them. We will take the Gesu back to the church, but that cannot be till
dusk. I will keep Him safe with me. Go, you dear, and clean your skin
and your clothes, lest any seeing you should suspect what you have
done.'
'I will not go,' he muttered; 'you promised----'
'I promised, oh fool!' she said, with quick passion, 'and my word I
will keep, but not while the Gesu is with us. I love you for all you
have braved. I love you for all you have done. I will be yours and no
other's. See! I swear it on the Holy Child's head!'
And she kissed the silver brow of the babe.
He was convinced, yet irresolute and impatient.
'Let us go back with it now, then,' he muttered. 'I did but bring him
to show you in witness of what I had done.'
'No,' she said, with that imperious command in her voice and her gaze
which made the resolve in him melt like wax beneath a flame. 'You
cannot be seen with me in such a state as you are. I will carry the
Christ back to the church if so be that He rests uneasily in common
arms like ours, and then--well, I will pass by your cabin as I come
down. Dost complain of that, my ingrate?'
A flood of warmth and joy and full belief swept like flame through the
whole being of Caris. Her eyes were suffused, her cheek blushed, her
lips smiled; he believed himself beloved; he thought himself on the
threshold of ecstasy; the minutes seemed like hours until he should
regain his hut and watch from its door for her coming.
'You will go now?' he asked eagerly.
'At once,' she answered, holding the Gesu to her as a woman would hold
a sucking child.
Caris closed his eyes, dazed with her beauty and the wild, sweet
thought of how she would hold to her breast some child of his on some
fair unborn morrow.
'Then go,' he muttered. 'The sooner we part, the sooner we shall meet.
Oh, my angel!'
She gave him a smile over her shoulder, and she pushed her way upward
through the chestnut boughs, carrying the Gesu folded to her bosom.
Watching her thus depart, a sudden and new terror struck him.
'Wait,' he called to her. 'Will the priest be angered that I disturbed
the graves, think you?'
'Nay, nay, not when he sees that you give him the image,' she called
backward in answer.
Then she disappeared in the green haze of foliage, and Caris struck
onward in the opposite direction, to take the way which led to his
cabin on Genistrello. Her words had awakened him to a consciousness of
his bruised, befouled, and tattered state.
He wished to avoid meeting anyone who might question him as to his
condition.
He got as quickly as he could by solitary paths to his home, and was
met with rapture by his dog. He entered the house, and drank thirstily;
he could not eat; he washed in the tank at the back of the hut, and
clothed himself in the best that he had: what he wore on holy and on
festal days.
Then he set his house-door wide open to the gay morning light which,
green and gleeful, poured through the trunks of the chestnuts and
pines; and he sat down on his threshold with the dog at his feet, and
waited.
It would be a whole working-day lost, but what of that? A lover may
well lose a day's pay for love's crown of joy.
Hour after hour passed by, and his eyes strained and ached with looking
into the green light of the woods. But Santina came not.
The forenoon, and noontide and afternoon went by; and still no living
thing came up to his solitary house. The whole day wore away, and he
saw no one, heard nothing, had no visitant except the black stoat which
flitted across the path, and the grey thrushes which flew by on their
autumn flights towards lower ground.
The long, fragrant, empty day crept slowly by, and at last ended. She
had not come.
He was still fasting. He drank thirstily, but he could not eat, though
he fed the dog.
He was in a state of nervous excitation almost delirious. The trees and
the hills and the sky seemed to whirl around him. He dared not leave
the hut, lest she should come thither in his absence. He stared till he
was sightless along the green path which led down to the four roads.
Now and then, stupidly, uselessly, he shouted aloud; and the mountains
echoed his solitary voice.
The dog knew that something was wrong with his master, and was pained
and afraid.
The evening fell. The night wore away. He put a little lamp in his
doorway, thinking she might come, through shyness, after dark; but no
one came. Of her there was no sign, or from her any word.
When the day came he was still dressed and sleepless, seated before
his door; the flame of the little lamp burnt on, garish and yellow in
the sunshine.
The sun mounted to the zenith; it was again noon. He went indoors,
and took a great knife which he was accustomed to carry with him to
Maremma. He put it in his belt inside his breeches, so that it was
invisible.
Then he called the dog to him, kissed him on the forehead, gave him
bread, and motioned to him to guard the house; then he took his way
once more down the hillside to Massaio's house.
If she had fooled him yet again, she would not live to do it thrice.
His throat was dry as sand; his eyes were bloodshot; his look was
strange.
The dog howled and moaned as he passed out of sight.
He went onward under the boughs tinged with their autumnal fires, until
he came to the place where the house and sheds and walls of the wood
merchant's homestead stood. He walked straight in through the open
gates, and then stood still.
He saw that there was some unusual stir and trouble in the place: no
one was at work, the children were gaping and gabbling, the housewife
was standing doing nothing, her hands at her sides; Massaio himself was
seated drumming absently on the table.
'Where is Santina?' asked Caris.
They all spoke in answer, 'Santina is a jade'--Massaio's voice louder
and rougher than the rest.
'She has gone out of the town and away, none knows where; and she has
left a letter behind her saying that none need try to follow, for she
is gone to a fine new world, where she will want none of us about her;
and my brother says it is all my fault, giving her liberty out on the
hills. And the marvel is where she got the money, for we and they kept
her so close--not a stiver--not a penny--and it seems she took the
train that goes over the mountains ever so far, and paid a power of
gold at the station wicket.'
The voice of Caris crossed his in a loud, bitter cry. 'She sold the
Gesu! As God lives--she sold the Gesu!'
Then the blood rushed from his nostrils and his mouth, and he fell face
downwards.
VII
A few days later he was arrested for having violated and robbed the
tombs in the burial-grounds of St. Fulvo. The pickaxe and the spade had
been found with his name burned on the wood of them; he was sentenced
to three years at the galleys for sacrilege and theft.
When the three years were ended he was an old, gray, bowed man, though
only twenty-nine years of age; he returned to his cabin, and the dog,
who had been cared for by the charcoal-burners, knew him from afar off,
and flew down the hill-path to meet him.
'The wench who ruined you,' said the charcoal-burners around their
fire that night, 'they do say she is a fine singer and a rich madam
somewhere in foreign parts. She sold the Gesu--ay, she sold the Gesu to
a silversmith down in the town. That gave her the money to start with,
and the rest her face and her voice have done for her.'
'Who has the Gesu?' asked Caris, hiding his eyes on the head of the dog.
'Oh, the Gesu, they say, was put in the smelting-pot,' said the
charcoal-burner.
Caris felt for the knife which was inside his belt. It had been given
back to him with his clothes when he had been set free at the end of
his sentence.
'One could find her,' he thought, with a thrill of savage longing. Then
he looked down at the dog and across at the green aisles of the pines
and chestnuts.
'Let the jade be,' said the forest-man to him. 'You are home again, and
'twas not you who bartered the Christ.'
Caris fondled the haft of the great knife under his waistband.
'She stole the Gesu and sold Him,' he said, in a hushed voice. 'One day
I will find her, and I will strike her: once for myself and twice for
Him.'
A LEMON-TREE
A LEMON-TREE
I
It was a small lemon-tree, not more than forty inches high, growing
in its red earthen vase as all lemons are obliged to be grown further
north than Rome. There were many thousands and tens of thousands of
other such trees in the land; but this one, although so little, was
a source of joy and pride to its owner. He had grown it himself from
a slender slip cast away on a heap of rubbish, and he had saved his
pence up with effort and self-denial to purchase, second-hand, the big
pot of ruddy clay in which it grew, now that it had reached its first
fruit-bearing prime. It had borne as its first crop seven big, fragrant
lemons, hanging from its boughs amidst leaves which were as fresh and
green as a meadow in May. He had watched its first buds creep out of
the slender twigs, and swell and swell gradually into sharp-pointed
little cones, which in their turn became pale yellow fruit, 'fit for
a princess,' as he said, patting their primrose-coloured rind. They
seemed so many separate miracles to him, coming as by some magic out of
the little starry white flowers on the glossy twigs.
He was a poor, ignorant man, by name Dario Baldassino, known as
Fringuello (or the Chaffinch) to his neighbourhood and fellow workmen.
He lived on the south side of the ferry of Royezano, and dug and carted
the river-sand; a rude labour and a thankless, taking the sinew and
spirit out of a man, and putting little in return into his pocket. The
nave or ferry is a place to please an artist. All the land around on
this south side is orchard--great pear-trees and cherry-trees linked
together by low-growing vines, and in the spring months making a sea
of blossom stretching to the river's edge. The watermills, which were
there centuries ago, stand yellow and old, and cluster like beavers'
dams upon the water. The noise of the weir is loud, but the song of
the nightingale can be heard above it. Looking along westward down
the widening, curving stream, above the fruit-trees planted thick as
woods, there arise, two miles off, the domes and spires of the city
of Florence, backed by the hills, which here take an Alpine look upon
them when the sun sets beyond the rounded summits of the more distant
Carrara range; and the spurs of the Apennines grow deeply blue with
that intense transparent colour which is never seen in northern lands.
To the north also lie the mountains, and on the east; and late into May
the snow lingers where the day breaks above Vallombrosa and Casentino.
All the vale is orchard, broken now and then by some great stone-pine,
some walnut or chestnut tree, some church spire with its statue of
its saint, some low, red-brown roofs, some grey old granary with
open-timbered lofts. It is a serene and sylvan scene--at sunset and at
sunrise grand--and the distant city rises on its throne of verdure,
seeming transfigured as Dante, exiled, may have seen it in his dreams.
Of all this beauty outspread before his sight Fringuello saw little;
his eyes were always set on the sand and shingle into which he drove
his heart-shaped spade--all which is the pageant of the painter, the
paradise of the poet, but is nothing to the toiler of the soil. The
sweat of his fatigue drops down before his eyes, and shuts out from
him the scenes amidst which he dwells. For him the weir has no song,
the orchard no poem, the mountains no counsel, and the vales no charm.
He does but see the cart-rucks in the sand, the house-fly in the
sunlight, the coins hard-earned in his horny palm, the straw which
covers the coveted wine-flask, or the glass which holds the hot and
acid flavours of less natural drinks. Now and then Giotto looks up from
his sheepfold, and Robert Burns from his furrow, but it is only once in
a century. This poor labourer, Fringuello, lived in two little rooms
in a poor house which looked on the weir and the water-mills. He had
never been able to have a house of his own, and even the small charge
of the rooms was more than he could easily pay, miserable though they
were. His employment was intermittent, and in winter, when the river
was spread wide over its bed, covering the sand and shingle, it ceased
entirely. Some odd jobs he got elsewhere, but nothing certain. He had
no knowledge of any other work than the digging and carrying which had
been his lot. But he was always merry, with the mirth which had gained
him his nickname, and in his light-hearted poverty had done what the
poorest always do--he had married at twenty a girl as poor as himself.
She was called Lizina, the familiar corruption of Luisa, and was the
daughter of a cobbler of the adjacent village of Ripoli.
It was an imprudent union and a foolish one, but it was happier than
many which fulfil every condition of prudence and thrift. Lizina was
a blithe, buoyant, active, and laborious creature, and whilst she
lived he never had a hole in his hempen shirt, or went without a
tablespoonful of oil to his beans and bread. They were as merry and
happy as if they had really been a pair of chaffinches in a nest in
one of the pear-trees. But of joy the gods are envious, whether it go
to roost in garret or palace, and in a few brief years Lizina died of
fever and left him all alone with one little girl, as like herself as
the bud is like the flower.
For months he never sang as he worked, and his ruddy face was pale,
and he had long fits of weeping when he lay on his lonely bed, and
stared up at the starry skies which were visible through the square,
unshuttered window. Lizina was in the ground, in a nameless grave,
with two crossed sticks set above it, and the river rolled over the
weir, and the wide wheel turned, and the orchards blossomed, and the
people laughed on the yellow sand, and no one cared that a little
merry, glad, tender, harmless life was done for and over, stamped down
into the clay like a crushed butterfly, a broken branch, a rotten
fruit, or a dead grasshopper. Nobody cared; and after a time he, too,
ceased to care, and began to hum and whistle and carol once more as
he worked, and laughed once more at his comrades' jokes as they dug
up the heavy sand. In the lives of the poor there is little leisure
for sorrow, and toil passes over them like an iron roller over the
inequalities of a road, forcing them down into dull indifference, as
the roller forces into level nothingness alike the jagged flint and the
sprouting grass.
Meanwhile, Lizina, as she was called after her mother, grew up apace
like the little lemon-tree which had been planted at her birth, a
lovely child like a Correggio cherub, thriving on her dry bed and
herb-soup as the lemon plant thrived on the dry earth and uncongenial
atmosphere of the attic under the roofs.
Fringuello did his best by both of them, making up to them by
tenderness and gentleness what he was forced to refuse to both of
material comfort. Both the child and the tree went hungry often,
suffered from cold and frost in the sharp, short winters, and
languished in the scorching days, when foul odours rose from the naked
bed of the shrunken river, and white clouds of little moths hovered
over the cracked sand, and the leaves of the orchards grew yellow and
wrinkled, and curled up, and dropped in the heat before their time.
All that he could not help; he could not help it more than he could
help the shrinking of the river in drought, and the coming of blight to
the orchards. Though it went to his soul like a knife-thrust when he
saw the child pale and thin, and the lemon-tree sickly and shrunk, he
could do nothing. But he murmured always, 'Patience, courage,' as he
coaxed the child to eat a morsel of crust, and consoled the tree with
a spray of spring-water, and he got them both safely through several
burning summers and icy winters, and when they were both sixteen years
old the tree was strong and buxom, with glossy foliage and fine fruit,
and the child was healthy and handsome, with shining eyes and laughing
mouth.
He had worked as hard as any mule for them both, and though a young man
in years, he looked an old man from excess of toil, though his heart
was light and his smile was like sunshine.
When he got up in the dark to go to his work, and drew his leathern
belt about his lean ribs, he always looked at the pale light of dawn
as it touched the green leaves of the tree and the closed eyes of the
child, and then he muttered an Ave, content and thankful at heart. Many
would have thought the hardness of his lot excuse enough for suicide;
he never knew what it was not to feel tired, he never knew what it was
to have a coin in his pocket for pleasure. His bones ached, and the
gnawing of rheumatism was in his nerves, from the many hours spent
knee-deep in water or damp sand, and always at the pit of his stomach
was that other still worse gnawing of perpetual insufficiency of food.
But he was content and grateful to his fate, as the birds are, though
they hunger and thirst, and every man's hand is against them.
The child and the tree were indissolubly united in his mind and
memory. They had grown up together, and seemed part and parcel of each
other. Imagination scarcely exists in the brains of the poor; they do
not know what it is. The perpetual grind of daily want leaves no space
for or possibility of impersonal fancy in it; but, in a vague kind of
superstitious way, he associated the well-being of the one with the
welfare of the other. If the tree sickened and drooped for a day, he
always looked nervously at Lizina to see if she ailed anything also.
If the little girl coughed or grew hot with fever, he always watched
anxiously the leaves of the lemon. It was a talisman and fetish to him;
and when he came up from the river at evening when his work was done,
he looked upward always to see the green boughs of the tree at the
square little window of his garret under the deep eaves, and above an
archway of old brown-red brick.
If it had been missing at the window, he would have told himself that
Lizina was dead. There was no likelihood that it would ever be missing
there. Lemon-trees live long, and this one would, he knew, most likely
outlive himself if he kept it from worm and fly, and rot and mildew.
Nevertheless, he always glanced upward to make sure that it was there
when he toiled up the strip of road which led to his home when his work
in the sand was done. Lizina herself did not wait at the window. She
always came jumping and dancing down the path, her auburn curls flying,
and her big brown eyes sparkling; barefooted, ill-clad, scarcely fed,
but happy and healthy, singing at the top of her voice as her father
had always done in his youth.
When they reached their fifteenth birthday, neither she nor the
lemon-tree had ever ailed anything worse than a passing chill from a
frosty week, or a transient sickness from a sultry drought.
The lemon-tree had given her the few little gifts she had ever
received. The pence brought in by its fruit were always laid out for
her: cake at Christmas, sugar-egg at Easter, a white ribbon for her
first Communion, a pair of shoes to wear on high feasts and holy
days--these little joys, few and far between, had all come to her
from the copper pieces gained by the pale, wrinkled, fragrant fruit
sold at five centimes each in the village or the town. '_Soldi della
Lizinanina_,' said her father whenever he put any so gained in his
trousers pocket.
Well as he loved his pipe, and thankful as he was when he could get a
drink of watered wine, he never touched a halfpenny of the lemon money
to buy a pinch of tobacco or a glass of _mezzo-vino_. It was all saved
up carefully for his little girl's small wants. Sometimes in hard
seasons it had even to go in bread for her, but of that bread he would
never himself take a mouthful. Moreover, the pence were few, for the
lemons were not many.
Lizina remained quite a child, though she grew fast, and her little
round breasts swelled up high and firm where the rough hempen shift
cut across them. Young as she was, the eyes of an admirer had fallen
upon her, and young Cecco, the son of Lillo, the _contadino_ where the
big pine stood (a pine three hundred years old if one), had said to
her father and to her that when he had served out his time in the army
he should say something serious about it; but Fringuello had answered
him ungraciously that he could never give her bridal clothes or bridal
linen, so that she would needs die a maid, and his own people had told
him roughly that when he should have served his time he would be in a
different mind. But Cecco, nevertheless, thought nothing would please
him ever so well as this ragged, pretty child with her blowing cloud
of short, crisp bright curls, and he said to her one evening as she
sat on the wall by the ferry, 'If you will be patient, my Lizinanina,
I will be true;' and Lizina, too young to be serious, but amused and
triumphant, laughed gaily and saucily, and replied to him: 'I will make
no promises, Cecco. You will come back with a shorn pate and soft hands
and tender soles to your feet.'
For the soldier seems but a poor creature to the children of the soil,
and is, indeed, of but little use when the barracks vomit him out of
their jaws and send him back to his home, a poor, indifferent trooper,
but also a spoiled peasant; having learned to write indeed, but having
forgotten how to handle a spade, drive a plough, or prune a grape-vine,
and to whose feet, once hard and firm as leather, the once familiar
earth with its stones and thorns and sticks seems rough and sharp and
painful, after having marched in ill-fitting boots for three years
along smooth roads and paven streets.
To the city lad and lass the conscript may seem somebody very fine; but
to the country ones he seems but a mere popinjay, only useful to waste
powder. Lizina, although only a river labourer's daughter, was country
born and bred, and had the prejudices and preferences of the country,
and had run about under the orchard boughs and down the vineyards of
the countryside till she thought as a peasant and spoke as one.
Cecco was mortified, but he shared her views of the life to which he
was about to go. He was useful now to tame a steer, to milk a heifer,
to fell a tree, to mow a meadow, to reap a field, to get up in the dark
and drive the colt into the city with a load of straw and bring back
a load of manure. But in the barracks he would be nothing--worse than
nothing; a poor numb-skull, strapped up in stiff clothes with a pack on
his back, and a musket, which he must fire at nothing, on his shoulder.
'Wait for me, Lizina,' he said sadly. 'The time will soon pass, and I
will come back and marry you, despite them all.'
'Pooh! I shall have married a man with a mint of money by the time they
let you come back,' said the unkind child, saucily tossing the curls
out of her eyes; but through her long lashes her glance rested a moment
softly on the ruddy face of Cecco, which had looked down on her so
often through the boughs and twigs of the cherry or pear trees of his
father's farm, as he threw down fruit into her outstretched and eager
little hands where she stood in the grass of the orchard.
She said nothing more tender then, being coy and wayward and hard to
please, as became her incipient womanhood; but before she went to bed
that night she came close to her father's side and put her hand on his.
'Cecco says he will come back and marry me, _babbo_,' she said, with a
child's directness. Her father stroked her curls.
'That is a joke, dear; his people would never let him marry a little
penniless chit like you.'
Lizina shook her head sagely with a little proud smile.
'He will not mind his people. He will do it--if I wish--when he comes
back.'
Her father looked at her in amazement; in his eyes she was a little
child still.
'Why, baby, you speak like a woman!' he said stupidly. 'I am glad this
lad goes away, as he puts such nonsense into your head.'
'But if we both wish, you would not mind, _babbo_?' she asked,
persistent and serious.
'The angels save us! She speaks like a grown woman!' cried her father.
'My poor little dear,' he thought sadly, 'you will never be able to
wed anyone. We are poor! so poor! I can never give you even a set of
shifts. Who could go to a house so naked--in rags, as one may say? My
poor little angel, you must live a maid or go to a husband as beggared
as I.'
He wished to say all this, but the words choked him in his throat. It
seemed so cruel to set before the child the harsh, mean demands of
life, the merciless rules and habits of that narrow world of theirs,
which was bounded by the river and the sand on one side, and the
cornfields and orchards on the other.