the Flemish dykes from the northern seas were like waves of ice, which
froze every living thing they touched. The interior of the immense vault
of stone in which they were was even more bitterly chill than the
snow-covered plains without. Now and then a bat moved in the shadows;
now and then a gleam of light came to the ranks of carven figures. Under
the Rubens they lay together, quite still, and soothed almost into a
dreaming slumber by the numbing narcotic of the cold. Together they
dreamed of the old glad days when they had chased each other through the
flowering grasses of the summer meadows, or sat hidden in the tall
bulrushes by the water's side, watching the boats go seaward in the sun.
No anger had ever separated them; no cloud had ever come between them;
no roughness on the one side, no faithlessness on the other, had ever
obscured their perfect love and trust. All through their short lives
they had done their duty as it had come to them, and had been happy in
the mere sense of living, and had begrudged nothing to any man or beast,
and had been quite content because quite innocent. And in the faintness
of famine and of the frozen blood that stole dully and slowly through
their veins, it was of the days they had spent together that they
dreamed, lying there in the long watches of the night of the Noël.
Suddenly through the darkness a great white radiance streamed through
the vastness of the aisles; the moon, that was at her height, had broken
through the clouds; the snow had ceased to fall; the light reflected
from the snow without was clear as the light of dawn. It fell through
the arches full upon the two pictures above, from which the boy on his
entrance had flung back the veil: the Elevation and the Descent of the
Cross were for one instant visible as by day.
Nello rose to his feet and stretched his arms to them: the tears of a
passionate ecstasy glistened on the paleness of his face.
"I have seen them at last!" he cried aloud. "O God, it is enough!"
His limbs failed under him, and he sank upon his knees, still gazing
upward at the majesty that he adored. For a few brief moments the light
illumined the divine visions that had been denied to him so long--light,
clear and sweet and strong as though it streamed from the throne of
Heaven.
Then suddenly it passed away: once more a great darkness covered the
face of Christ.
The arms of the boy drew close again the body of the dog.
"We shall see His face--_there_," he murmured; "and He will not part us,
I think; He will have mercy."
On the morrow, by the chancel of the cathedral, the people of Antwerp
found them both. They were both dead: the cold of the night had frozen
into stillness alike the young life and the old. When the Christmas
morning broke and the priests came to the temple, they saw them lying
thus on the stones together. Above, the veils were drawn back from the
great visions of Rubens, and the fresh rays of the sunrise touched the
thorn-crowned head of the God.
As the day grew on there came an old, hard-featured man, who wept as
women weep.
"I was cruel to the lad," he muttered, "and now I would have made
amends--yea, to the half of my substance--and he should have been to me
as a son."
There came also, as the day grew apace, a painter who had fame in the
world, and who was liberal of hand and of spirit.
"I seek one who should have had the prize yesterday had worth won," he
said to the people,--"a boy of rare promise and genius. An old
woodcutter on a fallen tree at eventide--that was all his theme. But
there was greatness for the future in it. I would fain find him, and
take him with me and teach him art."
* * *
Death had been more pitiful to them than longer life would have been. It
had taken the one in the loyalty of love, and the other in the innocence
of faith, from a world which for love has no recompense, and for faith
no fulfilment.
All their lives they had been together, and in their deaths they were
not divided; for when they were found the arms of the boy were folded
too closely around the dog to be severed without violence, and the
people of their little village, contrite and ashamed, implored a special
grace for them, and, making them one grave, laid them to rest there side
by side--for ever.
_A BRANCH OF LILAC._
And indeed I loved France: still, in the misery of my life, I loved her
for all that I had had from her.
I loved her for her sunny roads, for her cheery laughter, for her
vine-hung hamlets, for her contented poverty, for her gay, sweet mirth,
for her pleasant days, for her starry nights, for her little bright
groups at the village fountain, for her old, brown, humble peasants at
her wayside crosses, for her wide, wind-swept plains all red with her
radiant sunsets. She had given me beautiful hours; she is the mother of
the poor, who sings to them so that they forget their hunger and their
nakedness; she had made me happy in my youth. I was not ungrateful.
It was in the heats of September that I reached my country. It was just
after the day of Sedan. I heard all along the roads, as I went, sad,
sullen murmurs of our bitter disasters. It was not the truth exactly
that was ever told at the poor wine-shops and about the harvest-fields,
but it was near enough to the truth to be horrible.
The blood-thirst which had been upon me ever since that night when I
found her chair empty seemed to burn and seethe, till I saw nothing but
blood--in the air, in the sun, in the water.
* * *
I remember in that ghastly time seeing a woman put the match to a piece
whose gunner had just dropped dead. She fired with sure aim: her shot
swept straight into a knot of horsemen on the Neuilly road, and emptied
more than one saddle.
"You have a good sight," I said to her.
She smiled.
"This winter," she said slowly, "my children have all died for want of
food--one by one, the youngest first. Ever since then I want to hurt
something--always. Do you understand?"
I did understand: I do not know if you do. It is just these things that
make revolutions.
* * *
When I sit in the gloom here I see all the scenes of that pleasant life
pass like pictures before me.
No doubt I was often hot, often cold, often footsore, often ahungered
and athirst: no doubt; but all that has faded now. I only see the old,
lost, unforgotten brightness; the sunny roads, with the wild poppies
blowing in the wayside grass; the quaint little red roofs and peaked
towers that were thrust upward out of the rolling woods; the clear blue
skies, with the larks singing against the sun; the quiet, cool,
moss-grown towns, with old dreamy bells ringing sleepily above them; the
dull casements opening here and there to show a rose like a girl's
cheek, and a girl's face like the rose; the little wine-shops buried in
their climbing vines and their tall, many-coloured hollyhocks, from
which sometimes a cheery voice would cry, "Come, stay for a stoup of
wine, and pay us with a song."
Then, the nights when the people flocked to us, and the little tent was
lighted, and the women's and the children's mirth rang out in peals of
music; and the men vied with each other as to which should bear each of
us off to have bed and board under the cottage roof, or in the old
mill-house, or in the weaver's garret; the nights when the homely
supper-board was brightened and thought honoured by our presence; when
we told the black-eyed daughter's fortunes, and kept the children
round-eyed and flushing red with wonder at strange tales, and smoked
within the leaf-hung window with the father and his sons; and then went
out, quietly, alone in the moonlight, and saw the old cathedral white
and black in the shadows and the light; and strayed a little into its
dim aisles, and watched the thorn-crowned God upon the cross, and in the
cool fruit-scented air, in the sweet, silent dusk, moved softly with
noiseless footfall and bent head, as though the dead were there.
Ah, well! they are all gone, those days and nights. Begrudge me not
their memory. I am ugly, and very poor, and of no account; and I die at
sunrise, so they say. Let me remember whilst I can: it is all oblivion
_there_. So they say.
* * *
Whether I suffered or enjoyed, loved or hated, is of no consequence to
any one. The dancing-dog suffers intensely beneath the scourge of the
stick, and is capable of intense attachment to any one who is merciful
enough not to beat him; but the dancing-dog and his woe and his love are
nothing to the world: I was as little.
There is nothing more terrible, nothing more cruel, than the waste of
emotion, the profuse expenditure of fruitless pain, which every hour,
every moment, as it passes, causes to millions of living creatures. If
it were of any use who would mind? But it is all waste, frightful waste,
to no end, to no end.
* * *
Ah, well! it is our moments of blindness and of folly that are the sole
ones of happiness for all of us on earth. We only see clearly, I think,
when we have reached the depths of woe.
* * *
France was a great sea in storm, on which the lives of all men were as
frail boats tossing to their graves. Some were blown east, some west;
they passed each other in the endless night, and never knew, the tempest
blew so strong.
* * *
Winter tries hardly all the wandering races: if the year were all
summer, all the world would be Bohemians.
* * *
We poured out blood like water, and much of it was the proud blue blood
of the old nobility. We should have saved France, I am sure, if there
had been any one who had known how to consolidate and lead us. No one
did; so it was all of no use.
Guerillas like us can do much, very much, but to do so much that it is
victory we must have a genius amidst us. And we had none. If the First
Bonaparte had been alive and with us, we should have chased the foe as
Marius the Cimbri.
I think other nations will say so in the future: at the present they are
all dazzled, they do not see clearly--they are all worshipping the
rising sun. It is blood-red, and it blinds them.
* * *
It is so strange! We see a million faces, we hear a million voices, we
meet a million women with flowers in their breasts and light in their
fair eyes, and they do not touch us. Then we see one, and she holds for
us life or death, and plays with them idly so often--as idly as a child
with toys. She is not nobler, better, or more beautiful than were all
those we passed, and yet the world is empty to us without her.
_SIGNA._
In the garden of these children all the flora of Italy was gathered and
was growing.
The delights of an Italian garden are countless. It is not like any
other garden in the world. It is at once more formal and more wild, at
once greener with more abundant youth and venerable with more antique
age. It has all Boccaccio between its walls, all Petrarca in its leaves,
all Raffaelle in its skies. And then the sunshine that beggars words and
laughs at painters!--the boundless, intense, delicious, heavenly light!
What do other gardens know of that, save in orange-groves of Granada and
rose thickets of Damascus?
The old broken marble statues, whence the water dripped and fed the
water-lily; the great lemon-trees in pots big enough to drown a boy, the
golden globes among their emerald leaves; the magnolias, like trees cast
in bronze, with all the spice of India in their cups; the spires of
ivory bells that the yuccas put forth, like belfries for fairies; the
oleanders taller than a man, red and white and blush colour; the broad
velvet leaves of the flowering rush; the dark majestic ilex oaks, that
made the noon like twilight; the countless graces of the vast family of
acacias; the high box hedges, sweet and pungent in the sun; the stone
ponds, where the gold-fish slept through the sultry day; the wilderness
of carnations; the huge roses, yellow, crimson, snow-white, and the
small noisette and the banksia with its million of pink stars; myrtles
in dense thickets, and camellias like a wood of evergreens; cacti in all
quaint shapes, like fossils astonished to find themselves again alive;
high walls, vine-hung and topped by pines and cypresses; low walls with
crowds of geraniums on their parapets, and the mountains and the fields
beyond them; marble basins hidden in creepers where the frogs dozed all
day long; sounds of convent bells and of chapel chimes; green lizards
basking on the flags; great sheds and granaries beautiful with the
clematis and the wisteria and the rosy trumpets of the bignonia; great
wooden places cool and shady, with vast arched entrances, and scent of
hay, and empty casks, and red earthen amphoræ, and little mice scudding
on the floors, and a sun-dial painted on the wall, and a crucifix set
above the weather-cock, and through the huge unglazed windows sight of
the green vines with the bullocks in the harvest-carts beneath them, or
of some hilly sunlit road with a mule-team coming down it, or of a blue
high hill with its pine-trees black against the sky, and on its slopes
the yellow corn and misty olive. This was their garden; it is ten
thousand other gardens in the land.
The old painters had these gardens, and walked in them, and thought
nothing better could be needed for any scene of Annunciation or
Adoration, and so put them in beyond the windows of Bethlehem or behind
the Throne of the Lamb--and who can wonder?
* * *
In these little ancient burghs and hillside villages, scattered up and
down between mountain and sea, there is often some boy or girl, with a
more wonderful voice, or a more beautiful face, or a sweeter knack of
song, or a more vivid trick of improvisation than the others; and this
boy or girl strays away some day with a little bundle of clothes, and a
coin or two, or is fetched away by some far-sighted pedlar in such human
wares, who buys them as bird-fanciers buy the finches from the nets; and
then, years and years afterwards, the town or hamlet hears indistinctly
of some great prima donna, or of some lark-throated tenor, that the big
world is making happy as kings, and rich as kings' treasurers, and the
people carding the flax or shelling the chestnuts say to one another,
"That was little black Lià, or that was our old Momo;" but Momo or Lià
the village or the vine-field never sees again.
* * *
The heart of silver falls ever into the hands of brass. The sensitive
herb is eaten as grass by the swine.
* * *
Fate will have it so. Fate is so old, and weary of her task; she must
have some diversion. It is Fate who blinded Love for sport, and on the
shoulders of Possession hung the wallet full of stones and
sand--Satiety.
* * *
As passion yet unknown thrills in the adolescent, as maternity yet
undreamed of stirs in the maiden; so the love of art comes to the artist
before he can give a voice to his thought or any name to his desire.
Signa heard "beautiful things" as he sat in the rising moonlight, with
the bells of the little bindweed white about his feet.
That was all he could have said.
Whether the angels sent them on the breeze, or the birds brought them,
or the dead men came and sang them to him, he could not tell. Indeed,
who can tell?
Where did Guido see the golden hair of St. Michael gleam upon the wind?
Where did Mozart hear the awful cries of the risen dead come to
judgment? What voice was in the fountain of Vaucluse? Under what nodding
oxlip did Shakespeare find Titania asleep? When did the Mother of Love
come down, chaster in her unclothed loveliness than vestal in her veil,
and with such vision of her make obscure Cleomenes immortal?
Who can tell?
Signa sat dreaming, with his chin upon his hands, and his eyes wandering
over all the silent place, from the closed flowers at his feet to the
moon in her circles of mist.
Who walks in these paths now may go back four hundred years. They are
changed in nothing. Through their high hedges of rhododendron and of
jessamine that grow like woodland trees it would still seem but natural
to see Raffaelle with his court-train of students, or Signorelli
splendid in those apparellings which were the comment of his age; and on
these broad stone terraces with the lizards basking on their steps and
the trees opening to show a vine-covered hill with the white oxen
creeping down it and the blue mountains farther still behind, it would
be but fitting to see a dark figure sitting and painting lilies upon a
golden ground, or cherubs' heads upon a panel of cypress wood, and to
hear that this painter was the monk Angelico.
The deepest charm of these old gardens, as of their country, is, after
all, that in them it is possible to forget the present age.
In the full, drowsy, voluptuous noon, when they are a gorgeous blaze of
colour and a very intoxication of fragrance, as in the ethereal white
moonlight of midnight, when, with the silver beams and the white
blossoms and the pale marbles, they are like a world of snow, their
charm is one of rest, silence, leisure, dreams, and passion all in one;
they belong to the days when art was a living power, when love was a
thing of heaven or of hell, and when men had the faith of children and
the force of gods.
Those days are dead, but in these old gardens you can believe still that
you live in them.
* * *
"Pippa!" echoed Istriel. His memories were wakened by the name, and went
back to the days of his youth, when he had gone through the fields at
evening, when the purple beanflower was in bloom.
"What is your name then?" he asked, with a changed sound in his voice,
and with his fair cheek paler.
"I am Bruno Marcillo; I come from the hills above the Lastra a Signa."
Istriel rose, and looked at him; he had not remembered dead Pippa for
many a year. All in a moment he did remember: the long light days, the
little grey-walled town, the meetings in the vine-hung paths, when
sunset burned the skies; the girl with the pearls on her round brown
throat, the moonlit nights, with the strings of the guitar throbbing,
and the hearts of the lovers leaping; the sweet, eager, thoughtless
passion that swayed them one to another, as two flowers are blown
together in the mild soft winds of summer; he remembered it all now.
And he had forgotten so long; forgotten so utterly; save now and then,
when in some great man's house he had chanced to see some painting done
in his youth, and sold then for a few gold coins, of a tender
tempestuous face, half smiling and half sobbing, full of storm and
sunshine, both in one; and then at such times had thought, "Poor little
fool! she loved me too well;--it is the worst fault a woman has."
Some regret he had felt, and some remorse when he had found the garret
empty, and had lost Pippa from sight in the great sea of chance; but
she had wearied him, importuned him, clung to him; she had had the worst
fault, she had loved him too much. He had been young and poor, and very
ambitious; he had been soon reconciled; he had soon learned to think
that it was a burden best fallen from his shoulders. No doubt she had
suffered; but there was no help for that--some one always suffered when
these ties were broken--so he had said to himself. And then there had
come success and fame, and the pleasures of the world and the triumphs
of art, and Pippa had dropped from his thoughts as dead blossoms from a
bough; and he had loved so many other women, that he could not have
counted them; and the memory of that boy-and-girl romance in the green
hill country of the old Etruscan land had died away from him like a song
long mute.
Now, all at once, Pippa's hand seemed to touch him--Pippa's voice seemed
to rouse him--Pippa's eyes seemed to look at him.
* * *
It was very early in the morning.
There had been heavy rains at night, and there was, when the sun rose,
everywhere, that white fog of the Valdarno country which is like a
silvery cloud hanging over all the earth. It spreads everywhere and
blends together land and sky; but it has breaks of exquisite
transparencies, through which the gold of the sunbeam shines, and the
rose of the dawn blushes, and the summits of the hills gleam here and
there, with a white monastery, or a mountain belfry, or a cluster of
cypresses seen through it, hung in the air as it were, and framed like
pictures in the silvery mist.
It is no noxious steam rising from the rivers and the rains: no grey and
oppressive obliteration of the face of the world like the fogs of the
north; no weight on the lungs and blindness to the eyes; no burden of
leaden damp lying heavy on the soil and on the spirit; no wall built up
between the sun and men; but a fog that is as beautiful as the full
moonlight is--nay, more beautiful, for it has beams of warmth, glories
of colour, glimpses of landscape such as the moon would coldly kill; and
the bells ring, and the sheep bleat, and the birds sing underneath its
shadow; and the sun-rays come through it, darted like angels' spears:
and it has in it all the promise of the morning, and all the sounds of
the waking day.
* * *
A great darkness was over all his mind like the plague of that unending
night which brooded over Egypt.
All the ferocity of his nature was scourged into its greatest strength;
he was sensible of nothing except the sense that he was beaten in the
one aim and purpose of his life.
Only--if by any chance he could still save the boy.
That one thought--companion with him, sleeping and waking, through so
many joyless nights--stayed with him still.
It seemed to him that he would have strength to scale the very heights
of heaven, and shake the very throne of God until He heard--to save the
boy.
The night was far gone; the red of the day-dawn began to glow, and the
stars paled.
He did not know how time went; but he knew the look of the daybreak.
When the skies looked so through his grated windows at home, he rose and
said a prayer, and went down and unbarred his doors, and led out his
white beasts to the plough, or between the golden lines of the reaped
corn; all that was over now.
The birds were waking on the old green hills and the crocus flowers
unclosing; but he----
"I shall never see it again," he thought, and his heart yearned to it,
and the great, hot, slow tears of a man's woe stole into his aching eyes
and burned them. But he had no pity on himself.
He had freedom and health and strength and manhood, and he was still not
old, and still might win the favour of women, and see his children
laugh--if he went back to the old homestead, and the old safe ways of
his fathers. And the very smell of the earth there was sweet to him as a
virgin's breath, and the mere toil of the ground had been dear to him by
reason of the faithful love that he bore to his birthplace. But he had
no pity on himself.
"My soul for his," he had said; and he cleaved to his word and kept it.
In his day he had been savage to others. He was no less so to himself.
He had done all that he knew how to do. He had crushed out the natural
evil of him and denied the desires of the flesh, and changed his very
nature to do good by Pippa's son: and it had all been of no use; it had
all been spent in vain, as drowning seamen's cries for help are spent on
angry winds and yawning waters. He had tried to follow God's will and to
drive the tempter from him, for the boy's sake; and it had all been of
no avail. Through the long score of years his vain sacrifices echoed
dully by him as a dropt stone through the dark shaft of a well.
Perhaps it was not enough.
Perhaps it was needful that he should redeem the boy's soul by the utter
surrender and eternal ruin of his own--perhaps. After all it was a poor
love which balanced cost; a meek, mean love which would not dare to take
guilt upon it for the thing it cherished.
To him crime was crime in naked utter blackness; without aught of those
palliatives with which the cultured and philosophic temper can streak it
smooth and paint its soft excuse, and trace it back to influence or
insanity. To him sin was a mighty, hideous, hell-born thing, which being
embraced dragged him who kissed it on the mouth, downward and downward
into bottomless pits of endless night and ceaseless torment. To him the
depths of hell and heights of heaven were real as he had seen them in
the visions of Orgagna.
Yet he was willing to say, "Evil, be thou my good!" if by such evil he
could break the bonds of passion from the life of Pippa's son.
He had in him the mighty fanaticism which has made at once the tyrants
and the martyrs of the world.
"Leave him to me," he had said, and then the strength and weakness, and
ruthless heat, and utter self-deliverance of his nature leaped to their
height, and nerved him with deadly passion.
"There is but one way," he said to himself;--there was but one way to
cut the cords of this hideous, tangled knot of destiny and let free the
boy to the old ways of innocence.
"He will curse me," he thought; "I shall die--never looking on his
face--never hearing his voice. But he will be freed--so. He will
suffer--for a day--a year. But he will be spared the truth. And he is so
young--he will be glad again before the summer comes."
For a moment his courage failed him.
He could face the thought of an eternity of pain, and not turn pale, nor
pause. But to die with the boy's curse on him--that was harder.