it is a certain Magnani, who works for me, and of whom I think very
highly. During the ball they sat in my garden together, and I was very
near them--just behind the myrtle bush. I had gone there to rest, and
was almost in hiding, in order to escape for an instant the torture of
such a long performance. I overheard their conversation, which
interested and touched me to the last degree. Your brother has a noble
mind, Mila, but your neighbor Magnani has a great heart. They talked of
art and work, of ambition and duty, of happiness and virtue. I admired
the artist's ideas, but I fell in love with the artisan's sentiments.
For your young brother's sake, I hope that Magnani will always be his
best friend, the confidant of all his thoughts, and his adviser in the
delicate emergencies of his life. You can advise him to that effect from
me, if he happens to mention me to you; and if you tell either of them
that I listened to the sincere outpouring of their thoughts, you will
not fail to tell them also that I was a discreet listener, for there
came a time when Magnani seemed on the point of disclosing to
Michelangelo some personal matter which I did not choose to overhear. I
retired hastily at the first word,'--Is all that accurate, Magnani? Do
you remember the subject of your conversation with Michel in the garden
of the Casino?"
"Yes, yes," sighed Magnani, "it is all true; indeed, I noticed when the
princess retired, although it would never have occurred to me that it
was she who was listening to us."
"At all events, you ought to be proud of it, Magnani, and very glad of
it, since what you said made her feel so much friendship and esteem for
you. I even thought that I could see that she preferred your way of
thinking to my brother's, and that she looked upon you as the wiser and
better of the two, although she says that she has felt the same motherly
interest in the welfare of both of you from that moment. Couldn't you
repeat to me all the beautiful words which the princess so enjoyed
hearing? I should be very glad to have the benefit of them, for I am a
poor little girl, with whom Michel himself hardly deigns to talk
seriously."
"My dear Mila," said Magnani, taking her hand, "honor to the man whom
you consider worthy to form your heart and your mind! But, even if I
could remember all that Michel and I said to each other in that garden,
I should not presume to think that it would benefit you in any way.
Aren't you better than either of us? And as for wit, which of us can
have more than you?"
"Oh! now you are laughing at me! Princess Agatha has more than all three
of us together, nor do I think that even my father has any more than she
has. Ah! if you knew her as well as I do, Magnani! Such a head and
heart! such charm! such kindness! I could pass my whole life listening
to her; and, if my father and she would allow it, I would like to be her
servant, although obedience is not my leading characteristic."
Magnani was silent for a few moments. He could not succeed in
disentangling his thoughts in his excitement. Hitherto Agatha had seemed
to him so far above all praise that he was indignant and hurt when
anyone ventured to say that she was lovely, charitable and sweet. He
preferred to listen to those who said that she was ugly and mad, when
they did not know her and had never seen her. They at all events said
nothing about her in which there was the slightest sense, whereas the
others praised her too feebly, and annoyed Magnani beyond words by their
inability to comprehend her. But on Mila's lips Agatha lost nothing of
the idea he had formed of her. Only Mila seemed to him pure enough to
utter her name without profaning it, and because she shared his
adoration, she was almost equal to his idol in his eyes.
"Dear Mila," he said at last, still holding her hand, which he had
forgotten to give back to her, "to love and to understand as you do
indicates a great mind. But what did you say about me to the princess?
Ought I not to ask you?"
Mila blessed the darkness, which concealed her blushes, and she grew
bolder as a timid woman gradually becomes intoxicated by the assured
impunity of a masquerade.
"I am really afraid that it will be indiscreet in me to repeat it to
you," she said, "and I should not dare to do it!"
"So you said unkind things about me, did you, naughty Mila?"
"No; for Princess Agatha had said so much good of you that it would have
been impossible for me to think any evil of you. I cannot look at
anything except through her eyes. But I let out something which Michel
told me in confidence."
"Really? I don't know what you mean."
Mila noticed that Magnani's hand trembled. She ventured to strike a
decisive blow.
"Well," she said, in an artless, almost indifferent tone, "I told the
princess that you were really very kind, very pleasant and very learned;
but that one had either to know you very well, or else guess at you in
order to find it out!"
"Because ----?"
"Because you were in love, and that made you so melancholy that you
lived almost entirely alone, buried in meditation."
Magnani trembled.
"It was Michel who told you that!" he said, in a changed tone that made
Mila's heart bleed. "And doubtless he betrayed my confidence to the
end," he added; "he told you the name----"
"Oh! Michel is incapable of betraying anybody's confidence," she
replied, struggling to maintain her courage at the level of the crisis
she had provoked; "and I, Magnani, am incapable of leading my brother on
to such a base thing. Besides, why should I be at all interested, I
should like to know?"
"Of course, it must be a matter of entire indifference to you," replied
Magnani, completely crushed.
"Indifference is not the word," she said; "I have much esteem and
friendship for you, Magnani, and I pray for your happiness. But I am
interested in my own happiness, too, so that I have no time to be idle
and pry into other people's secrets."
"Your happiness! At your age, Mila, happiness is love; so you are in
love, too, are you?"
"In love? why not? Do you consider me too young to think about such
things?"
"Ah! my dear child, you are at the age when one should think about such
things, for at my age love is despair."
"Why, is your love not returned? I was not mistaken in thinking that you
are unhappy?"
"No, my love is not returned," he replied, dejectedly, "and never will
be; I have never even dreamed that it would."
A more romantic and more experienced woman than Mila might have looked
upon that admission as a definitive obstacle to all hope; but her ideas
of life were more simple and more logical: "If he has no hope, he will
recover," she thought.
"I pity you deeply," she said to Magnani, "for it is such great
happiness to feel that one is loved, and it must be so ghastly to love
all by oneself!"
"You will never know such a misfortune," Magnani replied; "and the man
you love should be the most grateful and the proudest of men!"
"I am satisfied with him," she said, gratified to feel that jealousy was
beginning to make itself felt in the young man's perturbed heart; "but
listen, Magnani! there is a noise in my brother's room."
Magnani ran to the other door; but, while he was making vain efforts to
distinguish the nature of the noises Mila had heard, she heard other
noises in the yard. She looked through the blind, and, beckoning to
Magnani, pointed out to him Michel's mysterious guest, who was gliding
toward the street so lightly and adroitly, that unless one had a
delicate ear and keen eye and was on the alert, expecting to see him, it
would have been impossible to detect his movements.
Even Michel had not been roused from the light doze into which he had
fallen.
Mila was still very ill at ease, although Magnani urged her to take some
rest, promising that he would remain in the yard or in the gallery, and
that Michel should not leave the house without him. As soon as Magnani
had left her, she fell upon a chair and drew her table noisily along the
floor, so that she might hear Michel wake and move about in his turn.
The young man soon entered her room, after noticing with amazement that
the Piccinino's light body had left little more impression on his bed
than if he had been a spectre. He found little Mila still up, and
reproved her for her wilful sleeplessness. But she explained her reasons
for anxiety; and, without mentioning Magnani, for the princess had
enjoined upon her not to let Michel know of his presence, she told him
of the Piccinino's strange and impudent visit to her room. She also told
him something of her experience with the monk, and made him promise that
he would not leave her during the morning, and that, if he were summoned
by the princess later in the day, he would not go out without letting
her know, because she was determined to seek shelter with some friend
and not remain alone in the house.
Michel readily agreed. He was utterly unable to understand the bandit's
conduct on that occasion. But we can imagine that such an audacious
performance, taken in connection with the impertinence of the pretended
monk, left him in a decidedly uncomfortable frame of mind.
When he returned to his chamber, after barricading the door of the
gallery with his own hands in order to protect his sister against any
fresh attack, he looked about for the cyclamen upon which he had gazed
so sorrowfully as he sat beside his table. But the cyclamen had
disappeared. The Piccinino had noticed that the princess, as on the
evening of the ball, had a bouquet of cyclamen in her hand or close at
hand, and that she seemed to have contracted the habit of playing with
that bouquet even more than with her fan, the inseparable companion of
all the women of the South. He had also noticed that Michel treasured
one of those flowers, and that he had drawn it toward his face several
times, then hastily pushed it away, during the first agitated moments of
his vigil. He had divined the mysterious charm attached to that plant,
and before leaving the room he had maliciously taken it from the glass
upon which Michel's inert hand still rested. He threw the little flower
into the sheath of his dagger, saying to himself: "If I stab anyone
to-day, perhaps this memento of the lady of my thoughts will remain in
the wound."
Michel tried to follow the Piccinino's example, that is to say, to
recover his lucidity of thought by enjoying an hour or two of real
sleep. He had insisted that Mila should go to bed, and, in order to make
surer that she was adequately guarded, he left the door open between
their rooms. He slept heavily, as young men of his age do, but his sleep
was disturbed by confused and distressing dreams, an inevitable
consequence of his present position. When he woke, shortly after
daylight, he tried to collect his thoughts, and first of all he looked
to see if he had not dreamed of the abstraction of the precious
cyclamen.
His surprise was unbounded when he saw that the glass, empty when he
fell asleep, was filled with freshly gathered cyclamens.
"Mila," he said, seeing that his sister was already up and dressed, "you
have cheerful and poetic ideas, I see, despite our anxieties and
dangers. These flowers are almost as lovely as you; but they can never
replace the one I have lost."
"You imagined," she said, "that I had taken it or tipped over the glass
after your extraordinary friend went away; you almost scolded me, and
you refused to remember that I had never so much as thought of putting
my foot inside your _mysterious_ chamber! Now, you accuse me of
replacing it with others, which is no less absurd; for where could I
have got them? Am I not barricaded on the gallery side? Haven't you my
key under your pillow? Unless, indeed, these pretty little flowers grow
on my pillow, which is possible--in a dream."
"Mila, you persist in jesting on all subjects and at all seasons. You
may have had this bouquet last night. Weren't you at Villa Palmarosa in
the afternoon?"
"For heaven's sake, don't these flowers grow anywhere but in Princess
Agatha's boudoir? I understand now why you are so fond of them. Where,
pray, did you pick the one that you looked for so long this morning,
instead of going straight to bed?"
"I picked it in my hair, little one, and I believe that my brains left
my head with it."
"Ah! very good; now I understand why you talk nonsense."
Michel could find out nothing more. Mila was as calm and smiling when
she woke as she had been disturbed and fearful when she fell asleep. He
obtained nothing from her but quips of the sort in which she was
proficient, always possessed of some metaphorical meaning, and instinct
with a sort of childish charm.
She asked him for the key of her room, and while he was dressing, lost
in thought, she attended to her household duties with her usual activity
and lightness of heart. She flew about the corridors and stairways,
singing like the morning lark. Michel, as melancholy as the winter sun
on the ice-fields at the pole, heard the floors creaking under her agile
feet, heard her merry laugh as she received her father's kiss on the
floor below, heard her ascend the stairs to her room, like a well-aimed
arrow, then go down again to the fountain to fill the graceful earthen
jugs, which are made at Siacca, after Moorish models, and are commonly
used by the people of those regions; heard her salute the neighbors with
kindly pleasantries, and play with the half naked children who were
already beginning to roll about on the flagstones in the yard.
Pier-Angelo was also dressing, more rapidly and in more cheerful mood
than Michel. Like Mila, he sang, but in a deeper and more martial voice,
as he shook his brown, red-lined jacket. He was interrupted at times by
a lingering remnant of drowsiness, and yawned over the words of his
ballads, then finished the refrain triumphantly. That was his way of
waking, and he never sang better, in his own ears, than when his voice
failed him.
"Happy heedlessness of truly popular natures!" said Michel to himself,
as he leaned on his window-sill, half-dressed. "One would say that
nothing unusual was taking place in my family, that we were not
surrounded by enemies and snares; that my sister slept as usual last
night, that she knows nothing of love without hope, of the danger of
being beautiful and poor in view of the schemes of vicious minds, and of
the other danger that she may be deprived at any moment of her natural
protectors. My father, who must know everything, acts as if he suspected
nothing. In this wretched climate everything is forgotten or takes on an
entirely different aspect in the twinkling of an eye. The volcano,
tyranny, persecution--nothing interrupts the songs and laughter. At
noon, overwhelmed by the heat, they all sleep and seem like corpses. The
cool evening air revives them like vigorous plants. Terror and rashness,
grief and joy, succeed one another with them like the waves on the
shore. Let one of the chords of the heart be relaxed, and twenty others
wake to new life, just as the taking of a flower from a glass of water
causes a whole bouquet to appear there! I alone, amid these
incomprehensible transformations, am always on the alert, but always
serious; my thoughts are always lucid, but always gloomy. Ah! would that
I had remained the child of my caste and the man of my native land!"
XXXII
THE ESCALADE
The group of houses of which Michel's formed a part was shabby and ugly
in reality, but exceedingly picturesque. Built upon blocks of lava, and
in part constructed of the same lava, those rough structures bore traces
of the last earthquakes which had overturned them. The lower floors,
which were bolted to the solid rock, retained an unmistakable flavor of
antiquity; and the upper portions, erected in haste after the disaster,
or already shaken by later shocks, even now had a decrepit look: huge
cracks, roofs with a threatening pitch, and dangerous staircases, the
rails of which were all awry. Wild vines inextricably tangled about the
ragged protuberances of cornices and awnings, prickly aloes, crushing by
their weight the old terra-cotta urns, and encroaching with their rough
branches upon the little terraces which hovered in the most insane way
upon the highest points of those tumble-down buildings; white linen, or
garments of gaudy hue hanging from all the windows, or flying about like
banners on lines stretched from house to house: all this formed a
strange, bold picture. One could see children playing and women working
almost among the clouds, on narrow platforms surrounded by pigeons and
swallows, and barely protected, away up there in space, by a few black,
worm-eaten rails, which it seemed that the first gust of wind would blow
away. The slightest change of level in that volcanic soil, the slightest
convulsion in that gorgeous but ill-omened landscape, and the torpid or
reckless occupants of those houses would be engulfed in a raging hell,
or swept away as the leaves are by the tempest.
But danger acts upon men's minds in proportion to its distance. In the
midst of actual security, the idea of a catastrophe presents itself
under terror-inspiring colors. When one is born, breathes and lives in
the midst of actual danger, under a never-ceasing threat, the
imagination becomes deadened, fear loses its keen edge, and there ensues
a strange repose of mind which resembles torpor rather than courage.
Although the picture we have described possessed a genuine poetic charm,
in its very shabbiness and its disorder, Michel had not yet detected it.
He had passed his childhood at Rome, in houses more solidly constructed
at all events and of a neater aspect, if not more sumptuous, and his
thoughts always aspired to the splendor of palaces. His father's abode,
that hovel in which Pier-Angelo had lived ever since his childhood, and
to which he had returned with so much love in his heart, seemed to young
Michel nothing more than a pestiferous den which he would have been glad
to see return to the lava from which it had come forth. In vain did
Mila, in marked contrast to her neighbors, keep their little quarters
almost fastidiously neat and clean. In vain was their staircase
embellished with the loveliest flowers. In vain did the bright morning
sun draw broad lines of gold athwart the shadows of the black lava and
upon the heavy arches of the recessed portions of the building. Michel
thought of nothing but the grotto of the naiad, the marble fountains of
the Palmarosa palace, and the porch where Agatha had appeared to him
like a goddess in the doorway of her temple.
At last, after bestowing one regretful thought upon his recent chimera,
he was ashamed of his dejection. "I came to this country, when my father
hadn't sent for me," he said to himself, "and my uncle the monk
convinced me that I must submit to the drawbacks of my position and
accept its duties. I subjected myself to a most severe test when I
turned my back upon Rome and the hope of glory to become an obscure
workingman in Sicily. The test would have been too mild and too short
if, at the outset, being loved or admired at first sight by a great and
noble lady, I had had only to stoop and pick up laurel crowns and
piastres. Instead of that, I must be a good son and a good brother, and,
moreover, a stout-hearted man, to defend at need the honor of my family.
I am well assured that the signora's esteem and my own, perhaps, can be
had only at that price. Very well, I will accept my destiny cheerfully,
and learn to endure without regret what my nearest and dearest endure so
courageously. I will be a man in advance of my years, and lay aside the
overpetted personality of my youth. If I have anything to blush for, it
is for having been a spoiled child so long, and for having failed to see
that it would soon be my duty to assist and protect those who devoted
themselves to me so unselfishly."
This determination restored peace to his heart. His father's songs and
little Mila's seemed to him the sweetest of melodies.
"Yes, yes," he said to himself, "sing on, happy birds of the South, pure
as the sky that looked down upon your birth! This merriment is the
indication of a perfectly clear conscience, and laughter well befits
you, who have never had an idea of evil! Ah! my old father's dear old
ballads, which have allayed the anxieties of his life and lessened the
fatigue of his labor--I should listen to them with respect instead of
smiling at their simplicity! And my young sister's merry laughter I
should welcome with affectionate delight as a proof of her courage and
her innocence! Away with my selfish dreams and my unfeeling curiosity! I
will go through the storm with you, and will enjoy as you do a burst of
sunlight between two clouds. My careworn brow is an insult to your
candor--black ingratitude for your kindness. I propose to be your staff
in distress, your comrade in toil, and your boon companion in joy!
"Sweet and melancholy flowers," he added, stooping fondly over the
bouquet of cyclamen, "whatever hand plucked you, whatever the sentiment
of which you are a pledge, my breath, aflame with evil desires, shall
sully you no more. If I sometimes lay bare my heart, as you do, I pray
that it may be as pure as your calices; and if it bleeds, as you seem to
bleed, I pray that virtue may exhale from its wounds, even as fragrance
exhales from your bosom."
Immediately after forming these excellent resolutions, made more
seductive by this vein of poetic imagery, young Michel completed his
toilet without further dallying, and made haste to join his father, who
was already at work mixing colors to _patch_ the paint at Villa
Palmarosa in many places where it had been marred by the chandeliers and
decorations of the ball.
"Here," said the goodman, handing him a large purse of Tunisian silk,
filled with gold pieces; "here is the pay for your beautiful ceiling."
"It is too much by half," said Michel, examining the beautifully
embroidered and shaded purse with much more interest than its contents.
"Our debt to the princess is not yet discharged, and I propose that it
shall be this very day."
"It is, my child."
"Then it must have been paid out of your wages, not out of mine. For if
I know how to estimate the contents of a purse, there is more here than
I propose to accept. Father, I do not propose that you shall work for
me. No, I swear by your gray hairs that you shall never work for your
son again, for it is his turn to work for you. Nor do I intend to accept
alms from Princess Agatha; I have had enough of such patronage and
generosity."
"You know me well enough," replied Pier-Angelo, with a smile, "to
believe that, far from interfering with your pride and your dutiful
sentiments, I shall always encourage them. Take my advice, therefore,
and accept this money. It is honestly yours; it costs me nothing, and
the person who gives it to you is at liberty to place what estimate she
pleases on the merits of your work. That is the difference that there
will always be between you and your father, Michel. An artist has no
fixed price. A single day of inspiration may make him rich. Whereas, a
deal of hard work is not enough to raise us mechanics out of the slough
of poverty. But God, in His mercy, has given us compensations. The
artist conceives and brings forth his works with much pain. The mechanic
performs his task with laughter and a song. I am so accustomed to that,
that I wouldn't exchange my trade for yours."
"Let me at least derive from mine such pleasure as it is capable of
affording me," said Michel. "Take this purse, father, and let nothing
ever be taken from it for my use. It is my sister's marriage portion; it
is the interest on the money she lent me when I was at Rome; and if I
never earn enough to make her richer, let her at least have the benefit
of my day of success. O father!" he cried, seeing that Pier-Angelo was
unwilling to accept his sacrifice, "do not refuse me; you will break my
heart! Your blind affection has almost corrupted my nature. Help me to
cease to be the selfish creature that you would have made me. Encourage
my good impulses, instead of robbing me of their fruit. It comes only
too late."