"MY DEAREST LIFE AND ONLY LOVE: I run no risk of alarming

your extreme sensibility by writing this letter, since it is

not my intention that it shall come into your hands unless

and until, through some other channel, you shall be informed

of the event which it anticipates as possible. For our happy

union to be dissolved by death is indeed at every moment

possible; but at this time there is an uncommon degree of

danger that you may lose a life which I know you value more

than you do your own. I say I _know_ this, because I have

long been taught, from our perfect sympathy of affection, to

judge your heart by mine; and I can say solemnly and truly,

as far as I know myself, that I have no other value for my

own life than as a means of continuing a conjugal union with

the best of women--the wife of my soul, my first, my last,

my only love. I have told you in my current letters that the

plague is raging with considerable violence in this place. I

must tell you in this, if it should be your fortune to see

it, that a pressing duty of humanity requires me to expose

myself more than other considerations would justify in

endeavoring to save as many of our unhappy citizens as

possible from falling a sacrifice, and to embark them at

this cruel moment for their country. Though they are dying

very fast, it is possible that my exertions may be the means

of saving a number who otherwise would perish. If this

should be the case, and _I_ should fall instead of _them_,

my tender, generous friend must not upbraid my memory by

ever thinking I did too much. But she cannot help it: I know

she cannot. Yet, my dearest love, give me leave, since I

must anticipate your affliction, to lay before you some

reflections which would recur to you at _last_, but which

ought to strike your mind at _first_, to mingle with and

assuage your first emotions of grief. You cannot judge at

your distance of the risk I am taking, nor of the necessity

of taking it; and I am convinced that were you in my place

you would do more than I shall do, for your kind, intrepid

spirit has more courage than mine, and always had.

"Another consideration: Many of these persons have wives at

home as well as I, from whom they have been much longer

separated, under more affecting circumstances, having been

held in a merciless and desponding slavery: if their wives

love them as mine does me (a thing I cannot believe, but

have no right to deny), ask these lately disconsolate and

now joyous families whether I have done too much.

"Since I write this as if it were my last poor demonstration

of affection to my lovely friend, I have much to say; and it

is with difficulty that I can steal an hour from the fatigue

of business to devote to the grateful, painful task. But

tell me (you cannot tell me) where shall I begin? where

shall I end? how shall I put an eternal period to a

correspondence which has given me so much comfort? With what

expression of regret shall I take leave of my happiness?

with what words of tenderness, of gratitude, of counsel, of

consolation, shall I pay you for what I am robbing you

of--the husband whom you cherish, the friend who is all your

own?

"But I am giving vent to more weakness than I intended:

this, my dear, is a letter of _business_, not of love, and I

wonder I cannot enter upon it and keep to my subject.

Enclosed is my last will, made in conformity to the one I

left in the hands of Doctor Hopkins of Hartford, as you may

remember. The greater part of our property now lying in

Paris, I thought proper to renew this instrument, that you

might enter immediately upon the settlement of your affairs,

without waiting to send to America for the other paper.

"You will likewise find enclosed a schedule of our property

debts and demands, with explanations, as nearly just as I

can make it from memory in the absence of my papers. If the

French Republic is consolidated, and her funds rise to par,

or near it, as I believe they will do soon after the war,

the effects noted in this schedule may amount to a capital

of about one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, besides

paying my debts; which sum, vested in the American funds or

mortgages equally solid, would produce something more than

seven thousand dollars a year perpetual income.

"If the French should fund their debt anew at one-half its

nominal value (which is possible), so that the part of your

property now vested in those funds should diminish in

proportion, still, taking the whole together, it will not

make a difference of more than one-third, and the annual

income may still be near five thousand dollars. Events

unforeseen by me may, however, reduce it considerably lower.

But, whatever may be the value of what I leave, it is left

simply and wholly to you.

"Perhaps some of my relations may think it strange that I

have not mentioned them in this final disposition of my

effects, especially if they should prove to be as

considerable as I hope they may. But, my dearest love, I

will tell you my reasons, and I hope you will approve them;

for if I can excuse myself to _you_ in a point in which your

generous delicacy would be more likely to question the

propriety of my conduct than in most others, I am sure my

arguments will be convincing to those whose objections may

arise from their interest.

"_First._ In a view of justice and equity, whatever we

possess at this moment is a joint property between

ourselves, and ought to remain to the survivor. When you

gave me your blessed self you know I was destitute of every

other possession, as of every other enjoyment: I was rich

only in the fund of your affectionate economy and the sweet

consolation of your society. In our various struggles and

disappointments while trying to obtain a moderate competency

for the quiet enjoyment of what we used to call the

remainder of our lives, I have been rendered happy by

misfortunes, for the heaviest we have met with were turned

into blessings by the opportunities they gave me to discover

new virtues in you, who taught me how to bear them.

"I have often told you since the year 1791, the period of

our deepest difficulties (and even during that period), that

I had never been so easy and contented before; and I have

certainly been happier in you during the latter years of our

union than I was in former years; not that I have loved you

more ardently or more exclusively, for that was impossible,

but I have loved you _better_: my heart has been more full

of your excellence and less agitated with objects of

ambition, which used to devour me too much.

"I recall these things to your mind to convince you of my

full belief that the acquisition of the competency which we

seem at last to have secured is owing more to your energy

than my own: I mean the energy of your virtues, which gave

me consolation, and even happiness, under circumstances

wherein, if I had been alone or with a partner no better

than myself, I should have sunk.

"These fruits of our joint exertions you expected to enjoy

_with me_, else I know you would not have wished for them.

But if by my death you are to be deprived of the greater

part of the comfort you expected, it would surely be unjust

and cruel to deprive you of the remainder, or any portion of

it, by giving any part of this property to others. It is

yours in the truest sense in which property can be

considered; and I should have no right, if I were disposed,

to take it from you.

"_Secondly._ Of _my_ relations, I have some thirty or forty,

nephews and nieces and their children, the greater part of

whom I have never seen, and from whom I have had no news for

seven or eight years. Among them there may be some

necessitous ones who would be proper objects of particular

legacies, yet it would be impossible for me at this moment

to know which they are. It was my intention, and still is if

I live, to go to America, to make discrimination among them

according to their wants, and to give them such relief as

might be in my power, without waiting to do it by legacy.

Now, my lovely wife, if this task and the means of

performing it should devolve upon you, I need not recommend

it: our _joint_ liberality would have been less extensive

and less grateful to the receivers than _yours_ will be

alone.

"_Your own_ relations in the same degree of affinity are few

in number. I hope I need not tell you that in my affections

I know no difference between yours and mine. I include them

all in the same recommendation, without any other

distinction than what may arise from their wants and your

ability to do them good.

"If Colonel B---- or his wife (either of them being left by

the other) should be in a situation otherwise than

comfortable, I wish my generous friend to render it so as

far as may be in her power. We may have had more powerful

friends than they, but never any more sincere. _He_ has the

most frank and loyal spirit in the world, and she is

possessed of many amiable and almost heroic virtues.

"Mary----, poor girl!--you know her worth, her virtues, and

her talents, and I am sure you will not fail to keep

yourself informed of her circumstances. She has friends, or

at least _had_ them, more able than you will be to yield her

assistance in case of need. But they may forsake her for

reasons which to your enlightened and benevolent mind would

rather be an additional inducement to contribute to her

happiness. Excuse me, my dearest life, for my being so

particular on a subject which, considering to whom it is

addressed, may appear superfluous; but I do it rather to

show that I agree with you in these sentiments than to

pretend that they originate on my part. With this view I

must pursue them a little further. One of the principal

gratifications in which I intended, and still intend to

indulge myself if I should live to enjoy with you the means

of doing it, is to succor the unfortunate of every

description as far as possible--to encourage merit where I

find it, and try to create it where it does not exist. This

has long been a favorite project with me; but, having always

been destitute of the means of carrying it into effect to

any considerable degree, I have not conversed with you upon

it as much as I wish I had. Though I can say nothing that

will be new to you on the pleasure of employing one's

attention and resources in this way, yet some useful hints

might be given on the means of multiplying good actions from

small resources; for I would not confine my pleasure to the

simple duties of _charity_ in the beggar's sense of the

word.

"_First._ Much may be done by advising with poor persons,

contriving for them, and pointing out the objects on which

they can employ their own industry.

"_Secondly._ Many persons and families in a crisis of

difficulty might be extricated and set up in the world by

little loans of money, for which they might give good

security and refund within a year; and the same fund might

then go to relieve a second and a third; and thus a dozen

families might be set on the independent footing of their

own industry in the course of a dozen years by the help of

fifty dollars, and the owner lose nothing but the interest.

Some judgment would be necessary in these operations, as

well as care and attention in finding out the proper

objects. How many of these are to be found in prisons,

thrown in and confined for years, for small debts which

their industry and their liberty would enable them to

discharge in a short time! Imprisonment for debt still

exists as a stain upon our country, as most others. France,

indeed, has set us the example of abolishing it, but I am

apprehensive she will relapse from this, as I see she is

inclined to do from many other good things which she began

in her magnanimous struggle for the renovation of society.

"_Thirdly._ With your benevolence, your character and

connections, you may put in motion a much greater fund of

charity than you will yourself possess. It is by searching

out the objects of distress or misfortune, and recommending

them to their wealthy neighbors in such a manner as to

excite their attention. I have often remarked to you (I

forget whether you agree with me in it or not) that there is

more goodness at the bottom of the human heart than the

world will generally allow. Men are as often hindered from

doing a generous thing by an _indolence_ either of thought

or action as by a selfish principle. If they knew what the

action was, when and where it was to be done and how to do

it, their obstacles would be overcome. In this manner one

may bring the resources of others into contribution, and

with such a grace as to obtain the thanks both of the givers

and receivers.

"_Fourthly._ The _example_ of one beneficent person, like

yourself, in a neighborhood or a town would go a great way.

It would doubtless be imitated by others, extend far, and

benefit thousands whom you might never hear of.

"I certainly hope to escape from this place and return to

your beloved arms. No man has stronger inducements to wish

to live than I have. I have no quarrel with the world: it

has used me as well as could be expected. I have valuable

friends in every country where I have put my foot, not

excepting this abominable sink of wickedness, pestilence and

folly--the city of Algiers. I have a pretty extensive and

dear-bought knowledge of mankind; a most valuable collection

of books; a pure and undivided taste for domestic

tranquillity, the social intercourse of friends, study, and

the exercise of charity. I have a moderate but sufficient

income, perfect health, an unimpaired constitution, and, to

give the relish to all enjoyments and smooth away the

asperities that might arise from unforeseen calamities, I

have the wife that my youth chose and my advancing age has

cherished--the pattern of excellence, the example of every

virtue--from whom all my joys have risen, in whom all my

hopes are centred.

"I will use every precaution for my safety, as well for your

sake as mine. But if you should see me no more, my dearest

friend, you will not forget I loved you. As you have valued

my love, and as you believe this letter is written with an

intention to promote your happiness at a time when it will

be for ever out of my power to contribute to it in any other

way, I beg you will kindly receive the last advice I can

give you, with which I am going to close our endearing

intercourse.... Submitting with patience to a destiny that

is unavoidable, let your tenderness for me soon cease to

agitate that lovely bosom: banish it to the house of

darkness and dust, with the object that can no longer be

benefited by it, and transfer your affections to some worthy

person who shall supply my place in the relation I have

borne to you. It is for the living, not the dead, to be

rendered happy by the sweetness of your temper, the purity

of your heart, your exalted sentiments, your cultivated

spirit, your undivided love. Happy man of your choice should

he know and prize the treasure of such a wife! Oh, treat her

tenderly, my dear sir: she is used to nothing but kindness,

unbounded love and confidence. She is all that any

reasonable man can desire. She is more than I have merited,

or perhaps than you can merit. My resigning her to your

charge, though but the result of uncontrollable necessity,

is done with a degree of cheerfulness--a cheerfulness

inspired by the hope that her happiness will be the object

of your care and the long-continued fruit of your affection.

"Farewell, my wife; and though I am not used to subscribe my

letters addressed to you, your familiarity with my writing

having always rendered it unnecessary, yet it seems proper

that the last characters which this hand shall trace for

your perusal should compose the name of your most faithful,

most affectionate and most grateful husband,

"JOEL BARLOW."

After her husband's decease Mrs. Barlow returned to America, and

continued to reside at Kalorama until her death in 1818.

CHARLES BURR TODD.

FOOTNOTES:

[C] The name is variously written Zarrow, Zarniwica and Zarrowitch.

TERESA DI FAENZA.

I.

If he should wed a woman like a flower,

Fresh as the dew and royal as a rose,

Veined with spring-fire, mesmeric in repose,

His world-vext brain to lull with mystic power,

Great-souled to track his flight through heavens starred,

Upborne by wings of trust and love, yet meek

As one who has no self-set goal to seek,

His inspiration and his best reward,

At once his Art's deep secret and clear crown,

His every-day made dream, his dream fulfilled,--

If such a wife he wooed to be his own,

God knows 'twere well. Even I no less had willed.

Yet, O my heart! wouldst thou for his dear sake

Frankly rejoice, or with self-pity break?

II.

What could I bring in dower? A restless heart,

As eager, ardent, hungry, as his own,

Face burned pale olive by our Southern sun,

A mind long used to musings grave apart.

Gold, noble name or fame I ne'er regret,

Albeit all are lacking; but the glow

Of spring-like beauty, but the overflow

Of simple, youthful joy. And yet--and yet--

A proud voice whispers: Vain may be his quest,

What fruit soe'er he pluck, what laurels green,

Through all the world, for just this prize unseen

I in my deep heart harbor quite unguessed:

I alone know what full hands I should bring

Were I to lay my wealth before my king.

EMMA LAZARUS.

PIPISTRELLO.

I am only Pipistrello. Nothing but that--nothing more than any one of

the round brown pebbles that the wind sets rolling down the dry bed of

the Tiber in summer.

I am Pipistrello, the mime, the fool, the posturer, the juggler, the

spangled saltinbanco, the people's plaything, that runs and leaps and

turns and twists, and laughs at himself and is laughed at by all, and

lives by his limbs like his brother the dancing bear and his cousin the

monkey in a red coat and a feathered cap.

I am Pipistrello, five-and-twenty years old, and strong as you see, and

good to look at, the women have said. I can leap and run against any

man, and I can break a bar of iron against my knee, and I can keep up

with the fastest horse that flies, and I can root up a young oak without

too much effort. I am strong enough, and my life is at the full, and a

day's sickness I never have known, and my mother is living. Yet I lie

under sentence of death, and to-morrow I die on the scaffold: if nothing

come between this and the break of dawn, I am a dead man with

to-morrow's sun.

And nothing will come: why should it?

I am only Pipistrello. The people have loved me, indeed, but that is no

reason why the law should spare me. Nor would I wish that it should--not

I. They come and stand and stare at me through the grating, men and

women and maidens and babies. A few of them cry a little, and one little

mite of a child thrusts at me with a little brown hand the half of a red

pomegranate. But for the most part they laugh. Why, of course they do.

The street-children always laugh to see a big black steer with his bold

horned head go down under the mace of the butcher: the street always

finds that droll. The strength of the bull could scatter the crowd as

the north wind scatters the dust, if he were free; but he is not, and

his strength serves him nothing: the hammer fells him and the crowd

laughs.

The people of this old Orte know me so well. Right and left, up and

down, through the country I have gone all the years of my life. Wherever

there was fair or festa, there was I, Pipistrello, in the midst. It is

not a bad life, believe me. No life is bad that has the sun and the rain

upon it, and the free will of the feet and the feel of the wind, and

nothing between it and heaven.

My father had led the same kind of life before me: he died at Genoa, his

spine broken in two, like a snapped bough, by a fall from the trapeze

before the eyes of all the citizens. I was a big baby in that time,

thrown from hand to hand by the men in their spectacles as they would

have thrown a ball or an orange.

My mother was a young and gentle creature, full of tenderness for her

own people, with strangers shy and afraid. She was the daughter of a

poor weaver. My father had found and wooed her in Etruria, and although

he had never taken the trouble to espouse her before the mayor, yet he

had loved her and had always treated her with great respect. She was a

woman very pure and very honest. Alas, the poor soul! To-day her hair is

white as the snow, and they tell me she is mad. So much the better for

her if she know nothing; but I fear the mad and the imbecile know all

and see all, crouching in their hapless gloom.

When my father died thus at Genoa my mother took a hatred for that

manner of living, and she broke off all ties with the athletes who had

been his comrades, and, taking the little money that was hers in a

little leather bag, she fled away with me to the old town of Orte, where

my grandmother still lived, the widow of the weaver. The troop wished to

keep me with them, for, although I was but five years old, I was supple

and light and very fearless, and never afraid of being thrown up in the

air, a living ball, in their games and sports.

Orte was just the same then as it is now. These very aged towns I think

never change: if you try to alter them you must break them up and

destroy them utterly. Orte has known the Etruscans: she can very well do

without modern folk. At Orte my mother and grandmother dwelt together in

one room that looked over the river--a large vaulted chamber with grated

casements, with thick stone walls--a chamber in what had once been a

palace. My mother was then still very young and beautiful--of a pale,

serious beauty, full of sadness. She smiled on me sometimes, but never

once did I hear her laugh. She had never laughed since that awful day

when, in the full sunlight, in the midst of the people, in the sight of

the sea, in Genoa, a man had dropped from air to earth like an eagle

fallen stone dead from the skies, struck by lightning.

My mother had many suitors. She was beautiful of face, as I say, like

one of the Madonnas of our old painters: she was industrious, and all

her little world knew very well that she would one day inherit the strip

of field and the red cow that my grandmother owned outside the gates of

Orte. All these pretty suitors of course made a great fuss with me,

caressed me often, and brought me tomatoes, green figs, crickets in wire

cages, fried fish and playthings. But my mother looked at none of them.

When a woman's eyes are always looking downward on a grave, how should

their tear-laden lids be lifted to see a fresh lover? She repulsed them

all, always. She lived, lonely and sad, as well as she could in our

great garret: we ate little, our bed was hard, and she and my grandam

labored hard to get a pittance. But when a rich bailiff sought her in

honest marriage, she kissed me and wept over me, and said again and

again, "No, no! To your father I will be faithful, let what will chance

to us."

The bailiff soon consoled himself: he married a big country wench who

had a fine rope of pearls and gold bracelets, and I continued to grow

up by my mother's side where the Tiber is gilded with the gold of the

dawns and rolls its heavy waves under the weeping boughs of its willows.

My boyish strength increased in the heat of the summers, and I grew like

a young brown stalk of the tall maize. I herded the cow, cut the rushes

and hewed wood, and I was always happy, even when my mother would send

me to the old priest to learn things out of books. She wished to make a

monk of me, but the mere idea made me shudder with fear. I loved to

climb the oaks, to swing in the maples, to scale the roofs and the

towers and the masts of the vessels. What had I to do with a monkish

frock and a whitewashed cell? _Ouf!_ I put my fingers in my ears and ran

away whenever my poor mother talked of the cloister.

My limbs were always dancing, and my blood was always leaping, laughing,

boiling merrily in my veins. A priest? What an idea! I had never wholly

forgotten the glad, bright days of childhood when my father had thrown

me about in the air like a ball: I had never wholly forgotten the shouts

of the people, the sight of the human sea of faces, the loud, frank

laugh of the populace, the sparkle of the spangled habit, the

intoxication of the applause of a crowd. I had only been five years old

then, yet I remembered, and sometimes in the night I cried bitterly for

those dead days. I had only been a little brown thing, with curls as

black as the raven's wing, and they had thrown me from one to the other

lightly, laughingly, like a ripe apple, like a smooth peach. But I had

known what it was to get drunk on the "hurrahs" of the multitude, and I

did not forget them as I grew up here a youth in old Orte.

The son of an athlete can never rest quiet at home and at school like

the children of cobblers and coppersmiths and vine-dressers. All my life

was beating in me, tumbling, palpitating, bubbling, panting in

me--moving incessantly, like the wings of a swallow when the hour draws

near for its flight and the thirst for the south rises in it. With all

my force I adored my pale, lovely, Madonna-like mother, but all the

same, as I trotted toward the priest with a satchel on my back, I used

to think, Would it be very wicked to throw the books into the river and

run away to the fields? And, in truth, I used to run away very often,

scampering over the country around Orte like a mountain-hare, climbing

the belfries of the churches, pulling off their weathercocks or setting

their bells a-ringing--doing a thousand and one mischievous antics; but

I always returned at nightfall to my mother's side. It seemed to me it

would be cruel and cowardly to leave her, for she had but me in the

world.

"You promise to be sensible and quiet, Pippo?" the poor soul always

murmured. And I used to say "Yes," and mean it. But can a bird promise

not to fly when it feels in its instincts the coming of spring? Can a

young colt promise not to fling out his limbs when he feels the yielding

turf beneath his hoofs?

I never wished to be disobedient, but, somehow, ten minutes after I was

out of her sight I was high above on some tower or belfry, with the

martens and the pigeons circling about my curly head. I was so happy on

high there, looking down on all the old town misty with dust, the men

and women like ants on an antheap, the historic river like a mere

ribbon, yellow and twisted, the palaces and the tombs all hidden under

the same gray veil of summer dust! I was so happy there!--and they spoke

of making me into a monk, or, if I would not hear of that, of turning me

into a clerk in a notary's office!

A monk? a clerk? when all the trees cried out to me to climb and all the

birds called to me to fly! I used to cry about it with hot tears that

stung my face like lashes, lying with my head hidden on my arms in the

grass by the old Tiber water. For I was not twelve years old, and to be

shut up in Orte always, growing gray and wrinkled as the notary had done

over the wicked, crabbed, evil-looking skins that set the neighbors at

war! The thought broke my heart. Nevertheless, I loved my mother, and I

mended my quills, and tried to write my best, and said to the boys of

the town, "I cannot bend iron or leap or race any more. I am going to

write for my bread in the notary's office a year hence, for my mother

wishes it, and so it must be."

And I did my best not to look up to the jackdaws circling round the

towers or the old river running away to Rome. For all the waters cried

to me to leap, and all the birds to fly. And you cannot tell, unless you

have been born to do it as I was, how good it is to climb and climb and

climb, and see the green earth grow pale beneath you, and the people

dwindle till they are small as dust, and the houses fade till they seem

like heaps of sand. The air gets so clear around you, and the great

black wings flap close against your face; and you sit astride where the

bells are, with some quaint stone face beside you that was carved on the

pinnacle here a thousand years and more ago, and has hardly been seen of

man ever since; and the white clouds are so near you that you seem to

bathe in them; and the winds toss the trees far below, and sweep by you

as they go down to torment the trees and the sea, the men that work, and

the roofs that cover them, and the sails of their ships in the ocean.

Men are so far from you, and heaven seems so near! The fields and the

plains are lost in the vapors that divide you from them, and all their

noise of living multitudes comes very faintly to your ear, and sweetly

like the low murmuring of bees in the white blossoms of an acacia in the

month of May.

But you do not understand, you poor toilers in cities who pace the

street and watch the faces of the rich.

I was to be a notary's clerk--I, called Pipistrello (the bat) because I

was always whirling and wheeling in air. I was to be a clerk, so my

mother and grandmother decided for me, with the old notary himself who

lived at the corner, and made his daily bread by carrying fire and sword

where he could through the affairs of his neighbors. He was an old

rascal, but my mother did not know that: he promised to be a safe and

trustworthy guardian of my youth, and she believed he had power to keep

me safe from all dangers of destiny. She wanted to be sure that I should

never run the risks of my father's career: she wanted to see me always

before the plate of herb soup on her table. Poor mother!

One day in Orte chance gave me another fate than this of her desires.

One fine sunrise on the morning of Palm Sunday I heard the sharp sound

of a screeching fife, the metallic clash of cymbals, the shouts of boys,

the rattle of a little drum. It was the rataplan beating before a troop

of wrestlers and jugglers who were traversing the Marche and Reggio

Emilia. The troop stationed themselves in a little square burnt by the

sun and surrounded by old crumbling houses: I ran with the rest of the

lads of Orte to see them. Orte was in holiday guise: aged, wrinkled,

deserted, forgotten by the world as she is, she made herself gay that

day with palms and lilies and lilac and the branches of willow; and her

people, honest, joyous, clad in their best, who filled the streets and

the churches and wine-houses, after mass flocked with one accord and

pressure around the play-place of the strollers.

It was in the month of April: outside the walls and on the banks of

Tiber, still swollen by the floods of winter, one could see the gold of

millions of daffodils and the bright crimson and yellow of tulips in the

green corn. The scent of flowers and herbs came into the town and filled

its dusky and narrow ways; the boatmen had green branches fastened to

their masts; in the stillness of evening one heard the song of crickets,

and even a mosquito would come and blow his shrill little trumpet, and

one was willing to say to him "Welcome!" because on his little horn he

blew the good news, "Summer is here!" Ah, those bright summers of my

youth! I am old now--ay, old, though I have lived through only

twenty-five years.

This afternoon, on Palm Sunday, I ran to see the athletes as a moth

flies to the candle: in Italy all the world loves the saltinbanco, be he

dumb or speaking, in wood or in flesh, and all Orte hastened, as I

hastened, under the sunny skies of Easter. I saw, I trembled, I laughed:

I sobbed with ecstasy. It was so many years that I had not seen my

brothers! Were they not my brothers all?

This day of Palm, when our Orte, so brown and so gray, was all full of

foliage and blossom like an old pitcher full of orange-flowers for a

bridal, it was a somewhat brilliant troop of gymnasts which came to

amuse the town. The troop was composed of an old man and his five sons,

handsome youths, and very strong, of course. They climbed on each

other's shoulders, building up a living pyramid; they bent and broke

bars of iron; they severed a sheep with one blow of a sword; in a word,

they did what my father had done before them. As for me, I watched them

stupefied, fascinated, dazzled, drunk with delight, and almost crazy

with a torrent of memories that seemed to rain on me like lava as I

watched each exploit, as I heard each shout of the applauding

multitudes.

It is a terrible thing, a horrible thing, those inherited memories that

are born in you with the blood of others. I looked at them, I say,

intoxicated with joy, mad with recollection and with longing;--and my

mother destined me to a notary's desk, and wished me to be shut there

all my life, pen in hand, sowing the seeds of all the hatreds, of all

the crimes, of all the sorrows of mankind, lighting up the flames of

rage and of greed in human souls for an acre of ground, for a roll of

gold! She wished to make me a notary's clerk! I gazed at these men who

seemed to me so happy--these slender, agile, vigorous creatures in their

skins that shone like the skins of green snakes, in their broidered,

glittering, spangled vests, in their little velvet caps with the white

plume in each. "Take me! take me!" I shrieked to them; and the old king

of the troop looked hard at me, and when their games were finished

crossed the cord that marked their arena and threw his strong arms about

me, and cried, "Body of Christ! you are little Pippo!" For he had been

my father's mate. To be brief, when the little band left Orte I went

with them.

It was wickedly done, for my poor mother slept, knowing nothing, when in

the dusk before daybreak I slipped through the bars of the casement and

noiselessly dropped on to a raft in the river below, and thence joined

my new friends. It was wickedly done; but I could not help it. Fate was

stronger than I.

The old man did not disturb himself as to whether what he had encouraged

me to do was ill or well. He foresaw in me an athlete who would do him

honor and make the ducats ring merrier in his purse. Besides, I had cost

him nothing.

From this time life indeed began for me. I wept often; I felt the barb

of a real remorse; when I passed a crucifix on the road I trembled with

true terror and penitence; but I fled away, always. I drew my girdle

closer about my spangled coat, and, despite all my remorse, I was happy.

When I was very, very far away I wrote to my mother, and she understood,

poor soul! that there were no means of forcing me back to her. Children

are egotists: childhood has little feeling. When the child suffers he

thirsts for his mother, but when he is happy, alas! he thinks little and

rarely about her.

I was very happy, full of force and of success: the men kept their word

and taught me all their tricks, all their exploits. Soon I surpassed my

teachers in address and in temerity. I soon became the glory of their

band. In the summertime we wandered over the vast Lombard plains and the

low Tuscan mountains; in winter we displayed our prowess in Rome, in

Naples, in Palermo; we loitered wherever the sun was warm or the people

liked to laugh.

From time to time I thought of my mother: I sent her money. I shivered a

little when I saw a Madonna, for all Madonnas have the smile that our

mother has for our infancy. I thought of her, but I never went home. I

was Pipistrello the champion-wrestler. I was a young Hercules, with a

spangled tunic in lieu of a lion-skin. I was a thousand years, ten

thousand leagues, away from the child of Orte. God is just. It is just

that I die here, for in my happy years I forgot my mother. I lived in

the sunlight--before the crowds, the nervous crowds of Italy--singing,

shouting, leaping, triumphing; and I forgot my mother alone in the old

chamber above the Tiber--quite alone, for my grandam was dead. That I

have slain what I have slain--that is nothing. I would do the same thing

again had I to live my life again. Yes, without pause or mercy would I

do it. But my mother--she has lived alone, and she is mad. That is my

crime.

I was a tall, strong youth, full of courage and handsome to the eye of

women: I led a life noisy and joyous, and for ever in movement. I was

what my father had been before me. So they all said. Only I liked to

finger a book, and my father never had looked inside one, and out of

remembrance of the belief of my mother I uncovered my head as I passed a

church or saw a shrine, and to do this had not been in my father's

habits. In these years I made a great deal of money--a great deal, at

least, for a stroller--but it went as fast as it came. I was never a

vicious man, nor a great gambler or drinker, yet my plump pieces soon

took wing from my pocket, for I was very gay and I liked to play a

lover's part. My life was a good life, that I know: as for the life of

the rich and of the noble, I cannot tell what it is like, but I think it

is of a surety more gloomy and mournful than mine. In Italy one wants so

little. The air and the light, and a little red wine, and the warmth of

the wind, and a handful of maize or of grapes, and an old guitar, and a

niche to sleep in near a fountain that murmurs and sings to the mosses

and marbles,--these are enough, these are happiness in Italy. And it is

not difficult to have thus much, or was not so in those days. I was

never very poor, but whenever money jingled in my purse I treated all

the troop and half the town, and we laughed loud till daybreak.

I was never aught save Pipistrello--Pipistrello the wrestler, who jumped

and leaped, and lifted an ox from the ground as easily as other men lift

a child. No doubt to the wise it seems a fool's life, to the holy a life

impure. But I had been born for it: no other was possible to me; and

when money rained upon me, if I could ease an aching heart, or make a

sick lad the stouter for a hearty meal, or make a tiny child the gladder

for a lapful of copper coins, or give a poor stray dog a friend and a

bed of straw, or a belabored mule a helpful push to the wheels of his

cart,--well, that was all the good a mountebank could look to do in this

world, and one could go to sleep easy upon it.

When the old man died who had been my father's comrade the troop fell to

pieces, quarrelling over his leavings. The five brothers came to a

common issue of stabbing. In Italy one takes to the knife as naturally

as a child to the breast. Tired of their disputes, I left them

squabbling and struck off by myself, and got a little band together,

quite of youths, and with them made merry all across the country from

sea to sea. We were at that time in the south. I was very popular with

the people. When my games were done I could sing to the mandoline, and

improvise, and make them laugh and weep: some graver men who heard me

said I might have been a great actor or a great singer. Perhaps: I never

was anything but Pipistrello the stroller. I wanted the fresh air and

the wandering and the sports of my strength too much ever to have been

shut in a roofed theatre, ever to have been cooped up where lamps were

burning.

One day, when we were in dusty, brown Calabria, parching just then under

June suns, with heavy dust on its aloe-hedges and its maize-fields, a

sudden remorse smote me: I thought of my mother, all alone in Orte. I

had thought of her scores of times, but I had felt ashamed to go and see

her--I who had left her so basely. This day my remorse was greater than

my shame. I was master of my little troop. I said to them, "It is hot

here: we will go up Rome-way, along the Tiber;" and we did so.

I have never been out of my own land: I fancy it must be so dark there,

the other side of the mountains. I know the by-roads and the hill-paths

of Italy as a citizen knows the streets and lanes of his own _contrada_.

We worked and played our way now up through the Basilicata and Campania

and Latium, till at last we were right near Orte--dull, old,

gray-colored Orte, crumbling away on the banks of Tiber. Then my heart

beat and my knees shook, and I thought, If she is dead?

I left my comrades drinking and resting at a wine-shop just outside the

town, and went all alone to look for her. I found the house--the gloomy

barred window hanging over the water, the dark stone walls frowning down

on the gloomy street. There was a woman, quite old, with white hair, who

was getting up water at the street-fountain that I had gone to a

thousand times in my childhood. I looked at her. I did not know her: I

only saw a woman feeble and old. But she, with the brass _secchia_

filled, turned round and saw me, and dropped the brazen pitcher on the

ground, and fell at my feet with a bitter cry. Then I knew her.

When in the light of the hot, strong sun I saw how in those ten years my

mother had grown old--old, bent, broken, white-haired, in those ten

years that had been all glow and glitter, and pleasure and pastime, and

movement and mirth to me--then I knew that I had sinned against her with

a mighty sin--a sin of cruelty, of neglect, of selfish wickedness. She

had been young still when I had left her--young and fair to look at, and

without a silver line in her ebon hair, and with suitors about her for

her beauty like bees about the blossoms of the ivy in the autumn-time.

And now--now she was quite old.

She never rebuked me: she only said, "My son! my son! God be praised!"

and said that a thousand times, weeping and trembling. Some women are

like this.

When the bright, burning midsummer day had grown into a gray,

firefly-lighted night, I laid me down on the narrow bed where I had

slept as a child, and my mother kissed me as though I were a child. It

seemed to purify me from all the sins of all the absent years, except,

indeed, of that one unpardonable sin against her. In the morning she

opened the drawers of an old bureau and showed me everything I had sent

her all those years: all was untouched, the money as well as the

presents. "I took nothing while you did not give me yourself," she said.

I felt my throat choke.

It was early day: she asked me to go to mass with her. I did so to

please her. All the while I watched her bent, feeble, aged figure and

the white hair under the yellow kerchief, and felt as if I had killed

her. This lone old creature was not the mother like Raffaelle's Madonna

I had left: I could never make her again what she had been.

"It is my son," she said to her neighbors, but she said it with pain

rather than with pride, for she hated my calling; but Orte was of

another way of thinking. Orte flocked to see me, having heard of

Pipistrello, its own Pipistrello, who had plagued it with his childish

tricks, having grown into fame amongst the cities and villages as the

strongest man in all Italy. For indeed I was that; and my mother, with

dim, tear-laden eyes, looked at me and said, "You are the image of your

father. Oh, my dear, my love! take care."

She, poor soul! saw nothing but the fall she had seen that day at Genoa

of a strong man who dropped like a stone. But I fear to weary you. Well!

I had left my spangled dress and all insignia of my calling with my

comrades at the wine-shop, fearing to harass my mother by sight of all

those things which would be so full of bitter recollection and dread to

her. But Orte clamored for me to show it my powers--Orte, which was more

than half asleep by Tiber's side, like that nymph Canens whom I used to

read of in my Latin school-books--Orte, which had no earthly thing to do

this long and lazy day in the drought of a rainless June.

I could not afford to baulk the popular will, and I was proud to show

them all I could do--I, Pipistrello, whom they had cuffed and kicked so

often in the old time for climbing their walnut trees and their pear

trees, their house-roofs and their church-towers. So, when the day

cooled I drew a circle with a red rope round myself and my men on a

piece of waste ground outside the town, and all Orte flocked out there

as the sun went down, shouting and cheering for me as though Pipistrello

were a king or a hero. The populace is always thus--the giddiest-pated

fool that ever screamed, as loud and as ignorant as a parrot, as

changeful as the wind in March, as base as the cuckoo. The same people

threw stones at me when they brought me to this prison--the same people

that feasted and applauded me then, that first day of my return to Orte.

To-day, indeed, some women weep, and the little child brings me half a

pomegranate. That is more remembrance than some fallen idols get, for

the populace is cruel: it is a beast that fawns and slavers, then tears.

It was a rainless June, as I say. It was very warm that evening; the low

west was vermilion and the higher sky was violet; bars of gold parted

the two colors; the crickets were hooting, the bats were wheeling, great

night-moths were abroad. I felt very happy that night. With us Italians

pain rarely stays long. We feel sharply, but it soon passes. I had

drowned my remorse in the glory and vanity of showing Orte all I could

do by the sheer force of my muscles and sinews. We are not a very brave

people, nor a strong one, and so strength and bravery seem very rare and

fine things on our soil, and we make a great clatter and uproar when we

ever find them amidst us. I had them both, and the people were in

ecstasies with all I did. I put out all my powers, and in the circle of

red rope exerted all my might, as though I had been performing before

kings. After all, there is no applause that so flatters a man as that

which he wrings from unwilling throats, and I know Orte had been long

set against me by reason of my boyish mischief and my flight.

In real truth, I did nothing now in my manhood so really perilous as I

had done in my childhood, when I had climbed to the top of the cross on

the church and sat astride of it. But they had called that mischief and

blasphemy: they called the things I did now gymnastics, and applauded

them till the noise might have wakened the Etrurian dead under the soil.

At last I came to the feat which, though far from the hardest to me,

always looked to the crowd the most wonderful: it was my old master's

trick of holding his five sons on his shoulder. Only I outshone him, and

sustained on mine seven men in four tiers, and the topmost had on his

head little Febo.

The mite whom we called Phoebus, because we had found him at sunrise

and he had such yellow locks--yellow as the dandelion or the

buttercup--was a stray thing picked up on the seashore in Apulia--a

soft, merry, chirping little fellow, of whom we were all fond, and to

whom we had easily taught that absence of fear which enabled us to play

ball with him in our spectacles. He always delighted the people, he was

such a pretty little lad, and not, perhaps, more than four years old

then, and always laughing, always ready. To him it was only fun, as it

had been to me at his years. I never thought it was cruel to use him so,

I had been so happy in it myself. All at once, as I stood erect

sustaining the men on my shoulders, the topmost one holding on his head

our tiny Phoebus--all at once as I did this, which I had done a

hundred times, and had always done in safety--all at once, amongst the

sea of upturned faces in the glowing evening light, I saw one woman's

eyes. She was leaning a little forward, resting her cheek on her hand.

She had black lace about her head and yellow japonica-flowers above her

left ear. She was looking at me and smiling a little.

I met her eyes, full, across the dust reddened by the sunset glow as the

dust of a battlefield is reddened with blood. I felt as if I were

stabbed; the red dust seemed to swim round me; I staggered slightly: in

another instant I had recovered myself, but the momentary oscillation

had terrified my comrades. The seventh and highest, feeling the human

pyramid tremble beneath him, involuntarily, unconsciously, opened his

arms to save himself. He did not lose his balance, but he let the child

fall. It dropped as an apple broken off the bough falls to the earth.

There was a moment of horrible silence. Then the men leaped down,

tumbling and huddling one over another, not knowing what they did. The

audience rose screaming; and broke the rope and swarmed into the arena.

I stooped and took up the child. He was dead. His neck had been broken

in the fall. He had struck the earth with the back of his head; he was

rolled up on the sand like a little dead kid; his tiny tinsel crown had

fallen off his curls, his tiny tinselled limbs were crushed under him,

his blossom-like mouth was half open. It was horrible.

People spoke to me: I did not see or hear them. The crowd parted and

scattered, some voluble, some dumb, with the shock of what they had

seen. I lifted up what a moment before had been little Phoebus, and

bore him in my arms to my mother's house.

She was sitting at home alone, as she had been alone these ten years and

more. When she saw the dead baby in those glistening spangled clothes

she shuddered, and understood without words. "Another life?" she said,

and said nothing more: she was thinking of my father. Then she took the

dead child and laid him on her knees as if he had been a living one, and

rocked him on her breast and smoothed the sand out of his pretty yellow

curls. "The people go always in the hope of seeing something die," she

said at length. "That is what they go for: you killed the baby for their

sport. It was cruel."

I went out of the house and felt as if I had murdered him--the little

fair, innocent thing who had run along with us over the dusty roads, and

along the sad seashores, and under the forest trees, laughing and

chirping as the birds chirp, and when he was tired lifting up his arms

to be carried on the top of the big drum, and sitting there throned like

a king. Poor little dead Phoebus! It was true what my mother had said:

the people throng to us in hope of seeing our death, and yet when they

do see it they are frightened and sickened and sorrowful. Orte was so

this night.

"Could I help it?" I cried to my comrades fiercely; and in my own soul I

said to myself, "Could I help it? That woman looked at me."

Who was she? All through the pain that filled me for the death of the

child that wonder was awake in me always. She had looked so strange

there, so unlike the rest, though she was all in black and had the lace

about her head which is common enough in our country. All the night long

I saw her face--a beautiful face, with heavy lids and drooping hair,

like that marble head they call the Braschi Antinous down in Rome.

Little Phoebus was laid that night in my mother's house, with lilies

about him, while a little candle that the moths flickered into burnt at

his feet. As I sat and watched by him to drive away the rats which came

up in hordes at night from Tiber into the rooms that overhung the river,

I only saw that face. It had been a bad home-coming.

I would play no more in Orte, nor go with these men any more. I

disbanded my troop and let them pass their own ways. I had coin enough

to live on for months: that was enough for the present. I felt as if the

sight of the red rope and the spangled vest and the watching crowd would

be horrible to me--those things which I had loved so well. Little

Phoebus was put away in the dark earth, as the little Etruscan

children had been so many hundred years before him, and I buried his

little crown and his little coat with him, as the Etruscans buried the

playthings. Poor little man! we had taught him to make Death his toy,

and his toy had been stronger than he.

After his burial I began my search for the woman whose face I had seen

in the crowd. My mother never asked me whence I came or where I went.

The death of Phoebus had destroyed the trembling joy with which she

had seen me return to her: happiness came to her too late. When grief

has sat long by one hearth, it is impossible to warm the ashes of joy

again: they are cold and dead for ever. My time passed sadly; a

terrible calmness had succeeded to the gayety and noise of my life; a

frightful silence had replaced the frenzied shouts, the boisterous

laughter, of the people: sometimes it seemed to me that I had died, not

Phoebus.

The constant hope of finding the woman I had seen but once occupied me

always. I roamed the country without ceasing, always with that single

hope before me. Days became weeks: I wandered miserably, like a dog

without master or home.

One day I saw her. Having on my shoulder my _girella_, which gave me a

pretext for straying along the river-side, I came to that part of

Etruria where (so I had used to learn from the school-books in my

childhood) the Etruscans in ancient times drew up in order of battle to

receive Fabius. The country is pretty about there, or at least it seemed

so to me. The oak woods descend to the edge of the Tiber: from them one

sees the snow of the Apennines; the little towns of Giove and Penna are

white on the Umbrian hills; in the low fields the vine and the olive and

the maize and the wheat grow together. Here one finds our Lagherello,

which I had heard scholars say is no other than the Lake Vadimon of

which Pliny speaks. Of that I know nothing: it is a poor little pool

now, filled with rushes, peopled with frogs. By the side of this pool I

saw her again: she looked at me. Like a madman I plunged into the water,

but the reeds and the lilies entangled me in their meshes: the long

grasses and water-weeds were netted into an impenetrable mass. I stood

there up to my waist in water, incapable of movement, like the poor

cattle of which Pliny tells, who used to mistake all this verdure for

dry land, and so drifted out into the middle of the lake. She looked at

me, laughed a little, and disappeared.

Before sunset I had learned who she was from a peasant who came there to

cut the reeds.

Near to the Lagherello is a villa named Sant' Aloisa: about its walls

there is a sombre, melancholy wood, a remnant of that famous forest

which in the ancient times the Romans dreaded as the borders of hell.

The Tiber rolls close by, yellow and muddy with the black buffaloes

descending to its brink to drink, and the snakes and the toads in its

brakes counting by millions--sad, always sad, whether swollen by flood

in autumn and vomiting torrents of mud, or whether with naked sands and

barren bed in summer, with the fever-vapors rising from its shallow

shoals. The villa is dull and mournful like the river--built of stone,

fortified in bygone centuries, without color, without light, without

garden or greenery, all its casements closed like the eyelids of a

living man that is blind.

This was and is Sant' Aloisa. In the old times, no doubt, the villa had

been strong and great, and peopled with a brilliant feudal pomp, and

noisy with the clash and stir of soldiery: now it is poverty-stricken

and empty, naked and silent, looking down on the tawny, sullen swell of

the Tiber--the terrible Tiber, that has devoured so much gold, so much

treasure, so much beauty, and hidden so many dead and so many crimes,

and flows on mute and gloomy between its poisonous marshes. Of Tiber I

have always felt afraid.

Sant' Aloisa has always been a fief of the old counts Marchioni. One of

that race lived still, and owned the old grounds and the old walls,

though the fortunes of the family had long fallen into decay. Taddeo

Marchioni was scarcely above his own peasants in his manners and way of

life. He was ugly, avaricious, rustic, cruel. He was lord of the soil

indeed, but he lived miserably, and this beautiful woman had been his

wife seven years. At fifteen her father, a priest who passed as her

uncle, had wedded her to Taddeo Marchioni. She had dwelt here seven

mortal years, in this gloomy wood, by these yellow waters, amidst these

pestilential marshes. Her marriage had made her a countess, that was

all. For the rest, it had consigned her, living, to a tomb.

The lives of our Italian women are gay enough in the cities, but in the

country these women grow gray and pallid as the wings of the night-moth.

They have no love for Nature, for air, for the woods, for the fields:

flowers say nothing to them. They look neither at the blossoms nor the

stars. The only things which please them are a black mask and a murmur

of love, a hidden meeting, the noise of the streets, the bouquets of a

carnival. What should they do in the loneliness and wildness of the

broad and open country--our women, who only breathe at their ease in the

obscurity of their _palco_ or under the shelter of a domino?

The travellers who run over our land and see our women laughing with

wide-opened rose-red mouths upon their balconies at Berlingaccio or at

Pentolaccia can never understand the immense, the inconsolable,

desolation of dulness which weighs on the lives of these women in the

little towns of the provinces and the country-houses of the hills and

plains. They have the priest and the chapel; that is all.

In Italy we have no choice between the peasant-woman toiling in the

ploughed fields, and growing black with the scorch of the sun, and bowed

and aged with the burdens she bears, and the ladies who live between the

alcove and the confessional, only going forth from their chambers by

night as fireflies glisten, and living on secret love and daily gossip.

What can these do in their gaunt, dull villas--they who detest the sough

of the wind and the sight of a tree, who flee from a dog and scream at a

tempest, who will not read, and whose only lore is the sweet science of

the passions?

This I came to know later. All I saw that day, as I tramped around it

wet and cold, was the gloomy evil shadow of the great place that had

once been a fortress, the barred and shattered windows, the iron-studded

doors, the grass-grown bastions. She had made me kill Phoebus, and yet

I only lived to see her face again.

Sometimes I think love is the darkest mystery of life: mere desire will

not explain it, nor will the passions or the affections. You pass years

amidst crowds and know naught of it: then all at once you meet a

stranger's eyes, and never again are you free. That is love. Who shall

say whence it comes? It is a bolt from the gods that descends from

heaven and strikes us down into hell. We can do nothing.

I went home slowly when evening fell. I had seen her eyes across the

crowd in Orte once, and once across the pool that was the Vadimon, and I

was hers for evermore. Explain that, ye wise men, who in your pride have

long words for all things. Nay, you may be wise, but it is beyond you.

My mother and I spoke but little at this time. That home was a sad one:

the death of the child and the absence of long years had left a chill in

it. We ate together, chiefly in silence: it was always a pain to her

that I was but Pipistrello the gymnast--not a steadfast, deep-rooted,

well-loved citizen of Orte, with a trade to my hand and a place in

church and market. Every day she thought I should wander again; every

day she knew my savings shrank in their bag; every day she heard her

neighbors say, "And your Pippo? will he not quiet down and take a wife

and a calling?"

Poor mother! Other women had their sons safe stay-at-homes, wedded

fathers of children, peaceable subjects of the king, smoking at their

own doors after the day's work was done. She would have been so blessed

had I been like them--I, who was a wrestler and a roysterer, a mere

public toy that had broken down in the sight of all Orte. My father had

never failed as I had failed. He had never killed a child that trusted

in his strength: he had fallen himself and died. That difference between

us was always in her eyes. I saw it when I met them; and she would make

up little knots of common flowers and carry them to the tiny grave of

Phoebus, my victim. Once I said to her, "I could not help it: I would

have given my life to save him." She only replied, "If you had consented

to bide at home the child would be living."

Nay, I thought, if she had not looked at me--But of that I said nothing.

I kept the memory of that woman in my heart, and went night and day

about the lake and the river and the marshes of Sant' Aloisa. Once or

twice I saw Taddeo Marchioni, the old count--a gray, shrunken, decrepit

figure of a man, old, with a lean face and a long hard jaw--but of her,

for days that lengthened into weeks, I saw nothing. There are fish in

the Lagherello. I got the square huge net of our country, and set it in

the water as our habit is, and watched in the sedges from dawn to eve.

What I watched for was the coming of the vision I had once seen there:

the fish came and went at their will for me.

One day, sick of watching vainly, and having some good fish in the net,

I dragged them out into the reeds, and pushed them in a creel, and

shouldered them, and went straight to the gloomy walls of Sant' Aloisa.

There were no gates: the sedges of the low lands went along the front of

the great pile, almost touching it. Around it were fields gray with

olives, and there was neither garden nor grass-land: all had been

ploughed up that was not marsh and swamp.

The great doors were close fastened. I entered boldly by a little

entrance at the side, and found myself in the great naked hall of

marble, empty and still and damp. There was a woman there, old and

miserable, who called her master. Taddeo Marchioni came and saw the

fish, and chaffered for them with long hesitation and shrewd greed, as

misers love to do, and then at last refused them: they were too dear, he

said. I threw them down and said to him, "Count, give me a stoup of wine

and they are yours." That pleased him: he bade the serving-woman carry

the fish away, and told me to follow him. He took me into a vaulted

stone chamber, and poured with a niggard hand a glass of _mezzo-vino_. I

looked at him: he was lean, gray, unlovely. I could have crushed him to

death with one hand.

These great old villas in the lone places of Italy are usually full at

least of pleasant life--of women hurrying to the silk-worms and the

spinning and the linen-press, of barefooted men loitering about on a

thousand pleas or errands to their master. But Sant' Aloisa was silent

and empty.

Passing an open door, I saw her. She was sitting, doing nothing, in a

room whose faded tapestries were gray as spiders' webs, and she was

beautiful as only one woman is here and there in a generation. She

looked at me, and I thought she smiled.

I went out with my brain on fire and my sight dim. I saw only that

smile--that sudden, momentary smile whose fellow had brought death to

little Phoebus. And I felt she had known me again, though she had seen

me but once, in my spangled coat of velvet and silver, and now I had my

legs bare to the knee, and was clad in a rough blue shirt and woollen

jacket, like any other country-fellow upon Tiber's side.

As I was going out the serving-wench plucked my sleeve and whispered to

me, "Come back a moment: she wishes to see you."

My heart leaped, then stood still. I turned back into the house, and

with trembling knees went into that chamber where the dusky tapestry

mouldered on the walls. She looked at me, sitting idly there herself in

the bare, melancholy room--a woman with the face of our Titian's Venus.

"Did the child die?" she asked.

I stammered something, I knew not what.

"Why did you tremble that day?" she said, with the flicker of a smile

about her lovely mouth: "you look strong--and bold."

How the words had courage and madness enough to leap to my lips I know

not, but I do know I said to her, "You looked at me."

She frowned a moment: then she laughed. No doubt she had known it

before. "Your nerves were not of iron, then, as they should be," she

said carelessly. "Well! the people wanted to see something die. They

always do: you must know that. Bring more fish for my husband to-morrow.

Now go."

I trembled from head to foot. I had said this bold and insolent thing to

her face, and she still bade me return!

No doubt had I been a man well born I should have fallen at her feet and

sworn a midsummer madness: I should have been emboldened to any coarse

avowal, to any passionate effrontery. But I was only a stroller--a poor

ignorant soul, half Hercules, half fool. I trembled and was mute.

When the air blew about me once more I felt as if I had been

drunk--drunk on that sweet yeasty wine of a new vintage which makes the

brain light and foolish. She had bade me return!

That day my mother ate alone at home. When night fell it found me by the

Lagherello. I set my nets: I slept in a shepherd's hut. I had forgotten

Phoebus: I only saw her face. What was she like? I cannot tell you.

She was like Titian's Venus. Go and look at it--she who plays with the

little dog in the Tribune at Pitti: that one I mean. With all that

beauty, half disclosed like the bud of a pomegranate-flower, she had

been given to Taddeo Marchioni, and here for seven years she had dwelt,

shut in by stone walls.

Living so, a woman becomes a saint or a devil. Taddeo Marchioni forgot

or never knew that. He left her in his chamber as he left the figures of

the tapestry, till her bloom should fade like theirs, and time write

wrinkles on her as it wove webs on them. He forgot! he forgot! He was

old and slow of blood and feeble of sight: she was scarcely beautiful to

him. There were a few poor peasants near, and a priest as old as Taddeo

Marchioni was; and though Orte was within five miles, the sour and

jealous temper of her husband shut her up in that prison-house as Pia

Tolomei was shut in the house of death in the Maremma.

That night I watched impatient for the dawn. Impatient I watched the

daybreak deepen into day. All the loveliness of that change was lost on

me: I only counted the hours in restless haste. Poor fools! our hours

are in sum so few, and yet we for ever wish them shorter, and fling

them, scarcely used, behind us roughly, as a child flings his broken

toys.

The sultry morning was broad and bright over the land before I dared

take up such fish as had entered my girella in the night and bend my

steps to Sant' Aloisa. Fever-mists hung over the cane-brakes and the

reedy swamps; the earth was baked and cracked; everything looked

thirsty, withered, pallid, dull, decaying: in the heats of August it is

always so desolate wherever Tiber rolls. "Marchioni is out," said the

old brown crone whom I had seen the day before. "But come in: bring your

fish to Madama Flavia."

It was a strange, gaunt wilderness of stone, this old villa of the

Marchioni. It would have held hundreds of serving-men--it had as many

chambers as one of the palaces down in Rome--but this old woman was all

the servitor it had, and in the grand old hall, with sculptured shields

upon the columns of it and Umbrian frescoes in the roof, she spread

their board and brought them their onion-soup and their dish of _pasta_,

and while they ate it looked on and muttered her talk and twirled her

distaff, day after day, year after year, the same. Life is homely and

frugal here, and has few graces. The ways of life in these grand old

places are like nettles and thistles set in an old majolica vase that

has had knights and angels painted on it. You know what I mean, you who

know Italy. Do you remember those pictures of Vittorio Carpaccio and of

Gentileo? They say that this is the life our Italy saw once in her

cities and her villas: that is the life she wants. Sometimes, when you

are all alone in these vast deserted places, the ghosts of all that

pageantry pass by you, and they seem fitter than the living people for

these courts and halls.

"Madama Flavia will see the fish," said the old crone, and hobbled away.

Madama Flavia! How many times has Tiber heard such a name as that

breathed on a lover's mouth to the sigh of the mandoline, uttered in

revel or in combat, or as a poisoner whispered it stealing to mix the

drug with the wine in the goblet. Madama Flavia! All Italy seemed in

it--all love, all woe! There is a magic in some names.

Madama Flavia! Just such a woman as this it needs would be to fitly wear

such a name--a woman with low brows and eyes that burn, and a mouth like

the folded leaves that lie in the heart of a rose--a woman to kneel at

morn in the black shadows of the confessional, and to go down into the

crowd of masks at night and make men drunk with love.

"Madama Flavia!" The name (so much it said to me) halted stupidly on my

lips: I stood in her presence like a foolish creature. I never before

had lacked either courage or audacity: I trembled now. I had been awake

all the night, gazing at the dim, dusky pile of her roof as it rose out

from the olives black against the stars; and she knew it--she knew it

very well. That I saw in her face. And she was Madama Flavia, and I was

Pipistrello the juggler. What could I say to her? I could have fallen at

her feet and kissed her or killed her, but I could not speak. No doubt I

looked but a poor boor to her--a giant and a dolt.

She was leaning against a great old marble vase--leaning her hands on

it, and her chin on her hands. She had some red carnations in her

breast: their perfume came to me. She was surrounded by decay, dusty

desolation, the barrenness of a poverty that is drearier than any of the

poverty of the poor; but so might have looked Madama Lucrezia in those

old days when the Borgia was God's vicegerent.

At the haul of fish she never glanced: she gazed at me with meditation

in her eyes. "You are very strong," she said abruptly.

At that I could do no less than laugh. It was as if she had said the ox

in the yoke was strong or the Tiber strong at flood.

"Why are you a fisherman now?" she said. "Why do you leave your arena?"

I shuddered a little. "Since the child fell"--I muttered, thinking she

would understand the remorse that made my old beloved calling horrible

to me.

"It was no fault of yours," she said with a dreamy smile. "They say I

have the evil eye--"

"You have, madama," I said bluntly, and then felt a choking in my

throat, fearing my own rashness.

Her beautiful eyes had a bright scorn in them, and a cold mockery of me.

"Why do you stay, then?" she asked, and smiled at the red carnations

carelessly.

"Because--rather would I die of beholding you than live shut out from

sight of you," I said in my madness. "Madama, I am a great useless fool:

I have done nothing but leap and climb and make a show. I am big and

strong as the oxen are, but they work, and I have never worked. I have

shown myself, and the people have thrown me money--a silly life, good to

no man or beast. Oh yes, that I know full well now; and I have killed

Phoebus because you looked at me; and my mother, who has loved me all

her life, is old before her time through my fault. I am a graceless

fool, a mountebank. When I put off my spangles and stand thus, you see

the rude peasant that I am. And yet in all the great, wide, crowded

world I know there does not live another who could love you as I

love--seeing you twice."

I stopped; the sound of my own voice frightened me; the dull tapestries

upon the wall heaved and rocked round me. I saw her as through a mist,

leaning there with both arms on the broken marble vase.

A momentary smile passed over her face. She seemed diverted, not angered

as I feared. She had listened without protest. No doubt she knew it very

well before I spoke. "You are very strong," she said at length. "Strong

men are always feeble--somewhere. If the count Taddeo heard you he

would--" Then some sudden fancy struck her, and she laughed aloud, her

bright red lips all tremulous and convulsed with laughter. "What could

he do? You could crush him with one hand, as you could crush a newt!

Poor Taddeo! did he not beat your fish down, give you watered wine, the

rinsings of the barrel, yesterday? That is Taddeo always."

She laughed again, but there was something so cruel in that laughter

that it held me mute. I dared not speak to her. I stood there stupidly.

"Do you know that he is rich?" she said abruptly, gnawing with her

lovely teeth the jagged leaf of one of her carnations. "Yes, he is rich,

Taddeo. That is why my father sold me to him. Taddeo is rich: he has

gold in the ground, in the trees, in the rafters and the stones of the

house; he has gold in Roman banks; he has gold in foreign scrip, and in

ships, and in jewels, and in leases: he is rich. And he lives like a

gray spider in the cellar-corner. He shuts me up here. We eat black

bread, we see no living soul: once in the year or so I go to Orte or to

Penna. And I am twenty-three years old, and I can read my own face in

the mirror." She paused; her breast heaved, her beautiful low brows drew

together in bitter fury at her fate: she had no thought of me.

I waited, mute. I did not dare to speak.

It was all true: she was the wife of Taddeo Marchioni, shut here as in a

prison, with her youth passing and her loveliness unseen, and her angry

soul consuming itself in its own fires. I loved her: what use was that

to her--a man who had naught in all the world but the strength of his

sinews and muscles?

She remembered me suddenly, and gave me a gesture of dismissal: "Take

your fish to the woman; I cannot pay you for them; I have never as much

as a bronze coin. But--you may come back another day. Bring more--bring

more." Then with a more imperious gesture she made me leave her.

I stumbled out of the old dark, close-shuttered house into the burning

brilliancy of the August day, giddy with passion and with hope. She knew

I loved her, and yet she bade me return!

I know not how much, how little, that may mean in other lands, but here

in Italy it has but one language--language enough to make a lover's

heart leap like the wild goat. Yet hope is perhaps too great a word to

measure rightly the timid joy that filled my breast. I lay in the

shepherd's hut wide awake that night, hearing the frogs croak from the

Lagherello and the crickets sing in the hot darkness. The hut was empty:

shepherd and sheep and dogs were all gone up to the higher grounds

amongst the hills. There were some dry fern-plants in a corner of it. I

lay on these and stared at the planets above me throbbing in the

intense blue of the skies: they seemed to throb, they seemed alive.

A mile away, between me and the stars, was the grand black pile of Sant'

Aloisa.

Christ! it was strange! I had led a rough life, I had been no saint. I

had always been ready for jest or dance or intrigue with a pretty woman,

and sometimes women far above me had cast their eyes down on the arena,

as in Spain ladies do in the bull-ring to pick a lover out thence for

his strength; but I had never cared. I had loved, laughed and wandered

away with the stroller's happy liberty, but I had never cared. Now, all

at once, the whole world seemed dead--dead heaven and earth--and only

one woman's two eyes left living in the universe, living and looking

into my soul and burning it to ashes. Do you know what I mean? No? Ah,

then you know not love.

All the night I lay awake--the short hot night when the western gold of

sunset scarce fades into dark ere the east seems to glow luminous and

transparent with the dawn. Ah! the sunrise! I shall see it once more,

only once more! I shall see it through those bars, a hand's breadth of

it above Tiber, no more; and when again it spreads its rosy warmth over

the sky and reddens the river and the plain, I shall be dead--a headless

thing pushed away under the earth and lime, and over my brain and skull

the wise men will peer with knife and scalpel, and pour the plaster over

its bones to take a cast, and say most likely to one another, as I heard

them say once before a cast in a museum, "A good face, a fair brow, fine

lines: strange that he should have been a murderer!" Well! so be it.

Even though I lived for fourscore years and ten, the sun would nevermore

rise for me as it rose before Phoebus died.

At that time I lived only to see a shadow on the barred windows, a hand

open a lattice, a veiled head glide by through the moonbeams. I was

wretched, yet never had I been so happy. The bolt of the gods stuns as

it falls, but it intoxicates also.

I had been such a fool! such a fool! When she had said so much I had

said nothing: that last moment haunted me with unending pain. If I had

been bolder, if I had only known what to answer, if I had only seized

her in my arms and kissed her! It would have been better to have had

that one moment, and have died for it, than have been turned out of her

presence like a poor cowardly clod.

I cannot tell how the long hot days went on: they were days of drought

to the land, but they were days of paradise to me. The fever-mists were

heavy and the peasants sickened. Tiber was low, and had fetid odors as

its yellow shallows dried up in the sun, clouds of gnats hovered over

the Lagherello and its beds of rushes, and the sullen wind blew always

from the south-east, bringing the desert sand with it. But to me this

sickly summer was so fair that I continued to live in the absent

shepherd's empty hut. I continued to net the fish when I could, and now

and again I saw her. I lived only in the hope of seeing her face. She

had the evil eye. Well, let it rest on me and bring me all woe, so that

only I might live in its light one day! So I said in my madness, not

knowing.

I must have looked mad at that time to the few scattered peasants about

the pool. I lived on a handful of maize, a crust of bread. I cast my

nets in the water, and once or twice went up to Sant' Aloisa with the

small fish, and was sent away by the crone Marietta. August passed, and

the time drew nigh for the gathering of the grapes, ripe here sooner

than in the Lombard and the Tuscan plains. But the vintage of Sant'

Aloisa was slight, for the ground was covered with olives in nearly

every part. When they were stripping what few poor vines there were I

offered myself for that work. I thought so I might behold her. There was

no mirth on the lands of Taddeo Marchioni: the people were poor and

dull. Fever that came from the river and the swamps had lessened their

numbers by death and weakened those who were living: my strength was

welcome to those ague-stricken creatures.

The day of the gathering was very hot: no rain had fallen. The oxen in

the wains were merely skin and bone: their tongues were parched and

swollen in their muzzled mouths. The grass had been long all burnt up,

and the beasts famished: the air was stifling, pregnant with storm.

Amidst the sere and arid fields, and the woods, black and gray, of ilex

and of olive, the great old square house rose before us, pale, solitary,

mysterious--a mausoleum that shut in living creatures: it terrified me.

Night fell as the last wagon, loaded with the last casks of grapes,

rolled slowly with heavy grinding wheels toward the cellars of Sant'

Aloisa. With the wagon there were a few men enfeebled with fever, a few

women shivering with ague. I walked behind the wagon, pushing it to aid

the weary oxen. There was no moon: here and there a torch flickered in a

copper sconce filled with oil. The courtyard and the cellar were of

enormous size: in the old times Sant' Aloisa had sheltered fifteen

hundred men. In the darkness, where a torch flared when he passed, I saw

now and then Taddeo Marchioni coming and going, giving orders in his

high, thin voice, screaming always, swearing sometimes, always

suspecting some theft. He did not see me. He was entirely absorbed in

his vintage and in the rebukes he hurled at his peasants. I drew back

into the shadow, leaning against the column of the gateway, a huge wall

blackened with time and damp. The bell of the old clock-tower sounded

the nineteenth hour of the night. All at once the servant Marietta

muttered in my ear, "Go in: she wants to speak with you. Go in to the

tapestry-room on the other side of the house: you remember."

My blood bounded in my veins. I asked nothing better of Fate. I glided

along the old walls, leaving the central court and the master there

absorbed in his work, and I found with some difficulty the little

side-door by which I had entered the house before. I trembled from head

to foot, as in that hour. I felt myself all at once to be ugly, heavy,

stupid, a brute to frighten any woman--sweating from the labors of the

day, covered with dust, poor and frightful in my rough hempen shirt,

with my naked legs and my bare knees impregnated with the juice of the

grapes. And I dared to love this woman--I! Loved her, though she had

slain Phoebus.

My mind was all in confusion: I was no longer master of myself. I

scarcely drew breath; my head was giddy; I staggered as I went along

those endless galleries and passages, as I had done that day when

Phoebus had fallen on the sand of my arena. At last I reached--how I

knew not--the room of the _arazzi_, scarcely lighted by a lamp of bronze

that hung from the ceiling by a chain. In the twilight I saw the woman

with the fatal gaze, with the lips of rose, with the features of

Lucrezia, of Venus, the woman who in all ages has destroyed man.

Then I forgot that I was a laborer, a peasant, a juggler, a wrestler, a

vagabond--that I was clad in coarse linen of hemp--that I was dirty and

filthy and ignorant and coarse. I forgot myself: I only remembered my

love--my love immense as the sky, omnipotent as Deity. I fell on my

knees before her. I only cried with stifled voice, "I am yours! I am

yours!" I did not even ask her to be mine. I was her slave, her tool,

her servitor, her thing, to be cherished or rejected as she would. I

shivered, I sobbed. I had never known before, it seemed to me, what love

could be; and it made a madman of me.

All the while she said nothing: she let me kiss her gown, her feet, the

stone floor on which she stood. Suddenly and abruptly she said only,

"You are a droll creature: you love me, really--you?"

Then I spoke, beside myself the while. I remember nothing that I said:

she heard me in silence, standing erect above me where I kneeled. The

light was very faint; the lamp swung to and fro on its bronze chain; I

saw only the eyes of the woman burning their will into mine. She bent

her head slightly: her voice was very low. She said only, "I have known

it a long time. Yes, you love me, but how? How?"

How? I knew no words that could tell her. Human tongues never have

language enough for that: a look can tell it. I looked at her.

She trembled for a moment as though I had hurt her. Soon she regained

her empire over herself. "But how?" she muttered very low, bending over

me her beautiful head, nearly touching mine. "But how? Enough to--?"

She paused. Enough? Enough for what? Enough to deny heaven, to defy

hell, to brave death and torment, to do all that a man could do: who

could do more?

"And I love you--I." She murmured the words very low: the evening wind

which touches the roses was never softer than her voice. She brushed my

hair with her lips. "I love you," she repeated. "For you are strong, you

are strong."

Kneeling before her there, I took her in my arms. I drew her close to

me: I drank the wine of Paradise--the wine that makes men mad.

But she stopped me, drew herself away from me, yet gently, without

wrath. "No," she said, "not yet, not yet." Then she added, lower still,

"You must deserve me."

Deserve her? I did not comprehend. I knew well that I did not deserve my

joy, poor fool that I was, mere man of the people, with the trestles of

the village fair for all my royal throne. But, since she loved me, a

crowd of ideas confused and giddy thronged on my brain and whirled madly

together. Up above in the belfries and the towers in my infancy, with

the clear blue air about me and the peopled world at my feet, I had

dreamed so many foolish gracious things--things heroical, fantastical,

woven from the legends of saints and the poems of wandering minstrels.

When she spoke to me thus these old beautiful fancies came back to my

memory. If she wished me to become a soldier for her sake, I thought--

She looked at me, burning my soul with her eyes, that grew sombre yet

brilliant, like the Tiber water lighted by a golden moon. "You must

deserve me," she repeated: "you must deliver me. You are strong."

"I am ready," I answered. I was still kneeling before her. I had at my

throat a rude cross that my mother had hung there in my childish years.

I touched the cross with my right hand in sign of oath and

steadfastness. "I am ready," I said to her. "What do you wish?"

She answered, "You must free me. You are strong."

Even then I did not understand. "Free?" I repeated. "You would fly with

me?"

She gave a gesture, superb, impatient, contemptuous. She drew herself

backward and more erect. Her eyes had a terrible brilliancy in them. She

was so beautiful, but as fierce in that hour as the wild beast that I

saw once at a fair break from its cage and descend amidst the people,

and which I strangled in my arms unaided.

She murmured through her closed teeth, "You must kill him. You are

strong."

With a bound I rose to my feet. In the burning night an icy cold chilled

my blood, my limbs, my heart.

Kill him? Whom? The old man? I, young and strong as I was, and his

wife's lover?

I looked at her. What will be the scaffold to-morrow to me, since I have

lived through that moment?

She looked at me, always with her sorceress's eyes. "You must kill him,"

she said briefly. "It will be so easy to you. If you love me it will be

done. If not--farewell."

A horrible terror seized on me. I said nothing. I was stupefied. The

gloomy shadows of the chamber surrounded us like a mystic vapor; the

pale figures of the tapestries seemed like the ghosts arisen from the

grave to witness against us; the oppressive heat of the night hour lay

on our heads like an iron hand.

A phantom parted us: the spectre of a cowardly crime had come between

us.

"You do not love me," she said slowly. She grew impatient, angered,

feverish: a dumb rage began to work in her. She had no fear.

I drew my breath with effort. It seemed as if some one were strangling

me. Kill him! Kill him! These ghastly words re-echoed in my ears. Kill

an old and feeble man? It was worse than a crime: it was a cowardice.

"You do not love me," she repeated with utter scorn. "Go--go!"

A cry to her sprang from my very soul: "Anything else, anything but

that! Ask my own life, and you shall have it."

"I ask what I wish."

As she answered me thus she drew herself in all her full height upward

under the faint radiance from the lamp. Her magnificent beauty shone in

it like a grand white flower of the datura under the suns of autumn. A

disdain without bounds, without limit, without mercy, gleamed from her

eyes. She despised me--a man of the people, a public wrestler, a bravo,

only made to kill at his mistress's order, only of use to draw the

stiletto in secrecy at the whim and will of a woman.

I was Italian, yet I dared not slay a feeble old man in the soft dark of

a summer night, to find my reward on the breast of his wife.

Silence fell between us. Her eyes of scorn glanced over me, and all her

beauty tempted me and cried to me, "Kill, kill, kill! and all this is

thine!"

Then her eyes filled with tears, her proud loveliness grew humble, and,

a supplicant, she stretched out her arms to me: she cried, "Ah, you love

me not: you have no pity. I may live and die here: you will not save me.

You are strong as the lions are--you are so strong, and yet you are

afraid."

I shook in all my limbs. Yes, I was afraid--I was afraid of her, afraid

of myself. I shivered: she looked at me always, her burning eyes now

humid and soft with tears.

"In open war, in combat, all you wish," I said to her slowly. "But an

old man--in secret--to be his assassin--"

My voice failed me. I saw the light in the lamp that swung above,

oscillating between us: it seemed to me like the frail life of Taddeo

Marchioni that swung on a thread at our will.

She drew herself upward once more. Her tears were burned up in the fires

of a terrible dumb rage. She cried aloud, "You are a coward. Go!"

I fell once more at her feet; I seized her by her gown; I kissed her

feet. "Any other thing!" I cried to her in my anguish--"any other thing!

But the life of a weak old man! It would be horrible. I am not a coward:

I am brave. It is for cowards to kill the feeble: I cannot. And you

would not wish it? No, no, you would not wish it? It is a dream, a

nightmare! It is not possible. I adore you! I adore you! I am a madman.

I am yours; I give you my life; I give you my body and my soul. But to

kill a feeble old man that I could crush in my arms as a fly is stifled

in wine! No, no, no! Any other thing, any other thing! But not that."

She thrust me from her with her foot. "That or nothing," she said

coldly.

The sweat fell from my brow in the agony of this horrible hour. I was

ready to give my life for her, but an old man, a murder done in secret!

All my soul revolted.

"But you love me!" I cried to her; and a great sob rose in my throat.

"You refuse to do this thing?" she answered.

"Yes."

Then she threw me away from her with the strength of a tigress:

"Imbecile! You thought I loved you? I should have used you: that is

all."

The lamp went out: the darkness was complete. I stretched my hands out,

to meet but empty air. If I were alone I could not tell: I touched

nothing, I heard nothing, I saw nothing. A strange giddiness came upon

me; my limbs trembled under the weight of my body and gave way; I lost

consciousness. It is what we call in this country a stroke of the blood.

When my senses revived I opened my eyes. It was still night about me,

but a pallid light shone into the chamber, for the moon had risen, and

its rays penetrated through the iron bars of the high windows. I

remembered all.

I rose with pain and effort: the heavy fall on the stone floor had

bruised and strained me. A great stupor, the stupor of horror, had

fallen upon me. I felt all at once old, quite old. The thought of my

mother passed through my mind for the first time for many days. My poor

mother!

By the light of the moon I tried to find my way out of this chamber--a

chamber accursed. I gained the entrance of the gallery. Silence reigned

everywhere. I could not tell what hour it was. The lustre from the skies

sufficed to illumine fitfully the vast and sombre passages. I found the

door by which I had entered the house, and I felt the hot air of the

night blow upon my forehead, as hot now as it had been at noonday.

I passed into the great open court. Above it hung the moon, late risen,

round, yellow, luminous. I looked upward at it: this familiar object

seemed to me a strange and unknown thing. I walked slowly across the

pavement of the courtyard on a sheer instinct, as you may see a wounded

dog walk, bearing death in him. My heart seemed like a stone in my

breast: my blood seemed like ice in my veins. All around me were the

walls of Sant' Aloisa, silent, gray, austere.

My foot touched something on the ground. I looked at it. It was a thing

without form--a block of oak wood or a slab of marble?--yet I looked at

it, and my eyes were rooted there and could not look elsewhere. The moon

shed a sinister white light upon this thing. I looked long, standing

there motionless and without power to move. Then I saw what it was, this

shapeless thing: it was the body of Taddeo Marchioni--dead, horribly

dead, fallen face downward, stretched out upon the stones, a knife

plunged into the back of the throat, and left there. He had been stabbed

from behind.

I looked, I saw, I understood: it was her act.

I stooped; I touched the corpse; I turned the face to the light; I

searched for a pulse of life, a breath. There was none: he was dead. A

single blow had been given, and the blow had been sure. A ghastly

grimace distended the thin lips of the toothless mouth; the eyes were

starting from their orbits; the hands were clenched: it had been a death

swift, silent, violent, terrible.

I drew out the knife, deep buried in the bone of the throat below the

skull. It was my knife, the same with which I had slashed asunder the

boughs of the vines in the day just gone in the vintage-fields. She had

taken it, no doubt, from my girdle when I had fallen at her feet.

"I understand," I said to the dead man: "it is her work."

The dead mouth seemed to laugh.

A casement opened on the court. A voice cried aloud. The voice was hers:

it cried for help. From the silent dwelling came a sound of hurrying

feet: the flame of a torch borne in a peasant's hand fell red on the

livid moonlight.

She came with naked feet, with unloosed hair, as though roused from her

bed, beautiful in her disarray, and crying aloud, "An assassin! an

assassin!"

I understood all. She meant to send me to the scaffold in her place. It

was my knife: that would be testimony enough for a tribunal. Justice is

blind.

She cried aloud: they seized me, and the dead man lay between us,

stretched on the stones and bathed in blood. I looked at her: she did

not tremble.

But she had forgotten that I was strong--strong with the strength of the

lion, of the bull, of the eagle. She had forgotten. With a gesture I

flung far away from me, against the walls, the men who had seized me:

with a bound I sprang upon her. I took her in my arms in her naked

loveliness, scarcely veiled by the disordered linen, by the loosened

hair, and shining like marble in the glisten of the moon. I seized her

in my arms; I kissed her on her lips; I pressed against my heart her

beautiful white bosom. Then between her two breasts I plunged my knife,

red with the blood of her dead lord. "I avenge Phoebus," I said to

her.

Now you know why to-morrow they will kill me, why my mother is mad.

Hush! I am tired. Let me sleep in peace.

* * * * *

And on the morrow he slept.

OUIDA.

STUDIES IN THE SLUMS.

III.--NAN; OR, A GIRL'S LIFE.

"An' this one? Lord have mercy on her, an' forgive me for saying it the

way I do every time I look at her! It comes out of itself, an' there's

times when I could think for a minute that He will; an' then it comes

over me like a blackness on everything that her chance is gone. Look at

that one by her. Ain't he a rough? Ain't he just fit for the Rogues'

Gallery, an' nowhere else? And yet--Well, it's a long story, an' you

won't want to hear it all."

"Every word," I said. "For once, we are all alone, and the rain pours

down so nobody is likely to interrupt. Such a face as that could hardly

help having a story, and a strange one."

"The most of it happens often enough, but I'll tell you. You think it's

pretty, but that black an' white thing doesn't tell much. If you could

once have looked at her, you'd have wanted to do something, same as

'most everybody did when the time for doin' was over. Let me get my bit

of work, an' then I'll tell you."

It was in the "McAuley Mission-parlor." The street below, cleared by the

pouring rain, was comparatively silent, though now and then a sailor

swung by unmindful of wet, or the sound of a banjo came from the

tenement-houses opposite. Below us, in the chapel, the janitor scrubbed

vigorously to the tune which seems for some unknown reason to be always

a powerful motive-power,

"I'm goin' home, no more to roam,"

the brush coming down with a whack at each measure. In my hands was the

mission album, a motley collection of faces, as devoid of Nature or any

clew to the real characteristics of the owners as the average photograph

usually is, but here and there one with a suggestion of interest and, in

this special case, of beauty--a delicate, pensive face, with a mass of

floating hair, deep, dark eyes, and exquisite curves in cheek and lip

and chin--the face of some gently born and nurtured maiden, looking

dreamily out upon a world which thus far, at least, could have shown her

only its tender, never its cruel or unfriendly, side, and not, as its

place would indicate, that of one who had somehow and at some strange

time found a home in these slums. Beauty of a vulgar, striking sort is

common enough there--vivid coloring, even a sparkle and light poverty

has had no power to kill--but this face had no share in such dower, and

the dark, soft eyes had a compelling power which made mine search them

for their secret,--not theirs, after all, it might prove, but only a

gift from some remote ancestor, who could transmit outline, and even

expression, but not the soul that had made them.

Mrs. McAuley slipped the picture from its place as she sat down by me

again. "I ought to have done that long ago," she said. "Jerry is always

telling me I've no business to keep it where everybody can look at it

an' ask about her; an' I hadn't, indeed, for it brings up a time I'd

hardly think or talk about unless I had to for some good. I'll put it

away with two or three more I keep for myself; an' Jerry'll be glad of

it, for he hates to think of her, 'most as much as I do.

"Her father and mother? Ah, that's it: if she'd had _them_! But, you

see, her mother was a young thing that wasn't used to roughing it, an'

this Nan only a baby then. They were decent English folks, an' he looked

like a gentleman; but all we know was that she died of ship-fever on the

passage over, an' was buried at sea; an' he had it too, an' came 'most

as nigh dyin', an' just had strength to crawl ashore with Nan in his

arms. He'd a cousin in the Bowery, a woman that kept a little store for

notions, but didn't make any headway on account of two drinkin' sons;

an' he went to her, an' just fell on the floor before he'd half finished

his story. She put him to bed, and, though the sons swore he shouldn't

stay, an' said they'd chuck him out on the sidewalk, she had her way. It

didn't take him long to die, an' he'd a good bit of money that

reconciled them; but when he was gone there was the baby, just walkin'

an' toddlin' into everything, an' would scream if Pete came near her. He

was the oldest, an' he hated her worse than poison, an' about once in so

often he'd swear he'd send her to the orphan asylum or anywhere that

she'd be out of his sight. Jack didn't care one way or another, but the

mother was just bound up in the little thing; an' she was, they said,

just that wonderful-lookin' that people stopped an' stared at her. Her

eyes weren't black, as they look there, but gray, with those long curly

lashes that looked innocent an' baby-like to the very last minute; and

her hair--oh, you never saw such hair! Not bleached out, as they do it

now, to a dead yellow, but a pure gold-color, an' every thread of it

alive. I've taken hold of it many a time to see it curl round my finger,

an' the little rings of it lying round her forehead; an' her face to the

last as pure-lookin' as a pearl--clear an' soft, you know--an', when I

saw her first, with a little color in her cheeks no deeper than the pink

in a pink rose.

"Now, it'll seem to you like a bit out of the _Police Gazette_ or those

horrid story-papers, but, do you know, when she wasn't three Pete came

home one night just drunk enough to be cunnin', an' he said, after he'd

had his supper, he wanted to take the child a little way, only round the

corner, to show her to some friends of his. Mrs. Simpson said

No--whoever wanted to see her could come there, but she shouldn't let

her be taken round. The shop-bell rang that minute, an' she went out. It

wasn't ten minutes, but when she came back Pete an' the child weren't

there. She ran to the door an' looked up an' down the street, but it was

twelve years before she ever saw that child again. Pete was gone a week,

an' when he come home not a word would he say but that the child was

safe enough, an' he'd had enough of her round under foot. They had high

words. She told him he should never have another cent till Nan was

brought back, an' he went out swearin' an' cursin', to be brought home

in half an hour past any tellin' in this world. He'd been knocked down

an' run over by a fire-engine, an', though there was life enough left to

look at his mother an' try to speak, speak he couldn't.

"Well, there was nothin' that woman didn't do, far as her money would

go. She'd a nephew was a policeman, an' he hunted, an' plenty more, but

never a sign or a word. She couldn't get out much on account of the

shop, but whenever she did there wasn't a beggar with a child that she

wouldn't stop an' look with all her eyes to see if it might be Nan. You

wouldn't think anybody would take a child that way to be tormented with,

when there's hundreds runnin' round loose that nobody claims; but, for

all that, it's done. Not as often as people think. There's more

kidnappin' in the story-papers than ever gets done really, but it _does_

happen now and then. An' New York's a better place to hide in than

anywheres out of it. I know plenty of places this minute where the

police couldn't find a man if they hunted a month.

"Pete Simpson took this child to a hole in the Five Points, rag-pickers

an' beggars an' worse, an' gave her to a woman that took children that

was wanted out o' the way. He paid her a dollar, an' said she could make

enough out of her to pay for the trouble, she was so fair-lookin'. She

was one of the women that sit round with a baby an' one or two children

close to her, mostly with laudanum enough to make 'em stupid.

"Nan was spirited, an' she screamed an' fought, but blows soon hushed

her. She remembered, she's told me. She didn't know where she'd come

from, but she knew it was clean an' decent, an' she wouldn't eat till

hunger made her. Then there was a long time she came up with three or

four that made a kind of a livin' pickin' pockets an' a turn now an'

then as newsboys, or beggin' cold victuals an' pickin' up any light

thing they could see if they were let in. Nan changed hands a dozen

times, an' she never would have known where she come from if Charley

Calkins hadn't kept half an eye to her. He was six years older, an'

nobody knew who he belonged to; an' he an' Nan picked rags together, an'

whatever trick he knew he taught her. They cropped her hair, an' dirt

hid all the prettiness there was, but by ten she'd learned enough to get

any bit of finery she could, an' to fight 'em off when they wanted to

cut her hair still. She'd dance an' sing to any hand-organ that come

along; an' that was where I saw her first--when she was twelve, I should

think--with a lot o' men an' boys standin' round, an' she dancin' an'

singin' till the very monkey on the organ danced too. I was in a house

on Cherry street then, with some girls that played at a variety theatre

on the Bowery, an' Nan by this time was so tall they'd made her a

waiter-girl in one of the beer-shops. It was there the theatre-man saw

her one day goin' down to the ferry. He thought she was older, for she

never let on, an' she was tall as she ever was, an' her hair floatin'

back the way she would always have it. She could read. She'd been to

school one term, because she would, an' she had a way with her that

you'd think she was twenty. So it didn't take long. The variety-man said

he'd make her fortune, an' she thought he would; an' next day she come

an' told me she had agreed for three years.

"She didn't know there was work in it, but she soon found there was just

as much drudgery as in the rag-pickin' or a beer-shop. But she had an

ambition. She said she'd started here, an' she would stay an' learn

everything there was, but she believed she should be an actress in the

Old Bowery yet. That seemed a great thing to me in those days, an' I

looked at her an' wondered if she knew enough, an' if she'd speak to us

when she got there. She was so silent sometimes that it daunted us, an'

then she'd have spells of bein' wilder than the wildest; but she said

straight enough, 'I'm not goin' to stay down in this hole: I'm goin' to

be rich an' a lady; an' you'll see it.'

"The time came when she did get to the Old Bowery, an' the manager glad

to have her too. The variety-man swore he'd kill her for leavin', for

she drew at the last bigger houses than he ever had again. How she

learned it all you couldn't tell, but the night we all turned out to see

her in _The Rover's Bride_ you'd have said yourself she was

wonderful--painted of course, and fixed off, but a voice that made you

cry, an' a way just as natural as if she believed every word she said.

An' when she came out the third time, after such a stampin' an' callin'

as you never heard, with her eyes shinin' an' _such_ a smile, I cried

with all my might.

"It was the very next day. Charley Calkins was bar-tender in a saloon,

but getting off whenever he could to see Nan act. That was another

thing. She wouldn't take any fancy name, but was Nan Evans straight

through--on the bills an' everywhere--an' every one she'd grown up with

went to see her, an' felt sort of proud to think she belonged to the

Fourth Ward. An' a strange thing was, that, though so many were after

her, she never seemed to care for anybody but this Charley, that had

knocked her round himself, though he wouldn't let anybody else.

"Well, the old woman that had taken her first was dyin'. She was

Charley's aunt, an' so she sent for him, for want of any other relation,

an' told him she'd a little money for him, an' was a mind to give a

little to Nan. Charley said, 'All right!' He knew she most likely had a

good bit, for they often do, but then he said, 'You've always kept to

yourself where you got Nan, an' I'm a mind to know.'--'Simpson's, up the

Bowery,' she said; an' that was the very last word she ever spoke. She

left thirteen hundred dollars in the Bowery Bank, an' it seemed as if

there were odd sums in every bunch of rags in the room, so that Charley

had enough to set him up pretty well. An' it didn't take him long after

he started his own saloon near the theatre to find out, among all the

Simpsons, the woman that had had Nan. She had her store still, an' a

young woman to help her, an' she cried a little when Charley told her.

But she was a member of the Mott Street Church, an' when she said,

'Where is she now? and why don't she come herself?' an' Charley said,

'She couldn't, because rehearsal's going on,' she looked at him.

"'Re-what?' says she.

"'Re-hearsal: she's an actress,' says he; an' she shut her eyes up as if

the sight of him after such words was poison.

"'I want nothing to do with her,' says she. 'I've had my fill of sorrow

an' trouble from wickedness. You can go, an' say no more.'

"This didn't suit Charley, for he knew how Nan kept herself sort of

respectable even when she was with the worst, an' he was bound to find

out all he could.

"Well, he hung on an' asked questions till he'd found out all there was,

an' that was little, as you know. But Nan had wondered many a time where

she came from, an' if she'd ever belonged to anybody, an' he wanted to

be the first one to tell her. He scared the old lady, for he wasn't long

from the Island, where he'd been sent up for assault an' battery, an',

do what you would to him, clothes nor nothin' could ever make him look

like anything but a rough. But he was bound to know, for he thought

there might be money belonging to her or folks that would do for her.

There wasn't a soul, though, that he could find out, an' the next thing

was to go to Nan an' tell her about it. They'd have been wiser to have

waited a day, till the old lady'd a chance to quiet down and think it

all over; but he went straight to Nan an' told her he'd found some of

her folks; an' she, without a word, put on her hat an' went with him. If

she'd been alone it might have been better, for Charley seemed worse

than he was. The old lady was in the room back of the shop, neat as a

pin, an' Nan looked as if she was looking through everything to see if

she could remember.

"An' when the old lady saw her there was a minute she cried again an'

took hold of Nan. 'It's her very look,' she said, 'an' her hair an'

all;' but then she stiffened. 'I've no call to feel sure,' she said,

'but if you are Nan, an' want to be decent, an' will give up all your

wickedness, an' come here an' repent, I'll keep you.'

"'Wickedness?' Nan says, sort of bewildered--'repent?'

"'I don't know as it would do, either,' the old lady said, beginning to

be doubtful again. 'A lost creature, that's only a disgrace, so that I

couldn't hold my head up, any more'n I can when I think how Pete went: I

couldn't well stand it.'

"'You won't have to,' said Nan, with her head high. 'I did think I'd

found some folks, but it seems not;' an' out she went.

"Charley shook his fist an' swore. 'Nice folks, Christians are!' he

said. 'I like 'em,----'em! I'd like to burn her shop over her head!'

"'Nonsense!' Nan said, as if she didn't mind a bit. 'I thought it would

feel good to have somebody I belonged to, but it wouldn't. I never could

stand anything like her shaking her head over me; but it's strange how

I've always been hoping, an' now how I don't care.'

"Then Charley told her she'd better go home with him: he'd got a

comfortable, nice place, an' he'd never bother her. They'd talked it

over many a time, but she'd held off, always thinking she might find her

folks.

"Marriage didn't mean anything to either of them. How could it, coming

up the way they had? though she'd never been like the other girls. You

can't think how they could be the heathen they were? Remember what

you've seen an' heard in this very place, an' then remember that ten

years ago, even, a decent man or woman didn't dare go up these alleys

even by daylight, an' the two or three missionaries were in danger of

their lives; an' you'll see how much chance they'd had of learning.

"Nan wasn't sixteen then, an' she didn't think ahead, though if she had

likely she would have done the same. She had her choice, but she'd

always known Charley, an' so it ended that way.

"Then came a long time when my own troubles were thick, an' I went off

to the country an' lost sight of her. It was two years before I came

back, an' then everything was changed. All that set I'd known seemed to

have gone to the bad together--some in prison and some dead. Jerry was

out then, an' we were married an' began together in the little room down

the street; an' now I thought often of Nan. They told me Charley was

drinkin' himself to death, an' that she was at the theatre still, an'

kept things goin' with her money, an' that he knocked her round, when he

was out of his head, the worst way. It wasn't long before I went to her.

She looked so beautiful you wouldn't think a fiend could want to hurt

her, an' her eyes had just the look of that picture. I told her how I

had turned about, an' how happy we both were, in spite of hard times an'

little work; but she listened like one in a dream, an' I knew enough to

see that I should have to tell her many times before she would

understand or care. But she seemed so frail I couldn't bear to leave her

so. An' the worst of it was, that she'd begun to wish Charley would

marry her, an' he thought it was all nonsense, an' swore at her if she

said a word about it. She'd been gettin' more and more sensible, an'

he'd just been goin' the other way, but she kept her old fondness for

him. I said nothing then, but one day I found her cryin', an' her arm so

she could hardly move it; an' it came out he'd knocked her down, an'

told her she could clear out when she liked, for he was sick of her pale

face an' her big eyes an' her airs, an' meant to bring a woman there

with some life in her."