I mean." Merthyr was tempted to discharge him at
first, but controlled his English antipathy to babblers, and discovered
him to be a serviceable fellow. Toward nightfall they heard shots up a
rock-strewn combe of the lower slopes; desultory shots indicating rifle-
firing at long range. Darkness made them seek shelter in a pine-hut;
starting from which at dawn, Lorenzo ran beating about like a dog over
the place where the shots had sounded on the foregoing day; he found a
stone spotted with blood. Not far from the stone lay a military glove
that bore brown-crimson finger-ends. They were striking off to a dairy-
but for fresh milk, when out of a crevice of rock overhung by shrubs a
man's voice called, and Merthyr climbing up from perch to perch, saw
Marco Sana lying at half length, shot through hand and leg. From him
Merthyr learnt that Carlo and Angelo had fled higher up; yesterday they
had been attacked by coming who tried to lure there to surrender by
coming forward at the head of his men and offering safety, and "other
gabble," said Marco. He offered a fair shot at his heart, too, while he
stood below a rock that Marco pointed at gloomily as a hope gone for
ever; but Carlo would not allow advantage to be taken of even the
treacherous simulation of chivalry, and only permitted firing after he
had returned to his men. "I was hit here and here," said Marco, touching
his wounds, as men can hardly avoid doing when speaking of the fresh
wound. Merthyr got him on his feet, put money in his pocket, and led him
off the big stones painfully. "They give no quarter," Marco assured him,
and reasoned that it must be so, for they had not taken him prisoner,
though they saw him fall, and ran by or in view of him in pursuit of
Carlo. By this Merthyr was convinced that Weisspriess meant well. He
left his guide in charge of Marco to help him into the Engadine. Greatly
to his astonishment, Lorenzo tossed the back of his hand at the offer of
money. "There shall be this difference between me and my wife," he
remarked; "and besides, gracious signore, serving my countrymen for
nothing, that's for love, and the Tedeschi can't punish me for it, so
it's one way of cheating them, the wolves! "Merthyr shook his hand and
said, "Instead of my servant, be my friend;" and Lorenzo made no feeble
mouth, but answered, "Signore, it is much to my honour," and so they went
different ways.
Left to himself Merthyr set step vigorously upward. Information from
herdsmen told him that he was an hour off the foot of one of the passes.
He begged them to tell any hunted men who might come within hail that a
friend ran seeking them. Farther up, while thinking of the fine nature
of that Lorenzo, and the many men like him who could not by the very
existence of nobility in their bosoms suffer their country to go through
another generation of servitude, his heart bounded immensely, for he
heard a shout and his name, and he beheld two figures on a rock near the
gorge where the mountain opened to its heights. But they were not Carlo
and Angelo. They were Wilfrid and Count Karl, the latter of whom had
discerned him through a telescope. They had good news to revive him,
however: good at least in the main. Nagen had captured Carlo and Angelo,
they believed; but they had left Weisspriess near on Nagen's detachment,
and they furnished sound military reasons to show why, if Weisspriess
favoured the escape, they should not be present. They supposed that they
were not half-a-mile from the scene in the pass where Nagen was being
forcibly deposed from his authority: Merthyr borrowed Count Karl's glass,
and went as they directed him round a bluff of the descending hills, that
faced the vale, much like a blown and beaten sea-cliff. Wilfrid and Karl
were so certain of Count Ammiani's safety, that their only thought was to
get under good cover before nightfall, and haply into good quarters,
where the three proper requirements of the soldier-meat, wine, and
tobacco--might be furnished to them. After an imperative caution that
they should not present themselves before the Countess Alessandra,
Merthyr sped quickly over the broken ground. How gaily the two young men
cheered to him as he hurried on! He met a sort of pedlar turning the
bluntfaced mountain-spur, and this man said, "Yes, sure enough, prisoners
had been taken," and he was not aware of harm having been done to them;
he fancied there was a quarrel between two captains. His plan being
always to avoid the military, he had slunk round and away from them as
fast as might be. An Austrian common soldier, a good-humoured German,
distressed by a fall that had hurt his knee-cap, sat within the gorge,
which was very wide at the mouth. Merthyr questioned him, and he, while
mending one of his gathered cigar-ends, pointed to a meadow near the
beaten track, some distance up the rocks. Whitecoats stood thick on it.
Merthyr lifted his telescope and perceived an eager air about the men,
though they stood ranged in careless order. He began to mount forthwith,
but amazed by a sudden ringing of shot, he stopped, asking himself in
horror whether it could be an execution. The shots and the noise
increased, until the confusion of a positive mellay reigned above. The
fall of the meadow swept to a bold crag right over the pathway, and with
a projection that seen sideways made a vulture's head and beak of it.
There rolled a corpse down the precipitous wave of green grass on to the
crag, where it lodged, face to the sky; sword dangled from swordknot at
one wrist, heels and arms were in the air, and the body caught midway
hung poised and motionless. The firing deadened. Then Merthyr drawing
nearer beneath the crag, saw one who had life in him slipping down toward
the body, and knew the man for Beppo. Beppo knocked his hands together
and groaned miserably, but flung himself astride the beak of the crag,
and took the body in his arms, sprang down with it, and lay stunned at
Merthyr's feet. Merthyr looked on the face of Carlo Ammiani.
EPILOGUE
No uncontested version of the tragedy of Count Ammiani's death passed
current in Milan during many years. With time it became disconnected
from passion, and took form in a plain narrative. He and Angelo were
captured by Major Nagen, and were, as the soldiers of the force
subsequently let it be known, roughly threatened with what he termed I
'Brescian short credit.' The appearance of Major Weisspriess and his
claim to the command created a violent discussion between the two
officers. For Nagen, by all military rules, could well contest it.
But Weisspriess had any body of the men of the army under his charm,
and seeing the ascendency he gained with them over an unpopular officer,
he dared the stroke for the charitable object he had in view. Having
established his command, in spite of Nagen's wrathful protests and
menaces, he spoke to the prisoners, telling Carlo that for his wife's
sake he should be spared, and Angelo that he must expect the fate of a
murderer. His address to them was deliberate, and quite courteous: he
expressed himself sorry that a gallant gentleman like Angelo Guidascarpi
should merit a bloody grave, but so it was. At the same time he
entreated Count Ammiani to rely on his determination to save him. Major
Nagen did not stand far removed from them. Carlo turned to him and
repeated the words of Weisspriess; nor could Angelo restrain his cousin's
vehement renunciation of hope and life in doing this. He accused
Weisspriess of a long evasion of a brave man's obligation to repair an
injury, charged him with cowardice, and requested Major Nagen, as a man
of honour, to drag his brother officer to the duel. Nagen then said that
Major Weisspriess was his superior, adding that his gallant brother
officer had only of late objected to vindicate his reputation with his
sword. Stung finally beyond the control of an irritable temper,
Weisspriess walked out of sight of the soldiery with Carlo, to whom, at a
special formal request from Weisspriess, Nagen handed his sword. Again
he begged Count Ammiani to abstain from fighting; yea, to strike him and
disable him, and fly, rather--than provoke the skill of his right hand.
Carlo demanded his cousin's freedom. It was denied to him, and Carlo
claimed his privilege. The witnesses of the duel were Jenna and another
young subaltern: both declared it fair according to the laws of honour,
when their stupefaction on beholding the proud swordsman of the army
stretched lifeless on the brown leaves of the past year left them with
power to speak. Thus did Carlo slay his old enemy who would have served
as his friend. A shout of rescue was heard before Carlo had yielded up
his weapon. Four haggard and desperate men, headed by Barto Rizzo, burst
from an ambush on the guard encircling Angelo. There, with one thought
of saving his doomed cousin and comrade, Carlo rushed, and not one
Italian survived the fight.
An unarmed spectator upon the meadow-borders, Beppo, had but obscure
glimpses of scenes shifting like a sky in advance of hurricane winds.
Merthyr delivered the burden of death to Vittoria. Her soul had crossed
the darkness of the river of death in that quiet agony preceding the
revelation of her Maker's will, and she drew her dead husband to her
bosom and kissed him on the eyes and the forehead, not as one who had
quite gone away from her, but as one who lay upon another shore whither
she would come. The manful friend, ever by her side, saved her by his
absolute trust in her fortitude to bear the burden of the great sorrow
undeceived, and to walk with it to its last resting-place on earth
unobstructed. Clear knowledge of her, the issue of reverent love,
enabled him to read her unequalled strength of nature, and to rely on her
fidelity to her highest mortal duty in a conflict with extreme despair.
She lived through it as her Italy had lived through the hours which
brought her face to face with her dearest in death; and she also on the
day, ten years later, when an Emperor and a King stood beneath the vault
of the grand Duomo, and the organ and a peal of voices rendered thanks to
heaven for liberty, could show the fruit of her devotion in the dark-eyed
boy, Carlo Merthyr Ammiani, standing between Merthyr and her, with old
blind Agostino's hands upon his head. And then once more, and but for
once, her voice was heard in Milan.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Confess no more than is necessary, but do everything you can
English antipathy to babblers
He is in the season of faults
Impossible for us women to comprehend love without folly in man
Never, never love a married woman
Speech was a scourge to her sense of hearing