Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida

Bruno lay down that night, but for an hour only. He could not sleep.

He rose before the sun was up, in the grey wintry break of day, while the fog from the river rose like a white wall built up across the plain.

It is the season when the peasant has the least to do. Ploughing, and sowing, and oil-pressing, all are past; there is little labour for man or beast; there is only garden work for the vegetable market, and the care of the sheep and cattle, where there are any. In large households, where many brothers and sisters get round the oil lamp and munch roast chestnuts and thrum a guitar, or tell ghost stories, these short empty days are very well; sometimes there is a stranger lost coming over the pinewoods, sometimes there is a snow-storm, and the sheep want seeing to; sometimes there is the old roistering way of keeping Twelfth-night, even on these lonely wind-torn heights; where the house is full and merry, the short winter passes not so very dully; but in the solitary places, where men brood alone, as Bruno did, they are heavy enough; all the rest of the world might be dead and buried, the stillness is so unbroken, the loneliness so great.

He got up and saw after his few sheep above amongst the pines; one or two of them were near lambing; then he laboured on his garden mould amongst the potato plants and cauliflowers, the raw mist in his lungs and the sea-wind blowing. It had become very mild; the red rose on his house-wall was in bud, and the violets were beginning to push from underneath the moss; but the mornings were always very cold and damp.

An old man came across from Carmignano to beg a pumpkin-gourd or two; he got a scanty living by rubbing them up and selling them to the fishermen down on the Arno. Bruno gave them. He had known the old creature all his life.

"You are dull here," said the old man, timidly; because every one was more or less afraid of Bruno.

Bruno shrugged his shoulders and took up his spade again.

"Your boy does grand things, they say," said the old man; "but it would be cheerfuller for you if he had taken to the soil."

Bruno went on digging.

"It is like a man I know," said the pumpkin-seller, thinking the sound of his own voice must be a charity. "A man that helped to cast church-bells. He cast bells all his life; he never did anything else at all. 'It is brave work,' said he to me once, 'sweating in the furnace there and making the metal into tuneful things to chime the praise of all the saints and angels; but when you sweat and sweat and sweat, and every bell you make just goes away and is swung up where you never see or hear it ever again—that seems sad; my bells are all ringing in the clouds, saving the people's souls, greeting Our Lady; but they are all gone ever so far away from me. I only hear them ringing in my dreams.' Now, I think the boy is like the bells—to you."

Bruno dug in the earth.

"The man was a fool," said he. "Who cared for his sweat or sorrow? It was his work to melt the metal. That was all."

"Ay," said the pumpkin-seller, and shouldered the big, yellow, wrinkled things that he had begged; "but never to hear the bells—that is sad work."

Bruno smiled grimly.

"Sad! He could hear some of them as other people did, no doubt, ringing far away against the skies while he was in the mud. That was all he wanted; if he were wise, he did not even want so much as that. Good-day."

It was against his wont to speak so many words on any other thing than the cattle or the olive harvest or the prices of seeds and grain in the market in the town. He set his heel upon his spade and pitched the earth-begrimed potatoes in the skip he filled.

The old man nodded and went—to wend his way to Carmignano.

Suddenly he turned back: he was a tender-hearted, fanciful soul, and had had a long, lonely life himself.

"I tell you what," he said, a little timidly; "perhaps the bells, praising God always, ringing the sun in and out, and honouring Our Lady; perhaps they went for something in the lives of the men that made them? I think they must. It would be hard if the bells got everything, the makers nothing."

Over Bruno's face a slight change went. His imperious eyes softened. He knew the old man spoke in kindness.

"Take these home with you. Nay; no thanks," he said, and lifted on the other's back the kreel full of potatoes dug for the market.

The old man blessed him, overjoyed; he was sickly and very poor; and hobbled on his way along the side of the mountains.

Bruno went to other work.

If the bells ring true and clear, and always to the honour of the saints, a man may be content to have sweated for it in the furnace and to be forgot; but—if it be cracked in a fire and the pure ore of it melt away shapeless?

"Toccò" was sounding from all the city clocks. He met another man he knew, a farmer from Montelupo.

"Brave doings!" said the Montelupo man. "A gala night to-night for the foreign prince, and your boy summoned, so they say. No doubt you are come in to see it all?"

Bruno shook himself free quickly, and went on; for a moment it occurred to him that it might be best to wait and see Signa in the town; but then he could not do that well. Nothing was done at home, and the lambs could not be left alone to the shepherd lad's inexperience; only a day old, one or two of them, and the ground so wet, and the ewes weakly. To leave his farm would have seemed to Bruno as to leave his sinking ship does to a sailor. Besides, he had nothing to do with all the grandeur; the king did not want him.

All this stir and tumult and wonder and homage in the city was for Signa; princes seemed almost like his servants, the king like his henchman! Bruno was proud, under his stern, calm, lofty bearing, which would not change, and would not let him smile, or seem so womanish-weak as to be glad for all the gossiping.

The boy wanted no king or prince.

He said so to them with erect disdain.

Yet he was proud.

"After all, one does hear the bells ringing," he thought; his mind drifting away to the old Carmignano beggar's words. He was proud, and glad.

He stopped his mule by Strozzi palace, and pushed his way into the almost empty market to the place called the Spit or Fila, where all day long and every day before the roaring fires the public cooks roast flesh and fowl to fill the public paunch of Florence.

Here there was a large crowd, pushing to buy the frothing, savoury hot meats. He thrust the others aside, and bought half a kid smoking, and a fine capon, and thrust them in his cart. Then he went to a shop near, and bought some delicate white bread, and some foreign chocolate, and some snowy sugar.

"No doubt," he thought, "the boy had learned to like daintier fare than theirs in his new life;" theirs, which was black crusts and oil and garlic all the year round, with meat and beans, perhaps, on feast nights, now and then, by way of a change. Then as he was going to get into his seat he saw among the other plants and flowers standing for sale upon the ledge outside the palace a damask rose-tree—a little thing, but covered with buds and blossoms blushing crimson against the stately old iron torch-rings of the smith Caprera. Bruno looked at it—he who never thought of flowers from one year's end on to another, and cut them down with his scythe for his oxen to munch as he cut grass. Then he bought it.

The boy liked all beautiful innocent things, and had been always so foolish about the lowliest herb. It would make the dark old house upon the hill look bright to him. Ashamed of the weaknesses that he yielded to, Bruno sent the mule on at its fastest pace; the little red rose-tree nodding in the cart.

He had spent more in a day than he was accustomed to spend in three months' time.

But then the house looked so cheerless.

As swiftly as he could make the mule fly, he drove home across the plain.

The boy was there, no doubt; and would be cold and hungry, and alone.

Bruno did not pause a moment on his way, though more than one called to him as he drove, to know if it were true indeed that this night there was to be a gala for the Lamia and the princes.

He nodded, and flew through the chill grey afternoon, splashing the deep mud on either side of him.

The figure of St. Giusto on his high tower; the leafless vines and the leafless poplars; the farriers' and coopers' workshops on the road; grim Castel Pucci, that once flung its glove at Florence; the green low dark hills of Castagnolo; villa and monastery, watch-tower and bastion, homestead and convent, all flew by him, fleeting and unseen; all he thought of was that the boy would be waiting, and want food.

He was reckless and furious in his driving always, but his mule had never been beaten and breathless as it was that day when he tore up the ascent to his own farm as the clocks in the plain tolled four.

He was surprised to see his dog lie quiet on the steps.

"Is he there?" he cried instinctively to the creature, which rose and came to greet him.

There was no sound anywhere.

Bruno pushed his door open.

The house was empty.

He went out again and shouted to the air.

The echo from the mountain above was all his answer. When that died away the old silence of the hills was unbroken.

He returned and took the food and the little rose-tree out of his cart.

He had bought them with eagerness, and with that tenderness which was in him, and for which dead Dina had loved him to her hurt. He had now no pleasure in them. A bitter disappointment flung its chill upon him.

Disappointment is man's most frequent visitor—the uninvited guest most sure to come; he ought to be well used to it; yet he can never get familiar.

Bruno ought to have learned never to hope.

But his temper was courageous and sanguine: such madmen hope on to the very end.

He put the things down on the settle, and went to put up the mule. The little rose-tree had been too roughly blown in the windy afternoon; its flowers were falling, and some soon strewed the floor.

Bruno looked at it when he entered.

It hurt him; as the star Argol had done.

He covered the food with a cloth, and set the flower out of the draught. Then he went to see his sheep.

There was no train by the seaway from Rome until night. Signa would not come that way now, since he had to be in the town for the evening.

"He will come after the theatre," Bruno said to himself, and tried to get the hours away by work. He did not think of going into the city again himself. He was too proud to go and see a thing he had never been summoned to; too proud to stand outside the doors and stare with the crowd while Pippa's son was honoured within.

Besides, he could not have left the lambs all a long winter's night; and the house all unguarded; and nobody there to give counsel to the poor mute simpleton whom he had now to tend his beasts.

"He will come after the theatre," he said.

The evening seemed very long.

The late night came. Bruno set his door open, cold though it was; so that he should catch the earliest sound of footsteps. The boy, no doubt, he thought, would drive to the foot of the hill, and walk the rest.

It was a clear night after the rain of many days.

He could see the lights of the city in the plain fourteen miles or so away.

What was doing down there?

It seemed strange;—Signa being welcomed there, and he himself knowing nothing—only hearing a stray word or two by chance.

Once or twice in his younger days he had seen the city in gala over some great artist it delighted to honour; he could imagine the scene and fashion of it all well enough; he did not want to be noticed in it, only he would have liked to have been told, and to have gone down and seen it, quietly wrapped in his cloak, amongst the throng.

That was how he would have gone, had he been told.

He set the supper out as well as he could, and put wine ready, and the rose-tree in the midst. In the lamplight the little feast did not look so badly.

He wove wicker-work round some uncovered flasks by way of doing something. The bitter wind blew in; he did not mind that; his ear was strained to listen. Midnight passed. The wind had blown his lamp out. He lighted two great lanthorns, and hung them up against the doorposts; it was so dark upon the hills.

One hour went; another; then another. There was no sound. When yet another passed, and it was four of the clock, he said:

"He will not come to-night. No doubt they kept him late, and he was too tired. He will be here by sunrise."

He threw himself on his bed for a little time, and closed the door. But he left the lanthorns hanging outside; on the chance.

He slept little; he was up while it was still dark, and the robins were beginning their first twittering notes.

"He will be here to breakfast," he said to himself, and he left the table untouched, only opening the shutters so that when day came it should touch the rose at once and wake it up; it looked so drooping, as though it felt the cold.

Then he went and saw to his beasts and to his work.

The sun leapt up in the cold, broad, white skies. Signa did not come with it.

The light brightened. The day grew. Noon brought its hour of rest.

The table still stood unused. The rose-leaves had fallen in a little crimson pool upon it. Bruno sat down on the bench by the door, not having broken his fast.

"They are keeping him in the town," he thought. "He will come later."

He sat still a few moments, but he did not eat.

In a little while he heard a step on the dead winter leaves and tufts of rosemary. He sprang erect; his eyes brightened; his face changed. He went forward eagerly:

"Signa!—my dear!—at last!"

He only saw under the leafless maples and brown vine tendrils a young man that he had never seen, who stopped before him breathing quickly from the steepness of the ascent.

"I was to bring this to you," he said, holding out a long gun in its case. "And to tell you that he, the youth they all talk of—Signa—went back to Rome this morning; had no time to come, but sends you this, with his dear love and greeting, and will write from Rome to-night. Ah, Lord! There was such fuss with him in the city. He was taken to the foreign princes, and then the people!—if you had heard them!—all the street rang with the cheering. This morning he could hardly get away for all the crowd there was. I am only a messenger. I should be glad of wine. Your hill is steep."

Bruno took the gun from him, and put out a flask of his own wine on the threshold; then shut close the door.

It was such a weapon as he had coveted all his life long, seeing such in gunsmiths' windows and the halls of noblemen: a breech-loader, of foreign make, beautifully mounted and inlaid with silver.

He sat still a little while, the gun lying on his knees; there was a great darkness on his face. Then he gripped it in both hands, the butt in one, the barrel in the other, and dashed the centre of it down across the round of his great grindstone.

The blow was so violent, the wood of the weapon snapped with it across the middle, the shining metal loosened from its hold. He struck it again, and again, and again; until all the polished walnut was flying in splinters, and the plates of silver, bent and twisted, falling at his feet; the finely tempered steel of the long barrel alone was whole.

He went into his woodshed, and brought out branches of acacia brambles, and dry boughs of pine, and logs of oak; dragging them forth with fury. He piled them in the empty yawning space of the black hearth, and built them one on another in a pile; and struck a match and fired them, tossing pine-cones in to catch the flames.

In a few minutes a great fire roared alight, the turpentine in the pine-apples and fir-boughs blazing like pitch. Then he fetched the barrel of the gun, and the oaken stock, and the silver plates and mountings, and threw them into the heat.

The flaming wood swallowed them up; he stood and watched it.

After a while a knock came at his house-door.

"Who is there?" he called.

"It is I," said a peasant's voice. "There is so much smoke, I thought you were on fire. I was on the lower hill, so I ran up—is all right with you?"

"All is right with me."

"But what is the smoke?"

"I bake my bread."

"It will be burnt to cinders."

"I make it, and I eat it. Whose matter is it?"

The peasant went away muttering, with slow unwilling feet.

Bruno watched the fire.

After a brief time its frenzy spent itself; the flames died down; the reddened wood grew pale, and began to change to ash; the oaken stock was all consumed, the silver was melted and fused into shapeless lumps, the steel tube alone kept shape unchanged, but it was blackened and choked up with ashes, and without beauty or use.

Bruno watched the fire die down into a great mound of dull grey and brown charred wood.

Then he went out, and drew the door behind him, and locked it.

The last red rose dropped, withered by the heat.

There is always song somewhere. As the wine waggon creaks down the hill, the waggoner will chant to the corn that grows upon either side of him. As the miller's mules cross the bridge, the lad as he cracks his whip will hum to the blowing alders. In the red clover, the labourers will whet their scythes to a trick of melody. In the quiet evenings a Kyrie Eleison will rise from the thick leaves that hide a village chapel. On the hills the goatherd, high in air amongst the arbutus branches, will scatter on the lonely mountain-side stanzas of purest rhythm. By the sea-shore, where Shelley died, the fisherman, rough and salt and weather-worn, will string notes of sweetest measure under the tamarisk-tree on his mandoline. But the poetry and the music float on the air like the leaves of roses that blossom in a solitude, and drift away to die upon the breeze; there is no one to notice the fragrance, there is no one to gather the leaves.

But then life does not count by years. Some suffer a lifetime in a day, and so grow old between the rising and the setting of a sun.

But he was not obstinate. He only stretched towards the light he saw, as the plant in the cellar will stretch through the bars.

Tens of millions of little peasants come to the birth, and grow up and become men, and do the daily bidding of the world, and work and die, and have no more of soul or Godhead in them than the grains of sand. But here and there, with no lot different from his fellows, one is born to dream and muse and struggle to the sun of higher desires, and the world calls such a one Burns, or Haydn, or Giotto, or Shakespeare, or whatever name the fierce light of fame may burn upon and make irridescent.

The mighty lives have passed away into silence, leaving no likeness to them on earth; but if you would still hold communion with them, even better than to go to written score or printed book or painted panel or chiselled marble or cloistered gloom is it to stray into one of these old quiet gardens, where for hundreds of years the stone naiad has leaned over the fountain, and the golden lizard hidden under the fallen caryatide, and sit quite still, and let the stones tell you what they remember, and the leaves say what the sun once saw; and then the shades of the great dead will come to you. Only you must love them truly, else you will see them never.

"How he loves that thing already—as he never will love me," thought Bruno, looking down at him in the starlight, with that dull sense of hopeless rivalry and alien inferiority which the self-absorption of genius inflicts innocently and unconsciously on the human affections that cling to it, and which later on love avenges upon it in the same manner.

Who can look at the old maps in Herodotus or Xenophon, without a wish that the charm of those unknown limits and those untraversed seas was ours?—without an irresistible sense that to have sailed away, in vaguest hazard, into the endless mystery of the utterly unknown, must have had a sweetness and a greatness in it that is never to be extracted from the "tour of the world in ninety days."

Fair faiths are the blossoms of life. When the faith drops, spring is over.

In the country of Virgil, life remains pastoral still. The field-labourer of northern counties may be but a hapless hind, hedging and ditching dolefully, or at least serving a steam-beast with oil and fire, but in the land of the Georgics there is the poetry of agriculture still.

The fatal desire of fame, which is to art the corroding element, as the desire of the senses is to love—bearing with it the seeds of satiety and mortality—had entered into him without his knowing what it was that ailed him.

Genius lives in isolation, and suffers from it. But perhaps it creates it. The breath of its lips is like ether; purer than the air around it, it changes the air for others into ice.

Conscience and genius—the instinct of the heart, and the desire of the mind—the voice that warns and the voice that ordains: when these are in conflict, it is bitter for life in which they are at war; most bitter of all when that life is in its opening youth, and sure of everything, and yet sure of nothing.

Between them there was that bottomless chasm of mental difference, across which mutual affection can throw a rope-chain of habit and forbearance for the summer days, but which no power on earth can ever bridge over with that iron of sympathy which stands throughout all storms.

When the heart is fullest of pain, and the mouth purest with truth, there is a cruel destiny in things, which often makes the words worst chosen and surest to defeat the end they seek.

There is a chord in every human heart that has a sigh in it if touched aright. When the artist finds the key-note which that chord will answer to—in the dullest as in the highest—then he is great.

Life without a central purpose around which it can revolve, is like a star that has fallen out of its orbit. With a great affection or a great aim gone, the practical life may go on loosely, indifferently, mechanically, but it takes no grip on outer things, it has no vital interest, it gravitates to nothing.

Fame has only the span of a day, they say. But to live in the hearts of the people—that is worth something.

Keep young. Keep innocent. Innocence does not come back: and repentance is a poor thing beside it.

The chimes of the monastery were ringing out for the first mass; deep bells of sweet tone, that came down the river like a benediction on the day. Signa kneeled down on the grass.

"Did you pray for the holy men?" Bruno asked him when they rose, and they went on under the tall green quivering trees.

"No," said Signa under his breath. "I prayed for the devil."

"For him?" echoed Bruno aghast; "what are you about, child? Are you possessed? Do you know what the good priests would say?"

"I prayed for him," said Signa. "It is he who wants it. To be wicked there where God is, and the sun, and the bells"–

"But he is the foe of God. It is horrible to pray for him."

"No," said Signa, sturdily. "God says we are to forgive our enemies, and help them. I only asked Him to begin with His."

Bruno was silent.