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P ASCAREL 
 
 ONLY A STORY 
 
 BY OUIDA 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'CHANDOS,' ' TRICOTR1N ' ' HHLD IN BONDAGE, 
 ' TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES ' ETC. 
 
 A NEW EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 
 CHAT TO & WINDUS 
 1900 
 
"IOVE is EJTOUGH; though the World be a-waning, 
 
 And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining, 
 
 Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover, 
 
 The gold-cups and daisies fair blossoming thereunder, 
 
 Though the hin be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder 
 
 And this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over, 
 
 Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter ; 
 
 The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter, 
 
 Those lips and those eyes of the loved and the lover."" 
 

 jdou 
 
 Ci 
 
 681 
 
TO THE BEADEK. 
 
 WITH feminine obstinacy the Donzella sacrifices truth 
 to pictorial effect, and 'justice to high-coloured con- 
 trast, touching Rome.* The love that Rome begets 
 is different to that which Florence inspires ; but it is 
 never less strong and is even more reverent ; less 
 familiar, and more close on awe ; as tender, but more 
 solemn. In Rome, Art and Nature strain together ir. 
 perpetual conflict for supremacy; a struggle of a Titan 
 with a God that holds mortal onlookers breathless ; in 
 Florence, Art and Nature clasp hands and smile on men, 
 and even the Mercury Agoreus, being in Florence, 
 borrows the flowers of Dionysus to deck his scales of 
 barter. But who, with any power of vision or soul of 
 artist in them, can live a day blind to the vast and 
 sublime beauties of the Capital of the V/oiid? who can 
 fail to grow at once the humbler and the greater by 
 
 * P. 103. 
 
l PREFACE. 
 
 dwelling on that sacred soil ? who will not draw nearer 
 to God himself as they see how mighty human genius 
 can he ? who will not yield to Eome a homage that is a 
 passion as well as a religion ? If any such there he, let 
 them see the sun fall once on the face of the Faun, let 
 them see the moon shine once on the Palace of the 
 Caesars : and surely they will repent. 
 
 OUIDA. 
 
 
 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 
 
 CHAP. PACK 
 
 I. KING CARNIVAL ........ 1 
 
 II. THE BIRD AND THE FATES * 4 
 
 HI. BY THE BROKEN DONATELLO 11 
 
 IV. WITH THE POPOLANI 22 
 
 v. THE PEACOCK'S PLUMES ....... 33 
 
 VI. MATER DOLOROSA 40 
 
 VH. A TWILIGHT TALE ....... t 42 
 
 VIII. THE LITTLE RED BOX ...... e * 49 
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 THE CITY OF LILIES. 
 
 I. THE GIFTS OF GALA . . . . D . 55 
 
 II. THE VEGLIONE MASQUER . . . , . . . 61 
 
 III. THE LAST SLEEP 69 
 
 IV. AT AVE MARIA 70 
 
 V. THE PEAST OP PAUSTINO ....... 75 
 
 VT. FUORI ,.....,.. 80 
 
X CONTENTS. 
 
 FAQl 
 VH. UNDER THE GARISENDA ,.,.,,, 86 
 
 VIII. THE MAIDENHAIR ........ 92 
 
 IX. THE SNOW-FLOWER 97 
 
 X. LA REINE DU MOYENAGE , . . . . f . 101 
 
 XI. THE MIDNIGHT FAIR ....... 106 
 
 XII. WITH THE WILD CROCT'S . . . . . , . 109 
 
 XIII. THE GREAT MAGICIAN . , . . .119 
 
 BOOK III. 
 
 THE DAUGHTER OF HERCULES. 
 
 I. UNDER THE RED LILY ....... 
 
 II. THE ROSE AND THE FLOK1NS ...... 14C 
 
 III. THE GOLDEN CELANDINE . , . . . . . 155 
 
 IV. BESIDE DEAD FIRES . . 161 
 
 V. GIUDENTU DELL 7 ANNO , . . . * , , 168 
 
 VI. THE OLD STAR TOWER . , . . . . , 169 
 
 VII. DUE AMOR1 ' , . . . \ 172 
 
 VIII. THE LILY-QUEEN , : 179 
 
 BOOK IV. 
 
 THE WANDERING ART& 
 
 X. IL BIANCO ASrETTO ........ 186 
 
 II. fclOILE QUI FILE 190 
 
 III. THE RIBAND AND THE MANDOLINE . . . . . 19G 
 
 IV. THE POET'S COUNTRY . 200 
 
 V. FUMA DI GLORIA ...*> 207 
 YJ. aWYN ARAUH , , ? - - , 213 
 
CONTENTS. XI 
 
 PAQK 
 
 VII. OLIVET . . . 215 
 
 Vin. ECOLE BUISSONNI|E t . . 217 
 
 IX. THE FEAST OF ST. JOHN . i 223 
 
 X. ON THE HILLS > 232 
 
 XI. THE HOBBLE OF LEAD ....... 238 
 
 XII. THE LEGEND OF THE LUCCIOLS . . * * 244 
 
 XIII. THE TOMB OF THE KING ....... 252 
 
 XIV. THE GOLD OF ETRURIA ...... t 259 
 
 XV. THE SCEPTRE OF FEATHERS , . . . 263 
 
 BOOK V. 
 
 THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 
 
 I. THE FOUNTAIN OF THE PINE 270 
 
 II. THE NIGHT OF ALL SAINTS 280 
 
 m. SUNRISE . 284 
 
 IV. SUNSET * 286 
 
 V. NIGHTFALL . 297 
 
 VI. ALONG THE MOUNTAINS 300 
 
 VII. THE CHURCH OF THE CROSS ...... 306 
 
 BOOK VI. 
 
 THE QUARTER OF THE DOVK. 
 
 I. OLTEARNO t . . . 308 
 
 II. AT BOCCACCIO'S WINDOW . . . , , ,311 
 
 III. BY THE MOUTH OF THE LION . . . . , . 317 
 
 IV. DEAD ROSES . , 324 
 
 T. UNDFB mi WHITE LION t * * * f , , 328 
 
rii CONTENTS. 
 
 BOOK VII 
 
 THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 
 
 PAOH 
 
 I. ms STORY , 341 
 
 II. HER STORY , 376 
 
 III. THE OLD SEA QUEEN ....... 385 
 
 IV. IN THE LAND OF VIRGIL .,,.,.. 394 
 
 V. THE SONG OP THE GRILLI . , . . . , .399 
 
 VI. RED AND GOLD ......... 406 
 
 VII. THE BROKEN BUBBLE . . . % . 411 
 
 VIII. THE LILY AND THE LAUREL . . . . , , 413 
 
 IX. LOVE IS ENOUGH 422 
 
 
PASCAREK 
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 THE CITY OF CATULLUS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 KING CARNIVAL. 
 
 IT was the first day of Carnival. 
 
 The populace was out all over the city in a many-coloured and 
 ever-changing swarm of human life. The gay masque reeled 
 madly round the marble iron-hound flanks of the Duomo, and 
 llung its hail of toys and flowers against the frowning masses of 
 the old palaces and prisons ; and surged in its foam of mirth and 
 mischief all along the length of the green Adige in the light of 
 the winter noon. 
 
 Tor a month King Carnival would reign supreme in mockery 
 and merriment over the lives of men; his path strewn with 
 violets, his sovereignty shouted over wine, his dynasty pro- 
 claimed far and wide everywhere, by high and low, from the 
 cobbler who pranked himself in the guise of Stenterello to the 
 great lady who laughed through her velvet mask of Venice. 
 
 And at the month's end, at nightfall, just as the moon should 
 rise, with music and many a jest and sound of horn and drum, 
 and rioting of Arlecchino and Pulcinello and all their imme- 
 morial brotherhood, at nightfall the fickle people would lead the 
 old King out to his funeral pyre in the great square, and there 
 would burn him in all pomp and cruelty until the flames should 
 redden grini Boland standing at his vigil at the cathedral doors f 
 
 a 
 
* PASCARkL* 
 
 and be seen afar off, where the last outposts of the great Alp 
 kept watch and ward in the quiet of the silence and the chillness 
 of the snow. 
 
 Burn him, a monarch yesterday, to-day a scapegoat, in grim- 
 mest ironic symhol of all human histories. 
 
 Poor King Carnival ! 
 
 His rule has lasted longer than any other dynasty ; for though 
 his nations burn him one year, he rises from his ashes, and they 
 cry All hail ! to him the next. 
 
 But the axe is at the root of his throne. The old glad days 
 of his mumming are numbered, and the pomp of his pageant is 
 shorn. The world is old and very weary. 
 
 Here "nel aer dolce, che del sol s'allegra," life is brighter 
 and more buoyant than elsewhere. 
 
 Here the people still laugh from clear throats, and the hours 
 still reel away, marked with flowers ; here they sit in the sun, 
 and still know the priceless pleasures and true uses of leisure ; 
 and here the heart of a child still beats in the war-scarred breast 
 of the nation. 
 
 Yet even here the world is older, greyer, sadder than of yore ; 
 and even here the day is close at hand when King Carnival will 
 ride his last ride round the city walls, and be burned for the last 
 time, in all the panoply of his historic robes, upon a pyre whence 
 his ashes shall never rise again. 
 
 The world is too wise to be foolish so they say. Or is it too 
 foolish to be wise ? 
 
 King Carnival might tell us if he would. Perhaps he would 
 answer : 
 
 " In the days when men were so great that they did not fear 
 to stoop, and were so strong that their dignity lost nothing by 
 their mirth, they rode in my train and followed me Carnivale, 
 the old King and laughed as children laugh those men of 
 those days of Dante, of those days of Leonardo, of those days oi 
 Shakspeare. Are you wiser than they ? or weaker ? or only 
 more weary, perhaps ? No matter. I have held high feast with 
 the giants, and they were not ashamed to be glad. But you, 
 who blush for your mirth because your mirth is vice, bury me 
 quickly. I am a thing of the Past." 
 
 And the old King would speak sadly aright ; for his name is 
 almost emptiness, and his earth-swaying orb is but now an empty 
 gourd in which the shrivelled beans of the world's spent 
 pleasures are shaken in fruitless sport and sound. 
 
 For ia the old days, when he reigned supreme, over all men'* 
 
XMG CARNIVAL. J 
 
 lives, from sovereign's to serf's, for a few weeks' span of full 
 feast and fair folly, in the old days men lived greatly great lives 
 to great ends. 
 
 Their faith was ever present with them a thing of daily 
 use and hourly sweetness. Their households were wisely ruled 
 and simply ordered. They denuded themselves of their sub- 
 stance to give their gold to the raising of mighty works vives 
 lapidilus which to this day do live and speak. 
 
 Great artists narrowed not themselves to one meagre phase of 
 art, but filled with all its innumerable powers the splendid plen- 
 itude of their majestic years. 
 
 And that art was in the hearts of the people who followed it, 
 and adored its power and were nourished by it, so that it was no 
 empty name, but an evervivifying presence a divinity at once 
 of hearth and temple that brooded over the cities with sheltering 
 and stainless love. 
 
 Therefore in those days men, giving themselves leave to be glad 
 for a little space, were glad with the same sinewy force and man- 
 ful singleness of purpose as made them in other times laborious, 
 self-denying, patient, and fruitful of high thoughts and deeds. 
 
 Because they laboured for their fellows, therefore they could 
 laugh with them, and because they served God, therefore they 
 dared be glad. 
 
 In those grave, dauntless, austere lives the Carnival's jocund 
 revelry was as one golden bead in a pilgrim's rosary of thorn- 
 berries. 
 
 They had aimed highly and highly achieved ; therefore they 
 could go forth amidst their children and rejoice. 
 
 But we in whom all art is the mere empty Shibboleth of a 
 ruined religion whose priests are all dead; we whose whole 
 year-long course is one Dance of Death over the putridity of our 
 pleasures ; we whose solitary purpose it is to fly faster and faster 
 from desire to satiety, from satiety to desire, in an endless eddy 
 of fruitless effort ; we whose greatest genius can only raise for 
 us some inarticulate protest of despair against some unknown 
 God; we have strangled King Carnival and killed him, and 
 buried him in the ashes of our own unutterable weariness 
 and woe. 
 
 For the old King is heartsick to hear the manful laughter that 
 he heard in his youth; and we we cannot laugh; all we cac 
 give is a sneer and a sob. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE BIED AND THE FATES. 
 
 in Yerona this first day of Carnival men made 
 believe to be glad. 
 
 In the deep wintry gloom of the old sad city the gold of the 
 alien tyranny had been scattered broadcast that the people might 
 wear at least the mask of contentment ; and on the whole they 
 wore it, nothing loth, grinning gleefully from ear to ear. 
 
 The old stone balconies were draped with amber and rose and 
 silver; the beautiful trecento windows were filled with eager 
 faces ; the dusky crypt-like streets were full of colour and tumult ; 
 the great marble tombs, looming white in the darkness of their 
 sepulchres, were flecked with the pretty pallor of violets from 
 Rome. 
 
 Verona under her taskmasters took holiday. 
 
 Under a deep porch, sculptured with Tine foliage and the 
 heads of griffins, two children stood looking on the pageantry, 
 and not thinking very much about it ; for one of them the girl, 
 was full of trouble, and the boy tried his best to solace her. 
 
 " Do look at Stenterello ! " the little lad murmured. " How- 
 nimble he is look, look ! the boys have caught him. No ! he 
 slips through like an eel. Ah, ah ! do look ! There is Arlecchino 
 angling for a priest's hat with a gilded fishing-hook. Oh, carina 
 mia ! to think you have no heart to laugh to-day " 
 
 The tears brimmed over in his companion's eyes. 
 
 " How can I laugh ? "We have nothing absolutely nothing. 
 "We must sell those poor little jewels of my mother's, or 
 Mariuccia will starve. It must not be, you know; she 13 
 so old, so old ! And yet to sell the jewels ! See here, 'Ino. 
 I have a voice, and I am fifteen years old, and I am good 
 to look at, you all say. Why should I not sing in the 
 choruses ? You know how often we have laughed at them 
 the fat ugly women with the crowns that would always tumble 
 cff. Now I am as thin as a cane, and am handsome, and could 
 wear a crown as one should be worn. "Why might I not sing in 
 the chorus ? " 
 
 The pretty boy looked perplexed, and his little bare foot traced 
 flervously an arabesque on the stone of the dusty stair. 
 
THE BIRD AND ItiE FATES. 5 
 
 "That would never do, dear donzella! Tour father is too 
 Illustrious " 
 
 'But one cannot live on being illustrious. One wants to eat 
 somehow. And there is nothing to eat. Nothing. We have 
 not heard of my father for more than a year, and Florio even 
 does not send now. Why should I not sing in the chorus ? It 
 is quite easy, all that sort of music/' 
 
 He shook his pretty, curly, golden, Venetian head, ia grave 
 concern. 
 
 " Oh no, dear donzella; it would never do. Mariuccia would 
 never allow it. It is so late at night, and the women are not fit 
 for you : it would never do." 
 
 " Then the jewels must go ? And they are all that I have of 
 my mother's the only, only little thing ! " 
 
 The words ended in a sob ; and the whirling, many-coloured 
 procession of the Carnival was hidden from the child's sight by a 
 haze of sudden tears. 
 
 At home there were an empty cupboard, a cold hearth, and an 
 old woman of eighty years, who had not broken her fast. Such 
 things seem hard to bear when one is very young; and it is the 
 first day of Carnival ; and beneath there, iu the street, all the 
 mad and merry masque is flaunting on its way. 
 
 The boy listened wistfully, with a tender and anxious face. 
 
 " See here, dear donzella/' he murmured, after a pause. "I 
 have a thought. Sing in the chorus you must not ; but why not 
 sing in the streets ? The people are all happy and good-tem- 
 pered to-day. I have got my lute here, and we will sing, and 
 then ask them frankly to help us. Why not ? We have made, 
 music for them often out of pure love and goodwill. They will 
 certainly give us a little money now, and no harm done." 
 
 "Oh, 'Ino! You never sang for money yet, nor I. It is so 
 different " 
 
 " We have not sung for it, because we have not wanted it. 
 But if we do want it, where is the harm " 
 
 " It is shameful !" 
 
 " Shameful ! How shameful ? When the great singer Lillo 
 went through here last spring, do you not remember that the 
 least atom of standing room in the theatre was worth gold, and 
 the people took the horses from his carriage, and drew him through 
 the streets, shouting and smothering him with Easter lilies ? " 
 
 " That is very different." 
 
 " Not at all different. Except that they pay Lillo by 
 and we only want a few florins." 
 
6 PASCAK&L. 
 
 " But why, then, will you never take money when you play 
 yourself? You never do." 
 
 He crossed himself, and glanced gratefully at an old battered, 
 black-faced Madonna that hung behind an iron grating high up 
 above in the doorway. 
 
 " Our Lady has been so good to me, and I have never wanted 
 for any thing . And the people who would have paid me have 
 always been so poor so poor. Eut I would play for money 
 rather than sell a thing of my mother's. Perhaps your mother 
 up there says to Our Lady, 'Look at my donzella; she is 
 proud : take that sin out of her heart.' And Our Lady says, 
 1 We will prove her : she must love you a little, though she never 
 looked on your face/ And so Our Lady sets this thing in your 
 way. And your mother up there waits, watching and trembling, 
 to see if indeed you do love her, or only care for your pride. 
 For mothers never forget. That I am very sure. No, not 
 though they sit on the right hand of God with His angels." 
 
 The boy's voice was very sweet and solemn, and murmured 
 with a strange softness and clearness through the riotous laughter 
 and uproar that rose from the Carnival crowds in the street 
 below. He looked no longer at the antics of Stenterello and the 
 pranks of Arlecchino, but up at the breadth of blue serene sky 
 which stretched above where the gabled roof parted. 
 
 His companion listened, with the colour coming and going, 
 fleeting and burning, in her downcast face ; then suddenly she 
 caught his hand and sprang down the first stair. 
 
 " Let us go, 'Ino let us go ! " 
 
 And hand in hand they ran down, and were mingled with the 
 hundreds who were streaming in frolicsome humour, through the 
 narrow tortuous street towards the great Piazza. 
 
 A few minutes later they also were standing in the Cathedral 
 square. 
 
 They were a picturesque little pair the girl taller than the 
 boy by full a head. 
 
 He was barelegged and barefooted a child of the populace; 
 he wore the loose shirt and the red waistband of the Venetian 
 gondoliers ; and slung round him by another bit of scarlet was 
 an old ebony mandoline. She was clad in quite another guise, 
 BO that she looked like some silky-leaved flower growing out of 
 the grey stone pavements ; she had a hood of dark velvet over 
 her head, from which great, bright, trustful eyes looked out 
 wonderingly upon the world ; her skirts were of heavy amber 
 ltin, that seemed to have been fashioned out of some brocaded 
 
THE BIRD AND THE FATES. 7 
 
 *iu, her hands were full of flowers that she had picked up 
 from the ground as the people of the balconies flung them 
 downward. 
 
 As they stood together, hand in hand, the contrast of colour 
 and the grace of attitude made a picture against the dusky pile 
 of the Duomo and in the crisp whiteness of the sunny frosty 
 air. Many people passing paused to look at them ; the little 
 lad whispered to her, and then unslung his mandoline. 
 
 There was a lull in the sports of the day. Some sporting of a 
 band of mummers headed by a scarlet Mefistofelo and a gorgeous 
 Dulcamara was over and done with : the commencement of the 
 traditional Gala was delayed; the crowd was unoccupied and 
 willing to be amused, but not impatient nor out of temper, 
 because it was a crowd of Italy. 
 
 The boy judged his time accurately, aud touched the cords of 
 his lute. The girl wavered a moment with the colour hot in 
 her face ; then with a sudden gesture threw the hood back off 
 her curls, and lifted up her voice and sang. 
 
 Her song was an old familiar street-song of the Lombard 
 population. 
 
 Tar and wide on the clear wintry air, keen with the hard 
 breath of the mountains, the strong pure notes of a voice in its 
 earliest youth rang out like a bell over the muttering and shout- 
 ing of the people. Those nearest to her listened, and hushed 
 down the noise around them ; the silence spread and spread 
 softly like the circles in the water where a stone is thrown ; the 
 boisterous gaiety dropped to a quieter key ; in a little while all 
 the square was still. 
 
 The hood fell back wholly upon her shoulders ; the sun shone 
 upon the little group ; the amber of her skirts, the violets in her 
 hands, the scarlet wool of the boy's sash, all glowed in the light; 
 above all hum and buzz from the other quarters of the city the 
 eong rose on the air clear as only the tones of childhood can be. 
 
 " I/Uccello ! " the people shouted. " Go on, go on ! " 
 
 A smile rippled over her face, as at some familiar word of 
 greeting : she sang on at their bidding song after song of the 
 sweet unwritten melodies of the nation. Now and then the boy 
 struck a chord or two from his mandoline, but seldom ; her voice 
 was rich enough and strong enough to fill the square without 
 aid, and it leaped aloft in the wintry air with the eager, straight, 
 upward flight of a hawk that is loosed from its holdings. 
 
 "When at length it ceased, the throng in the great squaro 
 screamed, laughed, almost cried with delighted applause; the 
 
S PASCA&&L. 
 
 people in the balconies clapped their hands, the loungers at the 
 caffe dashed their hands on the marble tables till their glasses 
 rang, the masquers and merry-makers shrieked a hundred times, 
 " Viva TUccello ! Yiva 1'TJccello ! " 
 
 The boy marked the propitious hour. He took the red berretta 
 off his curly head, and advanced amongst the multitude, and 
 with the infinite grace of his nation, the grace which is so per- 
 fect because so utterly unconscious of itself, stretched out his 
 hand to them for charity. 
 
 " Some little thing, signori, for the love of God. There is an 
 old woman at home who wants bread." 
 
 He was generous, and he sought to bear all the shame of tho 
 alms-seeking for his own portion. But his companion saw his 
 purpose, and sprang to his side. Her cheeks were flushed, the 
 tears were bright on her lashes, the winds blew tie heavy gold 
 of her hair and the snow off her courtly skirts , her voice had 
 lost its strength, and trembled a little. 
 
 " It is not for him, signori ! " she cried. " It is for me. For 
 himself, when he plays and the people would give him coins or 
 cakes or confetti, he will never take payment for his music. Ho 
 says it is God's gift, not his. The money that he begs now is 
 for me. I am illustrious ; oh yes ! but I am very poor. I have 
 an old nurse at home who wants bread, and sits by a fireless 
 hearth. She is so old, so old. And we have nothing to sell but 
 a few little jewels, and they were my mother's, who is dead. 
 Will you give me some little thing, if my songs pleased 
 you?" 
 
 The answer came from a hundred hands at once from above 
 and around, on every side. 
 
 Paper money fluttered to her feet; loose silver rolled like 
 sugar-plums ; here and there a piece of gold flashed like a star 
 through the air ; flowers and toys and gilded horns of sweet- 
 meats, and ribboned playthings of the pageantry were all 
 showered upon them from the balconies above and from the 
 throngs around, until their arms ached with stretching for tho 
 gifts, he his red berretta, and she her amber skirts. 
 
 Great ladies, leaning in the draped galleries of old palaces, 
 cast down money with lavish hands; white-coated soldiers, 
 laughing over their wines at the marble tables, tossed bright 
 florins to swell the store ; a child-noble in his gala- costume of 
 white and gold and powder and jewels, ran down some palace 
 steps and shyly thrust a roll of notes into the singer's hand, and 
 hastily lifted his soft smiling mouth to kiss her cheek; tha 
 
THE BIRD AND TH& FATES. 9 
 
 poorest of the people sought in their leathern pouches for soino 
 eopper pieces to give. 
 
 In vain the boy and girl, being honest, protested, laugh- 
 ing and crying both at once "Basta, basta! enough, 
 enough ! " 
 
 In vain ; the golden shower did not cease, until, in the dis- 
 tance, as the first of the patrician pageantry appeared on the 
 entrance of the square, there rose a glad shout, " The Gala ! 
 the Gate!" 
 
 And the populace, kindly of heart, but fickle of temper, 
 turned to the new pastime, and the little noble ran to his people, 
 and the great ladies looked the other way, and the golden 
 chariots rolled under the historic walls, and the sea of the bright 
 masque surged outward ; and the children were forgotten where 
 they stood. 
 
 Then to them there came one who had listened and watched 
 all the songs and all the payments where he had leaned in the 
 shadow of the cathedral wall. 
 
 He uncovered his head as he approached, arid the sun fell full 
 on his face the dark, poetic, historic face of Florence. 
 
 "Ah, cara donzella," he murmured softly with a smile. 
 "Money I have none to give you, until I make some more to- 
 night. I too ain an artist ; and so it goes without words I 
 too am poor. Nevertheless, let me thank you." 
 
 He dropped a ring into her amber skirts, amongst the violets 
 of Parma and the daffodils of Tuscany, and turned away and 
 vanished in the throng. 
 
 The girl sought for the ring amongst the flowers and toys and 
 money and sweetmeats with which her skirts were fi$L 
 
 It was a very old seal ring an onyx, cut with the heads 01 
 the Fates. 
 
 She looked at it long and curiously, with a dreaming look on 
 her face ; then thrust it into the bosom of her dress. Then she 
 gathered closely up about her the heavy brocades of her gar- 
 ments, and turned to the boy. 
 
 " Let us run, 'Ino. The people are not looking now. TV0 
 shall lose the Gala, but Mariuccia is so cold at home." 
 
 So they turned away from the square, and went back into the 
 old, irregular, gloomy streets where even at mid-day there wa? 
 no gleam of brightness. 
 
 But now they could not run ; their fleet feet were powerless 
 to bear them swiftly; they were too heavily laden with the 
 ipoils of tlieir prosperous efforts ; it was of no avail to try ^nd 
 
10 PASCAR&L. 
 
 move quickly ; at every step they trod upon a knot of violets, or 
 trampled a bright narcissus under foot. 
 
 They were forced at last to go very tranquilly, with bent 
 heads and with cramped limbs, along the cold and dreary 
 passage ways. 
 
 "Oh *Ino!" the girl cried. "When we sang for love and 
 goodwill, we were so light of heart and of foot. But now " 
 
 She sank down upon a flight of steps, her skirts glided from 
 her hands, her treasures rolled to the ground and were scattered. 
 She sobbed as if her heart would break. 
 
 " That is ungrateful to the people, cara mia," said the little 
 lad, softly, "Is it that stone with the Fates that has chilled 
 you?" 
 
 "Kay she is right," said a voice above them. "Count art 
 by gold, and it fetters the feet it once winged." 
 
 He who had given the ring spoke the words, passing swiftly 
 in the shadow so as not to be delayed nor questioned. 
 
 After him ran a gay and giddy throng of masks, thrashing 
 each other with coloured bladders, and chasing him with 
 tumultuous shouts as of a band of mummers to their chief. 
 
 The shouts in their hoarse vibration filled the tunnel of the 
 narrow twilit street as the parti-coloured group of the masquers 
 reeled down it like a score of anemone leaves blown heedlessly 
 upon an autumn wind. 
 
 They all cried one word: PascarL 
 
 I, the child who sat on the stone stair, weeping over my 
 fallen violets and my scattered wealth, treasured the name in 
 my heart on which the carven Fates were resting. 
 
 The masquers reeled on out of sight, a cloud of misty and 
 tangled hues; over the high grim roofs and the sculptured 
 buttresses the name came back flying gaily in glad echo on the 
 air 
 
 " Pnscarillo I Pascarel ! " 
 
BY THE BROKEN DONATELLO. tl 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 BY THE BEOKEN DONATELLO. 
 
 THE first thing I remember is of how poor we all were ; how 
 horribly poor, how terribly poor ! 
 
 "When I went to take my first dancing lesson at four years old 
 I had holes in my littlo lace frock, and a pair of faded blue shoes 
 nearly out at the toes. I cried bitterly for very shame sake. 
 
 " Never mind, carina," said old Mariuccia, my nurse. " Never 
 mind. If you dance away with a light heart, what does a tatter 
 or two in the dress signify ? It is better to have holes in the 
 shoes, little one, than a leaden weight on the feet, believe me." 
 
 Oh ! and what a fool I thought her ! Though she was sixty 
 and I was not six. 
 
 But when my father's man Florio came in and lifted me up 
 before the old battered silver mirror, and murmured in his soft 
 tongue, "Ah! what does a shabby frock matter when one has 
 an angel's face like the signorina's ? The other little ladies may 
 be all hung with rubies and pearls if they choose ; nobody will 
 look at them if the signorina bo there" then, indeed, there 
 seemed some sense in the argument, and Florio appeared to me a 
 person so discerning that I consented to be pacified and to be led 
 away to the vast bare frescoed dancing-hall, where one little 
 shrill fiddle was piping and shrieking to a score of Lombardic 
 babies, all more or less noble, I believe, in descent. 
 
 "We were at that time in Verona. Poor old Verona ! "World 
 forgotten, though having given so much to the world. 
 
 The city of Lesbia's lover is but a sorry desolation now, 
 despite its hidden treasures, that no man remembers once in a 
 score of years. 
 
 These narrow sun-baked streets, those grim dust -covered forti- 
 fications, those little lines of stunted sickly trees, those simooms 
 of lime dust, those bitter piercing mountain winds, those pale 
 grasses, all alive with brown lizards, those lofty desolate houses, 
 palace and prison in one, those straggling vines choking the 
 strangled maples, the dreary weary "waveless plain," how 
 miserable it all is now, how miserable it all w r as then ! 
 
 Verona never seemed like Italy to me. Perhaps because I 
 eaw it always under the dominion of those white -coated stranieri, 
 who pampered its greedy priesthood and bribed its lazy prole- 
 tariate, and who waltzed themselves into favour with ma by 
 
13 PASCAR&L. 
 
 swinging ine rotind many and many a time to the gay measure* 
 of their regimental bands, and spending on me floods of sweet- 
 meats and pretty phrases, although old Mariuccia, whenever sho 
 saw me thus polluted, would snatch me away from the barbarian's 
 arms with fiercest flashes of her still eloquent Tuscan eyes. 
 
 Mariuceia told me many a tale of the old grandeurs of the 
 city of Can Grande ; and I used to wander about it gazing at its 
 amphitheatre and its acacia hedges, and its green Adige and its 
 two Paladins at the door of the duomo, and dreaming cf Marius 
 and Theodoric, of Catullus, and Carolus Magnus, of Romeo, and 
 Ezzelino, of Yitruvius, and Paolo Yeronese, in the strangest con- 
 fusion of fable and truth, in which my little brain floated as on a 
 gorgeous, but misty, sea. 
 
 I never loved Yerona. 
 
 The four first years of my small life had been spent with 
 Mariuccia, on a farm on the distant lloinagna. 
 
 There I had lived in the open air, rolled in the grass, gleaned 
 the gold of the millet, got drunk in my innocent fashion off the 
 grapes at vintage time, and filled my hands with wild wood 
 flowers all the whole year round. There I had owned all a child* 8 
 delicious riches of freedom and sunlight, of chains of daffodils, of 
 fans of chesnut leaves, of friendships with birds and beasts, of 
 long, happy, heedless days in which the sky seemed always blue, 
 and the angels of God always near. 
 
 When at four years old I was taken and cooped up in the 
 dusty duskiness of Juliet's birthplace, I rebelled bitterly, and at 
 first pined constantly, refusing to be comforted. I fretted for 
 the free air and the glad light, as many a prisoner had done 
 before me in the days when 
 
 "Death and sin played at dice with Eccelin." 
 
 Of course after a while my sweet first memories paled a little 
 and I grew a little reconciled. But I never forgot that bright 
 beloved Italy of mine, away there southward in the blue ocean 
 of the distant Romagna ; I never grew to care for these grim 
 streets, these filthy courts, these parching heats, these frozen 
 winters, these masses of frowning stone, these labyrinths of 
 palaces and prisons, which seemed always to my fancy, as I grew 
 older, to have upon them the mark of the scourge of Attila, the 
 grip of the gauntlet of Scala, the scorch of the crimes of Romano. 
 
 At the time when the little shrill fiddle played to me in my 
 little shabby shoes, we were, I eav, in Yerona, for no better, or 
 
B THE BKOAEN DONATELLO. *3 
 
 lesser reason, than that having got in there we had not the 
 means to get out again. 
 
 We had the second floor of an old palace ; such a palace as 
 you used to rent for a song in Italy, before Italy changed her 
 proud "Fara da Se," from a boast and a dream to a heroism and 
 a truth. 
 
 A palace with superb staircases reeking in filth ; courts which 
 would have held a tooop of men, armed and mounted, given over 
 to lizards and centipedes ; chambers with tapestries of Eosts, 
 from the cartoons of Eronzino, ankle deep in dust and dirt ; and 
 walls that were due to the designs of Fra Giocondo, hung with 
 the padrona' s ragged garments, drying in the sun after their 
 wash in the Adigc. 
 
 "Peintures aux plafonds; ordures aux pieds." It is Georges 
 Sand, if I remember aright, who wrote that bitter line, or some- 
 thing like it, upon Italy. It is terribly bitter, for it is at times 
 terribly true. 
 
 Our palace was no exception to the rule. 
 
 It was magnificent as a dream, even still above-head, where 
 some wondrous-eyed woman, worthy almost of Leonardo himself, 
 laughed down from her frescoes of roses, or where some apothe- 
 osis or cenacolo by Gentile, or Pisanello, still kept its radiant 
 colours, despite all ravages of time, and neglect, and fire, and 
 dust. It was magnificent too from that beauty of proportion, in 
 which, as by some almost unerring instinct of symmetry, so 
 many Italian buildings have a beauty that cannot perish whilst 
 one stone is left upon another, even as in so many Italian faces 
 there is a perfection which, being born not of hue but of outline, 
 is unharmed by age, and endures even after death itself, as did 
 that golden loveliness of Faustina that was found a century after 
 death unharmed in the dusky depths of Santa Croce. 
 
 But it was also unutterably dreary, dirty, ghastly, dismal, 
 {ornfortless ; bats rustled through its passages, and downy owls 
 Aaunted its roof timbers. The upper rooms were all tenanted by 
 working people, or rather by people who affected to work, and 
 in reality lived on the Austrian doles ; and the lower halls were 
 the abode of the padrona and her eight children. She was a 
 stout-built, black-browed, comely soul; the most good-natured 
 creature in existence ; and her children lay in the sun, or played 
 boccetta, or fought for the chesnuts on the stove, or did whatv 
 ever seemed best to them all day long in an endless strife and 
 riot. 
 
 The padrona was poor enough ; she beat her own linea fe the 
 
14 PASCARbL. 
 
 river, and baked, and swept, and cooked unaided, and added to 
 her scanty means by stuffing mattresses with grass and wool, at 
 which she was an adept. Eut it was owing to the padrona 
 very often, and to nobody else, that Mariuccia had a meal to give 
 her beloved little illustrissimi. 
 
 There were four of us ; the others were boys ; beautiful boys, 
 who might have come out of a Tiziano or Giorgione canvas; 
 gay, kindly, saucy, daring creatures, popular with the people 
 everywhere, and caring nothing how their linen blouses were 
 torn, quite content to sit and eat polenta for their only dinner 
 with the woman below and her dirty children. 
 
 My poor brothers ! they were so bright and so bold, so mirth- 
 ful on nothing, so full of goodwill to all the world ; and they all 
 died so young ; mere children. One of fever in Yerona itself; 
 another of a knife thrust in a street scuffle in Rome ; the last in 
 a white squall off Cagliari, that swamped the little felucca within 
 sight of land. 
 
 Eut at the time of which I now write, whilst they were all 
 three around me, they were the pride and torment of Mariuccia' s 
 life, the delight of the padrona 1 s, and the wonder of all the town, 
 for the skill with which they bambini inglesi poured quips 
 and cranks upon the people in true Veronese tongue and fashion, 
 
 The padrona would stand in her great arched doorway, with her 
 arms akimbo, rocking too and fro with laughter at their encounters, 
 whilst her onions frizzled neglected in her frying-pan. They 
 were quite happy teazing the market-women, riding in the 
 bullock waggons, driving the ball at pallone, fishing with the 
 boatmen, dancing the tarantella in the wine shops, playing at 
 dominoes with Pepe and Zoto and Gian, and all the rest of the 
 padrona' s brood. It was only into my soul that the iron of our 
 degradation entered. 
 
 With the male children in the market-place they were still the 
 young signori, whose shabby clothes could not lessen their dis- 
 tinction, so long as they threw the ruzzola unerringly, and had a 
 lightning-like skill in morra: but for me it was otherwise; with 
 the feminine aristocrats in embryo of the dancing-lessons I was 
 only a little detestable forestiera, who had shabby shoes and a 
 torn frock, and who had nevertheless the intolerable insolence 
 not to be ugly in proportion to her poverty, and also to dance 
 very much better than they did themselves. 
 
 "Look at the signorina, little ladies, all of you," the ol& 
 dancing-master would say a dozen times in an hour, suspending 
 the screams of his fiddle to point at me with its bow, "Look 
 
By THE BROKEN DONATELLO. 15 
 
 at her ! only a month in this room, only half the age of most oj 
 you, and look at her ! What grace, what accuracy, what light* 
 ness ; the sweep of the swallow, the poise of the sea-gull ! And 
 such a bahy ! It is wonderful. Are you not ashamed to carry 
 yourselves as you do, with such an example as the little Uccello's 
 before you ?"' 
 
 Dear old Fortunato! He taught me, out of pure goodwill; 
 having met me often in the street, and having at last succeeded 
 in persuading Mariuccia that not to initiate a woman child into 
 the ways and wiles of Terpsichore was to fly in the face of all 
 the designs of Providence. He taught me from sheer love of his 
 art, and some touch of love I think for me ; but he did me an ill 
 service with the little Lombard ladies by his praise. 
 
 They dared say nothing; for Fortunato could rap both feet 
 and hands sharply enough with his bow, when he was irritated 
 by contumacy or clumsiness ; but they eyed me askance very 
 evilly and munched their chocolate chicchi, grouped all together 
 at the top of the room, muttering scornful things of me and mine 
 in an offensive and defensive alliance. 
 
 Unhappily, there were few scornful things which could have 
 been said of us that would not have been sufficiently true to hit 
 us hardly. We were all of us handsome ; in all times, they say, 
 the race we came from had had the gift of the " fatal face ; " but 
 we had very little else. 
 
 It was the old, old story ; I used to make Mariuecia tell it me 
 as far as she knew it, over and over again, when she used to sit 
 of an evening shelling beans on the great staircase, under a half- 
 ruined Btatue that they said was by Donatcllo. I can see her now, 
 so plainly, as she used to sit there, with a big round brass 
 basin in her lap ; she had a dark red skirt and a yellow kerchief; 
 her costume never varied; she had a huge silver pin in her 
 white hair; she had the noble frank face and the changeful kind 
 eyes of her country people ; she was weather-beaten till she was 
 as brown as a chesnut, though she had the broad flap hat of the 
 country spreading its roof over her head to keep her from tho 
 blaze that streamed through the vines that hung over the grated 
 casements. 
 
 The sunbeams and shadows used to play on the old marble 
 stairs and the old grey statue ; a passion flower had somehow 
 trust itself through the stones from without and blossomed there 
 at her feet on that chill bed ; the brass bowl used to glitter like 
 gold in the light ; above at a vast height there was a lunette 
 with frescoes of the labours of Hercules ; from below there rose 
 
1 6 PASCAR&L. 
 
 a smell of garlic, of fried meats, of coriander seeds, of stabled 
 cattle ; the crack, crack, crack of tbe beans used to sound on the 
 silence regular as the ticking of a clock ; the huge straw hat 
 would shake itself slowly and sadly as she spoke : 
 
 " Do I remember your mother ?" she would say. " You ask 
 me that so often, 'Nella. Surely I remember her. I was with 
 her at the birth of every one of you. I was an old woman then. 
 At least as you children count age. She was beautiful, yes ; 
 else your father had never looked at her. You are more like 
 him. Oh, you are handsome enough ; I do not deny that ; you 
 have a face like a flower, and you know it, though you are such 
 a little thing. The people spoil you ; they will turn your head 
 with praise. You will end just like that wicked Speronella of 
 Padua whom they sing about to this day in all Komagna. It 
 was a name of horrid savour, of ill omen, for you ; I always 
 said so; but your poor mother would have it; it had been her 
 mother's, she said. It is no use teasing me to tell you more; I 
 have told you all I know a hundred times, and none of it is any 
 good. "When I first went to your mother she had not been long 
 wedded ; she was happy then ; they always are, for a week ! 
 There were difficulties ; that I saw the first hour ; but they did 
 not press much. He had met her in Florence ; she was an opera 
 singer; he was a great sign ore, in his own country, so they said; 
 it is always a mistake. He was double her years ; but he was 
 so handsome, Milordo Maurice. You only see the wreck of 
 him. But you may see that still " 
 
 " And I am like him ! " I cried where I sat at the feet of the 
 mutilated Donatello, shedding my quota of beans into the brazen 
 bowl. 
 
 Mariuccia nodded. 
 
 " Yes, you are like him," she said gravely. "In more way 6 
 than one, signorina. When you get older, take care you do not 
 throw your life away as he has thrown his. A noble in his own 
 country ; and I have to beg a meal for his children from the 
 woman below !" 
 
 My father was not a nobleman, though Mariuccia, in the com- 
 mon continental incapacity to understand insular titles of 
 courtesy, always called him so. He was only the fourth son of 
 a northern marquis : God help him ! but even so much as this 
 I scarcely knew at that time. 
 
 !N"ow I adored my father with very little reason for it, for I 
 saw him perhaps six days in the year, and each time I saw him 
 received atout six careless word3. But he was so handsome, sc 
 
BY THE BROKEN DONATELLO. 17 
 
 easy and good-humoured, so indifferent to every created thing or 
 any possible fortune, that he seemed to me the very perfection of 
 humanity. 
 
 I adored him, at a distance indeed, for it was chiefly when I 
 was eating figs on the stairs or cracking walnuts in the court 
 yard, that I ever saw him at all ; but adore him I did, and with 
 the inconsistent ingratitude of human nature, I cared more for a 
 slight or a reproof from him whenever he deigned to notice mo 
 by one, than I did for all the untiring goodness of Mariuccia. 
 
 She, dear soul, was very wroth against him always, and could 
 not forbear letting out her wrath to me. 
 
 Mariuccia did not think very much of filial duties; her own 
 parents had been a travelling cobbler and his paramour, who had 
 rid themselves of her in her babyhood by the simple process of 
 leaving her at the Innocenti ; and she considered that she broke 
 no moral canon when she inveighed against the shortcomings of 
 her master to me on the old grey stairs. Indeed, I think she 
 honestly believed she only did her duty in trying to turn me 
 from my unreasonable worship of a false god; a god moreover 
 who provided next to nothing, and left her to puzzle her brains 
 as best she might how to find bread for three hungry, healthy 
 boys, and how to turn rny poor mother's costly faded wardrobe 
 into decent attire for my use. 
 
 " He broke your mother's heart," she used to say with a sharp 
 crack of a bean ; and I used to feel a certain pang, yet also a 
 certain incredulity. My mother was a mere vague name to me ; 
 I had not even a portrait of her. " What did he do ?" I used 
 to persist, and Mariuccia would respond in anger : 
 
 " "What did he not do, rather ? He did as he does now. He 
 went and amused himself, and threw away the little he had in 
 gambling, and left us for weeks and months to starve in some 
 hole, whilst he feasted in gaming-towns and winter-cities, and 
 spent such gold as he might win on creatures as bad and as use- 
 less as himself. Oh, it is no good your curling your lips and 
 getting on fire like that, signorina. It is the truth, as you will 
 know to your cost one day. Why do you ask me of your mother 
 if you do not believe what I say ? You are always angry that 
 you are so poor; pray whose fault is it if not your father's, and 
 how should he be worth anything, I would be glad to know, 
 when not a soul of his own people ever takes notice that he lives, 
 but every one of them leaves him alone as men pass by a trodden 
 fig, or a dead dog on the causeway." 
 
 That used ta silence ine, for I knew it was true ; and I could 
 
 o 
 
1 8 PASCARkL. 
 
 only sit in mute rebellion shelling the heans with a swelling 
 heart, while the bright golden lizards darted to and fro on the 
 etairs, and the radiant sunset lights poured down from the 
 frescoed lunette. 
 
 Then Mariuccia, whose temper was as close a mingling of 
 sour and sweet as the core of a ripe pomegranate, would relent, 
 and would suspend her bean-shelling to lay her hand on my 
 head. 
 
 " Carina," she would say tenderly, " why will you vex your- 
 self about your father ? Little one, he cares as much for that 
 lizard as for you. Do your duty by him ; that is proper, of 
 course ; but do not make a god of him. Fret yourself for some 
 good love, not for a foolish one. It is all very well for the 
 maple to be choked for the vine's sake ; but it is rubbish for the 
 maple to die for the night-shade." 
 
 Which hard saying she left for me and the lizard to digest as 
 best we might, whilst she went into the cavernous gloomy little 
 crypt which served her for a kitchen to fry her beans in oil, or 
 set them to stew with a cabbage. That, or something like it, 
 was our daily meal ; dainty little birds and tempting little pots 
 of chocolate went in for my father when he was there, procured 
 and prepared by Florio, who was a sort of universal genius ; but 
 we children never tasted of such fare. We thought ourselves in 
 wondrous luck if we got a big dish of eggs and macaroni in the 
 Pasqua Week, or could have a handful of sweet ciambelle or a 
 lump or two of pan giallo for the Befana night. 
 
 As for envying my father his quails and thrushes and mullets, 
 I should have thought it as blasphemous as Mariuccia would 
 have thought it to envy the Madonnas in the churches their 
 weight of jewelled garments and crowns of beaten gold. 
 
 At such times as Florio was with us, which was but seldom, I 
 had more success in my endeavours to hear good of my idol. 
 
 Florio, in Italian fashion, had attached himself to us, and 
 having once done so was not to be separated from us by anything 
 that adversity could do to him. Once on the staircase I heard 
 the padrona ask him how he could waste his years in service, so 
 little lucrative, so often indeed, actually only repaying him by 
 privation. 
 
 Florio shrugged his shoulders with the most expressive panto- 
 mime in the world. 
 
 " Eh ! what would you ? " he replied to her. " I have got to 
 love them, it is all said." 
 
 Florio would acquiesce in all my enthusiasm for his master. 
 
BY THE BROKEN DOXATELLO. *Q 
 
 though he looked a little grave sometimes. But when I would 
 fain have learned from him how my father spent those innu< 
 merable long absences of his, Eiorio would tell me nothing. He 
 would pretend to laugh and show his white teeth. 
 
 "No, no, no," he would cry. "In good time the donzella 
 will see for herself how men live ; but she could not understand 
 it yet; no, no, no." 
 
 Once again also I overheard him say to Mariuccia, "It is 
 almost always such bad luck with him now ; sometimes he has a 
 good vein, and then we live like quails in the fattening coops ; 
 but it is very seldom now. They are all scared of him. At 
 Nizza this very winter they warned him privately from the 
 Masse"na. And to be too bad for the Massena !" 
 
 Florio threw up his hands in the air with a gesture that con- 
 cluded his sentence more eloquently than any speech. 
 
 Florio was about forty years old at that time ; a little plump 
 man, as round as a ball, with merry eyes, and the frank, tender 
 smile of his nation. 
 
 He was a charming creature. There was very little he could 
 not do. He could put on a white apron and cook to perfection ; 
 he could talk most languages, more or less correc tly ; he could 
 draw inimitable caricatures ; he did not disdain to wax a floor, 
 and skim on it with brushes for skates; on occasion he has 
 woven Machramme as well as any woman lacemaker along the 
 Eiviera ; he could string a lute and sing on it in a very pretty 
 tenor ; and he would go to market with a big basket and bargain 
 for butter and cheese with a terrible acuteness that was feared 
 by the stoutest shrew that ever sat under a, green or crimson 
 umbrella on a sunny piazza, with her live hens screeching in her 
 old mule's panniers. 
 
 As far as his principles went, looking back to that time, I 
 should say he was absolutely innocent of even knowing the 
 existence of such things. 
 
 He would lie with the sweetest smiling serenity in all the 
 world, and he would cheat in our service at least with the 
 most exquisite dexterity. Yet in other ways he was as frank as 
 a babe, and if moved to pity he gave with both hands, with- 
 holding no tiling from any thought of self-interest. Yes, 
 Florio was a charming creature; the most perfect mixture of 
 intense shrewdness and entire simplicity that I have ever met ; 
 and wholly and entirely devoted to a service in which his multi- 
 farious talents were utterly lost and almost utterly unrequited, 
 And yet even Tlorio blamed my father ! 
 
 0* 
 
20 PASCAR&L. 
 
 It was a terrible perplexity to me. What evil could my 
 father do ? 
 
 Night after night I used wearily to wonder over the problem, 
 lying awake on my truckle bed, in a vast room painted with the 
 loves of Orpheus and Eurydice, while the bats beat against the 
 lofty windows and the beautiful white moon sailed past them 
 backed in clouds. 
 
 To the condemnations upon him I attached no idea of gambling, 
 despite Mariuccia's invectives. 
 
 1 saw everybody gamble ; the children in the court below, the 
 people in the streets and at the public lotteries, the men in the 
 coffee houses and taverns, the boys in the market-place, the old 
 beggars on the church steps : they all gambled, with cards, or 
 dice, or balls, with nuts, or little cheeses, with dominoes on the 
 pavement, with the gay painted cards at taroc, or by means of 
 their fingers alone, at morra, if they had no other method avail- 
 able. That a pastime so universal in the broad daylight could 
 be in any one criminal never occurred to me. 
 
 And having a strong and entirely reasonless adoration of my 
 father, who fascinated me into love for him by his mere look and 
 gesture, as he fascinated Plorio into his service by a mere surface 
 kindness and gracious trick of manner, I came to the conclusion 
 as I watched the clouds and the moon, that my father was a 
 man deeply wronged by his world and his relatives. It was 
 very easy for me to solace myself thus, for I knew nothing of 
 either one or tlie other. 
 
 He was called Milordo, and our name was Tempesta as the 
 Italians had it that was all I knew : and I had mingled my 
 ideas of him vaguely and oddly enough with that great Tempesta, 
 who has left his sign on so many frescoes and canvases through- 
 out Italy, and who fled to Isola Bella with his fatal love and all 
 its crime upon his soul, and dwelt there between sea and 
 sky. 
 
 Such small obstacles as centuries and probabilities were 
 nothing to me, lying awake under the smile of Eurydice, and 
 watching the bats in the moonlight beat their wings against the 
 painted casements. 
 
 One winter in Verona he stayed longer than usual. He 
 was not well in health Florio told us; and he had found some 
 Austrians who amused him. He used to go out every evening 
 and return at dawn ; that I knew, for I could tell his step and 
 listened for it. I do not think he rose all day ; for Florio was 
 perpetually in and out of his master's rooms, with some frothing 
 
BV 7 HE BROKEN DONATELLO. . *1 
 
 cup of chocolate, some sparkling cool drink, or some dish ol 
 dainty flavours, compounded by his skill. 
 
 One evening I was upon the stairs as he came down them. 
 
 Our stairs were very dark. One little poor oil lamp burning 
 under a hapless Madonna who had lost her nose and hands was 
 all that illumined the immense depth of it from hall to dome. 
 I had been to my lesson with Portunato ; it was cold ; I was 
 muffled in a little purple- velvet hooded cloak that Mariuccia had 
 made me out of one of my mother's dresses ; my cheeks were warm 
 with the run home : I had in my hands a silver laurel- wreath 
 Fortunato's yearly prize with which he had just presented me, 
 for the fourth time, in all solemnity and honour. 
 
 In the deep shadows I saw my father descending the steps ; 
 involuntarily I paused ; my heart gave a great bound ; if he 
 should notice the laurel- wreath, I thought ? 
 
 By a miracle he stopped likewise. 
 
 " Is it you, 'Kella ? Let me look at you." 
 
 He drew me up under the lantern which was hung a step or 
 two above, and bent his eyes in studious scrutiny upon my face ; 
 [ trembled from head to foot ; I was a bold child enough, but I 
 was afraid of him because I loved him, and because he was 
 to me such a majestic mystery, unapproachable, and inscru- 
 table. 
 
 He looked at me long ; my hood had fallen back ; my hair 
 was blown about me by the wind ; I felt my cheeks changing in 
 colour every second under his gaze. 
 
 " Heavens ! how like you look to your mother," he murmured. 
 " And yet you are like us too ; how old are you ? " 
 
 I told him that I was nearly ten years old at least so 
 Mariuccia said. 
 
 "I daresay, I daresay/' he said, carelessly. "You have 
 grown very much of late. You will be a beautiful woman, 
 ^ella. Do they tell you so ? " 
 
 " Many people do," I murmured; my limbs shook under 
 me ; my face was scarlet ; my heart beat like a wild bird's : he 
 had praised me ! 
 
 He laughed a little, wearily. 
 
 " Already ? Very well ! ^ Good-night, little one." 
 
 He slipped a littie gold piece into my velvet mufflers, and, for 
 the first time in my life, touched my lips lightly with his. As 
 he went out of sight into the gloom below, I sat down on the 
 filthy marble stair under the Madonna and her poor dull lamp, 
 and burst into tears, tears of passionate joy. 
 
22 PASCAREL. 
 
 "When Mariuccia found me, she found me sobbing bitterly, the 
 laurel- wreath neglected on the stones. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 WITH THE POrOEAXI. 
 
 THAT small gold piece I treasured ever afterwards ; piercing 
 it, and hanging it round my neck. I used to be often hungry 
 in those days, but no temptation of coriander cakes, or anchovy 
 pastries, of Neapolitan confetti, or Florentine dolci, ever allured 
 my little precious five-franc from its hiding-place. 
 
 The next day Florio summoned Mariuccia into my father's 
 room ; he gave her a sum of money, and bade her get me with 
 it such education as she best could in Yerona. She had taught 
 me to read; Fortunato had taught me to dance; Florio had 
 taught me to sing ritornelli to a mandolin ; but these were all my 
 acquirements ; at ten years old I was barbarously ignorant, and 
 knew nothing, except such quaint old stray pieces of knowledge 
 as I had gleaned from some odd volumes of Yasari and Ammirato, 
 of Yillani and Muratori, and the like, which I had found left by 
 some former tenant in our chambers, and which made me con- 
 versant with some art-lore and with the heroical histories of 
 
 (f Le donne, i cavalieri, le armi, gli armori, 
 Le cortesie, le audaci imprese " 
 
 of the by-gone centuries. 
 
 "It is the Tedeschi' s money," grumbled Mariuccia, with her 
 face dark, and full of reluctance and abhorrence. 
 
 Florio showed his white teeth. 
 
 " What is that to you? " he responded. " All your business 
 is to spend it. That is enough." 
 
 Florio theoretically hated the Tedeschi as much as she did, 
 but practically he thought the best use Tedeschi could be put to 
 was that of spoliation. 
 
 " They are foreigners ; they are hateful; they are our tyrants 
 and oppressors; and we will make them fly one day," he would 
 say. " But while they are here, we may as well get what we 
 can out of them. That is the true patriotism." 
 
 It was the true philosophy, at all events ; and one that served 
 its professor exceedingly well. 
 
WITH THE POPOLAM. * j 
 
 As for me, I could not understand how my father's money 
 tould be said to be the Austrians' also. 
 
 " It is not much, anyhow," I heard Mariuccia say, when she 
 busied herself over her pots and pans while Florio plucked a 
 Piedrnontese partridge as plump as himself. "As I had the 
 chance to see the signore, I spoke up the truth a little. When 
 he had given his commands for 'Nella, I said to him, ' And the 
 boys, excellent ? What of them ? They are growing tall, 
 strong, dauntless lads, and they live with Pepe, and Zoto, and 
 Gian, and the children of the people ; and they are as ignorant 
 as so many young mountain bulls. Will vossignoria deign to 
 say what is to be done about them ? ' 
 
 " He only laughed a little. 'They must do as they can, he 
 answered me. 'When they are old enough, your Tedeschi 
 friends will give them rank in some regiment, I daresay ; and 
 there is very little learning wanted for that/ Did ever you 
 hear such an answer, Florio ? As if the blessed children would 
 ever draw a sword against Italy ? But he would not say any- 
 thing better; he bade me begone in that gentle way of his which, 
 as you know, there is no gainsaying. But was it not horrible ? " 
 she went on lifting the lid off her stewpan. " The noble lads ! 
 I am sure they would be cut in a thousand pieces before 
 they would wear the white, and help to enslave Italy, who 
 has been a foster-mother to them from the very days of their 
 birth." 
 
 Florio smiled, as having plucked, he proceeded to truss hia 
 partridge. 
 
 " To be sure ; to be sure. Of course we none of us would. 
 Nevertheless, the Vienna beer tastes very light and good in the 
 eaffes, they say ; especially when it costs nothing ; and I have 
 seen a good many of our people with their noses buried in the 
 tankards." 
 
 Mariuccia poured her stew into a dish with a charitable wish 
 that an " accidente" might strangle forever all Italians who so 
 far forgot themselves as ever to drink the horrible barley brew 
 of the accursed stranieri ; it was to be as vile a traitor as Judas, 
 she averred, when God himself had given the Italians the juice 
 of the vine. 
 
 So it came to pass that I had such teaching as Verona could 
 afford, whilst my brothers ran wild like young colts. 
 
 Mariuccia locked the sum my father had given her away in 9 
 etout bronze coffer, and eked it out, with religious fidelity, as 
 lorg and to as good purpose as she was able. Every atom of it 
 
24 PASCARbL. 
 
 she spent loyally, as she had been bidden; and shrewdly as 
 became her Florentine citizenship. 
 
 She wanted many things direfully, for ho and Florio went 
 away with the first months of spring, and left her hut a miserable 
 pittance for all household purposes. Eut to take the smallest 
 note from that money to procure rice, or wood, or onions, or 
 ilour, or oil for her daily needs, would have been a falseness to 
 the trust of her stewardship which I am certain never even 
 tempted in imagination that good, sturdy, honest soul of hers. 
 
 She laid it out to the last in the culture of my worthless little 
 brain ; if I did not profit by it as I might have done, it was no 
 fault of hers. It was the fault of the saucy impatience of re- 
 straint, and the indolent love of basking in the sun, doing 
 nothing, which the country and its habits had fostered in me. 
 For I was decidedly a naughty child ; I loved my own way and 
 generally took it ; and my sins of omission and commission were 
 eo many and various that with every Eve of Epiphany I listened 
 in fear for the tinkling bell in the streets, and dreaded the bag 
 of ashes and the long cane with which the black-faced Befana 
 punishes the wilful. 
 
 Mariuccia went very wisely to work ; she would have nothing 
 to do with women teachers or schools ; there were many old pro- 
 fessors, old scholars, in the town whom she knew were terribly 
 poor, and yet full of erudition, and not too grand to take some- 
 thing for imparting it. To these men she went, and so she 
 secured me the means of getting a knowledge much more worth 
 the having than the convent-culture which the children of my 
 sex ordinarily obtain ; that I profited too little by it was, as I 
 say, no fault of my dear old nurse. 
 
 For the only teacher amongst them all to whom I really gave 
 attention and obedience was my singing-master. 
 
 I adored music ; it is impossible, I think, not to care for it, if 
 you are reared in Italy. Everything seems to sing, from the 
 cicale upwards. All that unwritten music of the populace whose 
 scores no hands have ever penned, is exquisite ; and every now 
 and then in the streets, or from some high casement in the roof, 
 you hear the notes of a divine voice, and you seek it out through 
 filthy courts, up cut-throat stairways, into dark, dismal, foul- 
 emelling chambers, and you find that it is only Pasqua tho 
 washerwoman singing at her tub, or Gillo the facchino amusing 
 himself as he carries up the wood. 
 
 I had my mother's voice so Mariuccia said. It seems that 
 she had been of infinite promise as a singer when my father, 
 
WITH THE POPOLsrtfl. 35 
 
 desperately enamoured of her for the moment, hore her off 
 from the stage in the second season of her public appearance, 
 find the first of her performances at the Pergola. "What my 
 voice was to others, I do not know ; I only know that all my 
 life long song has been as natural to me as to any thrush or 
 bullfinch. 
 
 The Veronese used to call me L'Uccello, the bird ; and where 
 xhere were so many uccelli, all more or less musically-throated, 
 the name was in itself a distinction. Many and many a time, in 
 Verona, when I have been out alone, I have found myself the 
 centre of an eager little crowd, which followed me because I was 
 singing aloud as I went ; and to pacify them, I have vaulted on 
 a parapet or a ledge, or anything that was convenient, and re- 
 peated the stornelli to an enthusiastic circle of blacksmiths, and 
 horse-boys, and porters, and fruit-sellers, and beggars; Ma- 
 riuccia knowing nothing. 
 
 And then they would escort me homeward, humming the 
 choruses of the songs themselves, delighting in me with that 
 mingling of charming familiarity, and yet perfect respect, of 
 which the Latin nations alone seem to know the secret; and 
 saying nothing to me, that a little princess might not have 
 heard, but waving their caps to me, and tendering me, by the 
 hands of some old butcher, or some young ostler, a knot of china 
 roses, or a plume of lilies and verbena, with the prettiest grace, 
 and the sweetest smiles in all the world. 
 
 Ah ! dear people, dear people ! when I think of you, I repent 
 me that I have said that I hated your ugly town ; for of a truth 
 I loved you, and you me. 
 
 My music-master was an old man, by name Ambrogio Rufi ; 
 he was most wretchedly poor ; he lived in a little square den in 
 the roof of a tumble-down house; he was very dirty, very 
 shabby, very ugly ; tho world had never heard of him, and he got 
 a bare living as first violinist at the theatre. In his youth he had 
 created things that the world would never listen to ; and he had 
 become instead the interpreter of other men's creations. 
 
 He was inexorable as a master ; but he was also admirable. 
 His severity had an enthusiasm, and even a tenderness, under- 
 lying it which made it endurable. One knew that he was only 
 harsh, because he would allow of nothing slight, or mean, or 
 Blurred, to be put forward in the guise of his art. Himself, he 
 was a great master ; yes ; though he had never made a name f 
 and had barely wherewithal to get a daily meal. I have seen 
 the sums of a princely fortune, and the homage of a fastidious 
 
26 PASCARBL. 
 
 society, poured out upon artists who were not fit to hold a candle 
 to my old master for him to read his score. 
 
 Circumstance is so odd and so cruel a thing. It is wholly 
 apart from talent. 
 
 Genius will do so little for a man if he do not know how to 
 seize or seduce opportunity. No doubt, in his youth, Ambrogio had 
 been shy, silent, out of his art timid, and in his person ungrace- 
 ful, and unlovely. So the world had passed by him turning a 
 deaf ear to his melodies, and he had let it pass, because he had 
 not that splendid audacity to grasp it perforce, and hold it until 
 it blessed him, without which no genius will ever gain the bone- 
 diction of the Angel of Fame. 
 
 "Which is a fallen Angel, no doubt; but still, perhaps, the 
 spirit most worth wrestling with after all; since wrestle we 
 must in this world, if we do not care to lie down and form a 
 pavement for other men's cars of triumph, as the Assyrians of old 
 stretched themselves on their faces before the coming of the 
 chariots of their kings. 
 
 Ambrogio had a few pupils not many. Most of them were 
 young choristers of promise, whom he had sought on hearing 
 them at some office in the S. Zanone ; and whom he taught for 
 pure devotion to his art, as Fortunato had taught me to dance. 
 His method of instruction was wonderful, strict, and inexorable, 
 as I have said, and giving infinite labour, infinite repetition to 
 the scholar, but it was of an unapproachable excellence, and 
 sifted the grain from the chaff amongst his aspirants with 
 unerring accuracy. 
 
 There was there is an academy of music in the old city of 
 Catullus, but such was the blindness of its direction, or such the 
 rabid envy of its professors, that no effort was ever made to 
 secure it for the inestimable value of Ambrogio' s lessons. Ma- 
 riuccia's payments for myself were, I verily believe, almost alJ 
 the remuneration that he ever received. All the rest were so 
 poor; the children of coppersmiths, and coopers, and vine- 
 dressers, and pottery -painters ; boys and girls who had fair 
 voices, and who sang in the choirs of the churches. 
 
 "We used to stand in a semi-circle before him, a dozen children 
 or so, and sing the scale simply hour by hour. You had to be far 
 advanced before he would permit you to leave that first arduous 
 exercise. 
 
 It used to be bitterly cold in winter in that little den of his, 
 with its cold stove and its brick floor; and stifling hot in summer 
 there amongst the red and grey roofs, the cupolas, and the 
 
WITH THE POP OL AN I. 2J 
 
 towers. There was nothing picturesque or poetic in it; it waa 
 all hard work in a wretched little place before an ugly old man 
 who flashed fury upon you through his spectacles if you dared 
 to torture his ear with a false note. And yet we all went to 
 him faithfully ; and seldom or never rebelled. 
 
 There were in him the sincerity and the excellence which 
 impress themselves upon children long before those children are 
 old enough to reason on what they are awed by and admire. I 
 tormented my other masters sadly enough : but I am thankful 
 to think that I never added to the many pains and the infinite 
 disappointments of Ambrogib's life. 
 
 I was a favoured pupil with -him I and Raffael Baptista. 
 
 EaiFaello was the son of a coppersmith in the town, who lived 
 hard by the cathedral, in a quaint old vaulted place filled with 
 coppers of all sorts and sizes, which used to blaze quite red in 
 the sunset. 
 
 It was the workshop as well as the dwelling-house, and was 
 full all day of the clash of hammers on metal as well as the dis- 
 cordant noises of the church bells and the people's cries. 
 
 Yet amidst all that clangour and uproar, the child had been 
 born with the most subtle and perfeot instinct for melody. One 
 would have thought that all that clanging and clashing of 
 copper and iron all the livelong day, from the time he had cried 
 in his cradle, would have deadened his ears to all perceptions of 
 harmony ; but it seemed as though it had produced the contrary 
 effect, for he detected an incorrect note, and shivered under it as 
 quickly and painfully as the Maestro himself. 
 
 Raffaelino as we called him, when I met him first at our 
 music lessons, was just eight years old when I was ten; his 
 mother came of a Venetian race, and he had the Venetian look 
 and accent; he was a small, slender lad, with eyes full of 
 dreams and a mouth full of smiles; his fair hair clustered 
 thickly round his head; he had dark, straight brows and a 
 curious half shy vivacity of expression that changed twenty 
 times in an hour. He was the most picturesque figure in all 
 our little group, with his brown legs bare, and his shirt loose 
 about his throat, and a scarlet woollen sash girt in Venice 
 fashion round his loins. 
 
 It was not in song that the little Baptista excelled. His voice 
 was pure and true, but of no great compass. It was for the 
 violin that he showed the extraordinary talent which won old 
 Ambrogio's heart to him, and one day when he had played on 
 his own little viol a charming little capriccio full of life and 
 
grace, and 1 asked him whence it caine, he hung his head, and 
 coloured, and confessed at last that it was of his own inven- 
 tion. 
 
 He implored me not to tell the Maestro ; he was quite sure 
 that Ambrogio would look up with that frown through his 
 terrible spectacles which we all dreaded, and bid him in tones of 
 thunder to go back to his scale practice, and not to tempt the 
 wrath of dead Cimarosa and Palestrina, and all the immortal 
 brotherhood with such impious audacities. I thought differently ; 
 but Raffael had a right to his own secret, so I did not betray 
 him. Which was unfeminine I suppose; but the only two 
 women I had ever had aught to do with had been the padrona 
 and Mariuccia, both simple people as the world went. 
 
 I liked Raffaello the best of all the children in Verona ; he 
 had an infinite tenderness for his mother, who was blind and 
 whom he tended with untiring patience ; and he had a profound 
 homage for myself, the donzella as he called me, and would 
 never meet me without some spray of roses, some bough of 
 lemon, some knot of violets, or some cluster of chesnuts, for 
 which he had rifled the hedges or had begged some neighbour. 
 
 In my way I was very proud; Mariuccia continually re- 
 proached me for it ; but I was not the least beset by that sort of 
 pride, which would have made me regret EafFael JBaptista's 
 companionship, because his father was a coppersmith, and he 
 ran about the streets without shoes. I had lived too much 
 amongst the people ; and I had too much of the Bohemian in 
 me for that. 
 
 Indeed I enjoyed vastly, when I left Ambrogio's attic, draw- 
 ing my little velvet hood over my curls and running home hand 
 in hand with RafFaelino, past the dancing hall, at the hour 
 when Fortunato's pupils, of whom I no longer needed to be one, 
 were coming forth from his lessons. 
 
 The little feminine respectabilities, my born foes, glorious 
 in starch and ribbons, and coral and silk stockings, would recog- 
 nise me by a solemn stare and a general drawing together of 
 themselves for mutual protection, and I would laugh in their 
 faces and flash by them holding 'Ino's hand the tighter, and 
 shaking the rose petals all over my little weather-stained 
 purples, which like all purples fared ill when brought down into 
 the streets. 
 
 Mariuccia never objected to my complaisance for Raffael. 
 There was much of the old genuine, sturdy Florentine democrat 
 in her. His mother, too, was a gossip of her own. 
 
WITH THE POPOLANI. 29 
 
 " It is a rare good lad," she used to say; and tliat he ran the 
 ireets with bare feet was no social sin in her eyes. 
 
 At such rare times as Mariuccia allowed herself a spare hour 
 from her incessant baking and washing, spinning and sewing, 
 she used to cross the piazza to the coppersmith's workshop, under 
 the sign of the Spiked Mace, and drink a cup of black coffee 
 with the blind woman, not losing her time, but whilst she gos- 
 eipped going on with her weaving of rough linen garments for 
 us from the little distaff which in true old Tuscan fashion was 
 seldom absent from her, being hung round the waist with its 
 hank of flax in readiness for any unfilled moment of her rare 
 leisure. 
 
 I used to go with her, and Eaffaclino and I used to sit on tho 
 threshold and play dominoes on the bottom of some big copper 
 turned downwards to serve us as a table; or at other times he 
 would bring out from its corner his little old quattrocentiste viol, 
 which he had found amongst some lumber, and we would play 
 and sing stornelli whilst the white moonlight was flooding tho 
 pavement, and the marbles of the buildings turned to silver in 
 its lustre: Mariuccia beating time with her spindle, and his 
 blind mother nodding her head to the measures. 
 
 One of the young painters then in Verona made a little 
 picture of Raffael and of me, playing and singing thus in the 
 moonlight;, with the background of the huge arched doors and 
 the innumerable coppers with just the glimmer of a brass oil- 
 lamp behind us where Mariuccia sat and span. 
 
 It was a pretty little bit of genre; he was delighted to sell it 
 for twelve gulden notes to a German Jew dealer. I have seen it 
 since in a great collector's galleries ; and the holder of it told me 
 he had given for it some fifteen thousand francs. 
 
 One of the saddest things perhaps in all the sadness of this 
 world is the frightful loss at which so much of the best and 
 strongest work of a man's life has to be thrown away at the onset. 
 If you desire a name amongst men, you mus* buy the crown of 
 it at such a costly price ! 
 
 True, the price will in the end be paid back to you no doubt 
 when you are worn out, and what you do is as worthless as the 
 rustling canes that blow together in autumn by dull river sides : 
 then you scrawl your signature across your soulless work, and it 
 fetches thrice its weight in gold. 
 
 But though you thus have your turn, and can laugh at your 
 will at the world that you fool, what can that compensate you 
 for all those dear dead darlings those bright first fruits, those 
 
JO PASCAR&L. 
 
 precious earliest nestlings of your genius, which had to be sold 
 into hondage for a broken crust, which have drifted away from 
 you never to be found again, which you know well were a mil- 
 lion fold better, fresher, stronger, higher, better than anythirg 
 you hav3 begotten since then; and yet in which none could be 
 found to believe, only because you had not won that magic spell, 
 which lies in being known ? 
 
 I was great friends with all those youthful artists who lived 
 in nooks and corners all over the town, and who got their living 
 by copying or by counterfeiting the old masters. 
 
 Erom the time that I had been old enough to climb up their 
 steep stairs unaided, they had made a pet of me always, and 
 often a model. I liked nothing better than to be perched on a 
 table in any one of their big barns, arrayed in peacock's plumes, 
 or old laces, or ancient brocades, or any other of the picturesque 
 useless dusty lumber : and I think the dealers and buyers in the 
 old town must have got very tired of my dark-eyed, golden 
 fringed little face, which these students were wont to use for 
 every allegory or childish subject that was ordered of them. 
 
 But painters, if one chance to please them at all, always see so 
 many types in one's face, all more or less contradictory of each 
 other, that one comes to the irresistible conclusion that it must 
 after all only be typical of the poor human nature which makes 
 us all akin, when it does not set us all at strife. 
 
 They were very good to me all these poor lads ; though they 
 quarrelled often enough amongst themselves, and not seldom got 
 into trouble for fierce wrangle with the invader. They all of 
 them lived high up in the air, amongst the open rafters of the 
 uncoiled roofs ; with wondrous lights streaming in through the 
 vast bare garrets and magnificent views of limitless horizons, 
 southward to the plains and northward to the mountains. 
 
 They used to be very good to me. They would dance with 
 me unweariedly at the open air balls ; they would take me to 
 laugh my heart out over the dear delicious rheumatic burattini ; 
 they would play me all sorts of sweet little mad canzoni, rippling 
 all over with a very phrenzy of mirth ; and when I sat to them 
 they would run out at noonday down six pairs of stairs into the 
 street to fetch me a noonday meal of coffee, simmering in its 
 brass pipkin, and little patties crisp in their white papers. I 
 fear they must often have spent on me the only coins they had 
 for their own dinners, for they lived on about three soldi a day 
 two of which would go for the theatre and the nightly smoke at 
 their clubs. 
 
WITH THE POPOLANL 31 
 
 To my coming and going with them, Mariuccia having once 
 eatisfied herself that they were honest lads, offered seldom anj 
 opposition. The Italians are not a people who think evil of 
 every trifle, and Mariuccia had a good deal in her of the stanch, 
 uncompromising republicanism of old Florence. 
 
 We amused ourselves ; that seemed to Mariuccia the right and 
 proper thing for childhood and youth; and moreover, as she 
 used to say, with a laugh and a frown together, the " signorina 
 is proud enough for six ; how she queens it over them, the little 
 imperious thing." 
 
 No douht a nurse duly reared to a sense of her duties would 
 have thought the judgment of heaven would have fallen on her 
 had she allowed a little "illustrissima" of ten years old to 
 clamber up into the roof of houses to sing stornelli amongst 
 paints and pots, and cans and lumber, with a circle of bearded 
 Bohemians, or clamber down again in company with some stout- 
 limbed peasant in gold ear-rings and scarlet kirtle, with a grand 
 head like the Donatello Judith's, and a profession which was 
 frankly and undesignedly that of a model. 
 
 But the songs had never a line in them for which I could have 
 been the worse, and the model was a good gentle soul who had 
 babies at home that she loved, and whose only care was to get 
 broth and polenta enough for them. And dear old Mariuccia 
 was too straight and simple a soul to be on the watch for evil ; 
 besides, as she sometimes mumbled to herself as she unlaced her 
 bodice at night before coming to her small straw bed in my cham- 
 ber, she thought it might be well if I should take to the people 
 altogether, and be happy and marry amidst them in due time, 
 for of a surety money there would be none for me, and my 
 father's people made no sign. 
 
 But when I heard her breathe these wishes for me, she stand- 
 ing over me perhaps with her dull oil lamp and fancying me 
 asleep, I used to laugh her to scorn in silence under the rough 
 hempen sheet. 
 
 " Never, never, never ! " I used to say in my heart. 
 
 Mariuccia used to close her soliloquies by kneeling down to a 
 picture of the Mother of Many Sorrows, and praying to her for 
 my future ; but I, silent beneath the sheets, used impiously to 
 think, " what use is it to be handsome if one cannot do for one- 
 self without the Madonna? " 
 
 The Madonna was all very well, no doubt, for these poor lean 
 old folks who had not a friend in the world, or those pale foolish 
 lovesick girls who could not keep their lovers, but could only 
 
33 PASCAK&L. 
 
 kneel down and pray for them in the chapels; it was very well 
 to have a Madonna, no doubt, when one was ugly or old, and 
 when with one's life all was finished : hut for me ! there was a 
 littlo triangular mirror hung in the corner of my room to which 
 I am afraid I said many more orisons than I ever offered 
 to Mary. 
 
 I loved the people: who would not in Italy? the dear, 
 graceful, sunny-natured people, whose very selfishness is more 
 engaging than other nations' virtues. 
 
 Where else but in Italy, when you give a franc for an armful 
 of roses will the seller cast to you in free gift of pure good will 
 his choicest magnolia flower ? 
 
 Where else will the old porter to whom you offer two sous for 
 his trouble in hobbling up and down the stairs for you, limp off 
 to his snuggery and bring you thence a bough from his lemon 
 tree with a courtesy and a smile that courtiers might envy ? 
 
 Where else will the facchino who has toiled after you on a 
 summer's day with a heavy load, put his hands behind his back, 
 and shake his curly head, and steadily refuse reward, crying: 
 
 " JSTo, no, no ! it is pleasure enough just to see the signora ! " 
 
 Where else, if you pause at a little music shop in a bye 
 street, will the master of the shop come out and hum you the 
 songs that you seek harmoniously in a mezza-voce, whilst your 
 coachman turns round to correct a change to the minor, and the 
 baker-boy pauses to join in the refrain, and a girl, mending her 
 shoe at a window, chaunts her share in the measure, and every 
 mortal leaves off his or her occupation to loiter out and join the 
 chorus with sweet singing rhythm, till the whole narrow street 
 is filled with the melody ? 
 
 Where else, indeed ? 
 
 True, if you fail to buy roses next day, the seller may 
 petulantly wish you an accidente. True, the porter next week 
 may keep you languishing for your letters while he gossips over 
 your affairs in the street, and allots you more lovers than there 
 are days in the year. True, the facchino may expect you to nod 
 and btnile and be luon amico with him all the rest of your life. 
 True, the music-seller may feel not the smallest scruple in giving 
 you imperfect copies at six times their due value. 
 
 But all the same how genuine were the grace and the courtesy 
 and the vivacity and the kindliness ! how genuine they will be 
 egain a million times over ! how they smooth and illumine the 
 rough and dark pathways of life ! how easy they render the 
 cordial intercourse between far- sundered classes ! how pleasantly 
 
THE PEACOCK'S PLUMED. 33 
 
 they make melody amidst our rude human nature, like the 
 singing flower-sown brooks amidst the hill-side stones ! 
 
 " Italians cheat one as much as other nations do," said a 
 shrewd Frenchman to me, the other day. "Oh, yes, no doubt; 
 some say they cheat one a little more. But then they alone 
 know how to do it amiably; they alone save one's self-respect." 
 
 Such was his verdict (a very superficial one, for, except 
 Stendahl, where is the Frenchman who ever could understand 
 the Italian ?) ; but myself I would go farther than he did. 
 
 I would much sooner say, and surely more justly, that the 
 Italian, to the fine subtleties of civilisation and the keen astute- 
 ness of his natural intelligence, unites a rare simplicity and a 
 joyous frankness which lie alone of all people has retained 
 amidst the artifice of modern life. 
 
 No, I loved the people; I had enough soul in me for that; 
 but all the same, even in my happiest hours, I never dreamed 
 for an instant, as Mariuccia dreamed for me, of being content to 
 dwell amidst them for ever. 
 
 And happy hours I had ; though my brothers and I sat at 
 night reading Yasari, or old Pulci, or the Chronicles of Com- 
 pagni, or Ferreto, or the wonderful stories of Croce, that 
 Bolognese "Homer of Children," by the light of one poor little 
 miserable lamp; and though in the winter sometimes we had 
 barely charcoal enough to heat the small brown jars, and though 
 even on most summer days we had little else to eat than a roll 
 of bread and a broth of herbs, a few ripe figs from the old treo 
 in the court, or % slice of the padrona's polenta. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE PEACOCK'S PLUMES. 
 
 WE were happiest when we were alone with Mariuccia. 
 
 We were children, and strong and well, and there was the 
 bright, broad, living sunlight about us, and all things were 
 possible for us in the future. But when my father came and 
 Plorio it was different. We did not reason on it, but we wera 
 vaguely affected by their presence, vaguely depressed by iU 
 Some breath from a world we knew nothing of blew in on us, 
 
 D 
 
and chilled us in our bare old home in the mellow Lombardio 
 heats. 
 
 " Oh, Bio inio ! but it is terrible ! " Florio would say, lifting 
 his hands as he peered into the faggotless cupboard, the empty 
 stewpans, the ill-furnished bread pot, and then we became 
 sensible of the privations which we had scarcely perceived before, 
 and alive to that vital truth of the old Condottieri, that " Sema 
 soldi non possono fare" 
 
 " It is terrible," Florio would say, cooking a couple of little 
 larks and some toadstools out of the woods in such magical 
 fashion that they would have deceived any epicure in the country 
 into belief in them as ortolans and mushrooms. " It gets worse, 
 you see, every year; of course it gets worse. He wins less 
 often ; and he takes more brandy when he loses. It is always 
 the way. It is a puzzle to live at all, and half the cities are 
 shut to us. Debt debt debt. It slaps the gates in our faces. 
 There is hardly anywhere that they will trust him now. It will 
 end in that, some day, and soon." 
 
 "With "that" he gave a gesture as though he drew a knife 
 across his bare throat. Mariuccia shook her head. 
 
 "End in that? End?" she echoed. "And, say you, 
 Florio, what pray will then begin for them ? For the dear little 
 ones ? It is very well to say ' end/ as if he were the only one 
 concerned in the matter. Four of them : and not a farthing 
 except the few notes he leaves with me when he comes and goes, 
 which the Holy Mother knows would be hardly enough to feed 
 up a goose for San Giovanni's day, let alone feeding four big 
 hungry children from one Lent on to another." 
 
 Such discourse as this we used to hear between them in stray 
 fragments; and they left on us a subtle, indistinct sense of some 
 impending evil ; and even I, despite the innumerable illusions 
 and indestructible faiths in which the name of my father was 
 involved for me, grew by degrees dimly sensible that he only 
 returned to us at such times and seasons as it had become im- 
 possible for him to live elsewhere. 
 
 The old barren dusky palace was the cheapest roof that wo 
 could have found all the world over to cover our heads, and when 
 he came tbither for a temporary refuge, the fidelity of his two 
 servants still contrived to sustain around him some show of cere- 
 monial and some sense of comfort. How they did it I cannot 
 tell, nor even at this day can I imagine ; but do it they did ; 
 with surpassing patience and with unwavering self-sacrifice. 
 
 An Italian can subsist on almost as little as an Arab ; and if 
 
THE PEACOCK'S PLUMBS. 35 
 
 he only offer you but a couple of dates lie can serve them on a 
 majolica plate with a few lentiscus leaves and a little myrtle in 
 such fashion that they will lack nothing in grace of service that 
 anv king could desire at his banquet. 
 
 Such a man as my father was could not be anywhere wholly 
 without companions. 
 
 The native nobility and gentry never came nigh him ; but the 
 Austrians used to flash their white uniforms on our dark stair- 
 case many and many a night. They used to pass within the 
 doors of his room and remain till daylight ; and all night long 
 Florio used to be gliding to and fro with glass jars of chartreuse, 
 or fresh flasks of brandy. 
 
 They were my old Tedesco acquaintances who had waltzed me 
 round a hundred times to the swell of their military bands; but 
 as I grew older my father sternly bade Mariuccia take heed that 
 I was never about upon the stairs at evening, and she kept ma 
 imprisoned by her side under the lamp, weaving the laca, which 
 I hated, or studying the scores of Ambrogib Kufi, which I loved. 
 
 Other of my pleasures came to an end too about this time. 
 
 Tt was a lovely spring in Lombardy, mild even as though 
 amidst the Sorrentine orange woods. 
 
 Everywhere the meadows were white and hyacinthine-hued 
 with a million crocuses. The violets followed them in countless 
 hordes amongst the grass tufts underneath the vines. The 
 maple and mulberry trees were pushing forth their tender leaf- 
 lets, and in the dark old city there were soft blushes of colour 
 where the yellow daffodils and the home-reared carnations 
 blossomed in the casements and tbe balconies. 
 
 And away to the northward was the silvery cloud of the Alps, 
 fend the students would go outward thither and come back with 
 >he fresh winds blowing in their hair, and with their hands full 
 of blue gentian flowers. 
 
 In the spring, even, our level plain of the Adige, which had 
 not the beaut} r either of the mountain or the valley, had a certain 
 charm of its own under the budding vice boughs and amongst 
 the delicate acacias ; I used to be in the fields all the day long, 
 with my brothers and Eaffaelino, playing till we were tired, and. 
 then, lying down to rest, watching the blue sea, of those immeasur* 
 able distances beyond which lay the' world. 
 
 One day, when I. had filled my arms with masses of wood 
 violets, I clambered up the stairs to the bottega of one of the 
 students. He was very fond of flowers, and introduced them in 
 all his sketches, and I was accustomed to take him a share of 
 
 D 2 
 
3& PASCAR&L. 
 
 my field-sports. He was a swarthy, large-limbed, toader-hearted 
 creature ; a son of peasants of an Aquillian village, whom he 
 always called Cecco. 
 
 One day, when I was about twelve years old, I went my 
 round as usual amongst my friends the painters. It was a fine 
 bright day in February; I had been out in the woods by day- 
 break with my brothers and the padrona's boys gathering violets ; 
 the great odorous purple violets that, like so many other flowers, 
 sin ell surely sweeter in Italy than ever they do elsewhere. 
 
 We came home by noon laden with them ; the padrona's lads 
 went out to stand with their share of the forest plunder at the 
 corners of the streets, and see if they could get a penny to play 
 with at boccette; I filled Mariuccia's pots and jugs with some of 
 mine, and took the rest to my friend Cecco, who loved flowers, 
 as I say, and so often introduced them in his pictures that the 
 students nicknamed him II Squarcionino, or the Little Squarcione, 
 from that old Pad o van who was the first of the Early Masters to 
 paint flowers and fruits in arabesque. 
 
 He lived at the top of a lofty old house in a gloomy bye-street. 
 
 I climbed the hundred and odd stairs with labour, for they 
 were rotten, twisting, and slippery from over-much dirt ; and, 
 with my arms full of violets, purple and white, darted into his 
 painting -room, that was as bare as a barn, and not half as 
 cleanly. 
 
 With Cecco there were three or four other lads, smoking and 
 laughing, and talking as they worked. He had an admirable 
 light in his great, ugly workroom ; and those comrades of his 
 who were not so fortunate in that respect were wont to set up 
 their easels beside his, and labour together all in their various 
 manners. 
 
 They welcomed me with enthusiasm, went on their knees to 
 me and my violets, and abandoned their work that they miga* 
 sketch me. 
 
 " Just as you are, signorina!" they called to me. "$To! do 
 not touch a tbiag; it is perfect. Look at her now, with the 
 light on all that ruffled hair, and the little gay skirt full of the 
 violets, and the colour all hot in her face from the wind : ah, 
 belli na^, bellina ! " 
 
 So they cried around me in twenty different forms of admira- 
 tion the artists' admiration, which is so curiously compounded 
 of fancy and of fact, and which they were accustomed to pour 
 out on me as unthinkingly as though I had been a porcelain 
 figure. 
 
THE PEACOCK'S PLUM&S. 37 
 
 1 v?as so accustomed to it, that it hardly hurt mo more than it 
 would have done the china ; I knew Nature had made me good 
 to look upon and picturesque. Altro ! I used to shrug my 
 fchoulders and think no more ahout it except to give a passing 
 pity to the unfortunate ones who were rot similarly gifted. 
 
 So that day they hoisted me up upon the wooden dais where 
 their models were accustomed to stand, and, with their four 
 easels in the four corners of the room, set to work to paint me as 
 I was, with my load of violets, and my hair all blown from the 
 rough mountain breezes. 
 
 In a couple of hours they had all contented themselves more 
 or less thoroughly with a first sketch, and simultaneously laid 
 down their brushes. 
 
 "I have made her the Genius of Spring," said Bernardino 
 Scalchi, surveying his workmanship with his head on one side, 
 like a robin's. 
 
 "And I have made her 'La Primavera della Vita, La Gio- 
 ventu dell* Anno/ " said Beppo Lavo, who wrote very pretty 
 verses, and could sing them, too, not ill. 
 
 " And I have made her the ^Renaissance of Italy; the type of 
 the Dawn of Freedom, the Symbol of the Future," said Neri 
 Castagno, who was a patriot and a red republican. 
 
 Old, swart, clumsy Cecco laughed a little as he turned round 
 to them : 
 
 "lam very prosaic after you. I have only made her what 
 she is a child.'* 
 
 And ye,t, when all the sketches stood side by side, in the 
 dying light of the late afternoon, it was Cecco' s, they frankly 
 admitted, which had the true poetry in it, after all. 
 
 A child with a skirt full of violets, with a rough wintry sky 
 behind her, with a fresh wind tossing her hair, and with her 
 feet gaily flying over the wet earth already green with the 
 coming of spring : that was all that Cecco had made of it ; but 
 beside his picture the others looked false in sentiment, strained 
 in fancy, and garish in grandiloquence. 
 
 Their work over, they made me jump from my throne; they 
 thrust the violets in a bowl of water ; they insisted that I should 
 stay and have a little feast with them. Cecco had been in luck 
 that day; a small panel of his, a girl's face in a garland of roses, 
 had sold for the enormous sum of twenty florins ; he was a mil- 
 lionaire, at least, for a day, in his own estimation. 
 
 He ran down stairs into the street, and in a few minutes came 
 back in gay triumph with a couple of flasks of chiante, with a 
 
38 PASCAJR&L. 
 
 pan of steaming chesnuts, with a round sweot-alniond cake, and 
 a big bundle of cigars. 
 
 Then he thrust me in an old oak chair draped with dusky 
 tapestries; he cast over me a magnificent old brocaded robe that 
 the Jews would have bought of him to cast in the fire for its gold 
 to melt out of the threads, but which he would never part with, 
 because it had belonged to his father, who had been an artist 
 before him; he gave me a sceptre of peacock's plumes, and a 
 diadem of silvered paper with which models were crowned when 
 they had to sit for Madonnas ; and then our feast began. 
 
 How we enjoyed ourselves ! how we chattered ! how we 
 laughed ! how rich the wine tasted ! how crisp were the ches- 
 nuts! how we shouted the "Fuori il stranieri!" how we sang 
 every song that occurred to us, from motives of Rossini's and 
 Bellini's to the last chorus of the newest street song ! 
 
 We were merry at heart, and full of zest, in the deepening 
 twilight and the clouds of smoke, while a ruddy light from the 
 setting sun glanced on the swarthy face and kindling eyes of 
 Cecco, and lit up the peacock's plumes of my thyrsus and the 
 gold stitches in the brocade : so merry, indeed, and so full of 
 zest, that we never heard the door unclose or perceived that any- 
 one besides ourselves had entered the painting-room. 
 
 Only at the sound of a strange voice did Cecco tumble 
 hurriedly up from the floor where he was stretched, and, with 
 eager apologies and bewildered haste, strike light to a lamp and 
 welcome three strangers, who, going the round of the ateliers, 
 had come in its turn to his. 
 
 I, seated on my brocaded throne, with my Madonna's crown 
 on my tumbled hair, and my pewter plate of chesnuts on my lap, 
 paused in my singing, and looked up ; two of the strangers were 
 Austrian s, the third was my father. 
 
 Trembling, I slid down and stood like a little culprit, with 
 the folds of the brocade curled like many-coloured serpents round 
 my feet : it was not that I had any sense of doing what was 
 wrong, it was only that he was to me a mystery so full of awe, 
 and wonder, and attraction, that to see him suddenly there 
 appalled me. 
 
 It was the first time in my life that I had ever met him in 
 Verona out of our own old home. 
 
 His eyes glanced across me and he knew me in a moment ; 
 that I saw ; but he gave me no recognition. 
 
 As chance would, however, have it, one of the Austriaci looked 
 at me by the flickering lights of the lamp and the sunset. 
 
PEACOCK'S PLUMES. 35 
 
 '* A charming little figure !" he cried. "Fantastic but very 
 charming. A model, of course, in all that tinsel and brocade." 
 
 Dumb and perplexed, and glancing at my father in a vague 
 terror, I stood still, with the silver crown upon my curls, and 
 wished to sink into the depths of the old brocades ; but he, hear- 
 ing his friend speak, came forward and looked at me coldly. 
 
 "A pretty little beggar," he said, with a cold, swift glance of 
 his eyes. I knew his meaning in a moment : he chose to affect 
 to avoid all recognition of me. 
 
 My face burned, my heart rose, my fear of him was forgotten. 
 I threw off my silver diadem and the old robes, and stood up 
 straight before him, the poor neglected peacock sceptre trailing 
 on the bricks. 
 
 " If I be a beggar, it is not my fault, nor yet Mariuccia's," 1 
 said, boldly, with a scorn for him that thrilled me with a horrible 
 sense of guilt and of humiliation. * ' "We are very hungry and very 
 cold all of us very often. They do not dare to tell you. But 
 it is true. And if I can forget it a little while laughing here, 
 where is the harm ? I am not ashamed." 
 
 My father's face, haggard and cold though it was, flushed 
 deeply, whether with anger or any more tender sense of shame, I 
 cannot tell. He thrust me from the room. 
 
 " Whatever else you be, you are too young to rant so glibly," 
 he said, as he closed the door upon me. 
 
 I ran down the street to fling my woes at Mariuccia's feet, and 
 sobbed as I ran, the poor bedraggled peacock's plumes still trail- 
 ing from my hand, and gathering in their course the dust and 
 ordure of the uneven and uncleanly stones, 
 
 I fled along under the darkling shadows of the grim fortresses 
 which overhung the pavement, burning all over with a sense of 
 outrage and of indignant scorn. 
 
 My father was not ashamed to starve me, but he was ashamed 
 to acknowledge me because I sat and laughed and sang, and was 
 glad in a garret, in a paper diadem, over a horn of cheap wine, 
 and a handful of chesnuts, and a bowl of wood- violets. 
 
 I had a passion of scorn for such shame : and yet the weight 
 of it was heavy on my child's heart, for I had a vague, shapeless, 
 anreasoned-on sense of foreboding that, as my father had judged, 
 so would the world judge likewise. 
 
 Mariuccia comforted me in her tender, homely fashion, and 
 washed clean the peacock's plumes, and set them up over the 
 stove with a palm -sheaf blessed for good luck in Holy Week. 
 
 But at evening-time she told me sadly that my father had 
 
4<? PASCAR&L. 
 
 forbidden her to allow me ever again to visit any of the 
 students. 
 
 The loss of that cheery, good-natured, chivalrous, riotous 
 companionship of theirs cost me many and many an hour of re- 
 bellious tears, and from that moment I ceased to be loyal to my 
 father. 
 
 I would look at the peacock eceptre again and again, and 
 think to myself 
 
 " If you had been of gold and ivory, he would have praised 
 you." 
 
 And I loved my feather-thyrsus all the more tenderly for 
 other's neglect of it; and for my father a settled scorn fired 
 itself in me, and killed love. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 MATER DOLOBOSA. 
 
 So things went on, until I reached my fifteenth year. I was 
 tall, but I was still, for I had the open-air life which develops 
 the limb and strengthens the body, I was still in my ways and 
 my tastes quite a child. 
 
 Eaffaelino grew apace, too, and his people talked of his enter- 
 ing the priesthood ; they did not know what to do with him ; he 
 had no taste for any hand trade ; he was for ever haunting the 
 churches ; and to his mother, who was a religious soul, there 
 seemed no life more beautiful or blessed than life amidst the 
 silent marble cloisters, and the perpetual calm of Certosa or 
 Camaldoli. 
 
 One of my brothers long before had died of fever in one of 
 the hot, nauseous, pestilential summers of the uncleanly town ; 
 another had gone of his own will off with a Genoese sea-captain , 
 whom he had met by chance, and who had dazzled him with 
 Btories of the sea, and he had been drowned on his first voyage ; 
 a third had kissed us, and clung round Mariuccia's neck, and con- 
 fessed, shamefacedly that his heart was breaking with monotony 
 and inaction, and so had also gone his way to see the outer world 
 with some other young students, as poor and hopeful as himself, 
 who talked of immortality and starved upon a dream ; and of 
 him, also we had heard that autumn that a knife thrust in a 
 
MATER DOLOROSA. 41 
 
 students* scuffle had ended his short life just as it had opened 
 into manhood. 
 
 She and I were left alone in the old home. 
 
 "We closed the great rooms, and lived through a dreary winter 
 in one little chamher abutting on her kitchen, and looking dowiv. 
 into the stone court where the fountain that year was frozen, 
 and the cold killed even the hardy bitter-orauge-trees. 
 
 We had not heard of my father since the previous Easter- term. 
 
 Twice or thrice, Mariuccia had gone to the little dark den on 
 the piazza, where the letter- writer of the poor people sat, ready 
 to indite an amorous effusion or a summons for rent, a proposal 
 of marriage or a butcher's bill, according to his clients' require- 
 ments; and thence she sent a letter each time to Florio or to her 
 master. 
 
 I suppose she did not care for me to know of it, since she did not 
 avail herself of my aid to pen them. Twice or thrice, in answer, 
 Florio sent a little money, as from my father ; but I have had 
 many doubts since that Florio had contrived to gain it by some 
 one of his innumerable talents, and robbed himself for our sakes. 
 From my father, directly, we received no word, 
 
 The winter was terribly dull. 
 
 Mariuccia was getting very old, and wept sadly and often for 
 the loss of her boys. 
 
 They had been as the very apple of her eye ; she had toiled for 
 them from the very days of their births ; she had spent many a 
 sleepless night and weary day beside their sick beds in their 
 wayward infancy; she had gone without her morsel of meat 
 many a time to feed better with it the young lion cubs she 
 loved ; and now, one was dead, and the other two had thrown 
 their arms about her neck, and laughed and talked of the future, 
 and gone gaily away, thinking only of the worlds they had never 
 seen, and of the dreams they were sure would come true. 
 
 That was all her reward : it was hard. 
 
 I saw those firm-shut lips of hers quiver often as she sat and 
 spun by the dull lamplight ; and I heard her many a night mur- 
 mur on her knees to the Mater Dolorosa, " Do not forget them, 
 thou Blessed One. They will forget thee children will but 
 mothers are not angered for that." 
 
 " "What has made you stay with us, Mariuccia ? " I asked her 
 once, smitten suddenly with some remorseful consciousness of 
 the enormous debt we owed to her. " Why have you stayed with 
 us ? It has been a hard life always ; and we have been only a 
 trouble to you and no reward ? " 
 
4* PASCAR&L. 
 
 She looked at me with a steady look that had a certain 
 pathetic sadness in it. 
 
 " One must love something," she said, simply. I pondered 
 darkly on the saying. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 A TWILIGHT TALE. 
 
 TJIE winter was very dull. My father's forbiddance had 
 taken from me many of my old pleasures ; and the failure of 
 funds had arrested all continuance of my education. There wag 
 only Ambrogib Eufi to whom I still went, and in whose attic I 
 was solaced by the strains of Cherubini and the melodies of 
 Gluck. 
 
 It was bitterly cold there. 
 
 The snow was thick on the roof, and the wind from the 
 mountains poured through and through the unprotected place. 
 The old man could afford no such luxury as a stove ; and the 
 bare brick floor was like ice to the feet. I used to shiver as I 
 sang. 
 
 And yet when I think of the sweet sigh of the violin me- 
 lodies through the white winter silence ; of Raffaelino's eager, 
 dreamy eyes, misty with the student's unutterable sadness and 
 delight ; of old Ambrogio, with his semicircle of children round 
 him, lifting their fresh voices at his word; of the little robin 
 that came every day upon the waterpipe, and listened, and 
 thrilled in harmony, and ate joyfully the crumbs which the old 
 maestro daily spared to it from his scanty meal when I think 
 of those hours, it seems to me that they must have been happi- 
 ness too. 
 
 " Could we but know when we are happy!" sighs some 
 poet. As well might he write, " Could we but set the dewdrop 
 with our diamonds ! could we but stay the rainbow in our 
 skies ! " 
 
 During this sad time of privation, I saw a little way into the 
 closed past of my old music-master. 
 
 Verona perceived nothing in him but a meagre old man, who 
 took his toilsome way noon and night to the theatre; who 
 chaffered in the market for a pinch of charcoal and a bit of 
 goat's-milk cheese; who wore his clothes so long that they 
 
A TWILIGHT TAL&. 43 
 
 fairly dropped asunder ; and who mado their boys and girls cry 
 bitterly at many a sharp word and blow of his fiddle-bow when 
 they sung not to his liking. 
 
 But I had always felt or fancied fancy is so much feeling 
 with every child that there was something sadder, wiser, 
 nobler in Ambrogio than the townsfolk credited. 
 
 Perhaps he liked me better than he did the others, or he liked 
 my voice better ; all human creatures were only counted as so 
 many voices by him; at any rate he now and then let fall, in 
 my hearing only, brief sentences which seemed to me born of a 
 mind higher than most of those with which I came in daily 
 contact. 
 
 Mariuccia would not listen to any idea of the kind. She was 
 a little jealous of my regard for him. 
 
 " Those music-mad people," she would say, "are just like 
 that big sea-shell the dear lads brought me from Genoa. The 
 sea-shell sings all day long if you put it to your ear. Why does 
 it sing ? Just because it is empty. Just because the heart that 
 used to beat in it is dead and gone. It is just so with them. 
 They are all melody because everything else born in them is 
 withered up che-e-e 1 " 
 
 One night, as it grew dark, I ventured, contrary to usage, to 
 go and see my old maestro. 
 
 I was dissatisfied with my tiresome fate ; I was ill at ease and 
 impatient ; I wanted I knew not very well what. 
 
 I climbed up his dark staircase, and found him in his chamber. 
 
 It was a night when there was no performance at the theatre 
 of which he was one of the orchestra. He sat alone in the 
 cheerless, fireless attic scanning some old scores by the light of a 
 miserable little oil lamp. 
 
 He looked up as I entered ; I think that he was always glad 
 to see me, though he said nothing in welcome at any time. 
 
 " It is late for you to be out," was all his greeting. 
 
 I told him the Ave Maria had only just then rung ; and asked 
 him to explain again some obscure instruction in counterpoint 
 which had been hard for me at his last lesson. 
 
 He went through and through the passage lucidly with me ; 
 he was always willing to smooth difficulties to a patient student, 
 and in music I had patience, though in nothing else. 
 
 When the point was so clear to me that I had no longer 
 excuse to linger over it, I still loitered by him, sitting there at 
 the old bare table, leaning my elbows on it, and my face on my 
 lurnds, and gazing at the red, dull wick of the ill-fed lamp. 
 
44 PASCA&&L. 
 
 " Talk to me a little, maestro ! " I said, suddenly. 
 
 Ambrogi6 took off his spectacles slowly, and gazed at me in 
 Btupe&etion. 
 
 "Talk!" he echoed : it never happened to him to be asked 
 for words ; such things as he had it in him to say he said 
 through the strings of his violin. 
 
 "Yes! Talk," I repeated, with the insistance of a spoilt 
 child, for poor Mariuccia had spoiled me sadly, despite all her 
 warnings. "You must have seen the world sometime. Tell 
 me a little about it." 
 
 "The world!" 
 
 He said the words with a startled, heavy breath. He looked 
 like one who hears the Ion g-un uttered name of some dead 
 thing. 
 
 " Yes. The world," I said again. " What is it like ? " 
 
 " Go in a convent, and never know," he answered, with a 
 bitter brevity. 
 
 "Is it so bad, then?" 
 
 He looked at me across the deal table in the dull yellow lamp- 
 light; a dreary, grey shrunken figure, very old, very poor, very 
 hopeless, with his great hollow eyes burning bright with the 
 fires of awakening memories. 
 
 "Bad? Good? Pshaw! Those are phrases. Ko one uses 
 them but fools. You have seen tbe monkeys' cage in the beast- 
 garden here. That is the world. It is not strength, or merit, 
 or talent, or reason that is of any use there ; it is just whicli 
 monkey has the skill to squeeze to the front and jabber through 
 the bars, and make his teeth meet in his neighbours' tails till 
 they shriek and leave him free passage it is that monkey which 
 geia all the cakes and the nuts of the folk on a feast-day. The 
 monkey is not bad ; it is only a little quicker and more cunning 
 than the rest; that is all." 
 
 I sat silent; it seemed to ine but a dreary prospect, this 
 monkeys' cage which I should be doomed to enter when onco I 
 should be across the mountains. 
 
 " Tell me a little more," I urged to him. "You must have 
 seen so much when you were young." 
 
 " !N"o," he answered me. "I never saw very much. The 
 man who is poor can only look out of a garret window. He sees 
 the skies, and the sun, and the moon, and the changes of thfe 
 clouds, better than anyone else; but it is all he does see." 
 
 "But he can walk abroad ! " 
 
 "Can he? Shoe leather costs money; and though bare feet 
 
A TWILIGHT TALE. 45 
 
 might safely tread the sands of deserts in the days of saints, 
 they go bur ill upon the flints of the king's highways now." 
 
 This I felt was true ; indeed I kaew it by many a painful 
 moment when my little worn-out shoes had clicked- clacked 
 sorrowfully over the scorching stones of Verona in midsummer. 
 
 1 grew cold with a sort of sickly fear of this new world into 
 which a second earlier I had been all eargerness to plunge. 
 
 "But you must have seen so much to what I have seen," I 
 Mrged, after a pause, again with a child's persistency. " Do tell 
 ise something some story I mean of your old life ?" 
 
 His eyes were full of pain beneath his shaggy brows as they 
 met mine across the dim light. 
 
 " Child, you should never open dead men's graves," ho said, 
 drearily, with a sort of shudder. " I tell you I was always 
 poor. It is a kind of blindness poverty. We can only grope 
 through life when we are poor, hitting and maiming ourselves 
 against every angle." 
 
 "But you had genius ? " 
 
 He shrugged his shoulders in a pathetic, hopeless gesture of 
 resignation tbol went to my heart through all my thoughtless 
 selfishness. 
 
 "I have been most unhappy," he answered, simply. "Yes; 
 you are right." 
 
 I felt that I knew his meaning, vaguely though his words 
 shadowed it. 
 
 "And how then," I said under my breath, t{ how then not 
 great?" 
 
 He smiled a little, very wearily. 
 
 "How? Well, I loved Art, and not the world, and, in my 
 way, was honest. Time was, when I was young, that I dreamed 
 a little of being, as you call it, great. At twenty-five, I was 
 yes, even I was happy. 
 
 " I was poor indeed ; in winter I had to keep my bed lest I 
 should die of cold, and in summer I was glad to dispute the 
 acorns with the swine. But I was happy. I had my Art, and 
 I had a friend closer than a brother. 
 
 " He was a German, Karl Eothwald ; together we studied 
 music at Milano. He had no strong talent, only a graceful 
 taste. I well, I had genius, God help me, and of the most 
 arduous study I was never tired. 
 
 " At twenty-five I trusted myself to commence my first great 
 work an opera upon the theme of Alkestis. I was two years 
 engaged upon it. They were the two happy years of my life. 
 
46 PASCAR&L. 
 
 (t Kothwald and I dwelt in the same chambers together; \v$ 
 walked abroad in the daybreak and the evening times, and we 
 *at up late into the nights, I all the while dreaming of Alkestis, 
 *nd giving shape to the creations that haunted me, and calling 
 on his sympathy and joy each time when my composition was 
 good on my own ear and satisfied my own desire. He never 
 was fatigued, nor ever failed to rejoice with me. 
 
 " Often and often as we went through the millet-fields at sunrise, 
 or sat in our garret through the long moonless nights, and the 
 power of song that was in me broke forth and arose triumphant, 
 and filled me with its own exultant strength, he my friend 
 would laugh and weep in his boyish fashion and fling his arms 
 about my shoulders and cry out how beautiful and strong my 
 music was, and prophesy I should rank with Bach and Gluck 
 and Palestrina, 
 
 " Those two years I was quite happy, quite, though I was 
 but a starving scholar, and had often to go without bread to be 
 able to buy paper for my scores. 
 
 " All the world was full of hope and of beauty to me ; every- 
 where I heard delicious melodies in leaves, and waters, and 
 bells, and winds, and all the things that moved, and my friend 
 was with me, close as a brother, dear almost as a mistress. I 
 wanted nothing more, and was sure of fame. 
 
 " My opera was barely finished when Kothwald was sum- 
 moned from my side ; some illness in his northern home, he 
 said. 
 
 " I begged him to return swiftly ; I pledged my word to him 
 not to submit my opera to the direction of La Bcala until he 
 should return. ' My triumph would be robbed of half its joy if 
 thou wert not with mo to rejoice in it ; ' so I spoke to him as 
 we bade each other our farewell. It was then autumn. 
 
 " The delay was sad for me, for I had hoped to have seen the 
 Alkestis produced that winter ; but I never thought of putting 
 it forward in his absence. I loved him only second to my 
 work; and I had pledged him my word that he should be 
 present whenever it should be given to the public. 
 
 " The first months of winter are bitter in Milano ; they were 
 very cheerless and desolate to me ; but I had many tender letters 
 from him to keep warm my heart, and I occupied myself fondly 
 in touching and refining the creation on which all my future 
 bung. 
 
 " Ko one had ever heard a chord of it, except himself, but I 
 had not much fear that it would not be accepted - At the great 
 
A TWILIGHT TALU. 47 
 
 Scala, they knew me ; and the conductor of orchestra, who was 
 powerful with the direction, had a liking for me, because of ray 
 execution upon the violin. 
 
 " llothwald had been gone four months ; there were snow and 
 ice in Milan ; one day I sat shivering in my garret, yet with 
 my heart warm still, because so much hope abode in it. The 
 chief of orchestra paid me a visit ; he was, as I say, good to 
 me ; I could not have maintained my life at all without the 
 place he gave me amongst his musicians. 
 
 u He spoke to me of myself this day. ' Ambrogib/ he said, 
 ' it seems to me that you have too much genius to sit behind my 
 baton all your life. I hear that you have attempted original 
 composition. Is it true? Then let me see your score. It 
 should be something great. You are a master of counterpoint.' 
 He argued with me so kindly and so long, that in the end he 
 prevailed, and I drew out my Alkestis, and bade him judge 
 of it. 
 
 "' Alkestis? Alkestis?' he murmured, as he heard the 
 name. * Is that your theme ? It is unfortunate. There is a 
 new opera this very week produced in Vienna on that same old 
 story/ 
 
 " I was pained to hear that I had been forestalled ; I asked 
 him by whom it was composed. 
 
 " 'Naj', that I forget, and am not sure if I have heard/ he 
 answered me. 'But, anyway, you had best go thither and 
 judge of it for yourself. If it be poor and fail, you can still pro- 
 duce yours ; but if a triumph, as I am told, we must needs fit 
 your music to some other narrative. Ah ! I know how you love 
 your first thought your first poem, but still we might manage 
 to alter the libretto without much injury. "Well, go you to 
 Vienna nay, nay, do not be so proud. Tak-3 my gold for the 
 journey, and we will leave the matter as a debt to be paid me 
 when La Scala first brings out your opera. Kay, do not argue. 
 Go. You must, of necessity, judge your rival for yourself/ 
 
 " So I took his gold and went through tho bleak white winter 
 over the mountains at peril of my life. 
 
 " It was night when I reached Vienna. 
 
 " The gay city was all ablaze with light. I had travelled far 
 and fast ; I was exhausted. Nevertheless, before I changed my 
 clothes, or broke my fast, I made my way to the opera-house. 
 There they played Alkestis. 
 
 " I paid my entrance-money, and went into the heat and 
 glare and stood and listened. The house was shaking with 
 
43 
 
 thunders of applause. When the clamour ceased, the music rose 
 again it was my own. 
 
 " Phrase after phrase, chorus on chorus, solo and septuor, and 
 recitative, I heard them all like one made stupid by a blow. 
 They were all mine. 
 
 "The curtain fell; the rapture of the people cried aloud, 
 'Rothwald!' 'Eothwald!' 'llothwald!' 
 
 " Then I understood : 
 
 " I fell like a stone ; so they say ; they took me up as dead. 
 
 "Ho had stolen it all all all: stored up in his notes and 
 his copied score. 
 
 "It made him a great name. You may hear of him now in 
 the world. He has done nothing great since ; the world won- 
 ders ; but it is possible to stretch one triumph over a lifetime so 
 that it covers every after-failure. To make a name is hard ; but 
 once made, to live on it is easy. 
 
 " As for me I say I was dead. My heart, my brain, my 
 genius were all killed. It is only my body that has dragged on 
 life ever since. 
 
 " I never denounced him no. For I had loved him. And 
 if I had denounced him, where had been my proof? None 
 would have been found to believe." 
 
 As the last words died on his lips, his head sunk on his chest; 
 a film overspread the weariness of his hollow eyes ; the silence 
 of the innumerable years that he had passed, mute and alone, 
 amidst his kind, stole afresh over him. 
 
 In vain I knelt before him ; in vain I caressed his withered 
 hands ; in vain I spoke to him, begging his forgiveness for my 
 thoughtless cruelty which had thus torn open rudely this deadly 
 wound so long concealed from every human glance. 
 
 In vain : he answered nothing ; he heard nothing ; his dulled 
 eyes only gazed at the gleam of the lamp ; his hands only moved 
 vaguely as though straying over the chords of some half- remem- 
 bered music; his lips only muttered uow and then under their 
 breath : 
 
 "He betrayed me; yes; he stole all, all, all. But could 
 I denounce him ? He had been my friend." 
 
 And this he said again, and again, and again, many times ; 
 not knowing rightly what he said; and mumuring between 
 whiles softly to himself sweet broken snatches of sad melodies 
 the melodies, doubtless, of his lost Alkestis. 
 
 I stole away, awed and afraid, for I was but a child, and went 
 out into the flood of moonlight, into the bath of cpltl and 
 
T&M UftLB RD BOX. 45 
 
 luminous air, and there in the streets I sat down and wept 
 bitterly for a woe not my own for a life that was ended. 
 
 On the morrow he did not seem to remember the confession he 
 had poured out to me, nor ever again did any allusion to it pass 
 his lips or mine. But he had become sacred to me ; every time 
 that I stood before him I could have kissed his hands for veiy 
 love, and reverence, and pity. 
 
 From that hour I loved and honoured, and never dared bo 
 wayward with him. 
 
 He was only an old withered man, very bent and broken and 
 poor, ill clad, and taking snuff with trembling hands in the 
 bitter cold of his fireless attic, but to me from that night 
 onward he was a hero and a martyr, and whilst he lived I nevel 
 told to anyone what he had told to me, not even to Raffaelino. 
 
 "When a man's eyes meet yours, and his faith trusts you and 
 his heart upon a vague impulse is laid bare to you, it always has 
 seemed to me the basest treachery the world can hold to pass the 
 gold of confidence which he pours out to you from hand to hand 
 as common coin for common circulation. 
 
 It was Mariuccia who had reared me in that manner of 
 thinking. 
 
 " Child/' she used to say, " if they gave a diamond in trust 
 to your safe keeping, would you run with it to the goldsmiths* 
 shops in the public streets ? "Well, is not human faith of more 
 sanctity than diamonds ? " 
 
 She thought so ; being an old stanch republican of Florence, 
 and a woman very poor always, who knew little of the world or 
 of its ways. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE LITTLE EED BOX. 
 
 AT this time the winter set in with an almost unexampled 
 severity. 
 
 All over Italy it was cold ; so they said ; and poor Verona 
 lying in her open plain receiving full upon her defencelessness 
 the strokes of the alpine storm winds, seemed to crouch and 
 perish under the driving of the hurricanes; her huge old houses 
 were riven through and through with cold, and her high leaning 
 walls, whose shadow was so precious in the summer noons, 
 seemed now like barriers of ice. 
 
50 PASCAR&L. 
 
 That winter was a very terrible one to ATariuccia and to me. 
 
 Poor we had always been, but that winter we had absolutely 
 nothing. Of my father we had not heard for nearly twelve 
 months, and the last of Florio's letters was already half a 
 year old. 
 
 Mariuceia earned a little, a very little, by spinning and by 
 selling the work, but this was all. We lived on the very barest 
 food that could keep life in any human creatures. 
 
 Of clothing there was no absolute need, for my poor mother's 
 wardrobe had been costly and almost indestructible. But even 
 in this we had come to the very last, and I was forced either to 
 wear rustling silks and lustrous velvets, which made rne look 
 like a figure out of a masked ball, or else go without covering in 
 the bitter alpine blasts. 
 
 Happily it did not matter so much in Italy as it would have 
 mattered any where else ; yet I used to feel absurdly and cruelly 
 out of keeping with my fate as I wove lace^to get a pennyworth 
 of bread to stand between me and starvation, whilst all the time 
 my brocaded skirts swept the brick- floor, and -a bodice sown 
 with gold thread and seed pearls imprisoned my aching and 
 hungry heart. 
 
 I was fifteen ; and old enough to know that it was very terrible 
 to be without friends or money in the world ; and very bitter to 
 sit endlessly crossing and knotting the threads of my lace all the 
 while wholly powerless to untwist one of the threads of fate. 
 
 If I could only escape from. Verona, I used to think it 
 seemed to me it would all bo quite simple then, once beyond the 
 gates: just once. 
 
 The Christmas week came, and kept the bells of all the 
 churches ringing all day and night. 
 
 The dark, black-faced Befana had her feast-day, and tho 
 people rejoiced and ate and drank and sang at the midnight mass, 
 and exchanged compliments and confetti, good will and generous 
 wines. 
 
 And all this time Mariuccia and I had not so much as a log 
 of wood for the hearth, or a slice of meat for the soup pot ; we 
 were cold, poor, alone. 
 
 We went to mass all the same ; and no one looking at her in 
 her ruddy serge kirtle and her great Tuscan hat, and at me in 
 my satin skirts and my velvet hood, would ever have dreamed 
 We were in want of anything. For Mariuccia in her way was 
 very proud j and so was I in mine. Nevertheless, so utterly did 
 
THE LITTLE RED BOX. 51 
 
 we want that we besought the Madonna humbly to send us a 
 crust of bread. 
 
 But no doubt the Madonna hears this cry of " bread, bread, 
 only a little bread,' ' so very often that she has got deaf to it. 
 
 15e that how it may she sent us nothing ; and in a little while 
 it came to pass that for one whole day we did not even break 
 our fast, and must have gone supperless to our chill beds, had 
 not the padrona, from whom we could never quite conceal oar 
 dire needs, toiled up the stairs in the dark with a smoking pan 
 of maccaroni lentil flavoured, and besought us to partake of it 
 for the love of God. 
 
 Mariuccia accepted it with tears in her fearless old eyes, which 
 for more than eighty years had never failed to open at dawn to 
 the day's labour. Mariuccia would take a gift as frankly as she 
 would give one ; yet to eat the meal of charity was very bitter 
 to her : she had done her best so long to live without alms ; it 
 seemed to her, I think, hard not to have died a little earlier, so 
 as to have escaped this degradation. 
 
 That night she prayed very long to her Mother of Many 
 Sorrows; I sobbed myself to sleep shivering and without a 
 prayer. 
 
 In the morning, when we rose, there was not a thing in the 
 house for our hunger ; not a drop of milk for our thirst. Mari- 
 uccia set out the cups and plates by sheer habit, but they 
 remained empty ; there was not so much as a dust of charcoal 
 with which to heat any water. 
 
 It was a very cold day, but very bright. The sun was 
 shining. The bells were ringing. Already in the streets below 
 there was a crowd of quickly moving feet and of laughing voices. 
 The Carnival had come. It was the first day of the corso 
 di gala. 
 
 Mariuccia and I looked at one another with the dry eyes of an 
 absolute despair. 
 
 After a little space she went to a drawer in an old walnut-, 
 wood press, and took out a little red box. She brought it to me 
 where I sat with the pillow of my work lying idle in my lap. 
 She took out of it a few trinkets ; corals and mosaics. 
 
 " These were your mother's," she said tenderly. " She had . 
 great mass of jewels when I went to her first. After her deatk 
 your father took them away, and sold them all no doubt. I have 
 never seen them again. He kept these few little things ; they 
 are not of much value, though they are good of their kind. I 
 have kept them for you. I could not think it right to sell them. 
 
 z 2 
 
52 
 
 But now it is a question whether they go or you starve. You 
 are old enough to choose; say." 
 
 I held them in my hand whilst she spoke ; there were ear- 
 rings and lockets and a "bracelet, all in mosaic. 
 
 My poor young mother ! I had never felt such pity for her, 
 such nearness to her as I felt then. 
 
 My eyes grew wet with a rush of tears. I threw my arms 
 about Mariuccia's throat. 
 
 " "Keep them to-day," I murmured. " Dear, dear Mariuccia ! 
 just to-day. I have thought of something. I am going to 
 Ambrogib." 
 
 I had flung my velvet hood over my head, and was out of the 
 chamber and down the stairs into the street before she had time 
 to question me ; moreover she had no fear ; I went every other 
 day to Ambrogib. 
 
 The sun was shining radiantly upon the frosty pavements as I 
 went out upon them. It was the fourteenth day of the new 
 jear and the first of the carnival. 
 
 In the teeth of the cold people were all astir; hugging close 
 their charcoal braziers, and wrapping their faces to the eyes in 
 their cloaks ; and although it was scarcely noon, in many a dark 
 doorway there flashed some gay mummer's disguise. 
 
 The chimes of all the churches were ringing madly ; there 
 were bursts of music here and there ; a set of the Tedeschi flashed 
 by me, driving in the Tirol fashion ; nrnfaed with scarlet ruga 
 and brown sables, their horses in belled harness stretched like 
 greyhounds ; from a balcony above, there fell on them as they 
 galloped by a shower of house-reared violets and rosea, a woman 
 laughed gaily as she cast the flowers ; their Tirolean postilions 
 roused the echoes of the old gateways with a tarantarratara 
 upon their tasselled bugles how pretty and bright it all was ! 
 
 It was the first gala of Carnival, and although the procession 
 had scarcely commenced all the city was out in holiday attire, 
 and in holiday humour. 
 
 There was a wonderful glow everywhere of many various 
 colours. 
 
 In the great multitudes that thronged every square and street 
 and passage-way, and shelved upward like banks of flowers 
 against the huge stones of the palaces and prisons, there were 
 beautiful half tones of crimsons and greys and ambers, with here 
 and there a broad flash of white from a woman's coif, or a glisten 
 of golden spangles from a mummer's gear. 
 
 Here and there about in the throngs ran Stenterello or Arleo* 
 
TilE L1T7LE RED BOX. 53 
 
 cLiiio, or some other of their quaint, gay, bespangled and 
 beribboned brotherhood. 
 
 Now and again tlie ranks of tlie people parted with shouts to 
 let through some group of masks in. all the colours of the rain- 
 bow, or some conjuror all aglow in scarlet, striking at them with 
 his magic rod. 
 
 Through the swarming masses there began to sweep the 
 gorgeous equipages of the patriciate, ushered forth in all the old- 
 world pomp of Carnival; with the child-nobles clad in the 
 costumes of their ancestors, powdered and jewelled with their 
 rapiers at their side. 
 
 The draped balconies and the deep embrasures of the casements 
 were filled with bright-eyed children, dark-browed women, and 
 old men with grey and noble heads, like a painter's studies for 
 Prospero or Bellincion Berti. 
 
 Sometimes there was a burst of music, sometimes some glit- 
 tering troop of cavalry clanged and clattered through the press, 
 sometimes there rose the blare of trumpets, the tinkling of man- 
 dolines, the cries of the vendors of confetti, the shouts of little 
 lads baiting the pantomime ; and above it all, the laughter of 
 the populace was always murmuring like an unresting sea. 
 
 I ran eagerly through the twisting passages to Ambrogio's. 
 I had an idea that he might get me some employment in the 
 chorus of the opera house. I found his attic empty ; the people 
 of the place told me he was gone to a rehearsal at the theatre of 
 Don Pacheco. 
 
 I ran then not less quickly to the coppersmith's under the 
 Spiked Mace; I thought I would ask Kaffaelo's mother to take a 
 little coffee and bread for pity's sake to her poor old gossip and 
 friend. But there was not a living creature in the workshop ; 
 even the blind woman had gone forth with her children to hear 
 the echoes of the festivities she could not see. 
 
 I thought of poor Cecco, who would I know share his last 
 soldi with me, but he and all his heedless tribe would be I knew 
 as surely out in the town, busily helping or hindering the pre- 
 parations of the mumming and the harlequinade, and all the gay 
 street shows with which the Carnival would be welcomed in its 
 royal pomp. 
 
 Broken-hearted and hungry, and with my cheeks wet with 
 tears, I wandered carelessly about the streets, unwilling to 
 return ; the time stole on, the people began to pour out in 
 throngs that grew merrier and larger with every moment ; even 
 the very cripples and beggars looked glad and triumphant, and 
 
54 PASCARkL. 
 
 had garlanded their crutches or adorned their rags with wreaths 
 of leaves or knots of ribbons. 
 
 I only was all alone and most unhappy. 
 
 All at once a flute-like voice called out to me : 
 
 "Oh, dear donzella, come up here, come up here. I havo 
 looked for you everywhere. My mother is gone with my big 
 brothers, and I have been to the house to look for you, and you 
 had been out quite an hour and more, so the padrona said. Come 
 up here ; it is such a good place. One sees everything, and the 
 crowd is getting large." 
 
 It was little Eaffaelino who called to me, standing on the top- 
 most edge of a flight of marble steps in one of the arched door- 
 ways of an old palace. 
 
 I joined him where he stood ; and so it came to pass, that day, 
 that I sang to the people in the great Piazza in my violet hood 
 and my amber skirts, and that I heard the band of the maskers 
 and scaramouches running down the street, with their coloured 
 bladders, crying, in eager chase : 
 
 " Pascar&lo ! Pawjarfl ! " 
 
BOOK II. 
 
 THE CITY OF LILIES. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE GIFTS OF GALA. 
 
 is Pascarel?" I asked of Raffaelino as they passed 
 away, and I gathered my fallen treasures and rose to go home, 
 ward to poor Mariuceia. 
 
 The little lad did not know; he said that he would ask hia 
 brothers. He thought that it must be the name of some new- 
 fashioned game of the Carnival. 
 
 At the entrance of my dwelling, 'Ino poured all his own spoils 
 into my arms, and before I could refuse them or arrest him, he 
 had fled off down the street again as fast as his fleet, brown, bare 
 limbs could carry him. 
 
 He wanted to avoid being pressed to take a share ; and, more- 
 over, altogether to lose seeing the gala would have been a trial 
 too bitter for his pleasure-loving Italian temper to endure to con- 
 template. He loved me, and had sacrificed himself to serve me ; 
 but now that he could no longer benefit me, the gala resumed 
 all its supremacy. 
 
 The tears were still wet upon my cheeks, but my heart 
 bounded joyously against the grim, graven stone of the Fates as 
 I crossed the courtyard and flew up the staircase. 
 
 The house was quite empty ; everyone was gone to see the 
 Corso ; there was no sound but the drip, drip, drip of the water 
 in the stone fountain, and the wailing of little Zoto and Tito, 
 the padrona's youngest children, who being too small to go out 
 by themselves without being trampled on, and too troublesome 
 for their mother to spoil her festa by looking after them, had 
 been locked in, in the lower part of the house, and left to console 
 themselves as they could with a few chesnuts and some curls of 
 wood shavings for playthings. 
 
56 PASCARkL. 
 
 I ran like a grey hound up the stairs and across the bare 
 chambers to the little inner den where Mariuccia always sat and 
 span under the high turret window that was stained in many 
 colours with the life and miracles of S. Bruno. 
 
 I was covered with violets and confetti; they had lodged 
 everywhere, in my hood and my curls, in my skirts, in my 
 gathered-up dress which held, like a great yellow pannier, the 
 heaps of rosettes and bouquets, and crisp bank-notes, and florins, 
 gold and silver, and sweetmeat-papers, and knots of carna- 
 tions. 
 
 My old nurse glanced up, startled, as I appeared before her 
 like the very genius of the Carnival incarnated and filled with 
 gifts, for, as I threw open the door, a flood of high noonday sun- 
 light streamed in with me, and danced upon the yellow daffodils 
 and the rosy knots of the other flowers, and the bright bands of 
 the ribbons that streamed away from me in all directions. 
 
 Breathless and wordless, I poured my gleanings into her lap 
 before she had fully seen that I stood before her. 
 
 " Here is enough for weeks and weeks and weeks ! " I cried to 
 her. " You need never be cold any more, and the stew-pots 
 shall always be full. Just a few minutes in the square, and it 
 is done ! We shall never want to sell the mosaics !" 
 
 Mariuccia looked, stupefied, down upon the confused heap of 
 gold and of silver, of bank-notes and of cakes, of fruits and of 
 sugared dainties. I dropped down on my knees before her and 
 laughed in her face with delight ; a delight to which tears lay 
 dose. 
 
 " Are you so astonished, Mariuccia? You never thought the 
 people would care so much ? It was 'Ino's thought, not mine. 
 He would not take a thing for himself, not so much as a candied 
 chesnut. But are you not glad, Mariuccia? Only think how 
 we can live now ! Just a song or two in the streets and we are 
 rich!" 
 
 Mariuccia' s strong old frame shook with a sudden emotion 
 that vaguely awed me: a glance that was stern and yet piteous 
 flashed on me from her dark eyes; a quick sad-stricken cry 
 escaped her ; 
 
 ' ' In the streets !" she echoed; "in the streets? for money? 
 And for me ? child, carina I What shame ! -" 
 
 ''Shame?'' 
 
 I rose to my feet chilled, silenced, mortified. I had used the 
 one little gift witty which Nature had dowered me, and the 
 people had only given, me what thej- would in return for tho 
 
THE GIFTS 0& GALA. 57 
 
 song that I gave them. Where was the harm? It was simple 
 and fair, and honest ; how could it, then, bring any shame ? 
 
 So I pondered, being but a child. 
 
 Meanwhile Mariuccia covered her face with the hem of her 
 garment, and, rocking herself to and fro, wept bitterly. 
 
 " In the streets? for money ?" she murmured again and 
 again. "Oh, carina! the shame of it, the shame!" 
 
 I said nothing ; I felt the tears swell to my eyes, but I would 
 not let them fall. 
 
 I took up my poor treasures from the floor, on to which tliey 
 had fallen in a disordered heap, and carried them to the head of 
 the stairs and sorted them. 
 
 The notes and money I put away in the little old oak coffer 
 that always held our riches when we earned any : then I leaned 
 over the deep well of the staircase and called the names of Zoto 
 and Tito. 
 
 The poor little lonely babies came tumbling and tottering to 
 me at the summons from their old playground in the snow- filled 
 court ; I filled their little dirty eager hands with all the ribbons 
 and roses, and sweetmeats, and pretty painted toys, which no 
 longer had any beauty in my sight, or flavour to my mouth. 
 
 *' Take them all, all, all ! " I cried to the astonished children 
 who stood before me open-eyed at my sudden wealth and their 
 good fortunes ; they wanted no second permission to seize on all 
 they saw; in another moment I had nothing left, and they, 
 rapturous and shouting loudly in over glee, toddled down again 
 in the court below, keeping high carnival amidst the snow. 
 
 As for me, I sat cold and still and sorrowful exceedingly 
 beside the broken Donatello. Against my heart I still held tho 
 Fates. 
 
 I was wrong when I was proud, so they said ; and now, when 
 I had conquered pride for honesty's sake, I was wrong too; 
 the perplexity was a knot I could not unravel. 
 
 Mariuccia, the dear tender soul, soon found me sitting there, 
 and came to me, and laid her hand upon my shoulder and kissed 
 me between the eyes. 
 
 " 'Nella mia, I was wrong to be so quick with you," she said, 
 whilst her voice still shook. " You did for the best, dear, and 
 it was good of you to think of me at all. But, all the same, it 
 must not be ; you must never go out in the streets again never, 
 never." 
 
 I sat silent upon the marble stairs; I was pained, angered, 
 inortificd, perplexed. She spoke to me I thought, as if I had 
 
58 PASCAR&L. 
 
 robbed in the streets instead of simply using the gifts with which 
 Nature had dowered me, and taking nothing but what the good* 
 will of the people had joyously cast to me. 
 
 Mariuccia kept her hand on my shoulders where she stood 
 before me, trying to see down into my dropped veiled 
 eyes. 
 
 " Promise me you will never do such a thing again, 'Nella ! " 
 she said, anxiously; "I love you for it, caiinaj dearly, dearly. 
 But it is so shameful ! " 
 
 I shook her hands off me, and rose. I felt my face burn with 
 anger ; anger that was not perhaps so very unjust after all, for I 
 had tried honestly to do right. 
 
 " Shameful I" I echoed. "I see nothing shameful in it. 
 You speak to me as though I were a thief. I think it is much 
 more shameful to sit still and see you starve of cold and hunger, 
 and live myself on the padrona's chanties. Sell the mosaics, if 
 you like, if you think that better. But they will not last long, 
 and what shall we do then ? Altro ! I am not a baby now. 
 I know we have no money at all, and that you cannot tell where 
 to write to my father. Are we to die of famine like caged rats, 
 then, because you will not let the people pay me of their own good- 
 will for pleasing them? I am fifteen now, Mariuccia; and 
 something or other I will do with my life ; I will not mope and 
 moulder for ever in this old prison-house. I will go away, as 
 my brothers have gone." 
 
 My heart smote me as soon as the words had passed my 
 lips. I saw her sturdy old frame shrink as if I had struck her 
 a blow. 
 
 No doubt it was hard harder than in my thoughtless youth I 
 realized to have given so many years, so much patience, such 
 long unchanging care to the rearing of us motherless things, 
 only to have us all as we reached our strength and stature 
 impatient to escape her hold and pass from out her sight. 
 
 She was silent ; and so was I ; down in the court -yard the 
 children played with their spoils in riotous glee ; a sound of 
 trumpets and of laughter came, deadened, through the closed 
 easements from the distant streets. 
 
 "Do you hear them?" I cried to her at last in impotent 
 impetuous pain. "Every where there are mirth and riches, and 
 ease and pleasure ; why am I not to have my share ? I am 
 handsome, so you all say; I have a voice; I am not a fool; I 
 could do something in the world, I think. Anyway, can one do 
 worse than die of cold and of want of food here ? Let me go, as 
 
THE GIFTS OF GALA. 59 
 
 my brothers have gone. Whatever the worst may be, it cannot 
 be worse than this." 
 
 Mariuccia grew very pale, with that strange terrible pallor of 
 age when the emotions come and go so slowly and with so much 
 pain. 
 
 She looked down into my eyes which now met hers, speaking, 
 no doubt, the longing that possessed me with more eloquence 
 than my words could hold. 
 
 Her strong withered hands shook where they still rested, en 
 my shoulders. 
 
 " Wait a little," she said, at length, " wait, and let me think. 
 The boys, at the worst, can only die; but you " 
 
 She left the phrase unended and went from me, and passed 
 away into the gloom of the passages. 
 
 Where I sat, under the broken Donatello, a shiver, that did 
 not come from the chillness of the marble solitudes, or from the 
 winds that blew from over the mountains and the snow, ran 
 through and froze the bright current of my warm young blood. 
 
 What was this calamity, worse than death, which could not 
 come to my brothers, but to me alone ? 
 
 The rest of that day Mariuccia and I spoke not at all to one 
 another ; we sat silently as two strangers in the little square 
 dark room with its smell of dried rose leaves and of the onions 
 that keep off the evil eye. 
 
 She sat and span on at the distaff at her girdle, for she came 
 of the class that cannot lay aside its daily work however much 
 it may endure or may lament ; but I sat aimlessly doing nothing, 
 leaning my forehead against the grated window, and watching 
 the Carnival throngs far down beneath me in the white piazza. 
 
 Once as the twilight closed in, Mariuccia called me to her ; 
 her voice sounded a little feeble. I could not see her very 
 plainly, the shadows were so dark. 
 
 I bent to her to hear what she would say; her hand went up 
 to my forehead, and passed over my hair in her old familiar 
 gesture. 
 
 "Bambina mia," she said, eagerly, quite in a whisper, as she 
 held me there; " promise me you will not sing in the streets 
 again. Promise me ! What should I say to your mother in 
 heaven?" 
 
 " I will promise," I answered her, for there was an accent in 
 the words that vaguely awed me, and almost vanquished the 
 angry rebellion that was astir in my heart. 
 
 " Our Lady be with you ever," she muttered, softly anl 
 
63 PASCAR&L. 
 
 wearily, like one who is half asleep from fatigue, uua speaks but 
 on unconscious instinct. I went back to my place by the grated 
 easement and fretted my soul in mute repining. 
 
 Now and then people flung up at me crowns of evergreens or 
 showers of sweetmeats, but these all struck against the barred 
 panes and fell back again into the street below. 
 
 I did not care to reach my hand and open the lattice so that 
 they might enter. 
 
 The day went dully on its course ; the duller in that little 
 room, of ours because of the mirth and mischief in the town 
 below. It was the first day of the first Carnival in which 
 Mariuccia and I had not clothed ourselves in the best and 
 brightest apparel that we could and gone down to wander 
 through the crowded ways laughing at every step, giving gay 
 greetings, and lingering until with the grey of night the lamps 
 had glittered by their tens of thousands all over the lines and 
 domes of the green old city, 
 
 It was the first day in which we sat within and let the re- 
 joicing throng flash by without us. 
 
 The hours were very slow, very cold, very dreary ; there was 
 no charcoal in the stove ; there was no bread in the pot ; the 
 padrona and all her flock had gone forth to the popular mirth- 
 niaking ; in the old house all was dark, and still, and melancholy. 
 
 The twilight came early ; there was no oil for our lamp ; no 
 food for our hunger ; it was night very soon ; we sat quiet in 
 the darkness, which was only broken when some torch-lit pro- 
 cession or some blaze of fireworks flashed a fitful reflection into 
 the chamber from the streets and squares of Verona. 
 
 We should go, cold to the bone and supperless, to our chill 
 beds; yet neither she nor I stirred to take the money I had 
 gained in the morning from its place in the oak coffer. 
 
 I looked at Mariuccia. She was still asleep. 
 
 At length, the rebellion and the weariness in me vanquished 
 every other feeling. Why should I not go and enjoy with the 
 rest ? Why should I sit and mope here like an owl in the market- 
 place, because a foolish old woman had quibbles and foibles about 
 the good blood in my veins and the dangers of girlhood ? 
 
 So I reasoned in the wickedness of my heart until the revolt 
 in me ripened. 
 
 I stole again a glance at Mariuccia. She did not stir nor seem 
 to hear. I stole noiselessly across the room, trimmed the lamp 
 afresh, reached down my hood, and went out on to the stairs. 
 
 There was no one to gay ine nay. Every soul in the bouse 
 
THE VEGUQNE MASQUER. 6l 
 
 ^ras out that night, except the two bambini, who were fast asleep 
 curled together on a heap of pine shavings, the emptied sugar- 
 pluni-horns and the broken toys strewn all around them. 
 
 I was soon in the streets and squares, that were all alive with 
 throngs of people, bent hither and thither, laughing and talking, 
 eome singing, others dancing down the gloom of the solemn 
 passage ways. 
 
 It was quite late. 
 
 Time had glided away unperceived as I had eat in that mono- 
 tonous vexation and quietude. They were setting fireworks in 
 the cathedral square, and the great hells were ringing the tenth 
 hour of the night. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE VEGLIOKE MASQUER. 
 
 LONG familiarity with the Veronese ways had made me quite 
 able to take care of myself in a crowd ; and the Italian crowds, 
 though often riotously mirthful, are never rough or rude. 
 
 I got in a coign of vantage just under the grim old stone 
 Holand, and seated myself comfortably and carelessly to see the 
 girandola. 
 
 The fireworks were very fine, and shot upward in streams and 
 clouds of glory on the frosty night air, shedding their many 
 colours on the sea of upturned faces, and flashing over the dark- 
 ness of the Duomo pile. I yielded myself eagerly and with 
 utter zest to the enjoyment of them. 
 
 I was very hungry, to be sure, and cold still ; but it was 
 much better to bo hungry and cold but well amused than to 
 Builer the same thing in loneliness and gloom. I had not been 
 born in Italy without being born to as much philosophy as lay 
 in this simple reasoning. 
 
 So I gave myself up to the girandola sitting aloft under the 
 paladins, laughing, and shouting " Bellissima !" and " Brava ! " 
 with tli3 throng around me, and for the time utterly oblivious 
 that I hal wept such bitter tears under the Donatello, and, alas, 
 equally forgetful, I shame to say, that Mariuccia sat at home 
 alone in her sadness and her patience. 
 
 The bands of the Austrian regiments were playing in the 
 giazsa, to keep the Veronese in good humour; an/il the nrasic, tho 
 
6f PASCAR&L. 
 
 fireworks, the picittreaqtie cliiaro scuro of the thronged square, as 
 the various fires illumined it, all combined to make me forget my 
 woes, and to rouse me into an exhilaration which was all the 
 more excited and unreal because I had fasted for so many hours. 
 
 I was in no mood to go home and creep to bed in the cold 
 supperless. It was now midnight, I knew, but I was indifferent. 
 Mariuccia would scold ; but then had she not done so when I 
 had tried to please and help her in the forenoon ? 
 
 So I hardened my heart ; and when the last sheath of coloured 
 flames had died out, and the streams of people began to pour 
 outward, this way and that, I strolled on also, looking to see 
 if by any chance there might be other amusements still forth- 
 coming. 
 
 The Stranieri spent their gold lavishly in diversions for the 
 populace ; and the Veronese Carnival at the time of that foreign 
 dominance, if its mirth were hollow, was, at least, as brilliant 
 in festivity as any in Italy. 
 
 Mariuccia would scold, of course, when I went home, but 
 what of that ? Words break no bones. 
 
 So I said to myself, in my wilfulness and revolt. Alas ! that 
 hour has been a remorse to me ever since. 
 
 As I have said before, I was never very good and often very 
 bad in those days, so far as waywardness and daring went. As 
 a child and I was still no more than a child I was affectionate 
 always ; and courageous, when my imagination was not affected 
 by fear ; I told the truth, and I would give anything I possessed, 
 however much I might want it myself. 
 
 But there my virtues ended. I was disobedient to a headlong 
 rashness ; and I was in a mood to be so to-night. 
 
 As I went out of the piazza, there was a little laughing group 
 of sightseers, cloaked and hooded in an odd fashion. They 
 looked like monks, but they were waltzing down the pavement, 
 and singing a tavern song very popular then in Yerona. 
 
 "Pascarello! Pascarel!" they screamed at the top of their 
 voices, as a flash of red went by under an old archway ; and 
 they set off running swiftly, their monkish robes showing 
 beneath them women's little feet with resetted ribbons flying. 
 
 This mystical name fascinated me; the desire to know ita 
 meaning grew stronger and stronger. 
 
 I flew in their wake, and ran too. The gleam of scarlet had 
 vanished into the gloom of the arch. 
 
 Soon I came upon a throng of people standing before some 
 columned steps and some wide entrance doors. Above, many 
 
THE VMGLIONE MASQU&R. 63 
 
 lamps glittered, and against the wall there fluttered on a scroll, 
 in great white letters on a scarlet ground, the word of Veg- 
 lione. 
 
 From the helfries of the city midnight was sounding. The 
 stream of people was passing within the building ; they looked 
 veiy strange to me ; they made me think of an old painting that 
 hung in our old palace-entrance hall, and that was called the 
 "Gates of Hell." 
 
 But I pressed on to enter with them ; I was not afraid ; it 
 was the Veglione by the writing on the wall. 
 
 I had heard strange and wonderful things of that saturnalia, 
 and I imagined many more ; moreover, here had entered those 
 veiled figures who had been seeking Pasearel. 
 
 I ran eagerly up the steps, and was carried by the press of the 
 pleasure -seekers into the body of the hall. There was a barrier 
 at which they stopped me for payment. 
 
 I stood helpless, with the rushing sound of the many footsteps 
 on my ears ; a man's hand, stretched over my shoulder, cast 
 down the money for me, and a man's voice laughed in my ear, 
 " So handsome, and not masked? Pass in, pass in, carina." 
 
 The pressure of the onward moving throngs swept me through 
 the barrier, and away from my deliverer. I was borne into the 
 very midst of the strange torrent of colour and tumult, of 
 laughter and of music. 
 
 1 stood still and looked, the blaze of the light half blinding 
 me ; my face was uncovered ; my hood fell back ; my feet were 
 bare ; my yellow skirts were stained with many a crushed fruit 
 and bruised flower, in the old glad days of my wanderings ; my 
 little hot hands held between them the onyx ring against my 
 breast. 
 
 There was a broad piece of mirror before me in the entrance- 
 hall; I saw my reflection in it, and was charmed and yet 
 ashamed. 
 
 My cheeks burned like wild poppies ; my hair was in a 
 lustrous tangle ; my eyes looked like great burning lamps in the 
 thinness of my hunger- worn, small face ; my mouth was scarlet 
 and parched with excitement ; and yet I knew so well I looked 
 handsome so well that the people would look at me and cry, 
 "Bellina!" 
 
 I was frightened, and yet I was fascinated. There seemed 
 some horrible evil about me, and yet it was so vivacious and so 
 gay, and so full of pictures, that I could not help being allured 
 by it. 
 
64 fiASCAX&L. 
 
 Pascarel I did not discover, and, truth to tell, I forgot all 
 ebout that mystery. 
 
 I was too absorbed in it all to be conscious that I was singular 
 in going thus bareheaded and unmasked amongst the dominoes. 
 
 It was a pageantry to me, nothing else ; and I moved on as I 
 should have done in the streets; the people supping at their 
 little snowy tables in their boxes ; the quaint, glittering cos- 
 tumes that leaned over the panels ; the stir and colour of it all, 
 the headlong flight of the mad waltzers, the white mousquetaires 
 wringing the champagne from their long moustaches ; the gor- 
 geous eighteenth-century dresses crowned with powdered hair ; 
 the crowd of black monk-like figures that served only to intensify 
 the gaiety of colour all these were so many pictures to me. 
 
 I wandered on enchanted, and unheeding the observation that 
 I gathered in my course ; the only thing that I noticed was the 
 intentness with which I was followed by the eyes of a Florentine 
 Florindo, who wore that traditional dress with an easy grace that 
 was in a manner familiar to me. But the Florindo did not 
 approach me, and I soon ceased to think about him in the midst 
 of the masquers. 
 
 For me, I never doubted that it was pandemonium itself; and 
 yet the fantastic charm, and the lurid brilliancy of it bewitched 
 me. It was horrible, and yet it was beautiful. 
 
 The women's eyes, as they glittered like snakes' eyes through 
 the blackness of the masks ; the cloud, and flutter, and tumult 
 of colour ; the furious speed of the dancers whirling, stamping, 
 shouting, reeling in all the maddest ecstasies of folly ; the sombre 
 darkness of the gliding dominoes passing silently with little low, 
 sneering laughs, as the arrows of their whispered speech hit 
 Eome blot or Borne wound in men's strength or women's weak- 
 ness; the intoxication of the loud, gay music crossed every 
 second by the wild war-whoop cf the revellers ; the dazzle of 
 innumerable hues and shine of countless jewels in the great 
 semicircle full from floor to roof, whilst here and there some 
 masquer, ablaze with diamonds, flung her flowers from above, 
 and some noble, powdered and jewelled, leaned down to pledge 
 a dishevelled, panting dancer, in rosy, foaming wine ; the won- 
 der, and chaos, and glow, and tumult of the scene bewitched mi 
 as I gazed on it. 
 
 It was only the masked ball of the Carnival; but to me il 
 was beautiful as paradise and horrible as hell. 
 
 It all swam giddily before my Bight, and the ^lusic rolled 
 like thunder above my head. 
 
THE VEGLlONE MASQUMX. 6g 
 
 As I stood, a dancer, in the dress of the Louis Treize 
 'musketeers, flung his arms about me, and swept me into the 
 circle of the waltaers with a force that bore me off my feet. 
 
 "Caramia," he cried in my ear, "you are in strange guiso 
 for the Yeglione, but what matter that ? I paid for you at the 
 doors. You shall reward me up yonder." 
 
 He never ended his phrase. I struck him en the mouth 
 blindly with both hands on the mere instinct for freedom, and 
 broke from his hold, and ran through the maze of the dancers 
 without sense or sight of what I did. 
 
 Shrill cries rose round me ; the people parted hastily to let me 
 through, and many fled from me in terror ; a shout arose that I 
 was mad, and had broken loose from the hospital. The sense of 
 the outcry came to me dully as voices ring over water from a far 
 shore to a drifting boat. 
 
 Suddenly I stopped, and flung my head upward like a beaten 
 stag, and looked across the blinding blaze of colour, vaguely 
 seeking help. 
 
 Fronting me was the red glow of drooping curtains, a great 
 knot of carnival camellias, a little group of men and women, 
 like a picture from the Decamerone, a medley of violet and gold, 
 and scarlet and black, and diamonds and pearls ; it was an opera- 
 box, in which five dominoes leaned and laughed, and drank and 
 jested. 
 
 The central figure of them all stood erect, with a red plum 
 tossing in the light ; he was in a flash of ruby colour and of 
 white ; he wore the dress of the Florentine Florindo, and had a 
 dark oval face like that of an old picture ; his hand was on his 
 sword-hilt; he laughed gaily with the masked and mirthful 
 women. 
 
 I do not clearly remember what ensued. 
 
 A band of debardeurs surrounded me ; a hideous cock crowed 
 at me ; a clown grinned and gabbered ; a set of black masks 
 hooted and threw their limbs hither and thither in wild contortion. 
 
 The Mousquetaire seized me afresh; lifted me from tho 
 ground, and plunged into the wild gallopade that was rushing 
 down the boards like a troop of riderless horses on San Giovanni's 
 day in Florence. 
 
 I shrieked for help and release. 
 
 My tormentor, screaming with laughter, held me the tighter. 
 There was a moment's pause ; then a crash of sound, a loud 
 outcry, a tumult of the masquers, and the Florindo with tho 
 scarlet plume had sprung from the box above, bad struck or 
 
66 PASCAR&L. 
 
 tossed the arms away that held me, and had hurried me through 
 the maze of the dancers out of the heat and the glare into tho 
 cool white moonlight that was streaming through the darkness 
 of Yerona. 
 
 " Pascarello Pascarel ! " the people had shouted as he came ; 
 and there was no pursuit, and no offence taken against him. 
 
 He stood and looked at me in the silvery light ; a bright and 
 many coloured figure, flashing with the grace and glitter of the 
 old dead centuries under the gloom of the walls of the Scala. 
 
 ""Well, my singing bird," he said, with a smile in his eye?, 
 " what were you doing there, may I ask ? It is a place for kites 
 and hawks, and all manner of evil birds; but not for nightin- 
 gales. You did not seem as if you liked the air?" 
 
 The voice was the voice of the giver of the onyx. I burst 
 into tears, and told him what had drawn me thither. 
 
 He heard me with a gentle amusement in his eyes ; dark eyes, 
 tender and poetic, such as Bordello's might have been here in 
 this very same Verona. 
 
 " The best thing I can do for you is to take you homeward 
 quickly," lie said, moving onward, and "bMding me" show him 
 the way to my home. "To be abroad on a Voglione night is 
 not the best thing for you," donzella. Courage is very admirable, 
 but a little prudence is needful too in this world. 
 
 " It is to make your cake all of coriander-seeds to make life 
 up of rashness only. 
 
 " Tell me why were you singing in the streets this morning ? 
 You look like a little princess, Signorina Uccello. Nay ; never 
 mind. You shall tell me to-morrow. You will let me coma 
 and see you to-morrow. 
 
 " You want to get out of Yerona ? Oh, fie, for shame. That 
 is not poetic at all. To get away from the Stranieri is always 
 good, I admit, but surely Yerona has a charm, of her own still, 
 if only you will look for it. 
 
 " She is not like my Florence, indeed ; it is not giveu to every 
 city to be born out of fields of lilies, and keep their sweetness 
 with her for ever, as Florence does; a woodland fragrance 
 always amidst the marble and the gold. 
 
 "But Yerona, oh, yes, Bordello's song is here, if only you 
 listen, and it is the same moon that Giulietta saw from the 
 balcony, and those great Scali they seem to daunt and to awe 
 the place still, and do you not see Adelaida ever bending hei 
 terrible brows in the shadows ? 
 
 "Nor Cunizza, the faithless, with her 'strong, cruel star/ 
 
67 
 
 that ruled her life so ill, and her lovely eyes burning with the 
 madness of the Eomano, and at her side her gentle Troubadour, 
 Ser Folco ? Do you never see them ? They lived and loved 
 here in this old Yerona that you despise because you are so 
 ignorant of all its beai*ties. 
 
 " And then, far away, so far i way in the dawn of the poets 
 the pretty Lesbia twisting the roses in her lover's locks in their 
 gardens yonder, while at a bow-shot in the circus the citizens 
 shouted, ' Ad leones ? ' Oh, you should not hate Verona. It is 
 so ancient, and it was so mighty once, though it never used its 
 might for any very good purpose." 
 
 He talked on thus merely of course for the purpose of banish- 
 ing my fear, and reconciling me to the strangeness of my posi- 
 tion, in wandering the streets thus at night, with an unknown 
 masquer in the dress of Florindo. There was that true arid 
 kindly delicacy in him which would not to prolong his own 
 amusement, and gratify his own. curiosity, increase my embar- 
 rassment, or cause me pain. . 
 
 His voice was so beguiling, his eyes so frank and tender^ his 
 whole bearing so full of a certain gentleness and carelessness, 
 that 1 was attracted into an irresistible sense of confidence in 
 him. 
 
 He was an utter stranger ; he was one of those mad carnival 
 mummers who had imbued me with a vague sense of unspeakable, 
 intangible evil; he was only a Veglione masquer, gay and 
 grotesque in his vari-coloured disguise in the white Veronese 
 moonlight; and yet I trusted him, and felt a sense of security in 
 his presence, and spoke to him as simply and as naturally as I 
 could have done into the ear of little Raffaelino. 
 
 " But this was very naughty of you," he said, still with the 
 smile in his eyes, as he heard my sins. 
 
 "I am never good ! " I confessed very piteously. " I am like 
 that wicked Speronella of Padova, whose namesake I am so 
 rry nurse says, at the least." 
 
 He laughed indulgently. 
 
 " Oh come ! not quite so bad as that, I trust. And you will 
 grow wiser in time. Let us hope rather that you will end like 
 that good Nella whom her husband, even in a better world than 
 this, if poets may be credited, quoted as a priceless perfection. 
 But what possessed you to go to that place to-night ? A freak of 
 mischief no doubt, but what promoted it ? " 
 
 "I wanted to see what Pascarfcl was! That was all. That 
 was all indeed! " 
 
 rl 
 
68 PAStAREL. 
 
 lie i>aused a moment in the silent street, and laughed 
 outright. 
 
 1 Well," he asked, " did you find out ? " 
 ' No ! Do you know ? Pray tell me." 
 
 have tried to find out too/' he said, with the laugh on 
 
 his 
 
 lips. " Tried all my life, and never succeeded yet/' 
 
 ' Is it something eo wonderful ? " 
 f Oh, dear, no. No wonder of any sort in it." 
 ' Is it an enigma then ? " 
 
 1 Well yes a little. Probably the answer lies in nothing 
 deeper than in the one word with which (Edipus answered the 
 Sphinx. Do not trouble your head after it. It is not worth 
 your while." 
 
 " Why? The people seem to care." 
 
 A tender and saddened shade swept over his face. 
 
 " Ay ! the people, perhaps, a little." 
 
 " What is it then ? Do tell me." 
 
 In my eagerness I paused midway in the street ; the snow lay 
 lightly on all the roofs and stones and balconies ; the icy Alpine 
 air had frozen it into all sorts of lovely and fantastic shapes. 
 
 The masquer broke off one of the pretty snow flowers off an 
 iron scroll, and held it in his hand. 
 
 It slowly melted and vanished. 
 
 " That is what Pascarel is; nothing more ! " he said, lightly. 
 " Do not talk of it ; tell me about yourself." 
 
 I had not space to tell him much, for the old palace was at a 
 stone's throw from the opera-house, and he and I stood in a few 
 moments' time before our huge, cavernous, arched portals, whose 
 nail- studded ancient doors stood forever wide open, night and 
 day, for we were all too poor there to have fears of theft, 
 having naught amongst us all to lose. 
 
 At the entrance he paused and uncovered his head. 
 
 "I will bid you good -night, donzella, and go back to my 
 pranks and my follies. To-morrow, if you will let me, I will 
 come and see you. Gratitude ? Oh, altro ! you have no cause 
 for that. It is I rather who am grateful to the Fates. Ey- 
 the-way, I wish that I had had something brighter and fairer 
 to give you than the old grim onyx ; they are an ugly portent 
 I am afraid, those stern sisters. Never mind, I will try and 
 get you some roses to-morrow. They will be very much fitter 
 for you. Nightingales and roses have belonged to one another 
 ever since the days of paradise. Addio ! " 
 
 He kissed my Tb&nd with easy grace, and turned aw*7 down 
 
THE LAST SLEEP. 69 
 
 the deep shadows of the street; in the moonlight xne red and 
 white of his dress colours of Florence glistened as the moon- 
 rays caught them; he went singing, halt' aloud, the catalogue 
 of the Loves from the Giovanni. 
 
 I watched him until he was lost to sight in the darkness 
 that fell from the lofty palaces, half fortress and half prison, 
 the twisted galleries, the marble balconies, the frowning stones 
 of Borneo's city; it was a little scene from the Tre Cento, 
 from the Decamerone, from Goldoni; the old dead amorous 
 poetic life seemed suddenly to breathe and move again amidst 
 the decay and the despair of old Verona. 
 
 I went slowly up the staircase, past the ruined Donatello, 
 and fancied that the broken, dust-strewn stairs were the steps 
 of the Capulet palace, and that I was Giulietta in that tender 
 daybreak, when the lark sang all too soon. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE LAST SLEEP. 
 
 As I entered the chamber where I had left Mariuccia, and 
 groping for a match lit the little lamp, I saw that she was still 
 in her oak chair by the fireless hearth. Her hands were folded, 
 and her chin had sunk upon her breast. I knew that she was 
 used to allow herself a little rest and slumber after her long day 
 of toil, and I imagined that she had dozed on and on, not 
 noticing my absence, nor the flight of time. 
 
 I slid down quietly upon the floor at her feet, and did not 
 speak lest I should waken her. 
 
 I was glad that she could in sleep forget the hunger and tho 
 cold. I was glad, too, to have escaped the reproaches and 
 rebukes that my conduct merited. 
 
 I leaned my head against her knee as I had done so often in 
 my babyhood, and sat there, very quiet, with her hands resting 
 heavily against my shoulder. 
 
 It was deadly cold ; my limbs were frozen ; my brain swam 
 a little from long fasting and excitement ; it was quite dark ; 
 from the streets below there caine the hum and outcry of a city 
 in its holiday ; Mariuccia did not waken. 
 
 I think that I also must have slept a little or at the least lost 
 of time, for I started as one starts when suddenly 
 
70 
 
 roused from a bad dream, as the last fireworks of the sight's 
 pageantry ro.se with a rushing sound above the roof, against the 
 moonless sky. 
 
 A great girandola shot its fountain of many -coloured fires up 
 above the black outline of the Duomo, fired most likely by the 
 last revellers of the Veglione, and the reflection from it fell, 
 golden and reddened, through the little grilled window into the 
 chamber; its light fell upon Mariuccia's face. 
 
 Something in the look of its closed eyes and silent mouth 
 made my heart tighten with a breathless fear. 
 
 "Mariuccia! " I cried to her. "Mariuccia! You frighten 
 me ! dear Mariuccia are you still asleep ? " 
 
 She was indeed asleep. 
 
 The brief and fitful fires of the girandola died away, and left 
 behind it the blank of an utter darkness ; the dense impenetrable 
 darkness that precedes a winter's dawn. 
 
 Upon the old quiet patient face there was a look of rest, and 
 the withered hands on which I rained my kisses were yet warm. 
 Yet I, who never before had looked on death, knew well that 
 death was here, and that whilst Verona laughed on her first 
 night of Carnival, I sat in the silence of the old palace, alone 
 with the dead body of the sole friend I had on earth. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 AT AVE MAEIA. 
 
 THREE days from that time Mariuccia had gone to her last 
 home. 
 
 The wooden shell had been jostled in the common hearse and 
 buried iri the common resting-place where the poor lie. The 
 padrona and llaifaello and his blind mother and I had toiled 
 after it through the driving cold of the early morning, and 
 heard the heavy clods fall on it one by one. 
 
 It was all over all over : the strong, pure, honest, tireless 
 life had gone, spent in obscurity and toil, unrecognised and 
 unrecompensed to the last. 
 
 I was but a thoughtless, wayward, and selfish child. I had 
 been heedless always, cruel often. I had taken the countless 
 sacrifices that she made to me with all a child's reckless, 
 
AT AVE MARIA. Jt 
 
 tyrannous, unconscious egotism. - I scarcely even now knew the 
 immeasurable debt I bad owed to her, 
 
 . Yet a yague heavy pain, that was almost remorse, weighed on 
 me, and on some insufficient yet pregnant sense. 
 
 I realised all that this one lost life, old as it was, and humble 
 and poor, had yet been to me from my birth, with its buckler of 
 Btanch fidelity held ever between me and the evils of the world. 
 
 The dreary weeks went by ; to all the rest of Yerona they 
 were gay with all the zest of Carnival. 
 
 Night after night the fireworks would blaze against the skies, 
 and the music would roll through the sad old streets, and the 
 mad and merry masquers would scamper and frolic under the 
 ehadow of prison and fortress and monastery. 
 
 The echoes and the reflections of the noise and the lights 
 tarould come to me where I sat in my dismal little chamber, but 
 that wus all the share I had in them. 
 
 The padrona, though so poor, would have some friends to 
 laugh with her in her dim old kitchen, and would find some 
 copper pieces to give her a sight of the puppets and the shows 
 that enlivened for Yerona those long and chilly days when the 
 winds swept down like dragons whose breath was ice from the 
 deep Tyrol valleys and the desolate Dolomite range. 
 
 But I was all alone, except when Eaffaellino came and tried 
 to while away my sorrow by his innocent fanciful talk and the 
 tender strains of his viol. 
 
 With the sad morrow my Borneo of the Yeglione never 
 returned. 
 
 Even in my passionate remorse and grief I could not but 
 think often of him that day. 
 
 When we returned from our dreary errand in the Bnow, there 
 was awaiting me a great cluster of roses, red and white, that 
 must have come from Tuscany or Rome. 
 
 Little Gian, who had been upon the stairs when they arrived, 
 said that a boy about his own age had brought them, saying 
 nothing whence they came. 
 
 I knew. 
 
 I set the beautiful things before me against the dismal grated 
 window, and wept my heart out over them. The grief was 
 most for the loss of dear dead Mariuccia; but a little also for the 
 broken faith of the Florence masquer- 
 
 What could I do? 
 
 I knew no more whither my father was gone than whither 
 the crows flew when they passed in a black cloud over the 
 
'/ PASCARkL. 
 
 Adige ; and though the good padrona served for me, cooked for 
 me, and bade me be as welcome under her roof as were the rain a 
 in summer, I was too proud to think a moment that such 
 dependence on another could ever long endure. 
 
 The desire to escape from Verona grew stronger on me with 
 every hour. I had no notion of what I should do elsewhere : but 
 all good things seemed possible to me if once only I could crosi 
 the dreary plain and seek the sunrise of the south. 
 
 I said nothing ; for I knew that KafFaello would weep and 
 protest and the padrona take fright, and the priests would be 
 spoken with, and some means perhaps be found to detain me, if 
 ever they knew that I wished to take wing. 
 
 But all those winter days, when the Corso was at its gayest 
 and the streets were full of masks and mummers, I sat in my 
 dull little stone chamber and revolved again and again a 
 thousand schemes for my freedom. 
 
 As the first step towards liberty, I went out one day at the 
 close of the Carnival to see the scrivere whom Mariuccia had 
 been wont to employ for her communications to Florio. 
 
 A certain sense of reluctance to trench on anything that seemed 
 like a secret of the dead had held me back from asking this letter- 
 writer any questions ; but as the weeks of silence succeeded one 
 another, I argued that not to try and find my father would be a 
 folly and a fault, and in the last hours of one wintry day I 
 crossed the square to where Maso Sasso held his councils at his 
 little worm-eaten desk. 
 
 I thought sadly as I went of the homely old figure that had 
 always been at my side spinning and talking as she hobbled over 
 the stones ; I thought a little too of that gay red and white 
 masquer whose eloquent eyes had smiled on me in the moonlight 
 of Juliet's city. 
 
 "Why had he not followed his roses ? 
 
 He was not a man to me, nor a stranger ; he was a poem, a 
 picture, a thing of grace, a shape of the cinque cento ; Sordello, 
 only not so sad ; Borneo, only not so boyish ; Ariosto, perhaps, 
 that gayest of lovers and poets ; or one of those patrician impro- 
 visatori who spent half their lives in a court and the other half 
 in the market-place. 
 
 I was thinking of him still as I crossed the piazza to the hole 
 in the wall where Maso Sasso sat. 
 
 When the Ave-Maria was rung he used to close his office by a 
 bronze wicket and his day's work was done. Then he would 
 pass methodically across the piazza to his favourite trattoria \ 
 
AT AVE MARIA. 73 
 
 and in front of it, taking his frugal repast, would make himself 
 amends for the long silence of the day by detailing to an inte- 
 rested audience such of the sayings and doings of his clintela as 
 ho deemed it proper to reveal. 
 
 He was known to be a miracle of propriety and discretion ; 
 nevertheless he was a good companion when the sun was set. 
 
 Indeed, they were used to say if you brewed him a bibita to 
 his liking, there was very little that you might not hear con- 
 cerning your neighbour in Verona. But a public that has to 
 recount its joys and sorrows aloud to its penman cannot be very 
 scrupulous about secresy, and the popularity of Maso Sasso never 
 waned on that account. 
 
 He had his office in a little dark stone loggia ; curiously black 
 and still in the midst of the changeful life of the piazza. 
 
 He was a little meagre, yellow, shrivelled old man, who sat all 
 day long in his den and heard all the comical comedies and tear- 
 ful tragedies of the city, and never seemed to be touched at all 
 by any one of the innumerable idyls and the pathetic obscure 
 heroisms which came hourly before him, as the citizens and the 
 contadini flocked around his stall eager to have some good 
 tidings sent to some absent one, or to unfold some stiff and 
 blotted scrawl from over the mountains and the sea. 
 
 There was a crowd of people around the loggia in which his 
 desk was placed when I drew near it ; it was nearly four, and it 
 was known that no press of public necessities would ever make 
 him prolong his sittings after the Ave-Maria. 
 
 I had to wait patiently my turn. 
 
 A broad-shouldered crimson-kertled contadina wanted a love- 
 letter sent to a soldier away in Piedmont ; she did not care what 
 was said so that it was all as sweet as sugar. 
 
 A poor wife held out a dirty miserable scrawl, and fell down 
 in a loose lifeless heap upon the stones, as she heard that her 
 husband had been drowned off Ischia. 
 
 A jager of the Tirol, with his green plumes dangling in his 
 saucy black eyes, dictated an offer of marriage, giggling and 
 grinning as the pen flew. 
 
 An old meek, timid creature tendered a paper with a trembling 
 hand, and turned away with a heart-stricken moan as the slow 
 changeless tones of the scrivere read aloud to her that her only 
 son was sentenced for life to the galleys far away in the 
 Eegno. 
 
 What an epitome was Maso Basso's den of human nature an J 
 of human fate ! 
 
74 PASCAR&L. 
 
 I stood and listened with my hood drawn over my face; 
 when my turn came I had forgotten my own sorrows. 
 
 " Oh how can you bear it every day and all day long- 
 like this?" I cried to the wizen, immovahle, indifferent old 
 man. 
 
 He spread his palms outward over his desk in a gesture of 
 fcilent contempt. 
 
 " Signorina it is life ! " 
 
 " But the sorrow the joy one against the other the comedy 
 the tragedy it is horrible ! " 
 
 The old man smiled grimly. 
 
 ""What does that matter to me? joy or sorrow tragedy or 
 comedy I get my scudo for my trouble." 
 
 "But how can you bear it ? " I cried again, "day after day, 
 year after year always those terrible things, side by side with 
 all this laughter." 
 
 The old man shrugged his shoulders and took off his horn 
 spectacles to wipe them free of dust. 
 
 "Signorina whether it is woe or laughter, what does it 
 matter to me ? I get my scudo, and have something to gossip 
 about. That is all that concerns me." 
 
 In later years I have found that the world is very much of 
 opinion with the scrivere. It scans the mass of human life 
 through its spectacles, and whether it reads a fiat of death or dis- 
 honour, or a jest-story of love and of lightness, it cares nothing 
 so that only it can take out of both its scudo* s worth of scandal. 
 
 He asked me for the third time what I needed ; I was keep- 
 ing more profitable customers from his stall. I inquired of him 
 whether Mariuccia had addressed her letters to my father. 
 Maso Sasso shrugged his shoulders again, and sought in the full 
 stores of his memories. 
 
 " The letters were to be left at the post, anywhere," he said 
 at last. " Sometimes Nice Paris Vienna the last time, I 
 think, Florence. Yes; Florence. But always the post-office. 
 Nothing more." 
 
 "You are sure it was Florence the last time?" I cried, 
 entreating him tremblingly. 
 
 " Yes, quite sure. JJut the last time was eight months ago. 
 Will the Signorina please to move aside ? People are waiting 
 and the sun will soon set." 
 
 I moved aside mechanically, and walked dreamily across the 
 square and sat down on the steps of a great church, where the 
 beggars were wont to sit. 
 
THE FEAST OF FAUST/NO. %$ 
 
 Florence seemed a long way off ; and the chance but a very 
 Blight one. Nevertheless, it was all I had. 
 
 The evening was cold still, but bright and windless. 
 
 It was at the end of February ; there were lovely roseate 
 lights in the sky, and all fresh mountain scents on the air. 
 "Women went by with large baskets full of crocuses and 
 daffodils. 
 
 In the beautiful pearly hues of the late day the old gaunt city 
 was transfigured. 
 
 Its roofs and domes gained a spiritual light, and vast dream- 
 like shadows swept its plains. It was for once possible to 
 believe in Giulietta and to muse on Catullus. 
 
 At least, so it seemed to me ; but perhaps it was only lovelier 
 that night because I knew that so soon I should look my last on 
 it, perchance for ever. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE FEAST OF FAUSTINO. 
 
 AN hour passed away with me sitting there, dreamily watching 
 Verona. 
 
 I could see my old home ; the dark gruesome stone pile of it 
 rose sheer as a rock against the blueness of the sky, unchanged 
 since the days when Henry the Seventh had slept beneath its 
 roof, and the bright Conraddin ridden forth from its court-yard. 
 
 I had never loved the place. Indeed, it had been as a prison 
 to mo all my years. And yet my heart ached now to leave it. 
 We are so bitterly ungrateful to the present, so blindly grateful 
 to the past, always. 
 
 The Ave Maria slowly swung from all the bells of all tl .e 
 churches ; the bronze gate of the loggia was shut with a clanj j, 
 the scrivere hobbled across the square to his place of gossiprj ; 
 lamps were set one by one in the doorways ; the oil wicks we) e 
 lighted in the iron sconces of the streets; the little charcoal 
 stoves of the chesnut sellers began to glow ruddily in the comix, g 
 gloom. 
 
 As I turned away from the sunset to go homeward, whilst 
 those colours of glory faded over the silent city, a hand touched 
 me, P, voice startled me. 
 
76 PASCAR&L. 
 
 t( Pregiatissima Signorina ! have the Veronese no eyes that 
 you are left to stray their streets alone ? " 
 
 It was the voice of the Mousquetaire, from whom the Flo- 
 rentine Florindo had rescued me at the Veglione ; a voice with 
 a strong and harsh foreign accent. The shudder of disgust and 
 dismay with which I recognised him made an impatient and 
 displeased shadow sweep across his face. 
 
 " "Wait. Hear me a little/* he said eagerly as I turned my 
 back on him and went with quicker steps out of the piazza. 
 " I am a friend of your father's. I have spent many an hour 
 with him. You have nothing to fear. I have pitied you many 
 a time, poverina, sitting up there, all alone, at that grated 
 window ; so fair a singing bird in so dark a cage." 
 
 I twitched my purple mantle from his grasp. 
 
 " I do not want your pity. Let me be." 
 
 Eut he kept step with me. 
 
 "Nay, why do you bear me such ill will?" he said, with a 
 petulance in his laugh that served ill to reassure me. 
 
 " Listen, carina mia ; you are a beautiful child. Did no ono 
 ever tell you so before ? I have seen your golden head at that 
 grating many a day, and been sorely tempted to enter your door; 
 only that direful dragon whom you have happily buried for good 
 and all, sat on guard so vtjry grimly." 
 
 I shook him off as best I could. 
 
 " Eespect the dead at least, and leave me ! " I cried to him ; 
 I hated the sound of his voice, the look of his eyes, and the 
 street into which we had passed was so empty, and now that the 
 after-glow had faded the city was so dark. 
 
 He laughed lightly and pursued his way. 
 
 " Oh no, cara mia ! I let you go that night because I liked 
 you too well to raise a scene around you. But I mean soon or 
 late to have all that I there surrendered out of chivalry to you. 
 See here, my pretty signorina, you were out on a freak, and no 
 one knew, of course, and it was I who passed you in to the 
 Veglione. Well, that is very harmless if you trust in me ; I 
 shall be silent, that you may be sure. But otherwise, if you 
 provoke me if you carry that handsome sunny head of yours 
 aloft in that fashion, why then " 
 
 I paused and faced him. 
 
 "Well? What then?" 
 
 "What then? Why then every one will know that the 
 little Tempesta stole at midnight to the opera ball with me, and 
 she will be very glad to give me whatever I please to 
 
tllE FEAST OP FAUSTJNO. 77 
 
 He threw his arms about me, and bent his face to mine; but 
 all the strength I had I struck him on the mouth, poured 
 oa him all the epithets of injury and of disgust with which my 
 knowledge of the Veronese streets supplied me, and shaking my- 
 self free of him, ran as swiftly as a hare through the twisting 
 passages to my home. 
 
 The insult of this stranger had decided me. I did not dare to 
 stay another day longer in Yerona; I was pursued with the 
 dread of him, and the disgust that he inspired was the last 
 touch of impulsion needed to make me take wing into the un- 
 known lands into the unknown world. 
 
 I reached my own room unobserved ; and put together the 
 few clothes I possessed and counted my little store of money. I 
 had changed all that I had gained on the day of Gala into gold 
 with a childish idea that notes were of little comparative value ; 
 and so liberal had been the people to me, that when Mariuccia's 
 funeral and my own expenses for the last weeks had been paid, I 
 had left me sixteen broad gold Austrian florins. 
 
 I put the money with my mother's mosaics into a leathern bag, 
 and strapped it about my waist. The onyx Fates were round 
 my throat. I had a fancy that they would bring me fair 
 fortune. 
 
 I took too a little dead rosebud from the great clusters that 
 the Florentine masquer had sent me ; and tied it with the onyx 
 close about me. I had a fancy that it would propitiate the 
 Fates. 
 
 My purple and amber costume was an absurd one for travel, 
 but I had no other that had any warmth against the mountain 
 winds, and I was forced to wear it. 
 
 I looked longingly around the long, familiar chambers, dusky 
 and grim, with grated windows and deep vaulted roofs and floors 
 of marble ; desolate and prison-like though they had been, they 
 were yet all I knew of Home. 
 
 With sobs that choked me I kneeled and prayed to the Mother 
 of Many Sorrows, where her picture hung above Mariuccia's 
 bed, then with a last look of farewell I drew the velvet hood over 
 my head and stole down the stairs. 
 
 I met little Zoto and Tito, and kissed them. 
 ^ I could see the padrona in her kitchen wringing out washed 
 linen by the light of a little oil lamp, under a picture of S. 
 Sulpitia. A contadina from the plains sat chatting with her and 
 plaiting straw as they talked. 
 
 My eyes filled with tears, and shut out the little picture. In 
 
78 PASCAR&I. 
 
 another moment I had crossed the threshold, and was running 
 hard and fast towards the south gate in the twilight. 
 
 On my way, I passed of necessity the coppersmith's workshop 
 under the Spiked Mace. I glanced wistfully through the open 
 entrance. 
 
 The light of a large wood fire was leaping about all the brazen 
 and copper vessels. The blind woman sat in its warmth. The 
 coppersmith moved to and fro with bare sinewy arms. Little 
 llaffaellino sat reading a score, with his lithe limbs twisted under 
 him, and his lute by his side on the bricks. I dared not let him 
 know that I was going away, lest he should raise, far and near, 
 opposing clamour. 
 
 I prayed mutely, in my heart, to the Madonna for them, then 
 went on my way to the dull crooked passage in which Ambrogia 
 Rufi dwelt. 
 
 I dared not bid any one farewell lest they should find means 
 to. stop me in my course. I knew well that they would all say 
 I was too young to stray alone over Italy, I dared not -speak- to 
 anyone else, but I could not bring my heart to quit the city 
 without some word, some look upon the face of my old master. 
 
 I stole upward to the desolate garret, and entered it unheard 
 by him. 
 
 He was sitting leaning over the little brazier, which was all 
 that he could afford to warm him in the bitterest weather. 
 
 It was the feast of the Martyr Faustino, and all the churches 
 were calling to vespers. 
 
 The attic was quite dark. 
 
 The moon had not yet risen. It was so high in the air, that 
 all the metallic clash and clangour of the bells seemed to beat 
 through its silence like the clamour of a thousand hammers on a 
 thousand anvils. 
 
 I went and kneeled down by him without his hearing me. I 
 yentured to touch him gently. 
 
 "Dear master, does not the noise of all these bells tire you 
 sometimes?" 
 
 He did not lift his head from his chest. 
 
 " I am always tired," he muttered. " What of that ? " 
 
 "But if you lived where it is quieter? here it is so close to 
 ftll the belfries." 
 
 " It does not matter," he answered me, absently, " They 
 drown the music in my brain. I am glad of them sometimes." 
 
 " But if you wrote the music down ?" 
 
 He shivered a little where he leaned over the brazier. 
 
THE FEAST OP FAUST1NO. - 79 
 
 11 To feed the stove ? Not I not I." 
 
 I dared not urge him farther. The utter hopelessness, the 
 terrible apathy of this lost genius, which all its life long had 
 woven beautiful things to which the world was forever deaf. 
 What could I say to these ? I, a child, to whom every sun that 
 rose was as a promise and a smile from God ? 
 
 I waited a little while, kneeling before the brazier at his side 
 My heart was very sore to leave him, though he so seldom 
 seemed to note my presence. 
 
 "Maestro,"! murmured, at the last, "speak to me a little. 
 I am going away." 
 
 "Ay, ay!" he echoed drearily. "To be sure to be sure. 
 You all go away. Why not ? " 
 
 I was silent. 
 
 How many hundreds of us he must have seen pass away, bright- 
 eyed, flute-voiced children, who stood around him for a little 
 space, and then drifted out of sight, out of knowledge, into the 
 darkness of the unknown world ; while he, the old man, changed 
 in nothing, but remained always by his cheerless hearth under 
 his lonely roof. 
 
 I pressed a little closer to his side,' timidly. 
 
 " Maestro," I murmured again, " I have no one in the world, 
 and I am going away. Will you bless me once just once, for 
 fear .1 never see your face again ? " 
 
 He roused himself from his lethargy with a strong shudder. 
 He looked at me a moment with a startled, awakened look in his 
 dim eyes. He laid his hand upon my head, and, as it rested 
 there, it trembled greatly. 
 
 " I dare not bless you I have doubted God ; but I wish you 
 well, poor child. That is I wish you without a heart, without 
 a soul, without a conscience, so that you may deal unto men as 
 Biirely they will deal unto you." 
 
 His hand sunk from my head ; his chin dropped again upon 
 his chest. He had fallen once more into his old dreanrng 
 Btupor over the charcoal fumes under the roar of the bells. 
 
 1 rose to my feet sorely afraid. It was a dread benediction 
 with which to commence my pilgrimage. 
 
 In another moment I was again on my way to the south gate 
 of the city. I looked back once. The old palace was black and 
 full of gloom against the clearness of the skies. I shivered a 
 little, and set my face again to the south-east. 
 
 Who could say how the sun might rise for me there P 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 FUOBI. 
 
 if ALF-JLN-HOTJB later I was rolling underneath the stone vault 
 cf the gate which faced towards Tuscany, in the old heavy, 
 cumbrous, leathern- curtained diligenza, which thrice in every 
 week droned on its way to Pad ova and Bologna. 
 
 Kich people travelled otherwise, I knew; but I had only 
 sixteen florins in the world. 
 
 The soldiers at the gates looked hard at me, but said nothing. 
 The man with the horn, on the step of the clumsy vehicle, took 
 my money and asked no questions. I was safe on the road to 
 Florence. It seemed a terribly long way off, across those un- 
 known mountains ; but the name of the City of Lilies allured me 
 with a strong sweet spell. 
 
 Mariuccia had told me many glories of the place of her birth ; 
 and my young mother I knew had there won her bright brief 
 fame. And with what love my Florentine masquer had spoken of 
 it, he whose tenderest little rose I had saved when dead with 
 the rest, and had brought away v/ith me where the stone Fates 
 were hidden. 
 
 It was a queer, capacious, ill-scented old waggon this- con- 
 veyance, which was dignified by the name of diligenza. 
 
 There were three peasant women, smelling strongly of garlic, 
 and hugging great baskets of woollen stuffs, of pizzicheria goods, 
 and of live hens that they had purchased in the town. There 
 were two old priests, a burly fat tore, and a young Tirolese in 
 the picturesque garb of the Untermnthal. 
 
 The vehicle was as full as it could hold, and no one looked 
 with much favour on me as I entered, except the young moun- 
 taineer. 
 
 JS"o doubt I had appeared to them, starting up in the heavy 
 gloom of the night, strange enough as they had thundered slowly 
 over the stones in the gateway ; all alone at my age, and dressed 
 as I was in my mufflings of velvet, and my most absurd yellow 
 skirts of rich brocaded satin fit for the wearing of any queen. 
 
 They made place for me, however, with pleasant good-humour. 
 
 The old waggon settled heavily on its way over the plains. 
 
 It was a dark, moonless night. An oil-lamp hung in the roof, 
 which gave us very little light. "We rolled on with a creaking 
 droning noise, only varied by the crack of the whip. 
 
PVORl. 8 1 
 
 The contadina and the priests went to sleep ; the fattore took 
 out his accounts and reperused them; the good-looking TJnterinn- 
 thaler and I were alone wide awake, being young, and on a journey 
 that was strange to us. They had told ine that it would be day 
 and night again before we reached Bologna ; and to Bologna, as 
 the farthest stage of all, I had said that I would go. The others 
 were to be set down midway at Padova and other places on the 
 route. 
 
 I had never been out of Yerona since our residence had begun 
 there in my fourth year. 
 
 My head was in a tumult, my brain was in a whirl, with the 
 strange movement, the throbbing noise, and that odd sense of 
 jumbling on into the darkness of the night which was but too 
 true an crablem of the obscurity of my fate. 
 
 I could with difficulty keep my sobs quite silent as I thought 
 of the old deserted, familiar chambers, of the old bronze lamp 
 swinging by the broken Donatello, of the little quiet, nameless 
 grave in the cemetery of the poor ; of the homelike nook amongst 
 the coppersmith's huge, shining vessels, where Eaffaelino would 
 still bo sitting with his blind mother, scanning some ancient 
 score by the dim light of his bronze lucerhata. 
 
 It was all gone all gone forever, never to come back. 
 
 Yet I felt with it all a curious sense of liberation and of exul- 
 tation. If I had been alone I would have laughed and cried aloud. 
 
 The pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat of the horses' feet on the hard road 
 seemed to me to beat out an everlasting trisyllable, " Puori, 
 fuori, fuoii ! " Yes, I was "fuori" now, fairly out of the 
 gates and away. So I told myself again and again, and took an 
 odd, unsatisfactory, remorseful and yet intoxicating pleasure in 
 the freedom of it all. 
 
 I must have looked very strange, doubtless, as I sat there with 
 my cheeks changing to red and white in my excitement, and my 
 lips twitching in my longing to cry, and my hair all ruffled by 
 the haste with which I had run, and the ridiculous yellow 
 skirts crushed up between the tattered black robe of a priest and 
 the grey woollen petticoat of a contadina. 
 
 We thundered on in perfect silence for a time, with a littlt 
 light flashing in upon us now and then, from some village post- 
 house or some lamplit wayside Calvary. 
 
 The nights were still cold, being so early in the spring. Sik 
 ting there, I grew very stiff and chilly. The priest was stout 
 and so was the contadina. Both were soundly sleeping, and 
 lometimes swayed heavily against me. 
 
83 PASCARkt. 
 
 My heart began to sink, The sense of the "iuori" to be 
 more pain than glory. I thought wistfully of the little bed 
 where I had slept for so many years under the sheltering shadows 
 of Mariuccia's Mater Dolorosa. 
 
 I was roused by a sheepskin being placed about my knees, and 
 by the gentle rustic voice of the young Tirolese, who prayed me 
 to accept its covering. He was sure, he said, the signorina was 
 very cold. 
 
 I looked up and thanked him. In the dull light of the lamp 
 I saw his gentle honest eyes fixed on me, whilst he blushed hotly 
 at his own temerity. 
 
 I took his sheepskin. It was roughly dressed, but warm 1 , 
 and emboldened, he asked me if I was all alone. 
 
 "Yes," I told him, glad to hear his voice in that horrible 
 gloom and that unceasing galop. " And you too P" 
 
 " I too, signorina? Yes but then for a man it is nothing," 
 he answered. "Besides, I go to people I know in Este an 
 uncle of mine married and settled there. But the signorina, 
 does she go to friends too ? " 
 
 "Oh, yes," I assured him, being too proud to say otherwise. 
 But my heart rose in my throat at the little lie. I knew how 
 far, far away was the only hope to which I clung. 
 
 The young TJnterinnthaler looked at me wistfully. I think he 
 knew that what I said was not very true. 
 
 ' It is cold to-night, signorina," he said gently. 
 
 1 Yes very." 
 
 ' And you go far ? " 
 
 ' To Bologna." 
 
 ' Your friends meet you there ? " 
 
 <Mo." 
 
 ' Then you go farther still ? " 
 
 " I am not sure." 
 
 Do what I would the great tears brimmed over in my eye? ; 
 his questions made me realise my desolation. 
 
 With kindly courtesy he busied himself with rubbing off the 
 mist of our breaths from the glass window nearest him, so that 
 t/e might gee the dark maple-trees fly by us in the shadows of 
 the night. 
 
 "Do you know my country, signoriua?" he asked me, tc 
 divert my thoughts, no doubt. "My country, across the moun- 
 tains- I am a farmer in the TJnterinnthal No ? Ah, that is 
 such a pity ! " 
 
 " Is it so beautiful then ?" 
 
FUOR1. 83 
 
 " Beautiful? Ay, God knows it is beautiful. Not flat liko 
 this, with nothing but these weary olives; but all so great, 
 so superb, so wonderful ; all pine forest and endless alps, and 
 then the waters that flash like so much light, and the snows 
 that lie BO high ; and then the clouds that are always about the 
 mountains, and the rich green woods and the yellow maize-fields 
 all belowbeautiful ? Ah, indeed ! " 
 
 " You would not leave it, then ? " 
 
 " To live in Este ? The holy saints forbid. I should be a 
 dead man in a year, signorina. Away from the mountains ? I 
 will tell you who did that. It was Andrea Zafur ; he was older 
 than I, but I knew him. He was kapellmeister in our burgh. 
 When he led the choir it was enough to make one weep; it was 
 like the singing of the angels in heaven. "Well, some day some 
 people came who persuaded him that his voice might be a mine 
 of gold to him if he would only leave the mountains and go into 
 the world along with. them. In an evil hour Andrea listened. 
 He was poor, you see, and they told him fine things; so he 
 went. Whether the world cared much for him or not I never 
 heard; but I know that they shut him up in cities over there, 
 German cities and French. And one day, two years later, they 
 came for his old mother, and told her that Andrea was dying 
 and prayed to see her. She went at once ; but even then she 
 was too late. She found him in Paris, but he was out of his 
 mind ; he did not know her at all ; and all he kept saying forever 
 was * Take me back to the mountains ! take me back ! take me 
 back P He had made a great deal of gold ; the old mother was 
 rich when she returned ; but he died, crying aloud to see the 
 mountains once more. Nothing had been any joy to him ; ho 
 had always been cramped and stifled, and sick to death away 
 irom the mountains. It must always be so. Love them once, 
 you can never leave them and live." 
 
 His voice was very hushed and quiet as he spoke, and there 
 came a dreamy look into his eyes^ the far-away look that men 
 always get who dwell amidst the heights. 
 
 I hardly understood him well ; for, though he spoke Italian it 
 was not our Italian; yet there was something so gentle and 
 simple in him that it pleased me to hear him talk. 
 
 I was glad to have him to speak to in that oppressive endless 
 gloom, with the surging noise of the horses' gallop always on my 
 ears, and only now and then some break in it when a lantern 
 flashed its red glare in upon us, and hoarse, shrill voices piped 
 discordant orders at the doors of some roadside posting house. 
 
 a 2 
 
84 PASCARtiL. 
 
 Finding that I listened to him, lie went on to tell me all 
 about himself how his name was Marco Rosas ; how he was of 
 Italian race ; how he was left fatherless in infancy ; how his 
 twin-brother and himself lived together on the little farm on the 
 green slope of the Berg ; how he was twenty-two years old, and 
 well-to-do in his own way, and indeed quite rich for a farmer of 
 the Tirol. 
 
 He described all his treasures to me ; his chalet of pinewood, 
 shingle-roofed against the hurricane and avalanche, in autumn 
 hung over with the great yellow ears of the millet ; the herds of 
 small dun cattle, with their antelope-like eyes, and flocks of 
 silvery hill goats ; his stout little horse, with its peal of musical 
 bells ; his vines, that yielded such sweet huge purple grapes as 
 were never ripened save in that clear, lustrous, buoyant air ; the 
 painting of the Holy Trinity that was fastened in his wall, over 
 his house door, in an iron grating, to be a blessing on the place ; 
 his orchard, and his pastures that stretched in such perfect vivid 
 green up the hillside, whilst above all the great snow slopes 
 towered. 
 
 Most of all he talked of his mother a woman whom, if all he 
 said wero true, must have been one of those who are far above 
 rubies. A tender, homely, noble soul as this mountaineer 
 sketched her, such, indeed, as those great silent hills produce 
 not seldom a woman with the life of a saint and the heart of a 
 hero, though she neither read nor wrote, but span her own linen, 
 milked her own herds, and had had the sweet strong breath of 
 her own mountain air upon her all her years. 
 
 So we journeyed on our way, and, like Conraddin before us, 
 passed " per Lombardia c per la via di Pavia," into the Romogna 
 country. 
 
 The day was one long bright flood of sunshine with beautiful 
 Hakes of clouds floating before a fresh mountain wind. 
 
 The broad plains that have been the battleground of so many 
 yaces and so many ages were green and peaceful under the 
 primitive husbandry of the contadini. 
 
 Everywhere under the long lines of the yet unbudded vines 
 the seed was springing, and the trenches of the earth were brim- 
 ful with brown bubbling water left from the floods of winter, 
 when Reno and Adda had broken loose from their beds. 
 
 Here and there was some old fortress grey amongst the silver 
 of the olive orchards ; some village with white bleak house-walls 
 and flat roofs pale and bare against the level fields; or some 
 little long-forgotten city once a stronghold of war and a palace 
 
fit/6M. 35 
 
 for princes, now a little hushed and lonely place, with weed- 
 grown ramparts and gates rusted on their hinges, and tapestry 
 weavers throwing the shuttle in its deserted and dismantled ways. 
 
 But chiefly it was always the green, fruitful, weary, endless 
 plain trodden by the bullocks and the goats, and silent, strangely 
 silent, as though fearful still of its tremendous past. 
 
 Day came and night again, and all the heavy, chill, bitter, 
 lonely hours jumbled themselves away in some dreary chaos. 
 The journey had become horrible to me. I was stiff and cold 
 and miserable. I lost all heart to look out at the spaces between 
 the leathern curtains on to the country beyond. I had lost 
 all power to watch for the first outline of Tasso's "grand' 
 Apennino." 
 
 We had passed through Padova in the darkness, and I had 
 not noticed the young Tirolese descend there. But I found the 
 sheepskin left about my knees, and was touched by this little 
 gentle wayside flower of kindness. 
 
 I suppose I must have slept some portion of the time, but the 
 beat of the horses' hoofs never ceased to thunder through my 
 brain. 
 
 There were red flashes of lights on my eyes as we stopped to 
 change at a posting-house; wonderful purple and rose sunsets 
 and sunrise; a sense of endless gliding green distances that 
 never grew any one whit the nearer; a confusion of cruel 
 noises ; a continual sense of pain and of unrest ; and then at 
 length the cumbrous vehicle paused under an immense vaulted 
 gateway ; a sentinel challenged ; a guard looked in, holding up 
 a lantern ; the gates unclosed and closed again ; and as we rolled 
 over the stones I heard the tired travellers mutter the name 
 " Bologna." 
 
 I trembled, and felt afraid as the tired horses toiled wearily 
 over the pavement underneath the ink-black shadows of those 
 vaulted footways. 
 
 It seemed to me as though they would never end; their 
 silence, their gloom, their architecture, the enormous height of 
 the walls, the vista of the interminable arches, the hollow echo 
 of the stones that had been trodden for fifteen hundred centuries 
 by the feet of men and beasts all terrified me with a vague 
 poetic awe which yet was, in a sense, delightful. 
 
 Every old Italian city has this awe about it holds close the 
 print and moves the living to a curious sense that they are dead 
 and in their graves are dreaming ; for the old cities themselves 
 have beheld so much perish around them, and yet have kept so 
 
86 PASCAR&L. 
 
 firm a hold upon tradition and upon the supreme beauty of great 
 arts, that those who wander there grow, as it were, bewildered r 
 and know not which is life and which is death amaugst them. 
 
 To enter Bologna at midnight is to plunge into the depths of 
 the middle ages. 
 
 Those desolate sombre streets, those immense dark arches, 
 dark as Tartarus, those endless arcades where scarce a footfall 
 breaks the stillness, that labyrinth of marble, of stone, of an- 
 tiquity ; the past alone broods over them all. 
 
 As you go it seems to you that you see the gleam of a snowy 
 plume and the shine of a straight rapier striking home through 
 cuirass and doublet, whilst on the stones the dead body falls, and 
 high above over the lamp -iron, where the torch is flaring, a case- 
 ment uncloses, and a woman's hand drops a rose to the slayer, 
 and a woman's voice murmurs, with a cruel little laugh, " Cosa 
 fatta non capo ha ! " 
 
 There is nothing to break the spell of that old world enchant- 
 ment. 
 
 Nothing to recall to you that the ages of Bentivoglio and of 
 Yisconti have fled for ever. 
 
 The mighty Academy of Luvena Juris is so old, so old, so 
 old ! the folly and frippery of modern life cannot dwell in it a 
 moment ; it is as that enchanted throne which turned into stone 
 like 'itself whosoever dared to seat himself upon its majestic 
 heights. 
 
 For fifteen centuries Bologna has grimly watched and seen 
 the mad life of the world go by ; it sits amidst the plains as the 
 Sphyni amidst her deserts. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 TJXDEK THE GAKISENDA. 
 
 I SEEMED to awake roughly from some marvellous dream, when 
 the vehicle stopped at a post-house with a great gilded sign of a 
 golden boar projecting far out in the dull lantern light across the 
 shadow of one of the narrow streets. 
 
 The entrance to it was through a deep archway into a paved 
 court ; from within there was the feeble light of oil wicks burn- 
 ing in iron sconces ; beyond I could see the kitchen, with the 
 glimmer of its copper and pewter and the sturdy padrona in a 
 
UNDER THE G ARISEN DA. B; 
 
 Rlrtle of orange and green, who was sending her people right 
 and left in her eagerness to retain for the night all travellers by 
 the stage. 
 
 The diligence stopped for good at the Cignale d'Oro, and I 
 thought that I could do no better. The inn folk came round me 
 eyeing me with some amazement and with some suspicion ; but 
 an Italian's first impulse is always one of ready kindness ; the 
 vociferous padrona softened her voice for me, her household 
 smiled on me, and when I asked them for a little bed where 
 I could sleep in peace, a black-browed damsel showed me up a 
 wooden stair to a little bare chamber with a radiant gleam of her 
 white teeth and laughter of her dusky eyes, such as might fairly 
 liave made sunshine in the shadiest place. 
 
 That sunny smile of Italy ! it has in it all the youth of the 
 earth's golden ages all the faith of man's first dreams of God. 
 
 My little chamber was very bare, very narrow, with a floor of 
 red brick and a casement that looked only on to a pigeon-house in 
 the roof. But I had been used to simple ways of living, and I 
 was very tired ; I wanted nothing but rest; and being young, 
 rest came to me as soon as I stretched my limbs out and closed 
 my eyes upon the hard grass mattress. 
 
 I slept all night dreamlessly ; and when I awoke with the 
 sun shining full on my face, and the pigeons, white and grey, 
 pluming themselves upon the roof outside, I sprang up refreshed 
 and fearless ; eager to begin again this strange new stoiy of life, 
 whose first chapter I had read and turned down for ever when 
 I had looked my last at sunset on Verona. 
 
 There is nothing iu any after times, however radiant with 
 pleasure or success those latter times may be, so perfectly happy 
 as the buoyant and fearless ignorance of the creature who has 
 just left childhood for youth,- just first thrust out its -head from 
 the shell of dependence and ventured alone to survey with 
 dazzled and delighted eyes the illimitable domain that lies in 
 the mere Possible. 
 
 To any other than myself it would have seemed, as it had 
 done to the Tirolean, that nothing in the whole range of human 
 fate could be more desolate or more appalling than my fate ; 
 there was a child of fifteen years let loose upon the world with a 
 <lozen gold ilorins for her solitary possession, without a friend,, 
 without a refuge, and with no relative in all humanity, except a 
 father \vho had abandoned her, and of whom she knew not even 
 so much as whether he were living or were dead. 
 
 JSiothiug could well have been more lonely or less to be envied 
 
88 PASCAK&L. 
 
 surely than I; and yet when I had flung the cold water ove? 
 myself and tossed the hair back over my shoulders, and looked 
 out of the window to say good morrow to the pigeons opposite, I 
 laughed quite happily in the face of the bright day and was not 
 afraid. 
 
 It seemed to me that nothing could long go very ill in that 
 freah spring air, in that warm living light, in that pleasant 
 murmur of birds' wings, and of drowsy bees, that rose up- 
 ward on the stillness of the city from the little garden court 
 below. 
 
 It was early as I unslid the wooden bar of my door and ran 
 downstairs in the mirthful sunlight ; but the padrona was up 
 and about, and all her stout damsels at work with her, coming 
 and going in their many-coloured garments to and fro in the 
 brightness and the shadows of the open court and the sombre 
 archways. 
 
 Great turkeys were ruffling and strutting about the passages, 
 hens were squatting by the stoves, a big white owl blinked his 
 eyes on a butter tub, and grey rabbits ran between the swiftly 
 flying feet of the inn-maidens as they vied in haste to obey the 
 shrill commands of their mistress. 
 
 In the square court they had set out the winter-housed store 
 of lemon trees. 
 
 There was a thread of water bubbling from a sculptured 
 Medusa's mouth into a huge earthen amphora ; on the door sill 
 an old woman was slicing carrots ; above her in the carved lintel 
 was a Lucca della Eobbia worth its weight in gold : it was such 
 a scene as might have stayed there unchanged since Guido had 
 first dipped his brush in oils. 
 
 I had all the forenoon before me, and not liking to take up 
 room there in that busy tavern, I wandered out to look a little 
 at the city. 
 
 A winding passage-way led from the court- yard straight out 
 in front of the two leaning towers, with their coppersmith's 
 workshops beneath them and above the clear blue sky of the 
 Bomagna. 
 
 It was about nine o'clock and a market-day, and all the town 
 was astir; throngs of busy, laughing, hurrying people were 
 crying their goods aloud, or lustily chaffering for the goods of 
 others; whilst around them were those old sun-burned walls, 
 those dim gigantic frescoes, those austere arcades, those mighty 
 stones that had borne the fires and the furies of a thousand years 
 of sack and sie 
 
UNDER THE GARISENDA. 89 
 
 Mules brayed, dogs barked, poultry cackled, the charlatan 
 screamed his sing-song recitative, the hawkers vaunted their 
 dried pumpkin seeds, their little fried alardi, or their barrowful 
 of many-coloured woollen socks and kerchiefs ; the bells clanged 
 sonorously, the old scriveri held solemn court within their dens, 
 the peasants rode in on their asses laden with cabbages ^or with 
 poultry ; the ringing hammers of the countless coppersmiths and 
 pewterers resounded from a hundred workshops ; and it was all 
 life, mirth, tumult, business; and amidst it all rose the old 
 unfinished mournful pile of the Duomo, the ancient palaces with 
 beggars' rags fluttering from the balconies, the slanting shafts of 
 the twin towers, the arched footways brown and sear with the 
 passing of a thousand generations, 
 
 In the gay sunlight it was not so terrible as in the darkness 
 of night ; but it was perhaps more melancholy still. 
 
 I wandered on and on, looking now at the contention of some 
 buyer and seller under the leathern awning of a market-stall, 
 and now at the grandeur of some decaying fresco dying slowly 
 of neglect and age above on the sculptured houses. 
 
 I stood gazing up at the Garisenda, where it leaned above 
 against the delicate blue of the immense llomagna skies, whilst 
 beneath in their dusky workshops the brawny bare-armed 
 coppersmiths beat the ruddy metals, their hammers rising and 
 falling with steady and deafening rhythm. 
 
 I stood gazing at the Garisenda and the Assinelli that in their 
 day had seen the slender hands of Properzia de' Rossi at work 
 upon the monumental marbles j and had heard the last Benti- 
 voglio called from his workshop to a crown ; and had watched 
 the scholars come frora all far countries from wild Ireland, 
 away in the mists of the northern seas, as from fountain-filled 
 Damascus rose-girt on the edge of the desert, trooping by 
 thousands and tens of thousands to pace the stones and learn the 
 lore of the great Academy. 
 
 I loitered long in the old stone labyrinths of the Bentivoglie's 
 city. It awed me, it oppressed me, yet it allured me. 
 
 The Past is very gaunt and grim in the old University, rat it is 
 noble for all that. It is like the lofty skeleton of a dead knight 
 wrapped in the black cloak of the Misericordia. 
 
 The people chattered with me gladly ; and told me where to 
 find the Raffael, the Guido, the Domenichino, the Tarini, above 
 all their darlings the Carracci. 
 
 In Verona I had felt but little of the genius of the place. 
 Verona had forgotten so much ; the foe's heel had stamped out 
 
90 PASCAR&L. 
 
 her brain; and besides, her great Paolo, ages ago, was stolen 
 utterly from her by wanton Venice. 
 
 But here in Bologna it was beautiful to find how dear and 
 living to them their three Brethren were. 
 
 Stendahl was astonished to find his cobbler in Bologna able to 
 tell him all sorts of traits of the Carracci, and really full of 
 Borrowful reminiscences, because Luigi had died of grief at some 
 bad drawing of his own in the angel of the Annunciation. 
 Stendahl adds that a cobbler in Paris would have had a gilt 
 chair in his shop, but would have told you nought of Greuze or 
 of Gros. 
 
 It is just this tenderness of the past and knowledge of it, 
 which make the Italian populace unlike any other under the 
 sun: in these peoples' eyes there are always dreams, and in 
 their memories there is always greatness. 
 
 Wandering full of these thoughts, vivid and yet confused in 
 my brain, the hours sped away uncounted by me. 
 
 That there was pain or danger or singularity in my position, 
 I had utterly forgotten. I was only glad to be free and to be 
 amidst these places which had lived so long for me only in the 
 light of imagination and of history. 
 
 I was standing under the Garisenda^ picturing that old 
 academic life and thinking how good the days of a student must 
 have been in those times when the meaning of scholarship had 
 just touched the world with its light ; I was just standing there, 
 when the voices of men and women beside me caught my ear, 
 speaking of an opera which had been given the previous night 
 with unusual pomp before all the great people of the Homagna. 
 
 Its name arrested me ; for it was the Alkestis. 
 
 " A German opera ! " said one with, a shrug of his shoulders. 
 " We have to swallow it." * 
 
 " Nay, it is fine music; music that has held all the stages of 
 Europe forty years," said another. "And it is more Italian 
 than anything; the man studied always in Milan " 
 
 " But what good thing has he written since ? " 
 
 " Mere roba," grumbled the first speaker. " It is that which 
 beats me ; and he gets such prices ! he is as rich as all the 
 Ghetto whilst look at our Rossini." 
 
 " Those German hogs get all the truffles of Europe," said the 
 other with a sigh. "But there is this Hothwald, the guest of 
 the Grand Duke, to-day, and to-morrow of the Cardinal, and 
 what not, and good Italians starving their naked bones over a 
 p\nch of charcoal in their garrets, with more melody in their 
 
UNDER THR GAR1SENDA 91 
 
 do, re, me, as they sing to themselves as they saunter about, 
 than this fellow in all his long lifetime." 
 
 u Caro, caro, be just," laughed the others. " The Alkestis is 
 perfect, quite perfect ; our fathers settled that long ago ; but then 
 of course it is due to Milan, since he studied there. Rothwald 
 is a great old man, that we are bound to confess, and his music 
 is as fresh to-day as though some youngster had just penned it. 
 The chorus people sang his great Cora degli Dei, under his win- 
 dow in the Palace this morning early. He was quite touched ; 
 he came out into the balcony, and there threw down a handful 
 of gold whilst they tossed him carnival flowers." 
 
 I heard, and my cheek burned, and my heart beat high with 
 hatred : I thought of Arnbrogib Bufi as I had left him. stooping 
 over his wretched and solitary hearth. 
 
 "They honour Ilothwald like that?" I cried to the students, 
 heedless who my hearers were, as it was my careless childish 
 fashion to be, everywhere and always. 
 
 They looked at me in surprise, and no doubt I had a strange 
 enough aspect, glowing in my purple and yellow against the 
 darkness of the coppersmiths' dens, and above me the quaint 
 Garisenda. 
 
 "Why not, signorina?" they cried gaily to me, possibly 
 amused at the rage of disdain that doubtless quivered over all 
 my face. "Because he is a Tedesco? a good reason, we 
 grant." 
 
 "Because he was a traitor ! " I said to them, and then could 
 say no more, but turned away with a burning face and a 
 swelling heart, for there seemed to rise before me the broken- 
 hearted, weary, death-stricken form of my dear old master, and 
 the thought of this man who had betrayed him was unbearable 
 to me ; this man, who dwelt in princes' palaces, and scattered 
 gold broadcast, and received the songs and the flowers of tho 
 nation lie had robbed. 
 
 In the fury against injustice and the passion of longing to 
 redress it, which are part and parcel of all youth that is at all 
 generous or at all unworldly, 1 felt strong enough to force my 
 way to the palace itself up high on the hill there amongst the 
 cypresses, and fling the truth in the face of this perjurer whose 
 lie had been for forty years fair and fruitful before the world. 
 
 "Oh! why does God let such things be?" I cried in the 
 rebellion of my heart against the cruelty of creation, as I dropped 
 down under a little shrine in a twisting passage-way out of the 
 public square. 
 
9$ PASCAX&L. 
 
 Bologna had lost its cliarm for me ; it seemed only a great 
 dark, dusty, noisome, cruel place, with, its strange city of the 
 dead walled up beyond its gates. 
 
 What was it to me that my old master sat alone by a wretched 
 hearth whilst the man who had betrayed him was feasted by 
 cardinals and honoured by nations ? What was it to me ? 
 
 Nothing indeed. 
 
 And yet I sobbed bitterly as I turned from the streets into an 
 old dark church, ashamed that the people should see the tears 
 upon my cheeks. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE MAIDENHAIR. 
 
 THE church was quite empty: an immense naked marble 
 desolation, with a white Christ looming vast and sad above 
 the altar. 
 
 I sat down on an oaken bench and cried my heart out, as the 
 children say : most for the cruelty of Ambrogib's fate, but also a 
 little for the utter loneliness of my own. 
 
 I had little hope of finding my father; and if I found him, 
 how could I tell he would not disown a little travel-stained 
 penniless wanderer, as he had disowned the child with the 
 peacock's plumes in the painting chamber of the Veronese 
 students ? 
 
 I dreaded his calm cold smile ; I dreaded his icy incredulous 
 response; I resolved within myself, if I found him not at 
 Florence, to seek him no more, but to go on and try my fortunes 
 at Rome. 
 
 For once, when I had sung in the streets to a little knot of 
 people in Verona, an old man had come up to me and had told 
 me he was the director of the Corea, and had bidden me, if ever 
 I had a mind to appear in public, to betake myself to him there 
 in the Eternal City. 
 
 " Might I not help you a little, illustrissima ? " said a gentle, 
 timid voice. I started, and saw the young Tirolean, the bright 
 colour in his costume glowing in the gloom of the dusky aisles. 
 
 I was not sorry for companionship, yet I was wounded to be 
 Been in my sorrow. I stared at him stupidly through my tears. 
 
THE MAIDENHAIR. 93 
 
 " You did not stay at Padova, then? " I asked him at length, 
 seeing that he seemed more ashamed than I. 
 
 "No, signorina," he answered shyly, and then was still. 
 
 " You have business in Bologna? " 
 
 "Ho." 
 
 He spoke with downcast eyes, and swept the dust of the pave- 
 ment with the long plumes in his hat. 
 
 "I was sorry for the little eceellenza," he stammered humbly. 
 " And it seemed so terrible for her to be alone ; so young, and 
 with such a face as that ; and so I dared to travel on with her. 
 I was on the roof of the diligenza all the way from Padova." 
 
 Then he was silent; lifting, timidly, his brown, honest, dog- 
 like eyes, that were wistful like a dog's that dreads a beating. 
 
 But I was too used to the comradeship of II Squarcionino and 
 all his boyish brethren to be in any whit embarrassed by this act 
 of the young mountaineer. I took it as a kindly piece of 
 thoughtfulness, no more. 
 
 " It was very good of you," I said, brightening a little, " and 
 and it is true, I am all alone. But no one would hurt me 
 why should they ? I am not afraid." 
 
 " The little illustrissima is hardly more than a child," mur- 
 mured Marco Rosas, with a pity in his look I did not compre- 
 hend. " It is so damp and cold in this church. Would the 
 signorina come a little in the country ? There is a great 
 Madonna here to see, they say, and the day is long." 
 
 I hesitated a moment, then consented. What harm could 
 there be ? And anything was better than being alone ; and the 
 young man was so gentle, so simple, and so frank, that he 
 seemed to me only like a bigger Raffaelino. 
 
 So out of the gates I went into the white wide country, with 
 the sun on its dusty roads, along which the bullock wagons were 
 crawling. 
 
 Anywhere else I should have been stared at in my yellow 
 and violet, with the hood lying on my shoulders and my hair 
 uncovered to the sun, and the young Unterinnthaler in his 
 picture-like dress of velvet, and broad red sash, and hat with 
 the drooping myrtle-green plume. 
 
 But in Italy blessed Italy no one noticed. 
 
 There is such immunity from, observation in a country where 
 colour is a household fairy brightening every rent and ruin, 121 
 lieu of an unknown god at once dreaded and derided. 
 
 So I went on in the sunshine along the road that leads to the 
 Madonna of S. Luca high on her gr&en hill. 
 
94 PASCA8&L. 
 
 "We made our obeisance at her shrine, and gazed through the 
 wonderful breadth of the plains with their countless cities and 
 towns, and the low lines of the circling mountains lying curve 
 on curve in endless undulation. 
 
 Then we came down from the height and wandered whither 
 we knew not exactly amongst fresh-turned fields and vines just 
 Bet with leaf, and orchards of olive and mulberry, where many a 
 little quiet paese nestled with white-walled houses and red- 
 roofed dovecotes. At one of these poderi there was a woman 
 with a merry handsome face and a scarlet kirtle sitting spinning 
 on the top of a flight of steps under a dark archway hung with 
 convolvulus. 
 
 Marco Rosas asked her if she could give us a draught of 
 milk. 
 
 She assented joyfully, and brought out not only milk but 
 honey and pomegranates and black sweet bread, and set them 
 out on a stone bench on the top of the step under the con- 
 volvulus ; and would have us eat there and then, she spinning all 
 the while and telling us her own history and her grandmother's 
 before her, looking across the great sunny plains that stretched 
 away like the sea-green ocean, some white tower rising here and 
 there out of the sun-mist like a seagull on the wing. 
 
 She was a cheery, good-hearted creature; she lived on the 
 most wondrous battle-field of all Europe, but she knew nothing 
 of that; she only knew that her eggs sold well in Bologna 
 market, and her bit of land was fruitful, and her husband was a 
 good man though careless, and her olive-trees had been bit by the 
 frost and would bear ill that summer. 
 
 We had a pleasant hour with her there on the sunny steps 
 facing the low tumbled crests of the Apennines, hyacinth-hue 1 
 in the clear spring weather. 
 
 "We bade her farewell with many good wishes on either side, 
 and went on our way to the city. The sun was not far from its 
 setting. 
 
 Daring those long sauntering walks the TTnterinii thaler had 
 told me still more. about himself and his birthplace in the high 
 mountains. 
 
 As we drew under the city walls he began to speak again, and 
 a little confusedly, of his country, of his home, of his people, 
 llis millet- fields and his mountain cattle were dearer to him than 
 all the dead glories of Bologna. 
 
 "The chalet is large/' he told me, "and Anton, my brother, 
 is a good, gentle lad. There is a great store of lin,en, for my 
 
THE, MAIDENHAIR. 95 
 
 mother and her mother before her were great spinners; and 
 there is some little silver in the plate chest, for our people 
 have been there for generations. It is not so very cold in the 
 winter-time, for everywhere we have double windows, and we 
 can afford to burn as many oak logs as we like. And then 
 in the spring it is so beautiful all the waters leaping as though 
 they were mad, and the loose snows rushing, thundering down, 
 and the cattle lowing with delight to get once more up on their 
 pastures, and the hyacinths and gentian springing up every- 
 whereoh, signorina, you do not know how beautiful it is upon 
 our mountains then ! " 
 
 "!N"o doubt," I answered him, dreamily, my thoughts not 
 being with him. 
 
 "Much more beautiful than all this! " he said, with a sweep 
 outward of his hand to the country. "Here it is just maple 
 and mulberry, mulberry and maple, over and over again, and 
 those endless vineyards everywhere so flat, so pale and tiresome." 
 
 "No doubt," I said again to him, indifferent, watching the 
 white bullocks come through the gates with an open wagon of 
 the past year's hay. 
 
 He was silent a little while ; then he spoke again ; his voice 
 was swift and low. 
 
 " Signorina, did ever you hear of a tale that our priest told 
 us once? There were terrible times across the mountains, 
 amongst the Francesi, I think, and the peasantry rose against 
 the aristocrats, and everywhere they slew the nobles ; and at 
 one place the nobles were drowned by thousands in a river. Do 
 you know ? " 
 
 " You mean the Noyades of Kantes ? " 
 
 "It may be. I cannot tell the name. It was in some time 
 of revolution, and they did not spare even the women. All tLe 
 wives and daughters and mothers of the nobles were bound an:l 
 flung into the water. There was only one way that anyone of 
 those young noble maidens could be spared ; it was if one of the 
 men of the populace asked and took her in marriage " 
 
 He stopped abruptly. I, gathering sotae tufts of -maidenhair 
 off the city wall, laughed a little. 
 
 " The waters were better, I should think. Well ? " 
 
 "Signorina," he began once more, and as I looked up, 
 astonished at the tremulous sound in his voice, I saw his eyes 
 fastened on me in pathetic entreaty, still as of a dog that prays 
 .of you not to beat him. " Signorina, I have been thinking. 
 It is almost as ill with you as with those young noble Frances^ 
 
9$ PASCAR&L. 
 
 maidens. You are all alone, and you have no home and no 
 friends you have told me so ; and surely your father cannot be 
 amongst the living, or he had never been silent so long. Now, 
 I am only a mountaineer, I know that, and ignorant, and alto- 
 gether beneath you, and yet if you will let me give you my 
 home so long as ever as ever you want one. The world is 
 bitter and bad for a motherless child." 
 
 He paused and grew very red, then hurried on with his ex- 
 planation. 
 
 " I meant if you would come to us my mother is so good : 
 the little illustrissima would get to care for her; and the place 
 is humble indeed, but sweet and wholesome and safe. I would 
 go straight back with the donzella, and not rest till she was safe 
 with my mother on the mountains. And I I know well the 
 donzella would never look at me, never think of me I should 
 never dream of it. But if she would only let me be of use to 
 her, only let me put a roof over her head, I should be so thank- 
 ful ! I would serve her like a dog. For for in this one little 
 short day I have got to love her so well ! !> 
 
 Then he stopped abruptly, and grew very white, and I could 
 hear his quick hard breathing as we stood together outside the 
 gates of Bologna in the red sunset light. 
 
 My first impulse was that of ungrateful waywardness. 
 
 What ! escape from Verona only to end my gorgeous dreams 
 in a peasant's shieling on northern mountains ! I, who had set 
 my face to the golden south, dreaming of my Bordello of the 
 winter's masque, of my Borneo of the fairy roses. 
 
 I am ashamed to say that, like a spoilt and cruel child as 3 
 was, I flashed on him a contemptuous glance and laughed aloud. 
 
 Tho moment my laughter had struck on the evening silence 1 
 was sorry. I shall never forget the look on the frank fair face 
 of Marco Rosas. 
 
 "The donzella is right and I was mad no doubt," he mur- 
 mured, humbly ; then he fell behind, and followed me in silence 
 through the gates into the grim old town. 
 
 My heart smote me a little as I went. He had meant so well ; 
 perhaps it was cruel in me to wound him. 
 
 I heard his slow firm tread behind me until I had passed into 
 the open court of the Cignale d'Oro. 
 
 Then he stopped, and his voice quite changed in tone mut- 
 tered in my ear 
 
 ^ " Signorina, I will never see your face again. Say you for- 
 give me once ? " 
 
THE SNOW-FLOWER. 97 
 
 I turned and looked at him, relenting a little. It fras so 
 absurd; and yet some sense of his thorough goodness, of his 
 perfect simplicity and sincerit}-, stole on me and moved me 
 despite myself. 
 
 I stretched my hand out to him. with the little shaking 
 maidenhair as a peace-offering. 
 
 " You were very good," I said to him, half laughing, half 
 crying. "I thank you very much indeed; only, it was so 
 absurd, you know; go away and forget me; pray, pray do, or 
 I shall be so sorry ! " 
 
 He took the little tuft of grasses and looked at me with a 
 wistful sadness in his eyes that haunted mo for many an hour 
 after. 
 
 " I shall never forget, dear signorina. Never till I die." 
 
 Then he bent his head very low, and turned away, and 
 left me. 
 
 One little short day, and a life was won ! 
 
 I felt a strange thrill of conscious power, yet a sense of somo 
 wrong thing done by me, as I watched him pass wearily through 
 the entrance passage and disappear into the blackness of tho 
 shadow. 
 
 I let him go in silence, and went upstairs to niy little room 
 under the eaves. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE SNOW-FLOWES. 
 
 I WAS pained and yet incensed. 
 
 It seemed as though all the cares and sorrows of mature yeais 
 crowded in on me in one moment. I had been so happy in my 
 needless goodfellowship with any one who smiled on me, and 
 was willing to be idle and mirthful with me for an hour. 
 
 I do not know how others have been moved by the first utter- 
 ance of love to them ; but to me it brought a weary sense of 
 burdensome power and of lost liberty. All the golden hazy 
 glory of my future seemed to have faded suddenly. The future 
 was only now to me a blank uncertainty, which might hold any- 
 thing or nothing. 
 
 All the gay elastic hopefulness of the previous day was gone 
 from me. I leaned on the edge of my little casement, tired, and 
 an aching heart 
 
98 PASCAREL. 
 
 It was another red and gold evening. 
 
 The voices were merry in the cortile below. The little boy of 
 the house played dominoes with his granddam on the stone steps, 
 
 The padrona and her maidens hurried in and out, for the in if 
 was full of travellers passing through towards Padova and Yenice 
 and Milan. 
 
 The whole was a little bright busy picture in the sombreness 
 of this great old city, which had seen so much bloodshed, so 
 much genius, so much woe, so much splendour, and now lived 
 on, on its past, as childless greybeards do alone amidst their 
 palaces. 
 
 I had no heart any more that day for the streets of Eologna. 
 I shut myself in my little chamber and watched the pigeons 
 plume themselves upon the roof, and heard the chattering, 
 laughing voices down below, and vexed my soul as young things 
 will over the perplexities and the cruelties of human life. 
 
 The warm sunset was just tinging the solemn greys of the 
 city into all manner of tender hues, when above the clatter of 
 the voices I heard the little shrill voice of the child of the inn 
 crying as he ran out into the court, 
 
 " Oh, mother, mother; give me a scudo just one to spend to- 
 night.'' 
 
 "Fie, you naughty soul!" grumbled the mother; " you are 
 always spending money. You will come to no good, Berto. The 
 Frate says you do not know your alfabeta, and you with those 
 blessed Scolopi Fathers over two years ! " 
 
 " Give me a scudo, mother ! " pleaded the little lad. " Only 
 one ! I will win it back at ruzzola to-morrow." 
 
 "Oh, I dare say/' sighed the padrona; "all my dear little 
 cheeses bowled away down the streets. You are a wicked one, 
 Berto, and you my only child, and I a widow ; seven years old 
 too, as you are ! ;> 
 
 " Give me a scudo! " cried Berto, clinging to her skirts, and, 
 in fine, helping himself without more ado from the leathern 
 pouch that hung at her girdle. 
 
 "What is it for, Berto?" she asked, catching the child by 
 his long hair, 
 
 " Pascarel, mother mine ! " shouted the little scapegrace, who 
 might have seven years at the uttermost. " To-night just to- 
 night and then on to Florence. Will you come too? Do, 
 mother!" 
 
 " 1 do not mind if I do," said the padrona, casting her lace veil 
 about her head. * ' There is only that li^le donzella in the house, 
 
THE SNOW-FLOWER. 99 
 
 end two traders from Ferrara. I do not mind if I do. PascarSl 
 is as good as a winning number at lottery. Here, Pasqua, Gilla^ 
 Marta," 
 
 She called Her maidens round her, and set them their tasks of 
 cooking, spinning, poultry-feeding, and the like, standing in a 
 circle of red light in the black and white paved court under my 
 casement, and then went out with her little son down into the 
 dusky tunnel of the passage-way. 
 
 Pascarel ! the name bewildered and yet comforted me. What 
 would it be, I wondered; a game, a show, a dance, or the name 
 of a living creature ? 
 
 The name of the man who had chosen the bright melting snow 
 as its emblem? the snow-flower that glittered a day in the 
 light, and then vanished ? 
 
 Anyway it had a solace for me when I leaned there in the red 
 evening, while the place grew quite still as the pigeons went to 
 roost, and the old chimes called to vespers, and the inn maidens 
 ran to chatter within- doors to the Ferrarese as soon as their 
 mistress's back was turned. 
 
 Whatever it might be, this mystical Pascarel, it went before 
 me southward to Florence. If it were only a snow-flower, that 
 would melt at a touch, it seemed to me better than all the death- 
 less flowers of Paradise. 
 
 As I leaned there watching the silvery birds fly against the 
 reddened sky, I thought why I do not know of Properzia de* 
 Bossi. 
 
 I knew her story. I had often pondered over it, and looked 
 at the delicate sad face of her, with its drooped lids and its 
 Madonna's eyes. She had dwelt here, in this mighty Bologna; 
 and Bologna had made her its saint and sovereign whilst her 
 short life lasted, and in her death had mourned her almost as 
 Home Eaffaelle. 
 
 A slender, dainty, girlish thing, she had a name of power even 
 in that age of giants. She dared to wield, and to wield well, 
 the chisel and the burin in the days when Michaelangelo and 
 Harcantonio held them as their sceptres. Her city honoured 
 her, and the envy and injury of Arnico gave her the surest 
 warranty of triumph. 
 
 And yet, she had no joy in any of it ; she won one by one 
 all the laurels only to find them bitter on her lips ; the marbles 
 chilled her as though they were dead children, and the shouts of 
 the Eomagnese homage were dull and without music on her ears. 
 For why ? for this ; so little and yet all That one, only in 
 
100 PASCAR&L. 
 
 the city's width, saw no beauty in lier, and no wonder in her 
 deeds : and this one, alone of them all, she loved. 
 
 And he, not knowing, and when knowing, caring nothing, but 
 turning away his beautiful cold face into the light of others' 
 BRiiles, Properzia grew weary of her work, and changed to hate 
 her lavish gifts of nature ; and left undone the public sculptures 
 she had sought so eagerly; and would not for all the city's 
 wooing use her power again, but drew herself in from life and 
 light like a sea-flower that is thrown by tempest on the rocks. 
 And so, when Clement came into Bologna to crown great Charles, 
 and asked, as the first of all the wonders of the place, for that 
 Properzia whose fame had spread from sea to sea in Italy, the 
 Bolognese, weeping bitterly, could only lead him to the hospital 
 to look upon the fair dead body of a girl. 
 
 I thought of her wistfully as the tawny evening colours spread 
 themselves like an emperor's pall over the desolate city. 
 
 I only saw the beauty and the sadness of the story. What 
 there was of evil in it passed by me ; the passion and the shame 
 shadowed out in that terrible sculpture, which was the last her 
 genius wrought, had no meaning for me; of the poison of 
 unrequited desire which had burned up and ruined all the deli- 
 cate grace and innocent loveliness of her nature and her life, I 
 had no sense or suspicion. 
 
 I was only sorry for her dead all those centuries before 
 here in the city of Guido. And a strange new wonder awoke 
 and thrilled in me; what could it be, this marvellous thing 
 called Love which had thus killed her ? 
 
 And then I thought, I knew not why, of the dark and 
 tender eyes of the Florentine Masquer. 
 
 The owl had awoke from his watch-tower on the tub, and had 
 begun to boom to and fro hunting bats through the shadows of 
 the angles and roofs. 
 
 The deep bell of the Misericordia boomed over Bologna in the 
 stillness. The old woman, spinning at her wheel, stopped t 
 cross herself and say a prayer or two for the poor passing 
 soul. 
 
 I saw the stars corae out, and thought of hew they were shin- 
 ing there away across the plains on those lowly graves beneath 
 the shadow of the Alps ; and then I threw myself wearily on the 
 little bed, and cried myeelf to sleep. 
 
 At daybreak I rose and went down and paid my slender score. 
 Then I "bade them farewell, and went out into the white and 
 glistening light that heralds morning in the Italian plains. 
 
LA HEINE DU MOYENAGE. IO1 
 
 An hour later I was on my way across the wild gorges of the 
 hills to Florence. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 LA HEINE DU MOYENAGE. 
 
 ALL day long, and all night long, the heavy diligenza creaked 
 and rolled upon its course over the grey heights, and through the 
 dusky ravines of the Apennines. 
 
 I slept and dreamed, and woke and gazed, and slept and 
 dreamed again ; it was all blent to me in a confused tumult of 
 light and darkness, rest and pain. 
 
 It was again daybreak, when, with a shock and a dull crash, 
 the great vehicle reeled over on its side and fell broken and 
 crushed upon the stony way, the poor beasts struggling under 
 their entangled weight of leather, rope, and links of brass. It 
 had been urged too swiftly down a steep and angular slope. 
 
 I rose with a confused sense of pain, but I had received no 
 hurt. 
 
 There were stir and strife and lamentation. Then some one 
 told me that it would be hours ere the vehicle could be again 
 upon the road, and that it were better to go on foot to Florence : 
 we were on the hill- side, not a league away, and very soon 
 night would have fallen. They pointed me the way ; I followed 
 it; a rough road winding between high stone walls, descending 
 always abruptly, and without beauty, white with dust, and 
 rugged to the feet ; above, a wondrous sky ; sapphire blue in the 
 zenith, all to westward glowing with a million cloud-flecks of 
 intensest rose; the rose of the deep carnation buds when they 
 blush into life with the spring of the year. 
 
 I followed patiently the windings of the path, always between 
 the pale stone walls, a little solitary figure, purple and pellow, as 
 though the violets and crocuses of the woods had dressed me. 
 
 Suddenly, with a sharp bend, the road sheered downward into 
 a wide valley, white and grey with the blossoming woods of the 
 olive. In the midst of that silvery sea was stretched the fairest 
 city of all the empires of the world. 
 
 The snn was setting. 
 
 Over the whole Valdarno there was everywhere a faint ethe- 
 real golden mist that rose from the water and the woods. 
 
102 
 
 PASCAR&L. 
 
 The town floated on it as upon a lake ; her spires, and domes, 
 and towers, and palaces bathed at their base in its amber waves, 
 and rising upward into the rose-hued radiance of the upper air. 
 The mountains that encircled her took all the varying hues of 
 the sunset on their pale heights until they flushed to scarlet, 
 glowered to violet, wavered with flame, and paled to whiteness, 
 us the opal burns and fades. "Warmth, fragrance, silence, love- 
 liness encompassed her ; and in the great stillness the bell of the 
 basilica tolled slowly in the evening call to prayer. 
 
 Thus Florence rose before me. 
 
 A strange tremor of exceeding joy thrilled through me as I 
 beheld the reddened shadows of those close-lying roofs, and those 
 marble heights of towers and of temples. At last my eyes 
 gazed on her ! the daughter of flowers, the mistress of art, the 
 uursing mother of liberty and of aspiration. 
 
 I fell on my knees and thanked God. I pity those who, in 
 such a moment, have not done likewise. 
 
 My eyes were dim, but my heart was strong, and beat high 
 with hope as I rose and stumbled down the rugged way, on- 
 wards, to the entrance of her gates ; always with the great dome 
 shining before me in the golden haze ; always with the clouds 
 light as a breath, scarlet as a flame, hovering above me in the 
 windless air. 
 
 The afterglow was still warm in the heavens when I reached 
 the city walls and entered the shadows of her historic streets. 
 
 I wandered all the evening, unconscious of fatigue, until the 
 streets were all ablaze with lights, and all astir with people. I 
 remembered then, for the first time, that it was the last Domenica 
 of the year's Carnival. 
 
 The great white Seasons of the Santa Trinita rose like snow 
 against the golden air. Monte Oliveto towered dark against the 
 rosy glory of the west. There was a sweet sea wind blowing 
 which fanned out as it went all the spiced odours of the phar- 
 macies, and all the scents of the budding woods. The shops of 
 the goldsmiths, and mosaic sellers, and alabaster workers gleamed 
 and sparkled in the light. Everywhere there was some beauty, 
 eoine fragrance, some treasure ; and above it all rose the wondrous 
 shaft of the campanile, glancing like gold and ivory in the 
 Bun. 
 
 Where lies the secret of the spell of Florence ? a spell that 
 strengthens, and does not fade with time ? 
 
 It is a strange, sweet, subtle charm that makes those who 
 love her at all love her with a passionate, close- clinging faith in 
 
LA REINE DU MOYEN^GM. 103 
 
 her as the fairest thing that men have ever builded where she 
 lies amidst her lily-whitened meadows. 
 
 Perhaps it is because her story is so old, and her beauty is so 
 young. 
 
 Behind her lie such abysses of mighty memories. Upon her 
 is shed such radiance of sunlight and of life. The stones of her 
 are dark with the blood of so many generations, but her air is 
 bright with the blossoms of so many flowers ; even as the eyes of 
 her people have in them more sadness than lies in tears, whilst 
 their lips have the gayest laughter that ever made music in the 
 weariness of the world. 
 
 Borne is terrible in her old age. It is the old age of a mighty 
 murderess of men. About her there is ever the scent of death ; 
 the abomination of desolation. She was, in her days of power 
 and of sorcery, a living lie. She called herself the mother of 
 freed men, and she conceived but slaves. The shame of her and 
 the sin cling to her still, and the blood that she shed makes 
 heavy and horrible the air that she respires. Her head is crowned 
 with ashes, and her lips, as they mutter of dead days, breathe 
 pestilence. 
 
 But Florence, where she sits throned amidst her meadows 
 white with lilies, Florence is never terrible, Florence is never 
 old. In her infancy they fed her on the manna of freedom, and 
 that fairest food gave her eternal youth. In her early years 
 she worshipped ignorantly indeed, but truly always the day-star 
 of liberty ; and it has been with her always so that the light 
 shed upon her is still as the light of morning. 
 
 Does this sound a fanciful folly ? Nay, there is a real truth 
 in it. 
 
 The past is so close to you in Florence. You touch it at 
 every step. It is not the dead past that men bury and then 
 forget. It is an unquenchable thing; beautiful, and full of 
 lustre, even in the tomb, like the gold from the sepulchres of the 
 ^Etruscan kings that shines on the breast of some fair living 
 woman, undimmed by the dust and the length of the ages. 
 
 The music of the old greatness thrills through all the com- 
 monest things of life like the grilli's chant through the wooden 
 cages on Ascension Day; and, like the song of the grilli, its 
 poetry stays in the warmth of the common hearth for the ears 
 Df the little children, and loses nothing of its melody. 
 
 The beauty of the past in Florence is like the beauty of the 
 great Duomo. 
 
 About the D?iomo there is stir and strife at all times ; crowds 
 
104 PASCAR&L. 
 
 come and go ; men buy and sell ; lads laugh and fight ; piles 
 of fruit blaze gold and crimson ; metal pails clash down on the 
 stones with shrillest clangour : on the steps boys play at domi- 
 noes, and women give their children food, and merry maskers 
 grin in carnival fooleries ; but there in their midst is the Duomo 
 all unharmed and undegraded, a poem and a prayer in one, its 
 marbles shining in the upper air, a thing so majestic in its 
 strength, and yet so human in its tenderness, that nothing can 
 assail, and nothing equal it. 
 
 Other, though not many, cities have histories as noble, 
 treasuries as vast ; but no other city has them living and ever 
 present in her midst, familiar as household words, and touched 
 by every baby's hand and peasant's step, as Florence has. 
 
 Every line, every rood, every gable, every tower, has some 
 story of the past present in it. Every tocsin that sounds is a 
 chronicle ; every bridge that unites the two banks of the river 
 unites also the crowds of the living with the heroism of 
 the dead. 
 
 In the winding dusky irregular streets, with the outlines of 
 their logge and arcades, and the glow of colour that fills their 
 niches and galleries, the men who "have gone before" walk 
 with you; not as elsewhere mere gliding shades clad in the 
 pallor of a misty memory, but present, as in their daily lives, 
 shading their dreamful eyes against the noonday-sun or setting 
 their brave brows against the mountain wind, laughing and 
 jesting in their manful mirth and speaking as brother to 
 brother of great gifts to give the world. All this while, though 
 the past is thus close about you the present is beautiful also, and 
 does not shock you by discord and unseemliness as it will ever 
 do elsewhere. The throngs that pass you are the same in like- 
 ness as those that brushed against Dante or Calvacanti; the 
 populace that you move amidst is the same bold, vivid, fearless, 
 eager people with eyes full of dreams, and lips braced close for 
 war, which welcomed Yinci and Cimabue and fought from 
 Montaperto to Solferino. 
 
 And as you go through the streets you will surely see at every 
 step some colour of a fresco on a wall, some quaint curve of a 
 bas-relief on a lintel, some vista of Bomanesque arches in a 
 palace court, some dusky interior of a smith's forge or a wood- 
 seller's shop, some Renaissance seal ring glimmering on a trader's 
 stall, some lovely hues of fruits and herbs tossed down together 
 in a Tre Cento window, some gigantic mass of blossoms being 
 borne aloft on men's shoulders for a church festivity of roses, 
 
tJl RHINE DU MOYENAG8. 105 
 
 something at every step that has some beauty or son.e charm in 
 it, some graeiousness of the ancient time, or some pietry of the 
 present hour. 
 
 The beauty of the past goes with you at every step in 
 Florence. Buy eggs in the market, and you buy them where 
 Donatello bought those which fell down in a broken heap before 
 the wonder of the crucifix. Pause in a narrow bye-street in a 
 crowd and it shall be that Borgo Allegri, which the people so 
 baptised for love of the old painter and the new-born art. Stray 
 into a great dark church at evening time, where peasants tell 
 their beads in the vast marble silence, and you are where the 
 whole city flocked, weeping, at midnight to look their last upon 
 the face of their Michael Angelo. Pace up the steps of the palace 
 of the Signoria and you tread the stone that felt the feet of him 
 to whom so bitterly was known " com* e duro catte, lo scendere 
 e'l salir per Valtrui scale" Buy a knot of March anemoli 
 or April arum lilies, and you may bear them with you through 
 the same city ward in which the child Ghirlandajo onco played 
 amidst the gold and silver garlands that his father fashioned for 
 the young heads cf the Renaissance. Ask for a shoemaker and 
 you shall find the cobbler sitting with his board in the same old 
 twisting, shadowy street way, where the old man Toscanelli 
 drew his charts that served a fair-haired sailor of Genoa, called 
 Columbus. Toil to fetch a tinker through the squalor of San 
 Niccolb, and there shall fall on you the shadow of the bell- tower 
 where the old sacristan saved to the world the genius of the 
 Slight and Day. Glance up to see the hour of the evening time, 
 and there, sombre and tragical, will loom above you the walls of 
 the communal palace on which the traitors were painted by the 
 brush of Sarto, and the tower of Giotto, fair arid fresh in its 
 perfect grace as though angels had build ed it in the night just 
 past, " ond' ella toglie ancora e terza e nona" as in the noble and 
 simple days before she brake the " cerchia antlca" 
 
 Everywhere there are flowers, and breaks of songs, and rills 
 of laughter, and wonderful eyes that look as if they too, like 
 their Poets, had gazed into the heights of heaven and the depths 
 of hell. 
 
 And then you will pass out at the gates beyond the city walls, 
 and all around you there will be a radiance and serenity of light 
 that seems to throb in its intensity and yet is divinely restful, 
 like the passion and the peace of love when it has all to adore 
 and nothing to desire. 
 
 The water will be broad and gold, and darkened here and 
 
106 PASCAR&L. 
 
 there into shadows of porphyrine amher. Amidst the grey and 
 green of the i: ve and acacia foliage there will arise the low pale 
 roofs and flat- topped towers of innumerable villages. 
 
 Everywhere there will he a wonderful width of amethystine 
 hills and mystical depths of seven-chorded light. Above, masses 
 of rosy cloud will drift, like rose leaves leaning on a summer 
 wind. And, like a magic girdle which has shut her out from all 
 the curse of age and death and man's oblivion, and given her a 
 youth and loveliness which will endure so long as the earth itself 
 endures, there will be the circle of the mountains, purple and 
 white and golden, lying around Florence. 
 
 Who, having known her, can forsake her for lesser loves? 
 
 Who, having once abode with her, can turn their faces from 
 the rising sun and set the darkness of the hills betwixt herself 
 an'\ them ? 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 THE MIDNIGHT FAIR. 
 
 So beautiful was it all, so strange, so wild, so fantastic, that 
 all hunger, fatigue, and fear were forgotten by me in its curious 
 delight. I wandered on and on, asking nothing, only for ever 
 looking and looking and looking. I thought that I had strayed 
 over the border land that parts us from the past, and was amidst 
 the breathing burning life of the Cinque Cento. 
 
 By many and various streets all made noble with frowning 
 fortress, carven statues, walls massive and lofty as alpine slopes, 
 ornament delicate and wonderful as frost on woven aspen boughs, 
 I came at length into a great square, which I needed none to 
 tell me was the place where the soul of Savonarola had been sent 
 forth on fire. Por there the standard of the people rose on the 
 tower of the Commonwealth, and the lustrous moonlight lay 
 calm and broad about the feet of the bronze Perseus. 
 
 The Hercules and the David stood white and serene against 
 the darkness ; the battlements of the magisterial palace were set 
 like jaws of iron hard against the night ; the moonshine caught 
 the colours on the blazoned shields that edged the walls ; the 
 beautiful Judith knit her brows against the world from under 
 the black arch of her loggia. How still it was there, where only 
 
THE MIDNIGHT FAIR. 1 07 
 
 the shapes of marble and of bronze kept watch and ward in the 
 gathering-place of the Eepublic. 
 
 Yet a stone's throw, and all Florence laughed, and danced, 
 and reeled, and sang, and gamed, and shouted in the open 
 gallery of the TJffizi. A stone's throw, and in the very shadow 
 of the Vecchio standard, under the very gaze of the Donatello, 
 Florence in her wildest gaiety held her riot and her revelry. 
 
 It was the midnight Fair of the Carnival. 
 
 All the length of the arcade was filled with the bright and 
 motley throng. In open spaces on the flagstones the people 
 were dancing to shrill clamour of fife and drum. Here a white 
 Filatrice with powdered face was whirled down by a scarlet 
 Mephisto, and here an Arlecchino all ablaze in squares of colour, 
 spun round a black domino ready masked for the Veglione. 
 There a debardeur, sunny-faced and stout-limbed, toyed with a 
 Neapolitan Pulcinello ; ant there a lithe contadina, with eyes of 
 jet, galloped like a Friuli filly down the pavement, tiring out a 
 panting and piteous StentereUo. 
 
 On either side in the niches between the marble figures were 
 ranged the little gay canteens and stalls of the traders ; wines 
 and straw work, and flowers and woollen goods, and all the 
 merchandise of the whole contado, were decked out with 
 coloured lamps and painted devices, and streaming ribbons, and 
 all fanciful follies of gay ornamentation. 
 
 Aloft on a barrel, the charlatan, in a flourish of scarlet cloth, 
 screamed forth the praises of his pharmacy and of his life-pills ; 
 whilst his compeer of the lottery, in tissue of silver and a conical 
 hat an arm's length high, with flaunting peacock's plumes,, 
 rattled his dice and shouted forth the winning numbers. Pea- 
 sant girls with penthouse hats of straw, grave fattori watching 
 the selling .of their wares,, little children hugging loads of strac- 
 eiataunta, maskers flying in a .blaze . of crackers, the people- 
 everywhere, in crowds, pushing, shouting, antieking, sporting, 
 but always in glee and always in good humour, while here 
 and there amidst them some patrician idler sauntered with some 
 mistress of the. hour, masked, upon his arm, smiling together as 
 they watched the humours of the fair. 
 
 Amidst it all stood the white statues ; here the quiet face of 
 Arretino, there the bold brows of the Uberti; here the austere 
 sadness of Dante, there the old man's smile of Sant' Antonino. 
 
 And away at the far end. of the great gallery the white arches 
 crossed each other high above against the blackness of the night ; 
 and in the gleam of the tossing lamps the drooping banners of 
 
Io3 PASCAR&U 
 
 the Lost Liberties iiung, crimson as the blood of Campaliino and 
 Custczza; and out further in the stillness beyond the stone 
 parapet rolled the broad moon-lightened Arno water ; and above 
 all were the clear skies, breathless as in summer, the eloquent 
 luminous purple skies of a Florence night. 
 
 This is how I saw the city first ; this is how she will lie in my 
 heart and in my memories for ever. 
 
 I was but a child ; I was entranced by the goodly chaos of 
 mirth and colour, by the beautiful outlines, by the zestful mask- 
 ing, by the gaiety and the grotesqueness that were framed in 
 that stately setting. 
 
 I found a quiet nook under the marble shelter of the figure of 
 old Taddeo Gaddi, and rested there and watched the whims and 
 vagaries of the Florentines. 
 
 It had grown quite late. I heard all the chimes of the 
 belfries striking and ringing the twelfth hour of the night. 
 
 Acrobats were tumbling, musicians were braying, the dancers 
 were flying faster and faster, the swift crackers were running 
 along the stones like stars, the buyers and sellers were raising 
 shriller and shriller their clamour, the winners at the lottery 
 were darting hither and thither triumphant, hugging their 
 prizes of wines and capons and kerchiefs a)id sugar-loaves ; and 
 every now and then, amidst the noise and uproar, there would 
 come a sweet, short ripple from a lute that broke in the air like 
 sea spray ; or there would pass through the crowd young, bare- 
 footed, with dreaming eyes that saw heaven afar off, and were 
 blind to all the stir aronnd him, some monk, with the head of 
 Fra Angelico. 
 
 For in Italy life is all contrast, and there is no laugh and 
 love-song without a sigh beside them ; there is no velvet mask 
 of mirth and passion without the marble mask of art and death 
 near to it. For everywhere the wild tulip burns red upon a 
 "uined altar, and everywhere the blue borage rolls its azure 
 craves through the silent temples of forgotten gods. 
 
 As I stood against the stone figure of old Taddeo, a man went 
 by me swiftly, laughing, and chased by the people. He was clad 
 in the gay and many-coloured dress of the Neapolitan Pulcinello, 
 bound, no doubt, later on, for the Yeglione. 
 
 He had a scourge of bladders and little gilded bells in hi? 
 hand, and he struck his pursuers deftly, casting amongst them 
 wild words of the shrewd Tuscan wit that is sharp and silver 
 like the leaf of the Tuscan olive. 
 
 The people flew after him, laughing, tumbling, shouting, 
 
WITH THE WILD CROCUS. ^IOQ 
 
 frolicking, and as they chased him called out, " Pascarello ! 
 Pascal!!" 
 
 It was he who had given me the onyx. It was my Borneo of 
 Verona, my Florindo of the scarlet plume, and unconsciously I 
 sprang forward and tried to touch him as he flew. 
 
 Alas ! it was in vain. 
 
 He passed me like the wind, and caught a girl of the Casen- 
 tino about the waist, and whirled her into the maze of the 
 waltzing. He did not notice me where I leaned in the grey 
 shadow of old Gaddi ; and I soon lost him from sight in tho 
 mass of blending hues, and the strange chiaroscuro of that 
 shadowy ballroom, with its torch lights flaming amongst its 
 banners and the blue night sky for its roof. 
 
 A sense of deadly dullness and of blank disappointment stole 
 over me. 
 
 He was but a stranger, and I had seen his face but twice, and 
 yet I was stung to a passionate grief and humiliation to think 
 that he had passed me by and gone to fling about in the wild 
 dancing that black-browed, red-kirtled contadina. 
 
 The beauty and the frolic of the fiera were all over for me. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 WITH THE WILD CROCUS. 
 
 I LEFT it with my eyes dim and my heart beating fast with a 
 sickening pain ; left it in the height of its revelry, the people 
 streaming in faster and faster to join the merriment and tako 
 their chance at the lottery. 
 
 I bad no knowledge whither to go or where best to rest the 
 night. I moved across the piazza without quite well knowing 
 where I went, and casting one look behind me at the Juditk 
 where she knit her dark brows in scorn against the folly of it 
 all, I left the square by a little dusky passage way. 
 
 Some man accosted mo as I turned into the gloom, but I 
 liurried on, my hood well over my face, and he was in haste to 
 reach the UiEzi and let me pass. In the street that is named of 
 the vine I saw a little homely-looking hostelry called the Silver 
 Melon. I was very tired and sad now that the excitement of my 
 entry into the city had passed by. I asked them if I could have 
 
1 10 PASCAR&L. 
 
 a bed there, and when they assented I crept up to the little 
 chamber that they offered me, and, after a little space, criod 
 myself to sleep with the shouts of the populace and the strains of 
 the music in the .gallery hard by keeping the air astir all night 
 and minglicg with my dreams. - 
 
 When the daylight came, a certain hope and gladness came to 
 me with it. 
 
 There was so much to see in this, wondrous city, and I was so 
 young, and, after all, things would surely go well with me. 
 
 The people had always said that I was fair to see ; and those 
 who knew had told me that I had a fortune in my voice. After 
 all, I was in Florence, and I had a dozen broad florins in gold, 
 and I was a child, and I was not afraid. 
 
 When I had broken my fast, I left my little load of clothes in 
 pledge of my return, and went, 
 
 " Where, white and wide, 
 Washed by the morning's water-gold, 
 Florence lay out on the mountain side." 
 
 It was past ten by the clocks and belfries, and a flood of sun- 
 light streamed on the Yaldarno. In its delicious brilliance I 
 moved on and on and on, enthralled, entranced, in rapture ot 
 the present, in meditation of the past. 
 
 " River, and bridge, and street, and square, 
 Lay mine, as much at my beck and call, 
 Through the live translucent bath of air, 
 As the sights in the Magic crystal ball." 
 
 And of my magic crystal I was never tired. 
 
 All the town was astir, eager to make the uttermost of the 
 last days of Carnival. The bells were ringing madly, in as 
 much tumult and confusion of metal tongues as ever called the 
 Trades together in the old days for a raid upon Oltrarno. The 
 long, covered gallery of the Medician tyranny hung in the air 
 like a black cloud. I thought of the day when to build it they 
 had pierced through the cobbler's dwelling, and had laid bare to 
 the tyrant's eyes the beauty of Camilla Martelli. One eeema to 
 gee her sitting there in the little, dusky den, with the smell of 
 the leather and the tic-tac of the shoemaker's hammer, her only 
 companionship all through the wear}'- hours, until the crash of 
 the axes and mallets broke down the wall of the chamber, and, 
 with the flood of the daylight, let in so wondrous a blaze of 
 changed fortune. Beneath it, on the old bridge, the penthouses 
 
WITH THE WILD CROCUS* III 
 
 of the jewellers and of the workers in gold and silver sparkled 
 with colour and glistened with treasure, whilst the men and the 
 mules pushed by, and to right and left through the arches shone 
 the sunny stretch of the river, the trireme-like group of the 
 hoats cutting sharply and darkly against the gold. I thought of 
 that awful morning when over that bridge there had ridden the 
 gay young bridegroom of Buondelmonte, with the white garland 
 on his golden locks, whilst at the feet of the statue of Mars the 
 avengers had waited with naked blades and souls set hard on 
 the slaughter. One seemed to hear the shiver of the steel against 
 the marriage jewels, and to watch the Easter lilies fall, trampled 
 on the blood-red stones. 
 
 Everywhere the people were about, they had danced till day- 
 dawn at the Yeglione and the Fiera, what of that? they tossed 
 down a little red wine, and fastened new signal ribbons to their 
 shoulders, and swept out in troops into the sunshine, ready 
 again for the masquing and motley. There were bursts of 
 music ; notes of mandolines ; ripples of laughter ; chattering at 
 all street corners; great clusters of scented roses torn from 
 castello walls beyond the gates ; sweet clusters of rosy cyclamen 
 blushing faintly like sea-shells ; baskets of yellow muscat grapes 
 and great black figs, and the red hearts of cut pomegranates. 
 And above all the warmth and stir, and glare, and mirth, and 
 tumult, there rose the spiritual beauty of towers and spires, such 
 as sculptors see in cities of their dreams, and on the high 
 standards there flashed the scarlet cross of Florence that once had 
 burned triumphant above even the walls of Home herself. 
 
 It was past noon as I came out on 'to the river's side, and saw 
 to right and left of me, far as the eye could strain, the lovely 
 reaches of the sun-burnished water, the near hills silver with 
 olive, dark with ilex and cypress, and, far, far away, the green 
 plains, the lines of Lombard poplars, the golden sea of light, the 
 purple shadows of the mountains, sown with their countless vil- 
 lages and villas as a lake with the whiteness of its summer lilies. 
 
 So near they looked, so ethereal, so worthy to be some mystic 
 border land of Paradise, those soft Apennine and Carrara ranges, 
 lying fold on fold in their loveliness, that my steps were irre- 
 sistibly drawn towards them until I had passed out through one 
 of the city gates, and was in a wooded place upon the river, 
 with deep ilex shadows above my head, and near me thickets of 
 acacia, with their budding branches quivering in the light ; and 
 in the distance always those soft dreamy hues of the Carrara 
 marble flashing in the noonday sun. 
 
U2 VASCAR&L. 
 
 Then, being tirtd and warm, I sat down upon a stone bench 
 where the trees grew very thickly and bordered a meadow sown 
 at every step with crocuses, until the grass was pale and purple 
 with them. 
 
 I did not think what was likely to become of me, nor of how 
 little probable it was that I should find trace of my father and 
 of Florio. I was only dreamily kappy, half-stupidly conscious 
 of the charm of the soft southern air and the spell of the stretching 
 mountains. 
 
 All was quite still : a rabbit scudded swiftly amongst tho 
 crocuses, nibbling here and there : a hawk flew by : beyond the 
 canes that grew thick by the water there were some sweet bells 
 ringing away there where the grey shadows of Monte Murello 
 sloped upwards against the sun. 
 
 After a while an old creature with a basket full of Roman 
 lilies and Parma violets, came across the place where I sat. She 
 cast some lilies into my lap, and called me her dear eignorina, 
 and begged of me a coin for the love of God. 
 
 " What bells are those?" I asked her, lifting the lilies, with 
 their long green leaves, doubtfully, for I was too poor to buy 
 them. 
 
 "Perretola, dear signora," she said, sadly. "I was born 
 there eighty years ago. It is hard to live eighty years only to 
 sell flowers for a bit of bread. It is a little place. Step out, 
 and you can see it across the vines. Yes, the bells are fine. 
 They rang when I was married. I thought marriage a fine 
 thing. He was a worker in stone. He got into trouble in the 
 old Duke's time when the Trench were about the place ; and was 
 in prison, and what not ; as if married men should do aught but 
 find charcoal to boil the soup-pot but it was the way of them 
 all at that time. And now he is dead ; dead a matter of twenty - 
 five year, and we are no nearer all the fine free things he used 
 to be mad to talk of, at least so they prate ; and I sell lilies for 
 a bit of bread. It was better in the old Duke's time better in 
 the old Duke's time so I say." 
 
 Poor soul ! It was " better in the old Duke's time " to her. 
 To her, nothing the liberties of Italy, the rise of the People, the 
 expulsion of the Gaul, the rebound from bondage into aspiration 
 and free-drawn broath. It was " better in the Duke's time" 
 when she had had youth and health, and love and dreams, away 
 there where the bells were ringing in the white village just across 
 the vines. 
 
 I felt sorry for her. she was so old, so old and to stand in tho 
 
\V1TH THE WILD CROCUS. II 3 
 
 un when one was as old as that, and hear the very bells that 
 once rung in one's bridal hour, and find no music in them, but- 
 only desire to mumble a crust in one's toothless jaws it seemed 
 horrible to me, very horrible. 
 
 " Give me something some little something, dear signorina," 
 she murmured, holding out her withered hands. " The lilies 
 die so soon in the sun, and I have walked in from Perretola 
 without bit or drop ! " 
 
 Wisely or unwisely, my heart was won. I slid my hand into 
 the little leathern pouch bound round my waist by a thong, in 
 which all my little worldly store was kept. Oh Dio ! the horror 
 of that moment. The purse was empty ! 
 
 In lieu of touching coin either of gold or of copper, my fingers 
 slid down the bag, meeting nothing in their way. I sprang to 
 my feet with a scream ; I tore the pouch off my girdle ; I pulled 
 it inside out with the horrible vehemence of a deadly terror ; not 
 so much as a brazen scudo fell upon the ground. In the 
 chamois leather there was a straight slit, as though cut through 
 by a knife : the pouch was empty. UTo doubt I had been robbed 
 the previous night in the press of the Carnival Fair. 
 
 I did not cry out ; I stood like a frozen thing, in cold, gazing 
 at my empty hands. The sunshiny country reeled before me ; 
 the white road seemed to heave to and fro like a sea. Every- 
 thing was sickly, and blinding, and unreal. 
 
 I knew the meaning of poverty too well not to measure in one 
 moment the whole extent of the ruin that befell me. Tho old 
 contadina stood still and looked at me, appalled, no doubt, by 
 the despair of my face and of my attitude. 
 
 "The signorina has nothing?" she stammered, thinking, 
 doubtless, poor wretch, of her own empty hearth and her own 
 aching hunger. The words broke the spell of the terror that 
 kept me motionless and silent. 
 
 "Kothing ! " I echoed, and I know I laughed aloud laughed 
 wildly, in riotous hilarity, in my unutterable horror. " Nothing 
 nothing nothing in all the whole world. My God !" 
 
 Then I threw myself down prostrate at the foot of the marble 
 bench, whilst the old peasant, aghast and bewildered, stood and 
 looked on, silent and appalled. I could not speak nor weep ; I 
 felt as though some huge stone had been flung on me and had 
 stretched me half dead beneath its weight. 
 
 "With my little store of golden florins, I had felt myself strong 
 enough and hopeful enough to meet all accidents of life and 
 Vanquish them, but, penniless, I was nerveless, hopeles% 
 
114 PASCAK&L 
 
 homeless. The extremity of my dire despair stifled me, as 
 though some suffocating hand were at my throat. 
 
 Alone, without a coin in the world .0 get me bread ! I thought 
 how much more mercy the robber of my little all would surely 
 have shown to me if only he had drawn his knife across my throat. 
 
 I do not know how long I lay there, crushed and stunned, 
 down on the beautiful crocus-filled grass of the pasture. 
 
 The old woman stooped and touched me gently. 
 
 "Have you, indeed, nothing, signorina? Is it stolen, or 
 what ? Do not lie like that you frighten me." 
 
 I raised my head, and looked at her. A mist swam before rny 
 eyes. The whole green expanse of the meadow eddied giddily 
 rJcout me like a whirlpool. But in the midst of my misery a 
 vague remembrance of how bitterly I must have disappointed 
 her arose to me; she was not poorer than I was now; but then 
 she was so old. 
 
 "I am. sorry," I murmured, brokenly, " sorry for youj but 
 they have robbed me I have nothing in the world." 
 
 The poor old creature sighed; to her also the blow was ; heavy. 
 She had argued from my face and my youth some liberal gift. But 
 the generous and tender heart of her country beat in her withered 
 breast. 
 
 " Nevermind, dear signorina," she said softly, " you wished 
 to give; Our Lady will remember it to you just the same just 
 the same. And you love the lilies." 
 
 She laid another cluster of the flowers on my lap as she turned 
 away. Poor soul ! I hope that act has been remembered to her 
 likewise. 
 
 How Italian it was ! the little simple sunny kindness done in 
 all the darkness of poverty and age and pain. 
 
 I could not speak to her again; vacantly I watched her 
 figure, brown and crooked, pass across the blossoming meadow in 
 the full blaze of the shadowless light. No doubt she went to 
 sell her lilies at the gates. 
 
 On the road, which ran through trees beyond the field with 
 all the vast panorama of the Apennines unrolled along its length, 
 I saw a bullock- waggon creeping towards me, and farther yet a 
 little cloud of people, bright against the sun as gold-winged 
 demoizelle. 
 
 Instinctively, to avoid sight or sound, I rose and wandered into 
 the wood which bordered the meadow ; it was of ilex and pine, 
 jiusky even at noon. I plunged into its shadow, holding tho 
 ULies to my aching heart. 
 
WITH THE WILD CROCUS tlS 
 
 I moved on and on through the trees, unconscious of what I 
 did, until I struck my breast against the trunk of a tall fir with 
 a shock that brought me to sharp consciousness of where I was. 
 I sat down beneath its shade, wounded by the momentary pain. 
 
 I was all alone. I looked around me with a curious sense at 
 once of apathy and desperation. I knew not what I feared ; but 
 I feared everything I in whose daring eyes, a moment earlier, 
 all heaven and earth had seemed to smile in the smile of 
 Florence, 
 
 I dropped my head upon my hands, and crouched there at the 
 foot of the pine. I sobbed as though my very heart would break. 
 
 As I sat thus there came the little white scudding figure of a 
 scampering dog; he ran before a little troop of people; they 
 all stopped at some distance from me at the end of one of the 
 aisles of pine. 
 
 They were talking and laughing gaily. I could hear the in- 
 distinct bubble of their mirthful chatter ; they had three dogs 
 with them and a monkey ; they threw themselves on the grass, 
 and took some food and wine from a basket, and one of them 
 built up a fire with dry sticks ; all the while the dogs frisked, the 
 men laughed, the woman sang little fresh passages of song; they 
 were all so glad and so gay, it seemed to make my misery un- 
 endurable. 
 
 The sun came down on them where they were stretched upon 
 the turf; I sat alone in the shadow. I saw them ; they seemed 
 not to sco me. 
 
 They had no doubt come out to breakfast in the Cascine woods, 
 as Florentines will do on spring and summer days. 
 
 They seemed gay as the grilli in the grasses, and their dress 
 was light and full of sunny hues ; and from the broad hats of 
 the men long scarlet ribbons floated. 
 
 They had only bread and herbs, and some purple wine ; but 
 their laughter all the while was like a rippling brook, and they 
 seemed not to know nor to want any better or fairer thing under 
 heaven than thus " in sweet Valdarno to forget the day in twi- 
 light of the ilex/' 
 
 They had a lute with them, and now and then one of them, 
 the one who seemed leader amongst them, sang to it. His voice 
 had the clear, sonorous, far-reaching vibration, like the chords 
 of some stringed instrument, that belongs alone to Italian voices. 
 
 I sat there in a sort of stupefaction, listening to them, wonder- 
 ing dully how much longer the sun would only fall on other 
 people and the gloom alone be mine. The slow tears dropped 
 
 It 
 
lid 
 
 down my cheeks ; my sobs had ceased ; I had passed into the 
 passive exhaustion of a great grief. 
 
 After awhile I think they caught sight of me, for they 
 whispered together in lower tones. The woman with them rose 
 and came towards me a little pretty figure, plump as a little 
 rabbit, blue, light, and gay, with twinkling feet and a small 
 brown face under the lace headgear of Genoa, that seemed to 
 me as bright and rosy as any tulip-bell amongst the wheat in 
 Maytime. 
 
 She came towards me with a fresh charming grace, and paused 
 before me. 
 
 " The signorina does not seem happy," she said, hesitatingly. 
 " Has anything gone ill ? " 
 
 I could not speak to her ; I was ashamed and full of pride. I 
 tried for her not to see the tears that were wet upon my 
 face. 
 
 "I am sure there is something ill," she persisted. "The 
 donzella is weeping, raid all alone ; if she would tell us, perhaps 
 we might help ? " 
 
 I turned my face to the trunk of the pine ; but I could not 
 keep from her sight the great mute sob that shook me from head 
 to foot as I leaned there. 
 
 Perhaps it frightened her, for she was silent some time, though 
 she did not move away; then, turning a little, she called to her 
 companions. 
 
 I heard the step of a man brush through the grasses and ap- 
 proach her. 
 
 " Speak to her, caro mio," said the girl, in a low voice. " There 
 must be something amiss with her, I am sure and she so young 
 too ! only a child ! " 
 
 " If the signorina will not speak we can do nothing," said the 
 voice of the man. It was very rich and flute-like. It was he 
 who had sung the songs to the lute. 
 
 It conquered my pride. I turned and answered without look- 
 ing at him. 
 
 " I had only twelve gold florins in all the world," I cried, ia 
 the despair of my heart. "And they have taken them, every 
 one every one 1 " 
 
 "Who have taken them?" 
 
 " A thief how can I tell? In the fiera, last night, it must 
 surely have been. They were safe when I came into Florence, 
 and now see here ! " 
 
 I turned and showed them my poor little slit pouch. I did 
 
WITH THE WILD CROCUS. II? 
 
 not look up in the face of the speaker, for my eyes were blinded 
 by their rain of tears. 
 
 He took the bag and examined it. 
 
 " Cut through with a knife, no doubt/' he said, after awhile. 
 "And you are very sad for the loss of this money, signorina? 
 Someone will scold you if you go home without it, is that it ? " 
 
 "Oh no!" I cried with a fresh passion of weeping that I 
 could not repress. " If it were only that ! It is all I have in 
 the world, I tell you all all all ! " 
 
 "But your friends?" 
 
 "I have none." 
 
 " What ! You were adrift on the world with twelve florins 
 you?" 
 
 "Yes. Why not? I have no one to give me anything. I 
 made that money honestly; it was all mine. It would have 
 lasted me till I should have got to Borne. And now I have not 
 a farthing in the world not one not one. I can sing a little, 
 indeed, but then I promised Mariuccia never to sing in the 
 streets, and I dare not break my word, for she is dead, you know. 
 And I am all alone here in Florence. I do not know a soul. 
 And my brothers are all dead ; and no one can tell where my 
 father is. But nothing of that frightened me so long as I had 
 the money. But now I am frightened, oh Mother of God ! for I 
 have nothing in all the world, you see ; I must jusfc starve and 
 die ; perhaps even they will not believe what I say, but will 
 take me for a thief, when they find that I have nothing ! And if 
 I had only died in Bologna ! " 
 
 The passionate stream of the words had coursed from my 
 tongue unbroken when once my pride had given way and found 
 a refuge in speech ; when my voice dropped in very weariness I 
 stood before them heart-broken and striving with my piteous 
 sense of shame; my cheeks burned dry my scorching tears, and 
 my sobs died silent in my throat. 
 
 The man standing above under the ilex leaves laughed, but 
 the laughter was tender and gentle. 
 
 " All nonsense, nonsense, cara mia ! " he cried lightly. " No 
 one ever dies in Bologna that can help it. It is not pleasant, 
 you see, to be walled up in a square of bricks, and labelled dis- 
 mally in the lump, with a thousand other ' vagabondij or ' ladri,' 
 or * briccdni,' just as it may please the good town complimentarily 
 to classify you. Take heart, signorina, and come and breakfast 
 with us. Your gold florins, after all, may perhaps have been 
 left at the house you slept is-r-whp knows ? You nmy 
 
Il8 PASCAR&L. 
 
 or the thief may repent, or be found out, which is indeed the 
 same thing. Come along and see my dogs, and taste my wine, 
 if there he any left. Do not be afraid of us ; we are none of us 
 very respectable perhaps, except the dogs, but we will do you no 
 harm." 
 
 Something in his voice and laugh, something of silvery re- 
 sounding clearness, " com? il dolce suonar (Puna lira" ringing on a 
 metal plate, thrilled through my heart familiar and full of solace. 
 I dashed the blinding mist from my eyes, and my falling hair from 
 my forehead, and gazed up at him breathless and entranced. 
 
 " And you never came the next day ! " I cried to him in 
 passionate reproach. " And you never saw me last night ! DC 
 you not know me now ? I have kept one of the roses look !" 
 
 I took out of the folds of my dress one of the dead white roses 
 of Yerona. His face flushed darkly ; he laughed ; but his beau- 
 tiful eyes looked dim. 
 
 How had I been a moment without knowing him? partly, 
 because absorbed in the terror of my grief I had paid hardly any 
 heed to anything around me ; chiefly because on the two nights 
 when I had seen him he had been disguised in the gay masque- 
 rade of the carnival costumes. 
 
 And yet his was a face not commonly seen, nor once seen 
 lightly forgotten ; the Cinque Cento face, the face of the old 
 llenaissance when the features of men bore the reflex of the 
 artistic and heroical life which was in its full flower in their 
 midst. The face with aquiline outline, dreaming lids, thought- 
 ful brows ; profoundly melancholy in repose, and in mirth gay 
 as a young child's; with eyes sad as death, and a smile frank as 
 sunlight ; the face which is the most historical and purely idealic 
 of all human countenances. 
 
 Be the reason what it may, lie as it will in climate, race, or 
 breeding, it is a fact that the Italian physiognomy retains, as no 
 other nation's does, the impression of the past upon it. 
 
 The noble comes to you down the bare stone galleries of his 
 old palace, and it is still the noble of Tintoretto and Tiziano that 
 salutes you with that cold and lofty grace, which can change at 
 will to the joyous and caressing softness of a woman. The 
 peasant of the contado flings his brown mantle across his mouth 
 to screen himself from the mountain blast in the market place, 
 and it is still the model of Angelo and of Sarto that laughs aloud 
 from those glancing -teeth, and saunters through the braying 
 mules and bleating kids with those supple asd sinewy limbs, and 
 that unconscious harmony of gesture. 
 
THE GREA T MAGICIAN. 1 1 9 
 
 Were it not too fanciful one would say that those great 
 lenturies, while they gave an immortal soul to the pagan graces 
 of art and produced human genius in its most complex and com- 
 plete form, had so entered into the blood and bone of these 
 people that their influence is deathless. The sun of that won- 
 drous summer noon of art has set indeed ; but the after-glow of 
 its rays shines still in the regard of the living sons of Italy. 
 
 Such a face was this which had laughed on me in the moon- 
 light in the streets of Verona, and now in gentle compassion was 
 before me in the City of Lilies. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE GBEAT MAGICIAN. 
 
 I SLID the rose back into its hiding-place a little shyly. The 
 black-eyed girl was gazing at me with wide-parted, astonished 
 lips, and a little jealous wonder in her eyes. 
 
 " And you never knew me, last night ? " I murmured to him, 
 " Last night I almost touched you, and you never saw " 
 
 "Last night! no;" said he frankly. "When I go mad at 
 the Carnival fair, I know nothing and nobody. But to-day, 
 donzella, oh yes, I recognised you the instant you sat dowc 
 under the cypress. That you have a genius for adventure 
 is self-evident. How come you here all this way over the 
 mountains?" 
 
 " But you never kept your promise ! " I cried to him, intent 
 on my one especial wrong. 
 
 "But you never came to me!" I cried to him, "You onlj 
 sent the roses ! " 
 
 "]N"o, for the best of all reasons, signorina," said he, with * 
 smile. " I had talked sedition that day, or so the stranieri coib 
 strued it. I had lashed thy people with more than bladders- 
 and had salted their soup with more than jokes; and to crowri 
 it all, in the Yeglione, after I left you that night, I made an 
 harangue which to Austrians' ears savoured of downright treason. 
 So, in the grey of the daybreak, as I went home singing and 
 dreaming no evil, the good Tedeschi seized hold of me, and 
 marched me out of the gates, and gave me not a second to pack 
 my knapsack or send a word to my people, but set off with me 
 
120 PASCARkL. 
 
 for the frontier in the sleet and the teeth of the wind. They 
 were fifty to one, so there had been no sense in resistance. 
 Hard by the gates I spied a flower-shop, just opening its shutters ; 
 I asked the soldiers to let me stop and light my sigaretto. Then 
 I picked out a knot of roses, the best I could see, and paid for 
 them, and bade them take them to you. I am glad they did so 
 honestly. It was very cold tramping across Lombardy, at a 
 horse's tail, in that ilorindo masquing dress, which looked 
 absurd enougli in the midst of the grey and white plain ; and it 
 snowed hard, and the tramontana blew like a knife, but the 
 sharpest thing about it to me was the thought that you would 
 believe I had broken my promise." 
 
 He smiled a little as he spoke, that wondrous Italian smile 
 which has so much mirth in it, so much tenderness, so much 
 pathos. Surely that smile of Italy is the loveliest thing left in 
 all the width and weariness of the world ! 
 
 Something in his accent made me turn and gaze at him. I 
 breathed quickly in a happy excitation. 
 
 " Then you had not forgotten me really ? " I cried. " I thought 
 you had; I quite thought you had last night." 
 
 He laughed. 
 
 " Certainly not. I knew you, cara mia, at my first glance at 
 you under the cypress yonder. You sang too well in Verona 
 that day to be forgotten, and that wonderful black and gold 
 dress, and your hands full of the Carnival roses, and that hair of 
 yours with all the yellow lights in it ; yes, I saw you, and a 
 pretty picture you made, that I grant I should have stayed a 
 little to find you out; but your Tedesco friends and I have no 
 love for one another. They say I excite the people. So I was 
 fain to go out of Verona, not knowing your name, signorina." 
 
 " They have not stolen the onyx," I cried, breathless, stand- 
 ing still with the red sun in my eyes, whilst I tore the little silk 
 cord from about my throat and drew the ring from its hiding- 
 place. 
 
 A flush of pleasure swept, like light, over his expressive face. 
 
 " Ah-ah ! you kept that stupid thing? Too large and clumsy 
 for your pretty little fingers, and no use to you at all. What 
 did you do with the rest of the treasures ? You had a fine lap- 
 ful that morning." 
 
 " I gave them away," I said, dreamily, not very well knowing 
 what he said, gazing at him in the lustre of that crimson flash oi 
 the red and fading light in which we both were standing. 
 
 The little plump brpwn rabbit of a maiden peepe4 with fyer 
 
THE GREAT MAGICIAN. 121 
 
 pretty, shy, raven -like eyes over my shoulder : she saw the ring 
 with the Fates. 
 
 " Why, Pascarel, that is your onyx," she cried to him; "the 
 onyx you lost in Verona that first day of the Carnival when I 
 was not with you, you remember ?" 
 
 Pascarel looked a little impatient. 
 
 "Did I ever tell you I lost it? At any rate the don2ella 
 found it, and it is hers now by every law of possession. Cara 
 mia, those dismal old immutable Parcae do not look fit dispensers 
 of the Future to you" 
 
 " Would you not have it again?" I murmured, seeing that 
 he now wore no ring. 
 
 He repulsed it with a sort of gentle impatience. 
 
 ""Would you insult me because I am poor? Keep it, signo- 
 rina; though it be a grim and gloomy fashion of gift to 
 you." 
 
 I hardly heard him, I was so bewildered at his recognition of 
 ni? I slipped the onyx fondly back within my dress. I looked 
 at him, glad and astonished. 
 
 " How strange it is ! " I murmured. 
 
 "Forse il destino!" hummed Pascarel, in a soft mezza voce, 
 as if in answer. 
 
 "Do you believe in destiny ?" I asked him, wistfully, in a 
 little awe. 
 
 "To be sure!" he answered me. "But it is always femi- 
 nine, cara mia, whatever our grammarians may say to the con- 
 trary. And, now, will you tell me your story a little ? " 
 
 What could he be, I wondered, ceaselessly ; of what grade, 
 what habits, what pursuit ? A scholar in every accent, a gentle- 
 man in every gesture, with the pure inflexions of voice, with the 
 slender delicacy of form, with the indescribable ease and indiffer- 
 ence of manner which only come of birth and of breeding, he 
 lived solely, as it seemed, amongst the populace ; his white lineu 
 garments were worn and threadbare; his meal was of the 
 simplest and most frugal; and his companions were nothing 
 more than populace, little more indeed than vagrants. 
 
 Perhaps he caught and understood the speculative wonder in 
 my gaze at him. At any rate, what could he be I wondered. 
 He did not leave me long in doubt. 
 
 " We are strolling players, at your service," he said, with his 
 bright laugh, casting himself down beside me. " She who was 
 BO terrified about you is called Brunotta; that short lad with th(? 
 round liead is little Toccb; and the other one owns the tims- 
 
1 22 PASCAR&L. 
 
 honoured name of Cocomero. The three poodles are Pepito, 
 Pepita, and Toto. The monkey is Pantagruel. Toto in especial 
 is the star of my troop. Now you know us all. As for me, I 
 am Pascarello or Pascarel. If you are not afraid of such disrepu- 
 table companionship, will you narrate us something of your own 
 history, signorina?" 
 
 He had made me drink a little of his red Chiante wine and 
 break a crust of bread ; it was a solace only to be able to speak of 
 my immense calamity; I told him willingly all my story, warm- 
 ing to the recital of my woes and of my wrongs. 
 
 He listened, stretched on the grass and leaning on one elbow ; 
 the girl Bruno tta lent an eager ear, her little round brown face 
 flushing and growing pale in sympathy; the two lads leaned 
 against a tree open-mouthed and breathless ; flattered by my in- 
 terested and reverential audience, I grew a little calmer under 
 my loss, and waxed more and more fluent in the narrative of my 
 sad adventures. 
 
 My tale ended, Pascarel sent the youth, whom he had called 
 Cocomero, into the city to acquaint the guardia with the theft, 
 and make inquiries at the laeanda ; that done, he threw himself 
 again upon the turf. I wondered if he were . sorry for me he 
 h<td not said so. All the ejaculations of sorrow and compassion 
 had been Bruno tta's. 
 
 I was full of passionate sorrow for myself; the sight of these 
 light-hearted people only made ray sense of utter desolation 
 weigh the heavier upon me ; when the excitement of the relation 
 of my miseries had passed away, a very horror of despondency 
 possessed me; and, without reasoning very much upon it, to 
 find my Borneo of the Yeglione nothing more than a hedge' 
 comedian cast a shadow of bitter disappointment over th& 
 romance of my vague dreams. 
 
 "So you are absolutely all alone, cara mia?" said Pascarel, 
 bending his luminous eyes down on mine. 
 
 "All alone yes! " 
 
 " And if we cannot find this thief, have not a copper paul in 
 all the world?" 
 
 " I have told you so ! " I cried with a desperation of pain at 
 being driven to repeat my degradation. 
 
 " Altro ! " he said, breathing gently that wonderful expletive 
 which comprehends in itself every shade and variety of human 
 emotion. 
 
 " Do you know what it is to be all alone and penniless in this 
 best of all possible worlds?" he said, slowly, cruelly, as I 
 
THE GREAT MAGICIAN. 123 
 
 tiiought. I almost burst out sobbing afresh under the torture 
 of the question. 
 
 " If I do no harm, can I be hurt ? " I asked, wistfully looking 
 in his face. 
 
 He laughed, in a kindly compassion. 
 
 " Ah ! if one does no harm, it goes very ill indeed with one in 
 this world. "We are suspected for ever ! " 
 
 In the stupefaction of my sorrow the irony was too fine to 
 reach me. 
 
 " Is it right to do wrong, then, ever ? " I asked, bewilderedly ; 
 for I knew that Mariuccia had been my only teacher, and that 
 she, poor soul ! had known nothing of the world. Besides, in 
 Ainbrogio's story, was it not liothwald who had done the wrong, 
 yet who had thriven?" 
 
 " There is only one thing, wrong in the world poverty," 
 ans wered. my jaew friend briefly. - 
 
 "It is much the same in the country too," the little Brunotta 
 murmured. 
 
 " Assuredly," said the player, stretched on his back in the 
 sun. "The country is only human nature washed in butter- 
 milk ; the town is human nature soaked in brandy." 
 
 " Why will you talk as though you were a cynic, Pascarel ? " 
 said Brunotta in petulant expostulation. 
 
 He held up the ragged sleeve of his old white jacket; it had 
 been, I saw, of finest and silkiest thibetti. 
 
 "Every one is a cynic who has a hole at his elbow," ho 
 answered her. 
 
 " But as if you cared ! " 
 
 He laughed, and pinched her pretty rosy ear. 
 
 "We do not care; but then we are very disreputable. All 
 respectable people care. It is only scamps who smile." 
 
 " A smiling scamp is better than a frowning miser," said the 
 girl ; and she set the two white dogs, Pepito and Pepita, to waits 
 round with each other, whilst she waltzed too, singing a dance 
 tune, down the avenue. 
 
 Pascarel sprang up and caught her round the waist, and set him- 
 self whirling likewise ; the boy with the fiddle struck out a wild 
 waltz measure : the dogs capered, the monkey chattered loud, 
 the man and the girl span round and round laughing, with their 
 hands on each other's shoulders, and their feet flying like leaves 
 clown in circles by the wind, 
 
 The fiddle grew louder and wilder and faster ; the ape screamed 
 in chorus; the dogs jumped over each other and sank panting on 
 
124 PASCARkL. 
 
 the ground. Pasearel and Brunotta danced and danced and 
 danced, with the grass beneath them and the leaves above, and 
 every now and then a blaze of sunshine catching the blue tassels 
 at her skirt and the scarlet ribbons on his hat. 
 
 Then, at last, exhausted and laughing, and panting like their 
 dogs, they cast one another aside, and dropped down on the turf 
 in the shadow. 
 
 " How well it is to be poor ! " cried Pascarel. " If we were 
 dukes and duchesses we could not scamper like that in a wood ! 
 we could only go masked, in the gas, to an opera ball." 
 
 As he spoke he laughed, and fanned himself and her with a 
 sheaf of chesnut leaves. I, sitting alone in the depth of the 
 shadow from the cypress, watched them, wondering, and envying 
 their glad content. 
 
 Brunotta of the bird-like eyes seeing me sitting there alone in 
 the dark, rose and crossed to me, and touched me again gently. 
 
 "Pascarel says it is always well for those who love to be 
 poor?" she whispered. 
 
 I shivered a little. The double trouble was mine, to be poor 
 without any love to help me under it. 
 
 " If both are content, perhaps/' I murmured aloud. But I 
 was very doubtful. 
 
 "He is; I don't say I see it so myself," said the little 
 player, as she dropped down by me and wove a plait of grasses, 
 and talked in a cheery, quick, babbling voice like the tinkling of 
 a brook; "we are poor so poor but then we are so merry. 
 Pascarel was not always so poor. He is a great comedian; only 
 the people are all he will play to, and he does not care to be 
 great. Coco's father was a Harlequin and never had any money ; 
 and they used to travel much as we do now. He danced for his 
 own bread when he was three years old ; and then, when he 
 grew older, he played. He is eighteen now. Pascarel has a 
 talent such a talenfo I have none. I never did anything until 
 three years ago, except milk the goats and take the insects off 
 the vines, and plait .straw, and spin, of course. I can only hop 
 about. "We have travelled with three or four companies, but 
 Pascarel never could get on with the. directors; one director 
 made love to me ; and another one was cruel to poor little Toto , 
 and a third one failed and ran away in debt to all his troop, and 
 so on and so on ; so we are as we are, and we have a merry life. 
 The two lads and the animals love us, and we go about where 
 we like ; and Pascarel can always make the people laugh, and 
 wp always get enough to live upon; anc} it is nruch bptter 
 
fHE GREAT MAGICIAN. 125 
 
 being at ny tyrant's beck and call ; and now and then we have 
 a holiday in the woods like this. In the winter it is a little 
 harder, of course ; but even then the little towns are bright and 
 frarm, and the people are always glad to be made merry ; and 
 before one has romped through Carnival presto ! the winter ia 
 gone ! A hearty laugh makes one forget that one could eat more 
 maccaroni, and when one's toes are cold in the snow a dance 
 warms them quicker than anything. Sometimes I am sorry 
 Pascarel cares nothing at all to make himself great, because he 
 has such a talent ; and if he were great one would have such 
 good things to eat every day, and fine clothes and real jewels; 
 but he says one should not care for such things but then to be 
 sure he does not trouble his head whether he eats a ciambello or 
 a cucumber, a swan or a sparrow ! But how selfish I am to ran 
 on so ! you are unhappy ? " 
 
 The little actress saw the whiteness that came over the face 
 above her, and paused in the weaving of her braid of grasses, 
 and said softly again : 
 
 " You are so unhappy ? " 
 
 " Of course ; but it does not matter." 
 
 " Yes, it does. Everything seems so unhappy except just 
 Pascarel and myself, and the dogs ; and it is such a pity, in a 
 sunshine like this, when everything ought to live like the cro- 
 cuses, being glad and taking no thought. You are unhappy 
 because you are alone, no doubt. "Will you come with us ? I 
 am sure Pascarel would be glad ! It will be so much better ; 
 and we will not teaze you to know what you do not wish to tell 
 if there is anything " 
 
 " But you know nothing of me " 
 
 The girl laughed. 
 
 "Ah bah! We are not great people that dare not taste a 
 pear till they know what stem it was grafted on. "We are only 
 poor players ; we have nothing to lose ; and if we take a liking 
 to a face we are not afraid of its fellowship. There is so much 
 liberty in being poor, you see ! >J 
 
 "Is there?' 7 
 
 I could not see it; it appeared to me that poverty was an 
 ass's hobble, with which one was tied miserably to one place 
 that we had long browsed bare. 
 
 "It is the difference between an old shirt and a new," said 
 Pascarel, rising and lounging near. " The new is embroidered 
 perhaps, and very white and handsome, no doubt, but it is tight 
 and the stitohes gall $ that shirt is respectable, admirable, and 
 
126 PASCAR&L. 
 
 fit for a palace ; but; comfortable no. The old is ugly maybe, 
 p.nd looks bad, and in it you will not be asked to a noble's table 
 or a bishop's feast ; but it is so easy to wear, and it has so many 
 recollections, that dear old shirt : you pawned it here, and you 
 danced in it there, and pretty fingers darned it in one place, and 
 a rosy-cheeked laundress cobbled it in another ; it is picturesque, 
 it is memorial, it is venerable; above all, it never scratches. 
 Those two shirts are Wealth and Poverty. " 
 
 "Will it not be much better?" said Bruno tta, eagerly inter- 
 rupting him, " much better, if the signorina come with us for a 
 little space ? " 
 
 Pascarel swept the turf with his ribboned sombrero, and 
 declared his willingness in flowery phrases. 
 
 " Only only," he said, at the end of his graceful and gracious 
 sentences, "you forget one thing, Bruno tta. The signorina is 
 gentle-born and gentle-bred j our mode of life would be but a 
 sorry one for her." 
 
 " But what can she do ?" cried the little Bruno tta. 
 
 " Ah ? what, indeed ? " I thought ; and I threw myself down 
 face downwards on the earth in a very paroxysm of despair. 
 
 Pascarel threw one gentle look on me, then turned and 
 walked up arid down under the trees in meditation. 
 
 " Bruxiotta ! " I heard him call: ; : she ' went to him; : afid I 
 heard their" voices, low and earnest," in "conversation at some 
 distance from me, too far away for their meaning to be in- 
 telligible. 
 
 Then they ceased, and all was quite silent in the wood except 
 the joyous and wild bark of the dogs as they chased a bird or a 
 rabbit. I lay still there with my face pressed on the dry, hard 
 earth. 
 
 "If they would only kill me," I thought, " and make an end 
 of it all!" ^ 
 
 A little picture rose before my memory of RafFaelino sitting at 
 the coppersmith's door at sunset playing on his mandoline, while 
 hia mother and Mariuccia gossiped within over the lamp, and 
 the light shone on the huge red coppers, and the stars came out 
 over the dark quiet piazza. 
 
 "Oh, why! oh, why!" I thought, "cannot we know when 
 we are happy ! " 
 
 I would have given away twenty years of my young unspent 
 life only to have been back once more in that old, despised, safe 
 home in the city of Can Grarde ! 
 
 Pascarel aroused me, touching me on the shoulder. 
 
G&EAT MAGICIAN. 127 
 
 Cl Ilisc up, cara mia," lie said, gently. "That is not the way 
 anyhow to get back your florins, or to win yourself new ones." 
 
 I rose as he bade me, and looked him in the face; my own 
 face I felt was white with pain and desperation. 
 
 " I have been very foolish/' I said to him, " and you have 
 been very good ; you are all strangers, and can care nothing for 
 me. I will go now; I thank you very much you and yours." 
 
 I put out my hands to him . in farewell ; his eyes were so 
 beautiful, and he had been so kind, I could hardly keep the 
 tears from flooding my own eyes as I spoke to him, and yet I 
 knew I must not trouble them any longer all strangers as they 
 were. 
 
 Pascarel took my hands and kissed them lightly with the easy 
 grace of all his actions. 
 
 He looked troubled and almost embarrassed. 
 
 "Kot so fast, donzella," he said, gently; "wait awhile; 
 Coco is not back yet with any news, and even if he find your 
 florins, it .cannot be said that you are in very fair case for 
 wandering over the country all alone. See here, we : are not of 
 your grade in life ; we are poor strolling -Bohemians ; we are not, 
 as I tell you, very reputable people, and we are poor as the devil 
 altro ! and yet, if you would like to stay with us as as 
 Brunotta said, it might be safer at any rate for you than to stray 
 about Italy by yourself as helpless as my little Toto would be if 
 I lost him. \Ve are a sorry resort, I know, but perhaps we are 
 better than nothing, and I may be more able to find your father 
 than you. Say, will you wait with us a little ? " 
 
 Ere I could answer him, the youth Cocomero burst through 
 the bushes breathless from having run to and from the town. 
 
 " There is no news," he panted, gloomily. " They knew 
 nothing at the Silver Melon, and the guards say there have been 
 many foreign cutpurses in the city of lato. They have had a 
 score of such robberies this winter." 
 
 Pascarel shrugged his shoulders and lifted his hands with that 
 indescribable gesture in which an Italian expresses consummate 
 disgust and resignation. 
 
 "It is destiny! " he murmured, resting his eyes on me with 
 a look I did not understand. " "Well, signorina mia, will you 
 stay with us ? " 
 
 "I should be glad!" I said, with a little sob in my voice. 
 " It is so horrible so very horrible to be alone ! " 
 
 " Of course it is horrible," he echoed, as he took my hands 
 afresh within his own, and cast himself down upon his knees 
 
t8 
 
 before mfc where I stood, in that easy unstudied abandonment of 
 himself to each impulse and emotion of the moment which makes 
 grace of posture as natural to an Italian as it is to a deer or an 
 antelope. 
 
 "You will stay?" he murmured, still lightly holding my 
 hand in his. " That is well at least for you it shall be well 
 that I swear. Riches we have not, and glory we have not, and 
 the ways of our life will be hard for you. But all that we can 
 do we will." 
 
 " You are very good ! " I said to him, scarcely knowing what 
 indeed to answer him. 
 
 He was a stranger, seen but half an hour before, and yet 
 already he seemed like a familiar friend. 
 
 A shade of sadness and impatience swept over his speaking 
 face. 
 
 " Che-chc ! "Wait to praise us till you know us. "We are good 
 for very little, cara mia. "We will make you laugh sometimes, 
 that I can promise, and perhaps that is much in this life." 
 
 " But if I stay with you? " I said, a sudden fear and remem- 
 brance striking me with its shame, " if I stay I have nothing ; 
 I will not be a burden to you ; never, never ! Is there nothing 
 I can do to get my bread ? My voice is good " 
 
 " Yes ! You sing like all the angels." 
 
 " About the angels I do not know. But anything; 
 always.'* 
 
 " But you are so young " 
 
 " Not too young for that only I promised dear dead Ma- 
 
 riuccia But I will not stay with you unless you tell me of 
 
 Bonie way to get my bread." 
 
 "Bread? JSfonsense! You eat, I dare say, as much as one 
 flings to the swallows. But, if you are in earnest, you might be 
 one of us." 
 
 "A player! I?" 
 
 I echoed the words half in affront, half in delight. My pride 
 rebelled, my fancy was allured. 
 
 " Why not ? " said Pascarel. " Do you know aright what it 
 is to be one?" 
 
 " Surely ! " I answered him, with a little gay contempt had 
 I not seen them scores of times in Verona? "It is to be no 
 longer a man or a woman, but only a mere wooden burattint 
 that has to dance or die, to swagger or shrink, just as its master 
 chooses to make people laugh for a copper coin. A fine thing 
 eertainly!" 
 
THE GREAT MAGICIAN. 129 
 
 Pascarel released my hands and sprang to his feet erect. His 
 mobile face flushed darkly; his changeful eyes flashed fire. 
 
 " Is that all you know ?" he cried, while his voice rang like 
 a trumpet-call. " Listen here, then, little lady, and learn 
 better. "What is it to be a player ? It is this. A thing despised 
 and rejected on all sides ; a thing that was a century since 
 denied what they call Christian burial; a thing that is still 
 deemed for a woman disgraceful, and for a man degrading and 
 emasculate ; a thing that is mute as a dunce save when, parrot- 
 like, it repeats by rote with a mirthless grin or a tearless sob ; a 
 wooden doll, as you say, applauded as a brave puppet in its 
 prime, hissed at in its first hour of failure or decay ; a thing 
 made up of tinsel and paint, and patchwork, of the tailor's shreds 
 and the barber's curls of tow a ridiculous thing to be sure! 
 That is a player. And yet again, a thing without which 
 laughter and jest were dead in the sad lives of the populace ; & 
 thing that breathes the poet's words of fire so that the humblest 
 heart is set aflame; a thing that has a magic on its lips to waken 
 smiles or weeping at its will ; a thing which holds a peoplt 
 silent, breathless, intoxicated with mirth or with awe, as it 
 chooses ; a thing whose grace kings envy, and whose wit great 
 men will steal ; a thing by whose utterance alone the poor can 
 know the fair follies of a thoughtless hour, and escape for a little 
 space from the dull prisons of their colourless lives into the 
 sunlit paradise where genius dwells that is a player, too ! " 
 
 His voice trembled a little over the closing words, and, 
 ashamed of the passionate eloquence into which the sting of my 
 idle slighting phrase had hurried him, he turned away and began 
 tu romp and laugh and gambol with Pepito and Pepita. 
 
 I listened ; ashamed myself; moved, I knew not very well 
 why ; and regretful to think that I had wounded him. 
 
 I waited a little while ; then I went up to him where he 
 stooped over his dogs, and laid my fingers on his arm. 
 
 "I spoke idly," I murmured. "I did not think. And 
 and I will try and be a player too." 
 
 He lifted his head, with a flash of light over all his face, and 
 touched my hand caressingly with his own. 
 
 "Altro!" he said. " It is a fate. Come with us. But as 
 for being a player ; wait and see. You must not choose your 
 future in blind haste." 
 
 Then he bade me sing to him, which I did, and Toccd touched 
 his violin in quaint accord with me ; and Pascarel himself raised 
 the echoes of the wood vith half the popular songs of Italy. 
 
f$0 PASCAR&L. 
 
 So, laughing and singing, and pausing to watch the dogs at 
 play, we idled time away under the black pines and the budding 
 chestnut trees. 
 
 I was only a child ; I was almost happy again. Sometimes 
 I started and wondered if indeed I had been so wretched, there, 
 in that very place, an hour before. 
 
 "Was he a magician, I wondered, this PasearSl ? 
 
 I wQ2 ungrateful to the supremo magician Youth. 
 
BOOK III. 
 
 TUB DAUGHTER OP HERCULES. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 UNDER THE HED LILT. 
 
 THE day rolled onward, growing chill something early, for it 
 Was still but the very first commencement of the spring. 
 
 I seemed to have known them all my life long this little gay, 
 good-humoured hand ; and the poodles frisked and fawned upon 
 me as impartially as on Brunotta. 
 
 She this pretty little brown thing was not jealous of their 
 sudden transference of caresses ; she was about six years older 
 than I a girl of the people, no doubt, but with something so 
 good-natured, so confiding, and so gay about her that one could 
 not choose but trust in her and like her. She was so fond, too, 
 of her brother, that one could see at a glance, and very proud of 
 him, and a little afraid of him also. 
 
 He was very different in mind and manner to her ; though a 
 strolling player, as he said, he had the tone and the temper of a 
 scholar : whilst little Brunotta confessed to me, half in glee, as 
 one who had escaped a gruesome penalty and peril, that, like the 
 padrona's son at the Golden Boar, she knew not her alfabeta. 
 
 What did that matter to me ? 
 
 llaffaelino only knew it just enough to carry him through the 
 offices of the Church: it never seemed to me a science indis- 
 pensable in people ere I took them for my friends, which, no 
 doubt, was a grave error on my part, and due to my running 
 loose in my babyhood amongst these Bohemians at Yerona. 
 
 The shadows and the cold came early in that dusky wood ; we 
 were almost in darkness, whilst the road and the plain were still 
 in full sunlight. Pascarel gave the signal for moving towards 
 the city. 
 
 "We emerged from the ilex groves on to the highway 
 
 k 2 
 
13* PASCAR&L. 
 
 Brunotta and I, Pascarel and his dogs, and the two lads follow* 
 ing us with the monkey and the fiddle. 
 
 " You have seen good players?" he asked me, as we walked 
 on towards Florence, whilst the silver bells of Perretola and the 
 deep toll of the city churches crossed each other ringing the Ave 
 Maria. 
 
 " I have seen the Eurattini hundreds of times, and the Per- 
 sonaggi too, in melodrama," I answered him eagerly, proud of 
 my experience, which was due to Cecco and the rest of the 
 students. 
 
 Pascarel gave his charming gesture of ineffable disdain. 
 
 " Fantoccini and melodrama ! Oh, cara mia ! how much yoa 
 have to learn, and to wwlearn, which is much the harder of 
 the two at all times ! No wonder you think little of the stage," 
 
 I thought that I was willing to be great as Lillo was great, 
 who had had the showers of gold and of lilies in Verona ; but 1 
 could see no possibility of any greatness in a strolling player, as 
 we passed over the white dry road, out of the rosy reflex of the 
 sunset, on into the shadow of the Florentine walls. 
 
 "Even Destiny loses the light out of her hair here," said 
 Pascarel, with a laugh, as we passed into the deep gloom of the 
 Borgognissanti. 
 
 He looked as if he meant to call me Destiny ; but how could 
 I be that, I wondered I who was but a poor little stray leaf 
 blown and buffeted by the hazards of every breeze of fate ? 
 
 As we crossed the Carraia bridge and entered the heart of tho 
 city, into the twisting streets that curve all around the red dome 
 of the Santo Spirito, and the frowning front of the Pitti, we 
 passed by a cobbler's stall planted against the roadway ; the old 
 man, who was stitching at his leather by the aid of a dim 
 lantern, called out gladly to him : 
 
 "Che-che! is it you, Pascarel? You are welcome as figs 
 in summer! " 
 
 Some urchins standing idly near caught up the name ; the 
 street became quite noisy with the cry of " Pascarel ! Pascarfcl ! 
 ecco il Pascarello ! " 
 
 The people were all sitting in their doorways, or half out in 
 the street, after the manner of Italian dwellers and traders, with 
 little lights burning before some pile of faggots, some stall of 
 chestnuts, some tray of amaretti, some stand of pizzicheria fare, 
 or some image of San Giovanni. They incontinently left their 
 trades and their pastimes and clustered round him in vociferous 
 homage whom would he sup with? where would he drink? 
 
UNDER THE RED LILY. 133 
 
 iid he play to-night beyond the Prato Gate ? Beppe and Pippo 
 fowl been fighting in the Sdrucciolo, he had been wanted badly ; 
 had he heard ? who was that pretty purple and yellow thing 
 he had got with him? a new dancer? So their stream oi 
 questions poured out rapid and mellifluous as olive oil from a 
 tilted flask! 
 
 But he shook himself free of them, and leaving the laughing, 
 clinging, delighted crowd as best he might, he took me into the 
 little tavern where they tarried in the town. It was a smaller 
 place, and humbler than the Golden Boar; a great fig-tree 
 climbed over it, just coming into leaf, and on an iron stanchion 
 swung its sign of two crossed halberds, a relic, no doubt, of old 
 Bianchi and JSTeri strife. But it was clean, and its people wor- 
 shipped Pascarel ; and their laughter and their welcome, and the 
 colour and pleasantness of the little place made it bright and 
 cheerful in the midst of the dusky old age of grim Oltrarno. 
 
 There we dined frugally, as became Italians, whilst the brass 
 stands of the lucernati threw a feeble light over the pretty black 
 head of Brunotta, and the golden folds of my poor Court dress, 
 and the Florentine face of Pascarfcl. 
 
 It was only a poor little tavern ; the chamber we dined in was 
 only parted from the kitchen by an open arch. 
 
 We saw the food stewed and fried ere it came to us, and near at 
 hand to us were some smiths and tapestry- workers playing domi- 
 noes and drinking innocent bibiti ; and yet I do not know how it 
 might have been in other countries but in Italy it was not vulgar, 
 was not even common, but was only a homely, picturesque, 
 pretty scene, full of colour, and movement, and mirth ; a noble 
 might have shared in it, an artist would have been happy in it. 
 
 They have suffered so much, these people, and yet through all 
 they have kept their hold on so much ; for they have kept the 
 smile on their eyes, and they have kept the grace in their limbs, 
 and they have kept the poetry in their hearts. 
 
 When our meal was over, the clocks chimed the half-hour 
 after six. Pascarel rose, and we went out into the clear and 
 cold evening, where the young moon was rising above the 
 immense dark masses of the city buildings. 
 
 "You play to-night, caro mio?" cried the smiths and the 
 weavers, and they flung their dominoes in a heap, and rose and 
 followed us, talking and laughing with him. 
 
 I gathered from their talk that it WES his habit to stroll 
 through the country, taking the large towns and the little as 
 they came, sometimes even pausing in the smallest villages, and 
 
rj4 PASCAR&L. 
 
 setting up for himself a little theatre of canvas and wood, in 
 the midst of any breezy pasture on the plain or sheltered nook 
 upon the hills that took his errant fancy. 
 
 Brunotta and he and the two lads were all the little company 
 which wandered as it would, subject to no dictation except that 
 impulse of the moment, which was always law to Pascarel. 
 
 By the enthusiasm displayed to him, he seemed to have a 
 strange power to charm, or, at any rate, to amuse the people ; 
 and as I listened, the seduction of this nomadic, changeful, care- 
 less, adventurous life bewitched me, as it has bewitched so many 
 in their youth. 
 
 Eroin their discourse and the confidences of Brunotta I 
 gathered that Pascarel was always a bohemian, often a beggar; 
 he led an idle, roving life, and preferred it to any other. 
 
 His stage had often been any plank across a cart or any board 
 in a fair booth that might offer to him ; he wrote the pieces he 
 played that they might serve for his little troop, of which the 
 dogs and the parrot were the stars ; he rarely knew one night 
 where he would lay his head another ; he often ate his supper at 
 a trattoria, trusting to his skill that same evening to pay off the 
 score; when he made money, as sometimes happened for he 
 was popular everywhere, except with the directors of theatres- 
 he spent it royally in a mingling of revelry and charity that left 
 him as poor as ever on the morrow. 
 
 He was a stroller and a vagabond, so far as social status went, 
 an idle rogue, and a dissolute ; but at his heart he was a great 
 artist ; and in many a little village, and township, and country 
 fair, and wayside tavern the people had found it out, and the cry 
 of " Pascarel" brought men and maidens, old women and young 
 children, poor students and day-labourers, in a great eager 
 crowd round any place where his changeful face, with its 
 speaking eyes and its flexile lips, laughed oat its mirth upon 
 them. 
 
 "He studies nothing; he outrages all traditions; he violates 
 every precedent and canon, " said the directors whom he quar- 
 relled with. 
 
 The people did not care for that; they only knew that 
 Pascarel, with a dog for his sole supporter, and a rag of carpet 
 or a broken bough for all his scenery, could make them laugh or 
 cry, hate or love, be miserable or be in ecstasy, whichever he 
 chose in the irresistible dominance of genius. 
 
 At a stone's throw from the Cascine woods was an open space ; 
 the moon was already shining clearly upon it; a large tent, 
 
UNDER THE RED LILY. 135 
 
 braced with, timbers, was set up in the centre of the place ; the 
 canvas was fluttering in the cool evening breeze. 
 
 " There is my theatre, donzella," said Pasearel. " Oh, your 
 Burattini have finer abodes; I know that. When one only 
 hangs on wires and has wooden legs, one must have a fine house, 
 or who will come and look at one ? But an artist, if he be 
 worth his salt, can made his temple in the minds of hi* 
 audience, if he have only the roof of a barn over his head and 
 theirs." 
 
 These were not the golden showers and Easter lilies of Lillo ! 
 and a little contempt for this nomadic drama rose up in me. 
 
 It stood on a breadth of meadow land outside the Prato Gate, 
 with the shadow of the mountain sides behind it, and around it 
 he scents of growing grasses from the fields that had been sown 
 for hay. 
 
 The people were trooping to it eagerly; townsfolk of all 
 trades and crafts, cobblers, tinkers, smiths, alabaster workers, 
 mosaic workers, conscripts, carabineers, market women, mule 
 drivers, heaven knows what not; and in from the villages of the 
 Yal de Grve there were coming in the opposite direction many 
 country women who plaited their straw as they walked, and 
 contadini who had stuck a flower behind their ear as evening 
 dress. 
 
 It was a pretty little wooden house, light and cleverly put 
 together; sometimes its walls were open to the sky like the old 
 Busiliche of the Latins, sometimes its canvas roof fluttered over 
 spectators as close packed and as eager as ever the canvas roof 
 of the Coliseum shaded. 
 
 It had the flag of Florence with the red lily flying merrily 
 above it, and above its entrance place was painted in gay letters 
 the words, "Del? Arte." 
 
 I asked Pasearel what the name meant. 
 
 " Oh, I broke a flask of wine against it, and named it so ages 
 ago," he answered me. " Why ? Because the first wooden homo 
 of Pulcinello and his brethren was called so when it rolled one 
 fine Carnival day into Yenice. 
 
 " A presumptuous name ? Oh, I don't see that. We are all 
 the arts in one, if we are worth anything at all. 
 
 " And besides, when they grew up in Italy, all that joyous 
 band, Aiiecchino in Bergamo, Stenterello in Florence, Pulci- 
 nello in Naples, Pantaleone in Yenice, Dulcamara in Bologna, 
 Beltramo in Milan, Brighella in Brescia, masked their mirthful 
 visages and ran together and jumped on that travelling stage 
 
136 PASCAR&L. 
 
 before the world, and what a force they were for the world, 
 ttiose impudent mimes ! 
 
 " ' Only Pantomimi?' "When they joined hands with one 
 another and rolled their wandering house before St. Mark's they 
 were only players indeed ; but their laughter blew out the fires 
 of the Inquisition, their fools' caps made the papal tiara look 
 but paper toy, their wooden swords struck to earth the steel of 
 the nobles, their arrows of epigram, feathered from goose and 
 from falcon, slew flying the many- winged dragon of Superstition. 
 
 " They were old as the old Latin land, indeed. 
 
 "They had mouldered for ages in Etruscan cities, with the 
 dust of uncounted centuries upon them, and been only led out 
 in Carnival times, pale voiceless frail ghosts of dead powers, 
 whose very meaning the people had long forgotten. But the 
 trumpet call of the Renaissance woke them from their Rip Yan 
 Winkle sleep. 
 
 " They got up, young again, and keen for every frolic Bar- 
 barossas of sock and buskin, whose helmets were caps and bells, 
 breaking the magic spell of their slumber to burst upon men 
 afresh; buoyant incarnations of the new-born scorn for tra- 
 dition, of the nascent revolts of democracy, with which the air 
 was rife. 
 
 " ' Only Pantomimi ? ' Oh altro ! 
 
 " The world when it reckons its saviours should rate high all 
 it owed to the Pantomimi, the privileged Pantomimi who 
 first dared take licence to say in their quips and cranks, in their 
 capers and jests, what had sent all speakers before them to the 
 rack and the faggots. 
 
 " Who think of that when they hear the shrill squeak of 
 Pulcinello in the dark bye-streets of northern towns, or see lean 
 Pantaleone slip and tumble through the transformation scene of 
 some gorgeous theatre ? 
 
 " Not one in a million. 
 
 " Yet it is true for all that. Free speech was first due to the 
 Pantomimi. A proud boast that. They hymn Tell and chant 
 Savonarola and glorify the Gracchi, but I doubt if any of the 
 gods in the world's Pantheon or the other world's Yalhalla did 
 so much for freedom as those merry mimes that the children 
 scamper after upon every holyday. 
 
 " And we players are all their sons and their successors; and 
 so I baptize my house after them ' Dell' Arte.' Why not ? If 
 we be not artists we have no business to profane a stage at all." 
 
 And therewith he badft me adieu, and ran in his room to dress. 
 
UNDER THE RED LILY. 137 
 
 We entered the booth for in truth it was hardly more as 
 the Florentine clocks tolled the quarter before seven. The 
 people were already gathering thickly in the meadow, and hf 
 could only break free of their vociferous welcome by reminding 
 them that if they kept him there without, he could not play 
 within ; a sober fact which they recognized at last, though with 
 some reluctance. 
 
 Pascarel drew me to a place where I could see both actors and 
 audience, unseen by the latter; the portion of the tent were the 
 stage was made was divided from the public part of it by a cur- 
 tain ; behind this I was stationed. 
 
 They all left me and disappeared ; Tocco ran round to light 
 the oil wicks which were to illumine the performance. In an 
 incredibly short space, so brief that it seemed to me Pascarel 
 must first have whisked a sorcerer's wand to change them all, 
 Brunotta in short skirts of tinsel, and white and rose, and 
 Cocomero in the vari- coloured dress of Arlecchino, and the dogs 
 in quaint little brilliant coats Toto pre-eminent by cap and 
 plume all bounded pell mell on to the boards together. 
 
 The curtain swung aside, the violin of Tocco thrummed a gay 
 melody, whilst a drum, ingeniously beaten by his foot, rolled 
 now and then its deeper melody. 
 
 They commenced one of those pretty and unintelligible dumb 
 dramas of gesture, which are so popular in Italy, and hold the 
 stage longer than opera, or tragedy, or comedy of voice, whether 
 in their grander form of ballet at the Pergola or the Fenice, or 
 in their humblest species such as that in which Brunotta and 
 Cocomero now danced. 
 
 Brunotta danced with all the agility and vivacity of a girl 
 who had spun round in the fairs and feste from the earliest days 
 of her existence ; Cocomero was a comic and untiring harlequin, 
 and the quaint tricks and astounding intelligence of Maestro 
 Toto were beyond all praise and would baffle all description. 
 
 The spectacle was received with glee and good humour by an 
 audience which was by far too large for the limits of the theatre, 
 and stretched far out into the open air in a sea of out-stretched 
 throats and eager faces, in a curious chiaroscuro from the dark 
 without and the oil lamps within, whilst they hummed the 
 melody of the dance tunes all the way through themselves a 
 detestable mode of testifying musical delight, from which the 
 most patrician musical audiences of Italy unhappily are not 
 free. 
 
 The curtain fell, Toto as primo-uomo was thrice summoned 
 
138 PASCAR&L. 
 
 and received a shower of sweet cakes and sugar, plaudits which 
 were to his comprehension. 
 
 Then loud and imperious rose the cry : 
 
 "Pascarel! Pascarel ! II Pascarello ! " 
 
 Pascarel soon obeyed the summons, amidst the tumult of 
 delight that greeted him from the throngs of coppersmiths, and 
 carpet-weavers, and craftsmen of all kinds, and students, at!d 
 beggars, and idlers of every sort who made up his motley 
 clientela. 
 
 The little piece he played in was called "Gli miraculosi 
 fortuni e le amori pietosissimi del Calzolajo e del Conte." 
 
 It had been written by himself, to suit the resources of his 
 scanty company ; a thing of the slightest and the simplest, in 
 which he played himself the two chief parts, those of the 
 cobbler and the count. 
 
 It was only a trifle ; but it abounded in wit ; it sparkled with 
 irony, it contained epigrams worthy of the palmy days of 
 Pasquin, and every now and then, amidst the rippling exuber- 
 ance of its play of nonsense, it deepened and had an exquisite 
 pathos hidden in it ; it was like a blue forget-me-not that the 
 rains have just dashed where it lifts its blue eyes in the 
 BUB shine. 
 
 With the utmost ingenuity, the play was constructed so that 
 the old man and the young, the cobbler and the noble, whilst 
 rivals throughout for the love of a contadina, never met one 
 another in all the accidents of their fortunes. 
 
 His transitions from age to youth, from youth to age, were so 
 sudden, so marvellous, so perfect, each in its kind, that none 
 who had not known him could have told which years were the 
 real with him or which the assumed. 
 
 Other actors in their youth have counterfeited as wonderfully 
 the age of Eichelieu or of Louis XL ; bat they have been 
 elaborately prepared by costume and by paint, and have sus- 
 tained the one part unbroken ; but here Pascarel changed from 
 youth to age with scarce breathing time between the phases, and 
 mado his personification a vivid living fact by no aid but that of 
 his own consummate powers. 
 
 It would have been impossible to say with which impersona- 
 tion tbe sympathies of the public were the stronger; each won 
 them in its turn. 
 
 The youth of the young nobls was so charming, so full of 
 happy insolence, of generous impulse, of audacious ease, of ir- 
 resistible assurance, of gay, good-tempered grace. 
 
UNDER THE RED LILY. 139 
 
 The age of the old cobbler was so full of sad genuine irony, 
 of wistful loneliness, of pathetic fear of mockery, of trembling 
 tenderness that scarcely dared be uttered ; no slippered pantaloon, 
 no palsied dotard, shrunken target for the gibes of fools, but 
 Age faithful, venerable, true to its own self-respect ; but Age 
 unutterably sad because alone. 
 
 It was a trifle, unaided by any scenic deception, or any de- 
 lusion for the senses ; but it was perfect as only the exquisite 
 delicacy, the unerring truthfulness, and the supreme histrionic 
 instincts of a great genius could make it ; and as such it swept 
 away to itself, with the rush of the storm wind, all the pity and 
 all the passion that throbbed in the countless hearts of its 
 audience. 
 
 When it was over, and the " Fuori 1 fuori ! fuori ! " of the 
 enraptured people had brought him for the last time before their 
 hurricane of applause, he came to me where I stood. 
 
 ; ' Well P " he said, with the smile in his eyes. 
 
 I trembled before him, burning, breathless, entranced, amazed ; 
 so wondrous did his power seem to me, I could have cast myself 
 at his feet and worshipped him for the divine force of the Art 
 that was in him. 
 
 <( Well?" he said again; but his voice shook a little, though 
 it had a laugh in it. "Well? sav is it better than the 
 Burattini?" 
 
 I could not answer him ; but I burst into tears. 
 
 When we left the wooden Arte that night where it stood, with 
 its flag dropping in the quiet air, and its gay scroll facing the 
 line of the Apennines, we were escorted in royal honour home- 
 ward by a half hundred or so of sturdy popolani, singing, 
 laughing, shouting, dancing in universal acclaim and fellowship, 
 as only Italians can sing, and laugh, and shout, and dance, when 
 the moon is. high, and a mandoline is making tinkling melody 
 before their steps. 
 
 It was late, and a beautiful, lustrous, cold night, full of the 
 smell of the young spring, as the breeze blew in from over the 
 budding contado. 
 
 We passed through the Porta al Prato, and glanced up at 
 white Fiesole, and went on under the limes of the piazzone and 
 slong the edge of the glancing water. 
 
 The music of the mandoline drew the steps of the loiterers, of 
 whom there were many about in those luminous, tranquil night- 
 hours. 
 
 A youth with a guitar slung across him joined us, and a man 
 
140 PASCAR&L. 
 
 with a violin ran out from under an archway, and caught the 
 strains, and skipped before us in many grotesque capers ; some 
 people above, on a lighted balcony, threw some violets and daffo- 
 dils at us as we went by ; the moonlight lay broad and white 
 upon the river; all the towers and spires rose clear against the 
 stars ; the music passed on, glad as the singing of Pan. 
 So we went homeward through Florence. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE HOSE AND THE FLORINS. 
 
 WHEN we reached the little tavern, our escort utterly refused 
 to let him enter it. 
 
 They claimed Pascarel as theirs by every human right, and 
 insisted on bearing him off amidst them to supper to a noted 
 wine-house, where the alabaster workers that night were about 
 to hold high revelry. Pascarel laughed and consented to go with 
 them, but before he turned away, he swept the earth with his 
 sombrero in a good-night to me, and murmured some parting 
 counsel in the ear of his sister. 
 
 Then off he went ; the rapture of his comrades no longer 
 restrained by the presence of the " donzella," at whom they had 
 glanced as a new and not altogether welcome addition to his 
 little party. 
 
 They lifted him fairly off the ground and bore him along aloft 
 on the shoulders and backs of half a dozen sturdy craftsmen of 
 Florence, the mandoline twanging cheerily before them, and all 
 their far-reaching voices blending together. 
 
 It was not the white lilies of Lillo ; but it was a homage 
 full as genuine in its way. 
 
 I stood in the doorway and watched them pass down the 
 sombre, darkling ancient street ; the moon shone whitely here 
 and there upon their path, the grim arcades and the mighty 
 walls were upon either side ; above, between the roofs, was the 
 dark blue sky of night. Their riotous glee died softly in the 
 distance as they turned out of sight by the base of the old 
 Guadagni Palace, and the last echo I heard was the shout of 
 their homage, " Yiva il Pascarello ! Pascarel! Pascarel ! " 
 
 How long; I stood the, lost in a dream of this strange and 
 
THM ROSE AND THE FLOXINS. 141 
 
 Wonderful life which had opened upon me, I cannot tell ; Bru* 
 ndtta touched me in kindly impatience : 
 
 "Do not dream in the moonlight like that, signorina. It 
 makes people mad, they say. I have some hot soup here ; come 
 and drink it, and let us get to bed." 
 
 " When will he be back ? " I asked, as I followed her within- 
 doors. 
 
 "PascarSl? Oh! not till daybreak, I daresay. He is often 
 out all night long. Come, do not let the soup get cold. And so 
 you thought him wonderful, did you ? Ah ! did I not tell you 
 only the truth ? " 
 
 She sat opposite me, with the little brass soup -kettle between 
 us, toasting her feet on an earthen scaldino; she had not 
 changed her pretty short white and rose skirts ; she had still her 
 little starry crown on her forehead. She was a little gay, rosy, 
 cheery soul, and yet I thought she seemed hardly worthy to be 
 of the same race as this marvellous Pascarel. 
 
 "I never could have dreamed of anything like him ! " I said, 
 under my breath, for I had been too deeply moved to be able to 
 talk of it easily: "but the whole world ought to know it; he 
 ought to play before kings ! " 
 
 "He likes this best," said Bruno tta, keeping her airy skirts 
 off the hot charcoal of her footstool. " He is so free, you see. 
 He does just as he likes : in the world fame would be bondage. 
 So he says, and no doubt he is right. Besides, I do not think 
 lie cares so much as this brown pot would care for either riches 
 or fame. He loves his freedom, and he loves the people, 
 Pascarel." 
 
 " Bat he wrote that piece himself? " 
 
 " Oh, yes. He writes everything that he plays." 
 
 " But that is genius !" 
 
 " I do not know what you mean. He is very clever, no doubt, 
 wonderfully clever; there is no one like him. But then he is a 
 great scholar, you know; he took his degree at Pisa." 
 
 "At Pisa? And you do not know how to read?" I cried, 
 forgetful in my astonishment of all laws of courtesy. 
 
 " No. I cannot read," said Brunotta, with a little confused 
 laugh. 
 
 " But a degree at Pisa, and not to know the alfabeta that is 
 a great difference." 
 
 Brunotta coloured ; perhaps she was vexed. 
 
 " Yes. No doubt it is a, good deal of difference. Put then I 
 was always a very lazy iittle thing, and never cared to do any- 
 
142 PASCAR&L. 
 
 thing but to dance in the streets, whilst Pascarel, oh, you can- 
 not imagine what wonderful things he has it in him to do. He 
 might be very great very great there is no doubt, if he 
 liked." 
 
 " It is odd he should not like ? " 
 
 "He has no ambition, I suppose that is it : he likes to be 
 free." 
 
 " But who can be free if they be poor ? " 
 
 " Anybody, signorina," laughed Brunotta, with the philo- 
 sophy which she had acquired from Pascarel; " that is, if they 
 do not try to be rich, you know. Of course, if you be always 
 struggling to be something you are not, you never can be at ease 
 rich or poor." 
 
 There was a profound wisdom in this, no doubt ; but it was 
 too profound for me. 
 
 " Pascarel might have made an enormous deal of money, no 
 donbt," pursued the little dancing girl, " but, he would nevtr 
 bind himself; that is where his fault is ; and people will not pay 
 you, ever, nn]ess you will pnt yourself into harness for good and 
 all. He is happier as he is; play ing just as the fancy moves 
 him. 
 
 " And you cannot think the good that he does, for all he looks 
 so careless. That poor little Tocco there ; he was the son of one 
 of the brigands at Paestum. The law took the father and the 
 whole gang. They shot some, and sent some to the galleys, 
 poor wretches ! and little Tocco they turned adrift on the streets, 
 for he was only twelve, and nothing proved against him. Of 
 course, in time, he would have been a thief like his father, but 
 Pascarel got hold of him and kept him ; and now there is not an 
 honester or better little soul in the whole length of Italy than 
 Tocco ; and I am sure he would be cut in a million pieces for 
 Pascarel. 
 
 " At the great flood, too, two winters ago, in Tuscany, when 
 the whole land was under water and the bullocks and sheep 
 drowned by thousands, and the people were only saved here and 
 there by getting up on the tops of the towers, and the great 
 stacks of hay and corn, and the trees, and often the roofs and 
 very bodies of the houses were tossing down the great yellow sea 
 of the flood like so many little cockle-shells in a gutter, you 
 should have seen Pascarel that day : we happened to be up high 
 on the hills where the flood did not reach, but he heard of it at 
 sunrise, and down he went and he got a boat, and he rowed about 
 hither and thither on the white horrid face of the torrents, 
 
THE ROSE AND THE FLORINS. 143 
 
 shaming the cowards that dared not stir, of whom there were 
 hundreds and hundreds ; and ever so many times he was within 
 an ace of being swept to his grave, and not a whit did he care 
 not he. 
 
 " He worked on and on till the night fell and the force of the 
 waters abated, and the men and women and children, and the 
 flocks and the herds that he saved, you would never believe if I 
 told you. 
 
 " There was much talk after that of some public reward for 
 his goodness and courage, and some of the towns wanted to 
 make great feasts in his honour and have jubilees in their 
 churches, and give him money. 
 
 "But when Pascarel heard that, he fled out of the country as 
 though the black death itself were after him, and went along the 
 Gorniche into France, and would not return into Italy till time 
 had gone by long enough for the people to forget what they 
 owed to him. It does not take very long for people to forget a 
 benefit, you know, signorina. 
 
 "But it is nearly midnight, donzella niia," said Brunotta, 
 rising after a pause in her chatter, and shaking the embers in 
 her earthen pot, " and Pascarel said you were to sleep early and 
 wake late, because you were tired and not used to our life. Let 
 me show you your room ; it is a very poor and small place, but 
 it is clean ; and I hope you will not mind it." 
 
 Then she led the way with a lantern, and we climbed a 
 rickety ladder- like stair, and I found my little chamber a inero 
 nook in a wall as it were, and bare of comfort, but still clean, as 
 she had said, and on the little hard bed was cast a cloak of 
 skins. 
 
 "That is Pascarel's; he thought you might be cold; the 
 nights are chilly, and so he told me to put it there/' said 
 Brunotta, busying herself in a hundred kindly girlish fashions 
 after my comfort as well as she could. 
 
 After she had bidden me thrice good-night, she stood, with 
 her light in her hand, looking at me wonderingly as I unloosed 
 my bodice and shook down all my hair, and took my shoes and 
 stockings off my tired feet. 
 
 "The donzellina is beautiful to look at," she said, medita- 
 tively, with a sort of astonished inquiring pleasure in her voice : 
 w and what white little feet, though she is so tall, and what a 
 white skin ! it is wonderful ! I wish Pascarel could see you 
 Sow. He says he never saw anything like you. He eays you 
 do for the Angelica in that poem he is so fond of, yor 
 
144 PASCAR&L* 
 
 know ? He is always running his head on that kind of rubbish 
 as if it would do one any good." 
 
 " You are very flattering, Brundtta," I said, laughing, as with 
 some vanity, I fear me, I displayed to her all the thickness of 
 my hair, which always delighted Italians, because of the yellow 
 lights it had in it, which never darkened with the sun as their 
 own did. 
 
 " I only say what is just true. Is that generous ? " said the 
 good little honest soul, as she turned at last fairly away with her 
 lantern, aiid drew my door close behind her. 
 
 For myself, I was so confused, so excited, so full of a mingled 
 pleasure and pain, that, though I threw myself at once on my 
 bed, it was long before I could sleep. 
 
 When I did at length fall asleep, the grey streak of the dawn 
 had already begun to stray through the narrow casement across 
 the bricks of my floor; and I dreamed feverishly of rushing 
 floods, of drowning cattle, of dancing harlequins, of the onys 
 with the Eates, of old forsaken Yerona, and of Pascarel. 
 
 It was broad day when I awoke ; the iron rod on a wall oppo- 
 site, which served for a sun-dial, showed that it was ten o'clock 
 I heard a voice that I knew a voice with a clear, careless laugt 
 in it. 
 
 "Oh, good little sotJ," it said, as in a mirthful expostulation, 
 " what possessed you to go aside in that wood yesterday? We 
 were so well as we were ; and women will never let well alone. 
 They will always paint their lilies, and, of course, the pocr lilies 
 die of it. We were content as we were, and now . "iVhat 
 possessed you to bind up with our hedge-row flowers a stray hot- 
 house rose like this?" 
 
 " You saw it before ever I saw it," the voice of Brunotta replied 
 to him "And you must have liked the look of the rose, Pas- 
 carel, or you never had given away for it your onyx." 
 
 I heard him laugh, self-convicted. 
 
 " That was for the pure love of music, carina. Don't you 
 believe that ? Oh, little sceptic ! Nay I will make no 
 bones of it ; I will say the truth. The donzella is too noble for 
 us; it is that which troubles me. When I saw her standing 
 first in the square of Yerona, I said to myself: What can she be, 
 that young princess, with her golden skirts, singing in a crowd 
 for a few baiocche ? I could not understand it ; and it troubles 
 me now. She is too good for our life, and we have no other." 
 
 " Let her go her own way, then, and go we ours," said 
 Brundtta, with tran^uillitv. 
 
THE ROSE AND THE FLORINS. 145 
 
 "No, by heaven, never ! " retorted Pascarel, with a fiery force 
 in his voice. " What ! Leave a beautiful, fearless, innocent 
 thing like that adrift by itself in the world ? Eie for shame, 
 little Brundtta ! " 
 
 Brundtta laughed ; but there was a little sadness in the ripple 
 of the mirth. 
 
 "Do you remember, Pascarel, in the great flood that winter, 
 when everyone was safe, as far as one could know, and it had 
 grown quite dark; you could just see the outline of a young bull 
 drowning far off; and nothing would do but you would launch 
 the boat afresh, and ride the flood again, and go for it ? And 
 you got to it as it was sinking, and dragged it into the boat, and 
 came to land with it with such a struggle that everyone thought 
 all was over with you, and you were indeed half dead. Do you 
 remember ?" 
 
 "Yes. What of that?" 
 
 " Well, do you not remember, too, that as soon as the bull had 
 strength enough to stagger up on to his legs alone he rushed at 
 you, and struck you in the breast with his horns, and scampered 
 off to the hills as fast as he could go ? And you were very ill 
 for many days; and they said if the blow had been an inch 
 nearer to the heart, you might have died of it ? " 
 
 "Well?" said Pascarel. 
 
 "Well," answered Brundtta, "I was only thinking if the 
 signorina should be like the bull! " 
 
 Then their voices ceased, and I heard a casement shut ; they 
 seemed to have been speaking in the chamber next to mine. 
 
 I sprang off my bed, a little indignant and a little touched, 
 too. 
 
 Like the bull ! I thought no, never, never. 
 
 Brundtta seemed a traitress to me only to have breathed the pos- 
 sibility of such a parallel. 
 
 1 dressed quickly, threw my hair back loose over my shoulders, 
 and ran down the stairs into the common room. Pascarel was 
 there alone, standing by the window, looking thoughtfully out 
 into the open air, with Toto at his feet. 
 
 i't was the Berlingancio the Mardi gras the maddest mad- 
 ness of Carnival ; all the fury and frolic already were ringing all 
 over the city with deafening clash and clangour. 
 
 He turned swiftly, and saluted me with that cordial and easy 
 grace which characterised all his movements. 
 
 "Ah, good day, my donzella. I have good news to shine on 
 you with the sun. We have got your golden florins." 
 
 L 
 
146 PASCARkL. 
 
 ft My florins ! " I echoed, doubting my own joy. " My 
 florins ! How ? when ? where ? Can it be possible ? " 
 
 " Very possible," he said, gaily, and he proceeded to count 
 out on the stone seat of the window a dozen round, bright, 
 golden Austrian florins. "How? Oh, never mind how. It is 
 always an ugly story a thief's. You know I told you the 
 rogue would repent as soon as he should be found out ; they 
 always do. You see the guardia of the town went to work in 
 earnest for you. But you must be more careful of your wealth 
 in future." 
 
 I was too enraptured to heed much what he said. He might 
 have told me the most improbable romances, and I should have 
 credited them at that moment, so supreme was my ecstasy over 
 my recovered treasure. 
 
 He watched me with a certain melancholy in his handsome 
 eyes. 
 
 "So now you are free again, you see," he said, after a 
 pause. " You can go away from us when you like, cara mia 
 if you like ; what do you say ? Twelve florins, even when they 
 are of gold, are not a large patrimony with which to scour the 
 earth. But still, you thought them enough for you rashly to 
 run away from Verona on the strength of them alone." 
 
 His words clouded the heaven of my restored happiness. I 
 had been kissing my florins, laughing and almost crying over 
 them. As he spoke I stopped, and looked him full in the 
 face. 
 
 " Signor mio, I ought to tell you, I heard what you said 
 this morning in the room next mine to Brunotta." 
 
 His face flushed hotly. 
 
 "By heavens you did! How much did you hear? What 
 about ? Tell me quickly." 
 
 " I heard you from the time that you called me a hothouse 
 rose to the time when your sister said that I should be like the 
 bull you saved out of the flood." 
 
 Pascarel laughed ; his face was a little flushed still, but he 
 looked relieved. 
 
 " Is that all, carina honour bright ? " 
 
 " Quite all. But you seemed sorry she spoke to me in the 
 wood yesterday; you seemed to think that I should be some 
 trouble or burden to you. If that be eo indeed, tell me the 
 truth : I will go." 
 
 Pascarel stood before me, with the lights and the shadows 
 swiftly succeeding each other on his changeful countenance. 
 
THE ROSE AND THE FLORINS. 147 
 
 " You do not wish to go, then, signorina ? " he asked at 
 length. ' I thought you might, now you have back your 
 florins." 
 
 " No, I do not wish to go; I wish to be one of you, and to 
 learn your art." 
 
 I could not trust my voice to say more, for my heart was full 
 at the idea that I should be again adrift by myself with those 
 poor florins, which no longer seemed to me the brilliant safe- 
 guard and the omnipotent possession which they had done ere I 
 had lost them. 
 
 Pascarel rolled towards me a little table spread with a white 
 cloth, on which coffee and wheaten rolls were set ready. 
 
 (t Breakfast first, cara mia; then we will talk. Do you mind 
 my smoke ? Ko ? that is right." 
 
 Therewith he stretched himself out on the stone sill of the 
 window embrasure, and rested at his ease, sending the smoke 
 into the air in almost absolute silence, glancing now out into 
 the street, already filling with processions of the Berlingancio 
 fooleries, now glancing back at me where I broke my fast with 
 pleasure, knowing that I could pay for what I took. 
 
 The radiance of the sunshine came through the open case- 
 ment and bathed the large square red bricks of the floor ; from 
 without there came the smell of tossed flowers, and the noise of 
 many bells, and the sound of countless feet pacing over the 
 stones of the streets : above everything, there was the sweet, 
 youthful 'scent of the Spring that dreamily breathed itself from 
 the vineyards and fields, even through the dark and blood- 
 stained old age of the Medicean streets. 
 
 When his spagnoletto was smoked out, and my coffee ended, 
 he came across the room, and sat astride on an old walnut- wood 
 chair, with his arms crossed on its back, and so gazed at me long 
 and gravely. 
 
 " What do you wish for most in this world, cara mia?" he 
 asked, at last. 
 
 " Money, of course," I answered him, with widely opened 
 eyes and a little impatient laugh of wonder. Was it not what I 
 had missed and wanted all my life long always ? 
 
 " You have no genius in you, then ! " he said, with a dash o^ 
 scorn. 
 
 My answer had offended all the artist's instincts in him. Jfo 
 doubt it seemed half puerile and half vile to him so true an 
 artist in every pulse and fibre of his being, that so long as his 
 audience laughed or wept with him, he could not bring himself to 
 
 L 2 
 
148 
 
 consider whether gold pieces or copper bits filled the box at the 
 door of his play-house. 
 
 " Perhaps not," I said, in my own turn a little offended. 
 <B u t 
 
 I glanced at the queer little bit of mirror which hung on the 
 rough stone wall between a waxen Jesu and a portrait of the last 
 brigand known in the Yaldarno. 
 
 He followed the gesture and laughed. 
 
 " Oh, you have the best genius for a woman, no doubt. I 
 would not deny that. But I thought you might, perhaps, have 
 a touch of the other too." 
 
 "It is a large word," I said, more humbly. "And no one 
 ever seems to know very well what they mean by it." 
 
 "No. Some people say it is all your days to carry about 
 with you a torch which illumines everyone's path except your 
 own." 
 
 " Perhaps. My old music teacher used to say that to have 
 genius was to be a fool." 
 
 " That I deny. It is to be alone amidst fools a thing much 
 more bitter. And such fools ! Dio mio ! Eut, after all, what 
 does it matter ? If the world were only human, it would matter 
 hideously ; but, thank heaven, the world is so much else besides. 
 When one is choked up to the throat with fools, one can always 
 get away to the woods, to the mountains, to the birds, to the 
 beasts, to the hills in the rain mist, to the sea when the sun 
 breaks. If it were not for that, one would go mad straightway, 
 *ao doubt. And even with that one feels small sometimes 
 choked, fenced in, Do you not know? One wants to push 
 back the clouds, to thrust away the skies, to see beyond the 
 horizon, to look close at the sun. If one only had wings ! but 
 let us talk of yourself. You want money, you say ; well, that 
 certainly will not come to you on the stage for a long time. To 
 many to most it never comes at all; and myself, I always 
 think that whether it does or not matters very little, after all." 
 
 "Eut money is everything ! " I cried to him I, who knew 
 BO well by the want of it all that its possession must imply. 
 
 "Is it? Well, no doubt, to those who think so it is every, 
 thing : I am not amongst them. Eut you are a woman-child ; 
 I am a man. We shall never think alike on that theme. 
 
 " A man, be he bramble or vine, likes to grow in the open air 
 in his own fashion ; but a woman, be she flower or weed, always 
 thinks she would be better under glass. When she gets the 
 glass she breaks it generally ; but till she gets it she pines. 
 
THE ROSE AND THE FLOJklNS. 149 
 
 " As for my art, the art of the stage needs much study, 
 though, I dare say, to you, as to all lookers on, nothing seems 
 easier than to rattle through a part. 
 
 " The actor must be born, like the poet, the painter, the 
 sculptor, no doubt ; but also, like them, he must be made perfect 
 by study. Gesture, glance, feeling, passion all these come by 
 nature : but accent, knowledge, oratory, effect all these are the 
 mechanical parts of the whole, which only long application will 
 acquire. 
 
 " To the art of the stage, as to every other art, there are two 
 sides : the truth of it, which comes by inspiration that is, by 
 instincts subtler, deeper, and stronger than those of most minds 
 and the artifice of it, in which it must clothe itself to get 
 understood by the people. 
 
 "It is this latter which must be learnt ; it is the leathers 
 harness in which the horses of the sun must run when they 
 come down to race upon earth. 
 
 "Do 1 talk nonsense? Never mind, if you know what I 
 mean." 
 
 I think my face showed him I knew, for he went on without 
 pausing for my reply. 
 
 " We Italians have always needed less of this harness than 
 men of other nations. The Trench and the Italians are the only 
 great actors that the world ever sees. The northern races 
 cannot act, just as they cannot paint. 
 
 " After all, both acting and painting are a matter of colour, 
 and the northern peoples have no feeling for colour, no sense of 
 it. Perhaps because it is not about them in their daily lives, 
 nor visible in their landscapes. They are great in very much, 
 but they are not great in art. 
 
 " The Trench are great, but they are three-parts artifice ; it 
 is a very perfect study, but it is a study always. With us we 
 do hold closely that ars est celare artem ; and w r e are infinitely 
 more natural than the French are upon the stage. This is 
 national in us, no doubt ; we are always ourselves at home and 
 abroad, and we concern ourselves very little as to what other 
 people may think of us. We carry this happy immunity on to 
 the stage with us, and the result is, that on the stage Italians 
 are without rivals. 
 
 "But, with all this, it is not the happy-go-lucky hit-or-miss 
 sort of thing that you may fancy it. No art can be good unlesi 
 into it be brought something of all other arts. 
 
 " A man may be a passable actor if Nature has given him the? 
 
15? PASCAR&L. 
 
 trick of it ; but he will not be a great one unless lie study tho 
 literature of his own and other nations, unless he know some- 
 thing of the intricacies of colour and of melody above all, 
 unless he can probe and analyse human nature, alike in its 
 health and in its disease. 
 
 "To be a great artist one must be a student, and a sincere, 
 and humble one, at the foot of every greatness ay, and every 
 weakness which has preceded us. 
 
 " The instrument on which we histrions play is that strange 
 thing, the human heart. It looks a little matter to strike its 
 chords of laughter or of sorrow ; but, indeed, to do that aright 
 and rouse a melody which shall leave all who hear it the better 
 and the braver for the hearing, that may well take a man's life- 
 time, and, perhaps, may well repay it." 
 
 He paused, while a dreamy thoughtfulness cast its shadow 
 over his features ; he had been speaking rather to himself than to 
 me, I saw. I thought of what Brunotta had said of him, that 
 he had been a great student of many sciences once, away there 
 in old Pisa. 
 
 And yet he had no ambition : it seemed to me very strange. 
 
 "You are a great artist, surely," I said, slowly. "And yet 
 yet you play only for the people." 
 
 He looked up with the quick, contemptuous flash of his 
 eloquent eyes. 
 
 " Only for the people! Altro ! did not Sperone and all the 
 critics at his heels pronounce Ariosto only fit for the vulgar 
 multitude ? and was not Dante himself called the laureate of the 
 cobblers and the bakers ? 
 
 "And does not Sacchetti record that the great man took the 
 trouble to quarrel with an ass driver and a blacksmith because 
 they recited his verses badly ? 
 
 "If he had not written ' only for the people/ we might never 
 have got beyond the purisms of Yirgilio, and the Ciceronian 
 imitations of Bembo. 
 
 " Dante now-a-days may have become the poet of the scholars 
 and the sages, but in his own times he seemed to the sciolists a 
 most terribly low fellow for using his mother tongue ; and he was 
 most essentially the poet of the vulgar of the vulgar e eloquio^ of 
 the vulgare illustre ; and pray what does the ' Commedia ' mean 
 if not a canto villereccio y a song for the rustics ? Will you tell 
 me that ? 
 
 " Only for the people! Ah, that is the error. Only! how 
 like a woman that is ! Any trash will do for the peDple ; that 
 
THE ROSE AND THE FLORINS. 15 T 
 
 is the modern notion ; vile roulades in music, tawdry crudities in 
 painting, cheap balderdash in print all that will do for the 
 people. So they say now-a-days. 
 
 " "Was the bell tower yonder set in a ducal garden or in a 
 public place ? Was Cimabue's masterpiece veiled in a palace or 
 borne aloft through the throngs of the streets ? 
 
 * * I am. a Florentine, donzella ; and I have enough of tho 
 blood of iny fathers in me to know that the higher and truer the 
 art, the more surely should it belong to the people. 
 
 " It is the people that make your nation great or vile in tho 
 sight of the universe. Shall you nourish them, then, on the 
 garbage of ribald feebleness, or oil the pure strong meats of the 
 mind? As you feed tbem, so will be their substance and 
 sinew ; a-s you graft them, so will be the fruit that they bear. 
 
 " How would it have been with Florence if she had not per- 
 petually born that vital truth even as the very marrow of her 
 bones ? 
 
 "Her great men gave their greatest not to the empire, not 
 to the pope, not to princes only, whether temporal or spiritual, but 
 into the very midst of the populace, into the very hands and hearts 
 of the people, so that through the blackest ages of oppression 
 and superstition, through the deadliest losses of liberty and of 
 peace, she was still as a shining light in the face of the nations, 
 and still held fust, to bequeath them to others, the unquenchable 
 fires of freedom and art." 
 
 The rapid words coursed like fire off his lips in passionate 
 enthusiasm ; then, as his habit was, he laughed at his own 
 emotions, 
 
 " Forgive my vehemence, cara rnia," he said, as he lit another 
 spagnoletto. " As I told you, I come of Florentine race." 
 
 " What were your people ? " I asked bim, expecting from, him 
 any one of the great names of the great Republic. 
 
 " My father was a tinker," he said brusquely, but with th' 
 shadow of a laugh about his mouth. 
 
 " A tinker ! Impossible ! " 
 
 He laughed outright at the accent of my voice. 
 
 " Not impossible at all. An Italian tinker, mind you ; that 
 is something very different to a tinker anywhere else. You 
 know us; we are never vulgar." 
 
 " But a tinker ! " I murmured, in unconquerable disappoint- 
 ment. 
 
 Pascarel laughed on, radiantly and inextinguishably, Jind 
 busied himself with his little paper roll of tobacco. 
 
I5 PASCAR&L. 
 
 "Ifaat is why Brunotta cannot read, I suppose?" I said, 
 after a pause, trying to shake off the curious coldness of dis- 
 enchantment which this announcement of his cast upon me. 
 
 He got up, and walked to and fro about the room. 
 
 " Of course ! A poor devil of a tinker has to mend several 
 millions of stew-pans and braziers before he can solder the 
 alphabet to the empty heads of his children. 
 
 " I went to Pisa ? Yes : who told you that? 
 
 " Poor blind old Pisa ! She was very glad to be rid of me, I 
 fear. I won all her honours, but I played her very sad pranks. 
 
 "Poor old widowed Pisa! she always seems to be lamenting, 
 Dido-like, her lost lover the Sea. She is unutterably sad ; ana 
 yet I am never abroad on a moonlit night without wanting to 
 watch it shine on her wonderful palaces, on her empty desolate 
 squares, on her perfection of desolation. 
 
 " Do you remember how the Florentines went forth in arms 
 to guard the gates of her, when her walls were weak because her 
 sons were all away on the high seas subduing Minorca ? She 
 was their old hereditary foe, but they defended her honour for 
 her in her day of weakness. I doubt if there be anything in all 
 history manlier than that is. 
 
 " But to talk of yourself, mia bella. 
 
 " Is it indeed true that, lacking all better friends, you would 
 like to wander awhile with us ? Nay, no fair words. Let us 
 speak honestly. I know that it is not the least likely that if 
 you had any other sort of protection you would seek that of a set 
 of strolling players. But you have no other, and so " 
 
 He came back, and cast aside his cigar, and stood by the table 
 looking down on me ; his eyes grew almost melancholy, and his 
 voice was very grave when he spoke. 
 
 " See here, donzella ; you are but a child, as one may say, 
 and know nothing of life but its dreams. It is but fair to warn 
 you ; to be a player for the populace with us may hurt you in 
 time to come. I told you yesterday we are not over reputable 
 people. 
 
 " We are honest, and we hurt no one, it is true ; we may, 
 perhaps, even do some little good in our way ; but in the very 
 nature of things we cannot be respectable. We could not be if 
 we wished, and I am afraid we don't wish. Well, all this may 
 hurt you in some time to come. I dare not say it will not. At 
 any rate, it is only fair that you should know so much. 
 
 " You are much above the life that we lead; you heard me 
 say so ; above it in temper, and tastes, and, no doubt, by your 
 
THE ROSE AND THE FLORIN. 153 
 
 birth. On the other hand, friendless and lonely as you are, 
 worse may easily befall you than to stay with us. 
 
 6 'You shall hear no evil, and shall see none that I can keep 
 you from ; that I swear. 
 
 " We owe no man anything, and we do the best we can that 
 no creature shall go out from our little house of canvas baser 
 than he entered by even so much as a licentious thought. We 
 are poor, indeed, but, as you have seen, we are none the less 
 glad and gay for that; and we find, perhaps, a fairer side to 
 daily life and human nature than do those whose honey of gold 
 draws the thieves and panders and liars to lick them over with 
 tongues false and foul. As you are now, your fate is a very 
 terrible one for your sex and your age." 
 
 His voice had a sweet, persuasive force in it, and lulled me 
 into a dreamy silence ; I did not answer to him ; I listened as to 
 some delicious music. 
 
 " I have been thinking, donzella," he pursued, after a while, 
 " that it may be ill for you to associate yourself with us. Asso- 
 ciation, you know, is like a burr off the hedges ; it clings ere we 
 know it, and we can scarcely free ourselves of it without losing 
 something, be it only a shred. 
 
 " The life of the stage it is only fair you should know at 
 its best has a certain slur in it. You spoke thoughtlessly, but you 
 spoke as the world speaks, when you uttered your scorn for us 
 living Eurattini. At its greatest the life of the player has only 
 false glitter in it, and never true honour. We are toys for the 
 rest of mankind; and the world, having done with us, laughs 
 and then breaks us. 
 
 ' ' Why not ? We are only its playthings. 
 
 "Yesterday, when you said this, I rebuked you, for you 
 wounded me more than you knew. But, to be frank with you, 
 as it is only just I should be, I confess that your gay disdain 
 had its grim root in fact, whilst my reproaches were baseless and 
 worthless, because they were only the fanciful utterance of a 
 fanatical enthusiasm. Sincere, indeed, in its way, but, for all 
 that, self-deceiving. 
 
 " Perhaps we never so fatally deceive others as when we arc 
 ourselves the first dupes of our falsehoods. 
 
 " Altro ! I love the life that I lead, but I will not wrong you 
 by saying that it is a fit one for you. Nevertheless, perhaps a 
 broken crust is better than no bread whatever at all. You 
 must choose for yourself. I have said all there is now to 
 say." 
 
I54 PASCAR&L. 
 
 I stood and thought bewilderedly, withheld from him by my 
 pride, drawn towards him hy the nameless seduction which ex- 
 isted in all his words and ways. 
 
 The brightness of the sun shone across us ; the brazen tumults 
 of the bells filled all the air ; the people streamed past the case- 
 ment, laughing, chattering, dressed in their best, and eager to 
 enjoy. 
 
 The fulness and gladness of human life was all about me ; I 
 had not courage enough to turn away from them and go out into 
 the darkness and the loneliness by myself. I was but a child, 
 and I was afraid of gloom, of solitude, of misfortune. This man, 
 with his passionate tones, with his radiant courage, with his 
 eloquent eyes, had an influence over me that I hardly attempted 
 to resist, and attempted not at all to dissect. 
 
 What matter if he were only a boheraian, an adventurer, a 
 strolling player, a tinker's son; he was an artist, a poet even; 
 it was surely better to laugh with him than to perish miserably 
 all alone in the very onset of my warfare with the world. 
 
 So the thoughts drifted vaguely and restlessly through my 
 brain ; self-centered as the thoughts of all young creatures are. 
 He spoke of niy future, but it was not of that I then thought ; 
 the present was enough for me. 
 
 "If I remain with you, can I earn enough to pay my way?" 
 I asked him, suddenly. 
 
 He gave a gesture of impatience. 
 
 " Certainly. Your florins will last for all eternity in sc 
 simple a life as ours ; and even if they do not, we can find a 
 place for you, no doubt." 
 
 " Then I will stay," I said, on an eager impulse that I did 
 not dream of defining ; and I remember that I held my hands 
 out to him with a little triumphant laugh. 
 
 That wonderful luminance, which gave so subtle a charm to 
 his face at such times as it lightened there, flashed over his 
 features. 
 
 He caught my hands and touched them lightly with his lips, 
 as one may brush with a kiss the leaves of a roso or the curls of 
 a child. 
 
 " Altro ! So be it ! " he cried, with a laugh which covered, I 
 thought, a deeper emotion. "Ah, dear donzellina, did I not 
 give you the Pates ? Eor me it was ill, very ill, I fear ; but for 
 you it shall be well, if the will of a man count for aught in this 
 world." 
 
 "Does it not count for much ?" I asked him. 
 
THE GOLDEN CELANDINE. 155 
 
 And he answered sadly : 
 
 "I have lived to think not; for in this world there is 
 Woman," 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE GOLDEN CELANDINE. 
 
 MY future being thus determined, Pascarel said no more ahout 
 it ; it was a thing resolved on and done with ; his sunny temper 
 threw off its momentary shadow, and he gave himself up, as his 
 habit was, to the easy, light-hearted, debonair enjoyment of the 
 present. 
 
 All that day we enjoyed Berlin gancio, and the next he 
 sauntered about Florence with me, whilst Brunotta stayed in to 
 niend her torn kirtle. He was bent upon making me happy, 
 and he succeeded. That day lives now, golden, and long, and 
 clear, in my remembrance a very king of days. 
 
 The weather was so radiant with the coming of the spring 
 that even in those deepest shadows of the walls it was bright 
 with the sweet youth of the year. 
 
 There were great masses of violets and of the snow-white 
 wood anemoli selling at all the corners of the streets. The 
 people sat out before their doorways, working and talking, laugh- 
 ing and chaffering, glad of heart because the winter was gone for 
 nine good months, in which they would be free to live at pleasure 
 in their heaven of the open air. 
 
 Between the grey grim piles of the war-worn stone, looking 
 up, one saw the smile of the blue blue skies ; beyond the gates 
 there was the silver gleam of the loosened waters, of the bud- 
 ding fields, of the fruitful olives, of the far-off hills. 
 
 All the day long we sauntered there, he talking often of the 
 city's past, with phrase so teeming with the colour of language 
 and the poetry of history, that one listened in enchanted breath- 
 lessness as to some sorcerer's tale. 
 
 Lelio Pascarello, whom one and all called Pascarel, was artist 
 in every fibre of his temperament. Passionate, sensitive to ex- 
 ternal influences as any woman, full of poetic thoughts and 
 impulses, he joined to this the vivid Florentine energy and the 
 gay Florentine ardour. 
 
 There was much ii> him of the bright vivacious humour which 
 
156 
 
 was in Birffulniaco and Bramante ; of that love of sport and of 
 ready jest which laughs like so much sunlight over the great 
 memories of Giorgione and Da Yinci. 
 
 Linked to an incapable companion he would have rid himself 
 of the burden with the same witty skill as Erunelleschi, and 
 locked in his study by an exacting patron, he would have escaped 
 by the window to enjoy his pleasures in the streets, in the same 
 ardent and amorous determination as Pra Lippi's. 
 
 He seemed to have just left those wise, fearless, gay, tumultu- 
 ous times when the great sculptors went laughing to buy theii 
 eggs and cheese in the market; when the great painters chal- 
 lenged each other to gay duello with pencil and with chisel ; 
 when the great artists held their rapiers no less ready than theii 
 brushes; when men worked and loved, and fought and jested, 
 and s^rept ail the Arts within the one magic circle of their uni- 
 versal genius in that easy strength which looks the miracle of 
 saints to this weakling world. 
 
 He loved light, and air, and indolence, and mirth ; the mere 
 sense of living sufficed for him with a voluptuous content which 
 those of northern lands can never know ; to lie and dream on a 
 grassy slope, and watch the lithe brown arms of a girl as she 
 washed linen in the brook below ; to go singing through the 
 luminous moonlight with a dozen comrades, waking the echoes 
 of old, dim, marble streets; to laugh and jest round the char- 
 coal fires in the winter veglie, or lying in the deep corn on the 
 moonlit threshing-floors at harvest time; to toss a draught of 
 wine behind the thick screen of a pergola foliage, whilst bright 
 eyes laughed at him and bright sunbeams darted on him through 
 the leaves, and made his year as one long holiday, from tie 
 Beffano to the feast of Ognissanti these were enough for 
 Pascarel. 
 
 Sometimes, as we went that day, he stopped before some 
 cobbler's stall or some stove where the last chestnuts of the year 
 were toasting, and exchanged with the Florentines presiding 
 over them fantastic passages of drollery and wit. Sometimes he 
 encountered some barrow rolling on its way with woollen stuffs 
 and silken handkerchiefs, or some truckful of oranges and 
 lemons, and took the sale of these out of the hands and the 
 mouths of their vendors, and made the crowd around them split 
 their sides with his quaint and subtle Tuscan humour. Some- 
 times he would enter some old dusky church where some world- 
 famous picture made a glory in the darkness, and, standing 
 before it, wo^ild let his thoughts and his words roam dreamily 
 
THE GOLDEN CELANDINE. 157 
 
 over tLe deepest meanings of art and the remotest mysteries of 
 history in all that abstract meditation which is the most precious 
 indulgence of the scholar. 
 
 Half a hundred times a day his mood and his manner altered 
 with that ardent vitality in every phase of their countless changes 
 which was the life and soul of the man himself. Not for one 
 tvhole half hour together was he the same throughout ; and yet, 
 grave or gay, riotously laughing with the crowd, or dreamily 
 questioning the lost secrets of the old masters, selling a yellow 
 bandana to a housewife at a fair with buoyant raillery, or stray- 
 ing through the dim arcades of the old academies tenderly re- 
 calling the heroism and the learning of their earliest ages, he 
 was always, in all his contrasts, Pascarel. 
 
 He was like the child's toy of the kaleidoscope, with every 
 moment his moods changed their shapes with unpremeditated 
 caprice; but the hues which made them did not alter. 
 
 " Were you truly a tinker's son?" I asked him, late in that 
 day, when we were stretched again upon the grass of the Cascine 
 woods. 
 
 " Che diamine ! " he cried, in the expressive Tuscan affirma- 
 tive. "Utterly and simply a tinker's son. But, to console you, 
 though thinkers we had become, we were of a race that yielded 
 in ancientness of blood to none. I think old Malispini even 
 accounts for us amongst those who, on coming out of the Ark 
 after the Deluge, bestirred themselves in the building of Fiesole. 
 In the old, old days, my people were of that territorial nobility 
 beside which the Medici are mere rubbisk of yesterday. We 
 were Ghibellines, and in their ruin fell, of course. Our utter 
 destruction came when one of us would have a palace fashioned 
 by Orcagna, to pay for which his descendants in the third gene- 
 ration had to sell nearly all their worldly goods and lands, like 
 that hapless fool Luca dei Pitti. Jews of the Oltrarno got the 
 little there was left in time. Old races die hard with the load 
 of long debt round their necks ; but they die. For two cen- 
 turies we had been poor, poor, poor. Poor as the devil. At* 
 last we worked for our daily bread. Old races have done worse. 
 My grandfather toiled to and fro as a facchino in the country 
 where his forefathers had scowled defiance on Carlo di Valois, 
 and mowed down the burghers round the red Carraccio on that 
 terrible day, * che fece TArbia colorata in rosso.' From a fac- 
 chino to a tinker is hardly a fall ; perhaps it is even a rise, for a 
 tinker must own some little stock in trade of tools, whereas the 
 tacchino only toils underneath the goods of other people. At 
 
158 PASCAR&L. 
 
 any rate, a tinker my father was, God save his soul ! and a man 
 of most infinite humour. I know he scratched. a prince's coronet 
 on his smelting pot. Coronets have been in worse places. He 
 was weak enough, I am ashamed to say, to be ever proud of his 
 lineage, and fed me when I was a little fellow on all sorts of dead 
 glories out of Dino Compagni and Yillani. But I ran about with 
 bare legs over Tuscany, and cared nothing that Iran over the graves 
 of my ancestors. At any rate it was more harmless than to run 
 about with a bare sword as those Pascarel princes did. It was 
 queer, perhaps, to blunder into some old church in some little hill- 
 town or city of the plain, and see a great white statue, and read 
 the record of some mighty Pascarello ; and all the while one was 
 a Pascarello too, though only a little mischievous dog, ragged and 
 hungry, scouring the country for saucepans to mend. It set one 
 thinking, no doubt. But, after all, what did it matter ? " 
 
 "It would have broken my heart!" I cried, where I sat 
 beside him amongst the crocuses. 
 
 Pascarel laughed, 
 
 11 It was likelier to break my head. Por, being a little fool, 
 and strong for my years, I would get fighting for that coronet on 
 the smelting-pot times out of number with half the boys of half 
 the villages we entered. They thought a coronet on an old iron 
 pot ridiculous, and they surely were right ; but I was resolute 
 to have both pot and coronet respected, being my father's ; and 
 perhaps I was right also. At any rate, I had the courage of my 
 opinions, and got half killed for them over and over again, as all 
 people rash enough to keep such ticklish possessions as opinions 
 invariably do. A princely couronne and a travelling tinker ! 
 Supreiaely ridiculous, that is certain ; but would they have been 
 less so if I had whimpered and had not fought ? It is stupid 
 to have a bad cause, no doubt ; but after all, as far as we our- 
 selves go, perhaps it is not the cause that matters so much as it 
 is one's way of upholding it. The Carroccio was a sorry childish 
 emblem in itself enough ; but does that take from the grandeur 
 of the deaths of the Tornaquinci round it ? My Carroccio was 
 my father's old tin pot; but I am glad even now to think how 
 many sucking Tuscans I in my babyhood thrashed for sheer love 
 and honour of that sacred household god. Not love of the 
 coronet, mind you, but love for what he had put there ; if he 
 nad scratched a cat's head on the pot, and they had laughed at 
 it, it would have been the same to me, and I, Pascarel, should 
 have been bound to fight for it." 
 
 "Did you ever work with him?" J asked, glancing at those 
 
THE GOLDEN CELANDINE 159 
 
 long, slender, brown hands of his which were weaving some 
 rushes together. 
 
 "Altro! of coarse I did. Tinkered many an old woman's 
 copper kettle all along the country, east and west, from Livorno 
 to Venice. But I never took to the work. I had a natural 
 genius for making holes, not for mending them. The people 
 used to call me the Marchesino, in derision of the leaves and balls 
 on the tin pot. But they dropped that after they found by fre- 
 quent experience that I could make holes in their sons' skulls 
 past all power of apothecary's soldering. Not that I was a 
 bully, believe me; but when they shouted their 'Marchesino' 
 in derision, I thought of the marble Pascarelli in the churches, 
 and hit out & little too straight home sometimes. I was a 
 little lad at that time, trotting on bare legs after rny father's 
 barrow, from house to house all over the land. It is all forgotten 
 now. I buried his tin pot in his coffin with him, as his fore- 
 fathers were buried with their golden crowns, and I have buried 
 all the old follies with it. I was fifteen years old when he 
 died." 
 
 " And you are the last Pascarello ? " 
 
 " The very last. Much good may it do me. The people, God 
 bless them ! have forgiven me all the broken heads of my boyish 
 time, and have learnt to love me well. I am afraid the 
 Ghibelline Pascarelli who live in marble in the churches could 
 never say as much." 
 
 " And you are content with that love ? " 
 
 " Eh, Dio ! I should blush for myself if I were not." 
 
 A great darkness stole over his face as he spoke that melan- 
 choly of an Italian face which is as intense as is the sunlight of 
 its happiness. 
 
 " Oh, cara mia, when one has run about in one's time with a 
 tinker's tools, and seen the lives of the poor, and the woe of 
 them, and the wretchedness of it all, and the utter uselessness of 
 everything, and the horrible, intolerable, unending pain of all 
 the things that breathe, one comes to think that in this meaning, 
 less mystery which men call life a little laughter and a little love 
 are the only things which save us all from madness the mad- 
 ness that would curse God and die." 
 
 A little laughter and a little love ! Across the brilliant fancies 
 of my supreme ignorance the words fell with a pathetic mean- 
 ing. Was this all, indeed, that the wide world could offer? 
 And was it worth while to wander so far to reach so little ? 
 
 " Yes, cara mia," he said, with his quick divination of 
 
r6o PASCAR&L. 
 
 another's thoughts. " Yes. They are all that are really worth 
 the having in this world ; and they lie so close to us sometimes, 
 and we flee away from them, not knowing, and perhaps we 
 never meet them face to face or have them in our reach again. 
 For neither of them will come for the mere asking/' 
 
 " How, then, shall we gain either ? " I asked. 
 
 He smiled. 
 
 " There was once a youth who was a shepherd. He was all 
 alone in the world, and sorrowful. No man tarried with him, 
 and no woman found him comely. 
 
 " A fairy took pity on him, and gathered a yellow blossom of 
 celandine, and put it in his hand. 'Breathe on the flower, 
 and wish thrice,' she said. ' Three times you shall have your 
 desire.' 
 
 " He breathed once on the golden flower, scarcely believing in 
 his own good fortune. ' Let me laugh as other men do/ he 
 wished. Immediately he laughed on and on, not pausing, over 
 a flagon of wine that was never emptied ; but there was no joy 
 in his mirth, and he grew sick of it. 
 
 " He breathed a second time on the flower. ' Let me love as 
 other men do/ he wished. Instantly a young maiden kissed 
 him on the mouth, and he toyed with her, and yet was not con- 
 tent ; it seemed to him that her lips were cold and her eyes 
 without any light. 
 
 "Then he breathed the third time on the flower and cast it 
 down weeping, and crying, ' Let others laugh and others love. 
 Joy is not for me, I see/ 
 
 " Then, strange to say, all at once his heart grew light, and 
 he was glad, and sang aloud with rapture, and the maiden 
 rejoiced beside him, and the kisses of her lips were warm and 
 evveet as the suns of summer. 
 
 " The fairy took from him the golden flower. * Now laughter 
 is yours and love/ she said. ' For the wish that you wished 
 was for others, and pure of the greeds of self/ 
 
 " Do you know what the story means? No ; you have only 
 just got your yellow celandine, and have scarcely breathed 
 upon it." 
 
 But I knew what it meant enough to know that he himself 
 used his golden flower for the gladness of others always. 
 
GBSWE DEAD FIRES. l6l 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 BESIDE DEAD FIRES, 
 
 the financial government of Pascarel my florins seemed 
 endlessly to expand. As yet I did not appear upon the stage 
 \nth any of them, though he trained me for it sedulously with 
 all the skill and subtlety that were given to him by the unerring 
 instincts and the long practice of his art. 
 
 We were completely happy ; Brunotta was a little humble 
 merry soul, quick as a mouse, bright as a bird, honest, I thought. 
 as the day. Cocomero and Tocco worshipped the ground tha> 
 their chief even trod on, and would have laid their lives dowii 
 willingly to do his bidding in the merest trifle. Whilst Pascarel 
 himself, the life and soul, the alpha and omega, of the small 
 community, governed it with that gentle sway which lends to 
 obedience as sweet a charm as lies in liberty. 
 
 He inquired everywhere, as best he could, for tidings of my 
 father and of Florio. But either the people knew nothing, or 
 those who knew anything had been bidden not to reveal it ; we 
 learned no intelligence of any sort, and at the post in the Uflizi 
 he heard that letters from Verona had been addressed to the 
 name of Tempesta, and were still lying there unclaimed. 
 Doubtless, these neglected things were those which old Maso 
 Sasso had penned for Mariuccia in the den of his loggia. 
 
 Pascarel sought, honestly and unweariedly, on my behalf; 
 but he did not affect to be sorry for the result. 
 
 4 'No one who has once caught hold of destiny likes to lose 
 that slippery sovereign," he would say, with a laugh ; and so I 
 remained with him and his, through the cool weeks of the 
 Quaresima. 
 
 At times, indeed, he spoke to me like one who does an 
 anwelcome duty of seeking shelter for me in some convent's 
 safety and stillness ; but my passionate terror of the captivity 
 disarmed his wiser resolves; and, indeed, to have won the 
 money necessary to secure such a refuge was as impossible to 
 me as to draw down the moon ; and to take it from him, as he 
 sometimes hinted, for he said he had a few hundreds of lire 
 laid by in the hands of a goldsmith of Florence, lest any evil 
 should befall him and leave his troop adrift, would have been 
 
 M 
 
163 PASCAR&L. 
 
 a debt from which, child though I was, all the instincts in me 
 revolted. 
 
 Before we left Florence on the springtide wanderings, he he* 
 took himself to Yerona, to see, for his own satisfaction, what 
 could be learned of my father. I heard long afterwards that he 
 went at great peril to himself, and in disguise, from the hatred 
 of Austriaci against him ; but of this he said nothing to me at 
 that time. Of danger to himself he never spoke. This was 
 only a week or so after I had first fallen in with the merry little 
 party in the ilex woods, and I was vaguely startled to feel how 
 deadly a blank his absence caused to me. The skies lost all their 
 light, and the city all her golden and transfigured beauty. 
 
 He placed me, whilst he went, at a house on the other side of 
 the river, where a good friend of his, Orfeo Orlanduccio, a 
 master worker in mosaic, dwelt. 
 
 Orlanduccio was a widower, with one little pretty, merry child 
 called Bice\ They were very good to me in the dusky ancient 
 house, through whose grated casements one looked oat, like pri- 
 soners, on the world, and whose massive chambers were all rich 
 with carving, and scented with that curious old world incense- 
 like aromatic odour of which the Florence streets are full. 
 
 It was in the Via de la Pergola, not far off the house that the 
 Duke gave to Cellini ; and as I leaned against the barred windows 
 I used to think of the bronze-workers in that little garden, and 
 of the fierce molten metal seething out under the flame from the 
 oak timbers ; and of the stream, hot and red, like blood from a 
 murdered man's throat, crushing in to fill the beautiful mask of 
 the Perseus, and of the artist breathless, agonised, torn betwixt 
 hope and fear, rent by the noble rashness of genius and the 
 feebler human dread of accident coming out under the dark 
 hanging fig-leaves with armsful of his household gods of silver 
 and pewter and copper and gold, and casting them all into the 
 furnace, as children were cast to Moloch, so that his Thought 
 might arise from the fires and live for all time in men's light. 
 
 Orfeo Orlanduccio was a grave, melancholy, stern, good man; 
 he had been lamed in the wars of Carl- Alberto, and was subject 
 to suspicion for his advanced political creeds ; he had a noble 
 grey head like Luca della Eobbia's, and it was a picture to see 
 him in his dark workshop piecing the tiny fragments so deftly 
 into all manner of delicate arabesques and dainty flowers with 
 his lithe slender fingers that had used to grasp a sabre to hard 
 purpose, they said, in earlier days. 
 
 I stayed with, him and the little, saucy, smiling rosebud of a 
 
BESIDE DEAD FIRES. 163 
 
 Bice* whilst Pascarel went northward. Brunotta did not come 
 with me there ; indeed the mosaic maker seemed to me to know 
 little or nothing of her existence. 
 
 On the fourth day of my stay with them, the good Orfeo, 
 coming from the market-place, was arrested and borne to the 
 Bargello under some accusation of conspiracy. I know not 
 what, but all liberal thinkers were under suspicion in those 
 days. 
 
 His apprentices brought word of his misfortunes, and little 
 Bice, a merry babyish thing, of nine or ten, cried her pretty 
 eyes red with weeping for her father, and in the evening time 
 her foster-mother, a peasant of the Casentino, came in and bore 
 her off to dwell in the country till her parent should be set free 
 which might not be for many months, they said. 
 
 I remember the sense of desolation, of belonging to no earthly 
 soul or thing, that shivered over me that night as the little 
 heedless child went, laughing through her tears to hear the 
 mule bells ring, and the apprentices took down their caps and 
 stared at me stupidly, and the woman who did the housework 
 there in the daytime, having cleaned her pots and pans and 
 swept up the kitchen, came and looked at me with her arm in 
 her side, and asked me, meditatively': 
 
 "The signorina will betake herself to her friends? the lads 
 sleep out, and then I will bar the place up safe. Orfeo has been 
 in this sort of trouble before. Men are such fools; they will 
 craze their heads for things that have no concern for them. 
 Will the signorina go ; I want to bar the doors ; it is darlj 
 now." 
 
 I begged her to let me stay a little. I had promised Pascarel 
 not to leave this house until he came for me, and no force in 
 Florence, I think, would have availed to make me disobey him. 
 
 A rebel to all other authority since my babyhood, I took a 
 passionate delight in obeying this stranger's mere glance and 
 gesture. 
 
 The donna di fatica, moved by my loneliness and my suppli- 
 cations, lit me a lamp and left me, promising to return in an 
 hour, when go I must, she said, for she had served Maestro 
 Orfeo twenty years and more, and was not going to leave his 
 bottega open to thieves for all the yellow-haired signorini in 
 Christendom. 
 
 Her heavy steps trod slowly out of the stone passages, and the 
 massive nail-studded door closed behind her. My heart sank as 
 I was left alo.Tie in the empty house with its unfinished mosaics 
 
 H 2 
 
1 64 PASCAR&L. 
 
 strewn over the floor, and its dreamy aroma from the millions of 
 pine cones and oak logs that had burned on those old hearths in 
 the fires of five hundred centuries. 
 
 It was one of the oldest dwellings in Florence. Its massive 
 stones and iron stanchions had stood against sack and seige, flame 
 and mob. It was only antique and strange with the 'prentices 
 merry feet on the stairs and Bice's rosy round face at the grated 
 casements, but when one was alone in it, at night, there seemed 
 dim clouds of ghosts in every dusky chamber. 
 
 My heart leaped with the sweetest gladness it had ever knowr 
 as I heard a light swift footstep on the stairs, and the clear sweel 
 ring of a Tuscan voice. 
 
 "My donzella ! " it called, in the gloom, "are you all alone 
 here?" 
 
 I sprang to him in joyous welcome, and did not notice till he 
 had sat down beside me on the oaken settle by the fireless hearth 
 that his face looked worn and weary. 
 
 " Yes, Orfeo is imprisoned/' he said, impatiently. " There is 
 nothing to be done. He is known to be in the confidence of 
 Mazzini, and papers have been found do not let us talk of it. 
 His child is safe, and he will come back to his old place in a 
 year or less. He is a good man and true. We must have 
 patience." 
 
 He was silent. The lamp burned dully. The old house was 
 silent around us. 
 
 " I am vexed for him and for you," he said, after a long 
 pause. " I thought," dear signorina, that it would be better for 
 you to stay with little Bice than to roam with us. Orfeo is the 
 only man whom I can trust. My friends lie amongst poor people 
 very poor or men honest, indeed, but reckless and given over 
 to wild work, who can be of no sort of good to you. Orfeo, 
 indeed, I could have trusted. He would have given you a safe 
 home, though a poor one. But it seems willed otherwise." 
 
 " But I am to go with you!" I cried, aghast at this disposal 
 of me. 
 
 He smiled gently, but a darkness and impatience passed like a 
 mist over his face. He was silent, trimming the wick of the 
 oil-lamp. 
 
 " Well, so it seems, dear donzella," he said, after awhile, with 
 a certain hesitation not natural to his frank, free rapid modes of 
 speech. "Well, I will do my best by you God help me, and 
 forgive us sinners ! Nevertheless, if Orfeo had not fallen on this 
 evil chance, it had been better." 
 
BESIDE DEAD FIRES. 165 
 
 " If I be any trouble to you/ ' I began 
 
 He stopped me with a tender gesture. 
 
 " Never say that it is not that I mean. It is a safe and 
 quiet home were better for you. But since fate wills it other- 
 wise, oh, cara mia ! credit me, you shall be as sacred to me as 
 though my dead mother lived to care for you." 
 
 I looked up at him in wonder at the emotion in his voice ; his 
 thoughts were in nowise clear to me. 
 
 There was a long silence in the dark old house. 
 
 He leaned against the wall, lost in meditations that my imagi- 
 nation failed to follow. 
 
 He looked down suddenly, and spoke : 
 
 " I have learned nothing at Verona/ ' he said, with a certain 
 tone of sadness that wounded me, for it seemed as though he 
 were regretful not to be rid of me. "No one has seen your 
 father, nor could anyone give me any news of him. Nor do they 
 appear to know any more of who or what he really is than you 
 do. But there is one sad story that I heard for you, and that is 
 of your old master." 
 
 "Ambrogib?" I cried, and all my heart went back to the 
 poor old lonely man whom I had forsaken in a child's eager 
 desires for fresh fields and pastures new. 
 
 " Yes, dear donzella," answered Pascar&L. 
 
 I sprang to my feet eagerly ; he answered me with a slight, 
 hopeless gesture of the hands that chilled me into a great awe. 
 
 "He died the night you left Verona. They found him dead 
 over his empty brazier in his garret all alone. The children 
 saw him first ; going to take their lesson in the morning. He is 
 buried by now." 
 
 The simple words seemed to pierce my heart as I heard 
 them. 
 
 My poor dead master ! 
 
 I saw the place the still lone garret, the uncurtained lattice, 
 the robin singing on the sill, the dreary roofs, and the snow 
 mountains far beyond ; the miserable home, with the grey ashes 
 of cold fires in the earthen brazier ; the children at the half - 
 opened door, peeping with pale scared faces, and whispering to- 
 gether, and pointing at the figure on the hearth all the sad, 
 dreary, colourless picture, drawn in the black and white of Age 
 and Death, arose before me as I listened. 
 
 I sank down on a bench, and cried bitterly, as for a woe all 
 my own. 
 
 Was this the end the only bitter end of all those years of 
 
1 66 PASCAR&L. 
 
 wrong and -want? One other nameless grave in the snow under 
 the bleak blasts in old Yerona ! 
 
 Pascarel let me sob on, and did not seek to console me ; but I 
 poured out all the history to him in my sorrow, and he listened 
 gravely, there, in the old, dim, lonely room, heavy with the 
 scent of the long-died-out fires that had warmed so many faces 
 and forms that were now dust in the crypts and sepulchres of the 
 city. 
 
 " You must never tell the tale but to me, my child, " he said, 
 at length. " The secret belongs to the dead. He chose to keep 
 it in his life ; you must keep it for him in his death. Rothwald 
 is rich and famous? Yes; why not? Justice is not of this 
 world." 
 
 "But why does God permit such things ?" I cried, in th? 
 despair of my poor lost master's wrongs. 
 
 Pascarel gave an impatient sigh. 
 
 " Oh, child ! Has the human race solved that problem in all 
 these many thousand years since the first men dwelt in the first 
 lake cities ? "We shall never know that till our souls leave our 
 bodies " 
 
 " Eut for no punishment to fall ! " I cried, and sobbed afresh, 
 weighed down with the burden of all those long, lone, fruitless 
 years, whose end was a beggar's grave in sad Yerona. 
 
 " Ay! if the bolts would smite, and the heavens would open, 
 life would be so much easier, and hope so much easier too/' said 
 Pascarel; " but, perhaps, even in this world, there may be more 
 punishment than we can know." 
 
 " Listen, donzella," he pursued. " Did never you hear the story 
 of Andrea dal Castagno, who lived here in the street hard by ? 
 tfo? Well, then 
 
 "He and the bright Yenetian Domenico dwelt together in 
 great and close friendship ; so much so, that they shared the 
 same chambers, painted in the same studio, were inseparable in 
 pursuits and pleasures, and aims and endeavours, and were cited 
 all through the city as the very symbol of faithful comradeship. 
 
 " Well, one night, the Yenetian went forth as usual, with his 
 lute under his cloak, to serenade his mistress in the moonlight ; 
 and there, in the dark archway of the street, a dark figure lay 
 unseen in wait for him, and he was stabbed through and through, 
 and his love-song was stifled in his throat, and he was slain. 
 
 " Who had killed him ? 
 
 " The city could not tell. 
 
 " Andrea was found painting quietly by lamp-light when they 
 
BESIDE DEAD FIRES. 167 
 
 bore the dying man home ; and he tore his hair and rent his 
 garments in agonised lawfcoritatioii over the bleeding body of his 
 dear dead friend. 
 
 " Yet Andrea was the murderer. 
 
 "For greed of the secret of the oils and varnisnes, some say; 
 some say for envy of the woman's love. "Which no one ever 
 rightly knew. 
 
 "Andrea lived in honour all his days. He was a great artist 
 and all men spoke well of him. Suspicion never fell on him. 
 Had not Doraenico breathed his death-sigh in his arms, blessing 
 him to the last ? Nay, the State even employed him to paint 
 the traitors hung on the city walls by their heels and his brush 
 did not falter. 
 
 "He had long life, I say, and everything to make it good and 
 even glorious. Yet, though he had riches, and fame, and, as men 
 call it, happiness, he never once in all that time could ever quite 
 forget. He never once forgot ; he never ceased to see the kindly 
 faithful face dead there in the lustre of the summer night ; he 
 never ceased to hear the familiar voice in the last love- song ere 
 he had stifled it in its death-struggle ; he never ceased to be 
 pursued night and day by the remembrance of his guilt : never, 
 that we are sure ; for, though he kept his secret close all his life 
 long, he could not keep it to the very end. On his death-bed he 
 confessed his crime, and Florence, though at the tenth hour, 
 despoiled him, and dishonoured him, and gave him a felon's 
 grave." 
 
 I shuddered as I heard. 
 
 The tale told in that old dark Florentine room, within a stone's 
 throw of the place of murder, had a terrible ghastly awe in it. 
 I shrank closer to Pascarel, and he stretched his hand out and 
 took mine. 
 
 " Did I tell you too frightful a story ? " he said, caressingly. 
 
 "JN"o, no," I murmured, "it is not that. But my poor old 
 master ! And see here : if Andrea were chastised, what did that 
 compensate Domenico ? It could not give him back his life and 
 love " 
 
 " Of compensation to Domenico there was none," said Pascarel, 
 sadly. " But of chastisement to Andrea I think there was 
 enough. I told you the tale to show you that, where we think 
 glory and gain are most abundant, there sometimes burns the fire 
 that quenches not, which men call remorse. Your master left 
 his vengeance with his (jod. "We must so leave it likewise. And 
 now, donzella mia, you shiver in tliis cold dark room. Come 
 
l68 PASCARRL. 
 
 out, aud let us get to the light and warmth again, and forget ail 
 these weary meditations. You must wander with us ; those 
 Fates on the onyx so will it. Well, I swear to you, carina, that 
 you shall never repent your trust in me." 
 
 He touched my hands lightly with his lips, and we went down 
 the stone staircase, and out of the dark and lonely house of the 
 mosaic- worker. 
 
 I clung close to him as we went through the now gloomy 
 streets, and I was glad when we reached the little bright arch- 
 way of the locanda in Oltrano, where Brunotta met us with many 
 exclamations, and with the ruddy flame of a wood fire she had 
 lighted glowing on her little plump figure and her gorgeous 
 silver ear-rings. 
 
 The Arte was shut that night, for it was the Domenica di 
 Passione. 
 
 She had a little supper ready for us of shining brown alardi, 
 crisply fried, and stewed rice with pears. She, like Pulci's 
 Margutte, was given to swearing " neither by black nor blue, 
 but only by a good capon, whether roast or boiled, " and had no 
 notion of starving even on the gravest fast of the Church. 
 
 It was all quiet in the quarter of the Silver Dove. 
 
 Bells were sounding for the vespers, that was all; and as we 
 eat at our little meal people streamed by the open door, going in 
 flocks to pray in the great white vaulted stillness of the Santo 
 Spirito 
 
 Pascarel and I were silent that night. 
 
 He thought of his friend Orfeo ; and I of my old dead master. 
 
 Nevertheless, we were both glad, I think, that the morrow 
 was not going to part us; and whilst Brunotta and the boys 
 played together at tarbc, I sat and looked every now and then at 
 the delicate profile of Pascarel against the shadows from the oil 
 lamp, and felt no trouble or fear for the future. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 GIUDENTF DELL* AlOx T 0. 
 
 WE stayed in Florence through the long, cool, sunny weeks of 
 the Quaresima, broken here and there with the mad frolic of the 
 Mi- Care me, and the fun of the Fairs of the Innamorati and the 
 Curiosi and the Gelosie at the Gates of the City. 
 
THE OLD STAR TOW MR. 169 
 
 The great lilies, white, and azure, and purple, were just be- 
 ginning to bloom everywhere round the city, and the streets and 
 the woods seemed to shine as snow with the clusters of the stain- 
 less anemoli. 
 
 There is nothing upon earth, I think, like the smile of Italy 
 as she awakes when the winter has dozed itself away in the 
 odours of its oakwood fires. 
 
 The whole land seems to laugh, 
 
 The springtide of the north is green and beautiful, but it has 
 nothing of the radiance, the dreamfulness, the ecstacy of spring 
 in the southern countries. The springtide of the north is pale 
 with the gentle colourless sweetness of its world of primroses ; 
 the springtide of Italy is rainbow-hued, like the profusion of 
 anemones that laugh with it in every hue of glory under every 
 ancient wall and beside every hill-fed stream. 
 
 Spring in the north is a child that wakes from dreams of death ; 
 spring in the south is a child that wakes from dreams of love. 
 One is rescued and welcomed from the grave; but the other 
 comes smiling on a sunbeam from heaven. 
 
 All the Quaresiina we abode in Florence ; and he made glad 
 and perfect to me each lenten hour as it glided by ; and when 
 the sun set, it left me always tired, happy, thoughtful, full of 
 peace. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE OLD STAK TOWEE. 
 
 ONE day, I remember, we strolled slowly out by the Romano 
 gate towards the hills as the day drew to its close. 
 
 The old frescoes on the house wall were bright in the afternoon 
 light ; there was a group of soldiers drinking ; there were some 
 asses laden with straw for the plaiters 7 market on the morrow ; 
 a bare-foot, brown-frocked monk went by amongst the soldiery ; 
 the cypress and ilex road stretched up into the distance; 
 coming down the Stradone was an old white horse with a pile 
 of fruit upon his back, and a lad in a yellow shirt at his bridle ; 
 about the base of the old broken statues of Petrarca some children 
 played. 
 
 " How very little that is ! " said Pascarel. " And yet it is all 
 a picture. It is a pity ever to do anything in Italy j the country 
 
170 PASCAR&L. 
 
 is made just to lie still in and dream in, with the body half asleep 
 and the mind wide awake, but lost in fancies. Italy soothes us 
 as a mother's arms lull a wayward child, if only we will let her 
 do it : but if we struggle from her natural influences, and try to 
 spend our lives in strife, then her sun stings, and her dust blinds 
 us, and all her charm is gone." 
 
 So, talking whilst we passed the people, and followed closely 
 by the three dogs, he took me up to the Star Tower of Galileo 
 amongst the winding paths of the hills, with the grey walls over- 
 topped by white fruit blossom, and ever and again, at some break 
 in their ramparts of stone, the gleam of the yellow Arno water, 
 or the glisten of the marbles of the City shining on us far be- 
 neath, through the silvery veil of the olive leaves. 
 
 It was just in that loveliest moment when winter melts into 
 spring. 
 
 Everywhere under the vines the young corn was springing in 
 that tender vivid greenness that is never seen twice in a year. 
 The sods between the furrows were scarlet with the bright flame 
 of wild tulips, with here and there a fleck of gold where a knot 
 of daffodils nodded. The roots of the olives were blue with 
 nestling pimpernels and hyacinths, and along the old grey walls 
 the long, soft, thick leaf of the arums grew, shading their yet 
 unborn lilies. 
 
 The air was full of a dreamy fragrance ; the bullocks went on 
 their slow ways with flowers in their leathern frontlets ; the con- 
 tadini had flowers stuck behind their ears or in their waistbands ; 
 women sat by the wayside, singing as they plaited their yellow 
 curling lengths of straw; children frisked and tumbled like 
 young rabbits under the budding maples ; the plum-trees strewed 
 the green landscape with flashes of white like newly-fallen snow 
 on alpine grass slopes ; again and again amongst the tender 
 pallor of the olive woods there rose the beautiful flush of a rosy 
 almond tree; at every step the passer-by trod ancle deep in 
 violets. 
 
 The air was cool, but so exquisitely still, and soft, and radiant, 
 that as the old people came out of their dark, arched, stone 
 chambers, and sat a little in the sun, and made up into bunches 
 for selling the blossoms which their children gathered by the 
 million, without seeming to make the earth the poorer, one felt 
 as if the sun shining on them as it did must make them young 
 again as if no one could very long be very old or very sad in 
 Italy. 
 
 It was the thought of a Qhild, and of a happy child. When 
 
THE OLD STAR TOWER. 171 
 
 one is old it must surely be better to creep away under the mists, 
 into the darkness of some chimney-corner, in the chill, short twi- 
 light of the loveless and bitter North, than to behold this divine 
 light, cloudless and endless, which seems to beat with all the 
 pulses of passion, and to laugh with all the sweet, soft, foolish 
 ecstacies of love. 
 
 AYho was it that called Italy the country of the dead ? Not 
 they surely who have beheld her in the days of spring. 
 
 About the feet of the Tower of Galileo, ivy and vervain, and 
 the Madonna's herb, and the white sexagons of the stars of 
 Bethlehem grew amongst the grasses, pigeons paced to and fro 
 with pretty pride of plumage ; a dog slept on the flags ; the cool, 
 moist, deep-veined creepers climbed about the stones ; there were 
 peach-trees in all the beauty of their blossoms, and everywhere 
 ubout them were close-set olive trees, with the ground between 
 them scarlet with the tulips and the wild rose bushes. 
 
 Erom a window a girl leaned out and hung a cage amongst 
 the ivy leaves, that her bird might sing his vespers to the 
 sun. 
 
 Who will may see the scene to-day. 
 
 So little changed so little, if at all, from the time when the 
 feet of the great student wore the timber of the tower stairs, and 
 the fair-haired scholar, who had travelled from the isles in the 
 northern sea, came up between the olive stems to gaze thence 
 on Yallombrosa. 
 
 The world has spoiled most of its places of pilgrimage, but the 
 old Star Tower is not harmed as yet, where it stands amongst 
 its quiet garden ways, and grass-grown slopes, up high amongst 
 the hills, with sounds of dripping water on its court, and wild 
 wood-flowers thrusting their bright heads through its stones. 
 
 Generations have come and gone : tyrannies have risen and 
 fallen : full many a time the plain below has been red with the 
 invader's fire, and the curling flame has burned the fruitful land 
 to blackened barrenness; full many a time the silence of the 
 olive thickets has been broken by the tumult of war and revolu- 
 tion, and the dead bodies of men have drifted thick as leaves in 
 the blood-stained current of the river. 
 
 But nothing has been changed here, where the old square pile 
 stands out amongst the flowering vines. 
 
 It is as peaceful, as simple, as homely, as closely girt with 
 blossoming boughs and with tulip -crimsoned grasses, now as then, 
 when from, its roof, in the still midnights of a far-off time, its 
 master read the secrets of the stars. 
 
17* 
 
 You can sec it to-day any day that you will this quiet 
 shadowy hill-side place amongst the fields. 
 
 But come up softly between the old gnarled olive stems ; tread 
 noiselessly the winding pathway where the wild hyacinth shakes 
 its blue bells on the wind ; be reverent a little if reverence in 
 this age be possible as you climb the narrow wooden stair, and 
 through the unglazed arches of the walls look westward where 
 the sea lies, and southward towards Rome. 
 
 Be reverent a little, for a little space at least : for here Galileo 
 learned the story of the sun; and here Milton, looking on Yal- 
 darno, dreamed of Paradise. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 DUE AM011I. 
 
 WE scattered the pigeons that day as they picked their way 
 amongst the rose trees, and we went across the sombre quiet 
 court, and up the wooden stairs, on to the square roof where the 
 great Tuscan had sat so many and many a night with his listen- 
 ing pupils round him, and, beneath, the dark stillness of the 
 sleeping plains. 
 
 "How fair she looks down there ! " said Pascarel, resting his 
 eyes fondly on the City. " I have seen pretty well all the world, 
 but I have never seen anything that can make one forget her. I 
 am of the same way of thinking as was Yisino ; better a flask 
 of Tribbiano and a berlingozzo of Florence than all the kings and 
 queens and courts and camps in Christendom. Look at her now; she 
 lies like a golden galley of old upon a silver moon -lightened sea." 
 
 Very fair indeed she was, the Lily Queen, that evening. 
 
 There had been shadows all day, and in the west there were 
 masses of cloud, purple and blue-black, spreading away into a 
 million of soft scarlet cirri that drifted before a low wind from 
 the southward, tender and yet rich in tone as any scattered 
 shower of carnation leaves. 
 
 Through that vast pomp of dusky splendour and that radiance 
 of rose, the sun itself still shone ; shone full upon the City. 
 
 Leaning on the broken edge of the watch-tower and gazing 
 down below, all Florence seemed like the seer's dream of the $ew 
 Jerusalem ; every stone of her seemed transmuted ; she was as 
 though paven and built with gold; straightway across the whole 
 
DUE AMOR2. 173 
 
 ralley stretched the alchemy of that wondrous fireglow, and all 
 the broad level lands of the Yaldigreve were transfigured like- 
 wise into one vast sheet of gold, on which the silver olives and the 
 dim white villages and villas floated like frail white sails upon a 
 sunlit sea. 
 
 Farther still farther yet, heyond that burnished ocean the 
 mountains and the clouds met and mingled, golden likewise, 
 broken here and there into some tenderest rose-leaf flush, mira- 
 culously lovely, as a poet's dreams of nameless things of God. 
 
 We stayed long, and watched it high above on the wooden 
 roof of the tower ; watched it until the sun had set, and the glow 
 had died, and the stillness of evening had fallen over the hills 
 and plain, and past our faces flew a little grey downy owl. 
 
 " Your fathers saw Galileo? " said Pascarel to the bird as it 
 went, " and thought what a fool he was, no doubt, to sit moon* 
 ing there with his face turned to the stars instead of hunting 
 moths in the night air and slaughtering mice under the olive 
 stems as they did. To be sure : the owls and the world, no 
 doubt, were quite of one mind concerning him. When there is 
 a nice, plump, black mouse to be killed down on the clay, what 
 greater folly can there be than to stay on high staring at stars ? 
 Who would not be an owl ten times sooner than a Galileo ? " 
 
 " Are you serious ? " I asked him, when we leaned against the 
 wooden rail. I had not then learned to disentangle his thoughts 
 from his language. 
 
 " Altro!" he cried, sending a pebble down into the olive 
 foliage beneath. " Who would not be an owl? To escape all the 
 toil and moil of the day, asleep in a cosy ivy hole ; to doze all 
 the hours away, and only awake to kill and eat; to be able to 
 swear there is no such thing as a sun, because we are too blind 
 to see it what can be finer than that ? It is such a popular 
 type, too ; ten thousand times more popular than a Galileo ! " 
 
 I looked at him where he leaned with his arms on the parapet 
 of the roof, and his profile, clear and dark, against the delicate 
 silvery greys that had followed the rose glow in the heavens. 
 
 He had more interest for me than Galileo or the owls ; in no 
 way could I reconcile the grace of him, the wit of him, and the 
 look of his face with the mode of his life, which was scarcely 
 above the grade of vagrants and of mountebanks. 
 
 It seemed to me so strange that any man of such various learn- 
 ing and such ironical perception should thus willingly pass away 
 
 his years in the homely and grotesque career of a strolling player. 
 * # * * * 
 
174 PASCAR&L. 
 
 " What could ever first make you take this life you lead ? " I 
 asked him, incredulously, when we stood together on the top of 
 the Star Tower. 
 
 " I fell in love," said Pascarel, promptly, leaning over the 
 roof- wall to watch the shadows steal over the long cypress Stra- 
 done, and come slowly upward and upward to the heights 
 whereon we stood, " not for the first nor the fifth time, of 
 course, but truly enough for that matter. A set of French 
 comedians came to stir the stately silence of old Pisa. They 
 were merry, poor, happy-go-lucky people who played their way 
 all along the Riviera. Clever people, too French players 
 always are. 
 
 " Amongst them there was a girl whom we called the Zinzara, 
 because of her pungent tongue. I am not sure that she was 
 handsome, but she had a diable au corps, you know no, you 
 don't know no matter ! 
 
 " To see the Zinzara play Phsedre in the first, and dance the 
 cancan in the afterpiece, was a revelation. I had always main- 
 tained that women could not possess genius, but I gave in before 
 her. Her renderings of Racine were miracles, and so were her 
 soups and salads. 
 
 " She would scare your very soul out of you with her whirl- 
 winds of passion, and her whisper was like the hiss > f a snake, 
 and her eyes seemed a blaze of fire and passion, and then half- 
 an-hour after you would see her in her one poor little room, with 
 her cuffs turned back from her long white hands, and she would 
 mix you oil, and lettuces, and beet-root, or toss you. a herb ome- 
 lette over her stove with a skill that half the cooks of Paris 
 could not have equalled. She was a true Frenchwoman, the 
 Zinzara. I have never seen her like since. 
 
 " It was she who made me an actor. I had always had a 
 taste for it, but when I saw this Paris mosquito the die was cast. 
 I had finished all my course in Pisa. For that matter I had 
 swept all before me, and won all there was to win. Indeed, 
 they actually offered me a professorship of mathematics. Never 
 say that I have not rejected greatness. 
 
 " I was two-and-twenty; I was an Italian; I was Pascarel; 
 and they imagined that I should settle down to lead all my life 
 in old Pisa like an owl in a belfry, till I grew as old, and as grey, 
 and as silent, and as forgotten of God and man as Pisa is her- 
 self ! But they meant well ; only they knew nothing of the fit- 
 ness of things. Academies never do. 
 
 " If I had meant to stay, the Zinzara would have swept my 
 
DUE AMOR1. 175 
 
 intentions to the winds. I had a room I was very fond of, high 
 up in a tower, with the river washing against the walls far away 
 down below. There were scores of cohwebs, and legends, and 
 ghosts attached to it, but I slept too soundly in those days to 
 take heed of any one of them. I had hundreds of books there, 
 and my tubes, and prisms, and telescopes, and I had passed seven 
 years there after the fashion of Faust, only that I had all my 
 life before me, and being young broke up my learning and 
 science with nights of nonsense and days of pleasure that needed 
 no devil's cordial. 
 
 " I loved my room, and was loth to quit it, and almost it 
 tempted me to stay in Pisa ; but one fine morning, as I read my 
 Plato for the thousandth time, I heard a merry noise and laughter 
 in the street at the foot of the tower ; and looking out I saw a 
 little set of people all ready for long travel, and going gaily on 
 their way. It was the Zinzara and her brethren going back 
 towards their France. 
 
 " They had the sun all about them; they had great clusters 
 of cherries in their hands ; they were eating, and laughing, and 
 singing; they were dusty already, but what of that? they were 
 going to the green country, to the blue sea, to the charm of 
 change, to the tumult and merriment and variety of life. 
 
 " The spell of the Wanderjahre was cast on me, to say 
 nothing that I was really in love with that poor Zinzara. 
 
 " An hour after I had made over my room and my books and 
 my instruments to my best friend, Ezio Luccone, and I had 
 caught up the mosquito and her friends on the high road for 
 Livorno, just as the sun reached to noon. From that day I was 
 a player. 
 
 " I stayed about two years with that troop, all that time on 
 the Biviera <^r among the little mountain towns of Savoy. 
 
 " The Zinzara taught me all she knew. For the matter of 
 that I had found my vocation, which assuredly did not lie in a 
 professorial tribune. 
 
 " I used to write comedies and 'revues' for them. $"0 ! I 
 have not a scrap of what I wrote left. What does that matter ? 
 If one have any ord sodd about one at all, either mental or moral, 
 one never counts what shreds of the good metal one drops along 
 the roads. If others pick it up, let them. To be of ever so 
 little use is all one can hope for in this world. 
 
 " At the end of two years the troop broke up ; it is a miracle 
 amongst actors when any set of them holds together half as long, 
 and I went by myself to Paris, where, too, I played. 
 
176 PASCAR&l 
 
 " But I never cared much for Paris. One cannot open one'e 
 mouth when one talks that language ; and amongst those shining 
 zinc roofs, and that blaze of white paint and of gilding, I grew 
 thirsty for my own great dark palaces, and still historic garden- 
 ways, and moonlit plains song-haunted, and measureless dis- 
 tances only Bwept by clouds and wind. Do you not know P Oh, 
 yes ; anyone who has once breathed in Italy knows. And to 
 anyone who had not, thjre would be no use in talking." 
 
 " What of theZinzara? 
 
 " Oh, the usual thing of the Zinzara. She loved me very 
 dearly for a time, and then she picked up a Marquis out of Mo- 
 naco only a Marchese di Truffaldino I am afraid, poor thing 
 and flung the salad-bowl at my head. 
 
 ' ' Women always fling something at you when they are angry 
 with themselves for having been in love with you; a great 
 genius flings a stinging * Elle et Lui ; ' a poor actress can only 
 fling a kitchen missile that comes handy. Perhaps the latter is 
 the better. It is not so disagreeable to be forcibly reminded of 
 the radishes and endive of the past, as it is to see all one's old 
 lollies and passions served up with pepper and mustard. 
 
 " The poor Zinzara! I have not a notion what became of 
 her. She had genius of a sort indisputably, both for tragedy and 
 cookery. But she never fastened her mark on the world, 
 though she had the making both of a Eachel and a Yatel in 
 her. 
 
 "Peace be with her wherever she be; she enlivened two 
 bright summers for me ; she taught me the tricks of the stage ; 
 and she only broke her wooden supper-bowl, and not either my 
 head or my heart.' ' 
 
 I was silent as he ceased speaking ; I had only the most 
 vaguely innocent notions of what this his passion for the Zinzars 
 might mean ; but I had a vague and restless impatience at hear- 
 ing him speak of any love for any creature at all. 
 
 His gaze went westward as he spoke. 
 
 Close at hand, on its own quiet hill-side, stood the little con- 
 vent church of Sta. Margherita, the highest point of all, bowered 
 close amongst olive and fruit-tree foliage, with the village slanting 
 away from it in a dusky line of roofs downward to where the 
 Pazzi tyrannicide was planned amongst the villa gardens. 
 
 Pascarel looked across to it. It is not changed since its beau- 
 tiful novice left its saintly peace and stole down through the 
 amorous olive shadows to the lawless love of Fra Lippi. 
 
 " Do you not see Fra Filippo," said he, " gathering hia 
 
DUE AMORf. 177 
 
 doiik's frock about him, and speeding up there to steal a glance 
 at Lucrezia through the convent grating, if chance favoured ? 
 What grace was there in that scamp of the Carmelites, that 
 Rabelais of painting, that Ealstaff of the fine arts, that a woman, 
 young and rich and beautiful, should leave all for him, and 
 ;leave to him so faithfully ? Some heart and soul there must 
 lave been. The city saw in him a wild, frolicsome, mad monk, 
 itter to worship Silenus than Christ. But there must have 
 been some soul in him some soul tender, pitiful, spiritual, pro- 
 found, or he had never painted his S. Stefano of Prato till it 
 made the fierce men of his own day weep, and he would never 
 have loved those green, wide, laughing countries which made 
 him greater than Masaccio, and the first of the Florence painters 
 of landscape. Perhaps that soul in him the young nun saw. 
 Are we ever truly read, save by the one that loves us best ? 
 Love is blind, the phrase runs ; nay, I would rather say Love 
 sees as God sees, and with infinite wisdom has infinite pardon." 
 
 His voice grew very sweet and still, and the dreamy look 
 came into his eyes as he leaned there gazing across at the little 
 red roof of Sta. Margherita, whose solitary bell was tolling the 
 Ave Maria over its silent woods. 
 
 His thoughts were far beyond me; I was but a heedless child, 
 and of where his mind had wandered I knew nothing ; and of 
 the greatness of such a love as he was wishful for, doubtless, in 
 his heart even then, I had no more conception or measurement 
 than I had of that baser passion such as he had been lured with 
 
 by the Ziuzara. 
 
 * -x- * * * 
 
 He spoke no more ; the night had fallen quickly and com- 
 pletely, as it does in Yaldarno when once the sun's disc has 
 dropped behind Carrara. 
 
 We went slowly together down the stairs and across the court 
 and through the olive downward to the City, and we passed 
 within the gates again as the stars began to burn, and the sheets 
 of moonlight to lie white and wide on river and piazza. The 
 world, so tired though it be with fruitless paiD, so dull in drowsy 
 apathy, so weary of for ever giving birth to what for ever 
 perishes when touching on its prime, the world is once more 
 young again when the moon shines on Italy. 
 
 " To my fancy," said he, softly, as we paused a moment on 
 the bridge of the Graces to see the silver width of the stream 
 shine away on either side into the sweet tremulous darkness ol 
 &e hills, " to my fancy, when the gods of the golden age were 
 
 M 
 
178 
 
 driven from earth and walked no more amongst men, they looked 
 back once, and said, ' that we may be remembered a little in 
 this land we, the old banished gods of the old, fair, dead faiths, 
 let Paradise return to earth when the moon wakes above 
 Italy/ Her nights are gifts of the gods that she has, this 
 Italy of ours; it is so trite to say so ay, because it is so 
 true." 
 
 Florence was very still that night as we went through her streets 
 from the old Star Tower. 
 
 It was the Holy week. 
 
 Here and there, from some low open door, a Miserere was 
 pealing. Here and there the shadow of a monk fell across the 
 broad white stones. Here and there a lamp burned before some 
 street shrine hung with those scentless flowers that are the joyless 
 Christian symbol of immortality. 
 
 But Florence never can be very sad. Her tears and smiles 
 lie close together. If she draw the saintly cowl about her, her 
 fair eyes laugh from beneath the folds, so that you half shall 
 swear the robe of penance is a masker's domino. 
 
 She tells her beads with one hand, but she touches her lute 
 with the other. 
 
 Even this night as we went, though it was the season of the 
 saintly Quaresima, there was a mandoline trilling from some 
 high casement in a palace tower; in an old dusky doorway there 
 was the glisten of a girl's white dress and a cuirassier's flashing 
 breast -plate; from a fretted balcony of stone fashioned with 
 lilies and fawns' heads a beautiful dark woman, gathering about 
 her a mantle of black and gold, dropped a single rosebud to a 
 lover who waited below for the pretty symbol ; far, far away, 
 across the great white luminous piazza, there came the sound of 
 voices, in chorus, laughing to light scorn the lenten lamenta- 
 tions ; some men and maidens had been in the meadows and 
 were bringing home sheaves of the lilies, they danced as they 
 came in the moonlight, and a young boy played a viol before 
 them. 
 
 Pascarel looked and listened, then went onward with a 
 smile. 
 
 " Is not my Florence perfect? " he murmured. " Some say 
 I talk of her as though she were a city of fairie. Well, a fairy 
 city she is to every poet and every lover. Was she not buildcd 
 in a night by Hercules as a pleasure toy for Venus and Flora, 
 made with the stones from the golden Arno water, and set up in 
 a meadow of lilies ? Hercules gave her his strength as a birth- 
 
THE LILY-QUEEN. 179 
 
 right, and Flora being content, touched the soil, and said, ' All the 
 year long flowers shall blossom here, and their smile shall not 
 cease in any season ; ' and Venus, being well pleased likewise, 
 called her son to her, and said, * When you dart your arrows 
 hither wreathe them with roses, and wing them from the eagle 
 and the dove.' " 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE LILT- QUEEN. 
 
 HE did indeed love Florence with a tender passion. 
 
 Paris is the Aspasia of cities, but Florence is the Heloise; 
 upon the brilliancy of her genius and her beauty there lie always 
 the shadow of the cloister, and always the divinity of a great 
 sacrifice. 
 
 Men, with any soul in them, love Florence reverently ; for 
 tuneful and thoughtless though her laughter be now, and 
 although now the strangers of northern isles and western worlds 
 coarsely intrigue in her pleasure-places, and basely cheapen her 
 treasures in her streets, Florence cannot be changed or lowered, 
 for in her day she suffered much and failed often, and aspired 
 greatly, and set her seal with a pure hand on much of the noblest 
 work of the world. 
 
 To Pascarel she was as a living thing. 
 
 Not a stone of her but had a tongue for him. Not a dark 
 nook in her quietest ways but for him was filled with some figure 
 of the past standing out in the gold and colours of idealised 
 tradition, like some form that a monk had drawn upon his missal 
 vellum. 
 
 Gay and idle, and buoyant and amorous indeed had been the 
 tenour of all his days in Florence ; laughed away to the tinkle 
 of mandolines, the chink of wine-glasses, the riot of carnival 
 mirth, the twittering love -chirp of women quickly won and 
 lightly lost. 
 
 But beneath this life of his there ran another vein, deeper and 
 truer, and filled with the strong heroical blood of the past ; and 
 he would go through the Florence ways many and many a time, 
 lost to all the daily stir around him, and seeing nothing but the 
 wistful spiritual eyes of Angelico, or the white bare feet of 
 
 If 2 
 
1 80 PASLAR&L. 
 
 Ginevra, or the flicker of the torch in the hand of the Black 
 Gian, or the dread of destiny on tbe face of Luisa Strozzi. 
 
 He would laugh at himself for his joy in it, for he would say 
 that he was a citizen of the world, and entered no narrower 
 classification; but at heart the love of Florence was always 
 warm with him, continual wanderer from her olive valleys though 
 he was. 
 
 He knew the story of her every stone and spandril; he 
 would trace the steps of all her heroes and prophets inch by inch 
 along the narrow ways ; for him her paven courts were eloquent 
 with a thousand tongues ; and all the curling leaves and shining 
 traceries of her sculptures had a million whispers of the great 
 workshops where great men had wrought at them amidst the 
 eager reverent eyes of pupils who, in their turn, took up the 
 glorious tale, and told it to the nations. 
 
 And now and then, coming out of the Bargello into the broad 
 silvery sunlight, or leaning on the old Eubaconte parapet, look- 
 ing far, far away, to the snows of Vallombrosa, now and then he 
 would bestir himself and speak of Florence, with that swift 
 rush of that mellow Tuscan which has the war- clang of the 
 clarion and the love-note of the lute together in it. 
 
 "Her riches?" said he, in one of those moments, answering 
 some thoughtless word of mine. " No. It was not the riches 
 of Florence that made her power it was her way of spending 
 her riches ; a totally different thing, cara mia. 
 
 "Amidst all her commerce, her wars, her hard work, her 
 money-making, Plorence was always dominated and spiritualised, 
 at her noisiest and worst, by a poetic and picturesque imagi- 
 nation. 
 
 "Florentine life had always an ideal side to it; and an 
 idealism, pure and lofty, runs through her darkest histories and 
 busiest times like a thread of gold through a coat of armour and 
 a vest of frieze. 
 
 " The Florentine was a citizen, a banker, a workman, a carder 
 of wool, a weaver of silk, indeed ; but he was also always a 
 lover, and always a soldier ; that is, always half a poet. He 
 had his Caroccib and his Ginevra as well as his tools and his 
 sacks of florins. He had his sword as well as his shuttle. His 
 scarlet giglio was the flower of love no less than the blazonry of 
 battle on his standard, and the mint stamp of the commonwealth 
 on his coinage. 
 
 "Herein lay the secret of the influence of Florence : the secret 
 which rendered the little city, R^etsihsd bv her river's side, 
 
THE LILY-QUEEN. l8l 
 
 amongst her quiet meadows white with arums, a sacred name to 
 all generations of men for all she dared and all she did. 
 
 "'She amassed wealth/ they say: no doubt she did and 
 why? 
 
 " To pour it with both hands to melt in the foundries of 
 Ghiberti to bring it in floods to cement the mortar that joined 
 the marbles of Brunelleschi ! She always spent to great ends 
 and to mighty uses. 
 
 "When she called a shepherd from his flocks in the green 
 valley to build for her a bell-tower so that she might hear, night 
 and morning, the call to the altar, the shepherd built for her in 
 such fashion that the belfry has been the Pharos of Art for five 
 centuries. 
 
 "Here is the secret of Florence supreme aspiration. 
 
 " The aspiration which gave her citizens force to live in 
 poverty, and clothe themselves in simplicity, so as to be able to 
 give up their millions of florins to bequeath miracles in stone 
 and metal and colour to the Future. The aspiration which so 
 purified her soil, red with carnage, black with smoke of war, 
 trodden continuously by hurrying feet of labourers, rioters, mer- 
 cenaries, and murderers, that from that soil there could spring, 
 in all its purity and perfection, the paradise-blossom of the Yita 
 JNuova. 
 
 " Venice perished for her pride and carnal lust ; Borne perished 
 for her tyrannies and her bloodthirst; but Florence, though many 
 a time nearly strangled under the heel of the Empire and the 
 hand of the Church Florence was never slain utterly either in 
 body or soul ; Florence still crowned herself with flowers even 
 in her throes of agony, because she kept always within her that 
 love impersonal, consecrate, void of greed which is the purifi- 
 cation of the individual life and the regeneration of the body 
 politic. ' We labour for the ideal/ said the Florentines of old, 
 lifting to heaven their red flower de luce and to this day Europe 
 bows before what they did, and cannot equal it." 
 
 " But she had so many great men, so many mighty masters ! " 
 I would urge, whereon Pascarfcl would glance on me with his 
 lightest and yet uttermost scorn. 
 
 " Oh wise female thing, who always traces the root to the 
 branch and deduces the cause from the effect ! Did her great 
 men spring up full-armed like Athene, or was it the pure, elastic 
 atmosphere of her that made her mere mortals strong as im- 
 mortals? The supreme success of modern government is to 
 flatten down all men into one uniform likeness, so that it is, only 
 
1 82 PASCAR&L. 
 
 by the most frightful, and often destructive, effort that any 
 originality can contrive to get loose in its own shape for a 
 moment's breathing space ; but in the Commonwealth of Florence 
 a man, being born with any genius in him, drew in strength to 
 do and dare greatly with the very air he breathed. 
 
 "Moreover, it was not only the great men that made her 
 what she was. 
 
 " It was, above all, the men who knew they were not great, 
 tyut yet had the patience and unselfishness to do their appointed 
 work for her zealously, and with every possible perfection in the 
 doing of it. 
 
 "It was not only Orcagna planning the Loggia, but every 
 workman who chiselled out a piece of its stone, that put all his 
 head and heart into the doing thereof. It was not only Michael- 
 angelo in his studio, but every poor painter who taught the mere 
 a, b, c, d of the craft to a crowd of pupils out of the streets, who 
 did whatsoever came before them to do mightily and with re- 
 verence. 
 
 "In those days all the servants as well as the sovereigns o? 
 Art were penetrated with the sense of her holiness. 
 
 " It was the mass of patient, intelligent, poetic, and sincere 
 servitors of art, who, instead of wildly consuming their souls in 
 envy and desire, cultured their one talent to the uttermost, so 
 that the mediocrity of that age would have been the excellence 
 of any other. 
 
 " Not alone from the great workshops of the great masters did 
 the light shine on the people. From every scaffold where a 
 palace ceiling was being decorated with its fresco, from every 
 bottega where the children of the poor learned to grind and to 
 mingle the colours, from every cell where some solitary monk 
 studied to produce an offering to the glory of his God, from every 
 nook and corner where the youths gathered in the streets to see 
 some Nunziata or Ecce Homo lifted to its niche in the city wall, 
 from every smallest and most hidden home of art from the 
 nest under the eaves as well as from the cloud-reaching temples, 
 there went out amidst the multitudes an ever-flowing, ever- 
 pellucid stream of light, from that Aspiration which is in itself 
 Inspiration. 
 
 4 'So that even to this clay the people of Italy have not for- 
 gotten the supreme excellence of all beauty, but are, by the 
 sheer instinct of inherited faith, incapable of infidelity to those 
 traditions ; so that the commonest craftsman of them all will 
 sweep his curves and shade his hues upon a plaster cornice 
 
THE LILY-QUEEN. 183 
 
 with a perfection that is the despair of the maestri of other 
 nations.*' 
 
 So he would talk on at divers times, as we paced the twisting 
 lines of the streets, or paused on some white olive slope to look 
 backward on the tumult of the roofs, with the hattlements of 
 the Yecchio tower rising out like some old sea-galley from the 
 waves of the rippling sunshine. And I grew quickly to share 
 this tender, fantastic, filial affection of his for the City of tho 
 Lilies. 
 
 Nay, who could do otherwise who has once dwelt within the 
 magic circles of her storied walls? 
 
 Say some day at noontide you feel a little weary of it all. 
 
 Say it is midsummer, and the strong Leone sun is white on 
 every stone; and the very cicale have hushed their chatter, and 
 have gone to sleep. 
 
 Arno is nearly dry ; grass grows between its pebbles, and straw 
 is laid to bleach on its deserted bed. The buildings are scorched 
 and colourless ; the olives are pallid in the heat ; the cypresses 
 strain thirstily upward against the sky, as though seeking a rain- 
 cloud and rinding none in all the shadowless wide blue. 
 
 Say for once you are almost a renegade to her. The zinzan 
 have been troublesome, and the sun beats against the blinds, and 
 will not be denied. Your eyes ache with the radiance as they 
 do when you throw off your mask after the opera ball. 
 
 You, for once in a way, are tired of the city, and think you 
 svill arise and go to that old, cool marble court in the villa 
 amongst the hills, where the vine shadows play all the day long, 
 and the waters drip in the deep acanthus shadows. Or else you 
 dream a little in remembrance of clear green alpine rivers, shin- 
 ing in greenest meadows; of Tirol pine-slopes, rising to the 
 snow with deep blue shadows asleep on bluer lakes ; of Swabian 
 woods or of Thuringian forests, wet, still, and full of song of 
 birds, into whose leafy darkness no daylight ever comes. 
 
 Perhaps in the blazing Tuscan noon you think of these or such 
 as these that you have known, and that are all lying there across 
 the dreamy flush of the rosy Apennines. 
 
 Say in the daytime you are thus, for once perhaps, faithless, 
 yet with the nightfall she will take up afresh her supremacy. 
 
 The long bright day draws to a close. The west is in a blazo 
 of gold, against which the ilex and the acacia are black a 
 funeral plumes. The innumerable scents of fruits and flowers 
 and spices, and tropical seeds, and sweet essences, that fill the 
 streets at every step from shops and stalls, and monks' phar- 
 
184 PASCARkL. 
 
 macies, are fanned out in a thousand delicious odours on the 
 cooling air. The wind has risen, blowing softly from mountain 
 and from sea across the plains through the pines of Pisa, across 
 to the oak forests of green Casentino. 
 
 Whilst the sun still glows in the intense amber of his own 
 dying glory, away in the tender violet hues of the east, the young 
 moon rises. 
 
 Eosy clouds drift against the azure of the zenith, and are re- 
 flected as in a mirror in the shallow river waters. 
 
 A little white cloud of doves flies homeward against the sky. 
 
 All the bells chime for the Ave Maria. 
 
 The evening falls. 
 
 Wonderful hues, creamy, and golden, and purple, and soft as 
 the colours of a dove's throat, spread themselves slowly over the 
 sky ; the bell tower rises like a shaft of porcelain clear against 
 the intense azure ; amongst the tall canes by the river the fire- 
 flics sparkle ; the shores are mirrored in the stream with every 
 line and curve, and roof and cupola, drawn in sharp deep shadow; 
 every lamp glows again thrice its size in the glass of the current, 
 and the arches of the bridges meet their own image there ; the 
 boats glide down the water that is now white under the moon, 
 now amber under the lights, now black under the walls, forever 
 changing; night draws on, then closes quite. 
 
 But it is night as radiant as day, and ethereal as day can 
 never be ; on the hills the cypresses still stand out against the 
 faint gold that lingers in the west ; there is the odour of carna- 
 tions and of acacias everywhere. 
 
 Noiseless footsteps come and go. 
 
 People pass softly in shadow, like a dream. 
 
 You lean down and bask in this sweet air that is like a breath 
 of paradise. 
 
 Against your hand there are great clusters of the red oleander, 
 that burn against the gleaming snowy globes of the half-opened 
 magnolia flowers. The voice that is dearest to you on earth is 
 low upon your ear. 
 
 From some other casement open like yours there comes the 
 distant cadence of a mandoline. A sheaf of lilies is flung from a 
 balcony with a laugh. A woman goes by with a knot of pome- 
 granate in her dark hair. A break of song floats down the 
 silence. 
 
 "Addio, gioja mia, addio ! " drops tenderly down the wind 
 like leaves shaken from a rose. 
 
 On the parapet of the river two lovers lean and watch the 
 
THE LILY-QUEEN. 185 
 
 stream as it glides to its grave in the grey sea-sand, as their own 
 passion glides to its grave of dead desire. 
 
 You smile, and know there is no grave for yours : he says so 
 at the least, and you believe. 
 
 It is night in Italy. 
 
 It is night in Florence. 
 
 In all the width of the world is there aught so perfect else- 
 where ? With a glad heart you will answer, nothing so perfect 
 anywhere. 
 
 In such a night why cannot the lips we love kiss us forever 
 forever forever into the dreams of death ? 
 
BOOK IV. 
 
 THE WANDEIUNG- ARTR 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 IL BIANCO ASPKTTO. 
 
 Do you know the delicate delights of a summer morning in 
 Italy ? morning I mean between four and five of the clock, ami 
 not the full hot mid-day that means morning to the languid asso 
 ciations of this weary century. 
 
 The nights, perfect as they are, have scarcely more loveliness 
 than the birth of light, the first rippling laughter of the early day. 
 
 The air is cool, almost cold, and clear as glass. There is an 
 endless murmur from birds' throats and wings, and from far 
 away there will ring from village or city the chimes of the first 
 mass. The deep broad shadows lie so fresh, so grave, so calm, 
 that by them the very dust is stilled and spiritualised. 
 
 Softly the sun comes, striking first the loftier trees and then 
 the blossoming magnolias, and lastly the green lowliness of the 
 gentle vines; until all above is in a glow of new-born radiance, 
 whilst all beneath the leaves still is dreamily dusk and cool. 
 
 The sky is of a soft sea-blue ; great vapours will float here 
 and there, iris coloured and snow-white. The stone parapets of 
 bridge and tower shine against the purple of the mountainsj 
 which are low in tone, and look like hovering storm-clouds. 
 Across the fields dun oxen pass to their labour; through the 
 shadows peasants go their way to mass ; down the river a raft 
 drifts slowly with the pearly water swaying against the canes ; 
 all is clear, tranquil, fresh as roses washed with rain. 
 
 In such a daybreak in the soft spring weather we left Florence 
 by the gate that was once in the old days broken down for the 
 mule of the Yicar of Christ to pass through into the city. 
 
 Pascarel was too inveterate a wanderer by instinct and habit 
 to remain long in one place, even when that place was circled by 
 
IL BIANCO ASPETTO. 187 
 
 the hills so dear to him ; and he was looked for eagerly with the 
 spring and summer in all the towns and villages through Tuscany 
 and Umbria, and the flowering Romagna and the drear sea- washed 
 Maremma. 
 
 The Arte, which was light and cleverly constructed, was at 
 such times sent onwards on the back of mules, on the flat cart of 
 a contadino, on the top of a hay- waggon, on the shoulders of 
 sturdy hill peasants, or any manner of conveyance which best 
 served the moment, and the sight of the red and white flag flut- 
 tering from the pile of canvas and wood was a signal for a head- 
 long rush and a shout of joy from the whole population over the 
 face of all the country. 
 
 As for ourselves we walked always where there was any 
 beauty, whether along the river-shores, or through the fields and 
 vineyards, or along the brown sides of the hills, or beside the 
 play of the tideless sea, on the hot yellow sands, or across the 
 plain from one little old walled town to another. 
 
 Pascarel and his little troop had never been extravagant enough 
 to take any other mode of travel than that which their own limbs 
 afforded, except when they needed to get quickly from one pro- 
 vince to another. 
 
 They always sauntered on from town to town, from village to 
 village, staying on the road as fancy moved them. They had 
 gone on in this way all across Italy, and half across Europe; 
 and as for me I liked nothing better than to do as they had done. 
 
 As soon as the sun showed his red disc where lie rose above 
 bhe southern seas and the eastern deserts far away, we used to 
 rise ourselves and set out upon our pilgrimage for the day, so 
 that each portion of it was accomplished before the heats of 
 noon. Or at other times, if they had not played anywhere that 
 night, we set forth when the moon showed herself, and went on 
 our way through the wonderful lustre of her, which seemed to 
 throb everywhere like so much conscious life. 
 
 In these wanderings I learned for the first time how beautiful 
 is the beauty of Italy. 
 
 In the old town of Verona, I had been nothing but a passion- 
 ate little rebel, hating my poor, pale prison-house for its poverty 
 and monotony, whilst the people with whom I had dwelt had 
 seen no wonder in that which had been about them from their 
 birth, and had found their vital interests lie in the scantiness of 
 the oil for their lucernate, and the uncertainty of the measure of 
 the soup for their morrow. 
 
 With Pascarel, and wandering thus through the length and 
 
1 88 PASCAR&L. 
 
 breadth of the Bomagna and of Tuscany, a surer and higher 
 perception awakened in me, and my heart and my mind alike 
 stirred into sympathy with that ethereal loveliness of air, of dis- 
 tance, and of light, which is, as it were, the very soul of all 
 Italian scenery. 
 
 Green plains have a certain likeness, whether in Belgium, or 
 Bavaria, or Britain. A row of poplars quivering in the light 
 looks much alike in Flanders or in Normandy. A rich wood all 
 aglow with red and gold in autumn sunsets is the same thing 
 after all in Ehineland as in Devon. 
 
 But Italy has a physiognomy that is all her own ; that is like 
 nothing else, which to some minds is sad and strange, and deso- 
 late, and painful, and which to others is beautiful, and full of 
 consolation and delicious as a dream ; hut which, be it what else 
 it may, is always wholly and solely Italian, can never be met 
 with elsewhere, and has a smile on it, and a sigh in it, that 
 make other lands beside it seem as though they were soulless 
 and were dumb. 
 
 It is not the intensity but the ethereality of its colour which 
 is its charm; for it reflects every colour this wonderful "bianco 
 aspetto " of Dante. 
 
 Colourless itself it takes by turn every hue, and returns every 
 gift of the sun's rays so exquisitely, that there is no single tone 
 which is not by it purified and spiritualised. 
 
 At sunrise and at sunset most especially, but more or less 
 throughout the entire day, this wondrous whiteness beams and 
 blushes into the million hues of the flame opal. 
 
 "Watch it from one year to another and you shall never find it 
 twice the same. 
 
 When the blue mists of daybreak drift across it ; when the 
 clouds duskily cast their violet shadows on it ; when the tre- 
 mulous wood smoke curls up in the rosy air ; when the whole 
 mountain side is flushed like apple-blossoms, darkening here and 
 there where the pines grow into softest amethyst ; here and there 
 lightened where the sun strikes into such glow, that like love it 
 becomes " tanta rossa che appena fora dentro al fuoco nata," in 
 all these changes and in a thousand others that sweep each other 
 away again and again in endless succession throughout each hour 
 of the twenty-four, this " bianco aspetto "is the loveliest thing 
 that the world holds. 
 
 It is the loveliness of a dream world ; it is the loveliness which 
 all other poets as well as Dante have beheld in their imparadised 
 vision of a life eternal ; and compared with it the denser colours 
 
//, BIANCO ASPETTO. 189 
 
 nnd the stronger contrasts of more northern lands are almost 
 coarse, and seem to have no soul in them, and speak no message 
 from the gods to man. 
 
 Indeed all lands are soulless where the olive does not lift its 
 consecrated boughs to heaven. 
 
 Noble and fruitful though the face of them may be, a certain 
 pathos and poetic meaning will be lacking in them, if on their 
 hills and in their valleys the olive do not hover like a soft rain- 
 cloud shimmering to silver with the light. 
 
 For the olive is always mournful ; it is amidst trees as the 
 opal amidst jewels ; its foliage, and its flowers, and its fruits, 
 are all colourless ; it shivers softly as though it were cold even 
 on those sun-bathed hills; it seems for ever to say (( peace, 
 peace," when there is no peace; and to be weary because that 
 whereof it is the emblem has been banished from earth because 
 men's souls delight in war. 
 
 The landscape that has the olive is spiritual as no landscape 
 can ever be from which the olive is absent ; for where is there 
 spirituality without some hue of sadness ? 
 
 But this spiritual loveliness is one for which the human 
 creature that is set amidst it needs a certain education as for the 
 power of Euripides, for the dreams of Phasdrus, for the strength 
 of Michaelangelo, for the symphonies of Mozart or Beethoven. 
 
 The mind must itself be in a measure spiritualised ere aright 
 It can receive it. 
 
 It is too pure, too impalpable, too nearly divine, to be grasped 
 by those for whom all beauty centres in strong heats of colour 
 and great breadths of effect ; it floats over the senses like a string 
 of perfect cadences in music ; it has a breath of heaven in it ; 
 though on the earth it is not of the earth ; when the world was 
 young, ere men had sinned on it, and gods forsaken it, it must 
 have had the smile of this light that lingers here. 
 
 This beauty, the beauty of perfect outline, of faint transparent 
 hues, of immeasurable horizons, of wondrous silvery effulgence 
 in which the eyes seem to range and reach until the mere sense 
 of sight grows into a voluptuous rapture, all this became known 
 to me as I wandered through those old old lands by the side of 
 Pascarfcl. 
 
 Some instinct towards it had been with me alvvaj's; but 
 through him I learned to know what it was that I felt ; and 
 lesser things than this became through him also eloquent to me 
 and beautiful. 
 
 The fruitful soil where flowers rose at every step, as though 
 
190 PASCAR&L. 
 
 the Bods still felt the touch of the divine thyrsus. The sad 
 cypress rising straight against the sky's pale gold with stars of 
 cyclamen white ahout its feet. 
 
 The vast, dim, cavernous churches, dark as night, save where 
 the lamps of the high altars burned. The lonely aisles where 
 tired feet of peasants wore their way across the marble pavement 
 where great men were laid forgotten in their tombs. 
 
 The radiant glad dawns when through the air came ringing 
 the clear sounds of countless bells across the fields to wake the 
 sleeping world. The old bruised shrine set at the dusky corner 
 of some populous streets, so that men looking upwards saw, and 
 remembered, and went the better for a fleeting thought of God 
 on to the daily labours of their humble lives. 
 
 The moonlight, magical, mystical, unutterable with the dens? 
 ebon shadows making but the more lustrous the wondrous silver 
 world on which they slept. All these he gave me eyes to see, 
 and, whilst I saw, taught me why they ftiied me with such soft 
 delight. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 ETOILE QUI FILE. 
 
 WE wandered all over the hills and the plains, along the 
 course of the rivers and through the wide and rich champaign 
 of the Yaldarno ; pausing here, pausing there, as tho whim of 
 the moment served, now setting up the wooden theatre on the 
 hillside, amongst the olive woods, now letting it find its 
 momentary resting-place amidst the fortresses and monasteries 
 of some old God-forgotten city. 
 
 Sometimes up amongst the mountains we had need to make 
 our home with the peasants, for there was no inn to go to, and 
 no fare but onions and black bread. Sometimes in the cities the 
 harsh laws which still prevailed at that time in some districts 
 swooped down like vultures on the free discourse of Pascarel, 
 and drove him forth from the gates, leaving his gains behind him. 
 
 Sometimes it happened to us to lose our way, or to have night 
 down on us ere we knew where we were, and we had to camp 
 there where we found ourselves, on some hillside, under the 
 chestnut trees, and raise a bonfire with the dead leaves, and 
 sleep around it as best we could until the sun rose. 
 
&TOILE QUI FILE. 191 
 
 But all this was little hardship in that gracious weather of 
 ihe springtime, and above us there was always the brilliance of 
 the deep blue sky, and around us there was always the gay good 
 humour of the hardy and gentle people. 
 
 The life was quite beautiful to me, and would have been so, 
 I think, to any one with anything of the child or anything of 
 the poet in them. The people were so fond of us, or, at least, 
 of him, that all the way we roamed was strewed with endless 
 little acts of tenderness and of good- will that blossomed like the 
 cyclamen along our path. 
 
 Quaint old women in huge straw hats and with smiling, 
 brown, shrivelled faces, would bring us little cheeses or golden 
 honeycombs wrapped up in vine leaves. Girls, with lovely 
 dreaming eyes like the San Sisto Madonna's, would come out 
 from the sun-baked, flat-roofed houses with gifts of eggs packed 
 cosily in rose leaves, or strewn over, for luck's sake, with Out 
 Lady's herb. 
 
 Sometimes from the white villages with their watch towers 
 in their midst, there would ring out, for us alone, in the golden 
 silence the sweetest melody of chiming bells that seemed to 
 ripple like so much laughter over the low-lying roofs amongst 
 the vines. 
 
 We were always amongst the people. Pascardl played for no 
 one else. 
 
 The opera-houses, where the sweet notes of men's throats 
 were hired with gold and diamonds, were for the rich and well- 
 to-do, for the dainty masked dames in the carnival time, and for 
 the noble lovers who wove their intrigues under the shelter of 
 roulade and fioritura. 
 
 PascareTs little theatre was for the populace alone; for the 
 bronzed vine-dressers, who laughed herculean laughter in their 
 broad bare chests ; for the tanners and coopers and smiths, who 
 came with the heat and the smirch of their labours upon them ; 
 for the peasant women who had worked weeding in the fields all 
 day, and sat in the tent with their big brown children sleeping 
 at their breasts ; for any and all whose lives were hard, and 
 whose bodies were bruised by toil, and who were glad to forget 
 with him a little while the tax that emptied their bread-pot, 
 and the hunger that gnawed at their vitals. 
 
 Give an Italian a copper coin, and though it be the sole thing 
 that he owns in the world, he will spend four -fifths of it on the 
 playhouse. 
 
 Pascarel knew his countrymen's foible; and he loved best of 
 
192 PASCAR&L. 
 
 all to play for those "who had not even the copper piece, and who 
 must have stood all night outside the longed-for paradise had it 
 not been for the joyous summons which rang out to them, from 
 his voice crying, 
 
 " Come in come in ; you can pay me with a laugh if I prove 
 worth it. Not a soldo in any one of your pockets ? oh, my 
 friend, you must be either the utterest fool or the honestest man 
 in all the universe. Well, never miad. Come in come in : 
 laugh or hiss as you like, but come." 
 
 And they did come by thousands ; it was the audience that he 
 preferred he who surely by his gifts and graces might have 
 done with the world almost whatever he might have chosen. 
 
 " You have no ambition ! " I said to him one day. 
 
 He answered me, with his bright laugh, " None absolutely 
 none!" 
 
 "We were resting on the slope of a hill in the Casentino in the 
 sweet may time. 
 
 It was late in the day. The land beneath us was white with 
 the delicate, sad pallor of the endless olive woods. Above, the 
 west was all one soft flame-radiance of that miraculous rose 
 which is to all the other hues of heaven as the ethereal grace of 
 Petrarca is beside all other odes of love. 
 
 " But that is very strange ? " I reasoned to him. 
 
 " Where would the world be if all men thought as you do ? " 
 
 " Much where it is, no doubt," he answered me, " and un- 
 stained, moreover, by the bloodshed of war. Do you think that 
 the world owes anything that is worth keeping in its Arts to so 
 personal a passion as ambition ? You are very wrong. 
 
 " No true artist ever worked yet for ambition. He does the 
 thing which is in him to do by a force far stronger than himself. 
 
 " The first fruits of a man's genius are always pure of greed. 
 
 " In time, indeed, the world gets at him and tempts him, and, 
 if he be not strong, will bribe and weaken him. That is one 
 reason why the creations of an artist's maturity seldom realise 
 the promise of his youth. 
 
 "But no mere ambition ever raised the piles of Brunellesclii, 
 shaped the gates of Ghiberti, created the Inferno and the 
 Hamlet, or gave us the Concerto in C minor of Felix Men- 
 delssohn. 
 
 "In these days men are governed by personal ambitions, and 
 as a consequence, they have ceased to produce greatly. In these 
 days no man will be content to chisel humbly, but to his very 
 best, a corbel or a spandril for another man's St. Peter's; not a 
 
&TG1LR QUI PILE. 193 
 
 whit; every one will have his own building all to himself, be it 
 only a gaze-a-bo or a magmni-d cucun ber-trame. 
 
 " After all, it was not only that Michaelangelo and Lionardo 
 were greater men than we, it was also because their pupils were 
 content to grind the colours and prepare the earths with utter- 
 most perfectness in their simple share of the great work. ETow- 
 a-days, did you ask a young artist to grind your colours, he 
 would tell you with scorn that 'he was not a shopboy. 
 
 " "When we can g^t back that single-hearted absorption into 
 Art which characterised the mediaeval schools of Italy, then we 
 shall get back with it greatness of execution in Art. 
 
 " You remember II Parmeggiano, who never heard the tumult 
 of the sack of Borne go on in the streets around him because 
 he was so engrossed with painting at the time ? The soldiers 
 broke into his studio and found him, brush in hand, and ignorant 
 that the city had been stormed. 
 
 ' ' Well, nothing less than that makes a great artist, and it is 
 just that vital absolute absorption of all personality of which 
 there is nothing absolutely nothing in the modern mind. 
 It is always outside its own creations ; vainly or coldly always 
 outside them. 
 
 " The modern priest of art does not believe in his own God 
 and in art, above all other religions, who that has not faith can 
 work miracles ? Art is the divining rod that will blossom like 
 the almond tree ; but it will be bare and barren if the magician 
 himself half scoff and wholly doubt" 
 
 "But, surely," I reasoned with him, wistfully, " surely those 
 men dreamed that they were doing what would keep their 
 memories fresh in the thoughts of men for many ages ? " 
 
 " I doubt it," said Pascarel. " I doubt very much that they 
 ever thought at all about it in that light. The true artist does 
 his work because he loves it because he cannot chose but do it. 
 Do you suppose the architect of Cologne Cathedral would have 
 torn his plans up if he had foreseen his name would have been 
 forgotten?" 
 
 " But surely an immortality of remembrance " 
 
 " Fine immortality ! " quoted Pascarel. " Napoleon was 
 right in his scoff at our Tiziano. Immortality ? Bah ! the 
 brief noonday that carrion flies take to suck at a dead eagle. 
 Immortality be so good as to tell me, donzella mia, if you can, 
 who were Eugoean of Samos, Bion and Diocchus, Eudemus of 
 Paras, Lampsacus, Damastes, Xanthus of Sardis, or Phericydea 
 of Leros?" 
 
194 PASCAR&L. 
 
 "I never heard of any one of them." 
 
 "No? And plenty of people, more learned than you, are in 
 the same plight. And yet they were all authors of Asiatic 
 Greece who, in their day, looked for as much * immortality ' as 
 Herodotus. To come into our own country tell me who 
 Trissino was, and what he did? " 
 
 I confessed that the name of Trissino said no more to me than 
 the name of any one of the little flowers that sprang up by 
 millions underneath the vines. 
 
 " Do you know who Trissino was? " he repeated. 
 
 "ffo/ 1 
 
 " There again ! why, he believed that he had restored the 
 epic to Italian verse in all its most heroic proportions, and 
 sneered at his contemporary, Ariosto, as only good for the 
 vulgar. Did never you hear, then, of Tito ap.d Ercole Strozzi ? " 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Heavens! And yet they were, or Ttrere thought, famous 
 poets ; but the world is like you, and only remembers Luisa 
 Strozzi because men were mad for her face, and she made a 
 picturesque figure coming down the hill by San Miniato that 
 night of the fair at the Feast of the Pardon. But to descend a 
 century or so; what, pray, were Chauvelin, Daunou, Eiouffe, 
 Ganilh, Ginguene, Larromiguiere ? " 
 
 I confessed my ignorance, looking across at the sapphire lights 
 on the Carrara mountains. 
 
 " No, again ? And yet those men, wi'h the rest of the hun- 
 dred Frenchmen of the Tribunal of Ninjty-nine, dreamed, 
 surely, of imperishable renown. ' A line in an universal his- 
 tory !' as my wise Napoleon said again e/ler Cairo. True, he 
 arrived later on at getting a whole page for himself; but to 
 print such a page, you must distil seas of haman blood to make 
 the only ink that will not rub out witl. (he wear of the ages : 
 and even then, as soon as a greater conqueror comes, you will 
 have your page blotted and turned into a palimpsest. You 
 remember how, in your old Yerona, there is a rude, dusky, 
 nameless grave in the mausoleum of tne Scala, and above it a 
 superb equestrian in marble, with three stages of sculptured saints 
 and prophets all to himself in might and glorv ; the first, the tomb 
 f the assassinated; the second, the tomb of the assassin? 
 Believe me, Fame in the world allots things very much like the 
 Scala's sculptor." 
 
 I was silent; I thought of poor old wronged Ambrogio dying 
 by his fireless and childless hearth, whilst as we had passed 
 
TOILE QUI FILE, 195 
 
 through Florence the names of Rothwald and Alkestis had 
 loomed largo upon the walls. 
 
 ' i Besides ambition for a player ! " laughed IPascarel, not 
 waiting for my answer, " you might as well say let the dog- 
 grass blowing there try to root itself and grow like that stone- 
 pine. ' Ci-git le bruit du vent ' is our only fit epitaph. 
 
 " Thistledown, smoke, soap-bubbles, les etoiles qui filent, qui 
 filent, qui filent et disparaissent,' those are all our emblems. 
 
 "They reproach us that we only live to laugh and to love, 
 and take no thought for the morrow. Why not? There is no 
 morrow for us. 
 
 "The player can leave nothing behind him; not even a 
 memory. ' You should have heard him/ say the old people to 
 the young of the dead actor. * You should have heard him ; 
 he was great, indeed, if you like.' But what do the young 
 believe of that ? There is no proof. 
 
 " Such greatness as the dead man had went out with his 
 breath like a lamp that was spent. 
 
 " We live in the present ; we live for the present. Why not, 
 I say? 
 
 " We are straws on the wind of the hour, too frail and too 
 brittle to float into the future. Our little day of greatness is 
 a mere child's puff-ball, inflated by men's laughter, floated by 
 women's tears; what breeze so changeful as the one, what 
 waters so shallow as the other? the bladder dances a little 
 while ; then sinks : and who remembers ? 
 
 " Ambition for such a thing as that ? 
 
 " Grow oaks from the thistle-down ; weave ships' cables from 
 the smoke ; change the soap-bubble into a prism for astronomers ; 
 arrest the falling star as a fixed planet in the spheres ; and then, 
 if you will, talk of ambition for a player ! " 
 
 He had risen as he spoke, and walked to and fro, brushing 
 the tall foliage of the undergrowth of acacia and cane ; he spoke 
 with passionate scorn, and though he laughed, there was for 
 once some undertone of bitterness in his easy mirth. 
 
 He jeered at the thing he himself was; no man's heart is 
 wholly free of care and doubt when he trenches on the semi- 
 suicide of any self-contempt. 
 
 "But players have been great," I said to him, not knowing 
 well what to say. " Great in their lives at least ? And 
 rich?'; 
 
 " Rich, oh yes ! " he echoed, breaking down with one hand a 
 head of iris. " A million francs a week you mean, and diamond 
 
 o 2 
 
196 PASCAR&L. 
 
 snuff-boxes from a prince's hand oh yesif that be gieatness. 
 Good heavens ! before you have fairly entered on a woman's 
 years, how thoroughly a woman's heart beats in you! " 
 
 4 * "What do you count greatness, then?" I asked, gathering, 
 as I rested on my arms, face downward on the grass, the 
 clusters of the white anemoli, and all the bright spring flowers 
 of the hills. 
 
 Pascarel, standing beside me, looked away to the rose-radiance 
 of the west with that strange introspective musing look in his 
 eyes which comes so suddenly into Italian eyes, and has so in- 
 tense a melancholy in it, and also so much of that spiritual 
 beauty which their country has. 
 
 " There is an old legend," he made answer to me, "an old 
 monkish tale, which tells how, in the days of King Clovis, a 
 woman, old and miserable, forsaken of all, and at the point of 
 death, strayed into the Merovingian woods, and lingering there, 
 and barkening to the birds, and loving them, and so learning 
 from them of God, regained, by no effort of her own, her 
 youth ; and lived, always young and always beautiful, a hun- 
 dred years ; through all which time she never failed to seek the 
 forests when the sun rose and hear the first song of the creatures 
 to whom she owed her joy. Whoever to the human soul can 
 be, in ever so faint a sense, that which the birds were to the 
 woman in the Merovingian woods, he, I think, has a true great- 
 ness. But I am but an outcast, you know; and my wisdom is 
 not of the world." 
 
 Yet it seemed the true wisdom, there, at least, with the rose 
 light shining across half the heavens, and the bells ringing far 
 away in the plains below over the white waves of the sea of 
 
 Oliv63. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE lilBAND AND THE MANDOLINE. 
 
 Nor many weeks after, whilst the year was still young, the 
 old city of Pisa came in our way in our wanderings; and 
 Pascarel would fain turn aside from the bright sea-road, and 
 stay within its walls a little. 
 
 I saw the ruined rival of Florence, the city " senza fede," 
 once the mart of the world and now a desert. I saw, too, the 
 
THE RIBAND AND THE MANDOLINE. 197 
 
 scholar Luceone, a gentle, meek-eyed man, with the brow of 
 Ghiberti and the mouth of Fra Giovanni. I saw the old 
 Faustus-like room in the tower, with the owls in its ^ broken 
 masonry, and with the Arno washing its base at one side, and 
 on the other the narrow darkling street that the comedians had 
 gone through with jest and song on that Easter morning which 
 had decided the fortunes of Pascarfcl. 
 
 The old city was sad and sombre with Orcagna's Death 
 reigning over its solitudes as the only sovereign left to it out of 
 all the arrogance and plentitude of its years of power. 
 
 So still it was, so unbroken the shadows slept upon its grass- 
 grown stones, so dully the yellow water dragged its w.'iy through 
 the yellow sand, one might have thought that it was only that 
 very day that the deathblow had fallen on it away there where 
 the wanton sea abandoned it to kiss and serve Genoa. 
 
 " Do you not see Margharita of France ? " said Pascarel to me 
 in Pisa one evening, as we strayed along, " leaning there out of 
 the old palace window in just such a stormy red and gold night 
 as this, perhaps, sick to despair of the gilded captivity, and 
 planning with the gipsies to escape? I wonder no one has 
 ever painted that scene; tbe delicate wanton royal head 
 stretching out in the crimson dusk to hold council with the 
 black-browed vagabonds. Can you not fancy the fret of her, 
 and the fever and the revolt, that made a barefoot liberty seem 
 sweeter than all the Medicean pomp ? " 
 
 But I shook my head, and told him no, which saddened him 
 a little as we went. A barefoot liberty was well in its way, no 
 ioubt, but to be a princess, was not that better ? 
 
 It seemed to me that Marguerite must have been but jesting 
 with the gipsies when she schemed thus with them here in dead 
 old Pisa. 
 
 So thankless are we to fate when it is fair for us. 
 
 I had all for which the heart of Margaret had hungered, 
 beating itself like a caged bird under its jewelled bodice; I 
 had it all as I went along the sad, windless, unpeopled streets, 
 which his voice filled with sweetest music for me, and the red 
 sun burnished into ancient pomp and panoply; I had it all 
 and but half valued it alas ! alas ! 
 
 At Pisa, as I say, I saw that old college friend of Pascarfcl, 
 the scholar Luceone. He was a gentle, meek- eyed man, with 
 pensive eyes, and a tender sad face, like the face of Masaccio. 
 
 He lived up in the Faustus chambers, with the owls outside 
 his casement, and the river water washing below, and on the 
 
198 PASCAK&L. 
 
 other the narrow pent-up street that led away to the gate for 
 Leghorn, and was very content in them, and grateful to his 
 fate, asking nothing better of the gods and men than to dwell 
 there in the heart of the academic city, in the midst of the 
 dreary sand plains, with the zanzari hooting and hissing all 
 night amongst the ancient walls. 
 
 He touched the self-drawn portrait of Pascarel with many 
 beautiful and tender lights, so that I saw that the painter had 
 done himself but sorry justice. 
 
 " I am so happy here so happy, " said the gentle philosopher 
 to me one day, as I leaned out of the high arched grated win- 
 dow from which Pascarel had watched the Zinzara and her 
 fcroop go by on their seaward way, " and I owe it all to him. 
 He was a greater scholar than I. I was his second in mathe- 
 matics, but only second, never his equal. Ah ! you would not 
 think it, you, who only see him smoking over his little 
 comedies, or gathering beans with a pretty peasant in an inn 
 garden. 
 
 " But it is true. There was never a greater scholar born than 
 Pascarel. So great that though he had been very wild in many 
 of his pranks, and in that manner a constant terror to the 
 academy, they wanted sorely to keep him always for the glory 
 of Pisa, and they offered him the vacant Chair of Mathematics 
 when our poor old Dottore died of apoplexy. 
 
 "Now, let Pascarel tell you what he will, it is a fact that the 
 professorship would have been very welcome to him for awhile 
 at least. He would have tired of it and gone on his own ways 
 in time, no doubt, but he would have liked to have had it, for 
 he loved these rooms of his, and at that time, for all he was so 
 gay and even riotous, he had a passion for science, and for all 
 manners of abstruse study, which he could pursue at his ease 
 and leisure here. 
 
 " But he knew that I was very poor, he knew that I had an 
 old mother and a sister to keep, he knew that I pinched myself 
 of bread and oil, and that I was glad to pick up the leavings off. 
 the dishes of the younger students, so what does he do ? 
 
 " He goes straightway to the authorities, and he says to them 
 in his careless fashion, ' Illustrissimi, I thank you for your offer, 
 and the honour you would do me, but do not take my meaning 
 ill if I tell you that you have made a great error. I am only a 
 reckless good-for-nothing, a scamp at heart, a riotous free liver, 
 who, as your excellencies know, have had the gates shut against 
 me scores of times, and black marks against my name always. 
 
THE RIBAND AND THE MANDOLINS.. 199 
 
 Bo not give your empty Chair to me ; but give it to one who is 
 as good a mathematician as I am, as sound a scholar as I am, 
 and who, unlike me, will furthermore do you credit by the 
 simple and blameless life that he leads. Give it to Ezio 
 Luceone, and I, Pascar&l, will hold myself as beholden to your 
 Signoria, as though I filled the Chair myself.' 
 
 " That is what Pascarel said to them, and they were so struck 
 that they gave it to me, and I have held it ever since that time. 
 
 " He told you he surrendered it to follow that Frenchwoman 
 and her comedians. Oh ! no doubt. That is just like him. Eut 
 he relinquished the professorship in the month of March, and 
 the Zinzara and her people only came into the town at Easter 
 time, which fell, as I well remember, towards the middle of 
 April in that year. 
 
 " It has been a wonderful thing for me, most wonderful. 
 The stipend is quite enough to keep my mother in perfect com- 
 fort ; and my heart and soul are in my work ; and the college 
 lads love me and I love them ; and I ask no better life of God 
 or man. 
 
 " But it is Pascarel I owe it to most surely; only I pray of 
 you do not tell him that I have told you, or he will never forgive' 
 me, never. I came to know it through one of the Signoria, 
 which vexed him sorely; he had always tried to make me- 
 believe that it was only just the reward of my own merit. But 
 it was all his own doing all. 
 
 " I was the gainer, you see; but nevertheless my heart ached 
 when I saw him go for ever out of the sea gate with his pack 
 on his back and his mandoline slung from his shoulder; the 
 mandoline he has now ? yes. The Frenchwoman put a scarlet 
 riband to it, I remember, sitting just there down in the street in 
 the sun as they ate pomegranates one warm Easter day. 
 
 " He does not know what has become of her, so he says ; but 
 he was wild about her then; a handsome woman, I remember, 
 with great burning black eyes and beautiful feet. 
 
 " She did with Pascarel what she liked ; if it had not been for 
 her I think the world would have heard of him. For he had 
 some ambition in those days ; and he is the last of the Pascarelli, 
 you know. And they were really princes once ? oh, yes ! you 
 may read it in Malespini and Villani." 
 
 So the gentle scholar would murmur on, and I would listen, 
 leaning my body over the grated sill, and watching the narrow 
 street far down below, where in other days the Frenchwoman had 
 sat, and wound the scarlet riband about the stem of the mando- 
 
200 PASCAR&L. 
 
 line, with the lights of the sun and of Pascal's eyes shining on 
 her. 
 
 I hated to think of it ; I hated to think of that far-away love 
 lightened past of his, in which I had no memory and no share. 
 
 Every woman, at all young and innocent of life, has felt the 
 feeling that I mean when she has loved. 
 
 Pascarel came behind me that day, having heard the latest 
 words of his old friend. 
 
 " Ah, yes, cara mia," he murmured, softly, while sadly. " So 
 many hands have tied so many ribbons to the mandoline yes, I 
 shame to say so and the ribbons have all fluttered away God 
 knows where, some to the dust-hole, some to the carnival -ball, 
 some to deck other men's guitars, some to lie amongst the cinders 
 in the ragpicker's basket. But after all what does that matter ? 
 the ribands never touched the chords of the mandoline; the 
 ribands were only for fairs and feast-days and follies ; it takes 
 something stronger and better than a riband to get music from 
 the strings." 
 
 I understood him a little though not wholly, and was com- 
 forted, leaning there out of the grated window as Marguerite had 
 leaned when she had communed with the gipsies, and thought 
 their liberties and love lore better than the gilded palle of the 
 Medici. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE POET'S COUKTET. 
 
 WE did not wait very long in Pisa. 
 
 The laughter of the Arte wakened its hollow echoes, and the 
 Florentine pennon fluttered amongst its haunted ways for a brief 
 space only. And whilst it was still springtime late spring we 
 left its gates and went over the ghostly plain that had been 
 soaked through and through with the blood of so many centuries 
 of warfare, and so back into the Val di Greve and between the 
 mountains along Arno's side. 
 
 Only to one place was he always constant amidst his incon- 
 stancy ; wander away from it perpetually as he would, no less 
 surely would he ever again come back to where the Vecchio 
 battlements were set sharp as lion's teeth against the sky. 
 
 He would always come back thither ; and Saint John's Day, 
 
THE POETS COUNTRY. JOI 
 
 and the Beffana, and the Pasqua, and the Berlinganoio, and the 
 Ceppb, and the Capo d'Anno, and the Anna feast, when the 
 flags of the Trades were set round the church, and all the other 
 giorni festivi that are as many as the golden eyes in a child' a 
 string of daisies, would have heen robhed of much mirth and life 
 to the populace of Florence, if they had failed to bring through 
 the gates Pascar&l. 
 
 All that lovely May time we were afoot through Tuscany. 
 
 Is there anything in all the world so beautiful as the spring- 
 tide greenery of Italy ? 
 
 The gold of her sunsets, the wonder of her orange groves, the 
 rose of her evening skies, the grandeur of her sterile mountains, 
 on these and on their like words of adoration have been lavished 
 by the million ; but who has stayed to bethink themselves of her 
 homelier and humbler charms ? 
 
 And yet, of these also, she has so many so many. 
 
 Come out here in the young months of summer and leave, as 
 we left, the highways that grim walls fence in, and stray, as we 
 strayed, through tbe field-paths and the bridle-roads in the steps 
 of the contadini, and you will find this green world about your 
 feet touched with the May-day suns to tenderest and most lavish 
 wealth of nature. 
 
 The green corn uncurling underneath the blossoming vines. 
 The vine foliage that tosses and climbs and coils in league 
 on league of verdure. The breast-high grasses full of gold and 
 red and purple from the countless flowers growing with it. 
 
 The millet filled with crimson gladioli and great scarlet 
 poppies. The hill-sides that look a sheet of rose-colour where 
 the lupinelli are in bloom. The tall plumes of the canes, new 
 born, by the side of every stream and rivulet. 
 
 The sheaves of arum leaves that thrust themselves out from 
 every joint of masonry or spout of broken fountain. The flame 
 of roses that burns on every handsbreadth of untilled ground, 
 and springs like a rainbow above the cloud of every darkling roof 
 or wall. The ocean spray of arbutus and acacia shedding its 
 snow against the cypress darkness. The sea-green of the young 
 ilex leaves scattered like light over the bronze and purple of the 
 older growth. The dreamy blue of the iris lilies rising under- 
 neath the olives and along the edges of the fields. 
 
 The soft, pretty, quiet pictures where mowers sweep down 
 with their scythes the reedy grasses on the river banks ; where 
 the gates of the villas stand wide open with the sun aslant upon 
 the grassy paths beneath the vines ; where in the gloom of the 
 
202 PASCAR&L. 
 
 house archways the women sit plaiting their straw, the broad shin- 
 ing fields "before them all alive with the song of the grilli ; where 
 the grey savage walls of a fortress tower on the spur of the 
 mountains, above the delicate green of young oaks and the wind- 
 stirred fans of the fig-trees ; where the frate, in broad-leaved 
 hat of straw, brushes with bare sandalled feet through the 
 bright acanthus, beaming a Rabelaisian smile on the contadina 
 who goes by him with her brown water-jar upon her head : 
 where deep in that fresh, glad tumult of leaf and blossom and 
 bough the children and the goats lie together, while the wild 
 thyme and the trefoil are in flower, and the little dog-rose 
 is white amongst the maize; where the sharp beak of the 
 galley-like boats cuts dark against the yellow current, and 
 the great filmy square nets are cast outward where the poplar 
 shadows tremble in the stream ; all these, and a thousand like 
 them, are yours in the sweet May season amongst the Tuscan 
 hills and vines. 
 
 The earth can be no greener even away yonder in the pi; 
 valleys of the Alps ; and for the air, what air can be like thi 
 that wanders from Adriatic to Mediteiranean across a land oi 
 flowers bearing lightly on its every breath and breeze the burden 
 of love songs, the sighs of nightingales, the odours of budding 
 fruits, the warmth of amorous suns ? 
 
 Poets of every nation have celebrated the great and the 
 gorgeous scenery of this land that is the native land of every 
 artist; its magnificence of outline, its riot of hue on sky and 
 earth, its voluptuous delights and violet seas, its classic ruins, 
 and its dryad-haunted groves ; these have been over-painted and 
 over-hymned till half the world is weary ; but of its sweet, lowly, 
 simple loveliness that lies broadcast on every hillside and under 
 every olive orchard, amongst the iris lilies in the meadows, and 
 along the loose lush grasses where the sleepy oxen slowly tread 
 their fragrant path of these, I say, not one in a thousand 
 wanderers thinks, perhaps not one in ten thousand even knows. 
 
 All that time we wandered about according to our whim and 
 will, from the blue waters of Spezzia to the green fields of the 
 Casentino, and from the spires of Milan to the shadows of St. 
 Mark. 
 
 "We never tarried long in any place ; the true nomadic temper 
 was in Pascarel. 
 
 The flag of our wooden Arte seldom fluttered longer than two 
 or three evenings under the same knot of chestnut trees, or on 
 the same hillside. A certain restlessness always impelled its 
 
THE POETS COUNTRY. 2OJ 
 
 owner to frequent change and movement, and though he would 
 lie and dream for hours together in the sun, he preferred that the 
 sun when it rose should seldom find him in the same spot where 
 it had shone on him at its last setting. 
 
 We went through all the historic country that the Apennines 
 girdle with their broad belt of vine leaves and marble; the 
 country of the poets that has heard their " sweet singing" 
 through so many centuries, from the love-notes of Catullus to the 
 death-sigh of Tasso. 
 
 Beneath Peschiera, that still " sits a fortress " as in Dante's 
 time, to denote the old Teutonic Tyrol ways. 
 
 On the stones of the sad City of the Lake, builded above the 
 bones of that " cruel virgin" who wandered from far Thebes to 
 lay her down to rest amidst the " thousand fountains." 
 
 Through the Reggio district at the mountains' foot where 
 Boiardo had sung, and laughed, and loved, and fought his grace- 
 ful life away. 
 
 By sad Ferrara, repenting in widowed loneliness the crimes of 
 her lord of Este against the poet who dared to plead in the teeth 
 of pride " per amor mio." 
 
 Far northward as Cremona, where the seeding grass and the 
 wild barley grew above that dreadful ditch, once filled up with 
 the bleeding and stifled peasants thrust into a living death that 
 the knights might spur their horses in safety over the chasm 
 whilst Carlo Malatesta's golden mantle fluttered in all the pride 
 of war. 
 
 Southward within the sound of Santa Lucia's bell, in saintly 
 Assisi, when the morning dews were wet on the ivy-grown 
 bridge of the Clausura, and the linnets sang in the same old 
 boughs that had sheltered the birds that once had chaunted their 
 Easter litanies to S. Francis. 
 
 To strange San Leo, mighty watch-tower of nature, towering 
 over the wide wild waste of uptossed rocks and barren mountains. 
 
 Along the treacherous moonlit waters of the P6, where the 
 bridal barge had floated to the moat tower, whilst Lucrezia in her 
 albernia of woven gold bent before her lord, and the torches 
 glowed on the plumes of the Moorish dancers, and the Bacchides 
 was played to the sound of Mantuan music. 
 
 On the high hills, once the eyrie of the Eagle of the Monte- 
 ieltro, where Dante dwelt with the great Ghibelline chieftain, 
 and the hazel eyes of the baby Sanzio opened to the light. 
 
 In the green gay country where merry-hearted Pudci strung 
 
204 PASCAR&L. 
 
 together his " heaps of sonnets hig as the clubs they make oi 
 cherry blossoms for May-day." 
 
 Amidst the Lombard fields and garden where Ariosto, " 'twixt 
 the April and the May" of his life, had loves as many and as 
 roseate as pomegranate blossoms in a July noon. 
 
 By old Urbino, in whose gaunt silence the silvery echoes 
 seemed to come of Raffael's laugh, and Tiziano's wooing, and 
 Bembo's wit, and the voices of Yittoria and Veronica, and the 
 applause of that gay and gracious court as it listened to the cantos 
 of the " Furioso " and the pages of II Cortegiano, in the mosaic- 
 chamber, whilst the sea-winds blew over Monte Carpegna, and 
 the stars rose above the iron-stone of Nero's mountain. 
 
 " If I had been any famous personage at all, I think I should 
 have chosen to be Boiardo," said he one day as we sat under the 
 shadow of a fig-tree in a little village of the plains, whilst the 
 white oxen trod slowly under the blossoming vines, and the 
 shallow threads of water were all blue with hyacinth and 
 iris. 
 
 " Boiardo' s life," said he, "must have been worth the living 
 from first to last in that pleasant and thrice-famous Reggio 
 country, green with the vines as this is. A beautiful life bold, 
 free, gracious, loving, and well loved; a life full of the deeds of 
 a soldier and the dreams of a poet, a life made sweet and fresh 
 by the open air, heightened by passion and battle, but chiefly 
 absorbed in the ideal, for did he not set the bells of Scandiano all 
 a-ringing until the people all thought a new saint had been 
 canonised, when it was only his joy at having found a fit name 
 for his hero ? Boiardo was to be envied, I admit : much maybe 
 for having begun the * Orlando/ but much more for having his 
 name pass into a proverb for a fair fortune. 'Heaven send 
 Boiardo to your house ! ' So the country folk of all the Reggio 
 district say still when they wish you well. How a man must 
 have been adored by his countryside to be transmitted BO down 
 the stream of tradition ! " 
 
 He spoke thus of Boiardo, nothing arrogating to himself; yet 
 it was hardly less love that was won by him through all his birth 
 country. 
 
 The fame of him was not indeed spread like that of the courtly 
 rhymester of the " Orlando Innamorato," amidst nobles' palaces 
 and in kings* circles, but there was not a lowly capanna betwixt 
 the two seas that was not the lighter and the gladder for the fall 
 of his footstep on its threshold, and not a peasant from Alp to 
 Abruzzi that would not bring forth to honour his coming the last 
 
THE POETS 
 
 ahred of the goat's flesh and the last drop of the rough red 
 wine. 
 
 Money he had not to give them, but he gave them all the 
 riches he had mirth and music and goodwill, and a strong hand 
 to part them in their quarrels, and a tender patience to aid them 
 in their wants, and a sunny wit to beguile them in their sorrows. 
 
 There was, indeed, always that about him which made one 
 think of Ariosto and of Gabriello's lines on that great Lom- 
 bard : 
 
 " Credere uti posses natum felicibus lioria 
 Felici fulgente astro Jo vis atque Dionis." 
 
 At his coming the people trooped out from all their villages 
 and towns in wildest welcome. The shout of " Pascarel, il Pas- 
 carello ! " from some shepherd in the fields or some lads playing 
 pallone on the outskirts, brought the whole population of any 
 place which he approached rushing helter-skelter towards him, 
 running and singing before his footsteps, and almost fighting for 
 the coveted honour of giving him shelter for the night. 
 
 He might have drunk a hundred stoups of wine, he might have 
 kissed a hundred women, he might have supped at a hundred 
 tables within any gates he entered. 
 
 The poorest hamlet got together some little show of riches in 
 his honour, and the best of everything, if poor that best might 
 be, was dragged forth and spread out in delighted homage before 
 him under the fig trees or the cork trees in the mellow evening 
 light. 
 
 I grew to understand how and why he was BO happy with his 
 life, and how and why he would have been loth to leave it for 
 any other. There were in it such perfect liberty, such continual 
 change ; and what touched him most, I think, so great a love for 
 him everywhere. 
 
 It was perhaps only a sunshiny form of selfishness, the laugh- 
 ing and indolent life that this man of fine powers and of fine 
 julture led from village to village over the face of his native 
 land. 
 
 Yet it had a great influence over me that purified and ennobled 
 my faults and my follies, and I think it had often the same over 
 the populace amongst whom he dwelt. 
 
 For once in a hamlet on the plains, when cholera raged, I saw 
 Pascarel welcomed as though he had been an angel who had 
 brought them healing on his wings ; and once in a turbulent 
 Street riot in Vicenza, he controlled a furious and death-dealing 
 
mob with the mere charm of perfect courage and trick of timely 
 and skilful wit 
 
 I think the earnestness that lies in the Italian character is alto* 
 gether overlooked. 
 
 Its indolence, its gaiety, its love of pleasure, lie on the surface, 
 and are steadily measured ; but the depths of it are graver very 
 grave indeed grave even to a profound melancholy. 
 
 The Italian character is made up of contrasts, more strongly 
 marked and vividly opposed than that of any other nation ; and 
 these contrasts are welded not seldom into as perfect harmony as 
 is possible to human nature ; for an Italian is melodious even in 
 his discord, and is symmetrical even in his contrariety. 
 
 See the country in a time of flood, of pestilence, of fire- she 
 is heroic, and the woe of one is the woe of all, with an unanimity 
 of action and a strength of emotion that can alone arise out of a 
 national character at once tender and full of force. Northern 
 nations have nothing, for example, comparable for self-sacrifice to 
 the Misericordia. For consolidation, for devotion to duty, for all 
 the deepest and purest forms of charity, the Order has no equal 
 in Europe. 
 
 Where- else will you see, as you can see all through Tuscany, 
 the nobleman leaving his masked ball, the lover his mistress, the 
 craftsman his labour, the foeman his vengeance, to go at the 
 sound of the tocsin, and aid the poor and the sick and the 
 dying ? 
 
 Superficial commentators wonder that the disciples of Savo- 
 narola could come from the same people as the debauchees of the 
 Decamerone, but the wonder is very idle. 
 
 A passionate sadness underlies in silence the gay and amorous 
 temperament of the Italian ; and not only in metaphor, but in 
 fact, will the hair shirt of a silent sorrow be worn by hi in under 
 the ribboned domino that he carries so airily in his life of 
 intrigue. 
 
 "No one will ever see it except one woman out of his many loves 
 who is near enough to him to touch his heart as well as stir his 
 passions ; no one else will ever see it, but there it is and his 
 sword is there too. 
 
 This earnestness was in Pascarel beneath all the vivacity and 
 lightness of his temperament ; and it produced in him that 
 mingled strength and tenderness which endeared him to the 
 people. 
 
 Often when we have been in the city he has left my side as we 
 laughed at some winestall in the market or played dominoes 
 
PUMA Dl GLORIA. 2O7 
 
 before some sunshiny trattoria, and has vanished in obedience to 
 the bell of the Misericordia. 
 
 Often when we have gone through some village in which pes- 
 tilence was raging, or where some sudden flood of water had 
 washed away the little wealth of the contadini, he has taken his 
 place by the sick beds or beside the bereaved and homeless 
 peasantry, with a skilful gentleness and brotheriiness that was 
 more balm to the sufferer than herbs or gold. 
 
 I think that his laughter was all the richer over the cards and 
 the wines in the little vine-hung loggia of the bettolini, because 
 his eyes were dim many a time over a suffering and penniless 
 stranger who would have died unaided and unshriven but for the 
 pity of the player of the Arte. And I am sure that the salte- 
 rello and the stornello were all the gayer and the sweeter on his 
 mandoline, because he could touch the strings of it into melody 
 that would soothe the death-bed of a child with visions of the 
 angels. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 I'TTMA DI GLORIA. 
 
 THIS wandering life was to me perfect. I wished for nothing 
 better than all that laughter at the wine fairs ; than all that 
 merriment at the village festivals ; than all those stories told in 
 the great threshing barns ; than all that gay chit-chat with the 
 women laying their straw to bleach on the shores, or the men 
 spreading their river nets where the leaves thrilled in the wind ; 
 it was all perfect to me, as it would have been to any other 
 creature young and of healthy body, and a soul not spoiled by the 
 world and its ways. 
 
 And as for the people ; the dear people ! the more I dwelt 
 amongst them the more I loved them. There is no other people 
 on the face of the earth so entirely loveable even with their many 
 faults as the Italians. But what is known of them by other 
 nations ? hardly anything at all. 
 
 That the Italian patrician may be little understood outside the 
 pale of his own immediate associates, it is not difficult to conceive. 
 His confidence is rarely bestowed ; and the pride which fences 
 him in is at once the most delicate and the most impenetrable 
 that a man can place betwixt himself and the outer world. 
 
ao8 PASCAZEL. 
 
 But it is passing strange that the Italian popolario, open t<) 
 whosoever will to study him at their leisure, the Italian of the 
 people, as seen in his streets and fields, by his hearth, and his 
 market stall, is as little understood and as invariably misrepre- 
 sented. 
 
 French vivacity and ease have passed into a proverb ; yet, in 
 reality, the Trench people are studied and conscious compared to 
 the Italian, who is the most absolutely unstudied and unself-con- 
 scious of all God's creatures. 
 
 True, the Italian, even in the lowest strata of social life, has 
 a repose and a dignity in him which befit his physiognomy and 
 evince themselves in his calm and poetical attitudes. See a stone- 
 breaker, or a mason, or a boatman asleep in the noonday sun, 
 and you will surely see attitudes which no sculptor could wish 
 bettered for his marble. 
 
 True, too, you will do ill to make a mock of him ; high or low, 
 it is the one unpardonable sin which no Italian will pardon ; he 
 is given also to the immoveable obstinacy of that animal which 
 he will never name save under the delicate euphuism of " the 
 little black gentleman ; " and he has a lightning-like passion 
 in him which may smite his neighbour to the earth in a trice 
 about a cherry- stone, or a broken broom, or any other casus lelU 
 of the hour. 
 
 But, then, lo ! how bright he is, how gregarious, how neigh- 
 bourly, how instant and graceful in courtesy, how eager and 
 kindly in willingness ; how poetic his glee in song and dance, 
 and holy day and pageant ; how absolute his content upon the 
 most meagre fare that ever held body and soul together; how 
 certain his invariable selection of a pleasure for the eye and the 
 ear rather than one for the mouth and the stomach. 
 
 See the gay, elastic grace of him ; the mirth that ripples all 
 day long about him like the sunlight, the laughter that shows his 
 white teeth, the tumultuous shouts in which his lungs delight, 
 the cheery sociability that brings him with a knot of his own 
 kind at the street corners and under the house archways to talk 
 the hours away with tireless tongue and shrewdest wit, and say, 
 is there a creature kindlier or more mirthful anywhere in tha 
 width of the world ? 
 
 And he will always have some delicate touch of the artist in 
 him too, and always some fine instinct of the gentleman let him 
 be poor as he will, ill clad, half-starved, and ignorant even of the 
 letters that make his name, let him feel the summer dust with 
 bare feet, and the mountain wind through a ragged shirt, nay, let 
 
DI GLORIA. 209 
 
 him be the veriest scamp and sinner in the world hut lie will 
 wear his tatters with a grace ; he will bring a flower to a woman 
 nrith the bow of a king ; and he will resent an insolence with an 
 air to which no purples and fine linen could lend dignity. 
 
 With the people I was happy all through that sweet season of 
 the spring and the summer ; and to pleasure Pascarel, there was 
 nothing they would not do to smooth the hardness of their modes 
 of life to the donzella. 
 
 Not that such hardships counted for much with me. 
 
 From my infancy I had known what hunger meant to the full 
 as well as any beggar child, and my years in old Verona had been 
 bare of all save the sternest necessities of existence. 
 
 Pascarel was true to his word. 
 
 It was always well with me. I never saw or heard anything 
 that dear old dead Mariuccia would have deemed unfit for me had 
 she been living then to shield me. Full of mirth indeed we were ; 
 mirth, endless and unstrained, babbling like a brook amongst the 
 (lowers and weeds of daily acts and words ; but amongst it all 
 there was not so much as a coarse word which could have harmed 
 me ; and when we were with the populace, who were apt to bo 
 coarse enough themselves in their jests and songs, Brunotta, at a 
 sign from him, would slide her hand in mine and draw me gently 
 away up to some little attic in the roof, or aside under some leafy 
 pergola, and keep me there talking, always, as my habit was, of 
 the miracles and the perfections of the life and ways of Pascarel. 
 
 I was always to her the donzella ; she was always a little shy 
 with me and a little humble. 
 
 " Tanta bellina, tanta bellina! " she would murmur often, 
 looking at me with a soft puzzled wistfulness in her bird-like 
 eyes : and all that I could do availed nothing to induce her to 
 set herself upon an equality with me. Day by day, instead of 
 growing more familiar with me, she seemed to feel the difference 
 that was between us with a clearer perception, and treated me 
 with a wondering homage, of which my natural vanity was well 
 contented to avail itself. 
 
 Nothing in the way of worship came much amiss to me at that 
 time. 
 
 I had ceased to be troubled about the tinker's pot ; I was con- 
 soled by the memories of the great race whence he came. 
 
 I had got in my mind a little picture of Mm as he must needs 
 have been in those days: a slender, lithe brown child with 
 beautiful eyes ; full of mischief and of tenderness ; of odd fancies 
 and of loyal impulses ; running along the white sun-baked roads 
 
 p 
 
210 PASCAR&L. 
 
 of his beloved country with a little clattering burden of kettles, 
 and flagons, and stewpans slung behind his shoulders. 
 
 And his father, too ; I pictured him also, a man of much 
 humour, as he said, telling strange, marvellous stories as he sat 
 in the dust of the wayside tinkering his pots ; a man who never 
 could utterly forget that his people in old remote times had been 
 great in the land, and who was always a little grave, with a 
 little touch of the old arrogance, though a good kindly soul and 
 a boon companion when the wine went round after the village 
 games. 
 
 Tor those vanished grandeurs and powers of his race, which 
 were almost mythical to him, Pascarel himself never once cast a 
 sigh down the wind. What his father had told him in childhood 
 many an evening sitting under a wayside crucifix mending the 
 copper pots and pans of the countryfolk might be true or might 
 not. 
 
 The perished nobility of his forefathers woke no envy from 
 him. 
 
 "It had been certainly a great race once ; yes," he was wont 
 to say, while half sceptical of the fact himself, " at least, so my 
 father would have it; and Malespini, if that old liar may be be- 
 lieved about anything, which is doubtful. Traces of it crop up 
 here and there in quaint old places ; here a tomb, there a for- 
 tress, here a bronze knight that the children aim at in their 
 games ; there a manuscript, that some old monk unearths from 
 his chapter rolls for want of something to do. 
 
 " Oh, I believe it was all true enough. 
 
 " There were mighty Pascarelli in the olden days. But I am very 
 glad that I was not of them ; except, indeed, that I should have 
 liked to strike a blow or two for Guido Calvacanti and have 
 hindered the merrymaking of those precious rascals who sent him 
 out to die of the marsh fever. 
 
 " Great? 
 
 "No; certainly I would not be great. To be a great man is 
 endlessly to crave something that you have not ; to kiss the hands 
 of monarchs and lick the feet of peoples. To be great ? Who 
 was erer more great than Dante, and what was his experience ? 
 the bitterness of begged bread, and the steepness of palace 
 stairs. 
 
 ." Besides, given the genius to deserve it, the upshot of a life 
 spent for greatness is absolutely uncertain. Look at Machiavelii. 
 
 " After having laid infallible rules for social and public success 
 with such unapproachable astuteness that his name has become 
 
FUMA DI GLORIA. 211 
 
 a synonym for unerring policy, Machiavelli passed his existence 
 in obedience and submission to Eome, to Florence, to Charles, to 
 Cosmo, to Leo, to Clement. 
 
 " He was born into a time favourable beyond every other to 
 sudden changes of fortune a time in which any fearless auda- 
 city might easily become the stepping-stone to a supreme authority; 
 and yet Machiavelli, whom the world still holds as its ablest 
 statesman in principle never, in practice, rose above the level 
 of a servant of civil and papal tyrannies, and, when his end came, 
 died in obscurity and almost in penury. 
 
 ' Theoretically, Machiavelli could rule the universe ; but 
 practically he never attained to anything finer than a more or 
 less advantageous change of masters. To reign doctrinally may 
 be all very well, but when it only results in serving actually, it 
 seems very much better to be obscure and content without any 
 trouble. 
 
 * Fumo di gloria non vale fumo di pipa.' 
 
 " I, for one, at any rate, am thoroughly convinced of that 
 truth of truths." 
 
 I hearkened to him sorrowful ; for to my ignorant eyes the 
 witch candle of fame seemed a pure and perfect planet ; and I 
 felt that the planet might have ruled his horoscope had he 
 chosen. 
 
 "Is there no glory at all worth having, then?'* I murmured. 
 
 He stretched himself where he rested amongst the arum- 
 whitened grass, and took his cigaretto from his mouth : 
 
 " Well, there is one, perhaps. But it is to be had about once 
 in five centuries. 
 
 " You know Or San Michele ? It would have been a world's 
 wonder had it stood alone, and not been companioned with such 
 wondrous rivals that its own exceeding beauty scarce ever re- 
 ceives full justice. 
 
 " Where the jasper of Giotto and the marble of Brunelleschi, 
 where the bronze of Ghiberti and the granite of Arnolfo rise 
 everywhere in the sunlit air to challenge vision and adoration, 
 Or San Michele fails of its full meed from men. Yet, perchance, 
 in all the width of Florence there is not a nobler thing. 
 
 "It is like some massive casket of silver oxydised by time ; 
 such a casket as might have been made to hold the Tables of the 
 Law by men to whose faith Sinai was a holy and imperishable 
 truth. 
 
 "I know nothing of the rule or phrase of Architecture, but it 
 
 F 2 
 
2 1 2 PASCARkL. 
 
 seems to me surely that that square set strength, as of a fortress, 
 towering against the clouds, and catching the last light alwaya 
 on its fretted parapet, and everywhere embossed and enriched 
 with foliage, and tracery, and the figures of saints, and the 
 shadows of vast arches, and the light of niches gold-starred and 
 niled with divine forms, is a gift so perfect to the whole world, 
 that, passing it, one should need say a prayer for great Taddeo's 
 soul. 
 
 11 Surely, nowhere is the rugged, changeless, mountain force 
 of hewn stone piled against the sky, and the luxuriant, dream- 
 like, poetic delicacy of stone carven and shaped into leafage and 
 loveliness more perfectly blended and made one than where Or 
 San Michele rises out of the dim, many-coloured, twisting streets, 
 in its mass of ebon darkness and of silvery light. 
 
 " Well, the other day. under the walls of it I stood, and 
 looked at its Saint George where he leans upon his shield, so 
 calm, so young, with his bared head and his quiet eyes. 
 
 " * That is our Donatello's/ said a Florentine beside me a 
 man of the people, who drove a horse for hire in the public ways, 
 and who paused, cracking his whip, to tell this tale to me. 
 4 Donatello did that, and it killed him. Do you not know ? 
 When he had done that Saint George, he showed it to his master. 
 And the master said, " It wants one thing only." Now this 
 saying our Donatello took gravely to heart, chiefly of all because 
 his master would never explain where the fault lay; and so 
 much did it hurt him, that he fell ill of it, and came nigh to 
 death. Then he called his master to him. " Dear and great 
 one, do tell me before I die," he said, " what is the one thing 
 my statue lacks." The master smiled, and said, " Only 
 speech." " Then I die happy," said our Donatello. And he 
 aied indeed, that hour/ 
 
 " Now, I cannot say that the pretty story is true ; it is not in 
 the least true ; Donato died when he was eighty-three, in the 
 Street of the Melon ; and it was he himself who cried, ' Speak 
 hen speak ! ' to his statue, as it was carried through the city. 
 But whether true or false the tale, this fact is surely true, that 
 it is well nobly and purely well with a people when the men 
 amongst it who ply for hire on its public ways think caressingly 
 of a sculptor dead five hundred years ago, and tell such a tale 
 standing idly in the noonday sun, feeling the beauty and the 
 pathos of it all. 
 
 " ' Our Donatello' still to the people of Florence. * Our own 
 little "Oonato ' stili, our pet and pride, even as though be weu 
 
GWYN ARAUN. I3 
 
 living and working in their midst to-day, here in the shadows of 
 the Stockingmaker's Street, where his Saint George keeps watch 
 and ward. 
 
 " 'Our little Donato' still, though dead so many hundred 
 years ago. 
 
 " That is glory, if you will. And something more beautiful 
 than any glory Love." 
 
 He was silent a long while, gathering lazily with his left 
 hand the arum lilies to bind them together for me. 
 
 Perhaps the wish for the moment passed over him that he had 
 chosen to set his life up in stone, like to Donato' s, in the face of 
 Florence, rather than to weave its light and tangled skein out 
 from the breaths of the wandering winds and the sands of the 
 shifting shore. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 GWYN ARA.TTN. 
 
 " WHAT life then would you really like ?" I asked him once, in 
 bewilderment at his utter scorn for all manner and degree of 
 aggrandisement, and the touch of impatience at his own mode of 
 existence which now and then escaped him. 
 
 "Gwyn Araun's!" he responded, promptly; "I think that 
 is the only perfect one that ever was known upon earth." 
 
 "Gwyn Araun?" I asked, in amaze. "He was not a Flo- 
 rentine." 
 
 "No; he was not a Florentine. He comes of a race called 
 Fable. We have never been famous for harbouring his kind. 
 They loved shade ; and we are all light. Gwyn Araun and his 
 race are ferns that grow where it is moist and dark. They 
 belong to the primaeval ages of the world. Gwyn Araun, to 
 begin with, had a horse that could transport him anywhere in 
 an instant to the moon if he wished. He could converse with 
 the stars and the flowers, the clouds and the trees, the gods and 
 the butterflies, turn by turn. He could wander invisible, and 
 take any shape that he desired. He had absolute omniscience, 
 and he used his power always to save and to soothe and to 
 pleasure mankind. Finally he had an ivory horn, at whose note 
 of enchantment all melancholy fled. That is the only perfect 
 existence I ever heard of, and he lived in the golden age of 
 
2f4 PASCAR&L. 
 
 Myth, in the depths of the Scandinavian woods or Teuton forests, 
 I do not quite remember which." 
 
 " And what became of him ?" 
 
 " He d isappeared. That is another perfection of G wyn Araun' a 
 species. They never die, they disappear. If we did the same 
 it would be much more agreeable ; it is difficult to retain much 
 idealism, when one knows one must end in a wooden box, and 
 have the flies buzzing about one as about a sheep's trotters on 
 a butcher's stall. Gwyn Araun vanished because he fell in 
 with a sage of prosaic mind, who, being bidden by him to a 
 feast of spiced meats and ambrosial draughts in jewelled dishes 
 and cups of gold, saw with the eyes of the flesh only, and stub- 
 bornly maintained that there was no food or drink at all in all the 
 place, but only dead forest-leaves and brook-water. Which so 
 disgusted Gwyn Araun that he fled from earth for evermore. 
 But he comes back sometimes even still in the shape of a poet, 
 invisible to men, and riding on his winged horse that can circle 
 the run in five seconds ; and then he spreads the divine feast 
 again ; and again the prosaic sage which calls himself the World 
 repeats the same scoff at it; and, again, Gwyn Araun flies away 
 ;n sorrow and disdain. That is, as the World phrases it the 
 poet perishes broken-hearted." 
 
 This was the manner in which Pascarel would talk to me 
 when the mood was on him, lying under the vines in the noon 
 heats, lazily touching a chord of his mandoline, or wandering 
 down some hill-side when the moon was tiigh amongst the trem- 
 bling stalks of maize. 
 
 And the charm of the quaint, fantastic, half-spiritual, sportive, 
 pathetic, whimsical discourse of his so grew upon me, little by 
 little, that it acted like a spell. All my rebellion against my 
 fate, my desires for riches, my feverish dreams of strange for- 
 tunes and of high estate, sank away into an absolute contentment. 
 Beside a dreamer who only thought a life like the Genius Gwyn 
 Araun' s worth the envying, all mere ambition looked meretri- 
 cious and empty; and beside a philosopher who broke his dry 
 bread contentedly under a peasant's house-vine, after a half 
 day's march along the mountains, one becomes ashamed to yearn 
 after such pitiful things as pearls and rubies and fine raiment. 
 
OUVBT. tl$ 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 OLIVET. 
 
 PASCAHEL believed in genius. It was his religion. For me- 
 diocrity his contempt was boundless. 
 
 Genius he had himself, and of the rarest sort. The countless 
 trifles which he flung away with such lavishness amongst the 
 populace were gems of the utmost perfection in their kind. 
 
 The brightest wit, the subtlest philosophy, the most gracious 
 charms of poetry and symmetry characterised these ephemeral 
 creations which he composed one after another, without effort, 
 almost, one could have said, without thought, and which, when 
 they had served their turn for a few nights, he remembered no 
 longer, and which would have been thrown away and lost for 
 ever had not little Tocco, who worshipped him, been wont ten- 
 derly to collect the scattered scraps and ends of paper on which 
 Pascarel wrote down these fancies in a careless stenography 
 which served him and baffled all others. 
 
 My own dreams that I might have any touch of genius in me 
 he dismissed with unutterable contempt, half gay, half tender. 
 
 " Genius !" he cried. " Cara mia, when you sang in the 
 Market-place of Yerona, you were a perfect picture, that I grant. 
 But a dog leapt on you with muddy paws, and you paused in 
 your singing to brush the snow off your yellow skirts. If you 
 had any genius, singing as you sang, what would you have 
 known though fifty dogs should have soiled your gown ? You 
 have no genius. Be thankful. What do women want with it 
 when they have as fair a face as you ? At your best you will 
 never be more than a mandoline, which will answer in true 
 chords to the touch of a fine player. You will never originate a 
 cadence one whit more than the mandoline ever does." 
 
 " And what shall I be at my worst ? " I cried, not well pleased 
 at his verdict. 
 
 (i Oh, at your worst, of course, you will be the mandoline 
 with every string broken, like everything else at its worst. But 
 what is more probable is, that you will fall into the hands of 
 some musician who will just get out of you all the vile flourishes 
 and ornate fioriture which go down as good music in this world, 
 you all the while believing the bungler who runs his roulades on 
 you to be a great maestro. 
 
2i6 PASCAX&L. 
 
 "It is women's way. They always love colour better than 
 form, rhetoric better than logic, priestcraft better than philo- 
 sophy, and flourishes better than fugues. It has been said 
 scores of times before I said it. 
 
 "Nay," he pursued, thinking he had pained me, "you have 
 a bright wit enough, and a beautiful voice, though you sing 
 without knowing very well what you do sing. But genius you 
 have not, look you ; say your thanksgiving to the Madonna at 
 the next shrine we come to; genius you have not." 
 
 " What is it I" 
 
 " Well, it is hard to tell; but this is certain, that it puts peas 
 unboiled into the shoes of every pilgrim who really gets up to 
 its Olivet. 
 
 "Genius has all manner of dead dreams and sorrowful lost 
 loves for its scallop-shells ; and the palm that it carries is the 
 bundle of rods wherewith fools have beaten it for calling them 
 blind. 
 
 " Genius has eyes so clear that it sees straight down into the 
 hearts of others through all their veils of sophistry and simula- 
 tion ; and its own heart is pierced often to the quick for shame 
 of what it reads there. 
 
 " It has such long and faithful remembrance of other worlds 
 and other lives which most mortals have forgotten, that beside 
 the beauty of those memories all things of earth seem poor and 
 valueless. 
 
 " Men call this imagination or idealism ; the name does not 
 matter much ; whether it be desire or remembrance it comes to 
 the same issue ; so that genius, going ever beyond the thing it 
 sees in infinite longing for some higher greatness which it has 
 either lost or otherwise cannot reach, finds the art, and the hu- 
 manity, and the creations, and the affections which seem to 
 others so exquisite most imperfect and scarcely to be endured. 
 
 "The heaven of Phoedrus is the world which haunts Genius 
 where there shall not be women but "Woman, not friends but 
 Friendship, not poems but Poetry ; everything in its uttermost 
 wholeness and perfection ; so that there shall be no possibility 
 of regret nor any place for desire. 
 
 " For in this present world there is only one thing which can 
 content it, and that thing is music ; because music has nothing 
 to do with earth, but sighs always for the lands beyond the sun. 
 
 " And yet all this while genius, though sick at heart, and 
 alone, and finding little in man or in woman, in human art or in 
 human nature, that can equal what it remembers or, as men 
 
&COLE BUISSONNI&&8. 2l^ 
 
 choose to say, it imagines is half a child too, always : for some- 
 thing of the eternal light which streams from the throne of God 
 is always shed ahout it, though sadly dimmed and broken by the 
 clouds and vapours that men call their atmosphere. 
 
 " Half a child always, taking a delight in the frolic of the 
 kids, the dancing of the daffodils, the playtime of the children, 
 the romp of the winds with the waters, the loves of the birds in 
 the blossoms. Half a child always, but always with tears lying 
 close to its laughter, and always with desires that are death in 
 its dreams. 
 
 " No ; you have not genius, cara mia. Say your grazie at the 
 next shrine we pass." 
 
 I heard him with humiliation and a sense of my own littleness. 
 
 Though he had never cared to make gold or fame with it, 
 there was in everything that this man did or said the indefinable 
 charm of that originality and that poetry which are called for 
 want of a better definition by the name of genius. 
 
 And I had dared to think my poor little trick of song, which 
 I shared with the blackbird on the cherry bough, had been 
 genius likewise ! 
 
 I felt ashamed of my presumption. I had only talent a 
 facile and delicate talent enough, but nothing that was higher. 
 My song was pure and flexile, and could reach with wonderful 
 ease high and far, as the stroke of a bell sounded on high over a 
 sunny, still country. 
 
 But it was no more than tho bird's gift as it sings under the 
 pink cherry-blossom. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 ECOLE BUI8SOXNIJERE. 
 
 IT won me much love, however, amongst the people. 
 
 Amongst the people and the little troop of Pascarel I was 
 most often spoken of by my old Veronese name of L'Uccello. 
 
 Although he would never let me act, he now and then per- 
 mitted me to sing to his audiences. 
 
 Whenever he did give his consent, which was but rarely, I 
 used to run on to the little stage with rapture, and look down 
 on the multitude of swarthy, eager, admiring faces with a 
 delight that was half childishness and half vanity. 
 
2l8 PASCAR&L. 
 
 They were good teachers too, in this careless e*cole buisson- 
 niire, those little knots of the Italian populace, unerring in 
 their censure of any imperfection, enthusiastic in their welcome 
 of any excellence. 
 
 They gave me stimulus and strength ; it stung me to be hissed 
 tor a false half-note by some black-browed pewterer or some 
 open-eyed taverner's boy. In much these people were my 
 masters, by accuracy of ear and facility of execution : and the 
 roughness of their inexorable criticism, joined with the sincerity 
 of their hard-won homage, completed for me the musical 
 education which Ambrogib had so well commenced. 
 
 Now and then it so happened that I pleased them so well, 
 that when the little curtain dropped they would break in gay 
 riot on to the stage, and bear me off in the midst of them, 
 covering me with flowers, and shouting vivas through the quiet 
 of the scattered village and the moonlit fields. 
 
 Poor old Uccello ! I thought of him often as his country 
 people hailed me by his name. 
 
 Of all the poetic figures of the Cinque Cento there is surely 
 none more pathetic than his ; going so timidly about in the 
 midst of the great, gorgeous, busy, passionate Florentine life, 
 absorbed in the one vast conception, with which scarce any man 
 ever credits him ; painting on the walls of his humble home the 
 likenesses of the animals which he loved so well and was too 
 poor to keep ; living with his birds that fluttered for ever round 
 his patient head, as he sat and worked out the immeasurable 
 gifts which the world takes at his hands without once thinking 
 of the giver. 
 
 "Ah, mia cara! Si voi sapevete quanto la Prospettiva m'd 
 dolce!" 
 
 How one hears the gentle words sighed out in the long nights, 
 of whose cold and sleeplessness the old man felt nothing, as he 
 dreamed over his one priceless discovery. 
 
 And in his life Florence knew him not ; Florence laughed at 
 him ; Florence only saw in him a meek, quaint, fanciful, timid 
 soul, good for very little in the victorious city. 
 
 There were only his birds that knew, his birds that talked 
 with him and solaced him, we may be sure, even as their 
 brethren did St. Francis. 
 
 The good and sad old Uccello ! I used to think of him often, 
 very often, when the people shouted his name about me after 
 I had pleased them with my voice, as we went homeward from 
 the theatre in the summer nights with the olive shadows all 
 
219 
 
 alive with fire-Hies, and the stretching plains of millet white as 
 the waves of a starlit sea. 
 
 The adoration of me under my old Veronese name that the vil- 
 lagers gave me far and wide, inspired me with many strong 
 desires to show myself upon his stage in the towns and in the 
 cities to a hushed many-coloured crowd as I had done in the 
 Cathedral Square at Verona. 
 
 But to this wish Pascarel showed himself inexorable. 
 
 It was all very well to sing in some little homely paese 
 amongst the hills, or amidst the fields in Tuscany, or the Adrian 
 Romagna, in my ainher and purple skirts, when there was no 
 one there to hear hut the contadini off the farms, or the straw- 
 plaiters, and stone-cutters of the village. These were my nights 
 of triumph. 
 
 But all the same, I aspired to some wider sphere. I wanted 
 to he heard in the cities. I wanted to take my share in amusing 
 the larger crowds, when we paused in the alpine shadows of 
 Milano, or amidst the Romanesque wonders of Ravenna, or 
 beneath the aerial and gorgeous pinnacles of S. Marco. 
 
 But of this Pascarel would not hear. 
 
 "No, ^donzella, it is not for you," he would answer; and 
 I found it of no avail to urge my cause ; for Pascarel was too 
 Italian not to have a woollen thread of obstinacy running here 
 and there through the soft bright- coloured velvets of his 
 temperament. 
 
 " Why is it not for me?" I said, one day, as we came down 
 from San Marcello and went on our way towards the little 
 town of Pistoia. 
 
 We were that day at Gavinana, I remember ; having gone up 
 under the chestnut trees, over the rocky road, in the bright 
 coolness of early morning. 
 
 The heavy June rains had swelled the mountain streams that 
 were tumbling and foaming with delicious sound far below in 
 the Rio Gonfio. The broad green lawn of the Vecchetto under 
 its deep chestnut shade was lonely and wet and fragrant, as 
 though it had never been steeped red in the blood of the last 
 Republic, and in the grove of the Doccio the thrushes were 
 singing where once there had shivered the lances of Florence. 
 
 We had been talking of those times when the tower chimes of 
 the little castello had all rung loudly a stormo, and where the 
 shady grass-grown market-place, that now only echoed with the 
 tinkle of a mule's bell and the splash of its quiet fountain, had 
 heard the savage shouts of Spain, as great Perruccio fell pierced 
 
220 
 
 with a thousand wounds from pike and arquebuse, and thinking 
 to the last of Florence. 
 
 We had been talking of all these times as we sat at our simple 
 meal of bread and wine and melons, under the ancient chestnuts, 
 and Pascarel had been sighing, as was his wont that his lot 
 had not been in those vivid and virile days. 
 
 " There was so much more colour in those days," he had said, 
 rolling a big green papone before him with his foot. " If, 
 indeed, it were laid on sometimes too roughly. And then there 
 was so much more play for character. Nowadays, if a man dare 
 go out of the common ways to seek a manner of life suited 
 to him and unlike others, he is voted a vagabond, or, at least, a 
 lunatic, supposing he is rich enough to get the sentence so 
 softened. In those days the impossible was possible a paradox ? 
 oh, of course. The perfection of those days was, that they were 
 full of paradoxes. No democracy will ever compass the im- 
 mensity of Hope, the vastness of Possibility, with which the 
 Church of those ages filled the lives of the poorest poor. Not 
 hope spiritual only, but hope terrestrial, hope material and sub- 
 stantial. A swineherd, glad to gnaw the husks that his pigs 
 left, might become the Yicc-regent of Christ, and spurn emperors 
 prostrate before his throne. The most famished student who 
 girt his lean loins to pass the gates of Pavia or Ravenna, knew 
 that if he bowed his head for the tonsure he might live to lift it 
 in a pontiff's arrogance in the mighty reality and the yet 
 mightier metaphor of a Canosa. The abuses of the mediaeval 
 Church have been gibbeted in every language ; but I doubt if 
 the wonderful absolute equality which that Church actually con- 
 tained and caused has ever been sufficiently remembered. Then 
 only think how great it was to le great in those years, when men 
 were fresh enough of heart to feel emotion and not ashamed to 
 show it, Think of Petrarca's entry into Borne ; think of the 
 superb life of Eaffael ; think of the crowds that hung on the 
 lips of the Improvisatori ; think of the influence of S. Bruno, of 
 S. Bernard, of S. Francis ; think of the enormous power on his 
 generation of Fra Girolamo ! And if one were not great at all, 
 but only a sort of brute with stronger sinews than most men, 
 what a fearless and happy brute one might be, riding with 
 Hawkwood's Lances, or fighting with the Black Bands ! Whilst 
 if one were a peaceable, gentle soul, with a turn for art and 
 grace, what a calm, tender life one might lead in little, old, 
 quiet cities, painting praying saints on their tiptoes, or moulding 
 marriage-plates in majolica ! It must have been such a great 
 
&COLE BUISSONNlkRE. 221 
 
 thing to live when the ^nrld was still all open-eyed with wonder 
 afc itself, like a child or *LS sixth birthday. Nowadays, science 
 makes a great discovery the tired world yawns, feels its pockets, 
 and only asks, ' Will it pay ? ' Galileo ran the risk of the 
 stake, and Giordano Bruno suffered at it; but I think that 
 chance of the faggots must have been better to bear than the 
 languid apathy and the absorbed avarice of the present age, 
 which is chiefly tolerant because it has no interest except in new 
 invented ways for getting money and for spending it." 
 
 Then, moralising thus, he had sliced the papone, and we had 
 made our morning feast before the matins bell had rung over 
 t. ! ;e little ancient deserted town. 
 
 The birds had been singing under the broad green leaves above 
 our heads, the sunshine was sweet and clear upon the old towers 
 and the worn grey stones; in the stillness the little torrents 
 i.'iade sad rushing sounds; across the piazza went an old monk 
 and a little barefoot child with her arms round a golden 
 pumpkin. 
 
 That was all all where once the last battle of free Florence 
 had been fought out and lost. 
 
 It was one of those tranquil, innocent, joyous days, which had 
 so little in them, and yet so much, days of bright weather, of 
 tireless feet, of innocent dreams, of unspeakable gladness, days 
 when the whole land was before us to stray at fancy, and the 
 people made us welcome from the one sea-shore to the other. 
 
 "When our morning meal was over, and the wrinkled rinds of 
 the melons flung to the black pig that had strayed out of a house 
 ov the church and borne us company, sniffing for chestnuts 
 v, here the last javelin had pierced Ferruccio, we left the little 
 town upon its spur of wooded rock, and sauntered out by the 
 Porta Piavana down the leafy ways to Pistoia, whither the Arte 
 had gone on backs of mules before us, and where Pascar&l 
 intended to act that night. 
 
 Pistoia was but a small place, but it was in a humble way a 
 city, and the people a month or two before had made a fuss with 
 me there, and had gathered under the casement of the locanda to 
 listen to me singing within, and had cheered and applauded me 
 half through the night. 
 
 I begged to be seen on the stage there, but Pascarfcl was, as on 
 all other occasions, inexorable. 
 
 " Why is it not for me ? " I argued with him. " Surely it is 
 good enough for your sister, why is it not good enough for 
 me?" 
 
122 PASCAR&L. 
 
 His face flushed, and as we walked along the road, by the 
 foaming water, he cut impatiently at the tall canes that grew by 
 the side of the stones. 
 
 " "What has that to do with it?" he answered me. "Bru- 
 notta is a silly little thing, whose feet are the cleverest part 
 about her ; she cannot read, she cannot be harmed, she is happy 
 in her humble estate. But you in time to come be a great 
 singer, if you will. There will be nothing to hinder you. But 
 you shall not do your future such, an ill-turn as to be seen on my 
 stage whilst you are too young to know all the risk you would 
 run, and all the tarnish you would gain. Besides, your father 
 lives, no doubt, though we find no tidings of him. I do not 
 choose to take the chance of one day being upbraided by him for 
 having allowed his daughter to show herself in a booth amongst 
 strolling players, whilst she was too much of a baby to dream of 
 the life -long injury that she wrought herself." 
 
 I walked silently beside him with a swelling heart, and a 
 pride sorely wounded. 
 
 A baby ! 
 
 I consumed my soul in muteness and bitterness, while watch- 
 ing the canes bend and break under his petulant strokes, whilst 
 the Gonfio flashed brownly amidst the pebbles of its precipitous 
 bed. 
 
 Then with that instinct of coquetry which comes untaught to 
 every woman in whose face men ever care to look, I turned 
 my head over my shoulder, and glanced at him full in the 
 eyes. 
 
 " A baby ! " echoed I ; " I am a head taller than Bruno tta, 
 and you you seem to think me woman enough sometimes ! " 
 
 His eyes flashed into mine a regard so sudden, so subtle, so 
 ardent, that the languor and the fire of it seemed to sweep over 
 me like a sirocco. 
 
 He stood still a moment, and caught my hands and kissed 
 them ; his own were burning. 
 
 TVe went on by the curving course of the torrent, quite silent 
 till our travel of that day was done. 
 
 Oh, glad and gracious days ! 
 
 I love to linger on them, for they were lightened with the 
 sweetest sunlight of my life. Never since for me have flowers 
 blossomed, and fruits ripened, and waters murmured, and grass- 
 hoppers and grilli sung, as in the spring and summer of that 
 wondrous time. 
 
 To rise when all the world was flushed with the soft red 
 
THE FEAST OF ST. JOHN. 223 
 
 of the earliest dawn; to go through the breast-high corn at 
 speed, with scarlet poppies clasping the gliding feet ; to see the 
 purple wraith of rain haunting the silvery fairness of the hills ; 
 to watch the shadows chase the sunrays on the dusky purple of 
 the mountain-sides ; to feel the living light of the cloudless day 
 beat as with a million pulses all around; to go out into the 
 lustre of the night aflame with lucciole, until the dark stilj 
 plains blazed like a phosphorescent sea ; to breathe the won- 
 drous air, soft as the first kisses of men's love, and rich as wine 
 with the strong odours of a world of flowers ; these were my 
 joys, joys at once of the senses and the soul. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE FEAST OF ST. JOITO. 
 
 LITTLE BBUKOTTA had always seemed to me as innocent as 
 mindless, and as happy a thing as any firefly that danced away 
 its little life amongst the boughs of the magnolias and over the 
 vields of maize. 
 
 She was supremely ignorant, infinitely good-natured, and 
 always content, humming on her heedless way with all the 
 light-heartedness of youth; and all that buoyancy of nature, 
 which seems to go in exact proportion to the poverty and igno- 
 rance of every creature. Brunotta, with nothing in the world 
 but a pretty face and two twinkling feet that could da ace her 
 every night into as much money as would pay for her bread on 
 the morrow, was happy always as it is not given to any to be 
 happy when once they have become the owners of either mind 
 or gold. 
 
 Brunctta, indeed, when she saw her brother and myself 
 lingering to watch the sunset fires pale into the ethereal lumi- 
 nance of the night, would shrug her shoulders and go in to see 
 that there were enough onions put in the soup, or that the 
 donna di facienda did not get at our leathern flask of wine and 
 weaken it with water. 
 
 Brunotta, when he and I were, as she called it, stargazing in 
 some old monastic church where, neglected or forgotten by the 
 world, some painting of Rozzi or G'mlano was slowly dropping 
 to piece* in the damp and darkness, Brunotta would be busy 
 
224 PASCAR&I* 
 
 in the tavern kitchen ironing out her dancing skirts, or standing 
 chattering over all the gossip of the town at the well in the 
 market-place with the young men and the old mothers. 
 
 Bruno tta, with all her homage for Pascarel, was not as ayerse 
 as might have been wished to the coarse compliments of the 
 youngsters of the places we passed through, and on more than one 
 occasion at our coming unexpectedly upon her had shot round 
 the corner of a garden wall, or through the portals of a public 
 building with suspicious swiftness and shyness, leaving to con- 
 front us some sturdy contadiuo in his brown cloak and red shirt 
 sleeves, cracking his whip over his mule's head with a sheepish 
 look of conscious guiltiness. 
 
 Brunotta was certainly only a little plump brown earthen 
 pipkin of commonest clay, and had nothing in common with the 
 tine porcelain of her brother's nature, but she was a little cheery 
 tender soul, full of good- will to all living creatures; a-nd ii 
 Pascarel saw any faults in her he never chid them, but treated 
 her with the habitual indulgence and good-humoured oblivion 
 that he might have shown to a child too much a favourite ever 
 to be rebuked, but too ignorant to be ever consulted or con- 
 sidered. 
 
 I held her in sincere affection : she was very good to me, 
 and observed Avith me always that wondering, deferential 
 homage which she had from the first blended with her cordial 
 familiarity. 
 
 " You are a donzella, and Pascarel says you are not as we 
 are," was her formula always in answer to my expostulations 
 against the services she rendered me, and the distance which she 
 would occasionally remember to set between herself and me. 
 
 She would trot to and fro untiringly in my service. She would 
 always take care that some daintier fare than their own was 
 prepared for me. And whenever any of her many adorers 
 broughther offerings from the village fairs or fruits off their own 
 little bits of land, she would always bring me the best of it all, 
 and urge me to take it : " It is worth nothing, signorina, 
 \iothing at all ; but just to please me ! " she would say. 
 
 And then I used to pretend to be charmed with the thing 
 perhaps some hideous paste necklace or some gaudy-flowered 
 handkerchief, which was of no more use to me than the statues 
 in the piazza; and it was all done so honestly and with such good- 
 will that 1 got to love the little dancer out of sheerest gratitude. 
 
 One day she pressed one of these gifts upon me, a choicer one 
 than common, a baud for the hair, of the Sicilian fashion, 
 
THE FEAST OF ST. JOHN. 22$ 
 
 and of real silver. I took it and fastened back my own hair 
 with it as I had seen Sicilian women do ; it was really pretty, 
 and I said so. 
 
 " Oh, do keep it, signorina ! " she urged on me for the twen- 
 tieth time. " Pray keep it. Look ! I have got all these corals 
 for myself real corals. They suit me very much better. That 
 silver fillet is made too delicate for me. My great coarse black 
 braids would break it ; and it looks so pretty just holding- in all 
 that loose gold of your hair." 
 
 It was San Giovanni's day ; the great feast of the Saint 
 of Florence, a beautiful smiling Midsummer day, with the 
 pleasant breath of a sea- wind blowing through the radiance ol 
 its warmth and light. 
 
 At sunrise all the chimes were pealing, and all the high altars 
 were dressed with masses of roses and lilies, and all the city was 
 waking up to one of those days of mingled masses and mirth 
 which are the delight of the Italian popolani. 
 
 Our Arte stood brave on the green meadow, where the grass 
 was high along the little stream where Calandrino once searched 
 for the magical stone of invisibility, and that day the theatre had 
 many rivals for the popular favour. 
 
 All the lines of the buildings were threaded with gay coloured 
 lamps, to be lit when the night should fall, and all down the 
 cascine woods, under the oaks and the ilex, the canvas of 
 mountebanks' booths, and the bright colours of itinerant shows, 
 and the little dainty bell-tents of the vendors of bibiti and 
 berlingozzi were ranged one on another in a pretty pleasure 
 camp. 
 
 All the day long the people were threading the streets and 
 the woods with that pleasure in the simple sense of sunshine 
 and of sociability which is characteristic of the Tuscan tempera- 
 ment. 
 
 All the day long we wandered and laughed, and chattered and 
 sang songs, and ate and drank under the trees, and watched the 
 humours of the crowds. 
 
 $ow big Erindellone rolled on his old historic way ; now a 
 squadron of cavalry swept through the sunlight; now a bespangled 
 acrobat turned summersaults above the pines ; now the athletes 
 raced each other round the circle ; now a negro climbed into the 
 highest foliage to set the lamps amongst the boughs ; now a 
 troop of children danced, with great bouquets in their hands, to 
 fhe music of some piping flute and fluttering lute, that heralded 
 saltiinbauk's performance. 
 
 Q 
 
226 PASCAR&L. 
 
 And everywhere the grass blew, and the ilex shadows 
 flickered, and the magnolias opened pale and cool in the heat, 
 and the lovers wandered away down the dim green aisles, and 
 the mountains were dreamily blue, like the iris in Maytime. 
 
 San Giovanni's day old as the walls of Florence, dear to her 
 since the earliest time that she ceased to be a pagan, and was 
 baptised a Christian queen in the old basilica that is still sacred 
 to the seer of the Syrian Desert. 
 
 San Giovanni's day, it was the very heart and core of Florence 
 life, the very pearl of the people's traditions. 
 
 Its lines of fire trace the battlements no more, and no more 
 glitter on the moonlit water ; it is dying slowly away, and the 
 city instead is bidden to the Feast of the Statute. But the 
 Feast of the Statute is not the same thing to the people, and 
 the heart of Florence is not in it as it was in the old glories of 
 their own St. John. 
 
 But on this day, when the Arte stood beneath the Apennines, 
 and we laughed and sang under the ilex shade, San Giovanni's 
 day was in the height of its power, and had no rival, save in old 
 King Carnival, whose kingdom lay buried in the winter snows, 
 and never clashed with the rose garlands and summer sovereignty 
 of St. John. 
 
 It was a pagan way of deifying her patron saint, no doubt ; 
 but Florence is always half a pagan at heart she, the daughter 
 of Hercules, who saw the flying feet of Atalanta shine upon hei 
 silvery hills, and heard the arrows of Apollo cleave her rosy 
 air. 
 
 She cannot ever altogether forget the old cultus, that laughter 
 of hers is still heathen, an echo of the joyous ages when the 
 symbol of immortality was the butterfly on the brow of Psyche. 
 . Pascarel, who was all pagan, laughed his glad way through 
 the day, enjoying and scattering enjoyment broadcast ; telling 
 fortunes, selling wares in the fair, pelting the children with con- 
 fetti and ciambellini ; playing dance tunes on his mandoline ; 
 leading the songs over the barrel of chiante broached in the 
 shade of the ilex, whilst half a kid smoked by a gipsy fire, 
 and purple plums and cherries of Prato tumbled out of dusky 
 Tush baskets, and the great Cavolo, who is a titular divinity in 
 Italy, slept in rotundity and benignity in the smoking soup-pot 
 with his court of garlic and of beans around him. 
 
 Italy has three kings Cavolo, Carnivale, and Cocomero, and 
 between them the reign of the seasons is joyous all over the 
 land, 
 
SHE FEAST OF ST. JOHN. 22 7 
 
 But Pascarfcl would not have been Italian soul and body as lie 
 was if, with all his gay good-humour, and his sunny elasticity 
 of temper, passion, fierce and swift as the lightning's play, had 
 not slumbered in him to be roused when occasion served. 
 
 Though I had wandered with him these four months and 
 more, I had seldom seen him out of temper never seen him 
 fairly angered. Eut St. Giovanni's day showed me a little what 
 his wrath could be. 
 
 Little Brunotta excited it early in the morning, when she 
 tripped like a little sparrow down the green glades of the woods 
 in her brightest holyday gear, with heavy silver ornaments 
 about her, and the glories of a new rose-coloured kirtle flashing 
 in the sun. 
 
 "One loves the very name of the day," said Pascarel, as we 
 walked along under the limes that were all in flower, with here 
 and there shining a white rose-laurel, and here and there glowing 
 a red pomegranate-tree all in blossom. One loves the very name 
 of the day, if it were only for Ariosto. It was on a St. John's 
 day that he saw Alessandra Benucci, with the vine-leaves on her 
 robes, and the laurel on her golden hair, coming through these 
 very streets of Florence with the strong June sun bright upon 
 her, as the town went mad with joy because Leo and the Palle 
 had won the triple crown. The dear Ariosto was a swift lover, 
 no doubt, and a bold, and . most inconstant ; we have his own 
 word for it. How could a man be otherwise who saw in fancy 
 that face of Angelica asleep under her bower of wild roses ? 
 She must have paled all living women that perfect creature who 
 brought Sacripant from the Circassian hills, and Agrican from 
 the Caspian seas, and made a fool of even the great Paladin 
 himself. 
 
 "What is the good of talking so about a creature in a poem 
 that never existed at all?" said Brunotta, who had so little 
 imagination in her that it was hard at times to believe in her 
 nationality. " We, too, met on St. John's day; you remember 
 that night, Pascarel?" 
 
 " Do you remember this day three years ?" she cried to Pas- 
 cardl, who had remained silent. " What weather it was ! and all 
 that press of people on the bridge and how frightened I was be- 
 cause the fireworks hissed and how you came behind and took 
 me by the waist and lifted me down into your boat and I took 
 you for some great lord, Pascarel ; do you remember, because 
 you spoke so softly, and your white coat was so fresh and 
 
 elean " 
 
 12 
 
2*8 VASCARkL. 
 
 " I remember !" said Pascarel, with petulance, cutting the 
 leaves with his cane as he went. 
 
 " Took him for a lord ! " I cried. " What, did you not know 
 him, then? did you not recognise him? how was that?" 
 
 Brunotta laughed gleefully. 
 
 " Why, it was the first time I saw him! " she cried, and then 
 stopped short in the middle path of the green stradone, and 
 stood blinking at him and me with half-shut, frightened, shy, 
 cunning, pretty brown eyes. 
 
 Pascarel stifled a half-dozen oaths under the droop of his 
 moustaches. 
 
 " I had been a wanderer so long,' 1 he said coldly, " and Bru- 
 notta had never left her foster-mother and her village away 
 there in the Casentino, and knew nothing except the names of 
 her goats and the trick of her straw-plaiting. Come on quicker, 
 donzella, or we shall miss the start of the Barberi." 
 
 I hurried on at his desire, and Bruntota followed, penitently 
 murmuring into the ear of Cocomero. I felt that there was some 
 secret connected with this day of St. John. 
 
 The little scarlet-mantled, brown, saucy thing followed us, 
 sulkily, like a scolded child ; and by the glance of her, restless 
 and cunning, I saw that she had done something amiss of which 
 she was conscious ; but I was too happy to weary myself much 
 with conjecture ; what did anything really matter after all ? 
 the sun of Florence was shining above head, and Pascare"! 
 laughed beside me. 
 
 Now, as we went along, her silver and corals glimmered 
 bravely on her brown throat and arms, and the band that she had 
 given me caught the sunlight in the avenue as it glistened 
 beneath the lace veil, which, to pleasure Pascarel, was always 
 cast about my head in Genoese fashion, in preference to any other 
 head-dress. 
 
 Pascarel's eyes flashing uneasily from her to me as we hurried 
 to see the riderless horses start from the gates, caught for the 
 first time the perception of some new ornament upon us both. 
 
 He paused suddenly in the midst of the green walk, whilst thd 
 other pleasure-seekers streamed on unnoticed. 
 
 " Where did that trinket come from, donzella ? " he asked me, 
 the swift Italian anger lighting up his eyes. 
 
 " Brunotta gave it me this morning," I answered him, attach* 
 ing no import to the answer. 
 
 But he apparently attached much, for he turned sharply round 
 her as she followed us with the two lads. 
 
TUB FEAST OP ST. JOHN. *2$ 
 
 " And who gave it to you, Brunotta ? " he asked. " And how 
 Came you by those silver and coral gew-gaws that are all new on 
 you I see?" 
 
 BruncStta flushed under her sun -burnt siun, and shifted herself 
 uneasily on to one foot like a little ruffled duck ill at ease. 
 
 " Eossello Brun gave them to me," she muttered. 
 
 " Eossello Brun! And who, pray, may that be?" asked 
 Pascarel, pausing there under the ilex shadows, with the angry 
 light increasing in his eyes, and a restless impatience betraying 
 itself on all his flexile features. 
 
 " Annunziata Brim's brother, the sailor. He is with his people 
 a little while, in the Sdrucciolo," murmured Brunotta, with her 
 heart fluttering in her mouth. "I had a bit and drop with 
 'Nunziata yesterday when you were in the botteza with the sig- 
 norina over all that ugly pottery ; and Eossello is a fair-spoken, 
 honest man, and he had just come from Sicily and brought the 
 things ; and he had seen the donzella in the street with you, and 
 thought her handsome, and he has been friends with me for ever 
 and ever so long. And the corals and things were for me, and 
 that silver fillet for the signorina. And where is the harm ? I 
 am sure there is no harm. Other women take all they can lay 
 their hands on " 
 
 " And since when have you been in the practice of imitating 
 them ? " asked Pascarel. 
 
 I should not have thought that his voice could have sounded 
 so sternly, or that his eyes could have had so fierce a flame in 
 them as they had now where he stood before the palpitating and 
 frightened Brunotta. 
 
 " Have you taken gifts before ? " he asked at length, when he 
 had waited some time for her to speak. 
 
 Brunotta shifted herself on to the other foot, and put one little 
 plump finger in her rosy mouth like a chidden baby. 
 
 " Not often," she muttered at last ; but it was easy to see the 
 denial was a lie, and a lie not easy to tell, with that full sunlight 
 and those searching eyes falling relentlessly upon her. 
 
 Her glances were roving restlessly from place to place, going 
 in every direction, rather than encounter the gaze of Pascarel ; 
 and suddenly the sulien, embarrassed trouble on her face cleared ; 
 a look of eager relief lightened it ; she espied an object upon 
 which to divert the anger of the moment from herself. 
 
 " There is poor Eossello ! " she said, with the coolest treachery 
 in the world. "GK and scold him his is the fault; not 
 mine!" 
 
230 PASCAR&L. 
 
 With a true woman's justice she surrendered her accomplice to 
 cause a diversion in her own favour. 
 
 She pointed out as she spoke a brown, loftily-built man in a 
 sailor's dress, who stood amongst a troop of people round a pole, 
 on which a spangled acrobat was climbing ; the sailor affected to 
 be absorbed in the gymnastics, but his restless, glittering eyes 
 roved ever and again from the meadow where he stood to the 
 avenue in which we were pausing. 
 
 Pascarel, without a word, lightly loosened the trinkets off Bru- 
 no tta's throat and wrists, and invited me, by a gesture, to unfasten 
 the band from my hair ; with all the ornaments in his hands, he 
 swept out of the stradone and across the pasture on which the 
 tumblers and climbers were performing hard against the old 
 pozzo of Narcissus. 
 
 We stood motionless, and following him with our eyes; e 
 vague fear fell upon us all, and Brunotta, who always wept 
 easily, began to shake her little shoulders and sob. 
 
 "He will kill him, as like as not," whispered Cocomero, to 
 whom it seemed the passions of his chief were not unknown 
 terrors and tragedies. "Do you not remember, Brunotta, that 
 day two years ago when he was angry at Eavenna ? he as good 
 as murdered the count for kissing you in the fair, and throwing 
 him a gold piece for payment?" 
 
 Brunotta sobbed aloud that she remembered only too well, and 
 that the count had meant nothing but courtesy, and that it was 
 terrible to have to deal with a man all lightning and gunpowder 
 as Pascarel was if only a word went wrong. 
 
 Meanwhile, across the sunny green meadow, strode Pascarel 
 with that habitual action of his, which was as swift as a bird's, 
 and as light as a woman's. 
 
 We stood and watched, powerless and breathless. There was 
 the lofty pole of the acrobat, the climber aloft in a blaze of 
 spangles, a particoloured crowd staring upward, a belt of green 
 boughs, and in the midst of it all the figure of the marinaro. 
 
 Pascarel cut through the throng as a sickle through wheat, and 
 went straight to where the sailor was, and tossed the trinkets 
 into his face. 
 
 The chattering of the eager crowd drowned every word he 
 spoke, but a space between the gymnast and his spectators left 
 the forms of Pascarel and of Eossello Brun plain before us in the 
 sunlight. 
 
 The Sicilian stood like one stupefied for a moment, bewildered, 
 no doubt, by the sudden flash of tho ornaments in his eyes ; then 
 
THE FEAST OF ST. JOHN. 231 
 
 the silver and the coral fell together in a little heap on the turf, 
 and the sailor snatched a long knife from his girdle. 
 
 "We saw the naked hlade of it, like a snake's tongue, glitter in 
 the hot keen air. 
 
 The people did not see ; they were staring upward at the acro- 
 bat, and discussing furiously with one another the chances there 
 were that the pole would break beneath him, and the pole was 
 at that instant bending like a reed, and the poor clown was in 
 jeopardy ; and the Florentines had neither eyes nor ears for any 
 other thing than that reeling mast against the trees, and the 
 gambling that they were rejoicing their hearts with on its 
 hazards. 
 
 We alone, left in the stradone, saw that deadly flash of the 
 southern steel. 
 
 Brunotta screamed, and hid her eyes, and fell upon her knees, 
 crying to the Yirgin ; but I said nothing. 
 
 I stood and gazed with wide-opened eyes, unblenching, like 
 one turned to stone. 
 
 Before the dagger could sheath itself in his breast, Pascarel, 
 with one of his lithe and subtle movements, sprang and caught 
 the sailor's arm in the air, and held it there fixed as in a vice. 
 Then, throwing his other arm round Rossello, he wrestled with 
 him and flung him backwards on the turf with a dull, hollow 
 crush that resounded above all the glad tumult of the people's 
 wagers. 
 
 He twisted the knife out of the Sicilian's hand, snapped it 
 across his own knee, and tossed the fragments across the meadow. 
 
 Then he walked back to us through the sunshine, calm and 
 colourless, and with no trace of anger on his face, singing half 
 aloud to himself as he came the burden of one of my songs. 
 
 " Do not take things again, Brunotta," he said, gently. " It 
 is bad for those who give them to you. That pole there will not 
 break, though the people would give their souls it should. Let 
 us go and see the Barberi." 
 
 " But you might have killed him ! " I murmured breathlessly 
 clinging to his arm in terror still. 
 
 He smiled down into my face. 
 
 " Altro ! Of course I might have done, and I shall probably 
 be very sorry that I did not before the sands of life are run out 
 with me. But you see, signorina mia," laughed Pascarel, 
 " Florentines were always magnanimous, that is well known. 
 Don't you remember the great Asses Bell that tolled day and 
 aight for a month before we went to war ' for greatness of mind 
 
232 PASCAR&L. 
 
 that the foe might have full time and warning to prepare him- 
 self? ' To he sure Semifonte, and the Ambona, and a few other 
 little trifles are to be set up against our generosity ; but whaf 
 would you ? even Florentines are human." 
 
 !NTo one had interfered. 
 
 To an Italian combat seems the natural issue of any quarrel, 
 and a murmur went through the crowd of " jealousy !" which 
 explained the action to the satisfaction of all. 
 
 Rossello Brun accepted his beating quietly, if he resolved in 
 himself to take vengeance some dark night in a lonely passage- 
 way ; and Pascarel's passion, as transient as it was violent, left 
 no trace on him to mar his sunny and good-humoured enjoyment 
 of the day. 
 
 Jealousy ? 
 
 As I heard the whispered word pass from mouth to mouth in 
 the laughing sightseers, I felt my cheek burn and my heart beat 
 high. No man is jealous of his sister ; so then his wrath had 
 been for me ? 
 
 It was pleasant for me to think so ; pleasant with a sweet, 
 tumultuous, unrestful wonder that I could not altogether under- 
 stand, but that made the rest of San Giovanni's feast hours burn 
 brighter than any that had gone before. 
 
 I remember in the fair under the trees Pascarel that afternoon 
 bought Brunotta, to console her, a gorgeous necklace of silver 
 and great amber beads, with a medallion of the Madonna, gleam- 
 ing in many colours, suspended from the chain. But for me he 
 only bought a beautiful ivory-white magnolia, j ust opened, with 
 all the spices of Asia in its breath. 
 
 " It is a cup fit for the King of Thule," said he, as he handed 
 it to me. 
 
 The necklace cost several lire, and the flower but a copper 
 piece ; but I would not have changed my magnolia for all the 
 jewels that ever gleamed in Golconda. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 ON THE HILLS. 
 
 SOMETIMES there would be brought a message to Pascarei from 
 gome old rambling white castello set on a hill slope, with all its 
 treeless mountain side bare and brown as a man'a hand a mes- 
 
ON Tff HILLS. 233 
 
 uage bidding him come up thither and amuse its duca or cavaliere, 
 where he yawned through the listless day, in the old, vast stone 
 chambers, with no sound to break the monotony of the hot hours, 
 except the shrill saw of the cicala and the fall of the water in the 
 fountain in the court. 
 
 But Pascarel never would obey that sort of summons. 
 
 "The signore can come to me," he would answer to the 
 messenger, and send him back as he had come, along the blind- 
 ing bleak ascent to the old villa where it stood with blistered 
 walls in the midday sun. 
 
 " Dio ! Not I, if I know it ! " he would say to Bruno tta, who 
 always would fain have gone up to the great house, as she urged 
 that there was sure to be good chiante and savoury messes steam- 
 ing and stewing somewhere towards three o'clock in the day; 
 and Brunotta was of opinion with the Giant Morgan te that dinner 
 at least was no dream. 
 
 " Toil up that hill in the sun," he would reply, " to make a 
 bow to Don Antonio or Ser Lorenzo, as he stirs out of his siesta 
 after a surfeit of quails ? what ! heat and fuss oneself before 
 sunset over French drolleries and Florentine oddities in the face 
 of his Illustrissimo, to be rewarded with a yawn and a concession 
 that one is not so very poor, after all, for a strolling player, and 
 a little pitiful wonder that one has never tried one's fortunes at 
 the Logge theatre ? Not I, if I know it. If illustrissimi want 
 to crack their sides with laughter, let them come down into the 
 valley to my little wooden house, and see if I can make them do 
 it there. I shall never go to them, that is certain." 
 
 And he never did : having a good infusion of obstinacy in his 
 disposition, and, along with his Florentine republicanism, some 
 lingering reluctance, no doubt, more or less strong in him, for the 
 last of the once mighty Pascarelli to bend his body as a comedian, 
 and tune his mandoline in old houses in which his fathers had 
 feasted as equals or harried as conquerors. 
 
 The Pascarelli had been cut down, root and branch, stem and 
 twig, centuries before, in one of those ruthless and complete de- 
 structions by massacre, and exile, and confiscation with which so 
 many of the histories of the old territorial races end abruptly, 
 like great hardy oaks uprooted and smitten through and through, 
 and blackened to the youngest crown of leaf by a thunderbolt. 
 
 It was all a thing of the past such a far, far away past, too ; 
 it was all emptiness, rubbish, weakness anything contemptible 
 and absurd that you might choose to call it. So he said. 
 
 But all the same, Pascarel, who had fought for the coronet on 
 
234 PASCARhL. 
 
 the smelting-pot when he was a little bare-legged rogue, scour- 
 ing the country from fair to fair, Pascarel had something of the 
 pride of race in him ; and he would not go up to villa or castello, 
 no, not if it were ever so, to pleasure the noble yawning there 
 among the vine shadows on the marble floors, in the long, hot 
 days when the very lizards seemed to pant in the cracks of the 
 earth, and the very stones seemed to shiver in their whiteness 
 and their nakedness because no moss would cover and no dew 
 would cool them. 
 
 Sometimes the " illustrissimi," nothing daunted nor offended, 
 did come down from their hill fastnesses or their olive thickets 
 to the fair or the festa, where their peasant folk were laughing 
 their hearts out in the little wooden house of Pascarel, and they 
 would pay their money and enter and laugh too, which they 
 were welcome to do, as far as he was concerned, though the 
 populace would as soon have been rid of them. 
 
 Life was very dull, no doubt, in those long summers to those 
 noble people in those vast dusky, silent dwellings up there on 
 the bare-swept side of some spur of the Apennines, or the lone- 
 liness of some Priulian or Emilian hollow, lined grey with 
 olives, as a bird's nest with sheep's wool. 
 
 Life was very dull, no doubt, to them, watching the waste 
 amongst their vines, or chronicling the cones of their silkworms, 
 there in the old places where their fathers had rioted with 
 Ezzelino as the slaughter went on in the cells of St. George, and 
 had ridden love-raids in Sicida with the Biandrati. 
 
 Life was very dull, no doubt ; and now and then some one of 
 them would find his way into the little theatre glimmering 
 brightly with its oil lights under the silvery moonlit leaves on 
 the edge of some mountain village or hamlet of the marches, 
 and there, amongst the stone-cutters, and the vine-dressers, and 
 the goatherds, would sit and smile at the pasquinades of Pascarel, 
 and call for him as vociferously as the rest, " Puori ! fuori! " 
 when the curtain fell. 
 
 Amongst those now and then there would be some obscure 
 lordling with a face like an Attavante miniature, or some young 
 Sordello, fretting his soul in the monotony of his warwasted and 
 tax-shaven fief; and these would surely find their way behind 
 the little stage to us, and offer to Erunotta many gay compli- 
 ments, and to me very graceful phrases, backed most likely on 
 the morrow with flasks of montepulciano and great clusters of 
 camellias or magnolia flowers. 
 
 Pascarel was wont to break the necks of the good wine with an 
 
ON THE HILLS. 335 
 
 angry twist of his wrist, and pour it out in a headlong fashion 
 to all the country folk of the place, touching none of it himself. 
 He always dealt in this mode with any gifts from the villas. 
 
 " Let them leave us alone," he would say, impatiently. " They 
 paii their coin at the door, I suppose : there is nothing more 
 needed of them. The wine I want to drink I can huy ; and when 
 I can afford to buy it no longer, there is always a public well in 
 every square for any ass to drink at, heaven be praised ! " 
 
 " Che e e e ! " murmured Brunotta, wonderingly, at such 
 outbursts. " That is odd indeed. You were not like that in the 
 old times, Pascarel. "When the like of those noble lads came, 
 they were welcome, and you would laugh and drink with them 
 just as well as with the others. What is your quarrel now ? " 
 
 Pascarel would toss a wrinkled pomegranate up into the sun- 
 shine. 
 
 "What does it signify? None that I know of: the good 
 townsfolk of Bergamo yonder cut the throats of a hundred odd 
 Calabrians, as you may have heard, because they carved the wings 
 of the fowls in a wrong fashion at supper. We Italians are an 
 unaccountable people. We take our likes and our dislikes hot 
 and strong, and neither gods nor devils can change us." 
 
 After which profanity he would slake his thirst with the 
 pomegranate. 
 
 One day only he broke through this rule. 
 
 At one time, when we were wandering through the hills that 
 lie round the plain in which the little brave walled city of Lucca 
 stands, there came to him many urgent messages from a villa on 
 the mountains praying him to go up thither, because the heir 
 and only son of the house was a child and a cripple, and could 
 not stir from his threshold to gain any amusement or distraction 
 of his pain. 
 
 Pascarel resisted long, then gave way to the impulse of com- 
 passion, which was always stronger with him than any prudential 
 or personal consideration. 
 
 So as the sun went down, we left our village where the 
 wooden Arte had been set up under a clump of chestnut-trees, 
 and we took our way along the face of the hills to where the 
 great villa had stood long before in the old days when Lucca 
 had hung upon her tower the chains of her freed Castracani. 
 
 Pascarel had been inclined to leave me in the contadina's 
 cottage which served us for an inn ; but I had begged and be- 
 sought him to let me go with them so eagerly, that he who 
 seldom found the force to refuse me let me have my way, and I 
 
walked beside him through the thick, rough herhage full of blue 
 borage, and the white stars of Bethlem, and the many -coloured 
 cups of wild anemones, Brunotta and the two lads following in 
 our wake, along the side of the hills, where the little, brown, 
 bare mule track wound up, and up, and up into the heights. 
 
 Pascarel had the lute slung across him ; and as we went, we 
 sang to it staves of contadini choruses, of love songs, and the 
 like, such as the peasants sang as they guided the oxen through 
 the fields or searched for the aphis in the vine leaves. 
 
 Now and then the kids scampered from our path ; now and 
 then a puff of blue wood -smoke rose through the branches from 
 Home charcoal-burner's cabin ; now and then, some great mag- 
 nolia flower shivered its rosy needles at our feet ; far away down 
 below, we could hear the Ave Maria chiming from the church 
 towers in the plain ; above, low rain clouds, fretted and edged 
 with amber, floated near the sun; over all the sky was that 
 wondrous evening hue which is like the soft violet-blue of the 
 iris, and is so clear and yet so mystical, as children's eyes are 
 when they wake from dreams of angels. 
 
 We looked up at it through the traceries of the boughs of the 
 cistus, and the ilex, and the fig-tree, and we thought of the skies 
 of Raffael ; and we changed the gay allegro of the popular songs 
 to choric thoughts of great Pales trina and antique symphonies of 
 Lasso ; and so went along the hill-path in the delicate light, 
 and were glad of heart because the earth was beautiful like this, - 
 and we were free to move hither and thither in its soft air as we 
 would. 
 
 No northern landscape can ever have such interchange of 
 colour as the Italian fields and hills in summer. Here the fresh vine 
 foliage, hanging, curling, climbing, in all intricacies and graces 
 that ever entered the fancies of green leaves. There the tall 
 millet, towering like the plumes of warriors, whilst among 
 their stalks the golden lizard glitters. Here broad swathes of 
 new-mown hay, starred over with butterflies of every hue. 
 There a thread of water sown thick with waving canes. Here 
 the shadowy amber of ripe wheat, rustled by wind and darkened 
 by passing clouds. There the gnarled olives silver in the sun. 
 And everywhere along the edges of the corn and underneath the 
 maples little grassy paths running, and wild rose bushes growing, 
 and acacia thickets tossing, and white convolvulus glistening like 
 snow, and across all this confusion of foliage and herbage always 
 the tender dreamy swell of the far mountains. 
 
 It is only the common country where the oil and wine and 
 
ON THE HILLS. 237 
 
 corn are pressed and reaped ; it goes for leagues and leagues and 
 leagues, over many a perished city and unrecorded battle field, 
 everywhere where the soil is tilled between the mountains and 
 the sea ; it is simple and lowly enough, and no poet that I know 
 of has sung it ; but it is beautiful exceedingly, and its hues 
 would be the despair of any painter. 
 
 The villa was high upon the mountain side vast, dusky, 
 crumbling, desolate without, as all such places are, and within 
 full of that nameless charm of freedom, space, antiquity, and 
 stillness, that does no less perpetually belong to them. 
 
 "Where these old villas stand on their pale olive slopes, those 
 who are strange to them see only the peeling plaster, the dis- 
 coloured stone, the desolate courts, the grass -grown flags, the 
 broken statues, the straying vines, the look of loneliness and 
 of decay. 
 
 But those who know them well love them and learn other- 
 wise ; learn the infinite charm of those vast silent halls, of those 
 endless echoing corridors and cloisters, of those wide wind-swept, 
 sun-bathed chambers, of those shadowy logge, where the rose 
 glow of the oleander burns in the dimness of the arches ; of 
 those immense windows wreathed with sculpture and filled with 
 the glistening silver of olive woods, and mountain snows, and 
 limitless horizons ; of those great breadths of sunlight, of those 
 white wide courts, of those tangled gardens, of those breezy 
 open doors, of those wild rose trees climbing high about the 
 Etrurian torso, of those clear waters falling through acanthus 
 leaves, into their huge red conche; of that sense of infinite 
 freedom, of infinite solitude, of infinite light, and stillness and 
 calm. 
 
 A stranger will see but the nakedness of the place, and the 
 sadness thereof, by reason of its impoverishment and of its age ; 
 but let him wait a little in that marble silence where the cicala 
 rings from dawn to eve, let him wander a little in those peaceful 
 ways where the lemon boughs are golden against the monastic 
 walls, let him live a little in that liberty of air and sunshine 
 where the vines uncurl iu the drowsy warmth and the tulips 
 spread a thousand colours to the sun, let him rest a little in it 
 all, and after awhile all other places will seem surely to him 
 dark and narrow, and gaudy and full of noise, and in their hues 
 and substances soulless and meagre, and a little coarse, beside 
 the old white villa on the silent olive hills. 
 
 It belonged to a great family, and the old chambers were still 
 full of ancient and costly treasures; though the outside walk 
 
238 PASCAR&L. 
 
 had long been peeled bare by the sun and winds, and weeds 
 might grow as they would amongst the oleanders and camellia 
 trees on the stone terraces. 
 
 Italy cannot be trim and smirk in modern wise and modern 
 gear; half muse, half maenad as she is, with the thyrsus and the 
 calliope in her hands, and her feet scorched by the smoke of war, 
 she can neither deck herself with theatric paint and power, nor 
 gird herself with housewifely care and prudence. 
 
 The wild vine on her blown hair, the old Etruscan gold on 
 her bare breast, the tangle of knotted ivy cast about her loins, 
 the snow of the field-lilies wreathing her beautiful bruised arms, 
 these are her only ornaments. 
 
 Let her alone with them. 
 
 She is best so. 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 THE HOBBLE OF LEAD. 
 
 WE went into the great open court of the villa just as the 
 last sun rays died away behind the hills ; Pascarel flicking his 
 mandoline into harmony with the lazzarone song which he was 
 humming to himself. 
 
 They brought us wines and meats in the great breezy loggia, 
 where the fig leaves curled around the dull tawny gold of the 
 travertine cornice. 
 
 The moon rose; all ate and laughed and jested; the old ser- 
 vants stood and looked on and gossiped and laughed too ; great 
 puffs of odour were blown, by a light breeze, from the mag- 
 nolias. 
 
 This is how one lives in Italy, sauntering, talking, idling, 
 dreaming, always in the open air, always amongst the flowers, 
 always finding the people ready to lean their arms on an old wall 
 and exchange some good-humoured chit-chat while the lizards 
 run in and out the stones and the nightingale sings in the ilex 
 leaves. 
 
 Then we went within to the central hall, where the raised 
 platform built for musicians was to serve us as a stage. When 
 all was ready we saw that though the lad of the house was a 
 cripple, indeed, who was carried in on his couch by a servant, 
 the villa was at that moment full of gay people strayed over from 
 
THE HOBBLE OF LEAD. 239 
 
 the batlis in the hills above Lucca and from the sea places of 
 Spezzia and Livorno. 
 
 As Pascarel watched the hall fill with them from behind the 
 screen that was drawn across our stage, a dark displeasure 
 flushed his face ; he saw that he had been tricked into coming 
 thither to arouse a set of idlers. But there was no help for it ; 
 he had agreed to play, and play he did in two of his own briefest, 
 wittiest, gayest, most sparkling and most satirical pieces. 
 
 " But you shall not sing for them, donzella," he said with an 
 oath in his throat. " You shall not sing a note for them, that I 
 swear." 
 
 I who was proud of my talent in that way, and had set my 
 heart on displaying it to those brilliant looking persons, was 
 sorely chagrined at his decision, and had I loved him less I 
 should have rebelled against it. 
 
 As it was, I sat in mute unwilling submission on a stool be- 
 hind the screen, through the chinks of which I could see the 
 great dim hall, the oil lamps, the group of noble people at the 
 farther end, the doorways filled with the eager faces of the 
 household, the high windows open to the night, and tho pale 
 flood of moonlight that poured through them across the marble 
 floor. 
 
 Perhaps in the solitude of those chestnut woods idlers ceased 
 to be critical ; or perhaps the genius of Pascarel and the mirth 
 of him swept languor and apathy before it, as fogs are swept 
 away by sea winds. 
 
 Whichever it was, as he played to them, they were stirred to 
 almost as much enthusiasm as though they were his general 
 audience of vine-dressers and pewterers and cobblers and shep- 
 herds ; first in his comedietta, where the irony bit as sharplv as 
 aquafortis, and then in a bright, airy, satirical grotesque, graceful 
 sort of masque, in which all his little troop were concerned and 
 in which he was wont to improvise the most stinging verses that 
 would suit the humour of the moment, with all the skill and 
 all the salt that ever Lorenzo Cavelli himself could have displayed 
 when he lampooned the Tedeschi from under the old three-cor- 
 nered hat of Tuscan Stenterello. 
 
 And yet very bitter were his rhymes that night ; showered in 
 profusion from his flexile lips like almond blossoms shaken 
 downward in an April breeze. 
 
 Very bitter ; I was not sure why ; perhaps because he had 
 been thus entrapped into beguiling the lazy hours of a few rich 
 veople, or perhaps because it struck him a little hardly that he 
 
840 PASCAR&L. 
 
 should come as a strolling player into old feudal places where the 
 Pascarelli Princes would have only come with a herald's note of 
 defiance and a flutter of the Red Lily on a white standard in the 
 gun. 
 
 Whichever it was, or whether both in one, it gave an addi- 
 tional burnish to the gold coinage of his wit that night ; he had 
 never been keener, subtler, swifter, and he strung his glittering 
 pasquinades together on the finest silken chord of decorous 
 derision. 
 
 " A clever rogue," I heard one of the villa people say, when 
 they leaned on their couches in the shadow of the great vine- 
 canopied windows, and another assenting, murmured back: 
 
 " Beaumarchais and Lemaitre in one ; what does he do here 
 strolling with a wooden booth ? The fool might make his hun- 
 dred francs a night in Paris." 
 
 Then, the thing being over, they called him again and again 
 upon the platform before the screen which had served for all his 
 scenery, and yet again, not satisfied, summoned him by a servant 
 to go up the hall and speak to them in person. 
 
 But thereto Pascarel gave point blank refusal. 
 
 "Go and tell your illustrissimi," said he, "that I bow tc 
 them upon the stage because I belong to my public whilst I am 
 in my art ; but the moment that I cease to play I cease to be 
 an artist; and with me personally they have no more to do than 
 vnth his holiest Holiness the Pope." 
 
 And when the servant having delivered this message, or more 
 probably having translated it into some politer guise, they sent 
 [.-gain and yet again with no happier result ; and in the end the 
 illustrious persons themselves being curious as to who could thus 
 so well amuse them without any adjuncts of scenery or decora- 
 tion, came down the hall to visit this contumacious stroller who 
 deliberately refused to obey the invitation which he should have 
 construed humbly into a command. 
 
 Pascarel received them with the frank nonchalance of his 
 habitual manner, which never varied at any time for prince or 
 peasant. Being a Florentine, he was a little cnrter, a little 
 cooler with the first than with the last ; that was all. 
 
 The great persons essayed in all ingenious ways to discover 
 his history and his reasons for straying across the country like a 
 mountebank when he had a talent that would make him welcome 
 on the most famous boards of Europe. But Pasearel was too 
 truly Italian not to be as impenetrable at some moments as he 
 was transparent at other. 
 
THE HOBBLE OF LEAD. 241 
 
 "Tuscan eyes can say everything, or can say nothing," and 
 PaseareTs eyes as well as his lips and his gestures and his inflec- 
 tions of voice were truly Tuscan in this sense. 
 
 Had he cared, he could have been as fine and as subtle a 
 master of craft as ever was he who studied men and their mo- 
 tives under the boughs of the Rueellai gardens. But it would 
 have been too much trouble for him, and the rule of his temper 
 was frankness. 
 
 Whilst they talked with him they gazed at me while I leaned 
 against the screen. 
 
 As I had come to a great house my vanity had lecl me, careless 
 of the heat, to take out my old gorgeous dress of amber satin and 
 purple velvet, which I kept for feast days and high holyday, 
 loving its richness, its weight, its very incongruousness ; trea- 
 suring it too a little because I had worn it that day when he had 
 given me the ring of the Fates. 
 
 One of the villa guests, a man young ancl handsome, with a 
 look that was familiar to me in his eyes, paid me many graceful 
 compliments, and gleaned from me much more about the life we 
 led than his friends could gather from Pascarcl. Hearing that I 
 sometimes sang in our theatre, and was called 1'Uccello by the 
 people, he brought the mandoline from a corner where it had 
 been cast down, and eagerly entreated me for one song at least. 
 
 I glanced at Pascarel ; his face grew very dark. 
 
 "You sing to villagers, wLy not to us?" urged the foreigner 
 with that look on his face which startled me with some vague 
 remembrance. " It seems to me that your impresario keeps the 
 fairest constellation in his histrionic heaven for his own especial 
 pleasure; that is scarcely just to his audience; or to the star 
 herself." 
 
 The boldness of his eyes and the insolence of his accent gave 
 more meaning to his words than shone upon their surface. Pus- 
 carel listening keenly, though affecting to be in converse with 
 the seigneur of the place, Pascarel swung round, his changeful 
 eyes flashing and stormy in his wrath ; and took the answer from 
 rne in hot haste. 
 
 " My histrionic heaven dees not open its gates for gold. I 
 came to-night thinking to pleasure a sick lad. I find that I was 
 tricked into whiling the empty hours of a herd of idlers. I 
 have given you what I choose, and you shall have nothing that 
 I do not choose. Put the money you would pay me in the poor- 
 box of your chapel, and learn for once, oh, most illustrious, that 
 we of Florence never were docile to dictation yet." 
 
 
 
242 PASCAR&L. 
 
 With that sole sudden outbreak of the anger which had been 
 gathering in him all the evening through since he had first seen 
 that he had been decoyed thither on an exaggerated pretext, he 
 swept the mandoline from my lap, signed to the two lads to 
 follow him, and with a salutation to the owner of the villa, took 
 my hand with his gravest grace and led me from the hall. 
 
 The people hs had thus suddenly abandoned were too amazed 
 or too incensed to follow him. We went out unmolested into 
 the moonlight. 
 
 Their servant indeed was sent after him with a profuse present 
 in money, and even a silver box embossed with the count's own 
 arms ; but Pascarel tossed them all back again with so impetuous a 
 disdain and so headlong a torrent of fiery words, that the bearer 
 fled in terror, crying aloud that he never had thought to have 
 lived to see the day when a Florentine would have refused a 
 payment. 
 
 After that we went on in silence down the white terrace steps 
 and under the avenues of ilex and cypress, Brunotta in the rear, 
 and shaking hei little plump shoulders in pitiful sobs, because 
 she would have had so good a sapper if only Pascarel had not 
 been so impetuous ; she had seen it all laid out on the table in 
 the loggia, and she had even smelt it too ; for the ideas of Bru- 
 notta found their paradise in 
 
 " Un* oca beurica piu die burre," 
 
 and similar juicy dainties, and she had all Pulci's disdain for 
 " Qualche fratta frutta," 
 
 and the like poor stuff for supper ; being hardly Italian at all in 
 her tastes, except so far as her love of idling and of dancing may 
 be counted to her credit. 
 
 Pascarel for once did not attempt to console her, but strode on 
 apace through the gardens. He did not slacken his steps nor 
 speak until he was out of the gates of their vineyards, and once 
 more on the mule path along the side of the hills. 
 
 Then he turned to me, for him a little roughly. 
 
 ""What made you look so much, donzella, at that insolent 
 fool who bade you sing ? You were half inclined to do his bid- 
 ding too ! " 
 
 " He had a look of my father in his eyes," I answered him 
 dreamily, still haunted by the vague and shadowy resemblance. 
 
THE HOBBLE OF LEAD. 243 
 
 " Ah! what, was that all?" laughed Pascardl, with a con- 
 tented sound in his voice. 
 
 All ! it seemed to me that it was very much. 
 
 I was always pursued by the fancy that perchance some day 
 or another those very great people to whom my father un- 
 doubtedly belonged would somewhere arise and claim me. 
 
 In the old time I had wished it fervently, and spent upon the 
 vision of it many golden hours of fancy, but now it made me 
 shudder a little. !N"o life could seem more perfect to me than the 
 one I led. Even my father himself I had some fear rather than 
 much strong desire of meeting. 
 
 "Why were you so angered against them ? " I asked him in 
 counter question. "They meant well, I think; and I heard 
 one of them say that with your genius you would make a hun- 
 dred francs a night in Paris ? " 
 
 In the moonlight, as he walked beside me, I saw the quick 
 disdain smile on his mobile lips. 
 
 " If I could make a thousand still I should lose my liberty." 
 
 " But you would be famous ?" 
 
 "Famous? Oh yes! About as much so as the bull they 
 decorate for Mardi Gras, and lead about with music, and eat 
 afterwards in stews and steaks. A day's carnival of flowery and 
 then the chopping-block of the critical butchers, and then anni- 
 hilation in the teeth of the world's oblivion; a player's fame 
 lasts just as long as the bull's. But perhaps if you wish it, 
 donzella, perhaps " 
 
 "Perhaps what?" 
 
 ^ Perhaps one day I will go up for my Mardi Gras and risk 
 my murder afterwards, if you have a fancy to handle my paper 
 laurels in those soft little fingers of yours. Perhaps? Who 
 knows?" 
 
 So we went on along the rough hill- side, and Pascarel recovered 
 the serenity of his temper, and again strains of Pergolesi and of 
 Lasso were heard in the moonlight as we went down through 
 the glistening herbage with the smell of the flowering vines 
 rising up to us from the plains below. 
 
 It was midnight when we reached the little village in a 
 cleft amongst the rocks and chesnut woods where our temporary 
 home had been made. 
 
 All its small world was asleep. There was no light except 
 where a knot of fireflies burned under the great leaves of the 
 gourds and the pumpkins in the contadina's gardens. 
 
 Where our wooden Arte was planted, its red and white flag 
 
 & 2 
 
244 PASCARkL. 
 
 droopod in the moonlight and the clear drowsy air, as though it 
 were sad to think how in other times its scarlet giglio had been 
 T>orne in victory aloft over clumps of spears along that plain be- 
 neath where Lucca lay. 
 
 Pascarel glanced up at his flag as he passed his theatre. 
 
 " I told you truly, donzella," he said, with a certain sadness 
 in his voice, "truly, the night I saw you first, that Art, being 
 once weighed by the gold it brings, changes the Hermes' wings 
 it lent you for an ass's hobble of leather and lead. Like the 
 ass, you can graze so shackled, but it is all that you can do. 
 Unhappily women always prefer grazing to flying. Sarto's wife 
 has many sisters." 
 
 "With that he bade me go within, for we had to rise with the 
 sun on the morrow ; and as I undressed by the light from the 
 gleaming skies I could hear the little shrill voice of Brunotta 
 still piping its lamentations over the savoury meats she had lost, 
 and through the casement screen of the vine leaves I could see 
 the shadow of Pascarel passing slowly to and fro along the slip 
 of turf in front of the porch, thinking his own thoughts, no 
 doubts, of the paper laurels and the hobble of lead. 
 
 And all the while the living fires of the lucciole burned above 
 the green seas of flax and maize, and shone like clusters of 
 fallen stars along the side of Shelley's Serchio. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE LEGEND OF THE LTJCCIOLE. 
 
 " THE pretty lucciole ; one cannot wonder that the poets love 
 them, and that the children believe them to be fairies carrying 
 their little lanterns on their road to dance in the magic circle 
 under the leaves in the woods. 
 
 " But you know what the lucciole really are ? "No? Oh, foi- 
 shame ! 
 
 " I heard it when I was a boy from a dark-eyed woman, with 
 a mouth like a rose, who leaned down from her loggia in the 
 summer-time, and gleaned them from the acanthus coils to set 
 them in her hair. 
 
 " The lucciole are just this : they are all the love words that 
 are spoken in Italy. 
 
TUB LEGEND OF THE LUCCJOLB. 245 
 
 " For these are so eager and tender and burning that no other 
 Vmd hears their like, as they fall from the lovers' lips in the 
 lustrous moonlit midnights, when the mask is thrown down 
 with the knots of roses, and the ball is left far away and for- 
 gotten, and the hands are folded fast in one another, and the soft 
 sighs tremble to silence in the softer warmth of caresses. 
 
 " !Now, long, long ago, the god Eros, who has always reigned 
 supreme in this land, the god Eros, floating one summer night, 
 as is his wont, from balcony to balcony, from breast to breast, 
 breathing through mortal mouths those amorous ardours, be- 
 thought himself that it was sad that things so beautiful should 
 perish with a breath, and to himself, thus musing, said : 
 
 " ' These murmuring and burning words, surely they should 
 be deathless, for they are so old, so old, and yet they are so new, 
 and no man's mouth is weary of them, and no woman's ear is 
 tired. They ought surely to live for ever. They are too perfect 
 to die with a breath. See I whom men call Love I will give 
 these sweet words wings, and let their fire burn in them like 
 the stars, and fling them out upon the summer nights, and let 
 them live their lives in glory there amongst the dewy darkness 
 of the myrtle and the blush flowers of the wild pomegranate. 
 And so no love word shall be ever lost, but shine amidst the 
 flowers as a lucciola.' 
 
 " As Eros said so did he; wherefore the lucciole gleam in 
 millions all through the months of summer whilst the magnolias 
 shed their rose-flushed arrows on the balconies, and the vine 
 shadows dreamily darken the logge wherever the lovers lean. 
 
 " Year after year they burn, tender and fitful fires, along the 
 green garden ways and under the women's casements deep in a 
 lily's white heart, or high where the rose-laurels climb. 
 
 " Some say they die in a day ; some say they live on for ages. 
 Who shall tell ? They look always the same. 
 
 " For are they not winged words of passion the same yes* 
 terday, to-day, and for ever ? 
 
 " And this is the truth of the lucciole. 
 
 " Let him who doubts, walk abroad in the gorgeous nights of 
 the midsummer, when they make pale the red oleander, and 
 light to flame the magnolia whiteness, while the notes of the 
 lute thrill the stillness, and under the shade of the ilex two 
 shadows lean one on the other. 
 
 " He will doubt no more then if he love." 
 
 * # # * * * 
 
 I heard Pascarel tell this legend a few nights later on in the 
 
246 PASCAR&L. 
 
 sultry June weather, when tht< lucciole were bright over all the 
 land ; sparkling in the grasses, dancing in the boughs, clustering 
 around the corn-stalks, and lighting the chestnut forests. 
 
 We were in a little village in the mountains, a little beautiful 
 green nook in a deep gorge with one of the many hill -torrents 
 bubbling and foaming headlong down its rocks. The people had 
 clustered round him at sunset, and had caressed him, and 
 clamoured for a song, a story, a personation, anything ; and he, 
 with a touch or two of the mandoline, and leaning his back 
 against a great castagno tree, had rhymed for them, in the quick 
 improvisation that was at once nature and habit with him, and 
 strung together for this knot of charcoal burners and of 
 quarry workers strings of golden fancies and pearls of wit and 
 wisdom. 
 
 All kinds of poetic imaginations and of quaint conceits fell 
 lightly into rhythm off his lips with all the tender, gay, sympa- 
 thetic humour of Pule*i and of Berni in them. He had refused 
 to pleasure the noble idlers in the white villa above the Serchio, 
 but he begrudged nothing to this little community of rough 
 foresters as they gathered about him under the shadow of the 
 chestnuts with the warmth of the afterglow and the dreamy 
 Dbscurity of the descending night upon their upturned faces. 
 
 Many things that he said may have been obscure to them, for 
 when the mood for speech was on him he forgot all except the 
 thoughts which thronged upon his fertile and lavish fancy. Yet 
 they in a manner understood it all, for the Italian peasant is 
 quickly touched to "fine issues/' and has a poetic pathos in him 
 which utters itself in his rhymed rispetti and ritornelli. 
 
 He had chosen the better part, no doubt, since he was so con- 
 tent ; in wandering thus amongst his country people he was free 
 as any swallow on the wing. But he had said truly, Sarto's wife 
 has many sisters; to women the crowns of Francis seem ever 
 better than peace of conscience and immunity from care. As I 
 looked at him where he stood under the broad green shadows of 
 the chestnut, with the starlight of the early night upon his face, 
 and the musical, sonorous Tuscan, rhythm coursing off his 
 tongue, I could not but wish that the world knew him as I 
 knew him ; that the great people of the great cities should be his 
 auditors rather than these labourers of the mountains and the 
 forests. 
 
 I wanted to fasten the gilded string round the foot and draw 
 the broidered hood over the eyes of my free and fearless hawk, 
 in lieu of leaving him to lean on the wild west wind and spread 
 
THE LEGEND OF THE LUCCIOLE. 247 
 
 his wings to the sun in full liberty : that is to say, child though 
 I was, I was a woman. 
 
 A little later, when he had shaken himself loose from the people, 
 and we were sitting under the chestnuts alone on the edge of the 
 hillside with the liicciole-lightened plain before us, far, far down 
 below, I returned to the old story with which in those days I 
 must sadly and often have teazed him. I tried so hard, I know, 
 to persuade him that the hobble of lead was a golden band that 
 fastened only more firmly the pinion of Hermes. But he shook 
 his head and laughed, and would not be convinced. 
 
 " What would you? " he said, almost impatient at the last. 
 " I am not the great genius you think me. I am only a wan- 
 dering idler with a trick of my tongue, that half the peasants in 
 the country share with me, and a whole knapsack of droll, 
 quaint, out-of-the-way fancies as jumbled and, perhaps, as 
 worthless as the odds and ends of a curiosity dealer's barrow. 
 
 " I promised you last night to go up for the paper laurels ? 
 Nay, ' promise ' I never did. I said I might, to please you. 
 But not even to please you, I think, shall I ever bring myself to 
 go into harness. The nomadic life is what suits me. 
 
 " Women do not see the beauty of it no ! They are for ever 
 breaking bounds and roaming in imagination, but it is always 
 into some land flowing with milk and honey, and abounding in 
 creature comforts. Even my divine Angelica never forgot a 
 banquet. Now I do not care for banquets, and I care very much 
 for liberty. 
 
 " You cannot alter me, my donzella. Nature cast me in her 
 gipsy mould so many years before ever you were born. It may 
 sound very shocking to say so, but between ourselves I have very 
 little doubt, I assure you, that Menighella's life was a great deal 
 happier than Michelangelo's. 
 
 "You know that cheery, simple, merry wanderer whom 
 Michelangelo loved so well ? straying over the country with his 
 sketches that the contadini bought at fair and market; his 
 S. Francesco, that the peasants would have frocked in gay colours 
 in utter defiance of fact and the frate ; his quaint little saints in 
 pasteboard, and his waxen Christs, for which his illustrious 
 friend gave the models. 
 
 "Think of the fanciful pleasant days he had in all the little 
 towns and castella, with his light load of apostles in terracotta 
 and martyrs in millboard; welcome for all the baptisms and 
 weddings, and feasts and fairs ; and bidden to sup here, drink 
 there, laugh with this one, sorrow with that, according as the 
 
248 PASCARhL. 
 
 people bought a S. Anna to bless a baby's biith, or a S. Putrus 
 to guard a mother's grave. 
 
 " Oh, take my word for it, roving, humble, merry Menighella 
 must have been much happier than his mighty friend, badgered 
 by Pope and council, and hunted by patrons from city to city ; 
 besides, the ambulant artist can have been no fool, and must 
 have had a soul in him, or he had never been so dear to 
 Michelangelo." 
 
 I listened to him, glad as I was ever of hearkening to the 
 swift sweet music of his voice. It was a perfect night : the 
 forests were still as death; the great moon hung yellow and 
 lustrous as gold above the dark edge of the high mountains. 
 
 " But men you honour did not disdain fame ? " I said, a little 
 timidly, to him, for I had always of him that soft sweet fear 
 Avhich yet is not fear without which no woman's or giiTs love 
 is worth a fallen chustnut husk. " Look at your Ariosto ! and I 
 think you are as great a poet as he, only you never will write 
 down a word." 
 
 He laughed gently. 
 
 "As great a poet as Ariosto, because I can string the terza 
 rirna at times as an old woman reels thread off her distaff? Oh, 
 my child, you would make me as vain, if I believed you, as 
 the dauber Mccolb Sogg when he dared to challenge Del 
 Sarto. 
 
 " It is national in us, that is all, that knack of verse. Jules 
 Janin says somewhere, ' to say an Italian poet is needless ; say 
 an Italian, and the poet is a matter of course.' Kow I would 
 not go as far as that, but there is a certain truth in his pretty 
 compliment. We are always poets at heart and Romeos when 
 the moon rises. 
 
 "It always seems as if that well-spring of poetry and art 
 which arose in Italy, to feed and fertilize the world when it was 
 half dead and wholly barren under the tyrannies of the Church 
 and the lusts of Feudalism ; it would always seem, I say, as 
 though that water of life had so saturated the Italian soil, that 
 the lowliest hut upon its hills and plains will ever nourish and 
 put forth some flower of fancy. 
 
 " The people cannot read, but they can rhyme. They cannot 
 reason, but they can keep perfect rhythm. They cannot write 
 their own names, but written on their hearts are the names of 
 those who made their country's greatness. They believe in the 
 virtues of a red rag tied to a stick amidst their fields, but they 
 treasure tenderly the heroes and the prophets of an uuforgotteu 
 
THE LEGEND OF THE LUCCIOLE. 249 
 
 time. They are ignorant of all laws of science or of sound, but 
 when they go home by moonlight through the maize yonder 
 alight with lucciole, they will never falsify a note, or overload a 
 harmony, in their love songs. 
 
 "The pootry, the art, in them is sheer instinct; it is not 
 the genius of isolated accident, but the genius of inalienable 
 heritage. 
 
 "It is universal. It is an Easter egg that lies alike in 
 the hands of gentle and simple ; not a Eoc's egg, that falls from 
 the skies once in a thousand years. Being thus diffused it has 
 ceased to produce individual and conspicuous achievement : but 
 it is this diffusion which bringing with it a perpetual ideality 
 and an eternal youth will render possible for us our Italia 
 llediviva." 
 
 As he ceased to speak, as though in answer to him, there 
 came from the distance the sound of a man's singing. Down 
 below, through the maize, there was going a little knot of 
 peasants ; they carried great bundles of green canes ou their 
 shoulders ; the lucciole flashed from their feet as they passed 
 away into the darkness where their little homes were gathered 
 round a campanile ; the voices, softly sighing, died away in the 
 wild sweet love songs that echo all over the land unwritten by 
 any human hand, only passed from mouth to mouth, from age to 
 age, telling the one eternal story. 
 
 We listened till all was silent. 
 
 He turned to me and smiled. 
 
 " Does all poetry want to be written to live? Ah, no ! eara 
 mia not so long as men love." 
 
 A soft strange trouble, that yet was infinitely peaceful, stole 
 on me. I sat quiet in the white moonlight, and put my hand 
 into my breast and felt for the stone Pates. They were quit* 
 warm where they rested against the beating of my heart. 
 
 The tears filled my eyes suddenly ; sweet tears, and glad ; I 
 could not have told whence nor why they came. 
 
 "Ah! you are right, you are right," I murmured. "What 
 does fame matter ? your life is so beautiful as it is ! " 
 
 He stretched his hand out and held mine closely, and sighed 
 a little as he answered. His moods were so swift in variation ; 
 his fancy was so vivid and so fast ; one could never quite be cer- 
 tain whether any mood would last with him much longer than a 
 butterfly may rest upon a flower. 
 
 "Ah, dear donzella!" he said, with a sigh, "perhaps, that is 
 too much to say. I am afraid so. It is hard to find a beautiful 
 
250 PASCAR&L. 
 
 life in these days ; riches are not hard to come by; even success, 
 if one is not too particular as to the roots of it, is moderately 
 easy likewise ; luxury, there is no doubt, was never at any time 
 BO general. But beauty 
 
 "Perhaps there was never any kind of life so really beautiful 
 as that of the improvisatore in the middle ages ; such as Bernardo 
 Accolti's for example. What a life that must have been : the 
 sun can never have set on it. 
 
 " Roaming the length and breadth of the land, the guest of all 
 that was most brilliant and most graceful in each city ; every- 
 where the streets garlanded and the shops closed at his coming ; 
 everywhere the whole people, from princes to beggars, gathered 
 in the vast squares, in the breathless sunlight, hushed like little 
 listening children at the first words that fell from his lips. 
 
 " All the pageantry, all the warfare, all the genius, all the 
 tumult of the age, spread like a wondrous gold-threaded tapestry 
 before him for him to tread on it as he chose. All the passion 
 and the poetry of the era close to his hand like flowers to be 
 woven into his own myrtle wreath as he would. All the nation, 
 from its cardinals to its contadini, like so many chords of an 
 leolian harp, that the breath of his mouth could thrill like the 
 winds of the summer. 
 
 " The mountain lord, the brigand chief, the fierce free lance, 
 the begging friar, the weaver and the armourer, the prince - 
 bishop and the Ghetto Jew, the damsel at her lattice, and the 
 page in his satin hose, the Pope's mistress above in her silk-hung 
 balcony, and the trooper's leman below with a wound in her 
 ragged breast all the vast motley of the century his to paint and 
 to sing as he would in the great sun-burnt piazza, with the 
 swallows wheeling against the blue sky, and on the edge of 
 the listening crowd who knows? perhaps the angel face of 
 Raffaelle. 
 
 " And then always for rest, Urbino, with the breath of the 
 Adrian sea and the breeze of the Apennine hills blowing through 
 its palace chambers, and the night waning on Bembo's tireless 
 wit, and the morning breaking above the Monte del Cavallo 
 before the Court of Love had solved one-half its problems. A 
 beautiful life that, a beautiful life that, if you will. 
 
 " I am not sure that I do not envy Bernardo even more than 
 Boiardo, though the fire of his words was quenched with the 
 ashes of his body, and when we read him now, we find him dull 
 as dust, and wonder what the spell was that once held all Rome 
 speechless as he spoke. 
 
THE LEGEND OF THE LUCCIOLE. 251 
 
 " Well, there is a compensation in all things. Bernardo had 
 tis life : a perfect life surely, if a whole people's applause, and 
 years that were as one long feast day, count for anything. But 
 Bernardo's is an empty name now to all save a few scholars who 
 only hold him as a poor stilted sterile fool ; and where is the 
 child that has not heard of One who died war-worn, and heart- 
 sick, and exiled, alone in Gothic Ravenna ? " 
 
 His voice sank dreamily into silence. 
 
 We stayed there both silent a little while under the chestnut 
 shadows ; the wind from the south blew over us on its way to 
 wander over the country of the poets. Then, silently still, we 
 arose and went homeward ; the moonlight white about our 
 lingering feet. 
 
 I leaned long at my little lattice that night, watching the 
 lucciole where they shone amidst the waves of millet and 
 amongst the tendrils of the vines ; rocking on the bough of a 
 rose, or glancing in clusters where the leaves of the arum grew 
 thickest. 
 
 I stretched my hands out and caught one as it went by my 
 casement, and held it, half gladly and half timidly, as a child 
 holds a ladybird that it deems a fairy. 
 
 Had it been a love word once on any woman's ear? Had 
 Borneo breathed it, or Paolo ? Had it died of its own sweet- 
 ness, as love will ? Had it life eternal, as he said, amongst the 
 roses ? 
 
 It told me nothing, but burned there ; a little star ; captured 
 in the hollow of my hand. 
 
 I looked at it a little while, then let it go and dance upon the 
 wind. 
 
 " What do I want with you ? " I murmured to it ; "if you 
 be living fires, yet you are dead words. And I have his all 
 his for me alone." 
 
 Then half ashamed that even the lucciole should hear me, I 
 shut the lattice, and, whilst my face grew warm as with some 
 noonday fervour of the sun, I stole into my bed and slept au j 
 dreamed, 
 
CHAPTEE XIIL 
 
 THE TOMB OF THE 
 
 FEOM tie date of St. John's Day, Brunotta treated me with 
 coldness and with something that was almost like aversion. Her 
 gifts and goodness to me ceased, and nothing that I could do or 
 say would win a smile from her. 
 
 I had noticed sometimes hefore that when we were with Bru- 
 notta he treated me differently, with more deference, but with 
 far less tenderness. Before Brunotta he never kissed my hands, 
 nor let his eyes dwell on me fondly, nor called me all the 
 pretty caressing names that he lavished on me when we were 
 alone. 
 
 Sometimes, too, I noticed the bright merry eyes of the little 
 Tuscan watch me with a keen, hard suspicion, and at times she 
 would turn away from us with some little sullen, petulant 
 phrase that was only not satirical because her powers were not 
 equal to more than a childish sulkiness. 
 
 But the only result of this change of manner in her was 
 to send her more to the companionship of her favourite Coco- 
 mero, who was a good, silly, laughter-loving lad, always 
 comically afraid of the flail of her tongue ; and to leave Pascarel 
 and me more free to wander by ourselves through the vine- 
 shadows of the country sides and the dim arcades of the ancient 
 cities. And I was too glad of this to give the cause more 
 thought. 
 
 Cocomero and Brunotta were so well suited to one another, 
 they loved to wrangle for a lean poulet, to gossip at a village 
 well, to cheapen trumpery at the fairs, to tussle with the tavern 
 keepers, to cheat the guards at the town gates by bringing in a 
 smuggled snipe or water melon. 
 
 These were their daily joys ; whilst to them Pascarel and I 
 seemed utter fools, dreaming through the fields content with a 
 bird's song, or wandering for hours in some old silent grass-grown 
 place abandoned by the world, but to us memorable for the sake 
 of some great life that there had opened to the light in the dead 
 ages. 
 
 " If it were not for me you would all go without bit or drop 
 
THE TOMB OF THE KING. 253 
 
 from dawn to moonrise," Brunotta would cry, displaying some 
 booty from the farms that she had borne into the town under the 
 very noses of the unsuspecting guards at the gateway, and which 
 was made tenfold more sweet to her by the falsehoods and perils 
 which she had incurred in its transit. "A beautiful plump 
 peahen eating for a prince and spinach and herbs to garnish 
 it all for three soldi worth walking out four miles for any day 
 things are so dear in the markets. Spinello lived and died 
 here ? and you two have been dreaming over him and Petrarca 
 all day ? The Saints help us ! What fools are clever folk ! 
 And who was he when all is said ? A dauber in colour ? Oh, I 
 know ; his paintings are in the little church whitewash would 
 look as well, and it kills insects too. A Madonna one must have, 
 of course, but Our Lady I know is quite content with a wax 
 figure of her, and those pretty paper flowers and some coloured 
 tapers they look much better than the frescoes Che-che ! how 
 fat the hen is ! and all for three soldi, Pascarel ! " 
 
 Pascardl would shrug his shoulders with silent ineffable dis- 
 dain, and go out into the archway of the house and stand under 
 the vine-leaves, sending smoke into the air with a troubled and 
 impatient contempt upon his face. 
 
 They were as far asunder as the poles these two who travelled 
 together, played together, lived and laughed together, and yet 
 never caught sight one moment of each other's souls. 
 
 That day he and I let the fat peahen stew on neglected 
 amongst its herbs over the little charcoal pan, and wandered 
 about the old, old streets of Arezzo, talking of Maecenas and Pe 
 trarca and the merry Bacco in Toscana, and thinking wistfully 
 of that noble old cathedral that was levelled with the dust for the 
 war lust of the Medici. 
 
 He was sad at heart that day; the contact of Brunotta' s low 
 little soul seemed to have jarred on him ; his hours of melancholy 
 were not frequent, but the gloom, when once it settled there, 
 was deep. Sometimes he was curt and full of scorn in it ; this 
 day he was gentle, and his eyes dwelt on me with a soft pain in 
 them. 
 
 We searched, and vainly, for Spinello' s tomb ; like the cathe- 
 dral, it was lost in the summer dust. 
 
 There was a tired -looking, h amble olive, that by its look had 
 grown there beneath the walls five hundred years if one ; but all 
 the pomp and beauty of the pagan temple had dissolved like a 
 dream of the night. We sat in the shadow of the olive, and iu 
 pur fancies rebuilded the temple, 
 
a 54 PASCAR&L. 
 
 It was full midsummer. 
 
 The Tuscan sun was burning in a cloudless heaven. A cloud 
 of swallows were silver in the light. The mountains were soft 
 in hue as rose-leaves. Everywhere in the plains of maize the 
 shrill cicale were loudly singing their rude love odes. Above 
 the grey walls there was a flush of pomegranate flowers, and 
 amongst them there hummed the yellow porselline that the 
 people so prettily say bring happiness wheresoever they rest. 
 
 The city so great in Etruscan, in Latin, and in Eenaissance 
 days, was very quiet in cloudless sunshine. 
 
 It was all bright and hot, northward over the Tuscan olive 
 valleys, and southward, where tawny Tiber dragged his way, 
 deep bosomed in the Umbrian oakwoods. 
 
 "It is just the same country," said Pascarel, glancing down 
 north and south. "Just the same scene as when Maecenas was 
 born here, and Pliny pondered beneath the garden- trees upon the 
 hills yonder. 
 
 "The city has crumbled to dust twice, and been rebuilded in 
 new fashions, though the new is now so old that we cannot find 
 Spinello's tomb, but I doubt if the district has changed a whit 
 since Livy wrote of it. 
 
 * ' "What a great book a great student might write upon Arezzo ! 
 What an epitome in this single town of the Etruscan, of the 
 Roman, and of the Mediaeval life ! And of the Benaissance 
 alone what countless and various types ! 
 
 "Fighting ecclesiastical Tarlati; shrewd, gay, merry Kedi; 
 our idealic Petrarca ; good heavens ! one could string great 
 Arezzan names until the sunset ! 
 
 " The history of this one town might be the history of Italy, 
 and of all its wonderful complexities and contrarieties of 
 character and of circumstance. 
 
 " By-the-bye I hear they have found a new Etruscan tomb in 
 that olive orchard where you see the little cloud of people. The 
 tomb of a king they say by his ornaments. Myself I should like 
 to know something of the ornament-makers. 
 
 " "What manner of men were they, those earliest gold- workers 
 whose art is the despair of modern goldsmiths? 
 
 "Did they sit in the sun as we do now and hear the cicale 
 chatter ? Did they labour for love of the art or greed of the 
 shining metal? Did their hearts go down to the grave with 
 those chains on those fair dead women ? 
 
 " What a sad tender grace there is about that old Etruria! 
 A whole nation swept off the face of the soil, and leaving only a 
 
THE TOMB OP THE KING. 255 
 
 few placid dead that melt to dust as the air touches them, and 
 a handful or two of golden chains that neither rust nor time can 
 alter. 
 
 " Their temples, their palaces, their laws, their armies, their 
 very history, all have perished; and only these golden toys of 
 theirs live and shine in the modern daylight. 
 
 " Ah, Dio inio ! how full the world is of wonder! Only its 
 wonders are all the children of Death, and chill us when, 
 we touch them." 
 
 So he spoke his fanciful thoughts aloud, lying stretched on 
 the hillside, under the walls of the city. His meditations often 
 clothed themselves in that facile and picture-like speech which is 
 national with the Italian; for amongst these people, who have all 
 more or less in them of the improvisatore abundant, detail and 
 fluent expression are natural as the breath of the lungs and the 
 lips is to others. 
 
 " We will go and look when the shadows lengthen at that 
 Etruscan tomb," he said, taking a little lizard in the hollow of 
 his hand. " We shall not find old Spinello's if we hunt all the 
 week. 
 
 ' Appena i segni 
 De 1'alte sue mine il lido serba. 
 Muoiono le citth ; muoiouo i regni : 
 Coprc i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba : 
 El 'uom d'esser mortal par die si sdegni. 
 Oli nostra mento cupida e superba ! * 
 
 "His tomb is gone," he pursued, and his voice sounded 
 hushed and sad in the dreaming silence of the sunny plains. 
 " And that great Latin inscription is trodden somewhere under- 
 neath those clods that the bullocks are treading. What does it 
 matter ? He had a good life here for ninety years. 
 
 " It must have been such a good life a painter's in thosa 
 days ; those early days of art. Fancy the gladness of it then 
 modern painters can know nothing of it. 
 
 " When all the delicate delights of distance were only half 
 perceived ; when the treatment of light and shadow was barely 
 dreamed of; when aerial perspective was just breaking on the 
 mind in all its wonder and power ; when it was still regarded as 
 a marvellous boldness to draw from the natural form in a natural 
 fashion; in those early days only fancy the delights of a 
 painter I 
 
 "Something fresh to be won at each step; something 
 new to be penetrated at each moment; something beautiful 
 
256 PASCAR&L. 
 
 and rash to be ventured on with, each touch of colour, the 
 painter in those days had all the breathless pleasure of an 
 explorer; without leaving his birthplace he knew the joys of 
 Columbus. 
 
 " And then the reverence that waited on him. 
 
 " He was a man who glorified God amongst a people that 
 believed in God. 
 
 " What he did was a reality to himself and those around him, 
 Spinello fainted before the Satanas he portrayed, and Angelico 
 deemed it blasphemy to alter a feature of the angels who visited 
 him that they might live visibly for men in his colours in the 
 cloister. 
 
 " Of all men the artist was nearest to heaven, therefore of all 
 men was he held most blessed. 
 
 " When Francis of Yalois stooped for the brush he only repre- 
 sented the spirit of the age he lived in. It is what all wise kings 
 do. It is their only form of genius. 
 
 " Kow-a-days what can men do in the Arts ? Nothing. 
 
 "All has been painted all sung all said. 
 
 " All is twice told in verse, in stone, in colour. There is no 
 untraversed ocean to tempt the Columbus of any Art. 
 
 "It is dreary very dreary that. All has been said and 
 done so much better than we can ever say or do it again. 
 One envies those men who gathered all the paradise flowers 
 half opened, and could watch them bloom. 
 
 " Art can only live by Faith : and what faith have we ? 
 
 " Instead of Art we have indeed Science ; but Science is very 
 sad, for she doubts all things and would prove all things, and 
 doubt is endless, and proof is a quagmire that looks like solid 
 earth, and is but shifting waters." 
 
 His voice was sad as it fell on the stillness of Arezzo Arezzo 
 who had seen the dead gods come and go, and the old faiths rise 
 and fall, there whore the mule trod its patient way and the 
 cicala sang its summer song above the place where the temple of 
 the Bona Dea and the Church of Christ had alike passed away, 
 so that no man could tell their place. 
 
 It was all quiet around. 
 
 The black and gold demoizelle hummed above in the red pome- 
 granate flowers. The long curling leaves and auburn feathers of 
 the maize were motionless in the windless air. Beneath the 
 vines great pumpkins shone like gold, and little lizards glanced 
 like emeralds in the light. 
 
 It was ail so bright, so quiet, so full of sweet summer life, 
 
THE TOMB OP THE KING. 257 
 
 e, where a whole nation had passed away from the face of the 
 earth, leaving but a few crumbled stones as the sum of its story. 
 
 "I would rather have been Spinello than Petrarca," he pur- 
 sued, after awhile. " Yes ; though the sonnets will live as long 
 as men love : and the old man's work has almost every line of it 
 crumbled away. 
 
 " But one can fancy nothing better than a life such as Spinello 
 led for nigh a century up on the hill here, painting, because he 
 loved it, till death took him. Of all lives, perhaps, .that this 
 world has ever seen, the lives of painters, I say, in those days, 
 were the most perfect. 
 
 " Not only the magnificent pageants of Leonardo's, of Haifa- 
 elle's, of Giorgone's : but the lowlier lives the lives of men such 
 as Santi, and Eidolfi, and Benozzo, and Francia, and Timoteo, 
 and many lesser men than they, painters in fresco, and grisaille, 
 painters of miniatures, painters of majolica and montelupo, 
 painters who were never great, but who attained infinite peace- 
 fulness and beauty in their native towns and cities all over the 
 face of Italy. 
 
 " In quiet places, such as Arezzo and Volterra, and Modena 
 and Urbino, and Cortona and Perugia, there would grow up a 
 gentle lad who from infancy most loved to stand and gaze at the 
 missal paintings in his mother's house, and the coena in the 
 monk's refectory, and when he had fulfilled some twelve or 
 fifteen years, his people would give in to his wish and send him 
 to some bottega to learn the management of colours. 
 
 "Then he would grow to be a man; and his town would be 
 proud of him, and find him the choicest of all work in its churches 
 and its convents, so that all his days were filled without his ever 
 wandering out of reach of his native vesper bells. 
 
 " He would make his dwelling in the heart of his birthplace, 
 close under its cathedral, with the tender sadness of the olive 
 hills stretching above and around; in the basiliche or the 
 monasteries his labour would daily lie ; he would have a docile 
 band of hopeful boyish pupils with innocent eyes of wonder for 
 all he did or said ; he would paint his wife's face for the Ma- 
 donna's, and his little son's for the child Angel's ; he would go 
 out into the fields and gather the olive bough, and the feathery 
 corn, and the golden fruits, and paint them tenderly on grounds 
 of gold or blue, in symbol of those heavenly things of which the 
 bells were for ever telling all those who chose to hear ; he would 
 Bit in the lustrous nights in the shade of his own vines and pity 
 those who were not as he was ; now and then horsemen would 
 
 8 
 
258 PASCAR&L. 
 
 come spurring in across the hills and bring news with them of 
 battles fought, of cities lost and won ; and he would listen with 
 the rest in the market-place, and go home through the moonlight 
 thinking that it was well to create the holy things before which 
 the fiercest reiter and the rudest free lance would drop the point 
 of the sword and make the sign of the cross. 
 
 " It must have been a good life good to its close in the 
 cathedral crypt and so common too ; there were scores such lived 
 out in these little towns of Italy, half monastery and half for- 
 tress, that were scattered over hill and plain, by sea and river, on 
 marsh and mountain, from the day dawn of Cimabue to the after- 
 glow of the Carracci. 
 
 "And their work lives after them; the little towns are all 
 grey and still and half-peopled now ; the iris grows on the ram- 
 parts, the canes wave in the moats, the shadows sleep in the 
 silent market-place, the great convents shelter half a dozen 
 monks, the dim majestic churches are damp and desolate, and 
 have the scent of the sepulchre. 
 
 "But there, above the altars, the wife lives in the Madonna 
 and the child smiles in the Angel, and the olive and the wheat 
 are fadeless on their ground of gold and blue ; and by the tomb 
 in the crypt the sacristan will shade his lantern and murmui 
 with a sacred tenderness : 
 
 " 'Here he sleeps.' 
 
 "'He/ even now, so long, long after, to the people of his 
 birthplace. "Who can want more of life or death ? " 
 
 So he talked on in that dreamy, wistful manner that was as 
 natural with him in some moments as his buoyant and ironical 
 gaiety at others. 
 
 Then he rose as the shadows grew longer and pulled down a 
 knot of pomegranate blossom for me, and we went together under 
 the old walls, across the maize fields, down the slope of the hills 
 to the olive orchard, where a peasant, digging deep his trenches 
 against the autumn rains, had struck his mattock on the sepulchre 
 >f the Etruscan king. 
 
 There was only a little heap of fine dust when we reached 
 the spot. 
 
 "When they uncover the dead faces the faces dead two thou- 
 sand years they are always perfect in these Etruscan tombs ; 
 but at the first touch of light they seem to shiver ; they cannot 
 bear the day ; in a moment they dissolve like a snow flower that 
 the sunrays strike,- there are only left the golden chains lying in 
 the grey soft dust. 
 
THE GOLD OF ETRURIA-. 259 
 
 The violated grave yawned under the olive tree ; the coffin had 
 jeen broken open ; the peasant had eagerly rifled its Jewels; a 
 little throng of people from Arezzo were standing looking at the 
 mound of ashes ; the sad silvery olives were all around ; above, 
 in the city, there were bells ringing. 
 
 We looked too : then went away in silence along the edge of 
 the ripening maize. 
 
 The dead king had reigned here on the hills ages ere Rome had 
 been ; ages here Horace had sung of Soracte ; ages ere the chariots 
 of Augustus had rolled through the broad amber seas of the 
 Umbrian harvests ; ages ere the marshes by Trasinone southward, 
 yonder across the fields, had been red with the slaughter of 
 consul and cohort, and strewn with the fasces and eagles. 
 
 The dead king had reigned here ; and after two thousand years 
 his nameless dust was rifled for the greed of peasants, and lay 
 friendless in the sun there beneath the olive branches. 
 
 We went through the gates in silence. 
 
 At our resting-place in the Via dell' Orto, where the eyes of 
 Petrarca had opened to the light, Brunotta met us in the arched 
 entrance, in the rosy evening stillness, with shrill rebuke for her 
 peahen overstewed and spoilt by waiting. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 THE K>LD OF ETKT7KIA. 
 
 PASCAKEL played that night in Arezzo. But a strange fancy 
 came to him. 
 
 At the last moment, as his turn came for the stage, he flung off 
 his gay dress and abandoned the jesting little piece he was pre- 
 pared for, and flung the grave Florentine iucco about him, and 
 went before the lamps with only his mandoline. 
 
 He struck a few chords of it, tender and far-reaching, that 
 made silence fall on the little crowd of Tuscans and TJmbrians 
 that filled the Arte, which was unroofed that night to the breath- 
 less summer skies. 
 
 Then he began to speak to them, quite quietly at first, with 
 Ids luminous eyes drooped and full of retrospection, his voice as 
 clear as a bell on the great stillness. 
 
 A certain fire of improvisation fell on him, aod his words 
 
 8 2 
 
260 
 
 dropped naturally into the swing and measure of the terza lima. 
 Verse to the Italian is natural as laughter to the child or as tears 
 to the woman. 
 
 The dust of the dead king under the olive trees outside their 
 gates was his key-note; a note grave and tender, on which 
 his redundant fancy strung every variety of meditation and of 
 metaphor. 
 
 All the life of the dead ages revived in his words and gestures. 
 
 The lost people of unknown Etruria lived again in his pas- 
 sionate fancy. 
 
 " There was a gold worker in Etruscan Arezzo ; the delicate 
 metal bent to his hand finedrawn as the thread of a spider's web; 
 Vie was poor and alone, but quite happy ; an old olive grew bj 
 his door and he worked in its shade all the da.y ; the gold was in 
 his hands like a maiden's hair, and he talked to it, and wove it, 
 and loved it. 
 
 " One day the king's daughter went by, and her horse sought 
 a drink at his well. She rode on and took no thought of him ; 
 but his olive was no more the tree of peace by his threshold. 
 
 " He haunted the steps of her temples and palaces until the 
 king's people beat him away with rods. He could work no more 
 for his masters, and he fell into great wretchedness, and the olive 
 tree pined for him and withered away grey and useless as the 
 silver beard of an old dead man. 
 
 " Now it came to pass that there was a famine in the land in 
 these broad plains of Tuscany and Umbria, where the yellow 
 waves of the wheat spread so far and wide : and all the people 
 besought the Bona Dea whose curse was on the black and barren 
 land. 
 
 " And the oracle of the temple spake and said, ' Let a sheaf of 
 corn be made of gold and bound up with twelve thousand 
 gossamer threads in gold, finer than the web of the spider, and 
 the lands shall blossom and wear full harvest.' 
 
 " Etruria was full of gold workers, and hundreds on hundreds 
 essayed the task, but all failed ; for who should work gold so 
 that the spider's spinning should be less fine and less frail ? 
 
 "Then he who had loved the king's daughter rose from his 
 wretchedness, and remembered his ancient learning, and said v 
 1 Give me gold, I will try.' 
 
 "At first they mocked him ; a poor naked outcast, crawling 
 feebly in the sun. But the famine increased ; all the city was 
 full of lamentation by day and night j mothers slew their children 
 not to hear their piercing cries. 
 
THE GOLD OF ETRURIA. 26 1 
 
 "The king came down from his weary throne and said, * Let 
 the beggar have gold, and try ; it can be no worse with us if be 
 fail, since thus we perish/ 
 
 " So they gave him gold, and he shut himself alone for six 
 days, and on the seventh he opened the door and came out into 
 the synshiiie amongst the multitude of the breathless people, and 
 in his hands were the golden webs of twelve thousand threads, so 
 fine that the spider's gauze beside them seemed coarse. 
 
 t The people were silent; the passion of a great joy and fear 
 was on them ; by tens of thousands they dragged their fleshless 
 limbs after him, always in silence, to the temple of the Bona 
 Dca. 
 
 " There was a great blight everywhere ; the black earth 
 sickened under it; the famished people watched with bloodshot 
 ravenous eyes ; was the weaving fine enough ? Would the goddess 
 accept the offering ? 
 
 "There was silence in the temple; the strong sun shone on 
 the web of twelve thousand threads. 
 
 " Then the oracle spoke, and said, 'By gold shall Etruria live. 
 Let the earth rejoice and bear.' 
 
 " And in one moment, on all the earth whereon Etruria held 
 dominion, the green blades broke through the parching soil, and 
 grew and ripened in a second's space in every valley and on 
 every hill. 
 
 " Then the multitude cried with one voice, ' Bear him to the 
 palace, crown him on the king's right hand. Let him have his 
 will in all the land. From the bonds of death he has set ur 
 free ! ' 
 
 ' But he, still on his knees on the threshold of the temple, 
 looked up, and said, ' Nay, I want nothing ; has it mado her 
 smile ? ' 
 
 " And with that he stretched his hands gently outwards to the 
 sun and died. 
 
 " The king's daughter never knew that it was for her the 
 golden web was woven. 
 
 " But the gods knew, and said, ' By its gold workers let 
 Etruria live. For this man's love was great, and its witness 
 shall endure when the nation has perished from the earth and 
 its very records have passed away as the clouds dissolve before 
 daylight. 1 
 
 " So to this hour, through all the Etrurian land, the vanished 
 people are ever to be traced by the golden links that shine through 
 the dust of the tombs ; and the Etrurian gold is without speck or 
 
262 PAS CAR EL. 
 
 daw, or equal anywhere, but rises from its burial ever and again 
 where the olives shiver in the summer winds and the maize 
 feathers blow above the buried cities." 
 
 It is nothing as I say it now, this tale of his, that fell from his 
 lips that night instead of jest and laughter : but as he spoke it, 
 with the deep blue skies over our heads, with the sweet, cool, 
 acacia-scented air streaming in from the open doors, with the rise 
 and fall of his wonderful voice that could sigh like a sea- shell 
 and sound defiance like a clarion, with that old Etrurian land 
 around lying white beneath the moon, with the mighty Tiber 
 rolling there away beyond the oak-woods, with the dust of the 
 dead king so near, under the olive-tree on the side of the hill ; 
 with all these with the shadows on the Florentine robes and tha 
 Florentine face of Pascare 1, in the tawny half-lights of the dim 
 Arte, tho tale had a strange poetry and pathos that moved the 
 passionate people as they heard it to tears. 
 
 And when, as it drew to a close, the swift facile words came 
 faster and faster from his lips, falling without strain or visible 
 consciousness into the sonorous rhythm of the Petrarcan sonnets; 
 when he passed from the past to the present and spoke of the 
 living Italy which had become the inheritrix of Etruscan grace 
 and Latin power, and was the daughter of such mighty dead, that 
 her descended nobility became a divine obligation; when, with 
 all his soul kindling at the fire of his thoughts into a poet's faith 
 and a prophet's inspiration, he stood, with outstretched arms and 
 flashing eyes, calling on the treasures of the past to become the 
 weapons of the future, and the divided children of the nation to 
 bind themselves into one bond of brotherhood by the chain of a 
 perfect purpose woven fine and indestructible as the gold chain of 
 Etruria by the force of love; when his impetuous and impas- 
 sioned improvisation swept like a storm- wind over the listening 
 people, the moonlight from the cloudless skies shining full upon 
 his face, then a greater force than that of the player fell upon 
 him, and he who held them thus silent in Arezzo, ruled them by 
 the strength of the patriot and the spell of the poet. 
 
 The people streamed out quite quiet when his voice had ceased, 
 and went quietly along their various ways through the haunted 
 streets of Petrarca's city. 
 
 In many eyes there was the gleam of tears. 
 
 They did not dare to cluster round him with shout and song 
 that night, and bear him off as was their wont to some wine feast 
 within the walls. They left him alone, as one who was their 
 master and apart from them. 
 
THE SCEPTRE OF FEATHERS. 263 
 
 Only some lads, quite young, whose fathers had died with 
 Carlo Alberto and with Ugo Bassi, drew near him timidly, and 
 gently kissed his garments as in homage. 
 
 These were all his thanks in grey Arezzo. Btft could any 
 greed of pomp or storm of plaudit have been greater ? 
 
 He himself said never a word, but left us to go indoors to our 
 rest in the street of Orto, and went away outward through the 
 gates into the shining country where the moon was white upon 
 the fields of olive. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 THE SCEPTRE OF FEATIIEKS. 
 
 I REMEMBER that night, that sweet hot August night, I sat 
 i-leeploss at the open window, watching down the moon-lightened 
 street for the sheer sake of seeing Pascarel pass through its 
 shadows when he should come homeward. 
 
 The hours went slowly by, and he did not come. The old 
 street was silent as a grave ; beneath me, before the entrance of 
 an old palace, two Italians stood talking together. They looked 
 gentle people, and their accent was pure and scholarly. 
 
 " What genius has that stroller Pascarel ! " said one of them ; 
 "and what a sway over the people, and what a rush of words, 
 and what a choice of powers ! In the Trecento he would have 
 been at the head of Tuscany ! " 
 
 " Oh, altro ! " assented the other, heartily. " Eut in our 
 modern days it is not the men of genius who are eminent ; it is 
 the men of talent. All the earth over, it is careful and cautious 
 combination which now succeeds ; and it is exactly this of which 
 the nervousness, the impetuosity, the impressionability, the force 
 and the weakness of men of genius, are incapable. This man 
 Pascarel might have led High Italy when she was a group of 
 art- cities, that could be grasped together like a bundle of divin- 
 ing rods or firebrands, and hurled at church or empire by a hand 
 that was fearless enough and able enough not to let them scorch 
 it. But what place is there for a man of his sort of capricious 
 inspiration, and poetic temper, in any part of modern Europe ? 
 What Europe crowns now are drill-sergeants and accountants." 
 
264 PASCAR&L. 
 
 And the Tuscan having said so much, sauntered on with his 
 friend through the high, dark archway where the acanthus was 
 clinging about the old sculptured bosses of some race whose very 
 name had perished in Arezzo. 
 
 As they disappeared, there came into the street the figure of 
 Pascarel ; his white dress caught the gleam of the moonbeams, 
 and he passed thoughtfully down the grey stones, through the 
 cool brown shadows. 
 
 The church clocks of Arezzo were tolling four o'clock ; in the 
 east there was the first tremulous lighting of the skies that 
 heralds daybreak. 
 
 He came slowly down the street, very slowly, under the lean- 
 ing antique walls that had heard the first frail wail of Petrarch's 
 opening life. 
 
 Looking up, he saw me where I leaned above. There was a 
 Trecento stone gallery to my casement, and in it was growing, 
 set in a great red conca, a gum-cistus, all white with flower. 
 
 I looked down to him through the leaves. 
 
 "Ah, donzella! up so very early?" he said to me. "That 
 is not wise when we are not upon the road. What ! not been 
 to bed? Oh, that is very wilful." 
 
 " You have not been to bed yourself," I said to him. " What 
 did you find in those fields ? I thought you would never come 
 back." 
 
 " You have been watching for that? I shall be very angrj 
 if you ruin your health in such nonsense." 
 
 He did not look very angered. There was a smile on his 
 mouth, and the beautiful sudden light in his eyes that I loved 
 so well. 
 
 "But what did you find in the fields?" I cried to him. 
 "Have you been to the king's tomb again!" 
 
 He paused a moment, then glanced down the street to see 
 that it was empty. 
 
 "Well, no, donzella," he said, hesitatingly, with a little 
 flush on his face. "I may as well tell you it will give you 
 pleasure. You were sad to-day for that poor contadino, with 
 his old sick people and his seven children, who had had nothing 
 to eat all the summer, the worm being at his wheat, and his 
 padrone a hard man ? Well, I went to take him half the Arte's 
 receipts. It was so full I could easily spare him that without 
 begrudging ourselves another fat peahen. And I went to-night 
 well, because walking at night is pleasanter than by day in 
 this time of the year, and I thought I should meet the poor 
 
THE SCEPTRE OF FEATHERS. 265 
 
 heart-stricken wretch just going out across his fruitless fields 
 as I did. Besides, the old woman, without food, would not 
 have lived long past noon. It is no use talking to people about 
 a chain of gold for Italy, unless one does one little miserable 
 mite towards forging a lilliputian link of it." 
 
 " Oh, I am so glad, so glad ! " I cried, in my thoughtless 
 delight in him, leaning down through the cistus flowers of 
 silver. " It is so good of you, so like you. What did the con- 
 tadino say ? "Was he not happy ? " 
 
 " Ah, we will not talk about what he said," murmured Pas- 
 car&l, lightly. " "When you have seven children and an old 
 father and mother all wailing for bread, and a hard padrone who 
 will screw you down to the letter of the Mezzadria, and, if the 
 soil be empty, lets your mouth be empty too, of which hard- 
 ness there is very little in this Tuscany of ours, God be praised, 
 when you are in this sort of plight, of course any little gift 
 brings gladness to you, and you are apt to talk a very great 
 deal too much about gratitude, as this poor fellow did, until I 
 was fain to run away from him, and leave him weeping over his 
 two lean bullocks, who look the worse for no provender them- 
 selves, poor beasts ! Eut get to bed, bambina mia ; these old 
 streets are not too healthy in the moonlight. Good night, and 
 dream of Petrarca." 
 
 But I dreamed, instead, of Pascarel. 
 
 He might have ruled Tuscany in the old days of Gian della 
 Bella, or the TJberti so they said. "Well, like enough. But 
 was it not better as it was ? 
 
 I thought nothing could be freer or gladder than this life he led. 
 
 It was like the old sceptre of peacock's plumes that Mariuccia 
 had set on high, with the blessed palm-sheaf ; in emblem of so 
 many simple joys, of laughter in a garret, of a bowl of field- 
 born violets, of jests over a pan of chestnuts, of a dusty brocade 
 brought down from high estate to embellish a child's masking. 
 
 The world would have contemned, like my father, the sceptre 
 of feathers. 
 
 But could the world have given aught better in exchange ? 
 
 I thought not, sinking to sleep, while the day-break stole 
 over the dusky stillness of Arezzo. 
 
 And I was sure that the poor contadino, hurrying homeward 
 at sunrise to his capanna, in the midst of his barren fields, 
 bearing food and oil to his famished children, and wine to hia 
 old dying people, would have thought not likewise could one 
 have asked him. 
 
f66 PASCAR&L. 
 
 The gold was rare and costly that had been found in the 
 tomb of the king that day ; but it seemed to me that all the 
 gold in Etruria could not have out-weighed that impulse which 
 bad sent the feet of Pascarel on their errand through the moonlit 
 olives. 
 
 We wandered awhile about old Umbria. The mighty oak 
 woods were welcome in the hot suns of August, and there was 
 no sweeter place for a Midsummer dream than where the birds 
 were singing in the flower-sown shadows about S. Francis's quiet 
 Carceri. 
 
 We loitered in Gubbio, thinking of Maestro Georgio and oi 
 his wondrous rainbow hues ; and we sat on the stony slopes 
 where Pliny's villa once stood by the thread of hill-fed water; 
 and we watched the sunset colour burn on the Spoleto moun- 
 tains, with great rainclouds waiting the fall of night to break 
 above the marshes ; and we sauntered in the clear elastic dawns, 
 over the sites of the buried cities, where the goat cropped her- 
 bage above the sunken altars, and the smoke of the charcoal- 
 burncTS curled up amongst the oak boughs where the incense had 
 once li^en to Jupiter Feretrius, or Yenus Pandemos. 
 
 And thence we strayed into Tuscany for the vintage month, 
 and laughed to our heart's content amongst the vines, and saw 
 the wines pressed in the old, wasteful, classic fashion, and the 
 children tumble half -drunk amongst the reddening leaves, and 
 the dogs gorge themselves on grapes unstinted, and the great 
 wains roll homeward laden with purple wealth through the 
 narrow paths where the crocuses were all alive again m mil- 
 lions, till the earth was like one great amethyst with them, and 
 across the vast, still, sleeping valleys, where the sun was still 
 hot, and the white homesteads were all hung with the golden 
 ropes of that year's millet. 
 
 We worked and laughed and feasted on grapes with the rest 
 all the shining days through, and at evening the Arte was 
 thronged with the lusty Contadini, their mirth the readier for a 
 plenteous vintage, and their strong brown limbs grape-stained 
 like the limbs of Bacchus. 
 
 The recolta, which was of abundance, except in some few 
 places, as about Arezzo, where the fly and worm had ravaged, 
 made Tuscany all glad and gay, gladdest and gayest of all the 
 Val di Greve, and the Mugellino, and the Val di Ciiiana, and 
 the other Pianure lying close about Florence. 
 
 We paused in all the little towns one by one, and October 
 passed away, golden and sultry, and ruddy with jest and song 
 
THE SCEPTRE OF FEATHERS. . 267 
 
 about the great wine vats ; and the gardens full of the strong 
 sweet smell of damask autumn roses and the waxen tuberosa, 
 and the grass filled at every step with the vari-coloured cups of 
 the wild anemones. 
 
 On the first day of the new month, which is dedicated to all 
 the saints in imitation of the old great Latin feast of all the 
 gods in the times of " gli dei falsi e bugiardi," we came down 
 from the heights where we had been amongst the forest farms of 
 the Casentino and of Yallambrosa. 
 
 For the weather had grown chill there on tho mountains, and 
 wo had come slowly downward with intent to go into Florence 
 and rest there through the winter frosts, until the time of Car- 
 nival should have come round again, and have again passed away, 
 killed with the cannonade of the Confette. 
 
 Before he should enter the town, however, Pascarel had taken 
 a fancy to set the Arte a little while under Fiesole, so that the 
 scattered people in the little paesi along the hill sides should 
 have their hour's mirth under the Red Lily without being driven 
 to take a long tramp for it down the stony slopes. And the 
 place he chose for the Arte, and got permission to use from the 
 owner, whom he knew, was a narrow piece of grassland amongst 
 the stripped vineyards, with the grey bleak slopes rising above, 
 and making sunrise late and sunset very early to the few who 
 dwelt in that ravine of the mountain-shed Mugnone. 
 
 The Feast of the Saints rose a cloudless ^nd radiant day, in 
 which the scent and the warmth of the summer were sure to 
 prevail, so soon as the first chill crispness of the early morning 
 on the heights should have disappeared before the sunrays. 
 
 I remember how we came over thy mountain side in the clear 
 cold of the early day. 
 
 How we heard the matins bells ringing in the dusky depth 
 where Florence was lying. 
 
 How we watched the white mists lighting little by little as 
 the sun came over the edges of the hills. 
 
 How the libeccio was blowing keenly as we crossed the square 
 of Fiesole, but fell into a mere soft breeze as we went down the 
 winding road between the grey stone walls and the wild green 
 hedges, with ever and again some scarlet glimpse of roses burn- 
 ing above a villa gate. 
 
 It was only cold enough to make the air free and elastic and 
 inspiriting as a sea air. 
 
 All the hillside was in a pomp of scarlet and purple, and gold 
 and bronze, with great masses of deep green where the ilex and 
 
?68 PASCASJ&L. 
 
 acanthus grew, and soft pale greys where the olives were. 
 Everywhere there were clouds of autumn flowers. At times, af 
 we passed some wine-presses under the trees, the people shouted 
 us a gay good-day. At times a kid, browsing amongst the 
 stripped vines, bleated a tender little note upon the silence. 
 
 I remember how we went down the shelving zigzag ways, the 
 mules having passed before us at daybreak with the Arte in. 
 charge of a peasant lad. Pascarel and I were foremost ; he had 
 his mandoline slung about him, and struck it now and then so 
 that a sound, sweet and fine as the call of a thrush, came from 
 it, and seemed to drift away down amongst the wreaths of the 
 mist. 
 
 At some little distance Erunotta followed, talking eagerly 
 with Cocomero of a quarrel she had had with a contadina about 
 some duck's eggs in the place where we had slept. Little Tocco 
 ran hither and thither at his fancy, now chasing a lizard, now 
 plucking a rose Cat nodded over a wall, now stopping to chatter 
 with the women plaiting the straw. 
 
 I remember how we went down the hill light-hearted in the 
 morning air, pausing reverently as a priest passed by with the 
 Santissimo for some sick creature, a white-frocked chorister 
 going before him ringing the little bell along the peaceful 
 ways. 
 
 I remember how we strolled on silenced for a moment or two, 
 and then talked of the winter in Florence, and fell softly, as 
 people will who have learned to love one another, into recollec- 
 tion of the first day we had met in the City of Lilies ; and so, 
 with the west wind in our faces, came down above the bridge 
 of the Eadia, where the old brown monastery stood, russet with 
 age, amongst the olive and the mist. 
 
 I remember how we broke our fast whilst the sun was still 
 low in the east, at a little dwelling-house a mile above the 
 village, where Pizzichiria was scrawled in chalk along the wall, 
 and the green bough above the doorway told that the tenant of 
 the house sold wine as well. 
 
 I remember how we sat out under the pergola where some 
 grapes still hung, and brake our bread and drank sweet foaming 
 draughts of milk, the cow meanwhile, in her shed hard by, 
 gazing at us with her eyes of HSre over a great green dew- wet 
 mound of trefoil; and below, amongst the olives, the sacred 
 Solitudine, rising gaunt and bare, and brown and sombre with 
 innumerable memories. 
 
 I remember how we sat there, and laughed and clattered 
 
THE SCEPTRE OF FEATHERS. zby 
 
 gaily, and then took up the mandoline afresh and sang all sorts 
 of follies and of fancies, and then rose and strolled away down 
 the hills to see where they would set up the Arte, and soon 
 found a broad field a few roods above the Badia itself, where the 
 rattore, knowing us, had given eager acquiescence for the throne 
 of our hedgerow Thespia to be erected. 
 
 Ah, yes ; I remember it all so well so well that last day 
 of that glad, poetic, fanciful, careless life which was fated to be 
 broken off suddenly and for ever, as the pomegranate flower is 
 snapped from its stalk by the mistral. 
 
BOOK V. 
 
 THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE FOUNTAIN OF THE PINE. 
 
 IT had been all summer endless, cloudless summer from 
 the time of the carnival violets to the time of the autumn cycla- 
 men. And there was no foreboding of storm or of winter in the 
 air that day of All Saints, though, whilst I knew it not, I 
 heard for the last time the soft low laughter of Pascarel of my 
 lover ; my lover surely, though he spoke never directly of love 
 but only uttered it in those million ways and words and charms 
 of touch and eloquence of glance which are love's truest, subtlest, 
 and most perilous language. 
 
 He and I stayed in the field behind the Solitudine and threw 
 ourselves down there beside a little thread-like brook whose 
 water was all red and purple with anemones. Little Tocco 
 wandered away as his habit was under the stripped vines ; Co- 
 comero had stayed with Erunotta to help her, as they said, beat 
 some linen in the shallow course of the Mugnone. 
 
 It was yet quite early in the morning, and the gentle coolness 
 of daybreak had not left the air. 
 
 It is quite wild up there ; the hills rise steep and sombre, 
 their sides dark with the cypress ; the stream runs through a 
 deep gorge, and a bridge with a pointed arch rises over it quaint 
 and grey ; at this time, before the floods of winter had come 
 down, it was still shallow, and a man was wading it with a 
 fishing-net upon his back. 
 
 Southward, above us, rose the old Etrurian slopes, and the 
 walls and towers of the city that perished for daring to aspire to 
 be rival of the Scarlet Lily. 
 
 "Westward towered the great Salviati pile amongst its vines 
 and olives : and lower down was the smaller, humbler villa set 
 
THE FOUNTAIN OF THE PINE. 271 
 
 in a sea of roses, and girt with willow and lemon and magnolia, 
 whither the great nobles were wont to come down in the hush 
 of the fruit- seen ted nights to their love trysts; directly at our 
 feet was the gloom of the Solitudine ; away there in the far 
 centre, betwixt the lines of hills, Florence was stretched as a 
 white swan may spread her wings to sleep upon her river nest. 
 Yet not so far but what we heard each note of her warning 
 chimes ; for it was the feast-day of the saints, as I have said, 
 and the bells of her countless churches were calling to one 
 another. 
 
 All about us were the vine lands and the olive woods, the 
 rich rank vegetation sown thick with wild anemones. And so 
 we resolved that there the theatre should stand, and then we 
 threw ourselves down amidst the thick grass and the trefoil 
 with the delicate heads of the cyclamens about us in tens of 
 thousands. 
 
 "No theatre was ever better placed," said Pascarfel, lying at 
 my feet amongst the olives. "JSiot even where ankle deep in 
 thyme the Latins laughed over the roaring fun of Plautus. 
 It is a little profane, I fear, to set a playhouse so near the 
 Eadia ? 
 
 " When one thinks how often those great sad eyes of Dante's 
 have gazed through this same mist of olive leaves away to 
 the dome of the Duorno yonder. It is very profane, I am 
 afraid. 
 
 "When one thinks of all those monks, too, of San Marco-in- 
 Urbe, who used to come up here to their mountain Badia to rest 
 their eyes and souls a little out of hearing of the city riot : 
 Savonarola who, in all his life of storm and prayer, and triumph 
 and torment, had time to cherish a damask rose-tree : and that 
 bravest of brave souls, Domenico, whom one loves, I think, 
 almost better than any other saint or hero of them all : Pra 
 Bartolomme'o must have worked here too ; though there is not 
 his mark upon the walls: and the divine Angelico sometimes 
 left the dioi old convent down in Florence to come hither and 
 paint for the Solitudine. 
 
 " They must have been amongst his most blessed days alone 
 here with his pure thoughts and visions ; and the precious 
 colours waiting on his hand ; and about him the solitude of the 
 cloisters, and the country silence of the hill sides. How wise he 
 v/as, how very wise, to put away from him the proffered 
 mitre and the possible tiara 1 
 
 " Yes ; this is every inch of it haunted ground, sacred ground, 
 
27* PASCAR&L. 
 
 though the bullocks tread it with the ploughshare and the 
 reapers strip the vines. 
 
 " Do you ever think of those artist-monks who have strewed 
 Italy with altar-pieces and missal miniatures till there is not 
 any little lonely dusky town of hers that is not rich by art ? Do 
 you often think of them ? I do. 
 
 " There must have been a beauty in their lives a great 
 beauty though they missed of much, of more than they ever 
 knew or dreamed of, let us hope. In visions of the Madonna 
 they grew blind to the meaning of a woman's smile, and illumi- 
 nating the golden olive wreath above the heads of saints they 
 lost the laughter of the children under the homely olive trees 
 without. 
 
 "But they did a noble work in their day; and leisure for 
 meditation is no mean treasure, though the modern world does 
 not number it amongst its joys. 
 
 " One can understand how men born with nervous frames and 
 spiritual fancies into the world when it was one vast battle- 
 ground, where its thrones were won by steel and poison, and its 
 religion enforced by torch and faggot, grew so weary of the 
 never- ending turmoil, and of the riotous life which was always 
 either a pageant or a slaughter-house, that it seemed beautiful 
 to them to withdraw themselves into some peaceful place like 
 this Badia and spend their years in study and in recommendation 
 of their souls to God, with the green and fruitful fields before 
 their cloister windows, and no intruders on the summer stillness 
 as they painted their dreams of a worthier and fairer world 
 except the blue butterflies that strayed in on a sunbeam, or 
 the gold porsellini that hummed at the lilies in the Virgin's 
 chalice." 
 
 His voice dropped in its dreamy melody down the tranquil 
 air joining the hum of the insects, the chimes of the distant 
 bells, and the splash in the shallow Mugnone as the fisher 
 waded over its stones. Stones which were now so dry that a 
 rabbit could have hopped from one to another of them without 
 wetting its white feet ; although in winter time the little moun- 
 tain stream so often rages in tempest and wrecks the home- 
 steads, and deluges stalls and byres. 
 
 He shifted his attitude a little, and his hand played amongst 
 the anemones; the lights and the shadows changed on his 
 face as the boughs above were blown to and fro by the fresh sea 
 wind. 
 
 " I am not sure," he went on, ' that if I had been bora thea 
 
THE FOUNTAIN Of TH PINE. 273 
 
 I should not have been a monkish painter myself; though I 
 Fear I should have worn a cuirass like fighting Fra Benedetto, 
 wid scaled the walls like lihertine Fra Lippi. The Angel Monk 
 rould have found no fraternity, I fear, with me. 
 
 "Will he be angered, think you, that we set the Arte so near 
 fco his altar-piece? and Savonarola, who said to all gaieties 
 Retro Satanas? or Dante, who had small patience with any 
 puppets or pleasure-seekers ? He was so much here, or so they 
 say, when he would withdraw from Guelph and Ghibelline, and 
 be at peace a little while. One can believe he wrote better here, 
 in the quiet of the hills and with sad Fiesole so near, than down 
 in the street by San Martino where it was all so cramped and 
 dark. 
 
 "Yes; lam troubled about that; it is irreverent to set 
 the little lily flag of the Arte flying here. And the villagers of 
 Marco Vecchio are lusty of lung, and will laugh loud and 
 trouble the stillness of the old Solitudine. Yet it must have 
 heard worse in its time : many a shriek as the Salviati steel 
 went through a peasant's breast for daring to breathe against 
 seigneurial rights ; many a crash and clamour of crossed arms 
 down there in the defile as the lances of Hawkwood swept from 
 the mountains ; many a groan stifled there in the waters as the 
 Imperial reiters clattered with devil's joy through the curse 
 and the smoke of the burning hill sides. Do you not see it all ? 
 
 "And Dante, with his crimson lucco trailing, coming up 
 wearily there through Marco Vecchio, and glancing at the dead 
 horses on the bridge, and the empty casques, and the broken 
 lance heads amongst the grass under the vines, and then going 
 on his way into the quiet of the Badia, sick at heart ? 
 
 " Yes : certainly Dante must have seen and heard worse 
 things than Toto's little cap and plume and the villagers' harm- 
 less laughter before our stage to-night. And though I have 
 spoken evil and light things to you, donzella, of players, yet I 
 am not sure that we have not done more good if we could sum 
 it up than half the preachers and the poets. With the poets 
 indeed we have gone hand in hand from all time ; and without 
 us Shakespeare and Eacine, Calderon and Goldoni, would have 
 been dumb to their nations ; and as for the preachers, Savonarola 
 was a good man and true, and Francesco d'Assissi was blessed 
 of all peoples, and the name of San Bruno is great for all time ; 
 but on the whole I doubt if any of them did more to blow a 
 health-giving breeze through the world's lazar houses than have 
 done in another fashion our much slandered 
 
274 PASCAR&L. 
 
 Pascarfcl was silent awhile ; when he spoke it was with some 
 impatience. 
 
 " The great Austrian diamond, the Lemon Stone, was picked 
 up for two soldi in our Mercato Yecchio off a pedlar's stall. If 
 I chanced on such luck as that, donzella ! " 
 
 He stopped abruptly ; his thoughts seemed to me irrelevant 
 and oddly strung together Dante and the ducal diamond ? 
 
 " If you did P " I echoed. " Well ? what if you did ? Tell 
 me?" 
 
 He laughed a little. 
 
 " J^ay, the face of the world would he changed for me. That 
 is all." 
 
 " Changed! And can you want that? Are you not 
 happy?" 
 
 " Six months -and all my life before I was. Yes." 
 
 My eyes filled with a sudden rush of tears that blotted out 
 the sight of Florence. Tor the first time I thought him 
 cruel. 
 
 " That means before you found me! If I torment you, 
 let me go? And yet sometimes you seem so glad to have 
 me ! " 
 
 I was but a child, and I spoke as a child : but the fire that 
 swept over me from the momentarily uplifted eyes of Pascarel, 
 scorched the word to silence on my trembling mouth. 
 
 He caught my hands and kissed them with eager and tremulous 
 tenderness, as iiis habit often was with me. 
 
 " Do not jest about that. You are the life of my life," he 
 murmured, holding my hands against his lips the while. Then 
 he was s'lent too. 
 
 "But""' I whispered him, wistfully, perplexed strangely, and 
 vaguely touched to apprehension "but, if I gave you pleasure 
 indeed, why should you be so much less gay than when you 
 knew me first ? Then, all things contented you ; you laughed, 
 and were never troubled. And now you seem to be forever 
 wistful for some fate you have not ; you, who were used to say 
 that you would hardly change with Boiardo or Bernardo ! " 
 
 His face was turned from me as he listened, and he moved a 
 little restlessly. 
 
 " Cara mia," he said, endeavouring, I thought, to speak more 
 jestingly, with but little success, for he was too frank of nature 
 to counterfeit well the gaiety that in happy moments was so 
 natural to him u oh, cara mia, you have read or I have re- 
 cited to you the Orlando Innainorato many and many a time. 
 
THE FOUNTAIN OF THE PINE. 275 
 
 jjo you not remember how, when Einaldo found himself in 
 Arden, the single garden-lily struck him to earth all Paladin 
 though he was and the blows of the white and red roses left 
 him more dead than alive, and made the sharp edge of his good 
 sword Fusberta of no more strength or worth than a straw ? 
 Every man comes, soon or late, to that unequal flower-combat 
 in the enchanted forest ; and the armour that has been proof 
 against the dragons, and the shield that has been undinted by 
 the giants, are of no avail to help him, once by the Fountain of 
 the Pine." 
 
 My cheeks grew warm and my heart throbbed quickly in 
 wild tumult as I heard ; I said nothing; I felt a sweet dreamy 
 happiness steal over me. 
 
 For was not the garden-lily that struck down Binaldo the 
 weapon of the youth who was called Love ? 
 
 And was not the Fountain of the Pine the one from which 
 Rinaldo, drinking after the wounds of the lily, grew blind to 
 both the worlds of truth and magic, and saw only "la dolce 
 vista del viso sereno " of the Sister of the Lion, of the Rose of 
 Pentecost ? 
 
 If he said so much, why not yet a little more ? the dim 
 wonder of it drifted vaguely over me, but it was only vaguely, 
 for I was happy in the knowledge that I was dear to him, and I 
 was too young to question of what sort or of what strength this 
 half silent and half eloquent love might be. 
 
 "Let us talk of what we would do if we found another 
 Lemon Stone in the market/* he said gaily, with a certain im- 
 patience in his voice. " Ah, you are ashamed of me for han- 
 kering after riches at the last like this ? Well, I am ashamed 
 of myself, but if I found it I doubt if I should keep it. What- 
 ever I own in the evening is always gone before the next day's 
 sunset. But only think how odd it must be, to go through the 
 market poor as Job ; hungry perhaps, and with the hot pave- 
 ment scorching your feet through the holes in your boots ; and 
 then to see a queer-shaped bit of glass, and give a copper -piece 
 for it, because you are sorry for that poor old wretch, whose 
 only stock in trade is that stall of miserable Rola, and then to 
 go home to your garret with it, and be struck by some strange 
 look in it as the sun's rays catch it so, that you take it over the 
 way to your friend at the little pharmacy, who is a man of 
 science in his small way, under his bunches of herbs and his 
 glass retorts : and then all at once to know that by that shining 
 thing no bigger than a walnut, you are become all in a minute 
 
 T 2 
 
276 PASCAR&L. 
 
 the master of a kingdom only think of it all ; I could almost 
 talk myself mad with the very fancy of it. But in those stories 
 of diamonds they never tell us what becomes of that first buyer 
 of it, who has all the real sorcery and music of its history. 
 One would like to know if he ever went back to the market-stall 
 and shared his gains. One would hope he always did ; but 
 human nature being what it is, that is doubtful, very doubtful, 
 I am afraid." 
 
 I listened to him in some wonder ; Pascarel, the man of all 
 the world to whom riches were most indifferent and who had 
 resisted all manner of temptations and refused to turn his genius 
 into gold to dream thus of the treasures locked in a cube of 
 carbon! I struck him on the lips with a scourge of seeding 
 grasses, and scolded him for his new-born avarice. 
 
 " Dear donzella," he made answer in his caressing voice, and 
 with more warmth on the darkness of his face than the sun 
 brought there, " you must have read a thousand and one eastern 
 tales in your time. Did never you read of the shepherd who 
 was quite happy guarding his flocks in the wide Persian plains, 
 and roaming at will with no thought but where to find a fresh 
 watercourse when his beasts were athirst, or a cool grove of palm 
 and date wherein to lay him down when the stars arose quite 
 happy all his years, until one day the king's daughter rode by 
 and her shadow fell betwixt him and the sun ? And he was 
 never again content ; never, never again. Have you not read of 
 him?" 
 
 " But I am not a king's daughter !" I cried, and then was 
 silent ; there on the hillside that was sown with cyclamen, close 
 above the Badia. 
 
 He laughed a little; a low, soft, sad laugh that had more ten- 
 derness in it than tears have : doubtless at the unconscious in- 
 genuousness with which I took to myself the Persian tale. 
 
 He drew me down close to him where he leaned at my feet 
 amongst the grass. 
 
 " You come of great people, I suppose; people who would 
 scarcely care to see you on a strolling player's booth. And you 
 have a higher kingdom than any; the kingdom of innocence ; 
 wherein I have no right to trespass." 
 
 He was silent a long while, whilst the chimes rung slowlp 
 from above, where Fiesole was calling lier scattered flock to tin 
 fold. 
 
 " You have heard of Alaran," he said, abruptly. " Alaran, 
 of Acqui, who bore off the daughter of Emperor Otho, and 
 
THE FOUNTAIN OB THE PINE. 277 
 
 having nothing in the world but two horses, kept one to convey 
 her away with, and sold the other to buy a hut in the forest, 
 where he turned charcoal-burner. Legend says that the imperial 
 Alaxia was happy as the birds in the woods in this humble 
 estate, and that one day great Otho going hunting in all his 
 pomp, after he was summoned to the Roman crown, called for a 
 cup of water to a peasant-girl, and looking down on the face of 
 the woman who brought it, saw the face of Alaxia gladder, and 
 not a whit less proud than it had been in his own palace. What 
 do you say to the story ? do you wonder that the princess waa 
 content with the hut in the oak glades ?" 
 
 His eyes sought mine with eager wistfulness. I laughed a 
 little happily, and thought I knew why she had been so glad 
 there in the charcoal-burner's cabin. 
 
 " No; I do not wonder," I said, softly, more to myself thau 
 him. " Once I should have wondered, but now I under- 
 stand." 
 
 He did not ask me why, but his hand closed fast and warm x>n 
 mine. 
 
 " Ah ! my donzella," he said, softly and very sadly, after a 
 little time. " So you think so you think, being a child. But 
 you might repent. See here, I am content with my life it is 
 good enough in its way, though nameless and fruitless also 
 perhaps. But I cannot disguise from myself that it is not a lit 
 life for you. 
 
 " You are truly a 'donzella;' you have the hands, and the 
 feet, and the voice and the ways, and all the pretty imperious 
 graces that belong to those gentle born. 
 " You were reared hardly? Yes, I know. 
 u But you have the instincts of a baby princess for all 
 that. 
 
 " Could you be content always to go a-foot in all weathers, to 
 sleep in little humble places, to eat homely fare as we do, to live 
 with the people the Italian people, it is true, but still the 
 people only ? 
 
 " And that is why I wish for the Lemon Stone. 
 " Do you understand now ?" 
 
 I half laughed and half cried as I heard him, with the glad 
 golden morning all around, and my hand folded close in his. 
 It was only a sceptre of peacock's plumes that we had. 
 I knew that; but it seemed to me better than the winged 
 sceptre of gold and ivory that symbolled the empire of the 
 world. 
 
*/8 PASCAR&L. 
 
 I tossed a shower of anemone cups above our heads as I -oried 
 to him, 
 
 " I do not understand! I do not want to understand! I 
 shall be content anyhow, anywhere, any time always with 
 you ! >; 
 
 He let go my hands for him almost roughly and rose quickly 
 to his feet, and paced to and fro quickly under the trees silently, 
 with the broad flap of his hat drawn down over his eyes. He 
 brushed and trampled the anemones ruthlessly as he went ; I 
 could not tell what moved him, whether anger or pain. 
 
 I loved him well indeed, loved him with all the ardour and 
 simplicity of a child who had never before had any great affec- 
 tion for any living thing; but I missed that subtle sympathy, 
 that perfect passion and patience which alone enable one heart 
 to feel each pang or each joy that makes another beat. 
 
 His moods were as changeful as the winds, and at times there 
 was a restless impatience and depression on him which was far 
 beyond my understanding. 
 
 I did not comprehend BOW what I had said amiss ; the idea 
 had occurred to me that he was growing tired of me, and it made 
 me sad ; in the early days he had never been capricious thus. 
 I did not go to him therefore, but sat still amongst the grasses 
 and the fruitless boughs of the vines. 
 
 Ah, Dio mio ! if I had gone to him and asked him why he 
 was so grave, he might have spoken who knows ? and the 
 face of the world would have been changed for us. Eor what 
 would I not have pardoned had he asked me ? 
 
 After a little while, he mastered whatever emotion had moved 
 him, and came to me again. He spoke in his old gentle caress- 
 ing way, a little colder, perhaps, if anything, and less gay. 
 
 " Dear donzella, you are very good to care to wander with 
 me," he said softly. " But I fear it is but a sorry mode of 
 existence for you ; and I fear your horoscope contained some- 
 thing better for your future than a strolling player's homeless 
 career. The clear planet that presided over your birth cannot 
 have been the tinsel star on the painted foreheads of the Pan- 
 tomimi. Eut, altro ! we have had enough, and too much, of 
 such serious chatter. Some day we must talk seriously indeed, 
 and I must but never mind now. It is All Saints' Day, and, 
 perhaps the last day of summer. There was frost at sunrise. 
 Let us be happy while we can, carina. Such a morning as this/' 
 he said, after a pause, laughing himself back into that gaiety of 
 soul which lived side by side in his nature with a certain pas- 
 
TH& FOUNTAIN OF THE PINE. 279 
 
 Biofi&t<5 and poetic sadness : " and all this red gold of autumn 
 ours, and a whole long sunny day in which to wander as we like, 
 it is infamous to be melancholy, or to be athirst for lemon stones, 
 or for anything more than the good that we have got. Lean 
 backward to be in the shade of that tree ; and let your hand lie 
 quiet in mine so ; and now I will tell you a story." 
 
 I loved his stones ; I had the insatiable delight in them of a 
 young mind to which romances were unknown ; and his skill in 
 telling them was marvellous. 
 
 The heroical absurdities of the Morgante Maggiore, and the 
 Furioso, the grotesque fairyland, and miraculous adventures of 
 Easile ; the feuds and love-tales of the populace, as Cortese sang 
 them fresh from the market-place of Masaniello ; the narratives 
 of Boccaccio; the jests of Eerni; the comedies of Goldoni all 
 these and their like were stripped of all coarseness and harmful- 
 ness which they might possess, and served to me decorated by 
 all the grace and playfulness of his own fancy added to them. 
 
 I was readily consoled : when he was gay and good to me, no 
 shadows had power to rest on me. 
 
 No lemon stone could have added anything to my perfect 
 peace and gladness as I lay there under the golden-fruited pear- 
 tree amongst the cyclamens, with my hand in his, listening to 
 the sweet, sonorous cadence of his voice, while the Lily of 
 Florence floated on the flag of the wooden theatre, and the 
 robins chirped amongst the many-coloured autumn blossoms, and 
 the sun was high, and the radiance was cloudless above the 
 Solitudine. 
 
 I was a child ; I needed nothing more than the joy of the 
 moment; and whatever darkness he might see in the future it 
 was all light to me ; for did it not lie in the sweet sunshine of 
 his smile ? 
 
 It was All Saints' Day ; we could hear the bells ringing in the 
 city all the morning long ; we leaned there on the hillside, and 
 took no thought for the morrow the morrow that was the Feast 
 of the Dead. 
 
280 PASCAR&L: 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE NIGHT OP ALL SAINTS. 
 
 THAT evening he did not play at his Artc, and we strolled 
 down the hillside into Florence as the sun set. 
 
 Bruno tta elected to stay "behind ; she had some shirts to iron, 
 as she said, and wished to sup afterwards with a blacksmith's 
 wife in Marco Vecchio. Coco was missing when we left the 
 hills, and little Tocco alone ran beside us, throwing his ruzzola 
 as gleefully as though he had been six years instead of sixteen. 
 
 It was a beautiful warm red and gold evening, promising to 
 be stormy on the morrow, but splendid then, as the sun set, and 
 full of odour from the full wine-presses where they stood beneath 
 the trees, and the glow of roses that burned over every villa wall. 
 
 "We went into the city on the caretta of a contadino piled with 
 fresh hay ; for we cut hay all the year round in Italy. 
 
 The old mule stumbled down the stony ways ; I sat amidst 
 the flower-sown grasses, and drew the dead daisies in it through 
 my fingers; Pascarel walked beside me; the boy ran on before; 
 the contadino told us stories of his crops and vines, and of the 
 prices he had made by his wife's home-woven linen ; sometimes 
 -ye had to draw up against the wall and wait to let a waggon- 
 ioad of grapes go by ; all along the road the people were sitting 
 out at their doors. 
 
 It had been a good vintage time, and all the world was con- 
 tent ; at the gates even the soldiers who took the custom dues 
 rere in good humour, laughing over flasks of new red wine. 
 
 The city was all life and light. It was a beloved feast of the 
 people, and the streets were foil. 
 
 All the bells were pealing; there was music everywhere. 
 Women leaned from the casements with roses in their hands. 
 Over all the place there was a curious dreamy golden hue, 
 deepened here and there into deep bronze shadows, at times 
 broken by a flush of scarlet, as a wood fire glowed through an 
 open doorway, at times paled into a pearly coolness when the 
 last daylight gleamed upon the marble of a statue or a tomb. 
 
 The Florentines were all out, flocking to the churches, to the 
 theatres, to the bands of music, to the coffee houses, playing 
 
THE NIGHT OF ALL SAINTS. 281 
 
 dominoes in the street, chaunting praises at the vespers, wan- 
 dering by the river side, or gambling at morra at the corners of 
 the streets. 
 
 "We ate black figs and drank black coffee hard by the old 
 palace of the Strozzi, with the cornice of Cronaca still catching 
 the sunrays, whilst the walls below were black as night, and 
 the passers-by were illnmined by lantern and lamplight shed 
 from doorway and casement, and little bright specks of flame 
 like glowworms sparkled as the stands of the chesnut sellers 
 wandered from place to place, and the vendors of amaretti and 
 brigidini shouted from corner to corner. 
 
 Then having long before lost little Toccb, where some street- 
 tombola for toys and fruits had attracted him, we too wandered 
 away, and strayed with others up the stairs of the little Logge 
 theatre, above the old mediaeval granary, and laughed our hearts 
 out over the merry melodies of Don Bucefalo, and then came out 
 again into the streets into the starlight. 
 
 " To-morrow will be the Feast of the Dead," said Pascarel, 
 his voice droopiug softly, as we went through the Street of the 
 Dead. " There will be only the sound of the Miserere all over 
 Florence to-morrow. 
 
 " Well, no city has so true a cause to pray for her dead, for 
 none other has dead so great. 
 
 " Will any pray for Ginevra, I wonder ? I think you will, 
 gioja mia. Do you not see her, on just such a night as this, 
 flying down this very place ? 
 
 " There is no story so perfect as the Ginevra tale. 
 
 " The dreadful loneliness of the great dome as she awoke be- 
 neath it; the vast haunted stillness, with here and there the 
 whiteness of a moonbeam; these quiet gloomy streets afc mid- 
 night ; the black shadows ; these yawning archways, like the 
 gates of tombs; the trembling, hunted, heart-sick thing, with 
 her bare feet wounded on the stones, and the grave-clothes falling 
 from her shivering limbs ; everywhere denial, incredulity, horror, 
 superstition ; everywhere the closed wicket and the cry of terror 
 as at some unearthly apparition. 
 
 " Then at last the lover's threshold, the timid summons of 
 despair, the open door, the instant welcome ; not a doubt, not a 
 question, not a fear "What matter whether living or dead, of 
 heaven or of hell ? 
 
 " What matter whence she came ? 
 
 " What matter what she brought ? 
 
 " Welcome, thrice welcome, as flowers in the May time. 
 
*82 PASCAR&L. 
 
 " Welcome and precious since the face was hers/ 99 
 
 His voice had a thrill of passion in it that seemed upon my 
 ear, in the silence of the deserted street, sweet as the song of 
 nightingales in the ilex forests in the nights of Midsummer, 3 
 felt without well knowing what I felt that it was not o* 
 Ginevra only he was thinking. 
 
 " And it was all true too, here in this Via della Morte," he 
 said, very softly and sadly, after awhile, drawing me closer 
 against him as we went under the solemn shadow of the leaning 
 walls ; and he uncovered his head reverently in the moonlight, 
 as though there had passed hy him all those dead, for whom his 
 .Florence on the morrow would beseech her God. 
 
 We went on in silence until we had passed through the Gate 
 of San Gallo to go homewards towards the hills. 
 
 " That cost us in all just four soldi," laughed Pascarel, as the 
 city harriers closed behind us. " Figs and coffee and music, 
 and all for the price a rich man gives for one cigar, or one peach, 
 away in Paris. What do we want with a Lemon Stone ? Our 
 coffee would be in eggshell china, to be sure, and we should 
 have red velvet arm chairs at the Pergola ; but should we be 
 any the happier really? tell me, donzella, should we ?" 
 
 " How could we be any happier ?" I answered him dreamily. 
 
 It had only cost four soldi, that sweet starlight evening, 
 amongst the laughter of the people and the ringing cadence of 
 the Bucefalo ; but what of that ? 
 
 The gladness was with us that never comes twice in a lifetime, 
 and our hearts had an echo for the music that made it sweet as 
 the voices of angels. 
 
 He did not answer. 
 
 As I glanced at his face, there was a certain vague disquietude 
 upon it that stole there all suddenly, while his eyes beamed on 
 mine in the shadows, with the look that had made silence fall 
 between us that day beside the Eio Gonfio. 
 
 " Ah, carina, you do not know, you do not know," he mur- 
 mured softly. 
 
 What was it that I did not know ? That look in his eyes 
 made my heart beat in a strange tumult, and I did not ask him. 
 
 We went in silence up the hilly road, with the stars shining 
 overhead. He passed his arm around me to aid me in the toil- 
 some way, and drew my hand in his. 
 
 No palace floor strewn with roses was ever softer to the san- 
 dalled feet of an eastern queen than seemed that Econy dreary 
 way to me. 
 
THE NIGHT OF ALL SAINTS. 283 
 
 The road was quite deserted at that hour. The moonrays 
 made it white and cairn. 
 
 The dust of it was changed to silver, and its jagged walla 
 seemed like ivory where the light touched them, and like mala- 
 chite and porphyry where the green ivy and the golden vine 
 leaves crossed each other. 
 
 From the winepresses full of juice of the grapes there came 
 strong fruit! iko odours. 
 
 In the stillness we could hear the goats browsing off the grass 
 under the stripped vines. There were sweet scents of roses, of 
 pasture, of grazing cattle, as we passed the villa gates. Away 
 in the city below there was a sound of men singing to the chords 
 of a lute. Above, against the lustre of the skies, rose the white 
 outlines of sad Fiesole. 
 
 We paused a moment to rest within the garden walls of a 
 villino. Cypresses were swaying plumelike in the wind ; wild 
 roses were blowing, half closed, with the dews shut in their 
 hearts ; a stream of water dropped slowly into a marble shell ; 
 clusters of yellow grapes hung about a broken statue of dead 
 Hyacinthus. 
 
 We stood there close together, with the stars above us, and on 
 the cool night air the scent of the crushed grapes and fallen 
 leaves. 
 
 In the soft gloom, his eyes burned into mine; his arms drew 
 me closer ; his lips touched my hands, my cheeks, my throat. 
 
 Are there any who have not known these hours ? they have 
 heard but half the language, have seen but half the sun. 
 
 We spoke but little. What need were there for words ? 
 
 We went slowly, after awhile, homeward up the road, which 
 at another time would have seemed steep and dreary enough, but 
 to me was beautiful as the earth can only be once in the length 
 of any life. 
 
 There were no lights in Marco Vecchio, nor in the little 
 humble place where we had made our dwelling. There was 
 only the moonlight glistening on the convent walls above upon 
 the heights, and a falling star that ran swift and bright until it 
 dropped in the sea of the olive woods. 
 
 I went up to my little bare chamber, where the brick floor 
 was white from the rays of the moon. 
 
 He stayed without, walking to and fro beneath the bronzed 
 leaves of the walnuts. 
 
 I was sleepless and full of those dreams born of memory, which 
 are svs ?eter than all the dreams of fancy. 
 
284 PASCAR&L. 
 
 The small square casement of my chamber was hung round 
 with thick acanthus coils ; beyond them the stars of Orion 
 gleamed in the deep blue of the skies. 
 
 All the hillside sloped away dimly towards Florence, pale 
 under the moon, and only black where the cypress grew. The 
 worn marbles and dull frescoes of tho old historic villas gleamed 
 like silver, and below in the valley the lights of the city glowed 
 as a cluster of lucciole glows in the harvest amidst the blowing 
 maize. 
 
 The roof of the house was low; the upper chambers were 
 underneath the eaves, some broken blocks of macigno, grown 
 over by a fig-tree, were beneath my window. He, looking up- 
 ward, saw me leaning there. 
 
 He paused a moment ; then, lithe as a deer, swung himself bj 
 the boughs of the fig until he could touch me where he stood. 
 
 The great dark leaves were all round him ; the moonlight was 
 upon his face. He drew my hands about his neck, and murmured 
 the sweetest words of passion that lie in the tongue of Tasso, of 
 Romeo, of Francesca. 
 
 The perfect night was all around us. "We were alone beneath 
 the throbbing stars, amidst the burning roses. 
 
 There, in the old Badia, men, dreaming of heaven, had missed 
 the heaven that we entered by a touch, a look, a breath. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 SUNRISE. 
 
 I LAY awake ior very happiness that night, and rose so soon 
 as the sun came over the hills and through the broad screen of 
 the fig foliage. 
 
 It was a beautiful wet, cool dewy world into which I ran 
 joyous and bare-headed from out the little lowly capanna on to 
 the misty side of the hills. 
 
 I was a child in my joy : I was full of the present ; I had no 
 thought beyond ; I reasoned on nothing ; I reflected on nothing 5 
 I only wanted to hear him say once more he loved me. 
 
 Life was not more real to me than if we had been genii', like 
 the Gwyn Araun he envied ; it was a wonderful perfect flower- 
 
SJNRISR. 285 
 
 like tiling that I held in eagerness and ecstacy, douh ting not that 
 it came from God. 
 
 I ran into the sweet, cold, rosy, misty morning, with the 
 hronze of the reddened vine leaves about my feet, and looked up 
 at the blue sky and laughed a little gladly and low, and then 
 felt my eyes fill with delicious tears, and stood still, wondering 
 if ever any creature had been so blessed as I. 
 
 About me was all the gold and crimson of the autumn foliage ; 
 the whole hill-side seemed to burn with it up to the brown wall? 
 of the old Badia; but away in the valley there was a dense white 
 fog in which Florence was hidden from sight ; even the golden 
 cross of her cathedral was no longer visible. 
 
 I dropped on to a stone bench in the olive orchard of the 
 cottage, and sat and dreamed, and listened for the footfall of 
 Pascarel. Eut all was quite silent round me. 
 
 My heart fell a little. I had thought that he would have 
 been watching as eagerly for the dawn as I was. 
 
 After a while bells began to ring in the city under the pale 
 shadows of the fog. I could hear them where I sat on the hill- 
 side ; but they sounded muffled and sad. 
 
 A. woman came through the olives to cross the bridge of San 
 Marco. She passed me closely ; she was weeping quietly. 
 
 I looked at her in a sort of wonder ; in this world my 
 beautiful, wonderful fairy world how was any sorrow possible ? 
 
 " I go to pray for my lost children," she said, gently, in 
 answer to the look upon my face. " It is the Feast of the Dead. 
 May you never know grief, my pretty signorina." 
 
 She went on under the olives. I shivered a little where I sat, 
 with the red vine coils bright about my feet : the mist dense as 
 clouds in the valley. 
 
 Florence was veiled in her white shroud ; she was mourning 
 her dead. 
 
 I had forgotten what the day was. 
 
 I gave a swift thought to the lonely nameless graves in cold 
 Verona. 
 
 What had happened ? Nothing. 
 
 And yet in the stead of my perfect joy there stole on me & 
 vague fear- 
 
286 PASCAREL. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 SUNSET. 
 
 ALL was quite still on the hill-side. 
 
 A few peasants went through the trees to matins in the old 
 monastery church. 
 
 The bells rang on wearily and mournfully, echoing through 
 the fog. 
 
 Little Toccb ran down to me with a ruzzola in his hand. 
 
 " He went into the town before the sun was up ; he left me 
 this for you." 
 
 On it Pascarel had written, " I must go into Florence, but will 
 be back ere sunset." 
 
 A great darkness fell on me. The bells seemed to be wailing 
 for the dead. 
 
 It was only a day, indeed; but then I had dreamed such 
 perfect dreams of this single little day amongst the red autumn 
 leaves, hearing of his love forever and forever and forever, and 
 yet never enough. Alone with him on these haunted sacred 
 bills. 
 
 A. lattice was thrown sharply open ; a shrill voice called 
 1 He is gone into the town, and never let me know ; and I 
 wink coffee, and pins, and a shoestring, and the saints know what 
 not f and nothing is to be had in this beastly place, be it ever so. 
 Toivo, run in the village and see if you can buy aught worth the 
 eating. HE would never cared if he lived on acorns ! " 
 
 It was Bruno tta making her daily lamentation. 
 
 I rose, and wandered away out of hearing ; that little sharp 
 voluble voice jarred upon me. 
 
 Little Tocco passed ine, running with a few scudi to do her 
 errand. 
 
 I stayed him a moment on the hill. 
 
 " Do you know why he is gone? " I asked him, wistfully, 
 
 Tocco shook his curly head. 
 
 " Not I. But I think at least the cowherd said so that he 
 seemed troubled as he left the house at day-dawn. Perhaps he 
 is gone to pray for someone dead. It is the day of the dead, you 
 know. But I must make haste, signorina, or Brundtta will box 
 my ears, surely." 
 
SUNSET. 287 
 
 The lad flew down the slope and across the bridge to the village. 
 I strayed away amongst the olives, choosing hunger in that peace 
 and stillness rather than encounter the perpetually ringing chimes 
 of Erunotta's chatter. 
 
 Under the wall of the Yilla of Mario a dairywoman gave me a 
 draught of milk and a crust, and I wandered by myself all the 
 morning, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming always of him. Of him 
 alone. 
 
 Had he gone to pray for any dead that he loved ? 
 
 My heart for a moment was heavy at the thought. 1 was 
 jealous even of a memory that might be dear to him ; but not for 
 very long. He loved me now. 
 
 What matter the rest ? 
 
 So many hands had touched the mandoline yes, no doubt. 
 Eut I had a sweet, vague suro instinct that one chord had been 
 reached by me alone. 
 
 When the day had passed the meridian, all my spirits rose 
 again. He had said that he would be back before sunset. I 
 might hope for him every moment. 
 
 I returned through the fields and orchards lingeringly and 
 happily ; the mists had all lifted by noon. 
 
 It was another clear summer-like day. The golden cross of 
 the duoroo glittered in the hollow where the city lay. 
 
 In the village, the people, having prayed for their dead, were 
 out in their holiday gear ; they were talking cheerfully of the 
 abundant vintage, and some of them were dancing under the red 
 vine foliage to the sound of a flute and a fiddle. 
 
 I saw, afar off, Erunotta, brave in a scarlet kirtle and white 
 bodice, with the amber beads of St. John's Day round her throat, 
 merrily footing the salterrello with a brawny blacksmith of San 
 Marco. Her white teeth shone, her little rosy face laughed, her 
 small plump feet twinkled ceaselessly, the sunshine fell about 
 her, the gold and bronze of the dying vine leaves hung above her 
 head ; she was as happy as a grillo in the grasses. 
 
 I went into the garden of the capanna we had lodged at and 
 sat down in a green nook of it, whence I could see the bridge 
 and the white road beyond as it shelved down towards Florence. 
 
 I lost sight of the dancers under the vines, but I could watch 
 him come up from the city, or fly to meet him if no one looked. 
 
 The little garden was gay with all kinds of autumn flowers : 
 for the daughter of the house was one of the flowersellers of 
 Florence. There were great bands of scarlet salvia blossoming, 
 find many yellow heads of gourds and pumpkins. 
 
288 PASCAR&L. 
 
 A pergola stretched from the threshold to the garden wicket ; 
 grapes still hung on it, and the leafage was a brilliant tangle of 
 red and green and gold. I sat on a bench in one corner of this, 
 whence I could see the shallow sunlit river ; children were 
 wading in it with many joyous cries, and a grey mule was drink- 
 ing at the ford. 
 
 I was shut in by the green leaves. 
 
 !N"ow and then a great lustrous bee or moth went humming 
 through the bean blossoms. I could see through the vine foliage 
 the white wall of the house and the open window of the kitchen ; 
 the padrona went to and fro past the window in a white coif and 
 a red petticoat, with copper vessels in her hands. 
 
 Lazily, every now and then, I lifted my arm over my head, 
 and drew down one of the grapes off the clusters that hung above 
 there. A grey cat was walking slowly through the maze of the 
 pumpkins on the ground. Beyond the garden walls there were 
 the fields and the vineyards, and beyond all these again, Fiesole 
 and the mountains. 
 
 Ave Maria bells were ringing dreamily down in the valdarno. 
 
 It was five of the clock in the afternoon ; there was no light 
 on the sun-dial on the wall, but a tawny glow like molten gold 
 was shed over everything from the western skies above the 
 hills. 
 
 The rabbits were scudding with bustle and glee amongst the 
 cabbages. Tar away at the other end of the garden two little 
 children were gathering great yellow pears off the side of a 
 shed, eating and laughing as they filled the rush baskets with 
 the fruit. 
 
 A white pigeon spread silver wings against the deep cloudless 
 blue of the sky. The houseleek on the red sloping roof turned 
 to vivid gold. The woman of the house hummed to herself 
 fragments of song as she went to and fro past her open window; 
 and I could hear the merry music of the flute where the villagers 
 were still dancing. 
 
 Why do I think of all these things ? I do not know : only 
 the leaves and the flowers, and the beasts and the unconscious 
 people that have all been about one in any great misery seem 
 to become a portion of it, and burn themselves into one's brain 
 forever. 
 
 The sadness of the daybreak had passed away from me with 
 the vanished mists. My future seemed to glow before me 
 golden, beautiful, indistinct, sacred, as the cross of the cathedral 
 glowed down in the valley. 
 
SUNSET. 28q 
 
 I sat and dreamed over the tender music of his voice, which 
 could lend to the simplest phrase or commonest greeting all the 
 eloquence of a caress. 
 
 For the last time in my life I was happy with that perfect 
 happiness only possible in extreme youth, which is only half 
 conscious of itself, and does not awaken to question either its 
 wisdom or its hereafter. 
 
 After a while there was a rustle and a step, and Bruno tta, hot 
 and tired, pushed her way through the leaves. 
 
 She stopped short as she saw me. 
 
 "I thought you were on the hills, signorina," she said 
 sullenly, and stood posed on one foot, like a little sulky bird, a&, 
 her habit was when not quite at her ease. 
 
 I looked up and smiled on her. I loved every living thing 
 that day, and though she had been capricious and out of temper 
 with me recently, I had never forgotten all the goodness she had 
 shown me in the early days of my wanderings with the Arte. 
 
 " Have you had a good dance, Bruno tta ? " I asked her. " I 
 saw you in the village with that big black Domenico." 
 
 " There is no harm in stretching one's limbs awhile," said 
 Bruno tta, sulkily, as though I had accused her of some fault. " I 
 went to mass in the morning, of course. Of course one always 
 prays for the dead. They never haunt you if you do. Though, 
 for the matter of that, I knew a good soul in Casentino who paid 
 a dozen masses every Quaresima to keep her husband quiet in 
 his grave, and it was all not one bit of use ; he was a pedlar, 
 and was thought murdered for good and all by brigands, but just 
 when she was married to a rich poulterer, and comfortable, he 
 came to life again, and all the church money was wasted that she 
 had paid for six years and more ; if that was not enough to try 
 a woman ! still, I always say prayers for them, for they can do 
 one a great deal of hurt if they like. And I am always afraid my 
 old father may come any night, for there was a matter of fifteen 
 soldi for goat's milk that we quarrelled about the very day he 
 fell down in a fit ; and his very last words were, ' If I get out 
 of my grave, I will have those soldi, you wicked wench.' He 
 said that even with I/ Olio Santo upon him." 
 
 And Brunotta paused, overcome with her recollections, look- 
 ing vaguely and still sulkily at me, as she rested one foot on the 
 other. 
 
 I listened with a little wonder ; it was the first time she had 
 ever spoken of her father, though she had often told me of the 
 cruelties of her foster-mother in Casentino; and this dying 
 
 u 
 
$90 PASCAR&L. 
 
 thought of the soldi seemed to me wholly unlike the gay, 
 ironical, humorous, and whimsically proud man whom Pascare] 
 had so often described to me as the graver of the prince's coronet 
 upon the old tin tinker's pot. 
 
 Moreover, if Pascarel had been fifteen when his father had 
 died, how could Brunotta, who was so many many years younger 
 than he, remember the dead man at all ? 
 
 "You mean your foster-mother's husband?" I said, looking 
 away down the white road and thinking little of her, only eagerly 
 watching for the shadow so familiar and so dear to me to fall 
 across the sunny bridge. 
 
 " I mean my father," said Brunotta, stubbornly, and was 
 silent, with the guilty, conscious, cunning look upon her face 
 that she had worn on the day of the San Giovanni. 
 
 I did not think much of her. 
 
 My eyes went across the bridge to that little white glimpse of 
 road on which with every second I hoped to see the elastic 
 slender figure, the white dress, the dark oval face, like an old 
 picture, that I had so often watched for in such happy hours, 
 but never watched for with such a beating, eager, tremulous 
 heart as now. 
 
 When at last I looked at her she was still in the same position, 
 looking like an angered chidden child, but with a certain appre- 
 hensive cunning on her ruddy face. 
 
 " Why, Brunotta, how you stare at me ! " I cried, growing a 
 little tired of her gaze. "Is there anything strange m me to- 
 day?" 
 
 In answer, her lip fell, her plump shoulders heaved, and she 
 began to sob aloud. 
 
 My heart stood still with terror. My fancy flew to every kind 
 of evil that might have befallen him. 
 
 "What is it?" I cried, breathless with fear. "Any acci- 
 dent any sorrow to him? " 
 
 Brun6tta dropped at my feet in the dust, a little ruffled heap, 
 like a gay-plumaged bird that is beaten down by the rain. 
 
 " He is well enough ! Or I daresay he is," she muttered, 
 sitting there upon the sand. 
 
 She caught hold of my skirts with both hands, and hid her 
 face, and began to sob aloud. 
 
 " No, no, he is well enough. It is you, signorina. Will you 
 go away, and let us be happy once more ? We were so happy 
 before you came. I have been telling him so, ever so many days 
 past, but it is all no use. You have bewitched him, and he cares 
 
SUNSET. 291 
 
 nothing for me. Will you be generous and go away ? You are 
 so handsome, and men care so much for you. It will be sure to 
 be well with you anywhere." 
 
 "Go away!" I echoed, stupidly. I thought I could not 
 fairly be awake. 
 
 " I was so sorry for you in the wood that day/' she went on, 
 pushing my skirts aside, and speaking in petulant passion, while 
 her round black eyes swam in tears. "Ah, Holy Gesu I It is 
 always one's good deeds *hat turn round and sting us like wasps. 
 It is very hard to do right in this world. It costs one so much. 
 And I was fond of you, donzella ; oh yes ! I am fond of you still, 
 if only you will go right away. I will pray for you night and 
 morning to our own black Madonna of Impruneta, and she will 
 look after you, and see you want for nothing. I am sure she will 
 if I ask her; for I never miss mass on her feasts not once; 
 and whenever I have owed her a candle for any good that she 
 did me I always have paid it, in the very finest wax, too. She 
 will care for you, that I am sure ; and, besides, what will you 
 want for, anywhere ? You can do as you will with men. There 
 is no strength like that strength. It comes to one here and there, 
 in tens of millions, they say ; and you have it. I do not grudge 
 you it. Oh no. I would not have you think that " 
 
 "Think what?" I cried to her, still amazed and bewildered, 
 and not dreaming the truth. 
 
 " That I am jealous of you, Oh no, I am not jealous. But 
 if you would just go away. "We were so well till you came. 
 That first night he was wise and I the fool. He said to me, 
 ' Why bind up with our hedgerow flowers this beautiful stray 
 hothouse rose ? ' And I, like a fool, only laughed at him, and 
 paw no harm. Though, of course, I might have known full well 
 what the end would be. He will kill me, I daresay, for speak- 
 ing to you. So he must. I would rather die." 
 
 I rose and drew away the hem of my dress with which her 
 hands were nervously playing. I looked down on her in in- 
 credulous amaze. 
 
 " Are you mad, Brunotta ? "What is it you mean ? How can 
 I hurt you i Cannot you speak simply and straightly, and say 
 what it is that you. want?" 
 
 She cast a scared glance down the long green aisle of the 
 pergola to make herself sure she was not overheard : there was 
 only at the farther end the white wall of the house and the 
 open casement, with the woman still moving to and fro and still 
 Dinging, 
 
 u 2 
 
292 PASCAR&L. 
 
 "I mean you to go away," she muttered, under her breath, 
 with a certain sound almost of fierceness in her voice. " To 
 leave him. Cannot you understand ? " 
 
 " !N"o, I do not understand, Why should you want me away ? 
 You were the first who asked me to stay. You mean something 
 more, Brunotta. Speak out " 
 
 " I know I was the first to ask you to wait with us," she 
 cried, with a great sob, half of pain, half of passion. " Have I 
 not said it is always what we do best that most hurts us ? It is 
 always so. I speak as plainly as I can. I tell you to go. 
 
 " He will kill me, no doubt; so he mast. From the very first 
 you bewitched him. 
 
 " I might have known a man as poor as Pascarel does not give 
 away twelve gold florins, making believe they were got back from 
 a thief, without love having something to say in it. He worked 
 very hard to make up those florins ; he did all kinds of coopers 1 
 and coppersmiths' work ever so long, and you never knew. 
 
 " You were so glad to get back your florins you believed any 
 follies he told you. 
 
 " He has loved you from the first, that I am sure. That day 
 when he half killed the Sicilian it was out of rage for you, not 
 for me. And only look at him now ! 
 
 " Before he saw you, there was not such a gay-hearted, mis- 
 chief-loving, careless creature in all the country. He loved his 
 wine, and his wit, and his comrades, and his nonsense, and he 
 had kisses and jests for every woman he met. I was never 
 jealous of them. 
 
 " And now not once in ten times will he sup with the men 
 when they ask him : as for the women, he never looks at one ; 
 and when he is alone I mean when you are not there he just 
 sits dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, and never a word to throw at 
 a dog!" 
 
 She paused, breathless from the rapidity and vehemence of her 
 words, and I stood as breathless before her. My face burned ; 
 my heart beat ; my brain whirled. All wonder, all offence, all 
 amazement, were drowned in me under the flood of my own 
 delicious happiness he loved me. 
 
 I did not think to answer her. I was thinking only of that 
 perfect sympathy, this unutterable gladness, which bound my 
 life to his with silver cords. 
 
 A strolling player ! I could have laughed aloud in delicious 
 mockery of my old dead pride. A tinker's son ! "What matter ? 
 I" cried in my heart ; I knew him a king amongst men. 
 
SUNSET. 293 
 
 The little shrill, petulant voice of Erunotta came strangely on 
 my ears, as though from far, very far away, 
 
 " He will kill me if ever he know ! " she was crying. " For 
 he said to me that first night when we had found you in the wood, 
 'Not a word, Erunotta, never a word as you value my love and 
 your life.' And I promised him ; nay, I swore by all the saints 
 that I would never tell. 
 
 "No doubt they will burn me below, some time, for that; 
 though if they put women in hell for just breaking their word, I 
 cannot think how they find room in the place. 
 
 " It is bad to break a promise, I know. Eut I have begged 
 Pascarel to send you away from us, and he will not. And so at 
 last I must speak, and I will. It is three years ago last San 
 Giovanni's day since he said to me, * Piccinina, will you wander 
 with me ? ' 
 
 " WG were at the fireworks on the Carraia bridge, you know, 
 and I was frightened and screamed because a rocket fell near me ; 
 and he lifted me down into a boat he had got on the river; and 
 there were young men with him, and coloured Ian thorns, and 
 wines and sweetmeats, and they sang ; and it was all so merry 
 and good, that when he asked me I thought the life would be 
 one big feast day always. 
 
 "And I was so sick of the casentino, and the goats and the 
 strawplaiting ; and one had to tell a thousand lies to get a scudo 
 for oneself, the old people were so sharp and so mean ; and then 
 all one's savings went in absolution, of course ; and such a fuss 
 to get leave to go off to a fair as never was, and such a rage if a 
 youngster kissed one ! I remember being beaten black and blue 
 by the old woman after this very fair up here at Fiesole because 
 I went to have my fortune told at the Euda, and there was a 
 brave-looking boy from Prato who was full of money, and " 
 
 She stopped and coloured all over to the brown rings of her 
 pretty hair, and glanced at me with cunning eyes, whilst I 
 listened, comprehending nothing that she said, and waiting in 
 astonished silence to hear the purport of her words. 
 
 ' So you see, signorina," she went on, breathlessly, " I thought 
 to myself, when Pascarel in his boat said to me, half joking, 
 ' Pretty bird, will you fly away with us ? ' I thought to myself 
 I would jump at it, and get away once and for all from the goats 
 and the plaiting; and then, you know, Pascarel looks like a 
 marquis ; and I knew I should dance as much as ever I liked ; 
 and who could tell that he had it in him to be such a tyrant, and 
 would make such a fuss about taking a trinket ? 
 
294 PASCAR&L. 
 
 " Ever since that Giovanni's night I have been true to him, 
 quite true to him, that I vow ; and if I have had a neckkerchief 
 here and an earring there from a man or two, what does it 
 signify ? 
 
 " I have never given anything back for it, that I swear by all 
 the saints scarce a fair word even, for Pascarel is so fierce. 
 And how can one live in a playhouse as if one were in a convent ? 
 It is ridiculous to say such things ; and if one may not laugh and 
 gossip, whatever is life worth having ? 
 
 " And I have put up with all that, though at my age one does 
 not like to be cooped up like an abbess ; and I have borne with 
 his temper and it can be a horrid one, as you might see that 
 day with poor Hosello Brun and I have always had a care that 
 he should have a good supper, though for himself he never 
 knows whether he is eating a capon or a crow. 
 
 " And then all in a minute it is the donzella this, the donzella 
 that, and one is set aside in everything a stranger, who has not 
 even so much as a silver bodkin for her hair that she can call 
 her own. 
 
 "But if you will go away it will be well again. 
 
 " It is your face bewitches him ; and that pretty, proud, saucy 
 way you have with you. But if you will go away he will think 
 nothing about you in a month. He forgets very soon, does 
 Pascarel." 
 
 I heard her in perfect bewilderment, my thoughts too astray in 
 their own sweet confusion for me to be able fairly to seize the 
 sense of her words. 
 
 " Eut, Bruno tta, I cannot understand/ ' I murmured. " Why 
 should you not have come with your brother when you found 
 him on Giovanni's night? and why should I be asked to go 
 away now that he " 
 
 I stopped abruptly. My face burned, and I turned a little 
 away from her. I remembered that the affection between us 
 was his secret, and must not be given to the winds by me. 
 
 Erunotta's hands clutched nervously at the scarlet fringes of 
 her dancing skirt ; her face paled a little under its ruddy brown ; 
 her eyes glanced slyly through the leaves ; she strained her throat 
 to see that there was no hearer in the little garden or at the 
 wicket in the acacia hedge ; then she dropped her head sullenly, 
 and, with a little cunning laugh, like a child when it has broken 
 gome precious toy, muttered beneath her breath 
 
 " Signorina, he is not my brother ! " 
 
 " Not your brother ?" I echoed, vaguely. 
 
SUNSET. 295 
 
 Her meaning did not dawn on me. I had never been deceived 
 by any creature ; so far as I knew, no one had ever told me an 
 untruth ; to give and receive good faith had always seemed to me 
 a law of life as natural as to draw the breath. 
 
 And of any evil I had but the most shadowy conception. 
 There were women in the world who were wicked ; so much I 
 knew ; but of what shape or meaning their wickedness took T 
 had but the vaguest imagining. 
 
 " No ! Nobody but a baby like you would ever have believed 
 that folly," said Brunotta, still crouched at my feet in the dust, 
 her fingers plucking at her scarlet fringe. "How you should 
 ever have believed it I cannot think. There have been thou- 
 sands and thousands of things that ought to have told you if you 
 had not been as blind as an owl in the daylight. But if you will 
 just go away, it will be as if it never had been. You must never 
 say that I told you ; he would murder me. Go away quietly. 
 You will come to no harm. You have a face that is your friend 
 anywhere. And I will pray to our Lady for you, I will, honestly, 
 and she will have a care of you. Whenever I have promised her 
 anything I have always paid it faithfully. "We fell in with a 
 horrible storm off Catania once, and I vowed her three pounds of 
 candles if we got out of it safe, and I bought them in the very 
 finest wax and offered them up at San Prediano the moment I 
 set foot in Florence " 
 
 " Not your brother ?" I echoed, dreamily watching the grey 
 cat straying amongst the pumpkins. " You mean you were only 
 his foster-sister. I am not astonished at that." 
 
 " He is no brother of mine at all," she retorted, sullenly. " I 
 tell you he is no kith nor kin of mine. I only saw him for the 
 first time that San Giovanni's day three years and more ago. I 
 had never set eyes upon him before. You might have guessed at 
 once only you are such a baby. And I never would have told 
 you, only I know you love him yourself, and he loves you." 
 
 I listened with a strange sound like rushing waters beating at 
 my brain. I did not understand, and yet the green fields, the 
 red vine-leaves, the evening sky, that had grown grey as the 
 sun had sunk behind the hills all eddied round me in a dizzy 
 maze. 
 
 A man any man, however base, I think would have had 
 pity on my innocence and bewilderment. But a woman who is 
 jealous has no pity, and Brunotta had none. 
 
 She laughed, a forced little laugh, hard, cunning, and cruel 
 a laugh of envy and vengeance together. 
 
390 
 
 u How strange you look, signorina ! I am sure I never dreamt 
 you half believed that story. Who that had eyes in their hea4s 
 could think he was my brother ? " 
 
 " Not your brother? " I echoed the words mechanically. 
 
 That falsehoods were daily human food, that a lie was the 
 omall brass coinage in which the interchange of the world was 
 carried on to the equal convenience of all, was a truth of which 
 I had no suspicion. 
 
 " Not your brother ! " I repeated again. " What do you mean ? 
 What is he, then?" 
 
 A deadly coldness clutched at my heart as I spoke. I did not 
 ,-iow what I feared or what I thought, but a great woe seemed 
 suddenly to gather close about me. 
 
 Brunotta threw herself on her knees at my feet in the 
 chequered shadows from the foliage overhead. She sobbed con- 
 vulsively in a passion of repentance and of tears. 
 
 " I had sworn to him never to tell you. And now I have 
 told ; and he will kill me if ever he know. 
 
 " When we met you in the wood that miserable day, and I, 
 like a fool, asked you to join your life with ours, he took me 
 aside, and he said to me, * What does the donzella think that we 
 are to each other ? ' And I answered him that you had taken it 
 into your head that I was his sister, and that T had not contra- 
 dicted you that was all. 
 
 " Then he said to me, ' So let it rest, then. Mark my word ; 
 I will not have her ears soiled with the truth. She is innocence 
 itself. If she go with us she must never know. It is a sorry 
 sort of protection, but she might fall under worse/ And that 
 night he made me solemnly promise him nay, I swore to the 
 ^aints that I would never tell you the truth of my relation 
 with him. 
 
 " I meant to keep my word ; I did, indeed. I never was 
 
 pt^d to break it till that storm about Rosello Brun. That 
 
 ilf ue fcel mad against you. 
 
 * At first 1 had thought, * She is a donzella ; she will find her 
 own great people ; it will only be for a little space/ And I 
 felt a sort of love for you ; I did indeed. You were so different 
 to me. 
 
 " But after that my eyes were opened, and I have watched him, 
 and I have seen that it was you whom he loved, and not me any 
 longer ; and then I have thought and thought, ' If I let her stay 
 with him, soon he will not so much as cast a look at me,' and 
 tiiat made me mal; and I said to myself, 'Why should I be so 
 
NIGHTFALL. 297 
 
 coy with her, and not tell her the truth, when it is easy to see 
 she would ask nothing better than to be in my place.' 
 
 " The people do nought but talk of him and you. They know 
 what such amicnia means, if you do not ; and very nice it is fo 
 me to hear their jokes at my expense. 
 
 " And then to hearken to him, always the donzella this and 
 that, and such care had of you as if you were a princess born, 
 when all the while you are a lesser thing than I, for what, pray, 
 do you ever do to get your bread ? But I wash, and bake, and 
 stew, and mend his linen, and do all manner of things to say 
 nothing of my bringing in money for him by my dancing ; while 
 you lead a life like any cockered-up peacock on a villa terrace, 
 though all the time, as everyone knows, it costs Pascarel half the 
 theatre's receipts to keep you and to pay your lodgings. 
 
 " And yesterday I saw him look at you just with that look 
 in his eyes that it is like a sorcery for one ; and I would not wait 
 any longer. I said, ' She shall know to-day, and I will see if 
 she will go, or if she will wait and oust me and take my place. 
 It is best to know the worst straight at once/ " 
 
 I stood and heard. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 NIGHTFALL. 
 
 I REMEMBER staring at the russet leaves and the blue sky, at 
 che children under the pear-tree and the grey cat that walked 
 amongst the yellow pumpkins. And that it could be the same 
 world, that it could be going on in the same light and laughter, 
 seemed to me horrible, hideous, incredible. 
 
 For me the world was dead. 
 
 I did not speak ; I did not move. 
 
 Brunotta grovelled, frightened and sobbing, at my feet. The 
 beautiful vine foliage, the drooping grapes, the shimmering of 
 sunrays through the darkness of the leaves, the blaze of sunset 
 light on the white wall beyond, the gleam of scarlet from the 
 woman's kerchief moving to and fro in the window, the silver 
 glisten of the earrings in the bowed head at my feet they went 
 giddily round, and round, and round in a sickening whirl of 
 colour before my blinded eyes. 
 
298 PASCAR&L. 
 
 For many and many a month afterwards, whenever I closed 
 my eyes at night, I saw them still. 
 
 "You will not tell him, donzella?" whispered the poor, 
 little, treacherous, cowardly creature on the earth before me, 
 clutching closer the hem of my skirts. " You do not know what 
 his passion can he. He would kill me. He would kill me surely. 
 If you do not care for him, go away ; go straight away, and I 
 shall be happy again ; he so soon forgets. But if you love him, 
 as I think, best say so to me straight out. I will make an end 
 of my life some way ; it does not hurt much. And I could not 
 live to stand by and see you take my place " 
 
 " Your place ! " 
 
 The outrage broke the spell that held me paralysed. Poor, 
 little, foolish, ignorant, coarse-fibred soul ! How could she know 
 the shame she did me? How could she tell the unbearable 
 torture to roe of that level with herself to which all ignorantly 
 she dragged me ? 
 
 But in the pain and desperation of my wound I was incapable 
 of excuse or justice for her. 
 
 I was stunned and maddened by the shock of the first sense of 
 falsehood, the first perception of evil, the first horror of treachery 
 tiifct had ever touched me. 
 
 Some indescribable unknown guilt seemed to rise around me, 
 like noxious fumes of baleful fires, and stifle all the young life in 
 me. Of the sin of the world I knew nothing ; of the treason of 
 it I knew as little. 
 
 That I had been betrayed, insulted, outraged, was rather an 
 instinct with me than any reasoned knowledge. He had deceived 
 me ; that was all I knew, and all I cared to know. 
 
 She grovelled in the sand before me, clutching my skirts, 
 bathing my feet with her tears, beseeching me not to reveal her 
 broken troth to him. 
 
 When I thought that he had loved her, and then loved me 
 oh God ! how wretched, base, and poor a thing I grew in my own 
 sight ! 
 
 I loathed myself as much as I loathed her ; and yet, great 
 heavens ! how I hated her, because his lips had touched hers ; 
 because she, too, had known that touch, that smile, that kiss 
 which, child as I was, I would have given my life away to win 
 one hour ! 
 
 And/gloved Tier! this timorous, treacherous, base-born, base-bred 
 fool, who was not even true to him, who had not even such poor, 
 simple, natural virtue in her as lies in loyalty and in good faith. 
 
NIGHTFALL. 299 
 
 All the blood in me burned like a flame. I drew my skirts 
 from her grasp, and thrust her away with my foot. Looking 
 back on the unutterable passion and horror of that time, I wonder 
 now I did not strike her. 
 
 I understand how men strike women men who are not 
 cowards either. 
 
 " You will not tell him ? " she moaned, dragging herself upon 
 her knees again to me. " You will not tell him? You do not 
 know how violent he can be in his rage. You will not tell him ? 
 He would kill me ! " 
 
 I thrust her again from rne with an unutterable loathing. He 
 had loved her ! loved this craven thing which could dare betray 
 him, and yet not dare to brave his vengeance. 
 
 " No ; I will not tell him," I answered her ; the words seemed 
 to suffocate me as I spoke. 
 
 She had been good to me once; in her way she had shown me 
 hospitality and good will; she was safe from any revenge of 
 mine. 
 
 A sudden fear seemed to fall on her with my answer ; not fear 
 for herself, but fear of me. No doubt my face looked strange to 
 her there, where I stood in the vine shadows, with the golden 
 sunset world reeling around me, and all the beauty of my young 
 life struck dead in me at one blow. 
 
 "Are you going away?" she muttered, under her breath. 
 " How you look ! I wish now I had not told you. If you love 
 him indeed so much " 
 
 I seized and shook her, mute. 
 
 " Oh fool, fool, fool ! " I cried to her. " Have you no fear 
 that /may kill you?" 
 
 I thrust her away once again with such violence that she was 
 driven from me, like a spurned dog, under the shadows of the 
 leaves; and she shivered a little and crouched, and then rose 
 slowly on her feet and stood shivering and sore afraid. But I had 
 taught her silence. 
 
 I left her there, and went down the green length of the pergola, 
 out of the gold of the sunny garden, across the archway of the 
 threshold, and so on into the darkness and the coldness of the 
 iiouse. 
 
 At every step I dreaded to hear the voice of PascarSL 
 
 I went up to my own little room, and barred the door, and 
 (lung myself on my bed in a stupor of misery. 
 
 All my faith in God and man seemed killed in me. 
 
PASCAR&t. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 ALONG THE 
 
 AGAINST the little square of the open window the breeze gently 
 blew the clusters of roses that had climbed there ; the chirp of 
 the birds was shrill on the silence ; there was a soft splash of 
 water below as some one filled and refilled the metal pail at the 
 well. All these things were distinct to me and horrible. My 
 love was dead ; why were not all other things dead too ? 
 
 I did not cry aloud, and my eyes were dry; what I had heard, 
 and the shame of it, seemed to have scorched and shrivelled all 
 the life in me. I was little more than a child. I was all 
 instinct; I had no reason. I abandoned myself without medita 
 tion or analysis to any impulse of the moment. 
 
 My love for him had been one of the noblest, sweetest, purest 
 impulses of my life. It had been better than myself. All love, 
 if it be worth anything, is higher than the nature that begets it. 
 
 My love had subjugated all weaker and vainer things in me ; 
 it had vanquished my pride, and my selfishness had been sub- 
 dued and destroyed by it. 
 
 It had been passionless because quite childlike ; it had been 
 quite happy only to see him come and go, to have the clasp of 
 his hand, to listen to his fancies and his dreams ; it had possibly 
 irritated him often by its unconsciousness and its contentment in 
 so little ; and yet it had been intense with all its innocence, and, 
 in its way, perfect. 
 
 Had I been older I should have paused and weighed awhile 
 these cruel doubts that had fallen on me, like drops of scalding 
 lead upon an open wound. 
 
 Had I been truer and more faithful I should have known that 
 the love of a woman to be worth aught must be dog-like, and 
 take good and evil alike in implicit faith, and kiss the cherished 
 hand that deals the b^ow. 
 
 Had I been wiser in the world's wisdom I should have been 
 able to measure the emptiness and the weariness of these mind- 
 less ties, of the soulless bondage woven that fatal night, when, 
 for sake of a rosy face and a smiling mouth, he had said, " Will 
 you wander with me?" as the boat shot away in the moon- 
 light. 
 
ALONG THE MOUNTAINS. 301 
 
 Bat I was only a child, and I loved him with a child's igno- 
 rance and a woman's narrowness, and I was only alive to the one 
 intolerable unutterable shame which seemed to fall on me with 
 the coarse invective of this creature, who begrudged her place 
 to sue. 
 
 And with it all, a nobler despair, a deadlier woe, smote me in 
 the sense so slow to dawn on me, so blasphemous, as it still 
 seemed to me that he could have told a falsehood to me, that he 
 sould have let me live on and on and on, unthinking and unsuspect- 
 ing, in the tainted sunshine, in the plague-smitten beauty, of a 
 paradise of lies. 
 
 Since then I have known passions that beside it were as the 
 rushing stream of lava beside the limpid mountain burn ; yet I 
 doubt if I have ever known a love, more purely and perfectly 
 love, than this I then bore to Pascarel. 
 
 And it was all dead worse than dead ; struck in the eyes, as 
 it were, with all the insult of a blinding blow. At a stroke, the 
 words of this poor false fool had dragged it down from the heaven 
 of its innocent exaltation, and levelled it with all that was 
 poorest, basest, meanest, coarsest, in the acrid jealousies of women 
 and the amorous infidelities of men. 
 
 Her jealousy degraded me in my own sight. 
 
 Beyond every other thing I was proud. The evil had been 
 subdued by his influence, but never uprooted ; beneath the sting 
 of torture it rose up in tenfold strength. 
 
 " Take her place take her place ! " 
 
 I said the words that had outraged me a thousand times over 
 and over again between my locked teeth. There were times when 
 the ferocity of a beast awoke in me, and I was on fire to spring 
 at her throat and kill her. 
 
 For he had loved her once : so I believed, at least ; I who knew 
 nothing of men or women either. 
 
 Nothing of the brevity of the mere desire of the senses. No- 
 thing of the leaden weight of a sensual bondage. Nothing of the 
 languid reluctance of a sated fancy to strike and free itself. No- 
 thing of the indolent impulses and mindless passions with which 
 the heart of a man may be drawn hither and thither without once 
 touching or sighting the goal of its ideal. Nothing of all which 
 might have given pardon to him, to her, to myself. 
 
 The innocence of youth is cruel, because it is of necessity also 
 ignorance, and ignorance is cruelty always. 
 
 I did not stir, my eyes were never wet, no cry escaped me ; 
 but where I lay, face downward, as 1 had flung myself, I bit 
 
$02 PASCAR&L. 
 
 through and through, like a wild animal that is trapped, the 
 woollen coverture of my little pallet bed. 
 
 The time went on; the robins ceased to sing, the roses ble\t 
 against the window frame : when I looked up it was quite dark, 
 and there were stars shining. 
 
 I heard the pressure of a foot upon the woodwork of the old, 
 ricketty, worm-eaten door, a feeble, little, sobbing voice began to 
 mutter through it to me of a thousand selfish terrors. The sound 
 of it stung me to blind fury ; he would be home at sunset ; home 
 to her and me ; one at the least I vowed to heaven he should not 
 find there. 
 
 I had no space for hesitance, no time for thought ; there was 
 but one way I was young and supple as a willow bough, and 
 mad with pain I sprang on the stone coping of the casement, 
 turned and grasped the network of the rose-stems, and the boughs 
 of the fig, knotted and tough from half a century of sun and 
 storm. 
 
 Then holding by that hazardous support, I let my body drop 
 along the surface of the leaf-covered wall, dragging a ruin of 
 rose leaves as I fell. The house was very old and low : I touched 
 the grass beneath with a dull shock, but without violence ; as I 
 reached the earth I heard above the crash and splinter of the 
 panels forced and driven in before the blows of some one whom 
 Erunotta had summoned in her affright. 
 
 It was quite dark ; the garden was deserted ; I paused an 
 instant to draw my breath ; with the soft shower of the rose 
 leaves still like tears upon my face. 
 
 I felt bodily pain, but that only served to madden me, as the 
 lash maddens a beast already bruised ; I leaped the low stone wall 
 of the garden and flew like a lapwing into the dusky shadows. 
 
 Little Toccb leaned over the wall that parted the garden from 
 the olive orchards. He was singing clearly a sweet merry melody, 
 and gazing down through the gloom to try and see who passed 
 across the bridge. I crept up to him and slid into his hand the 
 onyx with the Fates. 
 
 " Give it to him when he comes," I murmured. 
 
 The boy started and stared, no doubt at the changed sound of 
 my voice ; but dreading lest he should detain me, I thrust the 
 stone into his hold and fled away through the shadows before he 
 well knew who had spoken to him. 
 
 Behind me I heard a noise of many voices, and as the house- 
 hold of the little place roused itself to its Padrona's summons. 
 Turning my head once I saw lights flash in its windows and 
 
ALONG THE MOUNTAINS. 303 
 
 underneath the trellis of its pergola. I held straight onward, 
 running with winged feet where the grass lands allowed my pas- 
 sage, stumbling and slipping where the maples and the vines 
 woven together opposed my progress. 
 
 At times I fell into the trenches cut in the hard soil against 
 the hill floods of winter. At times I bruised myself on the 
 tangled sticks of dying vines. 
 
 At times I lost myself amongst the thickets of olive, shining 
 white as the winding-sheets of ghostly apparitions. At times I 
 sank over my feet in shallow brooks that rippled from the moun- 
 tains, and went on with my garments heavy-weighted with the 
 moisture. 
 
 At times I crouched in some shed or under some sheaves of 
 Kiaize to get my breath, and then I saw scattered over the 
 country, close about the little wine-shops, the lights of lanterns 
 that nickered fit fully in and out amongst the foliage ; and then 
 I gave myself no rest, but gathered my skirts close and ran 
 again. 
 
 At length it may have been one hour, it may have been three 
 or four, by the look of the stars it was quite night one of the 
 vineyards that I crossed opened abruptly and without fence upon 
 a highway on which I heard the sound of a horse's feet. 
 
 Looking behind I saw no lights ; there was only the great 
 brooding darkness of the deserted country, with here and there a 
 silvery gleam as some ray of the young moon caught a belt of 
 olives, or a breadth of water. 
 
 I went into the road and waited there. To be beyond their 
 reach I knew I must not pause to rest amidst my flight. I knew, 
 too, that I was nearly at the end of all my force. 
 
 Through the gloom there came towards me a white horse, with 
 a red woollen covering spread over it in the Tuscan fashion, 
 dragging slowly a contadino's cart. 
 
 As it drew near me I saw, by the light of the lantern which 
 hung at the shafts, that the peasant was an old man of seventy or 
 eighty years. 
 
 His cart swayed heavily backward on its wheels ; it was filled 
 with straw and earthenware ; he dozed as he went, and the horse 
 picked its own way amongst the stones at will. 
 
 I called to him and stopped him ; he awoke, thinking of road- 
 side robbers, and began to mutter incoherent prayers to a leaden 
 saint in the band of his hat. 
 
 I made him, with difficulty, understand that I was harmless 
 and alone and tired, and that if he would give me a lift for a 
 
304 PASCAR&L. 
 
 league or two I would pay him well. "When he had recovered 
 his alarm, he told me that he was going with his pottery to a fair 
 at Settignano ; that to get a good place amongst the stalls it be- 
 hoved traders to be there whilst the dawn was grey; that ho 
 never hurried or harassed his beast, and so had started at night 
 fall to make his journey by easy stages. 
 
 He hesitated some time over my offer, then yielded. 
 
 The cart was a light one, he said, and rny weight was light 
 too; it would not harm the horse ; I might get in amongst the 
 straw if first he saw my money. 
 
 I gave him the little gold piece that my father had given me 
 on the stairs in Verona ; it had been slung round my neck with 
 the onyx. He let me climb up amidst the rough pottery of his 
 trade stock, and the patient beast set forward again upon its 
 road ; the old man settled himself again to doze at ease ; the cart 
 creaked onward down the steepness of the slopes, the lantern 
 glimmering redly in the gloom. 
 
 He paused a long time in the desolate grey piazza of Fiesole. 
 
 All the town was asleep upon its high hills, but there was some 
 friend he knew dwelling by the church who at his rap hung out 
 a lantern on a hook in the wall, and brought him a flask of wine, 
 over which they talked long together in the darkness. 
 
 Then the horse jogged on again along the stony gloomy roads, 
 on and on and on into the oak woods of Borgunto, where the 
 great masses of wooded hills sloped away, above and below, in 
 an intense stillness, only broken by the cry of an owl. 
 
 It is a winding and difficult road that passes along the side 
 of the mountain from the town of Fiesole to the old fortress of 
 Poggibonzi, and the agony of the slow and weary way seemed 
 endless. 
 
 After awhile the clouds broke and the moon shone out; 
 through the oak leaves one could see the vast silent valley 
 stretched far, far below, and the amphitheatre of the endless hills 
 encircling it. Even in my stupor and misery I had some vague 
 sense of its wonderful, solemn, mystical shadowy beauty. 
 
 Only a week or two before we had gone up that road on our 
 way from Casentino to the annual fair of S. Francis at Fiesole, 
 and we had talked of Masaccio and Desiderio as we saw their 
 little white town on the slopes, and had gathered the wild ane- 
 mones that covered the ground with bloom, and had sung songa 
 to the mandoline, passing under the acacias by the fortress walls, 
 and mounting higher and higher and higher with a gay good- 
 morrow to the smith at the mountain forge. 
 
ALONG THE MOUNTAINS. 305 
 
 Only a week or two before ! And now ! 
 
 The hours passed in a horrible nightmare for me. The cart 
 shook, jolted, rattled on the stones ; my body was bruised and 
 lacerated by the thickets and the vines ; the palms of my 
 hands were bleeding from the thorns of the rose-trees; the 
 night was very cold, as autumn nights are, north of the Abruzzi. 
 But the misery of my thoughts killed in me all sense of bodily 
 pain. 
 
 All I heard was the sweet music of his voice. The music lost 
 to me forevermore. 
 
 The night seemed endless. 
 
 The horse often paused to rest and crop a little of the wayside 
 grass, or drink at some stone tank in a monastery wall. 
 
 The old contadino awoke now and then to say a word to it, 
 or to trim his lantern, then slept again, while the rope of the 
 reins dropped idly from his wrists. 
 
 The road seemed interminable, going down, down, down, 
 along the face of the hills, always with the same stretches of 
 olives and vines on either side, always with the dark vapours of 
 the plain spread like a sea beneath. Now and then an owl flew 
 by with a low croak ; now and then there shone a little gleam 
 from some lamp at a roadside shrine that was all the change 
 there was. 
 
 The cart crawled on under the boughs and past the dusky 
 stone walls, still down, down, down into the lower wood, where 
 the oak is changed for the fir tree, and the path becomes sharp 
 and sheer and bent into curves that make the stoutest mule 
 stumble. 
 
 The first grey of daybreak had scarcely lightened in the skiea 
 when the horse paused at a turn in the descent. The old pot- 
 tery dealer woke for the first time with eyes wide opened, shook 
 himself, and descended from, his seat. 
 
 The old man roused me roughly. 
 
 " Signorina, you had best get out here if you want Florence. 
 I go to Settignano, and that will be out of your road. Keep 
 straight on, and go down, down, always, and you cannot miss 
 to come to the Croce Gate." 
 
 The cart jolted on its way to Masaccio's birthplace, and I 
 daggered, blind, and sick, down under the stone-pines. 
 
 I felt feeble, broken, aged by ten years. My head was giddy, 
 and the sunshine swam around me in bright rings of amber. I 
 felt numb, and, when I moved, the earth seemed hollow and 
 tremulous beneath my feet. 
 
306 PASCAR&L* 
 
 So, like one blindfolded, I stumbled down into the City that 
 is called Beautiful. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE CHUECH OP THE CKOSS. 
 
 IT was full sunrise. 
 
 The light was streaming from the east, golden and glistening 
 as it came gleaming across the desert. In the streets deep sha- 
 dows still slept. Lithe brown hands were unloosening the 
 wooden lattices, and flowers pent in casements thrust their heads 
 out to the air. 
 
 All was very quiet. 
 
 There was only the sound of the bells tolling for the first mass 
 of the churches, tolling everywhere, north and south, cast and 
 west, over the wide Yaldarno. Here and there a priest passed 
 to some holy office ; here and there a sun-belated reveller went 
 gaily home touching a mandoline ; here and there a woman with 
 brown bare arms swept down her steps or hung her lioen out of 
 window, gossiping the while to neighbours across the passage- 
 way. 
 
 It all went giddily and dimly round before my sight. I was 
 faint, and my limbs shook as I dragged them over the stones. 
 
 There was a sound of footsteps and of outcries behind me. 
 
 On the sheer instinct of the hunted deer, I paused and shrank 
 into the shade, and gazed around for shelter. Close against me 
 the doors of the S. Croce stood open. The vast, dark, solemn 
 churcli yawned like a grave. I crept into the shadow of its 
 porch. 
 
 At its altars they were saying the first mass. 
 
 A lady, all lace and jewels, as she had come from some palace 
 ball, was on her knees in the dusk and the solitude, praying, 
 while the voices of the priests echoed dully under rlie vast 
 vaulted roof that shelters the dust of Michelangelo and Giotto. 
 
 Behind me were the darkness, the coldness, the peace of the 
 great church, the lights burning dimly far away, the sepulchral 
 undertones thrilling the stillness. 
 
 Before me, in the open air, there came, swift as K the wind, a 
 rush of feet, a clamour of angered voices, a shower of weapons, 
 a tramp of horses, a cloud of dust, a flash of daylight, and, in 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE CROSS. 307 
 
 the midst, a gleam of beautiful bold eyes that last had looked at 
 me in the white moonshine underneath the leaves away on the 
 hill-side by Dante's Solitude. 
 
 The crowd went by like a whirl of dust and of leaves on a 
 day of scirocco. I sprang and caught the arm of an old man 
 who had uncovered his head reverently as it went by the church. 
 
 " What is it ? Oh, nothing/ ' he said, with a shadowy smile. 
 "Nothing. They broke on the wheel in my time. How scared 
 you look, you pretty child. It is only the ducal guard who are 
 taking Pascarel to the Eargello ; and the people want to rescue 
 him, that is all. Done ? No, he has done nothing that I know 
 of; but the town cares for him, and he tells awkward truths, 
 and it has been easy to seize the salt in his speech and tax it. 
 There was a sort of riot yesterday, and he quelled it ; but they 
 made that an offence against him. A player and a populano ! 
 What right has he to power ? to such power as Love gives and 
 gets ? So they arrested him last night, and they take him now 
 to the Podesta for judgment. I daresay they will give him three 
 months in prison. For the targello is strong and the people are 
 weak as yet/' 
 
 The old man, still with that subtle wintry smile upon hia 
 face, shook my hold off him, and went feebly along the street. 
 
 The crowd in its cloud of dust had passed from sight. I 
 lost all sense of where I was, and fell, like one dead, upon th 
 atones of Florence. 
 
BOOK VI. 
 
 THE QUARTEfi OP THE DOVR 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 OLTEAKXO. 
 
 You know the old old quarter, whose emblem on the 
 that were borne in war around the red Carroccio, was the Silver 
 Dove ? The church is there, though flame has ravaged it thrice ; 
 but the standard that bore the bird of the Holy Spirit over the 
 reek and carnage of the plains has crumbled away none know 
 whither in some closet or crypt of the city. 
 
 Yet the quarter is barely changed at all, since in the days of 
 the Republic the men of San Lorenzo and of San Giovanni 
 crossed the river to sack it from end to end under the storm of 
 arrows and the rain of fire. 
 
 It is dark, and dull, and noisy, and noisome there in the old 
 historic quarter of the Silver Dove : and yet it is so full of 
 story, so sacred, with so many names and memories, that there 
 is a charm about its twisting gloomy streets, its high walls 
 shutting out the sun, its dungeon-like chambers, its iron-bound 
 palaces, grim and firm set as sea-washed cliffs, its huge arch- 
 ways dark as Erebus, its narrow passage-ways where two 
 mules can scarce pass one another over the slippery and ur.pvon 
 stones. 
 
 It is all haunted ground in old Oltrarno. Come to it in a 
 summer morning. There is no sun in it, except in some square- 
 walled garden behind the frowning front of some antique, 
 coronetted house, where stray sunbeams make a glory on shining 
 lemon-boughs and broken water- cisterns. It is all dark, for the 
 houses are so high, and the walls lean so close. It is full of the 
 strange, dreamy old-world Florentine odour, that smells always 
 as though some king's coffin had been freshly opened, and the 
 spices and the perfumes of the cere-clothes lately loosened on 
 
OLTRARNO. 309 
 
 the air. The people are walking, leaning, gossiping, laughing, 
 quarrelling, all in the open street, and at the open threshold. 
 The cobbler is at his stall; the tinker at his barrow; the huck- 
 ster at his board of cloths and linens ; the melon-seller at his 
 truck of green paponi. In every one of the great dusky in- 
 teriors there is an etching worthy of Rembrandt. In every one 
 of the sculptured, unglazed windows, there is a study of colour 
 fit for Yelasquez. It is all dark, and dusty, and noisy, and 
 noisome, I say, and yet in its way it is beautiful the place is 
 so gruesome, and the people are so gay. 
 
 And then so many steps are echoing after yours, so many 
 faces look at you from the grated windows. 
 
 See in that dim street there is old Toscanelli's white head 
 bending over the charts busy with vague dreams of the unknown 
 world across the seas ; yonder enters a saucy, airy, ribboned, 
 plumed cavaliere, who sings a stornello as he goes, and fingers 
 the sprig of box with which he is playing the Lenten love game, 
 begun in Carnival with the original of Madama Pampinet; 
 away behind the Carmine church, where gentle Masaccio came 
 and painted in his title-deeds to immortality, runs a little bare- 
 foot, ragged imp, his mouth full of stolen convent cherries, whom 
 poor old Mona Lapaccia tries to catch and lead to the good friars 
 to be fed and clothed, and made in his due time into Fra Lippi ; 
 under the ieep shadows of the walls there goes to his sombre 
 and frugal home the finest wit and keenest logician of the 
 Eucellai Gardens, musing on sore straits of personal poverty, 
 and foreseeing, perhaps, with a certain delicate, cynical sadness, 
 that he who lives with clean hands the honestest of men in 
 Florence will so pass down to posterity that the name of 
 Machiavelli will be used, to all time, as synonym for Prince of 
 Rogues. 
 
 See there who comes down hither in the gloaming of the 
 last night of Carnival ? by the corner that is called of the Lion, 
 under the shade of the Carmelite's church? Handsome and 
 reckless still, as when he, Eenvenuto, hurled defiance at Diane 
 de Poitiers from the Tour de Nesle, prince of craftsmen and 
 king of egotists since his eyes opened to the light in the little 
 house in the Chiara street, full of its flutes and clavecins and 
 harpsichords, its mirrors of silver and its viols of ivory, wherein, 
 in the winter nights, the old father sat " singing all to himself" 
 by his brave oak fires for pride and gladness of heart, because a 
 son was born to him and to the city. He is come to seek the 
 recreant Tonino, he has left his workshop in the 
 
J 10 PASCAR&L. 
 
 strewn with grotesques in gold and acanthus leaves in silver, 
 and blazonries in enamel, and lilies in diamonds, and poniard* 
 in damascened metal ; the sword that hangs by his belt was 
 red a little while ago in the sack of Borne ; the gold crowns in 
 his pouch are payments for Fontainebleau from King Francis 
 he is in anger and in haste, yet going thus through the darkness 
 to the ingrate monk he thinks a little wistfully, great artist and 
 reckless liver though he be, of the old days when he and Michel- 
 angelo, and Piloto, the goldsmith, used to saunter hither on 
 summer eves to listen to the madrigals when all the dim night 
 world was dewy with the scent of roses. 
 
 See there, yet again, through the gloaming, goes a white- 
 frocked Dominican, with bent head and meditative eyes ; of all 
 the many thousand monks in Florence, he is "II Frate " to the 
 people. When he scourges himself in the crypt, and sees the 
 pictures and the sculptures feed the flames, does he ever sigh 
 for that old bright vine-hung bottega where he woke with the 
 sunrise and worked till the evening bells, when he was only 
 Baccio della Porta, the painter, dwelling just outside the gate 
 here, where the cypresses guard the entrance of that glad green 
 country whose smiling beauty gained it its gentle name of 
 Verzaja even in the dry grim records of the city's rolls f 
 
 Down the old street of the Augustines there comes a group of 
 merry-makers fresh from the laughter and the wine-cups 
 of the supper at the tavern by the Tower of the Amidei 
 away by the Jewellers' Bridge. They loiter in the moonlight 
 to hearken to the sweet singing of the street-choristers, and note 
 with painters' eyes one beautiful, gentle, golden curled youth, 
 to whom many a white hand undoes a casement, or lets drop 
 a lovescroll tied with a tress of hair. They are men who are 
 called Michelangiolo, and Cellini, and Bugiardini, and Alberti- 
 nelli, and Manzuolini. 
 
 A little while, and Michelangiolo paces the stones alone, with 
 his cloak wrapped about him and his hand ready to his sword- 
 hilt, and his heart heavy for the fate of free Florence ; for the 
 bell of the people has long rung a stormo, and his cannon 
 bristle and his bastions rise on the old monastic heights, and the 
 fire has burnt black the shady gardens of Gicciardini, and above 
 them, on the hills where Corsini built the cloisters for the Au- 
 gustines to dwell in all their days in peace, there the fierce 
 Spaniards are crying, "Lady Fiorenza, bring out your brocades, 
 and we will measure them at the pike's length; " and there, 
 
AT BOCCACCIO'S WINDOW. 311 
 
 too, floats that banner which has been for ever the malediction 
 of Italy, on whose yellow folds there is blazoned black, 
 
 " 1'Aquila grifagna 
 Che per pift divorar due becchi porta ; 
 
 In the morning when the birds are singing in the old grey 
 gardens Behind the old grey palaces, and the walls lean together, 
 and frown against the sun, you, thinking of all these who have 
 trodden the stones before you, shall stray slowly down the Via 
 Maggib the Street of the May time the street named from the 
 sweet season of the lilies and the lovers in the old amorous days 
 of free Florence, when, with the first morning of May, the 
 youths of the city went forth from the gates by the sunrise, and 
 came back with the spoils of the woods and the fields to the 
 sound of the lute and the viol, and at every grated casement hung 
 up the branch of hawthorn, and the knot of ribbon, and the 
 scroll of love words, each wooer for his own innamorata, so that 
 under the green wreath of leaf and blossom the dark iron-bound 
 walls looked like the helmet and hauberk of llinaldo flower- 
 decked by the rose-trails of Armida on the amorous banks of 
 Orontes. And so musing, you shall pass out by the gates and 
 feel the sweet winds blowing fresh again over the vine -lands of 
 the VaLTema, and you shall meet a woman carrying white roses 
 with her to lay upon some tomb upon the hill there ; and you 
 shall think of the night feast of Pardon, when all Florence was 
 wont to flock up hither under the stars to wash their souls clear 
 before the fall of Pentecost ; and so quiet of heart, and yet glad 
 for the beauty of dead days, and of the living summer time, you 
 will go up and up higher and higher till you reach the stillnesf 
 of the olive-woods upon Arcetri. 
 
 Shall you be dull and weary in dark Oltrarno now? 
 
 Nay, not if you have eyes that see, and ears that hear. 
 
 But the world is full of deaf and blind. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 AT BOCCACCIO'S WIXDOW. 
 
 1 WAS both blind and deaf in that horrible time. 
 I think a flower, when they break it off its stalk and throw 
 it down to sicken in the sun, must feel as I did all those weeks 
 
312 PASCAR&L. 
 
 and months. Only the flower faints and dies, and is so far at 
 peace; but I lived on, though all my youth, and heart, and soul, 
 and hope were killed in me. 
 
 It seems so long ago ; so very, very long ago ; and yet at 
 times near, as though it were only yesterday, that I saw the 
 people sweep past the great gaunt pallor of the Santa Croce, his 
 face in their midst within the reddening light of dawn. The 
 vast yawning dark the woman with her jewels at her prayers 
 the gleam of the silver at the altars the sweet shrill voices 
 of the singing children the rush of the crowd the ghostly 
 gleam of day how near they all are, and yet so far. Some- 
 times I fancy they wsre only dreams dreams, too, all that one 
 glad summer year of wandering and then I go slowly over the 
 links that bind me to the time, as other women in their pain tell 
 beads. 
 
 The links are clear enough, but I can say no prayer to them. 
 My beads are full of thorns, and hurt me still. 
 
 There must be good people, though one doubts it so. A 
 woman saw me fall thrice on the stones before the Florentine 
 Pantheon, and had zne borne upstairs to her little chamber before 
 the Misericordia bell could boom for me. She was an old woman, 
 and quite poor ; she got her living darning the silken hose of 
 dancers and of ladies ; she lived in that little crooked passage- 
 way under the shadow of the Pitti, where old Toscanelli 
 dreamed his way across the unknown waters to the unknown 
 land, and gay Boccaccio, with his cynical fine smile, loitered to 
 see the dames of Florence pass in their gold-fringed litters and 
 their gemmed zibellinfc to the feasts in the Palaces of Bardi and 
 JYescobaldi. 
 
 She was a little brown, crisp, clean woman, seventy years old ; 
 she had a wide, bare, stone chamber under the uncoiled roof; all 
 day long she darned at the stockings, looking now and then out 
 of the window, as Boccaccio had done before her, but seeing no 
 gold-fringed litters and jewelled dames, but only the weary 
 mules, and the pushing people, and the pedlar's stall of cloth 
 and linen, and the cobbler at his work over the way. 
 
 In that barren chamber I lay sick unto death for weeks, talk- 
 ing in so strange a confusion of cities and villages and flowers 
 and singing birds, and the notes of lutes and the shine of the 
 moon on the maize fields, that none who heard could make sense 
 of the medley. There she kept me ; there I slowly got my hold 
 again on life as youth will even when most reluctantly ; there 
 I recovered in a dull, hopeless, sullen, stupid way ; and there the 
 
AT XOCCACCSO'S WINDOW. 313 
 
 dreamy days would roll away with gleams of the "beautiful rose- 
 flecked sky just left to madden one above the frowning palace pile. 
 
 The old creature would sit in her garret window sewing on at 
 the silken hose; there was delicate carving all about the win- 
 dow, and a great shield with a marquis's crown above ; it had 
 been a palace in the old days wh cm the San Lorenzo men had set 
 all Oltrarno ablaze from theNiccolb gate to the Frediano. There 
 she would sit and sew ; chirping to my dull deaf ears in her 
 Tuscan ; she had stories for all the stockings that used to lie in 
 a great mixed heap in a rush basket the needy duchessa's with 
 the gay ballerina's. 
 
 " See ! " she would say, holding one after another up to the 
 strong light. " See ! what a little atom that is just worn in 
 the ball of the foot with dancing, a fairy might put it on, and 
 for certain a lover has been glad to stroke it, many and many an 
 hour when the dance was over and done with, and the fire-flies 
 put their lamps out ere the sun rose, and in the balcony where 
 those little feet were, it was all so still so still." 
 
 "And then again," she would go on, diving down for a stock- 
 ing thrice the size, " a big one this, no beauty in it ; broad as a 
 pumpkin leaf and thick as any melon worn in the toes you 
 know what that means. Pirouettes by the dozen on the Pagliano 
 boards ; standing strained on tip-toe as a Lotus Lily or a Queen 
 of Night. No story in it that is pretty like the lover's to the 
 little fairy feet. And, yet, perhaps, you know, some poem after 
 all; some homely thing sung to a baby's cradle and a shuttle's 
 swing, in some weaver's bare garret where the meal-pot would 
 be empty and the stove be empty too, if the young, fresh, bro^rn 
 mother did not run out into the cold and strip her kirtle and 
 dress herself in clouds and flowers to dance for a silver coin 
 before the gay theatre lights? Ay who knows? A big, 
 square, ugly pair of hose, no doubt, but worth the better darn- 
 ing maybe than those dainty ones of the pretty marchesina's, 
 nfter all." 
 
 So she would chirp to herself, driving her long needle deftly 
 all the day ; a poet who could not read, but only feel, like many 
 millions of her country people. 
 
 Pascarel would have talked with her for the hour and found 
 her histories for all the stockings tumbled in the rush basket ol 
 her feet. But I her chirping made my heart more sick, my 
 brain more dull, my life more desolate. I was thankless, so 
 utterly and cruelly and unremorsefully thankless, as only very 
 early youth can be. 
 
314 PASCAR&L. 
 
 For in later years we throb all over with so many wounds, 
 that we have learned to value the hand that plucks a dockleaf 
 for our nettle sting, though we know well no balm can heal the 
 /agged rent in the breast that no man sees. 
 
 Old Giudetta darned her hose under the sculptured shield, and 
 trotted to and fro between the lattice and my bed of sacking in 
 the corner where she had laid me, and prayed for me every chilly 
 morning in the great white silence of the Sta. Spirito, and 
 begged her own brass-framed red and blue picture of the 
 Madonna to have a care for me, though I seemed but a sad little 
 pagan to her, where I lay and sobbed and moaned wearily 
 through all the sickly hours. 
 
 How good she must have been, a woman so old as that, and 
 BO poor that she sewed stockings from the first peep of the sun to 
 the last flare of the oil- wick. Yes ; she must have been good 
 indeed. She died after one day of sickness only, a year later, so 
 I heard; her needle in her old worn, tired hand, smiling, 
 they say, and wondering if the Madonna would ever let 
 her darn a little there in heaven for mere old remembrance 
 sake. 
 
 I told them, when I heard that, to set her up the whitest, 
 fairest cross that ever shimmered in the light above there under 
 the cypresses on the dusky Miniato slopes. Cold gratitude, you 
 say ? but am I worse than nations when I measure my debt by 
 a stone's height and breadth ? 
 
 There is nothing so ingrate as a great grief; and mine was 
 bitterly thankless, utterly apathetic. I took what she did for 
 me indifferently as a right; I had no thought of her; all the 
 thought I had was with that sweet dead hour when the vintage 
 moon had shown above Fiesole. 
 
 She would sit and chirp all day in her sonorous Tuscan ; she 
 had darned stockings all her life, she said, drawing her threads 
 so fine no one could tell where the silk once had gaped. 
 
 She was most good to me, and I most thankless. 
 
 She was very poor ; but she pinched herself in her measure of 
 oil and her handful of meal to tempt my sickening indifference 
 with the rosy heart of some prickly southern fig, or fresh pome- 
 granate. She was childless and cheery, and loved by her neigh- 
 bours, and had no need of me : yet hardly could a mother have 
 been more patient with my ingratitude and fierce despair than 
 she was. I was so young, and friendless, and unhappy, it was 
 l>lain to see. That touched her, and she kept me. Ah, you 
 who say there is no honest fruit of love and grace beneath that 
 
AT BOCCACCiaS WINDOW. 315 
 
 sweet wide-opened sun-swept flower, of an Italian smile how 
 little way you see, and how you lie 1 
 
 Did ever you hear of Signa Rosa ? Nay not you. 
 
 She lived forty years in widowhood on the seashore by Nizza ; 
 a small, slender, beautiful old woman, very beautiful, they say, 
 I never saw her, for she died in my babyhood, but I have heard 
 this from many tongues, well, she bound the peasant's coif 
 about her head, and did her homely service daily for herself, and 
 never stirred across her theshold except when early mass was 
 ringing over the orange thickets ; but her country folk sought 
 her from far and near for consolation and for counsel ; in her the 
 dove's gentleness and serpent's wisdom were blended ; peace- 
 making was her office ; and none sought her who did not leave 
 her simpler, purer, better for her words of solace ; so she dwelt 
 for near half a century, the sanctity of the cloister about her, 
 yet in her the warmth of human sympathy, the sweetness of 
 widowed fidelity, and the passion of maternal love ; so she dwelt 
 \vhere the palms of the riviera rise against the blue sea skies, 
 and when she died ten thousand Italians followed her to the 
 grave, and to this day the country numbers her with its holiest 
 names. 
 
 For Signa Rosa was the mother of Garibaldi. 
 
 Without such women, think you that Italy would ever have 
 such sons ? 
 
 Indifferent to, insensible of, anything that moved around me, 
 I listened and answered with no sense of what I heard or said. 
 I used to lie and watch the figure of Giudetta, brown against the 
 golden sunset lightened panes ; and wonder feebly why I could 
 not die that was all. 
 
 It was the winter season of pleasure and pomp. 
 
 One morning lying there face downward on my mattress of 
 grass, I heard gay, tumultuous shcuts and bursts of music, and 
 the shrill pipe of eager voices, and the sun was shining yellow 
 and broad across the floor. 
 
 Another little old woman, a gossip of Giudetta' s, came and 
 stood by me awhile ; she had a new dark kirtle, and a scarlet 
 ribbon in her white hair, and some brave silver rings in her ears. 
 
 " I wish you could get up and come, poverina," she said 
 kindly. " You are so young to lie and die like a motherless 
 kid there ; and they are bringing in the Carnival, and it is good 
 to see. I have never missed once for seventy-two years ! " 
 
 I shivered and turned farther from her sight, and buried my 
 face in darkness. 
 
316 PASCAR&L. 
 
 The familiar me'rry welcome name of the old Catholic king 
 struck like a knife into my aching heart. 
 
 All the day long I lay there shrinking from the sun rays, and 
 striving to hide from the sounds and the shouts of the streets. 
 The chiming bells, the laughing voices, the furious fun, the blar- 
 ing trumpets, all came in a dull echo across the river into the 
 chamber where I lay ; and I shuddered and cowered down as 
 those do who, in the dead of night, believe that they behold the 
 risen ghosts of their lost and buried loves. 
 
 Mercifully for me, Carnival reigned and rioted on the other 
 side of Arno, and in the old still dusky quarter of the Silver 
 Dove silence and solitude only had dominion as the people 
 flocked across the bridges and left it to the coming of the chilly 
 twilight. 
 
 Giudetta stayed with me, and sat at her work in the case- 
 ment. 
 
 " We are always dull in old Oltrarno," she said. 
 
 I was thankful. I shivered where I lay, when on the nights 
 of Dominica across the river from the arches by the Yecchio 
 Bridge there floated to us the distant tumult of the Midnight 
 Pairs. 
 
 The Carnival went by, and all the coolness of (Juaresima, and 
 the bright brevity of Pasqua, followed it, and in their turn 
 passed by and dropped into the things that were. 
 
 I heard the shrill gala shouts and the clamour of the Berlin- 
 gaccio ; I heard the Lenten bells swing in monotonous measure 
 from dawn to eve ; I heard the joyous cries of the lovers and the 
 children tossing their Easter eggs into each other's breasts, or 
 bearing home their sheaves of palm. I heard it all telling the 
 passage of the feasts and seasons as chiming clocks ring away the 
 dying hours. I heard it all sitting against the empty stone 
 hearth, heart -sick, and weaving the threads to and fro, to and 
 fro, to and fro. 
 
 Pee v*e, every one of those fasts and feasts had voice, and the 
 dead days lived in them, as a dead child lives for its mother in 
 the tones and the glance of every laughing yearling that creeps 
 out to catch her black skirts in rosy fingers. She shudders 
 from the tender touch ; so I shuddered from the sunny hours. 
 
-THE MOUTH OF THR LION. $!/ 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 BY THE MOUTH OF THE LIOX. 
 
 THE cold had gone ; it was the balmy, cool, spring weather 
 united with the golden Tuscan noons and the roseate Tuscan 
 twilights that had welcomed me when T had first passed the 
 gates of Florence. I had been three months with Giudetta, and 
 had not left my bed. I was a wan, shrunken, tired thing, with 
 immense startled eyes and short clipped curls ; few would have 
 recognised in me the child that had wandered in the wake of the 
 Arte through all the blossoms of the year from the bright crocus 
 to the tremulous cyclamen. 
 
 One day I was lying listless and feeble in my dark room, 
 where no ray of light could come from the narrow grated case- 
 ment, when suddenly there arose upon the noonday quiet a rush 
 of many feet, and a wide echo of deep voices that seemed to rend 
 asunder the old walls. 
 
 She sitting by the window, thrust her stocking off her arm, 
 and leaned as far out as the grating would allow her ; a little, 
 bent, eager, curious figure with the glow of the noon light 
 catching the silver rings in her ears. 
 
 "Che, che!" she cried. " What a clamour and clatter, all 
 the town is out, they have those free three-coloured flags, 
 too, that the lads got shot so often for, years ago, and that the 
 priests say will always bring on us poison in the wells and 
 pestilence. There is little Tista, the baker's son, amongst them; 
 he is always a bit of tinder. Ah, Tista, Tista, tell me what 
 it is all about. Are the people mad ? or is Giotto's gold cap 
 put atop the campanile ? or is the Pope come ? Che, che ! 
 Stop a bit, Tista, and say a word, boy." 
 
 There was a shrill boy's voice, clear as a silver trumpet upon 
 Easter day, that pierced above the din and joyous uproar and 
 came through the darkness of the chamber to me. 
 
 "It is Pascarel set free of the Eargello, and we make high 
 holiday. Dress your casement, good mother, and at sunset bring 
 a light there, or we will break it sure to-night." 
 
 I sprang from my bed I whose wasted, fever- stricken limbs 
 for three long months had never known me upright, I 
 
$18 PASCAR&L. 
 
 my bare arms and my hollow cheek against the iron grating ; I 
 beat my aching breast against the bars like any fresh caged bird. 
 But all I saw was the gay glad tumult of the crowd heaving and 
 gathering under the broad sunshine, with the three colours of 
 free Italy tossing high against the scarlet cross of Florence. 
 Then, too weak to stand, my feet gave way beneath me, my 
 hands loosed their hold upon the stancheons, the bright multitude 
 in the narrow, dusky street was blotted into utter darkness ; I 
 fell moaning and bruised upon the garret floor. 
 
 At night she hung her light within her window, as Tista, the 
 baker's son, had bidden her ; and went quietly herself to vespers, 
 as was her wont. Ever since I had heard the one name ring 
 down the street, I had leaned there, pressed against the grating, 
 to watch the return of the people through Oltrarno. 
 
 I loved him so dear Heaven! and yet almost I hated him. 
 He had deceived me ! He had deceived me ! 
 
 This was the iron in my soul. It is an error so common ! 
 Men lie to women out of mistaken tenderness or ill-judged com- 
 passion, or that curious fear of recrimination from which the 
 highest courage is not exempt. A man deceives a woman with 
 untruth, not because he is base, but because he fears to hurt her 
 with the truth ; fears her reproaches, fears a painful scene ; and 
 even when she is quite worthless, is reluctant to wound her 
 weakness. It is an error so common ! But it is an error fatal 
 always. 
 
 Night fell quiet ; the oil lamp glimmered in the casement. I 
 forgot the light it shed upon my face, but crouched there, watch- 
 ing with wide beaming eyes the coming of the crowd. 
 
 The eighth hour echoed from the Yecchio as there rolled in on 
 the silence the deep sea-like sound of a rejoicing people. The 
 tramp of many feet came distinctly over the bridges. The swell 
 of song vibrated against the massive walls. 
 
 Strained against the grating, I watched and listened. 
 
 Then, after a little space, they poured through the narrow pas- 
 sage by the Lion's Mouth, they came, the people of Oltrarno 
 artizans, painters, mosaic-sellers, wood-cutters, cobblers, traders, 
 all in a confused moonlight struggle, with banners above them 
 and shouts rising from fchem ; and in their midst my darling, 
 with the white moonlight on his dark straight poetic brows and 
 on his dreamful eyes. 
 
 Breathless I pressed against the iron bars breathless I gazed, 
 as only any creature can who, for months of silence and of 
 absence has never once looked upon the face it loves. 
 
BY THE MOUTH OF THE I JON. 319 
 
 I forgot the light shed on me he looking up at the eager 
 people that filled every illumined casement, saw me where I 
 leaned, and with one great cry, like the cry of a drowning man, 
 he sprang down from the height on which they bore him aloft 
 upon their shoulders, and forced his way up the ink-black slope 
 of the steep stairs, and thrust his foot against the fastened door, 
 and broke into the room. 
 
 Then with a great cry he caught me in his arms, and held me 
 close there in the great darkness, as a man will hold some dear 
 thing dead. How many moments went I know not ; as there 
 are years in which one does not live a moment, so there are 
 moments, I think, in which one lives a lifetime. 
 
 The moonlight went whirling by; the darkling shadows swam 
 round me like eddying waters; the floors trembled; then my 
 vyes closed beneath his kisses, my sense grew faint, the world 
 was dark all dark. Eut it was the sweet, hot darkness of a 
 oummer night ; and even then I know I prayed, so far as I 
 could pray, that I might die in it. 
 
 The trance of passion passed. 
 
 After a while, whether the time was short or long I cannot 
 tell, the cloud upon my senses seemed suddenly to lift ; the death- 
 like trance of passion passed. I lifted my head, and strained 
 myself backward from his hold, and shivered where I stood. 
 
 For I remembered. 
 
 He, with a quick vague fear awakening in his eyes, held me 
 against him. 
 
 "Why look at me like that?" he cried, and then was 
 still. 
 
 What I answered I cannot tell. All madness of reproach that 
 ever any tongue could frame, I know left my own lips in that 
 blind, cruel hour. All excuse for him and all goodness in him I 
 forgot : ah, God forgive me, I forgot ! He had deceived me ; 
 that was all I knew or cared to know. 
 
 I had longed for his touch, his look, his word, as prisoners for 
 liberty, as dying youths for life ; and yet, now that he was there, 
 all the pride in me flamed afresh, and burned up love. All that 
 J poured on him were hot upbraiding, and broken bitter scorn. 
 
 " You shall not touch me, you shall not touch me ! " I cried 
 to him, wrenching myself from his hold as we stood there, in the 
 paleness of the moonlight, with the shouting of the baffled and 
 impatient crew filling the air with its strange tumult ; in the 
 noise, in the flashing light, in the sudden passion of joy and 
 terror, of love and hate, my brain was gone. I had only this 
 
320 
 
 PASCAR&L. 
 
 one memory left, and with it the instinct to wither him with his 
 shame. 
 
 I do not know either what he said in answer. I knew he 
 kneeled there in the moonshine, kissing my hands, my dress, my 
 feet, pouring out to me in all the eager fervid eloquence of his 
 nature the rapture, the woe, the wonder, the sorrow, the shame, 
 and the remorse that turn by turn had their sway over him. 
 
 " Loved her!" he cried, as I flung the word back on him 
 again and again and again in the fury of my solitary instinct. 
 " Loved her! Oh, God! do not profane the word oh, child! 
 how should you know ? Love ? "What has love to do with the 
 mindless follies and the soulless vagaries of men ? One catches 
 the rotten pear that falls with golden skin across one's summer 
 path ; but what fruit of thought, what flower of fancy, what 
 1 Vagrance of heart or soul can there be there ? Another passer- 
 by had had it, coming first. Oh, gioja mia! oh, anima mia! 
 listen, listen, listen, and believe ! If you love me, be jealous as 
 you will of the wind that touches me, of the sun that shinua on 
 me, of the air I breathe, or of the earth I tread, but never be 
 jealous of a soulless love. There is no dead thing in its cola 
 corruption that a man can ever loathe as he loathes that ! " 
 
 I shut my ears to the sweet pleading of his heart. I wrenched 
 My hands from him. I struggled from his arms. 
 
 " Ah ! so you say, ah ! so you say," I said to him. " But why 
 should I believe you? You deceived me once ! " 
 
 His head bowed itself down upon my feet ; he was silent a 
 moment, then he raised his face quite bloodless as the dead are 
 in the chill moonrays. 
 
 " Oh, my darling ! I know, I know ! " he murmured softly. 
 "But be gentle, have patience; what else then could I do? I 
 was frank with you as frank as I could be ; not to lay evil bare 
 beneath your guileless eyes. I told you from the first we were 
 unfit for you ; only you pleaded so to stay, and my heart pleaded 
 for you. You were so young, so helpless, so utterly lonely in 
 your defenceless ignorance ; and I tried to get better shelter for 
 you, and I failed. And you were happy, and you heard no 
 harm. It was a shame to love you, and let one's-self be loved. 
 Ah, yes ! I know, but it was all so natural, so innocent, so un- 
 foreseen ; ah, light of my eyes ! I sinned to you, indeed. But 
 all the while I strove so hard to do my duty to you, such poor 
 and feeble duty as I could. Can you not forgive me that I erred 
 in weakness ? " 
 
 Almost I yielded as I heard j the crowd, astonished and im- 
 
BY THE MOUTH OF THE LION, 32! 
 
 patient, surged with loud outcry through the narrow street below ; 
 but all that I had ears for was that sweet, sonorous, passionate 
 roice that had made its music for me in the old dead days in the 
 moon-lightened fields, whilst the maize was all ahlaze with the 
 love fires of the lucciolei. Almost I yielded : all the life in me 
 was yearning for his life ; for the softness of silent kisses ; for the 
 warmth of folded hands, for the gladness of summer hours spent 
 fside by side in the ilex shadow, for the passion and the peace of 
 mutual love that smiles at the sun, and knows that heaven holds 
 no fairer joys than those which are its own, at the mere magic of 
 a single touch ! 
 
 Almost I yielded, held there by his close-elapsed arms, his 
 face looking upward as he kneeled there where the moonrays 
 fell. 
 
 A moment a word and it was mine again ; mine for ever- 
 more ; mine a thousandfold more strong in sweetness, and more 
 sweet in strength than I had known it whilst the wild libeccio 
 blew the fragrance from the trampled grasses and the trodden 
 grapes and the tossing roses on the hillside on the night of the 
 saints beneath jFiesole. A moment, and it was mine. And I, 
 oh fool ! oh poor, vain, proud, half-hearted little fool ! I shut my 
 heart to him, and shuddered in scorn from the deep dreamful 
 delight that stole upon me like a trance. 
 
 Should the lips that had touched hers seek mine again ? should 
 the man who could sink to that baseness of a sensual bondage 
 kneel at my feet and pray to me for union of my soul with his ? 
 
 I dared not trust myself to look on him ; I flung my head 
 back, and strained against the all-compelling force of his 
 embrace. 
 
 1 'You talk you talk you talk as poets do!" I cried to 
 him, in my vain, bitter, childish rage. "It is your art, your 
 trade ! You string the terza rima for a brazierfull of contadini's 
 pence any night they ask you at a village fair. A poet you, 
 who for three years could find companionship in such as she ; 
 who, for all those seasons could stay unshamed and show yourself 
 upon your stage beside her like your own dancing dog beside its 
 chained and collared mate ! I will not hear you no ! It is too 
 late. Go to her go ! Since once you found your level with 
 her, keep it. It is too late, I say : words ? oh, yes ! They 
 are your art ; I know. You can make men weep, and laugh at 
 them in your sleeve. You can make children laugh ; and you 
 all the while as weary and sad as death. That is your trade, te> 
 lie, A little He or two one more or less what does it signify ? 
 
 Y 
 
322 PASCAL EL. 
 
 You dupe a woman what of that ? It is your art to fool the 
 world with the sham artifice of every counterfeit emotion. 
 Practise on every fool that loves you her or me, or any other 
 what does it matter ? you are still upon your stage ! " 
 
 He loosed his arms from round me and rose slowly, staggering 
 a little in the dusky shimmer of the shadows and the moonbeams. 
 There was a look upon his face that I had never seen there. 
 God forgive me ! So, I think, must a man surely look who gets 
 his death-hlow straight through flesh and bone, and lives a 
 second's space to look death in the face. 
 
 "You say that you?" he murmured; and then was still, 
 resting his eyes upon my own in an unspoken reproach, that 
 pierced me like a knife thrust through my heart. 
 
 "Yes, I say it I why not?" I cried to him, stung by 
 remorse at the pain I dealt, and yet driven on by what I deemed 
 my wrongs. "Have I not seen you, heard you, watched you a 
 hundred times if once, playing at any passion that you would ? 
 Of course it was so easy to cheat me, a child that trusted you, and 
 took your every word as a fixed law of God's ! Prom first to 
 last you know that you deceived me; from the day you gave me 
 the gold florins, to the night you said you loved me. If you had 
 loved me, would you have let me live in that paradise of false- 
 hoods for one single hour ? Would you not rather have sought 
 for me my father and my kindred ? I come of a great race ; I 
 told you so ; somewhere in the world live people who would own 
 and shelter me, people who would lift me up into some light of 
 fair repute and of known dignity. If you had loved me, that is 
 the thing you would have done ; I being too young, and poor, 
 and simple, and ignorant to be ever able to do it for myself : you 
 boast of honour ; you say you are the last of a once mighty line, 
 though only now a wandering player ; if it were so, if you were 
 worthy of the loyalty and love those people in the streets give to 
 you for their country's sake, would you have let your feet rest 01 
 your eyes close until you should have given me some firm, 
 straight place in life, some hold upon my kith and kin, some 
 knowledge of my heritage ? Por me it is impossible ; but for 
 you to have done that, how easy ! Then, indeed, I might have 
 said you loved me." 
 
 He was quite quiet as he listened. Men are so generous oh, 
 heaven, yes, how generous for only think how rare it is that 
 ever a man will strike a woman ? And they, themselves, daily, 
 hourly, incessantly stung, and bit, and galled, and chained by 
 scorpion words and adder kisses ! Men are so generous ; he was 
 
By THE MOUTH Ofi THB LION. 323 
 
 so. He never once lifted up his voice and said, as he might have 
 said so justly : " And what title had I to serve and save you? 
 "Why did I not leave you as I found you, a beggar in the ilex 
 wood that day?" 
 
 He was quite quiet. All the glow and eagerness and fervour 
 of passion had died off his face ; it grew cold, and colourless, and 
 still, with the impenetrable stillness of an Italian face that 
 masks all pain. 
 
 "No doubt you are right," he said, gravely. "It would 
 have been better had I done so. But, you doubt I loved you, 
 I?" 
 
 In lieu of such a gentle word as that, why did he not throw 
 me down under his feet, and cast on me his goodness and his 
 grace, his tender thoughtfulness and patient care of me, like coals 
 of fire on my vain, foolish cruel head ? If men set their heel 
 more often on what is weak and worthless, I think women might 
 be better than they are ; God knows. 
 
 All my old perfect love for him, all my old perfect faith in him, 
 welled up in my faint heart and almost broke the forces of my 
 bitter vanity and greed. Almost, but not quite; for what I 
 knew, might he not have come to me fresh that very night from 
 the babbling lips and the brown hands of his old toy ? 
 
 I was passionate with woman's passion; I was cruel with 
 children's cruelty. 
 
 " "Why should I believe you ? " I cried to him. " You have 
 let me believe a lie once ! " 
 
 His face flushed crimson, then grew very pale under its olivo 
 darkness. I think he looked as a dead man must do. He shrank 
 a little as though one had struck him a blow, a blow that he 
 could not return. 
 
 " You have a right to reproach me aa you will," he said very 
 gently. " And how should you know, how should you know ? >( 
 
 A heavy sigh ran through the words and made them barely 
 audible. He looked at me very long, very wistfully, with no 
 passion in his eyes, only a despair, that was so great that it 
 chilled me into speechless terror. For it was so unlike himself 
 or at least I thought so in my ignorance. He paused a moment, 
 looking so. 
 
 A convulsion of longing seized me to throw myself into his 
 arms and cling to him for ever, for ever, for ever, forgetting all 
 and all forgiving. Eut I was a child; I was fierce, I waa 
 ignorant, I was wayward, and I had been wounded in the one 
 sweet, sacred, perfect faith of my short life. I stood there 
 
3 $4 PASCAR&L. 
 
 and unyielding; my burning eyes were tearless, my scornful 
 mouth was mute. 
 
 There must have been that in my attitude, or in my look, or 
 in my silence, that stung him like some insult, for the blood 
 flashed back into his face, and he raised himself with his old 
 dauntless and grand gesture. 
 
 " Even you shall not say that twice," he murmured. " I will 
 serve you in other ways, God willing, but you shall not see my 
 face again. Farewell." 
 
 Before I had measured the force of what he had said he had 
 gone ; turned away and passed from sight. 
 
 A single step, a single cry would have called him back. But 
 I stood motionless and silent still ; and let him go : God ! 
 
 The clamorous people thronging the staircase and tne stairs, 
 filled the night with their loud outcries. I called him back, but 
 all in vain ; my voice was drowned in the tumult as a child's 
 death- cry in a storm at sea. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 DEAD HOSES. 
 
 THIS was in the week that followed upon Pasqua. 
 
 The summer months went by, and I neither counted them nor 
 knew what they were bringing. 
 
 The days and nights passed by in an agony, at times fierce 
 and at others dull, but always agony like that of a gunshot 
 wound which burns like a flame one hour and aches like a bruise 
 another. 
 
 The face of Pascarel I never saw ; and once when little Tista 
 went by and Giudetta asked him*what was become of the wild 
 fellow for whom he had made her burn her lamp all night, Tista 
 canea up to her sadly, " He is out of the city, mother; and we 
 are flat as ditch water all of us." 
 
 I never stirred out ; never once. 
 
 I thought that it would make me mad to see the sun shine 
 upon his Florence and I did not fear death, but I feared 
 madness. 
 
 I had seen it once, in a beautiful dark woman in old Ferrara, 
 whose lover had been swept down in the winter floods and 
 
DEAD ROSES. 325 
 
 drowned before her eyes, and she was forever walking to and fro 
 along the water's edge and calling to it to give up her 'Dino ; I 
 had seen her pacing there crying forever the one name when tho 
 sun was up, as when the moon was high; she was sacred in 
 Ferrara ; the rudest ruffian of the streets would not have touched 
 dead 'Dino's "Pazza." And sometimes I feared in the hush 
 of the night I often feared that I should be just like her. Eor 
 all I said, ever, and ever, and ever, was just one name, as sho 
 di^ only I said it in my heart, and no one heard. 
 
 I never stirred out as I say. 
 
 Often Giudetta strove to take me with her to Sta. Spirito, and 
 draw me out to see the humour of the streets ; but week by week, 
 and month by month dragged on, and I stayed there by the cold 
 hearth and saw the hand's breadth of blue sky burn above the 
 palace roof, and prayed as far as I ever prayed to have an 
 end made to my pain in death. 
 
 But death, like other gifts, comes not for our asking. 
 
 One morning, as I lay there upon my bed, old Giudetta drew 
 her stocking off her arm, put down her spectacles, and looked at 
 me with her brown Tuscan eyes. 
 
 " Do you know that it is the Ascension week, and we are 
 now in June ?" she asked me suddenly. 
 
 I shook my head wearily ; what to me was the flight of time, 
 or the advent of summer ? 
 
 " I have seen sixty- eight summers come and go," she said, 
 after a pause. 
 
 I did not answer. 
 
 " Sixty-eight summers," she said again. "There was a time 
 with me when the sight of the sun and the smell of the flowers 
 made me sick soul and body as you are." 
 
 I heard her, but her words were nothing to me. I should 
 not have heeded in these days, I think, the roar of flames, or 
 thunders of a flood. 
 
 " Listen to me a little," said Giudetta, and she turned her 
 round on her oaken stool and sat with the sun touching the 
 grated panes above her old white head. She was a little tender 
 old soul, forever chirping on her lonely hearth like a little brown 
 grillo, and very good and patient with me, and I all the while 
 brutally thankless. " Listen a little. You young things think 
 no one was ever born before you ; it seems so new to you, all 
 you suffer. You are wrong. Listen. When I was fourteen I 
 was a dancer at the opera-house here ; like these girls I mend 
 for, only I had prettier feet than they. I was a simple, honest, 
 
326 PASCAR&L. 
 
 happy thing* dancing for my bread and my mother's, and 
 thinking no harm, and doing none. I danced a couple of years ; 
 heart-whole and content, though I never got in the front, or 
 made over half a paul a-night. People all said I was pretty. 
 Perhaps I was, as a robin is. One Carnival night, as I ran home in 
 the snow, I slipped and fell down on Carraria bridge ; it was very 
 bad in those days. A passer-by picked me up and carried me 
 home, for I was light of weight, and had sprained my foot, so I 
 could not stand. There was no dancing for me for weeks. He 
 came to see how it fared with me ; came often ; he was a noble- 
 man and a soldier ; a Francese, too. Before the vines were in 
 flower we had got to love one another. Some people shook their 
 heads at me, but that did not matter ; no man had touched so 
 much as my hand till he kissed it. That year well, I thank 
 the good God for it. One can live on a year. He would have 
 given me all manner of great and rich things. But I said, ' No, 
 no, no ; if I take a paul of yours, what shall I be better than 
 the rest ? ' And all he ever gave me was a few knots of roses. 
 I have got thorn. They will be put in my coffin with me. "When 
 the year was lived out, I thank the dear God for that year, 
 there were war and trouble, and that great one they called 
 Napoleone was in his death-struggle, so they talked. Then my 
 love came to me and said, ' See, he was my chief, and I owe 
 him much, and I cannot let him fall and I not there. You are 
 the light of my eyes, Giudetta, but what can I do when my 
 honour speaks?' I tried all I could to speak to him. For 
 honour that sounds so hard to us women. We do not see it ; 
 and it is always set against us ; and we have no share with it ; 
 and we hate it, I think. But all I could do did not stir him. 
 4 If I come not back in a year's space I am dead in battle/ he 
 said. Then he kissed me for the last time and went. Napoleone 
 was ruined and put in chains; that they said ; but he he never 
 came back not at that year's end nor any other's. And never a 
 word have I had. It is near fifty years now. Never a word 
 dear God. People made a mock of me, and cried, ' A fine lover ! 
 he was only tired, and fooled thee ! ' But I never answered 
 them back. I knew he was dead, or he would have come. 
 What use was it to have loved him if one had not such little 
 faith as that?" 
 
 Her voice shook a moment, and dropped into silence ; it was 
 all still in the chamber ; the gold sunbeams shone through the 
 gratings and cast an aureole on her old bent head. 
 
 After a while, she took up her tale again. 
 
DEAD ROSES. 32? 
 
 " There were times I was mad, and was nigh throwing my 
 body in the river, and making an end, but I thought the good 
 God would not let me meet him in Paradise if I did that. So I 
 went on and on, and bore with my life. I never danced again 
 no, no it was not for others to look on what he had used to 
 call fair. I took to mending the maglil and the hose, as I do 
 now, just getting bread; that was all. My poor old mother 
 lived a long while. She used to fret herself, and curse me. I 
 was good to look at, and there were many men of our quarter 
 here wanted me all in marriage and honesty. And my mother 
 could not see why I shook them off ' all for a bad man, and a 
 dead one, or as good as dead/ she would say she did not know. 
 She lived a long while here ; yes, here ; I was born in this 
 room. I shall die in it. He used to want me to change to some 
 fine villa up in the orchards and gardens ; but I always said no ; 
 if I had taken an ounce of silver from him, I should have felt 
 he had bought my kisses. I only took the roses, I have them 
 safe, they will put them in my coffin with me. So many, 
 many, many years I used to look out at this window to watch 
 for him coming down the street, as he used to do, just at night- 
 fall, as the moon came up over the old palace there. I go and 
 look still still and I always think I shall see him just the 
 same, just as young and light of foot as he was then. And it is 
 fifty years ago fifty years this Carnival." 
 
 She was silent ; the sunbeams fell through the grating on to 
 the stone floor. She drew her stocking on her arm again, and 
 worked on and on, and on. 
 
 I shivered where I lay. 
 
 Fifty years ! and always alone thus ! 
 
 My life looked ghastly to me, seen by the light of this corpse 
 candle that shone over these buried lives. 
 
 Should I live to be as old always alone always alone live 
 to tell rny tale calmly, sitting in the evening light ? 
 
 If I had had strength, I think, in that moment's agony, 1 
 should have yielded to the temptation that had in her youth 
 beset Giudetta, and have gone out into the streets, and flung 
 myself into the full flood of the mountain-shed Arno water. 
 
 Swift death! fierce death! how fair and pitiful it looked 
 beside these fifty lonely years passed in poverty and pain under 
 the strong summer suns and all the driving winter blasts ! 
 
 " And did you never doubt him never doubt that he lived 
 and was faithless to you?" I asked her, roused out of my apathy 
 and isolation into a faint passing sense of some human interest. 
 
2*8 PASCAR&L. 
 
 She looked at me with eyes a little angered and more sur- 
 prised, and paused in her work, the stocking on her arm. 
 
 " Doult him! But, hambina mia, you have not understood. 
 I had loved him and belonged to him ; how could I ever doubt 
 him after that?" 
 
 The answer burnt me with a hot, sharp shame. 
 
 She was an old ignorant woman one of the very poor j she 
 could not read or write ; she had no knowledge of any sort ; she 
 had a child's eagerness for seeing feasts and pastimes ; she would 
 gossip by the hour with the people in the street about any 
 passing trifle of the town ; she was a little homely, harmless, 
 hard-working body, who went to pray in great white Santo 
 Spirito in a dumb, dog-like, wistful, pagan sort of faith; she 
 was the gossip of the washerwoman over the way, and the crony 
 of the cobbler at his stall in the road below ; she was only old 
 Gr&detta, the mender of the dancers' magliS ; and yet, shut up, 
 unseen in the rude, wrinkled, weather-worn rind of her rough 
 life, there was hidden the pure white heart of this noble and 
 deathless faith ! 
 
 Beside her I seemed in my own sight to fall away worthless 
 and rootless with neither love nor faith. 
 
 This was such love as he had dreamed of, there on the star 
 tower, in the days of spring the love that sees as God sees, and, 
 has pardon and pity, wide as the width of heaven. 
 
 It had not been in me ; young, with the years Love loves, 
 and dreaming with glad eyes against the sun, and fleet feet, 
 light as a blown leaf upon a world of flowers. It was in her, 
 poor, old, and utterly alone ; whose solitary hope on earth was 
 that a dead rose should lie with her in her grave : a rose dead 
 fifty summers. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 TODEK THE WHITE LIOIT. 
 
 GIUDETTX found time betwixt the mending of the maglid to 
 do many a little helpful act for her poor brethren and neigh- 
 bours. She was always moving about at such times, as the 
 hose she had to mend were not so many that they occupied all 
 her time from sunrise on to midnight. "But one August day, 
 
UNDER THE WHITE LION. 329 
 
 going down the seventy odd stairs of the old house she dwelt in, 
 she slipped and twisted her foot under the brass pail that she 
 was carrying for water to the well below. 
 
 She was a helpful, stout-hearted soul, and bore it well, and 
 contrived to do for herself and ine, and even to make the little 
 frugal meals all the same. But she could not move beyond the 
 church to which she went nightly at vespers ; and her neigh- 
 bour's child had to run hither and thither over the town to 
 fetch and carry home the stockings that were her only source 
 of income. 
 
 I should have done this, no doubt ; but I was too deeply sunk 
 in the apathy of pain to notice any duty. ^Nevertheless, one 
 day, when the little lad was later in than usual, she so begged 
 of me to take homeward some maglid, without which the poor 
 dancer waiting for them would be unable to make her appear- 
 ance at the summer theatre that night, that a vague sense of the 
 shamefulness of my own absorption stirred in me ; and, the hour 
 being close on eveningtime, and the streets already dusk, I 
 wrapped myself closely in an old dark-hooded cloak of hers, and 
 for the first time in six months and more, went out into the air. 
 
 It made me stagger and feel sick. 
 
 The owner of the maglid lived beyond the Erediano Gate. 
 The streets seemed all in a tangle of strange unknown curves to 
 me I, who had known the city, as a child his father* s garden- 
 ways, was adrift in it as in a foreign desert place. There was 
 the red evening light everywhere, burning on the black shadows 
 and the grey housewalls. Bells were beginning to toll for 
 vespers. There was the scent of orchards from great mounds of 
 ripe and rotting fruits. There was a loud gay chatter of voices 
 and hurry of feet everywhere. A girl, about my years, leaned 
 from a casement, and threw down a knot of carnations, and 
 pouted, and shook her head ruefully at a young man standing 
 below in a grey shirt and a scarlet cap. 
 
 " No chance of a stroll to-night, Agnolo ; mother will not 
 let me stir from the treccia." 
 
 She thought it such a hard fate, leaning there, tied to her 
 task of straw-plaiting, with her lover in the street below, 
 unable to get out in the cool summer night, to stray into the 
 woods, and see the lucciolS lighten, and count the nobles' car- 
 riages in the wide, moonlit piazzone. She thought it such a 
 hard fate, only able to toss down the carnations Oh God ! she 
 did not dream how hungrily I below there envied her the shelter 
 and the tyranny against which she thus rebelled. 
 
330 PASCAR&L. 
 
 Out by the Frediano Gate there was more light. The after* 
 glow came in fall from the west, across the valdigreve. The 
 cypresses of Olive to were standing out against a wonderful sky ; 
 rose-purple, like the heart of a dahlia flower. The Strozzi lion 
 couched white amongst the hanging woods. Along the road that 
 wound at their base there were some contadini going homewards 
 to the outlying villages. 
 
 One of these came towards me on a black mule. She was a 
 little round red-and-brown figure; her panniers were full of 
 market merchandise ; before her strutted slowly a flock of young 
 turkeys; she held a long switch, with which she struck at 
 them ; the old mule hobbled slowly in their wake ; the grey 
 plumes of the birds spread fanlike over the dust of the highway, 
 as they rose and rustled in their wrath. 
 
 " Our Lady grant me patience, oh you diavolini ! " cried the 
 shrill, swift voice of the market-woman. " The sun is down, 
 and, surely as one lives, you will all go to roost in the hedges 
 you always do; just wherever you find yourselves, like the 
 stupid boobies of birds that you are ! And what can one do 
 with you, you wretched simpletons ? sit and watch you in the 
 hedge oneself all night, or else not a wing feather of you will 
 there be to be seen in the morning ! Such thieves as they all 
 are in this city. That is what comes of buying you of that 
 Pratoese by the barracks. If ever I buy poultry in the street 
 again, may all my eggs be addled! And go to roost you will; 
 and we all these kilometres off home : you must have the 
 tempers of a herd of gipsies in you, you nasty beasts, or you 
 would never squat in any hedge like that, instead of waiting to 
 get to proper perches like good God-fearing fowls " 
 
 The shrill, scolding tones dropped suddenly; then a little 
 frightened shriek broke the silence; her switch fell in the dust, 
 her bridle on the mule's neck. In the warm ruddy light, under 
 the dusky wood, amidst the grey fluttering feathers of the birds, 
 the little round, rosy face of Erunotta looked down into mine, 
 blanching with sudden fear and wonder. Her hands sought the 
 ring of amber beads about her throat, and her lips began to 
 mutter prayers. 
 
 Perhaps I looked the ghost of my dead self to her, there, in 
 the shadows and the warmth, perhaps ; I was so changed. 
 And the long, dusky folds of the cloak covered my shape loosely 
 from head to foot, and all she saw were my wide opened, 
 feverish- startled eyes. I did not move. I sat on the stones, 
 and looked up at her. I felt no wonder, no surprise, no passion 
 
UNDER THE WHITE LION. 33! 
 
 of any kind ; only a dreary desolate disgust and sickliness of 
 great humiliation. He had loved her this little shrill, scolding, 
 petulant, coarse fool, striking at her turkeys with her switch 
 that was all I thought of: what better did I know ? 
 
 The birds fluttered to right and left of her ; the mule stood 
 still ; the other people had gone on round the bend of the wall ; 
 it was quite quiet ; there was only the sound of a iisher's feet 
 wading in the river below the bridge. 
 
 "Is it you? is it you, indeed, donzella?" she murmured, 
 timorously, her hands clasping and counting the beads all the 
 while. "I thought you were dead; I always thought so. 
 You look dead now ; only your eyes burn. Are you angry ? 
 Are you very angry still ? Oh, holy Gesu ! how you frighten 
 me! " 
 
 I made her no answer. 
 
 I gazed at her in a sort of dreamy contemplation, in which 
 my disgust of her was lost in deeper scorn for him and for my- 
 self. This was the thing that had shared his heart with me ; 
 this was the toy that he had dallied with ere he had turned to 
 play in my turn with me ! So I thought, poor little, weak, 
 faithless, ignorant soul that I was, knowing nothing of the 
 follies and fancies of men. knowing nothing of how their passion 
 floats over an ocean of froth, that it skims curlew-like till it 
 dives for its one pearl of price in the depths that the storm stirs 
 and opens. 
 
 "I was sorry as soon as I had done it," she began to 
 whimper. " But who was to know he was in the Eargello ? 
 And who could tell that you would tear away and kill yourself 
 like that ? You were handsome, and you said you were illus- 
 trious. I thought all would go well with you. And the very 
 next day I went and vowed a necklace to the Virgin, and I gave 
 it, too ; a beautiful thing, all real silver, with a moonstone, that 
 that big black Dominic hung round me all for love he swore it 
 was his mother's \ but I believe he pilfered it. Anyway, hand- 
 some it was, and the Madonna had it, and she ought to have 
 had a care of you. But if you are not dead, you must be very, 
 very poor are you poor ? Will you not say a word ? Look 
 you ; now it is all over, I am not one that bears ill-will. I 
 would give }~ou a bed and a bit and drop yes, I would ; for 
 Cocomero, he never saw any good looks in you ; you were too 
 thin for him ; he likes a woman like a juicy apple, all round 
 and rosy, just as I am. And if you like to come home with me. 
 come. You shall be welcome. It is all over with Pascarel and 
 
33 PASCAR&L. 
 
 me, you know ; and I have a tidy little places oat here, Signa 
 way, and I always was a handy one with poultry- " 
 
 "All over!" 
 
 I echoed the words, not knowing what I did. What ! a crea- 
 ture lived there, rosy, and young, and full of health, and quite 
 content with all her days, who yet could say thus coolly all was 
 over with her love, and could think and know that she would 
 see his face and hear his voice no more, and yet, a moment ear- 
 lier, had had no care but to drive her grey birds homeward ere 
 the evening fell ! 
 
 The sound of my voice banished her strange fears of me as an 
 unreal thing. She ceased to cling against her mule, and stepped 
 a little forward in the dust. The sun had set, it was growing 
 quite dark under the shadow of Mount Olivet. 
 
 "It is you, then donzella?" she cried, aloud; "and 
 
 you are here still? and in great straits, I think; for where 
 are your yellow skirts, and your sunny hair, and your proud 
 pretty toss of your head like a princess born? One would 
 think you were a beggar, sitting on those stones there. Yes, 
 it is all over with him and me. After you were gone I did 
 not seem to care somehow I had been jealous, and when he 
 was in prison it is as if a man were dead, you know. One gets 
 to forget quite. And I had always liked Coco : he was such a 
 good-natured simpleton, and just like a baby to manage, and as 
 merry as a dog in a fair. So, when Pascarel found us out one 
 day in Friuli and offered us this farm here, and said we might 
 go before the priest and syndic and make all straight and right, 
 as if one were a duchess, why, what could one do better ? Coco 
 was all for taking nothing men are such fools ; but I, I said, 
 1 never turn your back on a neat little podere, and a mule, and 
 a poultry-house; when the Madonna sends such things, we 
 should sin indeed not to take them/ And, after all, dancing 
 about in tinsel is merry and good enough in its way, but one 
 cannot do it for ever, and it is well to have a roof over one's 
 head, and a fair name for fat fowls in the mercato ; and, after 
 all, say what you will, it is something to be a wedded wife, 
 wedded before syndic and all, and if you only had seen the old 
 mother's face the first day I walked into the hovel in Casentino, 
 and held my hand up to her with the yellow ring ! It was 
 worth anything just to spite her, for she had always sworn I 
 should come to no good, but die in a ditch ; and now she would 
 give her ears for one of my turkeys to fat for Capo d'Anno." 
 
 So her tongue ran, standing there in the white dust, and 
 
THE WHITE LION. 333 
 
 tending with a little gleesome laugh that showed her whito 
 teeth from end to end between the ruddy lips, like daisies set in 
 poppies. 
 
 The dusky trees and purple skies, and all the deepening sha- 
 dows in the bronze and gold of the night, swam round me in 
 circles of darkness and light. 
 
 Brunotta slid herself from the back of the mule and stood 
 leaning against the animal with one arm over his neck ; a little 
 ruddy figure, scarlet and brown, with black braids shining, and 
 silver earrings glistening in the sunset, just as I had seen her 
 first of all as the day had died and the crocus flowers had closed 
 in the ilex woods to the sounds of the mandoline. 
 
 " Are you angry still ? " she muttered, piteously. "As soon 
 as I had told you, I was sorry yes, I was. I am not a bad 
 little thing only I was sick to see him crazed for you, and I 
 wanted you to know out of spite yes, out of spite. Eut as 
 soon as I had done it, I wished it undone. I hammered at the 
 door to tell you so, but you would not listen. You went away 
 through the window, and such a fuss as the padrona made about 
 her rose trees, that were all dragged down and trampled, never 
 was ! But how you look ! You must be dead, I think. And 
 if you are dead, I will have a mass said for you two or three 
 masses, if only you will be quiet, and not walk at night 1 " 
 
 She began to sob as her wont was in any fear, or any ex- 
 tremity ; her finger in her mouth like a sulking child, and 
 her shoulders shaking against the broad neck of the patient 
 mule. 
 
 I did not speak to her ; I did not even rise and move away. 
 I sat and looked at her vacantly ; while, through the stupor of 
 my thoughts, a shiver of the old scornful, bitter hate began to 
 steal upon and stir in me. 
 
 " A wife ! ' ' I echoed, dully. " A wife ! whose wife ? " 
 
 I had only one thought. I had gathered no definite sense 
 from her words. 
 
 She looked like a humbled chidden child who finds a gilded 
 toy he boasted of is only rag and patchwork after all. Some 
 sense and tinge of shame came on her ; she shifted her feet iu 
 the dust. There was a sort of exultation and mortification 
 struggling in her as she answered, 
 
 "I am Coco's wife; why not? He is just such a fool as he 
 seems ; and he dares not say his soul is his own if I look at him. 
 That is the stuff one wants in a husband. And I always had 
 been fond of him, that I vow, always. And when Pascardl 
 
334 PASCAR&L. 
 
 was in prison, it was as if he were dead, you know. Of 
 course I did not mean him to find out, but he overheard one day, 
 and then he gave us the farm ; and Coco, like a little blind bar- 
 baggiano as he is, went and told him I had driven you away. 
 And then he was in such madness such rage the saints for- 
 give him ! I never saw the like. And we have never seen him 
 since, except I passed him once on this very Signa road, and 
 thought his eyes would have withered me up like a shrivelled 
 leaf he can look so, you know. But I bear no malice ; no, not 
 I ; and if you want a roof over you, I will give it you, don- 
 zella oh, yes, willingly ; and we will let bygones be bygones, 
 and be good friends, just as we used to be ; and though you are 
 useless enough, as I remember well, still there are things that 
 you could do ; and if you could not, I, for one, should never 
 grudge you anything, and Coco, whatsoever I tell him he 
 thinks good, or says he does, which comes to the same thing; 
 and you could see the house was safe while I come into the 
 mercato, which one must do most days, or else lose credit with 
 the buyers. You see I bear no malice no, not I, why should 
 I ? I have all I want. So, if you like to come come ; and 
 say no more about it." 
 
 She put her hands out as she spoke rough, brown, chubby, 
 rosy palms in token of fair faith and of all amity. She nieaut 
 well oh, heavens, yes ! she meant well, poor little soulless, 
 mindless, empty thing, that had no force to love or force to hate. 
 
 Why did I not strike her ? Why did I not kill her ? 
 
 I moved where I stood in the dust: a convulsive shudder of 
 longing shook me to hurl her back into the dust and strike 
 her insult dumb upon her mouth as men may do with one 
 another. 
 
 Eut some strain of an old proud race still ran in me and 
 helped me to keep silence, and gave me force enough to rise 
 quite quietly from the heap of stones on which I crouched, 
 beggar-like as she had said, and look down into her pretty, 
 cunning, timorous eyes, in which the red light was shining. 
 
 " You mean no harm," I said to her, " may things go well 
 with you. But, if you are wise, do not let me ever see your face 
 again." 
 
 And so I left her, and went back under the olive shadows to 
 the city, and she stayed there, a little frightened ruddy figure, 
 in the glory of the after-glow, and ere I had gone far I 
 heard her calling to her birds that had nestled down by the 
 wayside and folded their russofc pinions for their rest, like 
 
UNDER THE WHITE LION. 335 
 
 feathered gipsies and hedgerow philosophers, as their kind have 
 ever been. 
 
 The turkeys would roost in the road that was her trouble ; 
 she had forgot all other. 
 
 'Who will may see her any day sitting underneath her green 
 umbrella, with her fowls clucking loud around her, hard by the 
 old Strozzi pile, and not a stone's throw from what was once the 
 bottega where Benvenuto shaped his Hercules on its field of 
 lapis lazuli, and fashioned in gold, and bronze, and silver, his 
 griffins and cherubs, his lilies and fauns, his wild acanthus 
 wreaths, and his love-legends for his daggers' hilts. 
 
 Ah, dear foolish folk that weep for women ! to one Gretchen 
 on her prison-bed there are a million, Bnmotte at their market 
 stalls. 
 
 Some pluck, like her, their speckled hens for a few soldi; 
 some pluck their golden geese in the great mercato of the world ; 
 but their end is all the same, and they are quite content. 
 
 I went on past the bridge, where men were wading with great 
 cloud-like nets, and underneath the little church of Santa Maria, 
 whose mellow bells were ringing across the silent water. 
 
 The sun had quite sunk ; but there was a deep hot glare upon 
 the sky that burnt the water red, the trees that stretch away 
 towards the country were black, and from the full moon that 
 hung in breathless purple skies, a lovely whiteness touched the 
 river here and there, and gleamed upon the old pale walls of 
 Signa, where she crouched to sleep under her feudal hills, scarce 
 changed at all since the days of her many martyrdoms, when she 
 was ever the first and surest mark for steel and torch from every 
 foe who came across the mountains to violate the fruitful and 
 serene loveliness of the olive -wreathed Yerzaja. 
 
 I paused and looked back at all that evening calm onoe just 
 once. I could still hear the voice of Brunotta screaming to the 
 birds beneath the monastery. I thought of one day, one golden 
 day of the late summer, that we had loitered away in Signa ; how 
 we had strayed amongst the tossing millet, and wandered amidst 
 the old monastic walls, and cut reed pipes from the canes by the 
 Greve stream, and quenched our thirst with the sweet green figs 
 as we watched the cloud shadows come and go on the shallow 
 gold of the Arno water, where Hercules had cast down the rock 
 that in later days served to save the fair jewel-hung throat of 
 Fiorenza from the brutal blade of her ravisher Castruccio. 
 
 Then I groped my way senselessly through the Erediano Gate, 
 the gate of the green country, as the old City called it. 
 
336 PASCAR&L. 
 
 It was night, though the red tinge was so slow to leave the 
 west. The bells were tolling everywhere. People were passing 
 through the doors of the churches to vespers. 
 
 Great, still, and white the vaulted basilica of the Dove looked 
 like a palace of peace. There were a few dim lights at its east 
 end. Scattered in its solitude half a dozen women, poor and 
 old, kneeled in prayer, dark bent forms against the marble 
 pillars. 
 
 I lingered a moment on its steps, wishful to enter and pray 
 likewise. 
 
 But shuddering, I looked and turned away how can one 
 pray when all one cares for on earth and in eternity is dead and 
 gone? 
 
 I turned away and dragged my weary feet across the piazza 
 where the moonlight was softly spreading, and under the shadow 
 ol the Guadagni Palace, where in the first night that I had 
 laughed in the Wandering Arte the alabaster workers of Florence 
 had borne away Pasearel upon their sturdy shoulders to the sound 
 of their shouting and singing. 
 
 When I had groped my way by the Mouth of the Lion up to 
 the garret of Giudetta, her lamp was alight ; there were swift 
 eager voices in the chamber ; the little old woman sitting on her 
 settle gave a little thrilling cry of joy ; a shadowy figure sprang 
 to me and knelt at my feet, and kissed my poor dust- covered 
 skirts. 
 
 " Ah, dear donzella ! " cried the voice of Elorio, " is that you ? 
 Is it indeed, you ? How I sought you, all northward all on a 
 false trail, and you in wretchedness like this the while ! And 
 such news, signorina mia such news ! The lord, your father, is 
 a great noble, and a rich one too this very Capo d'Anno only ; 
 such strange accidents, so many deaths, and he, whom none would 
 own or look at, called at last to his fathers' place. Oh you never, 
 never heard it is a wonder-story for a child at Ceppo. And 
 then to us when we were all in the black north, taking crown 
 and kingdom as it were for it is all so great then to us all of 
 a sudden when I, amidst our grandeur, was still thinking and 
 praying for you, though I had given up ail hope why, all of a 
 sudden, comes to us, a week ago, a light witted, reckless, 
 wandering scamp and playactor, who had made me split my sides 
 many a liightin his booth in years gone by in towns and villages. 
 And he, all travel- stained and tired, with that wayward, ca- 
 pricious lordly fashion he has with him for Pasearel was always 
 us proud in his ways as a priuce, hedge-stroller though he has 
 
UNDER THE WHITE LION. 337 
 
 been from his boyhood up he, I say, my darling signorina, 
 forced his way to audience with your father, do all one would, 
 and then and there told him where to find you ; and what more 
 passed between them the saints only know, but certainly high 
 words of some sort ; for the fellow when he came from your 
 father swung through us all mute and fierce and with such a 
 scorn on his face that I was like to strike him, only one knows 
 he is so very apt to strike back. And a very little later milordo 
 sent for me and bade me seek you out here, and I am come, and 
 no empress, oh, my blessed little lady, shall ever have been 
 greater than you shall be if only it had pleased the Dominiddio 
 to let dear dead Mariuccia see the day and have you never a 
 word to cast to your old faithful Elorio ; but can you only stare 
 at one with those sad blind strange eyes that it half breaks tho 
 very heart in one's breast to see ? " 
 
 I stood and listened : the flicker of the oil lamp on my face, 
 and on my ear the eager headlong torrent of my old friend's 
 words. 
 
 Little by little very slowly the truth dawned on me. 
 
 My bidding had been done ; and fortune came to me. 
 
 Then, in a passion of weeping, I wrenched myself from 
 Florio's hands and cast myself face downwards on the bare 
 stones of the floor. 
 
 Great? great? 
 
 Oh, God ! what use was that P 
 
 Only to wander once again light of heart and of foot in the 
 sweet Tuscan summer when the magnolias bloomed on the wide 
 hillside and the lilies were blue in the vine-shadowed grasses 
 only to wander so once again with my hand held in his and his 
 kiss on my cheek ! What use were the greatness of kings to 
 neP 
 
 I was left that night and day with old Giudetta, and Plorio 
 went and came a hundred times, bringing me silks and satins, 
 and jewels, and sweetmeats, and pretty painted toys, and all 
 manner of rich dainty things, to be a surety to me of my new- 
 won wealth ; and he, good merry soul, full of joy and glory to 
 the brim at the wondrous fortunes of the man to whom he had 
 clung through every evil chance of penury and shame, he could 
 not comprehend, but was sorely wounded because I would not 
 K>ok on any of the treasures, but turned my face to the wall 
 and kept crying : "Take me back to dear Mariuccia take me 
 back." 
 
 Tor it seemed to me, a brave glad child by nature, and therefore 
 
33S PASCAR&L. 
 
 the more utterly unnerved and passion-beaten under my great 
 pain, that the only real good that life could do me would be to 
 take me back again to that old innocent despised home, where the 
 lizards had sported under the broken Donatello, and the crack of 
 the bean shells had struck sharp on the silence. 
 
 All that I could have any sense to hear was when he spoke of 
 Pascarfcl, and this he did often ; because the story seemed strange 
 to him. 
 
 " It is odd," said he, " that you have chanced on that wild- 
 living fellow. Ah, dear donzella, I knew him so long ago 
 when you were not born a clever rascal, playing with French 
 people who strolled through Savoy. They used to say, even 
 then, that he might be a famous artist, and a rich one, if he 
 chose. 
 
 " But he never chose. He is a vagabond at heart. That is 
 certain. But I suppose he dealt with you as well as he could ; 
 for my lord, your father, let him go without rebuke, nay 
 seemed to be rebuked by him, if one might say so without dis- 
 respect. 
 
 " And of a surety he showed judgment and honour in never 
 letting you be seen on his wandering stage. I suppose he did 
 as well by you as he could, since you do not complain. But it 
 was a terrible fate for a little illustrissima like you. And your 
 father says that you are not to breathe one word of it. 
 
 " If you could have seen that fellow Pascarello sweeping 
 through us all as light and as swift and as fierce as a panther, all 
 dusty and travel-stained, and very pale, and with a strange light in 
 his eyes, and calling aloud to see your father, with all haughtiness 
 and insistance as though to be sure he were a prince himself, as 
 some folks say his ancestors were in this Tuscany. 
 
 " Yes, to be sure it was strange : to see that clever rogue, last 
 in his booth, in a little sea town on the Corniche making a 
 hundred fisher people split their sides with laughter ; and then 
 next to find him a dozen years later calling out like a king to 
 have speech with your father, all that way away in the northern 
 islands it is strange enough surely. 
 
 "And the people were so terrified at him because of his 
 imperious way and his language, that was all unknown to them. 
 But it was good of him, that I will always say, and I think only 
 an Italian would have done it ; to take all that pains and trouble 
 to trace your father; and it was no slight work, such a change 
 having come to our fortunes. A selfish man, dear donzella, 
 ^vould have been tempted to keep that pretty face of yours to 
 
UNDER THE WHITE LION. 339 
 
 deck his stage for him ; and a mean one would have looked for 
 some vast recompense. But Pascarel your father is a great 
 nohle now and has been a very bold person always, but I think 
 /ie would no more have dared to offer a reward to Pascarello than 
 a boy would have dared to face the Be Satana. 
 
 "And it is very piteous to see you with your little white 
 handsome face always shivering and weeping, though it is bright 
 sunshine like this. 
 
 " Pascarel said, I think, that he lost you when he got caged in 
 Bargello ; and I suppose, though this good soul has done her best 
 by you, still you have been half starved and very wretched. 
 
 " Never mind, carina ; you will be so great now so very, 
 very great, and when we have got the roses back into your 
 cheeks again you will have all the world at your feet. For even 
 miserable as you look, my darling, you are very handsome still 
 beautiful, if one could get that haunted look out of your 
 eyes/' 
 
 So he would speak, and I would listen, my heart breaking as I 
 heard. And I could see it all, so well, so well, in that dreary 
 misty land that I had never trodden, in those towering castles of 
 my father's race, that were set seawards against the clouds and 
 billows of the vexed Gaelic water. I could see it all, the steel- 
 hued waves, the grey bare country, the towering skies, the heavy 
 poinp, the sullen northern crowds, and amidst it all the proud 
 and wayward grace, the rapid voice, the lustrous eyes, the fear- 
 less eloquence of the Italian, dropped amidst them in utter 
 unlikeness like a pomegranate flower shaken down on winter- 
 withered bracken. 
 
 I could see it all, and broke my heart with vain-spent weeping 
 at the thought of it. 
 
 In face of all my cruel words he had left his country and his 
 people, and his free and simple life, and had gone northward in 
 my service, maintaining himself doubtless by hard toil for he 
 was poor. 
 
 And I had driven him away, and said that I would never see 
 his face again, for what ? Tor that poor little fickle traitorous 
 thing who had screamed to her roosting birds there at sunset on 
 the Signa road. 
 
 When Florio had left me that night in Giudetta's garret to 
 sleep my last hours under its kindly shelter, for which I had 
 been so thankless always, I sat and thought, and thought, and 
 thought, till I was mad staring at the blue summer sky above 
 the piled black roof of dark Oltrarno. 
 
 z 2 
 
340 PASCAR&L. 
 
 Giudett& came and looked at me and put her hands gently on 
 my bowed head. 
 
 " You are going to great people and great things, dear little 
 lady/' she said gently ; " well, no doubt the world must be very 
 fine for those who are rich and full of might in it. As for me I 
 cannot tell, I have darned magli& here by the Bocca di Lione all 
 my days. But I do not know rightly what is amiss with you. 
 You have never spoken. But if you have ever loved one man 
 do not ever try to love another. No. Not if it be ever so. So 
 only can you ever live and die pure of heart and pure of body. 
 That I know, though I have only mended maglte all my years in 
 Florence." 
 
 Then she bade the Mother of God bless me, and left me in the 
 twilight and went to her vespers in the Church of the Dove as 
 her wont had ever been for seventy years at evening-tide, when 
 there was no longer any light to draw together the silken 
 threads. 
 
 I was alone, in the shadows that deepened and deepened till 
 the brown front of the palace grew black and the streets had 
 only little gleaming stars of flame where the people's oil lamps 
 flickered. 
 
 When it was quite night there came a little knock at the door ; 
 a pretty bare -footed child stood there with a great knot of roses. 
 
 She crossed the floor and brought them to me. 
 
 They were the same sweet snowy beautiful things that had 
 come to me at day-dawn after the Yeglione. Round them was 
 a roll of paper, and on it was written only: "Be happy. 
 Farewell." 
 
 I crushed them to me as mothers crush their dying children 
 in their arms, and my hot tears burned tb^m like dropping 
 fire. 
 
 This was the end ? the end of all ? "Was the old sweet life of 
 that Tuscan summer dead and gone then for evermore ? Should 
 never I see a blue lily bloom in its lowly grass nest without this 
 sickness of soul upon me ? Should never I smell the fresh scent 
 of the vines and drink the magnolia breaths on a moonlight night, 
 without this madness of memory that is worse than all death ? 
 Was this the end P the end of all ? 
 
BOOK VU. 
 
 THE FIELD OF FLOWERS. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 HIS STOBY. 
 
 THE villa stands amongst the hills. 
 
 It is four hundred years old. The broken sculptures on the 
 terrace walls are all the shields of the great race that once reigned 
 here. The chapel is changed into the chief reception room ; it is 
 long and lofty, and has a high vaulted ceiling, painted with 
 frescoes of the Paradise ; through its one vast window at the end 
 there is a mass of silver shining ; it is so beautiful and luminous 
 and strangely white that nothing could compare with it except 
 newly-fallen snow upon the Alps, yet, go closer and look, it is 
 only the plum trees in blossom there, beyond the wall, above the 
 lily-filled grasses. 
 
 Out yonder in the rough simple gardens, where all that white- 
 ness shines, you can see the towers of the city rising amongst the 
 olives far below ; nearer glisten the marbles of the old Monte 
 Croce Church amongst the cypresses ; farther than all, away there 
 in the north there is Yallombrosa ; the pinewoods at that distance 
 are like cool blue shadows, and above them there is still snow, 
 white as these fruit blossoms that the wind shakes against your 
 hair. 
 
 A great artist has made his dwelling here ; there under those 
 roof arches of green leaf is his open air studio. On the old stone 
 terrace there is a litter of brushes and sketches, and books open 
 at a verse of Dante or a page of Boccaccio. Beneath, in violet 
 clusters, lies a mandoline. Under the ilex darkness stands a 
 eontadino ; he has a wreath of golden tinted laurel in his hand ; 
 he has been a model for a study from the Decamerone. A window 
 is half open into a chamber within ; through the space there 
 gleams the deep rose of a velvet curtain, and the ebony of an old 
 
3^2 PASCAR&L. 
 
 cinqnecento portrait frame. Within doors a sweet strong voice 
 is singing half aloud a fishing song of Naples. Who sings like 
 that i 5 oh, only little Gillino, the gardener's lad, who is plucking 
 the dead leaves off the trellis work in the open court there, 
 beyond the doors. 
 
 Save for Gillino's singing and a little tremulous note from the 
 mandoline, as a lizard runs across its strings, there is not a sound 
 on the sunny stillness of the day. 
 
 The artist paints on in silence under the ilex shade; the con- 
 tadino erect before him with the sun full on his yellow jerkin 
 and his black straight brows, and the tawny leaves of the winter- 
 gilded laurel. 
 
 I, Pascarel, come up through the fields where thousands of 
 yellow daffodils are blowing and the peach blossoms are scattered 
 by millions on the grass ; come through the fields and vault tho 
 low walls and stand by the painter's side. 
 
 " You would make a much better Panfilo," said the artist, 
 looking up with a smile of welcome. " Take Giacone's place and 
 let him go to his vines.' 7 
 
 The peasant goes, nothing loth to be liberated, and I take up 
 the laurel bough and stand with the sun in my eyes. 
 
 " I am not young enough for Panfilo." 
 
 " You are young enough for anything/' says the artist. " You 
 will never be old." 
 
 So the painter paints on, and his Pamffilio stands there while 
 the golden daffodils blow in the fields, and the city shines far 
 down below, beyond the light clouds of the olive foliage. 
 
 Shall I never be old ? I, Pascarel ? I felt very old to-day 
 before I came up here amongst tho white plum trees. I felt very 
 old as I walked through the Erediano Gate this morning, across 
 the Greve river, towards Signa, for where the red roses were 
 nodding over the field walls, I met a little woman on a black 
 mule with a great crate full of cackling poultry, and she was as 
 plump as a guinea-pig, and was hung about with big cabbages in 
 nets, and she screamed shrilly to her mule as she beat him. And 
 she looked at me and started a little and crossed herself, and beat 
 her mule afresh to hurry onward. Then I felt old. 
 
 Only the other day it seems she was a little round rosy laugh- 
 ing thing in the boat on the river, when the fireworks flashed red 
 against the blue night sky ; then she learned to dance the salta - 
 rello with the frolic of a kid, and her lips were like two cherries 
 only the other day ! 
 
 Now, on the Feast of the Dead that November morning, I 
 
HIS STORY. 343 
 
 .1 
 
 was heavy of heart as I went along down into Florence. For 
 what could I say, I thought, to my darling whom I had wooed 
 and won ? It seemed to me that for an honest man who had 
 tried his best to do right I had come as near to looking like a 
 scoundrel as might he. I would never judge men again, that I 
 swore to myself; for there was I who had suffered more than I 
 cared to confess to myself for the fair face of that child, and had 
 curbed and controlled myself in a way altogether novel to me, 
 here was I who had endeavoured with all my might to do well 
 by her, here was I, I say, become as nearly like a rogue, turn it 
 which way I would, as a man can well become through the love 
 of woman. And what a large latitude that is, all men know 
 without my telling them. 
 
 And how I loved her ! dear God ! "Well, what use was 
 that? 
 
 I saw my way none the clearer for it as I stumbled down the 
 stony road from Marco Yecchio, not being willing to see the don- 
 zella's two soft radiant eyes until I had faced the perplexities 
 before me and solved them. 
 
 For how could I tell her the truth ? And how could I tell her 
 what was not the truth ? One was as hard as the other. 
 
 Chance solved the question for me as it does often for most 
 of us. 
 
 For when I got down into Florence that day there was a storm 
 in the air. All about old bronze Porcellino, and in the square of 
 the Signoria the people were clustering with dark words and 
 darker brows, and it wanted but a touch of the match to the 
 tinder to have had a day of darkness and bloodshed. There had 
 been aggression and irritation, and they were sharp on the edge 
 of revolt ; and I knew the time was not ripe, and that they 
 would only nil the graveyard and prison, and I took their leader- 
 ship, for they always loved me, and one must do one's best for 
 Florence, and I spoke to them from the old Loggia as worthier 
 men than I had done in older times ; and so held them in hand 
 all that day, and saved, as I may say without boasting, their 
 bodies from shot and steel, and the city herself from, feud and 
 from flame. And at sunset for my pains I was arrested and 
 borne away to the Bargello Tower, and when I asked my crime 
 was told that I had harangued the people and incited them to 
 tumult. 
 
 Old Porcellino knew better, but being of bronze he could not 
 bear witness, and the people who could were not listened to : so 
 in the Bargello I lodged that night amongst thieves and mur- 
 
344 PASCAR&L. 
 
 derers, not able even to send so much as a word to the Capanna 
 above Marco Yecchio, and fretting my sonl bitterly because of 
 the trouble I knew must be there on account of my unexplained 
 absence. 
 
 The only thing I could hope was that some noise of the tumult 
 and of my own arrest would be taken up the hills by some 
 villager or another going home from the market in Florence, 
 
 On the morrow, quite early, they moved me from the Bargello 
 for judgment; and the people wanted to rescue me, and were 
 wild for a little space ; but I begged of them to keep quiet, for 
 the soldiery were strong, and I wished no Tuscan blood shed 
 about me a straw, a bubble, a player. The tribunal condemned 
 me to three months of prison. 
 
 It was not the first time by half-a-dozen. I had seen the soli- 
 tudes of Spielberg, and I had heard the water wash the dungeons 
 of Venice, and I had been quartered with the rats in old Vicenza, 
 and had spent a few dreary weeks behind the fortress of San 
 Leo, high above the rent and rocky land, on the bare peak 
 against the blaze of the skies. For I had never been behindhand 
 wherever the people had been moved against the Princes, and for 
 many a rash word spoken in my Arte the feeble Dukes and the 
 powerful Tedeschi had alike been adverse to me. 
 
 But that day the sentence fell on me like a thunderbolt. Be- 
 fore, it had been only myself that had suffered when the prison 
 gates had closed on me ; I was without a tear, without a pang ; 
 I laughed when I went in, I laughed when I came out. "What 
 was I that I should complain of what Boethius and Tasso had 
 endured ? But now now I fear they saw that they hurt me, 
 for what could ray song-bird do, homeless and friendless in the 
 snows of the winter, that were so soon to drive down through the 
 open gates of the Apennine gorges ? 
 
 I was heartsick that day as they took me through the old 
 familiar streets in the noon-day sun back to the Bargello Tower, 
 and for the moment I was remorseful that I had not allowed 
 those streets to run with blood at daybreak when the people had 
 clamoured for me. 
 
 For it is a bitter thing perhaps as bitter as life holds when 
 you hear the bolts grate in their sockets, shutting you out from 
 the living world, and know that for want of you that world may 
 be worse than hell itself to some helpless female thing that is all 
 adrift in it like a young bird in a storm. For there you are in 
 your iron cage, and your bird may beat her breast till death 
 release her, and you cannot touch her through the bars. 
 
ftJS STORY. 345 
 
 For many days I heard nothing and could send no word, and 
 so fretted my soul in sickly desperation, as many worthier men 
 bad done before me. 
 
 Somewhere about the twelfth day little Toccb came, having 
 wrenched down a lamp-iron and done some other naughtiness to 
 get taken to prison and have a chance to be near me poor dear 
 little lad for this was his notion of loving one, and a notion so 
 loyal that one could hardly believe that he had ever been born of 
 a woman. 
 
 Toccb delivered me many messages from Brunotta, and weep- 
 ing and frightened brought out from round his little brown throat 
 my old onyx ring with the Fates. 
 
 Then I knew what I had lost ; I knew before he had told me 
 that the child had fled away, none knowing why nor whither, in 
 the dusk of that very day when they had arrested me in the 
 Loggia of the Free Lances. 
 
 "What had driven her away? I could not tell. Not for one 
 moment did I dream that the sin was Brun6tta's men are such 
 fools. I thought that in some manner she must have heard of my 
 peril and have flown down the hillside in her wild innocent 
 childish impulse to aid me, and so had come to some terrible 
 woe in the city; and been killed perhaps or worse. Who 
 could say ? 
 
 A child like that sixteen years old and fearless because 
 knowing no evil, and beautiful in her way as the flushed flowers 
 of the rose -laurel. 
 
 I dropped like a dead man, they tell me, and when they brought 
 life back to me it came in the form of a raging fever the only 
 sickness that I ever remember in the whole course of my life. 
 
 Little Toccb got leave to tend me, and did it so well that I got 
 over it when the prison leeches had abandoned me as only good 
 for the graveyard. He said that I kept hold of the Fates in my 
 hand all the weeks through ; but raved of such a medley of cities 
 and seasons and women's faces and poets' fancies, that none were 
 a whit the wiser for what I said. 
 
 By the time I was strong again it was the end of my term of 
 captivity. The lad capered and flung his cap for glee when the 
 gates unclosed for us. But as for me, when that flood of dancing 
 sunshine flashed upon my eyes I reeled like a drunken man. 
 For the first time since I had run barefoot after my father's bar- 
 row the translucent living light of my Italy was hateful to me. 
 For how could I tell if the child were living or were dead ? 
 
 A good and loyal friend of mine was waiting for me, a worker 
 
346 PASCAR&L, 
 
 in gold and silver, who dwelt hard by in the old street of the 
 Ghibellines ; he lies now in the fields by the village of Magenta. 
 
 I staggered into his workshop that day and sat down and felt 
 like a man from beneath whose feet the solid earth splits and 
 opens. I had never suffered greatly in my life before ; except 
 in sympathy for grief outside myself and be one as philanthropic 
 as one may, one bears the woes of others more lightly than one's 
 own, but now I was dulled and dazed with the misery I felt. 
 And misery to me meant utter bereavement in a wider sense of 
 desolation than rich men can know. Misery to me meant famine 
 of the body and the soul and the senses. For if I could no 
 longer laugh at Fortune, I must feel her buffets as the galled 
 jade the lash. And if I had not my light heart to wander with, 
 what wealth had I on the face of the earth ? for it is only by 
 gaiety of heart that one can escape the thorns of the rough 
 hedge-school which is only mirthful in one's Maytime when the 
 hawthorn buds are fresh in blossom. 
 
 "Well, they sent me out of Florence that night and forbade me 
 the city. My friends tried to find trace of the child for me in 
 Florence, and I tried hard in the country. But it was all of no 
 use no use. Some straw-plaiters in Settignano thought that 
 they had seen a young girl in an amber skirt go down the oak- 
 wood-path towards the town one feast-day at early dawn. But 
 that was all ; and this slender clue brok^ in our hands and led 
 us no further than those old oaks under the war-seared Yin- 
 cigliata. 
 
 And the truth of the matter never dawned upon me never 
 once. All I could think of was that she had heard of my 
 seizure in the Loggia and had tried in her rash innocent fashion 
 to help me, and had so come to some horrible ending by som& 
 crime done to her that the guilty doers smothered. 
 
 I believe I was quite mad for the time, ranging north and 
 south to find her. But that Brunotta had aught to do with her 
 flight I never thought. Men are such fools. 
 
 One day in the spring-time I rested a little in a village in 
 Friuli, whilst I was ranging Lombardy and Yenetia in the vague 
 hope to hear or find something of my darling. 
 
 Brunotta was nothing to me, but how could I send her adrift 
 a little helpless, ignorant creature like that? She had loved 
 me very much that San Giovanni's day and every other day 
 afterwards, or at least so she swore twenty times in as many 
 hours. I did not doubt the truth of it ; perhaps I was too vain 
 and thought too well of myself to imagine that a little empty- 
 
ffIS STORY. 347 
 
 headed rogue out of the Casentino, who could not for her life 
 have read or written her name, would ever be tired of me ; of 
 Pascarel. Anyhow, could I send her adrift? A poor little 
 simpleton whom I had taken for niy whim and fancy away from 
 her straw-plaiting and her goat-tending, and could do nothing in 
 the world except hop about on her little plump feet, and that too 
 clumsily for any greater theatre than mine ? 
 
 I had always winced at the sight or the touch of her since I 
 had seen that child's eyes in the Cathedral square in Verona ; but 
 I would not be cruel to her. I had had so many pleasant sunny 
 heedless foolish days with her, going over the length and breadth 
 of the land in our idle gladsome fashion. Men are tender to 
 women for remembrance's sake, long after all love has died out 
 of them. Brunotta to me was like a little round brown bird out 
 of the woods; I could not wring the bird's neck just because its 
 homely little song had lost all music to me ; I could hardly even 
 fling it down the wind to go its own gait away from me. It was 
 such an innocent little thing, I thought ; and if it fell into the 
 fowler's snare through my abandonment, things would go ill 
 with me. 
 
 I joined her and the boys where of their own whim they had 
 set up the Arte in a Friulian village. ' I wandered carelessly, 
 stupidly, wretchedly, seeking only one thing, and that always 
 vainly. I had ceased to play ; the laughter choked me ; I did 
 field work when I worked at all, and for the rest 1 had some few 
 hundred pieces laid by with an old goldsmith in Florence, so that 
 I could keep together the poor little troop, of which the lads and 
 dogs and the brown-eyed dancing girl too, as I thought were 
 all dependent on me for every mouthful of bread. 
 
 Pepito and Pepita had been poor stray brutes that I had saved 
 from drowning ; Toto had been sentenced to death as dangerous 
 when I had cut his halter one day in Pisa, and showed the 
 Guardia that his madness was nothing more than thirst ; Toccb 
 I had taken out of the hell of the galleys ; Cocomero had been 
 perhaps the most utterly desolate of all when I had found him 
 in the streets ; his father had been a clown, called Flageolet, who 
 travelled with a French circus, and had been killed by a horse's 
 kick in the ring that very noonday, leaving his son without a 
 coin in the world and leagues away from his birth-country to 
 weep his poor cowardly heart out in the burning sun of grim old 
 Eimini. 
 
 We waited the night in a little place where a green bough 
 above the door told us we could get wine and bread. It was only 
 
348 PASCARhL. 
 
 a little mountain village, too poor and small to have any regular 
 place of resting. All Friuli is sad and unlovely ; if it were not 
 for the glimpses of the Alps away there towards Venice it would 
 be hateful, that desolate historic land that had every rood of it 
 stamped bare by the iron heel of Barbarossa. 
 
 This little village lies flat on the grey slope, with nothing to 
 break its melancholy and its barrenness where it is swept by the 
 sharp sea winds. The people were poverty-stricken, and scraped 
 the arid soil assiduously to get a bare subsistence from their 
 wines and millet. It has been incessantly a battlefield in the 
 times of the episcopal wars and of the aggrandisement of Milan, 
 and it seems still as if the torch of war had scorched it sear 
 for ever. 
 
 Still even here the vine leaves were thick and green, and the 
 grapes were budding in the little pergola, which the poor house 
 that entertained us had managed to stretch out between doorway 
 and garden wall in the teeth of the keen breezes that blow from 
 the lagunes and the chain of the Tirol. In the heat of the noon 
 I sat there, glad of the shelter of the leaves ; bitterly sad at heart 
 and tortured with a thousand imaginings of all that might have 
 chanced to that young and pretty thing, adrift by herself in the 
 width of the world. I had tried all I knew to trace her and had 
 failed ; the madness and the suspense of it were eating away all 
 the life of me. I reproached myself for a million things that I 
 had done and had said and for a million things that I had not 
 done and had not said. I seemed to myself such an utter fool ; 
 no better than a man who holds a diamond fit for kings in his 
 hands and lets it slip through his fingers into a foul ditch where 
 the toads can swallow it. 
 
 I sat there in the scirocco that blew like a furnace blast over 
 the nakedness of the land ; the insects were buzzing and boom- 
 ing in the thickness of the vine leaves; it was two o'clock in the 
 day and quite quiet. 
 
 Presently in the drowsy stillness there came a murmur of 
 voices ; one was Brundtta's. I was so used to hear it humming 
 all the hours through without cessation about millions of little 
 odds and ends that served her for endless discourse, that I heeded 
 it no more than a man who lives on a millstream heeds the noise 
 of the churning water. 
 
 The sense of what she was saying drifted to me without my 
 being aware; I heard as it were without hearing ; I was so used 
 to the sound of all her little shrill notes piping on by the hour 
 over a mislaid ribbon or a smoked dish of macaroni 
 
HIS STORY. 349 
 
 " jfray take more care," it was saying now with a little stifled 
 terror in it like a scolded child's. " He would beat me, perhaps, 
 or you, if he got to know. He can be so violent when he is 
 cheated." 
 
 " Why not let us run away P" whispered another voice, and 
 this time it was the voice of my eighteen-year-old Coco. " You 
 are afraid of him afraid of your ears of him since that dreadful 
 night the donzella went, and we do cheat him, as you say, and, 
 when one thinks, it is not well why not let us run away, right 
 away?" 
 
 " How could we live ? "We have not a bit of talent hardly, 
 you and I, and it would be very bad to starve," said Bruno tta. 
 The practical objection always comes from the woman. 
 
 "But then if you love me?" murmured Coco; the man, you 
 see, is always such an enthusiast, and always thinks that love is 
 meat and drink. 
 
 " Oh, I love you best a thousand times," cried Brundtta. " I 
 used to think I loved him, and so I did, and specially whilst I 
 was jealous of the donzella. But you see Pascarel is too great 
 for me. He is always doing and saying some wonderful thing, 
 and all that cleverness tires one ; it is like walking on the tight- 
 rope don't you know? I can do that; but I am always so 
 glad to jump down, so sick of being up so high. Pascarel is just 
 like the tight rope to me. But you are such another simpleton as 
 myself, as one may say ; and you are just my age, and you like 
 to romp about and stuff your mouth with fruit and make an ass 
 of yourself just as I do, and besides you have sworn you would 
 go before the priest with me, and I should like to show my 
 old foster-mother the ring on my finger just to spite her and 
 besides I do love you, Coco mio ! " 
 
 And with that she kissed him where these lovers stood to- 
 gether upon the other side of the vine leaves. 
 
 I thought it time to rise and walk out of the pergola. Bru- 
 notta screamed and dropped upon her knees. Coco was as white 
 as his ghost, and his limbs trembled under him. 
 
 I soon put them out of their misery. 
 
 " My dear children," I said to them quietly, " instead of 
 cheating me, why not have trusted me ? Instead of deceiving 
 me behind my back, why not have said all this to my face ? You 
 are two little fools, as Brunotta has sensibly said, and you have 
 succeeded in tricking a man who thinks himself no fool. The 
 wiseacre is always served quite rightly in such cases. How long 
 Aas this been going on some months P Qh^ 1 might have 
 
350 PASCAR&L. 
 
 guessed that you had learned too many comedies by heart not to 
 act them to your own profit some day. I might have wished in- 
 deed that it had heen anybody but Coco but after all, that is 
 the merest sentimentality. You owe me so much ? Altro I what 
 of that ? Ever since the world began, that has been only a 
 reason for the debtor to pay his debts by making a dupe if he 
 can. If you wish to many this poor lad, Brunotta, pray do, I 
 will not stop you. It will be very bad for him, but that is his 
 affair not mine. I have a thousand lire in Florence put by, 
 that I always intended for you whenever we should wish to part 
 company. Set up in life with it as best pleases you both, and 
 only take my advice in one thing never talk secrets close to a 
 pergola in full leaf." 
 
 And they did as I told them, and went before the priest, and 
 bought a little piece of land with my money, two leagues beyond 
 the Frediano Gate by Florence. 
 
 Coco indeed crawled at my feet and wept and cursed himself, 
 and was all for not touching one of the thousand pieces. Men 
 have so much more conscience and so much less common sense 
 than women. But Brunotta persuaded him out of those scruples, 
 and chose the little bit of ground herself, and selected as the 
 mission and fulfilment of her life the fatting of the finest turkeys 
 in all Yaldarno, which had indeed, she confessed, been all her 
 life-long the secret and chief ambition of her dreams. 
 
 No doubt it is a thing to be duly thankful for when a little 
 girl who has helped one to filer le parfait amour for a few foolish 
 seasons takes to so decorous an end for herself as marriage and 
 fat turkeys. It is a much more agreeable reflection than the 
 water-lilies of Ophelia or the prison-bed of Marguerita are to 
 their lovers ; and rids one of all responsibilities clearly. It would 
 be manifestly absurd to reproach a man with having broken his 
 mistress's heart or blasted her youth and her peace, when who 
 will may see her plump and busy jogging on the Pisan road upon 
 her mule and selling poultry under a green umbrella hard against 
 the Strozzi pile any market-day at noontide. Still such is the 
 vanity of man, I suppose one scarcely likes a little brown egg- 
 wife to play the traitress to one with a poor scamp like Cocomero. 
 And to have lost all that I lost through that little silly false- 
 tougued thing is bitter very bitter sometimes. 
 
 For, when they were fairly married out of anybody's power to 
 part them, and when the little bit of land had been made their 
 own where the roses nod over the high dusty walls as you go up 
 to the place where Arno's fury overthrew Castruccio's plans in 
 
HIS STOKY. 351 
 
 the oil times whilst all the glad Yaldarno was a smoking ruin, 
 when all, I say, was quite safe and sure with them, Coco, who 
 was not a had lad at heart, though timorous and deceitful, as it 
 proved, came and threw himself at my feet and lay there on the 
 ground as a beaten spaniel might, and bemoaned himself that he 
 had got a thing to confess to me. 
 
 " Say on," I said to him. " If it be a new villany, make a 
 clean breast of it. My dogs will not bite me, but they are the 
 only things whose life one can save without being made to rue 
 for it." 
 
 That was a harsh saying of mine, no doubt, but I was mad with 
 pain of which I could say nothing to any creature, at not find- 
 ing any trace of the donzella, and even this little miserable 
 treachery of the lad Coco, whom I had befriended as far as I had 
 been able ever since I had found him sobbing in the sun in 
 Rimini, had cut me a little ; one is always so weak in those 
 things. 
 
 And then Coco, weeping like a child, confessed to me with sore 
 terror that it was no fault of his own that he had now to tell, but 
 one of Brunotta's which he had known long before, but had 
 never dared to relate until she was surely bound to him, being 
 foolishly fond of her, poor lad, and having set his silly heart on 
 having her for his wife and dwelling with her on that dusty rood 
 of land towards Signa. But now that she was fairly his own, 
 and could no more fly away from him than his land could, and 
 he was sensible that he was seeing the last of me, and had broken 
 our fellowship by a piece of ingratitude for which lie was sorely 
 repentant, plucked up his heart and told me what he knew, and 
 of how she had betrayed me that autumn evening under the vines 
 below Piesole. And so I learned at the last why it was that I had 
 received back my onyx. Coco, I think, was terrified at the effect 
 on me of his revelation ; for when I came to myself he was 
 grovelling at my feet and beseeching me not to kill Brun6tta ; 
 and indeed in that moment if she had come before me I could 
 not have answered for myself very surely. These foolish vile 
 things sting so deep so deep and then we are to let them alone 
 because they are foolish and vile, forsooth ! It is hard to hold 
 one's hand sometimes. 
 
 He told me word for word as he had overheard it oil, that 
 scene under the vine by the Badia ; and I needed no more to tel/ 
 me the reason that the Fates had come back to me. And I had 
 never once in the wildest of my fancies imagined that Brunotta 
 had been to blame. I had never once in my sharpest pain sus< 
 
352 PASCAR&L. 
 
 pected that Brunotta had been lying when she had run weeping 
 out of the Friulian shadows to lament to me for the loss of the 
 donzella. No, I had never dreamed that her jealousy had been 
 at work, and that her rain of tears was all a lie ; never once, 
 men are such fools. 
 
 "Well, it was over and done, and there was no help for it, and 
 the poor foolish lad crouched aghast at his work at my feet. I 
 bade him never let me see their faces again ; and then I turned 
 away and left the village as the sun set ; and went where chance 
 might take me. "What did it matter ? the world seemed as 
 empty to me as a shrivelled gourd. To me Pascarel to whom 
 the world had always been as full of red colour and of pungent 
 flavour as any pomegranate that one cuts open in the first heats 
 of April weatber. The thing was over and done, I say, and as 
 far as I know, the issue of it might have been that the child had 
 already drifted dead down some mountain river, and the fair 
 white body of her have been already thrust unshriven amongst 
 the nameless and the lost in the marble desolation of some 
 Campo Santo. 
 
 WE Italians love the soil, I think, more closely than other 
 nations. I, wanderer though I have been all my days, I always 
 want to tread again the grey Macigno after I have had the Alps 
 awhile betwixt myself and Florence. One wants the light too ; 
 the dreamful radiance of the skies, that is neither so intense nor 
 so blue, nor yet either so glittering as the poets and painters will 
 make it, but is an endless ecstasy of light light clear and pure 
 and gentle, always soft, always silvery rather than golden; 
 always tender and dreamful, like the eyes of a woman who lies 
 awake and remembers the kisses of her lover. 
 
 So I c/vne back here to the city so soon as my time of exile 
 was ended, with little hope that she were living, but solely from 
 long habit and love of the soil. 
 
 And as I entered the town, the people got hold of me, and 
 would fain feast and welcome me, and bore me in the midst of 
 them all down the old Oltrarno. And then up on high, behind a 
 barred casement against the corner of the Lion's Mouth I saw 
 her face, and then 
 
 Well, then the sins and follies of my old life smote me from 
 the lightning of the child's eyes of scorn ; and she spoke words 
 I merited, no doubt, but still such words as one cannot hear 
 
STOXY. 353 
 
 even from a woman twice ; and so I saw my duty plain before 
 me, and did it, though late in the day, no doubt. 
 
 It was long and tedious labour to find her father, more es- 
 pecially because I had to earn my daily bread, whilst I sought 
 for him, by any such handicraft or labour of the roads as came 
 to my share in the bitter, joyless, strange countries where the 
 people only saw in me a travel-stained vagrant with a brown 
 skin and a foreign tongue. 
 
 But I did her will at last, and found her greatness and fail 
 fortune, and so sent her the roses in farewell, and knew that 
 she was lost to me for evermore, the pretty, careless, sunny, 
 wayward thing who had strayed with me through the Poets' 
 Country whilst the blue lilies were in bloom. I am glad that I 
 had strength to do it yes, glad, surely, for her sake. For even 
 had she been willing to link her life with mine, it would have 
 been shame in me to lead her into my obscure and thorn-set 
 paths of life whilst she was so young so young, and knew not 
 what she did. 
 
 Yes, I am glad. 
 
 For, though one be but a strolling player, and never saw one's 
 crown engraven save on a travelling tinker's old iron pot, still, 
 when one bears a once-mighty name of Florence, one must needs 
 try to be worthy of it by some poor shred of honour, at the least. 
 Only for me, look you, all the world seemed dead. 
 
 God knows what I might have done in the weary days when 
 I had sent her my farewell in flowers, and knew that every 
 year of her life would only serve to make her higher and higher, 
 farther and farther, away from me for evermore. 
 
 They were long burning days of drought and dust. The land 
 was white with long thirst, and within the city the clouds of 
 zanzari hooted all night long. For the first time in all my years 
 of love for her the face of my Florence looked without beauty. 
 Is not the beauty of all things so much within us, and derived 
 BO little from without ? 
 
 God knows, I say, what evil or mad end *o my life I might 
 not have been tempted to put, in my heart-sibjqiess and haste, 
 had there not chanced to me a strange accident. 
 
 One blazing eveningtide, just as the sun was close on its 
 setting, I was walking wearily down the Stock^g-makers' 
 Street, thinking of nothing in particular, when I came upon a 
 little group of people gathered before the door of a Cantina. 
 
 It is a quaint, odd, many-coloured, picturesque street, as all 
 the world knows ; and what with its pretty crowded gay wares, 
 
 A A 
 
354 
 
 PASCAREL. 
 
 and its narrowness, and its popularity, it is a street that will 
 always talk to one ; it has done so much ; the hlood of Florence 
 has coursed so often down it : and it has been a channel of the 
 full Florence life ever since the Arts and Trades marched along 
 it to set their flags round San Michaele that brave day when 
 Duke Walter was hounded out through the gates. 
 
 Calzaioli will always talk if you will listen here on the stones 
 that are still called the Song of the Lily it has heard the soft 
 footfall of Ginevra's bare and trembling feet; here, where 
 Guardamorta rose, it saw the Lion tremble before a mother's 
 love ; here in its workshop the Bronzino dwelt, and here, in its 
 church, his bones were laid to final rest; here Donatello and 
 Michelozzo laboured for the love of arts and men hard by yonder 
 against the little Bigallo ; here flame and steel ravaged their 
 worst after red Arbia; here the White Bands shivered and fled 
 before their old hereditary foes ; here, on Ascension Day, the 
 Signoria went up with the gold and purple of ripe fruits, to lay 
 them at the feet of that Madonna of TJgolino whose manifold 
 miracles sustained the soul of Florence beneath the Devil's 
 Plague ; here, on the Feast of Anna, it saw Walter of Athens 
 driven out of the city, and all good men and true trooping 
 thither to render her thanksgiving, and all the Arts raising in 
 memory the statue of their patron saint and the shields of their 
 blazonries all these things, and a million more, has Calzaioli 
 seen since its old towers and casements crowded hard on one 
 another, and the destriers and palfreys champed below in the 
 logge, and the painters and sculptors worked high abo^a in the 
 turreted roofs, worked amidst the challenge of silver clarions, 
 and the clangour of brazen bells, the fret of horses' hoofs, and 
 the clash of crossing swords, the saucy laugh of the playing 
 pages, and the sturdy tramp of the marching Trades. 
 
 Calzaioli will always talk to you, if you have ears to hear, 
 and it was talking to me then, and 1 was heeding not at all the 
 living throng around me, when my ear was caught by an air 
 that was being played on a violin where the knot of people 
 stood before the wineshop. I think I have heard most music 
 that has ever rejoiced the earth; and at Pisa, amongst other 
 things, I studied music as a science ; but this air struck me at 
 once as unlike anything else that I knew quaint, delicate, 
 fanciful, mournful, charming, and altogether new. I paused to 
 listen with the rest. 
 
 A boy of about fourteen was plajdng, sitting on an old barrow 
 that stood in the kennel of the street He was very small and 
 
STORY. 355 
 
 slight, and pretty as a child ; his clothes were ragged, and he 
 was very pale. It grows dark in Calzaioli long before the light 
 Aas died in the open contado ; there was a lamp lit in the door- 
 way ahove his head; the great silvery pile of San Michaele 
 loomed beyond, with the saints and prophets white in the dsck- 
 ness. I stayed with the rest of them and listened. 
 
 The air had enchanted the people ; they were humming it to 
 themselves as it was played ; and two country girls had caught 
 it, and were singing to it a first and a second as they plaited on 
 at their hanks of straw. It was just one of those melodies made 
 to be repeated on every lip, and handed from town to town in 
 every land : not because it was catching and common, but 
 because that true divine spirit of music was in it which has an 
 universal tongue and a life eternal. 
 
 All of a sudden, as I listened, the music of the violin ceased 
 snapped, as it were, and ceased; there was a little movement 
 in the group ; the musician had fallen backward in the gutter, 
 and the violin had dropped out of his hand. 
 
 I pushed the people aside and lifted his head on my knee. 
 By his looks I thought he had fainted from hunger. 
 
 The people, looking frightened, began to edge away, still 
 humming fragments of his melody. 
 
 u He does not belong to any of us," they said, with little 
 shrugs of their shoulders. 
 
 He did not belong to any one, poor lad ; he had been seen in 
 Florence for the first time for what anybody knew, playing 
 along the Arno side for pence that day at noon. The beauty of 
 his airs had drawn a little crowd after him. The people will 
 wander after any harmony hour by hour anywhere over Italy. 
 
 Down in the gutter the lad lay, and if one lie there in Cal- 
 zaioli, one is as sure to have a horse's hoof in one's face as May- 
 time is sure to bring cherries. 
 
 The wineshop people did not much like to let him in ; but, 
 nevertheless, as they knew me well, and in the old days of my 
 fooling I had had many an idle night over their chiante, they 
 gave way ; and after a while, in their inner chamber, the lad 
 came to himself, and opened great dark bewildered eyes on us. 
 He was as handsome and small as a girl, with curls of Venetian 
 gold lying soft and thick about his throat. 
 
 "I was playing a moment ago? " he murmured, staring up 
 into our faces. " It was in a street what has happened ? " 
 
 " You fainted, that is all," I told him. " Ww it the heat, 
 or are you ill, or what is it ? " 
 
356 PASCAR&L. 
 
 White as he was, and bloodless, he coloured painfully. 
 
 "It was hunger, I think." he murmured. "I have eaten 
 nothing for three days but a crust a dog left." 
 
 Knowing that, to do for him was easy. 
 
 He soon after sank into deep slumber, and seemed likely to 
 sleep all the night ; so I would not disturb him ; but with the 
 first of the daylight, as soon as the shutters were down, I, 
 watching by him, saw his pretty eyes open ; and then he was 
 all for falling at my feet and blessing me, as though, poor little 
 lad, I had been St. Michael himself who had called him up into 
 paradise. When he got a little calmer, he told me his story. 
 His name was BaffaeUo Baptista. 
 
 " You see, dear signor," said he, lifting his wistful, pitiful 
 eyes to mine, "I belong to Verona. My mother, who was 
 blind, was very very good, but she died more than a year ago, 
 and I was very unhappy. Because my old master in music was 
 dead too ; and there was a lovely little lady who had always 
 been my playmate who had disappeared in the strangest manner 
 possible. She was much above me oh yes, quite illustrious. 
 Her people, I believe, were very great ; only they never took 
 any notice of her, so that it was not any good at all. When she 
 was lost, all Yerona said she was dead, because a girl's body 
 was found in Adige, and the face none could see, being gnawed 
 by the rats. But I was always quite sure that the good God 
 had not taken her without letting me see her once more. And 
 little by little I came to think that I would try to find her, 
 My mother was dead and buried, and my father drinks all day, 
 and old Ambrogio, even, was gone ; and so I thought to myself, 
 no one wants me here, and I am kicked about like a useless 
 little cur, and I am quite old now, thirteen come the Day of 
 Ashes; and I will go and try and find out the donzella, and I 
 am sure Mariuccia and the Mother will pray for me. And so 
 off I came the very end of Quaresima, and I have been wan- 
 dering, wandering, wandering ever since then, and never a sight 
 of her face. Only once, in a hamlet, in the Bomagna country, 
 I heard of a girl who was singing, with hair all gold, like the 
 wheat in summer, and the people spoke of her as L'Uccello ; and 
 then I took heart of grace to hear the old dear Veronese name, 
 and I said, ' There cannot be two like that/ and I kept on and 
 on till I came into Florence. Her brothers are all dead, and she 
 is quite illustrious, you know, only so poor, so poor ! And she 
 and I were friends always, and always so happy together. And 
 elie has nobody at all but me : her old nurse died in the last 
 
f/ts sToxi. 357 
 
 wintertime, and of her people nobody knows. Have I money ? 
 Oh no. How should I ? You see my legs are bare, and I have 
 only this little pack one shirt in it and my little viol. But I 
 have wanted for nothing. Nothing, nothing. Yes, I have come 
 on foot all over the plains and the mountains. What of that ? 
 It has only been eold the last few months, and the people have 
 always been good. I have played for them at feasts, at fairs, at 
 bridals, at vintage dances, anywhere, always; and they have 
 always given me a supper and a bed, and very often much more 
 than that. Oh, I have not suffered at all sometimes just a 
 little, perhaps, from being tired, or out in the storms ; and once 
 some piiFerari set on me, and beat me, and threw me into a 
 ditch, because they thought I was in the way on their rounds ; 
 that is all the unkindness I have had. I have been only a fort- 
 night in Florence, and the last three days I have made no 
 money. I have been too weak to play, and I have slept in the 
 grass in the Cascine meadows, and I think I have got a little 
 fever perhaps. To-night I wandered out into the street, and dirf 
 play a little. You know the rest. I never shall find the don- 
 zella now. But but if I should die, will you let the poor 
 little viol be buried with me ? I should not like it to be burned 
 as waste wood, though perhaps it is worth nothing more." 
 
 So he spoke, the poor little Baptista, sitting on the mattress 
 in the inner room in the Cantina, and looking at me with his 
 great pathetic eyes under the auburn tangle of his locks such a 
 pretty, fragile, heavenly-looking little lad ; one would have had 
 him painted as that boy -martyr whose head being severed from 
 his body sang on day and night the sweetest Aves ever after- 
 wards. His whole face breathed music ; we have many such 
 faces amongst us. Very often they mean nothing ; but his'meant 
 all that it uttered. 
 
 I seemed to know him so well. Had I not heard of Raffaelino 
 scores of times from the mouth of his playmate, as she went, 
 with me along the Adda or Arno water? Had I not seen him 
 with his little mandoline, and his bare feet, and his red sash, 
 that first day of Carnival in Yerona ? 
 
 He did not know what the memory was that stirred ip. me 
 but it made him like my own son, as it were, to me, and ab 
 sacred. Besides, I loved the lad for staying neither for sense nor 
 prudence, but setting forth to find his donzella in that innocent, 
 foolish, childish faith and loyalty. 
 
 Now when I found Eaffaelino in Calzaioli that night I was 
 very little better off in the world than he; and the lad bein- 
 
358 PASCARkL. 
 
 rery ill and altogether destitute, I had need to cast about me for 
 some surer manner of maintenance, or let him drift away to the 
 hospitals and the sepulchre. It seemed to me that the boy came 
 in my way like a duty there was no means of escaping. My 
 own faulty fashion of living had cost so much anguish to the 
 child that had gone with me through all the fresh green Tuscan 
 summer ; and it seemed to me now that to do my best by her 
 favourite playmate was the only sort of poor atonement that ever 
 would lie within iny reach. 
 
 So whilst Raffaello was stretched on the sacking in an attic 
 amongst the roofs in the Street of the Stocking- weavers, I took 
 thought as to a means of livelihood. 
 
 Now I had absolutely nothing. 
 
 The little I had saved had gone for that bit of land in the 
 Yaldigreve. I could always gain my day's bread and lodging 
 by a turn amongst the vines, or a few hours in the modelling 
 shops, or by taking a fiddler's place in the little opera houses, 
 or by showing the trick of the clay to some young sculptor ; for 
 I have a sort of desultory universal talent, which is in a manner 
 the most general curse of my countrymen an over fertility of 
 invention that is very apt to end in absolute sterility of 
 achievement. 
 
 Little Toccb had gone as a pupil and 'prentice to Orno Orlan- 
 duccio, and was thought of good promise in the art, so that I 
 had no soul in the world to work for ; and where is the Italian 
 who will work for mere work's sake ? 
 
 It is not possible to us. Give us an end and we will labour 
 as well as other men ; but without some impetus we will not 
 serve that grim and ghostly Northern Thor whose hammer has 
 struck down all the wild roses and tossing hawthorns and sweet 
 skylarks of the world's soft smiling, useless, leisurely, heaven- 
 sent joys. 
 
 If we are happy, let us lie in the sun and dream of it ; and if 
 we are unhappy, what else better can we do ? For Italians do 
 not kill themselves ; why, I cannot say ; perhaps from fear of 
 Dante's Circles, or perhaps from sheer love of the mere plant-like 
 sense of living : why, I will not say, but they do not. 
 
 The fifth night after I had found him, I went up the dreary 
 Sdrueciolo by the Pitti to get a little fruit for him, and I had 
 nearly resolved to go to Carrara as soon as he should prove able 
 to be moved. The mountain air might do him good, and there 
 was always work enough for any one who knew how to chip 
 Garble ; and the life there, where all the sculptors' dreams take 
 
HIS STORY. 359 
 
 shape, amidst the white desolation of the quarries, with the 
 keen mountain solitudes all around, was most unlike (and there- 
 fore least painful to me of any) the life that I had led with my 
 gay little Arte. 
 
 I was known there. It had even happened now and then 
 that, finding some artist struggling with a fine fancy that he 
 could not to his liking embody in the clay, I had had the luck, 
 by a fitful night's work, to call up the Andromeda or the Spar- 
 tacus that escaped him, and the figure has gone forth mine, if 
 I had cared to claim it and now and then, I have even heard, 
 has made the other man's fortune. "What did it matter ? it was 
 only an accident, a knack, a turn of the hand, more or less 
 happy, that chanced to put fire into a soulless model. What 
 matter who claimed the statue in its city market-place ? When 
 we love Art for Art's sake, we are pained by a line awry, a note 
 discordant, a colour misplaced; bat we are not pained by a 
 name being lettered in gold instead of our own ? 
 
 To Carrara, therefore, I thought I would go. Eut, as fate 
 would have it, as I thus resolved, I ran against, in Sdrucciolo, 
 a little plump, oily Piedmontese, by name Luca Pestro, who had 
 rolled a good deal of gold together, as the men of Piedmont have 
 a knack of doing, and was the director of the Goldoni Theatre 
 in this city and of another larger one in Turin. 
 
 I knew Pestro very well, he having been a gay, jovial soul 
 before he had taken to money-making, and we had had some 
 merry days together years and years before in France, where he 
 was travelling with a choice company of marionettes, whose 
 joints were as stiff and as dire a trouble to him as the tempers of 
 any living troops of actors. 
 
 Pestro flew across the narrow passage to me, and cast his arms 
 about me, with tears in his eyes and his dress all disordered. I 
 had not met with him for at least five years. 
 
 " Pascarel ! oh, Pascarel! What ever good angel has dropped 
 you here ? " he cried, in hot haste, still holding me by both 
 arms, whilst the men and the mules pushed by us. " Do you 
 know Ferraris is dying struck speechless up at his villa only 
 an hour ago and he to play to-night to all the Princes, and I 
 at such expense as never was; and now all ruined, unless indeed 
 you would take the character yourself? " 
 
 I told him I had heard it as I came up the Sdrucciold ; people 
 were heavy of heart for it ; for Ferraris, though in the decline 
 of his years, was the greatest player that the stage of Italy then 
 numbered arnongst its actors. 
 
360 PASCAR&L. 
 
 Well, in a word, he so besought me and wrought on me to 
 take Ferraris' s place, that I, thinking of Raffaelino, at last 
 
 The doors of the Goldoni opened at eight of the clock. But 
 I needed little preparation ; the costumes of Ferraris were about 
 iny measure, and for the part I knew it all well : in the old 
 times, with the Zinzara and her people, who had played the 
 " Don Marzio alia Bottega del Caff 6 " many and many a time in 
 the little sea and mountain towns of the Riviera and the Basque 
 country. A glance, and all the old eloquence came back to me. 
 I heard, as though it had been yesterday, the sonorous roll of 
 the Zinzara' s voice as she had first taught me the part by the 
 light of a single candle, in her little attic, with her slender feet 
 bare on the bare bricks, and a red japonica-flower thrust into 
 her rough hair, and a great brown sausage hissing itself solemnly 
 into readiness for supper over the charcoal stove, and through 
 the broken lattice of the garret always the glimmer of the moon- 
 beams and always the shimmer of the sea. 
 
 Poor woman ! Was she dead ? I wondered. It is strange 
 how suddenly they flash into our lives, and how utterly they 
 drift out of it, all these women ! 
 
 I thought of the Zinzara of nothing else as I took the place 
 of Ferraris, and, for the first time since I had played with her 
 in those old dead days, passed on to the stage of a theatre " with 
 a roof to it," as my Piedmontese's phrase had run. 
 
 That night was one of the strange accidents which have the 
 force of gods or devils to change the tenour of men's lives. 
 
 When the curtain fell, my fame was crowned in Florence. I 
 the people's Pascarello had the ball at my foot to play with 
 it as I would. 
 
 The whole city seemed to go mad for me ; they took me home 
 to my garret in riotous homage, and stayed under my window 
 half the night singing my lo triomphe. 
 
 Much was due to the time, no doubt. I had become to them 
 a sort of incarnation of Free Italy, and I always love to believe 
 that it is les? Pascarel the Player they care for than it is 
 Pascarel the Patriot ; and if indeed it be so, how little, how 
 very little, it matters that one is not likewise Pascarel the 
 Prince. 
 
 From that night my fame spread, and spread, not only in this 
 country but in all others, like circles on water from a well-flung 
 stone. In a few months' space every hour of my art could be 
 3ounted by gold arid diamonds. And for Raffaelino I accented 
 
MS STOXY. %6l 
 
 it and worked ; the little angelic lad saved my reason osrtainly, 
 my life perhaps. 
 
 For the winter, any or all of the cities hire me, and they bid 
 much higher for me, one against another very often, than I am 
 surely worth ; but, when the vines are in blossom, I always 
 come back under the Cross and the Lily, and play all the summer 
 through to my own people in this dear city of mine, a Florentine 
 once more and nothing else. 
 
 For the other cities I am the Pascare'llo of the kings, and the 
 wits, and the great ladies, and the pleasure seekers, and 1 have 
 as many gold boxes and honied words as Marzzoco in the old 
 days had kisses from captives. But here I am the Pascarel of 
 the people who come trooping to me out of the scorching streets 
 and burning squares, that are even hot when the moon is high, 
 and in from the sun-baked contado, where the grapes burn black 
 in the fierce scirocco. 
 
 Here I am myself once more, and I have my own populace 
 .'ibout me: and the foreigners seek me with bribes in their hands 
 and say, come with us to Baden, to Monaco, to Belgium, to 
 Kussia, to heaven knows where not, and I will not go ; I stay 
 here in the summer and play as I choose in the open air theatres 
 "with the wings of the swallows over my head, and the eager 
 brown faces of my own people around me. 
 
 If half the year I did not hear that deep chested, sonorous 
 vibration of Italian laughter that is like the metal tones of great 
 melodious bells, I should lose heart and manhood. It has been 
 about me all my life, I cannot do without it. It is to me as the, 
 trumpet call to the trooper's horse. And there is no laughter 
 like it under the sun ; just, so I often think, must the young 
 gods have laughed when Pan piped to them. 
 
 And so I have played on from that time until now, for sake of 
 the little tender lad who dreams his days away in music in a 
 little home that I have made for him looking on an old green 
 convent garden behind the Palace of the Torrigianni. Besides, 
 one must do something, or go mad. 
 
 And going up under the pale walls where the field roses are 
 nodding, in the sunny road towards Signa, I meet Brunotta on 
 her mule, going to sell her birds in Florence. She is pi amp, 
 and brown, and cheery: she thrashes her beast, and shrieks 
 shrilly to the fowls in her panniers. And I once cared to caress 
 that little foolish sulky face I Oh God, what fools men look to 
 themselves when they see themselves in the mirrors of their old 
 dead loves ! I feel chilly and grown old. 
 
362 PASCAR&L. 
 
 The crickets sing in the canes by the shallow Gieve water, 
 and the little red roses are bright on the edge of the grey dusty 
 wall ; but for me I feel old, I say. 
 
 What brought me this way to-day ? 
 
 THEEE I stand with the laurel wreath in my hand. The 
 laurel is not green, it is yellow from the passing of winter : 
 laurels should always be painted so, for who gathers them in his 
 spring time ? 
 
 The daffodils blow to and fro by millions, in the fields ; the 
 vines are everywhere thrusting out their little tender buds; 
 down there, beneath the shimmer of the olives, lies my City of 
 the Lilies. 
 
 My friend paints on at his study of Pannlo, and tells me that 
 I shall never be old; he will have it that artists never are. 
 Perhaps there is some truth in it. In a sense we are children 
 to the end children who are ready to laugh even in our tears, 
 and whose gayest laughter has always a sob in it ; children so, 
 no doubt. Children who after all know that the only real good 
 that can come to them will be to be lulled into forgetful sleep 
 in the arms of the great nursing mother, Death. 
 
 The painter rises and breaks off a bough of laurel fully budded, 
 and brings it to me. 
 
 " Take this instead," he says; " your laurels are not tarnished 
 nor faded." 
 
 Tor the matter of that I differ with him. 
 
 " I prefer those wrinkled ones flaked and crumpled with the 
 winter's frost. They are very much more true, I say. 
 
 " Yet I have nothing to do with laurels of any sort, unless I 
 hold them as deputy for Madama Pampinea. Get me those dan- 
 delion heads, blow balls as the old poets call them, they are my 
 prototypes, for they are light as feathers, and arrow headed, and 
 all the four winds of heaven toy with them, and no one marks 
 where they fall. If a player is painted with any emblem, he 
 should be painted with those puff balls. Their place in creation 
 is very much about what his own is." 
 
 So I say. But he will not paint me with my puff balls ; he 
 paints his Pannlo holding a branch of amber tinted laurel. He 
 tells me that I always look as if I had stepped out of the Deca- 
 merone ; I tell him that every Florentine does the same. We 
 
HIS STORY. 363 
 
 have our father's faces, if not our father's force and our father's 
 florins. 
 
 It is absurd to paint me with even a dead laurel ; I Pasearel, 
 a player. I have a sort of fame now, it is true, but what is the 
 fame of a player ? I said long ago, the mere breath of a breeze 
 that drives the comets of man's wonder a little before it for one 
 hour, and with the wind sinks to utter silence, and cannot stir 
 so much as a baby's paper windmill were it ever so. 
 
 I used to be so happy in the old life of mine. I think few 
 men, if any, lived so long as I and had so little care. Merri- 
 ment, freedom, air, and pleasure ; I had them all, the petals of 
 the four-leaved shamrock, which here and there one in a million 
 finds and gathers, having the wit to know where to look for it, 
 not in kings' gardens, but in little cool, green, darkling nooks of 
 life, that bubble with the waters of content. 
 
 I had always been happy from the time that I first ran bare- 
 legged and bareheaded in the Tuscan sun after my father's 
 barrow. I was really and truly the last of the Pascarel princes; 
 so he said, my poor father, if he were not crazed/ and indeed I 
 suppose it is true enough. But what was that to me ? It was 
 much more to me that I had the lithest" limbs in the Salterello 
 of any one north of Abruzzi ; much more to me that the girls 
 leaning across the rails of the loggia in the summer nights had 
 ripe red lips that always smiled on me. I was happy tinkering 
 the old pots and pans, from the Aquilean marsh to the Sorren- 
 tine orange woods ; I was happy studying all lore, virtuous and 
 iniquitous, in the sad old ways of Pisa, and following even into 
 occult paths, the steps of Paracelsus and Agrippa ; I was happy 
 when I went seaward with the Zinzara and her people, to make 
 sport and laughter all along the bright sea road from Savoy to 
 Basque ; and happiest of all when, with no master but my own 
 whim and fancy, I sauntered through the world and then came 
 home this side the Alps, and set up, year after year, wheresoever 
 I would, my little wooden theatre in some silent, shadowy 
 grass-grown square of any old forgotten city, or amongst the 
 hyacinths, and the poppies, and the asphodels of any sunny hill- 
 side field ; the time when I lived with the country folk and the 
 craftsmen, and when the very best that could be said of me was, 
 ' 1 There goes that vagabond; some wit? Oh, yes; over his 
 wine cups, so they say ; but only a stroller, that goes a-foot from 
 place to place and carries his baggage like a pack horse, nothing 
 more." 
 
 Life was a merry and gladsome frolic, if a sigh ran under it 
 
364 PASCAR&L. 
 
 on occasion ; so it seemed to me, I Bay, then, when the brown 
 contadina grinned at my mirth, and the young coppersmith hid 
 his tears at my woe. But now, when they call me a great 
 genius, and despots laugh and their consorts weep at the things 
 that I say and the things that I do on the stage of the world* & 
 great theatre, now I feel myself no hetter and no wiser than any 
 soap bubble that a child's breath floats upwards on the air. 
 The heart is gone out of the jest for me ; and as for the pain 
 IT ell, it lies too close to me now ; so close, that when I make 
 tfiem laugh at it, I seem to make them mock my own. Can you 
 inderstand ? 
 
 y ay who should understand an artist ? We do not under- 
 stand ourselves. 
 
 They call me great. "Well, so be it, if it please them. But 
 for me, I know that I was nearer greatness under my old torn 
 canvas roof. Tor the artist is only great when he lives in the 
 ideal life of his imaginations, and when his own heart aches, 
 how can he do that well ? "When the rack of the Real holds him 
 tight in its iron jaws, how shall he sport and sleep and smile, in 
 the arms of the Dream Mother ? 
 
 " Have you seen Pascarel, the great Pascarfcl? " they all say; 
 and all the world runs to stare. 
 
 At times I play my own pieces, and then they say too, " "What 
 a genius he has ! " 
 
 !N"ay, it has even so happened that a king has called me to his 
 seat to give me a diamond box, and that a great princess has 
 cast to me her own bouquet of orchids in a band of jewels. 
 They run after me in the streets, and they sell my portrait be- 
 twixt the newest courtezan and the last murderer. "Who can 
 want more than that of Fortune ? 
 
 Nay, nothing that I know of : only where is the light heart 
 with which I used to toss down the poor mountain wine after I 
 had acted to an audience of stonecutters and vinedressers away 
 there on the grey Apennines ? Ah, light hearts do not tarry 
 with laurels. This artist friend of mine does rightly to paint 
 the laurel with edges sear and torn. That laurel that Panfilo 
 held, though gathered in the gardens of delight, it must surely 
 have borne the taint of the plague somewhere about it. Did the 
 laughter on their lips never make those story-tellers shudder ? 
 I shudder sometimes, now, at mine. 
 
 I am a fool : oh, I know that well. "What was a child with 
 a sheen of yellow hair and a voice like a lute, that she should 
 change the face of the world and the laughter of men to me ? 
 
HIS STORY. 365 
 
 Nothing in reason, I know, but then reason has so little to 
 do with one's life, and when one cannot so much as tell whether 
 the thing one cares for, be living or dead; that is hard, 
 you see. 
 
 Pascarello ! Pascarel. When a village ran at my heels with 
 welcoming clamour sending my name over the budding vines 
 and the crimson glow of the field tulips, how well it was with 
 me ; I asked nothing better of heaven or earth, than just to 
 laugh on in my own fashion through the careless spaces of the 
 happy years. But now, though all the cities cry it out, and 
 men come to me with gold in their hands, where is the charm ? 
 I felt old to-day, I say, as I went by the grey Greve water, 
 where the little red roses were all alive and glad in the living 
 sunshine. 
 
 And yet it is April too ; and I am here in my City of Lilies. 
 
 " You waste half your year/' said a Frenchman to me the 
 other day. " You fling away on your Florentines in the summer 
 all the fortune you make in the winter in Russia, and Paris, 
 and Rome." 
 
 Well, if I do : I love my Florentines better than Russia, or 
 Paris, or Rome : and, what do I want with a fortune ? 
 
 Besides, I like to be free in the glad summer weather, when 
 the fireflies flash all along the ground and the magnolia trees 
 are all white with flower. 
 
 Perhaps I am idle by nature, an Italian is sure to be. 
 
 One fierce summer noon I espied a letter-carrier going out 
 for a day's pleasuring at a fair in the contado, and stowing the 
 post-bags of a whole district away in a cupboard behind his 
 house door to await his return on the morrow. I asked him 
 how he reconciled the dereliction to his conscience. He looked 
 at me with wide open innocent eyes of surprise. 
 
 " Che diamine, signore ! The fair will not wait ; if I do not 
 go to-day, I go never. But, as for the letters, they will wait 
 very well. No one knows what is in them, so no one is expect- 
 ing anything ; and, no doubt, they are all bad news, letters 
 always are, and the poor people will be all the better for having 
 another day in peace." 
 
 With which he turned the key on the post-bags, and jogged 
 happily off on his donkey with red ribbons flying from its ears. 
 
 So on in like manner, I being idle and always at heart a 
 vagabond, shut the gold bags out of sight and come to the fairs 
 in the summer, only instead of sure-footed Dapple I have a 
 shying Pegasus j and there are no red ribbons at its ears, but 
 
366 PASCAREL. 
 
 only the frayed ends of tattered fancies ; and when I gefc to the 
 fair, the fun of it is flat and jarred to me now like a bell thai 
 has cracked in a fire. 
 
 It is odd too. In the old time, when I made a score of wool- 
 carders weep like children, or a handful of stonecutters laugh 
 in their dry dusty throats under that canvas roof of mine, that 
 blew with the winds, and rocked with the rains, and shone 
 yellow with the sunshine ; in that time it always seemed to 
 rue that the Player after all was the greatest artist of them all, 
 since turn by turn he was a breathing statue, a moving picture, 
 a poet who spake aloud, and a musician whose syrinx was no 
 less a thing than the million- chorded passions of mortals, strung 
 on the echoing shell of human sympathy. So it always seemed 
 to me in the old times. 
 
 It used to be pleasure enough just to be in the sun and hear 
 the cicale's zig-zig, and watch the big black for tuna buzz 
 amongst the magnolia flowers, and beckon a brown-faced buxom 
 girl up the path under the vines with her arm full of peaches 
 and her lips ready for kisses. It used to be pleasure enough, 
 all that ; but now, there is wit enough in the cities, and there 
 are women, handsome enough and ready enough with their 
 laughter, and it is a gay, mad, zestful life, this life in the gas 
 glare, and the masqueing, but still there is not much flavour in 
 it. Perhaps it is because I have won all such graces and glories 
 as there are to win graces of a string of glass beads, glories of 
 a truncheon of rushes. 
 
 Well, say I am great in my fashion, say I write what I please 
 and I say what I please, and I am true to the duties of the 
 Pantomimi and the Pasquin, whom every player worth his salt 
 represents, in thrashing the tyrants with ray scourge of asses 7 
 tails, and in showing the great world its ridicule in my trian- 
 gular fool's mirror. Say I am great, so far, pretty much as is 
 the barber's brass basin which reflects its audience with their 
 faces so lengthened or widened, that they perceive for the first 
 time all that is grotesque in their features. Well, the brass 
 basin only holds soapsuds, and sometimes I think I myself hold 
 nothing better. But whether I am great or little the flavour 
 has gone out of my life. 
 
 That is thankless enough. Yes, I know. They call me a 
 wit and a poet, they call me Martial and Plautus, they say I am 
 a Eoccaccio in motion, and an Ariosto in motley. Well, it is 
 all very pretty, if it be not all very true; and they know that 
 once down there in the cheerless spring of JS"ovara ; it was not 
 
HIS STQKY. 367 
 
 with a sword of lath that my blows were given ; they know that 
 in Pascarel the Player there is also a little just by that saving 
 grace, a little of Pascarel the Patriot. And that last title I 
 like much better than the old one my forefathers owned of Pas- 
 carel the Prince. But still the flavour is gone somehow. 
 
 Now and then, when the lads are around me and we go by 
 moonlight through the streets, and some one strikes a chord 
 from his mandolin and the shrill fresh voices rise, raising the 
 echoes from palace and prison, the old spirit comes over me, and 
 I drive them with words of fire, and I make them laugh, just 
 such riotous, endless, rippling laughter as the torrent laughs in 
 the sunshine, springing from stone to stone. Then I am the 
 Pascarel that the people knew, who was gay all day long like a 
 grillo. But it will not last now, and when I am quite alone it 
 seems to me that the world is weary as it seemed to me only 
 to-day down there by the grey Gr<lve water. 
 
 " IT is the idle hour," says Yarko, the painter, going into his 
 room, which is heavy with the scent from great sheaves of mu- 
 ghetti that fill a score of Montelupo bowls and Majolica dishes. 
 " Lie here a little while and smoke, and Ninetta will bring fruit 
 and wine ; meanwhile do you look at my winter's work, my 
 Mona Lisa." 
 
 4 'You are profane," I tell him; but he is indifferent to the 
 thunders of heaven that in justice should smite him for thus 
 taking in vain the name of a god. He pushes me gently back 
 into the shadow and then goes across the room and draws back 
 the velvet curtain that is catching the full light on it. As the 
 purple cloud sinks away, the light shines instead on a picture set 
 in a dark frame of cinquecento carving, that is heightened here 
 and there with a gleam of smalto in heralds' devices, and is sur- 
 mounted by a ducal crown. It is only a woman's portrait. 
 
 Behind her there is a scarlet frame of oleander ; she leans on a 
 trecento balcony ; her dress is of a curious dead gold, it is open 
 at the throat and breast, and against the white skin a knot of 
 vermilion-coloured carnations glow ; there is a broken lute at her 
 feet ; she does not smile ; one would say that she knows why the 
 cords are snapped, why the music is still. 
 
 Bed and gold! how the picture burns! And the woman's 
 face is beautiful in the midst of all the* fire ; and one would say 
 
$68 PASCAR&I , 
 
 that the last love-song she will ever care to hear has been sung 
 on that shattered lute. 
 
 Somehow, though it is summer with her, and girlhood with 
 her, and those oleanders are flowers of Florence ; somehow you 
 know well that there is a great silence round her, a silence as of 
 things that are dead. 
 
 It is a strange picture. 
 
 I stand before it blinded and confused. What is it I see ? 1 
 hardly know. In impatience, he asks me what I think ; what 
 I think? 
 
 "Who knows so little as I ? 
 
 Kudely I tell him that his oleander should not beam so radiant- 
 rt3 as that, Tiziano always painted his summer roses in dull semi- 
 tones ; Tiziano' s beside his woman's cheeks are cool and pale, 
 and have no flush on them. So I say to Yarko ; and all the 
 while my eyes gaze into that oleander glory ; and the woman's 
 eyes look back at mine, and all manner of dead dreams raise their 
 heads like little snakes around me. 
 
 Yarko is speaking to me, that I know ; but the sense of what 
 he is saying is vague and imperfect to me. Perhaps he is telling 
 me the history of the portrait. What need of that ? there is 
 the broken lute. 
 
 " And her name ? " 1 asked him suddenly. 
 
 My heart stands still as it were, and a rush of heat and life 
 seems to throb through those Fates, that have been so heavy and 
 BO chill on it so long. I ask under my breath, as one speaks of 
 the dead ; I know that I am afraid of the answer. Afraid as I 
 never was of that fiery sea of slaughter, down there by the field 
 of Xovara. 
 
 Yarko laughs aloud : a laugh that seems to me to echo 
 jarringly through the stillness of the lily-scented air. 
 
 " Have you heard not a word of all I have been saying ? " he 
 cries to me. " It is scarcely a portrait : have you. not heard me, 
 indeed? And yet it is herself, just as I saw her in the last 
 summer in Florence; I changed nothing. Nay, the oleanders 
 burned as red as that behind her in the sunset. I know the 
 Titian roses are all pale ; but still, I have painted as I saw. It 
 always seems best to me to do so, or try and do so at the least. 
 All that red, all that gold, they would kill any other woman's 
 face, but they do not kill hers. It is an old Florentine dress of 
 cloth of gold, you see. She was ready for a costume ball. She 
 came out on to the balcony just so, the sun was setting. I 
 sketched the scene, and showed it to her on the morrow. So the 
 
HIS STORY. 369 
 
 picture grew And, now, what shall I call it ? Not her name, 
 she will not have it. It might he the ( tanta rossa ' of Dante : 
 or, I thought, of the mistress of Giorgione ; she might have 
 looked just so upon his balcony in Venice ; and the lute is broken 
 there will be no more music in her life, a little space, and the 
 red oleander leaves will be falling like rain upon her grave and 
 his. The picture would tell all that Giorgione story, not ill, I 
 think. You see, under that lowest blossom to the left I have 
 put the little arrowy head cf an asp that will serve for the symbol 
 of the plague. I asked her once if I might call it so, and she 
 said : ' As you like ; only Giorgione' s mistress would smile, I 
 think ; she would kn<>w that death was about to be merciful to 
 them both. Eut, as you like/ she said; 'as you like.' So I can 
 call it so. And it is more Venetian than Florentine in colour 
 after all. Her name ? I wonder that you have to ask. The 
 world knows you both so well. She is often in Florence, but she 
 is not here now. She is the daughter of a great personage, a very 
 great personage." 
 
 Then he lets the purple cloud of the curtain fall again over 
 that fire-glow of the flowers, a little angered with the doubt that 
 Titian's roses being pale, he perchance is wrong. Eut I stand 
 looking at the shadow that had fallen and see still the oleander, 
 and the broken lute, and the eyes of the woman which have no 
 smile in them as the eyes of Giorgione' s mistress would have 
 had. 
 
 For the face of the picture is to me as the face of one risen 
 from the dead. 
 
 A great personage, so he says, leaning there with the gold 
 tissues falling all about her on the marble, and the Florentine 
 carnations in her breast, and the gleam of jewels on her throat 
 and forehead, and at her feet the lute, whose broken chords she, 
 with all her greatness, could not heal again so that they would 
 ever breathe forth the old, sweet, simple, tender notes. A great 
 personage : yet surely also the child that had once gone with me 
 through the lily- whitened grasses and the moon-lightened fields 
 of maize, singing as the birds sang and careless of the morrow. 
 
 I feel chilly and grown old, as I felt by the side of the Greve 
 water, where the sun had flashed amidst the canes. For there is 
 no ghost whose breath is so cold, as the ghost of a love that is 
 dead ; and I have met two this day, this April day, when the 
 soil is all yellow with daffodils, and all the earth is glad. 
 
 Would it be better to know her under the dusky marbles of 
 some aisle of graves, in the mouldering heart of some world -for* 
 
 S B 
 
370 PASCAR&L. 
 
 gotten city, or to find her great like this, with jewels in he* 
 breast, and that strange haunted look in her eyes ? 
 
 The lute is broken : does she remember, I wonder ? 
 
 Has she forgotten the days on the sunny hillsides, hy the 
 shallow hrook waters, and the leaves of the vines, and heneath 
 the murmuring poplars ? Has she forgotten ? Has she forgiven ? 
 What can it matter anyway if she be great like this ? 
 
 She must be dead to me, you know. 
 
 And that living death is worse than the death of the grave, 
 they say ; that living death when the voice speaks still to all 
 others, and only is silent to you. And yet the world is full of 
 these things ! One wonders the sun still drags on its way ; one 
 wonders all men are not mad. 
 
 The seeding grass was wet with torrents of blood down there 
 en the March day of Novara, and the cannon balls, as they swept 
 through the rising corn, did the work of the harvest sickle. 
 How came Pate to miss me amongst the slain ? I wonder ; 
 and grow old. 
 
 I have tried to love other women ; I have told other women I 
 did love them ; but I do not think they believed me, and I know 
 I did not believe myself. 
 
 And now that I have seen that picture yes, that is, of course, 
 how she must be; a great lady, with a knot of diamonds in her 
 breast. There is not much left in her of the bold, shy, pretty, 
 saucy child that I walked through Yerona with, that night of the 
 Yeglione. Nothing left probably, not even perhaps a regret. 
 
 A flush of shame at most, perhaps, when this brilliant illus- 
 trissima remembers how she roamed the fields and hills with a 
 troop of strolling comedians; remembers too, maybe, now and 
 then, that one of those wandering players set his lips to her 
 cheek and held her little hand in his in the autumn hour, when 
 the wild anemones were all aglow beneath the brown Badia. 
 
 "Well, no one will ever know that I remember it too. She last 
 and least of all ; if ever I should meet her. 
 
 There are things one is bound to forget, or, at least, that bind 
 one to live as if they were wholly forgotten. 
 
 And what is Oblivion if it be not Age ? I feel old, I say, as 
 I felt at noon where the little red roses nod by the Grve 
 stream. 
 
HIS STORY. 371 
 
 " Yoir are sure there is never a scorpion ? " says Astra, the 
 actress, to me this April day, when at sunset we go up together 
 to the great open-air theatre that draws all Florence to it on 
 summer nights where it stands under the pine woods on the hill- 
 side beyond the Gate of the Cross. 
 
 " You are sure there is never a scorpion ? " says Astra to me, 
 bathing her fair face in the lilies and lying breast downward in 
 the grass with the vine-shadows playing, as if in love with her, 
 over her soft, indolent, wanton limbs. 
 
 I tell her no ; but alas ! grow the lilies ever so richly there is 
 always a scorpion somewhere for me. 
 
 That is just because a man ever desires the thing he has not, you 
 see ; most surely desires it of all when that thing is called woman. 
 For the lilies are yellow as soon as gathered, but the scorpion 
 stings on and on, on and on. 
 
 I talked with a scorpion once ; an old, old scorpion, long as my 
 hand, and hoary as Esau with length of years. I found him, and 
 made his acquaintance in a prison in Venice long, long ago, 
 where the Stranieri lodged me three months or so for having 
 spoken words too strong and too seasoned one riotous Carnival 
 time, when I had rolled my first little Arte under the wings of 
 the Lion. 
 
 The old scorpion never hurt me but would lash his tail and 
 talk by the hour together. He had heard the sad tale of the wild 
 Lagoon waters and the sigh of the Gondolier's Stali ! for ages and 
 ages and ages there in his sea-girt chambers ; since first he had 
 come from the East, no bigger then than a scarabeus, hidden in a 
 fold of gold tissue that one of Dandolo's men had brought with 
 him from mighty Byzantium, and thrown on the couch of his 
 mistress one amorous night in August. The scorpion stung her 
 and she died why not ? there is always a sting in all love, and 
 perhaps the quickest death to it is the kindliest. 
 
 He had seen many things and many centuries this old wise 
 bearded scorpion of Venice, and one day when he sat in his chink, 
 a black blot in a line with the sun, I asked him to tell me, 
 since we were good friends together, what was the secret and 
 source of that mystical power for which my human kind was 
 wont to curse him and his ; and slay them and embalm them in 
 oil as dead Pharaohs were buried in perfume. 
 
 The old scorpion made me answer; he who had lived in the 
 beautiful wanton breast of that Venice, which men have called 
 the harlot of Italy ; the old scorpion made me answer. 
 
 B B 2 
 
372 PASCA&&L. 
 
 "What do we slay with? And what is the death in out 
 sting ? A venom that is as that fire which no water quenches, 
 and as the grave-worm that no feast of flesh can slake ? What 
 is that, you fool, with which we arm ourselves and strike where 
 we will and never fail ? Listen here then, and know that this 
 for which you all curse us is born of yourselves, not of us. Eor 
 in the beginning of time when Death came forth from the gates 
 of hell on the bloodless white horse and was set free to pace to 
 and fro the world, and scatter desolation as he would, Death 
 scattering himself broadcast in many shapes and fashions, Death 
 one night made us the scorpions and set us to run over the 
 earth. 
 
 " The first scorpion was only a harmless big beetle at the be- 
 ginning, ugly, of course, but quite innocent, but Death took it 
 up and steeped it in two human hearts that all bleeding and 
 smoking lay in the hollow of his hand. And from the man's 
 heart the first scorpion sucked desire, and from the woman's heart 
 it sucked jealousy ; and when it had sated itself of these to the 
 full, Death set it down on the ground. 
 
 " Now be fruitful and multiply,' ' he bade it, " and do your 
 work on the human race, for you have a venom in you that never 
 will die while the world rolls on round the sun." 
 
 So the old scorpion talked, blinking at the light from the sea 
 walls in Venice. 
 
 And now, bloom the blue lilies ever so brightly, there is 
 always a scorpion somewhere for me. 
 
 For Astra and Poppea there is a great supper spread this April 
 night, under a tent at midnight when our play is over. They 
 have acted superbly, and they have had all the glory their souls 
 could desire, and they laugh a gorge deployee, their red lips 
 parting over their snowy teeth, playing with flowers in bands of 
 jewels that some of the nobles have flung to them. They are 
 famous, and spoilt, and capricious, am? cruel sometimes, and 
 jealous always ; and like children in their oiirth, as all artists are 
 all the world over. 
 
 The white folds of the tent flutter, the torches flicker in their 
 brass sconces, the young actors have dressed the canvas with 
 boughs and pennons and fluttering scrolls ; where the curtains 
 open there shines the white radiance of magnolia trees that grow 
 just there on the hillside, and whose closed cups are silver in the 
 moon. 
 
 There are laughter and jesting, and such amorous follies as 
 women like Astra and Poppea await whenever their eyes may 
 
STOAT. 3/3 
 
 beam upon the sons of men. They lie there like Tiziano's 
 Women, and their jewels gleam and their pretty hands crush the 
 bursting fruits ; and without, down the hills, the people troop 
 away shadowy, cloud-like, singing as they go, the sweet sounds 
 grow fainter and fainter as they stream farther away under the 
 low stone pines. 
 
 "We ourselves go down the hill together a little later ; it is the 
 fancy of Astra and Poppea to leave their horses champing by the 
 gates and use their own pretty listless lightsome feet. 
 
 Their silken skirts shiver over the grasses, sweeping down the 
 lilies ; the young men go before them with flute and mandoline 
 singing the Invitation of Paesiello ; there are gleams of blue 
 where the iris is growing, the air is full of magnolia fragrance, 
 the night is as clear as the day, it is past one of the clock, 
 Florence sleeps silvery and very still. 
 
 A shrouded figure passes us masked, Astra and Poppea shrink 
 a little ; it looks dismal in the moon ; they take it for some 
 brother of the Misericordia. I see that it is a woman. But why 
 masked, and on the hills too ? It is not even Carnival. 
 
 We go on through the gates into the silent city, tho sleepy 
 guards let us through, the music and the singing wake all the 
 echoes as we pass along the dark old streets and under the Church 
 of the Croce. 
 
 The lads sing more sweetly as they go by and their voices drop 
 to a tender minor key ; they remember that Michelangelo and 
 Leonardo lie there. Now and then a woman drops a rose to us 
 from her lattice ; now and then a lover comes out from some 
 vaulted doorway, looking warily to see if any talebearer be lurk- 
 ing near ; now and then a stream of light falls from some balcony 
 where two shadows lean one on the other. 
 
 So we go on through the silent city, on into the square of the 
 Signoria, and here, late though it is, there are men grouped to- 
 gether in little knots, murmuring eagerly, with their cloaks cast 
 about them and their faces flushed and dark. 
 
 "We have left Astra and Poppea at their palace ; the youths 
 have ceased their singing ; we pause by the Cathedral and look 
 up ; someone has set against the bronze Judith a flag of three 
 colours ; the red in it glows like blood in the silver glistening 
 cool Florence night. 
 
 " What is it?" we ask; we have lost our memory up there 
 on the hills in music, and have forgotten for the moment tho 
 storm that hovers northward where the city of Yirgil lies, 
 
374 PASCAR&L. 
 
 " What is it P " we ask, whilst the Judith bends her brows 
 Against the moon. 
 They answer us in one word. 
 " War." 
 
 WAK again away there in the North. 
 
 As I go homeward by myself I am glad. 
 
 I am tired of Astra and Poppea, of the masquing and the folly, 
 of the paper laurels and the hobble of lead, of the showers of gold 
 and the laughter of fools. 
 
 I come upstairs to the broad tapestried chamber where the 
 moonrays lie so white upon the marble floor, and I go to an old 
 chest and I take out the old knapsack and the old musket that I 
 carried years ago over the Lombard fields. 
 
 After all, they are the truest friends a man has ; after all, 
 when one is a Florentine one is a soldier, before one is anything 
 else. 
 
 They lie there in the moonlight, old battered moulded war- 
 worn things; on the barrel of the musket there is red rust, it 
 was a fellow-student's life blood; I never had the heart to touch 
 it. How shabby and broken the knapsack is, too ; it was nearly 
 new that day in Pisa when I saw the Zinzara and her people 
 troop by under the old grey walls, and went after them on the 
 same sea road and caught them as they travelled along in the 
 dust singing and eating their cherries. 
 
 There are the cherry stains now on the leather, for she would 
 fill it with fruit, I remember; the stains are black, a dying 
 man leaned his head on it amongst the crushed grass whilst a 
 burning village smoked in the midst of the millet fields, as 
 Carlo Alberto's hopes died down with the setting sun. 
 
 I sit in the moonlight with the old pack in my hands and the 
 musket at my feet, thinking of all the dead years that seem 
 to drift by me one by one as the clouds go by past the casement. 
 
 Some friends of mine break into the room, and find me there, 
 the musket at my feet. 
 
 They are all breathless and excited talking of the news. 
 
 " You are not going, Pp.scarfel ? " they cry to me. 
 
 I tell them yes. 
 
 <; But you are macl ! " they say in chorus. 
 
 I shrug my shoulders, It is very possible 
 
 " But, with your fame ? " they cry. 
 
HIS STORY. 375 
 
 " Oh, altro ! my poor paper laurels a plaything for a Mardi 
 Gras what more ? " 
 
 " But you will be ruined ! " they urge. 
 
 " That is very possible, too." 
 
 "But just when you are great/* they cry; " just when the 
 world catches your words as if pearls fell from your mouth to 
 thrust that all away into a common soldier's knapsack it is 
 lunacy." 
 
 " That is as it may be. Italy wants Venice and Verona." 
 
 I rub the old cherry stains on the old knapsack, and think 
 how strange it is that all we students dreamed of in the gloom 
 of Pisa, and were called mad and worse for so dreaming of as we 
 marched twelve abreast by night through the sombre streets, 
 chanting sonnets of Manzoni, should now be come and be 
 coming to pass with a precision, and romance, that together 
 make it like the work of magic. 
 
 They stay tffil th<? 'lay breaks arguing with me what is the 
 use ? The old musket lying there on the marble, seems to suit 
 me better now than the painted bladder and gilded bells of the 
 pantomime. To care for the follies of the carnival fair, one 
 must have a heart as light as the bladder, and mirth that rings 
 like the bells. 
 
 Well, I had these longer than most men. If the bladder be 
 weighted with lead and the bells are jangled and out of tune 
 now, at least my measure lasted longer than it lasts for most 
 men. 
 
 At length my friends go away ; they go sorrowful, and they 
 think me a fool. 
 
 The chamber is black and grey around me. The dawn breaks, 
 but breaks slowly. 
 
 I felt old to-day as I went by the shallow Greve water. 
 
 I felt weary as Astra laughed amongst the lilies. 
 
 How still it is ! here, high amongst the roofs. 
 
 I am left alone in the chilly light of the dawn. The shadows 
 are black on the marble floor. A mouse creeps up and smells at 
 the musket where the blood of the dead soldier is crusted on 
 the steel. The knapsack still lies on my knee. I think of 
 Pisa. 
 
 How prettily and innocently jealous she was, the donzella, 
 leaning out of the old grated window, because she had heard, 
 how, in the student (lays, the Zanzara had wound a red ribbon 
 to my mandoline. Yet I remember, too, how as we went under- 
 neath the ?ld palaces, and spoke together of Margherita of 
 
376 PASCARfrL. 
 
 France, she marvelled how the princess could wish to wander 
 with gipsies, and to leave all the pride and the pomp of her 
 royalty for mere freedom and mirth and the fresh air of heaven. 
 She marvelled, yes, though she had wandered with the Arte and 
 me. She would not have been happy with us in other year? ; 
 no doubt she is best as she is. 
 
 And yet, does she never, I wonder, think of the hours when 
 we went together through the trailing vines light of foot as of 
 heart in the warmth of the sun ? 
 
 Oh, those old fair dead days ! they were so glad and so inno- 
 cent and so simple. Why could they not last for ever beneath 
 those blue Tuscan skies ? 
 
 The city is still asleep. 
 
 The first chimes ring muffled through the shadows of night 
 that still lingers. Good women will rise from their beds and 
 will go out into the darkness of the churches, and will break 
 their hearts in prayer over the sons and the lovers who are 
 going out to war, on the old Lombard battle-fields, where the 
 maize and the vine are green. 
 
 JL have no one to pray for me. 
 
 It is always so, when one has loved too many. We gather 
 the roses too quickly, and the wind blows the leaves away 
 hither and thither, and our hands are left empty. 
 
 Well, the musket lies there ; and, there is always Italy. 
 
 If the lute be broken and the fool's bells be jangled it is 
 time to die as my fellow -students died amongst the trampled 
 corn. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 HEE STOEY. 
 
 Do you know Sta. Margharita's ? the little brown square 
 church with its bell clanging in the open tower, high above in 
 the sweet air on the hills ? 
 
 There is level grass all about it, and it has a cool green 
 garden shut within walls on every side except where a long 
 parapet of red dusky tiles leaves open the view of the Yaldarno ; 
 underneath the parapet there are other terraces of deep grass 
 and old old olive trees, in whose shade the orchids love to grow. 
 
HER STORY. 377 
 
 and the blue iris springs up in great sheaves of sword-like 
 [eaves. 
 
 There are trees of every sort in the cloistered garden, the 
 turf is rich and long, the flowers are tended with the tenderest 
 care, the little sacristy glows red in the sun, an acanthus climbs 
 against it ; the sacristan's wife comes out to you plaiting her 
 straw, and brings you a cluster of her roses ; you sit on the 
 stone seat and lean over the parapet and look downward, birds 
 flit about you, contadini go along the grass paths underneath, 
 and nod to you, smiling ; a delicious mingled loveliness of olive 
 wood and ilex foliage and blossoming vineyards shelve beneath 
 you ; you see all Florence gleaming far below there in the sun, 
 and your eyes sweep from the snow that still lies on Yallambrosu 
 to the blue shadows of the Carrara range. 
 
 It is calm and golden and happy here at Sta. Margharita's, 
 high on the fragrant hill air, with the gueldre roses nodding 
 above head, and the voices of the vinedressers echoing from the 
 leaf- veiled depths below. 
 
 To live here and dream the years away and only score the 
 time by the colour of the vines, it would be well, I think ; very 
 \vell. Only for such a life one must needs be so happy. Happy 
 ns one is for an hour, for a day, for a month, but never for 
 longer. Happy as one can only be when a great passion is 
 close about us, and is past, and present, and future, is world, and 
 sun, and God. 
 
 Sometimes I come up here for quiet's sake and lean my arms 
 on the red ledge, and wait to watch the sun sink down behind 
 the deep azure of Carrara and change the broad green valley to 
 a sea of molten gold. 
 
 I used to come here with Pascarel many times, many times. 
 
 One day in especial I remember. The wooden Arte had been 
 reared in the village yonder ; it was a giorno di festa ; it was 
 in the April time ; we came up along the narrow road between 
 the high walls, overtopped with china roses and hawthorn; 
 we came into the garden by the church and sat down, he on 
 the parapet, I on the little stone bench in the corner under 
 the aloe. 
 
 Mass was over ; in the sacristan's house they were going to 
 the mid-day meal ; they brought food out to us and would take 
 no denial. We shared the simple feast of soup and bread and 
 salad, there amongst the green leaves and the flowers ; we paid 
 them for it with the mandoline and many songs of Florence. 
 
 "We stayed there all the afternoon tUl the sun set, and we 
 
378 PASCAR& 
 
 heard the Ave Maria ringing from all the belfries in the valley 
 as we strolled backward along the grass paths of the hills ; he 
 gathered the dainty orchids for me under the olive trees ; we 
 laughed and jested and made music as we went. 
 
 To-day the same scene lies before me in the sun ; the old bell 
 in the little square tower strikes the quarters with the same 
 sound; the garden and the church are nowise changed; the 
 sacristan's wife comes out smiling, plaiting her straw, and hold- 
 ing to me a little knot of flowers; she calls me the most 
 illustrious, she gazes with gentle awe at the jewels on my hands ; 
 she does not look aged, and her husband is stooping over the 
 dark inoist fresh-turned earth binding carnations just as we left 
 him on that day. 
 
 It is just the same, just the same, only the music is silent. 
 
 Only! 
 
 I lean on the red edge of the wall and look down ; two con- 
 f adini go by under those old gnarled olives ; they are young ; 
 he laughs and her cheeks grow red. I would give the world to 
 be the girl, bareheaded there in the sun, poor, plaiting her straw 
 as she goes along over the grass-grown farrows. 
 
 For the music is not silent for her. It may only, indeed be 
 a homely little pastoral song, only a peasant's stornellQ, rhymed 
 to the hum of the spinning wheel and the bleat of the goats in 
 the meadow. But it is the song that makes blythe her heart 
 in the ragged boddice and light her feet in the ox-ploughed 
 ways. It is perfect to her, and lips that are eager and tender 
 murmur it low in her ear; she is blessed amongst women, I 
 say. But to me the green earth is silent. 
 
 Yarko, the painter, made my portrait the other day. I stood 
 in the sunset one night in a court-dress that pleased him. He 
 brought me an old trecentisto lute and asked me to sing him 
 some Florence song as he worked. As I stretched out my hand 
 the lute fell and broke in two on the marble floor. " Paint it 
 so," I said to him; he did not know why, but so it seemed 
 fittest to me. 
 
 And the lute is there on the picture, broken beyond the 
 cunning of men to mend. He calls the painting Giorgi one's 
 Mistress. It seems an ill-chosen name to me. For she must 
 have been happy always ; all that glad life in Venice that was 
 one long golden flower-crowned masque, and then the short 
 sharp death that did not divide them but wedded them closely 
 for all time, together forever in the quiet of the grave and iu 
 the memory of the world. 
 
HER STORY. 379 
 
 It is so few years, and yet it seems so many ages since 
 the white roses came to me in farewell. 
 
 There followed on that time a space of absolute unconscious- 
 ness. It is all blank, all dark to me. 
 
 When I awoke again there were no more around me the bare 
 Florentine walls, the aromatic pungent Florentine odours, the 
 gay vibrating Florentine street chatter. I ^aw no more the old 
 carved window and the little brown figure of the stocking 
 mender with the sun on her silver earrings and the silken hose at 
 her feet. 
 
 It had all faded away as though it had never been. 
 
 I awoke with gold and silver and fine linen and rosy hives 
 about me ; I awoke with great wide windows before me, through 
 which there gleamed gilded rails and chestnut trees in blossom, 
 and a light vivacious crowd of children, running hither ani 
 thither with lilac in their hands ; I awoke with Florio's whispers 
 in my ears. 
 
 " Oh, carina mia, you will live? you will live? Only see, 
 this is Paris and we are so rich, so rich. If the donzella like 
 to eat gold she can have it as easily as grapes in vintage time* 
 Oh, carina mia, you will live, you will try a little to live, will 
 you not?" 
 
 I looked at him stupidly, pushing the curls from my aching 
 forehead ; live ? why should I live ? the blue lilies were all dead 
 in Tuscany. 
 
 One day they set before me great cases of sapphires and dia- 
 monds and other precious stones. They were heirlooms, they 
 said. 
 
 " You are too young for them," said my father, " but thej 
 will become you, as those old yellow and purple velvets used to 
 do in old Yerona. Make yourself your handsomest to-night, the 
 world will see you." 
 
 I had no choice but to obey. 
 
 The world saw me and made itself a fool for me : the great 
 dazzling lawless world of Paris. I stretched my hands to it 
 thankfully, it gave me a feverish forgetfulness ; anything was 
 better than to sit and see the chestnuts bud in the cool sunlight 
 and to go mad with longing for the deep vine shadows and the 
 sweet mountain stillness of my Tuscany. Anything was bettei 
 than to stare till one was blind at the cruel glare on the shade- 
 less pavements, and grow sick with longing for the mere smell 
 of the oak-wood fires in the Florence streets. 
 
 One day I saw an iris behind a gilded garden -pale; an iris as 
 
380 PASCAR&L. 
 
 blue as my lost heavens the iris of Dante that blooms in mil- 
 lions down the olive slopes and amongst the maize in Tuscany 
 with the first wakening of the spring-time sun. 
 
 I thought that Dante in his hell had missed the sharpest 
 torture of it all. Why did he not set a little Italian meadow 
 lily to grow in the darkness of Caina and Ptolomea and smile 
 with its azure eyes at the despair of those for whom the sun of 
 Italy had forever ceased to shine ? 
 
 Am I not mad ? as mad as dead 'Dino's Pazza, calling on 
 the waters to give up her lover by sad Perrara ? I call on the 
 dead days, and they are drowned and mute like 'Dino. 
 
 My father is good to me, in his cold idle manner. He is 
 proud because the world calls me so handsome, and he fills my 
 hands with riches ; I spend in a day when I like what would 
 make this little paese on the hills here a fairyland for all its 
 people. Men love me or vow they do, and I play with them, 
 and they say I have no heart. Women envy me as I pass by, 
 and hate me with that hate which is a woman's cross of honour. 
 What more can any female creature want ? 
 
 And yet you see one is so thankless. I, who dreamed cease- 
 lessly of all this greatness, and thirsted for it lying wide-awake 
 on my truckle bed, and watching the moon rise over the Scala's 
 palaces, and light the painted loves of Orpheus on the vault 
 above, I often shake the jewels off my aching head and fling 
 myself down weeping as 'Dino's Pazza weeps beside the river- 
 side, for the time when the wild poppies were twisted in my 
 wind-blown curls by the hands of Pascarll. 
 
 Many have asked me in marriage. My father looks at me 
 jvith a curious look often, and says, " Gather your roses while 
 you may that is sound counsel, though a poet's." 
 
 But how shall I gather them ? I ? who only hold a dead rose 
 to my heart that no one sees, as old Giudetta held hers fifty long 
 years in silence and in faith. 
 
 I have no faith ; if I had had faith, never had I let so poor 
 and vile a thing as his dead amorous folly stand betwixt me and 
 my belief in him. All that I know ; too late, too late. 
 
 But so much faith as this I have. He kissed me there, on 
 the dark hillside on the night of the saints under Fiesole. No 
 other shall ever touch me ; so much faith as this I have. 
 
 h woman who carries lips un-virgin to her husband, what 
 better is she than the adulteress "? 
 
 So I think at least ; old Mariuccia would say so if I could 
 rouge her from her hard-won rest away there where #10 
 
ti&R sfORY. 381 
 
 alpine storm- winds lash the sullen sea-green of the Adige into 
 foam. 
 
 There is one who torments me more than all others to he 
 faithless to this single poor shred of human fealty that I 
 treasure. 
 
 I have seen him but lately, since we came hither, back into 
 this dear Tuscan land ; it is he who in the old villa above Lucca 
 begged me to sing to the mandoline with so insolent an eager* 
 ness in his bold eyes. 
 
 He is my father's cousin and heir; the likeness in him that I 
 saw that night was no chance resemblance. At times I wonder 
 if he recognizes in me the child that leaned against the screen 
 in the great hall with her strange masquerade dress of violet 
 and gold : I cannot tell. He never talks of it; he is a man full 
 of grace and courtliness, and to all people my father speaks of 
 me as having been reared in a convent of Northern Italy. No 
 one doubts : why should they ? Only sometimes I think my 
 cousin doubts ; sometimes I think he knows full well that I was 
 once the little wandering TJccello of the Arte. 
 
 He loves me, or pursues me at the least with a strong ardour 
 and with delicate wiles and ways. My father favours his suit, 
 so far at least as he ever rouses himself from his voluptuous 
 apathy to urge upon me anything. The man is sole heir to all 
 his late-come greatness, and he would be glad that I should bear 
 the mighty name and wear the honour of it always. 
 
 So they talk ; so they talk ; and my cousin woos me as only 
 men skilled in the world as he is can ; he has my father's beauty 
 and my father's grace and ease ; but I whilst his words are 
 most eloquent upon my ear, all I can hear is one voice mur- 
 muring in its sweet sonorous Tuscan, " Oh, gioja mia ! " in the 
 dreamy lustrous midnight when the falling stars dropped over 
 white Fiesole. 
 
 Eor how can I forget ? how shall I ever forget till I am dead? 
 
 "What woman forgets the first kisses that have burned on her 
 cheek and throat, unless she grow light enough and foul enough 
 to lend her lips to fresh caresses ? And that I am not ; nay, 
 thank God ; so much of womanhood there is in me, though in 
 so much else, I, the great lord's daughter and the great world's 
 darling, am so far sunk beneath the little simple wayward, fear- 
 less, innocent TJccello. 
 
 Yet there must be something more, for in the world there 
 where they sing my praises, they always say " a beautiful thing 
 but wild and with an untamed look; " and when I shake off 
 
3$ 2 PASCAR&L. 
 
 >y rich velvets and my priceless laces at the end of the long 
 fights of pleasure, I shiver a little, and in my soul long for the 
 old simple dusty skirts stained with the juice of the trodden 
 grapes, and the play of the bleating kids and the dew of the 
 wind-blown acacias where I ran bareheaded and happy in the 
 fcummer sun in the wake of the wandering Arte. 
 
 For I am so young still, and yet I feel so old ; and all that one 
 sweet buried summer time has all my dead youth with it in its 
 grave of withered rose leaves. 
 
 " What would Mariuccia say if she came before iis now ? " 
 cries good, merry, blissful Plorio, a thousand times if once : ah, 
 yes ! I have all the greatness and the glories that I sighed my 
 Boul out for in my ungrateful babyhood, sitting at her feet under 
 the broken Donatello. And what good is it to me? so little 
 good that when I see a little white anemule shine under those 
 olive trees my heart is sick with longing and I am weary unto 
 death. 
 
 Is it three years ? only three years ? It seems eternity since 
 there, by the Mouth of the Lion, the crowd of Oltrarno bore him 
 away on the wild rejoicing night? 
 
 Men talk of him ; I hear his name and see it on the walls of 
 cities. 
 
 "A great genius," they say, " fitful and never to be controlled, 
 but of wit keen as the needle's edge, and of powers varied as the 
 sunset's hues." The fame of him has leapt into sudden light 
 before the world; "a player's fame!" says my cousin with a 
 sneer, " a player's fame ! a mushroom's fungus growth that will 
 die down with the first day of rain ! " 
 
 Does he remember, my cousin ? When he says these things, I 
 think so. 
 
 Can I be glad that he has those paper laurels, as he used to 
 call them ? 
 
 !Nb, for art is a rival longer lived than any woman. Ah, dear 
 heaven ! I should have known that a woman's love is worth no- 
 thing unless it be doglike and takes good and evil alike uncom 
 plaining ? Yes, perhaps ; but as it is my heart burns with love 
 still. 
 
 Last night, only last night, I was weak enough to wish to see 
 his face again there on the hillside where the great open-air 
 theatre stands, and I left my horses at the base of the slope, and 
 put my mask and domino on, and went upward on foot where 
 the red and white flag fluttered high above the oaK woods. 
 
 How still the night was ; and the great golden moon hung in 
 
HER STORY* 383 
 
 the silvery air, and the white magnolias gleamed like lamps, and a 
 cloud of rosy oleander leaves was blown in my face by the wind. 
 
 Do you know what the night is in Italy ? No ? Then you 
 do not know how near heaven your earth can be. 
 
 It is a great ^lace without a roof, a summer theatre for the 
 people. The grass grows up to thu walls and the oak woods are 
 all above. It was quite quiet ; there was a sound of dreamlike 
 music sighing everywhere upon the silent and leafy sides of th 
 hills. 
 
 There were many doors all open to the ail. f n one a group of 
 pifferari leaned ; next to them was a peasant girl with a bulrush 
 in her hand ; next her again a woman who rested her basket of 
 melons on a rail and held a child to her bare breast. 
 
 Behind, the little wandering pifferari strayed near the entrance 
 without paying, their eyes aglow under their tangled hair ; the 
 metal workers and perfume pressers and mosaic makers from the 
 town leant together with bended brows ; the noble stooped his 
 delicate dark head to hearken yet more surely; the proud duchess 
 at his side beat the measure softly with her broad black fan ; so 
 they listened, the Tuscan people, with the shadow of the great 
 roofless walls around them and above their heads the blue night 
 skies. And the genius of what' they had heard had entered into 
 them, and the sweet sounds of it were sighing in echo from all 
 their mouths, and they laughed aloud in pleasure, while their 
 eyes kindled and flashed through the shadow, and a great shout 
 went up from three thousand voices to the quiet stars where the 
 clouds were floating. 
 
 They all cried one name ; " Pascarel ! " 
 
 I glided in and stood in the press between a cobbler in his 
 leathern apron who had brought a shoe to sew there and a conta- 
 dino with his brown cloak tossed over one shoulder and behind 
 his ear a knot of asphodels. 
 
 The light and shadows played about them; the oil flames 
 burned clear, the smell of the fresh herbs and grass drifted from 
 the hills without ; above head were the purple clouds with the 
 moon a globe of gold, and a great dusky hawk winging his slow 
 way across the face of the sky. 
 
 Ah, God I the familiar sweetness of it all ! I lost all sense of 
 time and place. I was once more the little wandering Uccello of 
 the Arte, happy because the breeze blew, happy because the sun 
 would rise, happy for every trifle of the day and night, happy as 
 the flowers in the fields. 
 
 The people made a little way for me and I sank on the seat 
 
384 PASCAK&L. 
 
 that the old cobbler rose to surrender to me. They looked but 
 little at me, they were absorbed in what they had heard, and a 
 woman masked is not so strange in Italy as elsewhere. I sat 
 quite still. 
 
 The great circle went round and round before my sight, the 
 lights wavered in the dusky shadows of it, the music sounded 
 like the swell of some far-off sea. 
 
 Whether it were harmony or discord I had no perception, nor 
 how long it lasted after my entrance there I cannot tell. 
 
 I could feel the wind blowing in my eyes, I could see the 
 hawk hovering above with outstretched wings, I could smell the 
 sweet familiar scents of the wild hillside ; that was all. 
 
 My consciousness was with the old dead days. 
 
 The silence around me was broken by tumultuous shouts ; the 
 music had ceased, the people were sending the thunder of their 
 applause up to the quiet darkness where the stars were; the 
 hawk had soared away. 
 
 It was all vague and full of fury, like a storm, to me ; the 
 waves of sound beat on my ears but I did not hear them. 
 
 Then lightly as a leopard in its own deserts, Pascarel leapecf 
 on the stage with abound, and thunders of homage echoed through 
 the house, and his eyes flashed over the sea of faces and the clear 
 resonant vibrations of his voice thrilled through the murmuring 
 welcome of the hushing house. 
 
 And so I saw and heard him I once more ; I who had elt 
 his kisses there on the far hillside beneath Fiesole that unfor^ot- 
 ten night before the Feast-day of the Dead. 
 
 And yet I sat quite quiet, and only drew a little into shadow 
 where the gaslight would not find my diamonds. Women are 
 liars, say you ? Well, they need be. 
 
 There was silence, tumult, silence, tumult again; then the 
 people streamed away out into the moonlight. 
 
 I was left all alone. I could hear them going down the hills 
 playing on their mandolines. The lights were blown out. 
 There was only the white light of the full inoon. 
 
 Near at hand there was laughter and singing. They sounded 
 strangely, waking all the echoes in the great silent amphitheatre. 
 My life thrilled with sharp sickly pain, as though a snake had 
 bitten me. 
 
 I heard the clear vibration of the laugh of Pascarel, that 
 Italian laugh, like the ring of silver upon stone, which is like na 
 other upon earth. The light merriment of women crossed it, and 
 a burden of a love song followed. 
 
THE OLD SEA QUEEN. 385 
 
 I rose to my feet, and felt my way blindly through the rows of 
 seats to tho open doorway, round which the coils of wild vint 
 were blowing in the wind from the mountains. 
 
 Ho was standing on the hillside ; his lips laughed, the moon- 
 light fell about him; his mandoline was strung with a scarlet 
 ribbon; against him leaned a beautiful wanton thing with laces 
 UMilmg in the damp grass, and a white hand that stretched over 
 his shoulder and touched the strings of the lute. 
 
 I knew her face; she came of Yenice; they called her in her 
 world Poppea. 
 
 I went by them, noiseless and shapeless, a dark shadow against 
 the white magnolia blossoms. He started, and a false note 
 shivered sadly from the mandoline. 
 
 This was how he remembered ! Ah, God ! what is it that 
 stays with me still ? it cannot be love for very shame's sake it 
 must now be hate ? 
 
 And yet, and yet, I envy that peasant girl who goes yonder 
 through the olives with her lover's hand i 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE OLD SEA QTTEEK. 
 
 IT is not an army that goes out to war. It is a whole people 
 that rises in arms. My birth country alone sends out many 
 thousand Tuscans ; all made of the same steel as those who, in 
 the old day, held their villa on the Murello slopes there, against 
 all assaults from the stoutest chivalry of England and of 
 Germany. 
 
 I come down to Genoa in the fresh May days; along this 
 beautiful sea road that my knapsack and I travelled so long long 
 ago with the French comedians, eating their cherries and singing 
 their songs, with the blue sky overhead and the blue sea at their 
 feet. 
 
 I remember how we came into Genoa then they and I in 
 the glad Easter weather, with the white dust on our feet and the 
 ready jest on our mouths. Genoa was in festa that day ; and all 
 the ladder-like streets were ablaze with flags, and all the many- 
 coloured flints of the old sea palaces glowed in the fervid noon 
 heats from the sapphire water. And we ate fruits in the auaint 
 
386 PASCAR&L. 
 
 old galleries along the sea line ; and laughed and chattered down 
 the steep ways where the Doria and their fellows fought so often, 
 knee to knee and knife to knife ; and then, at nightfall, we 
 played to a thousand odd sailors and traders of every clime from 
 off the vessels in its harhour, and the theatre over and done with, 
 we strayed out into the moonlight along the sea again, slaking 
 our throats with pomegranates, and waking the echoes of the 
 palaces of the old Sea Queen with the thrill of the mandoline 
 until the dawn broke away there across the waves where Africa 
 was ly in.fr. 
 
 Ah, Dio mio ! those were goodly days, and gracious in their 
 folly, and sweet in the mouth as the red water melon, if also as 
 swift to melt away and leave no taste, and as little fit for life's 
 real sustenance. 
 
 And here is Genoa again in the May time, and this time its 
 music is of drums and bugles, and the roll of cannon and the 
 tramp of soldiers ; this May time its waters and skies and air 
 are grey, and full of storm ; the rain falls, the shadows of the 
 hills close darkly round ; the old palaces lean together, and the 
 streets are dark as night ; there are only the golden oranges and 
 the tricoloured banners that have colour in them, and laugh a 
 little through the gloom. 
 
 The city seems to tremble where she sits by the sea, that she 
 wrested in the old old days from bereaved Pisa. 
 
 Through her streets and down her mighty quays there tramp, 
 all day long, thousands and tens of thousands of tired feet all 
 Italy and half France are here. 
 
 Through the mists that hang on high, over the olive woods, 
 there come half muffled cheers. Though the rain falls the 
 bouquets fall too ; fall in showers on the shining lines of bayo- 
 nets from the balconies above. Through the white vapour from 
 the Mediterranean the sounds of the salutes from the frigates roll 
 heavily and echo down the mole. The old archways and the dim 
 cavernous galleries along the sea line are all full of the troops, 
 that pause there in a little breathing space to taste the wine and 
 press the fruits into their burning throats. Little children glow 
 here and there out of the fog like little knots of flowers ; the 
 smallest of them have the three colours somewhere on their 
 dress, and their small shrill voices are all crying vivas for the 
 King and Italy. 
 
 Genoa is for the moment the mouthpiece of the whole roused 
 nation. 
 
 The rain falls falls all day long; and at right dims the cres- 
 
TffR OLD SEA QUEEN. 387 
 
 sets and clusters of lights that glitter down the terraces in the old 
 palaces, and puts out the broad flame of torches that glow down 
 the terraces and flare on the sculptured fronts and the vari- 
 coloured carvings in all the sloping streets. The rain falls as 
 though the sky were sold to Austria. But for once it cannot drive 
 the people in ; for once, though the flags droop, the hearts do not : 
 for once the eager steps race, and the loud huzzas rise, and the 
 millions of flowers are thrown through the grey sad mist as 
 through the lost gold of the sunshine. 
 
 The clouds may gather and the storms may beat as they will, 
 and do their worst ; there is a fire alight in Italy that no rain can 
 quench; nay, not even a rain of blood. 
 
 Genoa for the moment is the meeting place of the whole roused 
 nation. 
 
 I sit here in the covered places in the galleries fronting the sea. 
 
 It is full of many-coloured fruits, and flasks of wine, and piles 
 of polenta. Oil lamps swing above, shedding a dim light. A 
 handsome brown-faced woman chaffers at the counter, her great 
 gold earrings flashing with each movement of her head. Soldiers 
 come and go by scores, by hundreds; Zouaves with the African 
 sun on them, Neapolitans still in their fishing shirts ; Tuscan 
 conscripts with the first down on their lips ; Cuirassiers with 
 flashing chains and plumes ; Italian nobles with Titian faces and 
 slender stately forms in the simple tunic of the volunteer, all 
 coming and going, drinking and jesting, clashing their sabres 
 against the great brass scales, tilting the straw-covered flasks to 
 their mouths, tossing their sashes against the baskets of oranges, 
 making, all unwittingly, a thousand studies for Meissonnier, 
 with the dusky light on the white crosses of Savoy and the silver 
 medals of Prance, whilst out there, beyond the quay, the sea is 
 murmuring, and the vessels are looming like phantom ships in th 
 shadows. 
 
 The French laugh and chatter endlessly, and our people will 
 not be outdone in lightness of heart ; but every now and then the 
 Italian faces grow very grave and pale a little under their olive 
 brows as their eyes go seaward ; here it is not a question of a 
 campaign lost or won, it is a nation's life or death that is in the 
 balance. 
 
 I have come from the Gaffe of the Concordia. 
 
 It is grander there and stiller amongst its orange groves and 
 throngs of staff officers ; but I like better to be here in this dusky 
 archway with my musket at my knee, and, around, the strong 
 salt smell of the sea. 
 
 002 
 
388 PASCAR&L. 
 
 As I sit here thinking thus, there comes noiselessly into the 
 crowded place a slight small figure, travel stained and very weary, 
 with a beautiful pale little face under curls of reddened gold. 
 The figure comes to me shyly through the noisy soldiers, and 
 takes my hand. 
 
 " Dear friend, am I too late ? May I go with you?" 
 
 It is Eaffaelino. 
 
 For a while I cannot speak to him, I am so much amazed. I 
 left him safe in Florence with his genius, in the quiet and the 
 sunshine, springing to goodly stature like the prophet's gourd. 
 
 " You!" I cry to him, making way for him on the window 
 Fettle. " You ; Merciful heaven, you ? to face this war? We 
 shall have women and children next ' ' 
 
 It is brutal of me, hut I am rough with him. I am angered 
 to see him there ; a lad no stronger than any reed that blows in 
 Arno water. 
 
 " The women and the children will arm, I think, if the men 
 fail," he said, with a gentleness that shames me. " Did you not 
 say yourself it is not an army ; it is a nation in arms ? " 
 
 I sit silent; I cannot chide him for any love that he bears to 
 Italy, but in my heart I think that the first hour's march under 
 the summer sun under his knapsack will stifle the life and music 
 in him, as a stone will crash a skylark. 
 
 As the oil flames flicker in the wind I see that he is very 
 pale, paler even than is his wont. 
 
 " Can we not go elsewhere? " he murmurs to me. " It is so 
 full of noise here, and the smell of wine so strong. And I have 
 a thing to tell you ! " 
 
 It is hard to find quiet in Genoa that night. Every house is 
 full of feasting soldiers, and all along the streets there come 
 bands of them singing and clanking down the precipitous old 
 world ways. 
 
 The rain has lifted a little ; there is only a sea mist ; I go 
 along the mole with him, and when we have got a little away 
 from the clamour we sit down in the shadow of an old boat that 
 is high and dry there up on the flags. The rain does not touch 
 us ; and we have the sea in front, with a captured schooner of 
 Galatz at anchor in the gloom. 
 
 Then Eaffaelino turns his shining eyes on me, and his eager 
 voice trembles. 
 
 " Oh, dear friend, she is living after all ! I have seen her, I 
 have spoken with her there in Florence and she was in the 
 Arte that night and we never knew ! " 
 
THE f>LD SEA QUEEK. 389 
 
 The grey sea eddies and heaves before my sight. For a mo- 
 ment the schooner's solitary light flashes out of the darkness 
 like a million suns. The ground grows unsteady beneath my 
 feet. 
 
 I have no need to ask him whom he means. 
 
 The boy leans his head on his hands, silent ; the wind blows 
 in from the sea ; the lights in the captive ship die out ; from the 
 terraces above, where the hills are, there comes a loud sweet 
 echo of men's voices singing ; they are chanting the Hymn of 
 Garibaldi. 
 
 Then 
 
 " Your donzella?" I say quietly, for it is her secret and 
 must be kept, and the lad knows nothing. "Your donzella? 
 Well ! she is not dead, then. But she is dead, no doubt, in 
 another fashion by all kinds of change." 
 
 He looks at me a little bewilderedly. Perhaps I speak too 
 coldly men do when they are in pain. 
 
 " She is changed, and yet she is not," he murmurs; " a hun- 
 dred times more beautiful, yet quite the same, I think, as when 
 we ran together through Verona. But she is very great, you 
 know very great and rich, and of high estate, and her own 
 mistress. Changed so; but not in any other way, I think, 
 
 except "Well, a great countess, you know, and a poor child 
 
 singing in the Carnival for bread, they are so wide asunder. 
 Yes, you are right change is a sort of death. Perhaps a sadder 
 one for those it leaves." 
 
 "She is married greatly ?" I say to him. The words have 
 no sense or reason to me as I say them. I think of my child 
 with the loose golden cloud of her iiair blowing in the fresh hill 
 winds, and her hands full of the purple glory of the wild ane- 
 mones as she came down on the day of the Saints towards the 
 old brown Badia. 
 
 I lost her, as one may miss a firefly in a myrtle thicket, one 
 hot June night, in the Florence gardens, and I find her as one 
 may find it another night, set to shine on high in a woman's 
 hair in the palace of a Florence duchess. 
 
 The firefly, gathered to play the part of a diamond, and gleam 
 in a palace masque, dies of the honour ; the little soul goes forth 
 in fire like other souls of greater martyrs ; but what woman 
 ever died of exaltation ? They leave such thankless follies to 
 the lucciole. 
 
 It cannot be a second ere he answers me, but it seems a 
 horrible endless space and silence that follows on my own voice; 
 
390 PASCAR&L. 
 
 the noise from the city and from the sea blending into a strange 
 dull roar that surges at my ear. 
 
 " She is not wedded," says the boy, at last, and my heart 
 leaps like a loosed deer that springs from hunter's nets to wood- 
 land liberty and yet what can it be to me ? to me more than 
 to any one of those careless lads in the streets up yonder, who 
 will find his grave in the ripening wheat of the wide Lombard 
 fields ? " No ! It is some great title of her father's. Our folk 
 call her contessa, because he is now so noble. I do not know 
 much. I did not listen. I could only think of her. There 
 was some wondrous change of fortune for them she did tell me, 
 I forget. She was in the Arte that night and then she saw 
 me in the street and sent for me, and I went it was the day 
 you left, she had the great villa under Sta. Margharita on the 
 hill. I went, in courtesy and wonder, to a stranger as I thought, 
 not dreaming then, when she stretched her hands to me, and 
 cried, "'Ino, 'Ino! is Yerona all forgotten? " she laughing a 
 little, and yet weeping too, then I knew her, though it was all 
 EO changed, and I fell at her feet, and I forget the rest." 
 
 After that he is silent a long time poor little tender 
 llaffaelino. 
 
 I am silent too. 
 
 The rain falls faster, and the wind drives against the boat, but 
 neither he nor I heed that. 
 
 As for me I do not ask another thing. He has seen her, and 
 the world has gone by just the same, and she is there in my 
 own city, and I am here a common soldier with my musket, 
 bound in honour not to turn back and look upon her face. For 
 ire are to march at dawn. 
 
 I sit still looking into the grey mist of the waters ; in the 
 town they are shouting and gathering and singing and drinking, 
 and all the lines of the palaces and streets glitter in zigzags of 
 light fretfully through the fog, but no one disturbs us under the 
 black shadow of the old fishing boat. 
 
 llaffaelino, after a time, speaks again, his head still bent upon 
 his hands. 
 
 "I do not think she is changed at heart," he murmurs. 
 "The same generous, imperious, tender, wilful, capricious 
 thing, I think, that used to run with me in the winter snows 
 and the summer noons, hungry and happy, about in old Yerona. 
 She laughed and wept with me ; she forgot all her greatness, 
 she called me her brother, her playmate, her friend she, a 
 princess, as it were, in the north land of her father's. She is a 
 
THE OLD SEA QUEEN. 391 
 
 proud, graceful, noble woman now, a little haughty of speech 
 and swift in scorn, I fancy, but to me most tender. "Oh, 
 'Ino ! " she cried, " if only I were now that merry, naughty, 
 wayward child that ran with you in the old carnival days 
 amongst the merry people ! " And then I think she would have 
 fairly wept only she turned her head and was too proud but 
 there went a sort of shiver over her, like that which shakes the 
 glacier just before it falls." 
 
 I let the boy talk on, the broken phrases of his speech filled 
 in with the fall of the rain, and the sough of the sea in the 
 harbour. I ask no questions. I seem to know it all. 
 
 "It was late in the day when I saw her," he goes on after a 
 pause. " She made me stay the evening with her. She lives 
 like an empress. We went out into the gardens as the sun set. 
 Then she would hear my story. Did ever you see her in the 
 world, I wonder?" 
 
 I look straight at the sea, and answer " Never, Why ? " 
 
 If one be a man, and have a shred of honour, one must lie so 
 often ; so seldom is there any other way that serves a woman. 
 
 " Only, because, when I spoke of you, and without you 1 
 should have no story, she grew quite pale, I thought, and lis- 
 tened with a strange look in her eyes. And when I told her 
 how you had kept me with you all these years, and won your 
 gold and fame for me ; her tears fell into a knot of oleanders 
 that she held, and she murmured to herself, 'So like him! 
 Oh, God so like ! ' And when I asked her if she knew you, 
 then she turned all coldly and suddenly, and answered, ' I 
 know what the world says of him, no more a great genius 
 wild and generous what can he see in those laughing painted 
 women? But they say he loves such best/ And then she 
 would hear no more of you, and then she would hear of nothing 
 except of you ,* and when she asked if you were still in Florence 
 she trembled, or I thought so perhaps it was only the flicker 
 of the trees, for it was twilight then and when I said that you 
 had thrown up fame and fortune, and gone off to join the troopg 
 at Genoa, she flashed on me her great proud starry eyes with 
 such a scorn it scorched me like a flame Ah, heaven ! I shall 
 see till I die. * And you wait here ! ' she cried, ' you let him 
 go alone ! You ! who but for him would have died in the 
 Florence streets of hunger like a dog ! ' She did not know how 
 much she hurt, nay, I am sure she did not mean to hurt at all 
 I murmured something of the only strength I had lying in 
 music. But her eyes flashed fire on mine, though they still 
 
392 PASCAR&L. 
 
 were dim. ' "WTiat ! ' slie cried, ' does genius then claim cowar- 
 dice as its first privilege and exemption? It was not Lelio 
 Pascarel who taught you that ! ' She did not mean to hurt 
 oh, no ! she never meant to hurt at all. That I am certain, 
 But only spoke out her quick proud passionate thought as was 
 her habit when a little child. Eat one would not wait to hear 
 a woman say that twice. And she was right too, very right, J 
 know. I left her very soon, and said that I would go to her 
 again. She gave me both her hands, in our sweet frank Italian 
 fashion, she is not changed in any thing of that; I kissed 
 them, and I left her. And when the morning came, I offered 
 myself for service with the volunteers, and they took me, though 
 I am weakly and girlish, as you say, and they gave me the 
 rough dress and the heavy musket, and I came to-day to Genoa 
 frith a thousand others. I shall be of little use ; but she was 
 right, you know. If one can only die one ought at least die 
 for Italy." 
 
 So she cannot have forgotten that sweet year-long Tuscan 
 summer ? 
 
 And it was she masked on the hillside that night ; and I I 
 laughed like a fool with Astra and Poppea. What could she 
 think but that I loved those " painted women" ? Ah, heaven ! 
 how sweet that jealous word to me ! 
 
 Nay I know how base my joy is. 
 
 What right have I to be glad that my memory lies lite a 
 deep evening shadow across the brilliancy of the morning of 
 her life ? 
 
 Of course she cannot forget. 
 
 What woman forgets kisses that have burned upon her lips, 
 unless she grow light enough and base enough to lend her lips 
 in loves swift-chosen and quick-changed? and that she will 
 never grow to be my proud innocent lost treasure. 
 
 I know that gladness is base in me. 
 
 Yet glad I am fiercely, madly, heedlessly glad, though I sit 
 mute here by the sea, and listen with a cold face lest the lad 
 should think any thought that may come near the truth. For 
 all I can ever do in this world for my darling now is to keep her 
 secret for her better than she would keep it for herself, perhaps, 
 if she be indeed so little altered. 
 
 After awhile, Eaffaelino looks up at me wistful, " Are you 
 aDgered with me that I come? -you are so still. One could not 
 let a woman say that twice." 
 
 " That is as one may feel," I answered him, roughly. " If 
 
THE OLD SEA QUEEN. 393 
 
 you did not fight for the sake of Italy, what use to fight for the 
 gibe of a woman?" 
 
 It is brutal in me, I know that, but I cannot sit quietly here 
 and hear him talk of her. I rise from the boat's rest and shake 
 mm a little as he leans with his head upon his hands. 
 
 " Dio ! you are wet through. Do you want to die before you 
 see a battlefield ? Get up ; you have done folly enough for one 
 day's work." 
 
 He gets up, as I bid him ; there is a startled pain in his eyes 
 that moves me with remorse for wounding him. 
 
 I laugh a little that he may see no change in me. 
 
 "Nay, 'Ino, you were my nightingale, and belong to me; I 
 am angered to see you come to be shot down with all the spar- 
 row-hawks and vultures. A girl might as well stay a breach 
 with her slender arm as you come out to feed the cannon. 
 Besides, the music in you I You should have had pity on your 
 genius " 
 
 " It was not by pity on their genius that your Florentines 
 made Florence great in the old days you love," he murmured. 
 " And, on your own, what pity have you had ? " 
 
 "Mine! Oh, altro! A trick of imitating any other crea- 
 ture that I see ; and being able to play a little with words upon 
 the hearts of a people who laugh or cry without knowing why 
 when I tell them ! A fine thing. But you who speak in 
 
 music, that is the very voice of God Himself amidst men ! 
 
 Well, now you are here you cannot turn back. We must do 
 our best for you. Eise up, and come out of this wild weather. 
 If you would serve Italy, you must keep your strength." 
 
 A gleam of moonlight from a rift in the clouds falls on his 
 face as he lifts it. 
 
 "If they kill me, it does not matter," he said softly. " You 
 know I have loved the donzella ever since we sang together in 
 my father's workshop amongst the clank of the hammers ; and 
 always, wherever I wandered, I thought of finding her; and 
 always, when I have dreamed of my music, I have heard her 
 voice as it used to sound in the still old square in the summer 
 nights ; and when they praised my music, and talked of a great 
 future for me, I thought to myself, perhaps she is in pain and 
 in poverty somewhere, or even perhaps in shame, and I shall 
 lift her up and crown her with my crown, and give her all that 
 men give me ; but now it is over all over for ever ! And now 
 she is set on high there, and she can never be anything ever 
 again to me ; and I feel as if I should never bear to hear a note 
 
394 PASCA8&L. 
 
 of music ; and my music was all my soul, you know. And it 
 is dead." 
 
 Ay, indeed, I know; know but too well. When you can 
 solace a mother for her first-born's death, then, and then only, 
 shall you solace an artist for the death in him of his Art. 
 
 Then the lad rises up and walks a little feebly along the grey 
 sea line : and we go in silence perfect silence, backward into 
 the heart of the town. 
 
 The rain has lifted a little. The fires of torches and of 
 illuminations light the grim stone heights of the old palaces ; 
 we tread on laurels as we mount the steep and crowded streets ; 
 from the terraces, where the orange boughs toss in the wind, 
 distant voices come chanting still the "Fuoriil Stranier ! " 
 
 Raffaelino turns to me a moment with his tender pale face in 
 a sudden glow from the warmth of the reddened lights in a 
 gallery above. 
 
 " You hear them ? " he says, softly. " Nay, she was right 
 so right. What can one ask better than to lay down one's life 
 for Italy P" 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 IN THE LAND OP VIEGIL. 
 
 IT is not an army, I say, that goes out to war, it is a naion 
 in arms that sweeps across the Mincio to grapple with the old 
 hereditary foe. When one heart beats in the million breasts of 
 a nation, the nation is invincible. Man cannot hurt her, and 
 God will not. 
 
 Every square inch of this soil, through whose golden harvests 
 the child Virgil once ran with fleet feet chanting strophes to the 
 great Ceres Mammosa, has been thrashed through and through 
 by the iron flail of man for twice a thousand centuries. 
 
 The struggle is so old, so old older than the old iron crown 
 of Lombardy. Down from the dreary fastnesses of the Dolomite, 
 the Imperial eagle has swooped so many times to fasten beak and 
 talons in the fair eyes of our Italia. 
 
 Against the empire ! It is the old old war-cry. 
 
 No doubt it was grander work going out across the green 
 Valdarno, with the red Carroccio and the milkwhite oxen, and 
 
IN THE LAND OP VIRGIL, 395 
 
 fche banners of the Silver Dove and the Silver Temple ; no doubt 
 it wa? grander ; but perhaps we are not altogether unworthy 
 our forefathers as we toil through the hot sun and the blinding 
 dust, with the mosquito in our flesh, and the regulation knap- 
 sack heavy on our shoulders. One is only a volunteer; but still, 
 if one does one's best 
 
 The other day, after a toilsome march, some of us bivouacked 
 in sight of Mantua ; our arms were stacked, and our tents set up 
 where there were old grey crumbled ramparts just on the very 
 cdgo of the lake. Some young soldiers, who were students 
 from Bavenna and comrades of mine, cased for such old things, 
 and spent their leisure in tracking out the line of the fortifica- 
 tions beneath the rank grass and the wild tulip roots that grew 
 so thickly beside the water, where the castello with its village 
 clustering beneath it had stood in the bygone times of Bonacolsi 
 and Avvocati. And amongst other marks and sculptures on the 
 fallen stones they found most often a prince's coronet, and two 
 hawks fighting, and dates of that old old time, when the Lake- 
 city yonder, in the midst of its melancholy waters, had quivered 
 ander the velvet hands in their gloves of steel of Beatrice and 
 Matilda. 
 
 I said nothing to the lads as they scraped the grass away with 
 their swords off the crown and the two hawks, but I knew the 
 cognizance well, it had been careen in many a razed fortress 
 and ruined town over the Tuscan fields and the Aquilean 
 marches, in the sign manual of the Pascarelli. If I had had all 
 those old fiefs and that crown, perhaps ; poof! it was the first 
 time that I had ever wished for them. But the Pates lie like 
 lead on my heart, mine ; to whom the three grim Parcae had 
 ever been up to that time of the Feast of the Dead only as 
 three gladsome maidens that only summoned me to dance whilst 
 they sang. 
 
 As it is, I go the next day into Alessandria, and an officer, 
 seeing me, and wanting his horse held, throws me the bridle, 
 with a word of command. 
 
 I walk up and down with the horse over an hour. When 
 the general comes out of the house he had entered he looks over 
 me with a steady glance : "A volunteer ?" 
 
 I salute, and assent. 
 
 :i What do you get?" he asks. 
 
 "A musket and twenty -five centimes a day." 
 
 "You- are a noble?" 
 
 "No." 
 
396 PASCAR&L. 
 
 "What then?" 
 
 " A vagabond." 
 
 He smiles and throws me, instead of the bridle, a soldo, and 
 so rides away. I keep the coin. 
 
 A copper" coin for holding a horse; well, the Pascarello 
 Princes in their graves there, nnder the ruined fortress, could 
 not be ashamed. 
 
 In its way that copper coin is worth the ducal crown. 
 
 It is fierce and dark work here in this fruitful land of Virgil. 
 The world has got so tired ; it has seen so much of heroism and 
 carnage ; it has grown old and dull, and would scarcely open its 
 drowsy ears at a noble deed, though the note of it were loud as 
 that bugle blast of Orlando which made the birds drop dead in 
 all the forests of Eoncesvalles. 
 
 Else the world has seldom seen anything finer than this fiery 
 torrent of national life rushing to the plains of the Mincio as 
 fast and as furiously as Mincio in time of flood can rush from her 
 Mother of Garda. The noble fights beside the populano. The 
 young marquis leaves his marble villa, as the cobbler his board 
 at the street corner. The prince strides through the millet, 
 shoulder to shoulder with the coppersmith and the mceaic- 
 maker. This is the reason that we are so strong in this summer- 
 season ; strong as a chain of which every link has been proved 
 in the fire. 
 
 The men who march and fight with me have laughed and 
 frolicked with me a thousand times in the masquerades and 
 sweetmeat showers of the Carnival, and I can do them some 
 little good. Even Italians find it hard to raise a jest sometimes, 
 plodding through the rain-soaked earth in autumn with only a 
 muddy blood-stained brook to drink at, and the ants settling by 
 the score in the gaps of half-healed wounds. Ev^en Italians feel 
 their hearts a little heavy, straining under the weight of rifle 
 and knapsack over the parched ground in the scorch of noon, 
 with comrade after comrade falling out of the ranks with sun- 
 stroke, and the mosquitos buzzing horribly where the sword- 
 slash is still unclosed. I can do some little good, perhaps, 
 raising their courage with a strain of Leopardi or Giusti, or 
 taking them back to their village under the vines by some burden 
 of a country-ritornella, sweetening their hard black bread with a 
 tale out of Boccaccio, and making them forget their ague on the 
 marshy ground by some one of the infinite jests in the old 
 comedies, of which my brain is full, and their ears aie never 
 tired. 
 
/# TH& LAND OF VIRGIL. 39) 
 
 I strive to keep up my mirth for their sakes ; at night lying 
 round the fires that we light to keep off the marsh fever, or by 
 day tramping along the dry, white, tiresome roads with the clouds 
 of gnats at our parching throats. 
 
 But it is hard to do it, sometimes. War is sickly work at its 
 hest ; and life, I say, is weary. So it seems to me as I go to^ 
 day alone, for once, through the smiling country where the 
 maidens pluck the mulberry leaves as though no such things as 
 flame and steel were as near them as the vines are near. ^ 
 
 My heart is heavy as I pace between the lines of olives and 
 watch the runlets of water glisten in the grass. 
 
 Poor little Toccb has died here. 
 
 He volunteered with me, poor dear little lad, only seventeen 
 then, and merry as a lark ; leaving the bottega and the work he 
 loved, and the fun and frolic of the Florentine street life; and 
 in the very heart of Magenta, as we marched through the standing 
 corn, under the hail of iron, a bullet struck him, and he fell. 
 
 I could not stay to see for him them ; the sea of blood swept 
 me away, a league away, as it seemed, in a second, and all the 
 day long it was as much as we could do to keep our feet amidst 
 that trampled wheat under that fierce red sun. 
 
 But when old Mars, who ever loved Florence, had turned the 
 balance in our favour, and the carnage was over and done, and 
 the sun was gone down westward, there beyond the Apuleian 
 Alps, then I had time to seek for him, and after long search I 
 found him ; one amongst so many other simple brown-eyed lads 
 in their rough coats of blue, and their little peaked caps, and 
 their straps and their belts, lying torn and crushed and nameless 
 and forgotten, down there amongst the summer harvest. 
 
 He was not quite lifeless. 
 
 He took a drop of water, and lifted his eyelids, and smiled ; 
 he knew me, though it was quite night, and he was nearly 
 dead. 
 
 " It is a great thing to die for Italy," he said gently, with a 
 light like morning on his little parched sad face ; then a shiver 
 shook him, and his hand tried to fold itself in mine, and he 
 stretched his limbs out, and all was over. 
 
 He was only a sod of clay that cumbered that harvest field. 
 
 Ah, Dio mio ! the world is weary after all. 
 
 I go through the green glad country. 
 
 "Who could tell that death in its most ghastly shapes walked 
 here with every day and night ? 
 
 It is all so peaceful. 
 
398 PASCAR&L. 
 
 The white road runs straight and shining in the sun. The 
 red roofs of the farmhouses glow through chestnut woods and 
 olivo orchards. The mighty river glistens here and there where 
 a "break in the vines shows its course. Away in the shadows are 
 the towers of Pavia ; and, heyond, the heautiful snowy sea-like 
 surge of the Alpine crests where Milan lies. Near me girls are 
 putting mulberry leaves into great baskets, chatting the while ; 
 and through the vine-yards gentle white oxen drag the lumbering 
 waggons. 
 
 Only now and again there is some headless helmet in the 
 grass, or the dogroses blossom above a dead warhorse ; or a cherry 
 tree, red with fruit, lies on the ground, its stem broken under a 
 rain of bullets. 
 
 I walk on, and think of another sad thing that I saw yester- 
 day. 
 
 It was by the wayside in a little village. There had been a 
 short sharp struggle between Tirolese, who held the street, and 
 Bersaglieri, who wanted to sweep it clear. The Bersaglieri 
 won, and carried the position. The little narrow road all green 
 and golden with fruit trees, where the women were wont to sit 
 out at their thresholds at evening spinning and singing in unity, 
 was strewn with dead and dying. 
 
 I had helped the Bersaglieri being in the way ; and when 
 all was over tried to help the wounded. 
 
 I carried one Tirolean into a cottage. He was a tall, strong, 
 and very handsome man ; a mountaineer ; and he had been shot 
 through the head, and had but half an hour to live. 
 
 I soothed that half-hour for him as well as I was able ; he 
 lying on the mud floor of the hovel with the door wide open, 
 and through it shining the glory of the afternoon sun, and the 
 whiteness of a late flowering peach-tree. He had been un- 
 conscious since the time the shot had struck him ; bofore death 
 his reason came to him it is often so. 
 
 His hand sought his chest feebly and uncertainly, like the 
 hand of a blind man. 
 
 " Do not take it away," he muttered, with his wistful beautiful 
 frank eyes looking with passionate prayer into mine his enemy's. 
 "Do not take it away it is all I have. She laughed, you 
 know but she did not mean to hurt oh, no, oh, no. Look at 
 that white is that snow? "We must bring the cattle down 
 from the mountains. Yes I am in pain; a little pain. Do 
 not tell my mother nor Anton. Lift me a little, so I can see 
 the hills she laughed, you know, but then she did not mean to 
 
THE SONG OF THE GRILU. 399 
 
 hurt. Do not take it away it is the only little thing I 
 have." 
 
 And so gazing at the whiteness of the fruit blossoms in the 
 open door, and thinking it the lustre of the virgin snow upon his 
 own eternal hills, he shuddered a little and turned wearily on 
 his side, and so looking up at me like a dog in pain, drew his 
 breath with a sigh and died. 
 
 When we stript to bury him his right hand was on his chest, 
 and on it was a little tuft of the wild grass that is called the 
 maiden's hair. 
 
 We laid him to rest in the little garden under the fruit trees, 
 todth his face turned to his own mountains. 
 
 His name I never knew. 
 
 His is one of the many million nameless graves that strew all 
 that green country betwixt Alp and Apennine. But I have no 
 doubt that if it could be known we should find it to be Marco 
 Rosas. 
 
 Away in a chalet of Unterrinthal the good motner will sit and 
 spin and pray; and the cattle will come from the grass lands in 
 autumn, and the sun and the clouds will play on the broad snow 
 fields, and the calves will low at the barred byre door, and the 
 seasons will come and go till the Alps are once more smiling blue 
 as the eyes of a northern child, with the gentian flowers and the 
 hyacinths of the spring. 
 
 But always in vain will the old mother pray, and never again 
 will the feet of her first-born come over the mountains. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE SONG OF THE GHILLI. 
 
 I HAVE kept the dear little Baffaello beside me as much as 
 possible. 
 
 Every soul treats him tenderly, as if he were a girl. There 
 are hundreds of lads as young as he ; but there is something in 
 his pretty innocent face with its curls of Giorgione's gold, and 
 its clear, wondering, wistful eyes that wins the heart out of the 
 toughest veteran and wildest trooper. 
 
 The boy looks so astray in it all. 
 
 His soul is in music. This thunder of cannonade, and scream 
 of dying horses, and clash of crossing steel, and falling trees and 
 
40O 
 
 burning houses, must be a hell to him. He has b ways a startled 
 look. 
 
 Yet he is brave in his way, this little dreamer, who only the 
 other day was a barelegged child, singing while the robins sang 
 in the garret of Ambrogib Bufi. 
 
 He is brave in his way, though he clings so closely to me, and 
 will hardly quit my shadow. 
 
 One day I found him hidden by the high yellow corn, listening 
 listening listening with an intent and wondering face. I spoke 
 and roused him, and forced him away; for a battery of the Austrians 
 commanded these very fields, and their fire was raking through 
 the bending wheat not ten yards off him. 
 
 " What were you doing there ?" I asked him in some wratn. 
 
 " I was hearing what the grilli said/ 7 he answered me ; and 
 then he got out his little trecento viol which lies always in his 
 kpapsack ; and began to echo out on it the story of the grilli ; 
 the little brown grilli singing so happily here in joy of the sun 
 and the summer, amongst the yellow corn stalks and the flame 
 of the tossing poppies ; the poor little grilli caged for Christ's 
 sake on Ascension Day, and singing still on and on in the little 
 prisons till their life grows out of them, whilst every hut and 
 homestead on the olive hills and in the vine-lands sets bread and 
 wine on its threshold and hangs out a lanthorn to guide the 
 steps of Christ who walks that night on earth. 
 
 Eaffaelino played the plaint of the grilli that day, whilst a 
 score of rough soldiers stood round, he nothing noting them, and 
 not a few of them had their fierce eyes dim with tears. Then 
 all in a moment he broke it off suddenly, and thrust the viol 
 behind him, and went away by himself into the little bare 
 plaster cottage, where a dozen of us were quartered. 
 
 When I followed him he was crying like a child. 
 
 " What is it ?" I asked him. 
 
 He hid his face shyly, as a girl may do. 
 
 "Only only I have loved my music for itself, you know, 
 and it was quite enough for me. But now I do not know I 
 think the things and feel them, and I can make others feel them 
 too, but all the harmony is gone out of it for me. In all I do, 
 I only see her face, I only hear her voice. My music is like the 
 grilli' s in the cage ; it is my nature and so it will not leave 
 me only I am faithless to it, so I die. She will never be any- 
 thing to me, you know ; how should she ? great like that, and I 
 a little beggar ? Oh, I know, I know it is my folly ; but you 
 see in old Yerona she had no one else but me, and so " 
 
THE SONG OF THE GRILLI. 401 
 
 And so the gentle heart of the little lad is half broken ; a 
 childish love and as innocent as ever this impure earth ere saw, 
 but still one that has killed art in him, and made the adder o/ 
 memory hiss in every sweet note that was once his solace. 
 
 He is no more fit for the fiery furnace of war than are those 
 delicate heads of the millet, that blow like a girl's auburn curls 
 upon the summer wind. Nevertheless, the battle does not spare 
 the frail maize feathers, but sweeps them aside, and treads them 
 down, and tramples them in blood. Nor does it spare Raf- 
 faelino. 
 
 The next day after he has listened to the grilles chaunt in 
 the cornfields, there is bitter struggle over all this fertile smiling 
 land, with its festooned vines and its leaf-hidden watercourses, 
 that is like one vast sheet of verdure enrolled between the far 
 mountains. 
 
 It is a struggle that is called, later on, the Field of Monte- 
 bello. 
 
 " We go in black with powder ; we shall come out red with 
 carnage," says one of its soldiers, and it is true that we do. We 
 dip the scarlet lilies of Florence and the white cross of Savoy in 
 blood till they are both of one colour. "We strangle the black 
 eagle that day, down there amongst the tangled vines and the 
 full-eared corn in the country of Virgil. 
 
 It is a hot and blinding day. 
 
 The sun lies heavily on all the white roads. The bruised vines, 
 and trodden corn, and ruined orchards, are sad to see. 
 
 At intervals here and there, on the green face of the country, 
 there are dusky clouds of smoke and dark small masses slowly 
 moving. There is a battle scattered over the great plain. The 
 fine ethereal lines of the mountains are delicate as gossamer 
 against the summer sky. So they looked when Theodoric and 
 Otho fought here. They have seen so many millions of men 
 slaughter one another here, since the far ages when men were 
 not, and all this laughing land of the vine and the pomegranate 
 was only a primeval valley of ice. 
 
 How the battle goes elsewhere I cannot tell. Where 1 am, 
 we hold a villa and its courts and gardens against the Austrians. 
 
 It is a rambling old place, with great walled gardens, and 
 great echoing chambers, and great discoloured frescoes peeling 
 in the sun. Its owners have fled long before. 
 
 There is only an old man, a gardener, who sits by a well in 
 the central court while the struggle goes on round him, and 
 stares and looks stupid, as though his wits were gone. 
 
 D D 
 
4O2 PASCAR&L. 
 
 God knows how we fight I do not. There are some fifty of 
 us and a handful of Bersaglieri that is all ; and the Austrians 
 are very numerous. They held the position early in the day, 
 and we took it from them at noon ; and we have held it against 
 the worst that they can do until it is now four by the sun-dial 
 on the wall where the great mulberry grows and a cherub's 
 head is painted. 
 
 The musketry rolls ; the smoke is thick ; the dead men fall 
 down the broad stone steps, and lie under the red oleander 
 flowers. The staircase is disputed step by step. The pavements 
 are all wet with blood. The din is horrible. Amidst it all I 
 know I hear, in a moment of stillness, a little bird singing. I 
 look up and see it above my head, on a tendril of a vine that 
 comes through the large unglazed window. 
 
 There is a young face lifted to listen to it. It is innocent 
 and heavenly looking, like the cherub's on the frescoed wall. 
 It is terribly out of keeping with the ghastly scene around. It 
 is quite white, even to the lips; but they are firmly closed, 
 although so pale, and Eaffaelino has not left my side to-day. 
 
 The sun-dial points four in the afternoon. 
 
 "We have looked for reinforcement, but none comes. How the 
 battle goes elsewhere we cannot tell. The enemy are strong 
 here still and keep pressing upward through the courts and 
 gardens. 
 
 All the later half of the bitter burning day our own men seem 
 to close round me, and look up to me as their leader. I do not 
 think how or why it is whether all those in command are dead 
 or not. I lead them because it comes naturally I, a mere 
 volunteer, a common soldier, like the rest of them, with nothing 
 but my musket. 
 
 As the bird sings, and a little lull comes in the strife, as such 
 a pause will, even in the fiercest struggle, I look around me 
 anxiously. My clothes have been shot through and through, 
 but, strangely enough nowhere is the flesh grazed or the bone 
 broken. Yet men have fallen round me like chestnuts in the 
 autumn forests. 
 
 We are very few. 
 
 However the day go elsewhere in the plain, here it goes against 
 us. 
 
 Jagers have joined the Whitecoats, and are pressing up 
 through the ilexes. 
 
 We hold the staircase and the inner court still ; but for how 
 long? 
 
THE SONG OF THE GRILLI. 403 
 
 If I could send word to the head of the bridge, a mile off, the 
 Sardinians are there, and might spare men. Raffaelino, watch- 
 ing my face, in that one little moment as the bird sings, reads 
 my thoughts, and whispers to me through the din 
 
 " If I crept through the laurels and ran, the poplars would 
 shelter me; once by the river-side, to the bridge is not far? " 
 
 I do not answer him. 
 
 The lad is dear to me. Did I not see him first, the pretty 
 child, touching his little viol that carnival day in the cathedral 
 square where grim Roland keeps watch and ward ? 
 
 The passage to the bridge is possible ; but whosoever makes it 
 being seen will surely meet his death. Tor all the way is 
 set thick with Tirolese, who mark their men as on the hills they 
 mark their chamois. 
 
 "-No, it is too dangerous," I say to him abruptly. "No ; I 
 forbid you." 
 
 Baffaelino lifts his golden head ; the sun coming through the 
 open window makes an aureola round it. A little feverish flush 
 comes on his cheeks. 
 
 " And I disobey you ! " he said quickly. " Even before you 
 Italy!" 
 
 And then he runs out swiftly, and through the window I see 
 him in the open air, and then I lose him underneath the leaves, 
 and have only space to breathe for him that half-unconscious 
 prayer which the most reckless men will cling to by an instinct ; 
 for the lull is over, and the Jagers are in the inner court, and q 
 ball has struck down the old man sitting at the well, and I have 
 to draw my comrades closer round me, and hold the hall as best 
 we can with a raking fire that makes the Tedeschi reel and scatter 
 is xhey come. 
 
 Then follows the fiercest, hottest, darkest, dreadest moments 
 of my life. 
 
 The shadow on the sun-dial creeps on ; it is a quarter past four 
 and more. My little troop is only half in numbers what it was 
 when the bird sang. The grape-shot falls like hail. Unless the 
 Sardinians come quickly 
 
 The shadow on the dial creeps onward. 
 
 It is no longer mere firing and counter-firing ; it is a hard, 
 devilish, hand-to-hand, throat-to-throat struggle on the marble 
 stairs and pavement that is all slippery with carnage. 
 
 Some of the Jagers have found a second stairway on the other 
 side of the villa, and so have crept up unseen by us, and pour 
 out on to the head of the great staircase, and thrust us down- 
 
404 PASCAR&L. 
 
 ward, BO that we are between two forces, as in a vice. We are 
 some thirty men in all not more; and many of us are wounded, 
 and very weak from long thirst and the heat of the day. 
 
 Caught between these two, the Jagers pressing on us from 
 behind, the Tirolese forcing us backwards on to their comrades' 
 steel, we struggle, God knows how, in a horrible crush and 
 medley, across the court and into the green grass-lands of the 
 gardens, where the ripening grapes are hanging on all the 
 trellised vines. 
 
 Here, if the Sardinians do not come, we must be butchered 
 like so many sheep. Yet all the while it is hardly of the Sar- 
 dinians that I think ; it is of the dear little lad making his 
 perilous way through the canes underneath the poplars; and 
 every now and then, even in the fellness and ferocity of the 
 struggle, I turn my head to look beyond the laurels to the grassy 
 stretches across which he must return. 
 
 The brutes hem us in on both sides. The men go down like 
 corn under the sickle. I and the few who remain contrive to 
 force a little breathing space, so that we have our backs to the 
 villa gates and get clear a moment of one half the pressure. 
 
 At that moment I see Eaffaelino. 
 
 He is running, not creeping fox-like, as he should do, for the 
 canes to shield him ; but running erect, his feet are bare as in his 
 childish days over the stones of Verona, that he may speed him- 
 self the quicker ; his fair tangled hair is blowing back from his 
 face. He has picked up a shattered standard somewhere, and 
 the colours of Free Italy float from him as he comes. 
 
 He waves it and cries aloud to me, the dear, rash, impatient, 
 unselfish little lad ; because he knows that, in such straits as 
 ours, hope, being a moment delayed, may be too late forever. 
 
 He cries to me the little dear, brave lad 
 
 "Hold out ten minutes, and they are here." 
 
 Then, as he speaks, there is a shower of green leaves above his 
 head; he throws his curls back with a strange dizzy gesture; 
 then he stops short there in the grassy path, with all the vines 
 and the rose-laurels close about him ; then down he falls, face 
 forward, on the turf. 
 
 They have shot him from behind the laurel-hedge. 
 
 What it does to me I know not ; I only know that all the rage 
 of desert lions wounded, and all their strength with it, seems t& 
 pour into me. 
 
 Seeing the child fall there, I only know that I pierce the storm 
 of shot, and cleave the pressure of the Austrians with a fury 
 
THE SONG OF THE GR1LL1. 405 
 
 before which all is borne down as before the rush of a mountain 
 tempest. 
 
 I only know that so do the agony and vengeance in my soul 
 set light to the passions of every Italian with me in that hour f 
 that, ere the ten minutes are spent, ere the Sardinians are with 
 us, we not thirty men in all, and faint and bleeding, and far 
 outnumbered have driven the foe out from the courts and 
 gardens, and hurled them on to meet their death under the hew- 
 ing steel and trampling hoofs of the Sarde* horsemen as they sweep 
 up to aid us by the river's course. 
 
 And then when it is all over, and the place is clear, and over 
 the broad plain all men know that Italy has won then I go and 
 find the dear child, there where he fell, with the torn flag under 
 him, and the rosy laurel flowers hanging their clusters over his 
 pretty head. 
 
 Is he quite dead ? 
 
 Not quite. When I lift him, his heavy, blue-veined lids raise 
 themselves, and his eyes smile. But I, who have seen so many 
 men die, know that this is Death, though the strong sun still 
 shines so clearly and the rose-laurels blow in the wind. 
 
 5< Give it me," he says softly ; his voice is barely audible. 
 
 They have shot him in the chest, and he bleeds to death 
 internally. 
 
 I know what he means. 
 
 I unstrap his knapsack and take out the little viol that he used 
 to play on in the moonlight in the arch of the coppersmith's 
 door in sad Verona. 
 
 He thanks me with his sweet, wistful, shining eyes, and tries 
 to touch the chords. 
 
 It is of no use ; he has no strength left. He tries no longer ; 
 his hand falls, and he sighs a little, whilst the rose-laurels brush 
 his curls. 
 
 " Take it to her from me," he murmurs. "Perhaps she will 
 remember a little now and then." 
 
 Then he lifts his face, like a tired child, and kisses me on the 
 cheek, and smiles against the sun. 
 
 " Do the dead grilli sing where God is ? " he says ; and then 
 the breath quivers a moment on his mouth, and the eyelids fall, 
 and I know that he sees the sun no more. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 At evening on that day all men praise me, and they speak 
 great things of my leadership whereby the villa was won ; and 
 even my king gives me brave words upon the field ; and I, 
 
406 PASCAR&L. 
 
 Pascarel, tlie player, have won a name as a soldier of Italy that 
 is not unworthy the dead Pascarelli who live in stone in the 
 crypts and the cloisters. 
 
 But I hear it all as in a dream ; I see it all as through half- 
 blind eyes. 
 
 "What I hear is the song of the grilli that is silent forevermore 
 with all the rest of the sweet wild music that lived in that inno- 
 cent soul. "What I see is the tender body of Baffaelino, where 
 we have laid it in the silent hall of the villa, with the moon- 
 beams shining white about his head, and on his breast a knot of 
 the red rose-laurel. 
 
 Ah, God ! it is as cruel as to wring the throat of a bird in full 
 song. Ah, God ! the fair dawn that will have no noon j the 
 sweet blossom that will have no flower ! 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 BED AND GOLD. 
 
 MY father tells me to put on that cinquecento dress of red and 
 gold, and set the rose- diamonds he gave me in my breast and 
 hair, and be ready for a great masque at a great palace to-night, 
 when all Florence is mad and drunk with joy. 
 
 Here in the stillness of the villa gardens, up where Sta. Mar- 
 gharita lifts her little bell-tower to heaven, even here, though so 
 high in the hills, the sound of the people's rejoicing comes to me 
 all the day long, as the heavy sough of a distant sea rolls up to 
 those who sit on the cliffs above. 
 
 I have told them I am tired and so cannot see the city in her 
 festivity to-day. But it is not true. The truth is, that I shudder 
 from the shouts of homage and the sight of mirth. 
 
 Tor he is not dead ; he has even done great things upon those 
 terrible plains so rumour says ; giving him the green bay of the 
 patriot in lieu of the paper laurels of the player. But I cannot 
 go down into his Florence, this the first day her troops return tc 
 her. I cannot risk to see his face as strangers see it, and look 
 upon him in the press of the glad streets, maimed, perhaps, war- 
 worn, dust-covered, lame with long marches in the summer suns 
 as heaven knows I may. 
 
 And little 'Ino ; my rash words must have sent him to the 
 
RED AND GOLD. 407 
 
 front, for they know nothing of him in that old cool cypress - 
 shaded chamber behind the Torrigianni Palace ; and I can hear 
 nothing of him a mere little lad, a mere grain of dust in the 
 great plains, a mere drop of blood in the vast sea of carnage. 
 
 Men make no acconnt of him. I cannot hear if he be living 
 or dead; my poor little bright playmate, who stood and sang 
 with me that day of carnival in old Yerona. And whatever his 
 fate be, I sent him to it. 
 
 Ah ! why do we frail, foolish, fire-filled things that they caB 
 women live only to hurt and kill ? all heedlessly as children 
 catch at flies ? 
 
 My heart is heavy as I sit within all the long luminous Tuscan 
 day, and hear the echo of the people's mirth, the thunder of the 
 guns, the tramp of marching columns, the roll of beaten drums 
 that comes dulled by distance up the olive slopes upon my ear t 
 
 But when the day is dead I cannot have the sad luxury or 
 solitude longer. My father and cousin will not be denied. I 
 put on the masque dress with the diamonds that Yarkb painted, 
 and I make ready for the festa of the night. 
 
 It is a wonderful and costly thing, this dress ; I have not worn 
 it yet in public. The train is cloth of gold, and the scarlet 
 skirts beneath are sown with little diamonds. It was my father's 
 fancy, copied from some old Florentine picture that he has. 
 
 It is very beautiful and rare, and lights me like a robe of flame, 
 and makes my eyes gleam black as night, and my rebellious hair 
 all shine like crisp new gold. 
 
 And yet and yet I fancy I looked better in the old yellow 
 and purple skirts, with my hands full of poppies and my curls 
 caught with the wild vine. 
 
 I lean on the terrace balustrade, and, despite my wealth of 
 diamonds, am sick at heart. 
 
 My cousin joins me : he is courtly and full of grace ; but a 
 great distrust of him is always on me, and some memory that I 
 hate, yet cannot disentangle, arises in me always with the sound 
 of his voice a voice ever harsh, however skilfully modulated. 
 
 This evening, while the sun is sinking over Carrara, he urges, 
 for the twentieth time, his love upon me. 
 
 He is in earnest, that I think. He seeks me with passion and 
 purpose ; and my father has more than once sought to persuade 
 me that the destiny of my future years lies here, in all this man 
 can give. 
 
 This evening, while the sun is red, my cousin presses his 
 prayer on me until I turn in weariness and rebellion. 
 
408 
 
 11 Once for all/* 1 say to him, with a tired impatience of his 
 honied phrases that sound so poor and pale beside the memory of 
 those words amongst the golden vines under Fiesole. " Once for 
 all, will you not take my answer ? I have said it often no I 
 no! no!" 
 
 " I am then quite hateful to you ? " he asks, very low 
 
 I look him full in the eyes, and answer straightly. 
 
 "Well, you are." 
 
 No milder way will end his importunity. 
 
 Then the veiled evil in him wakes. 
 
 " That is your last word ? " he asks. 
 
 " My very last." 
 
 " Well then," he says, and smiles a little cloudy as he speaks. 
 " Well then, I have a tale to tell you. I, straying about in this 
 dear Italy of yours, found myself, of a winter's night, in old 
 Verona. There was a masked ball. I went to it. Amongst the 
 crowd there was a beautiful wild, naughty thing who had broken 
 loose from home and took her pleasure there. I paid her entrance 
 money ; so I know " 
 
 He checked with a gesture the cry that escaped me, as the 
 memory which had pursued me in the sound of his voice rose 
 clear. 
 
 "Nay, hear me. I will make my story brief. I had no 
 thought who the girl was a pretty, foolish, feather-brained 
 fierce thing; but as time went I found she bore, rightly or 
 wrongly, the name I bore myself. I lost her in Verona, and in 
 the summer of the selfsame year I saw her wandering with some 
 strolling players, and let her go, for what was she to me P A 
 little while, and, through many deaths and strange accidents in 
 my family, the lands and the titles fell on one who had been dis- 
 owned by all his race for his loose living a worn-out gambler, 
 to whom fortune came at last in much magnificence. I came to 
 know him, since I was next of kin, and in his daughter I dis- 
 covered my waif and stray of the Yerona carnival. And then, 
 foolishly, no doubt, I grew to love her. Ay, I do love her, that 
 I swear ; and all a gentleman can offer to the woman he loves I 
 offer now to her. But if she turn against me, if she say me no 
 in her haughty, pretty fashion, that is half wild still, then let her 
 beware. Tor, though she holds herself so royally, she is but a 
 bastard born. For, though none knows it but myself, her 
 mother, the Florentine singer, was no wife." 
 
 The blood leaps into my face, and seems to sting me like a 
 thousand vipers. Not knowing what I do, I strike him hotly in 
 
RED AND GOLD. 409 
 
 the eyes with a bough of the pomegranate that I hold broken in 
 nay hand. 
 
 " It is a lie ! " I cry against him. 
 
 He recoils a moment, pale as death. Then, bowing low, he 
 gays, 
 
 Go, ask your father." 
 
 "You dare me to that!" 
 
 " Go, ask," he says to me calmly, with a quiet smile. 
 
 I go. 
 
 My father is there in the great dusky white room that the 
 sunset is touching to all kinds of tender hues, like those that fall 
 through the painted casements of great churches. 
 
 I go to him swiftly across the vast glistening floor, very 
 silently ; yet he looks up with a startled glance in his cold clear 
 eyes. 
 
 Perhaps I look strangely ; I do not know ; my mouth burns 
 and my face is flushed. I feel lost, and amazed, and feverish, and 
 vaguely frightened, as I did when I was astray in the press 
 and fury of the Yeglione. 
 
 "Is it true?" I ask him. 
 
 He looks me full in the face, and smiles a little slowly. 
 
 "Is what true?" 
 
 " That my mother was not your wife? " 
 
 The smile lingers on his mouth. It is very cruel though so 
 slight. 
 
 " What does it matter ? Mariuccia thought her so ; think you 
 BO if you like." 
 
 My own voice seems to choke me as I say 
 
 " Mariuccia thought so P Yet it was a lie. Is that your 
 answer?" 
 
 He looks at me coldly, full in the eyes 
 
 " She was a singer. I never married her. Wh) should I ? 
 You had never known it, had you been wiser and listened to 
 your cousin. These things can be kept unseen in the same 
 family. But with another there would be trouble ; one would 
 need to tell the truth. "What can it matter ? You have all you 
 want. You are called a great lady, and no one has looked too 
 closely yet. Some money I can leave you, and you are rich in 
 jewels. For, in a way, I love you, 'Nella ; you are beautiful, as 
 a picture is, and your wild grace is charming, and you fool men 
 with true woman's skill. But if you be wise, you will wed with 
 your cousin, No questions then, and the old name your own, 
 with no bar sinister. Mariuccia was a poor old purblind fool ; 
 
410 PASCAR&L. 
 
 she thought your mother was a wedded wife, and who should 
 undeceive her ? Pshaw ! why look at me like that ? I never 
 told you any lie not I. Go and marry with your cousin, and 
 who will know it then ? It rests with you." 
 
 I am silent. 
 
 My father rises, with a certain trouble on his face that for 
 once clouds its cool serenity. He tries to touch my hair, but I 
 avoid him by a gesture that makes him shrink a little. 
 
 "Nay, 'Nella, why take it to heart like that ? " he says, with 
 a tone in his voice that is half pity and half derision. " You 
 thought your mother married ; weU, that was Mariuceia's fault, 
 not mine. I never told you so. And, indeed, to quiet her, she 
 passed as my wife, to others, for most of the few short years 
 she lived. What had you to complain of? nothing surely. 
 Most men would have put you in a convent or had you taught 
 some useful trade, or left you as a model to your friends the 
 painters. But I have dealt with you as though you were my 
 heiress. And I I promised your mother when she died I 
 have told no one, have told no one : not even your friend the 
 vagabond player, when he upbraided me for my neglected duties 
 with a furia only possible to a flame-tongued Italian. No one 
 knows it, save your cousin ; and he, you should be told, found it 
 oat long, long ago, from following you one night in old Yerona, 
 when you broke away from home and ran in mischief to the 
 Yeglione. You never saw his face that night, but he remem- 
 bered yours. Now see you this, 'Nella, if you be wise, your 
 secret is his ; wed with him. He has a great passion for you, 
 and is sincere, so far, but if you cross him what can I do for 
 you ? Nothing. He can strike you with that sole sure weapon 
 truth. And you will feel your fall. For you have wasted 
 wealth as though you were an empress born ; and you are one of 
 those wild, wayward, graceful, useless pretty things, with 
 nothing but a picture of a face and a bird's trick of song. You 
 are one of those who will not like the world, carina mia,. uules? 
 its soil be velvet to your foot. Be wise while there is time, and 
 rest a great lady always. Wed your cousin." 
 
 And with that my father rises and leaves the chamber, already 
 weary of a theme that has no pleasure in it. I stand in the red 
 sunset light, looking out blankly on the glory of the oleander 
 flowers that fill the open casement with their fire. 
 
 Is all the world a lie ? 
 
THE BROKEN BUB&LJS. 411 
 
 . 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE BROKEN BUBBLE. 
 
 WHAT is it I feel? 
 
 I scarcely know. I act without knowing only stung into a 
 bitter, burning, all-corroding shame, that drives me like a whip 
 of scorpions. 
 
 Oh, poor little fool, who sat upon the broken stairs shelling 
 the beans at Mariuccia's feet, and prattled of a great past and a 
 great future alike allied to me by the golden and magic chain of 
 birth ! Oh, poor vain, baby dreamer, idler than the child that 
 blows soap bubbles in the sun, who had come hither across the 
 mountains, with my golden florins for all my store, doubting not 
 that the purples of some mighty destiny would enfold me as soon 
 as I should open the gates of the south I 
 
 "Was ever anything more pitiful, more foolish, more patheti- 
 cally lonely, more grotesquely fooled than I ? Was ever any 
 hapless idiot, thinking himself the sovereign of the world, under 
 a crown of straw, more deluded and more desolate than I have 
 been when I have played at greatness ? 
 
 A withering shame consumes me ; the humiliation clings to 
 me like Glauce's web of fire. 
 
 My poor poor mother too ! In the scorch and fury of my own 
 wretchedness, tears well into my eyes as I think of her think 
 no blame ; ah no ! heaven forbid ! Doubtless her fault of love 
 was purer and more innocent by far than my rank greed of 
 self. 
 
 My cousin's hand puts asunder the oleander flowers. He 
 comes and looks me in the face. 
 
 " Well? " he asks, softly. " You see I told you truth. Is it 
 now yes or no?" 
 
 I turn on him as a leopardess turns on her pursuer. The 
 longing thrills in me to strike him in the eyes, as I had done 
 that winter's day at dusk in the Yerona streets. 
 
 " No ! " I cry to him. " No ! a million times ! What ! you 
 think my fear is greater than my hate ? Sir, you mistakej 
 then. No, I say. No, no, no. Do you hear ? No if I die 
 for it." 
 
 In that moment I am all again the passionate outraged child 
 who had fled from him in the Yeronese twilight. 
 
412 PASCAR&L. 
 
 The years, the dignities, the tranquil scorn of my late life 
 drop from me ; I become again only the fierce, fearless, thought- 
 less, haughty little waif and stray whom Pascardl had rescued on 
 the Yeglione night. 
 
 I leave him standing there against the red oleander, dazed, as 
 it were, with the fire of my eyes and speech ; then, without 
 another word, I sweep to my own chamber, lock myself in from 
 him and every other, and tear off, like a frantic creature, the 
 gold and red of my perfect masque-dress. The shining skirts 
 fall in a crushed heap; the costly train is crumpled up like 
 wind-blown leaves; I shake the jewels from my breast and 
 hair ; I pluck the great rose-diamond from above my ear. 
 
 The things are to me hateful, horrible, vile : my father's 
 gifts, indeed ay, and so far justly mine ; but they are accursed 
 to me like the wages of my mother's shame and death. 
 
 I do not reason ; I can only feel. 
 
 As my father denied me when I stood before him with my 
 poor little sceptre of the peacock's plumes, so I deny him now. 
 
 There is no tie between us. 
 
 As the law yields me no rights on him, so I will yield him no 
 rights on me. 
 
 My heart burns that I have ever eaten his bread and ever 
 spent his gold. 
 
 A madness of determination comes to me. I will not stay for 
 the smile and sneer of the women I have reigned over, of the 
 men I have made my slaves. I will not stay an hour more in 
 this, the second paradise of lies, that has lulled me to sleep 
 sweet as the lotus, deadly as the upas. 
 
 I am useless ; ay, indeed ; but still I have my voice. It can 
 charm courts, let it charm nations. I can be once more the 
 people's Uccello. 
 
 Ah, no ! never again that. Never again the light-hearted and 
 thoughtless child that sang to the listening Tuscans when the 
 lucciole' lit the plains. The best that can be before me, if a life 
 of triumph, yet must be a life of utter loneliness. 
 
 My heart grows sick with dread and longing. 
 
 I do not reason ; I can only feel. 
 
 Between my father's life and mine there is a deep gulf fixed. 
 It is the darkness of my mother's grave. 
 
 It is evening. The sun is gone. The shadow of night is here, 
 even on these heights by Santa Margharita. 
 
 I leave aside every coin, every gem, every trifle of luxury or 
 cost I ever have possessed. I leave aside all my splendid cos- 
 
THE LILY AND THE LAUREL. 413 
 
 tumes and my priceless diamonds. I wrap myself in a dark 
 cloak, and cast a veil about my head, and, without the value of 
 a copperpiece upon me, I undo the bar of a side door that looks 
 upon the gardens and pass out. On the threshold I linger and 
 look back. 
 
 Lights are burning in the wide chamber. The glittering 
 things T have thrown down catch the reflection ; sumptuousness, 
 grace, ease all are symbolised in them. 
 
 Am 1 unhappy because I leave them ? No. 
 
 My whole life is on fire with shame, and my whole soul is 
 sick with falsehood. But amidst it all a strange sweet thrill 
 stirs ; for I am free. 
 
 It has been but a gilded slavery, this grand and gorgeous 
 pageantry of the great world. 
 
 I long for the breezy downs, and the wild hillsides, and the 
 sweet liberty of untrammelled movement, and the peaceful sleep 
 of healthful tired limbs. And yet oh, God! I shudder as I 
 think my life will be alone, all alone always. 
 
 "What beauty will the daybreak smile on me ? What fra- 
 grance will the hillside bear 3for me as I roam ? 
 
 I shall see the sun for ever through my tears. Around me on 
 the summer earth there will be for ever silence. For Love has 
 left me. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE LILY AND THE LAUHEL. 
 
 I UNBAR the door and pass into the coolness of the early night. 
 "Down there where Florence lies it seems alive with fire. The 
 people rejoice for their heroes. 
 
 "Without any thought or measure of what may befall to me, 
 or whither I, penniless and defenceless, may hereafter go, I 
 leave the gardens by the path that passes through the olive 
 woods, and, once more drifting like a snapped flower on the wind, 
 I set my face towards the city. 
 
 The night is perfect. 
 
 All the hillside is hushed to an intense stillness. The olive 
 woods upon Arcetri are white as silver in the moon. The hills 
 are steeped in radiance. The roses underneath the vines are 
 bright as in the day. 
 
414 PASCAREL. 
 
 From the depth where the massed lights of the town are 
 shining there come sounds of music, outcries of the populace, 
 deep shouts that rise and lose themselves like echoing thunder 
 amongst the mountains lying round. Florence rejoices in her 
 strength; to her, as her dower, Hercules gave the dragon's 
 teeth, and she has sown them on her sacred soil, and they have 
 sprung up armed men who have held her own again and again 
 against the world, and have not failed her now. 
 
 I go down the old green familiar ways ; the fieldmice run 
 from my feet amongst the tulip roots ; just so, down this very 
 path stole Lucrezia to Fra Lippi, but I am alone all alone. 
 
 They will think I am safe in my chamber. They will not 
 seek for me to-night. And by morning I must be away some- 
 where ; away seeking for work. 
 
 I have nothing even to buy bread with on the morrow. 
 
 It is no worse with me than it was in this very city when 
 under the old trees I had sat and wept my heart out because I 
 was a beggar. And yet how much poorer I am ! for then I had 
 all my dreams, and all things were possible to me. But now 
 I have nothing, not even a hope, only a dead rose on my heart 
 that I shall ask them to bury with me as old Giudett& asked. 
 
 Fifty years she lived with one memory shut in her soul, darn- 
 ing the dancers' maglie, and thinking of the love of her youth. 
 Oh, God ! is that all the Future holds for me ? 
 
 I tremble and grow sick with fear as I thread the olives and 
 vines to the city. 
 
 But I never pause and look back, not once ; I seem to hear 
 Mariuccia say in the still cool night, "Live on the shame and 
 the sorrow of your mother ? nay, anima mia, be strong and die 
 first." 
 
 Is it a folly that ? I do not know. I do not think, I say ; I 
 only feel ; and I keep my face straight to the city. 
 
 The masque dress I threw aside was put on for a palace festa. 
 The whole town is wild with jubilee. The shouts roll deep like 
 the war-cry of lions. 
 
 All down the water side the lamps and the torches burn by 
 millions. The bridges are lines of fire. Great Vecchio glows 
 like a lighted beacon against the clouds. The river is a sea of 
 flashing colour, from the many-hued globes of the illumined 
 boats. Laughter and music, and the ring of choruses, and th 
 Ball of trumpets, and the surge-like sound of an ever moving masi 
 of men grow nearer and nearer, as I pass through the gates, and 
 into the Street of the May time. 
 
THE LILY AND THE I.AUREL. 415 
 
 Everywhere the night is bright as the day. Long garlands 
 fiwing from one side of the street to the other. The old grim 
 iron-bound houses are bidden in flowers and foliage. Under the 
 feet are dropped blossoms, and above head is a maze of roses. 
 ]S~ot a single casement, not the poorest, but has hung out its 
 basket of flowers; great lilies, wild poppies, tuberoses, coils of 
 vine, trails of ivy, leaves of arums, everywhere in the streets 
 they are shedding their sweet woodland dews on the stones. 
 
 The reign of feasts and of flowers has followed the season of 
 death. All Florence is out to-night, drunk with freedom and 
 crowned with victory. 
 
 Everywhere the great arched house doors stand open. Every- 
 where groups of soldiers are drinking or dancing. Arms are 
 piled in the squares. Women waltz down the grim passage- 
 ways singing. 
 
 Conscripts, war-stained and dust-covered, tell tales to a won- 
 dering crowd. 
 
 Tables are spread under the stars; under the garlands that 
 the wind tosses hither and thither. 
 
 Bells are pealing; cannon are firing; great sheaves of 
 coloured fires are launched to the clouds. In the churches they 
 chaunt orisons. In the palaces they will dance till the dawn. 
 
 In the woods by the river the troops are bivouacked ; and 
 there in the fields the men and the maidens reel and spin, and 
 leap and laugh, to the wildest mirth and melody. 
 
 For in the Eield of Flowers, for the hundredth time, they have 
 planted the Laurel. 
 
 The gladness makes me colder and wearier as I go. The light 
 and laughter would drive me homeward in desolation, had I a 
 home to shelter me. 
 
 Vaguely I feel that the people look upon me in wonder. I, a 
 dark, veiled, shivering thing, a blot on the endless radiance 
 Ginevra, in her cere-clothes, amidst the mad masquing of an 
 universal Carnival. 
 
 But they part in reverence before me, and are a little quiet as 
 I pass them ; they think that I mourn some dead soldier lying 
 in the maize-fields beneath the shadow of the Alps. I mouru 
 the dead, indeed ; dead days, dead love, dead liberty. 
 
 But my dead I slew with my own hand, all witting what I 
 did. That I am now alone is just quite just. 
 
 But justice is hard. 
 
 It presses on my life like lead. I shut my eyes to shut out 
 from me the frolic and the brilliancy around, and stumble on 
 
416 PASCAR&L. 
 
 with little thought or purpose across the river and into the heart 
 of the city. 
 
 What can I do ? I know no more than knew Ginevra ; home- 
 less and denied, with every heart and every house closed against 
 her. But Ginevra had one refuge I have none. 
 
 As I go the throngs grow thicker, they push more eagerly. 
 Their passionate dark faces glow ; their voices pour forth tor- 
 rents of joyous words ; their holiday dresses gleam gaily against 
 the shadows and the stone fronts of the buildings ; they dash 
 the tears from their eyes for the dead; they laugh with proud 
 joy in the living. And from mouth to mouth, as in the night 
 of the Carnival Fair, one name runs more audible than any 
 other : 
 
 " Pascarel ! II Pascarello ! " 
 
 I catch the flying skirts of a woman as she hurries by me. 
 
 ' He is here ! Pascarel ? " 
 
 She twitches her garments from me in good-humoured 
 haste. 
 
 " Ay ! He talks to the people on the Place of the Signoria. 
 He has done great things in the war, they say." 
 
 Without well knowing what I do, I too follow with the pres- 
 sing crowds who are hastening under the Arches of the Uffizii, 
 where the red and white banners are tossing as in the midnight 
 of the Carnival Fair. 
 
 As we go under the arcades we pass a little contadina in all 
 the bravery of festal ornament ; great beads glitter at her throat; 
 golden pins shake in her hair ; all colours vie as in the rainbow 
 in her skirts ; she laughs, and shows her white teeth, grinning 
 as she sets them in the velvet skin of a peach ; she pushes a 
 young slim stripling before her, and scolds him with shrill 
 laughter, mocking at a tremor that shakes his limbs, and a 
 pallor that blanches his cheek. 
 
 " To let a look at his face unman you like that, you simple- 
 ton!" she cries; and drives him before her, crushing out the 
 juice of the peach between her rosy lips. 
 
 It is Brunotta. 
 
 So well goes life with the Unfaithful. 
 
 I draw my veil closer about my head, and am borne by the 
 strong swift tide of the hurrying crowd into the Place of the 
 Signoria, by the Loggia of the Lances, under the Palace of the 
 People, where the baby Cellini used to sit throned on his ser- 
 vant's shoulders, to sing his little song and pipe his little carol 
 to the grave ears of the great Gonfaloniere. 
 
THE LILY AND THE LAUREL. 417 
 
 The square is packed close with a listening people. Their 
 faces are all upturned like the ears of wheat that a strong wind 
 lifts to heaven. All the lines of the mighty building are traced 
 out by running lines of fire. Jets of flame, and garlands of 
 flowers, and blazonries of shields, and folds of standards, all 
 shine together against the moon. 
 
 On the steps of Orcagna's Loggia, whence of old the magis- 
 tracy were wont to harangue the city, with their faces set to 
 the mountains, and the keen hill winds blowing their robes of 
 office, on the steps betwixt the two lions, Pascarel stands, and 
 speaks to the Florentines. 
 
 There is the red-cross banner above his head ; he wears the 
 simple garb of the Tuscan volunteer, on his chest there is the 
 cross of valour, and on the stones at his feet there lie laurel 
 crowns and clusters of lilies that the people have flung to 
 him. 
 
 The moon shines upon his delicate dark face ; his straight, 
 poet-like brows; his dreaming eyes, that have at once the 
 scholar's sadness and the soldier's passions. 
 
 The multitude is hushed to perfect stillness. They love him 
 too well to lose a single word. 
 
 He is telling them a legend in that fantastic humour which 
 has flashed for so many centuries from beneath the tri-cornered 
 hat of Tuscan Stenterello. 
 
 Dear to them before, he is now to them sacred ; he who has 
 come forth from the heat and the dust of those fields of bloodshed 
 with the splendour of great and daring deeds to lend their lustre 
 to his name, and twine the bay-leaves of the patriot round the 
 harlequin's wand of the player. 
 
 I crouch down in the deepest shadow on the lowest step, and 
 gaze upward at him, and drink in the sweet and silver sounds of 
 his voice, until the love I bear him, and the loss of him, make 
 me mad as 'Dino's Pazza was, calling for ever on the grave to 
 yield her dead. 
 
 He was all mine ; all mine ; dear God ! Mine all the rich, 
 glad, fearless freedom of his life; mine all the rapturous 
 caressing, priceless passion of his love ; mine all ! And I have 
 lost them. 
 
 The war has left him life, but he is dead to me. 
 
 And yet I listen as he speaks to the people. I, athirst for 
 the mere echo of his step as dying men in deserts for the foun- 
 tains of lost lands. 
 
 B X 
 
4i8 PASCAR&L. 
 
 " You know how S. Michael made the Italian ? " he is saying 
 to them, and the clear crystal ring of the sonorous Tuscan 
 reaches to the farthest corner of the square. "Nay ? oh, for 
 shame ! Well, then, it was in this fashion ; long, long ago, 
 when the world was but just called from chaos, the Dominiddio 
 was tired, as you all know, and took his rest on the seventh 
 day; and four of the saints, George and Denis and Jago and 
 Michael, stood round him with their wings folded and their 
 swords idle. 
 
 " So to them the good Lord said: 'Look at those odds and 
 ends, that are all lying about after the earth is set rolling. 
 Gather them up, and make them into four living nations to 
 people the globe/ The saints obeyed and set to the work. 
 
 " S. George got a piece of pure gold and a huge lump of 
 lead, and buried the gold in the lead, so that none ever would 
 guess it was there, and so sent it rolling and bumping to earth, 
 and called it the English people. 
 
 " S. Jago got a bladder filled with wind, and put in it the 
 heart of a fox, and the fang of a wolf, and whilst it puffed and 
 swelled like the frog that called itself a bull, it was despatched 
 ro the world as the Spaniard. 
 
 " S. Denis did better than that; he caught a sunbeam 
 flying, and he tied it with a bright knot of ribbons, and he 
 flashed it on earth as the people of France ; only, alas ! he 
 made two mistakes, he gave it no ballast, and he dyed the rib- 
 bons bloodred. 
 
 " Now S. Michael, marking their errors, caught a sunbeam 
 likewise, and many other things, too; a mask of velvet, a po- 
 niard of steel, the chords of a lute, the heart of a child, the sigh 
 of a poet, tbe kiss of a lover, a rose out of paradise, and a silver 
 string from an angel's lyre. 
 
 " Then with these in his hand he went and knelt down at the 
 throne of the Father. ' Dear and great Lord/ he prayed, ' to 
 make my work perfect, give me one thing ; give me a smile of 
 God/ And God smiled. 
 
 " Then S. Michael sent his creation to earth, and called it the 
 Italian. 
 
 " But most unhappily, as chance would have it Satan us, 
 watching at the gates of hell, thought to himself, ' If I spoil not 
 his work, earth will be Eden in Italy.' So he drew his bow in 
 envy, and sped a poisoned arrow ; and the arrow cleft the rose 
 of paradise, and broke the silver string of the angel. 
 
THE LfLY AND THE LAUREL. 419 
 
 "And to this day the Italian keeps the smile that God 
 gave in his eyes; but in his heart the devil' s arrow rankles 
 still." 
 
 "Some call this barbed shaft Cruelty; some Superstition; 
 some Ignorance ; some Priestcraft ; maybe its poison is drawn 
 from all four ; be it how it may, it is the duty of all Italians to 
 pluck hard at the arrow of hell, so that the smile of God alone 
 shall remain with their children's children. 
 
 " Yonder in the plains we have done much; the rest will lie 
 with you, the Freed Nation." 
 
 A shout from the people drowns his voice and stays it for a 
 moment, the shout of assent and of homage, of love for him and 
 of love for the country. 
 
 For a while I hear nothing. 
 
 I weep as women must weep by the grave of some noble dead 
 thing they have lost. All my soul goes forth to him on fire, 
 All the passion that he taught me that night of the saints, 
 amongst the golden vines beneath Fiesole, burns in me and 
 consumes me with its longing and despair. Not knowing what 
 I do, I stretch my arms to him and moan aloud; none 
 hearken. 
 
 For a little space I fail to see or listen ; I hear only a dull 
 sound, as a drowning thing may hear the sighing of waters that 
 devour it ; when sense comes back to me he is still speaking to 
 the people ; but far more gravely now ; his eyes kindle, his face 
 flushes, his voice has in it all the yearning of a mighty love ; 
 his words fall without thought into the cadence of the terza 
 rima. 
 
 He speaks thus : 
 
 "All greatest gifts that have enriched the modern world have 
 come from Italy. Take those gifts from the world, and it would 
 lie in darkness, a dumb, barbaric, joyless thing. 
 
 " Leave Eome alone, or question as you will whether she 
 were the mightiest mother, or the blackest curse that ever came 
 on earth. I do not speak of Eome, imperial or republican, I 
 speak of Italy. 
 
 " Of Italy, after the greatness of Eome dropped as the Laba- 
 rum was raised on high, and the Eisher of Galilee came to fill 
 the desolate place of the Caesars. 
 
 " Of Italy, when she was no more a vast dominion, ruling 
 over half the races of the globe, from tie Persian to the Piat, 
 
but a narrow slip bounded by Adriatic and Mediterranean- 
 divided into hostile sections, racked by foreign foes, and torn by 
 internecine feud. 
 
 " Of Italy, ravaged by the Longobardo, plundered by the 
 French, scourged by the Popes, tortured by the Kaisers ; of 
 Italy, with her cities at war with each other, her dukedoms 
 against her free towns, hei tyrants in conflict with her munici- 
 palities ; of Italy, in a word, as she has been from the days of 
 Theodoric and Theodolinda to the days of Napoleon and Francis 
 Joseph. It is this Italy our Italy which through all the 
 centuries of bloodshed and of suffering never ceased to bear aloft 
 and unharmed its divining rod of inspiration, as S. Christopher 
 bore the young Christ above the swell of the torrent and the 
 rage of the tempest. 
 
 " All over Italy from north to south men arose in the darkness 
 of those ages who became the guides and the torchbearers of an 
 humanity that had gone astray in the carnage and gloom. 
 
 " The faith of Columbus of Genoa gave to mankind a new 
 world. The insight of Galileo of Pisa revealed to it the truth of 
 its laws of being. Guido Monacco of Arezzo bestowed on it the 
 most spiritual of all earthly joys by finding a visible record for 
 the fugitive creations of harmony ere then impalpable and evan- 
 escent as the passing glories of the clouds. Dante Alighieri 
 taught to it the might of that vulgar tongue in which the child 
 babbles at its mother's knee, and the orator leads a breathless 
 multitude at his will to death or triumph. Teofilo of Empoli, 
 discovered for it the mysteries of colour that lie in the mere 
 earths of the rocks and the shores, and the mere oils of 
 the roots and the poppies. Arnoldo of Breccia lit for it the 
 first flame of free opinion, and Arnatus of Breccia perfected 
 for it the most delicate and exquisite of all instruments of sound, 
 which men of Cremona, or of Bologna, had first created, Maestro 
 Giorgio, and scores of earnest workers whose names are lost in 
 Pesaro and in Gubbio, bestowed on it those homelier treasures of 
 the graver's and the potter's labours which have carried the 
 alphabet of art into the lowliest home. Brunelleschi of Florence 
 left it in legacy the secret of lifting a mound of marble to the 
 upper air as easily as a child can blow a bubble, and Giordano 
 Bruno of Nola found for it those elements of philosophic thought, 
 which have been perfected into the clear and prismatic crystals 
 of the metaphysics of the Teuton and the Scot. 
 
 " From south and north, from east and west, they rose, the 
 ministers and teachers of mankind. 
 
THE LILY AND THE LAUREL. 421 
 
 "From mountain and from valley, from fortress smoking under 
 battle, and from hamlet laughing under vines ; from her great 
 wasted cities, from her small fierce walled towns, from her lone 
 seashores ravaged by the galleys of the Turks, from her villages 
 >n hill and plain that struggled into life through the invaders' 
 ) /res, and pushed their vineshoots over the tombs of kings, every- 
 where all over her peaceful soil, such men arose. 
 
 " Not men alone who were great in a known art, thought, or 
 science, of these the name was legion ; but men in whose brains, 
 art, thought, or science took new forms, was born into new life, 
 spoke with new voice, and sprang full armed a new Athene. 
 
 " Leave Rome aside, I say, and think of Italy ; measure her 
 gifts, which with the lavish waste of genius she has flung broad- 
 cast in grand and heedless sacrifice, and tell me if the face of earth 
 would not be dark and drear as any Scythian desert without 
 these? 
 
 " She was the rose of the world, aye so they bruised and 
 trampled her, and yet the breath of heaven was ever in her. 
 
 " She was the world's nightingale, aye so they burned her 
 eyes out and sheared her wings, and yet she sang. 
 
 "But she was yet more than these : she was the light of the 
 world : a light set on a hill, a light unquenchable. A light 
 which through the darkness of the darkest night has been a 
 Pharos to the drowning faiths and dying hopes of man." 
 
 His voice rings like the call of a trumpet over the hushed and 
 awe-touched multitude. 
 
 Then it sinks low as a summer wind that steals over a tideless 
 sea ; and falls upon the silence with a sound in its gentleness and 
 its solemnity that moves men like a prayer. 
 
 " We are Italians/' he says, slowly. " Great as the heritage 
 is, so great the duty likewise." 
 
 Then he uncovers his head and stands a moment silent in the 
 moonlight. The people are silent too, and many kneel and 
 pray. 
 
42* PASCAR&l* 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 LOVE 18 ENOUGH. 
 
 HE comes down from the highest steps of the Loggia, his 
 hands full of the lilies and the laurels. A mighty shout goes 
 forth from all the city, such a shout as a populace can only give 
 when a great faith beats in ten thousand breasts with the same 
 pulses. 
 
 As he passes me, I catch his hand and touch it with my lips. 
 
 I worship the greatness in him ; I know it all too late ; when 
 he was mine, I had cast him from me, now that I am nothing, 
 less than nothing, I cannot even lift my eyes to his. I cannot 
 claim a memory ; that would be charity. 
 
 So many touch him as he goes, he does not note my kiss from 
 any other's; a dark veiled figure crouching at his feet; how 
 should he see tae in the blaze and stir, and tumult and triumph 
 of this festal night in Florence. 
 
 Ginevra was happier than I. 
 
 He passes by, not knowing ; ah, dear heaven ! can one be so 
 near to any man one hour, and then so utterly a stranger, and 
 more alien to him than the stray dog that brushes by him in the 
 street? 
 
 He passes by me ; and the crowds seize him, weeping and 
 laughing, and lift him up on their shoulders, and bear him 
 across the great piazza, shouting, with the white cross flags 
 tossing above their heads and women raining roses in the moon- 
 light. 
 
 He has his art ; his eloquence ; his power of the tongue and 
 sword; and all his city's love and loyalty. How natural it is 
 he should forget ! most natural. 
 
 But I! 
 
 I crouch down where I first dropped to rest, on the lowest 
 step of the Loggia. The bright bold Perseus keeps watch above, 
 and the black brows of the Judith frown against the stars. 
 
 The square is left quiet. The people have flocked elsewhere. 
 
 lie sounds of music and of mirth are still loud over all the town, 
 
 and the coloured fires flame against the sky. There is a sweet 
 
 odour heavy on the air ; the stones are strewn with flowers, and 
 
 they lie dying underneath the moon. 
 
LOVE IS ENOUGH. 423 
 
 I am half conscious of it all ; and yet it all seems far away, so 
 very very far. 
 
 I am so young, and yet my life is dead. 
 
 The deep chimes toll the hour more than once ; it is near mid- 
 night. Florence is still light as at noontide. Still the noise and 
 the mirth of the people are at their height. It is only the flowers 
 that fade ; the flowers that are trodden on the stones. 
 
 I sit with my head on my hands, crushed, and broken, and 
 bruised, like one of the trampled lilies. 
 
 I do not think of my fate or my future. All I hear is the echo 
 of his voice ; all I see is the life lost forever. If I had been 
 patient, if I had been true, if I had been faithful ! but I 
 thirsted for greatness, and it has failed and fooled me. And I 
 have touched his hand, I have looked on his face, I have been 
 close to him, as the dust beneath his feet ; and yet I can never 
 claim a look or word again from him. Never, whilst our lives 
 shall last. For what would any love of mine seem now save 
 like the prayer for alms of any homeless beggar ? 
 
 The night flies on ; the square is almost empty ; the flowers 
 are dying fast. I sit there, stupid with my wretchedness; the 
 laurels lie scattered on the steps above. 
 
 A footfall comes near. 
 
 I shiver and look up ; I see him in the moonlight, as so many 
 times I saw him in that glad summer time coming through the 
 silent streets of old forsaken cities, or the poppy-sown breadths 
 of the cornlands. 
 
 But now his head is drooped ; his face is pale and dark : and, 
 as he goes, instead of the notes of the mandoline there is the 
 clash of his sword on the stones. 
 
 He comes across the piazza ; he is all alone. As he passes me 
 he pauses and looks ; it is his nature to be pitiful to all things. 
 He only sees a human thing bowed down and solitary, mourning 
 where all others feast. 
 
 He stops before me, deeming me a stranger. 
 
 " What ails you," he asks, " that you sit so while all the town 
 rejoices ? " 
 
 I cannot answer him. I would rise and flee from him, but my 
 feet feel chained to the marble. 
 
 He touches me with gentle compassion. 
 
 " Are you a woman and young ? you sorrow for some dead 
 soldier?'' 
 
 With a great cry I clasp his knees, and lean my head against 
 him. 
 
424 PASCAR&L. 
 
 I sorrow for the dead indeed. 
 
 By some instinct or thought of the truth he tears the veil from 
 me, and lifts my face to the light of the moon. 
 
 Then ah, then ! I hunger no more for the sweet hillside on 
 the night of the saints under white Fiesole. 
 
 " BUT I am nothing nothing nothing? " I murmur to him, 
 an hour afterwards, as his embrace enfolds me, when all my tale 
 is told. 
 
 He answers me with a smile. 
 
 " And I have nothing ! So we are equal, my treasure ! Ah, 
 donzella mia ! you have learned then to think with me that these 
 are the fairest things, after all, that the world can give us, a 
 little laughter and a little love ? " 
 
 I wind my arms about him where we stand, and lean my cheej" 
 on his : 
 
 " Say rather only, a little laughter and a great love." 
 
 This is enough, indeed : enough, here and hereafter. A love 
 greater than death, great as eternity itself; a love that shal? 
 leave earth with us when our souls leave our bodies, and reach its 
 uttermost perfection in other lives, in other worlds ; a love that 
 time cannot chill, nor any woe appal, nor God himself unsever. 
 
 THE town is white against the shadows of the night. The 
 river breaks with sea-like sound against the piles of the old grey 
 bridges. The red cross banners slowly swing their white folds 
 on the wind ; the populace has grown quieter. 
 
 The shields of the old republic brighten their blazonries in the 
 moonbeams. The lions, white amidst a green wealth of forest 
 laurel, guard the place of the public liberties. 
 
 The roses and the lilies lie on the stones as on a palace floor. 
 By the water the people are singing, untired with joy and with 
 triumph. 
 
 Is it not ever with such things that one thinks of Florence ? 
 
 A cloud of blossoms, the notes of a lute, the ripple of a little 
 laugh ; the deeper joys of sighs that die in a caress ; the far-off 
 echo of a gay glad nation's mirth ; a sea of yellow moonlight, 
 broad and cool ; the stone faces of fauns and griffins coiled about 
 with acanthus foliage ; the sculptured shapes of saints and pro- 
 phets reigning over a frolic of masquers ; the fragrance of sea and 
 
LOVE IS ENOUGH. 4^5 
 
 mountain blown on fresh winds through shadowy marble ways ; 
 and in the sacred stillness of the night, in gardens where the 
 fountains fall, or casements where the lucciole are gleaming, the 
 soft fast throbs of quickened pulses, the touches of lovers' lips 
 in the silence these things are its breath and its life, the City 
 of Lilies, the Amorous City ; built in a field of flowers, on a 
 midsummer night, by the Slayer of the Lion, for the mother of 
 Eros; Florence, the daughter of gods and the queen of the 
 freedom of men ; Florence, the poetess and paradise of 
 
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AN ALPHABETICAL CATALOGUE 
 
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 Sowing the Wind. 
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 The World Well Lost. 
 
 By JUSTIN MCCARTHY. 
 
 A Fair Saxon. ( Donna Quixote, 
 
 The Atonement of Learn 
 
 Dundas. 
 
 The One Too Many. 
 Dulcie Everton. 
 Rebel of the Family. 
 An Octave of Friends, 
 
 Linley Rochford. 
 Dear Lady Disdain, 
 Camiola. 
 
 Waterdale Neighbours. 
 My Enemy's Daughter. 
 Miss Misanthrope. 
 
 Maid of Athens. 
 
 The Coiret of a Season. 
 
 The Dictator. 
 
 Red Diamonds. 
 
 The Riddle Ring. 
 
 The Three Disgraces. 
 
 Mononia. 
 
 By JUSTIN H. MCCARTHY. 
 
 A London Legend. | The Royal Christopher 
 
 By GEORGE MACDONALD. 
 Heather and Snow. | Phantastes. 
 W. H. MALLOCK The New Republic. 
 P.& V. MARGUERITTE.-The Disaster. 
 By L. T. MEADE. 
 
 A Soldier of Fortune. 
 In an Iron Grip. 
 Dr. Ruinsey's Patient. 
 The Voice of the Charmer 
 
 On Brink of a Chasm. 
 The Siren. 
 
 The Way of a Woman. 
 A Son of Ifihmael. 
 The Blue Diamond. 
 
 An Adventuress. 
 
 A Stumble by the Way. 
 By LEONARD MERRICK, 
 This Stage of Fools. | Cynthia. 
 
 By EDMUND MITCHELL 
 The Lone Btar Rush. 
 
 By BERTRAM MITFORD. 
 
 The Gun Runner. I The King s Asse.-cai. 
 
 LuckofGarardRidgeley. I Rensh. Fanning iQuest. 
 The Triumph of Hilary Blachland, 
 By Mrs. MOLESWORTH, 
 H&thercourt Rectory. 
 
 By J. E. MUDDOCK. 
 Maid Marian and Robin Hood. | Golden Idol. 
 Basile the Jester. i Young Lochinvar. 
 
 By D. CHRISTIE MURRAY. 
 
 A Life's Atonement. 
 Joseph's Coat. 
 Coals of Fire. 
 Old Blazer 'a Hero. 
 Val Strange. | Hearts. 
 A Model Father. 
 By the Gate of the Sea. 
 A" Bit of Human Nature. 
 
 BobMartin's Little Girl 
 Time's Revenues. 
 A Wasted Crime. 
 In Direst Peril. 
 Mount Despair. 
 A Capful o' Kai's. 
 Tales in Proco & Vera* 
 A Race for Millions. 
 
 This Little World. 
 His Own GLcst. 
 Church of Humanity. 
 
 Firat Person Singular. 
 
 Cynic Fortune. 
 
 The Way of the World. 
 
 By MURRAY and HERMAN. 
 The Bishops' Bible. I Paul Jones's Alias. 
 One Traveller Returns. | 
 
 By HUME NISBST.-- Bail Up r 
 
 By W. E. NORRIS. 
 Saint Ann's. | Billy Bellow. 
 
 Miss Wentworth's Idea. 
 
 By G. OHNET. 
 A Weird Gift. ' | Love's Depths. 
 
 By Mrs. OL!PHANT.-The Sorceress. 
 
 By OUIDA. 
 Hold in Bondage. j In a Winter City. 
 
 Strathmore. I Chandos. 
 Under Two Flairs. 
 Idalia. [Gage. 
 
 Cecil Castlemaine'i 
 Tricotrin. | Puck. 
 Folie Farine. 
 A Dog of Flanders. 
 Pascarel. | Signa. 
 Princess Napraxine. 
 Two Wooden Shoes. 
 
 Friendship. 
 Moths. | RnJBno. 
 Pipistrello. | Ariadae. 
 A Village Coimnvuia. 
 Bimbi. | Wanda. 
 Frescoes. \ Cthmar. 
 In Maremina. 
 Byrlin. j Guilder oy. 
 Santa Barbara. 
 Two Offenders. 
 
 The Waters of Edera. 
 By MARGARET A, PAUL. 
 
 Gentle and Simple. 
 
 By JAMES PAYN. 
 
 Lost Sir Massingberd. , The Talk of the Town. 
 The Family Scapegrace j Holiday Tasks. 
 
 For Cash Orly. 
 The Burnt Million. 
 The Word and the Will. 
 Sunny Stories. 
 A Trying Patient. 
 A Modern Dick Whit- 
 tington. 
 
 A County Family. 
 Less Black than We're 
 
 Painted. 
 
 A Confidential Agent. 
 A Grape from a Thorn. 
 In Peril and Privation. 
 Mystery of Mirbridge. 
 High Spirits. iBy Proxy. ' 
 
 By WILL PAYNE Jerry the Dreamer. 
 
 By Mrs. CAMPBELL PRAED. 
 
 Outlaw and Lawmaker. I Mrs. Tregasfciss. 
 Christina Chard. ! Nulrna. | Madame Izan. 
 
 ' As a Watch in the Night.' 
 By E. C. PRICE Valentina. 
 
 By RICHARD PRYCE. 
 Miss Maxwell's Affections. 
 
 By CHARLES READE. 
 Peg Woffington ; and Griffith Gaunt. 
 
 Christie Johnstone. 
 
 Hard Cash. 
 
 Cloister & the Hearth. 
 
 Never Too Late to Mend 
 
 The Course of True 
 Love ; and Single- 
 heart & Donbleface. 
 
 Autobiography of a 
 Thief; Jack of all 
 Trades; A Hero and 
 a Martyr ; and The 
 
 Love Little, Love Long. 
 The Double Marriage. 
 Foul Play. 
 
 Put Y'rself in His Place 
 A Terrible Temptation, 
 A Simpleton. 
 A Woman-Hater. 
 The Jilt, & otherSt ories; 
 & Good Stories of Man. 
 A Perilous Secret. 
 Read; ana ; and Bible 
 
 Wandering Heir. Characters. 
 
 By FRANK RICHARDSON. 
 The Man who Lost His Past. 
 
 By Mrs. J. H. RIDDELL. 
 Weird Stories. 1 A Rich Man's Daughtt* 
 
CHATTO & VVINDUS, Publishers, in St. Martin's Lane, London, W.C. 29 
 
 THE PICCADILLY (3/6) NOVELS continued. 
 
 By AMELIE RIVES. 
 Barbara Bering. I Meriel. 
 
 By F. W. ROBINSON. 
 The Hands of Justice. | Woman in the Dark. 
 By ALBERT ROSS.-A Sugar Princess. 
 J. RUNCIMAN.-Skippers and Shellback*. 
 By W. CLARK RUSSELL. 
 
 Round tho Gailey-Fire. 
 In the Middle Watch. 
 On the Fo'k'sie Head 
 A Voyage to the Cape. 
 Book for the Hainmcck. 
 Myafceryof 'Ocean Star' 
 Johny Karlowe. 
 An Ocean Tragedy. 
 A Tale of Two Tunnels. 
 
 My Shipmato Louise. 
 Alone ouWideWide Sea 
 The Phantom Death. 
 Is He the Man ? 
 Good Ship 'Mohock.' 
 Tho Convict Ship. 
 Heart of Oak. 
 The Tale of the Tea. 
 The Last Entry. 
 
 The Death Ship. 
 
 By DORA RUSSELL. -Drift of Pate. 
 
 By HERBERT RUSSELL. True Blue. 
 
 BAYLE ST. JOHN A Levantine Family. 
 
 By ADELINE SERGEANT. 
 
 Dr. Endicott's Experiment. 
 Under False Pretences. 
 By M. P. 511 1 EL. -The Purple Cloud. 
 By GEORGE R. SIMS. 
 
 Dagonet Abroad. 
 Once Upon a Christmas 
 
 Time. 
 Without the Limelight. 
 
 In London's Heart 
 Mary Jane's tieraolri. 
 Msry Jane Married. 
 The '-Small-part Lady. 
 A Blind Marriage. 
 
 Rogues and Vagabonds. A Blind Marri 
 
 Biographs of Babylon. 
 By HAWLEY SMART. 
 Without Love or Licence. I The Outsider. 
 The Master of Rathkelly. Beatrice & Benedick. 
 Long Odds. I A Racing Rubber. 
 
 By J. MOYR SMITH. 
 
 The Prince of Argolis. 
 By T. W. SPEIGHT. 
 A Secret of the Sea. A Minion of the Moon. 
 Secret Wyvern Toweri. 
 
 The Grey Monk. 
 
 The Master of Trenance 
 
 The Doom of Stva. 
 As it was Written. 
 
 The Web of Fate. 
 
 The Strange Experiences of Mr. Verschoyle. 
 
 By ALAN ST. AUBYN. 
 A Fellow of Trinity. The Tremlett Diamond!. 
 The Junior Dean. The Wooing of May. 
 
 Master of St.Benedict's. A Tragic Honey n>oon. 
 To his Own Master. A Proctor's Wooing. 
 Gallantry Bower. Fortune's Gate. 
 
 In Face of the World. Bonnie Maggie Lauder. 
 Orchard Daraerel. Mary Unwin. 
 
 Mrs. Dunbar's Secret. 
 
 By JOHN STAFFORD. Doris and I. 
 By R. STEPHENS. The Cruciform Mark. 
 
 By R. NEILSON STEPHENS. 
 Philip Winwood. 
 
 R. A. STERNDALE. The Afghan Knife. 
 R. L. STEVENSON. The Suicide Club. 
 
 By FRANK STOCKTON. 
 The Young Master of Hyson Hall. 
 By SUNDOWNER. Told by the Taffrail. 
 By ANNIE THOMAS. The Siren's Web. 
 
 By BERTHA THOMAS. 
 The Violin-Player. | In a Cathedral City. 
 
 By FRANCES E. TROLLOPE 
 
 Like Ships upon Sea. I Mabel's Progress. 
 Anne Furness. 
 
 By ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 
 The Way we Live How. I Scarborough's Family. 
 Fran Frohaaann. The Land- Leaguers. 
 
 Marion Fay. 
 
 By IVAN TURGENIEFF. &c. 
 Stories from Foreign Novelists. 
 
 By MARK TWAIN. 
 Choice Works. Pudd'nhead Wilsoa. 
 
 Library of Humour. 
 
 The Innocents Abroad. 
 Roughing It ; and The 
 
 Innocents at Home. 
 A Tramp Abroad. 
 'A'heAraerican Claimant. 
 AdventuresTomSawyer 
 Tom Sawyer Abroad. 
 Tom Sawyer, Detective 
 
 The Gilded Age. 
 Prince and the Pauper. 
 Life on the Mississippi. 
 The Adventures of 
 
 Huckleberry Finn. 
 A Yankee at the Court 
 
 of King Arthur. 
 Stolen White Elephant. 
 1,OGQ,CGQ Bank-note. 
 
 A Double-barrelled Detective Story. 
 
 C. C. F.-TYTLER. Mistress Judith. 
 
 By SARAH TYTLER. 
 
 WhatShe CameThrough , Mrs. Carmichael's God- 
 
 desses. 
 Rachel Langtcn. 
 A Honeymoon's Eclipn 
 A Young Dragon. 
 
 Buried Diamonds. 
 The Blackball Ghosts, 
 The Macdonald Lass. 
 Witch- Wife. | Sapphira _ 
 
 By ALLEN UPWARD. 
 The Queen against Owen. 
 
 By ALBERT D. VANDAM. 
 A Court Trageoy. 
 
 By E. A. VIZETELLY. 
 The Scorpion. | The Lover 'sProgreai. 
 
 By FLORENCE WARDEN. 
 
 Joan, the Curate. | A Fight to a Finish. 
 
 By CY W A RMAN.-Express Messenger, 
 
 By A. WERNER. 
 Chapenga's White Man. 
 
 By WILLIAM WESTALL. 
 For Honour and Life. . The Old Factory. 
 A Woman Tempted Him Red Ry vinston. 
 Her Two Millions. Ralph Norbreck'K^nurt 
 
 Two Pinches of Snuff. Trust-money. 
 Nigel Fortescue. Sons of Belial. 
 
 Birch Dene. Roy of Roy's Court;. 
 
 The Phantom City. With the Red Eagle. 
 
 A Queer Race. A Red Bridal. 
 
 Ben Clough. I Strange Crimes (True 
 
 Stories). 
 
 By ATHA WESTBURY. 
 
 The Shadow of Hilton Fernbrook. 
 
 By FRED WH1SHAW. 
 A Forbidden Name. 
 By C. J. WILLS. An Easygoing Fellow. 
 
 By JOHN STRANGE WINTER. 
 Cavalry Life ; and Regimental Legend*. 
 A Soldier's Children. 
 
 By E. ZOLA. 
 
 The Joy of Life. I Hia Masterpiece. 
 
 The Fortune of the Rougons, 
 Abbe Mouret's Transgression. 
 The Conquest of Plassans. | Germinal. 
 The Honour of the Army. 
 
 The Downfall. 
 The Dream. I Money. 
 Dr. Pascal. | Lourdei 
 The Fat and the Thin. 
 
 His Excellency. 
 The Drara-Shop. 
 Rome. | Paris. | Work. 
 Fruitfulness. | Truth. 
 
 By *ZZ. 'A Nineteenth Century Miracle. 
 
 CHEAP EDITIONS OF POPULAR NOVELS. 
 
 Post 8vo, illustrated boards, zs. each. 
 By ARTEMUS WARD. By GRANT ALLEN. 
 
 Artemus Ward Complete. 
 
 By Mrs. ALEXANDER. 
 
 Maid, Wife, or Widow? I A Life Interest. 
 Blind Fate. I Mona's Choice. 
 
 Valerie's Fata. I By Woman's Wit. 
 
 fbratae 
 
 By E. LESTER ARNOLD. 
 
 te Phoenicia*, 
 
 Philistia. | Babylon. 
 Strange Stories. 
 For Maimie's Sake. 
 In all Shades. 
 The Beckoning Hand. 
 The Devil's Die. 
 The Tents of Shem 
 The Great Taboo. 
 
 Dumaresq's Daughter. 
 Duchess of Powyaland. 
 Blood Royal. [piece. 
 Ivan Qreet's Master* 
 The Scallywag. 
 This Mortal Cctl. 
 At Market Value. 
 Under Sealed Order* 
 
30 CHATTO & WINDUS, Publishers, 111 St. Martin's Lane, London, W.C. 
 
 TWO-SHILLING NOVELS continued. 
 
 BY FRANK BARRETT. 
 
 Found Guilty. 
 A Recoiling Vengeance. 
 For Lova and Honour. 
 John Ford, &c. 
 Woman of Iro:i3raoe'ts 
 The Harding Scandal. 
 A Missing Witness. 
 
 Fettered for Life. 
 Little Lady Linton. 
 Between Life & Death. 
 Sin of 01?% Zassoulich. 
 Folly Morrison. 
 Lieut. Barnabas. 
 Honest Davie. 
 A Prodigal's Progress. 
 By Sir W. BESANT and J. RICE 
 
 Ready- Money Mortiboy 
 Mv Little Girl. 
 ?7ith Earp and Crowa. 
 This Son of Vulcan. 
 The Golden Butterfly. 
 The Konks of Tholcma. 
 
 By Celia'* Arbour. 
 Chaplain of tha Fleet 
 The Seamy Side. 
 The Case of Mr. Lucraft. 
 In Trafalgar's Bar. 
 The Tsn Year.-,' Tenant. 
 
 By Sir WALTER BESANT. 
 
 Tha Bell of Bt. Paul's. 
 The Holy Rc<53. 
 Armorel of Lyonssss. 
 S.Katherinc's by Towsr 
 Verbena Camellia Ste- 
 
 phanotis. 
 The Ivory C4ate. 
 The Hebel Queea. 
 Beyond tha Dream* of 
 
 Avarice. 
 
 The Revolt of Man. 
 In Deacon's Orders. 
 The City of Refuge. 
 By AMBROSE BIERCB. 
 In the Midst of Life. 
 
 By FREDERICK BOYLE. 
 Camp Note*. I Chronicle* of No-man 
 
 Savage Life. j Land. 
 
 BY BRET HARTE. 
 
 Ail Sort* and Condi- 
 tion* of Men. 
 
 The Captains' Room. 
 
 All in a Garden Fair. 
 
 Dorothy Forater- 
 
 Uncle .Tack. 
 
 The World Went Very 
 Well Then. 
 
 Children of Gibeon. 
 
 Herr Paulus. 
 
 For Faith and Freedom. 
 
 To Call Her Mine. 
 
 The Master Craftsman 
 
 Flip. | M^rrsja. 
 
 A Phyllis of the Sierras. 
 A Waif of the ?ia.in*. 
 Ward of Gold-rn Gate. 
 
 The Martyrdom of Ma- 
 deline. 
 
 The Now Abelard. 
 The Heir of Liane. 
 Woman and the Man. 
 Rachel Dene. | Matt. 
 Lady Xilpatricfc. 
 
 Californian Storle*. 
 Gabriel Conroy. 
 Luck of Roaring Camp. 
 An Heiress of Red Dog. 
 
 By ROBERT BUCHANAN 
 Shadow of the Sword. "-- 
 A Child of Nature, 
 God and the Man. 
 Love Me for Ever. 
 Foxglove Manor. 
 The ilaster of the Mine. 
 Annan Water. 
 
 By BUCHANAN and MURRAY. 
 The Charlatan. 
 
 By HALL CAINE. 
 The Shadow of a Crime. I The Deemster. 
 A Son of Eagar. 
 
 By Commander CAMERON. 
 The Cruise of the ' Black Princs. 1 
 
 By HAYDEN CARRUTH. 
 The Adventures of Jones. 
 
 By AUSTIN CLARE. 
 For the Love of a Lass. 
 
 By Mrs. ARCHER CLIVE. 
 Paul Ferroll. 
 Why Paul Ferroll Killed his Wifa. 
 
 By MACLAREN COBBAN. 
 The Cure of Souls. | The Red Cnltaa. 
 
 By WILKIE COLLINS. 
 Arraadala.l AfterDark. I My Miscellanies 
 
 No Name. 
 Antonina. f* 
 
 Basil. 
 
 Hide and Seek. 
 Tha Dead Secret. 
 Queen of Heart*. 
 Mi sa or Mr*.? 
 The New Magdalen. 
 The Frozen Deep. 
 The Law and the Lady 
 The Two Destinies. 
 The Haunted Hotel. 
 A Rogue'* Life, 
 
 The Woman in White. 
 The Moonstone. 
 Man and Wife. 
 Poor Miss Finch, 
 The Fallen Loaves. 
 Jezebel's Daughter. 
 The Black Robe. 
 Heart and Science. 
 1 1 Say No ! ' 
 The Evil Geniu*. 
 Little Novels. 
 Lagacy of Cai, 
 Bliad Lore, 
 
 Sweet Anne Page. 
 Transmigration. 
 From Midnight to Mid- 
 
 night. 
 
 Fight 
 
 _ By C. ALLSTON COLLINS. 
 
 The Bar Sinister. 
 
 By MORT. & FRANCES COLLINS. 
 
 Sweet and Twenty. 
 The Village Comedy. 
 You Flay me FaJs?. 
 Blacksmith and Scholar 
 A Fight with Fortune. Frances. 
 
 By M. J. COLQUHOUN. 
 Every Inch a Soldier. 
 
 By C. EGBERT CRADDOCK. 
 The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountain*, 
 
 By MATT CRIM. > 
 The Adventures of a Fair Rebel 
 By H. N. CRELLIN. -Tales of the Caliph. 
 By B. M. CROKER, 
 
 Pretty Miss Seville, 
 
 Diana Harrington. 
 
 To Let.' 
 
 A Bird of Passage. 
 
 Proper Pride. 
 
 A Fatal' y Likenes*. 
 
 A Third Perr.cn. 
 
 Village Tai-s and Juclt 
 
 Tragedies. 
 Two Masters. 
 Mr. Jervis. 
 The Real La.ly Hilda. 
 Married or Single 7 
 Interference. 
 
 Sy ALPHONSE DAUDET. 
 
 The Evangelist ; or, Port Salvation. 
 
 By DSCK DONOVAN. 
 
 In the Grip of the Law. 
 From Information ile 
 
 ceived. 
 
 Tracked to Doom. 
 Link by Link 
 Suspicion Aroused, 
 Riddle* Read. 
 
 The Kan-Hunter. 
 
 Tracked and Taken. 
 
 Caught at Last I 
 
 Wanted! 
 
 ?/ho Poisoned Hetty 
 
 Duncan 7 
 
 Man from Manchester. 
 A Detective's Triumphs 
 The Mystery of Jamaica Terrace. 
 The Chronicle* of Michael Danevitch. 
 
 Sy Mrs. ANNIE EDWARDE3 
 A Point of Honour, | Archie Lovell. 
 
 By EDWARD EGQLESTON. 
 
 Eoxy. 
 
 By G. MANVILLE FENN. 
 The New Mistress. j The Tiger Lily. 
 
 Witness to the Deed. | The White Virgin, 
 
 By PERCY FITZGERALD. 
 Bella Donna. Second Mrs. Tillotzon, 
 
 Never Forgotten. Seventy - five Brooke 
 
 Polly. Street. 
 
 Fatal Zero. The Lady of Bran tome 
 
 By P. FITZGERALD and others. 
 Strange Secret*. 
 
 By R. E. FRANCILLON. 
 Oiymoia. | King or Knave? 
 
 One by One. Romances of the Law, 
 
 A Real Oueen. Ropes of Sand. 
 
 Queen Cophetua. i A Dog and his Shadow 
 
 By HAROLD FREDERIC. 
 Beth'* Brother's Wife, j The Lawton Girl. 
 Prefaced by Sir BARTLE FRERE. 
 Panduran? Kari. 
 
 By GILBERT GAUL. 
 A Strange Haniiscript. 
 
 By CHARLES GIBBON. 
 Robin Gray. In Honour Bound. 
 
 Fancy Free. i Flower of the Forest. 
 
 For Lack of Gold. I The Braes of Yarrow. 
 
 What will World Say ? i The Golden Shaft. 
 In Love and War. Of High Degree 
 
 For the King. I By Mead and Stream. 
 
 In Pastures Green. I Loving a Dream. 
 Queen of the Meadow. I A Hard Enot. 
 A Heart 1 * Problem. ! Heart's Delight. 
 The Dead Heart. ! Blood-Money. 
 
 By WILLIAM GILBERT. ^ 
 James Duke. 
 
 By ERNEST GLANVILLE. 
 The Lost Heiress. j The Fossicker. 
 
 A F*-r Colonist. 
 
 By Rev. S. BARING GOULD 
 ltd Spider. I Ere, 
 
CHATTO &.WINDUS, Publishers, in St. Martin's Lane, London, W.C. 31 
 
 Love or a Name. 
 David Poindexter's Dis- 
 appearance. 
 Tlie Spectre of the 
 
 Camera. 
 
 T \VO-SHILLI NO NOVELS continued. 
 By ANDREW HALL1DAY, 
 Every-day Papers. 
 
 By THOMAS HARDY. 
 Under the Greenwood Tree. 
 
 By JULIAN HAWTHORNE. 
 Garth. Beatrix IlL-.^.-lp 
 
 Ellico Quentin. 
 Fortune's Fool. 
 Miss Caiiogna. 
 Sebastian St'rome. 
 Dust. 
 
 By Sir ARTHUR HELPS. 
 Ivan de Biron. 
 
 By Q. A. HENTY. 
 Rujub the Juggler. 
 
 By HEADON HILL. 
 Zambra the Detective. 
 
 By JOHN HILL. 
 Treason Felony. 
 
 By Mrs. CASH EL HOEY. 
 The Lover's Creed. 
 
 By Mrs. GEORGE HOOPER. 
 The House of Baby. 
 
 By Mrs. HUNGERFORD. 
 
 Lady Verner's Flight. 
 T. b .c- Ked-House Mystery 
 'fiie Three Graces. 
 Unsatisfactory Lover. 
 Lady Patty, 
 tf ora Creina. 
 Professor's Experiment. 
 
 A Maiden all Forlorn, 
 
 In Durance Vile. 
 
 Marvel. 
 
 A Mental Struggle. 
 
 A Modern Circe. 
 
 April's Lady. 
 
 Peter's Wife. 
 
 By Mrs. ALFRED HUNT. 
 That Other Person. j The Leaden Casket. 
 
 8elf- Condemned. 
 
 By MARK KERSHAW. 
 Colonial Facts and Fictions, 
 
 By R. A5KE KING. 
 
 A Drawn Game. I Passion's Slave. 
 
 The Wearing of the Bell Barry. 
 Green.' I 
 
 By EDMOND LEPELLETIER 
 Madame Sana-Gene. 
 
 By JOHN LEYS. 
 The Lindsays. 
 
 By E. LYNN LINTON. 
 
 Patricia Kemball. 
 
 The World Well Lost. 
 
 Under which Lord 1 
 
 Paston Carew. 
 
 4 My Love ! ' 
 
 lone. 
 
 With a Silken Thread. 
 
 By HENRY W. LUCY. 
 Gideon Fleyce. 
 
 By JUSTIN MCCARTHY. 
 
 Dear Lady Disdain. ?. nna 
 
 Waterdale Neighbours. 
 ' 
 
 Maid of A ciiens. 
 
 The Comet of a Season. 
 The Dictator. 
 Red Diamonds. 
 The Paddle Ring. 
 
 My Enemy's Daughter 
 A Fair Saxon. 
 Linley Rochford. 
 Miss Misanthrope, 
 Camiola 
 
 By HUGH MACCOLL. 
 Mr. Stranger's Sealed Packet. 
 
 By GEORGE MACDONALD. 
 
 Heather and Snow. 
 
 By AGNES MACDONELL. 
 Quaker Cousins. 
 
 By W. H. MALLOCK. 
 
 The New Republic. 
 
 By BRANDER MATTHEWS. 
 
 A Secret of the Sea. 
 
 By L. T. MEADE. 
 
 A Soldier of Fortune 
 
 By LEONARD MBRR1CK. 
 
 The Man who was Good. 
 
 By Mrs. MOLESWORTH. 
 
 Hathercourt Rectory. 
 
 By J. E. MUDDOCK. 
 
 StoriesWeird and Won- 1 From the Bosom of the 
 
 derfnl. Deep. 
 
 The Dead Man's Secret. ( 
 
 By D. CHRISTIE MURRAY. 
 
 A Model Father. 
 
 The Atoaeaient of Learn 
 
 Dundas. 
 
 Rebel of the Family. 
 Sowing tha Wind. 
 The One Too Many. 
 Dulcie Everton. 
 
 A Bit of Human Nature. 
 First Person Singular. 
 Bob Martin's Little Girl. 
 Time's Revenges. 
 A Wasted Crime. 
 In Direst Peril. 
 Mount Despair. 
 A Capful o'* Nails 
 
 Joseph's Coat. 
 
 Coala of Fire. 
 
 Vai Strange. | Hearts. 
 
 Old Blazer's Hero. 
 
 Th<? Way o: the World 
 
 Cynic Fortune. 
 
 A Life s Atonement. 
 
 By the Gate of the Sea. 
 
 By MURRAY and HERMAN. 
 One Traveller Returns. I The Bishops' Bible. 
 Paul Jones's Alias. | 
 
 By HUME NISBET. 
 
 ' Bail Up ! ' | Dr.BernardSt. Vincent. 
 
 By W. E. NORRIS. 
 
 Saint Ann's. | Billy B-.il^. 
 
 By GEORGES OHNET 
 
 Dr. Rame?.u. j A Weird Gift. 
 
 A Last Love. j 
 
 By Mrs. OLIPHANT. 
 
 Whiteladies. I The Greatest Heiress in 
 
 Tie Primrose Path. | England. 
 By OUiDA. 
 
 Held in Bondage. ; Two Lit. Wooden Shoes. 
 
 -ithraore. 
 
 iikUiar ' 
 
 TJiider Two Flags. 
 
 Cscil Castlemaine'sGage 
 
 Tricotrin. 
 
 Pack. 
 
 Foils Farine. 
 
 A Do-j of Flanders. 
 
 Pazcarel. 
 
 Btena, 
 
 Princess Napraxine. 
 
 In a Winter City. 
 
 Ariadne. 
 
 Friendship. 
 
 . 
 
 Moths. 
 Birnbi. 
 Pipistrello. 
 A Village Commune. 
 Wanda. 
 Othrnar 
 Frescoes. 
 In Maromaia. 
 Guilderoy* 
 
 Syriin. 
 
 *nta Barbara. 
 Two Offenders. 
 Cuida's Wiedom, Wit, 
 
 and Pathos. 
 
 By MARGARET AGNES PAUL. 
 Gentle and Simple. 
 
 By Mrs. CAMPBELL PRAED. 
 
 The Romance of a Station. 
 The Soul of Countess Adrian. 
 Outlaw and Lawmaker, j Mrs. Tregasklsa 
 Christina Chard. | 
 
 By JAMES PAYN. 
 
 Bontinck's Tutor. i The Tall; of the Town. 
 
 Murphy's Master. Holiday Tasks. 
 
 A County Family. A Perfect Treasure 
 
 At Her Mercy. What He Coct Her. 
 
 Cecil's Tryst. A Confidential Agent. 
 
 The Clyii'ards of Clyffe. Glow-worm Tales. 
 
 The Foster Brothers. The Burnt Million. 
 
 Found Dead. Sunny Stories. 
 
 The Best of Husbands. Lost Sir Lfassmgberd. 
 
 Walter's Word. A Woman's Vengeance. 
 
 Halves. Tiie Family Sc?.t>sr;'a- e 
 
 Fallen Fortunes. Gwendoline's Hai-ve^ ' 
 
 Huiaorons Stories, Like Father, Like Sou 
 
 200 Reward. Married Beneath Hi'.ij 
 
 A Marine Residence. Not Wooed, fcut \Vc.~, ' 
 
 Mirk Abbey Less Blaek than We re 
 By Proxy. Painted. 
 
 Under One Roof. Some Private Views. 
 
 Kich Spirits. A Grape from a Thorn. 
 
 Carlyon's Year. The Mystery of li'ir- 
 From Exile. bridge. 
 
 For Cash Only. The Word and the Will 
 
 Kit. A Prince of tbe file v 
 
 The Canon's Ward. A Ttyin* Ftt**t 
 
CKATTO & WINDUS, Publishers, iti St. Martin* s Lane, London, W.C. 
 
 Two- SHILLING NOVELS continued, 
 
 By RICHARD PRYCE. 
 
 Miss Maxwell's Affections. 
 
 By CHARLES READE, 
 
 It is Never Too Late to 
 
 Mend. 
 
 Christie Johnstone. 
 The Double Marriage. 
 Fut Yourself in His 
 
 Place 
 Love Me Little, Love 
 
 Me Long. 
 The Cloister and the 
 
 Hearth. 
 
 Course of True Love. 
 The Jilt. 
 The Autobiography of 
 
 a Thief. 
 
 By Mrs. J, 
 Weird Stories. 
 Fairy Water. 
 Her Mother's Darling. 
 The Prince of Wales's 
 
 Garden Party. 
 
 By F. W. ROBINSON. 
 Women are Strange. I The Woman in the Dark 
 The Hands of Justice. | 
 
 By W. CLARK RUSSELL. 
 
 A Terrible Temptation. 
 
 Foul Play. 
 
 The Wandering Heir. 
 
 Hard Cash. 
 
 Singleheart and Double- 
 face. 
 
 Good Stories or Man and 
 other Animals. 
 
 Peg Woffiajton. 
 
 Griffith Gaunt. 
 
 A Perilous Secret. 
 
 A Simpleton. 
 
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 Orchard Darner?!. 
 
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 Eandley Cross. 
 
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 Fran Frohinann. 
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 1,030,000 Bank-Note. 
 
 What SheCameThiough 
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 Noblesse Oblige. 
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 Tbe Englishman of the Rue Cain. 
 
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 My Flirtations. 
 
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