millions like it that the waves washed up, and had breathed into, and
had strung with fine chords, and had made into a syrinx sweet for every
human ear.
Why not break the simple shell for sport? She did not care for music.
Did the gods care--they could make another.
* * *
Start a lie and a truth together, like hare and hound; the lie will run
fast and smooth, and no man will ever turn it aside; but at the truth
most hands will fling a stone, and so hinder it for sport's sake, if
they can.
* * *
He heard the notes of a violin, quite faint and distant, but sweet as
the piping of a blackbird amongst the white anemones of earliest
spring.
* * *
"Nature makes some folks false as it makes lizards wriggle," said he.
"Lippo is a lizard. No dog ever caught him napping, though he looks so
lazy in the sun."
* * *
He did not waver. He did not repine. He made no reproach, even in his
own thoughts. He had only lost all the hope out of his life and all the
pride of it.
But men lose these and live on; women also.
He had built up his little kingdom out of atoms, little by little; atoms
of time, of patience, of self-denial, of hoarded coins, of snatched
moments;--built it up little by little, at cost of bodily labour and of
bodily pain, as the pyramids were built brick by brick by the toil and
the torment of unnoticed lives.
It was only a poor little nook of land, but it had been like an empire
won to him.
With his foot on its soil he had felt rich.
And now it was gone--gone like a handful of thistle-down lost on the
winds, like a spider's web broken in a shower of rain. Gone: never to be
his own again. Never.
He sat and watched the brook run on, the pied birds come to drink, the
throstle stir on the olive, the cloud shadows steal over the brown, bare
fields.
The red flush of sunrise faded. Smoke rose from the distant roofs. Men
came out on the lands to work. Bells rang. The day began.
He got up slowly and went away; looking backwards, looking backwards,
always.
Great leaders who behold their armed hosts melt like snow, and great
monarchs who are driven out discrowned from the palaces of their
fathers, are statelier figures and have more tragic grace than he
had;--only a peasant leaving a shred of land, no bigger than a rich
man's dwelling-house will cover;--but vanquished leader or exiled
monarch never was more desolate than Bruno, when the full sun rose and
he looked his last look upon the three poor fields, where for ever the
hands of other men would labour, and for ever the feet of other men
would wander.
* * *
He only heard the toads cry to one another, feeling rain coming, "Crake!
crake! crake! We love a wet world as men an evil way. The skies are
going to weep; let us be merry. Crock! crock! crock!"
And they waddled out--slow, quaint, black things, with arms akimbo, and
stared at him with their shrewd, hard eyes. They would lie snug a
thousand years with a stone and be quite happy.
Why were not men like that?
Toads are kindly in their way, and will get friendly. Only men seem to
them such fools.
The toad is a fakeer, and thinks the beatitude of life lies in
contemplation. Men fret and fuss and fume, and are for ever in haste;
the toad eyes them with contempt.
* * *
I would die this hour, oh, so gladly, if I could be quite sure that my
music would be loved, and be remembered. I do not know: there can be
nothing like it, I think:--a thing you create, that is all your own,
that is the very breath of your mouth, and the very voice of your soul;
which is all that is best in you, the very gift of God; and then to know
that all this may be lost eternally, killed, stifled, buried, just for
want of men's faith and a little gold! I do not think there can be any
loss like it, nor any suffering like it, anywhere else in the world. Oh,
if only it would do any good, I would fling my body into the grave
to-morrow, happy, quite happy; if only afterwards, they would sing my
songs, all over the earth, and just say, "God spoke to him; and he has
told men what He said."
* * *
No one can make much music with the mandoline, but there is no other
music, perhaps, which sounds so fittingly to time and place, as do its
simple sonorous tender chords when heard through the thickets of
rose-laurel or the festoons of the vines, vibrating on the stillness of
the night under the Tuscan moon. It would suit the serenade of Romeo;
Desdemona should sing the willow song to it, and not to the harp; Paolo
pleaded by it, be sure, many a time to Francesca; and Stradella sang to
it the passion whose end was death; it is of all music the most Italian,
and it fills the pauses of the love-songs softly, like a sigh or like a
kiss.
Its very charm is, that it says so little. Love wants so little said.
And the mandoline, though so mournful and full of languor as Love is,
yet can be gay with that caressing joy born of beautiful nothings, which
makes the laughter of lovers the lightest-hearted laughter that ever
gives silver wings to time.
* * *
It was a quaint, vivid, pretty procession, full of grace and of
movement--classic and homely, pagan and mediæval, both at once--bright
in hue, rustic in garb, poetic in feeling.
Teniers might have painted the brown girls and boys leaping and singing
on the turf, with their brandishing boughs, their flaring torches, their
bare feet, their tossing arms; but Leonardo or Guercino would have been
wanted for the face of the young singer whom they carried, with the
crown of the leaves and of the roses on his drooped head, like the
lotus flowers on the young Antinous.
Piero di Cosimo, perhaps, in one of his greatest moments of brilliant
caprice, might best have painted the whole, with the background of the
dusky hillside; and he would have set it round with strange arabesques
in gold, and illumined amongst them in emblem the pipe of the shepherd,
and the harp of the muse, and the river-rush that the gods would cut
down and fill with their breath and the music of heaven.
Bruno stood by, and let the innocent pageant pass, with its gold of
autumn foliage and its purples of crocus-like colchicum.
He heard their voices crying in the court: "We have got him--we have
brought him. Our Signa, who is going to be great!"
* * *
All life had been to him as the divining-rod of Aaron, blooming ever
afresh with magic flowers. Now that the flame of pain and passion burned
it up, and left a bare sear brittle bough, he could not understand.
Love is cruel as the grave.
The poet has embraced the universe in his visions, and heard harmony in
every sound, from deep calling through the darkest storm to deep, as
from the lightest leaf-dancing in the summer wind; he has found joy in
the simplest things, in the nest of a bird, in the wayside grass, in the
yellow sand, in the rods of the willow; the lowliest creeping life has
held its homily and solace, and in the hush of night he has lifted his
face to the stars, and thought that he communed with their Creator and
his own. Then--all in a moment--Love claims him, and there is no melody
anywhere save in one single human voice, there is no heaven for him save
on one human breast; when one face is turned from him there is darkness
on all the earth; when one life is lost--let the stars reel from their
courses and the world whirl and burn and perish like the moon; nothing
matters; when Love is dead there is no God.
* * *
Bruno lay down that night, but for an hour only. He could not sleep.
He rose before the sun was up, in the grey wintry break of day, while
the fog from the river rose like a white wall built up across the plain.
It is the season when the peasant has the least to do. Ploughing, and
sowing, and oil-pressing, all are past; there is little labour for man
or beast; there is only garden work for the vegetable market, and the
care of the sheep and cattle, where there are any. In large households,
where many brothers and sisters get round the oil lamp and munch roast
chestnuts and thrum a guitar, or tell ghost stories, these short empty
days are very well; sometimes there is a stranger lost coming over the
pinewoods, sometimes there is a snow-storm, and the sheep want seeing
to; sometimes there is the old roistering way of keeping Twelfth-night,
even on these lonely wind-torn heights; where the house is full and
merry, the short winter passes not so very dully; but in the solitary
places, where men brood alone, as Bruno did, they are heavy enough; all
the rest of the world might be dead and buried, the stillness is so
unbroken, the loneliness so great.
He got up and saw after his few sheep above amongst the pines; one or
two of them were near lambing; then he laboured on his garden mould
amongst the potato plants and cauliflowers, the raw mist in his lungs
and the sea-wind blowing. It had become very mild; the red rose on his
house-wall was in bud, and the violets were beginning to push from
underneath the moss; but the mornings were always very cold and damp.
An old man came across from Carmignano to beg a pumpkin-gourd or two; he
got a scanty living by rubbing them up and selling them to the fishermen
down on the Arno. Bruno gave them. He had known the old creature all his
life.
"You are dull here," said the old man, timidly; because every one was
more or less afraid of Bruno.
Bruno shrugged his shoulders and took up his spade again.
"Your boy does grand things, they say," said the old man; "but it would
be cheerfuller for you if he had taken to the soil."
Bruno went on digging.
"It is like a man I know," said the pumpkin-seller, thinking the sound
of his own voice must be a charity. "A man that helped to cast
church-bells. He cast bells all his life; he never did anything else at
all. 'It is brave work,' said he to me once, 'sweating in the furnace
there and making the metal into tuneful things to chime the praise of
all the saints and angels; but when you sweat and sweat and sweat, and
every bell you make just goes away and is swung up where you never see
or hear it ever again--that seems sad; my bells are all ringing in the
clouds, saving the people's souls, greeting Our Lady; but they are all
gone ever so far away from me. I only hear them ringing in my dreams.'
Now, I think the boy is like the bells--to you."
Bruno dug in the earth.
"The man was a fool," said he. "Who cared for his sweat or sorrow? It
was his work to melt the metal. That was all."
"Ay," said the pumpkin-seller, and shouldered the big, yellow, wrinkled
things that he had begged; "but never to hear the bells--that is sad
work."
Bruno smiled grimly.
"Sad! He could hear some of them as other people did, no doubt, ringing
far away against the skies while he was in the mud. That was all he
wanted; if he were wise, he did not even want so much as that.
Good-day."
It was against his wont to speak so many words on any other thing than
the cattle or the olive harvest or the prices of seeds and grain in the
market in the town. He set his heel upon his spade and pitched the
earth-begrimed potatoes in the skip he filled.
The old man nodded and went--to wend his way to Carmignano.
Suddenly he turned back: he was a tender-hearted, fanciful soul, and had
had a long, lonely life himself.
"I tell you what," he said, a little timidly; "perhaps the bells,
praising God always, ringing the sun in and out, and honouring Our Lady;
perhaps they went for something in the lives of the men that made them?
I think they must. It would be hard if the bells got everything, the
makers nothing."
Over Bruno's face a slight change went. His imperious eyes softened. He
knew the old man spoke in kindness.
"Take these home with you. Nay; no thanks," he said, and lifted on the
other's back the kreel full of potatoes dug for the market.
The old man blessed him, overjoyed; he was sickly and very poor; and
hobbled on his way along the side of the mountains.
Bruno went to other work.
If the bells ring true and clear, and always to the honour of the
saints, a man may be content to have sweated for it in the furnace and
to be forgot; but--if it be cracked in a fire and the pure ore of it
melt away shapeless?
* * *
"Toccò" was sounding from all the city clocks. He met another man he
knew, a farmer from Montelupo.
"Brave doings!" said the Montelupo man. "A gala night to-night for the
foreign prince, and your boy summoned, so they say. No doubt you are
come in to see it all?"
Bruno shook himself free quickly, and went on; for a moment it occurred
to him that it might be best to wait and see Signa in the town; but then
he could not do that well. Nothing was done at home, and the lambs could
not be left alone to the shepherd lad's inexperience; only a day old,
one or two of them, and the ground so wet, and the ewes weakly. To leave
his farm would have seemed to Bruno as to leave his sinking ship does to
a sailor. Besides, he had nothing to do with all the grandeur; the king
did not want _him_.
All this stir and tumult and wonder and homage in the city was for
Signa; princes seemed almost like his servants, the king like his
henchman! Bruno was proud, under his stern, calm, lofty bearing, which
would not change, and would not let him smile, or seem so womanish-weak
as to be glad for all the gossiping.
The boy wanted no king or prince.
He said so to them with erect disdain.
Yet he was proud.
"After all, one does hear the bells ringing," he thought; his mind
drifting away to the old Carmignano beggar's words. He was proud, and
glad.
He stopped his mule by Strozzi palace, and pushed his way into the
almost empty market to the place called the Spit or Fila, where all day
long and every day before the roaring fires the public cooks roast flesh
and fowl to fill the public paunch of Florence.
Here there was a large crowd, pushing to buy the frothing, savoury hot
meats. He thrust the others aside, and bought half a kid smoking, and a
fine capon, and thrust them in his cart. Then he went to a shop near,
and bought some delicate white bread, and some foreign chocolate, and
some snowy sugar.
"No doubt," he thought, "the boy had learned to like daintier fare than
theirs in his new life;" theirs, which was black crusts and oil and
garlic all the year round, with meat and beans, perhaps, on feast
nights, now and then, by way of a change. Then as he was going to get
into his seat he saw among the other plants and flowers standing for
sale upon the ledge outside the palace a damask rose-tree--a little
thing, but covered with buds and blossoms blushing crimson against the
stately old iron torch-rings of the smith Caprera. Bruno looked at
it--he who never thought of flowers from one year's end on to another,
and cut them down with his scythe for his oxen to munch as he cut grass.
Then he bought it.
The boy liked all beautiful innocent things, and had been always so
foolish about the lowliest herb. It would make the dark old house upon
the hill look bright to him. Ashamed of the weaknesses that he yielded
to, Bruno sent the mule on at its fastest pace; the little red rose-tree
nodding in the cart.
He had spent more in a day than he was accustomed to spend in three
months' time.
But then the house looked so cheerless.
As swiftly as he could make the mule fly, he drove home across the
plain.
The boy was there, no doubt; and would be cold and hungry, and alone.
Bruno did not pause a moment on his way, though more than one called to
him as he drove, to know if it were true indeed that this night there
was to be a gala for the Lamia and the princes.
He nodded, and flew through the chill grey afternoon, splashing the deep
mud on either side of him.
The figure of St. Giusto on his high tower; the leafless vines and the
leafless poplars; the farriers' and coopers' workshops on the road; grim
Castel Pucci, that once flung its glove at Florence; the green low dark
hills of Castagnolo; villa and monastery, watch-tower and bastion,
homestead and convent, all flew by him, fleeting and unseen; all he
thought of was that the boy would be waiting, and want food.
He was reckless and furious in his driving always, but his mule had
never been beaten and breathless as it was that day when he tore up the
ascent to his own farm as the clocks in the plain tolled four.
He was surprised to see his dog lie quiet on the steps.
"Is he there?" he cried instinctively to the creature, which rose and
came to greet him.
There was no sound anywhere.
Bruno pushed his door open.
The house was empty.
He went out again and shouted to the air.
The echo from the mountain above was all his answer. When that died away
the old silence of the hills was unbroken.
He returned and took the food and the little rose-tree out of his cart.
He had bought them with eagerness, and with that tenderness which was in
him, and for which dead Dina had loved him to her hurt. He had now no
pleasure in them. A bitter disappointment flung its chill upon him.
Disappointment is man's most frequent visitor--the uninvited guest most
sure to come; he ought to be well used to it; yet he can never get
familiar.
Bruno ought to have learned never to hope.
But his temper was courageous and sanguine: such madmen hope on to the
very end.
He put the things down on the settle, and went to put up the mule. The
little rose-tree had been too roughly blown in the windy afternoon; its
flowers were falling, and some soon strewed the floor.
Bruno looked at it when he entered.
It hurt him; as the star Argol had done.
He covered the food with a cloth, and set the flower out of the draught.
Then he went to see his sheep.
There was no train by the seaway from Rome until night. Signa would not
come that way now, since he had to be in the town for the evening.
"He will come after the theatre," Bruno said to himself, and tried to
get the hours away by work. He did not think of going into the city
again himself. He was too proud to go and see a thing he had never been
summoned to; too proud to stand outside the doors and stare with the
crowd while Pippa's son was honoured within.
Besides, he could not have left the lambs all a long winter's night; and
the house all unguarded; and nobody there to give counsel to the poor
mute simpleton whom he had now to tend his beasts.
"He will come after the theatre," he said.
The evening seemed very long.
The late night came. Bruno set his door open, cold though it was; so
that he should catch the earliest sound of footsteps. The boy, no doubt,
he thought, would drive to the foot of the hill, and walk the rest.
It was a clear night after the rain of many days.
He could see the lights of the city in the plain fourteen miles or so
away.
What was doing down there?
It seemed strange;--Signa being welcomed there, and he himself knowing
nothing--only hearing a stray word or two by chance.
Once or twice in his younger days he had seen the city in gala over some
great artist it delighted to honour; he could imagine the scene and
fashion of it all well enough; he did not want to be noticed in it, only
he would have liked to have been told, and to have gone down and seen
it, quietly wrapped in his cloak, amongst the throng.
That was how he would have gone, had he been told.
He set the supper out as well as he could, and put wine ready, and the
rose-tree in the midst. In the lamplight the little feast did not look
so badly.
He wove wicker-work round some uncovered flasks by way of doing
something. The bitter wind blew in; he did not mind that; his ear was
strained to listen. Midnight passed. The wind had blown his lamp out. He
lighted two great lanthorns, and hung them up against the doorposts; it
was so dark upon the hills.
One hour went; another; then another. There was no sound. When yet
another passed, and it was four of the clock, he said:
"He will not come to-night. No doubt they kept him late, and he was too
tired. He will be here by sunrise."
He threw himself on his bed for a little time, and closed the door. But
he left the lanthorns hanging outside; on the chance.
He slept little; he was up while it was still dark, and the robins were
beginning their first twittering notes.
"He will be here to breakfast," he said to himself, and he left the
table untouched, only opening the shutters so that when day came it
should touch the rose at once and wake it up; it looked so drooping, as
though it felt the cold.
Then he went and saw to his beasts and to his work.
The sun leapt up in the cold, broad, white skies. Signa did not come
with it.
The light brightened. The day grew. Noon brought its hour of rest.
The table still stood unused. The rose-leaves had fallen in a little
crimson pool upon it. Bruno sat down on the bench by the door, not
having broken his fast.
"They are keeping him in the town," he thought. "He will come later."
He sat still a few moments, but he did not eat.
In a little while he heard a step on the dead winter leaves and tufts of
rosemary. He sprang erect; his eyes brightened; his face changed. He
went forward eagerly:
"Signa!--my dear!--at last!"
He only saw under the leafless maples and brown vine tendrils a young
man that he had never seen, who stopped before him breathing quickly
from the steepness of the ascent.
"I was to bring this to you," he said, holding out a long gun in its
case. "And to tell you that he, the youth they all talk of--Signa--went
back to Rome this morning; had no time to come, but sends you this, with
his dear love and greeting, and will write from Rome to-night. Ah, Lord!
There was such fuss with him in the city. He was taken to the foreign
princes, and then the people!--if you had heard them!--all the street
rang with the cheering. This morning he could hardly get away for all
the crowd there was. I am only a messenger. I should be glad of wine.
Your hill is steep."
Bruno took the gun from him, and put out a flask of his own wine on the
threshold; then shut close the door.
It was such a weapon as he had coveted all his life long, seeing such in
gunsmiths' windows and the halls of noblemen: a breech-loader, of
foreign make, beautifully mounted and inlaid with silver.
He sat still a little while, the gun lying on his knees; there was a
great darkness on his face. Then he gripped it in both hands, the butt
in one, the barrel in the other, and dashed the centre of it down across
the round of his great grindstone.
The blow was so violent, the wood of the weapon snapped with it across
the middle, the shining metal loosened from its hold. He struck it
again, and again, and again; until all the polished walnut was flying in
splinters, and the plates of silver, bent and twisted, falling at his
feet; the finely tempered steel of the long barrel alone was whole.
He went into his woodshed, and brought out branches of acacia brambles,
and dry boughs of pine, and logs of oak; dragging them forth with fury.
He piled them in the empty yawning space of the black hearth, and built
them one on another in a pile; and struck a match and fired them,
tossing pine-cones in to catch the flames.
In a few minutes a great fire roared alight, the turpentine in the
pine-apples and fir-boughs blazing like pitch. Then he fetched the
barrel of the gun, and the oaken stock, and the silver plates and
mountings, and threw them into the heat.
The flaming wood swallowed them up; he stood and watched it.
After a while a knock came at his house-door.
"Who is there?" he called.
"It is I," said a peasant's voice. "There is so much smoke, I thought
you were on fire. I was on the lower hill, so I ran up--is all right
with you?"
"All is right with me."
"But what is the smoke?"
"I bake my bread."
"It will be burnt to cinders."
"I make it, and I eat it. Whose matter is it?"
The peasant went away muttering, with slow unwilling feet.
Bruno watched the fire.
After a brief time its frenzy spent itself; the flames died down; the
reddened wood grew pale, and began to change to ash; the oaken stock was
all consumed, the silver was melted and fused into shapeless lumps, the
steel tube alone kept shape unchanged, but it was blackened and choked
up with ashes, and without beauty or use.
Bruno watched the fire die down into a great mound of dull grey and
brown charred wood.
Then he went out, and drew the door behind him, and locked it.
The last red rose dropped, withered by the heat.
* * *