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SEVEN PRIZE MEDALS A WARDED.
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From the Fresh Fruit, as imported for the Hospitals; a perfect luxury ; forms, with the
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Have thbm in your Houses to secure these advantages.
Notice my Trade Mark and Name.
H. I.1MPLOUGH, 113, HOLBORN HILL, LONDON, E.C.
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A NEW EDITION
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lOKDoy:
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CITY ROAD.
SIGNA.
CHAPTER I.
He was only a little lad coming singing through the sum-
mer weather; singing as the birds do in the thickets, as the
crickets do in the wheat at night, as the acacia bees do all
the day long in the high tree tops in the sunshine.
Only a little lad with brown eyes and bare feet, and a
wistful heart driving his sheep and his goats, and carrying
his sheaves of cane or millet, and working among the ripe
grapes when the time came, like all the rest, here in the
bright Signa country.
Few people care much for our Signa and all it has seen
and known. Few people even know anything of it at all,
except just vaguely as a mere name. Assisi has her saint,
and Perugia her painters, and Arezzo her poet, and Siena
her virgin, and Settignano her sculptor, and Prato her great
carmelite, andYespignano her inspired shepherd, and Fiesole
her angel-monk, and the village Yinci her mighty master;
and poets write of them all for sake of the dead fame which
they embalm. But Signa has found no poet, though her
name lies in the pages of the old chroniclers like a jewel in
an old king's tomb, written there ever since the Latin days
when she was first named Signome—a standard of war set
under the mountains.
It is so old our Signa, no man could chronicle all it has
seen in the centuries; but not one in ten thousand, tra-
vellers thinks about it. Its people plait straw for the world,
33
SIGN A.
and the train from the coast runs through it: that is all
that it has to do with other folks.
Passengers come and go from the sea to the city, from
the city to the sea, along the great iron highway, and
perhaps they glance at the stern, ruined -walls, at the white
houses on the cliffs, at the broad river with its shining
sands, at the blue hills with the poplars at their base, and
the pines at the summits, and they say to one another that
this is Signa.
But it is all that they ever do do ; it is only a glance, then
on they go through the green and golden haze of Yaldarno.
Signa is nothing to them, only a place that they stop at a
second. And yet Signa is worthy of knowledge.
She is so ancient and so w ise, and in her way so beautiful
too; and she holds so many great memories in her ; she has
so many faded laurel-boughs as women in their years of age
keep the dead rose-leaves of their days of love; and once
on a time—in the Republic's time, as her sons will still
turn from the plough or rest on the oar to tell to a stranger
with pride;—she was a very Amazon and Artemis of the
mountains setting her breast boldly against all foes, and
they were many, wrho came down over the wild western
road, from the sea or from the Apennines, with reddened
steel and blazing torch to harry and fire the fields, and
spread famine and war to the gates of Florence.
These days are gone.
The years of its glory are done. It is a grey quiet place
which now strays down by the water and now climbs high
on the hill, and faces the full dawn of the day and sees the
sunset reflected in the mirror of the river, and is starry
with fireflies in midsummer, and at noon looks drowsy in
the heat and seems to dream—being so very old. The but-
tressed walls are ruins. The mass bell swings over the
tower roofs. The fortresses are changed to farms. The
vines climb where the culverins blazed. "White bullocks
and belled mules tread to and fro the tracks which the free
lances made ; and the peasants sing at their ploughs where
the hosts of the invaders once thundered.
Its ways are narrow, its stones are crooked, its summer
dust is dense, its winter mire is heavy, its hovels are many,
its people are poor—oh, yes, no doubt—but it is beautiful
in various ways and worthy of a scholar's thought and of
SIGNA.
3
an artist's tenderness. Only the poet does not eome to
make it quoted and beloved by the world as one single line
on the drifting autumn leaves has rendered Vallombrosa.
Here where the ancient walls of its citadel rise hoary and
broken against the blneness of the -sky; there where the
arches of the bridges span the river, and the sand and the
shallows and the straw that is drying in summer shine to-
gether yellow in the sun; here where under the sombre
poiuted archways the little children play, their faces like
the cherubs and the cupids of the renaissance; there
where the cobblers and coopers and the plaiting maidens
and the makers of the yellow rush brooms, all work away
under lintels, and corbels, and carved beam timbers, four
hundred years old if one; here where through the gate
ways with their portcullises woven over by the spiders, there
only pass the patient mules with sacks of flower, or the
hay carts dropping grasses, or the waggons of new wine;
there where the villas that were all fortresses in the fierce
fighting times of old, gleam white in the light upon their
crests of hills with their cypresses like sentinels around
them, and breadths of corn and vineyards traversed by
green grassy paths, that lead upward to where the stone
pine and the myrtle make sweet the air together. In all
these Signa is beautiful; most of all, of course, in the long
light radiant summer when the nightingales are singing
everywhere, noon as well as night; the summer which
seems to last almost all the year, for you can only tell how
it comes and goes by the coming and the going of the
flowers! the long-lived summer that is ushered in by the
daffodils, those golden chamberlains of the court of flowers,
and dies, as a king should, on a purple bed of anemones,
when the bells of the feast of the saints sound its requiem
from hill to hill. And Signa revels in all that brightness
of the Tuscan weather, and all about her seems singing,
from the cicala piping away all day long, through the hot-
test heat, to the mandolines that thrill through the leaves
at night as the peasants go by strumming the chords of
their love-songs. Summer and song and sunshine;—Signa
lies amidst them like some war-bruised shield of a knight
that has fallen among the roses and holds the nest of a
lark.
One day in summer Signa kept the Feast of the Corpus
b 2
4
SIGN A.
Domini with more pomp and praise than usual. The bells
were ringing all over the plain and upon the hillsides, and
the country people were coming in from all the villages
that lie scattered like so many robins' nests amongst the
olives and the maize plumes and the arbutus thickets
everywhere around. They were like figures out of a Fra
Bartolommeo or a Ghirlandajo as they came down through
the ripe corn and the red poppies from the old grey buildings
up above; in their trailing white dresses and their hoods
of blue, with the unlit tapers in their hands, and the little
white-robed children running before with their chaplets of
flowers still wet from the dew. It was the procession of
Demeter transmitted through all the ages, though it was
called the Feast of Christ; it might have been the hymns
of Ceres that they sang, and Virgil might have looked
upon them with a smile of praise as they passed through
the waving wheat and under the boughs red with cher-
ries.
The old faith lives under the new, and the old worship is
not dead, here in the country of Horace and in the fields
where Proserpine wandered. The people are Pagan still;
only now they call it being Christian, and mingle together
Cupid and the Madonna in their songs.*
It was fairest summer weather. There was sure harvest
and promise of abundant vintage. The sweet strong west
wind was blowing from the sea, but not too roughly, only
* Si e partita una nave dallo porto,
Ed e partito lo mio strug'gimento.
Madre Maria, dategli eonforto
Accid vada la nave a salvamento.
Lo mare gli si possa abbonacciare
E le sue vele doventin d' argento.
E tu Cupido, clie lo puo' aiutare,
Cogli sospiri tuoai mandagli il vento.
liispetto Toscano.
A ship goes out from port,
And with it goes my own immense desire.
Oh, Mother Mary, lend it strength and comfort,
So that the ship may steer to sure salvation.
So that the sea that bears it may be stilled,
And all its sails become of silver pure.
And thou, dear Cupid, who canst aid it too,
Breathe forth thy sighs and waft it fairest winds.
Tuscan Popular Song,
SIGN A.
5
just enough to shake the scent out of the acacia blossoms
and fan open the oleanders.
The peasantry were, in good heart and trooped down to
the feast of the Body of God from the loneliest farmstead
on the highest hill-crest; and from every villa chapel set
along the mountains, or amongst the green sea of the valley
vines, there was a bell ringing above an open door.
The chief celebration was at Signa, which had broken
from its usual ways, and had music on this great service
because a mighty bishop had come on a visit in its neigh-
bourhood, and all its roads and streets and lanes were
swept and garnished and watered, and at many open case-
ments there were pots of lilies, white and orange, and in
many dark-archways groups of little children on whose
tiny shoulders it would have seemed quite natural to see
such wings of rose or azure as II Beato gave his cheru-
bim.
The procession came out from the white walls above on
the cliff, and down the steep ways of the hill and across the
bridge, and through the Lastra to the little church of the
Misericordia. There were great silk banners waving heavily ;
gold fringe that shone and swayed; priests' vestments that
gleamed with silver and colour; masses of flowers and
leaves borne aloft; curling croziers and crimson baldac-
chini; and then came all the white-clothed contadini, by
tens, by twenties, by hundreds, and the cherubic children
singing in the sun; it was Signa in the Middle Ages once
again, and Bra Giovanni might have stood by and painted
it all in a choral book, or Marcillat have put it in a stained
window, and have illumined it with the azure sky for its
background, and the rays of the morning sun slanting
down like beams that streamed straight to earth from the
throne of God.
The procession came down the hill and across the bridge,
with its irregular arches and its now shallow green water
shining underneath, and on its sands the straw lying dry-
ing, and beyond it the near hills with their dusky pines,
and the white streaks where the quarries were cut, and the
blue haze of the farther mountains.
All the people were chaunting the Laus Deo—chaunting
with chests made strong by the mountain air, and lips made
tuneful by the inheritance of melody ; men and women
6
SIGN A.
and children were all singing, from the old white-haired
bishop who bore the host, to the four-year-old baby that
trod on the hem of its mother's dress.
But above all the voices there rose one sweetest and
clearest of all, and going up into heaven, as it seemed, as a
lark's does on a summer morning. He was only a little
fellow that sang—a little boy of the Lastra a Signa, poorer
than all the rest; with his white frock, clean, but very
coarse, and a wreath of scarlet poppies on his auburn curls ;
a very little fellow, ten years old at most, with thin brown
limbs and a lean wistful face, and the straight brows of his
country, with dark eyes full of dreams beneath them, and
naked feet that could be fleet as a hare's over the dry
yellow grass or the crooked sharp stones.
lie was always hungry, and never very strong, and cer-
taiuly simple and poor as a creature could be, and he knew
what a beating meant as well as any dog about the farm.
He lived with people who thrashed him oftener than they
fed him. He was almost always scolded, and bore the
burden of others' faults. He had never had a whole shirt
or a pair of shoes in all his life, lie kept goats on one of
the dusky sweet-scented hillsides above Signa, and bore,
like them, the wind and the weather, the scorch and the
storm. And yet, by God's grace and the glory of child-
hood, he was happy enough as he went over the bridge and
through the white dust, cliaunting his psalm in the rear of
the priests, in the ceremonies of the Corpus Domini.
For the music was in his head and in his heart; and the
millions of- leaves and the glancing water seemed to be
singing with him, and he did not feel the flints under his
feet, or the heat of them, as he went singing out all his
little soul to the river and the sky and the glad June sun-
shine, and he was quite happy, though he was of no more
moment ill the great human world than any one of the browr
grilli in the wheat, or tufts of rosemary in the quarryside
and he did not feel the sharpness of the stones underneath
his feet or the scorch of them as he went barefoot along the
street, because he was always looking up at the brightness
of the sky, and expecting to see it open and to see the
facesof curly-headed winged children peep out from behind the
sunrays as they did in the old pictures in the villa chapels.
The priests told him he would see them for a certainty if
SIGN A.
7
he were good ; and he had been good, or at least had tried
to be, but the heavens never had opened yet.
It is hard work to be good when you are very little and
very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no
mother's lips to kiss you.
But he tried in his own small way. When he carried
the bright blue plums to the market, not to taste even one '
when his mouth was parched with the dust and the sun;
to let his reed-flute lie mute while he searched for a stray-
ing kid; to tell the truth, though it cost him a thrashing ;
to leave his black bread untouched on a feast morning,
though he was so hungry, because he was going to confes-
sioa; to forbear from pulling the ripe grapes as he went
along the little grass paths through the vines;—these were
the things that were so hard, and that he tried his best to
do, because in his little dim mind he saw what was just, and
in his loneliness endeavoured with all his might to follow it,
that he might see the faces of the angels some day ; and he
wondered now why he could not see the cherubs through
the blue smiling sky, as the old fresco-painters had done
who did not want it half so much as he did, because no
doubt the painters were wise men and knew a great deal,
and were very happy, and were not like him, who was
always wanting to know everything, and could never get
any one to tell.
The old painters would have painted him, and would have
made a cherub of him, with his wreath of poppies and his
wondering eyes and his little singing mouth, and would
have taken all the leanness out of his face, and the paleness
out of his cheeks, and the darns out of his little coarse frock,
and would have made his field-flowers roses of paradise,
and would have glorified him, and made him a joy to the
wondering world for ever.
But he did not know that; he did not know that the
painters never saw any other little angels than just such
foot-tired and sun-tanned little angels as he, which their
genius lifted up and transfigured into the likeness of the
children of God.
He did not know that Bra Angelico would have kissed
him, and Baffaelle would have put him for ever in the
internal sunshine of the Loggie, with gold rays about his
head and the lilies of Mary in his hands.
8
SIGNA.
He only looked up—in vain—for the cherubs in the
shining morning skies, and was sorry that he was not good
enough to have the right to see them ; and yet was glad at
heart as he went carrying his taper in the rear of the silken
banners and the silvered robes and the chaunting contadini,
over the green sunlightened Arno water, with the midsum-
' mer corn blowing on all the hills around, and the west
wind bringing the salt of the sea with it to strengthen the
young bud-clusters of the vine.
Glad, because he was so young, and because he was sure
of one creature that loved him, and because the music
thrilled him to his heart's delight, and because it was a
happiness to him only to sing, as it is to the thrush in the
depths of the woods when the day dawns, or to the nightin-
gale when she drinks the dew in heats of noon off the snow
of a magnolia flower.
He had a little lute of his own, given to him by the only
hand that ever gave him anything. "Where he lived he
might not play it on pain of its being broken; but upon
the hills he did, and along the country roads; and when
people were asleep in their beds in Signa, they would be
awakened by notes that were not the birds' rippling up the
street in the sweet silent dark, and going higher and higher
and higher—it was only the little fellow playing and sing-
ing as he went along in the dusk of the dawn to his work.
In the Lastra no one thought anything of it. In any
other country, lattices would have been opened and heads
hung out, and breaths of deep pleasure held to listen better,
because the child's music was wonderful in its way, or at
least would have been so elsewhere. But here there was
so much music everywhere : nobody noticed much. It was
no more than a hundred other lutes strumming at cottage
doors, than a thousand other stornelli or rispetti sung as
the oxen were yoked.
There is always song somewhere.
As the wine-waggon creaks clown the hill, the waggoner
will chaunt 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 and sickles 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
SIGNA.
9
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 fisher-
man, rough and salt, and weatherworn, 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.
The songs of the people now are like their fireflies in
summer. They make night beautiful all over the dusky
hills, and the seas of vine, and the blowing fields of maize,
in a million lonely places of the mountains and the plains.
But the fireflies are born in the corn and die in it; few eyes
see their love-fires, except those of the nightingale and the
shrew mouse.
Theocritus cried aloud on his Sicilian muses, and the
world heard him and has treasured the voice of his sweet
complaining.
But the muse of these people now lives with the corn-
crake under the wheat, and the swallow under the house-
eaves, and is such a simple natural home-born thing that
they think of her no more than the firefly does of her lumi-
nance. And so they have no Theocritus, but only ever-
renewing bursts of song everywhere as the millet grows
ripe, and the lemon-tree flowers, and the red poppies leap
with the corn.
Often they do not know what they sing:—Does the fire-
fly know that she burns ?
This little fellow did not know what he sang.
He did not know what he was.
At home he was always being told that he had no right
to exist at all; perhaps he had not; he did not know.
Himself, he thought God had made him to sing, made
him just for that; as he made the finches and nightingales.
But he did not tell any one so. At home they would have
asked him what should the great God want with his puny
oat pipe. Toto could make as good a noise cutting a reed
in the fields any day.
Perhaps Toto could. He thought his own voice better,
but he was not sure. He was only glad to sing, because
all the world seemed singing with him, and all the sky
to
SIGN A.
seemed one vast space of sweetest sound—as, perhaps, it
seems to a bird, who knows ?
"When he went to bed in the hay he could hear the
nightingales and the owls and the grilli singing all together
in the trees behind the village and in the fields that stretched
by the river; and in the dusk of the dawn when he ran out
vith his little bare feet, dripping with dew, there were a
million little voices hymning in the day. That was what he
heard. O.ther people, no doubt, heard cart-wheels, and
grinding mills, and the scolding of women, and the. barking
of dogs, and the creaking of doors, and a thousand other
discordant things; but to him the world wras full of the
singing birds and the humming insects, and the blue
heavens teemed with a choir of angels: he could not see
them, but lie heard them, and he knew they were near, and
that was enough : lie could wait.
"Do you hear anything up there ? " the other children
would ask him, when he stood listening with his eyes lifted,
and they could not see so much as a bird, and he would look
back to them quite sorrowfully.
" Do you not hear, too ? You are deaf then ! "
But the children of Signa would not allow that they
were deaf, and pelted and fought him for saying so. Deaf,
indeed! when it was he who was the simpleton hearing a
bird sing where none was.
"Were they deaf? or, was he dreaming?
The children of Signa and he never agreed which was
which.
It is the old eternal quarrel between the poet and the
world; and the children were like the world, they were
strong in numbers ; since they could see no bird, they would
have it there could be no music, and they boxed his ears to
cure him of hearing better than his neighbours.
Only it did not cure him.
His angels sang above him this day of the Corpus
Domini, and he did not feel the sun hot on his bare head,
nor the stones sharp under his bare feet, and he did not
remember that he was hungry, and that he had been beaten
that morning, until the music ceased suddenly, and he
dropped to earth out of the arms of the angels.
Then he felt his bruises, and the want of food gnawed in
him, and he gathered up his little white acolyte's dress and
SIGN A.
II
ran as quickly as he could, the withering P°ppies shaking
off his hair.
He was only Pippa's child.
CHAPTER II.
There is wild weather in winter at Signa. The mountain
streams brim over and the great historic river sweeps out
in full flood, and the bitter Alpine wind tears like a living
thing over the hills and across the plain. Not seldom the
low-lying fields become sheets of dull tawny water, and the
little hamlets amongst them are all flooded, and from the
clock-towers the tolling bells cry aloud for succour, while
the low, white houses seem to float like boats.
In these winters, if the harvests before have been bad,
the people suffer much. They have little or no bread, and
they eat the raw grass even sometimes. The country looks
like a lake in such weather when the floods are on ; only
for ships there are churches, and the lighthouses are the
trees; and like rocky islands in all directions the village
roofs and the villa walls gleam red and shine grey in the
rain. It is only a short winter, and the people know that
when the floods rise and spread, then they will find com-
pensation, later on, for them in the doubled richness of
grass and measure of corn.
Still, it is hard to see the finest steer of the herd dashed
a lifeless dun-coloured mass against the foaming piles of
the bridge ; it is hard to see the young trees and the stacks
of hay whirled together against each other; it is hard to
watch the broken crucifix and the cottage bed hurled like
dead leaves on the waste of waters ; it is hardest of all to
see the little curly head of a drowned child drift with the
boughs and the sheep and the empty hencoop and the torn
house door down the furious course of the river.
Signa has seen this through a thousand winters and more
in more or less violence, and looked on untouched herself ;
high set on her hills like a fortress,, as indeed she was, in
the old republican days.
SIGN A.
In one of these wild brief winters, in a drenching night
of rain, a woman came down on foot along the high-road
that runs from the mountains, the old post road by which
one can travel to the sea, only no one now ever takes that
way. In sunshine and mild weather it is a glorious road,
shelving sheer to the river valley on one side and on the
other hung over with bold rocks and bluffs dusky with ilex
and pine; and it winds and curves and descends and
changes as only a mountain road can do, with the smell of
its rosemary and its wild myrtle sweet at every turn. But
on a winter's night of rain it is very dreary, desolate, and
dark.
The woman stumbled down it as best she might.
She had come on foot by short stages all the way from
the sea some forty miles over hill and plain. She carried
a bundle with her, and never let go her hold on it however
wildly the wind seized and shook her, nor however roughly
the rain blew her blind. For the bundle was a child.
ISTow and then she stopped and leaned against the rocks
or the stem of a tree and opened her cloak and looked at
it; her eyes had grown so used to the thick darkness that
she could see the round of its little red cheek and the curve
of its folded fist and the line of its closed eyelashes. She
would stop a minute sometimes and bend her head and
listen, if the wind lulled, to the breathing of its parted
lips set close against her breast; then she would take
breath herself and go onward.
The child was a year old, and a boy, and a heavy weight,
and she was not a strong woman now, though she had once
been so; and she had walked all the way from the sea.
She began to grow dizzy, and to feel herself stumble like
a footsore mule that has been.driven until he is stupid and
has lost his sureness of step and his capacity for safety of
choice. She was drenched through, and her clothes hung
in a soaked dead weight upon her. Even with all her care
she could not keep the child quite dry.
Somewhere through the darkness she could hear bells
tolling the hour. It wras eight o'clock, and she had been in
hopes to reach Signa before the night fell.
The boy began to stir and cry.
She stopped and loosened her poor garments and gave
him her breast. "When he grew pacified, she stumbled op.
SIGN A.
13
again; the child was quiet; the rain heat on her naked bosom,
but the child was content and quiet; so she went on so.
Sometimes she shivered. She could not help that. She
wondered where the town was. She could not see the
lights. In earlier years she had known the country step
by step as only those can who are born in the air of it and
tread it daily in their ways of work. But now she had
forgotten how the old road ran. Her girlhood seemed so
far away ; so very, very far. And yet she was only twenty-
two years of age.
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.
She had gone over the road so many times in the warm
golden dawns and the white balmy nights, plaiting 'her
wisps of straw, bare-headed in the welcome air, and with a
poppy or a briar-rose set behind her ear for vanity's sake
rather than for the flower's. But she had been long away
—though she was so young—at least it seemed very long
to her, and with absence she had lost all the peasant's in-
stinct of safe movement in the dark, which is as sure as an
owl's or an ass's, and comes by force of long habit and long
treading of the same familiar way. She was not sure of
her road; not even sure of her footing. The wind terrified
her, and she heard the loud surge of the Arno wmters be-
low ; beating and foaming in flood. She was weak too
from long fatigue, and the weight of the water in her
clothes, and of the child in her arms, pulled her earthward.
"No one passed by her.
Every one was housed, except sentries on the church-
towers watching the rising of the waters, and shepherds
getting their cattle upward from the low-lying pastures on
to the hills.
She was all alone on the old sea-road, and if she were
near the lights of Signa she could not see them for the
steam and mist of the furious rain.
But she walked on resolutely, stumbling often over the
great loose stones. She did not care for herself. Life wras
over for her. She would have been glad to lie down and
die where she was. But if the boy wrere not under some
roof before morning, she knew he would perish of cold in
her arms. Eor she could give him so little warmth her-
SIGNA.
self. She shivered in all her veins and all her limbs; and
she was soaked through like a drowned thing, and he was
Avet also. So she Avent on, groAving frightened, though her
temper Avas bold, and only keeping her courage to move by
feeling now and then as she went for the fair face of him
at her breast. But the touch of her hand made him cry—
it Avas so cold—and so even that comfort ceased for her,
and she could only pray in a dumb unconscious Avay to God
to keep the numbness out of her arms lest they should drop
the boy as she Avent.
At a turn in the road there is a crucifix—a Avooden
one set in the stone.
She sat down a moment under it, and rested as Avell as
she could, and tried to think of heaven. But the wind
would not let her. It tore the covering off her head, and
tossed her long hair about; it scourged her with a storm
of snapt boughs ; it stung her Avith a shoAver of shrivelled
leaves ; it pierced through and through her poor thin
clothes. She prayed a little as well as she could in the
torment of it, but it Avent round and round her in so mad a
whirl that she could not remember Iioav the Avords should
go. Only she remembered to keep the child warm, as a
mother-sheep sets her body betAveen the lamb and the
drifts of the snow.
After a Avhile he began to cry.
Do what she would she could not keep a sense of chilli-
ness and discomfort from reaching him ; he wanted the ease
and rest of some little cosy bed ; her cramped arms held him
ill, and the old shawl that wrapped him up was Avet and cold.
She murmured little words to him, and tried even to
sing some scrap of old song; but her voice failed her, and
the child Avas not to be comforted. He cried more, and
stirred restlessly. "With great effort she bent her stiffened
knees, and rose, and got on her Avay again. The rocking
movement, as she carried him and walked on, stilled him
a little.
She Avished that she had dared to turn up a path higher
on the mountain that she kneAV of, which she had passed as
the Ave Maria bell had rung. But she had not dared.
She was not sure Avho was there ; what welcome or what
curse she might get. He who Avas certain to be master
there uoav had always been fierce Avith her and stern ; and
SIGNA.
15
he might be married, and new faces be there too—she could
not tell; five years were time enough for so much change
She had not dared go up the path ; now that it was miles
behind her she wished that she had taken it. But it was
too late now. The town, she knew, must be much the
nearer of the two, now that she had come down so far; so
she went onward in the face of the blinding rain-storm.
She would go up in the morning, she thought, and tell him
the truth; if he were brutal to herself, he would not let
the child starve ; she would go up in the morning—so she
said, and walked onward.
Her foot had slipped a dozen times, and she had re-
covered her footing and gone on safe. Once again in the
dark she slipped, her foot slid farther on loose wet earth, a
stone gave way, she clutched the child with one arm, and
flung out the other—she could not see what she caught at
in the dark. It was a bush of furze. The furze tore her
skin and gave way. She slipped farther and farther, faster
and faster; the soil was so drenched, aud the stones were
unloosed. She remembered the road enough to know that
she was going down, down, down, over the edge. She
clasped the child with both arms once more, and was borne
down through the darkness to her death.
She knew nothing more ; the dark night closed in on
her; she lost the sound of the ringing bells, and she ceased
to feel the burden of the child.
CHAPTER III.
An hour later two men came with lanthorns into the
fields that lie between the rough vineyards underneath the
road from the sea. They had sheep there, which they were
going to drive into the town in the morning, and they were
afraid that the flock, terrified in the winds and rains, might
have broken loose, and strayed across the iron rails of the
other road that runs by the river, and might get crushed
under the wheels of the night trains running from the west.
i6
SIGN A.
As they went they stumbled against something on the
ground, and lowered their lights to look.
There was a broken bramble-bush, and some crushed
ferns, and a thing that had fallen from the height above on
the soaking soil. By their dim lanthorns they saw that
the thing was a woman, and bending the light fuller on her
as well as they could for the rain, they saw that she had
been stunned or killed by the fall.
There was •• great stone on which the back of her head had
struck. She l»y face upward, with her limbs stretched out;
her right arm was close round She body of a living child;
her breast was bare.
The child was breathing and asleep ; he had fallen upon
his mother, and so had escaped unhurt.
The men had been bora peasants, and they were used to -
wring the throats of trapped birds and to take lambs from
their mothers with small pity. They lifted the boy with
some roughness and some trouble from the stiffening arm
that enclosed him; he began to wail and moan; lie was
very wet and miserable, and he said a little word which
was a call for his mother, like the pipe of a little bird that
has fluttered out of the nest, and lies cold on the grass and
frightened.
One of them took him up and wrapped his cloak across
the little sobbing mouth.
The other knelt down, and tried to make his light burn
better, and laid his hand on the woman's breast Jx) feel for
pulse of life. But she was quite dead. He did what he
could to call back life, but it was all in vain ; at length he
coA*ered her breast, and stared up at his fellow.
" This looks like Pippa," he said, slowly, with a sound as
of awe in his voice.
The other lowered his light too and looked.
" Yes, it is like Pippa," he said, slowly, also.
Then they were both silent for some moments, the Ian-
thorn light blinking in the rain.
"Yes, it is Pippa; yes, certainly it is Pippa," said the
first one stupidly; and he ran his hand with a sort of
shudder over the outline of her features and her form.
The one who held the child turned his light on the little
wet face; the baby ceased to cry, and opened his big, dark,
wondering eyes at the fame.
SIGN A.
17
" And whose byblow is this ? " said he.
" The devil knows," said he who knelt by the mother.
" But it is Pippa. Look here on her left breast—do you
see F there is the little three-cornered scar of the wound I
gave her with my knife, at the wine fair, that day."
The other looked closer while the rain beat on the white
cold chest of the woman.
" Yes, it must be Pippa."
Then they were both silent again a little, for they were
Pippa's brothers.
" Let us go and tell them in the Lastra, and get the bier,"
said the one who knelt by her, getting up on to his feet,
with a sullen, dazed gloom on his dark face.
" And leave her here P " said the one who had the child.
" "Why not ? nobody will run away with the dead."
"But this little beast—what can one do with him P "
" Carry him to your wife."
" There are too many at home."
" She has one of his age; she can take him."
" She will never touch Pippa's boy."
" Give him to me, then, and stay you here."
"No, that I dare not'; the foul fiend might come after her."
" The foul fiend take your terrors. Let us get into the
Lastra; we can see then. We must tell the Misericordia,
and get the bier "
"There is no such haste; she is stone dead. What a
pipe this brat has! One would think it was a pig with the
knife in its throat."
" It is very cold. Who would have thought it could have
lived—such a fall as that, and such a night! "
" It lives because nobody wants it. She Lad no gold
about her, had she P "
" I do not know."
The one who held the child stooped over the dead woman
awhile, then rose with a sigh of regret—
"Not a stiver; I have felt her all over."
" Then she must have done ill these five years."
" Yes—and yet so handsome, too. But Pippa never
plaited even."
" Nay, never—poor Pippa! "
So they muttered, plodding over the broken heavy
ground, with the sound of the swollen river in their ears
c
i8
SIGN A.
and their lanthorn lights gleaming through the steam of
the rain. In the noise of the waters the child sobbed and
screamed unheard. The man had tossed him over his
shoulder as he carried the new-born lambs, only with a little
less care.
They clambered up into the road and tramped through
the slough of mud into the town. The woman had drawn
nigh to the upper town by a dozen yards, when her foot
had slipped, and she had reeled over to her death. But
the feet of the shepherds were bare, and kept sure hold,
liIce the feet of goats. They tramped on, quick, through
the crooked streets and over the bridge ; the river had run
high, and along the banks, and oil the flat roofs of the
towers there were the lights burning of the men who
watched for the flood. They heard how loud and swiftly
the river was running as they went over the bridge and
down into the irregular twisting street, and under the old
noble walls of the lower village of the Lastra.
The one who carried the child opened a rickety door in
the side of a tumbledown house, and climbed a steep stair-
way, and pushed his way into a room where children of all
ages, and trusses of straw, and a pig, and a hen with her
chickens, and a black crucifix, and a load of cabbage-leaves
and maize-stalks, and a single lemon-tree in a pot, were all
together nearly indistinguishable in the darkness. He
tossed the child to a sturdy brown woman with fierce brows.
" Here, Nita, here is a young one I found in the fields,
Teed it to-night; and to-morrow I will tell the priest and
the others, and we shall get credit. It is near dead of
cold already. Ho—I cannot stay—do you hear how the
waters are out ? Bruno is down below wanting me to help
to house the sheep."
He clattered away down the stairs, and joined his brother
in the street.
" I told her nothing of Pippa," he said, in a whispei'.
" If she knew it were Pippa's not a drop of milk would he
get to-night. As it is, it is a pretty little beggar ; she will
let him share with Toto. She knows charity pleases
Heaven. And—and—see here, Bruno, why need we speak
of Pippa at all ? "
His brother stared at him in the murky gloom. " Why ?
—why we must fetch her in and bury her."
SIGNA.
9
" The waters will do that before morning if we let
them alone; that will spare us a deal of trouble, Bruno."
" Trouble—why ? "
" Oh, it is always trouble—the church and the law, and
all the rest. Then you know the Syndic is such a man to
ask questions. And nobody saw her but ourselves. And
they may say we tumbled her over. She has come back
poor, and all Signa knows that you struck at her with your
knife on the day of the fair, and that she has been a dis-
grace and a weariness always. We might have trouble,
Bruno."
" But the child ? "
" Oh, the child! I have told Nita we picked it up lost
in the fields. Why should we tell anybody to-night about
Pippa? The poor soul is dead. No worse can come.
Men do not hurt dead women. And there is so much to
do to-night, Bruno. We should see for our sheep on the
other side now, and then stay down here. The devil knows
what pranks Arno may not play to-night. In five hours I
warrant you he will be out all over the country."
" But to leave her there—all alone—it is horrible ! "
" How shall we show we did not push her there to her
death ? "
" But wre did not."
" That is why they would all say we did. Everybody
knows that there was bad blood with us and Pippa: and
most of all with you. Let the night go over, Bruno. We
want the night to work in, and if she be there at day dawn,
then we can tell. It will be time enough."
" Well—lie as you like," said the other, sullenly. " Let
us get the sheep in anyhow."
So they went out to the open country again, through
the storm of the west wind that was blowing the river
back from the sea, so that it could not get out, and was
driven up again between the hills, and so overflowed the
lands through which it travelled. The men worked hard
and in earnest, housing their own sheep and driving their
neighbours' cattle on rising knolls, or within church doors,
or anywhere where they were safe from the water; and
then came down again into the street towards midnight,
where all the people were awake and astir watching Arno,
and holding themselves ready to flee.
SIGN A.
" You have got the ague, Bruno," said the man at the
wine-shop, for his arm shook as he drank a draught.
" So would you if you had been up to your middle in
water all the night like me," said the elder brother,
roughly.
But it -was not the water, they were too used to that.
It was the thought of the woman dead all alone under the
old sea-road.
The night became a bitter black night. Up the valley
the river was out, flooding the pastures far and near.
Boats went and came, taking help, and bringing homeless
families. Watchfires were burning everywhere. Bodies
of drowned cattle drifted in by scores. There were stories
that the great city herself was in flood. In such a time
every breath is a tale of terror, and every rumour grows
instantly to giant proportions.
The upper town of Signa itself was safe. But was great
peril for the low-lying Lastra. No one went to their beds.
The priest prayed. The bells tolled. The men went to
and fro in fear. The horrid loudness of the roaring waters
drowned all other sounds.
"When the morning broke, sullen and grey, and still
beaten with storm, the cold dull waste of water stretched
drearily on either side of the great bridge. The two brethren
went with the crowd that looked from it eastward and west-
ward.
The river had spread over the iron rails, and the grassy,
broken ground, and the bushes of furze, and reached half
way up to the rocks and the hill-road above. The wind
had changed, and was blowing in from the eastward moun-
tains. The water rolled under its force with furious haste
to the sea like a thing long imprisoned, and frantic with the
joy of escape.
"It has taken Pippa," said the brothers, low to one
another.
And they felt like men who have murdered a woman.
Not that it mattered of course. She was dead. And if
not to the sea, then to the earth, all the dead must go,—
into darkness, and forgotten of all.
SIGN A.
21
CHAPTER IY.
The brothers looked pale under their brown skins in the
ashen light of the dawn.
But they had lost sheep like other folks," and so like
other folks were pitied as they went back into the Lastra
to get a mouthful of bread, after the sickly vigil of the
night.
Bruno was an unwedded man, and could bear misfortune ;
but Lippo was a man early married, and having six young
children to clamour round his soup-pot, and fight for the
crusts of bread. He was pointed out amongst the crowd
of sufferers, and was one of those who were pitied the
most, and who was sure to get a good portion of the alms-
giving and public relief.
" Grive Bruno a cup of wine and a crust, Nita," said he,
going up the stairs into the house of his wife. He lived
there with her because her father, who was a cobbler,
owned the place, and he himself best liked the life of the
Lastra. The wife, too, having been a cobbler's daughter
and grand-daughter, had been always used to see life from
the half-door of the workshop; she would not become a
mere contadina, hoeing and weeding and plaiting and
carrying dung in a broad-leaved hat and a russet gown—
not she, were it ever so ; and Anita was one of those
strong and fortunate women who always get their own way
by dint of their power to make everyone wretched who
crosses them.
" Leave me to speak," said Lippo, with a glance of mean-
ing to his brother.
It was five in the morning, very cold, and still dusky.
Anxiety was allayed, since the wind blew from the east, and
the waters were sinking, though slowly.
Nita, who had been up all night on the watch, like the
rest of the women, was boiling coffee in a tin-pot, and fan-
ning the charcoal. The children lay about as they chose
on the floor.' None of them had been put to bed, since at
any moment they might have had to run for their lives.
Bruno looked round for Pippa's child. He did not
see it.
22
SIGN A.
" An awful night," said Lippo, kicking the pig out of a
doze. " They do say the Vecchio bridge is down in
Florence, and that the jewellers could not get out in time.
I wish the gold and silver and stones would drift down
here. All the Greve country is swamped. St. Giusto
sticks up on his tower like a masthead. The cattle are
drowned by herds. "Whole stacks of wheat are against the
piles, making hungry souls' mouths water; rotte.d and
ruined ; fine last year's grain ; the good God is bitter-hard
sometimes. AVhere is the baby I brought you last night,
my woman ? "
Nita pointed with her charcoal fan; her coffee was on
the point of boiling.
The brothers looked where she pointed, to a nest of hay
close to the hen and her chickens. The child lay there
sound asleep, with his little naked limbs curled up y and
close against him was Toto, a yearling child also.
The elder brother turned away suddenly, and his body
shook a little.
" You have never dried your clothes, Bruno," said his
sister-in-law. " What a gaby a man is without a wife.
Drink that, it is hot as hot. And what did you bring me
that baby for—you and Lippo ? You know whose brat it
is, I suppose, and look out for the reward? I thought so,
or I would not have given it house-room. Toto is more
work than enough, so masterful as he is—and so ravenous."
" Nay," said Lippo, as Avith a sheepish apology for his
weakness. " I know nothing of whose brat it is—I was
just sorry for it; left in the soaking fields there; and I
picked it up as I should pick up a latne lamb. What do
you think of it, my dearest ? does it look a poor child or a
rich one, eh ? Women are quick to judge."
The black brows of Nita lowered in wrath.
" Mercy of heaven ! Who would have to do with such
dolts as men ? Just because the child was there you pick
it up, never thinking of all the hungry mouths half-fed at
home! Shame on you. You are an unnatural brute. You
would starve your own to nourish a stranger! "
"Nay, sweetest Nita!" murmured Lippo, coaxingly.
" On such a night—and a child taken down by flood, too—
not a living soul but would have done as I did. And who
knows but he may be some rich father's child, and make
SIGN A.
23
our fortunes ? Any way, the township will give us credit,
and he can go to the Innocenti to-morrow if we find no gain
in him. Look what his things betoken."
" Oh, his things are rough-spun enough, and vile as can
be," said his wife, in a fuming fury. " And would a rich
man's child be out on flood ? It is only the poor brats
that the weather finds loose for it to play antics with; the
child is a beggar's son, and this thing linked round his neck,
by a little string, is a thing you get at the fairs for a copper-
bit."
The two men looked together at the locket that she held
to them ; it was of base-metal—a little poor round trum-
pery plaything. On it there was the one word in raised
letters of Signa, and inside a curl of soft light hair. That
was all. They could none of them read, so the letters 011
the metal told them nothing. They stooped together over
the sleeping child.
He was pretty and well made ; he lay quite naked in the
hay, and beside brown Toto looked like one of the little
white marble children of old Mino. His lashes and his
brows were black, but over his forehead hung little rings of
soft, fair, crumpled hair.
Bruno turned away.
" She used to look just like that when she was a little
child," he muttered to himself.
Lippo glanced round to see if his wife heard. But she
was busy with the hen, who had got into a barrel of rice,
and was eating treble her own price in the market at one
meal.
" The brat must go," said she, turning and flogging the
hen awav. " As for a chance that it is a rich man's child,
that is all rubbish. Tou make your, bread with next year's
corn. Chances like that are old wives' tales. "What we
have to do is to feed six hungry stomachs. Tou were a
fool to bring it here at all. But to dream one should keep
it! Holy Mary!"
" Holy Mary would say, keep it," said Bruno, munching
his crust.
" Maybe it is your own, Bruno. Those that hide can
find," said his sister-in-law sharply. "The child shall pack
to-day. I shall go and tell them at the guard-house. Toto
is more than enough, and as for that locket, you can get
24
SIGN A.
such trash as that at any fair for a couple of figs. That
goes for nothing."
"Well, well, keep the poor bahy till noon, and I will see
what the Curato says. It is always well to see what he
says," her hucband answered her hurriedly, and afraid of
the gathering storm on Bruno's face.
Bruno was passionate, tempestuous, and weak, and the
quieter and subtler brother ruled him with ease whilst
seeming to obey. But for turning the baby of dead Pippa's
to public maintenance—Lippo had a foreboding in him that
in this matter his brother would be too strong for him.
He hurried away out of pretext of the labour awaiting
them in the inundated country, not without misgiving that
the darkest suspicions as to the fatherhood of the foundling
were awakening in the jealous soul of his wife.
They went straight to the edge of the river, and got out
their old black boat, with its carved prow and tricoloured
tiller, and pulled down the current of the now quiet water
to see with the rest what they could help to save from the
flotsam and jetsum of the flood. Whole districts lay under
water, and the river was full of dead cats and dogs, drowned
sheep, floating pipkins and wine-casks, bales of hay, carcases
of cows, and broken bits of furniture from many a ruined
farmstead and peasant's liut laid low.
" Listen," said the elder brother suddenly, when the boat
was fairly out from the bank, and Avith his hooked pole he
drew in a spinning-wheel with its hank of flax drenched
like a drowned girl's hair. " Listen to me, Lippo. Pippa's
son must not go to charity. Do you hear F "
" I hear. But we are poor men, and Pippa was "
" That is neither here nor there," said Bruno, with his
dark brows meeting. "She never asked alms of us, nor
house-room, nor did anything except to go to her death just
as sheep tumble over a rock. The baby must not go to the
parish. We did faulty enough—letting her go down flood
with never an office, of church said over her. And who
knows—who knows—she might not be quite dead, after all."
" Nita will not keep him—that is sure," said the younger
quickly. " Look, that is Barcelli's old red cow. You may
know her by the spot on her side."
" Would she keep him if she were paid ? "
Lippo's eyes lighted with joy, but he bent a grave face
SIGN A.
25
over his pole as he raked in a floating oil-flask by its wicker
coat.
" I doubt if she would. She has a deal of trouble with
Toto. And who is there to pay, pray P We know no
more than the cow there who the man was—you know
that."
" I will pay."
"You!"
" Yes ; I will pay the child's keep."
" Holy augels ! And you who were for ever at words and
blows with Pippa, and stabbed at her even for being too
gay!" _
" I will pay," said Bruno.
Lippo rowed on in silence some moments.
" How much ? " he asked at last.
" I will give you half all I get."
Lippo's white teeth showed themselves in a sudden smile.
His brother gained a good deal in corn and oil and beans
and hay and wine, being on good land, and being a man
who worked and got the uttermost out of the soil that
he shared with his master, and Lippo was often pinched by
his father-in-law Baldo the cobbler, and half famished by his
wife, and was a true, thrifty son of the soil, and knew the
worth of a hundredth part of a copper coin as well as any
man between sea and mountain.
"Half all you get, and we to keep the child?" he said
absently, and as with reluctance. " But what can we say
to Nita ? "
" You are never at a loss for good lying, Lippo."
Lippo smiled ; his vanity was flattered.
" I never lie to Nita. She always finds one out. Only
in the matter of Pippa's son I hid the truth to please you.
She never would nurse the child if she guessed. But as for
making her keep him, say "what one will, it will be im-
possible—impossible, my dear."
" It must be," said Bruno, withdrawing his hand from the
tiller and bringing it down with violence on the boat's side,
while his eyes flashed with blue fire as the lightning flashes,
most summer nights over the blue hills of his own Signa.
" It must be. I will pay. I will give you half I get
Good harvests—you know -what that is. But Pippa's child
shall not go to the parish while I have an arm to drive
26
SIGN A.
a plough through the ground or to guide over the field.
Settle it with your wife your own way. But Pippa's child
shall grow up amongst us."
" Dear Bruno, to please you I will try," said gentle
Lippo with a sigh. " But we have brats too many in the
house, and you know what Nita's ' Nay ' can be."
" Nay or yea, the child stays," said "Bruno.
" The half of everything," murmured Lippo, as lie bent
to his oars and passed by a dog howling on the top of its
floating kennel to reach his pole to a butcher's basket of
meat that was tossing amongst the rubbish.
But Bruno, having the tiller, pushed first to reach the
dog.
" It is only a cur," said Lippo.
Bruno pulled the dog into the boat.
In the Lastra, and in the town, and in all the country
round or near Signa, the brothers were known as well as
the mass-bells of the churches. The Signa people thought
that Bruno the contadino was a bad man enough, ready
with his knife and often in a brawl, and too often seen
at fairs and with other men's wives on feast-days. Lippo
they liked and respected, and everybody spoke him fair;
and he would keep the peace most beautifully when men
got angry in the street before his house-door.
They were both handsome men, and could neither of
them read, and believed in their priest and their pater-
noster, and had never been beyond the mountains around
Signa, except now and then—Bruno with his bullocks, and
Lippo in a donkey-cart to buy leather—down the Yaldarno
into the Lily City.
Bruno lived on the wild hillside, amongst the thyme and
the myrtle and the gorse and the grass-cropping sheep and
the ever-singing nightingales. Lippo dwelt down in the
street, doing as little as he could, and by preference no-
thing, in the smell of his wife's frying and in the sound of
her father's little hammer; rowing out his boat when there
was any chance for it to pay, and seeing after the few sheep
that the shoemaker kept above the bridge. They had been
born within a year of one another—sons of peasants and
workers in the fields. Bruno had stayed on the old land
where his fathers had had rights of the soil uncounteO
generations. Lippo had loitered down love-making into
SIGN A.
27
the Lastra, and had married very early the daughter of
well-to-do old Baldo.
There had been several sons after them. Two had been
killed as soldiers, and others had died in infancy by various
strokes of evil chance; and the youngest of them all had
been Pippa—Pippa, whose body was gone out on the flood
to the sea with never a prayer said over her. Beautiful,
fierce, wayward, wilful, fire-mouthed Pippa, who had run
over the hills like a lizard, and who had had saucy words on
her tongue as a rose has its thorns, and who had had all
Signa gazing after her for her beauty when she had walked
singing like a cherub in the wake of the banners of the
church.
Not that she had ever cared much for the church,—poor
Pippa.
She had always been quarrelsome and self-willed and
headstrong; and had flouted her lovers, and been petulant
to her own hindrance, and as wild as a hawk, and provoking
—yes, provoking, past the endurance of any man who was
a brother and nothing more. She would never sit quiet
and spin; she would never keep her eyes on her tress of
straw as other girls did; if she milked the cow she would
upset the pail just out of wantonness, and would laugh and
dance to see their rage when she let the pigs run in amongst
her brother's plot of green peas. Yes, certainly, she was
provoking; a bad girl, even though loving at heart ; no one
was to blame that she had gone away without a word and
come back so, with a child at her breast, to find her death
the night of the flood.
A self-willed foolish girl and with wrong-doing ingrained
in her—as for patience, who could be very patient with
a woman that let the pigs in amongst your peas just when
green peas fetched their weight in silver ? And then she
had such a tongue too, the little shrew—true, she did not
bear malice, and would not growl, growl, growl for hours
' together as Nita would, and Nita's mother, thinking it the
only way to manage men; true, she was a generous soul,
and would let a beggar have her dinner, though meals were
meagre on the hills ; and when one had beaten her till she
was blue she would not tell, but say she had fallen from the
ladder trimming the vines, or that the bees had stung her.
Still a wilful, quarrelsome, pettish thing ; no man could be
28
SIGN A.
blamed for her ill-hap nor for her end. So Lippo said to
himself when his brother had gone up to the hills, and lie
himself left his boat to go down the narrow street home-
ward, pondering on Pippa's child and on what he should say
to Nita.
As he went up the stairs he settled the lie to his mind's
content, and entered the room looking with his fairest faith
out of his clear brown eyes.
" I am going to be frank with you, Nita," he said, and
then he sat down and lied so prettily, that if there be a
Father of Lies he must quite have rejoiced to hear him.
Nita listened as well as a woman can listen—that is,
interrupting twenty times and getting up to' do some irre-
levant thing twice twenty.
" Bruno's son ! " she cried at last.
" Hush ! The children will hear," said Lippo. " It is as
I tell you. Only Bruno must not know that you know,
because he is so afraid that red-haired Boma whom he is
courting should hear of it. But you see why I closed with
him, Nita. It will be a good thing for us. We can eat
like fatting pigs off Bruno's land. Nothing to prevent us.
And it is hill land, you know, and his share comes to a good
bit, taking fair weather and foul. And then, besides that,
we shall have credit in the Lastra, for Bruno never will say
a word, and the Curato and all the place may as well think
the child a foundling as not. A good deed smells sweet in
the neighbours' nostrils, and a good name is like a blest
palm. AVe must tell your father, or he will grumble at
their being a seventh mouth. But nobody else need know.
The brat will grow up with the others, and we shall seem
kind, that is all."
" To think of its being Bruno's! " cried Nita, with a clap
of her big brown hands. " Did I not say so, now ? Did I
not jeer him as he looked at it asleep F Oh-oh ! AVPo can
deceive me ? Never you try, Lippo, more ! "
" You can see through a millstone," replied Lippo, with
an embrace of her. " Only an ass can ever seek to blind
you, and that is why I toid you the truth, though Bruno
would have screened it. He is so afraid of the creature he
goes to now ever knowing—you understand."
" The child will be a bother," said Anita, remembering
the kicks and cuffs with whose best administration she could
SIGN A.
29
scarce manage to keep the peace amongst her brood, or
their hands ever out of the soup-pot.
" Oh, no," said Lippo, shrugging his shoulders, " where
there are six there may as well he seven. He will tumble
up with the others. We are to have half of all Bruno gets,
and I can guess to a stalk, you know, what an acre of wheat
is worth, or what an olive or a fig tree hears. Ho fattore
would outwit me. I was not bred out on the fields for
nothing. Half of everything, you know, Nita. That will
mean a good deal in good seasons. I am very hungry,
carina. Could you not fry something in oil, nice and
tempting for one ? An artichoke, now, or a blackbird ? "
Nita grumbled at the extravagance, but being in a good
humour went downstairs and across the way and brought
over some artichokes and fried them and ate them with her
husband, the children being sent to make dust pies and
castles in the sun on the stones below, old Baldo keeping
an eye on them over his half door.
Lippo and his wife ate their artichokes, and drank a little
wine with them.
Pippa's son cried unnoticed in his nest of hay, and sobbed
out his one little word for mother, which was like the moan
of a little unfledged bird left in the snow.
"We will bring him up to help himself," said Lippo, with
his mouth filled with the fried eggs and oil.
The child sobbed on, and felt for his mother's breast, and
only had his small soft rosy hands torn with the thorns and
pricked with the burrs and briars of the sun-dried hay.
CHAPTER Y.
Meanwhile Bruno went on up the hills; up the same
old road which had felt Pippa's footsteps on it the night
before; with the river underneath it, and on the other side
the mountains rising, with the olives and vines about their
sides, and on their summits old watchtowers and fortresses,
and dusky woods of ilex, and cloudy masses of stone-pine,
that sent their strong odour down the valley a score of
miles.
3°
SIGN A.
Bruno went on his way, looking neither right nor left.
He went over the ground so offceu, and he had seen it all
from the year he was boru ; always this and never anything
else; and long familiarity dulls the sense of beauty, even
where such sense has been awakened, and Bruno's never
had been—except for a woman's looks.
He strode on, not looking up nor looking back; a straight-
limbed, swarthy, fine-built peasant, of thirty years or more,
with the oval face of his country, and broad, black, luminous
eyes, soft and contemplative, like the eyes of the ox, when
the rage was not alight in them.
He did not look round, because peasants do not look up
from the soil; and he did not look back, because he had no
care to see the spot where he had kneeled down in the wet
grass by the broken bushes, with the noise of the river in
his ears.
He went up the sea-road some way, and then quitted it
and ascended to the left. The estate to which he belonged
was on the side of a spur of the mountains, that turns to
Signa, and faces straight down the valley, and whose wine
is named as famous in the Bacco in Toscana of Bedi.
There are beautiful hills in this country, steep and bold,
and formed chiefly of limestone and sandstone, covered all
over with gum-cistus and thyme, and wild-roses and myrtle,
wuth low growing laurels and tall cypresses, and boulders
of stone, and old thorn trees, and flocks of nightingales
always, and the sad-voiced little owl that was beloved of
Shelley.
Bruno's farmstead was on one of these hills ; half the
hill was cultured, and the other half was wild; and on its
height was an old, grey, mighty place, once the palace of a
cardinal, and where there now dwelt the steward of the soil
on which Bruno had been born.
His cottage was a large, low, white building, with a red
roof, and a great arched door, and a sun-dial on the wall,
and a group of cypresses beside, and a big walnut-tree before
it. There was an old well with some broken sculpture;
some fowls scratching under the fig boughs; a pig hunting
for roots in the black bare earth; behind it stretched the
wild hillside, and in front a great slope of fields and vine-
yards ; and far below them in the distance the valley and
the river and the bridge, with the high crest of the upper
SIGN A.
31
Signa, and the low-lying wall-towers of the Lastra on either
side of the angry waters.
Bruno did not look back at it at all. He saw the sun rise,
over it, and the beautiful pale light steal up, and up, and
up, and up, whenever he rose to his work in the day-dawn.
But it was nothing at all to him. "When now and then a
traveller or a painter strayed thither, and said it was
beautiful, Bruno smiled, glad because it was his own
country—that was all.
He went into his cold, quiet, desolate house, and sat
down for a minute's rest; he was tired. There was no one
to greet him. He did everything for himself. He had no
neighbours. The nearest contadino lived a mile doAvn
beyond the fields which in summer were a sea of maize
and a starry world of fire-flies ; and the old palace was some
distance higher on the crest, where the gorse grew thickest,
and the mountain moss clustered about the roots of the
stone-pines.
Here—in the long, low, rambling dwelling, with the sun-
dial on its wall, and the great archways underneath it, and
the stacks of straw before it—there had been nine of them
once. Now Bruno lived there alone.
He sat down a minute on the settle, and thought.
Thinking was new work to him. He never thought at all,
except of the worm in the ripening wheat, or the ticks in
the flock's fleeces. The priest did his thinking for him.
"What use was it to pay a priest for having opinions if one
had to think for one's self as well ?
But he sat and thought now.
Poor Pippa! what a little, ruddy, pretty thing she was,
lying in her white swaddling bands, when he was a big
rough boy twelve years old, with bare feet and chest, who
used to come in from the fields hungry and footsore, and
feel angry to see the last-come child in his mother's arms,
getting all her care and caresses.
He bore Pippa a grudge from her birth.
They were all boys, rough and tumble together, share
and share alike; and then one summer morning the girl
came, and their mother never seemed the same to them
again—never any more. The little girl, with a face like
the bud of the red rose laurel, seemed to be all she thought
about—or so they fancied; and anything good that could
32
SIGN A.
be got, honey, or a drop of new milk, or a little white loaf
from the town, or an apricot from the fattoria, was always
set aside for Pippa; pretty, saucy, noisy, idle Pippa, who
was more often in mischief than they were, but never got,
as they did, a thrashing, and a wish that the devil might
come and fetch away all naughty children.
There had been times when he had hated Pippa, hated
her from the first day he saw her lying on her mother's
bosom, with her little red mouth, clinging as a bee does at
a flower, to the night when he had scolded her for danc-
ing with any fool that asked her, and then she had mocked
him about a dead love, and he had struck at her with his
knife, and the people had dragged him off her, all blind
with rage and shame at his own misdoing; and the blood
had spouted up out from her neck, and stained the lace she
wore as red as a goldfinch's feathers.
He had hated her always.
It seemed to him now that he had been like a brute to
her—poor, pretty, brown-eyed, happy, self-willed thing,
who had been spoilt from her babyhood upward.
Lippo remembered how provoking she had been, and
justified himself as he went home through the Lastra.
But Bruno forgot it, and only reproached himself. He
had always been rough and fierce and moody with her—oh
yes, no doubt. If he had been patient with her—he twelve
years older, too—she might never have run away from her
home on the hill, and borne that nameless child, and gone
to her death on the old sea-road.
Ho doubt he had done wrong by her; had been too
severe and tyrannous, and had helped to make the cottage
distasteful to her after their mother had died and he had
become master, and had tried to shut her in, as a thrush is
shut in a wicker cage.
He forgot all her faults—poor dead Pippa—and he re-
membered all his own. Liberal natures will err thus to
themselves; and Bruno, with all his evil ways, was liberal
as the sun and winds.
Poor Pippa !
He saw her as he had seen her standing out in the light
on the hill, with her little brown hands plaiting the straw
all unevenly, and her bow-like mouth gay with laughter at
some piece of mischief sweet to her as a fig in summer.
SIGN A.
33
She had used to look so pretty, with her arch eyes shining
under her great straw penthouse of a hat, and her supple,
slim shape, in brown and red, like a firefly, standing up as
a P°PPy does against the corn on the amber light of the
evening sky, here where the hill was just the same, and
only she was a thing that was gone for ever and ever and ever.
Bruno shut his eyes not to see the hill. But he could
not shut out his thoughts. He had been a brute to her.
It stirred and grew in him ; this mute remorse, which Lippo
would have laughed at, and which had been awake ever
since he had gone about his business as the river rose, and
left the dead woman alone to drift down with the flood.
She was dead, of course, and it could hurt her no more
to'^be swept out to the salt sea-pools westward than to be
lowered into the earth in a coffin. Still Bruno, if he had
gone straight to the priest and told him, and had let the
Church sorrow over and bury her, would not have been
tormented by the thought of her as he was now. How, in
a curious kind of half-stupid way, he felt as if he had found
her and had killed her.
There had been war between him and Pippa always ; and
though it had shocked him a little to find her lying there
lifeless in the dark, yet he had not cared much at first.
But since he had forsaken her to the will of the waters, in
the vague fear of that nameless trouble which his .brother
had threatened him with as possible, Bruno—a brave man
all his days—felt a coward; and with the tingling shame
of that new craven sense came a self-reproach in which any
rough word and fierce act of his life against the lost creature
rose in judgment against him.
Poor Pippa!
After all, what had her faults been ? Only mirth and
over-eagerness for pleasure, and a quick tongue, and a love
of the sunshine idly spent amongst fruits and flowers whilst
others were working. These were all.
She had been truthful and generous of temper, and never
unwilling to forgive. Hay, though he had struck at her
with his open blade that fair-night, she had called out to
the people not to hurt him for it; and when she had left
the hillside that very summer—no one knew for whither
nor with whom—did she not tell an old woman, who alone
saw her going through the millet at break of day with a
D
34
SIGN A.
bundle, " Say to my brothers I am not angry any more;
they have been unkind to me, but I have been troublesome,
and said hot words very often ; and I will pray for them, if
that will do any good: only tell them not to try to bring
me back, because we never are at peace together."
Poor Pippa!
He shut his eyes against the sunlight; but, shut them as
he would with both hands, he saw her as he had seen her
last, coming through the beanflowers, with the long evening
shadows and the little golden fireflies seeming to run before
her ; when he had turned across the fields and avoided her
because of the thrust with the knife, which she had never
spoken of, and of which he wa3 half ashamed and half de-
fiant, and which therefore he would never admit that he
regretted, living on in silence with her under the same roof,
trusting to chance.
And chance came—the chance that one summer morning
the bed of Pippa was empty, and old Viola, comirig in with
a sheaf of green cane for her donkey, told them how she
had met the girl, and of her farewell Avords.
Shut his eyes as he would, he saw her so, amongst the
purple beanflowers that night when his heart had swelled
a little at sight of her, and. he had been half inclined to tell
her he Avas sorry for that blow, and then had felt the pride
rise in him, and had said to himself that the girl had
deserved it—disobeying him, and then jesting at him—and
so had struck across the rustling corn, and let her go
without a Avord.
And noAv she was dead—gone out on the flood to the
sea; and he had never told her that he had been sorry for
the stab, and never could tell her now.
"Would Glod tell her ? or any one of the saints ?
Bruno wondered. He felt as if that dead woman whom
the river had got stood for ever betAveen him and all the
hosts of heaven.
He was a strong man, and his emotions and his intelli-
gence Avere both unawakened, and his life was much like
that of his own plough bullocks ; but he shuddered through
all his limbs as he rose up from the wooden settle and faced
the day. Work Avith the labourer is an instinct, as watch-
ing is the house-dog's ; and pain may stifle it for a moment,
but no more.
SIGN A.
35
He went out and unloosed the bar of the stable-doors,
and brought out his oxen, and muzzled them and yoked
them together, and drove them out over the steep slanting
fields that ran upward and downward, and were intersected
by lines of maples and mulberries with the leafless vines
clinging to them, and by watercourses cut deep that the
rain might be borne down the mountain side, and by wild
hedges of briony and rose and arbutus, with here and there
winter-red leaves of creepers that the winds had forgotten
to blow away.
It was a grey morning, with heavy white mists lying over
all the valley down below ; and on the high hills it was very
cold. Bruno drove his meek large-eyed beasts through the
black earth with a heavy heart.
He seemed always to see Pippa as she had used to come,
when their father lived, and she was a child, with a black
loaf and a flask of wine, out to them on the hill in the
ploughing time, and stroked the bullocks, and put round
their leathern frontlets gay wreaths of anemones, purple
and red and blue, or the berries of the beautiful corbezzolo.
And now she was dead—stone dead—like the mouse the
share killed in the furrow.
The bullocks, well used to goad and curse, turned their
broad foreheads and looked at him with luminous fond eyes :
he was so gentle with them—they were grateful, but they
wondered why.
Bruno ploughed all day, and the wind blew up from the
sea, and he felt as if it were blowing her long wet hair
against him.
" I will do good by the child, so help me , and per-
haps they will tell her in heaven," he said to himself, as he
went to and fro up and down the shelving fields underneath
the lines of the leafless trees.
" Perhaps they will tell her in heaven? " he thought, as
he went over the heavy wet clods in the mist.
36
SIGN A.
CHAPTER VI.
Brukone Marcillo, always known as Bruno, did what
all his people had always done for seven hundred centuries
and more.
They had been vassals and spearmen in the old warlike
times, and well-to-do contadini ever afterwards; giving
their sons, when need arose, to die in the common cause of
the native soil, but otherwise never stirring off their own
hillside; good husbandmen, bold men, fierce haters, honest
neighbours, keeping their women-kind strictly, and letting
their males have as much license as was compatible with
unremitting and patient labour in all seasons.
They were a race remarkable for physical beauty—a
beauty that is strictly national; the dark straight-browed
classic beauty which Giotto has put in his Garden of Olives,
and Signorelli given to his noble Prophets.
They had always intermarried with mountain races like
their own, or taken wives from the Lastra households,
where the ancient blood ran pure. The father of Brunone
and Lippo had done otherwise; he had taken a work-girl
of the city, a pretty feckless thing, whom he had seen one
market night that he had strayed into the Loggia theatre,
when a good harvest had put too much loose cash in his
pockets, and the humours of Cimarosa's Nernici Generosi
had been making him laugh till he cried.
The girl had become to him a good wife enough, nobody
had denied that; but she was not of the stern stuff that the
Marcillo housewives always had been, with their busts of
Ceres and their brows of Juno, their arms that could guide
the oxen and their heads that could balance a wine-barrel.
She was timid, and some said false, though that was
never proved, and she had not the hill-born strength of
mind and body that these people who had lived nigh a
thousand years in the same air possessed.
Her second son, Filippo, or Lippo, inherited her consti-
tution, and with it her supplicating caress of manner and
her timidity—perhaps her falseness too; but the Lastra
did not think so; the Lastra was fond of Lippo, though
he had deserted the ways of his fathers, and dwelt in an
SIGN A.
37
idleness not altogether creditable and altogether alien to
the habits of his race, who had always been used to labour
together, father and sons, and often grandsons, all under
the same roof and on the same fields, generation after
generation.
When the large family dwindled down to one man, it
was out of custom to leave so much land to a solitary
labourer. But Brunone Marcillo was a favourite with his
master, and one of the best husbandmen in the province;
besides he was sure to marry and fill the house, they thought,
so he was left undisturbed, and the land suffered nothing;
for though he loved his pleasure in a wild lawless way, and
took fierce fits of it at times, he was devoted to his home-
stead and his work, and loved his birthplace with that fast-
rooted love of the Tuscan which makes the little red roof
under the red waning skies, on the solitary upland, or in
the silent marsh, or amidst the blue-flowered fields of flax,
or above the thyme-covered, wind-blown hills by the sea,
more precious and more lovely than any greater fate or
fairer gifts elsewhere.
All alone on his little farm Bruno became a man well to
do, and who could have put money by had he not loved
women so well—so they said.
It was a broad rich piece of land that went with the
dwelling-house he occupied. He grew wheat, and maize,
and beans, and artichokes, and had several sturdy fig-trees
that yielded richly, and noble olives that numbered their
hundred years, and the vines that marched with his corn
were amongst the best in the Signa country.
The half of all its produce was his, according to the way
of the land and the provisions of custom, and the house
was a better one than most of its degree; and the fields
that were his lay well on the open hillside, sun-swept, as
was wanted by vines and grain both, but sheltered from
cold winds by the jutting out of the quarried rocks and
the woods of ilex and pine that were above.
Bruno was a laborious workman, and was skilled in field
labour; he knew how to make an ear of barley bear double,
and how to keep blight away, and the fly from the vine.
He could not read; he could not write; his notions of
G-od were shut up in a little square coloured picture,
framed and hung up over the gateway into his fields to
38
SIGN A.
bring a blessing there; bis idea of political duty was com-
prised in hating any one who taxed him, and being ready
to shoot any one who raised the impost on grain; but he
was a husbandman after Virgil's own heart; he wanted no
world beyond the waving of his corn, and if a steer were
sick, or when the grapes were ripe, he took no sleep, but
watched all night, loving his cattle and his fruits as poets
their verse or kings their armies.
On the whole Bruno led a contented and prosperous life,
and if he had not been so ready with his wrath, might have
been welcome in all households; and if he had not been
over fond of those fairs in all the little towns where wan-
dering players set up their little music booths, and of the
women that he found there, and of the license that is
always to be had by any man whose money-bag has its
mouth open aud its stomach filled, might also have become
a very wealthy man in his own way. But he was fierce,
and every one feared him, and he was improvident, and
every one fleeced him. And he was lax and lawless in
his loves, and had 'a dangerous name in the countryside
amongst the mothers of maidens.
So that he of all men had had no title to be hard upon
Pippa: and yet hard he had been always.
The most amorous men and the wildest are usually the
most exacting of virtue and modesty in their own women.
He had always hated her: yes, honestly hated her he
told himself; and as she grew up -into girlhood, and they
were shut alone in the same house, always opposed one
to another, Pippa's idleness, and sauciness, and rebellion
against homekeeping, and passion for dancing and straying
and idling, infuriated him against her more and more with
every day that dawned.
Bruno, with all his excesses, never neglected or slurred
over his labour. The land and its needs were always first
with him. He would have had his sister one of those
maidens, numerous around him, who asked nothing better
than the daily round of household and field duties; who
could reap as wrell as a man; who could harness an ox and
guide him ; and who were busy from dusk of dawm to night-
fall hoeing, drawing water, spinning, plaiting, shelling
beans, rearing chickens, drying tomatoes, setting cauli-
flowers, thinning fruit-trees, winding silk off the cocoons,
STGNA.
39
and went to bed witb tired limbs and a light conscience,
never dreaming of more pleasure than a stroll on a feast-
day with a neighbour, or a new white linen skirt for some
grand church function.
""Why was not Pippa like that? " he had asked himself,
angrily, ten thousand times, instead of a girl that would
hardly do as much as tie up a few bunches of carnations or
S. Catherine lilies for the market.
The Marcillo women had always been reared in strong
usefulness and in stern chastity. This handsome, buoyant,
gay, insolent, idle thing offended him in every way aud
every turn.
He would have married her away willingly, and dowered
her well, to the first honest fellow; but Pippa had laughed
in the faces of all the neighbours' sons who had wanted her
to wed with them. She was in no hurry, she said.
She made all the countryside in love with her, and then
turned her back on it with a saucy laugh, and the sunshine
in her face was never merrier than whenever she heard that
two young fellows had quarrelled about her, and drawn
knives on one another, and set all the Lastra talking.
So that when Pippa disappeared many were glad, and
none very sorry. Bruno smarted with shame—that was
all.
Indeed, when she was gone away, the townsfolk talked
of a foreigner, a student and painter, who had been seen
with the girl at evening on the road, or by the river, or in
the shadow of the old Lastra bastions; a young man with
a delicate face, and a playful way, and a gay tongue, who
had wandered on foot, with his knapsack and colours, down
from the Savoy country and into Tuscany, and had danced
often with Pippa, and had been met with her after sunset,
on the hillside.
But none had told Bruno till too late, being afraid of
his too ready knife if a hint were taken wrong, and he had
known nothing of these tales until Pippa had vanished, and
even then the neighbours were slow to rouse his wrath by
telling the scanty rumours they had heard.
Even the young man's name the people had not known ;
a youngster lightly come and lightly gone, whom no one
took account of, till of a sudden they noticed that he had
been unseen since Pippa had been missing. He had lodged
4°
SIGN A.
a little while above a wide shop, and gone up and down the
river, and to and from the old white town, painting; and
had danced at the fairs and learned to strum on a guitar,
and eaten piles of fruit, and been restless and graceful as
a firefly: that was all; and only a few women had observed
as much as that.
It told nothing to Bruno ; and, besides, if they had told
him a hundred times as much, he could have done nothing ;
a contadino is rooted to the soil, and it no more would have
seemed possible to him to travel into far countries than to
have used his ploughshare for a boat, or driven his steers
to turn the sea like sod.
People had hardly ever thought what Pippa's fate had
been. If anything great had come to her, the countryside
would have heard of it.
In these little ancient burghs and hillside villages, scat-
tered up and down between mountain and sea, there is
often some boy or girl, with a more wonderful voice, or a
more beautiful face, or a sweeter knack of song, or a more
vivid trick of improvisation than the others; and this boy
or girl strays away some day with a little bundle of clothes,
and a coin or two, or is fetched away by some far-sighted
pedlar in such human wares, who buys them as bird fan-
ciers buy the finches from the nets; and then, years and
years afterwards, the town or hamlet hears indistinctly of
some great prima donna, or of some lark-throated tenor,
that the big world is making happy as kings, and rich as
kings' treasurers, and the people carding the flax or shell-
ing the chestnuts say to one another, " That was little black
Lia, or that was our old Momo;" but Momo or Lia the
village or the vinefield never sees again.
If anything great had come in that sort of way to Pippa,
Signa would have heard of it. There is always some one to
tell of a success—always some one to bring word, so that
the friends may gird up their loins, and go and smell out
the spoil, claim the share of it, and remind Momo, as he
comes out of a palace, of his barefoot babyhood, and call
to Lia's mind the time when she, who now quarrels with
princes, was glad of the day's bran-bread.
But none had ever said anything of Pippa. She had
dropped out of sight and remembrance, and no one had
asked what had become of her, though the girl had been
SIGN A.
41
beautiful in ner way, darkly, brightly, roughly, tenderly,
capriciously beautiful, like the barley blowing from shade
to sun—only, no man ever would stand her temper, said
the women.
That had been conceded everywhere; and her brothers
had been pitied.
Between the day that she had gone over the fields with
the farewell word to old Viola and the night that she had
stumbled to her death, over the sea, in the dark road, no
one had ever heard or known anything of Pippa.
But it was not because her story was a strange one; it
was only because it was so common. Mystery is to the
tongue of the storyteller as butter to the hungry mongrel;
but what is simple is passed over by human mouths as
daisies by the grazing horse.
Her tale was very simple.
That fair-day in Signa she had been so resolute to go to
the merry-making, because of the stranger, who would
Whirl to the thrum of the mandolin as a bat does when a
lamp burns, and who would come through the beanflowers
to see her plait straw when her brothers were out in the
fields, and who was gay like herself, and passionate, and
young, and found but one song worth the singing when the
sun went down and the fireflies burned.
Then there had come Bruno's blow, and the stab in her
breast—and all a man's natural passion of sympathy had
been aroused, and all a girl's terror of her fierce brother's
worse vengeance, if only the truth were known.
And so her lover took her with him when he went back
to Prance, while the beanflowers faded and died ; and
Pippa loved him like a dog—poor Pippa! who always having
been so saucy of tongue, and stubborn of neck, and proud,
and full of petulance, clung like a vine, and crouched like
a spaniel, and trembled like a leaf, when once she loved, as
all such women do.
Thus the broad shining Tuscan fields were changed for
streets of Paris, and the hills of olive for the roofs of lead;
and the song of the grilli for the beat of the drum; and the
fires of the lucciole for the shine of the gas ; and Pippa, a
thing of sun and wind aud seablown air, fresh as a fruit
and free as a bird, was cooped up in a student's attic, with
the roar of the traffic for ever on her ear, and the glistening
42
SIGN A.
zinc of her neighbour's house-roofs for ever before her
casement.
He did what he could for her.
He was a landscape painter and a student of Paris. He
had a beautiful face, great dreams, ardent passions, and no
money, except such little pittance as an old doting mother,
a widow in a little Breton hamlet, could send him, by
pinching herself of oil and bread. Bor three months he
worshipped Pippa; and this scarlet poppy from the Tuscan
wheat glowed on a hundred canvases in a hundred forms;
and then of course he tired. Then, of course, the poppy
ceased to be a magical flower of passion and of sleep; it
seemed only a red bubble, blowing useless in the useful
corn.
He thought he hid this from her ; but she felt, before he
knew, it. "Women will always do so who love -their lives
out in a year, as Pippa did.
The Mimis, and Bibis, and Libis around her were happy
enough, with a pot of mignonette for their garden, and a
theatre for their heaven, and a Sunday in the woods now
and then for their liberty. Besides, they could all chatter
with one another, and change their lovers, if need was, and
sing little triplets, like little canaries, as they sat sewing
at rose-coloured ball-skirts, or twirling up their cambric
mock rosebuds.
But Pippa was in exile. Pippa had the woman's worst
crime of loving over much. Pippa had brought nothing
with her but her own full, fierce, fond, little heart of storm.
Pippa felt her heart break in this cage.
Pippa could not read. Pippa knew nothing that he
talked of, except when he told her that he loved her, and
men get weary of saying this too long to the same woman.
Pippa could only plait straw—and that not very well; and
no one wanted it in Paris.
Pippa, when in the dance-gardens, one night, struck with
a knife at a man who would have kissed her, and wounded
him sorely, and wrhen hidden away from the perils that
arose, could not be made to see she had done wrong,
because Bruno had stabbed her, and she had borne him no
malice, and here she was on her just defence, and had done
right, she thought. Then 'her lover grew wroth with her,
and Pippa, whose spirit was broken, like that of all fiery
SIGN A.
43
creatures when they love, could only sob and kiss his feet;
and then,—he went elsewhere.
Then came hard winters, and a crying child, and the
garret was cold and empty, and debt stole in like a ghost,
and hunger with him, and Pippa sold her pearls—real
pearls, fished up from the deep sea by coral divers, and
worn at fairs and feasts by her with the honest pride of
the true Tuscan peasant. Only she never let him know
the pearls were sold. She made him think that it was one
of his own pictures which had brought them that little heap
of gold.
But that money lasted very little time, and the child
sickened and died, and the summer came ; but that would
not banish hunger; and Pippa lost her beauty, and her
rich, round, radiant look, and her great brown eyes got a
frightened look—because he so seldom kissed her now, and
sometimes would give her a little gesture like that which a
man gives when he sweeps away quickly with his elbows
some dead flower or dropped ashes. Yet still he was good
to her—oh, yes—he was good. Pippa told herself so a
thousand times a day. He never beat her. Pippa, once
so saucy and so proud, was grateful. Love is thus.
Then another winter came, the third one—that was hard-
est. They had nothing to eat for many days. They sold
their clothes and their bed-linen, and even the copper pot
in which their food was stewed; and she had no more
pearls. •
Pippa had nothing either of her beauty left but her
straight brows and her big, lustrous eyes. She was no
longer even a bright bubble, as the field poppy was. She
was a little dusky peasant, pale and starved, and blown
amongst the snow like a frozen redbreast.
"It is the pictures he cares for," she had learned to say
to herself. She had found this out. She got to hate them,
the senseless things of wood and colour, that cost so much
money, and now had all his looks, all his longings, all his
memories, all his regrets.
She hated even those canvas likenesses of herself, that
had blossomed into being with the purple beanflowers,
under the summer suns of Signa, when their passion was
new-born.
Pippa loved her lover with the same love, fierce, and
44
SIGN A.
faithful, and dog-like, and measureless, as when he had first
taken her small head within his hands, and kissed her on
the eyes and mouth.
But it was a love that could understand nothing; least
of all, change.
One day, in the bitterness of the mid-winter, after weeks
of hunger, and the shameful straits of the small debts that
make the commonest acts and needs of daily life a byword
and reproach, she woke to find herself alone.
There were twenty gold pieces on the bed, long stript of
all its covering, and a written line or two. She took the
paper to the woman of the house below, who read it to her.
It told her that he was gone to Dresden to copy a famous
picture for a wealthy man ; he sent her all the sum they
had advanced him, and said a little phrase or two of sorrow
and of parting, and of hope of better days, and of the
unbearable pain of such beggary as they had known. He
spoke vaguely of some union in the future.
Pippa cast the twenty gold pieces into the mud of the
street, where the poor scrambled and clutched and fought
for them. She understood that she was forsaken.
All he had said was true; but the great truth was what
he had not said. Pippa was ignorant of almost everything ;
but this she knew enough to know.
That night they took her to a madhouse, and cut close
the long brown braids of her hair, and fastened together
the feet that had used to fly, as the wind flies, through the
paths of the vines in summer.
Poor Pippa ! She had always plaited ill; the women had
always said so.
In half-a-year's time she gave birth to a child, and her
reason came back to her, and after a time they let her go.
She promised to go to her own country.
But she cheated them, and went to Dresden. She had
kept that name in her mind. She got there as best she
could, begging on the way or working; but of work she
knew so little, and of workers there are so many. She
carried the child all the way. Sometimes people were good
to her; sometimes they were bad; oftenest they were
neither one nor the other. Indifference is the invincible
giant of the world.
"When she reached Dresden it was summer. The city
was empty.
SIGN A.
45
With much trouble she heard of him. The copy was
done, and he was gone back to Trance.
" Perhaps he does not want you. If he wanted you he
wTould not leave you," said a comely woman, who was sorry
for her, but who spoke as she thought, giving her a roll of
bread under a tree in the street.
" Perhaps he does not want me," thought Pippa. The
words awoke her memory. She had been left by him. He
would not have left her unless he had been tired—tired of
all the poverty aud all the pain, and of the passion that had
lost its glow, as the poppy loses its colour once being
reaped with the wheat.
There was a dull fierce pain in her. There were times
when she wished to kill him. Then at other times she
would see a look of his face in the child's and would break
into an anguish of weeping.
Anyway, she set backward to find him.
Carrying the child, that grew heavier with each day,
and travelling sometimes with gipsies and vagrants, and
mountebanks, but more often alone, and begging her bread
on the way, she got back into France after many months.
She had got stupid and stunned with fatigue and with pain.
She had lost all look of youth, but she kept the child as
fresh as a rose; and now and then she would smile, be-
cause his mouth laughed like her lover's.
Back into Paris she went. The strange fortunes that
shelter the wretched kept her in health and in strength,
though she rarely had a roof over her at night, and all she
ate were the broken pieces that people gave her in pity.
In his old haunts it was easy to hear of him; he had
gone to study in Borne.
"He will do well for himself, never fear," they said in
the old house on the Seine water, where her dream of joy
had dreamt itself away. Some great person, touched by
his poverty and genius, and perhaps by Ins beauty, had
given him the means to pursue the high purposes of his
art at leisure. Some said the great person was a woman,
and a princess: no one knew for sure. Anyhow, he wras
gone to Borne.
Pippa knew the name of Borne.
People had gone through Signa sometimes, to wind away
by the sea-road, amongst the marshes and along the flat
46
SIGN A.
sickly shores, to Borne. And now and then through Signa,
at fair time, or on feast days, there had strayed little chil-
dren, in goat skins, and with strange pipes, who played sad
airs, and said they were from Borne.
But the mountains had always risen between her and
Borne. It had always been to her far off as some foreign
land. Nevertheless, she set out for Borne by the sole way she
knew—the way that she had travelled with him—straight
across France and downward to the sea, and along the
beautiful bold road, under the palm-trees and the sea alps,
and so along the Corniche back to Signa.
She knew that way; and toilsome though it was, it was
made sweet to her by remembered joys.
He had gone with her ; and at every halting-place there
was some memory so precious, yet so terrible, that it would
have been death to her, only the child was there, and
wanted her, and had his smile, and so held her on to life.
Her lover had been with her in the summer and autumn
weather; and all the way had been made mirthful with
love's happy foolish ways; and the dust of the road had
been as gold to her, because of the sweet words he mur-
mured in her ear: and when they were tired they had
leaned in one another's arms, and been at rest; and every
moonlit night and rosy morning had been made beautiful,
because of what they read in each other's eyes and heard in
the beating of each other's hearts.
Pippa had forgotten nothing; she had only forgotten that
she had been forsaken.
"Women are so slow to understand this always; and she,
since that day when she had flung the money in the street,
and fallen like a furious thing, biting the dust, and laughing
horribly, had never been too clear of what had happened
to her.
There was the child, and he—her love—was lost. This
was all she knew.
Only she remembered every trifle, every moment of their
first love time ; and as she went, walking across great coun-
tries as other women cross a hayfield or a village street, she
would look at the rose-bush at a cabin door, and think how
he had plucked a rosebud there ; or touch a gate rail with
her lips, because his hand. had rested on it; or lift the
child to kiss a wayside crucifix, because he had hung a rope
SIGN A.
47
of woodbine there and painted it one noonday; and at each
step would murmur to the child, "See, he was here—and here
—and here—and here," and would fancy that the baby
understood, and slept the sweeter because told these things.
Poor Pippa !—she had always plaited ill.
"Women do, whose only strand is one short human love.
The tress will run uneven; and no man wants it long.
Still, it is best to love thus. For nothing else is Love.
So she had walked on, till the golden autumn weather lost
its serenity, and stirred with strife of winter wind and
rain ; so she had walked, and walked, and walked—a beg-
gar girl for all who met her, with no beauty in her, except
her great, sad, lustrous eyes—until she found herself come
out once more on that familiar road which she had trodden
daily in her childhood and her girlhood, with her hank of
straw over her arm, and a pitcher of milk, or a sheaf of
gleaned corn, or a broad basket of mulberries balanced on
her head.
She thought she would see Bruno—just once. He had
been rough and fierce with her; but once she could have
loved Bruno, if he would ever have let her do so. She
thought she would show him the child, and ask him—if she
never got to ltome
Then her foot slipped, and she fell down into darkness,
and of Pippa there was no more on earth—only a dead
woman, that the flood took out, with the drowned cattle
and the driftwood, to the sea.
CHAPTER VII.
Local tradition has it that all this plain of Signa was
once a lake with only the marsh birds calling and the reeds
waving in the great silence of its waters—long ago, Their
" long ago " is very dim in date and distance, but very close
to fancy and to faith. Here iEneas is a hero born only
yesterday, and Catiline brought his secret sins into the
refuge of these hills an hour since it seems ; and Hercules
—one can almost see him still, bending his bold brows over
the stubborn rock in that stream where the quail dips her
wing and the distaff cane bends to the breeze.
43
SIGN A.
Nay, it is not so very far away after all since tlie dove
plucked the olive off the mountains yonder, and no one
sees anything strange or incongruous in the stories that
make the sons of Enoch and the children of Latona tread
these fields side by side, and the silver arrows of Apollo
cleave the sunshine that the black crucifixes pierce. Nay,
older than tale of the l)ove or legend of Apollo is this soil.
Turn it with your spade and you shall find the stone coffins
and the gold chains of the mighty Etruscan race whose
buried cities lie beneath your feet, their language and their
history lost in the everlasting gloom.
This -was once Etruria, in all the grace and greatness of
her royalties ; then through long ages the land was silent,
and only heard the kite shriek or the mountain hare scream ;
then fortified places rose again, one by one, on the green
slopes, and Florence set to work and built between her and
the sea—between her and the coast, and all her many ene-
mies and debtors—the walled village of the Lastra Signa;
making it noble of its kind, as she made everything that she
touched in the old time; giving it a girdle of the massive
grey mountain stone, and gateways with carven shields and
frescoes ; and houses within, braced with iron, and en-
nobled by bold archways aud poetised by many a shrine
and symbol.
And the Lastra stood in the green country that is called
the Verdure even in the dry city rolls, and saw the spears
glisten among the vines, and the steel head-pieces shine
through the olives, and the banners flutter down from the
heights, and the condottieri wind away on the white road,
and the long lines of the pilgrims trail through the sun-
shine, and the scarlet pomp of the cardinals burn on the
highway, and the great lords with their retinues ride to the
sea or the mountains, and the heralds and trumpeters come
and go on their message of peace or strife ; and itself held
the road when need arose, staunchly, through many a dark
day, and many a bitter night, for many a tale of years, and
kept its warders on the watch-towers, looking westward
through the centuries of war. And then the hour of fate
struck when the black eagle, who has " two beaks to more
devour," flew with his heavy wing over the Arno; and the
Republic had no help or hope but in Gideon, as she called
him:—frank Eerruccio.
SIGN A.
49
Ferruccio knew that the Lastra was the iron key to the
gates of Florence. But he had no gifts of gods to make
him omniscient, and he was rash, as brave men are most apt
to be. With his five hundred troopers he wrought miracles
of valour and relief; but in a fatal hour he, scouting the
country to search the convoys of food that he conveyed to
Florence, left the Lastra for Pisa, and the traitor Bandini
whispered in the ear of Orange, " Strike now—while he is
absent." And Orange sent his Spanish lances, and the
Lastra beat them back. But he sent them again as many in
numbers against the place as was all Ferruccio's army, and
with artillery to aid; and they made two breaches in the
walls, and entered, and sacked and pillaged, and ravished
and slew; the bold gates standing erect as they stand
to-day.
Is not the record painted in the Hall of Leo the Tenth ?
The brave gates stood erect; but the Lastra was an
armed town no more.
Its days of battle were done.
The grass and the green creepers grew oh the battle-
ments; and -out of the iron doors there only passed the
meek oxen and the mules and the sheep.
The walls of the Lastra are very old, and are still
beautiful. Broken down also in many places, and with
many places where" are hillocks of grass and green bushes
instead of the. old mighty stones, or, worse still, mean
houses and tiled roofs. But they are still erect in a great
part and very picturesque, with the ropemakers at work on
the sward underneath them, and the white bullocks coming
out of their open doors. The portcullis still hangs in the
gateways that face the east and the west, and the deep
machicolations of the battlements are sharp and firm as a
lion's teeth. There is exquisite colour in them, and noble
lines severe and stern as any that Arnolfo drew or raised.
" She is so old—our Lastra! " say the people, with soft
pride, while the women sit and spin on the stairs of the old
watch-towers, and the mules drink, and the waggons pass,
and the sheep are driven under their pointed archways.
Of the Lastra it may be written, as of the old tower of
Calais church:—"It is not as ruins are, useless and piteous,
feebly or fondly garrulous of better days; but useful still,
going through its daily work as some old fisherman beaten
E
50
SIGN A.
grey by storm yet drawing bis daily nets." Its years of
war indeed are done ; it can repel no foe—it can turn aside
no invader; the wall-sorrel grows on its parapets, the owl
builds in its loopholes, the dust of decay lies thick upon its
broken stairs; in its fortified places old women spin flax and
the spiders their webs; but its decay is not desolation, its
silence is not solitude; its sadness is not despair; the Ave
Maria echoes through it morning and night; when the warm
sunrise smites the battlements, its people go forth to the
labour of the soil: when the rays of the sunset fill the west,
there rises from its mountains a million spears of gold, as
though the hosts of a conquering army raised them aloft
with a shout of triumph; it garners its living people still as
sheep within a fold—"its bells for prayer still rolling
through its rents." Harvest and vintage and seed-time are
precious to it: fruits of the earth are brought within it; the
vine is green against its doors, and the corn is threshed in
its ancient armouries; beautiful even where unsightly;
hoary with age, yet linked with living youth; noble as a
bare sea cliff is noble, that has kept the waves at bay
throughout uncounted storms, the Lastra stands amidst the
green billows of the foliage of the fields as a lighthouse
amongst breakers; its towers speaking of strength, its
fissures of sorrow, its granaries of labour, its belfries of
hope.
When the great service was over, and the bishop and the
nobles had passed away in their glory, and the bells .had
ceased for a season to ring, and the white-robed contadini
had gone up amongst their hills, and the families of the
Lastra had gone within doors and closed their window-
shutters to the sun, the little singer, who loved every stone
of the old place, laying off his little surplice, and by a rare
treat being free of task and punishment, and sent only to
gather salads from the hill garden of his one friend, made
his way quickly through the village, and out by the western
gate.
Just a child of Pippa's—with no name or use or place or
title that anyone could see, or right to live at all, if you
pushed matters closely.
That was all he was—a child of Pippa's, who had died
without a coin upon her, or a roof she could call her own,
or anything at all in this wide world except this little
SIGNA.
sunny-headed, soft-limbed, useless thing, fresh as dew and
flushed like apple-blossoms, that she left behind her, as the
magnolia-leaf, dropping brown, to the brown earth, leaves a
blossom.
Himself, he did not know even so much as this, which
indeed was as bad as nothing to know. To himself he was
only a foundling, as he was to everyone else; picked up as
any blind puppy might have been, motherless, on the face
of the flood.
The old white town had stood him in the stead of father
and mother, and nation and friends; and though the
Church, purifying him with baptismal water, had given him
a long saint's name, Signa was his true eponymus.
The children had called him Signa, because of the name
on the little gilt ball that they were scratched on—the little
gilt ball which Nita had hung round his neck by its string
again.
"It looks well to give it to him," she had said to her
husband. "And it would fetch so little, it is not worth
keeping for oneself."
So his little locket had been left him—the locket that had
been bought that day of the fair, and filled with a curl of
sunny-brown hair, which Pippa had cut off herself in the
dusk where the vines met overhead;—and he was called
after the word that was on it, first by the children, and then
by their elders, who had said, "As well that as any name,
why not? the dogs of Jews are often called after the
towns that bear them: why not this little cur, so near
drowned here, after the place that sheltered him ? "
Hence he was Signa, like the town; and in a vague fancy
that he never followed out, he had some dim idea that
this village of the Lastra, which he loved p>o dearly, had
created him; out of her dust, or from her wandering winds,
or by her bidding to the owls that roosted in her battle-
ments: how he did not know, but in some way. And he
was thoroughly content; loving the place with a great love
quite reasonless, and quite childlike, and yet immeasurable.
He was proud because he had the name. When they
beat him, he would not cry out, because the Lastra had been
brave ; so the old people who told stories of it to him said;
and he would be brave likewise.
It was like his impudence to dare be brave when honest-
52
SIGNA.
born children squealed like caught mice ! so Nita would say
to him a score of times, slapping his cheek when Toto had
trodden on her gown, or beating him with the rods of alder
when Toto had stolen the fritters from the frying-pan.
" She is a good woman, Nita," said the neighbours,
shaking out the gleaned hay before their house-doors, or
sitting to plait together in the archways ; " and Lippo is an
angel. To think of them—seven children, and an eighth
nigh—and keeping, all for charity, that little stray thing
found at the flood. Any one else had sent it packing, a
poor child, as one could tell by its clothes that were all
rags, and no chance for any rich folk ever coming after it.
And yet treating it always like their own, share and share
alike, and no preference shown—ah, they were good people.
Old Baldo, too, not saying even a word, though he was a
sharp man about shoe-leather, and no blame to him, because,
after all, who will save the skin of your onion for you unless
you do yourself ? ''
As from a baby it grew into a little child, Bruno ever and
again saw to its wants.
"The child must be clean," he had said; and he would
not have it go in rags.
"The child must be well kept," he had said; and he
would not have its curls sheared close, as Toto's was.
Then as it grew older.
"Let the child learn," he had said; and Nita humoured
him, because she believed it to be his own offspring, and
Lippo, because of that good half of everything, which kept
his father-in-law in such good humour, and left himself free
to idle in the sun, and lie face downward on the stone
benches, and do nothing all day long except kill flies.
So Lippo and his wife were very careful to have the
child's curls shine, instead of shearing them close as they
did their own babies', and when he ran into the street would
give him a big lump of crust to eat as people passed, and on
saint days take him with them to the church in a little frock
snow-white, like one of the straight-robed, long-haired, child-
figures in any panel or predella of Delia Francesca or the
Memmi. He was so pretty that people gave him cakes and
fruits and money, just for the beauty of his wistful eyes, and
to see his little mouth, like a carnation bud, open to sing his
Aves.
SIGNA.
S3
And of course there was reason that the child, once
home, should give up the cakes and fruits to the other
children who were like foster-brothers and sisters to him,
and as for the money, of course he could not keep it, being
such a little thing; they took it from him to take care of it
—they were good, honest people.
As for the little lad, true he was hungry often, and beaten
often, when no one was looking, and worked like a footsore
mule at all times.
But then nobody noticed that, because he was always
taken to mass, and had the little white shirt on just like
Toto, and no difference made, and all his curls brushed out.
The curate's sister said there never was so sweet a soul as
Lippo's, for of course it all was Lippo's doing; Nita was an
honest woman, and true-hearted; but Lippo it was that was
the saint in the house. Another man would have turned
the brat out by the ears first sight: not he—he cut the
stray child's bread as big as any of his boys', and paid for
him, too, to learn his letters.
So the curate's sister said, the neighbours said after her;
and Lippo, being a meek man, smiled gently, and cast his
eyes down underneath the praise, and said in answer, that
no one could have turned a pretty baby like that out after
once housing it, and added, with a kindly grace that moved
the women to tears, that he hoped the child might be like
those gold-winged porcellini that, flying in your window
with the sunbeams, bring good will and peace, the people
say.
This day, after the ceremony, the little fellow ran over
the bridge and up the hill-road, where his mother, of whom
he knew nothing, had met her death. He was stiff with a
severe beating that had been given him.
The night before there had been a basket of red cherries
missing, and Toto had been found crunching them in the
loft, and Toto had said that he had been given them by
Signa, who first had eaten half; and old Baldo, who had
got them as a present for the priest, had been beside
himself with rage, and Nita had beaten Signa, as her habit
and daily comfort was, because he never would cry out.
which made him the more provoking, and also was always
innocent, than which there is nothing more irritating any-
where.
54
SIGNA.
He was very stiff, and felt it now that the music was all
done ; hut almost forgot it again in the pleasure of the hill-
side and the holyday.
The country was full of joys to the child that he never
reasoned about, hut which filled him with delight. The
great bold curves of the oak bough overhead; the amethyst
and amber of the trefoil blossoms; the voices of the wood
doves; the jovial croakings of the frogs ; the flash of butter-
flies; the glories of the oleanders here, white as snow, and
there rosily radiant as flame ; the poppies that had cast
their petals, and had round grey heads like powdered wigs;
the spiders, red and black, like bits of old Egyptian pottery;
the demure and dusky cavaletti, that looked like ghosts of
nuns, out by an error in the daylight; the pretty lizards
that were so happy asking nothing of the world except a
sunbeam and a stone to sleep under; the nightingales that
were so tame, and sang at broad noontide to laugh at poets;
the orchids, gold and ruby, that mimicked bees and flies to
make fun of them, because there is so much humour in
nature with all her sweet seriousness of beauty; the flies
that shone like jewels ; the edges of china roses that ran
between the corn ; the gaunt stern spikes of the artichokes;
the green Madonna's herb ; the mountains that were some-
times quite lost in the white mists, and then of a sudden
lifted themselves in all their glory, with black shadows
where the woods were, and hazy breadths of colour where
the bare marble shone beneath the sun;—all these things,
so various, great and small, wonderful and obscure, under
his feet, or on the far horizon, were sources of delight
to the child, who as he went lost sight of nothing from the
little gemmed insect in the dust he trod to the last glow left
on the faintest, farthest peak of the great hills that rose
between him and the sea.
Nobody had ever told him anything.
None had led him by the hand and bade him look.
Some instinct moved him to see and hear where others
were blind and deaf. That was all.
To the ploughman of Ayr the daisy was a tender grace
of God, and the mouse a fellow traveller in the ways of
life.
To Signa, who was only a baby still, and was beaton
most days of the week, and ran barefoot in the dust, the
SIGNA.
55
summer and the world were beautiful without his knowing
why, and comforted him. For in all this sea of sunshine
—as in the music—he forgot his pain.
He ran like a little goat up the road with the green river
winding below, and the hills changing at each step with
those inconstancies of light and shade, and aspect, and
colour in which all hills delight. It was an hour before,
always climbing sturdily, he reached an old stone gateway
set in breadths of grain just golden for the sickle, with a
black crucifix against it, and above it a little framed picture
of the Annunciation.
He stooped his knee, and crossed himself; then ran
between the old stone posts, which had no gate in them,
and sent his voice up the hill-side before his feet. " Bruno !
Bruno ! Bruno ! "
" Here ! " sang the man's voice in answer from above,
amongst the corn.
Signa climbed the steep green patches that ran between
the wheat and under the vines up the face of the hill, and
threw his arms round Bruno's knees.
" A whole day to spend! " he cried, breathless with
running. " And are you working ? Why it is Corpus
Domini. They do not work anywhere ! "
Bruno put down the handful of corn that he had just cut
and wound together.
" No ; one should not work," he said, with some shame
for his own industry. "But those clouds look angry;
they may mean rain at sunset; and to spoil such grain as
this—and the Padre will not come this way ; he never gets
so far down on feasts. And you are well, Signa ? "
" Oh quite well."
" But you must be hungry ?—running so ? "
" No ; I can wait."
" You have had your bread then ? "
" Yes."
It was not true. But then Signa had found out two
things: one, that when he told Bruno that he was ill-
treated or ill-fed at home, there were quarrels and troubles
between Bruno and his brother; and the other, that if he
let Bruno see that he was at all unhappy, Bruno seemed to
be consumed with self-reproach. So that the child whose
single love, except that for the old town itself, was Bruno,
56
SIGNA.
had early learned to hold his tongue and bear his sorrows
silently as best he might, and tell an innocent little lie even
now and then to spare pain to his friend.
Bruno always took his part. It was Bruno who got him
any little joy he ever knew, and Bruno who would not let
them shave his pretty clustering curls to make a bare round
pumpkin of his head like Toto's ; and one day when he had
been only seven years old, and Bruno by chance had found
him crying, and learned that it was with the smart of Nita's
thrashing, Bruno and Lippo had had fierce words and blows ;
and late that night the eldest boy of Lippo's had come and
shaken him in his bed of hay, and hissed savagely in his
ear:
" You little fool, if you go telling my uncle Bruno we
ill-treat you, he will strike at my father and kill him perhaps,
who knows, lie is so violent, and then a nice day's work you
will have made for every one ;—you little beast. My father
dead, and Bruno at the galleys, all through you who are
not worth the rind of a rotten melon, little cur ! "
And Signa, trembling in his bed, had vaguely understood
the mischief he might do, though why they quarrelled for
him, and why Lippo gave him a home, and yet ill-treated
him, or why Bruno should have any care to take his part, he
could not tell; but he comprehended that all he had to do
was to accept ill-usage dumbly, like the dogs, and bring
none into any trouble by complaining. And so he grew up
—with silence for a habit: for he loved Bruno.
Bruno, who was fierce and wayward and hated and
feared by every one on the country side, but who to him
was gentle as a woman, and was always kind. Bruno, who
had a most terrible knack of flashing out his knife in anger,
and who had quarrelled with all the women he had wooed,
and who had a rough heartless way of speech that made
people wonder he could be of the same blood and bone as
mild and pleasant Lippo, but who to him was never without
a grave soft smile that took all the darkness from this face it
shone on, and who for him had many tender thoughts and
acts that were like the blue radish flower on its rough, grey,
leafless stalk.
The child never wondered why Bruno cared for him.
Children take love as they take sunshine and their daily
bread. If it rain and they starve, then they wonder,
SIGNA.
57
because children come . into the world with an innocent
undoubting conviction that they will be happy in it, which is
one of the oddest and the saddest things one sees ; for, being
begotten by men and borne by women, how can any such
strange error ever be alive in them ?
Bruno put by his reaping-hook, and let the big bearded
turkish wheat stand over for another day. He had risked
his own soul to make sure of the wheat—for to Bruno
it was a soul's peril to use a sickle on a holy day ;—but he
let go the corn rather than spoil the little fellow's pleasure.
" You can eat something again—come," he said, stretch-
ing his hand out to the boy's.
Pippa's child was like her, only with something spiritual
and far-reaching in his great dark eyes that hers had never
had, and a gleam of gold in the soft thickness of his hair
that did not come from her. He was more delicate, more
slender, more like a little supple reed than Pippa ever had been,
and he had a more uncommon look about him; hut he was
like her—like enough to make Bruno still shudder now and
then thinking of the dead woman left all alone to the rain
and to the river.
" Come and eat," he said, and took the child indoors.
His house had a great arched door where Pippa had
stood plaiting many a night. It had a brick floor and a
ceiling of old timbers, and some old dusky chests and
presses that would have fetched a fortune in city curiosity
shops, and a strong musty smell of drying herbs and of
piles of peas and beans for winter uses, and trusses of straw
cleaned and cut for the plaiters ; and hens were sitting on
their eggs inside an old gilded marriage coffer six hundred
years old, if one, whose lid, that had dropped off the hinges,
was illuminated with the nuptials of Galilee in the style of
the early school of Cortona.
Through a square unglazed window there was seen the
head of a brindle^ cow munching grass in her shed on the
other side, and through a wide opening opposite that had no
door, the noon sun shining showed the great open building
that was granary and cart-shed, and stable and hothouse all
in one, and where the oil-presses stood, and the vats for
the wine, and the empty casks.
Against one of the walls was a crucifix with a little basin
for holy water, for Bruno was a man who believed in the
58
SIGN A.
saints without question ; and above the arched entrance
there grew a great mulberry-tree that was never stripped,
because he had no silkworms, and magnolias and cistus-
bushes, and huge poppies that loved to glow in the stones,
and big dragon-heads flaming like rubies, and aiabian jessa-
mine of divinest odour, and big myrtles, all flourishing
luxuriant alike together, because in this country flowers
have nine lives like cats, and will live anywhere, just he-
cause no one wants them or ever thinks of gathering them
unless there be a corpse to be dressed.
" Eat," said Bruno ; and he got the little lad out some
brown bread and a jug of milk, and a cabbage-leaf of currants,
which he had gathered early that morning before the mass-
bells rang, being sure Signa would come before the day
should be over.
Signa ate and drank with the eager goodwill of a child
who never got enough, except by some rare chance on a
feast-day like this ; but the larger part of the currants he
left on the leaf, taking only one or two bunches.
Bruno watched him.
" Are you going to give them away ?"
" I will give them to Gemma—I may ?"
"Do as you like with your own. But if you must give
them to any one, give them to Palma."
Signa coloured on both his little pale cheeks.
"I will give them to the two," he said, conscious of an
unjust intention nipped in the bud.
"Palma is a better child than Gemma," said Bruno,
sharpening a vine-stake with his clasp-knife.
Signa hung his head.
"But I like Gemma best."
" When that is said, there is no more to be said," answered
Bruno, who had learned enough of human nature on the hills
and in the Lastra to know that liking does not go by reason
nor follow after merit.
"Gemma is so pretty," said the little fellow, who loved
anything that had beauty in it; and he ran and got his
mandoline out of the corner where Bruno let him keep it,
and began to turn its keys and run his fingers over its
strings and call the cadence out of it with as light a heart
as if his back had never been black and blue with Nita's
thrashing.
SIGNA.
59
" If Gemma broke your chitarra, would you like her tho
better then ?" asked Bruno,,
" I would hate her," said Signa under his breath; for ho
had two idols—his lute and the Lastra.
" I wish she would break it, then," said Bruno, who was
jealous of this little child for whom Signa was saving his
currants.
But Signa did not hear. He was sitting out on the
threshold on an empty red lemon-pot turned upside down,
with the slope of the autumn corn and the green hillside
beneath him in the sun, and beyond them, far down below
in the great valley, and golden in the light were first the
walls of the Lastra set in the sea of vines, and then the
towers and domes of Florence far away; and farther yet,
where the east was warm with morning light, the mountains
of Umbria, with the little towns on their crest, from which
you see two seas.
"With all that vast radiant world beneath him at his feet,
Signa tuned his mandoline and sang to himself untired on
the still hillside. The cow leaned her mouth over the
window-sill, and listened ; cows seem so stupid, chewing
grass and whisking flies away, but in their eyes there is the •
soul of To ; the nightingales held their breaths to listen, and
then joined in till all the branches that they lived in seemed
alive with sound; the great white watch-dog from the
marshes came and laid down quite quiet, blinking solemnly
with attentive eyes; but the cicali never stopped sawing
like carpenters in the tree-tops, nor the gossiping hens from
clacking in the cabbage-beds, because cicali and chickens
think the world was made for them, and believe that the
sun would fall if they ceased from fussing and faming :—
they are so very human.
Bruno laid himself down face forward on a stone bench, as
contadini love to do when they have any leisure, and lis-
tened too, his head upon his arms.
The water dropped from the well-spout; a lemon fell
with a little splash on the grass ; the big black restless bees
buzzed here and there ; blue butterflies danced above the
grain as if the cornflowers had risen,winged; the swallows
wheeled round the low red-tiled roof; the old wooden
plough lay in the shade under the fig-trees; the oxen ate
clover and the leaves of cane in fragrant darkness in their
6o
SIGNA.
shed ; the west wind came from the pines above with the
smell of the sea and the thyme and the rosemary.
Signa played and sang, making up his song as he went
along, in rhymes strung like chains of daisies, all out of his
own head, and born in a moment out of nothing, and,
beginning with the name of a flower, and winding in with
them the sun and the shadow, the beasts and the birds, the
restless bees and the ploughshare at rest, and the full wheat-
ears and the empty well-bucket, and anything and everything
little and large, and foolish and wise, that was there about
him in the midsummer light.
Anywhere else it might have been strange for a little
peasant to make melody so ; but here the children lisp in
numbers, and up and down on the hills, and in the road
when the mule-bells ring, and on the high mountains with
the browsing goats, the verse and song of the people fill the
air all day long—this people who for the world have no
poet.
Bruno, lying face downward and listening, half asleep, to
the rippling music, thought it pretty, but nothing rare or of
wonder; the little lad played better than most of his age,
and had a gift for stringing his rhymes, that was all. •
For himself, he was almost jealous of the lute as he was
of the child Gemma. For Bruno loved the boy with a
covetous love and a strong love, and felt as if in some way
or other Signa escaped him.
The boy was loving, obedient, grateful, full of caressing
and tractable ways ; there was no fault to find with him ;
but Bruno at times felt that he held him no more surely
than one holds a bird because it alights at one's feet.
It was a vague feeling with him. Bruno, being an un-
learned man, did not reason about his impressions nor seek
to know whether they were even wise ones. But it was a
strong feeling with him, and something in the far-away look
of the little lad's eyes as he sang, strengthened it.
Pippa had never had that look; no one had it except the
little Christs or St. Johns sometimes in the old frescoes in
the churches that Bruno would enter once a year or so,
when he went to Prato or Carmignano or Pistoia to buy
grain or to sell it.
" That is God looking out of the eyes," an old sacristan
here said once to him, before one of those altar pictures,
S1GNA.
61
where the wonderful faces were still radiant amidst the
fading colours of the age-clad frescoes.
But why should God look out of the eyes of Pippa's
child?
Why was God in him more than in any others ?
Those children in the frescoes were most fitting in their
place, no doubt, amongst the incense, and the lilies, and the
crosses, and above the sacred Host. But to sit at your
bench, and eat beans, and be sent to fetch in sheep from the
hills ;—Bruno felt that a more workaday soul was better for
this, he would have been more at ease if Signa had been just
a noisy, idle, troublesome, merry morsel, playing more like
other boys, and happy over a baked goose on a feast-day.
He would have known better how to deal with him.
And yet not for worlds would he have changed him.
CHAPTER YIH.
If Pippa had not been quite dead that night when they
had found her in the fields ? If there had been any spark of
life flickering in her that with warmth and care and a sur-
geon's skill might have been fanned back again into a steady
flame ? It was not likely ; but it was possible. And if it
had been so, then what were he and Lippo ?
The sickly thought of it came upon him many a time and
made him shiver and turn cold. When he had left the
woman lying in the field he had been quite sure that all life
was gone out of her. But now he was not so sure. Cold
and the fall might have made her senseless. Who could
tell ?—if they had done their duty by her—Pippa might
have been living now.
It was not probable. He knew the touch of a dead thing,
and she had felt to him dead as any slaughtered sheep could
be. But sometimes, in the long lonely nights of autumn,
when he sat watching his grapes, with the gun against his
knee, lest thieves should strip the vines, Bruno would think
62
SJGNA.
of it, and say to himself—"If she were not really dead,
what was I ?"
He told all to the good priest in the little brown church
beneath the vines on his hill; told it all under the seal of
confession, and the priest absolved him by reason of his true
penitence and anxious sorrow. But Bruno could not absolve
himself.
He had left her there for the flood to take her;—and after
all she might have been brought back to life, had he lifted
her up on his shoulders and borne her down into shelter and
warmth, instead of deserting her there like a coward.
The water had done it; had washed her away out of sight
and killed her if she were not already dead when it rose, and
swept her out to the secrecy of the deep seas. But he told
himself, at times, that it was he who was the murderer—not
the water.
When he looked at the river shining away between the
green hills and the grey olives, he felt as if it knew his
guilt, as if it were a fellow sinner with him, only the more
innocent of the two. Of course the pain and the remorse of
it were not always on him. He led an active life ; he was
always working at something or another, from daybreak till
night; the free fresh air blew always about him, and blew
morbid fancies from his brain. But at times, when all was
quiet, in the hush of midnight, or when he rested from his
labours at sunset, and all the world was gold and rose, then
he thought of Pippa; then he felt the cold, pulseless breast
underneath his hand; then he said to himself—" If she were
not quite dead ?" The torment of the thought worked in
him and weighed on him, and made his heart yearn to the
little lad, who, but for his cowardice, might not now have
been motherless and alone.
Bruno sat on at his house door that night, watching the
little lad run along the hill. He could see all the way down
the slope, and though the trees and the vines at times hid
Signa from sight, and at times he was lost in the wheat,
which was taller than he, yet at intervals, the small flying
figure with the sunset about its. hair, could be seen going
down, down, down along the great slope, and Bruno watched
it with a troubled fondness in his eyes.
He was doing the best for the child that he knew. He
had him taught to read and write; he had him sing for the
SIGNA.
03
priests; lie was learning the ways of the fields, and the
needs of beasts, tending his sheep and Lippo's by turns, as
a little contadino had to do in the simple life of the open
air. He could not tell what more to. do for him; he a
peasant himself and the son of many generations of
peasants, who had worked here one after another on the
great green hill above the Lastra valley.
He did not know what else to do.
That was the way he had been brought up, except that he
had never been taught a letter; running with bare legs over
the thyme on the hills, and watching the sheep on the high
places amongst the gorze, and pattering through the dirt
after the donkey, when there were green things to go into
market, or loads of fir cones to be carried, or sacks of corn
to be borne to the grinding press. If there was a better
way to bring up a child he did not know it. And yet he
was not altogether sure that Pippa, if she saw, from heaven,
were satisfied.
The child was thinner than he liked, and his shirt was all
holes, and never a little beggar was poorer clad than was
Signa winter and summer; and Bruno knew that he gave
into Lippo's pocket more than enough to keep a child well,
for his land was rich, and he laboured hard, and he bore
with Lippo's coming and going, and prying and calculating
always to make sure how much the grain yielded, and to
count the figs and potatoes, and to watch the winepress, and
to see how the peas yielded, and to satisfy himself that he
always got the full amount they had agreed for ; he bore with
all that from Lippo, though it was enough to exasperate a
quieter man, and many a time he could have kicked his
brother out of his fields for all that meddling and
measuring; and being an impatient temper and resentful,
chafed like a tethered mastiff, to have Nita and her brood
clamouring for roots and salads and eggs and buckwheat, as
if he were a slave for them.
"The half of all I get," he had said in the rash haste of
his repentance and remorse; and Lippo pinned him to his
word.
He would have given the world that instead of that mad
bargain made without thought, he had taken the child to
himself wholly and told the truth in the Lastra, and given
the poor dead body burial, and been free to do Avith Pippa's
64
SIGN A.
boy whatever lie chose. But Bruno, like many others, had
fallen by fear and haste into a false way; and stumbled on
in it galled and entangled.
Bruno was now over forty years old, and his country folk
spoke more ill of him rather than less. When he went
down into the Lastra to sit and take a sup of wine, and play
a game at dominoes as other men did, none were glad to see
him. The women owed him a grudge because he married
none of them, and the men thought him fierce and quarrel-
some, when he was not taciturn, and found that he spoiled
mirth rather than increased it by his presence.
He was a handsome man still, and lithe, and burnt brown
as a nut by the sun. He wore a loose shirt, open at the
throat, and in winter had a long brown cloak tossed across
from one shoulder to the other. He had bare feet, and the
walk of a mountaineer or an athlete. Marching beside his
bullocks, with a cart-load of hay, or going down the river
for fish, with his great net outspread on its circular frame, he
was a noble, serious, majestic figure, and had a certain half
wild, half lordly air about him that is not uncommon to the
Tuscan peasant when he lives far enough from the cities not
to be contaminated by them.
The nine years that had run by since the night of the
flood, had darkened Bruno's name in the Lastra country.
Before that night he had been, whatever other faults or
vices he had had, openhanded to a degree most rare amongst
his people. A man that he had struck to the ground one
day, he would open his leathern bag of coppers to the next.
Whatever other his crimes, he had always been generous, to
utter improvidence, which is so strange a thing in his nation,
that he was often nicknamed a madman for it. But no one
quarrels with a madness that they profit by, and Bruno's
generosity had got him forgiven many a misdeed and many
a license, by men and women.
Since the flood, little by little, parsimony growing on him
with each year, he had become careful of spending, quick to
take his rights, and slow to fling down money for men's sport
or women's kisses. The country said that Bruno was alto-
gether given over to the devil, he was no longer good to get
gain out of even; he had turned niggard, and there was no
excuse for him, they averred; a better padrone no man
worked under than he, and his fattore was old and easy;
SIGNA.
and the land that in the old time had served to maintain his
father and mother with a tribe of children to eat them out of
house and home, now had only himself upon it, good land
and rich, and sheltered though on the mountains, whilst, as
every one knows, the higher the land lies the better is the
vintage. Men gossiping in the evenings under the old gate-
ways of the Lastra, watching Bruno with his empty bullock-
cart go back between the hedges to the bridge, would shake
their heads:—
"A bad fellow ! " said Momo, the barber, for Bruno never
came to have his head shaved as clean Christians should in
summer, but wore his thick dusky mane tossed back much
like a lion's.
" Brutal bad ! " echoed Papuccio, who was a tailor, with
slack work. "No doubt that little fly-blow is his own, and
see how he fathers it on Lippo. Lippo has as good as told
me it was that poor Frita's child by Bruno: you remember
her, a pretty young girl, died of a ball in the throat—or
they said so—very likely it was Bruno, that wrung her neck
in a rage—I should not wonder. He would have left the
boy to starve, only Lippo took it home, and shamed him."
" He is good to the child now," said Noe, the tinman,
who had a weakness for seeing both sides of a question,
which made him very disagreeable company.
" Oh hi! " demured the barber, with his under-lip out in
dubious reply. "The other day the little lad was bathing
with my youngster, and I saw his back all blue and brown
with bruises. ' Is he such a bad child you beat him so ?' I
said to Lippo, for indeed he was horrid to look at, and
Lippo, good man, looked troubled. 1 Bruno will be violent,'
he told me quite reluctantly, ' he forgets the child is small.'
Oh, I daresay he does forget, and when he has him alone
there flays him of half his skin ! "
" Why say the child was Bruno's or Frita's, either. He
was found in the fields at the great flood, and Frita was dead
a year before," said Noe, who had that awkward and un-
social quality, a memory. "Not but what I daresay it is
Bruno's, and perhaps he pays for it," he added with an
afterthought, willing to be popular.
" No, not a stiver," said the barber. " Lippo and Nita
have said to me a score of times, ' we took the boy from
pity, and we keep it from pity. Not a pin's worth shall we
F
66
SIGNA.
ever see back again this side heaven. But what matter that.
When we feed eight mouths it is not much to feed a ninth.'
They are good people, Lippo and his wife."
"Good as gold," said Brizzo, the butcher, "and saving
money, or I suppose it is old Baldo's; they have bought
that little pasture up at Santa Lucia; a snug little place, and
twenty little Maremma sheep upon it as fat as I ever put
knife into;—Lippo has God's grace."
"A fair spoken man always, and good company," said
Momo, who had shaved him bare and smooth as a melon
that very morning. This was the general opinion in the
Lastra. Lippo who had always a soft smart word for every-
body; who smiled so on people who knew he hated them,
that they believed they were loved whilst he was smiling;
who was always ready for a nice game at dominoes or cards,
and if he did cheat a little, did it so well that no one could
fail to respect him the more for it; Lippo was well spoken
of by his townsfolk, and one of the Council of the Miseri-
cordia had been often heard to say that there was not a
better man in all the province.
But Bruno, now that he chose to save money, was a very
son of the fiend without a spot of light anywhere. Now
that he would never drink, and now that he would never
marry, the Lastra gave him over to Satan, body and soul,
and for all time.
Bruno cared nothing at all. They might split their throats
for any notice that he took.
" 111 words, rot no wheat," he would say to his one friend,
Cecco, the cooper ; who lived across by the bridge, and had
a workshop there, with a great open arch of the thirteenth
century sculpture, and a square window with crossed bars
of iron, and a screen of vine-foliage behind it that might
have been the background of a pieta—so beautiful was it
when the sun shone through the leaves.
He went on his own ways, ploughing with his oxen,
pruning his olives, sowing and reaping, and making the best
of his land, and going down on market days into the city,
looking as if he had stepped out of Ghirlandaio's panels, but
himself knowing nothing of that, nor thinking of anything
except the samples of grain in his palm or the cabbages in
his cart.
Bruno cared nothing for other folks' opinions. What he
SIGN A.
67
eared for was to keep faith with Pippa in that mute compact
born of his remorse, which he firmly believed the saints had
witnessed on her behalf.
He had cared nothing for the child at first, but as it had
grown older, and each year caught hold of his hand more
fondly, as if it felt a friend, and lifted up to him its great
soft serious eyes, a personal affection for this young life
which he alone protected, grew slowly upon him ; and as the
boy became older, and the intelligence and fancies of his
eager mind awed the man whilst they bewildered him,
Bruno loved him with the deep love of a dark and lonely
soul, for the sole thing in which it makes its possibility of
redemption here and hereafter.
He sat now at the house-door and watched the running
figure so long as it was in sight. When the bottom of the
hill was reached and the path turned under the lower vines,
he lost him quite, and only knew that he must still be
running on, on, on, under all those roofs and tangles of
green leaves.
He was not quite at ease about him. The boy never
complained; nay, if questioned, insisted he was happy.
But Bruno mistrusted his brother, and he doubted the peace
of that household. The children, always grovelling and
screaming, greedy and jealous, he hated. It was not the
nest for this young nightingale—that he felt. But he did
not see what better to do.
Lippo held him fast by his word; and he had no proof
that the boy was really ill-used. Sometimes he saw bruises
on him, but there was always some story of an accident, or
of a childish quarrel to account for these, or of some just
punishment, and he, roughly reared himself, knew that boys
needed such; and Signa's lips were mute ; 01* if they ever
did open, said only " they are good to me,"—a lie, for
which he confessed and besought pardon on his knees in the
little dark corner in the Misericordia church.
Still Bruno was not satisfied. But what to alter he knew
not, and he was not a man who could spare time or acquire
the habit of holding communion with his own thoughts.
When the child had quite gone out of sight, he rose and
took his sickle again and went oacK to his wheat.
He seldom had anyone in to help him; men were careless
Sometimes, and split the straw in reaping, and spoiled it for
68
SIGNA.
the plaiters. He generally got all the wheat in between
S. Procolo's day and S. Paul's; and the barley he took
later.
The evening fell suddenly ; where this land lies they lose
the sunset because of the great rise of the hills; they see a
great globe of fire dropping downward, it touches the purple
of the mountain, and then all is night at once.
The bats came out and the night kestrels and the wood
owls, and went hunting to and fro. Nameless melodious
sounds echoed from tree to tree. The cicali went to bed and
the grilli hummed about in their stead; they are cousins,
only one likes the day and the other the night. The fireflies
flitted, faint and paling, over the fallen corn. When the
wheat was reaped their day was done. Later on a faint
light came above the far Umbrian hills—a faint light in the
sky like the dawn ; then a little longer, and out of the light
rose the moon, a round world of gold ablaze above the dark,
making the tree-boughs that crossed her disc, look black.
But Bruno looked at none of it.
He had not eyes like Pippa's child.
He stooped and cut his wheat, laying it in ridges tenderly.
The fireflies put out their lights because the wheat was
dead.
But the glowworms under the leaves in the grass shone
on; they were pale and blue, and they could not dance;
they never knew what it was to wheel in the air, or to fly
so high that men took them for stars; they never saw the
tree-tops or the nests of the hawks, or the lofty magnolia
flowers, the fireflies only could do all that; but then the
glowworms lived on from year to year, and the death of the
wheat was nothing to them ; they were worms of good
sense, and had holes in the ground.
They twinkled on the sod as long as they liked, and
pitied the fireflies, burning themselves out by soaring so
high, and dying because their loves were dead.
S1GNA.
CHAPTER IX.
The child Signa ran on through the soft grey night.
Toto was afraid of the night, but he—never.
The fireflies ran with him along the waves of the standing
corn. Wheat was cut first on the sunniest land, and there
was much still left unreapen on the lower ground.
One wonders there are no fairies where there are fireflies,
for fireflies seem fairies. But no fairies are found where the
Greek gods have lived. Frail Titania has no place beside
Demeter ; even Puck will not venture to ruffle Pan's sleep ;
and where the harp of Apollo Cytharoedus was once heard,
Ariel does not dare sing his song to the bees.
Signa caught a firefly in his hand and watched it burn a
minute and then let it loose again, and ran on his way.
He wished he could be one of them, up in the air so high,
with that light always showing them all they wished to
know ; seeing how the owls lived on the roofs of the towers,
and how the bees ruled their commonwealth on the top of
the acacias, and how the snow blossom came out of the
brown magnolia spikes, and how the cypress tree made her
golden balls, and how the stone-pine added cubics to his
height so noiselessly and fast, and how the clouds looked to
the swallows that lived so near them on the chapel belfries,
and how the wheat felt when it saw the sickle, and whether
it was pained to die and leave the sun, or whether it was
glad to go and still the pain of hungry children. Oh what
he would ask and know, he thought, if only he were a
firefly!
But he was only a little boy with nothing to teach him
anything, and a heart too big for his body, and no wings to
rise upon, but only feet to carry him, that were often tired,
and bruised, and weary of the dust.
So he ran down towards the Lastra, stumbling and going
slowly, because he was in the dark, and also because he was
so constantly looking upward at the fireflies, that he lost his
footing many times.
Across the bridge, he turned aside and went up into the
fields to the right of him before he walked on to the Lastra.
Between the bridge and the Lastra it is a picturesque and
70
SIGNA.
broken country. On one side is the river, and on the other
hilly ground, green with plumes of corn, and hedges of briar-
rose, and tall rustling poplars, and up above, cypresses ; and
old villas, noble in decay, and monasteries with frescoes
crumbling to dust, and fortresses that are barns and stables
for cattle, and convent chapels, whose solitary bell answers
the bells of the goats as they graze.
Signa ran up the steep grassy ways a little, and through a
field or two under the canes, twice his own height, and came
to a little cottage, much lower, smaller, and more miserable
than Bruno's house ; a cottage that had only a few roods of
soil apportioned to it, and those not very arable.
Before its door there were several sheaves of corn lying
on the ground ; all its produce except the few vegetables it
yielded. The grain had been cut the day before and was
not carried in on account of the day being a holy one, for its
owner did not venture to risk his hereafter as Bruno had
dared to do.
The man was sitting on the stone bench outside his door;
a good-humoured fellow, lazy, stupid, very poor, but quite
contented. He was one of the labourers in the gardens of
a great villa close by, called G-iovoli. He had many children,
and was as poor as it is possible to he without begging on
the roads.
" Where is Gemma," called Signa. The man pointed in-
doors with the stem of his pipe :
" Gone to bed, and Palma too, and I go too, in a minute
or less : you are out late, little fellow."
" I have been with Bruno," said Signa, unfolding his
cabbage leaf and his currants in the starlight, that was
beginning to gleam through the deep shadow of the early
evening. "Look, I have brought these for Gemma ; may I
run in and give them to her ? They are so sweet! "
The gardener, who was called Sandro by everybody, his
name being Alessandro Zanobetto, nodded in assent. He
was a good-natured, idle, mirthful soul, and could never see
why Lippo's wife should treat the child so cruelly; he had
plagues enough himself, but never beat them.
" If Gemma be asleep she will wake, if there be anything
to get," he said, with a little chuckle; himself he thought
Palma worth a thousand of her.
Signa ran indoors.
SIGNA.
71
It was a square-built place, all littered and untidy ; there
were hens at roost, and garden refuse, and straw with a kid
and its mother on-it; and a table and a bench or two, and
a crucifix with a bough of willow, and in the corner, a bed
of hay upon the floor, sweet-smelling, and full of dry
flowers.
Two children were in it, all hidden in the hay, except
their heads and the points of their feet.
One was dark, a little brown, strong, soft-eyed child, and
the other was of that curious fairness, with the hair of red-
dened gold, and the eyes like summer skies, which the old
Goths have left here and there in the Latin races. Both
were asleep.
They were like two little amorini in any old painting,
with their curving limbs, and their curly heads, and their
rosy mouths, curled up, in the withered grasses; the boy
did not know anything about that, but he vaguely felt that
it was pretty to see them lying so, just as it was pretty
to see a cluster of pomegranate flowers blowing in the
sun.
He stole up on tiptoe, and touching the cheek of the fair
one with a bunch of currants, laughed to see her blue bright
eyes open wide on him with a stare.
"I have brought you some fruit, Gemma," he said, and
tried to kiss her.
" Give me ! give me quick !" cried the little child turn-
bling up half erect in the hay, the dried daisies in her
crumpled curls, and her little bare chest and shoulders fit
for a statue of Cupid. She pushed away his lips ; she
wanted the fruit.
"If I do not eat it quick, Palma will wake," she whis-
pered, and began to crunch them in her tiny teeth as the
kid did its grasses. The dark child did wake, and lifted
herself on her elbow.
" It is Signa! " she cried, with a little coo of delight like a
wood pigeon's.
"I kept you no currants, Palma!" said Signa, with a
sudden pang of self-reproach. He knew that he had done
unkindly.
Palma looked a little sorrowful. They were very poor,
and never hardly tasted anything except the black bread,
like the dogs.
72
SIGN A.
" Never mind ; come and kiss me," she said, with a little
sigh.
Signa went round and kissed her. But he went back to
Gemma again.
" Good-night," he said to the pretty white child, sitting
up in the hay; and he kissed her once more. So Gemma
was kissed twice ; and had the currants as well.
Palma was used to that.
Signa ran out with a hardened conscience. He knew he
had been unjust; but then if he had given any of the cur-
rants to Palma, Gemma never would have kissed him at all.
He liked them both; little things of ten and nine, living
with their father and their brothers close to the gates of the
great garden, low down on the same hill where, higher,
Lippo's sheep were kept.
He liked them both, having seen them from babyhood,
and paddled in the brook under the poplars with them, and
strung them chains of berries, and played them tunes on the
pipes he cut from the reeds.
They were both his playfellows, pretty little things, half-
naked, bare-footed, fed by the air and the sun, and tumbling
into life, as little rabbits do amongst the grass.
But Palma he did not care about, and about Gemma he
did. For Gemma was a thousand times the prettier, and
Palma loved him always, that he knew; but of Gemma he
never was so sure.
Nevertheless, he knew he had not done them justice
about those currants, and he was sorry for it, as he ran
along the straight road into the Lastra, and with one look
upward to the gateway that he loved, though he could not
see the colour on the parapet because it was dark, he darted
onward quickly lest the gates should close for the night and
he be punished and turned backward, and hurried up the
passage into Lippo's house.
Lippo lived in a steep paved road above the Place of
Arms, and close to the open-arched loggia of what used to
be the wood market, against the southern gate. There is no
great beauty about the place, and yet it has light and shade,
and colour, and antiquity, to charm a Prout or furnish a
Canaletto. The loggia has the bold round arches that
Orcagna most loved; the walls have the dim, soft brown
and greys of age, with flecks of colour, where the frescoes
SIGNA.
73
once were; through the gateway there come the ox carts
and the mules, and the herds of goats, down the steep
paved way; there is a quiver of green leaves, a breadth of
blue sky, and at the bottom of the passage-way there is a
shrine of our Lady of Good Council, so old that the people
can tell you nothing of it; you can see the angels still with
their illumined wings, and the Virgin with rays of gold, who
sits behind a wicket of grey wood, with a cafven M inter-
laced before her, and quaint little doors that open and shut;
but of who made it or first set it up for worship there they
can tell you nothing at all.
It is only a bit of the Lastra that nobody sees except the
fattori rattling over the stones in their light carts, or the
contadini going in for their master's letters, or now and then
a noble driving to his villa, and the country folks coming for
justice or for sentence to the Prefettura. But there is
beauty in it, and poetry ; and the Madonna who sits behind
her little grey wicket has seen so much since first the lilies
of liberty were carved on the bold east gate.
The boy's heart beat quickly as he went up the stairs ; he
was brave in a shy, silent way, and he believed that the
angels were very near, and would help him some day. Still
Nita's weighty arm, and the force of her alder twigs or her
ash stem, were not things to be got rid of by dreaming, and
the angels were very slow to come ; no doubt because he
was not good enough, as Signa thought sorrowfully. And
he had sent them further away from him than ever by that
unjust act about the currants, so that his heart throbbed fast
as he climbed the rickety stairs where the spiders had it all
their own way, and the old scorpions never were frightened
by a broom, which made them very happy, because scor-
pions hate a broom, and tumble down dead at the sight of
one (cleanliness having immeasurable power over them), in
as moral an allegory as iEsop and Fontaine could ever have
wished to draw.
Nita and all her noisy brood were standing together over
the table with a big loaf on it, and an empty bowl and flasks
of oil and vinegar, getting ready for supper.
Lippo was down in the street playing dominoes, and old
Baldo was sitting below puzzling out, by a bronze lamp,
from a book of dreams, some signs he had had visions of in
a doze, to see their numbers for the tombola.
74
SIGNA.
" How late you are, you little plague, I gave you till sun-
set," screamed Nita, as she sawTtim. " And where is the
salad—give me—quick!"
"I am very sorry," stammered Signa, timidly. " The
salad ? I forgot it. I am very sorry !"
" Sorry ; and I waiting all this time for supper," shrieked
Nita. "Nothing to do but just to cut a lettuce, and some
endive off the ground, and you forget it. Where have you
been all day ?"
" With Bruno."
" With Bruno—of course with Bruno—and could not
bring a salad off his land. The only thing you had to think
of, and we waiting for supper, and the sun over the moun-
tains more than an hour ago, and you stuffed up there, I
warrant, like a fatting goose !"
" I had some bread and milk," said Signa. He was
trembling in all his little limbs; he could not help this, they
beat him so, so often, and he knew well what was coming.
"And nothing else?" screamed Nita, for every good
thing that went to him she considered robbery and violence
done on her own children.
"I had fruit—but I took it to Zanobetto's girls," said
Signa, very low, because he was such a foolish little fellow,
that neither example, nor execration, nor constant influence
of lying could ever make him untruthful, and a child is
always either untruthful or most exaggerately exact in truth
—there is no medium for him.
"And not to us," screeched Nita's eldest daughter, and
boxed him on the ear.
" You little beast," said Georgio, the biggest boy, and
kicked him.
Toto waited about, and sprang on him like a cat, and
pulled his hair till he tore some curls out by the roots.
Signa was very pale, but he never made sound nor effort.
Ho stood stock-still and mute, and bore it. He had seen
pictures of S. Stephen and S. Lawrence and of Christ—and
thoy were still and quiet always, letting their enemies have
their way. Perhaps, if he were still too, he thought, it
might be forgiven to him—that sin about the currants.
Nita, with an iron hand, sent her offsprings off, reeling to
their places, and seized him herself and stripped him.
He was all bruised from the night's beating still; but she
SIGNA.
75
did not pause for that. She plucked down her rod of alder
twigs, and thrashed him till he bled again. Then threw
him into the hay in the inner room beyond where the boys
slept.
All the time he was quite mute. Shut up in the dark his
courage gave way under the pain, and he burst out crying.
" Dear angels, do not be angry with me any more," he
prayed, " and I only did it to make Gemma happy; and
they beat me so here, and I never tell Bruno."
But the angels, wherever they be, never now come this
side of the sun: and Signa lay all alone in the dark, and
got no rest nor answer.
" The lute will be sorry," he thought, getting tired of
waiting for the angels.
He told all his sorrows and joys to the lute, and he was
sure it understood, for did it not sing with him, or sigh with
him, just as his heart taught it ?
" I will tell the lute," said Signa, sobbing in his straw,
with a vague babyish dim sense of the great truth that his
art is the only likeness of an angel that the singer ever sees
on earth.
CHAPTER X.
The little fellow had a laborious life at the best of times,
but he had so grown up in it that it never occurred to him to
repine.
True Toto, the same age as himself, and a mother's
darling, led one just as lazy and agreeable as his was hard
and over-worked. Toto sported in the sun at pleasure,
played morra for halfpence, robbed cherry trees, slept
through noon, devoured fried beans and green almonds and
artichokes in oil, and refused to be of any earthly use
to any human creature through all his dirty idle days as
best beseemed to him. But Signa from the cradle upward
had been taught to give way to Toto, and been taught to
know that the measure of life for Toto was golden and for
76
SIGN A.
him was lead. It had always been so from the first, when
Nita had laid him hungry in the hay to turn to Toto full
but screaming.
Signa, sent out in the dark before the sun rose to see
to the sheep on the hill, kept on the hill winter and
summer if he were not sent higher to fetch things from
Bruno's garden and fields; running on a dozen errands a
day for Baldo or Lippo or Nita; trotting by the donkey's
side with vegetables along the seven dusty miles into the
city, and trotting back again afoot, because the donkey was
laden with charcoal, or linen to be washed, or some other
town burden that Lippo earned a penny by in fetching for
his neighbours; early and late, in heat and in cold, when
the south wind scorched, as when the north wind howled,
Signa was always on his feet, doing this and that and the
other. But he had got quite used to it, and thought it a
wonderful treat that they allowed him to sing now and then
for the priests, and that he let his voice loose as loud as he
liked on the hill-sides and in the fields.
When he went up into these fields and knew the beautiful
Tuscan world in summer, the liberty and the loveliness of
it made him happy without his knowing why, because the
poetic temper was alive in him.
The little breadths of grass-land white as snow with a
million cups of the earth-creeping bindweed. The yellow
wheat clambering the hill-sides and darkened to ruddy
bronze when the vine-shadows fell over it. The spring-
tide glory of the Judas trees, which here they call in cruel
irony the Tree of Love, with their rose flowers blushing
amongst the great walnuts and the cone-dropping firs.
The fig-trees and the apple-trees flinging their boughs to-
gcihcr in June, like children clasping arms in play. The
glowworm lying under the moss, while the fireflies shone
aloft in the leaves. The blue butterflies astir like living
cornflowers amongst the bearded barley, and the dainty
grace of the oats. The little shallow brooks sleeping in
sun and shade under the green canes, with the droll frogs
talking of the weather. The cistus, that looks so like the
dog-rose that you pluck one for the other every day,
covering the rough loose stones and crumbling walls with
beauty so delicate you fear to breathe on it. The long
turf paths between the vines, left for the bullocks to pass
SIGN A.
73
by in vintage time, and filled with colours from clover or
iris, blue bugloss, or bright fritillaria. The wayside cruci-
fixes so hidden in coils of vine and growing stalks of
rush-like millet and the swaying fronds of acacia off-shoots
that you scarce can see the cross for the foliage. The
high hills that seem to sleep against the sun, so still they
look, and dim and dreamful, with clouds of olives, soft as
mist, and flecks of white where the mountain villages are,
distant as far off sails of ships, and full, like them, of vague
fancy and hope and perils of the past. All these things
were beautiful to him, and he was very happy when he went
up to Bruno.
Besides, this tall dark fellow, who scowled on everyone
and should have been a brigand, people said, was always
good to him.
He had to work, indeed, for Bruno, to carry the cabbages
into the town, to pump the water from the tanks, to pick
the insects off the vines, to cut the distaff canes, to carry
the cow her fresh fodder, to do all the many things that
are always wanting to be done from dawn to eve on a
little farm. But then Bruno always spared him half an
hour for his lute, always gave him a good meal, always
let him enjoy himself when he could, and constantly inter-
ceded to get him spared labour on a feast day, and leave
to attend the communal school.
He did not wonder either at Bruno's kindness or at the
other's unkindness ; because children take good and evil as
the birds take rain and sunshine. But it lightened the
troubles of his young life and made them bearable.
He had never wandered farther than the hills above the
town, and sometimes he was sent with the donkey into
Florence; that was all. But the war-worn staunch old
Lastra is enough world for a child ; it would be too wide
a one for an historian, could all its stones have tongues.
It is a trite saying that it is not what we see but
how we see that matters; and Signa saw in his battle-
dinted world-forsaken little town more things and more
meanings than a million grown-up wanderers would have
seen in the width of many countries.
He got the old men to tell him stories of it in the great
republican centuries ; the stories were ppocryphal, no doubt,
but had that fitness which almost does as well as truth
?8
SIGNA.
in popular traditions, and, indeed, is truth itself in a
measure.
He knew how to read, and in old muniment rooms, going
to decay in farmhouses and granaries, found tattered chroni-
cles which he could spell out with more or less success. He
knew all the old towers and ruined fortresses as the owls
knew them. When he got a little time to himself, which
was not very often, he would wander away up into the
high places and play his lute to the sunny silence, and fancy
himself a minstrel like those he saw in the illuminations of
the vellum rolls that the rats ate in many a villa, once a
palace and now a wine-warehouse, whose lords had died out
root and branch. Wading knee-deep in the green river
water amongst the canes and the croaking frogs that the
other boys were fishing for, his shining eyes saw the broad
channel of the river filled with struggling horses and fighting
men, as they told him it had been in the old days when
Castruccio had forded it and Ferruccio had ridden over it
with his lances.
It was all odds and ends and waifs and strays of most
imperfect knowledge that he got, for every one was ignorant
around him, and though the people were proud of their
history, they so mixed it up with grotesque invention and
distorted hyperbole that it was almost worthless. Still the
little that he knew made the old town beautiful to him and
venerable and most wonderful, as Troy, if he could see
it entire, would seem to a Hellenic scholar. His little head
was full of delicate and glorious fancies, as he pattered on
his bare brown feet beside the donkey under the gateways
of the Lastra ; the west one with its circlet of azure where
the monochrom used to be, and its chasm of green where
the ivy and bushes grow; and the east one with its great.
stone shields, and its yawning depth of arch, and its warders'
turrets on the roof.
He was so absorbed in thinking, that he would some-
times never see the turnips jump out of the panniers, or
the chestnuts shake out of the sacks on the donkey's back,
and Nita would beat him till he was sick for leaving them
rolling in the Lastra streets—to be puzzling about old
colours on the tops of gates, when the blessed vegetables were
flying loose like mad things on the stones !—it was enough
to call down the instant judgment of heaven, she averred.
SIGNA.
79
Those gleams of blue on the battlements, what use were
they ? and as for the clouds—they were always holding off
when they were wanted, and coming down when rain was
ruin. But as for turnips and beans—about their precious-
ness there could be no manner of doubt. And she taught
the priority of the claims of the soup-pot with a thick
cudgel, as the world teaches it to the poet. The poet often
learns the lesson, and puts his conscience in to stew, as if
it were an onion; finding philosophy will bake no bread.
But no beating could cure Signa of looking at the frescoes,
and hearing the angels singing in the clouds above.
Signa was not as other children were. To Nita he seemed
more foolish and more worthless than any of them, and she
despised him.
" You cannot beat the gates down nor the clouds," said
Signa, when she thrashed him, and that comforted him.
But such an answer seemed to Nita the very pertinacity of
the Evil One himself.
"He was an obstinate little beast," said Nita, "and if
it were not for that half of Bruno's land "
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 God-
head in them than the grains of sand. But here and there,
with no lot different to 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 iridescent.
Some other relaxations and enjoyments too the child
found ; and here and there people were good to him; women
for the sake of his pretty innocent face, with the cloud of
dusky golden hair tumbling half over it always, and priests
for the sake of his voice, which gave such beauty to their
services, when anything great happened to demand a full
ceremonial in their dark, quiet, frescoed sanctuaries scattered
under the hills and on them. Indeed Lippo would have
taken him into the city, and made money of his singing in
the celebrations at Easter time, or on Ascension Day, or in
8o
SIGN A,
Holy Week at the grand ceremonies of Rome. But of that
Bruno would never hear. He set his heel down on the
ground with an oath.
" Sell your soul, if you please, and the devil is fool enough
to pay for it," he said, " but you shall never sell the throat
of Pippa's child like any trapped nightingale's."
Poor Lippo sighed and yielded; it was one of those things
in which his own good sense and calm wisdom had to let them-
selves be overborne by his brother's impetuous unreason.
The churches—even the great ones—pay but a few pence ;
it was not worth while risking for a few coppers, or for an
uncertain future, that lucrative "half of my half" off the
rich fields and vinepaths of the Artimino mountain.
So Signa sang here and there, a few times in the year, in
the little choirs about the Lustra for nothing at all but the
love of it; and in the Holy Week sang in the church of the
Misericordia, where one of his chief haunts and sweetest
pleasures was found at all times.
It is the only church within the Lastra walls, the parish
•church being outside upon the hills, and very little used. It
is a small place, grey and grim of exterior, with its red door
veils hanging down much worn, and having, within, its
altar piece by Cimabue, only shown on high and holy feasts;
no religious building in this country, however lowly, is quite
without some treasure of the kind.
The church fills to overflowing at high mass, and the
people stand on the steps and in the street, and the sound
of the chanting and the smoke of the incense, and the
tinkle of the little bells come out on to the air over the
bowed heads, and with them there mingle all sweet common
country sounds, from bleating sheep and rushing winds, and
watch-dogs baying afar off, and heaving ropes grating boats
against the bridge ; and the people murmur their prayers in
the sun, and bow and kneel and go home comforted, if they
know not very well why they are so.
Above the body of the church, led up to by a wooden
staircase, there are the rooms of the Fraternity to which all
good men and true belong for the love of the poor and the
service of heaven. Rooms divided into little cells, each
with the black robes and mask of a brother of the order
in it; and black-lettered lines of Scripture above, and the
crossbones of death; and closets where the embroidered
SIGMA.
Si
banners are, and the sacred things for holy offices, and the
black velvet pall, with its memento mori and its golden
skulls, that covers each brother on his last travel to his
latest rest.
Here, in the stillness and the silence, with these symbols
of death everywhere around, there dwelt at this time in the
dull songless church a man who, in his day, had been a
careless wandering singer, loving his art honestly, though
himself one of the lowliest of her servitors.
Born in the Lastra, with a sweet voice and an untrained
love of harmony, his tastes had led him to wander away
from it, and join one of the troops of musicians who make
the chance companies in the many small theatres that are to
be found in the Italian towns which lie out of the great
highways, and are hardly known by name, except in their
own commune. He had never risen high in his profession,
though a favourite in the little cities, but had always
wandered about from season to season from playhouse to
playhouse ; and in the middle way of his career a drenching
in a rain-storm, after a burning day, had made his throat
mute and closed his singing life forever. He had returned
to his birthplace, and there joining the Misericordia, had
become organist and sacristan to their church in the Lastra,
and had stayed in those offices some thirty years, and now
was over seventy; a silent, timid oid creature usually, but of
a gentle temper, and liking nothing better than to recall the
days of his wanderings as a singer, or to linger over the keys
of his old organ with some world-forgotten score before him.
There was little scope for his fondness for melody in the
Lastra. It was only in Holy Week that he could arrange
any choral service ; or once in two or three years, perhaps,
there would come such a chance for him as he had had on
that day of Corpus Domini when the bishop's visit had
brought about an unusual greatness of ceremonial.
At all other times all he could ever do was to play a few
symphonies or fugues at high mass, and if any village child
had a great turn for melody, teach it the little science that
he knew, as he taught Signa; Signa who was so docile a
pupil that he would have knelt in happy obedience to the
whip which S. Gregory bought for his scholars—only he
never would have merited it for the transgression of singing
out of time.
G
82
SIGNA.
The stillness, the sadness, the seclusion, where no sound
came unless it were some tolling bell upon the hills, the
melancholy associations of the place, which all spoke of pain,
•of effort, of sorrow, of the needs of the poor, and of the
warnings of the grave, all these fostered the dreamful temper
of the boy, and the thoughtfulness which was beyond his
years; and he passed many a happy tranquil hour listening
to the old man playing, or trying to reproduce upon his lute,
as best he might, themes of the musicians of earlier genera-
tions—from the fugues of Merula—from the airs of Zinga-
relli—from the Stabat Mater of Jesi—from the Benedictus of
Jomelli—from the Credo of Perez—from the Cantata of
Porpora—knowing nothing of their names or value, but
finding out their melodies and meanings by sheer instinct.
Luigi Dini—whom everyone called Gigi—had many a
crabbed old score and fine sonata and cantata copied out by
his own hands, and the child, -having been taught his notes,
had grown able to find his way in this labyrinth, and pick out
beautiful things from the dust of ages by ear and instinct,
and make them all his own, as love appropriates whatever it
worships ; and never knew, as he went over the stones of
the Lastra with the donkey, and woke the people in their
beds with his clear voice, whilst all was dark, and only he
and the birds were astir, that when he was singing the great
Se circa, se dice, or the mighty Misero pargoletto, or the
delicious Quelli-la, or the tender Deh signore / he was
giving out to the silent street, and the dreaming echoes, and
the wakening flush of day, airs that had been the rapture of
the listening world a century before.
Crave Gregorian melodies; Laudi of the Florentine
Iaudisti of the Middle Ages ; hymns from the monasteries,
modelled on the old Greek traditions, with " the note the
slave of the word; " all things simple, pure, and old filled
the manuscripts of the sacristy like antique jewels. Signa,
very little, very ignorant, very helpless, strayed amongst
them confused and unconscious of the value of the things he
played with, and yet got the good out of them and felt their
richness and was nourished on the strength of them, and ran
away to them at every stolen moment that he could, while
Luigi Dini stood by and listened, and was moved at the
wonderful instinct of the child, as the Romans were moved
at the young Mozart's rendering of the Allegri requiem.
SIGN A.
»3
Music was in the heart and the brain of the child; his feet
moved to it over the dusty roads, his heavy burdens were
lightened by it, and, when they scolded him, often he did
not hear—there were so many voices singing to him.
Where did the voices come from ? he did not know; only he
heard them when he lay awake in the straw, beside the other
boys, with the stars shining through the unglazed window
of the roof, as he heard them when the hot noon was bright
and still on the hill-top where he strayed all alone with his
sheep.
One day he found the magical voices shut up in a little
brown prison of wood, as a great soul ere now has been
pent in a mean little body;—one day, a wonderful day,
after which all the world changed for him.
In a little shop in the Lastra by the Porta Fiorentina,
there was a violin for sale. A violin in pear-wood, with a
shell inlaid upon its case, and reputed to be very, very old.
Tonino, the locksmith and tinman, had it. So many
years before that he could not count them a lodger had left
it with him in default of rent, and never had gone back for
it. The violin lay neglected in the dust of an old cupboard.
One day a pedlar had spied it and offered ten francs for it.
Tonino said to himself, if a pedlar would give that, it must
be worth four times the sum at least, and put it in his
window with his old keys and his new saucepans, and his
ancient locks and his spick and span bright coffee pots; a
little old dusky window just within the tall east gateway of
the Lastra, where the great poplars throw their welcome
shadow across the sunny road.
Signa going on an errand there one day and left alone in
the shop took it up and began to make the strings sound,
not knowing how, but finding the music out for himself as
the young Pascal found the science of mathematics.
When Tonino entered his workshop, with a pair of hot
pincers in his hand, he was frightened to death to hear the
sweetest sounds dancing about the air like butterflies, and
when he discovered that the child was playing on his pre-
cious violin that the pedlar would have given ten francs for,
he hardly knew whether to kiss the child for being so clever
or whether to pinch him with the red-hot nippers for his im-
pudence. Anyhow he snatched the violin from him and put
it in the window again.
84
SIGNA.
A thing that could make so sweet a noise must bo worth
double what he thought.
So he put a price of forty francs upon it, and stuck it
amongst his tins, hoping to sell it; dealers or gentlefolks
came sometimes up and down the Lastra, seeing if there
were any pretty or ancient thing to buy, for the people have
beautiful old work very often in lace, in majolica, in carvings,
in missals, in repousse, in copper, and can be cheated out of
these with an ease that quite endears them to those who
do it.
A few people looked at Tonino's violin, but no one bought
it; because the right people did not see it, or because it was
an old violin without any specif, grace of Cremona or value
of Bologna on its case. As it lay there in the window
amongst the rusty iron and the shining tin things, with the
dust drifting over it, and the flies buzzing about its strings,
Signa saw it twenty times a week, and sighed his little soul
out for it.
Oh the unutterable wonder locked up in that pear-wood
case ! oh, the deep undreamed-of joys that lay in those mute
strings !
The child thought of nothing else. After those murmurs
of marvellous meanings that had come to him when touching
that strange thing, he dreamed of it by day and night. The
lute was dear to him ; but what was the power of the lute
beside those heights and depths of sound that this unknown
creature could give ?—for a living creature it was to him, as
much as was the redbreast or thrush.
Only to touch it again! just once to touch it again !
He begged and prayed Tonino; but the tinman was m-
exorable. He could not risk his bit of property in such
babyish hands. True the child had made the music jump
out of it; but that might have been an accident, and who
could tell that another time he would not break it—a little
beggar's brat like that, without people to pay for it if any
damage were done.
" Give me my forty francs and you shall have it, picci-
nino," Tonino would say with a grin, knowing that he might
as well tell the child to bring him down the star-dust from
the skies.
Signa would go away with his little head hung down ; the
longing for the violin possessing him with a one-idea'd
STGNA.
passion. In the young child with whom genius is horn its
vague tumultuous desires work without his knowing what it
is that ails him.
The children laughed at him, the old people scolded him,
Nita beat him, Bruno even grew impatient with him because
he was always sighing for an old fiddle, that it was as
absurd for him to dream of as if it were a king's sword or a
queen's pearls.
"As if he were not lazy and tiresome enough as it is 1 "
said Nita, boxing his ears soundly, when she went by one
evening and caught him leaning against Tonino's casement,
and looking with longing, pitiful, ardent eyes at the treasure
in its pear-wood shell.
After a time the child, shy and proud in temper,. grew
ashamed of his own enthusiasm, and hid it from the others,
and never any more tried to soften Tonino's heart and get
leave to touch that magical bow again.
Bruno thought he had forgotten it and was glad. The
violin lay with the metal pots and the rusty locks, and no
one bought it. Signa when he had to go past, on an errand
through the gate, to Castagnolo or S. Maria del G-reve, or
any other eastward village, tried not to look at the brown
shining wood that the wasps and the mosquitoes were
humming over at their will. But he longed for it the more
because he kept the longing silent, and had no chance of
ever feeling those keys of enchantment under his little
fingers. A thing repressed, grows.
He would lie awake at night thinking of the violin; if it
had not been so wicked he would have stolen something to
buy it with; some days it was all he could do to keep him-
self from stealing it itself.
One bright afternoon in especial, when everyone was at a
marionnette show in the square, and he had come back very
foot-sore from the city, and passing saw Tonino's place was
empty and the old lattice window was open and the sun's rays
fell across the violin, it would have been the work of a second
to put his hand in, and draw it out, and run off—anywhere
—anywhere, what would it have mattered where, if only he
had carried all that music with him ?
For genius is fanaticism ; and the little barefoot hungry
fellow, running errands in the dust, had genius in him,
and was tossed about by it like a small moth by a storm.
86
SIGNA.
To run away and wander, with the violin to talk to him
wherever he might gothe longing to do this tortured
him so that he clasped his hands over his eyes and fled—
without it—as fast as his feet could take him.
To see it lying dumb when at a touch it would say such
beautiful things to him!—he ran on through the gateway
and down the road with the burning temptation pursuing
him as prairie flames a frightened fawn.
If any one had had it who could have made it speak he
would not have minded; but that it should lie mute there—
useless—lost—hurt him with a sharper pain than Nita's
hazel rods could deal.
" Oh Gemma—almost I stole it! " he gasped, panting
and breathless with the horror of himself, as he stumbled
up against the pretty child on the green strip that runs
under the old south wall, where the breaches made by the
Spanish assaults are filled in with ivy, and the ropemakers
walk to and fro, weaving their strands under the ruined
bastions.
Gemma put her finger in her mouth and looked at him.
"Why not quite?" she said. Gemma had stolen many
things in her day, and had always been forgiven because
she was so pretty.
" Oh, Gemma, I did—so nearly ! " he murmured, un-
heeding her answer in the confusion of his own new stricken
sense of peril and escape.
" Was it to eat ? " said Gemma.
" To eat ? " •
He echoed her words without knowing what he said.
Two great tears were rolling down his cheeks. He was
so grateful that strength for resistance had been given
him; and yet, he was thinking of a song * of the country
to a lute; which sings of how its owner would gild its
strings and wander with it even as far as Borne—mountains
and rocks inclining before its silver sounds.
If only he could have that beautiful strange thing, he
* Oh quanto suoni bene chitarruzza!
Le tui corde si possono indorare!
Lo manico diventi una fanciulla!
E dove io vada ti posso menare
Ch' io ti posso menar da qui a Koma
E monti e sassi t 'abbiano a inchinare!
Tuscan Serenade.
SIGNA.
87
thought, how he would roam the world over fearing nothing*
or how happy he would lie down among the sheep and the
pines, for ever making music to the winds.
"Why did you not take it, if nobody was by to see,"
said Gemma.
" Oh dear, it is wicked to thieve," said Signa, drearily.
"Wicked, you know, and mean."
Gemma put out her lower lip.
"If no one know, it is all right," she said, with accurate
perception of the world's standard of virtue.
Signa sighed heavily, his head hung down; he hardly
heard her ; he was thinking of the violin.
"You are a mammamia," said Gemma, with calm scorn,
meaning he was a baby and very silly. " When I wish to
do a thing, I do it."
" But you do very wrong things sometimes."
Gemma shrugged her little white shoulders up to her ears.
"It is nice to do wrong," she said, placidly.
" They say things are wrong you know," she added,
after a pause. " But that is only to keep us quiet. It is
all words."
They called her stupid, but she noticed many facts and
drew many conclusions. This was one of them; and it
was alike agreeable to her and useful. She was a naughty
child, but was naughty with logic and success.
" If only he would let me touch it once," murmured Signa.
Gemma finding him such bad company went away hop-
ping on one foot, and wondering why boys were such silly
creatures.
"What is the matter?" said one of the ropemakers
kindly to the boy. "Do you want to see the puppet show
that came in this morning ? Here is a copper bit if^you do."
Signa put his hands behind his back.
" Oh no, it is not that. You are very good, but it is not
that."
" Take what you can get another time," said the rope-
maker, offended and yet glad that his too generous offer had
been repulsed by him.
" What an ass you are ! The puppets are splendid,"
hissed Toto, who was near, and who had spent an hour in
the forenoon, squeezed between the tent-pegs of the for-
bidden paradise, flat on his stomach, swallowing the dust.
SIGN A,
" They are half an arm's length high, and there are threa
kings in it, and they murder one another just like life—so
beautiful! You might have taken the money, surely, and
given it to me. I shall tell mother; see then if you get
any fritters for a week ! "
" I did not want to see the puppets," said Signa, wearily,
and walked away.
It was late in the day; he had worked hard, running
into the city and back on an errand; he was tired and list-
less and unhappy.
As he went thinking of the violin by the walls, not noti-
cing where his steps took him, he passed a little group of
strangers. They were travellers who had wandered out
there for the day. One of them was reading in a book, and
looked up as the child passed.
" What a pity the Lastra is forgotten by the world ! " the
reader said to his companions ; he was thinking of the many
memories which the old castello shuts within her walls as
manuscripts are shut in coffers.
Signa heard ; and flushed with pain up to the curls of his
flying hair.
He said nothing, for he was shy, and, besides, was never
very sure that people would not take him to Nita for a
thrashing; they so often did. But he went on his way
with a swelling heart. It hurt him like a blow. Toothers
it was only a small, ancient, desolate place filled with poor
people, but to him it wTas as Zion to the Hebrew children.
" If I could be very great, if I could write beautiful
things as Pergolese did, and all the world heard them and
treasured them, then praising me, they would remember the
Lastra," he thought.
A dim, sweet, impossible ambition entered into him, for
the first time ; the ambition of a child, gorgeous and vague,
and out of all realms of likelihood; visions all full of gold
and colour, with no perspective or reality about them, like a
picture of the twelfth century, in which he saw himself, a
man grown, laurel-crowned and white-robed, brought into
the Lastra, as the old Sacristan told him Petrarca was taken
into Rome ; with the rays of the sun of his fame gilding its
ancient ways, whilst all Italy chanted his melodies and all
the earth echoed his name.
" If I could but be what Pergolese was 1 " he thought.
SIGNA.
89
Pergolesi who consumed his^soul in high endeavour, and
died, at five-and-twenty, of a broken heart!
But then he knew nothing of that; he only knew that
Pergolesi was a great dead creature, whose name was
written on the scores of the Stabat and the Salve Regina
which he loved as he loved the roll of thunder and the rose
of sunrise: and he knew that it was he who had written
that " Se circa se dice,,' which he had learned in the dusky
organ-loft of the Misericordia ; that song in which the great
poet and the great musician together poured forth the pas-
sion of a divine despair, the passion which, in its deepest
woe and highest pain, thinks but of saving the creature that
it suffers for :
"Ah. no! si gran duolo
Non darle per me!"
He did not know anything about him, but looked up at
the sun, which was sinking downward faintly in the dreamy
warmth of the pale green west, and wondered where Pergo-
lesi was, beyond those realms of light, those beams of glory ?
Was he chanting the Salve Regina there ?
Between him and the radiance of the setting sun stood
the little figure of Gemma, her hair all aflame with the
light; hair like Titian's Magdalen and Slave and Yenus,
like the hair that Bronzino has given to the Angel who
brings the tidings of the Annunciation, carrying the spray
of lilies in his hand.
" Oh, you mammamia !" she cried, in derision, stopping
short, with her brown little sister bowed down beside her
under the weight of some earthen pots that they had been
sent to buy in the Lastra.
" Oh, you mammamia!'' cried Gemma, munching a
S. Michael's summer pear that some one had given her
in the Lastra for the sake of her pretty little round face
with its angelic eyes.
Signa took Palma's flower-pots on his own back, and
smiled back at Gemma.
" I have nothing to do before bedtime," he said : " I will
carry these up for you."
"And then we can play in the garden," said Gemma,
jumping off her rosy feet as she finished the pear. "But
what were you thinking of ? staring at the clouds ? "
90
SIGNA.
" Of a dead man that was a very great man, dear, 1
think, and made beautiful music."
" Only that!" said Gemma, with a pout of her pretty
lips; throwing away her pear stalk.
" Tell me about him," said Palma.
" I do not know anything," said Signa, sadly. " He has
left half his soul in the music and the other half must be—
there."
He looked up again into the west.
The two little girls walked along in the dust, one on each
side of him; Palma wished he would not think so of dead
people; Gemma was pondering on the veiled glories of the
puppets, of whose exploits Toto had told her marvels.
"Oh, Signal if we could only see the burattini/" she
murmured, as they trotted onward; she had been sighing
her heart out before the tent.
"The burattini?" said Signa. "Yes. Gian Lambro-
chini would have given me the money to go ; but I would
as soon hear the geese hiss or the frogs croak."
"You might have gone in—really in?—and seen them,
murders and all ? " said Gemma, with wide-opened eyes of
amazement.
" Yes."
" Money to go in !—to go in!—And you did not take the
money even! "
" No; I did not wish to go."
" But you might have given it to me! I might have gone!"
The enormity of her loss and of his folly overcame her.
She stood in the road and stared blankly at him.
" That would not have been fair to the Lambroehini," said
Palma, who was a sturdy little maiden as to right and wrong.
" No—and he so poor himself, and so old! " said Signa.
" It would not have been fair, Gemma."
"If you were fond of me, would you think of what was
' fair' ? You would think of amusing me. It is a shame
of you, Signa—a burning shame ! And longing to see
those puppets as I have done—crying my eyes out before
the tent! It is wicked."
" Dear, I am sorry," murmured Signa. " But, indeed—■
indeed, I never thought of you."
" And never thought of all you might have got with the
money! "
SIGNA.
91
Gemma twisted herself on one side, putting up her
plump little shoulders, sullenly, into her ears, with a scowl
on her face.
It cost a whole coin—ten centimes—to go in to even the
cheapest standing-places in the theatre, and with a whole
coin you could get a big round sweet cake for five centimes,
and for another centime a handful of melon-seeds, and for
another a bit of chocolate, and for another two figs, and for
the fourth and fifth and last a painted saint in sugar. And
he might have brought all those treasures to her !
Gemma, between her two companions, felt the immeasur-
able disdain of the practical intelligence for the idle dreamer
and the hypercritical moralist. She trotted on in the dust
sulkily ; a little rosy and auburn figure in the shadows, as if
she were a Botticelli cherub put into life and motion.
" You are cross, dear ! " said Signa, with a sigh, putting
his hand round her throat to caress her back into content.
But Gemma shook him off, and trotted on alone in out-
raged dignity.
They climbed the steep ascent of grassy and broken
ground past the parish church, with the sombre convent
above amongst its cypresses, and the wilder hills with their
low woodland growth green and dark and fresh against the
south, and then entered the great gardens of Giovoli, where
Sandro Zanobetto worked all the years of his life amongst
the lemons and magnolia trees.
The villa was uninhabited; but the gardens were culti-
vated by its owner, and the flowers and fruits were sent into
the city market, and in the winter down to Borne.
"Are you cross still, Gemma ? " said Signa, when he had
put the big pots down in the tool-house. Gemma glanced at
him with her forefinger in her mouth.
"Will you play ? What shall we play at ? " said Signa,
coaxingly. "Come! It shall be anything you like to
choose. Palma does not mind."
Gemma took her finger out of her mouth and pointed to
some Alexandian apricots golden and round against the high
wall opposite them.
" Get me four big ones and I will play."
" Oh, Gemma!" cried Palma, piteously. " Those are the
very best, the Alexandrian S. Johns for the padrone 1 "
" I know," said Gemma.
92
SIGNA.
" But the fattore counted them this very morning and
knows every one there is, and will blame father if one be
gone, and father will beat Signa or make Nita beat him ! "
" Besides, it is stealing, Gemma," said Signa.
" Che! " said little Gemma, with unmeasured scorn.
" You can climb there, Signa ? "
" Yes, I can climb ; but you do not wish me to do wrong
to please you, dear ? "
"Yes, I do," said Gemma.
" Oh, Gemma, then I cannot! " murmured Signa, sadly.
" If it were only myself—but it is wrong, dear, and your
father would be blamed. Palma is right."
"Che!" said Gemma, again, with her little red mouth
thrust out. " Will you go and get them, Signa ? "
" No," said Signa.
" Tista ! " cried Gemma, with her sweetest little chirp,
and flew through the twilight fragrance. " Tista ! Tista !
Tista! "
Tista was Giovanni Baptista, the twelve-year-old son of
a fellow-labourer of Giovoli, who lived on the other side of
the wall; a big brown boy, who was her slave.
Signa ran after her.
" No, No ! Gemma, come back ! "
Gemma glanced over her shoulder.
" Tista will get them, and he will swing me in the big
trees afterwards."
"No! Gemma, listen—come back! Gemma—listen;
I will get them."
Gemma stood still, and laughed.
"Get them first, then I will come back; but Tista will do
as well as you. And he swings me better. He is bigger."
Signa climbed up the wall, bruising his arms and wound-
ing his feet, for the stones of it were sharp, and there was
hardly any foothold; but, with some effort he got the
apricots and dropped to the ground with them, and ran to
Gemma.
" Here! Now you will not go to Tista ? But, oh,
Gemma, why make me do such a thing ? It is a wrong
thing—it is very wrong ! "
" I did not make you do anything," said Gemma, re-
ceiving the fruit into her skirt. " I did not make you. I
said Tista would do as well."
SIGN A,
93
Signa was silent.
She did not even thank him. She did not even offer to
shave the spoils. He was no nearer her good graces than
he had been before he had sinned to please her.
"Oh, Signal I never, never would have believed!"
murmured Palma, ready to cry, and powerless to act.
" She wished it so. She would have gone to Tista,"
said Signa, and stood and watched the little child eating
the fruit with all the pretty pecking ardour of a chaffinch.
Gemma laughed as she sat down upon the grass to enjoy
her stolen goods at fuller ease. When she had got her own
way, all her good-humour returned.
" What sillies you are ! " she said, looking at the tearful
eye of her sister, and at Signa standing silent in the shade.
" It is you who are cruel, Gemma," said Palma, and went,
with her little black head hung down, into the house, be-
cause, though she was only ten years old, she was the
mistress of it, and had to cook and sweep and wash, and
hoe the cabbages and bake the bread, or else the floors
remained filthy and the hungry boys shirtless and unfed.
Gemma did not know that she was cruel. She was any-
thing that served her purpose best and brought her the most
pleasure—that was all.
She ate her apricots with the glee of a little mouse eating
a bit of cheese. Signa watched her. It was all the recom-
pense he had.
He knew that he had been weak, and had done wrong,
because the fruit trees -were under Sandro's charge, who
had no right to any of it, being a man paid by the week,
and without any share in what he helped to cultivate ; and
this on the south wall being the very choicest of it all,
Sandro had threatened his children with dire punishment if
they should dare even to touch what should fall.
When she had eaten the last one, Gemma jumped up.
Signa caught her.
" You will kiss me now, and come and play ? There is
just half an hour."
But Gemma twisted herself away, laughing gleefully.
" No ; I shall go and swing with Tista."
" Oh, Gemma ! when you promised "
" I never promised," said Gemma.
" You said you would come back."
94
SIGN A.
Gemma laughed her merriest at his face of astonished
reproach.
" I did come back ; but I am going again. Tista swings
better than you."
And with her little carols of laughter rippling away among
the leaves, Gemma ran off and darted through a low door
and banged it behind her, and called aloud :
" Tista ! Tista ! Come and swing me!"
In a few moments on the other side above the wall her
little body curled upon the rope, and her sunny head, as
yellow as a marigold, were seen flying in a semicircle up
into the boughs of the high magnolia trees, while she
laughed on and called louder :
" Higher, higher, Tista!—higher! "
Signa could see her, and could hear—that was all the
reward he had.
He sat down disconsolate near the old broken statue by
the water-lilies.
He was too proud to follow her and to dispute with
Tista.
"I will not waste another hour on her—ever!" he
thought, with bitterness in his heart. There were the lute
and the music in the quiet sacristy; and old fragrant silent
hills so full of dreams for him; and Bruno, who loved him
and never cheated him ; and the nightingales that told him
a thousand stories of their lives amongst the myrtles; and
the stones of the Lastra that had the tales of the great
dead written on them :—when he had all these, why should
he waste his few spare precious minutes on this faithless,
saucy, sulky, ungrateful little child ?
His heart was very heavy as he heard her laughter. She
had made him do wrong, and then had mocked at him and
left him.
" I will never think about her, never any more ! " he said
to himself while the shadows darkened and the bats flew out
and the glowworms twinkled, and in the dusk he could still
just see the golden head of Gemma flying in the bronzed
leaves of the magnolias.
After a while her laughter and her swinging ceased.
The charm of perfect silence fell on the grand old garden.
He sat on, soothed and yet sorrowful. The place was beau-
tiful to him, even without Gemma.
SIGN A.
95
In the garden of these children all the flora of Italy was
gathered and was growing.
The delights of an Italian garden are countless. It is
not like any other garden in the world. It is at once more
formal and more wild, at once greener with more abundant
youth and venerable with more antique age. It has all
Boccaccio between its walls, all Petrarca in its leaves, all
Kaffaelle in its skies. And then the sunshine that beggars
words and laughs at painters !—the boundless, intense,
delicious, heavenly light! What do other gardens know of
that, save in orange-groves of Granada and rose-thickets of
Damascus ?
The old broken marble statues, whence the water dripped
and fed the water-lily; the great lemon-trees in pots big
enough to drown a boy, the golden globes among their
emerald leaves; the magnolias, like trees cast in bronze,
with all the spice of India in their cups ; the spires of ivory
bells that the yuccas put forth, like belfries for fairies ; the
oleanders taller than a man, red and white and blush colour;
the broad velvet leaves of the flowering rush; the dark
majestic ilex oaks, that made the noon like twilight; the
countless graces of the vast family of acacias ; the high box
hedges, sweet and pungent in the sun; the stone ponds,
where the gold-fish slept through the sultry day; the wil-
derness of carnations; the huge roses, yellow, crimson,
snow-white, and the small noisette and the banksia with its
million of pink stars ; myrtles in dense thickets, and camel-
lias like a wood of evergreens ; cacti in all quaint shapes,
like fossils astonished to find themselves again alive; high
walls, vine-hung and topped by pines and cypresses ; low
walls with crowds of geraniums on their parapets, and
the mountains and the fields beyond them ; marble basins
hidden in creepers where the frogs dozed all day long;
sounds of convent bells and of chapel chimes ; green lizards
basking on the flags; great sheds and granaries beautiful
with the clematis and the wisteria and the rosy trumpets of
the bignonia ; great wooden places cool and shady, with vast
arched entrances, and scent of hay, and empty casks, and
red earthen amphoras, and little mice scudding on the floors,
and a sun-dial painted on the wall, and a crucifix set above
the weathercock, and through the huge unglazed windows
sight of the green vines with the bullocks in the harvest-
g6
SIGNA.
carts beneath them, 01* of some hilly sunlit road with a
mule-team coming down it, or of a blue high hill with its
pine-trees black against the sky, and on its slopes the yellow
corn and misty olive. This was their garden ; it is ten
thousand other gardens in the land.
The old painters had these gardens, and walked in them,
and thought nothing better could be needed for any scene of
Annunciation or Adoration, and so put them in beyond the
windows of Bethlehem or behind the Throne of the Lamb—
and who can wonder ?
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.
Signa, in his little ignorant way, did love them with just
such blind untaught love as a little bird born in a dark cage
has for the air and the light.
When he stole into the deserted villas, where, after cen-
turies of neglect, some fresco would glow still upon the
damp walls where the cobwebs and the wild vine had their
way ; when he saw the sculptured cornices and the gilded
fretwork and the broken mosaic in the halls where cattle
were stabled and grain piled; when he knelt down before
the dusky nameless Madonnas in the little churches on the
hills, or found some marble head lying amongst the wild
thyme, the boy's heart moved with a longing and a tender-
ness to which he could have given no title.
As passion yet unknown thrills in the adolescent, as
maternity yet undreamed of stirs in the maiden ; so the love
of art comes to the artist before he can give a voice to his
thought or any name to his desire.
Signa heard "beautiful things" as he sat in the rising
moonlight, with the bells of the little bindweed white about
his feet.
SIGN A.
That was all he could have said.
Whether the angels sent them on the breeze, or the birds
brought them, or the dead men came and sang them to
him, he could not tell. Indeed, who can tell ?
Where did Guido see the golden hair of S. Michael gleam
upon the wind ? Where did Mozart hear the awful cries of
the risen dead come to judgment ? What voice was in the
fountain of Yaucluse ? Under what nodding oxlip did
Shakespeare find Titania asleep ? When did the Mother of
Love come down, chaster in her unclothed loveliness than
vestal in her veil, and with such vision of her make obscure
Cleomenes immortal ?
Who can tell ?
Signa sat dreaming, with his chin upon his hands, and his
eyes wandering over all the silent place, from the closed
flowers at his feet to the moon in her circles of mist.
Who walks in these paths now may go back four hundred
years. They are changed in nothing. Through their high
hedges of rhododendron and of jessamine that grow like
woodland trees it would still seem but natural to see
Raffaelle with his court-train of students, or Signorelli
splendid in those apparellings which were the comment of
his age ; and on these broad stone terraces with the lizards
basking on their steps and the trees opening to show a
vine-covered hill with the white oxen creeping down it
and the blue mountains farther still behind, it would be
but fitting to see a dark figure sitting and painting lilies
upon a golden ground, or cherubs' heads upon a panel of
cypress wood, and to hear that this painter was the monk
Angelico.
The deepest charm of these old gardens, as of their
country, is, after all, that in them it is possible to forget the
present age.
In the full, drowsy, voluptuous noon, when they are a
gorgeous blaze of colour and a very intoxication of fragrance,
as in the ethereal white moonlight of midnight, when, with
the silver beams and the white blossoms and the pale
marbles, they are like a world of snow, their charm is one of
rest, silence, leisure, dreams, and passion all in one; they
belong to the days when art was a living power, when love
was a thing of heaven or of hell, and when men had the faith
of children and the force of gods.
u
98
SIGNA.
Those days are dead, but in these old gardens you can
believe still that you live in them.
The boy, who did not know hardly why he was moved by
it so greatly, musing in this garden of Giovoli, and sitting
watching the glowworms in the ground bindweed, was
more than half consoled for the cruelty of his playmate.
When the nine o'clock chimes rang down below in the
Lastra, he did not move ; he had forgotten that if he were
away when Nita should shut her house up he would have
another beating and no supper.
How often was Giotto scolded for letting the sheep stray ?
Very often, no doubt.
When the moon had quite risen, with a ring of mist round
her, because there was rain hanging in the air, little feet ran
over the bindweed, and a little rosy face, all the prettier for
the shadows that played in its eyes and the watery radiance
that shone in its curls, looked up into his with saucy merri-
ment.
A little piping voice ran like a cricket's chirp into the
stillness.
" You may swing me to-morrow—do you hear ? "
Signa started, roused from his musing.
The beautiful things were mute; the clouds and the
leaves told him nothing more. He was only a little bare-
footed boy, vexed at being left alone and jealous of big
brown Tista.
• Gemma was a pretty sulky baby, with a pert tongue and
a sturdy will of her own ; a little thing that could not read
a letter, and cared for nothing but for eating and for play;
but there were shadowed out in her the twin foes of all
genius—the Woman and the World.
"Are you sulking here?" said Gemma. "Tista swung
me so high !—so high ! Much better than you. You must
get out of the garden now; father is come to lock the
gates."
Signa got up slowly.
" Good-night, Gemma."
" Good-night, Gemma! " echoed the child, mimicking
the sadness of his answer. "Oh, how stupid you are!
Just like Palma ! Tista has more life in him, only he never
has anything for one except those little green apples. You
may come and swing me to-morrow, if you like."
SIGN A.
99
" No ; you love Tista."
" But I love you best."
She whispered it with all the wooing archness and soft-
ness of twenty years instead of ten, with the moonbeams
shining in her eyes till they looked like wet cornflowers.
Signa was silent. He knew she did not love him, but
only his pears that he got for her from Bruno, or his baked
cakes that he coaxed for her from old Teresina.
"You will come to-morrow ?" said Gemma, slipping her
hand into his.
" You will flout me if I do come."
"No, said Gemma.
" Yes, you will. It is always like that."
" Try," said Gemma ; and she kissed him.
"I will come," said Signa; and he went away through
the dewy darkness, forgetting the stolen apricots and the
choice of Tista. It was so very seldom that she would kiss
him, and she looked so pretty in the moonlight.
Gemma glanced after him through the bars of the high
iron gate with the japonica and jessamine twisting round its
coronet.
Tista was going away on the morrow into the city to be
bound 'prentice to a shoemaker, who was his mother's
cousin, and had offered to take him cheaply.
But it had not been worth while to tell Signa that.
" There would have been nobody to swing me if I had
not coaxed him," thought Gemma; "and perhaps he will
bring me one of those big sweet pears of Bruno's."
And the little child, well contented, ran off under her
father's shrill scojding for being out so late, and went in-
doors and drank a draught of milk that Palma had begged
for her from a neighbour who had a cow, and slipped herself
out of her little blue shift and homespun skirt, and curled
herself up on her bed of hay and fell fast asleep, looking
like a sculptor's sleeping Love.
roo
SIGNA.
CHAPTER XI.
A few days later fell the feast of SS. Peter and Paul, and
Signa for more than half a year had been promised a great
treat.
Bruno had said that on that day he would take him to
see the marble men and the painted angels of the Certosa
Monastery, some ten miles away along the bend of the
green Greve water.
What Bruno promised he did always; the child had the
surest faith in his word ; and by five o clock in the fair sun-
rise of the June morning, Signa slipped down the dark
staircase, and undid the door and ran out bareheaded into
the sweet cold air, and stood waiting on the stones.
The Madonna of Good Council smiled on him through
her wooden wicket; bells were ringing over the country
around ; some tender hand had already placed before the
shrine a fresh bunch of field flowers ; the sky was red with
the rose of the daybreak.
He had not waited long before a tall figure turned the
corner, and Bruno's shadow fell upon the slope.
" You are ready ? That is right," he said, and without
more words the child ran on by his side out of the lofty
Fiorentina gate.
The morning was fresh and radiant, very cold, as it always
is in midsummer, before the sun has warmed the earth and
drunk up the deep night dews that drench the soil.
The shutters of the houses were unclosing and through
the open doors, and in the darkness of the cellars there
was the yellow gleam of wheat, cut and waiting for the
threshers ; the gardens and yards were yellow, too, with
piles of straw-hats wetted and drying; the shadows were
broad and black; men were beginning their work in the
great arched smithies and workshops; there was every-
where the smell of the wet earth refreshed and cooled by
night.
They went along the road that leads to the Greve river;
—past the big stone barns where the flails would be at rest
all day for sake of good SS. Peter and Paul; past the piles
of timber and felled fir-trees that strewed the edge of the
SIGNA.
road; past the old grey villa of the Delia Stufa who nigh
a thousand years before had come over the mountains,
Christian knights and gallant gentlemen, with their red
cross and their tawny lions on their shields ; the chapel
bell-was calling the scattered cotters of Castagnolo to first
mass ; past-the pretty bridge of the Stagno (the pool) with
its views of the far mountains, and the poplar-trees that
the Latins named so because of the restlessness of their
leaves, like the unresting mob; past the great fortress of
the Castel Pucci, once built to hurl defiance at the city
itself, now white and silent, sheltering in its walls the
woeful pain, and yet more woeful joys, of minds diseased ;
past the worthy barber's shop, where it is written up that
he has only painted his sign with the tricolour to quiet taste-
less whirligigs, he being a man of humour, with a pity
kindred to contempt for all the weathercock vagaries of
politics ; past the old dirty, tumble-down, wayside houses,
where the floors were strewn with the new straw picked for
the plaiting, and the babies were lying in flat fruit-baskets,
swaddled and laughing, and the girls were getting ready for
mass with bright petticoats and braided hair and big ear-
rings, and, if they were betrothed maidens, strings of pearls
about their throats; past all these till they came to the
Greve bridge, where they met a priest with the Host in the
brightness of the festal day-dawn.
They uncovered their heads and knelt down in the dust
and prayed for the passing soul till the little bell, borne
before the holy man, had tinckled away in the distance.
Then they walked on by the Greve water under the shiver-
ing poplars and amongst the grazing sheep.
There is no regular path along the river ; but they made
one for themselves, brushing through the canes, getting
round the rushes, or when it was needed, wading knee-deep,
or oftener, for the water was low, walking in the stony sand
of the dry river bed.
Once it was a warlike water enough, in the old days when
the Lotteringhi and Alberti, and Acciajoli and Pandolfini,
and all the other great races, Guelph and Ghibelline, had
their fortified places bristling along its banks; when its
stone landing quays were crowded with condottieri water-
ing their horses ere they went to lend their lances to the
strongest; when mighty nobles in penitence raised shrines
102
SIGNA.
and built hospitals beside it to seek God's grace upon their
arms; when the long lines of pilgrims wound along it, or
the creeping files of sumpter mules, or the bright array of
the White Company; in those days Greve was a busy
stream, and was as often as not made red with the blood
let out in many a skirmish or the reflected flames from a
castle fired in feud.
But all that is of the past. Now it is only a millrace, a
washing pool, a ford, a fishing burn, anything the people liked
to make of it; it sees nothing but the miller's mules or the
grape waggons, or the women with their piles of white
linen ; and the only battles it beholds are the fighting of the
frogs in the canebrake or of the tree sparrows in the air.
Now the Greve is a simple pastoral river. No one has ever
sung of it that one knows. It lies so near to the Arno, held
dear by every poet and made sacred by every art, that the
little Greve is as a daisy set beside a crown diamond ; and
no one thinks of it.
Yet perhaps—only one dare not say so for one's life—
perhaps it has as much real loveliness as Arno has. It has
the same valley—it has the same mountains—it is encom-
passed by the same scenes and memories ; and it has a
sylvan beauty, all of its own, like Wye's or Dart's or
Derwent's.
Grassy banks where the sheep browse; tall poplars,
great oaks, rich walnuts, firs, and maples, and silver larch,
and the beautiful cercis that blossoms all over in a night:
calm stretches of green water, with green hills that lock it
in ; old water-mills, half hidden in maize and dog-grass and
plumy reeds; broken ground above with winding roads from
which the mule bells echo now and then; steep heights,
golden with grain, or fragrant with hay, and dusky with
the dark emerald leaf of the innumerable vines; deep sense
of coolness, greenness, restfulness everywhere; and then,
where the river's windings meet its sister stream the Ema,
set in a narrow gorge between two hills, yet visible all along
the reaches of the water while far off, the monastery of the
Carthusians—the Certosa—ending all the sweet song of
peace with a great hymn to God.
This is the Greve—with flowering rushes in it, and the
sun in its water till it glows like emeralds, and goats going
down to drink, and here and there a woman cutting the
SIGN A.
green canes, and dragon-flies and swallows on tlie wing,
and oxen crossing the flat timber bridge, and from the
woods and rocks above the sound of chapel bells and
reapers' voices falling through the air, softly as dropping
leaves.
Bruno and the child kept always along the course of the
water, walking in its bed or climbing its banks as necessity
made them.
Bruno was never a man of many words; the national
loquacity was not his; he was fierce, sudden, taciturn, but
he smiled on the little lad's esctacies, and though lie could
tell him none of the ten thousand things that Sign a wished
to know, yet he said nothing that did not suit the joyous
and poetic mood of the child; for though Bruno was an
ignorant man, except in husbandry, Love is sympathy, and
Sympathy is intelligence in a strong degree.
Signa was wildly happy; leaping from stone to stone ;
splashing in the shallow water with a jump ; calling to the
gossiping frogs ; flinging the fir-apples in the air; clapping
his hands as the field-mice peeped out from the lines of cut
grain ; wondering where the poppies were all gone that a
week before had " run like torchmen with the wheat."
Once, his hands filled with blossoms and creepers from
the hedges, he stopped to gather a little blue cornflower
that had outlived the corn as mortals do their joys.
" Why is it called St. Stephen's crown ? " he asked.
" How should I tell ? " said Bruno ; for indeed it seemed
to him the silliest name that could be.
"Do you think it saw when they stoned him, and was
sorry ? " said Signa.
" How should a flower see ? You talk foolishness."
" Flowers see the sun."
" That'is foolish talk."
"And the moon, too, else how could they keep time,
and shut and go to bed ? And somebody must have named
them all—who was it ? "
Bruno was silent. Cattle liked dried flowers in their
hay, and horses would not eat them; that was all he knew
about them, and when the child persisted, answered him :
" The saints, most likely."
But he said within himself:
" If only the boy would pull off lizards' tails, or snare
i°4
SIGN A.
birds, like other boys, instead of asking such odd questions
that make one think him hardly sensible sometimes ! "
Signa, a little pacified, gathered his hands full, and ran
on, puzzling his little brain in silence. He had a fancy that
St. John had named them all one day out of gladness of
heart when Christ had kissed him. That was what he
thought, running by the Greve water.
Who did indeed first name the flowers ? Who first gave
them, not their Latin titles, but the old, familiar, fanciful,
poetic, rustic ones that run so curiously alike in all the
different vulgar tongues ?
Who first called the lilies of the valley the Madonna's
tears ; the wild blue hyacinth St. Dorothy's flower ? Who
first called the red clusters of the oleander St. Joseph's
nosegays, and the clematis by her many lovely titles, conso-
lation, traveller's joy, virgin's bower ? Who gave the spider-
wort to St. Bruno; the black briony for Our Lady's Seal;
the corn-feverfew to St. Anne ; the common bean to St.
Ignatius ; the bane-berry to St. Christopher ; the blue
valerian to Jacob for his angel's ladder; the toy wort to the
shepherds for their purse ? Who first called the nyctanthes
the tree of sadness ; and the starry passiflora the Passion of
Christ ? Who first made dedication of the narcissus to
remembrance; the amaranthus to wounded, bleeding love ;
the scabius to the desolation of widowhood ? Who named
them all first in the old days that are forgotten ?
It is strange that most of these tender old appellatives are
the same in meaning in all European tongues. The little
German madchen in her pinewoods, and the Tuscan con-
taaina in her vineyards, and the Spanish child on the
sierras, and the farm-girl on the purple English moorlands,
and the soft-eyed peasant that drives her milch cows through
the sunny evening fields of France, all gathering their
blossoms from wayside green or garden wall, give them
almost all the same old names with the same sweet pathetic
significance. Who gave them first ?
Milton and Spenser and Shelley, Tasso and Schiller and
Camoens—all the poets that ever the world has known,
might have been summoned together for the baptism of the
flowers, and have failed to name them half so well as popular
tradition has done, long ago in the dim lost ages, with names
that still make all the world akin.
SIGN A.
Meanwhile the man and boy came to a wooden bridge
that bullocks were crossing, with flowers in their frontlets
and red tassels. There was a broken arch beyond of a
bridge that Greve had thrown down in flood. The reaped
wheat was lying on the hi-lls. The long cool grass tossed
about to the water's edge. Children were fishing in the
shallows.
Up above there was an open space, with a house that had
a green bough over its door, and men drinking, and mules
resting with their noses in fresh cut cane leaves. Here
they left the bed of the stream, and went up on the high
path that gees along the wooded heights with the bold green
bluffs on either side, and the vines below, and the river
under the aspens between them.
They went along the path which is hardly more than a
mule and ox track, rising higher and higher, with the blue
mountains behind them, through the blackberry brambles
and the starry clematis, and the wild myrtle, and the innu-
merable hill flowers of all hues, and past a rambling farm-
house called Assinaria, with old arched doorways, and a
boy drawing water by a rope, standing in a high unglazed
window, 'with blue shirt and brown limbs, against the dark
behind him, like a figure painted upon an oaken panel; and
then ankle-deep through the sea of yellow corn strewn all
about around the place awaiting threshing, and out on to a
knoll of rock set thick with rosemary, and so on in view of
the Certosa.
The Certosa, afar of, above the stream with the woods in
front beneath it, so that it seemed lifted on a forest throne
of verdure against the morning splendour of the east; as he
saw it, Signa was still a minute, and drew a deep, long
breath.
Approached from the Roman road the monastery is
nothing; a pile of buildings, irregular, and only grand by
its extent, on a bare crest of rock ; but approached from the
Greve river, when the morning sun, shining behind it,
shrouds its vast pile in golden mist, and darkens the wooded
valley at its feet, the monastery is beautiful, and all the faith
and the force of the age that begot it are in it : it is a Te
Deum in stone.
" It looks as if the angels fought there," said Signa, with
hushed awe, as he stood on the sward and made the sign of
io6
SIGN A.
the cross ; and indeed it has a look as of a fortress, Accia-
joli, when he raised and consecrated it, having prayed the
Kepublic to let him make it war-proof and braced for battle.
" Men fight the devil there," said Bruno, believing what
he said.
The chimes of the monastery were ringing out for the first
msss; deep bells and of sweet tone, that came down the
river like a benediction on the day.
Signa kneeled down in 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, with that persistency
which ran with his docile temper. "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 for-
give our enemies and help them. I only asked him to begin
with His."
Bruno was silent. He did not know what to say to the
boy. The devil to him was a terrible reality ; had he not
seen him with his black, foul deformity and flame-vomiting
jaws on the frescoed walls, whenever he had entered any
church in the heat of noon, to sit a little and turn his face to
the pillars, and hear the murmurs of low mass in some side
chapel ?
The devil lived in the flesh for Bruno; the devil had made
him stab Pippa ; the devil was always in the fire of his
tongue, and in the haste of his hand ; and these holy painters
of the church had surely seen the devil in the flesh, or how
could they ever have portrayed him ?
" Pray for those the devil enters, carino," he said, sadly
" When you have done with them it will be time to pray for
him, and they count by tens of thousands."
" It is best to pray for him, himself," said Signa, with his
SIGNA.
107
docile determination to keep his own ideas which Nita so
constantly endeavoured to thrash out of him. " Perhaps
men made him bad, because they would not leave him any
hope of being better."
" Do not talk of those things, the priests would not like
it, Signa," said Bruno, to whom such a manner of speaking
of Satan seemed impious—only the child was so young—
heaven, he trusted, would not be angry.
Signa was silent; he obeyed an order always; only he
kept his own ideas ; it was as a dog obeys a call, but keeps
its instincts.
But his joyous chatter was subdued. He kept looking up
at the great monastery above the woods, that was all in a
glow of sunlight, and where men fought the devil, and,
perhaps, saw God.
" I would not fight him," he thought to himself. " I
would just bring him out, and tell him to look down the
river, and I think' he would take no more pleasure in hell
then."
And he fancied he saw golden-haired Michael and the
angel that was called Gabriel leading the dark incarnate Sin
out there, into the light, till the sun changed his sable wings
to silver.
Satan was as real to him as to Bruno ; only he felt sorry
for him, always sorry, when he heard the priests talk of him
and saw the old terrible pictures on the walls of all the woe
he wrought and the devouring flames.
Signa had thought a great deal about all these things—
sitting in the dusky aisle with his hand telling his beads and
his little hot feet on the cold pavement, while they droned
out the mass.
There were other country people waiting to go in; the
peasants love these places ; you will see them very often in
little groups, hushed and yet happy, wandering very quietly
through the aisles of the churches or monasteries, or sitting
against the columns or in the shade on the altar steps.
Though they are a mirthful people at times, and like their
lotteries and dominoes and whirling dances and gossiping
jokes, there is something in the solemn rest, in the serious
dusky stillness, that suits them strangely; the houses of
God are really to them abodes of rest; they take their tired
limbs there and get repose actual as well as figurative ;
io8
SIGNA.
perhaps they do not think about anything, but sit in a sort
of day sleep when their prayers are done ; but the influence
of the place is with them and their love for it is true.
A white-frocked brother met them in the long vaulted
passage-way, looking as though he had stepped out from
some canvas of Del Sarto's, and they went in with the five
other contadini waiting there; Bruno, with his brown cloak
on one shoulder and a clean shirt, and the child in rough
white linen with a carnation at his throat; a flower in the
ear or at the throat is seen here so often with bare legs and
feet.
Signa, awe-stricken and full of the beauty of the place,
was mute as they strayed through its cloisters and crypt,
and followed the white-frocked brother, and passed other
monks kneeling wrapt in prayer or meditation. Only when
he came to where the old bishop lies asleep in the wonderful
marble of Francesco di San Gallo he was moved by a sudden
impulse, and plucked the end of Bruno's cloak.
" I should like to sing him something," he whispered.
" Sing ? to whom ? "
" To that old man," said Signa, and then coloured, ashamed
of himself.
" His soul is in heaven, he would be angered," said Bruno,
in dismay. " He hears much better singing than yours.
Look! the padre is shocked at you, and in this holy
place! "
Signa hung his head.
" Are you fond of singing, little fellow ? " asked a stranger,
who had been loosing at the Perugino on the wall.
Signa nodded shyly.
"And why do you want to sing to the dead bishop ? "
" Because he is only asleep," said Signa, timidly, " and
it might give him pretty dreams. Old Teresina says she
always has good dreams towards morning, because I go
under the house singing."
" Sing, then," said the stranger, and turned to the monk
with some words of entreaty.
"If it be a holy song," said the monk, with reluctant
consenting.
" He sings well," said Bruno, with an outbreak of the
tender pride in Signa, which he endeavoured to conceal, but
could not always.
SIGNA.
109
Signa was shy and silent for a minute ; he wished he had
not spoken of doing it, with this grand strange signore
there ; but the old dead man's face smiled at him, and the
Holy Child in Perugino's picture seemed to look down in
expectation ; he forgot the living people ; the bishop and the
Gesu were all he saw ; he joined his hands as if he were at
prayer, and sang a sacrament hymn of Pergolesi that they
sang in his own church.
Whether the good bishop dead five hundred years, or
hard-headed honest Perugino sleeping under the wayside oak
in Frontignano, heard or not, who shall say till the secret of
the grave be loosed ? But the cantadini standing reverently
by, and the white-robed monk, and the listening stranger
heard, and held their breath. The monk turned his head a
moment to Perugino's picture to see if it were not some
miracle being wrought there, and the Angels of the Nativity
singing instead of this peasant child.
Signa sang on as larks do, forgetting everything when
once his voice was loosened on the air, and without knowing
what he did, left the hymn of Pergolesi, and sang on and on
and on cadences that were to be traced to no written score,
and that came to him, he never could tell how—just as they
came upon the mountain side, with not a creature near. The
words were the words of the Latin services, but the cadences
were his own as much as the thrush's are its own in the haw-
thorn time.
He might have sang on till sunset if two other monks
drawn by the unwonted sounds had not come near and
looked on through the half open door. The sound stopped
him ; he paused startled and half ashamed ; and not another
note could be got from him.
"He is not angry," he whispered to Bruno, looking at the
statue. " He is smiling still."
" You would make marble smile, if it had frowned through
ages, till you sang," said the stranger, while the monks
murmured something of a gift of God. " My pretty little
boy, you may make the world hear of you, your mouth will
drop gold."
Signa glanced at him bewildered; he understood nothing
of this kind of language.
" Come with me where I am painting," said the stranger,
" I should like to hear who taught you your perfect phrasing
no
SIGN A.
—who taught you to sing, I mean ? Come with me a few
minutes. Is that your father with you ? "
" That is Bruno," said Signa. For the first time it
occurred to him—why had he no father ? Was he born out
of the old town from the stones and ivy as the owls were ?
" Not your father ? What is he to you then ? "
" He is always good. I keep his sheep sometimes."
The artist did not ask any more; the boy was some
peasant's son; it did not matter whose. "But who taught
you to sing ? " he pursued.
"I sing in the churches at home."
" But have you had no teacher ? "
" No," said Signa ; then added, after a pause, " The birds
do not have any."
" But much that you sang—it is no known music—is it
composed by some village genius of whom no one has
heard ? "
Signa was very puzzled.
" I sing the music that I have in my head," he said, after
a little while.
" Then it is you who have the genius—a second
Mozart ? "
Signa could not understand those words at all. Perhaps
he was something wicked. Nita was always saying so.
"A genius ? that is a sin ? " he asked, shyly.
The artist laughed. " Yes ; unless you can sell it well.
A sin sold well is half forgiven."
The child did not understand, but was a little frightened.
To speak of sin at all was eerie in this great place, where
men all day long and all night long fought the. fiend.
" I should like to paint your face," said the stranger : " as
Perugino did the Holy Child's that you look at so—oh, a few
lines will do, but I fancy your face will be well known to a.
great world one day, and you have a look in your eyes that
is beautiful—can you wait ? "
The child asked Bruno. Bruno was displeased, but an
Italian has a respect for art and artists ; he muttered un-
willingly that it was a feast day, the boy might do as he
liked for him ; it was a folly, but it would not hurt; it was
not as if it were a girl.
The child went willingly into the room that is sacred to the
Popes, and where dQad Leo frowned on him. In the wide
SIGNA.
ill
window, looking to the north on to the purple mountains,
there stood an easel and other things of a painter's work;
the artist being a great man, and bringing authority of
governments with him, was painting that glorious view, and
living in retreat there for a few days.
Bruno followed them; he would rather have preferred
that strangers should leave the boy alone; he was jealous
over him, and he thought that praise would make him vain.
So Signa stood in his little white shirt, with his dark curls
that had the gold light in them touching his throat, and the
painter painted his head and shoulders with his chest half
bare, and the carnation bright against the skin.
He swept the likeness in with the fast, broad, true touches
of a great artist, who with a dozen strokes can suggest a
whole picture, as Rembrandt drew Jan Six's Bridge.
In half an hour he had what he wanted ; a little face full
of sadness and joy together, and most purely child-like,
with a look in the eyes that would make women weep.
He had been waiting for such a face in his great picture
of the child Demophoon in the sacred fire ; for whose scene
he had come to these purple hills and dreamful plains as all
the old painters—and Raffaelle, in his days of wisdom—had
come to these or such as these.
To move the boy to wondering interest and wake the
eager, rapt look in his eyes, the painter talked to him, with
easy graphic language, simple, yet eloquent, such as the
child had never heard.
He told him about the flowers he loved ; about the moun-
tains ; about the dead Acciajoli, whose marble effigies were
in the crypt below ; about Donatello, who had carved the
stone warriors in their mighty rest; about Griuliano, who
had sculptured the fruits and flowers there to take away all
terrors from the tomb ; about S. Bruno the ounder, and of
the far lone Alps, where he had dwelt, forbidding the sight
of woman for many a mile around; about the builder of
this charter-house, gentle Orgagna, that good old man, who
loved to paint Cupids frolicking with young maidens under
orange boughs, and brave youths hawking under sunny
skies, and yet could draw Black Death as if he feared her
not, but sent her upward through the air as though, by
allegory, not to leave men without hope; one of those
mighty workers who could write sculptor on their canvas
112
SIGN A.
and painter on their marble; one of those great, rich, wise
lives that make the best of our own look so barren, spent in
raising great piles and colouring beautiful things, and dwell-
ing in peace and honour, and closing tranquilly when their
course was run. Orgagna was writing sonnets when he
died to a young lad he loved. Sixty years old, and yet with
strength and youth and faith enough, and enough freshness
of heart and soul, to write a sonnet that should please a
boy ! These men had never been bitten in the heel by the
snake of Satiety; the wound which kills the Achilles of
Modern Art.
Bruno, stretched on a bench, lay still as a felled tree and
listened.
"If I could talk like that to Signa he would love me
better," he thought; but how was he to talk like that—a
man who knew how to make barley grow, and how to drive
bullocks over the land, and how to cleanse the vines with
sulphur, but no more.
He wished the painter would not tell the child the world
would know of him—what use was there in that. Yaldarno
and the hills were world enough—and were he to sing and
the great unknown cities hear him, he would have to go
away for that, and Bruno hoped to keep him always—
always—always, and see him safe for all the future after him
on that good piece of land on the hill-side^ where Pippa had
come through the beanflowers at sunset.
What better life was there than that? with the meek
beasts on the corn-lands, high in the air amongst the vines ?
Kings no doubt were higher, and great lords; but Bruno
pitied them.
Two o'clock came, and the monks had their simple dinner
in their refectory, and the same fare was brought to the
artist as to any laity who may dwell there in retreat, and he
made them bring portions for the contadino and the child,
and added wine of his own getting, rich and rare.
Bruno and Signa took it without ado, and with the simple
animal-like grace which is bred in Italian blood as in the
limbs of the chamois or the wings of the swallow.
He was a great man, perhaps, and rich, no doubt, and far
above them ; but why should they be ashamed to break his
bread with him ?
They would have broken theirs with him.
SIGNA.
"3
As for him, now he had the face he wanted—the face that
he had sought for high and low amongst the beautiful
children of the Riviera, and always vainly—he did not care
how soon they went nor where; and yet the boy had a
wonderful voice—only children were so often wonderful in
Italy that no one ever heard of when they were grown to
men—a precocious, swiftly passing, universal genius, that
burst to beauty like a rose laurel blossom, and dropped
down without fruit. Still, this little barefoot boy, that sang
to the dead bishop, had something in his face that surely
would not die.
" If I took you with me to the big world they would
make an idol of you, little lark," he said, as the boy put
down his white bowl of soup. "Would you come if I
would take you ? "
Signa looked up to Bruno's face and across at the hills
that hid his old town from his sight.
" No," he said, simply, but his face flushed all over sud-
denly; a vague fancy, a dim possibility broke before him
like the faint rose that is promise of the sunrise. Only he
was too young and knew too little to be able to be sure of
what he thought.
" No ? Well, you are right," said the great painter,
smiling. "To a million blanks one prize, only the prize is
a proud one, once got; though the men whose hands are
empty deny it, to console themselves. But be content in
your life, little fellow; it is a good one : you are not like a
town child, * un brin d'herbe, sans soleil, entre deux paves.'
You have the sun and the air and the country, the old
painters knew the value of these ; we do not. Look here,
my pretty boy, take these pieces and buy what you fancy,
and if you ever do wander far afield and want help, here is
my name; come to me and remind me of the Certosa, and
such influence as I have with other men I will use for you.
But if you are wise you will not wander. The ox furrows
are safer travelling than the city stones. Farewell."
He gave the boy two gold pieces of France, and smiled
at- him, and went within to the dormitory. He would not
have minded the child remaining all the day, but he was
tired of seeing that black-browed contadino stretched, list-
ening and silent, on the bench. Besides, he wanted to go
on with his landscape.
r
H4
SIGNA.
" Am I to keep them ? " gai<j Signa, looking down at the
money in his palm.
"Money is money," said Bruno, briefly. "It is forty
francs. Francs do not hang in the hedges."
Signa was silent in absolute amaze. He had never had a
centime for his own in his whole life. He felt dizzy.
Then all at once he gave a ringing shout of rapturous joy.
" I could buy the violin ! " he cried, till the vault of the
chamber echoed.
It was to him as if he could buy the earth and the sun
and the planets. .
" Yes ; you can buy the violin," said Bruno.
Signa laughed all over his little face as a brook does
when the sun and wind together please it; he was beside
himself with bewildered happiness. He shouted, he leaped,
he sang, he raced, regardless of the silence and sanctity of
the place, till Bruno hurried him away fearful that the good
brethren might enter and be displeased.
"What did the paper say? you have forgotten the paper,"
said Bruno, as they passed the pharmacy, where the monks
were distilling their sweet odours and strong waters with a
delicate fragrance of coriander and coromandel seeds, and of
dried herbs and lemons and the like, upon the air.
Signa, giddy and breathless, unfolded the crumpled scrap
on which the painter had written his name with a pencil, his
surname—Istriel—curtly, as men write who know that the
one word tells all about them to the world.
He spelt the name out slowly, but the line beneath it
puzzled him ; it was only an address in Paris, but then the
little boy did not know what Paris meant.
He crushed the slip of paper together with the gold and
ran out of the cool vaulted corridors, that were so still and
hushed and grey, like twilight, into the path that runs down
the vines.
" I can buy the violin ! " he cried to the bright sky ; he
thought that the sky smiled back again.
After all the angels had had thought of him.
" Oh this wonderful day ! " he shouted. " Oh Bruno, are
you not happy that we came ? "
" I am glad if you are glad," said Bruno. And that was
the truth at all times. Half way down the hill Signa
stopped and looked back to the monastery.
SIGN A.
Ir5
"I forgot to thanK the Holy Child," he said, with sharp
contrition.
" Where ? and for what ? "
" The little Christ in the picture that they call Perugino—
he sent me this to buy the violin. I am sure of that. He
smiled at me all the while I sang, and I never said a prayer
to thank him. Let me go back."
" They would not let you in ; say your prayers to him at
home ; he will be quite as pleased. But it was the painter
who gave you the money."
" It was the Holy Child sent it," said Signa, who had
seen so many frescoes of the heavenly host descending to
mingle in the lives of men, and had heard so many miracles
and legends, that the visible interposition of Perugino's
G-esu was only such a thing as he had looked for natur-
ally.
Well, the Gesu might, why not? thought Bruno, the
child was worthy even of such memory.
He did not know—it seemed presumptuous to think they
could think in heaven of a child's wish for a wooden toy;
but still, who could tell ?—it is such simple, humble, foolish
hopes as these that keep the peasants' hearts and backs from
breaking under the burden of unending toil. Untiring
intelligence may live best without a faith, but tired poverty
and labour must have one of some sort. Called by what
name it may be, it is the selfsame thing, the vague, sad,
wistful hope of some far off, but certain, compensation.
To Bruno, indeed, it seemed that the Gesu had sanctioned
the spending of a vast fortune on a mere plaything; it was
the cost of a sheep or of a barrel of wine ; but he could no
more have denied the child than he could have cut his hand
off—besides, if the saints willed it.
As for Signa, he had no doubt that heaven had sent it to
him. He cried and laughed in his delight. He showed his
gold to the birds, to the frogs, to the butterflies. He
leaped from stone to stone in the water, laughing at his own
image. He stopped to tell every contadino he met, and
every fisherman throwing a net from the canes. He ran
through the hedges of acacia and clematis, and told the
spiders weaving silver in the leaves. He stopped to tell the
millers at the mill-house over the river, where the good men
leaned out of a little square window with the yellow light of
Ii6
SIGNA.
a candle behind them, and above the moss-grown roof the
apple boughs interlaced against a dreamy blue evening sky,
like a Rembrandt set in a Raflaelle. He caught a big brown
velvet stingless bee, and whispered it the story, and let it go
free to carry the news before him to the swallows in the
Lastra ; and when he came to the red cross that stands on a
pile of stones, where the Greve is broad and green under
the high woodlands, where the mighty Acciajoli once reigned,
he knelt down and said the prayers he had forgotten, while
the wind chased the shadows in the water, and the weir and
the waterwheel sang to each other.
" Will it be too late to buy it to-night ? " he said, as he
saw Yenus rise above the mountains from the sea.
"Not if Tonino be not in bed," said Bruno, who never
could bear not to humour the child. So they walked on as
fast as they could.
" You are tired ? " said Bruno. " If you are tired get on
my back."
"I am not tired ! " laughed the child, who felt as though
he had wings, and could dart all the way home as swiftly
and straight as a dragon-fly. It was quite dark when they
reached the Lastra.
It was a hot night. The mosquitoes and the little white
moths were whirling round the few dusky lamps. There
were lights behind the grated windows, and darksome door-
ways lit as Rembrandt loved.
The men stood about in their shirt-sleeves, and the women
lingered, saying good night as they plaited the last tress.
There were groups in the archways, and on the high steps,
and in the bakers' and wine-sellers' shops, where the green
boughs were drooping after the heat of the day. In uncur-
tained casements only lighted by the moon young mothers
undressed their sucklings. There was a smell of ripe fruit,
of drying hay, of fir-apples, of fresh straw, of that sea-
scent which comes here upon the west wind, and of mag-
nolia flowers from the villas on the hills.
Signa's heart beat so fast he felt blind as he flew under
the gateway, and looked to see if Tonino had shut his house
for the night.
His heart leaped in him as he saw a light in the place, and
the big keys magnified in the shadow till they were fit for
the very keys of St. Peter, and in the door the locksmith
SIGNA.
117
himself, with bare arms and easy mind, chatting with his
neighbour, Dionisio the cobbler.
Signa darted to him.
" Give it me ! quick—quick—quick—oh, please, good
Tonino ! " he panted. " See—here are the forty francs—all
beautiful real gold—and the fair child in the monastery sent
it to me to-day. Quick—quick, oh dear Tonino ! You
never have sold it while we were away ? "
" The child pleased an artist to-day, and sat for a picture,
and so got the money. Let him have the toy," said Bruno,
following, to the astonished Tonino, who had stretched out
a hand by sheer instinct to seize the boy, making sure that
he had stolen something.
" I have not sold it," he said, with wide open eyes.
" But buy it—forty francs !—the like of you, you little bit
of a fellow ! It cannot be ! It cannot be ! "
" Oh, dear Tonino ! " cried the child, piteously, and he
began to tremble all over with dread, his colour went and
came hotly and whitely in the yellow gleams of the lock-
smith's brass lamp ; and he could hardly speak plain for
excitement, with both his hands clinging to the man's bare
arm. " Oh, dear, good Tonino, you never have sold it ? oh
say you have not sold it ? Here is the gold—beautiful real
money, and you never do have gold in Signa, and pray, pray
do let me have it quick ; I have longed for it so. Oh, you
never will know how ! Only I said nothing because you all
scolded and laughed; and now, perhaps, you have sold it—
do say you have not sold it ? "
And Signa broke down, crying with a very rain of tears
in the reaction from this immeasurable joy to fear.
Bruno's hand fell heavily on the locksmith's shoulder.
"It is good money. You cannot refuse your own price.
Let the boy have the fiddle."
" But a baby like that! " stammered Tonino. " And if
there are painters about that pay so, there is my little
Ginna, rich and rosy as a tomato, and how can you, even
in conscience, let that brat squander such a heap of wealth,
—the price of a calf almost, and a barrel of wine quite, and
the best wine in the commune too ; and sure he ought to
be made to take it to that good soul Lippo, who has kept
him, body and soul together, all these years, when any
other man would have let such a little mouse drown in the
Ii8
SIGNA.
flood where he came from; and I do not think I could in
conscience let the lad throw all that away, and he a beggar,
one may say, unless I speak to Lippo and Nita first, and
they be willing, because "
Bruno's eyes took fire with that sudden light which all
the Lastra had dreaded since he had been a stripling, and
his hand went inside his shirt, where, about the belt of his
breeches, he was always believed to carry a trusty knife,
notwithstanding all law and peril.
" Keep your conscience for your neighbours' kettles and
pans that you send home with new holes when you solder
the old ones ! " shouted Bruno. " Out with the fiddle, or
as the saints live above us, choked you shall be, and dead
as a doornail. Take the gold and fetch me the toy, and
learn to preach to me if you dare ! "
" But in conscience," stammered the locksmith.
" Give the child the plaything," he cried in a voice of
thunder, shaking him as a dog does a chicken, " or it shall
be the worse for you. You know me! "
"I would take the gold when I could get it, if I were
you, Tonino," whispered the cobbler, who was a man of
peace. " Gold is a rare sight for sore eyes in Signa, and
what is Lippo to you ? "
" That is true," murmured the tinman, frightened out of
his wits, and thankful for any excuse to yield. " But it is
only to-day that I heard that the fiddle is worth quite
double. There is a great singer come to stay at one of the
villas who saw it—and to let a child have it who will
break it—nevertheless, to please a neighbour "
And having soothed himself a little with this elaborate
and useless fiction, as his country folk will, always deriving
a very soothing and softening effect from the pleasure of
lying, Tonino went grumbling within, and poked about with
his dim lamp, and came out slowly with the violin, and
clutched the two gold pieces before he would let it go.
Signa, who stood trembling with wild excitement, took the
precious instrument in both his hands with trembling rever-
ence, the tears falling fast down his cheeks.
" Beast! you have made him cry ! " muttered Bruno,
and kicked the tinman into his own doorway with a will,
and laid his hand on the child's shoulder, and strode'up the
street of the Lastra, glancing from right to left with mute
SIGNA.
119
challenge if any man should have the courage to stop his
progress.
No one attempted to call him to account. Tonino was
not a popular man, and the weight of Bruno's wrath and the
keenness of his knife had been felt by more than one of the
eager, chattering audience who leaned out of the windows
and crowded each other in the doorways, in breathless hope
to see a pretty piece of stabbing.
Bruno went through them in silence. Signa trotted by
his side, his hands clasping the violin to his chest, and his
great eyes dewy with tears, yet radiant as jewels, in his joy.
Tonino grumbled that if a man made such a sweet morsel
of his own bastard he should not be above the owning of it,
and went to his bed with sore bones and a grieved heart
that he had not asked double for the fiddle; though for
more years than he could remember he had always thought
it worthless lumber.
Bruno and Signa went up the street in the moonlight,
with yellow flashes now and then falling across them from
the lamps swinging in the doorways.
" Where will you play on it, dear little lad," said Bruno,
gently, " if you take it home ? "
The child looked at him with the smile of a child dream-
ing beautiful things in its slumber.
" I will keep it at old Teresina's. She will let me, and I
will bring it to you when I come. Oh! is it really, really
true that I have got it ? "
" Quite true; and it is dearer to you already than the old
lute, Signa ? "
Signa was silent. Bruno had given him the lute.
They passed out of the Lastra and along the road into the
street that curves towards the bridge; it was quite dark;
but at the little cafe there which looks towards the river,
several men were drinking and playing dominoes on the
stones by the feeble light of the brass oil-lamps. Bruno
saw Lippo amongst them.
He put his own tall form with the dark cloud of his brown
cloak between Lippo and the child, and strode on carelessly
without stopping.
" Good night," he called out, "I am taking the boy up
with me. I want him to help stack wheat, and he will
have to be up at four, so he had best sleep on the hill."
120
SIGNA.
Lippo nodded, and hardly looked up from his dominoes.
They went on over the bridge unquestioned.
The bridge had many groups upon it as on all hot nights;
leaning against the parapets, and chatting in the cheerful,
garrulous Tuscan fashion. The moon was bright on the
wide reaches of the river. The sky was studded with stars.
On a summer night Signa loses her scars of war and age,
and is young as when Hercules shook her sunny waters
from his sunny locks ; resting from labour.
The child looked up at the stars. He wondered if ever
in all the world there had been so happy a thing as he.
And yet he could only see the stars through his tears ; he
did not know why the tears came.
An aziola owl went by with its soft cry,
" Such as nor voice nor lute nor wind nor bird
The soul ever stirred,
Unlike and far sweeter than they all."
" Oh, dear Chiu! " said Signa to the owl, calling it by
the familiar name that the people give it, "will you tell the
little Christ how happy I am, and the old dead bishop too ?
They may think I am thankless because I cry. Do tell
them, Chiu, you go so near the sky! "
" What fancies you have," said Bruno ; but the little
brown hand was hot as it touched his own. " You are
tired and excited," he said more gravely. " You dream too
much about odd things. That owl is hunting gnats and
mice, and not thinking about the angels."
"I am not tired," said Signa, but he was walking lame,
and his voice was weak and trembled.
Bruno, without asking him, lifted him up in his arms ; he
himself was a strong man, and the light burden of the thin
little lad was a small one to him.
" Go to sleep, I will carry you up the hill," he said,
putting the child's head down against his shoulder. Signa
did not resist. He still clasped the violin to him.
Bruno went up the steep road where his mother had
carried him through the darkness and cold before she
stumbled and fell.
With fever and fatigue Signa dropped asleep, and did not
awaken all the way up the long lonely paths through the
vines and the reanen fields.
SIGNA.
121
" How he loves that thing already—as never he 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.
Bruno, nevertheless, was glad that he had it. Fierce
and selfish in all his earlier life, he had taught himself to be
gentle and unselfish to Pippa's son. He carried him into
the house, still sleeping, and laid him down under the
crucifix on a pile of hay, and would have undressed him,
but the child, murmuring, resisted, clasping the violin to
him, as though in his sleep, afraid that anyone should take
it from him.
So Bruno left him as he was upon the hay with his
tumbled curls and his violin folded in his crossed arms, in
the deep dreamless slumber of a great fatigue, and lit a
lanthorn and went round to fodder the cow and see to the
ass, and make sure that all had been safe during his absence,
and then, with his loaded gun beside him, laid down to rest
himself.
He had not been asleep an hour himself, before he was
awakened by silvery sweet music that seemed to him to be
like the voices of all the nightingales in May singing together;
but the nightingales were most of them dumb now—now
that the lilies were dead, and the hay garnered.
Bruno started up and listened and looked; he too
believed in a dim sort of way in the angels ; only he never
saw them come down on the slant of the sun-rays as the
good men had done that had decorated the churches.
The moon was shining into the house ; by the white cool
light he saw that it was the child sitting up in the hay and
playing. Signa's eyes were open and lustrous, but they had
a look in them as if he were dreaming.
His chin was resting on the violin, his little hands
fingered the keys and" the bow; his face was very pale ; he
looked straight before him; he played in his sleep.
Bruno listened aghast; he had a melodious ear himself,
the music was never wrong in a chord; it was sweet as all
the nightingales in the country singing all together.
He dared not wake the boy, who played on and on in the
moonlight.
122
SIGNA.
" It is the gift of God," thought Bruno, awed and sorrow-
ful; because a gift of God put the child farther and farther
from him.
He listened, resting on one arm, while the owls cried
" Woe ! " from the great walnut trees over the house-roof.
The sweet melody seemed to fill the place with wonder, and
to live in the quivering rays of the moon, and to pass out
with them through the lattice amongst the leaves, and so go
straight to the stars.
A little while, and it faltered a moment, and then ceased.
Signa's head dropped back, his eyes closed, his hands let
the violin sink gently down; he slept again as other children
sleep.
" It is a gift of God; one cannot go against God," said
Bruno, making the sign of the cross on his own broad breast.
And he was very sorrowful; and yet proud ; and could not
bear that it should be so, and yet would not have had it
otherwise ; as men were in the old days of faith whose sons
and daughters went out to martyrdom.
When he got up to his labour before the sun was up, and
while the faintest rose-red alone glowed beyond the mountains
in the east, he stepped noiselessly not to awaken the boy,
and left him sleeping while he went out to his work at the
stacking of corn, with the earth dim with shadow and
silvered with dew.
He thought of the child and the gifts of God. He did
not know that he had seen Pippa's lover.
CHAPTER XII.
" Where is the little bit of paper with the name on?"
said Bruno, eating his bit of black bread when the morning
was up wide and golden over all the harvest land.
Signa lifted up his head from his violin. "I lost it.
When I caught the bee, coming home, the paper flew away ;
the winds took it; does it matter ? "
SIGNA.
123
" Noc Only it might have been a friend for you. Do
you recollect the name ? "
Signa shook his curly head.
Recollect anything !—with the violin in his hand, and the
music dancing out on the sunbeams, and saying everything
for him that he never could say for himself.
"What was the name to him; the giver of the gold had
only been the ministrant of the little Christ.
Bruno let him alone.
The boy was so happy; sitting in the shade there, trying
all cadences that came to him on this new, precious, won-
drous thing: he had not the heart to call him to come out
in the sun and carry the wheat.
He had been too rough with Pippa. He atoned by being
too gentle with this child.
So he went out into the fields again by himself, and built
up his stacks, made low because of the hurricanes that come
over when there are white squalls upon the sea, and covered
till there should be time to tliatch them, with snowy linen
cloths, so that they look like huge mushrooms growing for
the table of Gargantua.
When he had been at work some two or three hours, hear-
ing at intervals, when the wind blew it towards him, the
song of the violin that the boy was enjoying within with
the cow in her shed, and the sitting hens, and the tethered
goat and her kid for listeners, he heard the little feet that
he knew patter over the stubble, and from his half com-
pleted stack looked down on Signa's upraised face.
The child had the violin with him.
" Bruno," he asked shyly, " I have been thinking—there
is old Nunziata often without bread, and Giudetta, whose
children all died of those poison berries, and Stagno the
blind man, that has no legs either, and—and so many of
them that want so much, and are only hungry and sad—was
it selfish of me not to give them the money between them—
was it wicked to have the violin ? I am sure the angels
meant the violin, you know; but still did the angels wish
me to think of others or all of myself? What do you
think ? Do you think I was wrong ? "
" Anyway it is too late now, bambino," said Bruno, with
the curtness of his natural speech. " You have wanted the
violin a year, why spoil the pleasure of it ? "
124
SIGNA.
" But was it selfish ? " persisted Signa.
" Why worry yourself; it is done ? "
" But it was, then ? " cried the little fellow, with a sort
of feverish pain.
Bruno came down the ladder and took up more corn.
" Oh, no ; you things that love sounds or sights or bits
of wood or oils and earths better than human creatures,
always are selfish, so. But I don't know why ever you
should be blamed. There is no more selfish beast than a
cow with her calf, or a woman with her wean. Why should
you not have your fiddle like that; only you will be like
Frisco. I knew Frisco—he thought of nothing but saving
every scrap of money to buy things to paint with, and he
was always after the churches and gateways and places
where the colours are ; and he said it was a fine gift, and a
glorious one. I am not saying it was not; only he went
away and left his old mother to be kept by the commune,
and people say he is a great man away in Rome ; but the
old soul is dead and never saw him again. Not that it is for
me to say evil of any man."
" But I have no mother," said Signa.
Bruno shrank as though a grass adder had stung him;
and stooped and gathered more corn again.
" No, dear," he said, after a moment, very gently, "make
a mother of your music if you can. The good God gave it
you in her stead. And it is not selfish, dear; you praise
heaven in it, and make the children da ice with joy, and the
old folks forget they are old when they hear you. Do they
not say so in the Lastra a thousand times ? Do not fret
yourself, Signa. The angels sent you the fiddle. Be glad
in it. To quarrel with happiness is to quarrel with God.
It is but seldom he sends any ; perhaps he would send more,
only whenever they get it people spoil it by fuming and
fretting, as a bad spinner knots the smooth flax. Play to
the sick folk and the old and the sorrowful. That will be
the way to please the little Christ."
Signa was comforted, and sat down amongst the loose
wheat and played all his little fancies away on those strings
that were to him as of silver and gold, whilst the cicale
buzzed in chorus in the tree-tops, and all the field-finches
strained their pretty throats in rivalry.
But he did not play gaily as he had done in the house.
SIGNA.
125
He was afraid the Gesu was not content; and why had he
no mother as other hoys had ?
Bruno, working on the top of his golden rick could have
bitten his own tongue out for having reminded the child of
til Bit*
Signa never asked any questions. They had told him he
had come on the wave of the flood, and for himself he
thought that the owls had dropped him there. But then it
was never of any use to ask an owl. They never said any-
thing to any one, except " Chiu, chiu ! " " Woe, woe ! "
Bruno sent him away at sunset, with a big basket of beans
and cabbages for Nita, to propitiate her into good humour.
It was cheating his lord, because ifc is understood that
what a contadino takes for eating shall be what is needed in
his own house; but Bruno did not see harm in it; the men
who would not take a crumb out of their master's dwelling
for all the temptings of the worst hunger, will never see any
sin in taking things off the soil they labour on, and Bruno
was no better than his neighbours. Besides, he would have
done a wrong thing knowingly, to serve or help the child.
"I should love him little if I would not take a sin on
my own soul for his welfare," he said to himself often ; that
was his idea of how he ought to keep his word to Pippa.
He did not argue it out so clearly as that, because peasants
do not analyse, but the sense of it moved him always.
So Signa kissed his old lute in farewell, and laid it away
on the old marriage box under the crucifix, and sprinkled
rose-leaves on it and meadow mint, because he fancied it
would like sweet smells, and then shouldered his big skip
full of vegetables, and made his way down the hill, hugging
the violin close to him.
The waning moon hung silvery and round over the town
as he entered. In many of the interiors and in the stone
barns the men were thrashing, the flails heaving and falling
in pleasant regular cadence, the workers knee-deep in the
yellow grain. A few machines hum in Tuscany, but they are
very few; they fear to spoil the straw for the plaiters, and
they cling still to the old ways, these sons of Ceres Mammosa.
The rush skip on his back was heavy, but his heart was
light as he went. The wonderful wooden thing that he
could make sing like a nightingale was all his own for ever.
Only to think what he could do ; all that he heard—and
126
SIGNA.
he heard so much from the birds and the bees and the
winds at dawn, and the owls at night, and the whispering
canes and the poplars down by the water, and the bells that
swing for prayer—he could tell again on those wonderful
strings, of whose power and pathos the child, all untaught,
had a true intuition.
With the violin against his shoulder he felt strong enough
to face the world and wander over it—ten years old only
though he was, and of no more account than a little moth,
that a man can kill with the wave of the hand.
The fancy came once to him to go away, with the wooden
Busignuolo, as he called it, and see what people would do
to him, and what beautiful things he could hear, going along
the roads, and into the strange streets, playing. If only he
had not loved the town so well; but every stone of the
Lastra was dear to him. They held his feet to the soil.
And, besides, he was only a little child, and the moun-
tains looked too high for him to climb, though those old
painters, he knew, must have gone higher still, or how
could they have seen the clouds and the little angels and
amorini that dwell in the worlds where the rose never fades
and the light never ceases ?
But neither mountains nor clouds were within his reach,
so he only trotted down into the Lastra with his skip oi
cabbages and beans upon his little tired back, very happy
because he had his heart's desire ; and if he had been selfish
he had asked to be forgiven—none of us can do more.
All people were still astir in the place; by eight of the
clock it is nearly dark under these hills when once the day
of SS. Peter and Paul is past; they were sitting about in
the street, the doorways showed the golden straw that the
girls were still sorting; there was the smell of the fields
everywhere; oxen in red waggons crept through the twi-
light taking grain to the thrashing barns ; men came in from
the river-side with their nets wet and their bare legs shining
with sand, and their pumpkin gourds full of little fish; here
and there was a brown monk with his huge straw hat on
his shoulders and his rosary dangling in front of his knees.
He nodded up at old Teresina; eighty years old and
spinning at a high window under the gateway; she would
let him go and play his violin there in her little dusky den,
umeng the ropes of onions and the strings of drying toma-
SIGN A.
127
toes, and with the one little square lattice looking out to
the bold mountain of the high Albano range that rises above
Artimino and Carmignano, and takes all the rose of the
dawn, and all the purples of -the storm, and wears them as
its own, and has the sun go down behind it and the star of
love rise from it.
Then he ran up the little dark stairs into the room where
she lived ; a bright old soul with many daughters and sons
and grandchildren scattered over the place ; a good spinner
and good plaiter still, though nigh eighty years old, she had
spent all her years here under the western gate, seeing the
harvest waggons and the grape barrels come and go for
nearly three-fourths of a century; she could remember the
French fellows with Murat riding through; she had sat at
her window and watched them ; she had just married then ;
she had seen the sun sink down over the mountains calm
and golden, or red and threatening, every night of her life ;
and had never slept elsewhere than here, where the warders
had lighted their beacons and pointed their matchlocks in
the old days long before her, when news came that the
Pisans were marching from the sea; the Lastra was her
world, but it had been wide enough to make her shrewd and
keen of sight, and happy enough to keep her kindly of
temper and of quick sympathy with youth and childhood.
Of the child Signa she was very fond; she liked to be
woke in the dark mornings by his fresh voice carolling some
field song of the people as he went out under the gateway
to his work. And she was one of the few folks who liked
Bruno better than his gentler brother.
" I have seen them both with their bullocks when they
were lads," she would say to her neighbours. " Bruno
made his do a hard day's work, but he fed them well and
never galled them, and the beasts loved him. Lippo would
hang his with tassels and flowers, and pat them if people
were looking ! but he would prick them twenty times an
hour and steal their fodder and sell it for a penny and play
morra. Do not talk to me ! the fierce one for my money! "
So when Signa ran in to her and told her the story of the
violin, not very coherently, mingling the tinman and the
little Christ and the gold pieces and the marble bishop all
together in an inextricable entanglement, Teresina was sym-
pathetic and held up her hands, and believed in the angels
128
SIGNA.
and wondered at the beautiful gift with all the ardour that
he could have desired, and said of course, to be sure he
might keep it there ; why not ? and play it there too, she
hoped, and opened for its safer concealment the heavy lid
of a great chest she had in her chamber; one of those
sarcophagus-like coffers, which the Middle Ages made in
such numbers and ornamented with such lavish care; this
one was of oak wood, very old ; and a hungry connoisseur
had told her that it was of the workmanship of Dello and
had offered her any money for it; but she had told him that
Dello, whoever he was, was nothing to her, and that the
chest had held her bridal linen and now held her cere-
clothes all ready, and all of her own spinning, and would
hold her granddaughters' and great granddaughters' after
her, she hoped.
So the chest, whether of Dello or not, remained in its
corner, and she opened it and let Signa lay his Eusignuolo
in it on her bridal sheets, and her shroud, that she had
finished last winter and was very proud of, and helped him
cover it with the dead rose-leaves and the sprigs of lavender,
which she had put there to keep moth away, and the bough
of cypress which she had laid there to bring good luck.
So Signa, quite sure that all was safe, went away quite
happy and shouldered his kreel again, and went towards
Lippo's house.
Signa turned up by the old shrine that has the grey wood
door and the soft pink colour and the frescoed seraphs by
the high south gate, and mounted the paved steep lane to
Lippo's house.
There was a little gossiping crowd before it; old Baldo
with his horn spectacles shoved up on his forehead, and
Momo the barber, who had a tongue for twenty, and
Caccarello, the coppersmith, and several women, foremost of
whom was Nita screaming at the top of her voice, with
both hands in air in gesticulation, and Toto beating the
drum tattoo with a metal spoon on a big frying-pan as a sort
of chorus to his mother's cries.
"Whilst still he toiled up the lane concealed from their view
by his burden of cabbages, he caught her flying sentences,
scattered like dry peas rolling out of a basket.
" Two hundred francs in gold ! given him, all for his
peaking little face, and thrown away—thrown away—■
SIGN A.
129
thrown away on a wretched creaking thing that Tonino
kept amongst his nails and his keys! and never a centime
brought to us ! to people that took him out of the water like
a half-drowned pup and have spent our substance on him
ever since as if he were our own. Oh, the little viper!—
fed at my breast as he was and laid in the cradle with my
own precious boy! Two hundred francs all in gold !—all in
gold ! and the horrid little wretch squanders it on a toy
with a hole in it for the wind to come out of, squeaking like
a mouse in a trap. But there must be law on it—there
must be law ! that brute Tonino could not claim a right to
take such swarms of money from a pauper brat! "
" Nay," said the barber. " Tonino tells us he swore his
conscience was hair on end at such a thing. But when a
man has a knife at his throat—"
" I saw the steel touch him, so he shivered," swore
Caccarello, the coppersmith.
" And the fiddle was worth a thousand francs. It was a
rare Cremona," whined the barber. "It is poor Tonino
that is cheated—near as bad as you, dear neighbour !"
" But the money was not the little brat's, it belonged to
those who nourished and housed him," said a fat housewife,
who often gossiped with Baldo over a nice little mess of oil
and onions.
" That, of course," said Caccarello. " But Lippo is so
meek and mild. He has cockered up that flyblow as if it
were a prince's lawfully-begotten son and heir."
" Lippo is a heaven-accursed fool," said old Baldo, with a
blow of his staff—he was never weary of telling his opinion
of his son-in-law—" but he is not to blame here. He never
could have fancied that a little beast would come home with
the price of a prime bullock and go and waste it on a fiddle
without a thought of by your leave or for your leave, or any
remembrance of all he owed in common gratitude for bed
and bread. The child could be put in prison, and so he
ought to be ; what is a foundling's gain belongs to those
that feed him. That is fair law everywhere. If Lippo were
not daft he would hand the boy over to the law and let it
deal with him."
" Bravo ! " said the little crowd, in chorus ; for Baldo was
a well-to-do old man and much respected, wearing a silk
hat and velvet waistcoat upon feast-days.
K
SIGN A.
"Ay, truly," said Nita, str etching her brawny brown arms
in all the relish of anticipated vengeance, while Toto beat
louder on his frying-pan, and called in glee :
" And you will shave his head now, mother ? and give me
that gilt ball of his to sell ? and when his back is raw as
raw, you will let me rub the salt in it ? "
Nita kissed his shaven crown, forgetful of the character
for goodness that she had been at such pains to build up
before her townsfolk; but Lippo, mindful of his fair repute,
reproved him.
"Only a little wholesome chastisement: that is all we
ever allow ; you know that, my son."
And Toto grinned. He knew his father's tricks of
speech.
The neighbours thought nothing of it; take a brat off the
face of the flood and bring it up out of charity, and then
see it squander the first money that it touched upon a fiddle,
without so much as bringing home a farthing! They were
unanimously of opinion that it would have provoked a saint
into exchanging her palm-sheaf for a rod of iron.
A fiddle too, that Tonino swore was worth a thousand
francs, if one, and a purest old Cremona ; as if an oat pipe
cut in the fields were not good enough for this little cur
picked out of the muddy water! And then they all of
them had children too ; pretty children, or, at least, children
they all thought pretty, and where was even a painter found
to give them money for their faces ?
Money was scarce in the Lastra, and popular feeling ran
strong and high against Signa for having ventured to have a
piece of good fortune fall upon him. If he had brought it
home now and put it in Lippo's strong box and Lippo had
given them all a supper with it, and played a quarter of it
away in morra or draughts, as no doubt he would have
done, then, indeed, they might have pardoned it. But a
fiddle ! and not a single centime for themselves !
" Punish him I will,'"murmured Lippo, goaded to despera-
tion, but thinking woefully of what his brother would say,
or, worse still, do, on his own skin and bones. " Still, he is
such a little thing, and saved by me, as one may say—not
that I take merit. It is a horrible thing—all that good gold
squandered on a fiddle, and we robbing our precious children
nine long years to feed a bastard deserted by those that had
SIGNA.
the right; and yet, dear friends, a child no older than my
Toto "
" Maudlin ass," quoth Baldo in high wrath, while the
barber said that Lippo was too great a saint to live, and the
others answered that such goodness was beautiful, but Lippo
must look at home ; and all the while Nita screamed on to
the night air, bewailing.
Signa heard, as he laboured up the hill beneath his load
of cabbages, the angry voices rolling down the slope and
drifting to the Madonna sitting with the glory round her
head behind her little wooden wicket.
The poor Madonna often heard such words. When they
had spoken them worst they gave her flowers.
Signa heard. What had he done ? That they had power
to put him in prison he never doubted. They had power to
beat him—why not to do anything else ?
His limbs shook and his heart sank within him. Yet
one great thought of comfort was with him—the fiddle was
safe under its rose-leaves and its lilac mint-flowers. Tere-
sina would not let it go.
He understood that the story of his buying the violin
had run through the Lastra, gathering exaggerated wonders
as it went. Indeed, if only he had thought a little, he would
have known that the scene at the tinman's shop by the arch-
way never could pass without being talked about by the
dozen idle folks who had had nothing to do but to watch it.
But even Bruno had not thought of that. Italians love
secrets ; but they bury them as the ostrich buries her head.
Toiling up under his overshadowing cabbages, and in the
dusk of the evening, they did not see him. The loud shrill
voices thrilled to his very bones.
"Let me get at him!" thundered old Baldo, who
echoed his daughter always. " Two hundred francs ! The
little brute! And he owes me that for lodgement! Oh,
Nita mine ! now see what comes of taking nameless
mongrels "
" Two hundred francs! " moaned Lippo, his voice shak-
ing with a sort of religious horror, " When he might have
brought half to my wife, who has been an angel of mercy
to him, and spent the other half in masses for his poor dead
mother's soul, which all the devils are burning now! "
"That is the thought of a good man, but of an ass!"
132
SIGNA.
said Baldo bluntly. " They should have come to your strong
box and mine, son; and as many francs as there were shall
he have lashes ! "
" Let me get at him!—let me get at him ! Oh, the little
snake that I suckled at my breast, robbing my own precious
child for him ! Two hundred francs ! two hundred francs !
A year's rent! A flock of sheep !—wine to flood the town!
—waggons of flour !—ten years' indulgence ! — half this
world and all the next, why one might buy for such a sum
as that! And flung away upon a fiddle-case! But to
prison the child shall go, and Tonino must disgorge. Let
me only catch him ! Let him only come home ! "
Signa, in the dark upon the stones, looking up, saw this
excited crowd, with waving hands, and fists thrust into each
other's eyes, and faces glowing in the light of the gateway
lamp, and voices breaking out against him and blaming
Bruno.
They were ready to fling him bodily into the Arno.
He was shy, but he was brave. His heart sickened and
his temples throbbed with horror of the unknown things
that they would wreak upon him. But he lowered the load
off his shoulders, and darted up the paved way into their
midst.
"It is all untrue," he panted to them. "It was only
forty francs, and Bruno had nothing to do with it, and the
little Gesu of Perugino sent me the money for my own, and
selfish it might be, I know; but that I have asked God;
and beat me you may till I am dead, or put me in prison, as
you say, but it was all my own, and my wooden Rusignuolo
is safe, and you cannot touch it, and "
A stroke of Nita's fist sent him down upon the ground.
He was light and agile. He was on his feet in a second.
All the wrongs and sufferings of his childhood blazed up
like fire in him. He was a gentle little soul, and forgiving;
but for once the blood burned within him into a furious pain.
Stung and bruised and heated and blinded by the blows
that the woman rained on him, he sprang on her, struck her
in the eyes with all his force, and tearing himself out of the
score of hands that clutched at him, he slipped through his
tormentors and fled down the slope.
" I will tell Bruno ! I will tell Bruno ! " he sobbed as he
went; and while the women surrounded the screaming
SIGNA.
133
Nita, 'who shrieked that the little brute had blinded her for
life. A solemn silence fell upon the men, who looked at
Lippo. If Bruno were told, life would not pass smqothly
at the Lastra.
That minute of their hesitation gave the child time for his
liberty. "When Lippo and the barber pursued him, he was
out of sight, running fast under the shadow of the outer
walls, where all was silent in the dusk.
" This comes of doing good ! " groaned Lippo to the
barber.
CHAPTER XIII.
Signa ran on under the walls where the men make ropes
on the grass, but where it was all deserted now.
He had never known what passion was before. He had
borne all ill-usage as his due. He had let himself be kicked
and cuffed as a gentle little spaniel does, only looking up
with wistful eyes of sorrowful wonder.
But now the fury of a sudden sense of unbearable wrong
had boiled up in his veins and mastered him, and was
hissing still in his ears and beating still in his brain.
A sense of having done some great crime was heavy on
him. He knew he had been very wicked. He could feel
himself striking, striking, striking, and the woman's eyeballs
under his hands. He might have killed her for anything he
knew. To his vivid little fancy and his great ignorance it
seemed quite possible. And yet he had borne everything so
long, and never said a word, and lain awake so many nights
from pain of bruises.
Could anybody be very angry with him for having lost his
temper just this once ?
Bruno would not—that he knew.
He heard the steps of Lippo and the barber and the
mutterings of their voices pursuing him. He ran as if he
had had wings. A great vague terror of hideous punishment
lent him the speed of a gazehound. He doubled the walls
134
SIGNA.
at headlong speed, his bare feet scarcely touching the
ground, and darted in at the door of old Teresina's dwelling
in the western gateway. By heaven's mercy she had not
drawn the bolt.
The old woman was in her short kirtle, with the handker-
chief off her grey knot of hair, getting ready for going to
bed, with one little lamp burning under a paper picture of
the Nativity.
Signa ran to her, tumbling over the spinning-wheel and
the dozing cat and the huge brown moon-like loaf of
bread.
" Oh, dear Teresina ! let me hide here ! " he cried in his
terror, clinging to her skirts. " Lippo is after me. They
are so angry about the violin, and I have hurt Nita very
much because she knocked me down. Hide me—hide me
quick, or they will kill me or give me to the guards! "
Old Teresina needed no twice telling. She opened the
big black coffer with the illuminated figures, where she had
hidden the violin inside, and motioned the child to follow it.
The coffer would have sheltered a man.
She left the lid a little ajar, and Signa laid himself down
at the bottom with the old-world smell of incense and spiced
woods. His wooden Rusignuolo was safe ; he kissed it, and
clasped it to him. After all, what did anything matter, if
only they would leave that to him in peace ?
"Lie still till they have been here to ask for you," said
Teresina ; and she tied her handkerchief over her head again
and began to spin.
In a few minutes there was rapping on her door.
Teresina put her head out of the window, and called to
know who was there.
" It is I—Lippo," a voice called up to her in answer.
"Is the little devil with you? We have loved him as our
own, and now he has half murdered Nita—Nita that fed him
from her bosom and treated him inch for inch like Toto all
these years ! Here is 3?apucci—he will tell you. Is the
boy with you ? "
" I have not seen him all day," said Teresina. " I thought
he was on the hills. Come up, good Lippo, and look, and
tell me more. The child has a sweet pipe, but heaven only
knows where the devil may not lurk. Come up, Lippo, and
tell me all. You make me tremble."
SIGN A.
>35
"You work late, mother," said Lippo, suspiciously,
tumbling up the stairs into the chamber.
" Aye. Lisa's bridal is on S. Anne's day, and there is
next to no sheeting. A granddame must do what she can
for the dower. But tell me all—all—quick, dear! How
white you look, the saints keep us ! "
" White ! With a little viper nurtured nine years sting-
ing you, and a dear, good wife blind, I daresay, for life, who
would not be white ? " wept Lippo, glancing sharply through
the shadows of the room. " And of course you must have
heard—two hundred francs and a beastly fiddle ! and it is
enough to bring the judgment of Holy Church "
"I have heard nothing," said Teresina, with her hands
uplifted in amaze. " Sit down and tell me, Lippo and
Papucci too; you look ready to drop, both of you. Two
hundred francs ! Gesu! why, it would buy up the whole of
the town! And a fiddle—ah, now I think of it, the dear
naughty little lad was always sighing for an old thing in
Tonino's window that he had played on once."
" If I could find him or it I would break it in shivers over
his'head," said Lippo, forgetting his saintly savour. " I am
a meek man, as you know, and a merciful, and never say a
harsh word to a dog; but my dear wife blind, and all that
money squandered, and Bruno, if that little beast is gone to
him, ready to smash every bone in my body! It is horrible!"
" Horrible, truly," gasped Teresina. " It is like a green
apple to set one's teeth on edge. But tell me the tale clear;
how is one to understand ? "
They told her the tale, both in the same breath, with
every ornament that imagination and indignation could
lavish on it: death may be imminent, time may be money,
a moment lost may mean ruin or murder or a house de-
voured by flames; but, all the same, Lippo and all his
country-people will stop to tell their tale. Let Death's
scythe fall or Time's sands run out, they must stand still
and tell their tale.
The story-tellers of the Decamerone are true to nationality
and nature.
And while they told it Teresina trimmed fresh her lucer-
nata, and made the wick burn so brightly that there was not a
nook or cranny of the little place in which a mouse could
have been hidden unseen.
i36
SIGN A.
" But you never will go after him to Bruno's," she said,
when the narrative was done, and all her horror poured
out at it in strongest sympathy. " The child is half-way
there by this time, and Bruno takes part with him right
or wrong—you best know why—and he is so violent;
and at night, too, on that lonely hill; there might be mis-
chief."
" Aye, there might," said Papucci, with a quaking in his
voice : she knew her men.
" No fear of that," said Lippo, with a boast; " Bruno is
fierce, we all know his fault—dear fellow, the saints change
his heart! But with me—oh, never with me."
"For all that he shook you once many years ago when
you beat the child all in justice and good-meaning—shook
you as a big dog does a little one," said Teresina, with a nod
of her head and a twinkle in her eyes. "I would not go
nigh him, not to-night; you must think of your good Nita
and all those children. "With the morning you will be cool,
both of you. But Bruno on that hill, in the dark—I should
not care to face him, not on ill terms. You have your
family, Lippo."
" But if we leave it till the morning "
"Well, what harm can come? The child's sin is the
same, and Nita can have law on him; and, about the
money, Bruno, of course, must hear reason, and give up the
fiddle, and let you get the whole sum back. Tonino would
see the justice of that : you have reared and roofed the
child ; all his is yours—that is fair right. But if you cross
Bruno, of a sudden, in the night- "
" There is reason in what you say, mother," assented
Lippo, whose heart was hammering against his ribs in mortal
terror of confronting Bruno.
And after a little while he went, glad of an excuse to veil
his fears from the loquacious barber.
" Tell Nita I shall see her in the morning, and how sorry
I am, because I loved the lad's little pipe, and never thought
he had such evil in him," said Teresina, opening her door to
call the valediction after them down the stairway. Then
she came and opened the lid of the coffer.
"He is gone now—jump out, little one."
" Oh, why did you keep him ? " cried Signa, looking up
as if he were in his coffin. " I thought he never would go,
SIGN A.
137
and I was so afraid. And have I hurt her so much as that,
do you think ? "
44 As if your little fists could bruise a big cow like Nita—
what folly ! I kept him to send him away more surely.
When you want to get rid of a man, press him to stay; and
if you have anything you need to hide, light two candles
instead of [one. No, you have never hurt Nita. Take my
word, she is eating an onion supper this minute. But there
will be trouble when Bruno knows, that I do fear."
Signa sat up in the coffer, holding the violin to his chest
with two hands.
"Am I a trouble to Bruno ? " he said thoughtfully.
44 Well, I should think so—I am not sure. The brothers
are always quarrelling about you. There is something
underneath. You have never complained to Bruno ? "
44 No. Georgio told me Bruno might kill Lippo if I did,
and then they would hurt Bruno—send him to the galleys
all his life; so Georgio said."
44 Like enough," muttered Teresina. 44 But you cannot
hide this, little one. All the Lastra will talk about it."
44 And there will be harm for Bruno ? "
44 He will be violent, I dare say—he always is. Bruno
does not understand soft answers, and Lippo is all in the
wrong; and then, of course, Bruno must learn at last how
they have treated you. It will be a pasticcio"
Teresina sat down on her wooden chair, and twitched the
kerchief off her head, again perplexed and sorrowful; to
make a pasticcio—a bad pasty—is the acme of woe and
trouble to her nation.
44 Can I do anything ? " said Signa wistfully, sitting still
in the open coffer.
44 No—not that I see—unless you could put yourself out
of the world," said the old woman, not meaning anything in
particular, but only the utter hopelessness of the matter in
her eyes.
Signa looked up in silence ; he did not miss a word.
44 No, there is nothing to be done," said Teresina, in
anxious meditation. 44 Bruno will get into trouble about
you—I have always thought he would. But that is not
your fault, poor little soul! There is something .
Lippo is a fox. He plays his cards well, but what his game
has been nobody knows. Perhaps he has made a mistake
138
SIGN A.
now. Bruno must know they have ill-used you. That
comes of this money. Money is god and devil. Why could
that painter go and give you gold ?—a bit of a thing like
you. Any other man than Bruno would have put it by to
buy you your coat for your first communion. But that was
always Bruno—one hand on his knife and the other scatter-
ing gifts. For my part, I think Bruno the better man of
the two, but no one else does. Yes ; there must be trouble.
Bruno will break his brother's head, and Lippo will have
law on him. You might go to Tonino and get him to take
the fiddle back ; but.then it was only forty francs, and Lippo
will always scream for the two hundred that the fools have
chattered about; that would be no good. Oh, Dio mio ! if
only that angel at the Certosa had not sent you anything.
Angels stand aloof so many years, and then they put their
finger in the dough and spoil the baking. May they forgive
me up above ! I am an ignorant old woman, but if they
would only answer prayer a little quicker or else not at all.
I speak with all respect. My child, sleep here to-night, and
be off at dawn to Bruno. Sleep on it. Get up while it is
grey, to have the start of Lippo and his people. But sleep
here. There is a bit of grass matting that will serve you—
there, where the cat is gone. And I will get you a drop to
drink and a bit of bread, for tired you must be and shaken;
and what the Lastra see in Lippo to make a saint of baffles
me ; a white-livered coward and a self-seeker. He will die
rich; see if he do not die rich ! he will have a podere, and
keep his baroccino, I will warrant, before all is done ! "
She brought the child the little glass of red wine and a
big crust; he drank the wine—he could not eat—and laid
down as she told him by the cat upon the matting. He was
so unhappy for Bruno; the Rusignuolo scarcely comforted
him, only every now and then he would stretch out his hand
and touch it, and make sure that it was there; and so fell
asleep, as children will, be they ever so sorrowful.
He woke while it was still dark, from long habit, but the
old woman was already astir. She made him take a roll and
a slice of melon, as she opened her wooden shutter and
looked out on to the little acacia trees below, and the big
mountain, that was as yet grey and dark.
" Get you up the hill, dear, to Bruno, and out of the
house before the men are about underneath with the straw,"
SIGNA.
139
she "Said to him, "and I do not know what you can say ; and
I misdoubt there will be ill words and bad blows ; and it has
been said for many a year that Bruno would end his days at
the galleys. I remember his striking his sister once at the
wine fair in Prato—such a scene as there was—and the
blood spoiled her bran new yellow bodice, that was fit for
the Blessed Mary—speaking with all respect. There is
G-ian undoing his big doors below—every place is full of
grain now. Run, run, dear little fellow, and the saints be
with you, and do not forget that they love a peacemaker ;
though, for the matter of that, we folks are not like them—
we love a feud and a fight, and we will prick our best friend
With a pin rather than have dull times and no quarrel.
Run off quick, and take the melon with you."
He did as she told him, and ran away. She watched him
from the little square window over the carnation pots. She
was a good old soul, but she could not help a thrill of long-
ing to see how Bruno would come down into the Lastra like
a brown bull gored and furious.
" Only the one that is in the right always gets the worst
of it," thought Teresina (who had seen her seventy years of
life), as the last star died out of the skies, and she turned
from the lattice to scrub out her pipkins and pans, and fill her
copper pitcher with water, and sweep the ants away with
her reed besom, and then sat down to spin on at Lisa's
bridal sheeting, glancing now and then at the mountain, and
wondering what would happen.
What would happen ?
That was what tortured the little beating heart of Signa,
as he ran out into the lovely cold darkness of the dawn, as
the chimes of the clocks told four in the morning. He held
his slice of melon and bread in one hand, and clasped the
violin and its bow close to him with the other. A terrible
sense of guilt, of uselessness, of injury to others, weighed
on him.
Even Teresina, who was fond of him, had confessed that
he was a burden to Bruno, and a cause for strife at all times,
and no better. Even Teresina, who was so good to him,
had said that he could do nothing unless he could get him-
self out of the world.
The words pursued him with a sense that the old woman
would have bitten her tongue through rather than have con-
140
SIGN A.
veyed into the child's mind—a sense of being wanted by no
one, useful to no one, undesirable and wearisome, and alto-
gether out of place in creation.
He was old enough to feel it sharply, and not old enough
to measure it rightly. Besides Nita and Toto and Georgio,
and all of them, had told him the same thing ten thousand
times: what was said so often by so many must be true.
To kill himself never entered his thoughts. The absolute
despair which makes life loathsome cannot touch a child.
But he did think of running away, hiding, effacing himself,
as a little hare tries to do when the hounds are after it.
He would go away, he thought; it was his duty; it was
the only thing he could do to serve Bruno, and he was
ashamed of himself, and so sorrowful; and perhaps people
might be kind to him on the other side of the mountains
where the sun came from; perhaps they might when they
heard the Kusignuolo. Other boys decide to run away for
love of adventure or weariness of discipline, but he resolved
to run away because he was a burden and brought wild
words between two brothers, and was good for nothing else.
The curse of granted prayers lay heavy on his young
frightened soul. The thing he had desired was with him;
the thing that he had thought was sweeter than food or
friends or home, or anything; and yet his feet were weary
and his heart was sick from the woe which it had brought
upon him.
"Still it is mine—really mine !" he thought, with a thrill
of happiness which nothing could wholly stifle in him, as-
his hand wandered over the strings as he went, and drew
out from them soft sighing murmurs like the pipe of waking
birds.
Meanwhile he was quite resolute to run away; down into
Florence, he thought, and then over to where the sunrise
was. Of the west he was afraid ; the sea was there, of
which he had heard terrible things in the winter evenings,
and the west always devoured the sun, and he supposed it
was always night there.
" I will just bid Gemma good-bye—just once," he thought,
running on, stumbling, and not seeing his way, because his
eyes were so brimming with tears; but sight did not matter
much. He could fmd his way about quite safely in the
darkest night.
SIGNA.
I41
The gates of the great gardens were open, for the labourers
were already at work there, and he ran into the shadowy,
fresh, dew-wet place, looking for her.
If he could find her without going to the cottage, he
thought, it would be best, because her father might have
heard and might detain him, thinking to please Bruno.
He was not long before he saw her.. Out of bed at day-
break, as birds are out of their nests, lying on her back in
the wet grass by the marble pond, where the red Egyptian
rushes were in flower, and munching the last atom of a hard
black crust which had been given her for her breakfast,
while the big water lilies still were shut up, and the toads
were hobbling home to their dwellings in the bottom of the
tanks.
Gemma was one of those beautiful children, who, in the
land of Raffaelle, are not a fable. As they grow older, they
will lose their beauty almost always ; but the few people
who ever had time to look at Gemma, thought that she
would never lose hers.
No doubt there was some strains of the old Goth or of the
German blood in her from the far times when Totila had
tramped with his warriors over the ravaged valleys, or Otho
had come down like a hawk into the plains. She was
brilliantly fair ; as she lay now on the grass on her back,
with her knees drawn up and her rosy toes curled, and her
arms above her head, she shone in the sun like a pearl, and
her face might have come out of Botticelli's choir, with its
little scarlet mouth and its wonderful bloom and its mass of
lightest golden hair cut short to the throat, but falling over
the eyes.
" Gemma, I have brought you some more breakfast," he
said to the pretty little child.
She threw her arms round his neck, and set her pearly
teeth into the melon. The bread followed. When she had
done both she touched his cheek with her finger.
" Why are you crying ?"
"Because I am no use to anyone. Because I bring
trouble on everybody."
Gemma surveyed him with calm, serious eyes.
" You bring me good things to eat."
That was his use ; in her eyes there could be no better.
The tears fell down Signa's face; he sobbed under his
142
SIGNA.
breath, and kissed Gemma's light curling locks with a sorrow
and force in his lips that she did not understand.
" I think I will go away, Gemma," he said, with a sort of
desperate resolve.
Gemma, who was not easily excited, surveyed him with
her blue eyes seriously as before.
" Where ?''
" I do not know."
" That is silly."
Gemma was a year younger than he. But she was not
vague as he was, nor did she ever dream.
" I will go away, I and the Rusignuolo," said Signa, "with
a sob in his throat. " It is the only way to be no burden—
to make peace."
Gemma pushed a lizard with her little rosy toes.
" Mimi does not bring me so much fruit as you do,"
she said thoughtfully. Mimi was a neighbour's son, who
was nine years old, and worshipped her, and brought
her such green plums and unripe apples as his father's
few rickety trees would yield, by windfalls. She was won-
dering how it would be with her if she were left to Mimi
only.
" Perhaps I will get you beautiful golden fruit where I
go," said Signa, who always unconsciously fell into figures
and tropes. " The signore in the monastery said my mouth
would drop pearls. I have seen pearls—beautiful white
beads that the ladies wear. They are on the goldsmiths'
bridge in the city. When my lips make them you shall
have them round your curls, Gemma, and on your throat,
and on your arms ; how pretty you will be ! "
He was smiling through his tears, and kissing her.
Gemma listened.
" With a gold cross like Bice's ? " she said, breathlessly.
Bice was a rich contadina who had such a necklace, a string
of pearls with a gold cross, which she wore on very high
feasts and sacred anniversaries.
"Just like Bice's," said Signa, thinking of his own woe
and answering to please her.
Gemma reflected : pushing her little foot against the wet
gravel in lines and circles.
"Run away, at once!" said she suddenly, with a little
shout that sent the lizards scampering.
SIGN A.
143
" Oh, Gemma! " Signa felt a sting, as if a wasp had
pierced him. Gemma loved him no more than this.
" Run away, directly !" said the little child, with a stamp
of her foot, like a baby empress.
" To get you the pearls ? "
Gemma nodded.
Signa sat still thinking; his tears fell; his eyes watched
a blue and grey butterfly in the white bells of the aloe
flower. He could not be utterly unhappy, because he had
the violin. If it had not been for that—
"Why do you not go?" said the little child fretfully,
with the early sunbeams all about her little yellow head in a
nimbus of light.
Signa got up; he was very pale; his great brown eyes
swam in a mist of tears.
" Well—I will go—I have got the Rusignuolo. Perhaps
it is not true what the signore said—but I will go and see.
If I can get pearls—or anything that is good—then I will
come back, and the Lastra will be glad of me, and I will give
everything to the Lastra, and to Bruno and you. Only, to
go away—it will kill me, I think. But if I do die, I shall be
no burden anymore then on anyone. And if the signore
spoke truth, and I am worth anything, then I will be great.
When I am a man I will come back and live here always,
because no place can be ever so beautiful; and I will make
new gates, all of beaten gold ; and I will build the walls up
where they are broken; and I will give corn and wine in
plenty everywhere, and there shall be beautiful singing all
the night and day, and music in all the people's homes, and
we will go out through the fields every morning praising
God ; and then Signa will not be old or forgotten any more,
but all the world will hear of her—''
And he went, not looking back once at the rushes
and the water-lily and the little child; seeing only his
own visions, and believing them;—as children and poets
will.
But Gemma, pausing a moment, ran after him.
" Take me, too ! "
" Take you—away ? "
" Yes. I want to go too."
Signa kissed her with delight. ■
" You are so fond ox me—as that ? "
i44
SIGN A.
" Oh, yes ; and I am so tired of black bread, and Minn's
plums are always green."
Signa put her away a little sadly.
" You must not come. There is your father."
" Yes. I will come. I want to see what you will
see."
" But, if you should be unhappy ? "
" I will come back again."
Signa wavered. He longed for his playmate. But he
knew that she wished a wrong thing.
"I cannot take you," he said, with a sigh. "It would
be wicked. Palma would cry all the day long. Besides, I
am nothing—nobody wants me. I go to spare Bruno pain and
trouble; that is different. But you, Gemma, all of them
love you."
" Let us go," said Gemma, putting her hand in his."
" But I dare not take you ! "
" You do not take me," said Gemma, with a roguish
smile, and the sophism of a woman grown. "You do not
take me. I go."
" But why ? Because you love me ? "
Gemma ruffled her golden locks.
" Because they give me nothing to eat."
" They give you as much as they have themselves."
"Ah ! but you will give me more than you have," said
Gemma, with the external foolishness and internal logic of
female speech.
Signa put her away with a sigh.
" Perhaps I shall have nothing, Gemma. Do not come."
Gemma stopped to think.
"You will always get something for me," she said, at
last. " Take me—or I will go and tell Bruno."
Signa hesitated, and succumbed to the stronger will and
the resolute selfishness of the little child; they are more
often feminine advantages than the world allows.
" You will be angry with me, Gemma, in a day, if I let
you have your way," he said, hanging his head in sad per-
plexity.
Gemma laughed; she was so pretty when she laughed;
Fra Angelico would have delighted to paint her so.
" When I am angry, I am not dull," she said, with much
foresight for her own diversion. " The bovs slap me back
SIGN A.
145
again. But you never do. Let us go—or I will run up and
tell Bruno."
" Come, then," said Signa, with a sigh; he knew that she
would do what she said. Gemma, nine years old, was
already a woman in many ways, and had already found out
that a determination to please herself and to heed no one
else's pleasure was the only royal road to comfort in earthly
life.
And she was resolved to go; already she had settled with
herself what she would make Signa do, shaping out her
projects clearly in the sturdy little brain that lived under
her amber curls.
She was thought a beautiful child, but stupid; people
were wrong.
Gemma lying doing nothing under a laurel bush, with her
angelic little face, and her stubborn refusal to learn to
read, or learn to plait, or learn to spin, or learn to do
anything, was as shrewd as a little fox cub for her own
enjoyments and appetites. She lay in the sun, and Palma
did the work.
" We will go to Prato," said Gemma, all smiles now that
her point was gained.
" I thought—Florence," said Signa, who, in his own
thoughts, had resolved to go there.
"Che!" said Gemma, with calm scorn. "Boys never
think. You would meet Bruno on the road. It is Friday."
Friday is the market day, when all fattori and contadini
having any green stuff to sell, or grain to chaffer for, or
accounts to settle with, meet in the scorch of the sun, or in
the teeth of the north wind, in face of Orcagna's Loggia: a
weather-worn, stalwart, breezy, loquacious crowd, with eyes
that smile like sunny waters, and rough cloaks tossed over
one shoulder, and keen lips at close bargains either with foe
or friend.
"And there is a fair at Prato," said Gemma, "I heard
them saying so at the millhouse—when I tookBabbo's grain."
"But what have we to do with a fair'?" said Signa,
whose heart was half broken.
Gemma smiled till her little red pomegranate bud of a
mouth showed all her teeth, but she did not answer him.
She knew what they would have to do with it. But he—
he was dreaming of gates of inlaid gold for the Lastra.
L
i46
SIGN A.
What was the use of talking any sense to him ? He was
so foolish : so Gemma thought.
"Prato goes out—to the world," she said, not knowing
very well what she meant, but feeling that an indefiniteness
of speech was best suited to this dreamer with whom she
had to do. "And if you want to get away you must go
there at once—or you will have Bruno or Lippo coming on
you, and then there will be murder; so you say. Come.
Let us run across the bridge while we can. There is
nobody here. Come—run."
"Come, then," said Signa, under his breath, for it
frightened him. But Gemma was not frightened at all.
It was now five.
The great western mountain had caught the radiance of
the morning shining on it from the opposite mountains, and
was many-coloured as an opal; the moon was blazing like a
globe of phosphorus, while the east was warm still with
rosy light; all above them, hills and fields and woods and
river and town, were bathed in that full clear light, that
coldness of deep dew, that freshness of stirring wind, that
make the earth as young at every summer sunrise in the
south, as though Eos and Dionysius were not dead with all
the fancies and the faiths of men, and in their stead Strauss
and Hegel reigning, twin godhead of the dreary day.
She took his hand and ran with him.
Signa's tears fell fast and his face was very pale: he kept
looking back over his shoulder at each yard ; but the little
child laughed as she ran at topmost speed on her little bare"
toes, dragging him after her down the piece of road to the
bridge, and across the bridge, and so on to the hillside.
"I know Prato is the other way of the mountains," said
Gemma, who had more practical shrewdness in her little
rosy finger than Signa in all his mind and body. "I have
seen the people go to the markets and fairs, and they always
go up here—up, up—and then over."
Signa hardly heard. He ran with her because she had
tight hold of his hand; but he was looking back at the
gates of the Lastra.
No one said anything to them. On the north side of the
bridge no one had heard the terrible story; and if they had
heard, would not have had leisure to say anything, because it
was threshing time, and everybody was busy in one way or
SIGNA.
*47
another with the corn—piling it on the waggons, driving the
oxen out to the fields for it, tossing it into the barns or the
courtyards, banging the flails over it, or stacking the straw
in ricks, with a long pole riven through each to stay the
force of the hurricanes.
When the country side is all yellow with reaped grain, or
all purple with gathered grapes, Signa people would not
have time to notice an emperor; their hearts and souls are
in their threshing barns and wine-presses. When they are
quiet again, and have nothing to do but to plait or to loiter,
then they will make a mammoth out of a midge in the way
of talk, as well as any gossipers going.
CHAPTER XIY.
There were many mules, and horses, and carts, and men,
and women, and asses rattling out over the cross roads from
the many various villages and farms towards Prato.
In the ways of the Lastra itself dust was rising as the
noisy ramshackle baroccini were pulled out of their stables
and got ready with any poor beast that was at home. The
cattle had all been driven over in strings the night before
from every part of the country, lowing, whinnying, and
bleating as they went.
The road over the hill was thick with dust, and trampled
with traffic as the children climbed it, and many a rope-
harnessed horse and crazy vehicle flew by them in a cloud
of white powder, the driver shrieking, "Via, via, via! "
"We shall be seen and stopped," said Signa, shrinking
back; but Gemma pulled him onward.
"Nonsense," she said, steadily. "They do not think
about us; they think about themselves and the fair; and
where they will drink and eat, and how they will cheat."
Gemma dwelt under the lemon leaves of lonely Giavola;
but her experiences of life had been sufficient to tell her,
that when your neighbour is eating well and cheating com'
fortably he will usually let you alone.
148
SIGN A.
She would not let him go hack; she kept close hold of
his hand, and trotted on her rosy, strong little feet that
tired no more than do a mountain pony's.
She was right in her conclusions. The carts rattled by
and no one took any notice of them. Two children running
by the wayside were nothing uncommon, that anyone
should remark on it and reflect about it: and one or two
people who did look at them and recognise them supposed
that they were going somewhere on some errand for Sandro
or for Bruno.
They went along unmolested till the sun rose higher and
the glittering heavy dews began to pass off from the earth as
the day widened.
They descended the hill and proceeded along the straight
road of the plain ; the great line of the northern mountains
unrolled before them in the morning light, with airy grey
summits high in the clouds, and the lower spurs purple with
shadow, and here and there the white gleam of a village
dropped in a ravine, or of a Heti£ town shining at the foot of
a hold scarp. Monte Morello lose the highest of all the
heights, looking a blue, solemn, naked peak against the
radiant sky, keeping the secrets of his green oak forests and
his emerald snakes for such as have the will and strength to
see him near. Beyond, in the distance, far behind the
nearer range, were the fantastic slopes of the mountains by
the sea, that saw the flames of Shelley's pyre rise on the
solitary shore. They were of faint rose hue, and had a
silvery light about them. Signa looked at them; they
seemed to him like domes and towers.
" Are those temples, do you think ? " he said, in an awed
voice, to Gemma.
Gemma looked, and put her finger in her mouth.
"Perhaps they are the tops of the big booths at the
fair."
" Oh, Gemma ! " he said, with pained disgust, and would
have loosened his hand, but she held it too close and tight.
"If they are booths, we shall get to them in time," she
said.
"I would rather they were temples, though we might
never get to them," said he, with heat and pain.
" That is silly," said Gemma.
"What use were those temples that one never got to ;—-or
SIGNA.
149
of any temples, indeed ? Nobody ever fried in them, or
made sweetmeats.
That is what she thought to herself, hut she did not say
so aloud. He was so silly ; he never saw these things ; and
she wished to keep him in good humour.
In time they reached Poggio Caiano: they were used to
run along dusty roads in the sun and did not tire quickly.
They could both of them run a dozen miles or more with
very little fatigue, hut it was now seven in the morning.
"I am thirsty," said Gemma. " I should like some milk.
Ask for it."
There was a cottage by the side of the road with wooden
sheds and cackling hens, and bits of grass land under shady
mulberries. She saw two cows there. Signa hung back.
"We have nothing to buy it with—nothing ! "
" How helpless you are," said Gemma, and she put her
pretty golden head in at the cottage door. There was a
brown, kindly-looking woman there, plucking dead pigeons.
"Dear mother," said Gemma, coaxingly, "you look so
good, could you give us just a little drop of water ? We
have been walking half the night. Father is gone to Prato
with a string of donkeys to sell, and we are to meet him
there, and we are so—oh, so thirsty ! "
"Poor little souls!" said the woman, melted in a moment,
for all Italians are kind in little things. " My child—what
a face you have—like the baby, Jesus ! Step in here and I
will get you a draught of milk. Is that your brother ? "
"Yes," said Gemma.
" Oh, Gemma ! to lie is so wicked! " murmured Signa,
plucking at her ragged skirt.
"Is it ? " said Gemma, showing her pearly teeth ; " then
everybody is wicked, dear; and the good God must have
his hands full! "
The woman brought them out two little wooden bowls of
milk.
Gemma drank from hers as thirstily and prettily as a little
snake could do. Signa refused his. He said he did not
wish for it.
"Perhaps you are hungry," said the woman, and offered
them two hunches of wholesome bread.
Signa shook his head and put his hands behind his back.
Gemma took both.
SIGNA.
"You are so kind," she said, winningly, "and we are
hungry. My brother is shy, that is all."
" Poor little dear ! " said the good housewife, won and
touched, so that she brought out some figs as well. " And
you have been walking far ? and have so far still to go ?
Your father is cruel."
"He is very poor," said Gemma, sadly, " and glad to get
a copper driving the asses. We come from Scandicci, a long
way."
And then she threw her arms around the woman prettily,
and kissed her, and trotted on, hugging the bread and figs.
The woman watched them out of sight.
" A sweet child," she thought. " If the good Madonna
had only given me the like !—ah me ! I would have thanked
her day and night. The boy is handsome too—but sulky.
Poor babies, it is very far to go."
And she called Gemma back and kissed her again, and
gave her a little bit of money, being a soft-hearted soul and
well to do herself.
"Is it wicked to lie?" said Gemma to Signa, showing
her white little teeth again. " But, look !—it does answer,
you see ! "
"I cannot talk to you, Gemma," said the boy, wearily;
" you are so wrong, you grieve me so."
Gemma laughed.
"And yet it is me you always want to kiss—not Palma.
Palma, who never tells a lie at all! "
Signa coloured. He knew that that was true. He went
on silently, holding the violin close to him, and not giving
his hand to Gemma any more. She did not try to take it;
it was too far for him to turn back.
They came to the royal gardens of the palace where once
Bianca Capella reigned and was happy, and studied her love
philtres and potions for death's sleep. Some great gates
stood ajar; there were the green shade of trees and shadows
of thick grass.
" Let us go in," said Gemma ; and they went in, and she
sat down on the turf and began to taste the sweetness of her
figs.
Signa stood by her, silent and sad. She was so wrong,
and yet she was so pretty, and she could make him do the
things he hated, and he was full of pain, because he had
SIGNA.
left the Lastra and the hills, and went he knew not
whither.
"What are you doing there, you little tramps! Be ofl
with you," cried one of the gardeners of the place, espying
them.
Gemma lifted to him her blue caressing eyes.
"Are we doing wrong ? Oh, dear sign ore, let us stop a
little, just a very little ; we will not stir from here ; only we
are so tired, so very tired, and in the road it is hot and dusty
and the carts are so many! "
"The gardener looked at her and grumbled, and relented.
" If you do not stir you may stop a little while—a very
little," he said at last. " Where have you come from, you
baby angel ? "
" From Scandicci! and we go to Prato."
The man lifted his hands in horror, because Scandicci was
a long long way, away upon the Grevo river.
" From Scandicci! Poor children ! Well, rest a little if
you like."
And he left the gate open for them.
" Have you beautiful flowers here ? " said Gemma, softly
glancing through the trees. " I do love flowers ! "
She did not care for a flower more than for a turnip,
living amongst gardens always, as she had done. But
she knew flowers went to market, like the butter and the
eggs.
" Do you ? You are a flower yourself," said the gardener,
who had had three pretty children and lost them. " What
are you going to do, you and your brother ? "
" We are going to play in Prato. We have no father
or mother. He makes the music and I dance," said Gemma,
who, though without imagination of the finer sort, could ring
the changes prettily in lying.
" Poor little things ; and what are your names ? "
"I am Rita; and he is Paolo," said Gemma. "Do ycu
think you could give me a flower—just one—to smell at
as I go along ? "
" I will see," said the man, smiling.
Signa stood by mute, with a swelling heart. He knew
that he ought to stop her in her falsehoods, but he was
afraid to vex her and afraid to lose her. He listened,
wounded and ashamed, and feeling himself a coward.
152
SIGNA.
"Why do you do such things, Gemma?" he cried,
piteously, as the gardener turned away.
" It is no use telling you, you are so silly," said Gemma;
and she ate fig after fig, lying on her back in the shade
of the trees where once Bianca and Francesco had wan-
dered when their love and the summer were at height;
and where their spirits wander still at midnight, so the
peasants say.
In a little time the gardener returned, bringing with him
a basket of cut flowers. #
" You may like to sell these in Prato," he said to the
child. " And you will find a peach or two at the bottom."
" Oh, how good you are ! " cried Gemma, springing up ;
and she kissed the flowers and then the brown hand of the
man.
"You have but a sulky companion, I fear," said the gar-
dener, glancing at the boy, who stood aloof.
" Oh, no ! He is only shy and tired. What is this
great house ? "
" It is a palace."
" Are there people in it ? "
"No. Only ghosts ! "
" Ghosts of what ? "
"Of a great wicked woman who lived here; and her
lovers. She was a baker's daughter, but she murdered
many people, and got to be a duchess of Tuscany."
" Did she murder them to be a duchess ? "
" They say so; and to keep her secrets ! "
Gemma opened wondering eyes.
" And she walks here at night ? "
"By night: not that I can say I have ever seen her
myself."
" I should like to meet her."
" Why ? "
" Perhaps she would tell me how she did it."
The gardener stared,—then laughed.
"You pretty cherub !—if you have patience, and grow a
woman, you will find out all that yourself."
" Come away," said Signa, and he dragged her out
through the open gates.
She turned to kiss her hand to the gardener. Signa
dragged her on in haste.
SIGN A.
155
"'A rude boy that," said the man, as be shut the gates on
tbem.
" They are flowers worth five francs! " said Gemma,
hugging her basket of roses ; " and you think it is no use to
tell lies ? "
" I think it is very vile and base."
"Pooh ! " said Gemma, and she danced along in the 3ust.
She had got a basket worth five francs, bread and fruit
enough for the day, and some copper pieces as well; all by
looking pretty and just telling a nice little lie or two.
He seemed very helpless to her. He had got nothing.
"It is very hot walking," she said, presently.
"Yes," said Signa. " But we are used to it, you and I."
" I hate it, though."
" But we must do it if we want to get to Prato."
"Must we?"
She thought a few minutes, then looked behind her; in
the distance there were coming along a baroccino and an old
white horse.
Gemma gave a sudden cry of pain.
"What is it, Gemma, dear?" cried Signa, melted in a
moment and catching her.
" I have twisted my foot on a stone. Oh, Signa, how it
hurts ! "
She sat down on a log of wood that chanced to lie there,
and rubbed her little dusty foot dolefully. Signa knelt down in
the dust, and took the little wounded foot upon his knee and
caressed it with fond words. He could see no hurt; but
then no one sees sprains or strains till they begin to swell.
" Oh, Signa, we never shall get on ! It hurts me so ! "
she cried, and sobbed and moaned aloud.
The cart stopped; there were old people in it coming from
the city itself, people who did not know them.
" Is there anything the matter ? " cried the old folks,
seeing the little girl crying so bitterly.
" She has hurt herself," said Signa. " She has twisted
her ankle or something, and we go to Prato. Oh, Gemma,
dear Gemma, is it so very bad ? "
Gemma answered by her sobbing.
The old man and woman chattered together a little, then
seeing the children were so pretty and seemed so sad, told
them there was room in the cart; they themselves were
154
SIGN A.
going to Prato—there were eight miles more to do; the boy
might lift the girl in if he liked.
Gemma soon was borne up and seated between the two
old people; Signa was told that he might curl himself, if he
would, on the rope foot-place of the baroceino, and did so.
The white horse rattled onward.
" You are a pretty boy, too," said the woman to Signa.
" Why do you not talk to one ? "
" I have nothing to say," he murmured.
He would not lie ; and he could not tell the truth without
exposing Gemma's pretty fables.
" You are more sulky than your sister; one would
think it was your foot that had been hurt," said the old
woman.
It was the third time in half an hour that, through
Gemma, he had been called sulky. He hung his head, and
was mute, taking care that Gemma's ankle should not be
shakened as they went.
The way seemed to him very long.
He could see little on account of the dust, which rose in
large quantities along the road, for the weather was dry and
the traffic to the fair was great. Now and then he saw the
purple front of Monte Morello and the towers of Prato,
lying underneath it to the westward, and farther the dark
quarried sides of the serpentine hills, with the crimson
gleam of jasper in the sun ; and, much farther still, Pistoia ;
that was all.
Signa took her foot between his hands, and held it ten-
derly, so that the jolting should not jar it more than he
could help.
Her sobs ceased little by little, and she chattered softly
with the old driver, telling him that she was going to Prato
to sell flowers, and her brother to make a few coins by
playing if he could; they had no father or mother. She
cried out a little now and then, when the cart went rougher
than usual over a loose stone.
"Are you in such pain, dear ? Oh, if only I- could bear
it for you! " said Signa; and the tears came in his eyes
to think that she should suffer so much.
"It is better; do not fret," said Gemma, gravely; and
the old woman in the cart thought what a sweet-tempered
child it was, so anxious to be patient and not vex her
SIGNA.
155
brother For Gemma bad tbe talent to get credit for all the
virtues that she bad not—a talent which is of mucb more
use tban any real possession of the virtues ever can be.
Tbe eigbt miles were very tedious and mournful even to
Signa; be was full of sorrow for ber little bruised foot, and
full of care for ber future and bis own, and full of reproach
to bimself for having let ber come witb bim.
"Whatever will come of it—all is my fault," be thought,
tormenting bimself whilst tbe white horse trotted wearily
over tbe bad road, and tbe clouds of dust blew round them
and obscured the green sunny valley and tbe shining
Bisenzio river.
Gemma, moaning a little now and then, leant ber curly
bead against tbe old woman's knee, and before very long fell
fast asloep, ber long black lasbcs sweeping ber rosy cheeks.
" The innocent lamb ! " said tbe woman, tenderly, and
covered ber face from the sun and from the flies.
When tbe cart stopped at the south gate of Prato, the old
woman woke Gemma softly:
" My pretty dear, we cannot get the things out without
moving you, hut if you will sit a bit in the shade by the
wall there, we will take you up again in a minute, and put
you where you like; or maybe you will stay witb us and
have a taste of breakfast."
Her husband lifted Gemma witb much care down upon
tbe stones, and set ber on a bench, Signa standing still
beside ber.
" What is to be done, Gemma ? " he said, witb a piteous
sigh. " Tell these good people tbe truth, dear, and they
will take care of you, and drive you back again to Giovoli,
I am sure. As for me, it does not matter."
"You are a grullo/" said Gemma, witb calm contempt,
which meant in ber tongue that be was as foolish a thing as
lived. " Wait till they are not looking, then do what I do."
Soon tbe man and woman bad them backs turned, and
were intent on then' cackling poultry and strings of sausages.
" Now I " said Gemma, and she darted round a corner of
tbe gate, and ran swiftly as a young bare down the narrow
street, clasping ber flower-basket close to ber all tbe while.
"But you are not lame at all!" cried Signa, stupefied,
when at length, panting and laughing, she paused in ber
flight.
SIGNA.
Her azure eyes glanced over him with a smile of intense
amusement.
" Lame ! of course not ! But we wanted a lift. I got
it. That was all."
" Oh, Gemma ! "
He felt stunned and sick. He could only look at her.
He could not speak. He thought the very stones of the
street would open and swallow her for such wickedness as
this.
Gemma laughed the more to see his face. She could not
perceive anything amiss in what she had done. It had
been fun to see the people's anxiety for her ; and then
they had been carried the eight miles they wanted:—how
could anything be wrong that had so well succeeded?
Gemma, with her little plum'p bare shoulders and her ragged
petticoat, reasoned as the big world does:—Success never sins.
Signa could not laugh. He would not answer her. He
felt wretched.
" You are a kill-joy! " said Gemma, pettishly, and sat
down on a door-step to tie up her flowers and consider what
it would be best worth her while to do.
She decided that it was of no use at all to consult him.
He was full of silly scruples that grew naturally in him, as
choke-grass in the earth.
"It is very nice to be away from everybody," said
Gemma, sorting her flowers, and looking about her with
keen pleasure in the sense of liberty and strangeness.
" Oh, Gemma ! It breaks one's heart," murmured Signa,
while the water swam in his eyes. He thought his heart
was broken. He felt powerless and unutterably wretched.
A companion who would have clung to him and needed his
protection and his aid would have aroused his courage ; but
Gemma's hardihood and dauntlessness and reckless wrong-
doing only seemed to crush him and bewilder him till he
felt like any frightened kid lost upon the mountains.
When she rose, he rose also, and crept after her spiritless
and weary.
The bold craft of her practical mind and h'er little merci-
less words of worldly wisdom beat into impotency all the
finer impulses and higher intelligence of his own. Moral
impudence scourges spiritual beauty till it is cowed like a
whipt dog.
SIGN A.
*57
Gemma, for her part, was indifferent; she felt herself
the master-mind of the two ; she was perfectly happy seeing
strange things, and not knowing what new turn fortune
might not take any minute ; she thought of Palma hoeing
and toiling amongst the cabbages at home with scornful
pity, and said to herself, " how nice it is to be away and
not have a soul to scold one! " When they came in
sight of the cathedral and the belfry, Signa, moved to
sudden interest, pulled her skirt.
" Let us go and see the sacra cwtofa," whispered the
boy, for he was a devout little fellow, and had heard all his
days from all the country-side of the wonders of the holy
girdle that Prato enshrines.
" What will the sacra cintola do for us ? " said Gemma.
"Nothing," said Signa, sadly, "nothing—now we have
told so many lies."
" The girdle would not have had that cart," said Gemma,
with a smile that would have been a grin only she was so
pretty ; and she let Signa draw her onward to the square
where the Duomo stands, because, as she thought to
herself, there would surely be the most people there, it
being the hour of high mass—people always made them-
selves safe with heaven before they began to jump about
and eat and drink.
"Look!" said Signa, forgetful one moment of his woes
in his delight at looking up at the great duomo of which so
many legends were rife in the country-side. "Look!
Gemma, look ! There is Donatello's pulpit, where they
used to show the girdle to the people on the feast days ;
Donatello you know, who once was only just a little poor
boy like me, and lived to make the marble speak; the
signore at the Certosa told me so; do you think they ever
will talk of me hundreds of years after I am dead and gone,
as they do about him ? Oh, I think they will, because the
music does last like the stone, though no one can touch it
and feel it like the stone—and I am sure one day I will
make some music that they will care about. Oh, Gemma,
you are not looking—just see those beautiful children up
there, all in the marble, with the white flowers ! And
where is the mark of the man's hand that was cut off for
sacrilege, you remember ? Teresina has told us about it so
often !—it was thrown up in the air, you know, and the
SIGNA.
blood of it made a spot like an open palm on the grey wall
up above, that is always, always there ; only surely the
angels might wash it out now ; he must have suffered so
much, and been so sorry by this ! "
And Signa, trembling at his own vivid imaginations, stood
still, gazing up and trying to see the blood-stain amongst
the black and green serpentine of the inlaying above Lucca
della Robbia's Yirgin, with her S. Stephen and S. Lawrence.
The story was so real to him, he could see the wicked monk
going round and round in the aisles, in the dark, with his
stolen treasure, unable to find his way out, and believing
himself on the road to his own monastery, and so striking
on the panels of the great door, and crying " Open, open! "
and thus calling down detection and chastisement with his
own voice. He could see it all, and he stood gazing up and
looking for the blood-stain above Donatello's happy snow
white children, till he trembled all over with the awe and
fever of his own visions. Gemma, not heeding at all and
quite indifferent to the sacred girdle, since it was nothing
pretty to put on herself, sniffed with her dainty little nose
the various fumes of frying and stewing that came from the
open doors and windows of the houses in the square, and
decided with herself that it was high time to get something
more to eat.
It was noon, and breakfast was being prepared every-
where, and a slice of smoking kid or a taste of boar stuffed
with prunes were more to her taste than all the stone
children of Donatello. She had known what such dainties
meant at fairs at Signa and Impruneta, whither she had
occasionally been taken by kindly baby-loving women who
pitied her because she had no mother.
She pondered a little ; smelling the fragrance of the soup
pots, whilst the crowds of people let loose from high mass,
like boys from school, filled the piazza, laughing, buzzing,
chattering, pushing, loitering, with the broad bright sky
cloudless above their heads.
Gemma went and looked wistfully in at an open arched
entrance of a fruit shop; beyond, she saw a kitchen with a
plump motherly woman in an orange kerchief, who was just
taking off the fire a frying-pan full of bacon and lard,
browned and ready for eating.
" Might I just lay my flowers here in the shade ono
SIGN A.
moment or two ? " gaid little Gemma, timidly slipping her
basket on to the stone slab under the cool wet leaves that
kept the strawberries fresh. " Might I just leave them
here one moment with you, they will all fade away in the
sun ? "
"Certainly, my pretty one," said the woman. "But
where do you want to go ? "
Gemma looked very shy and sad.
" Only—to see—to buy—a little bit of bread. I have a
centime, and I am so hungry—"
" When did you eat last ? "
" Yesterday at noon. Mother is just dead, and there was
no more bread in the house, and no money."
"Poor little soul!" cried the good woman, with her
charity alive in a second; human charity is a match that
will strike light very quickly, only it will go out again very
nearly as rapidly. " Poor little sweet soul! "
"It shall never be said that I turned a hungry child
empty away. Come in and eat your fill. There is only my
husband; and we are half famished too, for there has
been no getting a mouthful were it ever so, so busy as this
morning has been ; there is searce a stalk of fruit left, as
you see, already. Come in, you pretty morsel, and eat for
two."
Gemma did eat for two, taking no remembrance of Signa
outside by the cathedral in the sun. He was well enough
with his Donatello and his nonsense. Meanwhile she stuffed
her little round mouth full of crisp, brown, savoury bacon,
and swallowed her little glass of blue wine, and picked as
many bigarreau cherries as she chose, and touched to the
quick the hearts of her host and hostess, who were childless.
They only let her go again with many promises that she
would return, which indeed she gave willingly, with every
intention of keeping them if she found nothing better to do.
When she had got her flowers and ran out again to look for
Signa, she could not find him. That dismayed her, because
he was her mine of money. She pondered a little, selling
some flowers in the square meanwhile, because, as she
reflected, however sorry one may be, pence are not the less
sweet-smelling for that; then reasoned with herself that
such a silly as he would be sure to bo inside the cathedral
dreaming about the sacrilegious monk; and there, in truth,
i6o
SIGN A.
did she find him, sitting on the lower step of the high altar,
with the bronze crucifix above him.
Signa was very pale from weariness and long fasting ; hut
his eyes were full of brightness, and he was almost happy;
someone had been playing on the organ somewhere unseen,
the church being empty and the custodians dozing in noon-
tide rest, and the noble silence around him and the deep
coolness and the beautiful colours and fuzes so lulled him,
and yet excited him, that he knew nothing of the flight of
time.
" Are you not hungry ? " said Gemma, pattering up and
dipping her golden head in half-impudent obeisance before
the altar.
" Hungry? Oh, no ! "
The word seemed to him almost like a sacrilege ; yet he
was hungry, only he had no leisure or sense for it.
" I am," said Gemma, knowing that her wants were the
strongest levers to stir him into movement.
" Are you ? I am sorry," said Signa vaguely, half re-
morsefully, yet almost incapable, in that beauty and holiness
which were around him, of bringing his mind wholly to any
ordinary daily thing. " Are you, dear ? I am sorry. What
can we do ? But, oh, Gemma dear, can you feel very
hungry in this place ? Do look at the paintings. Fra
Lippi did them, someone said. He was a monk, I think.
And then look at those terrible grey faces and the tails like
snakes—they are meant for Sins, are they not ? It frightens
one, and yet it is so beautiful, all of it."
Gemma looked with a sort of scorn at the marble sphinxes
with their serpent bodies on Mino da Fiesole's pulpit. They
did not move her.
" Sins are pleasant. Those are ugly things," she said
with a premature wisdom. "And I am hungry. Come
out."
Signa went lingeringly, reluctantly looking back into the
calm eyes of the sphinxes, and sorrowful to be forced out
of that solemnity and stillness into the noise and the confu-
sion of the fair.
" How happy the man must have been who made all
those things," he said to himself, with a dim perception of
the beauty of ages in which labour was done for sake of faith
and country and God's will, and not for sake of gold alone.
SIGNA.
161
Gemma jogged his shoulder.
" Do not go to sleep ! Come close to me, and do what I
ask you—that is all."
Keeping tight hold of his violin and its bow, Signa obeyed
her ; the bright, prompt, unswerving will of Gemma always
bore him away with it, without any volition of his own. The
ascendency of the unscrupulous will tells, in small lives as in
great.
She led him through the flocking people, with the loud
clanging bells and the hot sunshine above them.
The noble brown walls of Prato shut in that day a gay and
noisy multitude. There were unusual attractions in the way
of shows and travelling actors. The country folk had come
in from the plain and from both sides of the mountains. The
copper-smelters from the valley of the Bisenzio, the quarry-
workers from Figlone, the pottery-painters from Doccia, the
straw-plaiters and red-cap makers of the town itself, the
villagers from all the little places round about for twenty
miles and more, all had contributed to swell the sum of the
merrymaking throngs that put on their best, and ate and
drank, made love and bought trinkets and shouted and sang
under the frown of the old Ghibelline Castello and the prison
that was once a Guelph Palace. There were booths in the
streets, ^flags on the roofs, merry faces at the old grated
casements ; there was all the uproar of lotteries, charlatans,
cheapjohns, and the players of puppets; asses brayed,
children screamed, maidens laughed, mandolines twanged,
.kids and pigs were roasting whole in the streets, mounds of
plums and cherries reddened the stones with their juice,
barrels of wine ran in a hundred dark old kitchens and at
many a quaint corner under a terra-cotta shrine in the wall;
and above all the happy breathless turmoil rose bell-tower
and cupola and fortress and monastery, and above them again
the fair blue sky. •
Gemma slipped in amongst the multitude, keeping one of
Signa's hands in hers.
She watched her opportunity. There was a pause. One
puppet-show had just ended; the tombola had not begun.
She let go his hand.
'£Play," she said, simply.
"Play! " echoed Signa, with his beaming eyes full of
pain. " Oh, Gemma! how can I play ! so wretched as I am,
M
S1GNA.
and away from the Lastra; and Bruno hating me, perhaps ;
and Nita blind ; and all through my own wickedness ! "
" Che ! " said Gemma, with serene contempt; " standing
crying never mended a broken pot yet; Babbo says so a
dozen times a week. I want some sweet cakes, and you
have got to get them. How shall we keep ourselves if you.
do not play ? It is all you are good for."
" How cruel you are! " sobbed the boy, his heart in
revolt at his little tyrant, yet his- courage weak against
her.
" Oh, you silly ! " laughed Gemma, and pulled his curls.
" Let us dance, then—do as I do—dance the saltarello that
old Maro from the Marches taught us last year—that will
make you merrier."
And Gemma began to dance herself, in the agile lithe
postures that an old wandering fiddler had taught to the
children of the Lastra; for Tuscany has no dance of its own
except the droll trescone, which resembles the hopping of
frogs.
" Dance, and play the tune ! " said Gemma, imperiously,
looking like a little flower blowing up and down in the wind,
as her white arms went up above her head, and her small
naked feet twinkled on the stones.
Signa, by sheer instinct, obeyed her as a poodl® would
have done, making the tune come off the strings of his
Rusignuolo, and moving wearily to her lithesome invitation,
his head hanging down, and his feet feeling like lead, and
the big tears coursing down his cheeks.
" Oh, the little love, let one look at her! " said a woman
br two, and cleared a space ; and others gathered about, and
a ring was made, and one score of people, and then another,
and then another, gradually grew together, and watched
Gemma in the saltarello, which no busked maiden from the
wet green woods of the Marches, and no Roman child under
the vine-hung loggia of a Trastevere winehouse, ever danced
with more spirit or more grace.
Gemma was at home in the air, like a butterfly; and
untiring she whirled around, and spurned the pavement, as
if her little dusty toes had the wings of Mercury.
" Oh, the beautiful little angel ! " cried the women, when
at last she ceased, hot, and breathless, and panting, with all
her yellow hair blown back; and they kissed her, and
SIGN A.
163
worshipped her, and loaded her with sweetmeats, and cheap
trinkets, and playthings.
Signa stood apart, with swollen eyes and a swelling
heart.
"What fun it is ! " said Gemma to him, with her little
skirt full of her spoils.
Signa was silent.
"A sulky boy," said the women. " Is he your brother,
my dear ? "
" Yes, and he plays so beautifully," said Gemma. " He
was too tired to dance well. Play, dear, play for these good
kind people, who have given us such lovely things."
The words were simple, and she caressed him as she
spoke, but in his ear she whispered : " Play, and get some
money; or I will tell the guards, and send you back to
Lippo."
Signa was helpless in her hands.
If he were sent back, there would be woe—and the galleys
for Bruno.
He obeyed her, and drew the bow across the strings, and
played his old favourite Misero Pargoletto, of Leo, which he
had played so many times, that it came to him by sheer
instinct and habit. He could not play amiss, even when he
was not thinking what he did, his hands found the true
place, and struck out the true music.
Insensibly, the sweet accustomed sounds soothed him,
drove away his pain, and calmed his sense of desolation and
of danger.
Insensibly, he went on from one thing to another, and the
melody gained on the ^people. They are sure judges of what
is pure and excellent. Their ear is accurate ; their feeling
unerring. The little figure in their midst, with the sweet
and serious face, and the small brown hands, that moved so
perfectly, touched and won them. Muledrivers, copper
miners, pottery-painters, peasants, townsfolk, merry-makers,
gathered together, and listened to the child, till silence fell
on the crowded square, and Gemma, seizing the moment,
slipped in from one to another, holding out her little empty
palm, and whispering, while her pockets were full of half-
pence, and her ears were full of praises ; " We are so
hungry, my brother and I { "
164
SIGNA.
CHAPTER XV.
As it chanced that day Bruno heard nothing. He did not
leave his fields, the week being the threshing time, and he
having a man to help him whom he had to pay, and being
anxious to do all his grain and stack the straw entirely
before the Sunday. And down in the Lastra, Lippo, whose
courage though not his wrath had cooled, found excuse to
go up to his sheep who were ailing, and got out of reach of
his wife's tongue, and spent the day in pondering how best
he could compass the getting back the money without
rousing the ire of his brother too hotly on his own person.
He held Bruno by a chain indeed, but he had a foreboding
that under too severe a strain the chain would snap, and he
repented him of the impolitic passion into which his wife
had hurried him—nine years of prudence and hypocrisy had
been undone in five minutes' rage !
It was eight in the evening. There was red still in the
sky, but the sun had gone down. Bruno had set a torch in
the ring in the wall of his stone stable, and was still thresh-
ing by its light with the peasant whom he had hired to help
him. Unless they worked late and early there could be no
chance of finishing the grain by the Sunday morning; and
he wanted it threshed and done with, that he might have
all his time for his maize and vines, and begin the ploughing
forthwith.
The ruddy light gleamed on and off; the flails rose and
fell; the floor was golden; the walls were black; the air
blew in, fragrant with the smell of the meadow-mint in the
fields and the jessamine that clung to the arched doors, and
the stone-pines that dropped their cones on the grass above
where the hill was rock.
Bruno was very tired and hot; he had worked all day on
a drink of sharp wine from four of the morning, and had
only stretched himself on the bench for an hour's sleep at
noon. Nevertheless he went on belabouring the corn with
all his will, and in the noise of the flail and the buzz of the
chaff about his ears, he never heard a voice calling from
outside, coming up the fields ; and a child was standing at
his side before he knew that anyone was there.
SIGNA.
Then he left off, and saw Palma, Gemma's sister.
" Do not come lounging here. You will get a blow of the
flail," he said roughly.
" Signa ! " panted Palma, who was crying. She had
been crying all the way up the hill.
" If you want the boy he is in the Lastra. Get out of
the way."
" Is he not here ? We were sure they were here," said
Palma, with a sob, knee-deep in the tossing straw.
" No," said Bruno, whirling his flail about his head.
" Be off with you. I can have no brats idling here."
"But Signa is lost, and Gemma was with him!" said
Palma, with wide-open black eyes of abject terror.
" Lost! what do you mean ? The boy is somewhere in
the Lastra, doing Lippo's work."
" No," said Palma, with a sob. " They were in the
garden at Giovoli—very early—Mimi saw them—and they
went away together—very fast—over the bridge. And
Babbo sent me to ask you—he was sure that they were
here. But old Teresina says that Signa must have run
away, because Lippo and Nita beat him horribly—about a
fiddle—I do not know—and all the town is talking because
Signa hit Nita in the eyes ; and I know she was cruel to
him always, only he never, never would tell you."
Bruno flung down his flail with an oath that made the
little girl tremble where she stood in the gold of the corn.
" Stay till I come, Neo," he said quickly to the contadino
working with him, and caught his cloak from a nail, and
without another word or a glance at the sobbing child,
strode away through his vines in the twilight.
Palma ran with him on her sturdy little legs, telling him
all she knew, which was the same thing over and over again.
Bruno heard in unbroken silence.
His long stride and the child's rapid little trot kept them
even, and took them fast into the road and on to the bridge.
At the entrance of this bridge Sandro met them : though the
children were always together, Sandro knew little of Bruno,
and was afraid of the little he did know. But the common'
bond of their trouble made them friends. He seized hold
of Bruno as he went on to the bridge—
" Do not waste time in the Lastra. He is not in the
Lastra. There was some horrid quarrel—so they say.
i66
SIGNA
Nita knocked the boy down—all about that fiddle and the
quantity of money. The boy has run away, and my
Gemma with him—my pretty little Gemma !—and a minute
ago there came in Nisio with his baroccino ; he has been
to Prato, and he says he saw them there, and thought
that we had sent them—there is a fair. You can see
Nisio; he is stopping at the wineshop just across. That
was at four in the day he saw them. The boy was
playing. Will you go ? I do not see how I can go—they
will turn me away at Giovoli if I go—all my carnations
potting and all my roses budding—and then the goat is near
her labour, and nothing but this child to see to her or to
keep the boys in order—and what the lad could take
Gemma for, if he would run away, though she was only
a trouble in the house, and a greedy poppet always, still—"
Bruno, before half his words were done, was away over
the bridge, and had reached the wineshop, and had con-
fronted Nisio—Dionisio Riggo, a chandler and cheesemonger
of the Lastra, who had a little bit of land out Prato way.
" You saw—the boy—in Prato ? "
Nisio grinned.
"I saw Lippo's foundling in Prato. Is that much to
you ? Nay, nay ! I meant no offence indeed. Only you
are so soft upon the boy—people will talk! Yes, he was
there, playing a fiddle in a crowd. And the little girl of
Sandro's—the pretty white one—with him. Only a child's
freak, no doubt. I thought they were out there for a holi-
day. Else I would have spoken, and have brought them
home. But they can take no harm."
Bruno left him also without a word, and went on his way
as swiftly as the wind up to the house of Lippo.
Old Baldo was working at a boot at his board before his
door. Lippo, who had just come down from the hills, was
standing idling and talking with his gossip the barber. His
wife was ironing linen in an attic under the roof, her eyes
none the worse, though she had bound one up with a red
handkerchief that she might make her moan with; effect
to the neighbours.
Bruno's hand fell like a sledge-hammer on his brother's
shoulder before Lippo knew that he was nigh.
" What did you do to the boy ? "
Lippo trembled, and his jaw fell. People came out of
SIGN A,
167
the other doorway. Old Baldo paused with his awl up-
lifted. Children came running to listen. Bruno shook his
brother to and fro as the breeze shakes a cane by the river.
" What did you do to the boy ? "
" I did nothing," stammered Lippo. " We were vexed—
all that money—and nothing but a fiddle to show. That
was natural you know—only natural was it ? And then the
child grew in a dreadful passion, and he flew on my poor
good Nita like a little wild cat, and blinded her—she is
blind now. That is all the truth, and the saints are my
testimony !"
" That is a lie, and the devils are your sponsors!"
shouted Bruno, till the shout rang from the gateway to the
shrine. "If harm have come to the child, I will break
every bone in your body. I go to find him first—then I
will come back and deal with you."
He shook Lippo once more to and fro, and sent him reel-
ing against the cobbler's board, and scattered Baldo's boots
and shoes and tools and bits of leather right and left; then
without looking backward or heeding the clamour he had
raised, he dashed through the Lastra to get home, and fetch
money, and find a horse.
Old Baldo did not love his son-in-law. His daughter
had been taken by Lippo's handsome, soft, pensive face, and
timid gentleness and suavity of ways, as rough, strong,
fierce-tempered women often are; and Baldo had let her
have her way, though Lippo had brought nothing to the
common purse. It was a bad marriage for Nita, the sole
offspring of the old cobbler, who owned the house he lived
in, and let some floors of it, and was a warm man all the
Lastra said, with cosy little bits of money here and there,
and morsels of land even, bought at bargains, and a shrewd
head and a still tongue, so that he might be worth much
more than even people fancied, where he sat stitching at
his door, with a red cap and a pair of horn spectacles, and
a wicked old tongue that could throw dirt with any man's or
woman's either.
Lippo stood quivering, and almost weeping.
"So good as we have been ! " he moaned.
"You white-livered cur I" swore old Baldo, who had
been toppled off his stool, and was wiping the dust off his
grey head, and groping in the dark for his horn spectacles,
i68
SIGN A.
with many oaths. " Yon whining ass ! Your brother only
serves you right. It is not for me to say so. It is ill work
washing one's foul linen in the town fountain. But if Bruno
break your neck he will serve you right—taking his money
all these years, and starving his brat, and beating it;—pah ! "
" And what would you have said if I had pampered it up
with dainties ?" said Lippo, panting and shivering, and
hoping to heaven Nita's hands were in the starch, and her
ears anywhere than hearkening out of the window.
" That is neither here nor there," said old Baldo, who,
like all the world, detested the ta quoque form of argument.
" That is neither here nor there. The pasticcio was none
of my making. I said there were brats too many in the
house. But you have got good pickings out of it, that is
certain ; and it is only a raging lion like Bruno, a frank
fool, and a wrathful, and for ever eating fire and being
fleeced like a sheep, that would not have seen through you
all these years."
Lippo upset the stall again by an excess of zeal in search-
ing for the spectacles, and prayed the saints, who favoured
him, to serve him so that, in the noise of all the falling tools,
his terrible father-in-law's revelations might not reach the
listening barber.
Bage in, wit out:—Lippo sighed to think that his lot fell
for ever amongst people who saw not the truth and wisdom
of this saying.
He found the spectacles, and then gathered himself to-
gether with a sigh.
" My brother shall not go alone to seek the boy," he said,
with gentle courage and a sigh. " I thought the child was
safe upon the hill, or else Harm me ?—oh, no ! Poor
Bruno is a rough man; but he owes me too much—be-
sides, he is not bad at heart—oh, no ! Perhaps I was
hasty about that money. After all, it was the child's.
But when people are poor, as we all are, and never
taste meat hardly twice a year, and so much sickness and
trouble everywhere, it overcomes one. So much money for
a toy!—for, after all, an old lute does as well. Tell Nita I
am gone to look for Signa, and may be out all night."
" He is a good man, and it is a shame to treat him so,"
said the women at the doors.
Old Baldo picked up his waxed thread, and made a
SIGN A.
169
grimace to himself, as he went to his work again, with a
lanthorn hung up above him on a nail. But it was not for
him to show his daughter, or her husband, in the wrong.
Besides, popular feeling, so far as it was represented in
the lane between the gateway and the shrine, was altogether
with Lippo.
He had struck a chord that was sure to answer. People
who lived on black bread and cabbages, and had a good deal of
sickness, and laboured from red dawn to white moonlight to
fill empty mouths, were all ready to resent with him the
waste of gold pieces on a child and a fiddle.
He knew the right key to turn to move his little world.
Good man as he was, he went down the lane with an
angry heart, saying, as old Vasari has it, things that are
not in the mass; but he said them to himself only, for he
had a character to lose.
Under the light of the lamp that jutted out from the east
gateway, where the old portcullis hangs, he saw Bruno.
He was putting a little, rough, short pony into a baroccino,
having hired both from a vintner, whose tavern and stable
were open on to the street.
The baroccino was the common union of rope and bars
and rotten wood and huge wheels, which looks as if it would
be shivered at a step, but will in truth whirl unbroken over
mountain-heights, and fly unsinking over a morass. The
pony was one of those sturdy little beasts which, with a
collar of bells and a head-dress of fox-tails, fed on straw
and on blows, and on little else besides, will yet race over
the country at that headlong, yet sure-footed, speed, which
Tuscans teach their cattle, heaven knows how. Bruno had
hired both of the vintner, to save the time that his return
home would have taken him.
The street was quite dark. The lamp in the gateway shed
a flickering gleam over Bruno's dark face and the brass of
the pony's headstall.
Lippo's heart stood still within him with fear. Neverthe-
less, he went up to the place. He had a thing to say, and
he knew he must say it then or never.
" Bruno, give me one word," he said, in a whisper, touch-
ing his brother on the arm.
Bruno flashed one glance on him, and went on buckling
the straps of the harness.
SIGNA.
" Are you going to quarrel with me—about the boy ?'»
" As God lives, I will kill you if harm come to him."
Lippo shivered.
" But if you find him safe and sound—hoys are always
safe and sound—do you mean to quarrel with me ?—do you
mean to take him away ? "
" If you have dealt ill with him, it will be the worse for
you."
Lippo knew the menace that was in his* brother's voice,
though Bruno did not look up once, nor leave off buckling
and strapping. And he knew that he had dealt ill—very ill.
"Listen, Bruno!" he said, coaxingly. "He will tell
you things, no doubt; children always whine. We have
punished him sometimes;—one must punish children, or
what would they be ? If you listen, he will tell you things,
of course. Children want to live on clover, and never do a
stroke of work."
Bruno freed his arm from his brother's hand, with a
gesture that sent the strap he was fastening backward up
into Lippo's face.
"You have hurt him, and you have lied, and you have
betrayed me and cheated me," he said between his teeth.
"I know that—I know that! Well, your reckoning will
wait—till I have found the child."
Lippo's blood ran very cold. Concealment, be saw, was
impossible any longer. If the boy were found, he knew
that he would have scant mercy to look for from Bruno's
hands.
" But hear a word, Bruno," he said ; and his voice shook,
and his fingers trembled as they clutched at Bruno's cloak,
as the latter took the ropes that served for reins and put his
foot on the step of the baroccino. "Just^aword—just a
word only. Will you take him away ? Will you cease to
pay ? Will you break our compact ? Is that what you
mean ? "
Bruno sprang on the little cart, and answered with a slash
of his whip across Lippo's mouth.
Lippo, stung with the pain of the blow, and goaded by a
laugh that he caught from the vintner, who stood watching
in his tavern doorway, sprang up also on the iron bar that
serves as footboard to the little vehicle.
" Take care what you do ! " he hissed in his elder's ear.
SIGNA.
" Take care ! If yon cease to pay—if you take the child—
I will say what I said. I will make him hate you; I will
tell him who he is; I will tell him how you stabbed his
mother at the fair; I will tell him how you—you—you left
her alone dead for the flood to take her, and maybe had
murdered her, for aught I know. And see how he will love
you then, and eat your bread. Now strike me again, if you
like. That is what I shall say. And what can you do ?
Tell me that—tell me that! Now go and ride out all the
night, and think and choose. How weak you are!—ah, ah !
How weak you are against me now !—how weak, with all
your rage!"
Bruno struck him backward off the step. The pony dashed
away into the darkness. Lippo fell in the dust.
When the tearing noise of the wheels and the hoofs flying
away into the night over the stones had died away, Lippo
lifted his head to the vintner, who had raised him from the
ground, and had poured some wine into his mouth.
" Good friend," said gentle Lippo, with faltering breath,
wiping the dust and a little blood from his forehead; " good
friend, say nothing of this—it would only bring trouble on
Bruno. I would have gone with him to find the boy, but
you saw what his passion was. He thinks me to blame;
perhaps I was. So much money thrown away on a toy of
music for a child, when a pipe cut in the fields does as well,
and it might have been laid aside for his manhood ! And so
much want as there is in the world! But never mind that;
say I was wrong—only do not tell people of Bruno. You
know he is brawling always, and that gets him a bad name ;
and not for paradise would I add to it. He is too quick with
his hands, and will take life, I always fear, one day; but this
was an accident—a pure accident only! Oh, I am well—
quite well; not hurt at all. And your wine is so pure and
good."
And he drank a little more of it., and then went away
home; and the vintner watched him, going feebly, as one
bruised and shaken would do ; and shook his head, and said
to three or four others who came in for a flask and a turn at
dominoes, that that beast Bruno had well-nigh killed his
brother and driven over him ; and that it would be well to
give a hint of the story to the Carabineers when they should
next come by looking after bad men and perilous tempers.
SIGN A.
CHAPTER XYI.
When lie reached Prato it was quite night. Most of the
houses were shut up ; but, as it had been a great fair day,
there were lights in many places, and little knots before
winehouse doors, and groups coming and going to the sound
of mandolines, laughing and romping about the old crooked
streets.
There was a bright moon above the old town where Fra
Lippo once lived. The shadows of walls, and gables, and
towers, and roofs, were black as jet. The women and
youths danced on the pavement, while somebody strummed
a guitar for them. There was a smell of spilt wine and dead
flowers. Some mountebanks, in scarlet and blue and silvery
spangles, were coming down a lane, having finished their
night's work, drum and fife sounding before them.
Bruno saw nothing of all this.
He only looked for a little, thin, pale face with big brown
eyes as bright as stars.
He stopped the pony before a little osteria that was open,
because some men were still playing draughts and drinking
in its doorway, and bid them put the beast in the stable;
and asked if they had seen a little boy and a girl somewhat
younger, the boy having a fiddle with him, and long hair.
The people did not know ; they had not noticed ; scores
of children and country-folks had been about Prato all the
day.
Bruno left the pony and baroccino with them, and wan-
dered out where chance took him. He had no acquaintance
in Prato. He had only come there a few times to buy or
sell, if there were a good chance to do either with profit.
But he inquired of every creature he saw for the children.
He asked the girls dancing. He asked the old men raking
up the melon-rinds and fig-skins out of the dust. He asked
the women barring up their casements for the night. He
asked the lovers sauntering in the white, moon-lit midnight,
with their arms round one another. He asked the dusky
monk, flitting like a brown shadow from one arched door-
way to another. But none could tell him anything; no-
body had noticed; some thought they had seen a little fellow
SIGNA,
173
with a violin, but were not sure ; one girl had, she knew,
and had thought that he had played prettily; and remem-
bered there had been a crowd about him; but where the
child had gone, had no idea.
" He must be in the town," thought Bruno, and looked
for him in every nook of shadow—under arches or on the
steps of shrines, thinking to find them curled up asleep, like
kittens after play.
He tramped through and through the town, not staying
for any rest or drink, footsore and heartsore, and putting
away from him as best he could the dark perplexity of how
he should tell the child the truth, without risking the loss of
his affections; or, keeping his secret, save the boy from Lippo.
As he went pondering, with midnight tolling from the
ancient bells above him, one of the mountebanks came to
him down a dim passage-way, a rose-coloured and gold-
bedizened figure, skipping in the shadows with a mask on,
and a bladder that it rattled.
" Are you looking for two children?" it said to him
through its grotesque visage. " I can tell you of him—a
little lad with a fiddle, and a pretty baby, white as a lily.
They were here all day in Prato. And this evening Gio-
vacchini, whom we call the Ape, took them both off with
him to the sea. They went willingly 1—oh, they went will-
ingly ! The Ape's children always do; only they never
know what they go to ! Do you understand ? The Ape
has such a pretty cajolery with him. He would make the
little Gesu off the very altars dance and play for him. But
if you are their father, as I take it, follow them to Livorno,
the Ape will take ship there at once. Follow them. For
the Ape is—not so pleasant when children once are out of
sight of shore. You understand ! "
And, singing, the mountebank, with his masked face grin-
ning from ear to ear, rattling his peas in his gilded bladder,
skipped away as he had come, too suddenly and swiftly for
Bruno to stretch a hand to stay him.
"Is that true?" cried Bruno, with a great gasp. He
felt as if a strong hand had gripped his heart and stopped
its beating.
An old man, raking the fruit skins that the revellers had
left on the stones, looked up from his basket of filth.
" I dare say it is true," said he. " Why not ? That man
174
SIGNA.
they call the Ape seeks pretty children, and catches some,
and takes them off to strange countries, to go about and play
and dance, or sell the plaster casts, or grind the barrel
organs. I have heard of him. It is a trade, like any other.
He always takes care that they go willingly. Still, if you
be their father, and have no mind to lose them, best be off'.
He would be sure to go to sea at once."
" The sea ! Where is the sea ? " said Bruno.
He did not know, except that it was somewhere where
the sun went every night.
"Go to Livorno. They have gone to Livorno safe
enough. The Ape will be sure to ship with them, and has
got a score more I warrant! Go to Livorno."
" Livorno ! " the name told hardly anything to Bruno; it
was where the fish came from, that was all he knew, and the
river ran there ; and now and then from it to Signa there
would come some seafaring fellow home for a week to his
parents or brothers, bringing with him tales of strange
countries, and weeds that smelt of salt, and wonderful large
shells; and such a one would put up in one of the chapels a
votive-offering, picturing a shipwreck, or a vessel burning on
the ocean, or a boat straining through a wild white squall,
or some such peril of deep waters from which he had been
delivered—that was all Bruno knew.
Except into the great towns to sell or buy seeds or oxen,
Bruno had never stirred from the hill he was born on, and
to quit it had never entered his imagination.
To him, Livorno was as Nova Zembla or the heart of
Africa is to denizens of wider worlds.
The contadino not seldom goes through all his life without
seeing one league beyond the fields of his labour, and the
village that he is registered at, married at, and buried at,
and which is the very apex of the earth to him. Women
will spin and plait and hoe and glean within half-a-dozen
miles of some great city whose name is an art glory in the
mouths of scholars, and never will have seen it, never once
perhaps, from their birth down to their grave. A few miles
of vine-bordered roads, a breadth of corn-land, a rounded
hill, a little red roof under a mulberry tree, a church tower
with a saint upon the roof, and a bell that sounds over the
walnut trees—these are their world: they know and want
to know no other.
SIGNA.
175
A narrow life no doubt, yet not without much to be said
for it. Without unrest, without curiosity, without envy;
clinging like a plant to the soil; and no more willing to
wander than the vinestakes which they thrust into the
earth.
To those who have put a girdle round the earth with
their footsteps, the whole world seems much smaller than
does the hamlet or farm of his affections to the peasant:—
and how much poorer! The vague, dreamful wonder of an
untravelled distance—of an untracked horizon—has after
all more romance in it than lies in the whole globe run over
in a year.
Who can ever look at the old maps in Herodotus or Xeno-
phon 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 ? "
But Bruno was almost as simple and vague in belief as
the old Father of History, and the idea of the earth he dwelt
on was hardly clearer to him than to any Lake dweller in
Lacustrine ages. Dangerous people called Francesi were in
great numbers beyond that sea whose west wind sent the
rain up, and the floods, and the fish; and in Rome G od
lived, or St. Peter did—which was the same thing: so much
he knew ; but no more ; he did not want to know more ;
it would not have done him any good, the priests said so.
Therefore, when he heard now that the children were
gone to the sea shore, it was for him as if they had gone
with any falling star into the dusky and immeasurable
depths of night. But being a man who thought little but
acted fast, and would have followed Signa into the fires of
the bottomless pit, he did not tarry a moment, but flung his
cloak over his shoulder, and prepared to go straight sea-
ward.
C( I will go get the pony," he said, stupidly, like a man
stunned, and was moving off, but the old man raking in the
dust stopped him.
" Nay: what good is a pony, forty miles if one ? If
the b^ast were fresh you would not be in time. The Ape
176
SIGNA.
is there by this time. Go by the iron way. So you will
get to the sea a little after sunrise."
" The iron way ? " said Bruno, dully: the thought was
new and strange and weird to him; he saw the hateful
thing, it is true, winding every day through the green vine-
shadows underneath his hill, hut to use it—to trust to it—
it was like riding the horned Fiend.
"To be sure," said the old man with the rake and basket.
" Come—I will show you the way—it is a good step—you
will give me something for charity."
" I might get a horse," muttered Bruno, and pulled his
canvas bag out and counted his coppers and his little dirty
crumpled notes.
He had not very many francs ; twenty or so, that was
all; just what he had taken in the market on the Friday
before. He had never been away from home. He had no
idea what travel might cost.
"No horse that you could hire would get by day-break
to the sea," said the old man, who knew he would get
nothing by his hiring a horse, but thought he might turn
a penny by leading him to the rail. " Think—you want
those children—and if you saw the ship just out of port
and could not reach her—would you forgive yourself ? You
would never see them again then — never all the rest of
your days. The Ape would take care of that. But go by
the quick way. They will come through from Florence in
a few minutes. I hear the clock striking."
Bruno shivered a little under his brown skin. Never to
see the boy again!—and what would he say to Pippa on the
great day when all the dead should meet ?
"For the boy's sake," he muttered: there was no peril
or evil he would not have run the gauntlet of to serve or
save the boy.
"Show me the way—if it be the best way," he said to
the old man, with that curious and pathetic helplessness
which at times comes over men who, physically courageous,
are morally weak.
" Yes, I will show it you. But you will give me some-
thing? " stipulated the rag-gatherer, shouldering his basket.
Bruno nodded.
The old man hobbled on before him through a few
crooked lanes and little streets, throwing quaint black
SIGNA.
177
shadows on the moon-whitened pavement with his rake and
his rush-skip. Bruno followed; his brain in a dark con-
fusion, and his heart sick for the danger to the boy.
When they reached the place by the Bisenzio Gate, the
iron horse already was rushing in through the cool white
night, dinging foam and fire as it came.
It seemed to Bruno as if ten thousand hammers were
striking all at once. The showers of sparks seemed to him
as from hell itself.
He would watch for thieves alone on the dark hillside in
autumn nights. He could break in wild colts to the shafts,
and fierce steers to the yoke. He would stride through a
hostile throng at a brawl, at a winefair, careless though
every man there were his foe. He had the blood in him
that has flowed freely from Monteaperto to Mentana. But
he was afraid of this unnatural and infernal thing. His
fancy was bewildered, and his nerve was shaken by it.
He was like a soldier who will face a mine, but shudders
from a spectre.
"It is horrible—unnatural—unchristian," he muttered as
the great hlack engine, with its trail of flame and smoke,
stood panting like a living animal.
" But we must use the devil's work when it serves us.
All the saints say that," said the old man, dragging him to
the hole in the wall, and twisting his money out of the bag
and getting him his pass in due exchange.
Bruno was like a sheep; he followed mechanically; dull
with the ghastly fear of what had happened to the boy, and
the vaguer personal terror of this unknown force to which
he had to trust.
There were great noise, great shouting, hurrying to and
fro ; roaring of the escaped steam; lights green and red
flashing in the dark.
Confused and uncertain, Bruno caught his bag out of the
old man's hand, sprang in a hole that someone shoved him
to ; and felt himself moving without action of his own, with
the sparks of fire dancing past his eyes.
"For the boy," he said to himself; and made the sign
of the cross under his cloak, and then sat down as he saw
others do.
If he went to his death it was in seeking the boy: he
would meet Pippa with a clean soul.
N
i78
SIGNA.
The old man hobbled away chuckling. Bruno, true to
his word, had given him a penny; but in his palm he held
four of the dirty notes, each of one franc.
" I might have taken more," he said to himself, with self-
reproach. "He never would have known. The saints
send one folks in trouble! "
Bruno was borne on swiftly through the night.
With him there were a monk, a conscript, and two conta-
dini with a basket of poultry between them, and two melons
in a handkerchief. An oil lamp burned dully overhead,
throwing yellow gleams on the young soldier's boyish face,
and the begging-friar's brown cowl, and the black brows of
the sleeping peasant women, and the green wrinkled globes
of the fruit.
They rocked and thundered, and rattled and flew; the
white steam and the rain of sparks drifting past the wooden
window.
Bruno was like a man in a nightmare. He only dimly
understood the danger assailing the boy. He had heard
that men took children to foreign countries ; tempting them
with fair promises, and then grinding their little souls and
bodies in the devil's mill. But it was all vague to him like
everything else that was outside the lines of his vines, or
beyond the walls of the Lastra.
Only a word of the rag-picker's haunted him like a ghost.
The man would take ship ; and he, himself, might reach
too late and see the ships sailing—sailing—sailing—and
never be able to overtake it or see the face of the child
again.
That horror clung to him.
He sat gazing into the night; making the sign of the
cross under his cloak, and muttering ever and again an ave.
"You are in trouble my good son ?" said the monk.
"Yes, father," answered Bruno: but he said no more.
It was not his way to take refuge in words.
A great dull tumult of horror was on him. The strange
noise and swaying motion added to it. All the ill that ever
he had done in all his life—and it was much—surged up
over him. It was divine vengeance on his sins, he thought;
he had not clean hands enough even to save Pippa's child.
He had been a wild, fierce man, and had never ruled his
passions, and had struck rough blows when he should have
SIGN A.
m
asked forgiveness; and had been lawless in his loves, and
had made more than one woman rue the day his wish had lit
on her.
It seemed to him that it must be his sins which were
pursuing him. For the little lad was so innocent; why
should this misery befall them else ?
His thoughts were all in disorder, shaken together and
whirling round and confusing him, so that all he could think
of was that ship sailing away and he on shore, helpless :—
only now and then, in the midst of his pain, he thought too
of his oxen, Tinello and Pastore :—were they hungry ?—•
would the man to whom he had left them have wit to give
them their suppers ?—would they bellow with wonder at not
seeing him in their stable ?—if he were a minute late they
always lowed for him, thrusting their great white heads over
the wooden half-door.
So his thoughts went round and round, and the night
train flew on with him past the shining river in its thickets
of cane and acacia, and the grey hills silvery in the moon-
shine, and the knolls of woodland with their ruined
fortresses, and the vineyards that grew green where ruined
Semifonte was levelled with the soil; and the silence of
walled Pistoia holding the ghost of great Farinata; and
Pisa with her cold dead beauty like a lifeless Dido on her
bier ; and so past the great dense woods and breezy
heathery moorlands of the king's hunting grounds, till in
the light of the moon a white streak shone, and the monk
pointing to it said to them:
" There is the sea."
CHAPTER XVII.
Ix was four in the morning.
On the long, low sandy lines of the coast, and on the blue
waters, the moonlight was still shining. In the east the
great arc of the sky; and the distant mountains, and the
plains, with their scattered cities, were all rose-coloured with
SIGN A.
the flush of the rising day. Night and morning met, and
kissed and parted.
Bruno went down to the edge of the sea, as they told
him, and looked, and was stupefied. In some vague way
the strange beauty of it moved him. This vast breadth of
water that was so new to him, sparkling under the moon,
with white sails motionless here and there, and islands, like
clouds, and, in face of it, the sunrise, awed him with its
wonder as the familiar loveliness of his own hills and valleys
had no power to do.
He forgot the child a moment.
He crossed himself and said a prayer. He was vaguely
afraid. He thought God must be there.
He stood motionless. The rose of the dawn spread
higher and higher, and the stars grew dim, and the moon
was bathed in the daylight. A boat put out from the shore,
and stole softly away across the gleaming blue, making a
path of silver on the sea.
Bruno, like a man waking, remembered the warning of
the ship: for aught he knew, the boat was a ship, and the
child was borne away in it.
His heart grew sick with fear. He stopped the only
creature that was near him on the way; a fisherman going
to set his pots and kreels in the rock-pools to catch crabs.
" Is that a ship going away ?" he asked.
The fisherman laughed.
" That is a little boat, going fishing. Where do you come
from that you do not know a ship?"
" Has one sailed yet, since night ? Away ?—quite away ?
—not to come back ? "
"What do you mean?" said the fisherman. "If you
mean the mail-ships or the steamers to Elba or Genoa—
no! Nothing will leave port till night. Some will come
in. Why do you ask ? Do you want to get away ? "
The fisher glanced at him with some suspicion.
Bruno's eyes had a strange look, as if some peril were
about him.
" You are sure no ship will go away ? " he asked persist-
ently.
"Not till nightfall," said the fisherman. " There are
none due. Besides, there is a dead calm: see how these
rowers pull."
SIGN A.
x 81
And lie trudged on with his lobster-pots and kreels. This
man was in trouble, he thought; it was best not to meddle
with him, for fear of getting into any of the trouble.
Bruno went on along the wharf.
The natural shrewdness of a peasant's habits of action
began to stir underneath the confusion of his brain and the
perplexity of his ignorance and his sorrow. In many things
he was stupid, but in others he was keen. He began to con-
sider what he could best do. That great wide water awed
him—appalled him—fascinated him ; but he tried not to
think of it, not to gaze at it; he looked, instead, up at the
moon, and was comforted to see it was the same that hung
over the hills of Signa, to light the little grey aziola home-
ward through the pines. It seemed to him that he was half
a world away from the quiet fields where Tinello and Pastore
drew the plough beneath the vines.
But he had to find the boy;—that he must do before ever
he saw the Signa hills again. He pondered a little, passing
along the wharves, then turned into a winehouse that was
opening early for seafaring men, and ate some polenta, and
drank, and asked them tidings—if they could give any—of a
little lad with a violin, who had been stolen.
The tavern folks were curious and compassionate, and
would have helped him if they could have done, but knew
nothing. Only they told him that if the child had a pretty
trick of melody, he would be nearly sure to be taken to earn
money where the gay great people lived southward, along
where he could see the tamarisk trees. If he did not find
the children in the old town, it would be best to go south-
wards towards noon.
He thanked them, and wandered out and about all the
old, ugly, salt-scented lanes and streets and busy quays,
piled with merchandise and fish, and lines of fortifications,
and dull squares and filthy haunts, where there was the
smell of salt-fish all day long, and the noise of brawling
sailors of divers countries, and screaming foreign birds, and
the strong odour of fishing nets and sails and cordage.
He heard nothing of the boy; but learned that a ship
would go away to the coast of France at sunset.
So at noon, as they had told him it would be best to do,
he went along the seashore, southwards, past the lighthouse
and through the green lines of feathery tamarisks, that
SIGN A,
Titania of trees with its sweet breath, that is flower and
forest, and spice and sea, and feather and fern, all in one, as
it were.
To ask any public authority to aid him never occurred to
him. He had been too often at feud with it in his wild
youth to dream of seeking it as any help. Bruno and the
guardians of order loved not one another. When he saw
them at street corners with their shining swords and their
soldiering swagger, he gave them a wide berth; or, if forced
to go by them, passed with a fiercer glance than common,
and a haughtier step, as of one who defies.
His heart was sick as he went by the shining water. The
horror came on him that he had been misled. Neither
mountebank nor rag-picker had been sure that the children
had come to the shore. At best, it had been only a
thought.
Bruno felt for his knife in his waistband, under his shirt.
If only he could deal with the man who had taken the boy;
and with Lippo.
His soul was black as night as he went along in the full
sunshine, with the azure water glowing till his bold eyes
ached to look at it.
He had never known till now how well he loved the child.
And if he had drifted away to some vile, wretched, sin-
ful, hopeless life—the life of a beaten dog, of a stage
monkey, of a caged song bird,—if he lived so and died so,
what could he say in heaven or in hell to Pippa ?
The sweet tamarisk scent made him sick as he went.
The play of the sun on the sea seemed to him the cruellest
thing that ever laughed at men's pain.
When he came amongst the gay people and the music,
and the colour and the laughter of the summer bathers, and
the beautiful women floating in the water with their long
hair and their white limbs, he hated them all—for sheer
pain he could have taken his knife and struck at them, and
made the sparkling blue dusky with their death. It was
not only the child that he lost; it was his power to save his
own soul.
So he thought.
He went through the long lines of the tamarisks a brown
straight figure, with naked feet and bold eyes full of pain,
like a caught hawk's, in the midst of the fluttering garments
SIGN A.
183
and the loosened hair, and the mirthful laughter and the
graceful idleness of these bathers, whom Watteau would
have painted for a new voyage to Cytlierea.
Bruno did not notice what he was amongst. The Tuscan
blood is too republican to be daunted by strange rank or
novel spectacle. Whatever be its other faults, servility is
utterly alien to it, and a serene dignity lives in it side by
side with indolent carelessness.
Bruno went through these delicate patricians, these pic-
turesque idlers, these elegant women, as he went through
the poppies in the corn. They were no more to him.
He had come into the environs of the Ardensa, with the
pretty toy villas glittering on each side of him, and in front
the Maremana road, with bold brown rocks and sheep-
cropped hills, going away southward to the marshes and to
Rome; and on the sea, boats with wing-like sails, some
white, some brown, and the coral fishers' smacks at anchor,
and in the sunlight the violet shores of Corsica.
All at once his heart leaped.
He heard the notes of a violin, quite faint and distant,
but sweet as the piping of a blackbird amongst the white
anemones of earliest spring.
There were ten thousand violins and more in the world.
He did not think of that. To him there was but one.
He made his way straight towards the sound.
It came from a group of tamarisks and evergreens set
round a lawn some short way from the shore where the
luxurious bathers, after their sea plunge, were gathered
in a little throng, with all the eccentric graces of apparel
that fashion is amused to dictate to its followers.
His heart leaped with surer joy as he drew nearer and
nearer; he recognised the song that was being sung, a
rispetto of the people, strung to an old grand chaunt of the
sombre Neapolitan Traetta; which Signa, having heard the
air of it on the sacristan's organ, had played night after
night on his little lute, sitting outside the door of Tinello
and Pastore's stable, while the sun went down behind the
hill.
Moriro, moriro, serai contenta
Piii non la sentirai mia afflitta voce !
Quattro campane sentirai sonare
'Xa piccola campana a bassa voce.
Quando lo sentirai 'lmorto passare
184
SIGNA.
F&tti di fuora, che quella son io
Ti prego, bella, viemmi a accompagnare
Fino alia cbiesa per l'amor di Dio
Quando m'incontri, fallo il pianto amare
Ricordati di me quando t'amavo
Quando m'incontri, volgi i passi indietro
Ricordati di me quand' ero teco.
I shall die, shall die; and thou wilt be content
Thou wilt no longer hear my lamentation.
Four bells will ring upon thine ear for me,
And one small bell much lower than the rest!
When thou shalt learn the dead is passing by,
Come forth to see me, for that dead am I.
I pray thee, love, come forth to come with me,
Come to the church for the dear love of God;
And when thou see'st me, gather bitter plants,
And think of me in our dead days of love ;
And when thou see'st me, turn thy steps within,
Think of me in the time when I was thine.
Tuscan Rispetto
Bruno knew nothing of the name of the air, but he knew
the words, and with a great cry, he pushed his way into the
brilliant circle.
The music ceased; the child looked up, he was standing
in the midst of the graceful women and idle men playing
and singing, with big tears rolling down his cheeks.
Gemma, with a scarlet riband in her short gold locks, and
her hands full of sweetmeats, was running from one to
another of the listeners, taking- all they gave.
" Signa ! " cried Bruno.
The hoy stopped a moment, lifting his great eyes in
piteous uncertainty of what was right to do ; then the im-
pulse of affection, and of habit, and of home were too strong
for his resolution of self-sacrifice; he sprang into Bruno's
outstretched arms.
" 0 take me back, take me back, and Gemma too ! " he
sobbed; " and you will not hurt Lippo ? promise me,
promise me—because they will hurt you ; and that is why
I ran away, for fear that I should bring you harm. But I
am so unhappy. Gemma laughs and loves it all; hut I
0 take me back to the Lastra, and they will tell me there
if I have hurt Nita and ought to die. But promise me
about Lippo first—promise me ! "
SIGNA.
185
Gemma stood looking; the sea-wind blowing the scarlet
riband in her curls; she pouted sulkily, and ate a sweet-
meat.
" I promise you," said Bruno; his eyes Were blind, his
lips trembled ; he held the boy in his arms and kissed him
on the forehead. Then he set him down, and his hand
went to his knife, and a sudden savage remembrance swept
across his face, and darkened out of it all tenderness of
emotion.
" Let me get at the brute—point him out," he said, in
his teeth, while his eyes glanced over the gathered people.
But there were only the languid idlers staring at him,
and asking each other if it were a concerted scene to
enhance the charm of the little fellow's playing. The man,
Giovacchino, had disappeared at the first glimpse of the
stalwart peasant coming on his errand of vengeance.
Had Bruno known what his face was like, he would have
had but little chance of reaching him in the mazes of the
tamarisk groves; as it was, pursuit was impossible. He
took the two children by the hand, " Point him out, boy—
show me him," said he, breathlessly.
But Signa, bewildered, stared around, and could see
nothing like his tempter.
"He is gone, I think," he whispered, clinging to Bruno's
cloak. " He was not a bad man ; he was very kind."
" He was very good, and I want him," said Gemma, with
a flood of tears. " He has promised me pink shoes, and a
coral necklace, and a little gilt carriage to ride in, and a
harlequin toy that one can put on the floor to dance."
" "What is it ? " said the loungers. " Is it a comedy
scene to made one admire the children in new parts ? "
Bruno seized Gemma roughly, and took Signa by the
hand.
" Let us get home," he said, and the rage died off his
face, and a great serene thankfulness came on it.
He had back the boy.
Pippa would know he tried to keep his word. The man
might go unpunished.
Signa clung to him mute and half out of his wits with
the sudden wonder of this deliverance from the fate he
loathed. Bruno to him had been Providence always—as
other children see the strength of godhead in their parent's
SIGN A.
care, so he in Bruno's. To feel that Bruno was there was
to Signa to be ransomed out of death. He was speechless
and dizzy with his joy.
The idlers under the tamarisks watched him, supposing
it some portion of the programme of these pretty children,
who had come upon the sands that morning ; the boy, with
a voice so sweet, that the child Haydn himself never sang
more divinely those famous trilli for the famous cherries
that in old age he loved to recall with such delight; and
the girl with such a little face of grace, that she might have
stepped straight down from any tryptich of Botticelli, or
flown from any ceiling of Correggio.
" Where are you going to take him? Is the boy your
son ? " said one of the gentle people, who had been giving
their money and their pretty trifles to hear Signa sing and
play. "Bo you know he is a little Mozart? What do you
mean to do with such a genius as his ? Not bury it ? Tell
me all about him. Where do you live ? "
But Bruno flashed a dark glance of suspicion over the
elegant throng, and answered nothing, only moved his hat
in half-defiant courtesy of farewell, and turned away, afraid
that if he stayed some other means would be found by some
one to take the child away.
His hand gripped Signa's firmly.
" Let us get home," he said.
Signa smiled all over his little pale startled face.
" To the Lastra! " he said, with a little sigh of sweetest
self- content.
" What genius ! " said the throng left under the tamarisk
trees.
"What is genius?" thought Signa. "But anyhow if I
have it, it will go home with me. I did not get it here."
" Why do you cry, Gemma ? " he said aloud.
Gemma hung back and stamped her foot, and sobbed with
fury, letting all her gilded sweets and pretty treasures of
painted paper fall on the sand as she went.
" I will not go back ; I will not go back," she said. " I
want the pink shoes and the gilt carriage. We have
nothing to eat at home, and you heard them all say I am so
pretty. I want to hear them say it again. I will not go
back ; I will not!"
" But I am going, too," said Signa.
SIGNA.
Gemma pushed him away and struck at him with her
rosy little fists. But no one heeded her rage.
Bruno dragged her along without attention to her lament,
and Signa for once was indifferent to her; he clasped his
violin close, and he was going back to the Lastra; he was
so happy, that it almost frightened him.
He seemed to have lived years since he had run along,
with the angel's gift, by the Greve water three nights before.
Bruno went back straight to the winehouse in the town.
He asked them if they were hungry. They were not.
The man who had decoyed them had fed them well; till
they were out of sight of shore stolen children had nothing
but goodness at his hands; the mountebank in scarlet had
only said the truth.
There was a rough, kindly woman at the winehouse.
Bruno gave her Gemma to take care of for the few hours
that had to pass before they could get away to the Lastra.
Gemma was crying sullenly; she hated to go back; she
wanted this pretty gay world that she had had a glimpse of,
that was all ribbons and sweetmeats and praises of her
prettiness ; she hated to be taken to the bed of hay, to the
crust of black bread, to the lonely garden, to the trouble of
hunting hen's eggs, and killing grubs in the flowers, and
beating sheets with stones in the brook with Palma.
Then he took Signa out into the open air. It seemed to
him that what he had to say had better be said there.
Between four walls, Bruno, hill-born and air-fed, felt stilled
always.
The boy and he went silently down to the edge of the
sea once more.
Signa was startled and subdued.
He felt as if he were a child no longer, but quite old.
He had known what it was to be adrift on the world, to
gain money ; to be heartsick for home; to hear that he had
some great gift that other people wondered at; the contrast
and conflict of all these varying emotions had exhausted
him. And he was sorry too about Gemma. Gemma, who
cried for a strange life, for a strange country, for a strange
man—Gemma, who cared more about a scarlet band in her
curls, and a gilded box of sugar, than ever she had done for
all his music or caresses.
Signa had had his first illusion broken.
188
SIGN A.
He was no longer only a child.
Fair faiths are the blossoms of life. When the faith drops,
spring is over.
Amidst his great mnte happiness at his own home there
was a dull pain at his heart. He had found that beyond the
mountains he was no nearer God.
Bruno watched in silence along the sea. They came at
last along the level shore to a little creek, where the brown
rocks cast deep shadows, where the water was in golden
shallow pools, full of sea-weeds and sea-flowers; where the
town was sunken out of sight behind them, and they were
quite alone with the wide blue radiance before them in the
splendour of the noon.
" Sit here," said Bruno ; and threw himself down upon
the rock. Signa obeyed him, letting his little brown leg
hang over into the pool, and feel the cool sparkling ripples
break against them.
Bruno watched him.
Even now the boy was not thinking of him.
Signa with dreaming eyes was looking out to the sea and
the sky, and his hand was, by unconscious instinct, touching
such soft minor chords on the strings of his Busignuolo.
" What are you thinking of ?" said Bruno, abruptly. He
was jealous of these far-away thoughts that he could never
follow.
Signa hung his head.
" I do not know—hardly. Only I wondered—why does
God make the earth so beautiful and men so greedy ?"
His own thoughts were sadder and wider than this, but
they were dim to him; he could not put them into better
words.
" I suppose it is the devil," said Bruno; he had no better
reason or consolation to give.
Religion gives no better.
Signa shook his head. It did not satisfy him ; but he
could find no better himself.
4' It is the devil," repeated Bruno, who believed firmly in
what he said.
And he watched the child anxiously; he was oppressed
with his own secret; he hated himself because he had not
had courage that night of the flood to bear poor dead Pippa
to her grave, and tell the simple truth. The truth looked so
S1GNA.
simple now; so easy and so plain ; he marvelled why he
had been fool enough to hide it—truth always has this
vengeance soon or late.
None desert her without seeing that she would have
been their noblest friend. Only often it is too late when
they do see it. Once driven away with the scourge of lies
she is very hard to call back.
"Lippo ill treats you?" he said, abruptly,having resolved
to rend the spider's web that he had let his brother weave
about him.
Signa withdrew his gaze from the sea with a sigh. On
that world of waters he saw such beautiful things : why
must he be brought back to the misery of blows and hunger
and ill words ?
" You have promised me not to hurt him," he said,
anxiously. " They said you would hurt him—if you knew."
" And that is why you never told me?"
" Yes. And why I ran away."
" Tell me everything now."
The boy obeyed. Bruno listened. His face was very
dark. He did not look up ; he lay on the rock full length,
resting his chin on his hands.
"I am sorry that I promised you."
That was all he said when Signa's little tale of childish
woes and wrongs was ended. But there was a sound in his
voice that told the child why they had said in the Lastra that
Bruno, if he knew, would do that upon his brother which
would take him himself to end his days in the galleys.
" But you have promised," said Signa, softly.
Bruno was silent.
He was a fierce man, and in his passion faithless, and in
his ways wild and weak at once, oftentimes. But he never
broke a promise—not even one made to the beasts in the
yoke of his plough.
There was a long silence, in which the gentle ripple of the
water sounded clear; the intense silence of noon when all
things are at rest. After a while Bruno rose and lifted the
child up, and set him between his knees, sitting on a great
brown heap of rocks.
" You have been very unhappy ?"
" Sometimes," said Signa.
*' And were silent for fear of evil I should do ?"
SIGN A.
" Yes :—for fear that they would harm you."
" You do love me then ?"
" You are good to me."
" Would you love me if I did the evil ?"
"Just the same."
" You would not be afraid of me ? "
" No."
" How is that ? "
" You would never harm me."
" But if I did a great crime ? "
" I would hate that;—but I would love you."
" Who teaches you all this ? "
" I seem to hear God say it—when I make the music—I
do not know."
Bruno was silent.
He put the boy from him, and leaned his head on his
hands. Then suddenly he spoke, not looking up; very
quickly and any how.'
" Listen, I want to tell you the truth. I have hid it
because I was a coward—at first from fear of trouble and of
the people's talk—and of late because I wanted you to love
me, a little, and thought you would not if'you knew. Listen,
dear. It was such a simple thing. I was a fool. But
Lippo put it so. I must have been a coward, I suppose.
Listen, I had one sister, Pippa, a young thing; pretty to
look at, and idle as a lizard in the sun. I was rough always,
and too fierce and quick. They tell you right to be afraid
of me. I have done much evil in my years. I was always
a brute to Pippa. I had a sort of hate of her. When the
girl came my mother looked at none of us. I see her now—
a little brown baby laughing or crying all day long, and
my mother thinking of nothing but of her. I see her now
in the sun under the Pieta in the house door, her little red
mouth sucking at the breast, and mother so proud and sing-
ing, and talking of the time when she would want her
marriage-pearls. I hated her. No matter—I knew it was
a sin. I was rough and cruel with Pippa, grudging her all
pleasure and all playtime, and when the mother died she had
a hard time of it with me :—yes, I know. And at a winefair
she would dance when I forbade her, and mocked me about
a woman—never mind—and I struck my knife into her. I
should have killed her only the people held me back, and
SIGNA.
191
the knife turned on the busk of her boddice, and only
stabbed the flesh. You see I was a brute to her. That is
what I want you to understand. Well—then—one day she
went away. I cannot tell where she went to—no matter.
And the years went by. And one night, the night of the
great flood that you have heard us- tell of—Lippo and I
seeking the sheep, came on a woman in the field. She had
fallen down oyer the height, from that road we go on from
the town up to the hill. She was quite dead. She had a
child. We saw that it was Pippa. Then Lippo urged to me
—the sheep would drown ; the girl was dead—the town
might say that we had murdered her; he thought it best to
say nothing till the morning. We took you; we took the
child. We left her there till morning. The river rose. It
took her body with it. We never found it. Then Lippo
urged again—why say that it was Pippa ? It would do no
good. People would think we were ashamed of her, and so
had killed her. We could not prove we had not. What
use was it to say anything. The river had her. So I let it
be. I was a coward. Then there was the child. Lippo
would send it to charity. He had too many mouths to feed.
But that I would not have. For Pippa's son. I got Lippo
to keep it with his own, giving him half of all I got. He
has had half and more. His children have fattened like
locusts off my land. You know that. I thought he used
you well. You never told me. I did for the best. Lippo
has cheated me. Dear—you are Pippa's son. I got to love
you. I was afraid that you would hate me if you knew. I
have been a coward. That is all. Will you forgive me ?—
Your mother does, I think."
Signa had listened with breathless lips and wide-opened,
startled, wondering eyes.
When the voice of Bruno ceased, he stretched his arms
out with a little bewildered gesture; glanced round at sea
and sky one moment, then tottered a little, and fell in a
dead faint:—the long fatigue, the tumult of emotion, the
peril and the pain that he had undergone, the wild delight
of rescue and the hope of home, and now the story of his
mother and her death, all overcame his slender strength. He
fell, quite blind and senseless, down at Bruno's feet.
When consciousness came back to him his hair and clothes
were drenched in the sea water ; Bruno hung over him
192
SIGNA.
tenderly as a woman; Signa lifted himself and gazed, and
stretched his hand out for the violin, and saw Bruno, and
remembered all.
" That was my mother !" he said, bewildered, and could
not understand.
Bruno's eyes were wet with tears, salt as the sea.
" You do not hate me, dear?" he said, with a piteous
entreaty in his voice. "I have tried to do right by you
since. I think she is not angry, longer, if she knows."
" No," said Signa, dreamily; confused as though he had
been stunned by a heavy fall.
" That was my mother ? " he repeated, dully ; he did not
understand; the owls had never found him on the flood
then ; he had always thought they had.
" Yes; you are Pippa's son. I have tried to do the best.
You do not hate me—now ?"
Signa put his arms round Bruno's neck.
"No. I love you. Take me home."
CHAPTER XVIII.
It was late in afternoon when they got back to the tavern
by the wharves.
The child walked beside Bruno, very pale, and still, and
sorrowful.
" You will not hurt Lippo ? " he said once.
" I have told you no," said Bruno.
Then once he asked :
" Had I a father too ? "
" No doubt, dear! "
"And why have I not his name? The other children
have their father's name."
" How can we tell what it may be ? "
He could not say to the child—"You have no claim
on it."
" And where is he ? " persisted Signa.-
SIGN A.
193
"I cannot tell. I know nothing," answered Bruno,
impatient of the theme. "Pippa—your mother—went
away to some strange country. We never knew anything
more. Girls do these things, sometimes, when they are not.
happy."
" Then my father may be—a king ? "
" A beggar more likely. Anyway a rogue. Why think
of him ? "
" Why a rogue ? "
Bruno was silent.
"Your mother came back very poor, by the look of her,"
he said, after a while. "And sad she must have been, or
she would never have thought of her old home."
Signa was silent too. Then he said, musingly,
" Perhaps he would care to hear me play. Do you think
so ? When Carlo Gerimino makes at home figures in
wood,—dogs, and mice, and birds, just what he sees—his
father is so proud, and promises to have him taught great
things when he is old enough."
"Do not think of him, I tell you, dear," said Bruno,
with impatience. "You have me. I will do all I can.
Think of your Holy Child and your wooden bird; that is
better far. He may be dead, and so that and want together
drove her here. Anyway, it is of no use to vex your heart
for him. We can never know "
"I thought the owls found me," said Signa, sadly, and
dragged his little tired feet along, bewildered ; while the old
violin clangoured against him, and his head was bent, and
his hair was hanging over his eyes.
He would have sooner chosen that the owls had found
him. This sudden story, told in fragments, and never
clearly, as was Bruno's way, oppressed him with a sense of
mystery and sorrow.
Pippa's son ? What did that mean !
He did not understand.
But he understood that he would live with Bruno always,
and with Tinello and Pastore, and with the sweet wild hill-
side, all rosemary scented, and dark with the cistus, and the
myrtle, and the pine, and that made him glad—that com-
forted him.
" What beautiful things I shall hear all the day long," he
thought; for when he was alone, where the leaves were,
o
194
SIGNA.
and the sky was above him, he heard such beautiful things,
that it was the cruellest pity that they should ever be
driven away by the rough noise of Toto's fretting, and
Nita's rage, and the girls' quarrelling, and the baby's
screams, and the jar of the housework, and the creak of the
pump-wheel, and the curses of old Baldo on the gnats and
flies.
"When they reached the sailors' winehouse by the wharf,
the boy was so tired that he had almost lost all conscious-
ness of anything that went on round him. But at a great
rush of voices, and in the foul-smelling doorway, his dreamy
eyes opened, and his dulled ears were started to attention,
for he heard the woman of the place calling aloud:
" And who could have thought ? a casement no wider
than one's thumb, as one may say ? and how she could get
through it passes me ; the man must have helped her from
outside. As the saints live, I took every care. I kept
her in the little room at the back, that has the tamarisk in
at the window, and shells, and seaweeds, to amuse her, and
a beautiful picture of my husband's sister's son, of the
Martyrdom of the blessed Lorenzo. And she had a good
bowl of soup, and a roast crab, and a handful of figs—
eating for a princess—and ate it all, every bit, she did; and
then she seemed tired and sleepy, and no wonder, thought
I, and I laid her down on the bench with a pillow, and just
locked the door on her, and went about my work, and
thought no more, because my husband is always a poor
thing, and there are so many men coming and going, there
is more than one woman can get through—up at four, and
to bed at past midnight, as I am. And then, looking out in
the street, and seeing you coming with the little boy and
the fiddle, I went to wake her up, and the room was empty,
and some of the tamarisk twigs broken and tumbled down
on the floor, so that, of course, through the lattice she
must have gone, and the man must have been there to help
her out. The window looks on a lane; there is nobody
ever there; oh, he might have done it quite well, only so
small as the hole is—that beats me. And it is no fault of
mine, that Our Lady knows ; and why must you be leaving
her with me ? and you will pay me for the soup, and the
crab, and the figs, because she has got them away in her
stomach."
SIGN A.
*95
" Is Gemma lost ? " cried Signa, with a piteous wail in his
voice, that stopped the woman's torrent of phrases.
"Yes, dear; it seems so," said Bruno, in perplexity.
"But we will find her for you. Do not cry, Signa, do not
cry ; you hurt me when you cry."
But to find her was beyond Bruno's powers. He traced
her to the quay, led by a man; that was all he could hear.
They had gone in a smack that sailed away, bound for
Gorgona, at three in the afternoon. Some sailors on the
wharf remembered noticing the golden-headed, chattering,
little child; she seemed so happy to be off; the smack was
some strange one from some of the islands; no Livornese
craft; it had come in the day before with pilchards; they
supposed that the man had got the owner of it to give him
a lift over water; no one had known that there was any
need to interfere; they said that the father of the girl had
better come and see: no one else could have any right to
meddle.
That was all Bruno could learn.
They were quite certain the child with the red ribbon and
bare feet had gone to sea; they showed him the distant sail,
speeding fast over the waves, which were now freshened by
a breeze that had sprung up; by the direction she was
taking, they did not think that she was going to Gorgona;
anyhow, no one would overtake her till long after nightfall.
Signa stood and sobbed his heart out by the sea.
Bruno pondered a little; he could do no good, and he
had barely enough coins upon him to get home, and had no
credit in this strange town, nor any friend; besides, who
could tell, if Tinello and Pastore were well fed? They
might be stolen—heaven alone could tell; if the men
threshing with him were not faithful, no one could say what
evil might not happen, nor what ruin nor what blame the
fattore might not lay upon him for his absence without a
word. To stay another night away was impossible; he
could do no good to Gemma, and would be penniless
himself upon the morrow, and powerless to return.
He pondered a little while, then paid the woman at the
winehouse for the crab and figs that she lamented over, and
made his way back in the full red sunset heat by the iron
way he hated, half-leading, half-carrying the boy into the
waggon, where Signa wept for his playmate, till he wept
196
SIGNA.
himself to slumber, as the train, groaning, started on its
way, leaving the brilliancy of the golden west and the blue
sea, to plunge across the marshy wastes by Pisa, and
traverse the green vine country, where the Ave Maria bells
were ringing, and pause in the still twilit ancient towns, and
so reach the hills above the Lastra.
It was quite dark when they reached the hill of Signa.
Bruno, quite silent, looked up with a longing glance to
the purple lines of pine, where his vines were, and where
Tinello and Pastore dwelt in their shed under the great-
magnolia tree. But before he turned his steps thither, he
had to tell of Gemma's loss; he pressed money on her
father, and sent him seaward, on the vague chance that
what they had heard might be untrue ; then holding Signa
by the hand, he went straight down into the Lastra.
It was eight of the night.
Bells for the benediction offices were ringing from many
chapel towers on the hills ; single sonorous bells answering
one another under the evening shadows, and calling across
the hills.
The people were all about, idling at their doors, or in
knots of three or four talking of the many little matters that
make up the history of a country summer day. There was
hardly a lamp alight. The moon had not risen.
But the men and women all knew Bruno as he came down
into the midst of them with the stately tread of his bare
swift feet.
A stillness fell upon them. They thought he came to take
his brother's life most likely. They drew a little into their
own doors, and others came up from passages and house-
ways.
" Where is Lippo ? " he asked of them.
No one answered. But by an involuntary unconscious
glance that all their eyes took, it was easy for him to see
slinking away on the edge of the throng the slender supple
figure of his brother.
" Wait there ! " cried Bruno. " I shall not harm you—
coward."
Lippo paused; by some such fascinated fear as makes the
bird stay to be done to death at the snake's will.
"People of the Lastra, I have something to say," said
Bruno, standing still; a tall, brown, half bare figure in the
SIGN A.
197
gloom, with the boy„beside him; tall the people ran out to
listen; men and women and children, breathless and afraid ;
what could he be doing with words, he, whose weapon was
always straighter and swifter tnan any speech can be ?
The voice of Bruno rang out loud and clear; reaching the
open windows and the inner aourts, and the loiterers at the
gateways.
" I have something to say. I am a rough man. It is
easier to me to use my hand, but I want to tell you,—it is
just to the child. You remember that I was bad to Pippa.
I was cruel. I stabbed her, even ; you will remember. She
was a gay girl, but no harm. She forgave it all; she said
so. We never heard of her: you remember that. She went
—that was all. That night of the flood we found her dead,
Lippo and I; quite dead, under the bank by the sea-road;
just above there. There was a child with her : this child.
I left her alone in the night out of fear, and because of the
shame of it, and for the sake of the sheep, and because they
might have thought that we had killed her—Lippo said so.
At dawn I meant to go and tell the Misericordia, and go and
bring her in and get her decent burial by holy church. I
meant so : that I swear. But at daybreak the flood had
got her. Now you know. It was of no use to say any-
thing then—so Lippo said. It was as if one had murdered
her. But the good God knows how it came. I got Lippo
to take the boy. I said that I would pay for him ; give half
I got for him—always. I have done it. I thought the boy
was happy and well fed. Sometimes I had words with him
for the child's sake. But on the whole, I thought that all
was well. For nine years Lippo has had my money and
my money's worth. For nine years he has lied to me, and
beaten and starved and hurt the child. For nine years he has
lied to me, and cheated me. You know me. I would kill a
man as soon as a black snake in the corn ; but I have pro-
mised the boy. I lost the boy and found him by the sea.
The saints are good. The child ran away because he feared
that I should do ill on bis behalf, and fall into the power of
the law. For him I will let Lippo be. If it were not for the
child, I would kill him as one kills a scorpion—so ! You
know me. Go, tell him what I say. Though we live both
for fifty years, let his shadow never fall between me and the
sun; if he be wise. This is the truth. He has lied to me
198
SIGNA.
and cheated me. I do not forgive. Women and dogs may
forgive. Not men. This very day the child might have
perished, body and soul. And what should I have said to
Pippa before God's face when the dead rose ? That is all."
He paused a moment to see if any one would answer
there in Lippo's voice or Lippo's name. But'the darkening
groups, half lost in the night shadows, were all still; silenced
by amazement and by fear.
Then Bruno turnedt and with the boy's hand still in his,
went through the western gateway, and up the road, be-
neath the trees towards the river and the bridge, homeward.
When he was quite lost to sight the outburst of tongues
buzzed aloud, like swarming bees under the stars.
Was this the truth, indeed ? and hid so long !
Bruno went on his way over the cloudy waters to his hills.
CHAPTER XIX.
So the truth was told at last.
And the Lastra, of course, after taking the night to con-
sider, rejected it as a fiction.
When truth in any guise comes up from her well, she has
the fate of Genevra, when Genevra rose from the tomb;
every door is closed and bolted, and friends look her in the
face and deny her.
In the Lastra, after the first surprise of Bruno's speech had
passed "away, there remained very few believers in his story.
Old Teresina, who had always said that he was the better
man of the twain; and Luigi Dini, who had seen him at a
deathbed or two, and thought he had a soft heart under a
hard hide ; and his friend Cecco, the cooper, who made casks
and tubs under the line near the bridge, with the old work-
shop with the barred window, and the vine behind it; these
three and a few women, who had loved Bruno in other
years, and had sore hearts still, when they stopped working
to think—these did believe ; but hardly anybody else.
SIGNA.
199
At the time of his speaking, no one had heard him without
belief.
There was that strong emotion, that accent of truth,
which always cleave their way to the hearts of hearers,
however hard those hearts be set in antipathy or opposition.
But after a while, feeling his way by little and little, and
stealing softly into the minds of his townsfolk, Lippo, wan-
dering about with his sweetest voice, and tears in his eyes,
sighed and murmured that he would not speak; nay, let poor
Bruno clear himself, if he would; he did not wish to say
anything. He could clear himself. Oh, yes: as easily as
you could split a melon in halves. People knew him. He
was a poor man and of no account, but he had tried always
to do good. He had been wrong; yes, that he felt; twice
wrong in giving the shelter of his roof to his brother's base-
born one, and then, again, in letting the infirmity of anger
master him about all that good gold squandered on a squeak-
ing toy. But in nothing else, so far as he could judge him-
self—searching his heart. As for poor Pippa, heaven knew
he had sought high and low, vainly, for years and years, and
never could get tidings of any fate of Pippa's. There had
been a dead woman and a child found, but not by him; a
woman Bruno had driven to her ruin ; but, no, he would say
nothing. The Lastra knew him and his brother both. Let
it judge which spoke the truth. Only this, he swore by all
the hosts of saints, no scrap of Bruno's money or morsel of
food off Bruno's land had he or his ever touched in these
nine years. The child he had taken in out of sheer pity,
Bruno turning against his duty to it. But, there, he would
say nothing. He was glad and thankful when some natural
feeling had awakened in Bruno for the boy:—who knew
what good it might not bring to that poor darkened soul ?
If he wanted witness, there was Adamo, the wineseller, who
had seen him thrown brutally off the shafts of Bruno's
baroccino, and had heard his life threatened by him; but,
there—no—he would say nothing. The neighbours knew
him. As for gratitude, that no man might look for ; but it
was hard to be maligned after nine years' forbearance. But
the saints had borne much more and never took their ven-
geance. In his own humble, poor little way, he would
endeavour to do like them.
So Lippo, to the Lastra,—softly and by delicate degrees;
200
SIGNA.
and such is the force of lying, a force far beyond that of
truth at any time, that two-thirds of the town and more
believed in him and pitied him. For, start a lie and a truth
together, like hare and hound; the lie will run fast and
smooth, and no man will ever turn it aside; but at the truth
most hands will fling a stone, and so hinder it for sport's
sake, if they can.
Lippo jeopardised in credit a few days, recovered ground,
and, indeed, gained in the public estimation, with time; so
very prettily did he lie.
The parish priest took his part, and that went far; and
the counsel of the Misericordia did the same, and that went
farther still.
Lippo, a good soul, who rarely missed early Mass, arid
often came to Benediction ; who never did anything on holy
days, except lie on his face in the full sun, and made his
children do the same; who, if he was offended, kept a tongue
of oil and lips of sugar; and who was almost certain to have
all Baldo's savings, when that worthy should be gathered to
his father's : Lippo, plausible and popular, and always willing
to loiter and chatter at street corners and play at dominoes
and take a drink :—Lippo had a hold on public feeling that
Bruno never would have gained, though he had shed his
life-blood for the Lastra.
Most people knew, indeed, that Lippo was a liar: but
then he was so excellent a man that they respected him the
more for that.
So Lippo recovered his standing, and even heightened it;
and kept well out of the way of his brother ; and was brow-
beaten by his wife within doors for the loss of all the gain
the boy had been to them, but went to mass with her all
smiles, and on feast-days with his children was a picture of
felicity; and so no one was the wiser for what quarrels
raged under the tiles of Baldo's dwelling by the Loggia.
And only old Teresina and Luigi Dini and Cecco and such
like obstinate simpletons believed, or admitted they believed,
that Pippa had been found dead on the night of the great flood.
Why should they have believed it ? It is dull work to
believe the truth.
Bruno in return bent his straight brows darkly on them,
and kept his knife in his belt, and let them shout evil of him
till they were hoarse in market-place and wineshop.
SIGNA.
20I
He was hated by them just as Lippo was believed in; he
was unpopular just as Lippo was popular.
"Well, let it be so," he said to himself. He was in
different.
" Other folk's breath never made my soup-pot boil yet,"
he would say to the old priest of his own hillside, who would
sometimes remonstrate with him on the misconstruction that
he let lie on him. " They believe in Lippo. Let them
believe in Lippo. Much good may it do to him and them."
But the old Parocco shook his head, having a liking for
this wild son of the church, of whose dark, fierce, tender,
self-tormenting soul he had had true glimpses in the con-
fessional, when Easter times came round and men of their
sins disburdened themselves.
" But it will do you harm," said he. "The walnut-tree
laughs at ants; but when the swarm is all over its trunk and
in its sap, where is the tree then ? "
But Bruno bent his delicate dark brows, that made him
like a head of Cimabue's drawing; and smiled grimly. If
every man's hand were against him, he cared nothing: he
had his good land to till, and the boy with him in safety.
If he could have wrung his brother's throat he would have
been happier indeed. As it was, having promised the boy,
he passed Lippo in the Lastra with such a glance as Paul
might have given to Judas; and otherwise seemed no more
to remember that he lived, than if he had been a dead snake
that he had flung out in the road for the sun to wither.
" The same mother bore you," the priest would urge
sometimes, " and you honour the same God."
" What has that to do with it ? " said Bruno. " Though
he wrere my father, I would do just the same. He cheated me."
" But forgiveness is due to all."
tU Not to traitors," said Bruno.
And no one could move him from that faith. And Lippo
would go a long way round outside the gates rather than
meet that glance of his brother's in the narrow thoroughfares
of the Lastra.
Though on the whole, good man, the neighbours pitying
him, he -was the better for the wrath of Bruno, especially
since he was quicker than ever to answer to the Misericordia
bell, and droned louder than ever his responses of the mass,
being wise in his generation.
202
SIGN A.
CHAPTER XX.
So the child "went up to the hills with Bruno, and stayed
there for good and all, with Tinello and Pastore, and the big
magnolia tree, and the old gilded marriage coffer, and the
hens and the chickens, and the terra-cotta annunciation, and
the drying herbs and beans, and the big white dog from the
Maremma marshes, and the palm blessed on Easter day.
He was not quite the same.
He would never be quite the same again, Bruno thought
—and thought aright.
The child's vision had widened, and his thoughts had
saddened;, and he knew now that there was a living world
outside his dreams ; and he doubted now that the skies
would ever open to let him see the singing children of God.
And alas! though he cried his heart out for her, Gemma
never returned.
Sandro came back without her, and cried a little for a
week, but was not disconsolate, and on the whole found his
nutshell of a house more tranquil without the little sulky,
self-willed beauty. But Palma mourned her long ; and her
playfellow likewise.
Palma was sure that Gemma was dead. " She fell in the
sea and was drowned : else she would come back," said
Palma always, powerless to comprehend that any deliberate
choice could keep her sister long away from her. She had
loved Gemma with that extreme affection which a profoundly
selfish nature often begets on a very generous one. She
had sacrificed herself for Gemma twenty times a day with
delight in the sacrifice. Any little treat, any better food,
any morsel of fruit, she had always saved for Gemma; she
had waited on Gemma as if she had been born a little negro,
and the other a little princess; she had always taken
Gemma's misdeeds on her own shoulders, and screened her,
and served her in all possible ways. Gemma had been the
woe and torment of her childish life ; but she had never
known it; Gemma had also been its idol. The shrewdness
and the laziness of Gemma had taught her to make a scape-
goat and a slave of Palma, when they had been mere babies.
Palma had been happy in the servitude. She had firmly
SIGN A.
203
believed that Gemma had loved her in return; and so she
had done, when she had wanted her.
" She is drowned; else she would be back," said Palma,
to all attempts of others at consolation, and she hid a little
scrap of black ribbon, all she could get, about her little
brown throat, and having saved up a penny, by great toil,
with centime pieces, took it to the priest of the church above
Giovoli, and, sobbing, intreated him to say a prayer for
Gemma's soul. The old man put back her penny, and for-
bore to smile, and said a mass for nothing—being touched.
"What might be Gemma's fate, no one could tell; children
were kidnapped—so they said in the Lastra; and borne
away to carry plaster statues, or skip on a strained rope, or
play in circus-tricks, or wander with a monkey, and were
beaten if they returned to their masters with too few coins
at night—so they said; and the Lastra was sure that this
would be the fortunes of lost Gemma. But Signa, full of
agonized remorse for her, still felt in his own heart that it
was likelier that some way Gemma would not suffer very
much. "She will always suck the orange herself, and fling
the peel in some one else's eyes," said Bruno, when he spoke
of her; and Signa, though he resented the saying, and would
not assent to it, knew in his heart that it was true.
"X was so wicked to let her go with me ! " said Signa
often, in bitter self-reproach. But the good-natured Sandro
did not reproach him.
"My dear," he said, "when a female thing, however
small, chooses to go astray, there is not the male thing, how-
ever big, that could ever hinder her."
Sandro never looked beyond his pots of pinks and beds of
roses; but he knew so much human truth as that.
"What Gemma had gone to, who could tell ?—wandering
with little Savoyards and Roman image-sellers, or dancing
with dogs and monkeys, in rainy streets of northern towns,
or under the striped canvas of merryandrews' booths ; that
was what most of the children did who were tempted and
taken over sea.
'' Anyhow, wherever she is gone she is happy if she has
got a hit of ribbon in her hair and a sugar-plum upon her
tongue, and she will get them for herself, I will warrant,
anywhere," said Bruno, who could not have honestly said
that he was sorry she was lost.
204
SIGN A.
Bat Signa, when he said these things, cried so that he
ceased to say them ; and gradually the name of the sunny-
headed little thing dropped out of memory except with Signa
and Palma, who would talk of her often in their leisure
minutes, sitting under the wall by the fountain watching the
old speckled toads come and go, and the chaffinches preen
their white wings, and the cistus buds unfold from the little
green knots, and the snakes' bread turn ruby red till it
looked like a monarch's sceptre dipped in the bloodshed of
war.
Whenever at night the storm howled, or the snow drifted
over the face of the hills in winter, Signa would tremble in
his bed, thinking of his poor lost playmate, as she might be
at that very hour houseless and friendless on the cruel stones
of some foreign town. His imagination tormented him with
vision and terror of all the possible sufferings which might
he falling to her lot.
" It was my fault—it was my fault," he said incessantly
to himself and everyone ; and for a long time utterly refused
to be comforted. When the great day of his first com-
munion arrived, and he went, one of a long string of white-
clad children, with his breviary in his clasped hands, and
little brown shabby Palma behind him with the other girls,
Signa felt the hot tears roll down his cheeks, thinking of the
absent, golden-headed, innocent-eyed thing, who would have
looked so pretty with the wreath of white wild hyacinths
upon her head.
" The boy is a very lamb of God ; how he weeps with
joy at entering the fold," thought the good old Parocco,
from the hills, looking at him.
But Signa was thinking of Gemma.
"Dear love, do not fret for her," said Teresina, that very
day, after the service of the church, in her own little room
over the Livornese gate, " never fret for her. She is one
that will light on her feet and turn stones to almonds
always : trust her for that."
But Signa did fret; though he knew that they were right.
And he had lost his own mystery and wonder for himself.
He was nothing strange that the owls had found in the soft
night shadows and dropped down at the gates of Signa, as
he had always thought.
He was only Pippa's son.
SIGN A.
Poor Pippa ! She was not dear to him. He could not
care for her. When he went along the sea road he had no
.instinct of remembrance of the night that he had lain
against her breast and had had his cries hushed upon its
aching warmth.
Just Pippa's son, as Toto was Nita's—this was all ?
That the angels had breathed upon him and said to each
other, " Let this little soul see light," and then had dropped
him softly on the waters, and so the white wise birds had
found him and borne him to the Lastra, there to grow up
and hear about him the music of the heaven he had been
sent from—that had been intelligible to him, and had seemed
quite natural and beautiful and true.
But Pippa's son, as Toto was Nita's !
This was pain to him and perplexity. It made all dark.
A child's feet are bruised, and stumble on the sharp stones
of a hard, physical, unintelligible fact.
He was* much happier, in truth, than he had ever been :
unbeaten, unstarved, unpunished ; with only the free, fresh,
open-air toil to do ; and the man's strong affection about
him for defence and repose; and often allowed to wander as
he would and play as he chose, and dream unhindered as he
liked;—his life on Bruno's hillside was, beside his life in the
Lastro with Lippo, as liberty by slavery, as sunshine by
rain.
And yet a certain glow and glory were gone out of his day
for him; because of this truth about himself which to him-
self was so much less easy of understanding than the vaguest
fable or wildest miracle would have been.
Pippa's son !—no brighter born or nearer heaven than
that.
It was his faith and fancy that were bruised and drooped
like the two wings of some little flying bird that a stone
strikes.
The boy had something girlish in him, as men of genius
have ever something of the woman; and all that was
gentlest and simplest in him suffered under the substitution
of this harsh, sad history of his birth, for all his pretty,
foolish faiths and fancies.
But in all the manner of his life he was much happier.
In the country of Yirgil, life remains pastoral still. The
field labourer of northern countries may be but a hapless
206
SIGN A.
bind, hedging and ditching dolefully, or at best serving a
steam-beast with oil and fire ; but in the land of the Georgics
there is the poetry of agriculture still.
Materially it may be an evil and a loss—political econo-
mists will say so ; but spiritually it is a gain. A certain
peace and light lie on the people at their toil. The reaper
with his hook, the plougher with his oxen, the girl who gleans
amongst the trailing vines, the child that sees the flowers
tossing with the corn, the men that sing to get a blessing on
the grapes—they have all a certain grace and dignity of the
old classic ways left with them. They till the earth still
with the simplicity of old, looking straight to the gods for
recompense. Great Apollo might still come down amidst
them and play to them in their threshing-barns, and guide
his milk-white beasts over their furrows,—and there would
would be nothing in the toil to shame or burden him. It
will not last. The famine of a world too full will lay it
waste ; but it is here a little while longer still.
To follow Tinello and Pastore as they ploughed up and
down the slanting fields under the vines, dropping the grain
into each furrow as it was made ; to cut the cane and lucerne
for the beasts, and carry the fresh green sheaves that
dripped dew and fragrance over him as he went; to drive
the sheep up on to the high slopes, where the grass grew
short and sweet, and the mosses were like velvet under the
stone pines, and lie there for hours watching the shadows
come and go on the mountains, and the bees in the rose-
mary, and the river shining far down below ; to load the ass
and take him into the town with loads of tomatoes or arti-
chokes or pumpkins or salads, as the season chanced to be,
and ride him back amongst the hills, dreaming that the
" cucco " was a war-horse, and the pines the serried lines of
spears, and he a paladin, like Einaldo, of whom he had read
in an old copy of the " Morgante Maggiore " that lay in the
sacristan's chest in the Lastra, the sacristan holding it pro-
fane but toothsome versifying; to keep watch over the
grapes near vintage time in the clear moonlit nights when
the falling stars flashed by scores across the luminous skies,
and see the day-dawn rise and the sun mount over the far
Umbrian hills, and wake all the birds of all the fields and all
the forests into song; to pluck the grapes when they were
ripe, with the bronzed leaves red and golden in the light,
SIGN A.
207
ana load the waggon and dance on the wine-press till his feet
were purple, while all over the hillsides and along the fields
by the water far and ne&ar the same harvest went on, with
the echoes of the strife and the play and the laughter and {he
bursts of song making all the air musical from the city to the
sea;—this was the labour that he had to do, with kindly
words and with easy pauses of leisure, the passing of the
months only told by the change of the seeds and the fruits
and the blossoms, and by the violets and the crocuses in the
fields giving place to the anemones and the daffodils, and
they to the snow-flakes and the narcissus, and they to the
scarlet tulip and the blue iris, and they to the wild-rose and
the white broom, and they to the traveller's joy and the
yellow orchid, and so on through ail the year, with as many
flowers as there were hours.
The life on the hillside was full of peace for him, and
wholesome labour and innocent freedom and all those charms
of this country of sight and scent and sound which either are
utterly unknown, unfelt, incomprehensible, or are joys
strong as life and fair as children's dreams ; for men and
women are always either blind to the things of earth and air,
or have a passion for them: there is no middle-way possible.
You shall know " the hope of the hills " in its utmost
beauty, or know it never.
Signa did know it, small creature though he was, and
wholly untaught; and the joy of the hills was with him day
and night whilst he dwelt here so high in air, with the deep
mountain stillness round him and the sky seeming nearer
than the earth.
Weeks and months would go by, and he would not leave
the hillside for an hour, having no other companions than the
little wild hares and the gentle plough-oxen and the blue jays
that tripped amongst the white wakerobins, and the sheep
that he would drive up under the beautiful red-fruited
arbutus thickets, while far down below the world looked
. only like a broad calm lake of sunshine—like a sea of molten
goid.
The child was tranquillised, though he was saddened, by
that perfect solitude.
It was the most peaceful time also that Bruno's life,
tempestuous though monotonous, had ever known.
Since he had lost the boy, he had come to know as he had
208
SIGNA.
never done before tbe full force of bis great love for him.
Signa was not to him only a creature that he cared for with
all the strength of his nature, but he was like a soul com-
mitted to him straight and fresh from the hands of God, by
care of which, and by all means of self-devotion and self-
sacrifice, he was to redeem his own soul and to secure an
everlasting life.
He did not reason this out with himself, because reasoning
was not the habit of his mind; but it was what he felt every
time that he bowed his head before an altar or knelt before a
crucifix. He prayed, with all his heart in the prayers, that
he might do the best for the lad in all ways.
Most days he went on bread himself that he might be able
to give meat twice a week to the growing boy. He went to
the fairs in the early day, and left them as soon as his traffic
was done ; so that he might not spend money in roystering,
and get fighting as of old. He looked away from women,
and strove not to be assailed by them; so as to waste his
substance on their tempting. He laboured on his fields even
earlier and later than he had ever done, to make them
produce more; and so have means to get little trifles of
pleasure or better nourishments for the boy. He grew more
merciless at bargains, harder in buying and selling ; he gave
no man drink, and flung no feast-day trinkets into women's
breasts : all the Tuscan keenness became intensified in him
—he laboured for the boy.
Folks said that, losing his open-handedness, he lost the
one saving grace and virtue he had had in him: he let them
say it—if he were pitiless on others he was no less so on
himself. He combated the devil in him—what he called the
devil—because he could not let the devil loose to riot in his
blood, as he had used to do, without lessening the little he
had, and that little would be the all of Pippa's son.
Now that Signa was under his roof and always present
with him, his love for the boy grew with each day. The
sort of isolation in which his ill-repute and evil tempers had
placed him with his countryside, made the companionship
and the affection of this little human *thing more precious
than it would have otherwise been.
And as Lippo's story obtained footing more and more in
the Lastra, and the taverner's tale of how he had struck
Lippo off the cart under the pony's hoofs spread and took
SIGAa.
209
darker colours, men and women looked colder than ever upon
liim, and avoided kirn more and more. Why should they
not ?—since now he never bought their absolution with a
drink and tho cards for the one sex, and bold wooing and
free money for the other.
So tho years rolled quietly on, without incident and with
no more noteworthy memory in them than the excellence or
the paucity of the vintage, the large or small yield of tho
Turkish wheat, the birth and the sale of a calf, the dry
weather and the wet.
Only to Bruno a great aim had been set, a great hope had
arisen.
Before he had worked because he was born to work, now
he worked because he had a great object to attain by every
stroke that he drove into the soil, by every heat-drop that fell
from his brow like rain.
There was a little piece of ground on the hillside which
was much neglected—a couple of fields, a strip of olives, and
a breadth of wild land on which the broom and myrtle only
grew. It ran with the land which Bruno farmed, and he
had often looked at it longingly.
It was allowed to go to waste in a great degree ; but
Bruno knew the natural richness of the soil, and all that
might be done with it; and it had the almost priceless
advantage of a water-course ; a mountain-fed rush-feathered
brook, running through it. To own a little bit of the land
entirely is the peasant's ideal of the highest good and glory,
everywhere, in every nation. Nine times out of ten the
possession is ruin to themselves and the land too. But this
they never will believe till they have tried it.
It was Bruno's ideal.
All the other land of the hillside was the duke's, his
padrone's ; that he never thought of possessing any farther
than the sort of communism of the Tuscan husbandry already
accorded it to him. But this little odd nook always haunted
and tempted him to passionate longing for it.
It belonged to a carver and gilder down in the city. It
was said that the man was poor and inoapable, and often in
difficulty. Bruno, who was not a very good Christian in
these matters, used to wish ardently that the difficulty might
drift as far as bankruptcy, and so the morsel of soil come into
the market,
P
210
SIGN A.
For he had an idea.
An idea that occupied him as he drove Tinello and Pastore
under the vines, and looked across at those ill-tilled fields,
where the rosemary had it nearly all her own way, except
where the bear's berry and the wild cistus and the big sullen
thistles, and the pretty little creeping fairy-cups disputed
possession. An idea that grew more alluring to him every
night as he smoked his pipe before sleeping, and watched the
first ripple of moonlight on the little brook under the brush-
reed, the gardener's rush, and the water-star.
It so grew with him that one day he acted on it, and put
on a clean blue shirt, and threw his best cloak over one
shoulder with the scarlet lining of it turned back; and,
being thus in the most ceremonious and festal guise that he
knew of, he went first to his own fattore, who was a good old
man and his true friend, and then took his way straight
down into the city.
A few weeks later Tinello and Pastore were driven through
the rosemary and turned it upside down, and a pruning-hook
shone among the barren olives, and a sickle made havoc
amongst the broom-reeds in the little brown stream, and the
gardener's rush was cut too to tie the broom-reeds up in
bundles.
There was no one there to see except a neighbouring
peasant or two, who knew Bruno of old too weil to ask him
questions; and the fattore, when he rattled up-hill in his
little baroccino, knew what was doing, and stopped to look
with approval.
But when rumours of it in time filtered down the hillside
to the city market-place—as rumours will, trickling through
all obstacles like water—and busybodies asked the carver
and gilder in his dusky shop in the shadow of the Saints of
Orsanmichele, whether it were true that he had sold the land
or not, the man said " No," and said it angrily.
" How could any man," he asked, sell any place or
portion of his own in this now-law-beridden country with-
out his hand and seal and all his goods and chattels and his
price and poverty being written up and printed about for
any gaping fool to road ? "
Which was true: so the busybodies had to be content
with conjecture ; and Bruno, with whom busybodies never
meddled any more than dogs do with a wasps'-nest, worked
SIGN A.
211
on the little nook of land at his odd hours, till the rose-
mary dared show her head nowhere, and the brook thought
it only lived to bear brooms for the market.
This addition made Bruno's work more laborious' than
ever; but then it was of his own choice if he did so, and
no affair of anyone's. Besides, no one except its own
peasants ever concerned themselves with what went on
upon this, big, bold, lonely hill, with its lovely colours and
fragrant smells, that had the sunset blaze over it every
night in burning beauty in weather serene, or dark with
storm. It was his fattore's business only, and his fattore
was content.
And the carver and gilder was so, down in the city by
Orsanmichele ; for every month on a market-day he had
a little roll of much-soiled bank-notes, and these were so
rare to him that they were thrice welcome. Whatever else
Bruno's secret might be, he kept it—with a mountaineer's
silence, and a Tuscan's reticence.
Tinello and Pastore turned the first sod of this bit of
land in the month when Signa was found and Gemma lost;
and Bruno always took an especial pleasure in sending the
boy to work on that little brook-fed piece of the hill rather
than on any other.
He himself never neglected his own acres ; but he took a
yet greater pride in this small slope, which he had made
golden with corn; and those old rambling trees, which he
had made bear as fine olives as any on the whole mountain
side.
On great feast or fast days—when even Bruno, who was
not altogether as orthodox as his Parocco said he should be,
in being useless on the hundred odd days out of the year
that the Church enjoins, let his plough, and spade, and ass,
and ox be idle—he would, as often as not, saunter down
into this nook, taking the boy with him; and for hours
would loiter through the twisted olive boughs, and sit by
the side of the pretty, shallow, swift water running on under
the sun and shade, with the tall distaff canes blowing above
it, with a dreamy pleasure in it all, that he never took in
the land, well as he loved it and cared for it, where his
father's fathers had lived and died, ever since Otho's armies
had swarmed down through the Tyrol passes, and spread
over the Lombard and the Tuscan lands.
212
SIGN A.
" You are so fond of these three fields. Why is it ?" said
Signa, one day, to him, when they walked through the green
plumes of the maize that grew under the olives.
" They were barren; and see what they are now. I have
done it," answered Bruno.
And the boy was satisfied, and cut the brook reeds into
even lengths, sitting singing, with his feet in the brook and
his face in the sun.
He thought so little about these things : he was always
puzzling his brain over the old manuscript music down in
the sacristy in the Lastra. Whenever Bruno let him go off
the hillside he ran thither, and sat with his curly head bent
over the crabbed signs and spaces, sitting solitary in the
window that looked on the gravestones, with the ruined
walls and the gateway beyond, all quiet in the sunshine.
The music which the old Gigi had most cared for and
copied, and gathered together in dusky, yellow piles of
pages, was that which lies between the periods of Marcello
of Venice, and Paesiello, and which is neglected by a care-
less and ingrate world, and seldom heard anywhere except
in obscure, deserted towns of Italy, of in St. Peter's itself.
There was no one to tell Signa anything about this old
music, on which he was nourished.
The names of the old masters were without story for him.
There was no one to give them story or substance; to tell
him of Haydn serving Porpora as a slave; of Vinci, chief
of counterpoint, dying of love's vengeance ; of Paesiello
gathering the beautiful, savage, Greek airs of the two
Sicilys to put into his operas, as wild flowers into a wreath
of laurel; of Cimarosa in his dungeon, like a blinded nightin-
gale, bringing into his music all the gay, rich, elastic mirth
of the birth country of Pasquin and Polichinello; of Leo
marrying the sweet words of Metastasio to sweetest melody;
of the dying Mozart writing his own requiem; of the little
scullion, Lully, playing in the kitchen of the Guise the violin
that the cobbler had taught him to use ; of Stradella, by the
pure magic of his voice, arresting the steel of his murderer
on the evening stillness of San Giovanni Lateranno; of
Pergolese breaking his heart under the neglect of Borne,
while Borne—he once being dead—loved and worshipped
him, and mourned him with bitter tears, and knew no
genius like his; of Jacopo Benedetti, the stern advocate,
SIGNA.
213
leaving the world because the thing he loved was slain, and
burying his life in the eternal night of a monk's cell, and as
he penned his mighty chaunts, and being questioned where-
fore, answering weeping, " I weep because Love goes about
unloved."
There was no one to tell him all these things, and make
the names of his dead masters living personalities to him.
Indeed, he knew no more than he knew the magnitude of
the planets and distance of the stars, that these names which
he found printed on the torn, yellow manuscripts, a century
old or more, were of any note in the world beyond his own
blue hills.
But he spelt the melodies out, and was nourished on
them:—on this pure Italian music of the Past, which has
embalmed in it the souls of men who followed Raffaelle,
and Mino, and Angelico, and Donatello, and who breathed
in all the mountain-begotten and sea-born greatness of " il
bel paese Ch'Appennine parte e'l mar circonda, e 1' Alpi"—
men who were as morning stars of glory, that rose in the
sunset of the earlier arts.
CHAPTER XXI.
" You never come to the garden now," said Palma.
" You arc always in the sacristy."
" The music is there, and Gigi will not let me bring it
away," said Signa.
" But what do you want with that music ?" said Palma.
" You make it so beautifully out of your own head."
Signa sighed.
" I learn more—playing theirs. You like my music ; but
how can I tell ?—it may be worth nothing—it may be like
the sound of the mule's bells, perhaps."
" It is beautiful," said Palma.
She did not know what else to say. She meant very
much more than that.
Signa was fifteen now, and she was the same.
214
SIGNA.
Palma was a tall, brown girl; very strong, and somewhat
handsome. She had her dark hair in great coils, like rope,
round her head; and she had an olive skin, and big brown
eyes, like a dog's. She had a very rough poor gown, far too
short for her, and torn in many places; she wore no shoes,
and she worked very hard.
She was only a very poor common girl; living on roots
and herbs ; doing field work in all weathers ; just knowing
her letters, but that was all; rising in the dark, and toiling
all day long till nightfall, at one thing or another. And yet,
with all that, she had a certain poetry of look in her—a
kind of distant kinship to those old saints of Memmi's on
their golden grounds, those figures of Giotto's with the
fleur-de-lys or the palms. Most Tuscans have this still—or
more or less.
With the rest and food that Bruno allowed to him, and
the strong hill air, which is like wine, Signa, from a little,
thin, pale child, had grown into a beautiful youth : he was
very slender, and not so strong as the young contadini
round him; but the clear, colourless brown of his skin was
healthful; and his limbs were agile and supple ; and his
face had a great loveliness in it, like that of Guercino's
Sleeping Endymion. And his empress of the night had
come down and kissed him, and he dreamed only of her;
she was invisible, yet filled all the air of heaven; and men
called her Music—not knowing very well of what god she
comes, or whither she leads them, or of what unknown
worlds she speaks.
It was a noon, and Palma had snatched a moment of
leisure to gnaw a black crust, and to sit under the south
wall, and to talk to Signa, who had come for melon-seeds for
Bruno.
She loved him dearly; but he did not care very much
for her. All the love he had in him outside his music he
gave to Bruno.
Bruno he had grown to love strongly since the story by
the sea: he did not wholly understand the intense devotion
of the man to himself, but he understood it enough to feel
its immeasurable value.
With Palma and him it was still the same as it had been
on the night of the white currants and green almonds. He
SIGNA.
They had been playmates, and. they were often companions
now.
Only he thought so little about her, and so much of the
Rusignuolo, and the old manuscripts in the Misericordia
Church.
And Palma knew nothing; which is always tiresome to
one who knows something, and wants to know a great deal
more, as Signa did. The lot of an eager, enquiring, visionary
mind, cast back on its own ignorance, always makes it im-
patient of itself and of its associates.
The boy felt like one who can see amongst blind people:
no one could understand what he wanted to talk about; no
one had beheld the light of the sky.
Palma indeed loved to hear his music. But that did not
make her any nearer to him. He did not care for human ears.
He played for himself, for the air, for the clouds, for the
trees, for the sheep, for the kids, for the waters, for the
stones ; played as Pan did, and Orpheus and Apollo.
His music came from heaven and went back to it. What
did it matter who heard it on earth ?
A lily would listen to him as never a man could do ; and
a daffodil would dance with delight as never woman could ;—
or he thought so at least, which was the same thing. And he
could keep the sheep all round him, charmed and still, high
above on the hillside, with the sad pines sighing.
What did he want with people to hear ? He would play
for them ; but he did not care. If they felt it wrongly, or
felt it not at all, he would stop, and run away.
" If they are deaf I will be dumb," he said. " The dogs
and the sheep and the birds are never deaf—nor the hills—
nor the flowers. It is only people that are deaf. I suppose
they are always hearing their own steps and voices and
wheels and windlasses and the cries of the children and the
hiss of the frying-pans. I suppose that is why. Well let
them be deaf. Rusignuolo and I do not want them."
So he said to Palma under the south wall, watching a
butterfly, that folded was like an illuminated shield of black
and gold, and with its wings spread was like a scarlet pome-
granate blossom flying. Palma had asked him why he had
run away from the bridal supper of Gfriffeo, the copper-
smith's son,—-just in the midst of his music; run away
home, he and his violin.
216
SIGN A.
"They were not deaf," resumed Palma. "But your
music was so sad—and they were merry."
"I played what came to me," said Signa.
" But you are merry sometimes."
"Not in a little room with oilwicks burning, and a stench
of wine, and people round me. People always make me
sad."
" Why that ? "
" Because—I do not know:—when a number of faces
are round me I seem stupid; it is as if I were in a cage ; I
feel as if God went away, farther, farther, farther ! "
"But God made men and women."
" Yes. But I wonder if the trapped birds, and the beaten
dogs, and the smarting mules, and the bleeding sheep think
so."
" Oh, Signa ! "
" I think they must doubt it," said Signa.
" But the beasts are not Christians, the priests say so,"
said Palma, who was a very true believer.
" I know. But I think they are. For they forgive. We
never do."
" Some of us do."
" Not as the beasts do. Agnoto's house-lamb, the other
day, licked his hand as he cut its throat. He told me so."
" That was because it loved him," said Palma.
" And how can it love if it have not a soul ? " said Signa.
Palma munched her crust. This sort of meditation, which
Signa was very prone to wander in, utterly confused her.
She could talk at need, as others could, of the young
cauliflowers, and the spring lettuces, and the chances of the
ripening corn, and the look of the budding grapes, and the
promise of the weather, and the likelihood of drought, and
the Parocco's last sermon, and the gossips' last history of
the neighbours, and the varying prices of fine and of coarse
plaiting; but anything else—Palma was more at ease with
the heavy pole pulling against her, and the heavy bucket
coming up sullenly from the water-hole.
She felt, when he spoke in this way, much as Bruno did
—only far more intensely—as if Signa went away from her
—right away into the sky somewhere—as the swallows went
when they spread their wings to the east, or the blue wood-
smoke when it vanished.
SIGN A.
217
" You love your music better than you do Bruno, or me,
or anything, Signa," she said, with a little sorrow that was
very humble, and not in the least reproachful.
" Yes," said Signa, with the unconscious cruelty of one
in whom Art is born predominant. " Do you know, Palma,"
he said suddenly, after a pause. "Do you know—I think I
could make something beautiful, something men would be
glad of, if only I could be where they would care for it."
"We do care," said the girl gently.
" Oh in a way. That is not what I mean," said the boy,
with a little impatience which daily grew on him more, for
the associates of his life. "You all care ; you all sing; it
is as the finches do in the fields, without knowing at all
what it is that you do. You are all like birds. You pipe
—pipe—pipe, as you eat, as you work, as you play. But
what music do we ever have in the churches ? Who amongst
you really likes all that music when I play it off the old
scores that Gigi says were written by such great men, any
better than you like the tinkling of the mandolines when
you dance in the threshing barns ? I am sure you all like
the mandolines best. I know nothing here. I do not even
know whether what I do is worth much or nothing. I
think if I could hear great music once—if I could go to
Florence "
" To Florence ? " echoed Palma.
It was to her as if it were a thousand leagues off. She
could see the gold cross, and the red roofs, and the white
towers gleam far away in the plain against the mountains
whence the dawn came, and she had a confused idea that
the sun rose somehow out of the shining dome ; but it was
to her like some foreign land: girls live and old women die
within five miles of the cities, and never travel to see them
once; to the peasant his paese,—his hamlet,—is the world.
A world wide enough, that serves to hold him from his
swaddling bands to his grave clothes.
" To Florence," said Signa. " There must be great music
there. But Bruno will never let me go. If there be vege-
tables to take to the city, he takes them himself. He says
that cities are to boys as nets to birds."
" But why? " began Palma, having eaten her crust, and
with her hands braiding the straws one in another.
But Signa pursued his own thoughts aloud:
218
SIGNA.
" There is a score of a man called Handel in the church.
It is a part of what they call an oratorio ; a kind of sacred
play, I suppose, that must be. It is marked to be sung by
a hundred voiees. Now, to hear that—a hundred voices !
I would give my life."
"Would it be better than to hear some one singing over
the fields ? " said Palma.
Signa sighed.
"You do not understand. The singing over the fields,
yes, that is beautiful too. But it is another thing. Some
one has scribbled in old yellow ink on some of the scores.
In one place they wrote, ' This Miserere of Jomelli, sung
in the Sistine this Day oi Ashes, 1752; fifty-five voices,
very fine.' Dear ! To hear that!—it must be to the
singing in the fields like the lightning on the hills to a
glowworm."
" The lightning kills," said Palma, meaning simply what
she said, and not knowing that she pointed a moral in
metaphor.
"I must go back with the seeds, Palma," said the boy,
rising from under the old south wall.
. He was not vexed with her, only no one understood—no
one, as he said to the Rusignuolo, when he went home with
the basket slung at his back, playing the violin as he went
over the hills, as his habit was, while the little children ran
down through the vines to listen, and the sheep stood on
the ledges of the rocks to hear, and the hollowed crevices
gave the sound back in faint, sweet, faithful echo.
Palma, plaiting as she walked, went to her father's cottage,
and laid her straw aside, and twisted her short skirt as high
as her knees, and went down into the cabbage bed and
worked; hard labour that made her back bend like an osier,
and her brown skin wet with heat, and her feet cold and
black with the clinging soil.
He lived in the air like a white-winged fringuillo ; and she
in the clods like a poor blind mole.
" We are nothing to him, anyone of us," she thought, and
a dew that was not a raindrop fell for a moment on the crisp
green cabbage leaves.
But she hoed and weeded and picked off the slugs, and
scolded herself for crying, and laboured ceaselessly all the
afternoon over the heavy earth; and then put a pile of the
SIGN A.
219
cabbages into a great kreol, and carried it on her back into
the Lastra, and sold it for a few coppers ; and then went
home again to make her brother's shirts, and draw the
water that filled the troughs of bark that ran across the
plot of ground, and clean her poor little hovel as well as
she could with five boys and a pig and hens and chickens
always sprawling on the floor ; and when the sun set, washed
the mud off her limbs, and climbed the rickety ladder into
the hole in the roof, where her straw mattress was, with
two bits of wood nailed in the shape of a cross above it.
Palma worked very hard. In winter, when the bitter
mountain wind was driving everything before it in a hurri-
cane whose breath was ice, she had to be up and out in the
frosty dark before day, no less than in the soft dusk of the
summer dawns. She had all the boys to attend to and
stitch for; her father's clothes to make; the cottage to
keep clean as best she might: she had to dig and hoe, and
plant the slip of ground on which their food grew: she had
to help her father often in the great gardens : she had to
stand on the square stone well, and draw the water up by
the cord and beam, which is a hard task even for a man to
do, long together; and, finally, in all weathers, she had to
trudge wherever she was wanted, for the good-natured
Sandro was as lazy as he was cheery, and put labour on
what shoulders he could, so only they were not his own.
If ever she had a minute's leisure, she spent it in plaiting,
and so got a few yards done a week, and a few coppers to
add to the household store ; for they were very poor, with
that absolute poverty which is often glad to make soup of
nettles and weeds; frequent enough here, and borne with a
smiling patience which it might do grumbling northern folk,
whose religion is discontent, some good to witness if they
could.
This was Palma's life always; day after day; with no
variety, except that sometimes it was cabbages, and some-
times lettuces, and sometimes potatoes, and sometimes
tomatoes; and that when the sun did not grill her like a
fire, the north wind nipped her like a vice; and when the
earth was not baked like a heated brick, it was a sodden
mass that she sunk into like a bog. This was always her
life.
Now and then she went to a festival of the saints, and
220
SIGNA.
put a flower in her rough black braids as her sole means of
lioly-day garb; and twice a year at Ceppo and at Pasqua
tasted a bit of meat. But that was all: otherwise her
round of hours never changed, no more than the ass's in the
brick-kiln mill.
Nevertheless she put up her cross above her bed, and
never laid herself down without thanking the Heavenly
Mother for all the blessings she enjoyed.
The State should never quarrel with the Churches. They
alone can bind a band on the eyes of the poor, and like the
lying watchman, cry above the strife and storm of the sad
earth, " All's well! All's well! "
Palma never thought for a minute that her lot was a hard
one. Her one great grief had been losing Gemma. Under
all else she was happy enough; a brave, and cheerful, and
kindly girl, and with no evil habit or coarse thought in her;
and pure as Una, though she had to stand on the well-edge
with bare arms and legs, gleaming like bronze in the sun,
and the wind blowing her poor thin skirt like a leaf.
Meanwhile the boy went up the hillside thinking not at
all about her.
He was thinking of an epitaph he had seen in an old
book the day before—an epitaph from a tomb under an altar
of St. Simon and St. dude in Rome :—
" Johannes Petkus Aloysius,
Palesxeina
Musics Princeps."
He was thinking how beautiful a thing it would bo to die,
if one were only sure of having " Musicse Princeps "
written above one's rest under the golden glory of
St. Peter's dome.
He was no longer content, like the boy Haydn, over a
wormeaten clavecin—content with the pleasure of sound
and of fancy, and pitying kings because they were not
as he.
He was no longer content thus.
The desire of eternal fame—the desire of the moth for
the star—had entered into him.
He had no thought to be unkind to those he lived with;
but he became so, innocently and unwittingly.
SIGN A.
221
All his mind and heart were with those crabbed manu-
scripts in the sacristy, and with the innumerable harmonies
and combinations thronging through his brain. He wanted
to learn; he wanted to understand; he wanted to know
how others had been able to leave to the world, after their
death, those imperishable legacies of thought and sound.
He could only dream uselessly; puzzle himself uncertainly;
wonder hopelessly ; he thought he had power in him to do
something great, but how could he be sure ?
Meanwhile he was only a little peasant riding out with
the barrels of wine, pruning the olives, shelling the maize,
driving the cow up to her pasture under the pines. And
Bruno said always, "when you come after me"—"when
you are a man grown and sell corn in the town market
yourself"—" when you are old enough to go in on a Friday
and barter"—and ten thousand other phrases like these, all
pointing to one future for him as the needle points to the
pole.
The boy was heavy-hearted as he went up the hill-path.
Sometimes he was ungrateful enough to wish that Bruno
had never followed and found him on the sea-shore; that
he had wandered away with Gemma into the dim tangle of
an unknown fate. All his affections clave to the beautiful
mountain world on which he lived; but all his unsatisfied
instincts fluttered like young birds with longing for far
flight.
Sometimes he wondered if there were any great man
whom he could ask—and was vexed that he had lost the
little bit of paper by the waterside the night he had run
from the Lastra. It might have been of use—who could tell ?
"Are you tired?" said Bruno, that evening. "You
should not tire. At your age I could walk from here to
Prato and back, and never a bead on my forehead nor a
muscle weary."
" I am not tired," said Signa. " I was thinking."
" You are always thinking. What good does it do ? "
"I was thinking:—ever so many hundred years ago,
down in the city, I have read that three men, a Corsi, a
Bardi, and a Strozzi, found poet and composer, musician
and singers, all themselves, and gave the city an opera in
Palace Corsi; the second it ever heard. Are there any
nobles like that now ? "
222
SIGNA.
"I do not know. And how can you tell what an
opera is ? "
" I can fancy it. Gigi has told me."
"An opera is a pretty thing. I do not deny it," said
Bruno, too true a son of the soil to be deaf to the charms
of the stage. "When I was a youngster; indeed always
before—before I had more to do with my money—I was for
ever going down to get a standing-place in the summer
theatre: the women round you, and the fine music, and the
big moon overhead — oh, yes, I used to care for it very
much; but after all they are follies."
u Would you let me go—and hear one ? "
Signa's eyes lit, all the paleness and fatigue went out of
his face, he looked up at Bruno as a spaniel at his master.
"What for?" said Bruno, sharply. "If you want
merrymaking, they dance every night down at Fiastra, the
girls and the boys."
Signa's face fell; he went without a word into his own
little bedchamber.
To ju;mp about in the droll Tuscan rigadoon, and to whirl
round plump Netta or black Tina—that was not what he
wanted. But how should Bruno understand ?
He could hear the sound of the bell from the roof of the
Fiastra farm, calling the dancers along the hillside, but he
shut his door and sat down on his bed and took out his
violin.
After all, it was the only thing that could understand him.
His small square casement was open; clematis flowers
hung about it; the vast plain was a vague silvery sea, full
of all the beautiful mysteries of night.
He played awhile, then let the Rusinuolo fall upon his
knee and the bow drop. What use was it ? Who would
ever hear it ?
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.
When he had been a little child, he had been quite happy
if only the sheep had heard his music, and only the wander-
ing watercourse answered it. But now it was otherwise.
He wanted human ears to hear; he wanted all the millions
of the 'faith to sing in chorus with him.
SIGNA.
223
And no one of them ever would.
The power in him frightened him with its intensity and
its longing: his genius called on him as the Jehovah of
Israel called on the lad David : and, at the summons of the
solemn unseen majesty, all the childhood and the weakness
in him trembled.
He sat quite quiet, with the violin upon his knee, and his
eyes staring out at the starry skies.
The heavens were brilliant with constellations: Red
Antares flamed in the south; the Centaur lifted his head;
and radiant Spica smiled upon the harvest. The moon was
at the full, and all the sky was light, but it did not obscure
"the length of Orphiuchus large," nor the many stars held
in the Herdsman's hand, nor the brilliancy of Altair and Yega.
Bruno, working out of doors under the house-wall, heav-
ing up the buckets from the tank, and watering his salad
plants in the evening coolness, noticed the silence. He was
used to hear the sweet sad chords of the Rusignuolo all the
evenings through, outstripping the living nightingales' song.
" Perhaps he is beginning not to care for it," he thought;
and was glad, because he was always jealous of that thing,
for whose sake the boy was so often deaf and blind to
everything around him.
" When he knows what I have done," thought he, letting
the bucket down into the splashing water, that glittered like
a jewel in the starlight. "When he knows all I have done,
and sees his future so safe, and feels the manhood in him,
and knows he will be his own master, then all these fancies
will go by fast enough. Strong he never will be perhaps,
and he will always have thoughts that no one can get at.
But he will be so happy and so proud, and his music will
just be a toy for him—nothing more : just a toy, as Cecco's
chitarra is when he takes it up out of work-hours. He will
put away childish things—when he knows the saints have
been merciful to me."
And he stopped to cross himself, before he took up the
rope and drew up the pail and flung the water over the
rows of thirsty green plants.
The saints had been merciful to him.
All things had thriven with him since the day he had told
the truth in the Lastra. The seasons had been fair and
prosperous. The harvests large. The vintages propitious
!24
SIGNA.
There had not been one bad year, from the time he had
taken the boy home in the face of his neighbours. Every-
thing had gone well with him. It seemed to him that every
grain he had put into the earth had multiplied a millionfold ;
that every green thing he had thrust into the mould had
brought forth and .multiplied beyond all common increase.
He had laboured hard, doing the work of three men ;
sparing himself no moment for leisure or recreation ; crush-
ing out of himself all national inborn habits of rest, or of
passion ; denying himself all indulgences of the body ; toil-
ing without cessation when the hot earth was burning under
the months of the lion and scorpion, as when the snows
drifted thick in the ravines of the Apennines. And now his
reward was almost at hand.
He almost touched the crown of all his labour.
He thanked the saints and crossed himself, then flung the
last shower of water over his plants, and went indoors to
his bed with a heart at ease.
" He is tired of his toy; he is not playing," he thought,
as he closed the household bars and beams against the sultry
lustre of the night, and set his old gun loaded against his
side, and threw his strong limbs on his mattress with a sigh
of weariness and a smile of content.
After all he had done well by Pippa's child :—in a very
little while he would have bought the boy's safe future, and
housed it from all risks, so far as it is ever possible for any
man to purchase the good-will of fate.
The saints were very merciful, thought Bruno; and so
thinking fell into sleep with the stillness and the fragrance
of the summer night all about him in the quiet house.
CHAPTER XXII.
Four months later, on a Sunday morning, Sign a and he
walked to their own parish church over the ploughed land
for early mass.
The bells were ringing all over the plains below. Their
SIGNA.
225
distant melodies crossing one another came upward on the
cool, keen air.
The church was exceeding old, with an upright tower,
very lofty and ruddy coloured, and with an open belfry that
showed the iron clapper swaying to and fro, and the ropes
jerking up and down, as the sound of the tolling echoed
along the side of the hill.
The brown fields and the golden foliage sloped above and
below and around it. A beautiful ilex oak rose in a pyramid
of bronzed foliage against its roof. The few scattered
peasants who were its parishioners went one by one into
the quietness and darkness and stillness. The old priest
and a little boy performed the offices. The door stood
open. They could see the blue mountain side and the vines
and the tufts of grass.
Bruno this morning was more cheerful and of more gaiety
of words than the boy had ever seen him. His character
was deeply tinged with that melancholy which is natural to
men of his country, where their passions are strong, and
which lends its dignity to all the countenances of Sarto's
saints, of Giotto's angels, of Fra Bartolemmeo's prophets, of
Ghirlandaio's priests ; countenances that anyone may see
to-day in the fields of harvest, or in the threshing-barns,
anywhere where the same sun shines that once lit the early
painters to their work.
Bruno kneeled down on the bricks of the old hill church
with the truest thanksgiving in him that ever moved a
human heart; one of the desires of his soul had been given
him ; going through the fields he had thought, " Shall I tell
him yet ?—or wait a little." And told himself to wait till
he should get the boy down to the borders of the brook
quite in solitude.
With labour he had compassed the thing he wished. He
had made the future safe by the toil of his hands. He was
happy, and he blessed God.
Kneeling on the red bricks, with the mountain wind blow-
ing over him, he said to himself:
" I think Pippa must know. The saints are good. They
would tell her."
He breathed freely, with a peace and joy in his life that
he had not known since the dark night when he had let the
dead body drift out to the sea.
Q
226
SIGNA.
A sunbeam came in through a chink in the stone wall, and
made a little glow of silvery light upon the pavement where
he knelt. He thought it was Pippa's answer.
He rose with a glad light shining in his eyes.
" We will not work to-day," he said, when the office was
over.
Usually he did work after mass.
They went home, and they had coffee and bread. Coffee
was a thing for feast days. He went outside and cut a big
cluster of yellow Muscat grapes, growing on his south wall,
which he had left purposely when he had taken all the others
off the vine for market.
He laid them on Signa's wooden platter.
" They are for you," he said. " It is fruit for a prince."
Signa wanted to share them with him, but he would not
He lighted his pipe and smoked, sitting on the stone bench
by his door under the mulberry. Under his brows he
watched the boy, who leaned against the table plucking his
grapes with one hand, and with the other making figures
with a pencil on paper.
Signa's lithe, slender limbs had a girl's grace in them ; his
shut mouth had a sweet sereneness; his drooped eyelids
had a dreamy sadness; his lashes shadowed his cheeks ; his
hair fell over his forehead; he was more than ever like the
Sleeping Endymion of Guercino.
But he was not asleep. He was awake ; but only awake
in a world very far away from the narrow space of four walls
in which his body was.
" You look like a picture there is in the city," said Bruno,
suddenly, who had stalked through the Tribune as contadini
do. " The lad in it has the moon behind him, and he
dreams of the moon, and the moon comes and kisses him—•
so Cecco, the cooper, said—and never of another thing did
the boy think, sleeping or waking, but of the moon, which
made herself a woman. Is the moon behind you ? You
look like it."
Signa raised his head and his long dusky lashes ; he had
not heard distinctly; he was intent upon the figures he was
making.
" I have never seen the city," he said, absently ; " never
since I used to run in, when I was little, after Baldo's
donkey."
SIGN A.
"What are you doing there ? " said Bruno, looking envi-
ously at the pencil; he was envious of all these unknown
things, which he always felt were so much better loved by
the hoy than ever he was or would be himself.
Signa coloured to his curls.
" I was writing—music."
" Write music ! How can you write a thing that is all
sound ? You talk nonsense."
" I think it is right," said Signa, wistfully. " Only I
cannot be sure. There is nobody to tell me. Gigi thinks
it is correct—but impossible. He thinks no one could ever
play it. I can play it. But then I hear it. That is different."
" Hear the paper ? You get crazed ! " said Bruno.
" Dear—you get too old to dream of all this nonsense.
Your Rusignuolo is a pretty toy enough, and you play
so that it is a joy to listen to you. That I grant. But it is
a childish thing at best, and gets no man his bread. Look
at the old beggar Maso who wanders about with his flute.
Music has brought him to that pass."
" The beggar Maso says that men, by music, have been
greater than kings," murmured Signa, with his eyes dropped
again on his score.
" Then he lies, and shall get a crust at this door no
more," said Bruno, in hot haste.
For the world was a sealed book to him, and music a
thing universal but of no account, like the meadow-mint
that sweetened the fields ; a thing of a shepherd's pipe,
and a young girl's carol, and the throats of villagers as
Passion week masses, and the mandolines of lovers and
merrymakers going home on S. Anna's Eve through the
vines after dance and drink.
Signa sighed, and bent his head closer over his paper.
He never disputed. He was not sure enough of the little
he knew.
"You like it better than the grapes," said Bruno, with
vexed irritation. He had saved the grapes two months
and more with the thoughts of Signa's pleasure in them
always at his heart. It was a little thing—a nothing. But
still
Signa folded up his paper and ate his grapes, with a flush
almost of guilt on his face. All his soul was in the concerto
that he was writing.
228
SIGNA.
He had found his own way through the secrets of com-
position by instinct—for genius is instinct, only a higher
and stronger form of it than any other. The sacristan
knew a little—a very little ; but that little had been enough
to give the boy a key to the mysteries of the science of
sound.
Who can think that Raffaelle would have been less
Raffaelle, even though Sanzio had been a breaker of stones,
and Perugino a painter of signs ?
Genius is like a ray of the sun:—from what it passes
through, it will take its passing colour ; but no pollution of
air, of water, no wall of granite, no cloud of dust, no pool
of mire, will turn it back, or make it less the sunray.
Bruno blamed himself that he should have said a hasty
word. The fire ran off his tongue unawares. When all
his heart and mind were full of the boy, he felt impatient to
see that blank paper—those dots without meaning—raised
in rivalry with him, and outstripping him.
"Dear," he said, very gently, and putting his hand on
Signa's shoulder ; " come down to the brook with me, will
you ? I have something to say ; and I talk best in the air,
though talk is no great trick of mine at the best."
Signa rose obediently—he always obeyed. But, by sheer
habit, he reached down the Rusignuolo from the top of the
chest.
Bruno saw, and his brows drew together.
" Always that thing ! " he thought ; but he said nothing.
They went out into the air.
The little brook was brimming from the autumn rains : it
is these little brooks that bring about the great floods. The
reeds and rushes were blowing merrily : no one cut them
this time in the year. Red-breasted chaffinches were bathing
and chirping. Fir-apples were tossing down in the ripples.
The grass was bright with the cups of the autumn anemones,
in all colours. Robins were singing in the olives; and,
higher, a cushat cooed.
Bruno stopped and looked at it all, with a smile in his
eyes ;—a smile proud and full of peace.
" Sit here, dear," he said, pushing the boy gently down
on a large boulder of brown stone.
He remained standing still, with always the same look in
his eyes.
SIGNA.
229
He laid his hand onSigna's shoulder. His voice, as he
spoke, was low, and very soft.
" It is sixteen years to-day since I found you by your
mother. She had her arm round you. You had your mouth
at her breast. She was dead. It was the night of the great
flood. Sixteen years ago, dear. You must be seventeen
now ; for they said—the women who knew—that you
looked a year old, or more, that night."
"Yes ?"
Signa lifted his head and listened. All this he knew, and
it had always a certain sharp pain for him.
"Yes," said Bruno, and paused a moment. "Sixteen
years. The first nine went all wrong. But I thought I did
well. I think Pippa sees you now—and is content—and
quite forgives. You are a pure, good, frank boy, and fair to
look at; and have no fault, if one may say so of any mortal
thing. God knows I do not speak in idle praise ; no, nor in
vanity. You are as nature made you. But your mother
would be glad. Now, dear, listen. When one is seventeen,
one is not a child any more : one begins to labour for
oneself, to think of the future ! At twelve I was more a
man than you are now, indeed; but that—so best—so best
—so best! Keep young. Keep innocent. Innocence does
not come back : and repentance is a poor thing beside it."
Signa listened, with earnest upraised eyes, his feet hang-
ing in the fast, brown water, the violin lying by him amongst
the anemone flowers and the brown plantain stems.
" I have been tormented for your future," said Bruno.
" Yes ; very often. For if I die to-morrow, I have thought,
what would become of you ?—and I had nothing to leave !
And you—oh, you labour well and cheerfully for me, dear.
I do not mean that; but for others, there are stronger lads,
and hardier; and who like field toil more, and do not dream
at all. And you do dream—too much. I have been
tormented often, when I have been roofing the stacks, and
have thought—just a fall and a blow on the head for me,
and where would the lad find a home ? "
Signa laid his cheek against the hand that rested on his
shoulder—a long, brown, sinewy hand, good to grasp a
weapon or wield a flail.
"For you see," went on Bruno, his eyes shining as they
glanced down on the boy's face, and then at the old olive
230
SIGN A.
trees and the brown fields corn-sown, " while that treacher-
ous beast was draining me, I could hardly keep myself
together; much less could I well lay by for you. A few
francs in an old bag, at the end of a year, that was all, do
what I would. But I had often looked at these three fields
and the olives. If I could get them for my own, I thought;
but it was hopeless. What could I do, with that snake
coiling and sucking always, and all his brood ? But when
I got you safe that day, away from the Lastra and Lippo,
and I was all my own master, then I said to myself—It is
possible, just possible ! So I went first to the fattore, and
got his consent, and showed him my plans, and he had
nothing against them; and then I went down into the city
and saw Baccio Alessi. Oh, you do not know. That is the
ass who let the thistles he ought to sup off choke up all this
good soil. I went straight in to Baccio—the fool was gild-
ing a frame—and I put it straight before him : all I would
give and do. I found he was half willing to sell; wanted
three thousand francs—for me, he might as well have said
three millions! I could not get it anywhere, even Savio
would not lend it, though I would have worked it out—
somehow. But- I laid my plan before Baccio; we both
cunning as rats, and slow and sure ; and at last we came to
terms, hammering away at them for days and days. I was
to have the land to farm, in the way that seemed best to
me ; and I was to give him half I got off it for ten years,
and two hundred and fifty francs a-year as well, paid
monthly; and at the end of the ten years the ground was
to be mine—mine—mine ! "
Bruno stopped ; his breath came quickly; his hand
tightened on the boy's shoulder.
Signa looked up, listening; but calmer than Bruno had
fancied he would be. To him it was such a gigantic thing,
and so marvellous; he wondered the boy could hear it and
keep so quiet and sit so still.
"You know all I have done to the land," he pursued.
" You can see. You are farmer enough to judge that, my
dear. But I have never neglected anything on the old soil
—no—Savio says that. He is quite content that it is as it
is. He praises me to the padrone ; only the padrone is so
gay, and young; it is no matter to him. Now when that
fool Baccio yonder saw what his half became, and all I got out
SIGNA.
231
of his ground, he was for being off his bargain. Of course.
But I have him tight, hand and seal, and good testimony to
it. A Tuscan is no bird to catch with chaff. He was
grieved in his soul, I can believe, when he saw all the land
would give. But that of course was no business of mine.
Now this last summer—the saints are good to one—Baccio,
who is a shiftless dolt, and leaks on all sides like a rust-
eaten pipkin, got deeper and deeper into his troubles, and
was as well-nigh being sold up by his creditors as a man
can be to keep head above water at all. Now, dear, you
have never been stinted for anything ? No ? You have
had all the food you wished for, and all the leisure time you
wanted, and I do not think you have ever had a narrow
measure of anything ? Nevertheless, I saved money. When
Savio had taken his dues, and Baccio had had his month's
portion, I was always able to put away something in that
old copper pot, that I slip in the chimney, where nobody
ever would look for it ; not even a magpie. So, when I
heard the fool was so nigh his rope's end, I counted my
money. I had six hundred francs, and there were two years
to run under Baccio. I went down and saw him. I told
him I would give him the money down if the land were
made mine at once. The poor devil sprang at the chance.
He thought the money would help him over the bog of his
debts; and he knew in a month or two, if I did not have his
bit of land, the creditors would take it, and divide it between
them. So he asked nothing better than to do what I wished.
He had lost the courage to higgle. I paid him the money
down on the nail, and the notary made the ground over to
me, for ever and ever. Do you understand, dear ? It is
mine ! "
Signa smiled up in his eyes.
" How glad I am—if you are glad !"
" If I am glad ! "
Bruno looked at him bewilderedly. Was the lad stupid
or blind, that he did not know—that he did not guess ? and
with those three fair fine fields of wheat, and those good
olives round him in the sun as plain and as fair to be seen
as the gold disc round the head of the Gesu child on the
altars ?
"Glad!" he echoed; "be glad for yourself, too, dear.
Do you not understand ? What is mine is yours. I have
232
SIGN A.
worked the land for you. It shall be your inheritance,
Signa. No, rather, when you are of age, my dear, I shall
make it over to you, in your own name, and then you will
be your own master, Signa. Your own master—do you
understand ? "
Signa sprung up and threw his arms round the man's
brown neck.
" You are so good—so good ! To care for me like that;
to think so much ; to work so hard. Oh ! what can I do in
answer ?"
Bruno was silent. He was always ashamed of emotion,
and he was vaguely disappointed. "What the boy felt was
gratitude, not joy; not, in anyway, the great enraptured
pride of possession, which Bruno had expected would have
filled his young heart to overflowing.
For seven years he had toiled night and day, and denied
himself all rest of the body, or pleasure of the senses, that he
might make this one portion of mother earth his own. And
now, the boy loved him for his love indeed; but for the gift—
did he care for it ? Not so much as he did for the gift of a
blank sheet of paper to scrawl signs on. Not one tithe as
much as he had cared for the gift of the old brown wooden
Rusignuolo.
He put Signa gently away from him, and sat down also by
the side of the singing brook.
"You do not quite understand," he said, and his voice
had a changed sound in it, and his throat felt dry. " Dear,
you are seventeen, as I said, and it is time to think of the
future. Now that is why having this land makes me so
much at peace. Do you not see ? It will be all your own;
and on it alone a man could live. Oh, yes, live well, if we
build up a little house on it, and the stones lie so near here-
abouts, and Savio would get me leave to take them, and
there is a brambly corner there by the last olive. But that
is not what I am thinking of; I daresay I shall live to
be old ; I am tough as an ox; and threatened men never
die, they say, and so many would like to stick a knife in me;
still, anything may happen. And now, what I mean is
this: this land shall be yours, your own entirely, as fast
and as sure as the notaries can bind it; and then, when I
do die, you learning to be a good husbandman, and having
all the produce of your own fields to do as you like with,
SIGNA.
233
and so getting to care for the work as you do not yet,
because you are so young, Savio will let you stay on in my
place in the old cottage, where your mother was born ; and
you will marry, and have children, and grow a rich conta-
dino—and there is no better life under the sun, no, not
anywhere ; and so your future is safe, my dear, do you see,
and that is why I thank God. Because I have lain awake
many an hour, saying to myself if I should die to-morrow,
or be killed in a brawl, what would the boy do ? But now
you are safe, quite safe for all your life long, because you
have your own bit of land to live on, and get your bread
out of, and that is the sweetest thing that the world holds
for any man; and so I bless the saints that they have let
me get it for you, and—and I think Pippa knows."
His voice fell low, and he uncovered his dark curly head,
and made the sign of the cross on his breast.
The boy kissed his hand—but was quite silent.
CHAPTER XXIH.
" Is it not good, Signa ? " said he, after he had borne the
silence a little time with no answer but the cooing of the
dove in the cranberry bushes.
Signa laid his head against Bruno's arm, as a girl would
have done.
" You are good ! "
" No, I was never that," said Bruno, with some of his old
roughness. " But the life for you will be good. The best
the world holds—owing nothing to any man, and all to the
work of one's own hands and the good black mould that
feeds one's hunger all one's years, and covers one's naked-
ness when one is dead. Ah, dear! I think you are so
young you do not see how great a thing it is to set your
foot on a bit of the earth, and say ' This is mine !' A king
cannot say any more. Only, the king puts dead men into
it, and we put the seed that is life."
Signa was silent. He was thinking that he knew a
234
SIGN A.
greater thing : to be king in a realm that conquerors cannot
assail, in a world that the lives around cannot enter.
He was oppressed and frightened by this, which Bruno
had meant should be the crown and joy of his sum of seven-
teen years. It was as if the weight of the earth bestowed
on him was heavy on his heart.
To get rich—to marry—to have children. The common
ideal of human kind appalled the pure and lofty fancies of
the boy.
To live and die a tiller of the'soil, the common lot of the
common mortal, terrified the young soul which had believed
itself the care of angels.
He felt as if a great chain had been flung round him,
fastening him down on to the hillside. And yet what could
he say to this unchangeable unselfish devotion which had
thought to benefit him ?
He sat and looked at the brown running water, as it
rippled over his feet and the wind blew among the rushes.
He loved every rood of the land, and every cloud-mist that
floated over it, and every little humble flower that helped to
make the soil beautiful; he loved the great dusky pinewoods
above his head and the old roofs and towers by the river in
the plain far below ; he loved the roads he had run on with
a baby's feet and the blue mountains that he had worshipped
with a poet's heart; he loved them all with passion and
fidelity.
And yet this future, of which Bruno spoke as a supreme
mercy of heaven, oppressed him with a deadly sense as of
imprisonment.
Bruno watched him, and saw nothing of what he felt; he
only saw the troubled shadows that had come instead of the
cloudless sunshine which he had thought to see dawn on the
boy's face. He was struck dumb with amaze—he was
mortified to the quick; he was nearer to rage against Signa
than ever he had been in all his life.
What could it mean ?
He had given the boy a priceless gift—a treasure that
moth could not eat nor rust corrupt; he had made safe his
future at the cost of seven years of incessant toil and unend-
ing self-denial. And this was all—silence! only silence !
as though he had said to the child, as Abraham to Ishmael:
" Arise, and depart from me."
SIGN A.
235
He had come down to the side of th6 brook at peace with
heaven and all men; he had rejoiced with the pure joys of
an unselfish sacrifice and of a duty fulfilled ; he had counted
for years on the pleasure of this one moment; he had said
to himself ten thousand times, ploughing in the rain and
wind or rising in the stormy dusk of winter dawns ; " How
happy the boy will be !—how happy ! "
And now the gift was given, and Signa sat silent, watching
the brook run by them.
He thought it must be because Signa did not understand.
He spoke again, twisting the rushes to and fro in his
right hand.
"Look here," he said; "perhaps you do not see. I
think you are not glad. It is strange. What other lad
Do you know all it means to have a bit of land of your own ?
You cannot, I think. It means freedom. You would be a
poor man with only this, that I know; but you would never
need to starve, and you would be always free. No beggar
and no bondsman—always free. Do you understand what
that means ? You are seventeen. Some day you will see a
girl you want. Listen. When Pippa was but a child—not
twelve, I think—I loved a woman—not the first I loved, nor
yet the last, may heaven be merciful to my sins! but the
best—yes, the one I loved the best. The girl was poor, a
daughter of many; her father a shepherd up above there.
She was called Dina. I think she was not handsome ; but
she was like a wild rose—yes, just like that; a thing you
could not be rough with; a thing that made all the air round
her sweet. I loved her best of all. Well, well; you do
not know. You will know. If I had married her, all
would have gone right. She could keep me from fair and
fray, from riot and quarrel, as none of the others ever
could. I would have married her. But I was one among
many, working on the same soil. My father said, ' How
bring another mouth, when there was not enough for the
mouths there were ? There was not room for a mouse the
more in the old house.' Dina had nothing but the poor
rough shift and gown she wore. He would not hear of it;
so I never married Dina. We met by stealth up in yon
pines. We loved each other. Trouble came. You are too
young. Never mind. Dina died of it in the end, a year
later—that was all. And there was no soft little white soul
236
SIGNA.
between mine and the devil any more. I let myself go to
all the evil that chose to come in my path. I stabbed and
cursed and gambled and rioted, and made men afraid of me
and women rue me. If I had married Dina—I never saw
any other woman that I cared to marry ; nay, I would have
given none the place that ought to have been Dina's. Some-
times I go up and look at where she lies still, in that little
square place with the white walls round it, right up there
under the pines, where you see the cloud now—that cloud
that has come down and past the mountain. Yes, up there.
Sometimes I can feel her arms about my throat, and feel her
kiss me still. I never think of any of the others. But you
do not understand. What I meant to say was, if I had had
a little piece of land like this, and had not been one amongst
so many, I should have married Dina, and she might not
have died. God knows, at least, I should not feel it in the
way I feel it now, that it was I who brought her death on
her; and I should have lived with cleaner soul and straighter
steps, I think. Now you, dear, you are a gentle boy, and
tender of nature, and will love some girl more innocently
than ever I did. And when we have built your little house,
—just see how it will stand, with the sunrise always in face
of it, which will please you so ; and that curve of the hill to
keep it from the northerly storms,—why, then, I say, you
can bring home any honest, pretty maiden that you take a
fancy to, and need not ask my will nor anyone's, but can
live God-fearing and wholesomely all your days, instead of
being cast adrift on lame chances and blind passions. For
you are not very strong, my boy, and a tranquil life will "be
the best for you; and then, when death does come to you,
and you see your mother face to face at last, why, then
you will say to her that I kept you out of hell, though I
could not keep myself. And I shall not mind hell, dear.
No ! let it burn me as it may, if only they leave me just a
little light, so that I can look up and see you happy by God's
throne—you and my poor Dina. A man can be a man in
hell, I think."
His voice ceased.
What he spoke of was no metaphor to him, but dark
dread truth, as sure to come to pass as night to follow day.
Signa looked, half fearfully, up into his face. What could
the boy say ?
SIGNA.
23 7
He only vaguely understood all that the strength and the
weakness, the sternness and the tenderness, the force and
the frailty of this man's soul wrestled with and overthrew.
He only felt the dead weight of a future that appalled him,
being forced on him by the hands that were stretched out to
give him blessing.
A bitter sense of his own cruel thanklessness, and of his
impotence to make himself more thankful, choked up in his
heart all other emotions.
He was mute a little while, his chest heaving and his eyes
burning with an insufferable shame of his own ingratitude.
Then all at once he threw up his head, and spoke with the
desperate pain of one who feels himself most utterly un-
worthy, yet is carried out of himself by the force of a passion
stronger than his will.
" What can I say ? " he cried. " Oh, how good you are
to think so of me and never once of yourself! And any
other boy—oh, yes, I know—any other than I would be so
happy and so proud. You must hate me, because I am so
thankless. No—not thankless in my heart. Most thankful
—only it is not what I want. It sounds so vile to say so ;
and you toiling and saving, and thinking only of me and of
my future all those years. But one is as one is made. You
know the rose could not live the water-life of the rush, the
dove could not burrow in the moss and sand like the mole.
We are as we are made. We cannot help being rose or
rush, dove or mole. Something does it for us—God they
say. Only one wonders. You must hate me, so cold as I
seem, and so base and so callous; and you thinking only of
me all these years, and giving up your life for mine. But
it is better to tell you the truth, and you will try and
forgive it, because I cannot help it. It is stronger than I
am. I do not want any land nor any girl. I do not want
to he a contadino always, living and dying. I should do
no good. I love this hillside—ah, dearly ! I would spend
all my life upon it. But then not in the way you wish.
Only when I should have learned all I want, and should
come home here for ever and ever, and watch the sunrise,
and make music all day long that should go away to all the
ends of the earth and take the name of Signa with it, and
make it great everywhere in men's mouths. But to stay
here now and always—never knowing anything, never hear-
238
SIGNA.
ing a mass sung, nor a cantata placed, nor an opera given;
never doing anything except put the grain in and reap it,
and dig round the olives and trim them—oh, I would rather
you would throw me in the brook, and fling stones on me
till I should be dead. When I take the cattle out, I do not
think of them—I think of the music that is always about
me, all around me, everywhere. I love the land, but it is
because of its beauty I love it; of ploughing and weeding,
and watering, and stacking—I help you because I ought to
do it; but my heart is not in my body while I do do it. My
heart is with the birds, with the clouds, with the stars—
anywhere—but never in the labour at all. If I were alone
here in other years, as you say, I should let the briars and
the rosemary eat it all up as Baccio did. Oh listen, do
listen, and do not be angry. What I want to do is to
learn; to hear beautiful things, and see if I cannot make
more beautiful things myself. I have heard that there are
schools of music, where one can know what one is worth.
I play the old great things the great masters wrote, and
when I play them, then my heart is in my body, and my
soul seems to live in my hands. I cannot help it. The
only thing I care for in all the world is music, and I do
think that God has meant me to give my life to it for the
world. You remember what that stranger said when I sang
to him when I was only a child. I do not want my mouth
to drop pearls. I do not want gold, or pleasure, or comfort.
But if I could go away where I could learn. I have written
—but I do not know what it is worth. If I could go away
where I could hear great things, and study them, then I
think I could make you proud of me—then I think I could
honour the Lastra. Oh, listen, listen, listen! I am not
thankless, indeed. But what I want is to have the beau-
tiful things that I hear live after me. I would die a thou-
sand deaths, if it were possible, so that only I could give life
to them, and know that the world would say, • He was only
a little lad—he was only Signa—but his music was great.' "
Then his voice ceased quite suddenly, and he dropped his
face on his hands and trembled. For he was afraid of the
fruit of his words; and his unthankfulness made his soul
black and loathsome in his own sight.
At the first phrase Bruno had sprung to his feet, and had
all the while stood looking down on him, not breaking in
SIGN A.
239
upon him by a breath or by a sign. Only over bis face
there had come the old darkness that bad been banished so
long; bis eyes under the straight black line of bis brows
had the old murderous fire in them.
He listened to the end.
Then be set his heel on the violin which laid on the
sedges at his feet, and stamped it down again and again as
if it had been a snake.
" Accursed be the toy that has bewitched you—accursed
the gold that bought it, and the man that gave ! "
The bruised wood cracked and broke under his heel; a
single string snapped with a shrill, sad, shivering sound,
like the cry of some young thing dying. The boy sprang
erect, his fair face in a blaze of wrath and horror, his slender
hands clenched. For a moment they looked at one another ;
—a sullen gloom set in the man's flaming eyes; a wild
reproach and a hopeless defiance in the boy's.
Then Signa's arms dropped, and he flung himself on his
ruined treasure—covering it with kisses—weeping as girls
weep.
Bruno looked down on him, and the fierce scorn on his
face deepened, and he laughed aloud.
Mourn in despair for a broken plaything, and slay with-
out thought a love that would burn in hell through all
eternity to serve him!
Without a word he turned and went up the mountain-
side.
The boy lay face downwards in the grass, sobbing, with
the shattered wood under his quivering lips.
Bruno never looked back.
. CHAPTER XXIV.
It was night when Signa crept back from the side of the
brook to the house.
The sun had left a stormy red over the mountains. In
240
SIGN A,
the valley it was raining heavily. Wind blew from the
west. The bells were ringing for the benediction through
the dense violet-hued vapours.
The poor peasant who most often aided Bruno on his
fields was putting up the bar before the oxen's stable.
He turned his lanthorn to the boy, and nodded.
"You will be up by dawn, Signa—will you? It is too
much for me to do alone."
The boy stopped, shading his face from the lanthorn lest
the man should see his swollen eyelids and his pallid
cheeks.
" Is Bruno gone ? " he asked.
"Yes. Did you not know ? But, there; he never says
anything. It is his way. How your voice shakes. You
have got a chill. Yes. He came down from the mountains
an hour ago and told me he should be away a day—two
days; perhaps more ;—would I sleep in the house and see
to the things ? No offence. But you are no more than a
baby. Mind, the guns are loaded; and leave the wine
where I can get it easy if you go to bed."
Signa locked himself in his little room, heeding neither
the guns nor the wine.
All night the rain beat against his lattice and the winds
raged over the roof. All night he tried by the light of a
feeble little lamp to mend his shattered Rusignuolo.
It was quite useless. The wooden shell he could piece
together well enough ; but the keys were smashed beyond
all chance of restoration, and for the broken silvery strings
there was no hope.
The Rusignuolo was mute for evermore. As mute as a
dead bird.
Signa never slept, nor even undressed. He sat looking
at the violin with a sick dead apathy of pain.
He watched by it as a living bird will watch by the dead
one which has been its comrade in song and flight, and never
more will spread wing with him or praise the day beneath
the summer leaves.
When the morning came and the peasant flung a shower
of pebbles at his shutter to rouse him, he was still sitting
there, tearless and heart-broken, with the fragments of the
Rusignuolo before him.
The habits of his life were strong enough to make him
SIGN A.
241
rise and dip his head in water and shake his hair dry, and
go down and help the man in his stable and field work.
But, first he laid the violin reverently, as though he buried
it, in a drawer, where his rosary and his communion ribbon
and his book of hours and his little locket were all laid with
sprigs of fir and cypress and many rose leaves to keep them
sweet. His face was very white : he had a scared, appalled
look in his eyes, and he hardly spoke.
The peasant asked him if he had seen a ghost in the
night ?
Signa shook his head ; but he thought that he had heard
many—ghosts of his silent melodies, ghosts of his dead
dreams, ghosts of all the gracious, precious, nameless,
heaven-born things that he and the Rusignuolo together had
called to them from the spirit-world ; from the shadows and
the storms, from the stars and the sun.
The long, dreary, dull day dragged out its weary length.
It had ceased to rain, but the valley was hidden in vapour.
He could not see the river or the villages, or the distant
gleam of the golden cross. Dusky mists, white and grey,
floated along the face of the mountains, and rose like a dense
smoke from the plains.
He helped the peasant all the day, his own peasant train-
ing teaching him by instinct to labour whilst he suffered. He
fed the beasts and plucked up the beet-root, and drew
water and stacked wood, and did whatever the man told
him to do.
No one came near. The hillside was still as a grave. The
fog drifted beneath it, and hid the rest of the world. He
and the man worked on alone. The oxen lowed in the byre,
missing their master. The screech-owl finding it so dark
began to hoot. A great awe, like that of the sight of death,
weighed upon Signa.
He feared every thing, and yet he feared nothing.
The Rusignuolo was ruined and voiceless.
It seemed to him as if the end of the world had come.
He went up the stairs and looked at it often. No tears
would come to his eyes ; but his heart felt as if it would
burst.
Never again would it speak to him.
Never !
A dull aching hatred of the man who had done this evil
R
242
SIGNA.
rose up in him. Hatred seemed like a crime—after all that
he owed to Bruno; but it was there.
He was unutterably wretched.
If there had been anyone he could have spoken to, it
might have been better; but the only thing that had ever
understood him was dead—lying mute and broken amongst
the rose leaves.
He could only work on silently with his heart swelling in
him, and let the horrible grey hours come and go.
The peasant wondered fifty times, if once, where Bruno
could be gone. Bruno, who, for forty-nine years, never had
set foot off his own hill and valley, save that once to the sea.
But Signa answered him nothing. He did not care. He
did not ask himself. If Bruno were dead—the Rusignuolo
was dead. It would be only justice.
The boy's heart was cold and numb.
The Rusignuolo was dead, and all his hopes and all his
dreams and all his faiths dead with it,
" Why did he take me out of the flood ? " he thought, as
he looked down into the dull vapours of the great rain-clouds
that hovered between him and the plain.
There is a silence of the mountains that is beautiful
beyond all other beauty. There is another silence of the
mountains that is lonely beyond all other loneliness.
The latter silence was about him now with the world of
water and mist at his feet; that dim white grey world in
which he might have drifted away with his mother—but for
Bruno.
" Why did he save me, then ? " he thought. " If he must
kill all that is worth anything in me now ? "
And his heart grew harder against Bruno with each hour
that went by, and brought the wet, oppressive, sullen even-
ing round again, with the wind loud amongst the pines.
The boy looked out through the iron bars of his open
lattice into the cold still night, full of the smell of fallen
leaves and fir-cones. The tears fell down his cheeks ; his
heart was oppressed with a vague yearning, such as made
Mozart weep, when he heard his own Lacrimosa chanted.
It is not fear of death, it is not desire of life.
It is that unutterable want, that nameless longing, which
stirs in the soul that is a little purer than its fellow, and
which, burdened with that prophetic pain which men call
SIGNA.
243
genius, blindly feels, its way after some great ligbt, tbat
knows must be shining somewhere upon other worlds,
though all the earth is dark.
When Mozart wept, it. was for the world he could never
reach—not for the world he left.
With the morning Palma came up ; the same weather
lasted, but weather did not matter to her. She came for
sticks and gorze for her firing, which she could glean above
on the wild ground. Usually Signa helped her. Now he
murmured that he had too much to do, and let her go up
under the trees alone in the falling rain.
What was Palma to him, or any living thing ? the Rusig-
nuolo was ruined.
He sat on the low stone wall with the rain on him, and
left all his work undone.
The absence of Bruno weighed on him with a vague sense
of misfortune and fear, and yet he did not wish him to return;
he wished him to keep away—always, always, always, he
thought: how should he bear to see the man who had slain
his Rusignuolo, and how could he ever avenge it on the
man who had given him bread and shelter and love, and
almost life ?
The boy's heart was sick with sorrow, and the first bitter-
ness of wrath that had ever found resting-place in him.
He wished that he were dead—he wished that he had
never lived.
Palma came down from the higher ground under the pines,
with a sack of fir-apples on her shoulders, and a great bundle
of dry boughs and brambles balanced above it on her head.
Her feet were black with the moss and the mud ; her wisp
of a skirt was clinging to her, wet through; her brown face
was warm with work. She stopped by the wall.
" Is anything the matter ? "
Signa shook his head ; he could not speak of it.
" Cippone told me Bruno was gone away," she said,
meaning the man in the field : '* Is that true ? "
" Yes, it is true."
" Then there must be something."
Signa was silent; sitting on the wall with his wet.hair
blowing about him.
Palma rested her sack and her faggot on the stone para-
pet, and looked anxiously in his averted face.
SIGNA
" Dear Signa, do tell me."
" It is nothing," said Signa, slowly ; " only ho is a brute
—he kills what is greater than himself; and I hate him."
" Oh, Signa ! "
The girl's sunburned cheeks grew ashen: the slowness
and coldness of his answer frightened her more than any
outburst of wild grief or rage would have done. It was so
unlike him.
" I hate him," said Signa. " Palma, see here. He pre-
tends to love me, and he breaks my Rusignuolo, and he
breaks my heart with it; and he thinks he loves me, both
body and soul, because he buys a bit of land and bids me
live on it all the days of my life, and dig, and sow, and
plough, and hew, and draw water, and lead a life like the
oxen's—no better: he calls that love. To do with me ex-
actly what he wishes himself! To make a mule of me—a
mule—a stupid plodding thing, mute as the stones : he calls
that love."
" Oh, Signa ! "
She could say nothing else. She was so amazed and so
aghast, that all her love of the soil as a Tuscan, and all
her instincts of class and of custom as a peasant, were
roused in horror at him. Only she was so fond of him.
She could not think him wrong. She had a true woman
in her—this poor brown girl, who went half naked in the
wind, and bore her burdens on her back like any beaten ass.
" ' Oh, Signal' " echoed the boy, impatient of her tone,
tossing his wet hair out of his eyes. " Oh; no doubt you
think my gratitude is as poor as his love. No, it is not. If
it had been anyone else,—I am only seventeen, and not
strong, they say, but I would have found some way to kill
what killed my Rusignuolo. Oh, I know he took me out of
the flood—off my dead mother's breast, and has been good—
very good, and I have loved him. But now, because I
cannot promise him to live as he lives; because I cannot
choke the music out of me ; because I want to go away,
and see whether what I do is worth anything or worth
nothing, because I feel I could be great as Gigi says that
Paesiello, and Palestrina, and Pergolese were; now he turns
against me, now he is a brute, now he breaks the violin
under his heel as if it were an empty husk of maize! And
then he calls that love ; and you look at me in horror, as if
SIGNA.
245
I wore some heartless thing because I would sooner any day
have my lute than such a love as that;—to set its foot upon
my throat and keep it mute, as the kite sets his claw into
the thrush's !"
He spoke with vivid, tremulous, petulant passion ; the
first passion that had ever convulsed the tender, dreamful
youth of him; all the colour flushed back into his face, his
mouth quivered, his eyes flashed fire through the rain.
Palma listened with a great terror in her. But she was a
brave girl, and swift to reason and to see the right.
" Is your gratitude so much more real than his love ? "
she said, quickly; and then was sorry that she had said it,
fearing it too harsh.
Signa winced a little, struck home by a sudden conscious-
ness.
"You cannot buy gratitude," he said, angrily. "I was
grateful, heart and soul, and I would have died for him two
days ago. But now, he has forfeited all that. I hate him—
I hate him, I tell'you ! "
" Does a moment's rage outweigh sixteen years' care so
soon ? "
" He broke the Busignuolo," said Signa ; and his fair
mouth, set with a stern serenity, gave him for the moment
almost the look of manhood.
Palma looked at him, and thought how beautiful his face
was ; her eyes filled with tears.
" What do you want ?—To go away ?"
" To go away now, that I may come back great."
" Are people happier that are—what you call great ?"
" Happy ! that I do not know ; perhaps not. I dare say
not. What does that matter ? It is not to have lived in
vain. Not to be put under the sod like a dead horse. Not
to be forgotten while there are men on the earth. It is to
do the thing one has it in one to do; to see the sun always
while other people stare at the dust- It is—it is—oh what
is the use of talking. You never would know; you never
understand."
" No, dear," said Palma, with a sigh; " and what does
Bruno want of you ?"
" To live as he does. To be a contadino always. He has
bought that bit of land for me by the brook, you know it;
he would give it me for my own ; and when I am a man I
246
SIGNA.
am to live there, and take some girl as my wife, and so he
safe, as he calls it, and happy, as he thinks ! That is what
he has laid out for me. That is what he wants."
Palma coloured to the roots of her'dusky rippling hair,
and then grew very pale, as pale as her olive skin could be.
" And all that does not please you ? "
" Please me ! Oh, Palma, when one has the song of the
angels always in one's ears !"
His mouth trembled, his voice faltered; how could he say
what was in him; the force greater than himself that drove
him on ? the futile despair at his own powerlessness to alter
his fate, which made him heartsick at this future, which
they all thought so fair ?
Palma did not understand. A sickly pain settled over
her; a sense of isolation and of immeasurable distance from
the other life which had grown up with her own amongst
the flowers of Giovoli.
Besides, to have a bit of land, and dwell on it and die on
it; that seemed to her, as it had seemed to Bruno, the very
sum and crown of human desire.
The " sublime discontent" which stirred in the young
soul of Signa was as far from any range of her vision as
were the angels' songs he said he heard.
She believed in the angels indeed ; but for her they were
mute. For her they ever abode beyond the great white
clouds, invisible and silent.
She did not speak for a little time. Then she rose, and
left her sack and her faggot on the wall.
" It is true, dear. I do not understand. I am stupid, I
dare say. I will just go in and see if there is anything to
do in the house. I can stay a very little while. I have
everything to do at home. Father is so busy taking the
lemons indoors."
Signa let her go. He was looking through the still falling
rain at the mountains*, where he could no longer see the
sunrise, and at the plain where the golden cross was still
behind the mist.
When he had had the Rusignuolo with him, he had never
cared whether there were rain or sun.
Palma went into the house, and, like the laborious and
cleanly creature that she was, found much to do with broom
and nail and duster: made a fire underneath the cold soup-
SIGNA.
247
pot, cut fresh vegetables into it, and scoured out the pots
and platters of the daily use which were lying foul about
the place. She was accustomed to such work, and could
get through it quickly.
She worked hard and fast, the tears swimming in her
eyes all the while. She did not know very well what ailed
her. She only knew that Signa wanted to go away. That
the life, which seemed so natural and so good to them all,
was a thing impossible to him.
She loved him better than all her brothers; and it had
hurt her curiously to hear him talk with such scorn of the
little house that Bruno would have built for him on the hill
by the brook, and of the girl that in time might have dwelt
with him there in face of the great glad sunrise.
It was not that she thought she could have been chosen
to be that girl—oh no !—nevertheless it hurt her with a
dull and confused pain. Besides, she felt that he was
wrong; and she did battle with herself whether she ought
or ought not to tell him so.
She decided to tell him. Signa seemed to . her sturdier,
stronger, lower nature, like some beautiful, delicate shy
song-bird, that a rough word would scare and drive away
like a shower of stones. He was so unlike them all. To
Palma, who only saw her cabbages, and her broom, and her
water-bucket, those eyes of his, which were always looking
upward, and seeing such beautiful things in the clouds and
the sunbeams, seemed like those of a young saint.
If the church had made him " beato" she would not have
been astonished; she would have worshipped him honestly,
and besought his intercession with that God whom he was
always so near.
And, yet, now she knew he was in the wrong, and she
wrestled with herself, scouring out the metal pans, whether
it were her bounden right to tell him so, or whether she
might without cowardice hold her peace. And perhaps he
would only laugh her to scorn; she knew she was stupid,
except just for this rude hand labour, and that she knew
nothing at all, not even her letters all through; and that she
had never seen anything except this green hill and the walls
of the Lastra;—while Signa knew so much—so much !—■
and had been as a child to the city and to the sea, and now
could tell one so many things about the old walls that for
248
SIGNA.
him Had tongues, and the ways of the birds and the beasts
on the mountains ; and had read all the lives of the saints,
and could see right away into heaven when he had the
dream-look in his eyes—so she thought.
Nevertheless, being a brave girl, and with a resolute heart,
her conscience would not let her keep mute. When she had
done the house up tidily, and even put a new sprig of bay
under the Madonna, she went out into the air; the rain had
ceased, but the white mist was hanging everywhere. Signa
still sat looking down into the vapours of the plain. She
touched him timidly.
" Dear, do not be angry with me ; but I want to say one
word. I am not clever, I know. But the priest says, when
one is very clever one does not see simple things so straight.
I do not know. I want you to think. Of course you can
judge better than I. But—do you do rightly by Bruno ?
He has been so good, and given up so much, and hoped so
much: is it not just a little hard that you should be so
longing to leave him ? Perhaps he does love you selfishly.
But is not your want to get away selfish too ? He has been
cruel. Oh, yes ! that is certain. But then no doubt he was
in pain : he hardly knew what he did. If I were you, I
would try and do what he wishes. Yes, I would. You
wrnuld have had no life at all if it had not been for him. Is
that nothing ? I "would try if I were you."
Then, afraid of what she had said, and afraid of being late
at her home, she took up her sack and her faggots, and
went away into the rain-fog, down the rough side of the
ploughed land, over the yellow and brown leaves fallen
from the vines.
" She does not know. She knows no more than the
mules or the stones know," thought Signa, while she ran
on with firm, fast feet, and the boughs like a dark cloud
over her head.
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 to ice.
The day went on, and Bruno did not return. The peasant
pondered and wondered, but had the soup and the wine,
and stayed and saw to the fields and the cattle.
Signa wandered up into the woods, and waited there till
SIGN A.
249
nightfall. The rain had passed away, ]?ut there was no
sun.
The brow of the hill is very wild. A great breadth of
gorse and myrtle, with huge stones scattered over it, and
thousands of sea pines standing bold against the sky. Here
in spring and summer the nightingales sing in countless
numbers.
He had so often taken his violin up there and played in
concert with them, echoing and catching all their notes.
It seemed to him terribly silent now.
Palma's words pursued him into that cool grey silence.
She did not know: she was so stupid: and still she had
awakened his conscience.
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.
The boy threw himself downward on the wet earth, and
leaned his cheek on his hands, and gazed into the dim
watery world underneath him, where all the distant towns
and the pale villages began to gleam, whitely and faintly,
like little clouds on the dark greyness of the plains, and the
dull blue and black of the mountains, which rose like ram-
parts of iron in the east and north.
The girl was stupid—so stupid that everyone knew she
had never learnt her alphabet even—and yet he felt that
here she had seen and had spoken aright. That he felt.
Signa had had few moral teachings in his seventeen years
of life.
There is virtue on these lonely hillsides, but it is virtue,
self-sown, wind-drifted, like the wild pomegranate bushes,
and the wild peach trees.
No one had taught him what was right or wrong, so long
as he observed all the rules of the church, and did not
blunder against any civil law. So far as he had been told,
he had goodness enough to make his peace with heaven.
But the boy's own mind had clearness and simplicity in it,
and went by instinct to a higher sense of right and wrong
than any he had been ever taught—as Palma's did likewise;
Palma, who trotted in the mud or dust all her days, and
250
SIGN A.
whose brain wa^ all dulled with small cares as with
cobwebs.
He knew that she was right.
That he was thankless and selfish; that the hate which
throbbed sullenly in him was almost a crime; that a wolf
cub, fed and housed and cared for as he had been, would
have had more gratitude than he.
He knew that she was right.
That his life ought to be offered to the man who had done
all for it; that his long debt ought to cancel an hour's
wrong; that since he had no other way or means of pay-
ment save obedience, he should obey—even to the sacrifice
of all his dreams, even to the crushing out of all his soul.
He lay chest downward underneath the pines, and gazed
into the misty depths below, and felt the hard sharp pain of
his consciousness of right gnaw at him with her remembered
words. He could see the line of his olive trees and the
fields where he was to labour all his life long, facing the
sunrise.
He was wise enough to know that he could not have both
lives. That as he grew to manhood he must cease to be
either peasant or musician; that he must renounce one
thing or the other. He had lived too much on the soil not
to know the ruthless toll of hours and the ceaseless patience
and purpose which the soil, ere it will consent to repay him
anything, exacts from the husbandman.
He knew that he must choose, now and for ever.
It was the old common choice between bodily need and
spiritual desire; only for him the lower need was the one
linked with duty, the higher need was the one linked with sin.
He lay and gazed at the dark fields that were to be his
own, and the brook that glimmered like a glow-worm under
its dusky rushes. And it had been there that the violin
had been broken and all its melody silenced for ever and
aye!
It froze his heart against the little spot. He hated that
shallow water which could sing on and on and on, where the
greater music had been hushed into dumbness.
It seemed like a parable to him.
Just as the violin had been stricken mute there, so would
be the powers in him. Just as the silver string had snapt,
so would his heart break by that cruel streamlet. He saw
SIGNA.
himself growing older and older, living Qn and on, with the
music dying in him every day and every year, a little more
and a little more.
He saw himself as he would be on that land that looked
to the morning light:—spending his breath in shouting call-
words to the panting oxen; spending his strength in sowing
and in reaping the sum of his daily bread; touching his
lute perhaps at evening with dull tired hands, that others
might dance under the olive boughs.
What use would the morning light be to him then ?
What would it say to him ? He would only be able to look
on the black earth he turned, as it dawned; he would only
grow to loathe the little song birds, awakened by its beams,
because they would be free and he never. He lay looking
down and thinking and seeing himself thus—as he would
be—in all the years to come.
His eyes were dry, his face was calm, the coldness that
had frozen about him in the night, when he had watched by
his ruined Rusignuolo, never changed. It was as if all his
boyhood had perished in him with that lost music.
The struggle was hard in him. All the longing of his
soul wrestled with the consciousness of duty which the
speech of the girl had stung into life. He knew that he
ought to forgive. He knew that he ought to obey. All the
earth and all the air around him spoke to him of this man's
exceeding love. He looked down on the river from whose
flood it had rescued him. He looked down on the roof
under whose shelter it had harboured him. He looked
down on the old grey gateway beside whose shadow it had
faced calumny and forgiven treachery for his sake. He
looked down on the old dark trees beneath whose foliage it
had toiled for him in endless labour from daybreak to night-
fall, in light and in darkness, through sixteen years.
And he let the blow of a moment's passion sweep it all
away as though it had never been. Mighty and enduring as
granite, it was to him dissolved in a second of time like an
image of snow.
He wrestled with himself for this. He strove against the
hardening of his heart. He struggled to change himself;
to forgive ; to obey.
It was of no use.
With the music from the broken strings, gratitude and
252
SIGNA.
affection had passed out of his heart, and left a dead silence
there. A silence in which his conscience indeed spoke; hut
spoke in vain.
When the Ave Maria tolled dully under the mists of the
plain, he got up slowly, and went slowly homeward.
His mind was made up: he would not live on in his body
slaying his soul.
"He killed the Rusignuolo," he said to himself. "He
would kill me."
And he resolved to live his own life; how or where he
knew nothing; only by his own means and in his own way,
no longer eating the bread of the man who loved him
indeed, but who hated his genius, and who wished it to
perish.
" What one can do is sweeter and dearer than what any-
thing is," he thought to himself, with the terrible self-
absorption of the artist in his art:—terrible,—because ever
fore-doomed to die in agony soon or late, under some
human passion that avenges the rejection of humanity.
And he went slowly down the hillside home, losing sight
of the brook and the olives, for it had grown quite dark.
The house was silent. The shutters were closed. The
dog was mute. He lifted the latch of the door and entered.
There was the glow from a lighted lamp upon the stone
of the floor.
In the light stood Bruno.
He came forward and bowed his head before the boy. He
said:
"Forgive me."
CHAPTER XXV.
That night, when Signa had gone to his bed of hay, and
had fallen asleep there, with the tears left wet upon his
lashes, Bruno sat still and lost in thought, with his head
sunk upon his breast.
The boy must go.
SIGN A.
253
That was sure. That was plain to him.
Signa had begged to stay and do his will in all things—
meaning what he said. Touched into passionate repentance
of his own hardness of heart by this noble remorse which
had bent the strength of the man before him, he had vowed
in uttermost sincerity of purpose to live and die on the hill-
side. Bruno, a suppliant before him, had awed and ruled
him; as Bruno, a master tyrant over him, never could have
done.
When he had been embittering his soul against the love
that saved and sheltered him, that love had been returning
to him, bringing the fierce, proud, stern soul of the man
into supplication before him—him—a child, a debtor, a
beggar, an ingrate!
The sharpness of the contrast had stung him to the
quick.
At the first words of Bruno he had fallen on his neck in
passionate contrition.
His thankless, oblivious, selfish passion had seemed vile
to him as a crime.
44 Forgive me," Bruno had said.
But the boy had known that the forgiveness needed was
for himself.
That passion may be an infirmity of man; but that
ingratitude is a curse of hell.
441 will do what you wish," he had vowed, in all the
breathless eagerness of his repentance. 441 shall be happy
—so happy ! I will never go away—never, never! Let
my foolish dreams die. They are not worth a moment of
sorrow or regret to you. I shall be happy here—so
happy! "
Bruno had smiled; but it was a smile whose tenderness
had half appalled the boy.
44 My dear," he had answered; "later we will talk of
that. I sinned enough against you ; I will try to do right
—henceforth."
And when it was midnight, and the boy slept in the little
corner chamber with the blessed palm-sheaf above his head,
Bruno sat still and pondered—how to do this right.
Passion had mastered him. The old brutal, swift, savage,
unthinking rage, which had done so much evil in his day,
had burst out like a smothered flame, and for the first time
254
SIGN A.
had smitten the living thing in which all his affections and
all his atonement centered. When he had struck his heel
down on the Rusignuolo, it had seemed to him as if he were
crushing out the devil that was tempting the hoy from his
side into all the evil of the world. All his own great love
and uncounted sacrifices had been as nothing beside a play-
thing of wood, a toy of sound and wind!—it had seemed to
him as if he gave a kingdom and got back a stone.
In the fury of his pain, all that was worst in him had
surged up from its long sleep and broken its bonds. He let
all the evil in him loose. He went down into the city and
plunged into all the licence that he had sternly shunned so
long. He came out from the riot of it cooled and in his
right mind, like a man who awakes from the heavy sleep of
drugs. Three nights had gone by; he hated himself; he
thought of the boy without bitterness and with longing ; he
felt as if he were not worthy to meet the clear eyes of a
child.
He went, in the dull grey rain of the afternoon, into a
little dark chapel in the oldest quarter of the city, and
kneeled down in the black shadow of it, and confessed his
sins. It was his duty, he thought; he had been reared so.
He believed that he purified his soul.
He was vile in his own sight.
In his remorse, the broken Rusignuolo seemed to him—
no less than it had seemed to Signa, mourning it on the
hillside—a human thing, with a voice from heaven in it,
that he had hurled into death and silenced by a deed as
cruel as Cain's.
He went homeward along the familiar road, with the Ave
Maria bells ringing through the fog. As he went, he
struggled hard with himself. He hated this madness, as it
seemed to him, which had taken possession of the boy. He
hated it at once with the jealousy of an affection which
beheld in it an irresistible rival, and with the superstitious
fear which an uneducated intelligence has of an incompre-
hensible mental power.
Bruno was of the same stuff as those men who in earlier
ages burned the magic out of creatures whom they believed
bewitched, and thought the ruthless torture that they dealt
a righteous service both to God and man. In his sight, it
was a sorcery which enthralled Signa, and made him blind
SIGNA.
255
to all the peace and safety and plenty and sweetness of the
life upon the hills.
But, with the bating of his fury, the calmness of reason
had returned to him. It was a sorcery—that he thought;
but it was one which there was no combating—that he saw
also. He saw that it would only be possible to stifle it, by
destroying the very core of the boy's life.
He might keep his hand on the throat of his nightingale
—true; but, under the pressure, the life would go out with
the song.
Though to him this strange absorbing instinct which
killed all other was beyond any possible comprehension,
Bruno, by the force of his love for the lad, knew that he
must let him go, or see him fade away into a hopeless and
joyless creature, for ever beating and thirsting to be free.
As he went along the road in the rain which he never felt,
under the sound of the bells which he never heard, he
thought, and thought, and thought—tearing.the selfishness out
of his heart with the same haste and rage as in other years
he had hurled oaths or stricken steel at those who had
offended him.
To do right by the boy.
That had been his first intent, his sole desire, since, driving
his cattle out on the day after the flood, he had made his
mute promise to dead Pippa.
But, what was right ?
He did not know. His reason as a man told him that,
the strong instincts of the brain being stifled, the boy
would fall into a feeble, worthless, and unhappy thing.
His ignorance as a peasant made him fear, with all a
peasant's dread of the unknown and the unseen, the world
into which Signa pined to soar away, and the art which
usurped all his desires.
Music !—well, what was it ? Just a thing that came to
every flute-voiced girl carrying her linen to the river's
brink, every lithe-fingered shepherd or ox-driver who, when
his work was done, thrumbed on a mandoline before the
cottage door.
This power which took empire over the boy and drove
him from all paths of custom and of duty, and made him
happy with a few signs upon a piece of paper ;—that was
beyond all sense and meaning to him ;—a horrible exagge-
256
SIGN A.
ration and distortion of an innocent thing, such as men sent
who had the evil eye.
Which would be right ?
To bum and stamp this madness out of the young soul ?—
or to let it have its way and trust to heaven ?
If he only knew !
In the Lastra the lamps were burning. There was a
funeral going through the gates ; the bier borne by the
brothers of the Misericordia.
Unconsciously, from habit, he stood still and crossed
himself, and uncovered his head. When it had passed a
thought had come to him.
He entered the church where Luigi Dini was putting out
the lights after benediction. Bruno went up to him without
greeting.
" Old Maso told the lad men by music have been greater
than kings. Is that a lie ? "
The old sacristran was used to him, and took no offence.
" It is a truth," he answered.
"Can the lad be great ? "
" I think so."
" But is that happiness ?"
" No."
" What is the use of it then ?"
" It is what is not happy that speaks to men of God.
Happy men think of their coffers—of their children—of
their bodies—of their appetites : they are content with all
that."
" You have known a great man ? "
" Never out of books."
" And happy men ?"
" Yes ; they were three parts fool, and the rest rogue."
Bruno was silent: he wanted to be as God to the lad. He
wanted to give him endless daylight and ceaseless peace.
He wanted to be his fate; and stand always between him
and pain and sorrow and accident and the calamities of
earth.
The old man looked up at him, and understood his
thought.
" You cannot do it," he said, answering what was not
spoken. " It is not given to any life to be the providence
of another."
SIGNA.
257
The veins swelled on Bruno's forehead: a heavy sigh
broke from him : he was never a man to let another know
the thing he felt, but now pain mastered him—the miser-
able pain of irresolution and uncertainty, and of that sense,
beyond all others oppressive, of combating in the dark an
unseen and unmeasured force.
He stretched his hands out with an unconscious gesture,
as of a blind man seeking guidance.
" Look : you know the boy as well as I. Better maybe.
For his soul is dark to me. He is higher than I. It is as
when a bird goes up—up—against the sun. You cannot
follow it. There is too much light where it is gone. I only
want to do the best. For me it does not matter. You see
I have got the bit of land for him; the land on the moun-
tain ; I have made it good land and rich, and it is a safe
provision for him all his days. But, then, when he breaks
his heart at thoughts of it, and is crazed to learn and talks
of being great—if only I could tell what to do ? Perhaps
it is a boy's whim, and to do right one should be hard with
him and rough, and stamp it out, and seem cruel now, and
he would be thankful in a few years' time ? And then again,
if one made a mistake—if one did the wrong thing—if he
sighed and fretted, and wanted what he had not, and were
never content, and fell away to feebleness and uselessness—
how would one forgive oneself—ever ? How can I tell ?
I do not understand. If, at seventeen, they had said to me,
1 There is a bit of good land all for you; all your own, and
you beholden to no man, and working all for yourself, and
sharing with no master ;' I should have been mad with joy
and pride. I should have seen nothing but my corn and my
grapes. I should have thought I was better off than any-
one else in the wide world. Why should it not be so with
him ? I do not understand. He is Pippa's boy. He has
our blood in him. He should love the soil. He did not get
his dreams from Pippa. If one only knew ;—for me it does
not matter. I will cut off my right hand if that will serve
him ; if that will keep his soul safe here and hereafter. But
what he wants seems madness. Is it a devil that lures him?
Or is it an angel calls ? How can one know ? I want to do
the thing that best will serve him. But how to find it ?
Tell me, if you know. Do not think of me. For me it does
not matter,"
s
258
SIGNA.
Ho ceased, and leaned his hand on the rail before the
dark altar on which the last light had just sunk out; the
-rail shook with the trembling of his strong nerves ; his head
dropped upon his chest.
The old man looked at him a moment.
" You will be lonely if he go—it is not fair to you : you
have done all for him all his life."
Bruno gave an impatient gesture.
" I say—for me it does not matter. I can live alone.
Answer for the boy—as if I were dead, and there were only
him to think of—for his good."
" Then I say—let him go."
Bruno was silent. He breathed hard.
" Let him go," repeated the sacristan. " I never knew a
great man. No. My path did not lie that way. But I did
know one, a man that might have been great. Truly great,
I think. It was when I was a lad. He was a little older
than I was. He travelled with the first little troop that I
belonged to then; singers, and actors, and musicians, all of
us, going from town to town as the fairs, and the feasts, and
the carnival, and the vintage, fell. You have heard me talk
of it. He was the son of a poor organist, and was himself
a violin-player, hardly more than a boy, just keeping body
and soul together; he played divinely, and he wrote beauti-
ful things just as your boy does now. People would weep
to hear him. It was like nothing mortal. He had an old
mother, widowed, and a little sister in Perugia. They lived
wretchedly. He sent them every coin that he could get.
He stinted himself. One night while he was playing he
fainted. It was only hunger. Hunger is so common. The
world is so full. He used to dream of greatness, just as
your lad does. And indeed the things he made were perfect.
Only he had so little time ; and never had any chance to get
them heard. One day he had a letter from his mother. His
grandfather, a hard man, who had denounced her for her
marriage, had relented and had offered to take home my
Claudio into his house and way of business, on condition
that he should touch no note of music ever again. The old
man was a money-changer and banker in the north, sharp
and keen, and hard as any stone. The mother and the
little sister implored him ; they starved for all that he could
do; and here were peace and plenty, only waiting for his
SIGNA.
259
will. They wrote and wrote and wrote; then at last they
came. They wept, and raved, and entreated, and re-
proached. They wore him out; he yielded. ' It will kill
me,' said Claudio. ' But if it must he—for them '
That night he burned all he had ever written. It was to
him worse than any murder. He believed that he killed his
soul. He suffered hideously. Heath seemed to pass over
him as the flame took his music. ' No one will ever hear it
now,' he said. And he smiled. I suppose they smile like
that in hell, thinking of what they have to see, and of the
heaven they will never see. He went. The mother and the
little sister were happy. They had enough, and more than
enough. ' Claudio will be a rich man,' they said to me.
They rejoiced in their success. They thought they had
done rightly for him as well as happily for themselves.
"When a year and a little more had gone by I got a message
begging me to go to Claudio in Trieste. I was with a
theatre in Yerona at the time. I did not know how to do
it; but I felt that I should never see his face again unless I
hastened. I crossed the sea. I found him dying. < I did
my best,' he said to me. ' Indeed I did my best. But I
died when they killed the music in me. My body has
dragged on a little longer, but I died then.' Then he asked
them to let me sing to him ; he had kept his vow; he had
never played or heard one note. The mother and the sister
were there weeping. The old man said, 4 Yes: he may have
what he will now.' I sang to him—as men have sung
masses burning at the stake. For I loved Claudio. The
dying life flamed up in him as he heard. It came back for
one moment into his veins, into his eyes, into his soul. He
raised himself with such a look upon his face—ah ! such a
look; if there be angels indeed they must look so !—and he
lifted his voice, and sang with all the strength and beauty
of his youth returned to him, the Eterno Genitor, the chant
that Metastasio died singing. One moment—but a moment,
so it seemed—the glory of the song brought his life back.
Then his voice dropped—all suddenly. His mother raised
him. He was dead. The old man cried to heaven to take
his gold and give him back the boy. But heaven does not
hear these prayers, or will not answer them. They told me
later he had laboured at the desk with patience, and with
constant effort; but it had killed him. When the old man
2&0
SIGNA.
had relented, and would have made him free in his own
way, it was too late. If you blind a bird, you cannot give
sight and liberty again; nay, if you beseech God ever so,
even He cannot do it. There are things that done, cannot
be undone, by God or by man. His mother lived out her
days a rich woman. His sister had a large inheritance, and
wedded wealthily. But it had been bought with Claudio's
life, and who shall say what the world did not lose ? That
is true. He was my friend. It was fifty years ago—all
that. Claudio would be old. But the look that was in
Claudio's eyes is in your boy's. And I think—I think—if
you keep him here, and deaden his soul in him, that his
fate will be too, the same."
Bruno made no answer.
He stood still with his head bent by the side-altar, in the
gloom of the church that was only lightened by the brazen
sconce that the old man carried in his hand. He had not
lost one word; his breath came slowly and loud; he did
not understand : he did not know what it was that this dead
lad and this living one loved beyond ease and safety, and
friends, and peace, and daily bread. He did not understand
one whit the more, but he saw what he must do.
He turned with a heavy sigh like a man who stoops to
take up a great burden on his shoulders and walk on with it.
" Good-night! " he said, simply, and he went through the
little dark church lost in thought, and out into the starless,
misty night.
Luigi Dini went up the wooden stairs into the room where
the brethren keep their robes and masks.
" He will let the boy go," he said to himself.
The bell had rung for succour for a peasant who had been
flung from a mule-cart on the road going to Sta. Maria;
some brethren were busily fastening their cloaks while
others got out the black stretcher to go and fetch the
wounded man. Amongst them was Lippo, ever foremost
in good works.
As Lippo drew the hood over his head he was telling his
neighbour how his brother Bruno had lent money out for
several years on hypothec to the poor wretch Baccio Alessi,
the gilder, in the city, on the fine little piece of land under
Artemino, that ran with what he farmed ; and of how poor
Baccio, being close driven by unlooked-for calamity, and the
S1GNA.
261
cruelty of creditors who had no mercy on a hard-working
creature, had been in direst need, and Bruno, seeing good his
time, and taking advantage of necessity, had foreclosed and
drawn his claim so tightly and so suddenly, that Baccio
Alessi had no chance or claim, and so the land had passed to
Bruno; who, as he once had wasted all his substance on
evil-living and light women, now would make soup out of
pebbles and milk a mill-stone for the sake of his ill-begotten
darling whom he had foisted on the memory of poor Pippa.
" He will let the boy go," thought the old man, while
Lippo, mourning over his brother's hardness of greed
and the poverty of poor Baccio in the city, drew his cowl
close and hurried away to help raise the half-dead peasant;
and Bruno, solitary and musing, went up into the darkness
and the silence of the hills.
" The boy must go," thought Bruno, as he flung his cloak
across his mouth against the watery cold, and ascended the
sea-road in the teeth of the wind from the northward.
The outer world was a black and empty space to him.
The cities were whirlpools of vice, into which the young
were caught as in nets. The only life that he could com-
prehend, or could believe to be of any worth, was the life of
the husbandman living and dying under one roof. In the
dreams that made the future beautiful to the lad he himself
had no belief. In the greatness that the lad aspired to he
saw no reality and no excellence ; but only a vague dark
chimera of folly that would lead down, down, down, into a
bottomless abyss.
He had no consolation of hope.
He had no fond simple belief in some impending though
unknown good, such as mothers who love their sons without
comprehending them, are solaced by when their children
leave them.
To him all beyond was rayless, meaningless, comfort-
less.
He had said truly: he did not understand.
He only knew that the boy would perish hero like the
dead Claudio ; and so must go.
The rest was with the future. The silent, dark, inexor-
able future, which he burned to tear asunder as Milo tore
the oak, and see the heart of it and the secret; no matter
what they were.
262
SIGNA.
All lie did know was that he himself was nothing in the
life that owed him all.
The boy must go :—go to forget the sweet hill-side, the
hand that gave him daily bread, the old straight wholesome
ways, the old clean simple paths, the old innocent natural
affections ; go to forget them all; go to get drunk on this
strange madness of unrest; go to be possessed of this fever
of desired greatness.
Bruno cheated himself with no false faiths.
If the boy went now he went for ever.
His steps indeed might return, but the heart and the
youth, and the love of him never. If he went to the world
and to fame and to art, these would hold him for ever.
Bruno knew none of the three, but this he felt. No baseless
hopes, no lingering blindness duped him.
Nevertheless he knew that he must go.
Go, whilst he himself stayed to labour for him, and get
out of the soil the means for him to pursue the things he
wished, and change his visions into reality if such things
ever were done in the world ; and keep here roof and house
and refuge for him, if so be that he should never find his
dreams come true, but should return sickened and bruised
with effort and with failure.
The boy must go: this was his own portion; to labour
here, and get the gold together that would give this young
thing wings.
He did not think of that with any regret.
It was to him natural. He had of late years so bent all
his energies and all his endurance into working for the good
of the boy, that to continue doing this was nothing that
seemed to him either generous or strange. It was what he
had always said to himself that he would do for Pippa's son.
So he went home to his hills.
The morrow would be All Souls Day.
It was late in the afternoon. He went out of his way to
the little church of his daily worship.
Yespers were just over. The old priest was in his
sacristy. Two or three peasants were coming out. The
little, dark church was being hung with veils of black, here
and there, by the sacristan ; and a woman, who wept as
she worked, was putting up some branches of everlasting
flowers—her lover had died in the harvest time.
SIGN A.
263
Bruno went into the sacristy, and laid some money down
on the table.
" For Pippa's soul—to-morrow ! "
The old priest gave him his blessing; he dwelt on the
same hillside, and believed in the story of Pippa.
Bruno went out into the twilight.
" She will know I keep faith with her," he said to him-
self; and then entered his dwelling-house, and stood before
Pippa's son, and said—"Forgive me ! "
When many hours had gone by, and the boy was at rest,
Bruno sat on with his solitary lamp burning.
He sat motionless while the night waned; not sleeping ;
wide awake, but half paralyzed as a man under gunshot
pain.
He was at peace with himself; at least, he had that deep,
sad peace—sad as death—which follows the surrender, for
another's sake, of all the hope of life.
The calm of a great repentance, and of an unflinching self-
sacrifice were with him. The cold funeral meats wherewith
Duty feeds her faithful.
But a great loneliness weighed on him, and closed round
him. He felt that he had given a kingdom, and got back a
stone.
Like all generous natures, he had poured out his gifts
unthinking, ungrudging, and without measure.
His hands were empty, and his heart was desolate.
That was his reward.
It is a common one.
The night wore on ; the intense chillness of coming dawn
came into the house like ice; the cock crowed from the
stable. He rose and went into the inner chamber, where
the boy was ; it was only parted by an archway from the
common room.
Signa lay asleep, his head upon his arm, his face turned
upward. Bruno lowered the lamp, shading it with one hand,
so as not to awaken him. Its light fell on his soft young
limbs, on his thick lashes, on his beautiful mouth. Bruno
looked at him long. Then two great tears gathered in his
own eyes, and fell down his cheeks slowly, like the great
rain drops that follow storm.
He stood silent for awhile ; the lad slept on, unconscious ;
then he set down the lamp, and blew the flame of it out,
SIGNA.
and, without noise, unbarred his house-door and went into
the open air and began his labour for the day.
There was a strong wind blowing from the north. Rain
was falling. It was dawn—but dawn without the sun.
He yoked his oxen; and alone and in the darkness he
began the day.
CHAPTER XXYI.
When winter came, Bruno dwelt alone in the old house on
the hills; and Signa studied music in the schools of Bologna.
CHAPTER XXVII.
In the fair bright weather of the spring, when the virgin
gold of the daffodils was scattered broadcast everywhere, an
old man with white hair and horn spectacles hobbled over
the stones by the south gate to the post for a letter, and got
it, and went and read it in the shade by the shrine of Our
Lady of Good Counsel, and then took his way through the
Lastra to go across the bridge towards the great hills.
As he went under the west gateway, an old woman put
her head out over a window-board that had roses on and
some hyacinths not yet in bloom.
"Is he well ? " she cried down into the street.
" Quite well," said the old man, looking up ; and went on
between the budding trees.
Before he reached the bridge, a girl raced down the
sloping fields, all green with corn. She had great knots of
scarlet windflowers and white snowflakes, that she was tying
up for market, in her hands. Her feet were wet, because
SIGNA.
265
she had been standing in the brook to get tbe flowers ; sbe
bad a pitcher slung at her back ; her heart beat so high and
her breath came so fast that tbe lacing of her ragged bod-
dice broke.
" Is be coming back?" sbe asked, and her great black
eyes shone like stars.
" Coming back !—no ! " said tbe old man, with a smile.
" He must never come back now, Palma. That would
never do."
Tbe girl turned and went away up tbe fields slowly, let-
ting tbe snowflakes drop.
Tbe old man went on up tbe sea-road.
There was tbe lovely afternoon light everywhere ; all tbe
soil was radiant with leaf and blade; tbe river was a sheet
of gold and green shining like the lizards; tbe air was so
clear that on tbe highest and farthest heights tbe smallest
dwelling gleamed, white as any pearl, and each tree told;
near at band, along tbe footpaths, every tuft of grass bad
tbe rich ruby and purple of tbe anemone in it, and tbe fresh
odours of tbe violet; while tbe daffodils were tossing every-
where above tbe short green wheat. But tbe sacristan
looked at none of these things.
He was old.
An hour and more's sturdy laboured walking brought him
midway on tbe great bill, with tbe stone-pines on its summit,
and tbe blue mountain in its rear. A west wind was blow-
ing sweetness from tbe firwoods and salt from tbe sea. A
man was at work in tbe beanfields that ran under tbe olives.
He straightened bis back and looked up, shading bis eyes
from tbe sun. Then be saw tbe open letter, and made an
eager stride forward.
" Is be happy ? " be asked.
" This is the love that loves best," thought Luigi Dini.
And be sat down in tbe shade.
" Is be happy ? " Bruno asked, resting bis band on bis
hip, under tbe olive boughs, in tbe March afternoon.
And tbe old man answered him truthfully from tbe letter
that was a sealed book to Bruno, " Yes—be is happy; " and
read him what tbe boy said.
Bruno looked at tbe piece of paper with longing eyes.
He wished that in bis own boyhood be bad learned to read,
instead of wading amongst tbe canes, and climbing for nests
266
SIGNA.
of birds, and scaling convent walls to get the grapes, and
romping and dancing with every girl he could whenever a
mandolin was playing.
Signa wrote the truth : he was happy.
He had a little room in the roof. He heard the clanging
of the coppersmiths' hammers all day long. He missed the
freedom of the hills, as all hill-born creatures shut in cities
do. The fare he had was meagre and untempting. To the
people whom he was with he was a little peasant, a little
student, nothing more; they were too busy to heed him
further.
The town was very dark, very chill, very oppressive; with
the furious alpine winds driving through it, and the high
arcades shutting in the blackness of the shadows, and the
bitterness of the cold, it was like a vast tomb, after the
radiance of the sunset and the sunrise from the mountains
beyond the Lastra.
Physically he suffered much in his new life. Like Rossini,
he had to study his score in his bed, to keep his hands from
being numbed io ice. When he went out in the gloom of
the streets, it seemed to him as if noon were night. He
fainted twice from hunger and the stifling sense of want of
air in the class-room of the academy. He did not know how
to breathe, being shut for ever within four walls—he who
had been used to dwell 011 the high hills with the sheep, and
wander through the thyme and the gorse like the kids.
Other lads mocked him for a thousand things—for his
girlish beauty; for his gentle ways; for his coarse-spun
shirts; for his horror of hurting any creature; for his inno-
cence of mind; for his long thick curls; for his hatred of
shoes, which he would fling off the moment that he wanted
to run fast;—for a thousand things that made him at once so
wise and so foolish, so childlike and so thoughtful; while
they were town-bred world-worn young scholars, who knew
everything and meditated upon nothing.
He suffered much in many ways.
Yet he wrote no lie when he told them that he was happy.
He was happy, though always lonely, and sometimes fright-
ened, and very often persecuted. He was happy, looking
upward at the face of the St. Cecilia. Happy, learning all
that the great professors of his chosen art would teach him.
Happy, in his own little attic, that he would fly to for refuge,
SIGNA.
267
as a bird to its nest, studying with all the powers of his mind
the themes that had been given him to comprehend or to
compose; happiest of all, when they ordered him a sonnet
of Metastasio, or an ode of Giusti, to be set to music in a
dozen different ways, and he could let all his subtlest com-
binations and wildest fancies have full play, and, sitting in
the little dark-garret, heard again the "beautiful things"
that he had used to hear on his own mountains, till it
seemed to him that the Eusignuolo was with him once
more.
" I am as happy as ever I can be," he wrote, not thinking
how cruel the words might sound; and wrote the truth.
For cold and hardship did not hurt him much or seem
great things to bear upon his training in the house of Lippo.
And mockery wounded him little, because he heard so little
what they said, being always dreaming ; and those in
authority over him praised him for his docile ways, and found
his talent great; and many women were kind to him for the
sake of his fair face with its beautiful amorous-lidded eyes
that never yet had found a woman beautiful; and he believed
in his own future.
Who can do this, is happy.
When life is still a coin unspent, it looks of purest gold,
and bears on it, under a bough of laurel, the figures of
Victory and of Love. But when it is paid away and gone
for ever, its poor change left from it is of base metal. Even
if other men still see stamped on its alloy the Victory or the
Love within the garland, we who hold the poor coin in our
own hands know that the figures struck on it are those of
Failure and of Falsehood, and that the laurel-wreath was
copied from a faded knot of fennel.
Signa, whose coin was still unspent, wrote truly, "I am
happy."
Meanwhile another suffered greatly to give him happiness.
Bruno, a poor man as the world measures such things,
had always been a rich one in his own esteem. The Lady
Poverty of S. Francis had been a mistress with whom he had
never quarrelled.
True, he had to labour in ail hours and all weathers ; he
had to be content with rough bread and onion-soup most of
his days ; he had to be abroad in the driving hailstorm as in
the scorching sirocco.
1268
SIGNA.
But all things are measured by habit and weighed by
comparison. Beside such a man as Sandro Zampetti or
the poorer peasants on his own hillside, Bruno was almost
wealthy, having no need to stint himself for wood or oil or
wine, having those fine cattle of his own, and having, when-
ever he had cause to go down into the city, loose money in
his pocket, more or less, for drinking with a friend or idling
with a woman. He had never thought of himself as a poor
man since becoming, at his parents' and his brother's death,
the only owner of the old house he and his forefathers had
been born in; to have a roof over him and food enough, and
to be debtor to no man for anything—that seemed to him
wealth.
Perhaps the world was happier when the bulk of its people
thought so also.
But now, for the first time in all his life, the check and
gall of poverty pressed on him—the chain which rivets to
the soil those who gain their bread from it was for the first
time heavy about his feet.
He had to send the boy from him; he had to let him go
and live alone ; he had to trust blindly that all was well.
He could not stir. He could not go and see for himself.
He could not move and dwell wherever the thing he loved
might drift. He had to stay there, and turn the same sods
and prune the same trees day after day, month after month,
year after year.
For the first time he realised the one supreme good of
money—that it gives wings to men.
When the heart of a man or woman is where the feet are,
wings are not needed; but when the heart goes longingly
far away, and the feet must still abide on the same spot,
then the simplest and hardiest yearns for flight.
Gold is the talaria of Hermes.
Bruno, who knew nothing of Hermes, but saw the winged
figure painted in a thousand places and modelled in a
thousand ways in the friezes of old villas and the streets of
old towns, longed for such plumes to his ankles that he might
bridge space and see the boy. But freedom and travel were
as impossible to him as those feathered sandals. He had to
stay treading his fields from dawn to nightfall. For the
first time as he followed his oxen he felt as if the clinging
sods were weights of leaden fetters.
SIGN A.
269
Still he worked more than ever.
As it was, he could scarcely make ends meet. It was a
very different thing to keep the boy where food and drink,
light and fuel, all came off the soil, costing nothing ; and to
keep him far off in a city where every crumb called for a
coin.
Luigi Dini, indeed, whom he had sent with him, had put
the lad with people that he knew—good, honest, simple-
living souls, who gave him a room under their roof for little
in the grand square where the Guardamorta of Dante is, and
where the coppersmiths and market-folks wrangle and tussle
all day long.
But to maintain him thus, and meet the cost of his studies
too, drained dry the leathern sack in which Bruno, when his
accounts were squared with his master, put his surplus.
All that came from the bit of land which had been Alessio's
he counted as the boy's, and put aside for him entire, and
sent to him as it was wanted. But that was not sufficient;
and to obtain all that was needed Bruno had to stint him-
self down to the leanest portion that a man can live on even
in this land of his where hard handlabour is often cheerfully
wrought from daybreak to evensong on a piece of blackened
week-old bread.
His beasts he would not stint, not even for Signa. His
oxen were to him fond fellow-labourers and friends. But
himself he denied all except the sheer necessities of life; and
the grey came into his dark hair, and his strong, slender,
erect frame grew leaner still, and he never went down into
the city save early in the forenoon of a market morning, lest
temptation should assail him and he should spend a coin on
his own appetites or wishes. His life was going away
from him with no sweetness in it and no love and no
pleasure. But he did not think of that. It did not matter.
Two years went by—swiftly to the boy, leaping from
height to height of his great art, and feeling nothing of
poverty or privation, because always living in impersonal
desires, and always dreaming of the future time, and always
hearing the music of the spheres above all the bray of voices
and the clang of metal and the tumult of footsteps in the
streets around him.
But very slowly to Bruno.
To rise in the dark; to toil all day; to lie down for the
270
SIGNA.
heavy dreamless sleep of bodily fatigue ; to wrestle with
storm and drought and blight and hurricane ; to chaffer for
small gains ; to follow the oxen up and down and to and
fro; to go tired into an empty house and eat an unshared
loaf and go to a joyless bed ;—this was his portion.
There was nothing in it to give wings to time.
One day succeeded another without change, and the tale
of one month was as the tale of another. It was the life of
a beast of burden—nothing more. He had always thought
no life could be better; but it was oppressive to him
now.
Other men laboured for their children, or had that dusky
settle by the wood embers made bright by some fresh-faced
new-wed maiden. But he was all alone—alone with the
thought of dead Dina on the mountain height and Pippa's
body drifted to the sea.
Men would have little to say to him—they were Lippo's
friends.
He lived in almost absolute solitude. Sometimes it grew
dreary, and the weeks seemed long.
Two years went by—slowly.
Signa did not come home. The travel to and fro took too
much money, and he was engrossed in his studies, and it
was best so ; so Luigi Dini said, and Bruno let it be. The
boy did not ask to return. His letters were very brief
and not very coherent, and he forgot to send messages
to old Teresina or to Palma. But there was no fear for
him.
The sacristan's friends under whose roof he was wrote
once in a quarter, and spoke well of him always, and said
that the professors did the same, and that a gentler lad or
one more wedded to his work they never knew. And so
Bruno kept his soul in patience, and said, " Do not trouble
him ; when he wishes he will come—or if he want anything.
Let him be."
To those who have traversed far seas and many lands,
and who can bridge untravelled countries by the aid of
experience and of understanding, such partings have pain,
but a pain lessened by the certain knowledge of their span
and purpose. By the light of remembrance or of imagination
they can follow that which leaves them.
But Bruno had no such solace.
SJGNA,
271
To him all that was indefinite was evil; all that was
unfamiliar was horrible. It is the error of ignorance at all
times.
To him the world was like the dark fathomless waste of
waters shelving away to nameless shapeless perils such as
the old Greek mariners drew upon their charts as compassing
the shores they knew.
He had no light of knowledge by which to pursue in hope
or fancy the younger life that would be launched into the
untried realms. To him such separation was as death.
He could not write ; he could not even read what was
written. He could only trust to others that all was well
with the boy.
He could have none of that mental solace which supports
the scholar; none of that sense of natural loveliness which
consoles the poet; his mind could not travel beyond the
narrow circlet of its own pain; his eyes could not see
beauty everywhere from the green fly at his foot to the
sapphire mountains above his head; he only noticed the
sunset to tell the weather; he only looked across the plain
to see if the rain-fall would cross the river. When the
autumn crocus sank under his share, to him it was only a
weed best withered ; in hell he believed, and for heaven he
hoped, but only dully, as certain things that the priests
knew; but all consolations of the mind or the fancy were
denied to him. Superstitions, indeed, he had, but these
were all:—sad-coloured fungi in the stead of flowers.
The Italian has not strong imagination.
His grace is an instinct; his love is a phrenzy; his gaiety
is rather joy than jest; his melancholy is from temperament,
not meditation; nature is little to him; and his religion and
his passions alike must have physical indulgence and per-
petual nearness, or they are nothing.
Bruno, who had strong passions and blind faiths, but who
had no knowledge and no insight, was solitary as only a
man utterly ignorant can be solitary. But he never com-
plained even in his own thoughts : and he never attempted
to seek any solace. He had set himself on absolute self-
sacrifice, and he went through with it, as thousands and
tens of thousands of his own countrymen have done before
him in the old days from Chrysostom to Francis, in the
monasteries that rise majestic amidst the brown wastes of
272
SIGNA
the sun-burned plains, and crown the emerald radiance of
the hill-throned vines.
He was in his fields all day, having a crust of bread in
his pocket, and a flask of his own wine under the hedge.
He went indoors only when it was quite dark, and was at
work again before any gleam of sun showed over the
Umbrian mountains. Nothing broke the monotonous mea-
sure of his time. Nothing relieved the constant strain of
toil. He thought that he grew old. But it was only that
his weeks and months had the dulness and the barrenness
of age.
Climbing the steep vinelands, reaping in the sun, driving
his oxen, working among the bare boughs in the teeth of
the north wind, he thought always of Signa, far away there
in the unknown city amongst the unfamiliar people.
Did Signa think of him ?
He wished that he could know.
The boy's letters were few; but then that was because
their postage cost money, and every centime was of value.
Luigi Dini read them. They had always messages, tender,
thankful, affectionate.
But that was not much.
Bruno knew that the boy's soul 'and heart and fancy had
long left him, and soared into a world that he himself could
no more reach than he could reach the star Sirius shining
over the reapen fields in the hot night. He doubted if
remembrance had much hold on this child, who when with
him and beside him had always been dreaming of the future.
He did not reason about it. Only he said to himself
" It is as if he were dead."
But as, had the boy been dead, he would have spent all
that he possessed on masses and prayers to ransom his soul
and purchase heaven for him, as he would have fancied that
he could do, so he toiled now, and with as little thought of
recompense or remembrance.
" It is as if he were dead," he said often.
"Nay, nay!" the old man would urge to him. "He
only lives a stronger life, that is all, on his own wings, as
full-fledged birds do. The world will hear of him. He will
-be fortunate, I think. He will do something great. He
has true genius. Then he will come to you and say, " I
should have been a little hungry homeless goatherd all my
SIGN A.
273
years had it not been tor you. All that I am, and all that I
do, and all that men praise in me, I owe to you.' That is
how he will come back one day."
But Bruno shook his head, and worked on amongst his
vines and wheat, not lifting his eyes up from the soil.
" What will be, will be," he said, curtly.
But he did not deceive himself, nor did he even desire to
be much remembered.
Remembrance of himself would mean, for the lad, failure.
CHAPTER XXYIII.
Meanwhile Lippo, munching tomatoes stewed with garlic,
in the warm weather with his casement open to the evening
air, said to his wife :
" Nita, I met a man in the city to-day who has come over
from Bologna upon business. He told me that old Dini's
boast is not untrue—that the boy of Bruno's is doing well
at the Music School, and that people say he is clever, and
he gains quattrini singing in the churches—only Bruno does
not know that. The man knew, because his own son is at
the great School, having a good bass voice that they think
to make something of in a year or two. It is a good thing
that we never stinted the lad, and that all the Lastra said
how good we were to him, and always let him go to mass,
and never a clean shirt for Toto but there was one for him
too. If ever the lad should do anything that the world
talks about (not that I think it likely, an idle, dreaming
brat), still, if ever it do come to pass, people will know we
have fair claim on him, and nobody could say that if he
neglect us that it would be other than rank thanklessness.
Not that what we did, we did for gain. No, never! But
they do say those singing men and women make rare fortunes.
Or if he write for the theatres and the churches—there is
the man of Pesaro that wrote the ' Gazza Ladra' and the
' Otello '—I have heard them scores of times down in the
T
SIGNA.
city, he lives still, or aid quite lately; and such a fuss
with him as kings and queens and other countries make—if
it should be ever so with this dainty boy of Bruno's—well,
We did our duty by him, wife. That we can say honestly."
" Aye, that we did !" said Nita, with a grin on her wide
angry mouth, scarlet as the tomato that she ate.
Nita was a rough woman and a masterful, and could lie
when need arose with all the stubbornness and inventiveness
that could be desired from any daughter of Eve. But she
could not take the daily pleasure that her lord did in keep-
ing up the lie all the day long in her own household, when
all need was over, and not a creature there to be the dupe
of it.
"We did our duty by him, and very few there would
have been who would have taken pity on Bruno's base-born,
and brought him to a sense of what he owed to it," said
Lippo, pushing his emptied plate away with a sigh.
He had talked himself very nearly into the belief that the
boy was Bruno's, and his own charity just what he had told
the neighbours. He had said it so often that he had nearly
grown into the belief that it was true.
"I was thinking," he added, timidly, for he was always
timid before Nita, since who could say how she might
persuade Baldo to leave his money ? "I was thinking—after
all, he is our blood, though not come rightly by it—what do
you say if we were to send him a little basket of figs and
the like when this man goes back to Bologna ? It would be
just a little remembrance, and show one bore no rancour
against him for that fit of passion when he blinded you."
" Wait till he has written his opera," said Nita, with her
mouth still in an angry laughter. "You are a shrewd
fellow, Lippo. But sometimes you are too over-fond of
counting your chickens before your hen has even laid an
egg. Figs are figs, and fetch five centimes each till August
comes. And clever boys are like lettuces: in much sun
they run all to seed. Your precious brute Bruno gives this
lad all sun. If I had had him "
"Ah!" said Lippo, with a smile and sigh together, and
girded up his loins and went into the street to see who was
inclined to play a turn at dominoes ; and told the barber
and the butcher that the poor boy Signa was trying to do
right in Bologna, and was studying hard.
SIGMA.
275
" Oh, I bear no ill-will. We are all poor creatures;
where should we be at our best unless the saints were there
to intercede for us ? " said he, with gentle self-deprecation,
when they praised his kind way of speaking. " Oh, I bear
no ill-will; Bruno is hard, and always unjust, and the greed
of getting gold grows on him ; but some day he will see the
wrong that he has done. I can wait. It is sad to live ever
in estrangement, but when one knows one's innocence and
good intent—and the poor lad truly never was to blame.
He was encouraged in rebellion and ingratitude. I have
sent him a trifle of money by a man that is going to
Bologna; he is in little difficulties, so they tell me, and one
does not like a boy to suffer for his elder's fault. Besides,
now he has left, he sees who were his true friends. Bruno
dotes on him; oh, yes, in a mad fashion, but hoards for
him, and presses poor men he lends to, as he did to Baccio—•
poor Baccio Alessio; he is in the Bargello for another debt!
and all his children starve! it is not the way to bring a
blessing on the lad. So I have a mind to tell Bruno, only
he is so violent, and never speaks to me, being ashamed no
doubt. But all that is not the lad's fault. Nor would one
visit it."
And Lippo sat down to his dominoes, and was so pleased
with himself that he cheated a little more than usual by way
of self-reward. He never cheated greatly, because he knew
that to cheat a little every evening, with success and un-
detected, is much more productive and more prudent than
to cheat with a big audacity, that reaps one golden harvest
and then is found out, and so for ever ended.
" You will call him ' nephew' if he should write for a
theatre, and get paid ? " said old Baldo, looking up at him
through his spectacles, as he returned, with some loose notes
in his pocket, of which he would not speak to Nita.
4'Blood is blood, without the Church or notary, that I do
think," said Lippo, gently; he liked those vague well-
sounding phrases that pledged nothing.
Old Baldo chuckled and smoked a second pipe. Baldo
settled within himself that he would let all his savings and
his snug little purchase of land above Gfiovoli go unrestricted
to his daughter; her husband, he saw, was not a man to
waste money or opportunities, poor-spirited fool though the
cobbler thought him, as he heard Nita's voice saluting his
276
SIGNA.
return to bed with a shower of invectives, that rolled
through the open casement on the night stillness up to the
Pisan Gate.
"My dear," he heard Lippo's soft voice answer. "My
dear, I have only been to drink a cup of coffee with the
good canon. When he was so gracious as to do me so
much honour, how could I say no ? "
Baldo chuckled.
He did not like Lippo; he was impatient of him, and
contemptuous of him, but he felt a sort of respect for him,
nevertheless, as he listened where he sat in the porch.
Anyway, Lippo was a safe man to leave one's money to,
and all one's little outstanding crop of bad debtors.
He might be poor-spirited—no doubt he was. A bold
opponent might wring his neck like a chicken's. But such
pretty, neat, ready lying as this would stand him in better
stead than all the high spirit in the world ; which, after all,
only serves to get a man into hot water in this life and
eternal fire in the next.
Baldo put his pipe out, and nodded to the barber, who
was taking his neighbours' characters away by lamplight
under the Madonna of Good Counsel, and double-locked his
house-door, and carried his stout old body to his bed.
"I used to wish she had married the other one," he
thought, as he laid himself down. " But he would have
throttled her in a fit of passion; he would never have kept
her quiet with the Canon's cup of coffee. And he would
never have got in for me all my bad debts. He would have
burnt my ledgers as soon as I was dead. He is a fool. I
am glad she married the clever one."
CHAPTER XXIX.
Nearly two years had gone away.
It was a still night at the end of September. It was on
the eve of the vintage.
The vines lie open everywhere: to the roads, to the
SIGN A.
277
streams, to the mule-tracks, to the bridle-paths, over the
hills, down by the water under the cypresses, against the old
towers, anywhere and everywhere, climbing like gipsy chil-
dren, and as little guarded.
Only when they are quite ripe, then the peasants keep
watch with their guns at night; the gipsy children have
grown as precious then as little queens. Over the dark and
quiet country shots echo every now and then ; perhaps it is
a bird shot, or a dog, or a fox, or nothing at all, or perhaps a
man—it matters little; if he were stealing the grapes he
deserves his fate, and living or dead will never complain.
Bruno, like others, loaded his gun and watched abroad in
these latter weeks when the vintage was so near.
In September, summer has the day, but autumn takes the
night. It was the twentieth, and after sunset was cold.
He wrapped his brown cloak round him, and with his white
dog walked to and fro the grass paths of his vines, or sat on
the stone bench outside his house while the hours wore
away.
On the morrow they would all begin to gather; nearly
everybody in the Sigma country, at the same time and
moment. Then the winepresses would run over in the
shade of the great sheds, and the oxen would munch at
their will the hanging leaves unmuzzled.
It would be an abundant vintage, and wine in the winter
plenteous and cheap; there was joy in all the little house-
holds scattered over the mountains and the plains, behind
the gold of their stacks, and under the blue of their skies.
The hours wore away. The clock of the village church
midway on the hill told them with its sad dull sound; all
clocks and bells sound mournful in the night. There was no
wind ; but the smell of the ripened fruit, and of the stone-
pines, and the balm firs, was strong upon the air. The
moon was a slender crescent, just resting on the black edge
of the mountains before it sank from sight. The turf was
pale in the shadows, with the faint colours of the leafless
colchicum, and the blush hues of the mitre-flowers. The
screech-owl hooted with joy high in the tops of the trees.
The bats wheeled, like brown leaves blown about on a wild
breeze. Bruno sat in the fragrant cold darkness, with his
old gun resting against a hive, and stretched before him the
dog.
2-8
SIGNA.
He 8pi thinking of the yield of the morrow, out alert for
every sound. It was so lonely here that thieves were
likelier to be daring than in any place with aid nearer,
within call; but on the other hand, there were no tramps
from the towns, nor idlers from the beggar-haunts ; it was
too high to be traversed, or even known to such as these.
He had had frays with poachers thrice in all the years he
had lived alone there; that was all; and each time they
had been worsted, and had fled with his good swanshot in
their flesh.
As he sat now, when it was past midnight, and the moon
had vanished behind her mountain, withdrawing her little
delicate curled golden horn, as if to blow with it the trumpet
call of morning, he heard steps coming up the steep ascent
of his own fields, and the fallen leaves rustling and crackling.
The dog sprang up, barking. Bruno pointed his gun.
He did not speak ; it was not his way; if they came there
after an evil errand let them get their measure, and be paid
for it. He waited.
It was too dark to see "anything. It was of no use to fire
aimlessly into the cloudy blackness of the clustered vines.
The steps came nearer, the leaves rustled louder. He
lifted his gun to his shoulder, and in another second would
have fired at the wavering shadow that seemed to move the
boughs ; when suddenly the dog's wrath ceased ; it sprang
forward with a yelp of welcome, leaping and fawning ; he
paused, afraid that he might fire on the dog, angered with
the beast, and astonished; the dog bounded into the dark-
ness, and out of the darkness there came a slender swift
figure, graceful from the vines, as the young Borghese
Bacchus.
Signa stretched his arms out.
" Do not fire ! do not fire ! It is I i"
Bruno threw his gun upward, and shot the charge off in
the air, then with all his soul in his eyes, caught the boy in
his strong hands.
" Oh, my dear ! oh, my love ! I might have killed you 1"
All the great silent, longing heart of him went out in the
tenderness of the words.
Till this moment he had hardly known how he had longed
to see the face of the boy.
After a little he drew Sisum within the porch, and v/ent
SIGNA.
279
and lighted a lamp, and brought it out, and let its rays
shine on the lad from head to foot; and looked at him again
and again and again, with his own dark oxlike eyes, dim
and yet luminous, with all his heart shining out of them,
while he never spoke a word.
Signa had changed but little, except that he had grown
tall, like a young acacia tree; he was very pale, and very
thin; he looked fatigued and weak; he had all the soft
grace of his nation; his limbs were beautiful in shape,
though very slender ; his throat was like a statue's, and his
delicate head drooped always a little downward, like a flower
on a bending stalk.
He was more than ever before like the Endymion of the
Tribune.
The moon had kissed him. With earth he had nothing
more to do. His eyes seemed to say—
" Why keep me here ? "
Bruno felt it—dimly.
" Your body is come back," he said, sadly. " But—"
He did not end his phrase. He knew what he felt. But
he knew hardly how to say it.
The soul would never come back : never.
" Yes, I am come back," said Signa, with a smile, answer-
ing the words and not the thought. " I would not write.
I walked all the way to save the money. I thought I should
have been here before dark. Have I seemed thankless ?
What can I say ? You have given me more than life. You
have given me life eternal."
" Hush ! Come in and eat. You look weak, come in."
Bruno—someway-—why he did not know, could not bear
the boy to thank him. He gave all his own life for the
boy's—-just that—no more, no less. But he could not bear
to speak of it.
Leaving the vines to any chance of theft, he took Signa
within and heaped for him such rude fare as his house held;
bread and wine, and some fine fruit that had been meant for
market. He watched him at the meal with fond eyes, as a
mother might have done, but he spoke little. His heart was
full. He was so happy.
The boy had walked all the way to see him ; only to see
him!
He had not forgotten. He had needed nothing. He had
SIGNA.
only come back from remembrance and affection. The
moment paid Bruno for all the twenty long months of
solitude and toil.
"You wanted to see me, and you walked all the way!"
he said, over and over again; those words and nothing
more. It was so incredible to him, and yet so natural. He
was grateful, as liberal natures are to those who owe them
all things, and pay them with an hour's tenderness.
Signa coloured a little and looked away.
" Yes, I walked ; what of that ? It was so long a time—
to see you and the Lastra—"
Then he touched Bruno's hand with his lips, in soft
caressing grace.
"It was good of you," said Bruno, simply, and the tears
stood in his eyes. The boy had loved him always—never
forgotten—had walked all the way only to see his face
again !
The seventeen years of labour and of sacrifice and of fore-
thought and of shelter all rolled away from his recollection;
he had done nothing, so it seemed to him ; and it was he
who was Signa's debtor. Generous natures wrong them-
selves as much as others wrong them.
" If you had sent me word you should have had the
money to travel; I would have got it somehow," he said,
resting his elbows on the table, and still gazing at Signa,
while the brass lamp burned between them, its wick waver-
ing in the draught. "I did not ask you, dear—no—Luigi
Dini said that you were best left undisturbed, and-1 said, let
him be till his heart speaks—till he remembers and wants to
come. Ah, dear, it is more than your body that comes
back—it is your heart too."
" Surely," murmured Signa, but the colour rose a little
again in his pale cheeks, and he drank off his wine quickly.
" You have walked far to-day ?"
'' Only from Prato : and through Carmignano—I thought
of Gemma. Nothing is ever heard of her ?"
" Nothing. Palma is well—a good girl, as good as gold."
" Poor little Gemma ! " said Signa, with a sigh ; he could
not quite forget the pretty golden-headed sullen little
temptress that had made him play and dance that fair day
on the stones of Prato.
" If she be alive she is bad. You cannot change a gnat to
SIGNA.
28
a bee," said Bruno, briefly. " And, dear, do tell me of your-
self—there is so much to hear—you have been happy?"
Signa's eyes shone like Endymion's lifted to the moon.
" Happy !—that is so little. It is much more than that."
" But the people are good to you. You want for nothing ?
You have all you wish. ?"
" Oh, no, I want for nothing. Perhaps I am hungry
sometimes and cold ;—the other lads laugh, the masters
blame;—the bread runs short, the shirts are worn out, the
women say so—what does it matter? It makes so little
difference. While one has strength enough, and can have
faith in oneself—one has the future. What do the little
things signify ? One does not notice even—"
Bruno was silent. He did not understand.
" The angels speak to him, I suppose," he thought.
" Is the Lastra changed ?" said Signa, " I cannot give it
gates of gold—not yet."
" How should the Lastra change ?" said Bruno, to whom
it was immutable and eternal as the mountains.
" I do not know," said Signa. " Only I am so changed
that it seems to me everything else must be so too. It is as
if I had been away a thousand years."
" You were so sad of heart for us."
Bruno's face lightened with a deep unspoken gladness.
All this while that he had been resigned to be forgotten, the
boy had longed for his old home, and now had tramped on
foot two hundred miles and more to clasp him by the hand!
Signa answered with swift questions of a score of things:
Tinello and Pastore, and Teresina at the gate, and the har-
vest, and the flowers of G-iovoli, and the old priest on the
hill, and all the things and people of the old life he had
left.
Himself he knew that he seemed to have been parted
from them a thousand years, not for his regret or for his
sorrow, but for the immeasurable distance of thought and
knowledge that divided him from them all; from that hope-
less sense " they cannot understand," which yawned in an
unbridged gulf of difference between himself and them.
" And to-morrow we begin to gather," said Bruno, reply-
ing to him. " It will take two days or more. The grapes
are very fine ; the last rains swelled them so. You will see
all the people. There is not one dead. They will be so
282
SIGNA.
glad. No doubt you thought of vintage when you chose the
time ? It was well chosen." •
" I did not remember," murmured Signa, glancing at the
brown knapsack that he had put away in on8 corner. But
as I came along I noticed the vines were ready; and by
Carmignano a woman gave me a ripe bunch. You will be
busy then all the week ?"
" But you will stay the week, and more ?"
" If you wish."
He leaned his head on his hand; he spoke wearily; his
face flushed a little with the same uneven changeful colour.
"You are tired, dear," said Bruno, tenderly. "From
Prato ;—it is a long way for you. Very long. And the
nights cold. You look to have so little strength. You must
have overworked yourself. Go to your bed, dear. That
will be best now. We shall have time to talk; and it is
selfishness to keep you up; and with your eyes so sleepy.
Look, you see the bed is ready. I have always kept it so.
Quite ready. For I said who knows—he may get tired of
the city or of his learning, and come back without one's
knowing. Only I did think you might forget;—and you
have not forgotten. The people will be so glad; and you
will play to them."
" And if ever you should tire and should be of a different
mind," he added, setting down the lamp by the little bed.
" They say boys do change—dream of great things, and of
learning, and then see the cities a little, and the hollowness
and labour of it all, and grow content to return into the old
quiet ways, and leave the world to its own burdens—they
say so, men who know. Well, if ever it should be so with
you, or if it be so now, why there is your bit of land by
the brook always ready for you as this bed is, and getting
better and better every year, and yielding more. A safe
place for you, and daily bread, and the house we would
build in no time—that is, you know, if ever you should
change and wish for it. There it always is. A solid bit of
land:—if you should ail anything or be disappointed, or
see with different eyes ; that is all, dear. Good night, and
the saints keep you. And it was good of you to think of
me, and to walk all the way."
Signa was too tired to hear the words very clearly, and
was ready to stretch himself wearily on the little familiar
SIGNA.
283
mattress over which Bruno had been careful to set the
blessed palm of the previous Easter. Bruno left him and
took his gun again and went out into the moonless night to
continue his watch of the vineyard.
But all the sky seemed light to him.
The boy had wanted to see him, and had walked all the
way! He was quite happy as he sat in the silence and the
darkness. A great] hope was warm around his hearto The
boy had come back.
That proof of love was so precious to him that all his
years of toil were effaced by it and all his solitude glorified.
Who could say that the old ways and the old habits, and
the native air and the native soil, and the freedom of the high
hills, might not have some sweetness in them after all, and
roost at home those young, tired, wandering feet ? It was
possible at least.
Bruno crossed himself where he sat, with the musket
resting at his knee, and thanked the Mother of God. He
thanked her. He would not pray for anything. He would
not ask for anything. He was content,—quite content.
The boy had come back. That was enough.
" Only to sae me ; only just to see me !—and walking all
the way! " he repeated to himself while the hours wore
away.
Dawn came very soon.
It seemed to Bruno that it had come when the last gleam
of the moon behind the mountains had shone on the face of
Signa, with the red vine-leaves against his forehead.
CHAPTER XXX.
With the sunrise the vintage began.
Signa opposed nothing; but entered into all the work and
pleasure as if he were the little fellow who had run home
with his Rusignuolo seven years before. There was an
effort in it all; his heart was not in it; in his eyes there
was the old far-away wistful look; and, at times, he fell
284
SIGNA.
into abstraction and silence. But Bruno was too inces-
santly occupied to notice those shadows on his sunshine.
The boy was home again; that was enough. When he saw
Signa's slender brown hands pulling down the grape
clusters, and heard his voice calling across the hillside to
the men with the teams, he was content; so utterly content
himself that it did not occur to him to dream that the youth
could be otherwise. And he was very proud of him.
Proud of his soft grace, of his straight limbs, of hia
delicate, serious beauty; proud of that very something
about him which was so difficult to define, but which
seemed to separate him from all those around him as widely
as the solitary gold-winged oriole differs from the brown
multitude of the tree-sparrows.
Signa had learned other things beside his own art away
there under the Alpine winds; he had studied all that he
could, night and day, old lore and new;—it was not very
much, but to his old associates it seemed miraculous; they
did not understand what it was, but they felt that this
young scholar was a glory to them. One told another, and
from all the country about, as far as the bridge of Greve,
people came to see him and speak with him, and when the
good priest challenged him in Latin, and he could answer
with ease and grace, and when the head gardener of
Giovoli, who was a Frenchman, spoke to him in his own
tongue, and was fairly answered in it, Signa seemed to his
old friends and companions something very wonderful—a
little fellow running barefoot and cutting food for the oxen
only a day ago, as it seemed.
They said one with another that he could not have been
Pippa's son;—no, certainly, that was surer than ever,—
never poor Pippa's son ;—if Bruno's ! Who knew ? Bruno
had been famous for his physical comeliness in his younger
years. Who knew ?—patrician ladies had strange fancies
sometimes; their contadini could tell rare tales of some of
their love fancies.
So they gossiped going down the hill after seeing the boy
in the cool evening shadows, or talking with him in tho
Lastra. At last it became settled with them; the human
tongue, once beginning to jump, takes such grasshopper-
leaps from conjecture to affirmation—yes, that was the
secret of it all, they said. Bruno had pleased some grand
SIGNA.
285
dame too well for her peace or honour, and this was how it
came that the boy had such tastes and such an air about
him, and Bruno money enough to make a scholar of him;—
yes, that was how it was.
"We always knew it," said the women, with a sagacious
twirl of their distaff; and added, that they could name the
erring princess if they chose, but it was perilous work to
light truth under great names; like thrusting burning
straws under a hornets' nest.
As for Lippo he waited, hearing all they said ; and then,
by accident, was in the street close by the Livornese Gate
as the boy came down old Teresina's stairs, and stopped
with his gentlest smile before him.
" Dear ; we rejoice to hear you do so well," he said, with
outstretched hands, knowing his wife was safe over her
linen, washing in the brook underneath the trees by
S. Maria. "It is so sad. Bruno is hard to turn—we are
estranged. But it was all an error. I was too rough
with you about that violin when you were little. Yes, that
I feel; I have done penance for it often. But we were as
good to you as we knew how to be, so poor as we were and
with so many children. Indeed, we loved you always, and
Nita nursed you. You and my Toto are as foster-brothers.
I never can forget all that."
Signa put out his hands.
"I forgive everything," he said, gently. " When one is
free and away, that is easy. But friends we cannot be ; it
would be unjust to Bruno. And I do not know that I do
well. I cannot tell—not yet. One may fail."
And he went on his way to the church of the Miseri-
cordia, the little dark church, where his first communion
with the old masters of his art had opened to him the
glories that lie in the science of sound.
Lippo went the other way, chagrined.
" I wish he would not say that he forgives," he thought;
"it sounds as if one had dealt ill by him. I am glad I
did not ask him to the house. Perhaps it is all moonshine
what they say of him. ' One may fail,' he says. Fail in
what thing I wonder ? Nita was right. It is as well to wait,
and be quite sure. Only, whatever happens, Nita nursed
him. That he never can forget, if he should succeed in
anything and get a name."
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SIGN A.
For Lippo, like many others before him, held that a life
that rises from obscurity to triumph should look back in
grateful obligation to those who, when it was in obscurity,
did their best to keep it there.
The stone in the mud cries to the butterfly against the
clouds, " Come down and kiss me, for when you were a grub
I did my best to crush you: is not that a link between us?"
" We will go down to Fiastra," said Bruno, on the third
evening, when all the grapes were gathered in. It was so
the old farm-house was called where all the hillside danced
at vintage time. The bell was ringing from its roof; an old
bell that had on its copper—" Lavora : et noli contristari,"
and had been cast in the tenth century or earlier.
They were rich peasants at Fiastra. They had cattle and
horses of their own. They had a wide rambling dwelling-
house with immense halls and large lofty chambers. There
was a great stone court-yard in the centre; the house ran
round three sides of it; the fourth side was open to the
hill-slope, with all the landscape shining through a screen of
pines. They had a numerous family of grown-up sons and
young daughters. All through the vintage month, while the
maize was being picked, they used to dance there, and ring
the bell above the roof and bring all the contadini above
and below within hearing up and down to the merriment.
The youths and the maidens shelled the Indian corn, and
romped and jested and made love; when night fell, some
one played on a mandoline; perhaps there was a pipe or
a flute, too, and sometimes some wandering musician had a
tambourine. They whirled and jumped about to the rattling
music, while the old people smoked or spun, and the babies
tumbled with the dogs, with the yellow maize lying in a
pile and the calm night skies above, and the hillside shining
white in the starlight through the colonnade of the graceful
serious pines. They had done this in the old house for cen-
turies, always, as maize harvest and vintage came round;
prosperous folks, honest, simple and gay; generation sue-
ceeding generation, without break, and changing in nothing.
There still are many such in this country. Soon there
will be none. For Discontent already creeps into each of
these happy households, and under her fox-skin hood says:
" Let me in—I am Progress."
They had always gone down to Fiastra. It was the
SIGN A.
287
custom on all the hillside. But since Signa had been away,
Bruno had had no heart to go there; the lads and the girls
were so merry and so happy in their manner of life; it had
made his heart ache the more; why could not Pippa's son
have been so ?
But now all was well again. It was different. The boy
had come back. "Walked all the way !—just to see me ! "
Bruno had said to each neighbour that day, going out of his
habit of silence in the gladness of his soul.
It was early ; they were still shelling the last maize ; the
bell was just beginning to sound; girls were trooping in, in
their work-a-day dress; but each had their little strings of
pearls round their throats. Palma, who came amongst
them, had no pearls. She was not so much even as a con-
tadina. She felt very brown and rough and unlovely beside
the grace of Signa. She could not keep herself from think-
ing how Gemma would have looked if she had stayed there
and had lived; how pretty, though having no ornament but
her bright glancing hair and her wild-rose cheeks.
Palma took a portion of corn and shelled it, sitting apart
on a bench. She was not content like Bruno.
" His body has come back, but not his heart," she
thought: " and his feet will soon wander again."
"Will you not dance' with me, Palma?" he asked her,
when they touched the mandoline.
Palma looked up and smiled; but she shook her head.
She danced like all the rest at other times, but this night
she could not; she seemed to herself to have suddenly
grown coarse and heavy, and to have her feet shod with
lead. To be fit for him, she thought, one wanted butterfly's
wings and a face like a flower's—a face like what Gemma's
would have been, if Gemma had been dancing there.
Bruno stood with the elder men and talked of the vintage
and the new wine, smoking their pipes under the eaves of
the house, where a great walnut tree touched the red tiles.
But all the time his eyes followed Signa.
He thought, "He enjoys the old life ; he is happy in it;
he will not go away again."
Palma sat and shelled her maize and watched him too, as
he threw his light limbs about in the careless gestures and
joyous bounds, which here, without order or figure, do duty
for the western saltarello and the tarantalla of the south.
288
SIGNA.
But Palma thought:
" He does it to please them; he does not care; he is
thinking of other things ; he wants to be away."
For Palma noticed that his laugh ceased quite suddenly
very often, as the laughter of one who at heart is not gay;
she noticed that he hardly looked at the brown buxom
maidens whom he whirled round in the measures, but often
looked away through the' stems of the pines to the starlit
country, as if the tall straight trunks were the bars of a
cage; she noticed that when he paused to take breath and
came and sat down beside her and some other girl, though
his mouth smiled, his face was grave, and though his words
jested, his attention wandered.
" He sees the old ways are good, and that there is no place
like home," thought Bruno.
But Palma thought:
" He loves us all still; but he is tired of us. We are dear
to him still; but we are wearisome to him, and he would
like to be away."
For Bruno deceived himself, because he had hope; but
Palma having no hope, had no deception.
After a time, they were fatigued with their romps and
their dances, and all rested awhile ; cracking walnuts, eating
almonds, whispering, joking, bandying love nonsense, with
the stars over their heads, and the old dark house behind
them, with rich bits of colour here and there in the men's
blue shirts, in the girls' red petticoats, in the children's
brown limbs, in the broad gold of the sunflowers, in the
glazed terra-cotta of the Ascension above the house-door, in
the scarlet kerchiefs hanging from a casement, as the light
of the stars or of the lamp in the doorway fell fitfully on
them.
Signa sat a little apart under the walnut tree; he had for-
gotten where he was ; he was thinking of what was dearer
to him than any man or any woman. He started as they
spoke to him.
" Signa ! Signa 1 " the girls cried. " Have you left your
heart in Bologna ? Why are you dreaming there ? Come,
sing us something. Let us see if your grand learning has
made your voice any sweeter ? You have not played a note."
" Sing ? here ? " he asked, lifting his head in surprise.
His thoughts had gone so far away.
SIGNA.
289
Bruno put his hand on his shoulder:
" Sing or play. Who should care to hear you, if not
your old friends here ? "
Signa had the habit of obedience in him; he never dis-
puted any wish of Bruno's. He took a mandoline from the
old fellow who was thrumming it for the dancers ; a grey-
headed farmer, seventy years old, who, nevertheless, could
string a dance tune together as prettily as any one, and liked
to see his grand-daughters skip about like kids.
No one can make much music with the mandoline, but
there is no other music, perhaps, which sounds so fittingly
to time and place, as do its simple sonorous tender chords
when heard through the thickets of rose-laurel or the fes-
toons of the vines, vibrating on the stillness of the night
under the Tuscan moon. It would suit the serenade of
Romeo; Desdemona should sing the willow song to it, and
not to the harp ; Paolo pleaded by it, be sure, many a time
to Francesca; and Stradella sang to it the passion whose
end was death ; it is of all music the most Italian, and it
fills the pauses of the love songs softly, like a sigh or like a
kiss.
Its very charm is, that it says so little. Love wants so
little said.
And the mandoline, though so mournful and full of
languor, as Love is, yet can be gay with that caressing joy
born of beautiful nothings, which makes the laughter of
lovers the lightest-hearted laughter that ever gives silver
wings to time.
Signa took the mandoline and struck a few broad sweet
chords, sitting under the heavy shade of the walnut leaves,
with the pines and the starlit valley before him; just a
few chords in the minor key; sad and soft, and almost
solemn.
Then he sang.
He sang the old Misero pargoletto of Leo, which they had
heard him sing a thousand times when he was a little fellow
driving the sheep, and then he sang the Tu che accendi of
Rossini's Tancred, born from the lagunes of Venice, and
known wherever a note of music has ever been heard; and
then he paused a little, while the young men and the girls
filled the air with their chiming voices that echoed the deli-
cious familiar cantilena, in a chorus that vibrated through
u
290
SIGNA.
the pines and up to the skies, as if a thousand nightingales
were singing; and then with a few sadder chords, sweet
and almost solemn, he passed on to music that they did not
know, airs that were quite strange to them, grave recitatives
and sweet lovers' serenades and grand airs of prayer and
sorrow, and ritornelli, light as thistledown, and cathedral
chants as solemn as death ; they were all his own, with the
freshness of a genius in them that had invigorated itself from
study, but had borrowed nothing and retained its own origi-
nality, as the flower takes fresh colours from the bees, yet
is a flower still, and never is a bee.
"What is it?" they asked one another; for what with
their own songs handed down from mouth to mouth and
their little wandering theatres and their love of what is good
in melody and the traditions of it, common in all households,
these people know by ear so much that is ancient and beauti-
ful; though they could not talk learnedly about, it, and
though the names of the masters are as Sanscrit to them.
"What is it?" they asked one another; but they soon
ceased to whisper even that, and could only listen in rapt
silence.
It was music that had a familiarity to them, inasmuch as
it had something of the wild, fresh, hill-born fragrance of
their own popular songs, with which they followed the bul-
locks and lightened the toils of seed-time and harvest. But,
again, it was wholly unlike what they knew, having a great
purity and rarity in it. Something of the radiance of the
old Greek music blended with the solemnity of the litanies
and the misereri of the Renaissance of religious composition;
it was music in which the voice of the lover pleading to his
beloved on the moonlit nights of vintage was blended with
the cry of the desolate soul to stay the hand of the God that
scourged it; it was music true to that profound canon of the
Italian people : "La musica e il lamento dell' amore, o' la
preghiera a gli Dei."
They listened—the girls leaning their arms on their knees,
and their cheeks on their hands ; the young peasants resting
against the pine-stems, or stretched on the benches of stone;
the old people drawn together underneath the lamps and the
story of the Ascension, with their pipe-bowls cold with ashes,
and their spinning-wheels ceasing to turn.
The very dogs were silent, and the little tumbling children,
SIGNA
291
falling against one another, kept mute, with their curls inter-
mingled, and their big bright eyes lifted upward.
The face of Signa was quite in shadow where he sat undei
the walnut branches; the mandoline lay motionless across his
knees ; he sang on, and on, and on, as the young David
might have sung to the madness of Saul.
He had forgotten all that surrounded him, his soul was in
his music.
"When his voice ceased quite suddenly, he looked at the
people about him ; the women were in tears, the men list-
ened breathless ; there was a moment's silence, then they
sprang to their feet, all of them with one accord, and flung
themselves on him, and kissed his hands, and his hair, and
his clothes, and his feet, and shouted, and laughed, and
cried, and lifted him up on their shoulders, and called out to
the moon just sinking—
" Look at him ! look at him ! Our own little Signa, and
yet as great as this ! Oh, the beautiful music ! Did the
angels teach it to you, dear—the angels you used to see ? "
Bruno alone stood apart, and Palma sat in the shade of
the high house wall.
When they let him go at last that night, he smiled on
them, standing bareheaded in the shadows :
" You are the first to praise me—I will always think of
that."
Then he broke loose from them and went quickly away,
forgetting everything. For his heart was beating loud, and
his eyes swam, and the faintness of a great emotion made
the hill-side reel before him for a moment. He wanted to
be alone. They were only peasant people—farming-men
and girls from the fields—but if they were moved like that,
would the world be wholly indifferent ?
He climbed up the steep path towards Bruno's home, and
sat down under one of the pines and thought. The old
house of Fiastra was below him, he was out of the hum of
the voices, but he could have heard dance music had there
been any. He was glad it was all silent—he was glad they
could not dance again—so soon.
There was no sound anywhere around him.
Far down below the lights of the Lastra glistened ; above
were the fields and the woods and the blue mountain crest.
This was his home. He loved it. Nevertheless he said to
292
SIGN A.
himself: " Every day here is a day lost. How shall I tell
it to Bruno ? "
Bruno—who to every man he met, and to every woman
coming through the vines, had said always, with such pride
in his voice, " He has come back—he has walked all the
way only to see me—only just for that! "
And Signa never heard him without a rush of blood to his
cheeks and a rush of shame to his heart,—knowing that it
was not so.
He had not been there long before a step crushed the
fallen leaves and fir-needles, a step ascending with swift,
elastic, even tread, the tread of feet that have never been
trammelled in leather.
" Dear, are you there ? " said Bruno's voice.
Signa rose and met him. They went upward together.
The old house of Fiastra was shutting itself up for sleep;
the people were breaking up and going homeward: going
without their usual twitter of flute and thrilling of mando-
line, and without their usual jests and laughter, talking in
low murmurs of the wonderful boy, who yet was their own
little fellow—the little fellow that had been hungry, and
footsore, and beaten, and made a mock of so many years,
in the house by the Mother of Good Counsel.
The heavens were brilliant. Coma Berenice was setting
northward, and above the sea mountains Arcturus shone in
full splendour, soon to pass away. Perseus gleamed bold
on his white field of light: he had been shooting fire-arrows
half August through the sky, and now was still. Very low
down, eastward and southward, as though watching over
Rome, the strange lone star Fomalhaut hung in its mighty
solitude. Orion still was hunting in the far fields unseen.
"Was that all out of your own head?" said Bruno ab-
ruptly, as they mounted together under the pines.
" My own music ? Yes."
" It is very fine," said Bruno, and was silent. His voice
had lost its happy and hopeful intonation.
" Ah, if only I were sure," said Signa.
" It is very fine," repeated Bruno.
He knew it. He could not have told why. He had
heard, like all his countryfolk, the gay grace of Rossini and
Cimarosa, and the grave grace of Donizetti and Bellini, in
the little dusky crowded theatres of the populace down in
SIGN A.
m
the city, in all the seasons of autumn and carnival. It was
only a pastime to him ; a sport not fit to fill the life of a
man. Music was like the grass—it grew everywhere. That
was what he thought. But he knew that the songs of Signa
were beautiful—knew it by the wet faces of the women, by
the shining eyes of the men. And his heart was heavy with
fear.
"Do they not tell you it is fine where you study? " he
asked. " They must know there."
" Some do," said Signa, and then he hesitated, and his lips
were mute.
" It is what you care most for—still ?"
Signa drew a heavy breath.
"Ah, it is all I live for! Did I not say you have given
me more than life—life eternal."
" What will be will be," said Bruno, with the old gloom
deepening on his face. " It is not I, nor anyone. It is just
that,—the thing that is to be."
" Fate," said the boy.
" Perhaps that is what you scholars call it," said the man.
" It may be the great God, it may be the Devil."
" May it not be ourselves," said Signa, " or others ? "
Bruno did not answer. His face was dark. He had
neither mind nor mood to unravel thought, or unweave the
subtleties of fancy. What he felt was that there was a force
stronger than he, and always against him. It did not matter
what it was called.
They walked on in silence slowly. The moon was gone,
but all the stars were shining, and there was a little tremu-
lous light on the moss under their feet. Signa stopped and
lifted up a stone that had fallen across a few sprays of
cyclamen, and raised up the drooping delicate pink heads of
that most lovely and tender of all blossoms.
"Look!" he said. "My music was the cyclamen—cir-
cumstance was the stone; what my hand does for the
mitre-flower, you did for my music and my life. I cannot
call that Fate. It is something much warmer and much
more beautiful to me."
" You talk like a poet," said Bruno, roughly. " I am an
unlearned man. I cannot follow figures."
Signa threw the stone away, and went on without saying
more.
294
SIGNA.
When they had got to the house Bruno struck a match
and lighted his brass lamp.
" Good night," he said, and would have gone to his bed,
but Signa stopped him.
" I have something to say," he murmured. " Could we
talk now ? Something I came all the way on purpose to say
—it could not be written."
"Ah!" said Bruno.
He sat down on the settle by the cold empty hearth. He
drew his hat over his eyes. A dull, weary shadow was on
his face. It seemed to him as if a knife went to his heart.
And he had said all through these three days to the
people, "He has walked all the way to see mo—only just to
see me'! "
" Let us hear it," he said, and set down the lamp. He
could not tell what it could be; but before he heard it all
his hope died in him. The boy had not come for him, and
the old life would not hold him.
Signa remained standing, leaning against the marriage-
coffer.
"My music that you heard to-night," he said, softly.
" That is from an opera I have written. The first—the only
one. I have called it 'Actea.' Oh, you do not know; the
story does not matter. She was the love of Ne'ro, an
Emperor of Borne, and she a slave. I have studied hard.
Yes, indeed. It is not to praise myself. It was a happiness
■—no pain. If only one could learn more; but the nights
and the days seem so short; even with sleeping only four
hours. I have made all the opera myself. The music, of
course, but the story of it and the words too—all the libretto.
I would not speak to anyone of my idea, and if one be at
all a musician, one should be just a little also of a poet;
enough for that. There is the jealousy of Actea and Poppea,
and the triumphs in the Circus Agonistes, and the martyrdom
of the Christians, and Nero hearkening to the harping of
Terpnos, and the death of Nero, and then Actea all alone by
the grave ; but you heard some of the music, all is said in
that; I know that it is good. The great Father Polidria
says so. He even says it is great. But it will not please
the world; that is what he says. He thinks that ' canterello '
began with Bossini, who was great, and who had much else
besides ; and has descended to all the little comnosers that
SIGNA.
295
are reigning now, and who have nothing else besides, and, in
so descending, has increased and grown worse, and has cor-
rupted the ear of the people, so that they only want noise
and glitter, and care nothing for true harmony or pure
cadence. Perhaps it is thus. He should know. He says
that the people in all the nations have lost their critical
faculty and their understanding, and that even in opera seria
they now desire as much jingling and noise and spectacle as
in the buffa. And so he thinks that my ' Actea ' would fail,
because it has too much of Pergolese in it."
Bruno interrupted him:
" Tell me what you want; what you come for ? I cannot
understand all these long words."
"I am so sorry," said Signa, with the soft contrition of a
chidden child. "I am always thinking of it; always talking
of it; I forgot—I must tire you ; but I hardly know what
you will say, what you will think—listen. All my soul, all
my life, is in the opera. If only it could be heard I feel
sure that it would make a great fame for me, and that is
what you wish, is it not ? You would not have me live and
die an obscure musician, writing for little theatres or teach-
ing song in the cities ? Oh, no! Oh, my God, no! it
would be better to work in the fields here for ever."
Bruno's teeth shut close together.
"I begin to understand—go on. '
And sitting under the eaves of Fiastra that night, watch-
ing the young men and the maidens dance together, he had
said in his heart, with security, " He is content. The old
ways will hold him ! "
"You know," said Signa, still leaning against the old
gilded coffer, with his face in the glow from the lamp. " An
opera to be known must be heard on some stage; and it
must be a great stage : and the rendering of it good, or the
music will have no chance to be great in the world. I have
said nothing to you, because I hoped so much to send you
word of some great victory for it, all in a moment, while
you were thinking of me as only a little scholar. But the
J Actea' was finished in spring, and I managed to travel to
Milan,—never mind how, walking most of the way,—and
there I played from it, and showed it to many directors that
come to the city, the score of it is in my knapsack there, and
they have all wondered at me, and called me Mozart, and
296
SIGN A.
said that tne music was good, some even said great; and the
death chant of the Christians, and the grave song of Actea,
they said were sublime. But they were all afraid of it.
They all thought it too serious, too passionate, too thought-
fill. I suppose it has not ' canterello ' enough. They said
it would cost much, and would almost certainly fail to
please. They are afraid of their money—afraid to spend it,
and not to see it again. It is that everywhere, money. It
has half broken my heart. To hear them say that it is
beautiful, they all grant that, and yet to find not one there
that will have the courage to give it to the world ! I have
seen them, of all nations, and it is always the same. 'You
are a young genius, you are a Mozart,' they all say. Oh
heaven! how would ever anyone have known of Mozart if
they had all dealt with him as these men deal with me ! "
Bruno looked up.
"Poor lad!" he muttered; the thought of Signa, sup-
pliant and repulsed, moved him; he hated the music that
thus enchained the hoy's soul; but he hated as much those
traffickers in the labour of the brain, who had made him
suffer.
Signa went on full of his own thought.
"They told me I should take a homelier theme, with
tragedy in it, like the Gazza Ladra; as if the meanness of
the plot were not what destroys the beautiful music there !
They were all afraid of my Actea. Oh, you do not know
what I have endured. The hope of it, the despair of it, the
waiting, the longing, the beseeching, the thinking every time
' Here is one who will understand;' and then always the
same disappointment at the end. I have been sick with the
pain of it, mad with it; but you must not think that I lied
to you when I said I was happy. I have been happy always,
because I believe in my genius: I do believe in it against
everything. It is not vanity. I love the opera; but I love
it as if God gave it me. It comes out of me just like the
song out of the bird. No more. All the summer I have
toiled after these men, one or other of them; the city of
Milan is full of them; getting singers, and players, and
melodies for their theatres, all over the world, for the next
winter. I have lost weeks and months waiting, waiting,
waiting ; and often all day without a bit of anything to eat,
because thev do not think—those neonle—or because thev do
SIGNA.
297
not know one is so poor. I suppose they never want for
food themselves, and so forget.
" You never told us."
Bruno's voice was husky: his face was dark with troubled
pain. "When he had thought this young life so happy and so
tranquil and- so safe, it had been in conflict and torment,
beating against the buffets of the world. He was be-
wildered; he had a dull sense of having failed in all that he
had done ; failed utterly.
" Oh, no, what was the use ? " said Signa, " It was no
fault of anyone's: things are so, if one have not money.
You gave me all you could. I thought the ' Actea ' would
be taken at once. I thought that I should send you word
of my triumphs while you were still all thinking me a little
useless scholar. But it was not to be. If they could say
that I wrote ill, I could bear it. Yes, I would tear it all up,
and think the failure was in me, and study more, and do
better; but they cannot say that. The work that I have
done is good. The coldest of them own it. Oh heaven ! it
is that that breaks my heart: all my life is in it. I would
die this hour, oh, so gladly, if I could be quite sure that my
music would be loved, and be remembered. I do not know:
there can be nothing like it, I think :—a thing you create,
that is all your own, that is the very breath of your mouth,
and the very voice of your soul; which is all that is best in
you, the very gift of God; and then to know that all this
may be lost eternally, killed, stifled, buried, just for want
of men's faith and a little gold ! I do not think there can
be any loss like it, nor any suffering like it, anywhere else
in the world. Oh, if only it would do any good, I would
fling my body into the grave to-morrow, happy, quite
happy ; if only afterwards, they would sing my songs, all
over the earth, and just say, ' God spoke to him ; and he
has told men what He said.' "
His hand clenched as he paused, his eyes burned, his face
changed, and his mouth quivered : the madness of a great
passion was in him—the pure impersonal hero-passion of
genius, which only reigns absolute in earliest youth, and
whose death-note is human love.
Bruno looked at him darkly, drearily.
This was the boy that he had thought had walked all the
way only to look on his own face, and that he had thought
SIGNA.
had only cared for his old home, and come to live for ever
on the calm hillside ! What could he understand of this
impassioned spiritual pain ?—he was like a man watching a
delirium that raves in an unknown tongue.
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 with that iron of
sympathy which stands throughout all storms.
"I cannot follow—all that," he muttered, wearily.
"You go beyond me. No doubt you are born for greater
things than I know. It is dark to me. But you came here
for something — some wish, some aid, — tell me that.
Perhaps I can help you. But I am ignorant. I cannot
understand all that you say. Tell me the thing you want.
I am better at acts than at thoughts."
Signa, recalled to himself, hesitated a moment: then he
spoke, with the colour changing on his bent-down face.
" Well—all the hot months I have waited on these men.
Waited and waited, all to no good. They are all afraid.
Perhaps they think in their hearts that a boy like me—
yesterday a peasant, and still with my shirts in holes, and
only nineteen years old—perhaps they think I never can be
really worth the great world's hearing. Anyhow—they
refuse. All refuse. ' Have it played in your own country,
and then we will see,' say the foreign ones. 4 This country
is too poor to risk uncertain ventures in it,' say our own
people. It is always some excuse. Some way they are
afraid; of me or of the music. And then no one cares very
much to risk new music. The theatres fill with the Ballo in
Maschera and the Cenerentola, and all the rest. They only
want them to fill. That is all. Nothing is to be done with
them. * Comte Ory brings me as much as your Actea
would were it successful,' said one director to me. ' And I
have all the Comte Ory decorations, and all the singers
know it by heart; why should I risk what might be half
my ruin ?' For music they do not care, these men. No
more than the men who sell wine in the wine-shops care for
the beauty of the vines. But now—only I do not know
what you will say, you will think me mad;—now, last week
in Milan, I have found a director who would take the Actea.
Yes, take it, and bring it out in Carnival in Venice. In
SIGN A.
299
Venice—where they made Rossini's fame, and sang the Ti
rivedro even in the courts of law ! I do not know whether
he is a good man or a bad. But I would have kissed his
feet. For he believes in the Actea "
" Well ? " said Bruno, as he paused.
Signa's face flushed hotter, then grew very pale.
"He will bring it out, this coming Carnival! " he mur-
mured. " Only, as the risk is great, he says—he must have
from me, before he does commence it, three thousand francs,
one half the cost of it on his theatre."
"From you? " Bruno looked at him, doubting his own
senses.
"From me, yes," said Signa, and faltered a moment,
and then threw himself at the feet of Bruno, with that
caressing, suppliant grace of action which makes an Italian
bend his knee as naturally as a flower stoops before the
wind.
"Oh, listen! -You have been so generous, so good, so
long-suffering—it is a shame to ask for more, to trespass
further. Yes, I know. But, oh, listen to me, just this once
again. What is the use of life in me if I cannot make men
hear my music ? I feel I am strong; I feel I am right; I
feel what I do is great—only 1 have not the means of success
in this world. Just see a skylark, the bird that mounts,
mounts, mounts, ever singing; if it had a stone at its foot
it could not mount, and so it could not sing, and yet its
song would be in it just , the same, and it would break its
heart because it had to be mute. I am like the skylark
only the stone with me is poverty. You see they have all
had some little money. Mozart had his father's help, and
Haydn Prince Esterhazy's, and everyone of them, some
little thing just to loosen the stone off their foot as they rose
first;—and once risen, then no lark wants anything more
than only just the air and his own two wings. Now—oh, I
know it is so much to ask, and in a way it is shameful; but
you love me and I have no one but you. Now—that land
you bought for me, you send me the worth from it always,
and you mean to sign it away to me when I am of age, and
you would like me to live on it for ever. Now—now—
would it be impossible ; would it be wicked .in me to pray
for it;—would you sell it at once, sell it straight away to
whoever would buy it, the fields and the olives and all * and
3°°
SIGN A.
give me the money for the Actea ? Ah, my God!—do do
it! My life is worth nothing to me, and what should ever I
do with the land ? It is yours, I know, and I have no right
yet;—but if you do still mean to give it to me, let me have
the value of it now—now, for the Actea, and deliver me out
of this torture and give me a chance to he great. Ah, my
God, do hear me !—it will be as if you ransomed me out of
hell!"
His head dropped on his hands ; he sobbed aloud; he
knelt still at Bruno's feet, but all drooped into himself like a
crushed flower. He was ashamed of his own prayer ; and
yet the passion of his longing shook him from head to foot.
"What use were the land, and the olives, and the rush-
shadowed brook to him ? What he wanted was fame
eternal.
Bruno was silent.
This was why the boy had come back.
After awhile Signa lifted his head timidly and glanced
upward. Bruno's face told him nothing: it was dark as a
tempest, and, under all its bronze hue, pale ; but it said
nothing: it was like a moonless night.
The boy was afraid. He thought there would break upon
him an outburst of such rage as had shattered his lost
Busignuolo.
But none came. Bruno was quite calm and was mute.
" Will you do it? " said Signa, with a great fear at his
heart, touching the man's brown hands with a soft, shy
supplication like a girl's. " Will you do it ? See, you are
so strong, so good—you think so much of my body, and my
peace, and my happiness ; which all are as nothing to me :
will you help me to save my soul ? will you help me out
from this death in life ? Dear God ! if you knew—"
A terrible hopelessness seized him and stopped his prayer
on his lips. Bruno's face was so dark and so still: there
was no response in it. A ghastly despair froze the boy's
beating heart.
How could he ever make this man understand—this man
who knew nothing—this man who followed his oxen, and
reaped his corn, and was content ?
Bruno rose..
" J will think of it," he said, slowly; and his voice in the
darkness and the stillness of the lamnlit house, sounded
SIGN A.
301
deep and hollow, as a brave bell that is broken will sound.
" I will do it—if I see it for your good. I must think."
Then he went out into the night air and drew the house
door behind him, and the boy heard the echo of his foot-
steps passing away upward to the higher hills.
He knew that his prayer would* be fulfilled. He did not
know that for one single instant, as he had knelt there,
Bruno could have struck him down and stamped his life out
with as passionate a hate as he had once stamped the music
out of the broken violin:—one instant in which the heart of
the man had risen and cried against him:
"1 have given you all my life—and you bring me back a
stone."
The next day early Bruno went down into the Lastra.
He went to the sacristy of the Misericordia.
" Write to this man of Venice," he said briefly. " Have
it all in black and white : what he has said, what he will do."
Luigi Dini looked up astonished.
" What! He has told you ! You mean ? "
" We can speak of it when the answer comes. Write,"
said Bruno, and went out into the tender sunshine and
through the merry ways of the Lastra, that were over-
flowing with gathered grapes and laughing faces, down into
the city, to the house of the notary who had served him in
the transfer from Baccio Alessi, the carver.
1' I may wish to sell my land—that land—in a little
while," he said. " If you find an honest man at a fair
price, tell me."
The notary looked up as the sacristan had done.
" Sell the land! The land you were so proud of! What
can that be for ? "
"That is no concern of any man's. When you find the
bidder tell me," said Bruno, and went into the great square,
where, the day being the market-day, all the men from the
villages and the villas were chaffering together with sonorous
resonant voices, raised high in dispute or discussion.
" Bruno is going to do some evil thing," said the other
men, seeing the look upon his face. They had been used to
tell danger from the darkness of his face, as storm from the
cloud-crown of Monte Morello.
But he did no evil. He trafficked with them, driving his
bargains closely, and giving few words to all, with the glaive
302
SIGN A.
of Perseus and the bronze head of the Medusa above him in
the shadow of the arch.
When the day was ended, he entered the baptistery, and
prayed there in the twilight.
Then he crossed the river, and went out of the gates
homeward.
More than one man, going by with swift wheels and little
jingling bells, and flying fox-tails at the pony's harness,
stopped and offered him a lift; but he shook his head, and
strode on along in the dust.
It was the twenty-fourth hour—the close of day—when
he reached the foot of his own hill. The sun was just going
down behind the great mountain and the sharp peaks that lie
between the valley and the sea. It was nearly dark when
he had mounted high enough to see his own roof above the
olives.
He passed Fiastra.
The bell that said, " Lavora: et noli contristari " was
ringing loud.
On the path above there was a little tumult of young men
and girls running merrily one on another to reach the open
gates. They had torches with them, flaming bright in the
dusk, and branches of fir and boughs of the vines that they
tossed over their heads; they were shouting and leaping,
and scampering, and singing in chorus. As they drew near
the farmhouse, they called out to the people within :
"We have brought him down !—we have got him ! We
will make him sing—our own little Signa, who is going to be
so great! "
Four of the youths had Signa aloft on their shoulders.
They had sought him out where he was moping in solitude,
as they termed it; and had besought him and besieged him
with airy laughter and fervent entreaty, and a thousand
appeals and reproaches of old friends to one who deserted
them; and he had not been proof against all that kindly
flattery, all that tender supplication, which had the honey in
it of the first homage that he had ever known; and they had
borne him away in triumph, and the girls had crowned him
with vine leaves and the damask roses that blossom in hazel
and grape time, and danced round him in their rough, simple
glee, like the peasants of Tempe round the young Apollo.
Bruno drew back into the shadow of the pines, and let
SIGMA.
m
them pass by him. They did not see him. They went
dancing and singing down the steep grass paths, and under
the archway, into the courtyard of Fiastra.
It was a quaint, vivid, pretty procession, full of grace and
of movement—classic and homely, pagan and mediaeval, both
at once—bright in hue, rustic in garb, poetic in feeling.
Teniers might have painted the brown girls and boys
leaping and singing on the turf, with their brandishing
boughs, their flaring torches, their bare feet, their tossing
arms; but Leonardo or G-uercino would have been wanted
for the face of the young singer whom they carried, with the
crown of the leaves and of the roses on his drooped head,
like the lotus flowers on the young Antinous.
Piero di Cosimo, perhaps, in one of his greatest moments
of brilliant caprice, might best have painted the whole, with
the background of the dusky hillside; and he would have
set it round with strange arabesques in gold, and illumined
amongst them in emblem the pipe of the shepherd, and the
harp of the muse, and the river-rush that the gods would
cut down and fill with their breath and the music of heaven.
Bruno stood by, and let the innocent pageant pass, with
its gold of autumn foliage and its purples of crocus-like
colchicum.
He heard their voices crying in the court: "We have got
him—we have brought him. Our Signa, who is going to be
great!"
He stood still a little while : then he went up to his
own home, and lit his lantern, and foddered his cattle, and
worked in his sheds. He was too far off from Fiastra to
hear any sound of the singing, but every now and then the
wind, which blew that day from the south-east, brought up-
ward the bursts of applause, the enthusiastic shouts, that
succeeded the intervals of silence: mere murmurs as the
wind brought them ; but to Bruno they sounded like the
echo of the clarion of Fame, crying aloud to him from the
great world, "He is mine."
It was late when Signa returned, brought back by the
young men, who left him with caress and with gratitude as
to a creature far above them, and went away singing low
amongst themselves in chorus the greatest air that he had
written, the chant of the dying Christians, which had in it
all the majestic magnificence of the " Rex tremendte majes-
3°4
SIGNA.
tatis," and all the pathetic resignation of the " Huic ergo
parce Deus," of Mozart's "Dies Iras."
Signa stood on the threshold and listened to the broad,
regular periods, the sonorous pathetic rhythm of his requiem,
as the voices rose and sank, and grew fainter and fainter, as
the steps fell away down the hillside.
They were only peasants, only labourers of the flail and
the furrow; hut they could sing whatever took their ear
with unerring truth and time. It was the first time that
ever he had heard any music of his own upon the mouths of
others: it was the first time that any of that sympathy,
which is the sweetest part of public homage, had ever come
to him :—he stood and listened with a tumultuous pleasure
swelling at his heart, and a delicious sense of power on the
lives of others stirring in him.
" It will live," he murmured to himself, as he listened
there on the threshold until the voices died into silence, as
the young men went on their several ways to their own home-
steads, and parted.
Bruno was working still in one of the sheds, his lantern
burning beside him. He had heen sifting grain, stacking
wood, cleaning wine casks, with the white dog watching
him and the night wearing away.
Signa went within, and stood by him a little timidly. He
had not seen him that day, save for a few moments in the
early morning.
" You did not come to Fiastra to-night," he said gently,
not knowing well what to say.
" No," said Bruno, without lifting his head, whilst he
piled the brush-wood.
" Are you angry with me?" said Signa, with the child-
like way that was natural to him.
"No," said Bruno, but he worked on without raising his
head.
Signa's mouth quivered a little. He knew that he had
done no wrong, and yet he was not at peace with himself.
" Perhaps I am very selfish to ask so much," he said,
hesitating a little as he spoke. "I know I have no right;
I know I have no more of my own than the dog there.
But, indeed—indeed—what use would the land be to me ?
what joy would it bring me ? And you are so good."
Bruno paused in his labour a moment.
SIGN A.
305
"I said: I must think. Let it be. Wait a week—then
I will tell you. I do not know that you are selfish. It is I,
more likely. I will do what is for your good. Only leave
me in peace. Do not talk."
And he lifted more wood.
Signa stood by him sadly. He was not satisfied. He
knew that he had gained what he wished, that his desire
would be given him. But his victory brought a sense of
pain and of wrong-doing, as victory over a noble foe does to
a soldier.
Bruno could never measure the height of the boy's intelli-
gence; the boy could never measure the depth of Bruno's
nature. In some ways they were for ever both strangers
one to the other. Between human creatures it is often so.
As he stood there, confused, troubled, mute, Bruno
looked up with a gesture of impatience, and laid his hand on
the lad's shoulder, but gently, for since the day of the
broken Rusignuolo he had sworn to heaven never to be
ungentle with Pippa's son.
"I am not angered," he said. "But leave me alone.
Go with your friends ; sing, dance, be caressed, take your
pastime; enjoy yourself, dear, while you can. Do not
think that you have hurt me : only leave me alone. It is
not a thing to be done in a day. But you may trust me.
What is best for you, that I will do : only I will not talk of
it."
He thrust him still gently out of the shed into the night
air against the open house-door.
" It is late. Go to your bed."
CHAPTER XXXI.
Signa went, and climbed up to his own room, and opened
the old drawer and looked at his broken violin lying where
he had left it, with its rosemary and its sprigs of cypress, as
if it were a dead thing in a coffin.
x
3o6
SIGN A.
" Perhaps the world will prize you some day," he
thought, " as it does the old wooden shoe of Paganini."
He was happy because he had faith in himself, and hope ;
almost as happy as when the fair angel had given him the
Busignuolo; but he had a heavy sense amidst his joy of
having sinned against Bruno.
He only partly understood the pain that he had deals
He only dimly saw how the man who had believed that his
return had been one of affection was wounded to the quiet
by the revelation that ambition and personal desire and
immediate need had been the sole impulses moving him.
He only very vaguely comprehended that to ask Bruno to
give up the land which he had slaved for seven years to gain,
was to shatter at a blow all the pride of his days, all the
hope of his life.
The great genius overmastering him was like a cloud
before his eyes. If he were cruel to Bruno, he was cruel
unconsciously ; as he was cruel to his own body in inflicting
on it hunger and cold and all corporal ills whilst he followed
the spirits that beckoned to him.
If he asked Bruno to give up much, he himself was ready
to give up everything. If it could have been said to him,
" Die now, and your music shall live," he would have
accepted the alternative without a pause, and gone to his
death rejoicing.
It was the sublime fanaticism of genius, which, like all
other fanaticism, is cruel. The desire for glory had entered
into him, as yet impersonal, but none the less all-absorbing
and dominant.
Once he had been content to have leisure and rest, to
hear the " beautiful things " of his fancy. Now he had no
peace unless he could repeat them to the world of men:—
as at first the lover is content with the perfect possession of
his mistress ; but, when this has been enjoyed awhile in
secret, grows restless for the world to know the joy that
crowns his passions.
The days passed away with him in a fever of unrest,
eating little, sleeping little, vaguely consoled and elated by
the homage his old comrades gave him, but missing much
of the beauty of autumn, because the unrest of ambition was
in him. The little mitre-flower would not tell him half the
things it had whispered him in his childhood, and the great
SIGN A.
307
winds wandering amongst the pines had lost much of their
melody for him. He was always thinking—" Will they kill
my soul in me ? Shall I die unheard and unknown ? "
Palma came up no more to Fiastra : she stayed down in
her father's house, washing, mending, ironing, scrubbing,
hoeing, toiling.
" I am nothing to him,".she said to herself. " If I had
been Gemma, he would have made his songs about me."
Signa strayed sometimes into Giovoli, indeed, as he went
to old Teresina's and other places that he had known; but
he was always thinking, thinking—always absorbed; some-
times seeming to listen, and then writing music on any
scrap of paper from his pocket, and at other times singing
over softly to himself the recitatives and the airs of his
' Actea.'
The two weeks of uncertainty were torture to him. His
hope and fear were in equal portions, and each possessed
him by turns to all exclusion of the other.
"I thank heaven, lad, you did fail at the school of design
in the city, and came home to make honest tubs and churns
and buckets," said Cecco, the cooper, to his own youngest
son, in the workshop with the vine behind the barred
window.
They all had a dim sense that Signa was going to be
great; but they most of them thought it a bad thing, and
pitied him, and pitied Bruno for not having a good, strong,
contented youth, who would have helped him with the land
and held it after him.
As for Bruno himself, he never spoke to any man of the
boy or of the land.
Letters came and went. Luigi Dini and the notary, who
was a good man and kindly, puzzled the matter out together,
and dealt with it cautiously and carefully. "Weeks went by
with all things unsettled. At length the sacristan called
Bruno down into the Lastra, and said to him :—
" The man of Venice is an honest man. There is no fear.
If the half of the cost be paid, he will produce the work
in carnival and do it all justice. There is no fear. He will
not say it will succeed, but he will give the test. He is a
true man, as such men go, living by their own wits and the
brains of others."
Bruno shaded his eyes with his hand a few minutes;
308
SIGNA.
tlien lie nodded bis head to the old man, and drove to the
city, and said to the notary, " Sell the land."
The notary had some time before found with ease a man
who was willing and able to buy—money down, with no
faltering or pilfering.
"The deeds shall be ready by the week's end," he said
now; and he sent and called in the buyer, a stranger to
Bruno and a dweller in the city; and they shook hands on
the bargain, and it was concluded beyond possibility of
change.
Bruno did not speak once.
"Does he sell under pressure of debt, that he looks so
dark ? It is whispered about," said the buyer.
" Then a lie is whispered about," said the notary. " He
sells because he chooses to sell. And it is his way to look
like that."
But the notary thought to himself, " The man is a fool.
The boy has a pipe like a chaffinch, and so the good land is
to go in a puff of sound. The boy must be his own, or he
would never do so foolishly."
For the notary, though he dealt with the letters to and
from the city of Venice because he was paid to do so, and it
was no business of his, was sincerely sorry that the solid
soil was being bartered away for a lad's silly dream, and
was sorry, moreover, for Bruno.
"It will all end in vapour, and the boy will die in a
garret. It is always so," said the notary, though his own
dwelling-house was close against a wall on which was
written " Qui nacque Cherubini."
Bruno returned to his own hills in the stormy autumnal
evening, and entered his own house.
Signa was sitting by the oil-lamp writing music. He
seldom did any other thing. His hand on the dark oak
table was wbite and small as a girl's; his cheeks were
flushed with a feverish colour ; he looked weak, and he was
very thin.
Bruno went up behind him and laid both his hands on his
shoulders. He did not care for the boy to look up at his
face.
" Dear, it is done," he said gently. " You have got your
desire. Your music will be heard in the winter. Ask
Luigi Dini the rest."
SIGNA.
309
Then he left the room, and locked himself in the loft
above the stable of Tinello and Pastore. He could not
trust himself to speak more. All the night he had no sleep.
He went out again before daybreak, while the stars were
still shining.
He went out and upward to the little brook rushing away
under its reeds, to the three little fields corn-sown, to the
narrow grassy paths under the gnarled olives.
Kings leaving their kingdoms have suffered less than he,
losing this shred of land.
Nine years he had laboured on it, giving it the sweat of
his brow and the ache of his limbs, and all the stolen hours
that other workers gave to rest or pleasure; and now it
was going from him as sand runs out of a glass.
All the toil was over and useless. All the nine years
were passed like a breath of smoke, and left no more tale or
worth.
He sat down by the edge of the bright shallow water. It
was now close upon daybreak. No sound stirred, upward
or downward, on the great hill.
He was quite quiet. He had the dull dark look on bis
face that had come there when the boy had first asked this
gift at his hands. He said to himself, that what befell him
was just. On that spot by the rippling burn he had shat-
tered the boy's treasure: it was only meet now that he
should lose his own.
He did not waver. He did not repine. He made no
reproach, even in his own thoughts. He had only lost all
the hope out of his life and all the pride of it.
But men lose these and live on ; women also.
He had built up his little kingdom out of atoms, little by
little ; atoms of time, of patience, of self-denial, of hoarded
coins, of snatched moments :—built it up little by little, at
cost of bodily labour and of bodily pain, as the pyramids
were built brick by brick by the toil and the torment of
unnoticed lives.
It was only a poor little nook of land, but it had been like
an empire won to him.
With his foot on its soil he had felt rich.
He had wondered that men lived who spent their souls in
envy.
It had been his ambition, his longing, his dream, his
3io
SIGNA.
victory: labour for it bad been as sweet to him as the kisses
of love; and when he had made it all his own, he would not
have changed places with princes or with cardinals.
And now it was gone—gone like a handful of thistledown
lost on the winds, like a spider's web broken in a shower of
rain. Gone : never to be his own again. Never.
He sat and watched the brook run on, the pied-birds
come to drink, the throstle stir on the olive, the cloud
shadows steal over the brown, bare fields.
The red flush of sunrise faded. Smoke rose from the
distant roofs. Men came out on the lands to work. Bells
rang. The day began.
He got up slowly and went away; looking backwards,
looking backwards, always.
Great leaders who behold their armed hosts melt like
snow, and great monarchs who are driven out discrowned
from the palaces of their fathers, are statelier figures and
have more tragic grace than he had;—only a peasant
leaving a shred of land, no bigger than a rich man's dwell-
ing-house will cover;—but vanquished leader or exiled
monarch never was more desolate than Bruno, when the
full sun rose and he looked his last look upon the three poor
fields, where forever the hands of other men would labour,
and forever the feet of other men would wander.
CHAPTER XXXII.
On the morrow, the notary in the city saw duly signed
and sealed and attested the deed which gave the land by
the brook on the hill, that is called Artemino, over, from
Brunone Marcillo, to one Aurelio Avellmc cheese-seller, in
the street of the Red Gate in fair Florence.
SIGN A,
311
CHAPTER XXXIII.
It was a winter's night in the Lastra.
The cold had been severe. It was the first month of the
young year. Snow was resting on the barbecane and
watch-towers of the Porta Fiorentina and on the ledges and
battlements of all the old walls. It melted every morning
when the noon sun touched. it, but it lay there every night.
The villas were all deserted. The nobles were down in
their palaces in the city. The little churches rang their
bells regularly over the barren solitary country, like soldiers
firing over a forsaken field. The rivers were swollen, but
had not overflowed ; every little thread of water was swelled
into a brook, and every hill-fed brook into a torrent. The
people were hard pressed at times for food and oil. There
was a good deal of suffering in the little homesteads: most
of all in those set high on the hillsides and the mountain
crests, that were swept by the bitter fierce winds from the
north, where the dwellers could see no faces save those of
their own households, until spring should have come and
made the mule-tracks passable again.
Even down in the Lastra things were not very bright; for
the people are poor, and the taxes are many.
It was high carnival in the great towns, but they had not
much to do with that. Now and then some groups of men
and girls went down to join the mummery in the city with
masks on and ribbons fluttering, and came back white, not
with snow, but with the flour-pelting ; and for the midnight
fair, under the gallery of the Medici, the contadini dressed
up their wine barrels in quaint guise, and the straw-plaiters
took their prettiest baskets and tassels and hats and toys,
and the best looking maidens went down with the best
winter fruits, to stand and laugh behind the flaring torches
under the evergreens and the flags, and, perhaps, have a
waltz and a scamper down the broad pavement, with the
stars shining above and the tambourines and cymbals clash-
ing, and the Yecchio Tower frowning on the pastime and the
blaze.
Otherwise the Lastra had nothing to do with carnival,
except that now and then it put a fat goose in its pot, or
312
SIGN A.
munched a bit of tootnsome strong bread from Siena, or had
a set of strolling players in the old Loggia that used to be a
hospital in the days when Antonino preached charity as the
saving of men, and uprooted his" damask rose-trees in the
eternal antagonism of Theology and Nature.
It was a winter's night in the Lastra.
It was the first night of the midnight winefair in the city
and the noisiest folks were away. In the wineshop, however,
of one, Sanfranco, a good merry man and a son-in-law of old
Teresina, a score or more of people, men and women, were
gathered.
The great wooden nail-studded doors of the arched
entrance were shut to against the driving wind. The oil
wicks flamed brightly, though they could only dimly light
up the dark-vaulted cavern-like entrance room ; but long
branches of trees flamed on the dogs, and Sanfranco sold
good wine, and his wife was a popular soul and made the
best maccaroni in the commune, and a bough outside his
door always showed that hunger as well as thirst might be
allayed within.
At the moment no one was eating or drinking. The
straw-covered flasks stood about unnoticed. The pipes had
grown cold.
Old Teresina, who was at supper with them, had her
distaff idle and both hands on her knees, as she strained her
ears to hearken. Men and women sat and leaned around in
various postures, but all with the same stillness and intent-
ness, listening. Sanfranco himself forgot to chalk the scores
of the night; and his wife, for once, let her frying-pan
frizzle itself into blackness. They were all gathered together
in absorbed attention.
The sacristan of the Misericordia sat in their midst: his
spectacles were on his nose, his three-wicked lamp burned
close at his elbow : he had a newspaper in his hands, and
other papers crumbled at his feet. He had been reading
aloud sometime ; his glasses were dim with mist, his voice
faltered, and his sight almost failed him; for this was what
he read :
"What shall we say of this child ? For he is no more
than a child. Rossini was twenty-one when Venice first
welcomed, with one voice, his mighty ' Tancred.' This lad
is even younger. We predict for him a fame even greater
SIGN A.
3i3
than Rossini's. Since our grandfathers worshipped Cima-
rosa, there has been no parallel to the rapture of this city at
the ' Actea.' The grave song of Actea is on every woman's
lips to-day ; the death chant of the Christian is echoed by
every gondolier. All the air and all the waters seem full of
this new music, which, to the most perfect freshness of fancy
unites the severe grace and sonorous harmony of Durante
and Pergolese. If it have a fault at all, it is too pure. It
has the passions of faith, of heroism, of aspiration; it has
not the passion of love; it belongs to the soul; it has
passed by the senses. This is the result of his youth. It is
more divine than it is anything else. But its exquisite
beauty, its truth to all the requirements of the noblest
musical art, above all, its real sublimity of conception have
carried all before it. There has been no such scene as that
of last night in Venice since Rossini's Aria cli Rizzi rose on
every tongue. All the city was in tumult. Men and women
wept like children. From the first act, which opens with
the chorus of the gladiators, to the last, which closes on the
grave of Nero, there was not for one moment doubt or
coldness in the audience. Its reception was an ever-
increasing tempest of delight. Men who had gone listless
and even hostile were overborne and carried away by the
universal enthusiasm. The young artist could not be found
at the moment the opera commenced. When the second
act had passed, and such a shout as might have wakened the
very dead, shook the house from floor to roof, he was found
hidden in one of the dark unused passages below the stage.
He had fainted "
The old man paused ; his voice was choked with emotion ;
ho let the paper fall at his feet.
The men gave a deep glad cry; the women sobbed aloud.
" My pupil! yes, I may call him that," murmured Luigi
Dini. " I taught him all he knew—at first."
Then he took up the printed sheets, and went on with his
slow measured reading, —
" When at length he came before the people, he looked
more like some beautiful pale young ghost of Desdemona or
of Francesca, than like a youth who had fought his battle
with the world—and conquered. When all was over, the
people got hold of him, clambering on the boards to reach
him, and carried him aloft on their shoulders, and bore him
SIGNA.
out into the air, smothered with the flowers and the hand-
kerchiefs of women. A whole fleet of gondolas accompanied
him homewards. The great chant had caught the ear of the
whole city. The nobles of Venice seized him, and bore him
away to a brilliant feast. They sang it as they took him to
his home. They sang it under the windows. They brought
him out again, and again, and again. The night rang with
their cheers, and with the echoes of his music. It was not
until morning that anything like order or stillness prevailed.
Like the southern poet who loved Venice so well, he awakes,
and finds himself famous. It is said that he is a little con-
tadino, the son of a contadino also, in a village in Tuscany-
and that all the study he has ever had has been a year or
two in Bologna. It is said, too, that his friends are so poor,
and he so penniless, that yesterday he had not a coin to buy
himself a crust of bread. He calls himself only Signa."
Luigi Dini caught his breath a moment, and his withered
lips quivered.
" They then pass on to speak of the music, critically, and
in detail," he said, striving to seem calm. "You will not
care to hear that. It is too long. But you see—we were
no idle dreamers, no mere weavers of cobwebs. You see—
my boy is great."
"My little Signa, that I hid in the coffer! " cried old
Teresina, with the tears streaming down her cheeks, yet
laughing in her joy.
" Little Signa, that Nita beat like a dog! " said her
daughter, laughing and crying too.
" Little Signa, that thought it such a fine thing to have a
bowl of soup with the children on Sundays ! " said San-
franco himself.
" Little Signa, that we thought no better than a baby ! "
said his son, a strong, lusty, young blacksmith.
" Little Signa, that is only Pippa's son! " said Cecco, the
cooper. " Only Pippa's son ! and that baseborn."
"Little Signa no more," said Luigi Dini; "and base-
born ? what does that matter ? God has called him into
the light of the world."
" Will he ever look back to us ? " murmured the old
woman, with the slow tears falling down on her hank of flax.
" Never mind. We will look up at him," said the old
man, gently. " But I do not think he will forget. We do
SIGN A.
not think the stars see us in the daytime, but if we go down
into a well, we see that they do, just the same : so will it be
with him. The great light may hide him from our sight,
but he will see us all the same."
They were all silent.
"Did he write anything himself?" said Cecco, the
cooper, after a pause.
" He wrote, ' Tell Bruno,' and sent me all these papers.
That was all."
" Bruno ! " echoed the cooper, who was his friend.
They had none of them thought of Bruno.
" Poor Bruno," said the old man, sadly ; he was thinking
of the price that Bruno had paid for the night of victory in
Venice.
" You cannot go up to him to-night," said Sanfranco;
" the hill-paths are perilous."
"No. The post came so late too, from the state of the
roads. I will go up the first thing in the morning."
" Perhaps he will be in here to-night. I think he went
through to the wine-fair. I think he had to go—yes, he
said so."
" Yes, he said so," echoed Cecco. " But only to take
wine to Savio's stall. He will not stay."
" Does he expect to hear this news at all ? "
"Not at all," said the sacristan. "The man of Venice
has dealt so ill with the lad, putting off, putting off, till here
is nigh the close of the carnival. We began to think that
he would cheat us utterly. He had a ballet that ran well.
He did not care. No. Bruno had ceased to hope. ' What
is done is done ;' that is all he has ever said about it."
" It is a wonderful glory! " said the woman. " Bead us
again. Bead us again, good Luigi."
And he read again, the story which already he knew so
well by heart, that it mattered little that his eyes swam so
often, and that the printed letters were wrapped in mist.
As he read this second time, the heavy iron-beaded door
swung open, letting in a blast of bitter frosted air, that
almost blew the lights out: a man came into the room,
shaking snow at each step on to the red bricks, and muffled
in his thick brown cloak, wearing it across his chest and his
mouth, in the same fashion that Dante and Guido Calvacanti
once did theirs.
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SIGN A.
It was Bruno.
His baroccino stood without, with the mule tired and
cold, and the candle dark in the lantern that swung from the
shafts. He had deposited the wine at Salvio's stall, and had
come away, leaving to others the riot, and dance, and glee,
and jest, and mumming, and masking of the great carnival
fair, under the arches of the galleries on the edge of the
Arno.
In many a bye-gone year he had been the wildest there;
with rough jests over the sale of the wine, and rough wooing
of the women's torch-lit graces, and mad dancing with
black dominoes and rainbow-hued maskers, while the drums
and flutes had resounded through the great arcade till the
daylight broke.
" Sanfranco, will you give me a light ? " said he, coming
into the midst of them with the rush of cold air ; " mine is
gone out, and the frost makes the hills bad driving."
Then his sight fell on the sacristan with the printed paper,
and he glanced over all the faces of the others, and read
them.
He strode up to the old man.
" There is news of him ? " he said, under his breath, with
passionate thirsty eyes.
" Yes," great and good news," said Luigi Dini; but his
feeble voice was drowned in the deep shouts of the men,
and the women's shrill cries, each eager to tell the tale the
quickest, and to be the first.
" Great and good news ! " they clamoured. " All Venice
is mad for him, Bruno. He has taken the city by storm.
The people have feasted him, and chanted him all the night
long. Only think ! only think ! Just our own little Signa.
Just Pippa's son—as you say. He is great. He is famous.
He has all the world after him. Only think! only think ! "
Bruno stood in the centre of them, the snow falling in
flakes off his garments, his eyes turning bewildered from one
to another. Then he put his hand up before his sight, like a
man blinded with a sudden blaze of light. It was so hard
to understand. It was so hard to conceive as possible.
" Do they laugh at the boy ? or at me ? " he muttered,
with the anger of a sudden suspicion awakening in the flash
of his glance.
" No, no ! No, no ! " said Luigi Dini; " who would have
SIGN A.
V-7
the heart to make a mock of it ? A.nd what is there so
strange ? It is what we hoped and prayed for, only it
passes beyond all our prayers. The lad is great—yes, do
not look so. The dear child is great, and his future is safe.
God is good ; and you sold the land not in vain."
Bruno dropped down on~a bench that stood near.
" God is good," he muttered.
They were all silent. They could not shout and chatter
and praise and wonder any more. There was that in his
intense stillness which overmastered and awed them.
Whether it were pain or thankfulness they could not tell.
Whichever it was, it was beyond them.
Sanfranco was the first to speak. He touched Bruno on
the arm.
" Stay here in the warm and let him read you the news—
such news! We have heard it twice over, but we can well
bear it thrice. I will see to your beast. Do not go back to
the hills this rare night. We ought to have a bonfire on the
roof of the big gate. Stay with us."
Bruno rose to his feet, still with that unsteady dazzled
look on him like a man wakened by a blaze of fire.
" No," he said, absently. " No;—see to the mule—he is
cold and lame ;—come away with me, Luigi. Let me hear—
all alone."
The old sacristan made a gesture to the others to be quiet
and cease from their pressing; and gathered up all the
papers.
" Yes. We will go to my quiet little room. It will be
best," he said, and put his hand on Bruno's arm and guided
him out of the doorway into the dark freezing night. It was
but a stone's throw to the sacristy. Bruno went out like a
blind man.
Sanfranco followed them, and put up the mule in his
stable.
" One would think he was not glad after all," said he to
his wife, returning.
"Nay, he is glad and thankful," said his old mother-in-
law, who was clipping an oil wick. "If it had not been for
his labour, who would ever have heard of the dear little lad ?
But—look you—the stars may see us in the day, as Luigi
says, mayhap they do; but if a star were all one had to
love, it would be hard work to feel the loneliness and the
318
SIGN A.
cold close in, and sit in the dark water of the well and only
catch a glimpse of the star now and then shining ever so far
away up in the light of the sun—and we out of the light for
ever."
" That is true, mother," said Sanfranco. " But you talk
like a hook."
" Nay, nay, never so;—I talk sense," said the old
Teresina. " But that is how it will always be with Bruno
and Pippa's boy ; just the well and the star,—just the well
and the star—do you see ?"
"I see," said Cecco, the cooper, who loved Bruno; and
he emptied half a flask of wine.
The grey dawn came into the little room by the Miseri-
cordia Church, with the black crossbones and the memento
mori everywhere about it, and beyond its lattice the old
broken battlements and the dull winter skies.
He had it all read to him—over and over again. He sat
leaning against the table with his head on his hands.
He understood it all; he understood it—the fame of the
arts is that which is most intelligible to the peasants of this
country, those descendants of the men who ran weeping and
laughing before Cimabue, and filled the churches to hearken
to the oratorios of S. Philip Neri.
They understand it by instinct.
So did he. But it was still like a sudden blaze of flame,
so close to his face that whilst he was dazzled by it his eyes
were darkened and sightless.
Was he thankful ?—yes, he thanked God. God was good.
So he said from the depths of his heart.
Living for the world, the boy was dead for him.
And yet he thanked God.
Time went away and he took no count of it. His feet
and limbs were cold, but he had no sense of it. The little
lamp paled and the chilly dawn came, but he had no percep-
tion that it was morning. He sat thinking—thinking of this
wonderful thing which that night had brought: of this dis-
tant city, where the little fellow who had run barefoot by his
side was raised up as a prince amongst men.
Affection qiuiis before the supremacy of art; as art in its
turn cowers under the supremacy of passion.
The boy was dead to him ; that he knew.
The old man who had sat quiet and patient, sleeping a
SIGN A.
319
little and waking up to warm his hands over his little pot of
ashes, touched him at last, almost frightened at the silence
and the stillness with which he leaned there, with his head
on his hands.
"The dear, good lad!" he said, softly. "He will write
himself, ' princeps musicorum' after all;—aye, we always
said it;—he and I dreaming here together, the old fool and
the young one as they used to say. But do not lament for
it, Bruno ; I mean do not sorrow for ourselves. He will not
forget. He is too true of heart."
Bruno shivered a little, waking to his first sense of the
cold that had frozen around him. He rose: he smiled a
little.
" I will pray that he may forget," he said, slowly.
" When he remembers—then he will have dropped down
from this height. He was my lark. I broke his cage. Let
him go up—up—up. Why should he fall—for me ?"
He spoke dreamily, and he had his hand before his eyes,
with the same dull sense of confusion and of wonder which
had come upon him when he had first listened to the news.
He put out his hand and grasped Luigi Dini's in farewell.
" Tell him I have heard," he said. " Tell him I am glad.
What money I can, I will send. There is nothing more to
say."
Then he threw his cloak over his mouth, and went down
the staircase through the little church that was quite dark.
Luigi Dini fumbling with the keys, unlocked the door and
let him out; he passed up the street towards the seaward
gate, without remembering that his mule stood in Sanfranco's
stable.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
Was he thankless ?
No. He thanked God.
God was good: so he said from the depth of his soul.
Had not the boy his desire ? But Bruno said, " God is
320
SIGNA.
good," as the Argive mother said it when, in answer to her
prayer for their blessing, her sons were smitten down dead.
She did not doubt the goodness of her gods: nor did he
that of his.
But as the woman's heart was rent in two by the fulfilling
of her prayer, so was his now.
Some faint hope had been alive in him which he had hated
because it was hope, which he had plucked at to pluck out
from his soul as the basest and meanest of crimes : some
faint hope, cruel, irrepressible.
As he went, some men and women coming from the fair,
merry and loud-tongued from wine, tossing their masks by
the strings, and flinging white comfits and pellets of chalk
one from another up [against the closed casements and the
iron bars, reeled against him as they passed and recognised
him.
"Ah, Bruno, black Bruno!" they called to him, half
drunkenly. " There is rare news of your little lad in the
city, of Pippa's son, as you call him. A lion in Venice, a
lion with wings ! Such a fuss never was. The boy is a
great man, just at one leap. Bravo ! Why not ? We will
have his music down in Florence at Easter. If he be your
own boy—say so now. Claim him while you can get him.
Another year he will be too fine to notice you—oh, they are
all the same, those sweet-throated birds, when they get a
nest of gold and a bough of laurel to sing in—che, che !—he
will be like the rest."
Bruno passed them without a blow or a word. And yet
men had often hurt him less, and all his blood had been in
flame, and his steel had been in their flesh.
The maskers, laughing, dashed their chalk up at the grated
casements, and reeled noisily through the still sleeping
Lastra ; he walked away over the bridge, with the mountain
wind fierce in his teeth.
The solitary bell of his own little brown church was
ringing for the first mass when he reached the hills above
the farm of Fiastra, tolling sadly through the grey winter-fog.
He entered it, and prostrated himself on the stones.
There was no one there save the old priest officiating; the
candles burned dully, the white mist had got into the church,
and the vapours of it hung about the altar ; the voice of the
priest seemed to come from a cloud. Some sheep left out all
SIGN A.
321
night, forgotten by the shepherd, had crept in and lay hud-
died together at the foot of one of the pillars; the north
wind blew loud without.
Bruno kneeled there in the dampness and the darkness
and the bitter cold.
" 0 G-od, save the boy always," he prayed with all the
might of his heart. "Do not think of me—if I starve here
—if I burn hereafter—it does not matter—I am nothing.
Only save the boy."
So he prayed again and again and again, with his forehead
on the stones, and his heart going out to the great unknown
powers he believed in with a mortal agony of supplication.
The world was as a fiend to him that wrestled with him for
the soul of Pippa's son. Of himself he could do nothing.
Would heaven be on his side ?
Would the great quiet angels stir, and come down and
have pity ?
When the mass was over, and the old priest, thinking the
church empty, had gone away to break his fast, the shep-
herd, seeking his strayed sheep, followed his dog within the
church doors, and found them sleeping together at the foot
of the pillar ; and found beside them a man stretched face
downward, half senseless, in a trance of prayer.
" It is that tall, strong, fierce brute. We thought him
made of iron !" said the shepherd, wondering, to his sheep-
dog.
CHAPTER XXXY.
The next morning old Teresina, being a hale old body,
and active, climbed up the slope to Giovoli, and told Palma
the tidings.
The girl was hoeing amongst the frost-bitten ground, and
digging out cauliflowers.
She straightened her back and listened, with her great
eyes open in humid wonder, to the tale the old woman
brought; a tale enlarged and glorified, as such narratives
ever will be passing from mouth to mouth.
Y
322
SIGNA.
Palma could understand nothing of it; less than any of
them. She had never been out of the Lastra. She had
never been in any city, or heard any music except that at
church and at the country merry-makings such as those at
Fiastra. It was all obscure to her, terrible, incompre-
hensible. It was as if they had told her Signa had been
made a king.
" Sure it was his heart's wish, so we ought to be glad,"
said old Teresina, when all her story was done.
" Yes, indeed," said Palma; but her head was in a whirl,
and her throat was full. She knew, as Bruno knew, that,
living for the world, he was dead to them—quite dead. All
the country was talking of him: how should he remember ?
"She is a stupid little mule," thought the old woman,
angrily. " She feels nothing, she sees no greatness in it all
—she is only good to grub amongst her cabbages."
And she went away huffed, and thinking she herself had
been a fool to walk all the way to Giovoli to tell her news.
Palma worked on amongst the hard sods, filling her hand-
truck with cauliflowers, which her brother would wheel
down to the market at the back of the Palace Strozzi.
She was always hard at work, in the open air in all
weathers, and knowing no rest; for they were poorer than
ever now her brothers grew so big; and, what with the mill
tax, and the goods tax, and the tax at the gates for every
scrap of eatable stuffs or inch of homespun cloth, the lives of
the poor are terrible in this land, where all the earth runs
over with plenteousness.
Hour after hour she hoed, and dug, and uprooted, and
packed the green heads of the vegetables one on another :
all the while her heart was like lead, and her tears were
dropping.
" One ought to be glad ; he would have broken his heart
here ; one ought to be so glad," she said to herself.
But gladness does not come for the commanding of it, nor
at the voice of duty. She could not feel glad; she could
only feel, " We shall never be anything more to him—never
any more."
Signa had been the one grace, the one poem, the one
sweet gleam of leisure, rest, and fancy, in all the deal level
of her laborious life.
All the rest was so dull, so hard, so unlovely; all the rest
SIGNA.
323
was just one constant uphill struggle for sheer life—one cease-
less rolling of the stone of poverty upward every day, to have
it fall heavy as ever back again with every night. Her father
was idle, her brothers were quarrelsome; their needs were
many, and their ways of meeting them were few; everyone
leaned on her, everybody looked to her, everything was left
for her to do and save : she had a nature that would have been
happy on a very little, but she had no time to be happy; no
one ever thought she could want such a thing. All the love-
liness about her always, from the blaze of sunrise over the
hills to the mitre flower in the path between the cabbages,
she had no time to note ; if she had a moment to rest, she
was so tired she could only sit down with closed eyes, heavily,
stupidly, like an overdriven horse.
Signa alone had sometimes made her look up and see the
daybreak, look down and see the cyclamen; Signa alone,
with his smile and his song, and his dreams and his fancies,
had brought her a little glimpse of that life of the perception
and of the imagination without which the human life differs
in nothing from that of the blinded ass at the grinding
mill.
She clung to him quite unconsciously; he was the sole
ray of light in her long dark day of toil: toil that no one
thanked her for, because it was so simply her duty and her
obligation.
She loved him with the simplest, tenderest, most innocent
affection; and with infinite humility, because she so seldom
could reach the height of his thought or the stature of his
mind. He was the one beauty in her life ; he was so unlike
all else that surrounded her ; even when she knew him
wrong, his error was more divine to her than others' right;
the hope of him when he was coming, the memory of him
when he had gone, had illumined for her so many days
of joyless labour; when his life had gone quite out of
hers she had been desolate, with a desolation the more
absolute because no one, guessed, or, guessing, would have
pitied it.
And now at his victory she was not surprised. She could
not understand it, but she had believed in him as he had
believed in himself; and, so believing, had been sure that
he would do the thing he wished.
Therefore the news had found her, and had left her, so
324
MCr/VA.
quiet—so quiet: only with a weigut at her heart like a
stone.
She knew, as she had known at Fiastra, his feet might
return, but his soul never ! She tried to make herself glad;
she hated herself because she failed to rejoice.
" He would have broken his heart if he had not sue-
ceeded," she said to herself; and all the while she worked
amongst the black earth whose chinks were filled with ice,
and her feet were numb with cold, and her poor wisp of a
woollen shirt was blown through and through by the north
wind, and she tried to cheat herself and believe that she was
glad.
When the cabbages were all packed, and the rest of the
garden labour done, she went within a minute, and got out
a little morsel of paper-money sewn within her mattrass, and
stood and thought.
Years before it had been given her by her godmother; the
only little bit of money she had ever had for herself; and
she had been told by her father to spend it on herself; and
she had saved it always from year to year, thinking, when
she could get a little bit to add to it, to buy some stockings
and shoes for mass days; for she was a little ashamed of
her bare feet in the churches. But the other little bit she
had never got yet; all that was made by her labour being
always wanted for the black bread for the boys' mouths, of
which, though she toiled ever so, there was never enough.
She had clung to the hope of getting it always, but day
by day, year by year, the hope drifted farther and farther
away, and the little scroll of a bank-note was all alone
in the mattrass—a yellow tumbled scrap of a few francs in
worth.
Now she took it out, and meditated a moment, and then
ran down into the town. It was with her as if she were
weighted with some heavy burden dragging at her heart-
strings with every step ; yet with every step she said to
herself, "I am glad ; oh, dear Madonna, make me glad ! "
She ran down to a nook in the town where there dwelt a
man by name or nick-name Chilindro: a little old man of
great repute in the place as a draughtsman, and whose busi-
ness it was, for due payment, to make those coloured draw-
ing which by the score adorn the Yoto chapels; thank-
offerings for great mercies, and propitiatory presents to the
SIGN A.
325
saints, wnere colour is lavish, and perspective unknown, and
miracles commemorated in a primitive art that scorns all rule
save that of the buyer's fancy.
Chilindro drove a good trade in his art: the peasants love
these votive pictures, and believe in them beyond all other
ways of pleasing heaven.
Does a man escape death by fire or water, does he fall
unharmed from roof or rick ; does a child pass through peril
unscathed, or a mother hear her son is saved from ship-
wreck, or a loose horse in mad career pass without trampling
on a prostrate creaturethe miracle, if it have been wrought
for pious souls, is drawn and painted, or a fitting print is
coloured; and the Madonna, or the Saint invoked, beams
out from flames or waves or clouds; and the record of the
heavenly grace is carried up to some favoured chapel, and
hung with thousands of others, to show that there still is
gratitude on earth, and plead for further favours still from
heaven.
Chilindro did not know how to draw, but that was no
matter; in these pictures art is nothing, faith is all things ;
large splashes of red and blue, and the people taller than the
houses, and the Madonna or the Saint always very promi-
nent, that is sufficient. Chilindro was a good old man, and
a great gossip, and had a high repute for holiness, and had
painted the miracles of the Signa country for thirty years
and more, till heavenly interpositions seemed no more to him
than the dropping of an apple seems to any other man.
Palma climbed up to the attic against the south wall,
where, when times were good and accidents were many, he
spent his days, and took his orders, and put on his spectacles,
and drew his wonderful wooden men and women, and his
shipwrecks with gaping fish far bigger than the vessels, and
his blazing hayricks with the Virgin sitting in the flames,
and putting them out with the mere borders of her robe ; for
Chilindro, though he could not draw a straight line, had a
very great reputation, and people came from far and near to
him, even from the shores of the sea, and the coasts of the
marshes, where the little chapels, that crown the heathered
rocks and path, amongst the rosemary over the blue waters,
have so many of these offerings from seamen and seamen's
wives, and the coral fishers and the trawlers who draw their
daily bread from the deep.
326
SIGN A.
Palma went up to the old man, in the dusk of the late
winter afternoon, and drew out her piece of yellow paper.
" Is that enough for a good one !" she asked, with all her
heart in her eyes.
The old man scanned it prudently.
" It depends on what you want; has your sweetheart
been in trouble ? Is that it ?"
"No," said Palma, too utterly absorbed in longing to do
right, to heed the jest or blush for it. " Look; I am not
sure what it should be, but something that would please
S. Cecilia. It is she who listens to all music, and sends
beauty into it, is it not ?"
"Aye, aye," said Chilindro, roughly, being not over-sure
himself, and preferring fires and shipwrecks, which were all
the Madonna's. "Aye, aye, go on, what do you want with
S. Cecilia ? I deal with no childishness, you know; that
were profane."
Palma leaned both her hands on his table, and her heart
was beating so, that he might have seen her rough bodice
heave with it, only he was an old man and did not care for
girls.
" Profane ! oh no ; no, no ! It is the very life of his life.
It is the only thing he loves. If you would do something
very beautiful for her that would please her very much, and
show her I am glad ? Something that would please him
too, if ever he should see it ? I would take it up myself and
pray with it, and so she would watch over him always.
That was what I thought. This is all the money I have. I
have saved it for years ; meaning to buy shoes always. If
it be enough, if you would make it do ? then she would
know how glad I try to be. Only I cannot—I cannot—not
just at once."
Her voice choked in her throat; her eyes gazed implor-
ingly at the old man, as though he held the keys of heaven;
she had absolute faith in the power of what she strove to
do ; if she could have given her life-blood to get the picture,
she would have given it willingly.
The old man scanned her curiously. She was too thin
and ill-clad, and blown and beaten by the weather to have
much beauty; yet she looked almost handsome, in her
brown, rough, simple way, as she leaned there in the dusk
over his board, with her great braids wound about her
SIGNA.
327
shapely head, and her breast heaving, and all her soul
shining in her eyes.
"It is that boy who has made his fame in Venice,"
thought the old Chilindro, but he had seen too much of men
and women to seem to know the thing they did not wish
themselves to tell; he had painted votive offerings for road-
brigands in his earlier days, and taken their money and
asked nothing but what they chose to say : a still tongue, he
held, being as gold to whosoever has the wit to keep it
safely tucked behind his teeth. His business was to make
the pictures, not to turn people's memories and desires
inside out; besides, he saw the story of the girl in her
gleaming innocent eyes.
There were so many stories like it; without them half the
walls of half the votive chapels would be bare.
He looked at her and at the paper note, then seemed to
meditate.
" It is a low price—and S. Cecilia : that is more difficult
than the Madonna ; she is more hard to please. Our Lady
is everywhere. She is used to it. Still I will do my best,
you being a young thing, and wishing it so much : only
your price is low. Because you will want laurel, and harps,
and the trumpet of fame, and all the rest; it is to get
triumph for the youth and for his music that you wish? "
" Yes ! " said Palma, with a sigh that shuddered her with
an infinite pain. "Yes; triumph always, what he longs
for—triumph eternal, that shall live longer than he lives.
That is what he used to say. Ah, you are good to do it
for so little—then they will know in heaven I am glad."
The old Chilindro was silent. He was used to see all
woes and joys of human emotion. He was used to mothers,
sisters, wives, daughters, mistresses of men, who came and
Wept and laughed and prayed, and were mad with rapture
at the sweet sudden deliverance from death of some life that
made the sum of theirs. But this girl moved him ; she was
so quiet, and yet there was such longing in her eyes.
Nevertheless, he took her money.
"I will do the picture, and you may come for it this
time to-morrow," he said, as he raked up the little note into
his leathern bag. " But, that you are wise, I will not say.
My dear, in failure, they come back; in success, never."
"I know," said Palma.
328
SIGN A.
" And yon still wish the picture ? "
"I will be here for it this time to-morrow; and you are
good to do it."
Then she went.
Chilindro did no work that night, hut went and gossiped:
on the morning he did better for her than he did for most;
he took a little wood-engraved head of Eaffaelle's Cecilia,
and left it undaubed by colour, and drew round it in his
own clumsy fashion the laurel and the bay, and all immortal
symbols, Pagan and Christian, twisted altogether, and let-
tered under with the little line " Hauritis acquas in gaudio."
He did not know very well why he wrote that in his
flourishing gilded letters, but he thought it would serve its
turn.
Then he put it in a plain black frame, which was a free
gift, and could not have been claimed as portion of the
picture.
It was much simpler than his flames and waves, his
azures and his crimsons ; and yet, somehow, he thought he
liked it better than them all.
With the dusk of the day Palma came for it. To her,
too, it seemed beautiful. She looked at it in silence, her
hands crossed on her bosom, that he should not see how
high it heaved.
"It is good of you to have done so much for me," she
said, gently, and then she took the picture and folded it
under her ragged woollen shawl, and again went away,
without another word.
Chilindro was disappointed.
" I wish I had made her pay for the frame," he thought,
as his door shut upon her.
Palma, with the speed of a goat, ran up into the hills ;
she had so little time to spare; her brothers would be home
by nightfall, clamorous for their dish of soup.
There was a little church high above Griovoli that she
loved well; a little old brown tumbling church, where Signa
and Gremma had often played with her amongst the old
tombs in their babyhood, and sat with the sheep-dog up by
the altar, wondering at the little stone children and the
broken pieces of jasper and porphyry, and the blazoned S.
Sebastian, with the arrows in him, up in the narrow window,
cobweb-hung.
SIGNA.
329
And sometimes Signa, with Gemma and her at his feet on
the steps of the altar, had sung the chants he sang at matins
and complin with the other choir children ; and the sweet
little flute-like voice of him had gone sighing out through
the arched door to the sunshine, and away over the gorge
and the rosemary, till it found the thrushes singing too, and
was lost in the myrtle leaves with them.
She ran up the hill to this little church; there were no
thrushes now, and the rosemary and myrtle were bare, and
the savage north wind pierced her through and through,
and the ice in the clefts cut her feet.
It was just open for evening service.
There were a few scattered huts and farms, whose
peasants would steal into it sometimes, and sit down in the
darkness and rest, if they did not pray. She went in and
threw herself down on her knees in the corner nearest the
altar. It was there that she meant to ask to have the
picture hung,—just there; where the old broken rail was
still bright with the jasper, and where Signa had used to sit
and sing.
1' Oh, dear God! Iam glad, indeed; I am glad!" she
said, as she kneeled with her hand on the stone and the
little picture close clasped against her breast. " Gemma is
dead; and he is the same as dead to me. But Gemma is
safe with you and the angels, and he has the thing that he
wished. I am glad, indeed, I am glad. I would not have
them back—oh, no !—only perhaps he will see the picture
once, and then he will know I did what I could ; then he
will know.—I am glad ! "
CHAPTER XXXVI,
Meanwhile Lippo, in the Lastra, read the news-sheets,
and walked with meek pride among the idlers at the house-
doors at the close of the working-day.
" Yes—my nephew," he would say, with some new
33°
SIGNA.
journal in his hand, out of which he could spell some fresh
description of the successes of the Actea. "Dear boy! to
see how great he is. And to think that if I, or rather my
good father-in-law, had not advanced the money for that
little hit of land, all this great talent might have been buried
forever—aye !—it makes one proud to have been the humble
means. But, indeed, in his babyhood, I foresaw the bent
that he would have ; you will remember; I always spared
him to chant in any church they sought him for. I knew it
was fine practice, and what young life can begin holier than
by using God's gifts to praise His saints ? It always brings
a blessing. ' Put the child to work' people said always;
but I, and Nita too, said, 'No; as far as we have aught to
do with him, we dedicate him, as the parents did the little
Samuel, to the sacred offices of the Temple.' Only then
Bruno interfered, and would not have it, because the church
only gives but a few pence ; as if it were pence brought the
blessing!—but that is all bygone. I wish to bury all
remembrance of difference. Only poor Bruno is so hard and
harsh. Oh, yes, it is all true ! all printed here; the Syndic
of Genoa sent him special entreaty to be present at the first
representation in the Carlo Felice, and all the town was
dressed with flags, and strangers flocking from all parts; it
might have been a victory with half a million of men killed
and wounded, for all the mighty rejoicing that there was.
It does seem wonderful; and he such a little lad ! But he
does not forget us. No; he wrote to Nita yesterday, and
sent a necklace of pearls for our Richetta, remembering she
is sixteen years old to-day. Was it not pretty, and so
grateful ? But he knows who were always his true friends
—dear boy ! Nita will show you the pearls if you go all of
you upstairs. He is so fond of us, and we of him ; only he
cannot let it be seen when he stays here, because his first
duty is, I always say, to Bruno ; and we know what Bruno is."
And Lippo would go up the street, and murmur much
the same at other houses in the short twilight of the short-
ening days; and his towns-folk listened, and ended in be-
lieving him.
True, some sceptic said that the pearls were old ones of
his mother's that he had had reset himself on the jeweller's
bridge down in the city; and some of those malignant souls
that keep long memories for the torment of their fellow-
SIGNA.
33i
creatures, since most folks like to write their lives in sand,
remembered one with another a little fellow, [beaten black
and blue, who had run hungry about all day on Lippo's
errands.
But these were in a very small minority.
Baldo was a warm man, the Lastra knew, the Lastra itself
being usually cold, so far as empty pockets go; and Lippo
had got the bit of land upon the hill, and had added another
little bit to it; and had moreover such a pretty way of lending
money at convenient moments to his neighbours; and, when
obliged to ask for it back again at inconvenient ones,
sorrowed so and wept, and took high interest with such
reluctance or such protestation of it, that the Lastra could
not quarrel with him, nor object to seeing with his eyes.
Lippo grew daily into a power in the little place; and
Bruno, all the Lastra knew—and Signa-on-the-Hill knew,
too—had always been a dangerous, dark man, who kept his
own counsel in churlish silence, whilst candid cheerful Lippo
laid his heart bare as a good comrade should, and kept close
thoughts in nothing.
The Lastra, like the world, did not mind a little lying ; it
was the life of gossip; but silence it would not forgive ;
silence was the highest sin and the biggest.
And Baldo felt so much respect for him in consequence,
and had so high an opinion of his judgment, that he gave
his money for any scheme of investment or modes of pur-
chase that his son-in-law proposed.
"Lippo had not a centime of his own," said the shoe-
maker to his special gossips, " but then he knows how to
plant a centime in the ground, so as to make it take root
and blossom into hundreds. That is better perhaps than
to be born with money—to know the art of getting and
turning about other people's. The miller gains more by the
wheat than the farmer does."
It could hardly be said that Baldo ever liked his son-in-
law; but he grew to be glad of him, and to believe in his
good sense.
" Nature makes some folks false as it makes lizards
wriggle," said he. " Lippo is a lizard. No dog ever caught
him napping, though he looks so lazy in the sun."
Bruno had never known how, or knowing, never would
have troubled himself, to please the people round him.
33*
SIGN A.
Lippo did know.
" It is no good to make your life into a bit of solid silver
fit for goldsmiths, and shut it up in a cupboard : you will
get no credit," he said to himself. " Make it into a dish of
tomatoes, and put plenty of garlic in; and let every one
put a finger into it, and lick his finger afterwards : then
they will always speak well of you, and think they helped
to cook the dish as well as eat it, and so will take a pride—
even when your plates are all cracked—in you."
And Lippo always ate his tomatoes in public, and so was
much beloved, and turned bin vinegar to oil.
" I thought he was a csrer-do-weel," said Baldo. " But I
was wrong. For pretty lying, nicely buttered, and going
down like a fig in a dog's throat, there is not his equal any-
where—not anywhere."
CHAPTER XXXVII.
The spring came in Venice.
There were flowers all the day long everywhere, and
music all the night; the swallows and the doves were happy
iu the cloudless air; the sweet sea wind only blew softly
enough to lift the hair of the women standing on the wet
marble stairs to meet the boats of fish and of fruit.
It was the city of Desdemona, of Stradella, of Giorgione,
of Consuelo. Signa lived in it as in a dream ; this silence
enfolded him like sleep-—sleep filled with the stir of birds'
wings, the sound of waves, the sigh of the wind in the
casements full of lilies, the murmurs of amorous whispers.
"Am I awake ?" he would say to himself in this wonder-
ful trance of slumberous delight, when all the air was full
of his own melodies, and all the people's eyes turned after
him.'
Signa drifted on the tide of the city's praise and passion,
like a rose dropped on a smooth flowing river. He hardly
wondered. The women's touch and words would make him
SIGMA.
333
colour like a girl, and he submitted to them with a soft
timidity, graceful as the bending of a reed in the wind.
Otherwise he was quite tranquil. No glory and no beauty
could be quite so glorious or so beautiful as those of his
dreams.
To him who had dreamed of a triumph like Petrarca's
and a grave like Palestrina's, who had dreamed of gates of
gold for his Lastra, and all the nations of the earth for his
singers ; to him nothing could appear very startling or very
great. True, he was only a little contadino, who still loved
best his feet shoeless and his breast bare ; a little rustic from
the vines and the olives, happiest to sit in the sun and eat a
slice of bread and a handful of fruit; but the native grace of
movement and absence of self-consciousness made him as
serene in a ducal palace as on the hillside at home, and less
moved at a prince's compliment than at the shout of a boat-
man or a fruit-seller.
He came into the fame that welcomed him as a young
heir into his heritage. It was nothing strange to him. He
had looked for it so long.
" Only to long and dream, and give up all hope, and then
to wake of a sudden and find the dream all true—that is to
be happy, indeed ! " he would say to himself; and happy
he was with the sweet, glad, thoughtless innocence of a
child. So happy that lie never thought to turn his steps
backward to those who watched at home on the high lonely
hill in the light of the setting sun.
Every day, indeed, he thought: " To-morrow I will go."
But when the morrow became the present day, he still said—
" To-morrow !"
He was caressed, adored, feasted, sought, done homage to
all through the city in the months of spring. In any other
country there might have been a coarseness in the adulation,
a vulgarity of fashion in the universality of praise which
might have sated or have nauseated him; but here, in the
city that heard the serenades of Stradella and held the
women of Tiziano, it was all one simple impulse of ardour,
one unstudied outburst of rapture, one sweet natural inspira-
tion„ answering his own as the whole forest full of song-
birds answers the first morning singer at sunrise; and the
days were one long festa, and the gondolas wafted him from
palace to palace, and all women caressed him, from the
33*
SIGNA.
bare-limbed fish-girl, standing in the surf of the Lido, to the
jewelled lady leaning on her fringed cushions of silk.
Others beside the Moon leaned down to kiss this young
JEndymion.
He was so great a rarity to them; so innocent, so shy,
and yet so full of grace; with all his peasant's simplicity
and ignorance, yet so far away from them by that look in
his eyes and that serious beauty of his fancies; so utterly
unlearned in all the usage of the world, and yet so dream-
fully calm amidst it all as if he were some young marble god
that had been touched to life out from his sleep of twice a
thousand years in Latin soil.
For he was dreaming of another opera.
He had the story of the Lamia in his head. The Venus
Lamia of Athens ; the young Greek flute-player, whose face
is still seen on the carved amethyst in the library of the
Louvre ; she, who, in Alexandria, made captive, became the
sovereign mistress of her conqueror, and by the magic of
her music and her beauty, vanquished the victor of Ptolemy
and changed death into love.
He knew very little of any other learning than his own
sweet science, but here and there the old classic stories had be-
guiled him, and the " Lamia" had of all others pleased him;
perhaps because the girl, who became a goddess by force of
a man's passion for her, had been a high priestess of his own
art, and by that art had changed death into love.
In the glad spring days, the music for his Lamia came to
him as the butterflies came in on the sea breeze over the white
lilies in his window. The Actea had been solemn with the
gloom of wasted love and martyred courage; the Lamia as
she came to birth was radiant with all the glory of young
life.
He had read the story one day sitting on a boat's keel on
the Lido sands, with his feet in the water and the white sea-
birds above his head in the sunshine. He saw his Lamia in
the waves of light that ebbed and flowed from the shining
sea to the shining skies; saw her though he had never seen
the amethyst; saw her with her pure Greek face and her
passionate eyes and her floating veil and her fillet,, that
marked her the priestess of melody—the Lamia Aphrodite
of Athens.
And the story haunted him, and the music came with it,
SIGNA.
335
and had all the passion in it that was in all the air around
him, and yet not in his own heart; that women here
breathed on his own young lips, and yet which left him so
unmoved to it, as the sirocco goes over a lyre and leaves
it mute.
The red sullen glow of old Nile, the white serene radiance
of Athens, the brooding darkness of Egypt, the living rings
of the dance chain of the Hormus, the palm-crowned virgins
in the feasts of Hyacinthus—all the faces and things gone
from the earth three thousand years and more—became
living and visible to him. Actea had been but a shadow to
him in his music ; Lamia lived for him and smiled. Women
wanted him to love them. He did not. But he almost
loved Lamia.
" Shall I see her likeness living one day ?" he thought;
and his face grew warm.
It was the first time that any thought, save that of his
music, had quickened the pulse of his heart.
" You do not care for us," said a young fisher-girl, with
her beautiful bronze limbs thrown down by him on the sand,
and with her hands stroking his hair.
Signa smiled.
" Oh, no ! Why should I ? I see creatures so much
lovelier than any of you on earth."
" Where ? " said the girl of the Lido.
" In the sun—in the sea—where the swallows go—where
the shadows are—anywhere, everywhere. But most beauti-
ful of all when I close my eyes, and play in the dark—so
softly; and then they come."
" Who come ?" said the girl.
" Ah, who !" said Signa, and he smiled lying back on the
sand, with his eyes on the blueness of the vault above him.
" Does no one love you at home ? " said the girl.
44 Only a man," said Signa.
" And the great ladies here ? The princesses ?—that one
with the blue and gold in her gondola, who seeks you so
often ? "
44 She is—a princess. And I, I am only a peasant, you
know. At least I was yesterday."
44 Then you do not love her ; though she loves you ? "
" No."
44 And you do not love me?"
336 SIGN A.
" No, dear."
" Then, what is it you love ? "
"The things that I hear," said Signa. "And I will love
the Lamia when I find her."
CHAPTER XXXYIII.
With the spring a little house was reared on the bit of
ground by the brook; a little square, low house, of the
grey stone that is quarried above; roofed with red tiles,
and entered by a small arched door.
A peasant came to live in it; a very poor labouring man,
who could hardly keep body and soul together; but he was
enough for the work of the place. The corn was green and
promised fairly; the olives and the vines were well set for
blossom; the reeds and the rushes grew all the thicker for
deep winter rains and some weeks of hard frost.
When the little grass paths between the fields were all
white with the clusters of the sweet-smelling snowflakes,
that are called in this country the churchbells of the spring,
there came up, on Sundays and days of Feast, a handsome,
pensive-looking man; a black-browed, stout-built woman,
with a red shawl and gold pins in her uncovered hair; and
a tribe of riotous children.
Bruno, working in his cattle-shed, saw them.
They were Lippo and the family of Lippo.
They came up often, and brought a flask of wine with
them, and rolls of bread and cold meats, and would sit
down under the olives and eat and drink, and see the
children race about, and laugh very noisily, and seem the
very soul and symbol of content;—never quarrelling by any
chance whatever.
Bruno saw them through the trees. Their words could
not reach him, but the echo of their laughter did.
They were friends of the cheese-seller no doubt. The
cheese-seller never cared to come up thither himself;
perhaps being so far away down in the city.
SIGNA.
337
Bruno never spoke of it; - and no one never spoke of it to
him.
Who would, must come. He was a stranger there.
Later on fell S. Mark's Day.
Bruno was at work.
Since he had lost the land and the boy, he could not
keep the saints' days holy; he could not lie idle in the sun;
he could not endure the quiet of leisure. Unless he had
always some toil to do, some effort to make, he felt as if he
would turn sick or mad, or do some evil thing. In the
dawn he would go to the first mass; that done, he laboured
all the rest of the day till nightfall.
He was digging up his early potatoes and shaking the
earth off the roots; it was a calm, bright day; there had
been showers; the yellow water iris was pricking up in
every runlet, and the little black velvet lily, that the city
took for her arms and her emblem, was in the grass every-
where wherever he turned.
He did not strike them down with his spade now. Signa
had cared so much for flowers.
He was working on the side of his farm that looked
upward to the land he had lost.
There was a belt of fir-trees between him and it, and
then a field of young barley, and then again another row of
firs. Looking down on the black earth and the green
plants of the potatoes, he did not see three men come
through the trees and stand and look at him.
He only raised his head as a voice said his name softly.
Then he saw his brother Lippo, with his youngest child
clinging to his knees, and beside him his two friends, Momo
the barber, and Tonino the tinman.
" Bruno ! " said Lippo, very softly.
Bruno struck his spade deep down into the earth, and
struck his heel on it; and seemed as though he had not
heard.
Lippo left the nearer belt of firs between his brother and
himself. He stood at a little distance amongst the half-
grown barley. His youngest child, a girl of three years
old, with a face like a little St. John, and a temper like her
mother's, clung to him, dressed in fresh white clothes, and
with a knot of red field tulips in her hand.
" Bruno—dear Bruno," said he, softly. " You must see
z
338
SIGN A,
us often here. I thought I would come and tell you; you
might hear it by accident and wonder. I thought you
would be sorry for your land to go out of the family; once
having been in it. So—the name was Avellino's, I have
known him long and well, a most good creature; but the
money was mine, and the land is transferred to me, you
understand ? I am a poor man, but I have a kind father-in-
law, and when one has so many young ones, one tries to
save and better oneself—you understand ? I thought you
would be glad. And you will see us often here ; and if you
will be neighbourly and brotherly, dear Bruno, both Nita
and I shall be most willing. The children might come in
and cheer you, you so lonely here—"
The self-satisfied, soft smile died off his face; the little
girl hid hers and screamed. Yet Bruno had done nothing;
he had only dashed his spade into the soil to stand erect
there by itself, and stood with his eyes blazing upon
Lippo's. Then by the mightiest effort of his life he con-
trolled himself, and bent over the earth and dug again,
stamping his foot down on the iron as though he stamped &
traitor's life out with it.
Lippo waited with a vague and gentle appeal upon his
face, and a look every now and then of gentlest wonder at
his friends.
Bruno dug on, scattering the black ground right and left.
" Will you not speak, dear Bruno ? " said Lippo, mourn-
fully. " I thought to give you pleasure ! "
Bruno stood erect.
"Christ spoke to Iscariot—and forgave him. He was
the Son of God. I am a man. If you say one word, or
tarry one moment, I will brain you where you stand."
Monro the barber and Tonino the tinman plucked back at
Lippo's sleeve.
" Come away—come away. He is possessed—"
"Envy! " murmured Lippo, with a sigh, and let himself
be led away back through the green and bending barley.
Bruno, leaning on his heavy spade, breathed loudly, like
a man exhausted; the veins of his throat swelled; his
bronzed face grew black with the rush of blood.
" Christ, keep my hands from blood guiltiness," he
muttered. " I cannot!—I cannot I "
SIGNA.
339
CHAPTER XXXIX.
a-'own in tlie Lastra at evening, Momo the barber and
Tonino the tinman told the townsfolk how Bruno had
threatened his brother's life for the second time:—beware
the third!
"We heard him ourselves. It is worse than Cain ! " they
said, in the merry little wineshop in the Place of Arms.
" He squandered away his bit of land just to keep his boy
in lewd lining away in the cities ; and good Lippo, to do the
matter delicately, bought it back, only getting another's
name, not to seem too forward or hurt him too much, and
thinking only of saving his brother's credit, so that it should
not pass to a stranger; and when he breaks this to him, so
prettily—oh, so prettily !—and offers him love, and good
will, and the children to keep him company, the brute
threatens only to brain him;—to brain him with the spade
he worked with, and said that the Bon of Grod should have
done the same by Iscariot. It is too horrible ! Lippo is a
saint, else would he bid the guards of the law keep their
watch over Bruno. This v/e heard with our own ears.
This we saw with our own eyes."
And the wineshop echoed, " Worse than Cain ! "
CHAPTER XL.
The spring went by and the summer, and the tidings that
came to the Lastra were always good.
The boy wrote now from here, now from there—now
from a mountain town, where his music was playing in a
summer theatre ; now from a lake palace, where some great
prince had summoned him; now from the cities, where
foreign directors were seeing him ; now from the seashore,
where great ladies were "wooing him. He said so little; he
340
SIGNA,
was hidden from them in a golden cloud; they could scarcety
follow him even in fancy. But he was well, he was happy*
he was triumphant—he wanted for nothing. They had to
be content with that, and to imagine the rest—as best they
could.
All the northern country was echoing with his music, up
to the edges of the Alps, and from the one sea to the other,
and the boy was wandering, welcomed and praised and
rejoiced over everywhere, and with his own melodies always
ringing in his ears, as the gorgeous genius of the " Anacreon
of Genoa " had been three hundred years before. This was
all they knew, and they had to be content with it.
He was gone over the land like one of the improvisatori
of the old times, with the sound of his " sweet singing" in
herald of him everywhere ; their lark had gone up against
the sun ; they could see him no longer; they had their work
to do, the work that kept their eyes on the earth.
Bruno laboured on his lands, and went to and fro the
markets, and toiled early and late in all weathers, and seldom
spoke to any living thing except his dog or his oxen ; Luigi
Dini opened and folded the black robes of the brethren, and
saw the sick and the dead carried by, and unclosed and
closed the church doors, and thought that the days grew
very long; poor merry Sandro died, quite suddenly, of a
ball in his throat; and Palma had to sell her hair to a barber
in the town to pay the grave, and to keep the boys and the
roof over their heads as best she could, two of them earning
something small, and three of them nothing at all; old
Teresina fell down her wooden stairs and broke her leg, and
could trot about no more as her chief pleasure had always
been to do, but had to lie and look over the tops of her roses
in the little square window, and only knew when the sun
went down by the glow in the bit of sky that was all she
could ever now see ;—the weeks and the months were very
slow to all these, and the luxuriant summer only brought
them heat and pain. They could not follow their lark, even
in fancy; he was gone so high and so far ; and though the
summer had come for them, it was all dark and dust. But
they were glad to think he was away against the sun—glad
all of them.
One morning Bruno went down early to the market in the
city. It was August, and he had samples of his wheat with
SIGN A.
34i
liim. He worked hard ; never looking over through the
belt of pines to the brook under the rushes ; worked as hard
as he had done when he had worked with a great hope and
goal before him"; partly because it was the one habit of his
life, partly because he so had least time for thought; and
also—although, indeed, the boy needed nothing now, and
made his money for himself, and would have none sent to
him—because the time might come that he would want it.
" Di doman non si e certezza."
One never knew—so Bruno said to himself, and laid by
what he could in the old leathern pouch thrust behind a loose
brick in the chimney corner, that had once held the purchase-
money of the land that he had lost.
It was five in the morning ; a morning cold with that
fresh alpine clear coldness which precedes at daybreak the
hottest weather for the noon, and refreshes the thirsty earth
with its dense dews, that are as thick as rain. On the
bridge he met a girl slowly toiling under a great burden of
linen; she stopped as he passed her, and lifted her largo
eyes to him. She was very thin and very brown.
"Is it you, Palma ? " he said to her ; he could not refuse
to stop : poor Sandro had been a good friend and kindly to
the boy. " Is there anything I can do for you ? You look
ill ? "
"No," she said, timidly. "I wanted to know Bo
you have any news of him ever ? "
"All is well with him—yes," said Bruno. "That Gigi
sees—sees in the printed papers. He has not written now
■—not for some time. You see, it is not as if we could read
what he writes or write ourselves. I daresay it seems to
him as if we forgot, since we can never answer."
" He will not think that we forget," said Palma, and
stood still with her great eyes clouded.
" No. But no doubt it seems as if we were all dead. It
is to be half-dead in a way—not to read and write—I see
that now. I used to think it only fit for poor pale fools
in cities. Not a thing for a man—unless one were a
priest."
" But he knows we cannot write," said Palma, " and
Luigi Dini does for us—for you, at least. Perhaps it is he
himself who does forget."
"Why not?" said Bruno. The thought was like an
342
SIGNA.
arrow in his heart, hut he would never open his lips to blame
the boy.
" Why not ? " murmured the girl.
Why not, indeed ? They had nothing to do but to
remember ;—he had all the world with him.
"Good day," she added, and moved to take up the bundle
of linen, that she had rested for a moment on the parapet of
the bridge.
But Bruno looked at her curiously. He had seen her a
score of times since the Lenten time when Sandro had died,
but he had not noticed before that her hair was clipped short
to her head like a young conscript's.
" What have you done with all your braids ? " he asked.
" I sold them."
" What for ?"
" To pay my father's burial:—it just paid it."
"I wish you had let me know, I would have paid. Boor
child ! I never noticed it before."
" That is because I tied a handkerchief on. The barber
shaved my head quite close. Now the hair is grown just a
little."
"You are a good girl. Can you manage to live—any
how ? "
" Yes. We can just live. Franco and Beppo earn a
little."
" But you must work very hard ? "
" I have always done that. Why not ? "
"But you are a pretty, girl when you have your hair.
You must marry."
Palma gave a quick shudder.
" Oh, no."
"And why not ? "
She coloured to the bronze rings of her shorn curls.
" My brothers will want me many years yet; and then I
shall be old."
She nodded to him, and went her way over the bridge,
carrying the linen she had washed for the canon's house-
keeper on the hill. Bruno walked onward: he thought
little of the girl—though he had always liked her for her
courage and her industry—he thought much of one of her
answTers : " Perhaps it is he himself who does forget."
Yes ;—of course it was he himself; it is always the one
SIGMA.
343
who goes that forgets, always the one who is left that
remembers.
No doubt the boy forgot them : why not ? He said so to
his own heart every day all through the long months when
the letters came so seldom and the printed papers were so
full of Signa's name and of Signa's music.
He walked on trying to fancy what his boy looked like in
all those strange cities amongst all those strange faces ; try-
ing to fancy how it was when the streets were thronged and
the flowers were tossed and the theatres were besieged and
the vivas were shouted : he had seen such nights of applause,
such hours of homage himself in carnival times in his youth
when Florence had found some singer or some musician in
whom its heart delighted, and for whom its winter roses
were gathered, and its voices uplifted in one accord.
But he could not imagine the boy amongst such nights as
these—Pippa's son—the little delicate lad running with bare-
foot by him in the dust, and looking up through his curls
to see if the heavens had opened to show him the singing
children of God.
It perplexed him. He could not grapple with it.
All through the warm months, in the long oppressive
evenings, with the thunder-clouds brooding overhead, or the
sirocco driving the straw and dust through the gates, the
old man had sat in the doorways and read out to all the
many listening groups this tale and that, this history and
the other, of the victories of Signa's music wherever it was
heard, welcomed in every little city of the plains and every
gay town on the shores of lake or sea as the carnations were
welcomed and the swallows and the nightingales;—all
through those months Bruno, hearing, had come no nearer
to comprehension of it, no nearer than the vague dull sense
that the world had got the boy and he had lost him.
He had grown used to it, as we grow in a manner used
to any pain, wearing it daily as the anchorite his girdle of
sharp iron; he was proud of it in his own silent way as the
seamen on the shores of Genoa were proud when they
heard how the old world had been forced to take an empire
from their
" Nudo nocchior; promettitor di regni."
Proud when he went through the Lastra or down the streets
344
SIGNA.
of the city, and men who had long shunned him paused in
his path to say, " and that young genius they talk so much
of northward, is that indeed your boy ? " and he answered,
" Yes : it is Pippa's son," and went his way. Proud so.
Proud of the boy and for him :—the little corncrake that
left the fields to cleave his flight where eagles go.
But he could not comprehend it; could not realize that
the little fellow so late singing his sequence at mass, with
the other children, in holy week, with his ragged homespun
shirt, and hungry stomach and sad eyes, could now have
name and fame with other men, and be spoken of as they
spoke in Florence of great Cimarosa.
It was true, no doubt, and he was sure of it; and work-
ing in his field he thought of nothing else, and said for ever
to himself, "if he has got his desire, what does it matter
for me?" but still it was dark to him ; there were times
when the great oppressive weight of it lay on him as if he
had been buried alive, and in his grave could hear the foot-
steps of the boy going away—away—away, farther and
farther, always over his head, but beyond his reach and
beyond his call for ever.
It was a stupid feeling, no doubt, born out of ignorance
and emotion and solitude ; but that was what he felt often
■—often in the quiet lonely nights when there was no moon
in the skies, and no sound on the mountains.
This day he walked straight to the city, and did his traf-
ticking in the square before the heat had come, and while the
shadows were still long on the steps between the white lions.
By noon these matters were done with by most of the
men, for the weather was at its sultriest, and the shade of
the cool arched granaries and winebarns in the country
better to be desired than the scorching pavement. He went
into the place of S. Maria Novella, having a last errand there
to a harness maker; in the blinding sunshine of the un-
shadowed square there was a white slender figure, a boj^'s
face, a gesture that he knew—before he could speak Signa
had thrown himself upon his neck.
" It is I! yes, it is I," he cried, " I have just come by the
iron way that you hate so—I thought I would walk, I
thought I might meet you, being Friday. Ah, dearest,
truest, best friend!—all that I am you have made me ; all
that I may become will be yours! "
S1GNA.
345
Bruno looked at him speechless. Once before he had
rejoiced so greatly—only to find his error. He dared not
now be glad.
He gazed at the boy—so changed and yet in so much the
same—the solitary sunlit square went round and round
him like a whirlpool of white fire. The great stones seemed
to heave and dance.
" I made sure now you had forgotten," he muttered ; and
stood stupidly like one of his own oxen when it has been
very long in the dark, and is led out on a sudden into the
full blaze of the noon.
" Forgotten. Did you think me lower than the beasts ? "
said Signa, and he kissed the man's brown hands.
"Yes, it is true," he added. "Yes, I was base not to
come back long ago. But every day I said to-morrow, and
every morrow brought some change, some wonder, some
great thing to do or to hear; and so the summer has
slipped away as the spring did. But forget!—oh never,
never ! What would I be now but for you ?—a starved
and beaten thing in Lippo's house.
"Let us go in here," said Bruno, and he mounted the
steps of the church with the white marble of it shining in
the noonday sun, and went into the body of it where the
light was like a great rainbow stretching from one stained
window to another. There were a few people about it,
some gazing at the pictures ; some kneeling in dark corners.
Bruno drew him down the marble steps into the silence
of the green cloister ; there was not a soul there ; the gato
was left open, the guardian of the church dozed in the heat,
sitting in the shade under the pillars.
In the solitude where only Giotto's faded saints and angels
looked upon them, he drew the boy close to him and looked
in his face.
" My dear, my dear! God is good!" he muttered.
"I doubted it, aye, I doubted; God forgive my doubt.
When that traitor took the land I could have killed him.
God is good. My hands are clean. And the world has
not taken you from me ; men have not made you forget.
Ah, our God is good. Let us praise him ! "
He leaned against one of the columns with his face bent
down on his arm ; his bare chest heaved, his strong nervous
limbs trembled; the hot sun poured in on his uncovered
346
SIGNA.
head, then silently he put his hand out and grasped Signa's,
and led him into the Spanish Chapel, and sank on his
knees.
The glory of the morning streamed in from the cloister ;
all the dead gold and the faded hues were transfigured by
it; the sunbeams shone on the face of Laura, the deep
sweet colours of Bronzino's Ccena glowed upward in the
vault amidst the shadows; the company of the blessed,
whom the old painters had gathered there, cast off the faded
robes that the Ages had wrapped them in, and stood forth
like the tender spirits that they were, and seemed to say,
" Nay, we, and they who made us, are not dead, but only
waiting."
It is all so simple and so foolish there; the war-horses of
Taddeo that bear their lords to eternity as to a joust of
arms; the heretic dogs of Memmi, with their tight wooden
collars ; the beauteous Fiammetta and her lover, thronging
amongst the saints-; the little house, where the Holy Ghost
is sitting, with the purified saints listening at the door, with
strings tied to their heads to lift them into paradise; it is
all so quaint, so childlike, so pathetic, so grotesque,—like a
set of wooden figures from its Noah's Ark that a dying
child has set out on its little bed, and that are so stiff and
ludicrous, and yet which no one well can look at and be
unmoved, by reason of the little cold hand that has found
beauty in them.
As the dying child to the wooden figures, so the dead
faith gives to the old frescoes here something that lies too
deep for tears; we smile, and yet all the while we say,—
if only we could believe like this ; if only for us the dead
could be but sleeping !
Bruno sank on his knees on the bench by the west
door, under the beautiful Bronzino that the shadows were
so covetous of; where the word Silenzio is written on the
wall.
In him the old simple blind faith lived, as it had lived in
the hearts of the old painters, that had covered-the stones
here with their works.
He cried straight to heaven, and he believed that heaven
heard him.
Holding the boy's hand in his, and with his head thrown
back, and his eyes meeting the full sunrays that glanced
SIGNA. 347
from Bronzino's Christ to him, he blessed God, who had
brought back the body safe and the soul pure.
Then his head sank, his forehead fell upon the back of
the bench ; he knelt silent many moments. He spoke to
his God alone—or to his dead; not even Signa hoard.
CHAPTER, XLI.
When he rose he looked calm, and his eyes shone with
the peace of a tranquil happiness.
"Let us talk here a little," he said, and they went out
into the arcades of Giotto's cloister, where the mountain
winds, and the autumn rains, and the fierce beating of
the midsummer suns, have stripped the saints and prophets
bare.
"And you are a great man ! " he said, with a slow soft
smile. "A great man! you—Pippa's son—my little cow-
herd and sheep boy ! Forgive me, dear ; it seems strange."
"Nay, the music in me is great; not I; " said Signa.
"I am like the reed that the gods took to breathe through
—that is all."
" And that is pretty of you to say. But a man is known
by his works, as a tree by her fruit; and yours are good.
You were no dreamer, my boy, as we thought."
" But if you had not sold the land ! " said Signa.
Bruno winced.
"Why talk of that? YvTiat is done is done. The land
was for you; you were right to have it sold. I see that
now, dear—it was only hard at first."
" But who has it ? You said a traitor."
" Lippo has it. He bought it secretly. Honestly as
money goes—but not fairly—there is a difference. But
why speak of these things. Never put back on your teeth
a walnut that has the worm. Dear—you think I have
suffered. Do not poison your pleasure with that fancy.
"When the news came that winter night, I had more content
348
SIGNA.
—for you—than ever the land would have brought with it.
I said, ' God is good.' God is good. He has given you
your heart's desire; and you have come back safe; and
have not forgotten."
He was leaning against one of the columns, the boy was
sitting on the marble ledge where the graves are. Bruno
looked down on him as the sun shone above his young
upturned face. Signa was not much changed; his dress
was all of white linen, but it was very simple; the sea, and
the travel, and the hope, and new glory of his life had
warmed his cheek, and invigorated his limbs ; that was all;
but there was about him, and upon him, that immeasurable,
indescribable alteration which raises up the childhood that
dreams into the manhood that has accomplished ; he was a
boy still, but he was a boy who had fought his fight, and
had conquered.
He was no longer Endymion sighing fitfully in a tormented
sleep with vain desire ; he was the Endymion who had held
his divine mistress in his arms, and vanquished, and possessed
her.
" Do not think of the land any more, ever again," said
Bruno. " It was of use. That was all it could ever have
been. It is for me now as I had never had it. That is
all. Dear, tell me of yourself rather ;—you have so much
to tell."
It was a noble lie.
The land was the cruellest loss of his life. Every .time
that the voice of his brother echoed up through the pines,
every time that he saw the strange hands amongst the olive
boughs and the river rushes, the longing of vengeance
possessed him as ardently as in the moment of Lippo's first
taunts, the sharpness of its loss was as poignant to him as
in the hour when he had first said to the notary, "sell."
But Bruno gave his gifts with both hands ; he did not weight
them with a millstone of appraisement.
Signa had so much to tell; days, weeks, months, could
not have exhausted for him the story of his wanderings and
his victories. He had lost nothing of his simple eager
faith, nothing of his spiritual endless aspirations ; only now,
instead of dreaming of victory he had achieved it; now,
instead of the passionate praises of genius, he had its
passionate joys.
SIGNA.
349
Ho told his story sitting under the arches of the noble
cloisters, with the strong August sun making the marble
warm like human flesh. It was the same story that Bruno
had heard from the letters and from the printed sheets,
month after month; but it only now took life and colour
for him, it only now became an actual truth for him, heard
from the boy's happy breathless lips, with the blue shining
above the open court.
Signa was a great singer in the land, as Cimarosa had
been in his, with his gay melodies caught from the threshing-
barns and the orange-gatherers and the coral-fishers and the
vintage-dancers; as the poet Chiabrera had been with his
mighty odes that echoed like the roll of battle; as the im-
provisatore Bernardo had been with his silver lute that held
the Romans still as listening goats that circle round a
shepherd's pipe :—that he could understand now, wonderful
though it was; now that the boy's eyes shone back to
his, and the boy's own lips told him of cities and villas and
seashores and mountain palaces, and the tumult of towns
in summer nights, and the chorus of strange voices under
his casement singing his own songs till the dawn broke.
He could understand it now; and though it took Pippa's
son away from him—quite away into a world where he
himself could never tread—yet he was proud of it and glad
—bewildered, but very glad.
" That you should be so great, you little thing! " ho
murmured, and smiled, thinking of the night coming in from
the Certosa, when he had carried the child, worn-out and
tired, as the owls cried and Signa dreamed of the Fair
Angel.
To Bruno the boy was only such a little thing—no more
than a girl was, or a bulrush, or a willow rod in the stream.
And half the nation was chaunting his music, and the
other half babbling of his name !
"The land did not go in vain!" he thought, with a
thought that he would not utter aloud, lest it should seem a
regret or a reproach ; and then he rose and shook himself,
with a glow of joy on his olive skin and a softened light
beaming under his straight drooped eyelids.
"Let us go, dear. Hark! The clock is striking. We
have talked here three hours. I will get your baggage;
you left it yonder—yes ? It is not fair to keep you from
35°
SIGNA.
the Lastra. And you are tired, too, no doubt, and hungry.
Will you sleep to-night on your own little hard bed, after
lying under those great nobles' roofs '? Do palaces smell
sweeter than our hills ? I think they cannot."
Talking so, with a quickness and abundance quite rare to
him, that came with the proud overflowing of his silent
heart, he went and sought the boy's small packages, and
swung them over his shoulders and came out again into
the hot sunshine smiling.
He was only a peasant, with bare feet and shirt open at
his breast, and his face dark with many years of toil; but
there was nobility about him, and dignity, and freedom.
Signa, who, though he had half forgotten, loved him,
looked at the dark erect figure of him against the white
marble and the blue sky, and thought the old painters might
have painted him there in the chapter-house as the Shepherd
King, the Re Pastore of Metastasio.
" Can you walk, dear ? Oh, it is too far ! 1" did not
bring the cart to-day," said Bruno.
Signa laughed.
" Too far ! The dear old, dirty, ugly road that I had ta
trot down in an hour after Baldo's beast! No; I should
like to see every stone of it! And perhaps the people will
know me. I think so."
So they went.
"You should have a chariot, like a young prince; and
you walk as we do in the dust," said Bruno with a smile.
He was so proud and glad. All jests seemed sweet.
" I love the dust. Does it not go to the Lastra ? "
And he stooped and raised a little of the dust in his
hand and kissed it and blew it away and laughed. He too
was so happy. All trifles had their charm.
" Poor Palma asked for you this morning," said Bruno.
" Palma did ? I have brought a trinket for her."
"A trinket! She sold her hair in Lent to pay her
father's burying."
They went on along the road. It was dusty, noisy,
unlovely, as it always is; with the people sitting out at
their doors, and the smiths and the joiners and the coopers
and the straw-plaiters all at work in the darksome open
interiors.
Presently one woman clapped her bands.
SIGNA.
35*
" If that is not little Signa that used to live on the hill t "
And then a blacksmith stood and stared.
" What, Bruno Marcello ! is that your boy ?"
And the contadini going by in their carts turned and
looked and shouted.
" That is Signa, only he looks like a lordling all in his
white and with shoes on !"
And they drove away and said in the gates of the Lastra :
" Signa is come home. He will be here in a very little ;
we passed him on the road."
But the road was long to Signa; for now one would speak,
and then another would shake hands, and one man would
fetch out a stoup of drink, and some girl would give him a
fresh carnation; and what with one thing and another, and
the gathering groups and the recognitions and the wonder
and the eager greetings and the reluctant farewells, his path
was made as slow as any young conqueror's going along
laurel-hung streets in war-time ; and by the time they came
in sight of the shields on the Porta Fiorentina, it was nearly
night, and the Ave Maria was sounding everywhere, and the
lamps were beginning to be lighted.
In this country people gather together, like mosquitoes
after a wisp of lighted straw, on the slenderest pretext, to
follow and to watch, and to chatter.
There was a throng on his steps laughing, shouting,
chattering, not knowing very well why they went, but
vaguely fancying that he, since the world had made a king
of him, must have grown rich, and would by and by throw
some gold to the foremost.
There was a little crowd at his back, and out of the great
east gate there came another crowd ; there was a white-
haired old man at their head; they had torches daring red
on the dusk; women ran with them and children ; the deep
voices and the shrill ones rose together—they were singing
his own Death Chaunt of the Christians. Luigi Dini, who
led them, had taught it to them to sing as requiem in the
Holy week of the past Lenten season.
When the peasants had driven in saying, " Signa comes,"
the old man had called his choristers together, and many
young brethren of the confraternity, and had said to them,
" Let us meet him with his own music—there can be no
welcome like that."
352
SIGN A,
Signa stopped suddenly; his heart swelled, his eyes
swam; he had had many a grander triumph, many a more
radiant spectacle, many a louder-toned praise from bigger
multitudes; but none had moved him like that little crowd
in the fitful glow of the torches, those fresh, rough, untrained
voices singing his own music in the dusk and the heat of the
summer night—at home.
They came out to meet him as a conqueror; and, only
such a little while before, he had been a little child they
mocked at for hearing the angels singing in the clouds, when
for their ears only the crickets chattered in the corn.
He stood still while the torches tossed about him, and the
strong familiar voices throbbed and thrilled upon the air;
then he threw his left arm round Bruno's shoulders, and
stretched his right hand out to the old man; and he looked
at the brown well-known faces turned upward in the shadow
of the old grey gate :
" Bear friends! what I am, these two have made me.
The heavens would never have opened for me if on earth
these two had not succoured me. When I am gone, will
you remember that ?"
In an after time the people said to one another, " What
did he mean—' when he was gone ' ? "
Then, standing outside the gateway there, and stretching
in a long line through the Lastra, while every casement and
every doorway had its cluster of eager faces, they all flung
their torches in the air, and shouted vivas loud enough to
stir the soldier soul of dead Ferruccio, sleeping far away;
then, as the peasants had done above Fiastra before the
world had heard of him, they lifted him on their shoulders ;
and, laughing and shouting and crying and leaping like
young children in their pride and pleasure, they bore him
away under the arch of the old gate, chaunting the chorus
of the Christians, while from every dark doorway and every
grated window heads were thrust and hands were offered,
and in the small dull town just going to its sleep there was
one universal outcry :
"It is little Signa come home ! "
Up by the shrine of the Good Counsel, Lippo's window
alone was dark.
And Palma, mending the great holes in her brother's
shirts by the light of a solitary oil-wick while the boys
SIGNA.
353
were sleeping, knew nothing of the festival within the
gates.
It was late ere they would let him go. They were poor
people, all of them; working for their daily bread; but if
he could have eaten gold that night they would have found
means to change their loaves to it, they were so proud of
him—their little neglected, laughed-at waif and stray, to
whom the grilli in the moonlit wheat had taught such sweet-
toned singing.
They forgot that they had been rough with him,—that they
had kicked him about like a little lame dog—that they had
said all manner of cruel things to him and of the man who
defended him : those who do the wrong can so easily forget.
But neither did he care to remember.
They were the people of the Lastra to him—the people of
his home.
That was enough.
They would carry him into Sanfranco's house; they would
pour forth the richest wine that the country could yield ;
they would all touch him, all look at him, all have a word
with him; they would come in one on another in an end-
less stream, with a ceaseless delight; they would pour
question on question, wonder on wonder, and stand and
look at him as if he were a young god come down on earth.
" And to think if I had not let him have that fiddle so
cheap, the world might never ha,ve heard of him—never !"
said Tonino the tinman, looking in on the edge of the crowd,
though he did not venture farther.
For not only the fly on the spoke takes praise to itself for
the speed of the wheel, but the stone that would fain have
hindered it, says, when the wheel unhindered has passed it,
" Lo ! see how much I helped !"
Signa, perceiving him in the dark without, looked over at
him and smiled.
He did not care to remember his hurts. He was happy,
and men all seemed to him brothers in the sunshine of God's
peace, like the saints in the Spanish Chapel where he had
prayed that day.
" When I was a little thing," he said to them, "I dreamed
of gates of gold for the Lastra here. Gates of gold I never
can give. But, if all go well with me, I will live and die
amongst you here ; and you will make my grave on the high
A A
354
SIGN A.
bills, and you will sing what I have written when you bury
me."
"Why does he talk of dying?" they said to one another.
" His life is only just begun."
But Signa did not hear them. He was looking down on
them with a smile ; while his eyes were wet with tears.
He had looked like that when he had been a little child,
and they had said, "Is it the angels he hears ?—nay, it is
only the crickets in the corn that are humming."
It was late when they would let him go. Bruno had
waited patiently, saying nothing to any soul, drawn back a
little near the door, wTitk the look of a great peace upon his
face ; but silent, because too proud and with too much
scorn in him to say :
" You see that I spoke truth. And this is no young god
—this is only Pippa's son, whom you derided."
The crowd went with him out by the sea gate, and took
leave of him till the morrow, kissing his hands and his
clothes, and shouting and leaping around him, and bidding
him be down at sunrise—all the tables of the town should
be spread for him.
He had refused to be taken homeward. He wished to
tread with his own feet the lovely, familiar road. As the
last of the throng left him, and Bruno and he were alone, in
the moonless, sultry night of the hottest month of the year,
the echo of the people's voices followed them, still singing
the chaunt of the " Christians."
" Fame has only the span of a day, they say," murmured
the boy, half aloud. "But to live in the hearts of the
people—that is worth something."
" They love you now. Ten years ago they beat you—
ten years hence they will beat you again if the humour take
them," thought Bruno; but he said nothing. After all he
might be wrong.
There was a little light in a little hut by the wayside.
Bruno looked at it.
" That is where Palma lives now," he said. " The other
house went with the garden. She works late to-night—
there are so many boys."
"I will give her what I have brought," said Signa, and
he paused and knocked at the door. "It is I—Signa! " he
cried aloud.
SIGNA.
355
The girl unbarred the door, and flung it open. She did
not speak, but her great eyes were alight with a fire like the
leaping of the dawn, and she trembled from head to foot.
"It is I," said Signa, slipping into her hand a littlo
packet. "Look—you must wear this to please me—to
show you I did not forget. I will come and see you in the
morning, dear. Good-night!"
He kissed her cheek, and went away.
Palma took the parcel to the light, and opened it; it was
a string of carved coral beads and a cross.
"And I am so ugly, now! oh, so ugly ! Oh, how cruel
God is!" she cried, in a passion of anguish, and dropped
her poor brown head on her hands; her head that was like a
boy's.
She had never before thought it any pain to have given
her brave black tresses to pay her father's grave; only a
duty, so simple and natural, that it was not to be thought
twice about in any way, and never to be lamented with self-
pity; but now she could have wept her very soul out to
have lost her sole treasure, to be so unlovely, so absurd,
so shameful, to have given up her one crown and veil of
womanhood.
"I am so ugly!" she moaned, sitting on the bare mud
floor with the pretty coral necklace in her lap.
It was all the reward that her sacrifice brought her—to
know herself disfigured and discrowned, when Signa's eyes
should fall on her with the morrow's sun.
She had never thought about herself, never taken any
count whether she were lovely or unlovely, ill or well: in her
laborious life filled to the brim with work that was never
done, there was no time for any such speculation ; she
toiled all the day long and half the night without joy or
pause, or recompense of any sort; honest and pure and
loyal to her task by sheer instinct, as birds are clean, or
leaves are fresh ; never before with any thought of herself,
all her life being merged in the lives she served; but now,
for the first time, her heart cried out in sick rebellion.
God had made her ugly—just as Signa came.
He, unwitting, went on with Bruno up the sea-road where
his mother had stumbled to her death. There was hardly a
breath of air, even on the hills. After a while, having
reached a height, they paused and looked behind them. It
356
SIGN A.
was all a great sea of darkness, fragrant, but solemnly dark,
like a migbty grave.
"And you love nothing but your music still?" said
Bruno, suddenly. "Nothing? no woman? You would
tell me?"
"No woman, no !" said Signa ; and he spoke the simple
truth. Yet in the gloom of the night his face grew warm.
He had loved no woman yet; but, in his visions of late, the
angels that came to him had all women's forms and women's
faces as in the visions of the Paradise on Orgagna's field of
gold.
As they stood and looked back into that soft impenetrable
darkness, there came a fluttering line of light, which, undu-
lating like a fiery snake, stole through the shadow up and
up and up towards the clouds.
"What is that?" cried the boy, startled and unnerved
after the homage and the wakeful fancies of the night.
"They are the torches," said Bruno. "A hill burial—
that is all. There are so many lights; it is some young
thing dead."
" The torches came to meet me in triumph an hour ago,"
thought Signa, and a shiver went over him, and he ceased to
look back.
The lights stole up the hillside towards some lonely tomb
amongst the silence of the woods, then vanished, and all
was dark.
CHAPTEB XLII.
With the morning, Signa went down to see more quietly
all his old friends of the Lastra. Passing, he paused by
Palma's hut. She was at work in her garden, gathering
tomatoes off the bushes before her poor little dwelling. She
had tied the red woollen handkerchief over her head again.
She hardly looked up as she thanked him for his gift.
"It is too magnificent for me," she murmured. "You
know I am so poor always, and so ugly now; I have lost
my hair."
SIGNA.
357
"Who would not love you more, dear?—knowing why
you lost it," said Signa, kindly; for he knew the goodness
of the girl, and was fond of her in his gentle way—only
she never could understand anything, not knowing her
letters even, and being always at work like a little windlass
that everybody's hand turns.
But Palma shook her head.
She did not know anything indeed, but the instincts of
her sex moved in her and made her feel that no glory of a
golden deed is so great a nimbus to a woman as the rays
of a physical beauty.
" Indeed, you are never ugly, Palma," said Signa, to con-
sole her. " Dear, you have straight features and such noble
eyes ; you cannot be ugly, ever. And for the hair, that will
very soon grow, and you must wear the necklace on feast
days when I am gone, to show that you remember me."
Remember! Palma thought of the S. Cecilia hung up in
the church above on the hill. She had meant to tell him of
it; she had dreamt always of leading him up there hand in
hand, as they had used to go when they were children, and
making him sit on the altar-steps where the jasper was,
while she told him what she had done; but she was silent
about it now that he was here. Someway she felt almost
ashamed of it.
He had made his own fame; he had won his own victory;
he did not want her help or S. Cecilia's. Perhaps he would
only smile, she thought. She was not sure of the great
use of the picture ; all in a moment she had lost her faith
in it.
He looked so full of grace, smiling there in the sunshine.
She glanced up at him, feeling as if there were whole
worlds of distance between him and her. She could not
have done him any good with her prayers up there in the
dark; she could not have been wanted. She would have
liked to tell him, but she felt ashamed.
"You work so hard, Palma," he said, leaning over the
low stone wall.
" Yes ; but I have always done that. It is not new."
" But the boys must help you, now ? "
" A little ; but they eat more than they earn."
" Did your father suffer much—dying ? "
"A great deal; it only lasted a day. He could not
358
SIGNA.
speak much, but he thought of Gemma; he kept looking at
that little Jesus in wax that used to be so like her. He has
seen her now—in heaven."
" You are always sure she is dead ? "
" Oh, yes ! She would not have forgotten us so long as
this, if she were living."
Signa was silent. He knew that to those who go, for-
getfulness is easy; to those who stay, impossible.
" I never think she is dead," he said at last.
"Why?"
"Because she was so full of life; so sturdy, so mirthful;
always in mischief too, and doing so well for herself:
things like that do not die."
"Everything dies if God will it," said Palma. "For me,
I am sure, she would not have forgotten if she were living.
Sometimes I pray to her to make me a little sign from
heaven, but she never does."
" She was like a cherub in heaven to look at," said
Signa, who never quite had ceased to mourn his lost play-
mate or to reproach himself with her fate. After his music,
he had most loved Gemma.
"Yes," said Palma, and stooped down her head over her
hoeing at the weeds; she felt so ugly with her short, ruffled,
foolish, dipt curls, that made her feel like a shaven dog0
She never had thought of her face before; of what it
possessed or of what it lacked; but that morning, rising,
she had looked at herself in the little square bit of mirror
over the flour-bin, and had thought she was lean and brown
and frightful.
"I do not believe she is dead," said Signa, again.
" Sometimes, in the strange cities, I look about in the
women's faces to see if there may be one that might be
hers. She would not alter. I should know her."
" You never will see her. She is dead," said Palma, with
the obstinacy that is always in the peasant as in the mule.
She worked on amongst her tomatoes, gathering the
bright scarlet balls into a skip. She could not tell him
about her S. Cecilia.
He would only talk of Gemma all the while, if they were
to go up there amongst the thrushes and the rosemary;—
besides, the change that was in him she felt more acutely
than even Bruno had done. This beautiful young Endy-
SIGNA.
339
mion, whom the moon had kissed, could have wanted no
help of hers. Her poor, little picture seemed to her so
foolish, so humble, so small; the grace and greatness of his
fame could not have grown out of her prayers in that little
dark nook. All the year she had thought that it had. and
had poured out all her heart in them. But now that she saw
him, her hope seemed to her as stupid a thing as if a brown
ant creeping by with a grain of corn had thought it filled
the granaries of tl- e world.
She was ashamed of her little picture that she had spent
all she possessed to hang up there by the altar-rail, with the
ruby light of the stained glass upon it whenever the sun
went west. She did not dare to ask him to go up to the
hill with her and see it.
" I did what I could; but then he did not want anything
done," she thought.
" She is dull and morose; she works too hard, poor girl,"
thought he; and he moved away. " Good day, dear, for a
little; I will see you before I go."
" Go !—you go again then ? "
"Ah, yes! In a very little. It will be the autumn
season soon. I go whenever the ' Actea ' is played."
Palma looked up at him; straight in his face.
" And you are quite happy ? "
" Quite."
" And you are really great ? "
" Men say so. I do not know. I will be greater if I live."
"And Bruno lonelier."
She wished the words, when they were said, unsaid.
Signa's face clouded a moment.
"That is not my fault," he said, slowly. "And no—
perhaps he will not be;—when I am all that I dream of,
and when I have gold in both hands, I will come back and
live here on the hills, that I promise; and I will build a
palace of marble that shall look east and west; and all the
hungry shall be fed there, and all the footsore rest. And
then, when there are any boys quite desolate, as I was, and
dreaming beautiful things, as I did, and wanting help, and
not knowing where to turn, then they will all come to me;
and I will teach them, and we will sing together, and they
shall be happy, and we will give our lives for the world;
and men will love us, and through us love God: it will bo
SIGNA.
like the ' Angeli' of S. Marco dwelling together with music,
with the roses round them, and the sky above ! "
He stopped; the cloud had cleared from his face ; it was
shining with a light that was sweeter than the sun's.
He was only a boy still; and the world had not dimmed
his dreams with its breath.
Of all the innocent things that die, the impossible dreams
of the poet are the things that die with most pain, and,
perhaps, with most loss to humanity. Those who are
happy die before their dreams. This is what the old Greek
saying meant.
The world had not yet driven the sweet, fair follies from
Signa's head, nor had it yet made him selfish. If he had
lived in the age when Timander could arrest by his
melodies the tide of revolution, or when the harp of the
Persian could save Bagdad from the sword and flame of
Murad, all might have been well with him. But the time is
gone by when music or any other art was a king. All genius
now is, at its best, but a servitor—well or ill fed.
Palma listened, looking up at that bright, strange light
upon his face ; not understanding at all with her mind, but
wholly with her heart. The frozen pain in her melted.
She put her full basket back into the house.
" Will you come with me a moment ? "
" Where ? "
" To the old church, up yonder."
" Yes, dear."
She called to her little brother to mind the house, and
took Signa up the narrow, winding paths, just trodden down
in the grass by a few rare footsteps, going up amongst the
vines and then amongst the olives, and then where the land
grew wilder amongst the gorse. The vines were hung with
grapes that touched them as they went; the wild peaches
fell yellow at their feet; the blue radish-flower was in the
grass like gleams of the sky reflected on the dew; big oxen,
muzzled and belled, looked at them through the leaves.
"It is so beautiful!" said Signa, mounting higher and
higher into the tangle of green and the network of sun-
beams.
"Yes," said Palma. But she did not know it. She had
not time. Amongst all its sad losses, poverty has none that
beggars it more than its loss of perception.
SIGNA.
They reached the old church, brown and solitary, with' a
few cypresses near it, and round it the sheep grazing; it
had once been the chapel of a great villa, of which there
was nothing now left but roofless arches and a wall where
the rains of five hundred winters had not quite washed
away the frescoes.
She took him in, and led him up to the pillar by the altar
where the little picture hung.
" I bought it; I put it there," she said, timidly. "Perhaps
it has done nothing, you know; perhaps you do not want
it;—but at least it could do no harm, and I have come and
prayed here every little bit of time I had to spare. I am
sure the saints love you—without that or anything—but it
was all I could do. And when you were so far away "
Signa looked up at the column and understood it all. He
stooped and kissed her, touched to the quick.
" Ah, dear!—how good to think of me. You bought it
—you, who toil so hard ? Oh, Palma ! I will try and find
Gemma for you;—I shall find her;—something tells me so."
Palma sat down on the lowest altar step; she did not
answer. If he had looked at her face he would have seen that
it was very pale under the brown that the sun had scorched
on it. But he did not look; he was looking up at the
painted Sebastian against the roof, and thinking how bitterly
Gemma had cried one day because he could not reach down
the saint's golden arrows for her.
The sheep bells tinkled; the smell of the rosemary wras
sweet on the air; a bird sang, sitting on the old tattered
mass-book.
" Gemma is in heaven," said Palma, and sat still and pale
in the morning light.
Gemma!—who had always been so much happier than she.
" Perhaps I shall find her somewhere in the great world,"
said Signa, softly. " And she will have suffered, perhaps,
and sorrow have softened her and ennobled her—it does, they
say—and made her soul as beautiful as her little body was.
Think of that Palma ! and then I would bring her home to
the palace that I mean to build, and make her happy, so
happy ; and she would be in all my music, just as the sun
is in all the flowers. Think of that Palma ! Pray that it
may come true. It would be like a story out of the ' Legend
of Gold.' "
3 <32 SIGNA.
Palma was still very pale.
"You will see her in heaven," she'said. "She
drowned in that sea, that I am sure."
But Signa shook his head.
" She is alive ; that I am sure."
CHAPTEK XLIII.
Signa went down into the Lastra and sat awhile with
Teresina in the room over the sea-gate, and spoke with old
friends—of whom he found many, since they are flowers
that grow fast in the soil of success—and spent some hours
in the sacristy, turning over, with curious emotion, the
yellow scores and crabbed manuscripts which had once been
written to him in an unknown tongue.
Then he passed down into the city.
He knew so little of it, scarcely more than if he had
been a stranger. Bruno had held him back from it always.
He strayed into the galleries, quiet and deserted in the
strong August heats, and saw the face of the Samian Sybil
and the beauty of the Yenus of Titian.
As he wandered down the corridor which holds the por-
traits of the artists painted by themselves, he paused before
one which seemed to him, in a way, familiar. It was the
head of a man still young; a head that had grace and power
in it, but also a promise of levity and caprice. It was
roughly painted in black and white.
" Whose head is that ? " he asked the custodian dozing in
the sun.
" A living painter's—one Istriel."
" Of what country ? "
"France. He is a great man there. He did that for us
by order of the King."
"I have seen him somewhere; where does he live?"
said Signa, and mused a little while ; and then remembered
the morning of the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul, and the
gift of the Fair Christ.
SIGN A.
363
"He lives in France, I suppose," answered the other.
" But I think he is a great deal in Rome, I think he works
there a great deal."
" What kind of things does he paint ? "
" Women, for the most part, I believe. There is a picture
they talk very often of just now; you can see a copy of it
in the town: it is very fine—a woman."
" A portrait ? "
" Oh, no; just a woman dancing."
" I will see it," said Signa, and he went where the man
directed him for sake of those two gold coins that had
bought his Rusignuolo.
" Who knows ? " he thought, " without those forty francs
I might never have known more of music than to thrum on
a lute to the sheep."
Who could tell ? All Bruno's labour of eighteen years
might have been of less use than two gold pieces tossed by a
stranger.
He found the place where the copy of the great picture
could be seen ; a copy made by the painter's pupils, and
shown for a little while by his permission, the original being
in Paris. It was a picture of which all the world had talked
two years before, whilst Signa was buried under the dust
of study, and the darkness of poverty, and the disbelief of
men.
The copy was alone in a small cabinet, hung with red,
and lighted from the top ; it was a full-length form5; of a
woman dancing—only that; on a sombre background of
brown shadow.
Was it so beautiful ?
He did not know. But he shaded his eyes as from too
much sun. It dazzled him. The figure stood out from the
darkness like a living thing ; all the light was concentrated
on the exquisite fairness and warmth of the supple body, on
the head turned over the shoulder, on the upraised arms
tossing castanets above; on the knot of pomegranate buds
above the ear; on the rounded limbs, lithe as reeds and
white as snow; on the transparent scarf of scarlet, touched
with gold, which was the only drapery. The figure bent a
little backward, showing every curve and grace of it: the
face was beautiful.
It was called, with the arrogance of a genius that knew
SIGNA.
its hold upon the world, " A Sister for the Seven Dancers of
Herculaneum."
Signa stood before it blinded, stunned, confused.
No living woman had ever moved him as this dancer did.
He gazed and gazed till, as the passion of the Spanish love-
song says, " his heart's blood was drawn from him through
his eyes."
And yet the picture hurt him.
Hurt him by the taint that there was upon its loveli-
ness ; as there is in that of the Yenus Calipyge of Naples.
An old man, looking at the picture at the same time, spoke
of it.
"Yes; it is a beautiful study," the stranger said. "I
have seen the original. This is a fine copy. The artist has
touched it here and there himself."
"It is not a portrait?" said Signa, timidly. He could
not bear to speak of the picture, and yet he wanted to know
more of it.
" Oh, yes, it is a portrait. Only you see he has painted
it in the old Greek manner—the feet off the ground, no sign
of earth, indeed ; the figure floating, as if she flew. Yes, it
is drawn from life. A girl—a woman—whom they call
Innocence, in Paris."
" Innocence ! And painted there .' "
The old man smiled.
" Nay, Vitellius called his bear so. The wild beast shamed
it less than does the woman, perhaps."
The next morning he said to Bruno,
" I have found the name of the man who gave me that
money in the Lastra. It is Istriel. You remember my
losing the paper in the rushes as I ran."
" What do you want with any man now ? " said Bruno,
jealously ; " or with any man's help ? "
" Nothing, indeed; but I should like to see him."
" I cannot see why you should think about him."
" Perhaps I never should have got beyond my little lute
but for him."
Bruno gave an impatient gesture.
" We are what we are," he said, with rough fatalism. " It
is no chance wind that blows the notes into the nightingale's
throat, and the screech into the owl's ; all that is settled
beforehand."
SIGNA.
365
Signa was silent. He did not say his thought aloud
which was:
" I wish to meet this painter, because I want to know
where he found her, or if he only fancied her—that ' Sister
of the Seven Dancers.' "
He said instead, " Come down into the city and see a
picture of his."
"I cannot to-day," said Bruno, "because there is so
much to do. Watering alone takes six hours in this dry
weather; but to-morrow, perhaps, I can."
To-morrow he went. He did not know anything about
any of the arts, but he was at home amongst them; they
were familiar things to him: it is so with all his country-folk.
He stood and looked at it for some time ; then he laughed
a little.
" Yes ; it is a beautiful—wanton."
He had hit the blot on it.
Signa sighed unconsciously and restlessly. The picture
beguiled him, bewitched him, and yet hurt him.
Bruno said, " Do not look at it too long; it will get into
you—like marsh fever ; " and took him away.
When they were in the sun again • in the streets, he
added:
"If your baby Gemma were alive, that is just what she
would be like."
"No! never!" said Signa, indignantly; he did believe
she was living, but he looked for her always amongst the
innocent maiden faces at mass in the churches.
Bruno laughed a grim laugh.
"Let us hope she is dead," he said. " Only the devil
never cuts his very best flowers down early."
Signa did not answer.
"Your painter must be bred to spread the plague," said
Bruno.
Signa did not ask him what he meant.
He went and found Palma.
" You do pray for Gemma's soul ? " he said to her.
"Always," said Palma.
"Well, pray more, dear. Perhaps she needs it, who
knows ? "
" Oh, no ; she is in heaven," said Palma. " Such a child
■—and Christ so good."
366
SIGNA.
" Well, never mind. Pray always."
" That is all he thinks I am of use for, to pray for
Gemma's soul," thought Palma. But she reproached herself
for the thought, as mean and base.
She had never ceased to love Gemma and mourn her;—
only she wished he would not talk of her, not so very
much.
Signa wandered about the woods alone, and saw always
before him, in the golden fires of the summer clay, " The
Sister of the Seven Dancers."
She banished the sweet veiled face of Lamia.
"Your painter should cut off his right hand: it is like
the sun; it breeds corruption," said Bruno, who knew the
force of the flesh and the devil, and had in him a fierce,
scornful wrath against that picture which had burnt his
boy's soul with its impure sorceries.
One day Lippo met him in the pine woods, no one being
near.
"Dear nephew," said Lippo, softly. "We cannot meet.
Bruno is implacable. He will never forgive what he thinks
an injury. See here :—I know his little piece of land had
to be sold to give your work a trial and a chance of favour.
I said to myself: 'I have a kind father-in-law and good
friends, shall I offer to lend the money ? ' But then I
bethought me, ' Bruno would only answer with a blow.' So
when it was quite sure the land must go, I said to an honest
soul in the city whom I could trust, < Go, buy it in your own
name, and make it over to me; so the thing shall not
wound my brother, and yet the piece of ground not go away
from the family.' So said, so done. Dear—I only hold the
land in trust. I tried to explain to Bruno, but his head
was full of traitors and of wrath; I could make no way
with him. He would have brained me with his spade. But
this I wish to say to you—my children are dear to me, but
justice is dearer still. If ever you wish the land back again,
I will sign it over to you—almost as a gift: I would say
quite so; but, when one has so many mouths to feed, one is
not altogether the master of one's purse. Dear—be quite
sure of this : I bought it, hoping to please Bruno ; never to
spite and vex him, as he thinks. Christ knows there is no
venom in my heart. The other night, when you had such
a welcome I was proud and glad; I should have come fore-
SIGNA.
367
most out amongst them, only Bruno is so violent, and I
feared it might look like time-serving. But, believe me, no
»ne is prouder than I am, and Nita : she says fifty times if
once, ' To think he is so great—the little drowned baby that
sucked with Toto !' Dear—you have been made to think
ill of us. It is a pity. And in your grand, famous ways in
the future years you will not want us ; that is true. Still,
be sure our prayers go with you; and, though we are only
poor folks toiling hardly in a little village, we shall not
shame you, for we are Christians and we pay our way; and
if you ever should desire back that little bit of land—well,
I look on it still as yours, and I never let the interests of my
children bar the road of justice. No, that were to serve
them with very narrow sight and worldly selfishness. Bruno
has misjudged me always. Well—the saints bore all evil
and were patient. So must we. Dear—farewell. If ever
you dare brave my brother's wrath, and will like to look in
on us, you will find frank welcome. But perhaps I am not
right to ask it„ Your duty to Bruno before all things. Yes;
to you he has been good. Farewell."
And Lippo went away quite softly through the pines.
Signa was moved. True, they had been unkind to him ;
but such wrongs fade fast in generous natures, and, where
an impersonal passion reigns, personal injuries seem slight
and are soon forgotten.
Perhaps Bruno had been harsh and too swift in his ire,
he thought regretfully. Bruno's error was too great haste
of temper and strength of hatred; that all the country knew.
"I wish they could be reconciled," thought the boy, and
lingered on his way home wondering if there were any means
to do it.
He hinted at forgiveness that night to Bruno.
Bruno set his heel down with a force that jarred the
house.
"I do forgive as much as can be asked of any man;—I
let him be."
Meanwhile Lippo went homeward to his house by Our
Lady of Good Counsel, pondering whether he could not
prevail on Baldo to help him to acquire another acre or two
of ground, quite near on the same hill, which rumour said
would soon be in the market. Baldo had grown to have
strong faith in the prudence and wisdom of his son-in-law.
368
SIGJVA.
" You will let the boy have back the land at what yon
gave for it! " screamed Nita, when her husband told her of
the things that he had said ; for she was a rough, impetuous
woman, of fierce temper, and could never see an inch where
he saw full a mile.
Lippo smiled, his gentle pensive smile.
"Nay, dear; that is a question for the future. The
children's interests must not be forgotten ; that were not
just to them; and land rises in value every day, and money
gets more scarce."
And he sauntered out into the warm, star-lighted streets.
He liked his game at dominoes.
" I have seen the dear lad," he said to Momo and Tonino
and his other gossips. " I met him quite by chance. So
tall as he is, and so graceful, and so like a young prince:
one would not know him. His heart is full of love for us.
He cannot show it. No. He would come to us; but I
said to him—I say always—' Your duty, before all else, to
Bruno.' I must say it—knowing what I know. His duty
is to him :—as Toto's duty is to me. Oh, yes. He is a
noble lad: spoiled in much; yes, but of a good heart.
Bruno has not done ill in letting him have the land's money
for his opera; I know it has paid Bruno back thrice over.
Bruno has a clear head and a keen eye. They know that in
the Square of the Signoria. Poor boy ! Well—I say poor—
perhaps stupidly, but it does seem so. Parted from us all,
and ruled by Bruno ; and, like all people that have genius, a
baby, a simpleton, a mere piece of wax—in worldly matters.
All the country is ringing of him. It is a great thing to
think : unless we had let him go to the church functions and
learn the plain-song and be so much with the sacristan in
the organ loft, he might never have known all that there is
in him ; he might have been a little shepherd, barefoot on
the hills—yes, still. Throw your bread upon the waters ;—
aye :—perhaps come back to your own mouth it will not;
but you will be blessed by it, someway. The dear boy !—
no doubt in his great world he will forget us all, why not ?
We are peasants, when all is said ; and he will go to palaces.
But then the good that we have done to him keeps with us
like a cypress bough that never withers and drives the evil
spirits far away. Dear boy!—to think he is so great!—and
will be rich too; if, at least, his gold be left him, and his
SIGNA.
369
career well managed. That is the only thing I fear. Bruno
loves him—oh, surely—in his way. But then Bruno loves
money too."
And Lippo sighed, and piled the dominoes in a little heap
absently, and with a sad, nervous gesture—thinking. The
gossips shook their heads.
Lippo was so just a man : that all the town knew. Of
such men is the kingdom of heaven. To be sure his window
had been dark that night when all the Lastra was rejoicing;
but that had only been good feeling in him. He had not
liked to seem to claim the boy's grateful remembrance—
when there was such great triumph too.
" We may remind those who fail, of us," said Lippo, with
a gentle smile. "But we must be forgotten by those who
succeed—if they choose it shall be so."
"Your are so good," said his neighbours; and began to
mutter to one another that Bruno, when he had sent the
boy to the great schools and sold the land for him, had only
been sharper of sight and more prudent of forecast than
ever—yes.
And the Lastra was well content to think that, when it
had welcomed so loudly the young hero of the Actea, it had
left Bruno standing aloof, and had not noticed him—not
even when Signa bade them.
The lad stayed on till vintage came again and passed;
correcting and perfecting his new music of the Lamia in the
fresh hill air, in the sweet smell of the fruit; and now and
then went down into the city, and stood and gazed at the
dancer of Istriel, and drank in the impure sorcery of her,
without knowing it.
"Your painter is like the sun; he breeds rottenness
from beauty," said Bruno; who knew the force of the flesh
and the devil, as he called it, and felt a sort of sullen scorn
of this strange painter who spent his strength in giving en-
during shape to the fleeting graces of wantons.
To Bruno it seemed a poor thing to fill a man's life.
Women were women—to be toyed with if you would;
but to pass your life painting in their own likeness their
wiles of a moment and their postures of pleasure !—that
seemed to him poor pursuit enough. This painter was only
a name to him, a vague shadow ; but he felt a fierce wrath
against him. But for the coins that had bought the Rusig-
B B
SIGN A.
nuolo, who could tell ?—Signa might have dwelt contented
in the peaceful husbandry of the hills.
For the iron was always in his soul. He was proud of
nis boy, and loved him, and knew that now Signa could
never be other than he was ; and so ceased to chafe at the
unchangeable ; and tried to make the best of an undesired
destiny. But, like Palma, it was all in vain that he brought
his thank-offering, that he prayed to his gods, that he said a
thousand times, " I am glad."
In his heart there was no gladness.
In his heart he lamented still and rebelled.
With the last day of vintage Signa spent his last hours 011
the hills.
The Actea was being given at the theatre of Como, and
he had to go thither, and thence to Milan, where its music
was yet unknown.
He had a sort of longing to buy that dancer of Istriel and
take her with him, and look at her always; but it was
impossible : despite his own new-born fame and Lippo's
fables he was poor; he made some money, but no more
than was needed, for his costs of travel and his simple ways
of living and the gifts that he loved to throw broadcast.
He was famous, indeed ; but he was only a boy, and had to
deal with a shrewd world, and it cheated him. The world,
like Lacedemonia, is fond of hounding into silence and exile
its Timothei who dare to add new chords to its lyre of song;
but it is unwise to do it, for its Timothei are so intent on
stringing the lyre anew, and hearing the full, sweet sound of
their fresh creation, that the world may empty their pockets
unfelt, as it will, and unchidden. Its Timothei are its
golden geese—it should be content to pluck them; but it is
not often so : seldom is it satisfied with doing less than what
kills them.
It was very early in the morning.
There had been heavy rains at night, and there was, when
the sun rose, everywhere, that white fog of the Yaldarno
country which is like a silvery cloud hanging over all the
earth. It spreads everywhere and blends together land and
sky; but it has breaks of exquisite transparencies, through
which the gold of the sunbeams shines, and the rose of the
dawn blushes, and the summits of the hills gleam here and
there, with a white monastery, or a mountain belfry, or a
SIGNA.
57'
cluster of cypresses seen through it, hung in the air as it
were, and framed like pictures in the silvery mist.
It is no noxious steam rising from the rivers and the
rains: no grey and oppressive obliteration of the face of the
world like the fogs of the north ; no weight on the lungs and
blindness to the eyes ; no burden of leaden damp lying
heavy on the soil and on the spirit; no wall built up
between the sun and men; but a fog that is as beautiful as
the full moonlight is, nay, more beautiful, for it has beams
of warmth, glories of colour, glimpses of landscape such as
the moon would coldly kill; and the bells ring, and the
sheep bleat, and the birds sing underneath its shadow; and
the sunrays come through it, darted like angel's spears : and
it has in it all the promise of the morning, and all the
sounds of the waking day.
Bruno's dwelling was lifted out of it, but it spread every-
where beneath ; and the tops of the highest hills seemed to
ride on it like ships upon a sea.
Signa paused and looked over the vast scene as he and
Bruno came out into the air. He had to leave at eight of
the morning for the northern lakes, trusting himself to that
iron way and horse of fire which Bruno had never ceased to
hate and to mistrust, though night and day for so many
years he had heard the steam beast thunder dully through
his valley, winding as the river wound.
They came out of the house after their meal of bread,
which was all they broke their fast with, and stopped by
mutual impulse under the old mulberry-tree by the porch.
Bruno had said nothing to dissuade him from departure.
He had grown to see the necessity of their lives being
perpetually asunder.
Signa could only come to him now and then—that he
saw; and the times of his coming must grow rarer and
rarer, and the links of union between them fewer and fewer
—that he saw too. He never complained. He hardly
regretted. He had known that it would be so, when he had
broken the Busignuolo. It was a dull, ceaseless, unchanging
pain to him, but he said nothing. What was done, was done.
This young singer—this young hero—this young crowned
dreamer of dreams, could by no miracle be brought back
and be made into a peasant lad, and be contented with a
labourer's lot.
372
SIGNA.
If he ever returned to live here it would only be because
the world drove him back with a broken heart; therefore
Bruno said, in his dark corner in the church, to the unknown
powers that he worshipped : " Let him never be brought
back-—never."
The world had his boy. Since the world would only part
with him if it flung him bruised and ruined away,—let the
world keep him.
"After all it does not matter for me," said Bruno, and
taught himself to think so.
Only a vague fear, a shapeless anxiety, haunted him
always. He knew too little of any life beyond that of his
own country side to be able to go with Signa, even in fancy,
into these strange new lines of his fate. He was too ignorant,
and mistrusted himself too much, to be able to tell the lad
what it was that he dreaded. But in his heart he was full
of trouble.
" All is well enough with him now," he thought. "But
when the woman comes ?"
For Bruno thought that the great world, since it was made
up of men and women, must have the same fatality in it as
the life he knew.
The woman makes or mars the man: the man the woman.
Mythology had no need of the Fates.
There is only one; the winged blind god that came by
night to Psyche.
So much Bruno knew.
A weight of longing and of warning was upon his heart.
But he stood silent in the arched way of his house.
The boy seemed now so much wiser than he ; had seen so
many cities and men; had sown the seeds of his young
brain and made already harvest;—was great, though so
young. What could he say himself ?—a man who knew
nothing except to drop the wheat grain into the earth, and
wait for sun and storm to make it multiply ?
What came in his mind to say were a million confused
things; he did not know how to sort them, and shape them
into speech.
At last he did say, with the heavy gloom of parting on him :
" Woman is god or devil to man, as he to her. Bear,
when you love a woman—tell me. Will you tell me that ? "
Signa smiled musingly.
SIGN A.
373
" Oh, yes ! I love my Actea and my Lamia. They are
the real and living women to me. The rest are shadows."
" That will not last," said Bruno, curtly. " Your Actea
and your Lamia will be the shadows soon."
Signa shook his head.
"Not to me. Mozart loved his wife; but it was not of
his wife he thought when he was dying. It was of his
requiem."
" You speak like a child," said Bruno ; and they were silent.
It was of no use speaking: they did not understand each
other. The hoy knew the powers of art, of which the man
was insensible. The man knew the powers of passion, of
which the boy as yet was ignorant.
Bruno saw in the future a fate that wrestled with him for
the soul of Pippa's son. It wore to him the likeness of that
" Sister of the Seven Dancers" of the city of ashes.
To him she was a symbol: she haunted him ; he hated
her. She—or her likeness—would dispute the boy's life
with him.
As he had hated the sorcery of the Rusignuolo, so he
hated the vision of the unknown woman. What use were
the boy's promise, the boy's faith, the boy's foolish proud
confidence in the empire on him of his dreams ? Bruno
knew well—a woman would look some day,—just look;—
and all these things would be as vapours drifting before the
break of day.
" Love kills everything, and then dies itself," he said,
bitterly. " Or, perhaps, it does not die : then it is a flame,
always burning, burning, burning, till the body and the
heart are cracked, empty, shrunken potsherds. That is love."
Signa shuddered a little.
" You frighten me," he said.
" I wish I could," said Bruno.
And he knew that he could not: that, say what he would,
some single look from a woman's eyes would undo it some
day. He had never thought about it till he had seen that
Dancer with the pomegranate blossom, in the town; but
now he knew—there would be a foe to him some day, that
he would not be able to break under his foot, as he had
broken the Rusignuolo.
His heart was heavy, standing there in the white cold
mists of the daybreak.
374
SIGN A.
To the boy, the future was a golden haze—a mirage full
of fair colours—a certainty of national love and public
praise, and sweet intoxication, and all tho liberty of an
untrammelled genius. To the man, the future was dark :
he saw no way into it; he had no faith in it; he doubted
the good faith of the world.
No doubt it was because he was ignorant. He had told
himself so ; but he had no belief in this fair fortune blown
from the breath of other men.
" It is to plough and to sow in the sand-bed of tho
river," he said to himself. And it seemed to him that Signa
mistook the shadow of a reed for tho sword of fire of an
archangel.
" If your great world should turn against you, should
tire of you—they say it is capricious—your heart will be
broken," he said, abruptly, with his hand on the lad's
shoulder.
Signa looked up and smiled.
"No; the world cannot hurt me. My music has gone
down into the hearts of the people. It will live there.
Nothing else matters."
"But the world is changeable, I have heard."
" Fashion is—the people are not. In Milan the other day
they sang the same chants in the cathedral that St. Gregory
composed five hundred years after Christ. Nothing can hurt
me now. If the great world did not want me, I know my
force now. I should go through the countries, teaching my
songs to the people everywhere. Death itself would not
hurt me very much, because, though dead—they might
forget me quickly enough, no doubt—but the music would
live, and my soul would live in it. What else do I want ?"
"I cannot understand," said Bruno. "You talk as if
you had no body to be pained or pleased. One would
think you were a spirit—to hear you. It is nonsense ;—if
one kill a nightingale with a stone, then the song is killed
too."
"Perhaps not," said Signa, softly. "Perhaps a poet has
passed and heard it, and sings the song over again to the
world."
But Bruno did not see what he meant.
" One stones it, and it is dead; there is an end," he
repeated, with a sick, heavy sense of peril upon him —of
S1GNA.
375
what he did not know clearly; but it seemed to him that
the boy walked with his head in the clouds and his feet in
the quicksands.
He could not help it.
He could not guard Signa's steps, nor bend his eyes to
earth. It was beyond him. He could only hope ; and
with Bruno, do what he would, his hope had always the
drooped clipped wings of doubt.
They stood silent together; while the sun, behind the sea
of snowy mist, shone golden in their faces.
" Dear," he said, at last, " you go away into a vast
unknown world. I cannot help you, nor follow you ; nor
even warn you—not to do any good. I know the things of
the soil, as well as any man ; but nothing else. No doubt
you go to greatness, having won it for yourself already.
And you so young! And I suppose nothing else would ever
have contented you ; so, it is best so. But there are things,
I think, that will go hard with you—one cannot tell; you
have not suffered yet, and you seem all mind, just as a
flower is all bloom. That will not last: you will find the
beast in you some day—even you. Dear, it is not for me to
preach, or teach, or counsel anything. I have led a bad life
often, and I know nothing. If I were to begin to talk, I
might hurt you. One fears to handle your soul: it is like a
white moth—to me. What I want to say is just this. You
know I promised your dead mother. What one says to the
dead, one must keep faith to, more than to the living. The
living can avenge themselves, but those poor dead Dear,
will you remember ? I want to meet your mother, face to
face, on the Last Day; and to just say to her—' This is
your boy; I have done my best by him; he comes back to
you with a pure soul; I have given my life for his.' Will
you remember ? You are far away from me always now;
much farther than by miles. I can do nothing—only hope
and fear. If evil do assail you, think of that. Help me to
keep my faith with Pippa."
Signa heard him,—moved, subdued, perplexed.
The great shadow of Bruno's doubt fell also upon him.
Was there so much more peril in the world than ho
knew ?
He bowed his head.
" I will try," he said, simply.
3/6
SIGNA.
Bruno thought, " He does not say—I will."
They left the house, and went down through the wet
woods and the clouds that floated on the sides of the hills.
Before another hour, he was gone.
Bruno stood a little while alone on the edge of the iron
rails, listening to the distant thunder of the steam, as the
last curl of the smoke disappeared in the windings of the
valley. The fog had lifted and passed away. Mountain and
river and vineyard and homestead stood out clear in the
morning light; his own hill rose above them all,—the
quarries shining in the sun, the bold pines piled against the
brightness of the sky.
" It is a good augury," he said, to himself.
He tried to think so.
He retraced his steps up the cliff road, and went home
alone, and yoked his oxen to the plough, and drove them up
and down beneath the vines, as on the day when Pippa's
body had drifted away on the face of the flood to the depths
of the sea.
" It is a good augury," he said to himself, as the glory of
the morning spread over all the earth beneath him.
But, though the sun shone, it seemed to him as if, on all
the land and water, a great, empty, desolate silence had
fallen.
All was so still.
He was alone.
" The birds do not sing after vintage," he told himself;
and tried to think that it was only that.
CHAPTER XLIV.
Palma looked out of her cottage door, and saw the trail of
the smoke too—going farther and farther away under the
green leaves along by the river, round between the moun-
tains. She watched it, shading her eyes; and turned slowly
within into the house.
SIGNA.
377
He had not thought to say a word of parting that morn-
ing; a kind, careless farewell, the night before, at the
garden gate, when Bruno was by—that had been all.
"Why do you cry, Palma?" said the youngest of her
brothers, who was only twelve, and a cripple, with his small
limbs mis-shapen and withered.
'' Do you ask ?—with father not six months in his grave ?''
murmured Palma.
Her heart smote her as she said it. She was lying to the
child.
She went about her daily work. It was for her as if she
did it in the dark. But she did it, missing nothing—not
even slurring anything. There was so much to be done,
with all those five boys, and two only of them earning
anything.
Once in that long, laborious day she stole up-stairs, and
looked at the necklace.
"He was thinking that he was buying for Gemma," she
said, as she looked.
Later in the day, the eldest son of Cecco, the cooper,
came and leaned over the wall as she worked. He was a
cooper too, and a fine-built youth, and well spoken of in the
Lastra.
"You will not think of it, Palma ?" he said to her, with
his brown eyes wistful and sad.
"You are good; but, no;—never!" said Palma, and
went on weeding.
What he wanted her to think of was himself. He did
not mind her cropped hair, that would grow. He loved her
industrious ways, her independence, her patience, her care of
her brothers. His father was well-to-do ; he would look over
the absence of a dower.
" I shall not marry," said Palma, always.
And when the young cooper said, for the hundredth
time, "You will not think of it?" in this warm, radiant,
summer forenoon—Palma only said, "Never!" and went
on, stripping her tomatoe bushes of their fruit, and hoeing
between the lines of her newly set cauliflowers.
She belonged, she said, to her brothers. So her living
self did—her body and her brain, such as it was; and her
strong, laborious, untiring feet and hands. But her heart
belonged to two other lives—one dead and the other lost:
378
SIGN A.
llio two lives that had been by hers in their childhood, in the
moonlit lemon alleys of G-iovoli, and the calm shadows of
the old church of S. Sebastian.
Signa and Gemma were always together in her thoughts:
—one dead, the other lost.
Cecchino, the son of Cecco, could give her a good house
in the Lastra, and a full soup-pot always, and a good store
of house linen, and shoes and stockings, and a settled place
in the world. Oh, yes ; she knew. And his mother, who
was a tender soul, had said, " He loves you, we will not
mind about the dower, and you shall have my own self-spun
sheets and my string of pearls." And they were all good—
good as gold. And Beppo and Franco, who foresaw help
for themselves in this union, upbraided her always, and
railed at her when the bread was too stale, or the sour wine
ran short.
But Palma—though she knew, none better, the worth of
bread and wine in this life, and the use of a strong arm to
bar the door against the Old Man Poverty whom the devil
has given leave to hobble perpetually upon the earth and
creep in at all cold hearths—Palma shook her head, and
would not even think of it, however Cecchino besought
her.
" I will not marry you ; I do not love you," she told him.
And Cecchino urged that marriage should come first, love
last, with women.
" Not so," said Palma. " That is to have the leaves
bitter and the flowers leafless—like the endive. But it is
not only that. I will not marry. I will work for my
brothers while they want it; and when they do not want
me, I will go into a convent—and rest so. That is what I
mean to do—Our Lady willing."
And Cecchino could not change her.
That was what she meant to do.
Best so;—a brown-faced, middle-aged woman, in a white
coif, saying prayers in a little cell, on knees stiff from many
years of toil, and going amongst the orphans and the poor,
and tending dying souls—that was how she saw herself in
the future.
It did not appal her.
Any thought of marriage did.
In the convent she would be able to pray for Signa and
SIGNA.
379
for Gemma;—and then in heaven she might see their
faces.
Perhaps, if she worked very hard and prayed very much,
the Madonna might call her up quickly, and give her some
grace of beauty, there, in heaven to be like them. Some-
times she hoped that, quite humbly; and never sure that
she could merit it.
In the twilight of this day—having laboured hard, and
seen her brothers come and go, and smiled on them, and
forced a cheerful laugh for them, because a dull house was
bad for boys, and apt to drive them to the wineshops and
the lotteries—Palma stole up, foot-weary though she was, to
the little church above the gardens of Giovoli.
She carried her little crippled brother on her back, because
he fretted if he were left long alone, and set him down where
the last gleam of sun fell, and gave him a few pebbles to play
with, which contented him, because he was not very bright
of brain.
Then she went herself and prayed in the nook by the
column where the S. Cecilia hung. She had lost faith in it,
because he had seemed to have none. He had thanked her
for her thought of him, but he had never seemed to think it
possible that it could have helped him in any way to fame.
" Keep him safe in the world, and let him meet Gemma
in heaven," she prayed; and said it over and over again, in
passionate reiterated supplication, clinging to the pillar with
her arms wound about it, and her forehead pressed against
its cold grey stone.
She prayed there till the moon shone through the stained
window on to the broken jasper ; and the little cripple cried
because the air grew cold, and he*could not rise to catch the
glow-worm alight upon the altar step.
She did not ask anything for herself.
Hard work for ten or twenty years longer, and then rest
—on the rough boards of a convent bed, and by the death
agonies of beggars.
That was her future.
It did not affright her.
" Only keep him safe on earth,—and her in heaven."
That was all she prayed.
She wus sure the saints would hear her.
She came out into the moonlight, carrying the lame boy
380 SIGN A.
on her back, and - with the glow-worai like a little lamp
within her hand. She was almost happy.
Prayers, innocent and in firm faith, brought the benedic-
tion of their own fulfilment. She was sure of that.
CHAPTER XLV.
It was a sultry night northward.
There was a storm in the air, but it had not broken. The
great lake was curled by the faintest of breezes. There was
the smell of oranges—leaf and flower and fruit—upon the
air. Little boats went sailing through the shadows. The
constellations of the Winged Horse shone clear high up in
the heavens, though all round the horizon the skies were
overcast—the Horse that has a star for his nostril, and that
is plumed with strong desire, and that says to the poet,
" Mount, and ye shall enter the realms of the sun with me,
and ride also through the endless night where Persephone
lies sighing."
Signa—who did not know the stars by any name, but
loved them as all dreamers do, and held them in that wistful
awe which was with him one half the terror of a child, one
half the woader of a thinker—was drifting in a little boat
over the quietness of the water, and looking up at Pegasus.
They were giving his ^music at Como; and they were
about to bring the Lamia out in Milan. He went where his
music went, as the way is in this country. But the small
strife of the theatres, and the contentions and envious revil-
ings, and the men and women with whom he had to do,
were all painful to him : too rough, too real, too coarse for
him. He broke from them whenever he could, and they had
ceased to try and alter him; he was no more fit for their
world, they saw, than a young nightingale for a gay brawl-
ing street. They laughed at him—which he seldom knew,
or knowing, did not heed—and let him live in his own
fashion as he liked, and made their money out of him, and
SIGNA.
381
said all genius was no better after all than an inspired
idiotcy, and he was such a boy: only a little peasant still,
though he had so sweet a face and so soft a grace.
Signa was careless of them—utterly careless.
He was so purely, naturally, innocently happy, that
nothing could much stir or trouble him. All the noise
around him was like the sound of a whirlpool to a child
seated high on the rocks, who hears it, but only sees the
silver seagulls and the sunshine. All the fret of their life
could not hurt him; he saw only the dreams and the desti-
nies of his own.
What was beautiful to him in those long months of wan-
dering were not the pleasures which his associates found;
he hardly cared even for the praise that made his pilgrimages
triumphs. What were beautiful to him were the changing
mountains, the fresh wide waters, the unknown old cities,
the treasuries of lost arts, the noble churches, the silent
monasteries, the lonely little towns that had all some wonder
of stone or of colour; the delicious free sense, as of a
bird's flight, with which he was borne from place to place,
filling his brain with memories, as a child its hands with
flowers, thinking each new one found still lovelier than the
last.
He drifted now in his little boat: a fisherman rowed him
from point to point along the shores. He had talked to the
man till they were both tired ; going with the current, little
movement of the oars was needful; the man sat mute,
thinking of his haul of fish of that morning ; Signa lay back
looking up at the radiance of Pegasus.
He did not know it as the constellation that belongs to all
who dream of any art, but its stars shone down on him
with a bright serene light, and he thought how they were
shining too upon the water and the hills about his home.
His heart always went back to the Lastra.
His fondest fancy was of what should be the manner of
his return to it; to raise works of marble like the palaces
he saw, and live a great life in peace and pleasure, with a
choir of young singers like himself around him, and the love
of all the country with him.
He was so young still; such dreams were possible to him.
His hands were filled with the fast-fading laurels of earth,
but he believed them the changeless asphodels of heaven.
SIGNA.
The life of Rossini, had he seen it close, would have hurt
him like a blasphemy.
To Signa—reared in simple religious faiths, half pagan,
half monastic, which were quite real to him—victory was
obligation.
God had given him his desire; so he thought. He said
always to himself, " What can I render back ? "
In so many things he was only a little peasant still.
The boat floated along, rocked gently on the liquid dark-
ness.
He watched the stars, and dreamed, and dreamed, and
dreamed, and seemed to see again, white upon the shadow,
a statue he had seen that day at noon: the Love and
Psyche of Canova.
Canova—whose soul was dead when he moulded the
lascivious charms of the Borghese Venus and the poor
vulgar graces of the Dancing Girls—has put all his soul into
this marble.
For one moment, in his vision of the face of Love, he
has reached the height where the Greek sculptors reign
alone.
In the face of Love there is the very heaven of passion
—all its longing, all its languor, all its ineffable aban-
donment and yearning, all its absolute oblivion, which
makes it live only in one other life, and would let the
earth dissolve and the heavens shiver as a burnt scroll,
and take no heed, so that " only from me this be divided
never."
The boy had watched the statue long, with a strange sense
of something missed in his own young years—something
unknown; and like a hot wind over him had come the
memory of the dancing girl of Istriel.
He had hated the memory, yet there it came.
Her face effaced the softer face of Psyche : Psyche, who
is not worthy Love in the marble, as in the fable of the
lamp.
Floating along the shores of the lake he dreamed of the
statue ; only, do what he would, instead of Psyche he saw
always the form of the dancer of Istriel. And the boy in
his ignorance smiled, remembering the warnings of Bruno.
" What does he know ? " he thought, " living on his hill
there. All men love—the lowest and the highest. One
SIGNA
383
would be greater surely in all ways, not lesser—if one
loved."
For be did not know that Love will only reach bis height
by treading all other things beneath his foot. He did not
know that Love lends a fire divine to human souls only by
burning all their world to waste.
The boat paused at a bend in the shore, grated a little,
and then was fastened to the land.
Signa leapt out with the fresh cool leaves smiting him
sweet blows upon his eyes and mouth. They had reached
the little village where he liked to sleep and see the dawn
break over the lake better than to remain in Como, where
the singers drank, and laughed, and quarrelled until day-
break, and thought it ill of him unless he joined them.
The boat went on to where the rower lived;—Signa
strolled a little on the shore. It was not late, and he could
see the white-walled cottage where he had house room
amongst its orange-trees and myrtles, and he wished to
watch the storm which, country-born and hill-bred as he
had been, he knew was rising, though the lake was still.
The village stood on a small creek : its woods and thickets
went to the water's edge; it was a wilderness of roses. It
had a little white church, with one bell; several huts and
houses of peasants and fisberpeople ; and a few villas, that
were sought by summer idlers and by rich strangers towards
the early autumn time.
Signa walked on the edge of the water, his feet in rose-
leaves and fallen jessamine flowers : the- shore was all a
garden, wild or cultured according as the proprietor of the
soil were poor or rich.
He wandered along till he lost sight of the roof of his
own little dwelling, listening to the soft lapping of the little
waves upon the stones and the splash of distant oars.
All at once he paused. He saw a statue in the water
through the leaves—at least, he thought it so.
It was the white figure of a woman, half clothed in close
clinging draperies, which with her right hand she held
upward to her knees ; with the other hand she was gather-
ing her hair into a great knot; her naked feet were in the
shining water ; her arms were bare too. She was quite
still at the moment he saw her first, as though awaiting
something; the moon had come out of a heavy cloud, and
3«4
SIGNA.
fell on her, so that she looked a piece of sculpture, white as
Psyche was.
Then, tired of holding up her hair, she let it fall in a
sudden shower, thrust the boughs of the wild roses apart,
and stepped from the pebbles and the water on the shore.
The movement brought her face to face with Signa.
He saw she was no statue, but a woman ; young and
living, and impatient of some delay; dripping with water,
which ran from her hair and limbs in silvery rain, and made
her white thin garments cling to her. She had been bathing
in the solitude of her gardens, into which he unwittingly
had strayed.
Signa stood still and gazed at her, too much amazed, too
startled, too confused, to move or speak. His face flushed
with shame—shame for himself and shame for her.
" Forgive me," he murmured; but his feet were rooted to
the ground, his heart beat so loudly it seemed to him to fill
the air. The woman—all white there, with her shining
limbs and shiniug hair tangled in the thickets of the roses,
with her wet small feet like ivory upon the moss—he
thought it all a dream.
She had started, too; then she looked at him with a
smile slowly uncurving the rose leaves of her close pouted
lips. She was in no wise embarrassed. She stood looking
at him with the moonrays full upon her, making the water-
drops like pearls.
Then she laughed.
A pretty laughter pealing through the garden silence, she
shook her hair over her like a veil, her white arms and
bosom shining through it as through a golden network, like
cobwebs in the sun.
Another woman ran quickly up to her with breathless
excuse for absence, holding a scarlet shawl in her out-
stretched arms. She let it be wrapped round her, and
turned away, looking at Signa through her hair.
" Stay there," she said to him ; " stay there, and string
a romance upon me. I am wet—I was bathing. I will
come back. Stay there ! "
He stood there, stupefied and entranced, as she had
bidden him ; not sure, still, whether it were a woman indeed,
or only a statue that his fancy warmed.
He was not sure that all was not a trick of his own
SIGN A.
imagination, and of the sudden shining of the moon out
from the dark night.
He stood, bewildered and breathless, listening with throb-
bing pulses to every noise in the leaves and on the water.
If she were a living creature, she had bade him wait.
For his life he could not have moved away.
He felt hot with shame for her if she were indeed a living
thing.
Strange stories he had heard in the old folk-lore of the
Lastra—where people believe in many an eerie phase of the
night side of nature—came over him with a shiver. What
human thing could have looked half so white ? or could have
borne his gaze without a blush ? or could have laughed
straightly in his face as she had done ?
His brain was giddy, his heart beat high ;—he glanced up
to find his stars, but they were gone—the clouds had covered
them. The rose-boughs rustled, the grasses seemed to
thrill, the shallow water shimmered at his feet. Would she
come back, or had she only mocked him ? Was she like
the beautiful white woman who cannot forget her crimes,
but wakes from her grave and strays all night through the
great forsaken gardens of the Medici ? He shuddered as he
thought—he who had been reared where the people believe
in the ghostly wanderings of Bianca Capella.
He longed for her back again, and yet he feared her. He
strained his eyes to watch for her in the gloom, and yet he
was afraid—afraid as he had never been in his childhood
going in the darkness over the lonely hill-lands peopled with
the spirits of the dead, as peasants told him.
It might have been hours that he waited there, it might
have been but moments ; he could not tell which, he had no
sense of time ; but the moon was still shining when he saw
her.
She came under the leaves of the orange-trees through
the crossing rose-boughs to him; she was still wrapped in
white—some glistening thing with silver in it, like a spider's
web that has caught the dew; her wet ham fell over her
shoulders ; her feet were shod in soft white furs; she had
put a string of pearls about her throat, which gleamed a
little as snow does as she moved; she came through the
shining moonlit leaves, bending down towards him and
smiling.
c o
386
SIGN A.
"mave comeback. "Why, how you look! I was too
wet to stay. I know you—yes. I saw you last night,
and once before in "Venice. Signa ! Why, how you look 1"
He fell at her feet, touching the hem of her white robe
with tremulous timid hands, and gazing up at her with eyes
of doubt and fear and adoration, because she was so wonder-
fully fair to look at, and yet he was afraid of her as of a
creature not of earth and not of heaven, just such a lovely
terrible thing as that which walked at midnight in the old
green gardens of the Medici.
" What are you ? " he murmured with the soft grace of a
poet's homage. " You know me—you? Oh, speak a little !
Are you my Lamia, that I have dreamed of so often ? Or
are you Psyche that I saw at noon ? You cannot be a living
thing, you are too beautiful."
She stooped, and with her soft, cool hands ruffled the
thick hair falling on his brow, and laughed and threw a rose
against his lips.
" Lamia ! Psyche ! They are dead : I live. Know you!
Of course I know you. And when I saw you at Venice I
was glad ; only I said ' he shall not see me yet—not yet.'
And was it all mere chance to-night ? I thought perhaps
you knew, and came. No ? Why, how you look! But,
indeed, how should you know me ? I was a little ragged
thing. How well it was we ran away that fair-day, and
how sad you were, and how you cried ; and yet I made you
play. Poor Signa ! "
She, stooping still above him, put her fresh lips to his
hair and kissed him on the eyes; and then she laughed
again, and then again she leaned to kiss him.
But Signa had sprung upward to his feet.
His face was very pale ; his eyes had horror in them and
amaze.
" Gemma ! " he muttered. " Gemma ! Gemma ! "
A cloud of anger gathered on the fairness of her face.
"Yes, I am Gemma. Well ?"
" Gemma!"
He said the little familiar name again and again, stupidly,
as a man says a charm, gazing upon her in the moonlight.
He had looked for her among the poor maidens of the work-
ing world, amongst the crowds at mass ; he had thought
often of finding her lonely, longing for home, repentant of
SIGNA.
387
lier flight, living in gome little nook among the roofs, making
her daily bread by some sad means; and he had dreamed
of how he would raise her up and take her back and crown
her with his laurels and make her glad. And this was
Gemma.
This beautiful thing unshamed, who came to him wet from
the water and laughed, with the moonlight on her wet, half-
naked limbs. This was^ Gemma.
She was silent. A great anger obscured the beauty of
her face, but there was a touch of shame with it. Her hands
tore a rose asunder and threw the leaves on either side of
her. She had looked for the passionate rapture with which
all her years were full: this mute rebuke in its gentleness
smote her dully like a blow.
He stood looking at her with a dazzled, bewildered pain ;
he was not certain that he was awake ; he thought of Palma,
praying for her sister and sure she was with Christ.
" Gemma ! Is it you, Gemma ? " he murmured. " You
were a little ragged thing—you were so poor, and now you
have those pearls about your throat. Palma was sure you
were in heaven, but I said no. I always said that I would
find you, only I thought so differently. I always hoped—
so lonely, so penniless, so sorrowful for them all at home ;
and then I thought how I would take you back, and we
would love you all the better for the sorrows you had had.
And now you are like this. Ah, God ! "
His voice shook, his lips trembled; the words were all
incoherent, confused, almost foolish; but she knew all he
meant.
" Poor ! lonely 1 sorrowful! " she echoed ; and her azure
eyes laughed back at him, though they had more rage than
mirth. " You thought I should be that ?—I ? Did I not
get the things I wanted always ? You forget."
" That is what Bruno said," he muttered, and was still.
" Bruno t"
She had forgotten nothing; nor had she forgiven any-
thing, child though she had been.
When Bruno had dragged her off the sands by the sea
away from the gifts and the praises of the great people, she
had marked it in her thoughts, a thing to be avenged.
Between the manhood of Bruno and her babyhood there had
been always war.
388
SIGN A.
" Your father died in Lent," said Signa suddenly. He
did not know what to say. He fancied still she was some
shadowy thing that mocked him in the moonlight, not
Gemma living.
She looked grave and troubled for a moment.
" Died ! He was not old ? "
" No, he was not old."
He echoed the words unconsciously. He did not know
what he felt. His heart seemed stifled. He caught her
hands in his.
" Oh, Gemma! is it true ? Oh, my dear, speak to me
more ! I never have forgotten you, Gemma. After my
music I loved you best of anything ; yes, better than Bruno,
I think—heaven forgive me ! You were a little trouble-
some, cruel child, but you were—Gemma. Oh dear, it
cannot be—you did not seem to have any woman's shame
about you just now looking at me in the water; and then
those pearls, and all this dainty, delicate stuff like silver.
Gemma, oh Gemma! tell me for the good God's sake, you
are not a thing that your father can never meet in heaven ?
You are not—lost to us all for ever ? "
Her eyelids were dropped as he spoke, and there was not
light enough for him to see the changes that passed over
her face ; anger, contempt, derision, trouble, amusement,
all following one another; each and all moved in her by his
simple words, but none reaching any depth.
She hesitated a moment how to answer him, he seemed to
her so foolish—oh, so foolish ! and yet she did not wish for
his disdain or his rebuke. She thought she would cheat him
just a little while—to see.
She looked at him with the old pouting anger on her
lovely mouth, the anger he had known so well when the
little child in the gardens of the Giovoli was thwarted in her
whim.
" You are very quick to judge me ill," she murmured.
" Ah, dear, if I judge you wrong, may God heap coals of
fire on my head. But what can I think, Gemma ? Answer
me; answer me truly. I could not hate you, Gemma, not
if you were fallen to the vilest depths. Palma might. I do
not know—I could not. Oh, my dear, do tell me truly,
what fate have you found in the world ? What thing have
you become ? When they said that you were dead, I
SIGNA.
389
loathed myself for letting you have your way that morning,
and so letting you drift to your own misery ; but oh, my
dear, my dear,—if it should be with you so that death at its
worst would have been better! I do not judge you,
Gemma ; only tell me—tell me truth ! "
He knelt down before her in his eagerness and pain; he
held her hands; his face, as it looked up to hers, was white
with fear and with anxiety.
She was so lovely, too, above him in the shadows, with
the rose-boughs caught against her and the wet gold of her
hair touching the silvered orange-leaves.
"Am I not beautiful, Signa?" she murmured. "The
rest ? What does the rest matter—for a woman ? "
" Oh, God ! Is that all you say ? "
He rose again to his feet. Almost he hated her, this
perfect shameless thing. And yet she was so beautiful.
Looking at her, he shaded his eyes as from the sun or the
heat of fire.
" Poor Palma ! " he muttered. " Day and night she prays
Christ for your soul."
" My soul! "
Gemma smiled—a soft, slow smile.
Then she looked at him full in the eyes. She did what
sire would with any man, that way.
"You are too quick to judge. Come back to-morrow ; to
the house yonder. Now it is nearly morning. I am cold
still after the water. I bathe by moonlight because a negress
told me I should keep my beauty so; there is a charm in
it. Good-night. Oh, you will come—yes, I know that.
No ! Do not stop me. I am cold, I say. Good-night—
come back to-morrow."
She drew her white clinging clothes out from his grasp,
and laughed a little; for indeed she was amused, though
troubled, and put the orange-boughs aside and threw another
rose at him and went: whither he could not see, the night
had grown quite dark.
" Gemma ! Gemma ! stay ! " he cried to her. " If you
be Gemma, do not leave me so ! "
But he called to her in vain. He was alone.
The first thunder of the coming storm rolled over from
the mountains, a shrill wind blew on the lake water, the rain-
drops fell.
390
SIGNA.
She left him to meet the tempest as he might. Wet
through, he reached with difficulty the little cottage higher
by the shore.
It was dawn; but the dawn was darker than the night
had been.
The hurricane was severe, and the sullen lake wrecked
more than one boat that in the moonlight had danced lightly
on its smiling surface.
Signa did not even try to sleep.
He watched the storm.
CHAPTER XLYI.
There were thunder and lightning and wild north winds
all over land and sea, even to the great plains on either side
the Apennines.
The storm travelled as far as the Valdarno, reaching there
by morning, and men watched the rivers, fearing flood
again, and farmers thanked the saints that maize harvest
and vintage had been safely passed.
Palma, working in the fields for a small wage above upon
the slopes, and driven to seek refuge from the violence of-
the weather, sheltered herself in S. Sebastian's little church,
where the sheep also huddled together out of reach of the
rain.
She was not afraid.
She told her heads and said her prayers as the blue
lightnings flashed around her, and the winds howled.
" Dear God, keep him safe from harm," she prayed,
" And let Gemma, who is with you, where no storms come,
watch over him."
SIGNA.
391
CHAPTER XLYIL
Meanwhile, the woman of his vision let her people
unclothe her, and she lay down in her white soft bed, and
thought: the storm might beat without, she paid no heed
to it; it might wreck boats, flood fields, kill birds and
beasts and butterflies, send men and women homeless over
ravaged farms—but her it could not hurt. Why should she
think of it ?
She was amused, and yet there was disquiet at her
heart.
She hated all the old dead time ; hated the bare memory
of it: of its hunger, of its cold, of its hardship, of her little
naked feet, of her dirty, merry, kindly father, of her bed of
hay, of her platter of wood. She hated it all; and it had
sprung up before her suddenly till it all seemed alive.
She liked never to think of it—never. It was for this
that in Yenice, seeing her old playmate the hero of the
hour, she had left the city whilst still unknown to him.
And yet she had wanted to show herself to him.
" Chance shall choose," she said to herself, and when she
had recognised him in the moonlight among the orange-
leaves she had walked straight to him.
She was glad upon the whole ; though ruffled, and dis-
turbed, and angered, too, because of his strange way of
taking things.
It made her lie awake and think of the old years, and the
skill with which she, a little hungry ragged child, one
amongst many, had got to have her beauty known all over
many cities, and to have those big pearls—big as linnets'
eggs—about her throat, when she was tired of her diamonds.
But pearls best became her ; that she knew. Older women
have need of diamonds to lend new lustre to dimmed
charms; but she was fresh as any rose. And she was
known as " Innocence." So she wore oftenest her big
pearls, that no empress could have beaten; as her sister
peasants away in Tuscany wore their little seed-pearls on
feast-days amongst the brown hillfields.
Lying awake now, with the blue of her eyes just gleaming
under her curled lashes, she thought of that fair day
392
SIGN A.
in Prato, and of the sunny tamarisk trees by the shore, and
of her struggle from the window, and her hurry across the
wharves, and her escape in the brown-sailed fishing-smack
that her captor had bribed to take them over the open sea.
She thought of how she had laughed and danced and
clapped her hands as the rough old boat spread its wet sail,
and rocked and tore before the wind that rose as the day
declined, and blew hot and hard from the south-east, while
the man said to her, " No more black bread, my pretty pet:
all cakes and fruit in the future."
It had not been all cakes and fruit at first.
When he was sure of her he beat her. She bit his hand
through. He tumbled her amongst a score of other children,
older and younger, and took them to northern cities, and
sent them about, some on stilts and in spangles, some with
white mice and music, some with little statues—all thrashed,
and starved, and made to do his bidding.
Her fate was what the Lastra fancied that it was, knowing
how many children of this sort there are kidnapped, to
shiver in the wet sad north.
But this endured only a very little while, with her.
She was so pretty. He knew her value. He would not
leave her too hungry, or send her out in too cold weather.
He knew that she was like a good wine, and would pay well
for keeping.
One day, however, once more he beat her.
She darted into the street, and showed her little shoulders,
and all the bruises, and sobbing drew a crowd grieved and
indignant round her.
The crowd set on the man, and hounded him out of the
town under a rain of stones; a good old woman took her
home, weeping over her, and gave her a home.
That was three months after the fair at Prato, and took
place in the town of Mechlin.
She lived there a few years like a little mouse in a sugar
closet; the woman was aged, childless, and well off, keeping
a lace shop in the midst of the beautiful, gi-ave, quaint, grey
little city.
She was petted, pampered, fed on dainties; she teased all
the girls, and made all the boys slaves for her ; she learned
to read; she stole anything she wished for and could not
get without stealing, and was either never found out, or else
SIGNA.
393
always forgiven; people said she had a face like the little
Jesus.
Then she got tired. At Kermesse there came into the
place a troop of players.
She went to see them.
The chief of them said to himself, " What a beautiful
child ! " and spoke to her a little later as she trotted to
mass.
He tempted her to join them. She was too young to act,
but she could sing a little. He said he would make pieces
on purpose for her. She should just show herself; he said
that would be enough. He painted the world and his wan-
dering life in bright colours.
She pondered well, and weighed the matter, as her wont
was, with solid sense, and no idle misleadings of fancy. She
never dreamed. She only said to herself, " What is best for
me?" and what she saw was best she chose.
If any one suffered by her doing, she said to them, as the
ploughman to the flower, " Is it my fault that you grow in
my way ? "
Born in a little hut in the green leafy solitudes of a
garden, she had been gifted at birth with the fine sense
which leads straight to success : the sense of the paramount
claims of self.
She pondered awhile till the players were on the wing;
then she took a pretty quantity of the oldest and most
delicate lace, some gold out of the till in the little shop, and
all her clothes, and went with them, slipping out of the
house at night whilst the old woman was sleeping.
" I can always go back if I want," she thought. " She
will always forgive me anything."
And she ran out of the city to join her new friends
outside the gates, with a heavy bundle but a light heart.
She was then thirteen.
The old woman who loved her, waking to her loss, would
not believe that the child was to blame ; and when people
told her that the child had been seen going out of her own
free will to the north, she would not credit them : robbers
had taken the lace and the gold, and killed the child—that
was her certainty. And being old, and all alone, and taking
it too much to heart, she was never able to leave her bed
again, and in a few weeks died of it-
394
SIGN A.
Meanwhile the child throve.
The people she had joined were gay and good-natured,
and merry if not wise ; and in their way well to do. They
adored her. She did as she liked. For the lace she had
taken no one molested her. She showed herself nightly in
little bright laughter-loving towns and cities. She had little
to do, still less to say; they looked at her : that was quite
enough.
She had not talent of any kind; but she had a shrewd
sense that to let her lovely baby face look like a little
angel's was enough : and it was so.
When she was nearly sixteen, the people went to play in
the city of Paris. She said to herself, " Now! "
She refused to play with a true foresight—she would not
cheapen herself. She put her old white Flemish lace all
about her like a cloud; she looked half like a cherub, half
like a nun. She went and strayed by herself through gilded
gates into the first public gardens that she saw.
It was summer, and the alleys were full of people ; they
all looked after her ; she thought how good a thing it was to
live.
The painter Istriel met her.
He was rich.
The players saw her no more.
After three months he painted her as " Innocence " look-
ing with wondering eyes upon the world.
Nature gave her loveliness ; Istriel gave her fashion.
Three years later he painted her as the sister of the Seven
Dancers.
But by that time he had had many rivals.
He professed content. He cherished bitterest remem-
brance.
She had only used him. He had loved her.
To others he seemed to have passed from her lover to her
friend indifferently; himself he knew that jealousy would
never die in him whilst she had life.
She knew it too. It diverted her.
It never prevented her from smiling on whosoever most
pleased her caprices and most lavished upon her the wealth
she loved.
For the rest, she was at the height of her supremacy, and
she never let it make her dizzy; she kept the calm, wise,
SIGNA.
395
steady judgment of her own advantage that she had pos-
sessed even when a little child ; and she cherished her love-
liness, studied her health, moderated her follies', and garnered
her riches with a wisdom most rare in her world of pleasure.
Many lost fortune, many their senses, some few their lives
for her.
Nothing of that kind stirred her for a moment.
The vainest could not flatter himself that he owed her
smile to anything except his jewels and his gold; the
vainest could not deceive himself that she had ever loved
him.
She loved herself; just as much now that she had the
world at her feet, as when she had been a little child,
eating the white currants and green almonds in her nest of
hay.
Love, though the highest selfish ecstacy, must yet have
self-forgetfulness.
She had none.
She could enjoy. But she could not suffer.
" How much shall I tell him ? " she thought, lying with
half-closed eyes watching the lights flicker over the ivory and
silver of her mirror.
Why should she tell him anything ? Why should she see
him ? She did not want him. To her he would never be
anything but Signa; the little, silly, dreaming fellow that
had run about for her, and given up his fruit for her, and
fallen into fault uncomplainingly for her sake. She had
made him her stepping-stone to fortune ; then had done with
him : why not ?
And yet now she had seen him, she did not choose to let
him go.
He condemned her; he sorrowed over her; he rebuked
her ;—he !—who had been her little slave, running where she
would, and doing her will in the summer dust of the Lastra.
With noon she was ready for him.
She was alone in the little lake palace.
It belonged to the painter Istriel.
When she wanted rest and seclusion she went to it,
knowing how to keep her beauty fresh and render her
favour more precious.
He was content that men should think his old ties with
her not wholly broken.
39&
SIGNA.
He was now in the steppes of the North. He had visited
her passing by. She always smiled on him. She was a
little afraid of him.
Besides, she never turned any man against her ; she only
would have her own way always—that was all. She wore
her lovers as she did her jewels : some had their turn often,
some seldom, some for ever waited for a day that never
came—but all were hers; she could shut them in the hollow
of her rosy hand, as in the gardens of Giovoli she had held
the butterflies.
She was never swept away on any strong tide; not even
of caprice.
She kept her brain clear always.
She was not clever; but she had far sight.
She got all the best the world could give her, and was as
calm amidst it all as a dormouse in its nest of wool. No
one could quote a folly against her.
She walked wisely.
With noon they told her Signa had come there. She let
him wait. She always let them wait. Waiting heightened
the imagination and spurred expectancy. Besides she was
never in any haste herself.
He had been shown into a little cabinet, which had
statues in it and one great window looking on the lake.
He was standing when she entered.
He was very pale ; he had been all daybreak on the
shore, rendering what help he could against the storm
which now had passed away entirely, and had gone south-
ward.
They looked at one another a moment in silence; these
two who had run together over the stony road, and
ventured their little fortunes into the noisy press of Prate
Pair.
Their fates had divided there, and yet the link of union
never could be quite broken.
They looked at one another, remembering that hot, toil-
some day when they had eaten their figs under the trees of
the dead Medici; and when, in the tumult and the merri-
ment of Fra Lippo's town, she had laughed at his tears, and
pulled him by his curls and whispered, "I am hungry—play
—get me some cakes so. Do you hear me ? Play ! " And
he had played.
SIGNA.
397
She looked at him and thought, "He is not changed one
whit; he is the same; only a boy still."
He looked at her and thought, " Can she be Gemma ? It
is some goddess, dreamt of in the night."
They had run hand in hand across the plain to Prato.
But there were worlds, centuries, all the heights of heaven,
all the depths of hell, between them now.
She put her hands out to him.
" Signa—dear Signa—sit by me."
He took her hands and let them go.
" No. Tell me first."
She sighed a little.
"You used to love me, Signa."
"I loved a little child called Gemma—yes."
" And I am Gemma."
He was silent.
He would not sit by her. He was confused and blinded.
Her loveliness lost nothing by the morning light.
But he felt to recognise her less than he had done in the
dim shifting shadows of the night. She had no more in
common with the little, sturdy, ragged, mischievous baby he
had kissed in her bed of hay, than the butterfly seems to
have to do with the chrysalis. He felt still that he must be
in a dream; when he had fallen asleep over his score, in his
half-starving student days, such dreams had come to him.
" If you are Gemma, indeed," he said with effort; " have
you nothing to say of your own home ; of your father, who
died thinking of you ; of your brothers, of Palma ? Is that
all forgotten ? Do you never think ? "
She would not let him see the anger in her.
" I was so young," she murmured. " Children do not
think."
" No ? Palma thinks. She said, ' Gemma is dead. Else
she never would be silent all these years.' She prays for
you.",
" Is she in want of anything ? "
" She wants everything. She works like a mule. But
she would never take anything. Palma would be ashamed."
Gemma put out her under lip with the sullen contemptu-
ous gesture of her infancy. But she answered him gently.
" Palma was always good. Yes—I remember that. Poor
Palma! "
393
SIGNA.
" Gemma—if you be Gemma—need Palma, for all your
glory, be ashamed of you ? Tell me: you said that you
would tell me now ? "
" Sit by me, and I will."
" No S not till I know whose roof I find you under, and
why you are—like this."
" What is it to you ? "
" Nothing. Only, if you are a base woman I want to see
your face no more. I loved you when we were two little
children. It would hurt me like a sister's shame."
He spoke simply and directly the thing he felt; he was
calmer than he had been in the sultry, moonlit night; he
was cooled as the air was ; he felt oppressed and pained,
but it was with sorrow for the little child that had run with
him in the dust and heat, not for the woman that faced him
with her shining eyes.
Over Gemma's face rose a quick flush of anger and amaze ;
all her world envied her.
She had no sense of shame. Shame, like remorse, only
visits women that are left alone.
Gemma played with all the glories of life, as a child with
a ball of flowers.
She repressed the rage and wonder that she felt. She
could assume what shape she would.
" If I were base," she muttered, " might I not need more
tenderness ? You are two narrow, Signa ; and too harsh."
" I! Harsh?"
" I think so. You only love your music. You see
nothing outside that."
He was silent.
"Was he harsh ? He did not mean to be so. He had said
what he had felt. If she were no longer innocent, he
wished to go away and see her face no more. He had
meant no bitterness.
" You do not understand," he said, at last. " I blame no
living thing; I am not wise enough. Only there are
straight, simple things one feels about women like an
instinct—-just as when one keeps one's honour clean—do
you not know? You see—I have always thought about
you; and reproached myself; and dreamed so much of
finding you and taking you back to your own people ; and
when Bruno said, seeing the picture of a wanton dancer,
SIGNA.
399
4 That is what your Gremma is now, if she be living,' I
almost hated him; it seemed to hurt me so; because, though
you were wilful and liked your own way too well, yet I was
sure you were too true and brave for that—and would have
thought of Palma. Dear, if your life is honest—take my
hand. If you be any man's wife, and come by all this
luxury and riches justly—dear, I will beg for your forgive-
ness on my knees. But else—what can I think ? "
She was silent; a certain darkness fell upon her life. She
was like the Syrian king; all the fairness and richness of
her Palestine grew nought to her, because she was shut out
from one little, narrow, lonely vineyard.
"What shall I say to him," she thought. "What shall
I say, to keep him ? "
She wanted to keep him, and yet her heart was hard and
sullen with rage against him. He had lifted the golden
apples in her basket of silver, and had scorned them; she
was astonished and dully angered.
But she was never swept away on any impulse, not even
on that of anger, which was the strongest with her.
She looked up at last, and saw his eyes watch her with a
piteous tender eagerness, and he held out his hands to her.
" I cannot take your hands," she said; "no, not in fair-
ness. And yet I am not to blame; not in the way you
think. Signa, I owe you nothing. I need tell you nothing.
Yet, because we were children together, as you say, I will
tell you all the truth."
And then she built him up a tale of lies—such as would
touch him most. Poor Signa ! whose face had paled if she
had trapped a bird, whose heart had sorrowed for each kid
that went to slaughter in the old times, when the Lastra
and its green vine-ways had been the only world to both of
them.
To Bruno and his people he was changed utterly. They
looked up at him from the twilight of their ignorance and
obscurity. To her he was changed in nothing. She looked
down on him from the broad noonday on the heights of her
prosperity.
For five full years she had studied the full world of men;
to her he was only a boy, a peasant, a dreamer, a fool-—
inspired, perhaps; but only the greater fool for that.
Outside there was the shining beauty of lake, and wood.
400
SIGN A.
and mountain; within, the softly shaded room, filled with
paintings, statues, flowers. Gemma in her white robes of
morning, dead white, such as made the fairness of her look
like a rose set amongst lilies, turned a little from him, half
lying amongst her cushions, and told him the story of her
life from that day of the fair in Prato.
" Dear Signa, I was a little wilful selfish thing. I wanted
to see a bigger brighter life than any we had upon our hills.
The man persuaded me. He promised me all sorts of
golden toys, and never-ending feast-days. Yes. He took
me with him in that fishing smack. We were hidden in
Genoa a little while, then we went northward. We were
treated like beaten dogs, once in his power. There were
many other children. He sent us out in rain, and wind,
and snow. To him it did not matter what we suffered.
We sold images, or tumbled in the streets, or hawked
flowers, or went with an organ. We wandered from town
to town; all over the world sometimes, I think; we crossed
seas often, and mountains; where I do not know ; I was a
little stupid thing. I was made black and blue with thrash-
ing. Dear—I was punished for my selfish fault; punished
beyond all telling. Night after night I cried myself asleep,
longing for you, and Palma, and green Giovoli. In a few
years the] man sold me to a set of player people, low come-
dians, who went about with a travelling theatre, and dressed
me up in spangles, and whipped me to make me dance.
Nay, dear! how pale you look. Oh, it is all over—long
ago. I had no talent. You know I never had talent as
you had. Nature has made me so good to look at; it does
not matter for the rest. I did not act well; I was just
looked at, and of course I could jump and dance—you will
remember that. You recollect old Maro from the Marches
teaching us the salterello, and you and I dancing it every
minute that we could ? And at the fair, how pleased they
were, and you, with the great tears running down your
cheeks all the while you danced it. Ah, yes, yes, yes!
Signa—it seems like yesterday."
She paused a little while; and turned her head away still
further; his heart ached for her; he longed to take her
hands, and kiss her lips, and say, " We will forget that any
time has passed; " but a dark wall seemed to him between
them. He could not think of her, of this lovely woman in
SIGN A,
40t
her wealth, as Gemma; little ragged rosy Gemma, pouting
and laughing in his face in the Giovoli garden, because Tista
had swung her so high, so high.
And even if she were indeed Gemma, as she said, and as
her remembrance proved, what could he say to her-—until
he knew ?
The sense around him of her golden shame stifled him,
and kept him mute. He felt as Palma would have felt. It
was not this woman that he cared for; it was his little
playmate lost on the sands of the Mediterranean sea.
" I was sold to these players," she said; " sold just as a
monkey might be, or a goat that knew some tricks. They
sold me in their turn to others. I was made into little
Loves, and had wings, and looked pretty ; or else danced in
pretty costumes; we went here, and there, and every-
where ; they treated me well, and I liked it. I knew no
better. I had sweetmeats, and fruit, and fine words. It
was all good enough, and merry enough, I thought. You
know of old, if all went well, I did not want to look farther ;
and indeed, what did I know ? or what could I have done ?
A child all alone, and a thousand miles, they said, away
from home ! Amongst them I learned to read, and learned
some few other things. I do not know much, except the
world. That is so big a book, you know; one does not
want another. Signa, try and understand. Ho not be
harsh; I was not great of heart, and near to heaven, as you
were when you were a child ; nor plodding, and honest, and
loving the saints, like Palma. I loved—myself. And
wanted to enjoy. God made me such a weak and selfish
thing. You know he makes bees and butterflies. Hear, I
was in so bad an air; it reeked with shamelessness ; if you
had anything to sell, your body or your soul, you sold it,
and spent the money; why not ? they said. When I was
sixteen they betrayed me ; we were in Vienna, then ; there
was a woman that I trusted. Oh, it is a common thing ;
quite common. When I knew the thing that they had
made me, I grew blind and reckless ; I was turned to stone,
only stone that shut a devil in it, as the marble shuts a toad
sometimes, they say. He who had bought me, bought me
stupefied, like any moth you kill with sulphur smoke ; was
rich and a great man in his way. He covered his new toy
with diamonds and gold. I grew the fashion. You have
D D
402
SIGNA.
fame. That is another thing. Fame is a comet burning
itself with its own fire as it travels. Fashion is the wax-
light in a ball-room. I like the ball-room best. You see
space, and all the worlds set round about what men will call
the throne of God, no doubt. But I "
She laughed a little; she had forgotten for the moment
that she did not mean to let him see the truth of her—not
then ; whatever afterwards might come.
He listened; his breath came brokenly; his lips were
dry. He raised his head, and gazed at her, almost blanktyi
" You can jest! "
The words recalled to her the thing she wished to seem
to him.
" Yes. I jest; if you call that jesting. I saw a man
once watch his house burn, the fire took his children, and
made him a beggar ; he laughed. So I laugh. Oh, my dear !
they have not left me any heart—to laugh or cry. I would
say, I pray they have not; if I were you or Palm a. But
then I never had much. I loved myself, you will remem-
ber that. Such love is punished. So your priests say.
Well, you see now how it was with me : sixteen years old;
a chattel purchased; a decked slave ; a ruined thing made
glorious with gilding. I am not meek, I am not good.
Signa, you knew me when we were both babies. You
knew I had no mercy nor gentleness to others, even then.
I saw myself base, by no fault of my own. I saw myself
marked out with a brand, proscribed, outcast, whilst I was
myself as innocent as any yearling lamb we ever played
with on the hill at home. Well I did not drown myself.
I was too full of life. I looked at my own face in the
mirror, and I loved it. I could not give it to the water-rats
to gnaw. You love your music. I love my loveliness.
Why is one love, one vanity, worse than the other ? Can
you tell me ? Nature put the rhythm into your brain. It
put the beauty in my body. Well, why should the love of
one be holiness in you, the other sin in me ? But sin or
not, I have it. If disease made me hideous, or accident,
then I would kill myself with smoke or opiates, or some
easy gentle means of death. Not otherwise. No ; I did
not kill myself when I knew the thing I was. Your women
of romance do; but, for me, I shrink from being hurt; I
hate the thought of lying underground and leaving all the
SIGN A.
403
rest to laughter in the sunshine. To cease to be—it is
horrible! Oh, not for you who think that death will set
your spirit free and carry it straight to some great world
where all your dreams made true are waiting you; aye,
but for us ? We have only our bodies, and we dread the
worms. No ; I did not kill myself. I took my vengeance,
I made myself the loveliest thing the world has seen for
ages. They all say so. Then I melted their hearts and
broke them. I slew them with a hair of the dog that had
torn me.' Dear, do not judge me harshly. I took solace in
the strength I had; such strength as women like me have ;
we share it with the snake and with the panther. Your
God made snakes and panthers."
She paused; the boy was quiet; his chest rose and fell
with painful breathing; his lips were cold and white; he
was saying always to himself:
" Who was the man—at first ? "
For he felt as if for Palma, and for poor dead merry
Toto, and for his own honour's sake, the avenging of her
ought to be his own work and no other's; had he not let
her go with him that day, a little thoughtless child, over the
hill and plain to Prato ?
He pitied her from the bottom of his heart.
He believed the tale she told.
And he was sick with the giddiness of one who falls
through mountain air from some great height. He lost his
footing. He lost his hold upon the dreams and hopes of life.
He was cast down from the pure simple certainty whicli
never asked:
" And is there faith in heaven and is there love P "
because he was so very sure of both.
And now he was sure of nothing.
" God makes snakes and panthers."
Yes; and God had let Gemma be made vile, with no fault
in her, no sin or seeking of her own;—so he thought.
He grew dizzy. He, who had said to Palma, for her
sister's sake :
"Dear, pray always. Prayers are heard."
" Oh, my dear! oh, my poor lost love ! " he murmured,
and bowed his young head upon her knees ; his frame
shook with pain and the shock of the first burning rage
that had ever touched him.
404
SIGNA.
He was bewildered. Horror possessed him. The simple,
innocent affection he had kept for her shuddered and grieved
for her, as a brother's would have done. He had kept Gemma
in his fancy and his hope so pure, and safe, and strong.
The darkness of this irreversible fate spread over her, and
made her terrible to him. Signa had all the childlike belief
in heaven that a child has in its father; this struck his
belief at the roots. God was good, and yet let such things
be ! God was great, and yet would be for ever powerless
to make this horror as though it had never been ! There
were things then that even God could not do ? Signa stared
helpless at this wreck of all his faiths.
She watched him, reading him as easily as she would
have read gold letters on a white page.
By years their ages were the same, but she, in the world's
knowledge, already was so old,—so old; and he in his
unworldliness and ignorance, was yet so young.
She knew the ways of men at their worst, their wisest,
their best, their basest, and turned them over in her head
as a child does the wooden letters of a mastered alphabet.
He of woman, knew hardly anything.
" You hear my story now," she said, with a soft sigh, at
last. " Signa, you loathe me?"
He shuddered a little.
" From my soul—I pity yon."
A sort of loathing was in him for her, but how could he
say that ? Whatever she had become, she had once been
the little Gemma that he had kissed in her rough bed of
bay.
Her eyelids were cast down; he did not see the cold
blue flame of anger burn in her eyes a moment as she heard.
She to be pitied ! she who, in her arrogance and her
loveliness, thought she had the world to play with as a ball
under her foot 1
She turned her eyes upon him.
" So, you will leave me ? You mean that ?"
He coloured to his throat.
" You live still, by choice—in shame ? "
She could have laughed aloud. She could have dashed
her hand against his mouth. She could have killed him—
almost; but she said, turning her face from him, like one
in pain of which she is ashamed:
SIGNA.
405
" What other life was left me ? Fling wool in mud; do
you blame the fleece that it grows black ? I told you I
took my vengeance. There was no other thing to do.
You do not understand the world. I was so young, and
men so cruel. Wrong made me all that I have been, but I
am tired; oh, so tired, Signa; if you only knew ! A world
of lovers and not one single friend. The loneliest woman is
not so desolate as I. Dear, I am vile, perhaps, and cold,
and love luxury too well; and if I were born with any
heart in me, have killed it. That is what they say. I think
it is quite true. There is no love anywhere for me. Love
for me is the imperial beast that kissed and slew. Love : I
laugh at the word, I dance on it, I spit at it. Judas loved ;
—and that great empress who wallowed in the mire with
her guards and slaves ! What did they eall her ? I never
loved a living thing. How should I ? The only love that
I have ever seen is a devouring beast with fire in his entrails
and slime upon his mouth. That is the only love that ever
comes to me. Dear, I am tired. When I saw your face
last night, I said in my own thoughts, I will tell him all
the truth ; he is not as the others are; he was a baby
with me in the old green garden ways ; he will understand;
he will have sorrow for me; he will be true to me, when
all are false ; he will be my saint, when all others are my
swine ; he will despise me, lament for me, rebuke me; yes,
no doubt; but he will not leave me utterly—for the sake of
the old days when we were children. That is what I
thought. Oh dear! I was unwise and you are wise. Fly
from me. There is 110 common ground between us. You
cannot see in me the thing you used to play with. I am
only a base light wanton woman, without charm for you
and without pardon either from you and from your God.
Dear, you are right. To see more of me could only bring
you pain or get you evil names. Pure dreams are your fair
portion. Foul facts are mine. Leave me. I would not
have you stay, though you are all of homo or heaven that
I shall ever see in life. Go and tell Palma not to plead to
Christ for me. Her words are wasted. I am in hell, though
living ; let me be."
She rose as she spoke and pushed him from her with a
gesture of farewell.
The consummate art of her took every hue and grace of
SIGNA.
nature; her face was pale and cold; down her cheeks tears
rolled and dropped upon the laces on her breast.
She knew the chords to touch in him ; she played on him
as he could play on any lute or violin.
She stung the generous sweetness of his nature; she
stirred all his tenderness of pity.
Had he been cruel and self-righteous in his instincts of
disgust ? Had he been unmanly and unfeeling ; wounding
a dishonoured woman, whose truthfulness had laid her open
to his scorn ?
A confused sense of being wrong to her oppressed him,
and struggled with the natural impulse .of his aversions,
with his instinct never to look on her or be touched by her
or hear the sound of her voice again.
A nature, generous and yielding, accused of meanness or
selfishness, flew at a rebound to the unwisdom of self-
sacrifice.
"I had no thought of myself," he murmured, pierced to
the quick. " But between us there is such a gulf: what
can I do ? what can I say ? I cannot see you lead this life,
and come to you, and be in fellowship with the men who
ruined you, or the men you fool ? To me you are—
Gemma; it is as if you were my sister. It is horrible. I
do not know what to say to you. It seems to me we cannot
be together now."
"I said that you were right in saying so. Right—for
yourself. Go; who keeps you, Signa ? Not I. Go."
She spoke coldly, sadly; he thought he heard in her the
heart-sick resignation of a woman from whom all good is
banished, yet who cleaves to it.
The tender, unthinking, unwise ardour of his nature
carried him away; he dropped before her on his knees as
if she had been any saint or queen. His sweet and pas-
sionate voice thrilled with emotion.
" If I can serve, I will not leave, you," he said. " Gem-
ma, listen to me. You are heart-sick of the wretched
glories of your life. All the better nature in you is in
rebellion at it. Leave it. Come home. You shall be to
me as a sister. This horror shall be buried in our hearts.
Throw ycrur gold away; it brings the plague with it; strip
your jewels off; keep nothing but the beauty that God gave
you, and that you defile. Come back to the old hills, to
SIGNA.
407
the fresh air, to the green country ways, to the peaceful days
and nights. Come back. Palma is there ; she will love
you still. Her arms are strong enough, her faith is firm
enough, to lift you out of hell. Dear, fling this horror
from you and trample on it, and leave men, and cling to
God. I have some greatness. I can make enough to keep
you safe from want. You shall be to me ever as if you
were a sister—lost and found. This beast you talk of,
and that in your madness you call Love, shall never reach
you, nor hurt you there. Come home. Palma is poor and
ignorant, working for a crust, but she is strong in courage,
and wiser than us all. She will suffer, but she will help
you always. I look at you ; you blind me: I do not know
you. You seem to me one of those lovely lying things that
Satan made and sent into the wilderness to tempt the saints.
But if you are not that—if indeed you ever were the little
Gemma that ran with me in the summer dust that day—
come home. Oh, Gemma, Gemma ! if indeed you are the little
child I played with, joy there never can be for you, dear,
nor hope on earth, nor any love of any honest man, I know;
but Palma will not turn from you, nor I. It is too late to
save your beauty from the lepers—it is plague-stricken.
God himself cannot change that—but, Gemma, there is life
beyond this life. I seem to speak so poorly, I cannot plead
with you—not as I would. But, Gemma, the soul in you is
not dead. Cast off these riches that are viler than all rags,
and lead a straight and simple life, and trust the rest to God.
Come home ! "
He spoke in all his innocence, knowing no better.
A stray sunbeam shot across the shadow of the room, and
fell on his fair upturned forehead and the misty radiance of
his supplicating eyes. To him she was terrible; to him she
was plague-stricken;—almost he thought her, as he said,
one of those beautiful accursed things the devil loosed on
earth to tempt the minds of men in deserts, and sting their
senses, and destroy their lives, and level them with the
beasts that perish. Still,—if he could save her ? He
prayed with her for herself, as in his childhood he had
prayed for Satan to the angels, watching the sun shine
beyond the Certosa towers..
She listened, her beautiful golden head bent down, her
colour changing; do what she would, she could not keep
408
SIGN A.
the blood quite steady in her cheek. She was so deeply
angered. Yet some pain smote her through all the jewelled
armour of her tranquil self-content.
Had she lost something after all that poor dull women,
plodding for their bread, lived with and died with ?—had she
missed something in all her plenteous harvest, were it only
a vain vague fancy, worth the having ?
She had princes and heroes, all greatness, at her feet, and
all the soft ease and peace and triumph that she craved;—
yet for one instant the whole world seemed to grow as
nothing to her if she had this boy's scorn, this boy who had
run with her over the brown fields of the hills through the
autumn weather, when the crocus-cup and the dragon-weed
had been the only gold they owned.
He was a fool; yet—some fools stand near to heaven.
The tears scorched her cheeks. Not such tears as she
had summoned at her will a moment earlier, fair tricks of
studied arts ; but quick, salt, bitter drops, that burned her
as they fell.
They angered her. The rage in her grew as much against
herself as him.
" He shall know no heaven but me," she said in her own
heart. " He shall live on my kiss, and die because he
loses it. He is a fool—a fool! "
And yet—were she but such a fool!
For the moment she would have given all her empire to
have been no wiser and no guiltier than he.
He did not know. He only saw her cheek grow pale, her
proud mouth tremble.
" You hear me?" he murmured ; " you will come ?"
She was silent, mastering the rage within her and the new
strange pain. The pain passed—the rage lived. She said
to herself:
" There is no honesty upon my lips. Well, he shall find
some sweeter thing there, and get drunk on it."
She had meant to have sport with him. Well, sport with
vengeance in it, was the finer pastime. It was his fault.
Why should he speak of her as of a thing he scorned ? To
bring his babyish, monkish, womanish fancies here, of
honour and shame, and heaven and sins :—sick phantasies
from dying peasants' psalters and priests' penance-tales in
Lent I
SIGNA.
409
She gazed down on him with serious eyes.
" No; I cannot come, Signa. You are good to me, but
the things you dream of are not possible—for me, at least
You do not understand. I should make Palma mad; she
me. I could no more go back to the old ways of life than
you to a herdboy's empty days. Things cannot be undone.
When a tree is grown, you may cut it down and burn it,
but you cannot make it back into the acorn or the chestnut
that it sprang from first. Palma thinks me safe with the
saints ;—so let her. For you—you have your art, your fame,
your certain growth of greatness. You can soon forget me.
Dear, I fretted you and flouted you when we were children.
That was all, I think, ever. It is but little to regret."
"It is because I have no words to move you, to awake
your soul "
" If you were an angel from heaven you would say nothing
that could change me. And do not think of any soul in me,
Signa ; I have none. Has the butterfly any ? You are
mad, Signa ! I was an idle child—I am an idle woman. I
love ease, luxury, riches, beauty. I toil! I hunger and
thirst, and spin and sew ! I plod after the oxen in the
furrows ! I! You are mad ! You are mad, I say 1"
His colour rose.
" There would be no need to toil. It would be a poor
and simple life—yes ; that is true. But I could make
enough—I shall make more each year. All that I have should
be for you. And it is honest money. Gemma—see, dear—I
have always thought of you, and dreamed of you, and meant
to seek you out and take you back, and set you in the midst
of every greatness I could get. When the great ladies
courted me, I did not care for them. I thought, somewhere
there is a little girl with golden curls I used to kiss ;—for I
forgot that you grew old as I did. When men talked of
love to me I would say nothing, but I used to think—
" when I find Gemma." Dear, that is over now. I cannot
love you. You are a thing lost to me now for ever. Men
do not love such women as you are. You are divided from
me for ever. But you still are dear to me as if you were
my sister. I would not touch your mouth with any kiss,
for you have sold its kisses ; I would not take your hand in
mine, for you have perjured it; I would not, starving, break
a crust of yours, for you are sold for it. But I will labour
SIGNA.
for you all my life; I will set away each coin I get for you;
I will never have any joy, or mirth, or love in all my years,
that I may work the better for you, and the oftener give you
more. Dear, do not think it will be hard for me. You
know I was reared hardly. I can live on nothing; and I
can pass by woman's love and all that delights and leads
away men most, because, in truth, the only thing I love is
my great art. In this I have been given so much, that I
can easily renounce the rest. Dear, do not think that it will
be anything to me. Men have lived so in monasteries—
lived and died happily. Gemma, if you will come back—
listen—I swear to you I will dedicate all my life to yours.
There is the shame of you between us two for ever like a
grave. But since you never can be anything to me more
than the dead are, no other creature shall be anything—that
I swear, too. Dear, listen! After God and my music, you
are most dear to me—yes, even as you are. Let me work
for you. Say you have no soul, as the rose has none ; yet
when a rose has blossomed with us who can throw it in the
sewer ? And you are wrong: a soul you have, for I have
seen your tears. Oh, heaven! What word can I find to
tell you how utterly I mean the thing I say ? Gemma—if
I had done right, and had refused to let you go with me that
day to Prato, you would be living with your sister still,—an
innocent, frank, happy, stainless thing; and I should love
you, and you would be all my own. This misery is of my
act. I let you go that day. Your shame has come of it;
and I can never even kiss you, dear, because there is no
honesty upon your lips. But take you out of your dis-
honour and save your soul, I can—I will. Gemma, come
back; and let me give my life for yours. On earth you will
not bejiappy, dear—nay, never. But hereafter——What can
I say to make you trust me and believe ? "
The words poured from his lips swift, eager, breathless,
unconsidered, in all their unreason, their unwisdom, their
nobility, their ignorance, their folly, their sublimity. AD
the narrow simplicity of the peasant, and all the boundless
vision of the poet, met in him as he spoke. He meant, t$
their very uttermost, every syllable he uttered.
She was gone from him ; she was to him a thing terriblo
and almost loathsome. He burned with shame for hei
shame. Yet she was dear to him. He was ready to give
SIGNA.
411
his life to ransom hers. To him sin was real, and hell and
heaven. What he dreamed of was impossible; but in his
sight it was possible. It seemed to him that the faith to do
it was so strong in him, that it could not fail to work its
own fulfilment.
She listened.
As far as she could be touched by anything, she was
moved by his suffering. It was strange to her; it even
amused her; but it touched her. Poor boy! He had
always seen living things in lonely, wayside stones ; and
lamented for the birds and beasts, because the priests said
there was no eternity for them ; and heard so many voices,
that none else could ever hear, in the silent marshalling of
the clouds by night, and the low whimper of the autumn
ruffled brooks. She remembered all those things. He had
been always so foolish—always.
It amused her. Yet it hurt her a little—ever so little—
very, very little—too.
" Who would have thought he would have taken it to
heart—like that?" she thought. And she felt a sort of
sullen jealousy in her. It was not for her that he suffered
so much. Not for the real woman, as she knew herself.
Not for the beautiful cold wanton whom Paris had called
Innocence. It was for the playmate that had run with him
that summer day over the plains to Prato: it was for the
imaginary thing, which she had built up before him with
her words, and dressed in her apparel of soft lies.
She was almost jealous : as astrologists were of shapes
their magic conjured.
" Signa, do not be so full of pain," she murmured. " It
is no fault of yours."
" Yes : it is mine. I let you go with me that day," he
muttered. " Oh, poor Palma !—thinking of you night and
morning—thinking of you safe with Christ! "
His head was bent down upon her knees, otherwise he
would have seen her petulant proud mouth curve in a little
smile.
She stretched her hand out, and musingly touched the
soft curls of his hair.
He shrank, as if the touch had burnt him. She saw the
gesture of aversion. It set her heart harder on the thing
Bhe meant to do.
412
SIGNA,
"You shudder from me," she said, sadly. " Well, that
is natural, no doubt. But it is better to lose you from the
truth, than keep you by a lie. I tell a million lies. All
women do. But there is something in your eyes that will
not let one lie. What is it ? "
Lying all the while, she kept her hand upon his curls,
stroking them gently, till, magnetised by the contact, he no
longer moved away or strove to resist that touch, but looked
down with his cheeks on fire and his pulse beating.
" I do not understand," he muttered. " I see two simple
ways—one right, one wrong. I would save you with my
life ;—I say, with my soul;—only you laugh at that."
"Nay, I do not laugh; for you—you are of the things
God makes to live for ever—if he makes anything. I laugh
when you talk of soul or mind in me. A woman has a body
and a face ; no more. She has ten years' grace with them
and glory; then she is withered up and shoved aside, and
there is an end of all. I would make the most of my ten
years. What harm ? "
He looked at her in a blank despair. How could he give
sight to what was blind ?—how make her shamed for what
she did not see ?
" Leave me alone," she said. " What matter ? It is but
such a little while a woman lives. With the first wrinkle
on her skin, she dies. As well fret for each rose that falls
each time it rains, I tell you. Signa,—why stay to pain
yourself and me ? You cannot change me. Go back to
your own hills, and dream your music there, and pray to all
the saints with Palma—if it please you."
" Palma ! What is she to me ? "
He rose and stood irresolute, impatient, bewildered. Go—
and leave her! He felt as he had felt in the garden of
Giovoli, hearing her laughter on the other side of the wall
as she was swung by other hands than his up in the golden
fruit-boughs. His face was burning; his heart was beating;
his brain was giddy; he had spoken in all the earnestness of
pain and truth. It seemed to him that she must loathe her
life. It seemed to him that she must hate herself. He had
spoken in full faith. He would have surrendered up his
future years to hers, and served her faithfully for ever parted
from her.
But then she did not seem to see
SIGN A.
413
The passion of his sorrow fell back from her as hot tears
may fall back from the red smoothness of a rose-leaf.
She leaned backwards on the cushions of her couch; her
hands were tightly clasped behind her head; her wide
sleeves fell back from her arms to the shoulder; her face
was turned upward, with her blue eyes watching him
through half-closed lids; her small scarlet mouth was but
half shut, her breath came through it evenly as a child's;
she smiled a little.
It maddened him to look on her.
He could not stir one pulse of shame in her.
He could only—leave her.
So she said.
Had he been older, harder, wiser, he would have left her
then, without an effort to change the unchangeable, to pierce
the impenetrable; or he would have tossed her away from
him with such scorn, such force, such loathing, that, finding
her master in him, the cowardice which sleeps in every
woman would have awakened in her, and brought her
trembling to his feet. But he was not old, nor hard, nor
wise ; his heart was weak with all the innocent affection of
his childhood, and for the first time the loveliness of a
woman made him blind and stupid. She was so much to
him: she was Gemma, whom he had kissed a thousand
times in babyhood, tumbling in the flower-filled grasses of
the green hillsides ; and she was also the first woman whose
look sent fire through his veins. She was near to him by a
host of sinless memories; and she was sundered from him
so utterly by sins so vile.
The world held nothing for him but herself.
To cleanse her from her golden corruption, to shake her
conscience from its drugged apathy, to tear her away from
the companions of her life,—to do all this and save her for
the eternity that he believed in, the boy would have given
up his own life and his own soul.
All in a moment his art perished.
When a human love wakes it crushes fame like a dead
leaf, and all the spirits and ministers of the mind shrink
away before it, and can no more allure, no more console,
hut, sighing, pass into silence and are dumb.
She, lying back with her golden head on her clasped
hands, watched him.
414
SIGNA.
She knew all he felt.
" Leave me," she said, with a slow soft smile. " You
have your music, and the saints that you believe in, and
Palma, who will pray with you. "Why do you stay here ?
Go."
" I cannot go—not so."
She stung him with Palma's name ; poor, stupid, un-
learned, bare-foot Palma, treading the earth as the ox did
and the mule.
" Gemma ! have you no conscience in you; no pain, no
sorrow, no revolt against your fate?" he said, suddenly.
" Oh, my dear! have I spoken to the winds ? Is it because
my words are weak that what I plead for seems so too ?
Gemma !—I cannot leave you to your fate. It is to leave
you to drink poison as the very water of life, and to die a
dog's death at the end of all—a street dog's, kicked and
cursed. You speak of Palma. How can I look in Palma's
face, leaving her sister lost as you are lost ? The very hills
there would rebuke me. The very stones at home cry out.
Oh, God ! What shall I say ? If He put no soul in you,
how shall I ?"
She listened to the generous, foolish, noble, senseless
words. Some of them stung her like thorns ; some of them
moved her with wonder. He seemed to her such a fool—
ah, heaven! such a fool. He spoke as children dream. Yet,
innocently, he lashed her with a scourge of nettles; for he
rejected her with all his infinite tenderness; for he spoke of
her as of a lost, degraded, alien thing ; for he would not set
his kiss upon her lips.
She rose on an impulse of rage to send him from her for
ever;—he would not touch her! She, who saw princes sue
and lords in feud for her, could have thrust her foot at him
and spurned him from her presence in her fury at his inno-
cently uttered scorn.
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.
Each added word of his hardened more and more her
will upon the course that she had set herself; stung all her
warmest pride, and made more sure his doom with her.
No angel from heaven, 110 miracle of light shining as in
SIGNA.
4*5
the steps of Paul, could ever have changed her much; but
he, in all his innocence, struck the iron of her wilful vanity
and heat it into sharpest steel.
She rose erect on to her feet and thrust back the white
wooden shutters before the casement nearest her, and lot
the dazzling effulgence of the intense noonlight pour on her,
and bathe her in it, and turn the fairness of her hair to
molten gold, the whiteness of her flesh to ivory, the flush of
her cheeks to opal fires ; her beautiful limbs shone in it like
marble, her hair streamed against it till it was like an aureola
of heaven, the ruthless light glanced on her and searched
her everywhere, and found no flaw. Flowers droop in it ;
children pale in it; birds flee from it; but she bore it in all
its intensity, and was but the more glorious in it.
He gazed at her. She stood erect, golden and white
against the burning sun.
" Look at me !" she cried to him. " Look!—the light
that kills all other things and pales all other beauties, does
but make mine the greater. Look at me! The sun may
shine on me, search me, pierce me, it can find no fault any-
where. Look—look—look ! There is no blemish any-
where, I say—no flaw the sun can find. And you talk to
me of penitence and pain ! You talk to me of poverty and
shame! You talk to me of going back to penance in a
peasant's hut, and letting rains and winds and snows beat
on my body ! Look at me ! While I am this, you think
I care for heaven ? You are mad ! Unlovely, loveless
women may cling to priestly tales of it, as hungry curs
hope, shivering, for a bone. I give it with an hour of my-
self. Gods—if there be gods—can do no more than I!"
The mighty blasphemy of her superb vanity seemed to
him to burn through the golden light she stood in, as light-
ning through the sunbeams.
With her arms uplifted in the exultation of her measure-
less arrogance, and her eyes with contemptuous challenge
glancing through their amorous drooped lids, a sudden
memory struck him.
He cried aloud, as if some mortal hurt were done him in
the flesh.
" You were the dancer of Istriel! You are the creature
they call Innocence ! "
She looked him in the eyes straightly and serenely, her
4i6
SIGN A.
golden head erect under the mmous of the noonday
light.
" Yes. Well, then ?—what of that ?"
He gazed at her breathless ; a great tearless sob choked
him : then he fell down senseless at her feet.
When he came to himself he was alone upon a bed in a
darkened chamber. The wind was blowing over him; he
heard birds singing.
Long fasting, sleeplessness, and violent emotion—all had
made him lose his consciousness for awhile; his brain was
giddy still, the light swam before his eyes; he rose and
staggered to the glass doors which stood open, and put the
outer shutters aside and out into the air.
An old negress stopped him ; was he not too ill ? Would
he not wait ? Her mistress At the last word he put
her hurriedly aside and hastened farther out; it was the
house of this woman whom her world called, as the emperor
his desert beast—Innocence. He could not stay in it; the
air of it seemed to stifle him.
Without well knowing what he did, he traversed the
gardens with unsteady steps, the sunshine reeling and
dancing before his half-blind eyes ; then, his limbs growing
stronger and his sight clearer as the wind blew on him
from the water, he pushed his way through the maze of
flowering shrubs and thick-set orange-trees out of the
gardens down on to the shore. He sat down stupidly in
the shadow of a boat and leaned his forehead on his hands,
and, do what he would, saw only her—standing against the
light.
She was the dancer of Istriel.
" Well, what of that ? " she had asked him.
What of it, indeed. It made her neither better and no
worse. It changed nothing. To have been the nude model
of a painter was not more than to have been the willing
wanton of the world.
Yet it seemed more hideous to him.
It brought her vileness home to him.
It seemed to write her shame on earth and sky as on a
scroll for every eye to read.
This was a fancy; but the fancies of poets are their hell,
when they cease to be their heaven. And they cease so
soon.
SIGN A.
417
The dailcer of Istriel had been seen by all the nations of
the globe ; that lovely, voluptuous, smiling thing, with her
red blossom and her floating feet, had looked all mankind in
the face and made them wish for her; to the boy she seemed
sold to the whole earth—made harlot for all the peoples of
the world.
Istriel's gold had bought his llusignuolo. Istriel's gold
had purchased Gemma.
He owed his fame—she, her ruin—to the same hand. So
he thought. He exaggerated his own debt, and he shut his
eyes against her lie, as such natures as his will ever do, to
hurt themselves and keep their faith in their false gods.
Where was Istriel ?
In an aimless, hopeless passion, he longed to find this
man—this man who had taken her in her youngest youth
and drawn every curve and coloured every hue of her fair
frame so cruelly, and sent it out to let the eyes of all men
gloat on it in public as they would. The crime of the
painter against her seemed to him viler than all seduction.
It seemed to him the very brutality of license; the very
crown of outrage. The seducer fed but his own eyes with
the beauty he unveiled; this man had fed ten million
ravishers' eyes with hers.
It was the first passionate agony of his life. He had
suffered before; but then with hope underneath him, bear-
ing him up like the wings of some strong bird. He suffered
now as those do who suffer without hope.
All these years gone and Palma praying there in an
undoubting faith, and all the while nothing on earth or
heaven heeding ; but all this vileness done beyond recall—
beyond repair.
Do what he would he could not change this thing the
years had made her.
Cry as he would to fate, no means could undo what had
been done.
Nothing could give him back Gemma—little fair Gemma,
with unstained soul, sleeping as the lambs sleep in the bed
of hay. And yet the loveliness of her burned him like so
much flame.
He hid his face in his hands and saw her always as he had
seen her come out from the waters in the dark *\ight amongst
the red roses.
E E
SIGN A.
" Go, write a romance on me," she had said to him. But
he could no more have done it than he could have flown to
the sun with the eagles.
His brain seemed dead in him.
He heard no longer sweet concord in the waters, and
lisped numbers in the murmurs of the winds ; he looked
hack at his self of yesterday and wondered where the power
in him had gone ; all in a moment his art and his fame and
all his high desires seemed to grow as nothing to him.
He shut his eyes and saw the fair limbs of a woman
slowly moving through the shadows ; a mouth that smiled a
little, a bough of dark leaves and ruby buds, against a snow-
white breast:—that was all he saw.
His art:—where was it ?
It seemed to him like a dead thing. A sudden sense of
vast immeasurable loss fell on him.
He was terrified ; he did not know what ailed him.
In most men and women Love waking wakes, with itself,
the soul.
In poets Love waking kills it.
Nature had been always to the boy so full of sympathy
and solace. Beaten and hungry and overtasked in his child-
hood, he had been happy the moment that he had escaped
alone into the open air on the breeze-blown hillpaths, with
the sighing of the pines above his head ; nay, happy even if
he could but be by any little narrow casement and see the
line of the old town wall with the lichens and vetches clear
against the sky and in their crevices the shining lizards
sitting. But now mountain and lake and the autumnal
glories of the woods could bring no consolation ; they only
seemed to him cruel; they had no heart in them, they did
not care.
The hideous universal sentence of corruption for the first
time seemed to him written over all the things of earth and.
air.
For she was vile.
How the day passed he never knew.
It rolled away somehow ; the sky seemed like a sheet of
fire ; the sun for the first time burned him and hurt him; he
saw nothing but the form of a woman.
The man who had his opera at the town sought him and
said;
SIGNA.
419
" Only think!—they will play yonr Lamia at the Apollo
in Rome in Carnival. Only think !—and at San Carlo too.
Here are your letters."
He stared at the speaker and thrust the papers away, and
did not answer.
He hardly understood.
His music ?
It had been his religion. He was dead to it now. All in
a day his innocent spiritual joys were withered up in him.
What use was it ? It could not alter her.
In proportion to the absorption of any life in any art, so
is the violence of its dethronement and oblivion of art when
love has entered.
It seemed to him that every note in all the world might
be for ever mute, and he not care.
It seemed to him that if they said he was a fool, and let
him die nameless and despised, it would be no matter to
him.
For he loved this fair foul thing ; only he did not know it.
After awhile mechanically he found his way into his own
chamber.
It was late in the day. The little room was filled with
flowers that the village women, proud of having the young
genius in their midst, had placed everywhere about. He
did not notice them. But at the intense odour he shud-
dered a little; they made him think of the garden ways of
Giovoli.
Without knowing what he did he sat down to the piano
which stood there.
He began to play.
A torrent of passion, a passion of tears, were in the music
that he made with no sense of what he did; the abruptest
changes from pain to rapture ; the strongest and greatest
harmonies ; the most capricious transitions, the most bitter
woe were in the sounds he drew ; never in all his creations
had he reached so great a height as now, when he created
what he did not care to preserve, what he had no brain left
to measure.
By sheer instinct his nature cried aloud against its pain in
the art that was inborn in him as its song in a bird.
Then all at once he ceased and loathed it: what use was
it ? it was only a mockery ; it could not alter her.
420
•SIGNA.
Some of those who followed him and worshipped him—
for he was never now without some of these parasites of
success—standing outside his door, listened breathless in
ecstacy ; one or two, when the melody ceased, ventured in
and kissed his hands, and cried to him:
" You never were so great! "
He looked at them dully.
" What good is it ? " he said to them ; and he went into
his inner room and barred the door against them.
What good was it ?
He was scarcely more than twenty years old; he had a
great future ; he had put his name in all the mouths of men;
he had all that, dreaming under the pines above Bruno's
house the night when the violin was broken, he had thought
would be worth purchase by a whole long life of toil and
poverty and renunciation and neglect.
And all was unreal and useless to him now. It seemed
as if his hands grasped ashes and his ears were full of the
sound of empty winds mourning through desolate places.
He went out in the air again.
He could not rest indoors.
He shook himself free, with impatience, of his disciples
who would fain have accompanied him, and spoken to him of
the coming reception of his operas down in Rome. He got
away by himself to the shore of the lake ; to the still and
sombre shadows of a long-deserted garden that had been his
haunt in happier hours.
There are times when the weakness of humanity falls
back broken and heartsick before the iron wall of unchange-
able circumstance, as a beaten seabird falls back from the
stone face of the cliffs.
It was so with him now.
" If only I could save her ! " he cried in his heart: and
in his heart knew that he could not; not though he were to
give his soul up for her own. Legends tell of such barters.
Life does not know them.
Gemma had been her own destiny. But such destiny was
as immutable as though the gods of old had shaped it.
She had stained her white marble red. Signa knew that
though the stone should be washed seventy times seven and
bruised into a million fragments, the dust would he never
white again, but blood red always,—always.
SIGNA.
421
He had uttered his real thoughts to Gemma : to him she
was like one leprous-stricken. Her story had filled him with
pity, but with horror.
Bruno had taught him to hold wanton women accursed.
Bruno, who again and again had fallen in their snares, had
always bade him hold them like the deadly mushrooms that
men gather for bread and find are death. Bruno, fearing
the softness of the boy's nature, had said always to him,
" Poverty is bad, and hunger and sickness and sorrow and
labour that has no end—these are all bad—but worse than
any of these is it to be the slave of a woman who is un-
chaste."
He wandered all the day. It seemed to him as if it
would never end. He saw nothing but the face of Gemma.
The world which had seemed to him so beautiful was
changed ; heaven was cruel. It created loveliness only to
pollute it and deform it afterwards.
Out of his dreams he was brought face to face with facts
that sickened him. All the old landmarks of his faith were
gone. All the happy hopefulness of his nature was crushed.
He was bewildered and sick at heart. And through it all he
could not thrust away the personal beauty of the woman.
Her gaze, her form, her breath, her smile, her sigh :—he
could think of no other thing. It seemed to him as if she
were in the air, in the clouds, in the water; her voice rang
in his ears ; she was so lovely—and yet she was so vile ;—
she was so much more than a woman and so much less.—
" If only I could save her! " he said to himself, and then
could have flung his forehead on the rock remembering that
there was no way to make her other than she was ; re-
membering that to be torn from shame is not to 'become
innocent.
" Oh, dear God,—all Palma's prayers ! " he thought.
They had been all in vain, like so much futile breath spent
on the empty air to unresponding space.
The mockery of it stung him, as if God himself were
jeering as a man might do.
He looked up stupidly at the broad noonday skies. There
was the same sun, the same earth, the same water; beyond
the plains, on the hills that he knew best, men and women
were leading the same life, drawing the wine from the
presses, driving the oxen over the green sods, gathering up
422
SIGNA.
the ripe olives, with the bells ringing over their quiet world.
It seemed to him so strange. Everything was unchanged
except himself, and he seemed to have become old and tired,
and full of pain.
Only one night before, there had been no happier living
thing in all the human world than he; and now—he won-
dered that the sun did not stay in its course, that the
waters did not rise and cover the land, that all the flowers
were not withered off the ground—since sin so cursed the
earth.
The hours rolled by ; he did not count them. The long
hot day burnt itself out as passing passions do. The boats
came and went; the sun sank and the moon rose. His own
stars—the stars of the Winged Horse—shone down in the
first faint darkness of the early night.
He sat lonely on the solitary shore, watching the breeze-
blown water without sense of what he saw.
He could not understand the anguish that blotted out for
him all colours of earth and heaven.
All life had been to him as the divining rod of Aaron,
blooming ever afresh with magic flowers. Now that the
flame of pain and passion burned it up, and left a bare sear
brittle bough, he could not understand.
Love is cruel as the grave.
The poet has embraced the universe in his visions; and
heard harmony in every sound, from deep calling through
the darkest storm to deep, as from the lightest leaf dancing
in the summer wind ; he has found joy in the simplest
things, in the nest of a bird, in the wayside grass, in the
yellow sand, in the rods of the willow ; the lowliest creeping
life has* held its homily and solace, and in the hush of night
he has lifted his face to the stars, and thought that he com-
muned with their Creator and his own. Then—all in a
moment—Love claims him, and there is no melody anywhere
save in one single human voice, there is no heaven for him
save on one human breast; when one face is turned from
him there is darkness on all the earth ; when one life is lost
—let the stars reel from their courses and the world whirl
and burn and perish like the mo oil.; nothing matters ; when
Love is dead there is no God.
Signa sat by the wind-tossed lake waters.
He did not know what had killed his soul in him. He
SJGNA.
only knew that his music was no more to him than the
sound of stones shaken in a shrivelled bladder by an idiot's
hand.
Bruno was avenged.
" Give me to the worms ; let only my music live ! " he
had said again and again in his one prayer to Fate. Now—
what use were his fame or his art to him ? They could not
undo what was done.
Achievement holds its mockery, no less than failure.
The evening deepened; the stars of Pegasus grew clearer;
a lovely silvered radiance spread over the face of the waters
and the sides of the mountains. He had no sight for it and
no care. He sat where he had wandered; the hill thyme
under his feet: gold-fruited boughs above his head; the
lake before him.
Through the soft gloom a white form stole towards
him, a rose against her lips, as Silence has, to hide her
smiles.
She came and watched him a moment, and then laid her
hands on his bent head.
M You went away without a word to me," she said. " I
have looked for you since sunset, Signa."
He trembled from head to foot and sprang erect, and
stood and gazed at her.
She waited a little while, then sank on the rough stone
seat hewn out of a fallen rock where he had sat.
" Well ?" she said, softly. " Have you nothing to say to
me ?—nothing ?"
" What can I say ?" he muttered. <' X wound you, I hurt
you—or I seem a fool."
" A noble fool," she said. " Such fools as heaven is
peopled with, if the saints' tales be true."
His face flushed with the joy of her praise.
Yet what was any praise of hers worth ?—what value any
word ?
Her words were as the tinkling cymbals of brass which
lead men to destruction. Her beauty was bare to all the
world as Phryne's on the canvas of Gerome.
He had been reared in the stern judgments of the old
Dante temper which still lived in the recesses of the hills;
the temper which flung the nude marble and the voluptuous
image in the flames at Savonarola's bidding.
424
SIGNA.
" Why did you go away—so?" sne said to him. " I
left you for a moment with my women, and when I went
back you had fled, no one knew where."
" Knowing what I know, your house stifles me."
" That is how you repay me for the truth. I should have
lied to you."
" You have let him paint the truth in scarlet .letters for all
the world to read."
" Istriel ? Oh, that is so long ago I"
" He was your betrayer ?"
" What does it matter ?"
" He was ?"
" What does it matter, I tell you ; I have forgotten him.
He is far away painting in the Ukraine, waiting for the
great snows, they say, to draw the forests and the wolves.
Perhaps the wolves will eat him. Let him be. He painted
me in a hundred ways. The first thing he did was of me
standing like a little saint holding a dove and with those
white roses that we call of the Madonna: he named the
picture Innocence; that is how I had the name."
" He is in the snow-fields you say—now ?"
" I heard so—yes. What does it matter ? What would
you do if he were here ?"
He only looked at her. His face was very pale ; his
great eyes had an answer in them that she understood.
She laughed a little to herself.
"You would kill him? Poor Istriel! Why? Since I
did not ? "
" You would have done if "
" If I had been Palma ?"
She laughed again ; aloud this time.
" If you had been—a woman—as God made them."
"How is that? God made Eve—if He made anything.
Do not use phrases, Signa. You learned that of your
priests. You will die in a monk's robes, after all ?"
He turned from her with an inexpressible pain.
" Oh, my God ! You can jest!"
" Why not, dear ? All my life is a jest. It goes merrily
like bells. You will not understand."
" I will not believe ! You cannot be so base."
" In a man it were philosophy! why in a woman is it
baseness ?"
S1GNA.
42S
" You play -with words ! if you be happy why say a few
hours since you were in hell ?"
A faint smile broke across her face. She banished it
before he saw it there.
"You know women so little if you ask that. - We are in
hell one hour and in heaven the next. ' Flower of an Hour.'
That is a woman. I am happy—very happy—when yon
will not make me think."
He looked up at her again.
" Ah ! if you would but think;—but let your conscience
wake."
" We said enough of that," she interrupted him, with cold-
ness. "To-day I answered you, once and for all. If you
want conscience, and terror of the saints, and all you call
true womanhood, you have it all in Palma—whom you
leave ! As for me—I told the truth to you, judging you other
than you are. I thought that you were fair enough, tender
enough, sinless enough yourself to stay with me a little for
our childhood's sake, without reproach. I have lovers
where I will. I have no friend. Because I am no hypo-
crite, and will not take up at a moment's bidding sackcloth
and ashes, and say the seven psalms of penitence, you
shudder and leave me to my fate. You have no patience,
no reason, no compassion. You cast me off because I am
not ready to go back to the old, hateful, bitter, famished
life, and say my mea culpa at the feet of Palma. You are
mad. And do not speak to me of sorrow. If you had
sorrow for me you would say ' this woman is alone in all
her wealth, desolate in all her power, without a heart to
trust amidst a troop of lovers.' You would say :—' there is
a gulf between us, yes, and any word of love from her to me,
or me to her, is now impossible ; but I will serve her still.
I will not forsake her because she does not pile the cinders
of a false repentance on her head ; I will have more faith in
the latent strength of patient purpose to win her back from
error.' That is what you would say—were you, indeed, the
gentle boy I thought you. But you are like all the rest who
imitate the saints. Tenderness with you means flattered
vanity; you speak of your gods and act but for yourselves ;
you think you arm yourself with virtue, but your strength is
only your own self-love sharp-wounded and irate. You
preach tp me ; you bid me leave my world : you say you
426
SIGNA.
best had never see my face again—and why ? Because you
hate my sins ? Ah, no ! Because you hate my lovers !"
His face flushed scarlet; he sprang to his feet.
The. brutal truth, which yet was only half a truth, and
bore rankest injustice with it, pierced him to the quick.
There were honour, fair faith, and purity of intent in him,
which flung off the words, in honest rage, as calumny. Yet,
like all words that lay bare any truth, they had the electric
shock of lightning in them. Passionate repudiation sprang
to his lips ; then paused there ; he was silent.
Was it less her sins he loathed than those who shared
them ?
He searched his heart in vain; all seemed dark there.
He stood indignant, yet abased. He knew her words a lie,
yet were his own all truth ? He did not know. He was a
mystery to himself.
To himself; but not to her. She watched him, knowing
each pang that moved him, knowing each doubt that stunned
him and confused him. The lovers of her world, though
often their passion was high and their emotions violent,
could give her no such sport as this young soul which had
dwelt in solitude with art and God, and was bewildered in
the maze of passions that she dragged it to, as any antelope
caught in the hunter's toils, when the forest is ablaze with
torches and alive with steel.
" You do me cruel wrong—God knows," he said, simply;
and so turned and would have left her then for ever.
He knew she wronged him; but how much—how little,
—that he could not tell; he was sure no longer of himself;
nor of anything human or divine.
" What! " she said slowly. "You cannot even forgive
me, then ?"
He sighed from the depths of his heart
" I do forgive you—everything. But who is to know the
thing you really are ? You seem so vile and soulless, all
one moment, and the next—Ah, let me go ! It kills me to
be here. Perhaps I hate your lovers, as you say. Perhaps.
Your brothers would."
A dark scorn gathered in her eyes. He—who had felt
her hand amongst his hair, and on his drooping brow—
could speak so !
" My brothers ! they would be glad enough if I gave them
SIGNA.
427
gold to spend at loto, and new wine to drink, as far as I
remember them, which is hut little. They bit and pinched
me ; and I stole figs and nuts to bribe them with, if ever I
wanted them. If you have no better thing to say, than
quote my brothers !—"
" Say what I will you quarrel with it. Gemma—if you
be Gemma ; sometimes still I think you cannot be—let me
g°." . . ,
"I am not Gemma. Gemma was a little stupid child, fed
on black bread and tumbling with the pig. I am Innocence.
The Innocence of Paris."
And she laughed.
The laughter was like ice ; and made him shiver, flesh
and bone.
What had she not known, what had she not done, what
brutalities of license had not she bent to in willing bondage,
what cruelties and luxuries of vice had she not tasted, in-
vented, been prodigal of—what memories had she not, what
horrors must she not have steeped her fair white beauty in
—he thought of all that, hotly, dully, as a drunken man will
think of things that for ever pursue him, and yet are always
vague to him.
The moonlight was about her ; the crimson amaranthus
flung its tall feathers around her: some marble sculptures
shone behind her in the dark leaves of olive and of orange.
She was so perfect to look upon; no sculptor ever made a
fairer Clytie for the God of Song; and what had her life
been; what were her memories; what was her foul know-
ledge ? She was like the casket of silver that held the ashes
of death.
It broke his heart to look on her.
To others she might be only one fair false woman the
more, gone the way that all loose women take. But to him
she was the very ruin of earth, the very mockery of heaven.
He clasped her hands with a great cry : " Oh, Gemma !—
have you no pity! "
Had she any ?
She looked at him, thinking for the moment that she
would be pitiful, and let him go—go, whilst there was yet
time; while she could still become to him a thing seen in a
trance, a phantom soon forgotten, a mere name; go, whilst
the horror in him was stronger than the love,
428
SIGN A.
He was only a score of years old; he heard beautiful
things in his dreams; he was loved by the people and
cherished ; his future would be greater than his present; he
had the semi-divinity of genius; he had the virgin gold of
an unworn heart; he had the fond mad faiths of a poet: if
she let him go there was still time :—time for him to leave
in peace, forgetting her, in his art, as a feverish dream of
the night is forgotten in the breaking of morning.
Would she have pity ? it was but one plaything forborne;
one leaf of the laurel ungathered. But she had said to her-
self, " Palma shall die of want of him, and I will be his
god."
She said it again in her heart.
As much of warmth as she could know, stirred in her
towards him.
His beauty, his youth, his very innocence, had a charm
for her, such as sated Faustina or wearied Messalina might
have found in some fair boy captive from Judea, with the
simple asceticism of the Galilean fishers in his soul. And
then he rebuked her, shrank from her, condemned her: it
was enough.
In the day of their infancy she had done with him as she
chose ; should he be stronger than she was now ?
He cleaved to his art and his faith; well, he should for-
swear both.
He was a little shell off the seashore that Hermes had
taken out of millions like it that the waves washed up, and
had breathed into, and had strung with fine chords, and had
made into a syrinx sweet for every human ear.
Why not break the simple shell for sport ? She did not
care for music. Did the gods care—they could make
another.
''Have I no pity?" she murmured. "Nay, you only
dream—dreams are pale, cold things at best—learn with me
to live!"—and she drew her hands from him and passed
them round his throat and inclined his head towards her
breast, and brought his lips to hers.
" Have I no pity ?" she said.
His life passed into her life. His soul went from him and
became her own,
SIGNA,
429
CHAPTEE XLYIII.
It was a soft, clear winter in the country round the
Lastra.
On Christmas-day the wind-flowers were still rosy and
purple and snow-white in the grass of the fields ; and, with
the new year, the red roses blossomed behind the iron bars
of the casements, and in the corn-fields the crocuses were
thinking that it was already time to come through the earth.
Girls plaited at the doors on the mild mornings, as if it
were summer; and there was seldom a curl of wood-smoke
on the air, except when the soup-pots were simmering.
Men coming and going from the city, and post-bags
dropped as the letter-cart ran down over the bridge from
the upper town, brought tidings, in the soft, silvery weather,
of the Actea and the Lamia.
In all the cities one or the other was being given ; north
and south, under the Alps, and by the seashore of Vesuvius,
they were playing and singing the music of the young
master, who called himself by the old, historic word of
" Signa."
" What name will you take for the great world ? " they
had said to him, when he was still but a little scholar.
"Only Signa," he had said; and he signed all that he
wrote so.
"My mother was the flood, and my father the owls," he
said to himself; he liked best to have it so; dead Pippa
was a pain to him; and her lover, whoever he had been,
whether prince or peasant, had no hold on his thoughts.
"I am Signa," he said, that was all his own; owing no
man anything for it, nor the Church either. Signa, just as
the walls were, and the gates and the bells and the woods
and the old painted frescoes.
Everywhere they were playing and singing his music, and
it had even echoed over the Alps, and spread itself north-
ward and southward, in that victory of the lyre with which
his country has so often avenged herself for the invasions of
the sword.
His music was in the throats of the people.
In grim Perugia Augusta, in dark Bologna, in smiling
43°
SIGNA.
Como, in grand Ravenna, in the City of the syrens, in the
busy marts of Milan, in sombre obscure Etruscan towns, in
mighty opera houses, in little solitary theatres, anywhere
and everywhere, the melodies of the Actea and the Lamia
were ringing; they had the pure science which allures the
cultured ear, and the potent sympathies which sway the
multitudes ; learned doctors followed their accurate combi-
nations with delight in the solitude of the study, and hoys
and girls caught their sweet simplicity with rapture, and
sang them to the woods and fields, as birds their love-
calls-
The Actea and the Lamia were sisters and rivals both at
once ; the Asiatic slave, with her crucified god and her
murdered master, and the Venus of the flute, with her
crowned passion and her divine honours, divided between
them the adulation of the people.
Some found noblest the sacrificed love, some the vie-
torious; some the dishonoured grave that h£ld the world
for Actea, some the imperial art that rendered Lamia stronger
than her tyrant; but whether one or the other, or whether
both together, the two stories, old as the cities of the world
are old, fresh as love is fresh, took hold upon the souls of
the people, and by the interpretation of his harmonies
thrilled the world anew, as Rome had trembled when Actea
had wept, and Athens when Lamia had stayed the lifted
sword.
There is a chord in every human heart that has a sigh in
it if touched aright.
When the artist finds the keynote, which that chord will
answer to, in the dullest as in the highest—then he is great.
Signa had found it.
Found it by the instinct which men call genius, not know-
ing what else to say.
To the quiet Lastra, with the corn springing about it, and
the smell of the pines coming down on the wind, and the
fishermen throwing their nets in the full waters, tidings of
these great triumphs of the little fellow who had run bare-
foot amongst them, came every now and then ; written in
letters, spelled out of news sheets, and oftener still brought
by the mouths of men coming from the little fairs of the
towns, or the grain markets of the city.
They played the Actea in the city itself before Christmas.
SIGMA.
43*
The men and women of the Lastra went many of them
down into the city to hear this wonderful music which
Pippa's son had made : poor Pippa, who had always plaited
ill. And many more, who could not go, heard of it on the
market-days and brought back all the strange marvels of it
that were told, and said how, at midnight on Christmas Eve,
when the people sang all together in the Cathedral, praising
God for the past year, for the good and ill together, some
solitary voice had lifted itself and sung the death song of the
Christians, insomuch that the whole multitude was carried
away as with one impulse, and chanted it together as by one
voice, standing and beating their breasts with streaming eyes
under the great dome, when the music had got upon them,
so that no force could restrain them, but they had poured
out under the midnight stars into the fresh air, and gone
their various ways in various streams, in the teeth of the
northern wind, singing the hymn still in all the streets, and
filling Florence with it, as it had been filled in the olden
time with the litanies of Savonarola.
All that Bruno heard when he drove his mule through the
little towns, or went down into the city to buy or sell; all
that and much more of the same spirit in the winter-time,
when he worked by lanthorn-light early and late, and the
snow lay on the mountains between him and the sea.
Luigi Dini went and heard, and said his Nunc Dimittis in
the great peace of his heart. He had loved Music, and had
served her as the very humblest and lowest of her drudges;
and it had been given to him to feed on his crumbs of know-
ledge, and refresh with his cup of the water of faith, this
young High Priest of hers, this heaven-born Apollino.
Sitting in an obscure corner of the vast area of the
Pagliano, the old man heard the thunders of applause, and
saw the house filled from floor to roof, and listened to the
grave song of Actea, and thanked fate which had let him live
so long: few men can do as much.
" "Will you not go and hear it ? " he said to Bruno.
Bruno answered—
" No."
" No ! Not when the city rings with it ? "
" "Why should I? I have heard it—long ago—when ho
was a little child, sitting in the thrashed straw, playing on
the old cracked lute I gave him. X had it all—so long ago."
432
SIGN A.
" A child's twitterings on a lute ! You talk idly—you
know nothing of this."
" I know enough," said Bruno. For in his heart he still
hated it, the art which had taken away Pippa's son. It
was always his antagonist; always his conqueror.
But for that, Signa would have been so happy in the little
house that would have been built by the brook where the
rushes blew. So happy—and safe always.
He and Palma worked in the short winter days, and got
up in the dark and beat the black earth for their daily bread;
and neither of them ever forgave this mystical passion which
had usurped the life of Signa, and taken him from them to
give him to the world.
Bruno worked early and late, because it had been his
habit from his birth upward, and had so grown into him as
to be a very part of himself. But he had lost zest in it.
He had no longer any aim. The man, by temper open-
handed, did not care to save for saving's sake, and the mere
pleasure of seeing the money accumulate, as most men did ;
and Signa did not want his help. Signa earned his own
money.
Life, without a central purpose around which it can re-
volve, 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.
Bruno was too hardy and too used to the ways of labour
to leave any labour undone or ill done ; but the days were'
all stupid alike to him ; he would have been content to have
had no more of tjaem. His crops, his cattle, his fruits, his
oil ceased to fill him with pride, or to rack him with anxiety;
a bad year or a good year was the same to him; he had no
end to save for; there was Lippo in the three fields by the
brook : and Signa wanted no help. The old gloom fell upon
him; the old dark thoughts took possession of him.
The people on the hill saw that he worked harder than
ever he had done before, now that he was once more alone.
But they did not know that the joy had gone out of the
work for him.
Before, Bruno had had that pride and pleasure in his daily
labours without which labour is but as the task of the tread-
SIGN A.
433
mill. In his comely stacks, in his even farrows, in his
plenteous crops, in his cleanly vines, in his well-nourished
beasts he had taken delight. His fields had been to him as
a fair picture; his harvests as a stout victory; he would
have ploughed against any man to and fro the steepest slope
with the same triumph in his skill as a Napoleon in his
battles.
But now all that was changed with him. His work had
lost that gladness in it which alone sweetens life's perpetual
struggle. A sense of captivity had come over him. That
large liberty which the breath of the mountains gives had
gone away from him.
One market-day he had to stay later in the city over a
bargain, which Savio had bidden him miss on no account;
it was night before he could harness his little beast and
think of moving homeward. It was Twelfth-night, and all
the place was in a pleasant tumult. Carnival had come in
that day, and everywhere there were laughter and lights
and sport and jest, and at the corners of the streets masks
were dancing.
Time had been when he had had full zest in that merry
fooling; when he had come down in the dark evenings from
his homestead, walking all the way, and spent the midnight
in the masked riot, leaping round the bonfires and flying in
the circles of the mad dancers, and then had gone up again,
before dawn broke, to his oxen and his wheat-fields and his
olive-pressing.
But those days were done for him; he passed through
the mummers dark and silent, with never a look at them,
with his cloak wrapped across his mouth. His errand took
him past the great theatre; the lighted lamps gleamed on
the printed word of Actea ; a multitude was thronging in
while the city clocks chimed eight.
Bruno halted a moment. He had said he would never
hear it. A sort of hatred thrilled in him at sight of the
gathering people: it was to fill their ears and to have his
name in their mouths that Signa had foresworn the old safa
ways of his mother's people.
So Bruno thought, at least, who did not know that genius
is, at its best, but a slave, driven on by the whip of an im-
perious and incomprehensible obligation.
He had said he never would hear it. But at sight of that
F F
434
STGNA.
dense crowd pressing inwards, a curious impulse to go with
fchem seized on him.
Without thinking much what he did. he entered too ; drew
from his pouch the price they asked him; and found him-
self carried onwards by the pressure into the body of the
house.
He had been there once or twice in his life—no more.
It is the theatre of the people indeed, but peasants go to
humbler ones, and Bruno, except on carnival nights, had
never, even in his maddest years of youth, spent much time
in the city. The Lastra had been his world.
He stood and leaned against a pillar as he might have
done in a church, and the sweet, solemn harmonies of the
overture thrilled through the immense space round him.
Look where he would there was a sea of human faces;
the theatre was crowded, and there was not empty room
left for a little child. A curious emotion filled him with
pain and pride together. All this throng of living people
was summoned by the magic of the boy whom he had lifted
from the breast of his dead mother like a lamb from a
drowned ewe. He had never realised before what thing
it was ; this power of the artist on the multitude; this
power which is most the result of genius in proportion
as it is least its object. As he watched the silent,
breathless multitude such a power seemed to him like a
sorcery.
He recognised the beauty of the music, but it was not that
which moved him. It was to see all that wrapt intent throng
of men and women ruled by the spell cast on them by the
boy who, to him, was still only as a child: the boy who
only a day before, as it seemed to him, had been a little
thing carrying a load of vine-leaves for the cattle, and happy
if a crust of bread were given him to eat on the hill-side at
noonday.
He stood and watched and listened; the rapturous applause,
the tearful silence, the ecstasies of admiration, ma,de his
brain dizzy, and his heart throbbed. This was fame,—to
hold a mass of idle, curious, indifferent people in these
trances of delight, in these rhapsodies of emotion;—he
understood it at last. Each wave of these great sounds
seemed to lift the boy he loved farther and farther from him.
The shouts of the multitude were like the noise of a sea
SIGN A.
435
npest in his ears, bearing away from him and drowning
3 one innocent affection of his life. He realised his own
potence to follow or reach or do anything more to aid the
3 which had been swept ont of his orbit. All in a moment
*na grew an inaccessible, unfamiliar, far-distant thing to
cn—like any one of those stars which he looked up to at
ght, and which the priests said were worlds lying in the
illow of the hand of Deity.
" It is to be like a god," he said to himself, as the music
aled through the space around him, and held the people
liet in the breathlessness of their delight. He did not
Dnder any more that Signa had refused to be content with
lating the earth for his daily bread.
He heard two men close by him say:—
" It is strange the boy himself should be away—the first
ne any of his music is given here—his own city, too, as
te may call it."
"Aye: he is in Rome. They play the Lamia there in
,mival."
" And there is a woman, so they say."
" There always is a woman."
The two men passed onward, laughing.
Bruno touched them.
" Sirs—forgive me—is that true ?"
" Is what true ? "
They looked at him .in surprise ; a contadino with his dark
oak about him, and his careless defiance of attitude, and
s look of the mountain and the weather.
" That which you said—that there is a woman ; that this
why he does not come ?"
" Ah! we know nothing," they answered him lightly.
So they say. So young as he is, and a lion everywhere, it
quite natural. But what can it be to you ?"
" I am from his country," said Bruno, simply; he thought,
3rhaps, it would not do the lad good to say much more.
I come from the Lastra, if you could tell me anything of
m ?"
" Indeed we know nothing," said the men. " "We never
iw the youth; but everyone is talking of him ; so they will
3ssip—it may not be true. That is all; somebody said a
oman kept him down in Rome—some light woman out of
ra,nce. But they would be sure to say so, true or untrue.
436
SIGNA.
Fame is a sugared paper; but it brings all wasps down on
it. Nay, indeed, we know no more."
And with many asseverations and many excuses, as
tbougb he were a prince and not a peasant, courtesy being
the common way of the country, the men went out through
the crowd into the night air, and Bruno followed with the
pressing throng.
" Some light woman out of France."
The words sung in his ear like a hornet's booming.
He went and harnessed his mule, and went back through
the gay merry glittering streets, and over the river across
dark Oltrarno, and so out into the solitary country.
He met scarcely anyone upon the way.
The high road was quiet as a bridle-path across the fields,
and the Lastra was hushed, with fastened casements, and
asleep.
The mule flew speedity over the level ground, and strained
slowty up the steep hill road; the river shone—the leafless
plain was dark—the night was very cold—the skies were
clouded—a dark winter storm hung over where the sea lay,
and hid the Lyre and the Cross of Cignus and the five stars,
dedicated to the plumed steed which bears poets to their
dreams, and lifts them to the highest height—to let them fall.
" A light woman out of France."
The words went with him as a curse rings on the ear long
after it is spoken.
What would she do with him ? with that tender reed of
his soul, which the gods had singled out from all its fellows,
and taken away from the mountain brook of its birth to
make into a flute for their pleasure ?
Bruno drove on through the gloom up into the loneliness
of his own hills.
He felt like one chained.
The life which had seemed to him the best of all lives
grew into a prison cell. He was wedded to the soil; fas-
tened down to one daily track; held fast as by a cord about
his feet.
It had always seemed to him so well that a man should
never stir from one nook—should get his bread where his
fathers got theirs—should find his joys and his pains in one
spot—should live and die on the soil that saw his birth.
Men who sought fortune far afield had seemed to him no
SIGNA.
437
better than the gypsies. Men who bore their reckless dis-
content for ever to fresh pastures had seemed to him base
sons of a fair country. A narrow field was a world too wide
for a man to do the duties of it, so his people had always
said ; dwelling here, and letting the centuries go by without
bringing to them any change. Generation after generation,
they had filled the graves that the sheep cropped around the
old brown church. He had always said, " mine will be there
too," and been content.
Now—all in a moment—the hill-side that he loved nar-
rowed to a prison-house. Other men were free to come and
go, to follow the evil that they dreaded, and seek it out and
combat it; but the peasant cannot stir.
The earth has fed him ; the earth claims him. He is her
son, but he is her bondsman too; as Ishmael was Abra-
ham's.
All peril and all shame might encompass the young wan-
dering life of Signa: and the man who had set himself to
give his own life for it could not move to see the truth or
wrestle against fate.
" A light woman out of France."
The words ran with him through the dark like furies
chasing him.
It might not be true : it might be true.
It might be true : what likelier ?
Signa, inspired of heaven, and amongst sharp human eyes
a fool—as genius always is ;—a giant in his art, an infant in
his ignorance;—what plaything costlier or more alluring to
a woman ?
He had the power of the Apollo Cytharaedus indeed over
men ; but in all other things, save his music, he was but a
child; a child still half asleep, who looked at life with smiling
eyes, and stretched his hands to it as to a sunbeam. What
likelier than that a woman held him ? and a woman worthless
it was sure to be.
The heart of silver falls ever into the hands of brass.
The sensitive herb is eaten as grass by the swine.
Fate will have it so. Fate is so old, and weary of her
task ; she must have some diversion. It is Fate who blinded
Love—for sport—and on the shoulders of Possession hung
the wallet full of stones and sand—Satiety,
Bruno reasoned nothing so.
438
SIGNA.
Only he knew the boy; and he knew Love ; and he said
to himself:
" Fate will come that way."
He had no hope; he felt that what the men had said was
true. There was a woman yonder there in Rome.
Of course it might be so, and no harm come. Hurricanes
pass; some trees stand and are the stronger for the storm;
some break and fall for ever.
Or there might be no hurricane ; only a sweet, mild,
south wind that blew a little hotly for a space, and whirled
him on it like a straw ;—no more.
But not to be there !—not to know ! Going through the
winter night to his lonely house, Bruno felt as though the
soil that he had loved as loyal sons their mothers, was a
gaol.
His feet were fettered to it.
An alien force held the life that he had sworn to save, and
might destroy it and he never nearer, but working like his
beasts amongst the sprouting corn, from dawn to night, no
freer than the beasts were.
Reaching the summit of the hill he looked back south-
ward to the low mountains that lie between the plain and
Rome.
The black clouds that folded the Winged Horse in their
mists had now stretched thither; over those mountains
there wras darkness, but the stars were seen. Far away,
above where they told him was the place of Rome the star
Argol was shining clearer than all the rest.
Astrology and astronomy alike were nought to him; he
could find his way by Polaris if wandering at night—that
was all: for the rest they were to him only veiled, nameless
-wonders that he never thought of: only this star he knew.
Argol dreaded of Arab and Chaldean.
For on the night when Dina had died above there where
the pines were, that star had shone alone, as it did now,
when all the sky wTas dark.
And an old man, now dead, a shepherd, who had been a
soldier of Napoleon in his youth, and had brought strange
perilous faiths and fancies with him from the land of Egypt,
had said to him that night when Dina had died :
" That is the Demon Star. We knew it in the desert. It
means death—or worse."
SIGN A.
439
Bruno had known it always ever after; he knew it now.
Argol was shining above Rome.
Men who dwell in solitude are superstitious. There is no
" chance " for them.
The common things of earth and air to them grow por-
tents ; and it is easier for them to believe that the universe
revolves to serve the earth, than to believe that men are to
the universe as the gnats in the sunbeam to the sun ; they
can sooner credit that the constellations are charged with
their destiny, than that they can suffer and die without
arousing a sigh for them anywhere in all creation. It is not
vanity, as the mocker too hastily thinks. It is the helpless,
pathetic cry of the mortal to the immortal nature from which
he springs:
"Leave me not alone: confound me not with the matter
that perishes : I am full of pain—-have pity ! "
To be the mere sport of hazard as a dead moth is on the
wind—the heart of man refuses to believe it can be so with
him. To be created only to be abandoned—he will not
think that the forces of existence are so cruel and so unre-
lenting and so fruitless. In the world he may learn to say
that he thinks so, and is resigned to it; but in loneliness the
penumbra of his own existence lies on all creation, and the
winds and the stars and the daylight and the night and the
vast unknown mute forces of life—all seem to him that they
must of necessity be either his ministers or his destroyers.
Bruno went on with a shudder in his veins—beholding
Argol.
He had released his weary mule from his burden and
walked up the steep path between his winter fields, holding
the drooping mouth of the beast. It was very cold in the
hours before morning on the heights where he dwelt. There
was ice on the roots, of the pines where the rain waters had
settled, and the north winds chased the great clouds around
the head of the hill. His home was dark and silent.
When he had put the mule in the stall and thrown down
hay for it, he entered his house with the cheerlessness of the
place closing in upon him like a numbing frost. He paused
on his threshold and looked back at the southward skies.
Argol was shining over Rome.
He set his lantern down before his crucifix that hung
against the wall.
440
SIGN A.
" Are you not stronger than that star ? " he muttered to
it. "I have tried hard to serve you—are you not stronger ?
—can you not save him?—let the star take my soul if it
must have one. My soul!—not his. Do you not hear ?
Do we all cry—and you are deaf? Let the star do its worst
on me—that does not matter. Do you hear ? "
The crucifix hung motionless upon the wall. He had
expected some sign ; he knew not what.
Men had often been answered by such signs ; so the
priest told him ; out of the lives of saints in the legend of
goid.
But for him all was dark; all was silent. No voice
answered him in his perplexity. Nothing cared.
Only through his open door he saw the blackness of the
night and Argol shining.
CHAPTER XLIX.
" Dear Nita," said Lippo, this night, toasting himself
over a little pot of charcoal, " do you know I met my old
friend Fede in the city this morning; he has come from
Rome."
Nita grunted an indifferent assent; she was sorting and
numbering a pile of sheets and other house linen ; her eldest
daughter Rita was about to marry a corn chandler of
Pistoia,—a very good marriage, for the youth was rich and
had a farm to boot, and Rita was of that turbulent temper,
and had that strong love of theatres, jewellery, and gadding
about, which makes a burden of responsibility that a mother
prefers to shelve from her own shoulders to a son-in-law's,
as soon as may be.
"Fede is doing well in Rome," said Lippo, loquacious
and confidential as it was his wont to be, especially when
he had anything in his mind that he intended to keep secret.
" Only think! twenty years ago Fede was a poor lean lad
here, glad to get a copper by the holding of a horse or
SIGN A.
441
running with a message ; and now he is as plump and well-
to-do a soul as one could want to see, with a shop of his
own and good money in the banks, and a vineyard by
Frascati—all by knowing how to get old women to give their
dingy lace up for a song, and coaxing ploughmen to barter
old coins they turn up from the mud for bran-new francs,
and having the knack to make cracked pots and pans and
pipkins into something wonderful and ancient! What a
thing it is to be clever. But Providence helps always those
who help themselves."
" What have we to do with Fede ? " said Nita, who knew
that when her lord praised Providence for helping others he
generally had put his own spoon into their soup-plate.
" Oh, nothing—nothing ! " said Lippo, caressing his char-
coal pan. " Only if ever we see any little old thing—no
value, you know—a saucer or a pitcher or a cup or a plate
that the old folks use about here,—there are scores, you
know; why we can give them nice new platters or jugs fresh
made from Doccia, and take the old ones and send to Fede
—do you see ? We shall do a good turn so to all our
friends : to those poor souls, who will have new whole things
to use instead of old ones, and to Fede, who deals in such
droll antique things to the rich foreigners."
Nita's eyes sparkled.
" He will give us well for them ? " she said, suspiciously,
never having learned in all her years of marriage the fine
arts and the delicacy of her lord.
Lippo waved his hand.
"Oh, my dear!—between friends! Fede is the soul of
honour. It will be a pleasure to look out for him; and,
besides, such a benefit to one's poor neighbours, who will
have whole, smooth, pretty china instead of the cracked
clumsy pots that the silly English-speaking nations like to
worship. I did say to Fede—for one must always think of
what is just in conscience before all else—is it right to sell
pipkins and pans for idols to the English ? And Fede said
that for his part, too, he had had that scruple ; but that the
English are pagans, all of them, always, and if they cannot
get a pipkin to put on an altar under glass, fall on their
knees before a big red book, like a mass-book, that they call
a Pi-rage ; no one knows what is in it, only by what they
find there, or do not find, they smile or frown ; some book
442
SIGNA.
of a black art, no doubt. Bo that the pipkin is the more
innocent thing, because, when they get a pipkin, then they
smile all round. So Fede says "
" But he will pay us well for anything we find," said
Nita, always impatient of her husband's moral digressions.
" Many old wives I know of have platters and jugs hundreds
of years old and more—if that is what they want—such
rubbish ! "
Lippo waved his hands with a soft gesture to the empty
air.
" Dearest!—we are alone. It does not matter. I know
your noble nature. But if any one were here—a stranger,
or the children—they might think, hearing you, that our
souls were basely set on gaining for ourselves. Praise be to
the saints ;—we are above all need of that, now."
"WithToto spending all he does!" grumbled his wife,
who, for her part, thought it very silly to waste such pretty
periods when nobody was listening; why-wash your face,
she thought, unless you walk abroad?
" The pleasure," continued Lippo, as though she had not
interrupted him ; " the pleasure will be in doing two good
turns for one ; to Fede, whom we have known all our lives
—good, thrifty, honest soul, and to our neighbours; just
those dear old wives you spoke of, who will be made happy
by nice new china in the stead of ugly cracked old pots,
heavy as iron. And then there may be now and then a
little matter of lace, too—or a crucifix—or a bit of old
embroidery,—anything that is very ugly and dropping quite
to pieces pleases the foreigners. There is so much here-
abouts; in the old farms and the dames' kitchen-nooks.
But of that we will talk more. It is a new idea. Fede just
spoke of it this morning. He said to me, ' There is much
money to be made this way—not but what I know you do
not care for that—only to serve me and your towns'-folks.'
And so he took me in my weakest point! "
Nita grinned ; marking her sheets.
She was a rough downright vigorous woman, with some
sense of humour, and the delicate reasonings of her
husband, when they did not rouse her wrath, tickled her
into laughter.
She did not understand that he deceived himself with
them almost as much as he did others; blowing round him-
SIGNA.
443
self always this incense of fair motives till he believed the
scented smoke was his own breath.
"It is quite a new idea," pursued Lippo, "and may turn
out some benefit to ourselves and others. The other lads
are all well placed, but Toto is a torment,—nay, dear boy,
I know you love him best of all, and so do I, perhaps, after
my Rita, but his bold bright youth boils over at times. Oh,
it is only the seething of the new pressed grapes; the wine
will be the richer and the better by-and-by;—oh, yes.
Still, love, there is no being blind to it; Toto is a cause for
trouble. Now I see an opening for Toto down in .Rome,
with Fede. The dear boy does not love labour. It will just
suit him well; sauntering about to find the pots and pans
and lace and carvings, and idling in the shop to show them
afterwards to the great strangers and fine ladies. And Fede
will look after him and have a care of him—a fatherly care ;
and Toto, in time, may come to have a vineyard of his own
out by Frascati. And he will please the ladies,—he is a
pretty lad. Yes, Fede spoke much of it to me to-day. He
wants just such a boy,—and hinted at a partnership in trade
hereafter. Of course the future always rests with God. We'
see imperfectly."
"It seems a nice easy trade," said Nita, tempted; "and
lying must be handy in it; that would suit him. No one
lies so nattily as Toto."
" Oh, my love ! " sighed Lippo, " make no jests of the
dear lad's infirmity ; his sportiveness leads him into danger,
and he is too quick of wit; it is a peril for young tongues,
■—sore peril. But you mistake, indeed. This trade, as you
call it, is a most honest one. It buys from some people
what they do not want, to sell to some others what they
long for; it helps the poor, and shows the rich innocent
ways of easing their overflow of gold. Oh! a most honest
trade; a trade indeed that one may even call benevolent.
You cannot think that I would place your precious boy in
any employ where the soul's safety would be imperilled for
him. But to see well into this thing and judge of it, and
study Fede's books, which he offers in the most candid way
to show to me, it will be needful that I should run down with
him to Rome."
"What!" screamed his wife, and let her sheets fall
tumbling to the ground.
444
SIGNA.
In all their many years of wedded life Lippo had never
stirred from her roof for any journey; she had been a
jealous woman, and he had given her cause for jealousy,
though never means of proof that she had cause ; besides,
no one ever stirred from the Lastra from their life's begin-
ning to its end, unless for some day out at Impruneta ass-
fair or the feast of S. Francis in Fiesole, or the grain and
cattle markets over the plain at Prato, or such another
town. Folks of the Lastra never travel. It is not a Tuscan
way.
" Fede goes down to-morrow, and I think it will be well
that I should go with him," said Lippo, who was quite
resolved to go, but never made a scene for anything, holding
that rage and haste knotted your flax and never carded it.
" It is a great opening for Toto, your father will see that;
and I think the very thing that will be suited to the lad—■
for, even you, my love, cannot deny that he is idler than
one well could wish. It will cost very little,—only the
journey. I shall lodge and eat with Fede; that is under-
stood. And then there is your aunt, my dear, the good'old
Fanfanni; I might look in on her at Assisi, passing; you
have had ill news of her health, and she has no chick nor
child, and what she has will be going to the Church, unless,
indeed "
" Then it is I should go, not you," said Nita, hotly.
" The Church! If she has any bowels for her own kin—
never ! My father's only sister, and we with six sons and
daughters ! To the Church !—oh, infamous ! I will go
with you, Lippo."
" Oh, my dearest, if you only could ! But only ten days
to Rita's marriage, and the young man coming here daily,
and all the bridal clothes unmade; you never can be spared;
it would not be decorous, my dear, and I shall be back in
such a little time. Three nights at most; and, as for your
aunt's money and the Church—my love, we must use no
influence to hinder any sickening soul from making peace
with heaven. For me, I shall not say a word. If she wish
to leave it to the Church, she shall, for me. But, old and
ailing and alone, it is only fit that one should show her that,
though she quarrelled with your father in her haste, we
bear no malice, and no coldness; that is only right; and,
perhaps, if you put up some little thing—some raspberry
S1GNA.
445
syrup or some preserved peaches—just some little thing
that I could take with me, it might be well—to show we
bear 110 malice. Dear, pack me a shirt or two, and a suit
of clothes in case of getting wet; I need no more. And
now I will go down and tell your father: he is so shrewd and
full of sense. I never do anything without his counsel."
Lippo went downstairs, knowing that old Baldo would
count out a score of dirty yellow notes to be rid of the lad
Toto, or have the mere hope of being rid of him ; and his
wife grumbling and screaming and crying she was the worst
used woman in the land, yet did his will and packed him up
his things.
Nita believed she ruled her husband with a rod of iron;
but, unknown to herself, she was bent by him into as many
shapes and to as many uses as he liked.
A firm will, sheathed in soft phrases, is a power never
resisted in a little household or in the world of men.
" After all, Toto will be miles away in Rome," she
mused ; thinking uneasily of many freaks and foibles which
made the Lastra hot as an oven for her Benjamin, and
many a bundle of good money wheedled out of her by false
stories to be thrown away into the bottomless abysses of
the tombola or the State lottery.
So she packed her husband's shirts, grumbling but acqui-
escent, and added little dainties for the old aunt at Assisi,
and put with them a pictured card of the Agnus Dei, and
then went out and told her neighbours that her lord was
called away to Rome.
To Rome ! It was as if she said, To the very end of the
known world. It gave her a kind of dignity and majesty to
have a husband travelling so far ; it made her almost like a
senator's wife ; she almost began to think the Pope had
sent for him.
So Lippo got his will and departed in peace, where any
other man, less mild and clever, would have raised a storm
above his head, and gone away under a rain of curses.
Nita was a shrew, certainly, and Baldo a crabbed old
curmudgeon, and both, when Lippo had married, had held
their money-bags tight; but Lippo by good judgment and
wise patience had got both Nita and Baldo under his thumb
without their knowing it, and had the money-bags too ; and
yet he never said a harsh word—never.
SIGNA.
"The fool is violent," said Lippo. "If we can only fly
and fume like angry dogs, why is our reason given us ? "
Man was marked out from the brutes by the distinctive
human faculty of being able to cheat his fellows ; that was
what he thought, only he never used any such word as
cheat. He never used any unpleasant words. If driven by
the weakness of mortality ever into any breath of anger, he
confessed it to his priest with instant and unfeigned repent-
ance. He was ashamed of it as an error of intelligence.
"If we sin with our body, perhaps we cannot help it;
that is animal in us," he would say : " but to go astray with
our mind is shameful. That is the human and divine part
of us."
And he used his humanity and divinity with much skill
for an unlearned man, who only knew the little world of his
own birth-place.
And he journeyed now to Rome peaceably, keeping the
real chief object of his journey to himself, and pausing at
Assisi to see the old sick aunt, whom he so charmed with
his syrups and confections and his disinterested religious
fervour, that she made up her mind that Mother Church
was, after all, as wTell off as a fat sitting hen, and determined
to leave her savings, which made a nice little nest-egg, as
her life had been long and prudent and laborious, to this
good man and to his children.
" Though Baldo is a bad one," said she, shaking her
white head.
Lippo smiled and sighed.
" Oh, a kind soul, only too bent on things of the mere
passing world, and thinking too much that heaven is like the
binding to a shoe—the last thing to be thought of, and
stitched on in a minute when you want."
"A bad one," said the old woman, thinking all the more
evil of him from his son-in-law's gentle words ; for Lippo,
though he had never heard of a little crooked poet in the
northern isles, knew, to perfection, the artistic way to " hint
a fault and hesitate dislike."
And when he was gone, she hobbled straight to a notary's
office in the town and made her testament, bequeathing a
small sum for masses for her soul; but leaving all the rest
to her grandnephews and nieces in the Lastra, under their
father's rule.
SIGNA.
447
" Mother Church is plump enough without my crumb,"
she said to herself, "'and never a priest amongst them all
has ever thought to bring me a sup of syrup. They can
give one eternal life, I know, but still when one's cough is
troublesome "
So Lippo, dropping his bread on many waters by the
way, journeyed discreetly down to Rome.
CHAPTER L.
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 loneli-
ness so great.
He got up and saw after bis 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
448
SIGN A.
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 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."
"Aye," 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."
SIGN A.
4-19
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 Car-
mignano.
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 ? The
thought went confusedly through his brain as he cleaned
out the stalls of his cattle.
Down in the plain all the bells were ringing, the sweet
peal of S. Giusto replying to the long full chime of Peretola
from across the water, and all the other villages calling to
one another over the wintry fields; some with one little
humble voice, some with many melodious notes, while down
in the hollow, where the city lay, the deep cathedral bells
were booming, and all the countless churches answering;
but Bruno on his hill heard none of these.
He only heard the winds moaning amongst the unbending
pines.
He only heard the toads cry to one another, feeling rain
coming, "Crake! crake! crake! We love a wet world as
G G
45°
SIGNA.
men an evil way. The skies are going to weep ; let lis be
merry, Crock ! crock! crock! "
And they waddled out—slow, quaint, black things, with
arms akimbo, and stared at him with their shrewd hard
eyes. They would lie snug a thousand years with a stone
and be quite happy.
Why were not men like that ?
Toads are kindly in their way, and will get friendly.
Only men seem to them such fools.
The toad is a fakeer, and thinks the beatitude of life lies
in contemplation. Men fret and fuss and fume, and are for
ever in haste; the toad eyes them with contempt.
The toads looked at Bruno now, and he at them.
A soft thick rain had begun to fall. It scudded over the
plain, and crossed the river, and came up the hillside, dim
and yet dense, stealing noiselessly, and spreading vastly, as
if it were the ghostly hosts of a dead army.
Sometimes on the hill-tops, clouds would break that
never touched the plain; sometimes in the plain it was
pouring, while the hills were all in sunshine. Now moun-
tain and valley had the rain alike.
Bruno worked on in it, not heeding, till the water ran off
his hair, and his shirt was soaking. He did not think about
it. He was thinking of what the men had said: "A light
woman out of France."
All the evil in the world might be happening that very
hour, and he would know nothing.
There was no way to move; no way to hear. He was
like a chained dog.
"I am like the toads," he thought; "the whole city
might burn to the ground, and they would croak in their
pool, and know nothing."
But he was not like the toads, for he dreaded this fire,
which he could not see.
It rained thus several days.
Bruno saw no one. He had his hands full with the birth
of weakly lambs, in the wet ague-giving weather, that made
the mossy ground under the pines a swamp. One or two
nights he watched all night by a sheep in her trouble; with
the great pines over his head, and the broken rocks strewn
around. He worked early and late, seeing no creature,
except the dumb lad he had as shepherd and the dogs. It
SIGNA.
45*
was dark before four in the afternoons. He took bis big
lantborn into the shed, and bewed wood, or ground maize,
all tbe evening, witb tbe beads of the oxen near bim, over
tbeir balf-door. He felt as if be could not face tbe cold
lonely kitcben and living-room, witb tbeir empty beartbs.
Do whatever be might, be looked across to wbere Rome
was, and tbougbt of tbe "ligbt woman out of France."
Tbe drenching rains bid Argol, witb all tbe other stars.
But be bad seen it that once. It was enough. It haunted
bim.
Silently and uselessly be raged against bis own impo-
tence. Why bad be not been any creature free to roam ?—
a gipsy, a tramp, a vagabond, anything so that he could
now have set bis face to tbe south, and bent bis steps over
tbe bills.
Tbe habits of bis life were on bim like so many chains.
Tbe soil held bim as tbe flat stone holds tbe sucker of
leather. Change as possible never occurred to him. Tbe
peasant thinks no more of quitting bis land than tbe
sentinel bis post. Come what may, there be stays.
Several of these days and nights went by; it rained
always. There was no communication from village to vil-
lage. A grey cloud overspread tbe whole great landscape.
Bruno worked as if it were bright harvest weather; and
it went ill witb some of bis ewes, and tried bim; but going
and coming, rising and lying clown, sitting in bis sheep but
on tbe mountain side, and working tbe millstones by torch-
ligbt in tbe shed, one thought alone went witb bim, and
racked bim sore: was it true what they said of the boy in
Rome ?
At last the rain cleared; the roads grew more passable ;
tbe last lamb was born that would be born for some weeks;
be put tbe mule in tbe shafts, and drove down into market
with bis sacks of potatoes. When be bad done bis business,
a tbougbt struck bim. He went to tbe place near tbe
Rubaconte bridge, wbere be bad seen the dancing girl of
Istriel.
Tbe painting was gone. He asked them if they bad any
pictures of it; tbe things that tbe sun took ? They had,
and sold bim one. It seemed to bim very dear. It cost
more than a flask of wine.
But be took it with bim.
453
SIGNA.
"What is that man, Istriel?" ashed Bruno, of the seller
of the copies, who was an old Florentine, and knew some-
thing of painters and their ways, and had been about the
Villa Medicis in earlier years in Rome.
The man shrugged bis shoulders.
" He is Istriel. That is enough to say. It is as when
one says any other great name. It speaks for itself."
" Great! From painting wrantons ! "
" Tiziano painted them."
" He is not of our country ? "
"No. Of France. But he often works in Rome. He
has a palace there."
" I thought painters were poor ? How should he live in a
palace ? "
" They are poor for the most part, and I think it is best
for their pictures when they keep so. But he is not. He
paints naked women so beautifully that all the world runs to
see. Not to be bigger than your time is—that is a wonder-
ful secret to make you rich."
" I do not understand," said Bruno.
The man who had seen hundreds of students come and
go out of the class-rooms and the painting-rooms, laughed.
" Oh, I understand—because I see so much of them.
They are all alike. They come with great bright eyes, and
lean cheeks, and empty purses. They study our giants,
they do beautiful things. No one wants them. They starve
a few years, then they see what the world likes. They
change, and paint wantons in silk clothes, or without, as
large as life; or else, little rapiered mannikins, frilled and
furbelowed, no bigger than a shoe-buckle. Then they make
money. This Istriel has made more money than them all,
because he draws almost with the force of our Michel
Angelo, and colours with the softness of their Greuze. He
is a wise man, too. He knows his age. I remember him
well a student down in Rome. A handsome, gay, charming
lad, with great genius. He might have done better things
than his naked women. But I do not know—very likely.
He is right. They call him the new Tiziano, and he is at
the head of his school, and can get its weight in gold for
any picture. No man needs more."
" I do not understand," said Bruno, whom all these
words only confused.
SIGN A.
453
The old man chuckled, and nodded, and turned to other
people to sell other photographs of the Sister of the Seven
Dancers. For many a long year he had swept out the
floors, and set the easels, and trimmed the palettes in the
Yilla Medicis, and had seen the young artists grow old, and
knew how they grew to the greed of the world, as vines to
the twists of the maple.
Bruno was perplexed. Painters had ever been to him
mysterious religious men, who lived to the glory of God,
and made church walls and monastic altars eloquent with
sacred meaning to the common people. That was what he
thought; he who, from the time when he had run with his
father's mule to market, had trodden the streets of Del
Sarto, and Giotto, and the Memmi brethren, and said his
ave in haste in the cool summer dawns, in Or San Michele
before the white tabernacle of Orgagna.
Istriel was nothing to him. Yet his soul rose in a sullen
scorn against the man who had so fair a gift from heaven, and
only used it to show a dancer bounding away over " the
primrose path to the everlasting bonfire," and taking the
foolish souls of the young and the guileless with her.
Bruno would uncover his head before a Madonna or a
Magdalen, and feel, without knowing why, that those who
could make such things live on the pale plaster or the
brown cypress wood, were men worthy of honour. But
against the painter of Innocence, all the manliness and all
the strength of his character arrayed themselves in fierce
contempt.
Going out of the street^of the Archibusieri that day, he met
Savio. The old man stopped him.
" So they expect your boy in the town to-night, for a
great gala. What! Did you not know ? Perhaps he
meant to surprise you. He has done that before. No doubt
he will come round by the seaway from Borne to Signa.
"It is possible," muttered Bruno. "He may be there
now, then! "
" Like enough. I heard them saying in the streets some-
thing, I am not sure what, of a great festa for the court,
and of the king, and of your boy being sent for. He
would be sure to come by the sea, I think. Most likely he
is already there. You had better go home. Besides, the
lambs must not long be left."
454
SIGNA.
" No," said Bruno, almost stupidly.
Was it possible Signa was so near as tbis, and all the
gossip of the woman that held him was untrue ? No doubt
the boy meant to surprise him. Each time he had done so.
Each time, when his letters had been few and brief, he had
returned safely ; glad and well and proud. No doubt what the
men had said had been a folly ; born of jealousy and dis-
paragement, the twin parasites that feed on all success, and
kill it if they can.
Bruno's heart grew light.
He did not stop to doubt or question. It seemed so
natural. Nothing was likelier than that the lad, summoned
for any fresh or special honour, would have had no space
to write of it, but would have come round by the seaway to
tell the tale of it, and give a brief glad greeting, and then
pass down into the city. Nothing likelier.
Bruno left Savio, in haste, thinking of the boy reaching
the hill thence by the early morning time, as he no doubt
had done, and finding him absent. All these precious
hours lost, too ! It was now one o'clock. " Tocco " 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 sum-
inoned, 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, ho had
nothing to do with all the grandeur; the king did not want
him.
His heart grew light again, and he felt proud as he heard
the people talking in the streets, of how the princes had
ordered this great night of Lamia; and how the theatre
would be lit " like day ; " and how standing room there
was not to be had, no, though you could give all the jewels
and gold ancl silver for it off the Jewellers' Bridge. He
SIGN A.
455
felt proud. 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.
SIGN A.
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 S. 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 Casta-
gnolo ; villa and monastery, watch-tower and bastion, home-
stead 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 un-
broken.
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 un*
SIGNA.
4S7
invited 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 mad-
men 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 Borne 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, wTould 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;
458
SIGNA.
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 lanterns, and hung them up against the door-
posts ; 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 lanterns 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. " Ho
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 bright-
ened; his face changed. He went forward eagerly:
SIGN A.
4S9
" 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 morn-
ing 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.
He stripped the covering off the gun.
It was such a weapon as he had coveted all his life long,
seeing such in gunsmiths' windows and the halls of noble-
men: a breech-loader, of foreign make, beautifully mounted
and inlaid with silver; amongst the chasing of it he could
see engraved lines : he could distinguish his own name and
Signa's—the one he knew the look of, having seen it so
often on summons papers for mad deeds done against the
petty laws of his commune ; the other he knew because it
was painted over the railway place upon the hill. He could
decipher Bruno—Signa; and he guessed the rest: a date,
no doubt, and some few words of memory or love.
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 wralnut 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
460
SIGN A.
acacia brambles, and dry boughs of pine, and logs of oak;
dragging tbem 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, toss-
ing 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 onhfire. 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 phrenzy 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.
SIGNA.
CHAPTER LI.
February days are in the Signa country often soft as the
May weather of the north.
The trees are setting for leaf, the fields are green, the
mountains seem full of light; the birds sing and the peasants
too, the brooks course joyously down the hills, the grass is
full of snowdrops and the pearly bells of the leucoium, and
millions of violets pale and purple ; there are grand sunsets
with almost the desert red in them, and cold transparent
nights, in which the greatness of Orion reigns in its fullest
glory, and, watching for the dawn, there hangs that sad star
which we call the Serpent's Heart, and the Arabian astro-
logers called the Solitary One.
The stars were still out when Bruno with each dawn rose
from his short, troubled, lonely sleep, and went out to his
work as was his wont.
He worked early and late. There was nothing else for
him to do.
He was consumed with impatience and anxiety, but he
laboured on in his fields. To leave them never occurred to
him. The sailor in mid-ocean is not more chained to one
narrow home than Bruno was by habit and custom and
narrowness of knowledge to his high hill tops.
A fever of desire to hear, to see, to learn, to make sure,
consumed him. He ate his very heart away with the gnaw-
ing wish to know the worst. But Rome was as vague to
him and as far off as the white moon that faded away over
his pine-woods as the daylight waned to noon.
On his own land, in his own labour, he was a strong
skilful man, able to cope with any labour and turn aside any
disaster. But away from his own soil he knew nothing.
Custom and ignorance hang like a cloud between the peasant
and the outer world. He is like the ancient geographers of
old, who feared to step off the shore they knew lest they
should fall into an immeasurable, incomprehensible abyss.
Bruno would have walked through fire or plunged head-
long in the sea to serve or save the boy; but the lack of
knowledge paralysed him ; Rome to him was far off as
462
SIGN A.
the stars; he could only work and wait, and rise in the
dark coldness before morning, haunted with nameless fear,
and counting the dull dead days as they dragged on, and
meeting the old sacristan who said always, "he does not
write ;—oh, that is because all is well; when young things
are happy they forget."
Once or twice he took out a handful of money from off
the copper pitcher set behind the chimney bricks, and went to
his priest. " When we pay for masses for the dead it does
do them good ? " he said. " Hell if they be in it gives them
up—lets them loose—is it not so ? "
" Most certainly, my son," said the old pastor.
"Then can we not buy them for the living? There is
hell on earth," said Bruno, and emptied out his handful of
curled yellow notes, and looked at his priest with wistful
pitiful eyes.
"Tell me what the trouble is," said the Parroco, who
was the best and kindliest of souls, and had always had a
weakness for this sinner whom he had confessed and shriven
every Easter for so many years.
" I am not sure what it is," said Bruno, and told him
what he knew.
" Masses will do nothing, since there is a woman," said
the old priest, sadly.
. " Are women stronger than hell then ? "
" I have lived seventy years ; and I think so. But it is
not a case for masses. Prayer for your lad I will say with
my full heart's willingness. But put up your notes. I will
not take them."
But Bruno would leave them on the little wooden seat of
the sacristy. "Give them away in charity," he said:
" perhaps heaven will remember it to the boy." And he
would leave them there.
" We may get a soul out of purgatory, but a lad out of a
woman's toils—that is harder," thought the priest, but he
only said, rolling up the notes: "I will make sick folks
happier with them, Bruno, since you wish it. That can
neither harm you nor him."
" Pray for him, never mind me," said Bruno, simply; and
he left the little old red church, with its high crumbling
tower, where the daws built, and the owls, and the beautiful
blue jays.
■SIGNA.
463
It was a little solace to him that prayer should rise up
there in the stillness of the hills, and pass out of the narrow
windows with the wind, and go up through the sunshine and
the clouds to where they said God and the saints were.
Who knew what it might do ?
But it gave little rest to the anxious, troubled, heavy soul
of the man. Nature had made Bruno for action; to pray,
and hope, and trust, and wait resigned, was a woman's way;
it was not his.
The bitter ferocity, too, with which he had broken and
burned the gun had not passed away. With Bruno nothing
passed. His passions were flames which burned their pas-
sage indelibly. He kept the secret of his pain in his own
mind unspoken ; hut the rage with which he had destroyed
what had seemed to him as insult—as payment in base
metal when the gold of remembrance and of affection was
withheld—that rage chafed in him always.
He never opened his lips to blame Signa. He never let
any one in his hearing say they marvelled at Signa's forget-
fulness of him. When any man said within earshot of him
that it was strange that the boy should have passed a night
in the city and never sent any tidings home, Bruno had
answered him sharply : " The lad has great things to think
of; he belongs to all the world now; not to one hill-top ;
when I complain of him others may do so too ; till then let
them have a care." And people knowing his humours were
afraid, and never said a slighting word ; but supposed that
Bruno was content.
But the fury with which he had thrust the rifle into the
fire consumed him always. The gift—hurting him like a
blow, cast to him as it seemed like so much wage—had dug
a chasm between him and the boy he loved.
Any other time he might have taken it as a symbol of
grateful tenderness. But now—when Signa forsook him—
it added a sting to the sharpness of his pain under neglect.
It seemed to him the very insolence of success of triumph of
riches, which said,—" So my debts are paid."
In cold reason the next day, when he raked out the fire
and found one silver plate unburned amidst the embers, he
stamped it under his heel, and hurled it into the deep well
at his door.
Signa had had the unhesitating unhalting sacrifice of
464
SIGNA,
twenty years of bis life, and thought to pay him by a gun.
smith's glittering toy!
That was how it seemed to him.
So he worked on amidst the fields, and let the days go ;
between him and the boy there was a gulf of silence.
Bruno's heart revolted against him. He asked himself why
he had let the years go by and lived without woman's love,
and the laughter of children, and the good will of men
which comes from easy spending, that Pippa's son might
have his way and pay him with forgetfulness ? "Why had
he consumed a score of years in rigid self-denial, ceaseless
labour, and barren solitude for this boy's sake only in the
end to be abandoned for the first wanton face that smiled,
and recompensed with such reward as careless princes give
the forest-guards that drive their game ?
Yet the great loyal love in him cleaved even to what he
thought thankless and thoughtless and forgetful. He still
would have bought Signa's peace at any price of his own
body or soul; he still said to the priest, " Pray for him; for
me it does not matter."
But in the short soft days and in the long cold nights
there was a heavy darkness always on him. Once he said
to the priest:
" If she take him from me—there is no God."
And he toiled in his fields with the fragrance of the
coming spring in all the soil, and looked across at the low
lines of the hills, and felt his heart like a stone, his feet like
lead.
One fresh chill daybreak, as he worked with the silver
dew on every blade of grass, and spread like a white veil
over all the hills, his brother's voice called him.
Looking up he saw Lippo. He stood on the other side of
one of the low stone walls that are built across the sloping
fields to stay the force of water coming from the heights in
winter rains.
Bruno did as he had done ten years and more ; he worked
on and seemed never to see the figure of his brother between
him and the light.
They met a hundred times a year and more ; Bruno did
always so. For him Lippo had ceased to live.
The priest had urged him vainly to forgiveness.
" Who cannot hate, cannot love;" Bruno had answered
SJGNA.
always. " Forgetfulness is for women. Forgiveness is for
dogs : I have said it."
"Bruno, may I speak a word to you?" said Lippo,
gently. He had his softest and most pensive face; his
eyes were tender and regretful; his voice was calm and
kindly; in his boot he had slipped a knife, for fear—no one
■could tell,—Bruno was violent, and he had left his cowherd
in the lower fields within a call; but in his look and atti-
tude Lippo had the simplest trustfulness and candour. He
seemed oppressed and sorrowful: that was all.
Bruno went on and worked as he had done on the day
that he had heard his brother was the owner of the neigh-
bouring land. He was cutting his olive-trees. He slashed
the branches and flung them from him with force ; so that
if they would they might strike Lippo in the face.
Lippo watched the gleaming steel play in the grey leaves;
and was glad he had bethought him to slip that knife within
his boot.
" Bruno," he said, very gently, " do not be in haste or
rage. I come in all true brotherliness ; the saints are my
witnesses. You have been in anger against me many years.
Some of your anger was just; much unjust. I could not
defend myself from your accusations of having dealt ill with
Pippa's child unless I had blamed Nita—and what husband
can shield himself at his wife's cost ? Poor soul! She has
many virtues, but her hand is rough, and her tongue harsh,
and mothers think it a merit to hurt other children to benefit
their own. A woman's virtue is locked up in the cupboard
by her own hearthstone. Nita has been an honest wife to
me ; but she has—a temper."
Bruno slashed a great bough from his tree, and flung it
downward; it struck Lippo. He moved aside, blinded for
the moment, then went gently on.
"A temper:—oh, I know it, none so well. No doubt
the poor child suffered from it, and were it not that in mar-
riage one must serve a wife at every hazard, and take her
wrong-doing as one's own, I could have proved to you with
ease that what you thought my treachery was none of mine,
but bitter pain and grief to me ; aye, indeed. Again and
again I have gone supperless to give the little lad my por-
tion. You know I never was master in my house. The
money has always been hers and her father's. Never once
H H
466
SIGN A,
bave they let me forget that, though Baldo is a good soul in
much."
Bruno descended from his ladder, lifted it from the tree
upon his shoulder, and turned to leave his olives, as though
there were no man speaking or waiting on the other side
the wall. He would not waste words on Lippo, and, if he
looked at him he knew that he would do some evil on him;—^
this brother who had cheated him and got his land.
He shouldered his ladder, and turned to mount the sloping
held.
" Wait!" cried the other. " Bruno—as surely as we are
sons of one mother, I come to you in all amity."
Bruno went on up the hill.
" Bruno, wait!" cried Lippo. " By the Lord above us,
I come with good intent."
Bruno did not pause, nor look back.
He went up the slope of the grass-lands, leisurely, as
though there were no one near.
" But if I come to make amends ?" said Lippo.
Bruno laughed, a short deep laugh, fierce as a fierce dog's
bite; and went on his way against the glittering dews of the
rising ground.
Lippo cried to him from the wall,—-
" But I have journeyed up from Rome."
Rome ! Involuntarily, unconsciously, Bruno stopped, and
turned his head over his shoulder. The name of the city
struek him like a shot. It was the last word he would have
dreamed of hearing. It was the place for ever in his mind.
It was the dim, majestic, terrible world that Argol shone on
in the frosty nights.
Lippo, who had never travelled beyond the hills round
the Lastra and the town walls of Florence, had journeyed
back from Rome !
In the natural movement of surprise and wonder he halted
a moment under the olive trees and looked back.
Lippo took that one moment of riveted attention. He
leaped the wall lightly, and joined his brother.
" Bruno—as I live, I come to make amends. I want to
speak to you about the boy. If you will not listen, it is he
who will sufier. He destroys himself—there."
Bruno halted. Mechanically he shifted the ladder from
his shoulder, and set it up against the nearest tree. He was
SIGNA.
467
taken by surprise. He was forced to show his sense of his
brother's presence and his brother's words. He was shaken
out of his stern self-control, his impenetrable reticence. Do
what he would, he felt his face pale, his eyes fall, under
Lippo's. Passionate questions sprang to his lips ; but how
could he trust a traitor and a liar ?
In the instant of his hesitation, Lippo spoke.
" I have been down to Rome. On business. To place
my son in trade there. Nay, listen. All the city will tell
you I speak truth. Of course I heard of Signa. It was
impossible not to hear. At the Apollo they play his Actea;
all the town is full of him. Of his great genius no one can
say enough. But if some means be not found to save him,
he will be destroyed, body and soul. A woman has hold of
him. He only lives for her. I caught sight of him once
two nights ago; he was with her in the moonlight. He
looks so changed ; one would not know him for that happy,
simple lad of our last autumn time. Listen. All boys have
follies. This might pass as such a folly does. But it will
not do so—no. Because this woman is not as others are.
She is the vilest of the vile, but beautiful:—the saints for-
give me, but when I saw her, I felt one might do any crime
for such a face as that. They call her Innocence ! In
mockery, no doubt. For they say there is no living thing
more cruel than she is, nor more depraved, nor more vora-
cious of all kinds of wealth. That is the worst. This
woman is rich. The boy is poor. You know what they
will say—he lives upon her, or they say he does. I know
it is not true. Your Signa is too proud and pure for that.
But, still, they say so ; and great men, while they praise
his genius, look askance on him—so I hear. Nay:—it is a
sorcery. A strong will would break from it. But the lad
is not strong. When God gives genius, I think he makes
the brain of some strange glorious stuff, that takes all
strength out of the character, and all sight out of the eyes.
Those artists—they are like the birds we blind : they sing,
and make people weep for very joy to hear them; but they
cannot see their way to peck the worms, and are for ever
wounding their breasts against the wires. No doubt it is a
great thing to have genius: but it is a sort of sickness,
after all; and when love comes "
Bruno, standing with his back against the olive, heard his
468
SIGNA
brother's voice run on, and did not stop him. His eyes
were fastened with anxious, hungry pain on Lippo's face.
He knew that Lippo spoke the truth.
" The boy has amorous fancies, like any other," he mut-
tered. "Why not? Why not? You hate him, because
you wronged him. Therefore you make much from little.
You lie now ; you always lied. Get you gone—while I let
you go in peace."
Lippo sighed.
"Nay, Bruno—it is you who do wrong to me. Why
should I come and tell you this ? It cannot pleasure me,
nor hurt me. Only one has some natural affections, some
bowels of compassion—and he was poor Pippa's son! I do
not blame the lad; a boy like that. And if you saw the
beauty of the woman ! Only, I said to myself, Bruno should
know of this ; and, rather than ask a stranger to meddle in
it, I came myself. Because he is the woman's toy, her tool,
her fool, her slave. He does nothing with his time. He
never touches pen nor lute, nor anything of art. I hear she
says to him,' Give me a rival in your art, I leave you.' And
he, to do her will, flings all his life away. Some say she
loves him really. Some say that it is only wantonness,
because the world talks of him; and so she likes to rule him,
and, in a month or two, will break his heart, and send him
out a beggar and an idiot. Nay—I say nothing more than
all Rome says; in truth, not a tittle so much. It is the
common gossip of the streets. The woman is rich. She
has had great lovers, princes and the like. The boy is known
to live under her roof, to be lapped in luxury ;—you know
what men will say."
Bruno sprang forward and seized his brother by the
shoulders, in an iron grasp.
" It is a lie of Rome—a lie, a lie. They grudge my boy
his glory, and so they stone him thus, and fling their mud
upon him! "
"It is not a lie. Think—is he not silent to you ? Is be
frank with you, and glad, and truthful, as of old ? It is
true, terribly true : a woman has bewitched him."
" As God lives—do you say this in honesty and pity ?—
or brutally, to triumph in his weakness ? "
Lippo looked him full in the eyes, candidly.
"In honesty and pity."
SIGN A.
469
Bruno gazed in his brother's face. Lippo's eyes met him
in steadiness and sorrow. Bruno let him go, and stood
stupefied, mastering, as best he could, his own suffering,
lest Lippo should read it and be glad. In his heart, he knew
that the story brought from Rome was true.
Lippo took up his narrative; he had a sweet, pathetic
voice, and skill in speech, like almost all his countrymen.
" Bruno, I know I have offended you; nay, more—
wronged you, in the days gone by. I am poor, amongst
crafty well-to-do folks, who goad me on; I have many chii-
dren; I have a troubled home, and noisy hearth. I know I
have thought too much of getting on in life, and laying by ;
and so was untrue to your trust sometimes, and so lost your
confidence—-justly. That I see now. And you have been
harsh and violent. You cannot gainsay that. But, as the
angels watch us this hour in heaven, I have no single
thought but the boy's good in what I tell you now. He is
so young. He is soft-hearted as a girl. He is alone in a
great turbulent world, that first turns his head with flattery
and homage, and then reviles him the first moment that he
falls. They tell me it is always so. The world is a spoilt
princeling, and the genius in it is the dog it first flings cakes
to, and then bids go drown. They say so. But I think
Signa may be saved. He is so young. It cannot be that
this sudden passion has killed all natural, innocent love and
gratitude in him. That is impossible, his heart is good:
even to me—whom you had made him hold as his foe—he
was most gentle always. It cannot be he has forgotten all
he owes to you, or would be altogether deaf to what you
urge on him. It cannot be that all old memories and old
affections are dead in him."
Bruno stood with the grey wood and leaves of the old
olive-tree behind him; his head was bent; his face was very
white, under the brown hues from the sun; his lips quivered
under the dark, drooping hair; he strove to seem calm, but
Lippo read the pain that tortured him.
" It is too true, indeed," said Lippo. " Where a woman
is, and the love of her, there reason has no hold, and grati-
tude no abiding place. And she is beautiful. She makes
you dizzy, even seeing her go by in the moonlight, you
standing in the gutter. After our brown, dusky, sturdy
maidens, that white wonder seems more than a woman—■
47°
SIGN A.
somehow. They rave of her in Rome. It seems she has
abandoned all her mighty lords, and doats on Signa; and
they do say, too, that in a month or two she will veer round
and laugh at him, and take up her lords again; and then—
there will be worse evil still. Because the boy is mad for
her, and believes her all she is not. When he learns the
truth, there will be trouble ; and any day may show it.
When her fancy ends, then what will become of the lad ? I
spoke to an old man, whom my friend knew, one of the
flute-players of the opera-house, and he told me that they
think the boy's genius will die out altogether, he cares for
nothing—only for the woman and her whims and will. It
is a sorcery. Signa is not like other youths. He was
always thinking of the angels, and of all manner of strange
sights and sounds, that none but himself could ever see or
hear. Now that he loves this woman as he loved his music
—it will go hard with him. Because a wanton cannot ever
love. That grown men know."
Bruno was silent. His face moved with a great emotion
that he had no longer power to conceal; he could no longer
affect to doubt his brother's words, or deny the things they
spoke of; the misery and danger for the boy spread before
him as if they were written on the limestone hill and on the
cloudless winter sky ; he forgot all else.
His brother's treacherous deeds against himself paled into
nothing; his true and loyal faith to Pippa's son made his
own wrongs grow as nought to him; he would have let a
snake bite him to serve Signa. So he let the triumph of
Lippo sting him, thinking only of the peril of the boy.
" Why have you come to say all this to me ? You have
hated the boy, and been false to him and to me. Of all this
—if it be true—you are glad."
"Nay! God knows you wrong me!" cried Lippo, as
with a burst of generous indignation, of pained sincerity.
" You wrong me cruelly. The poor boy I never hated—
heaven and earth !—why should I ? I doubted that he was
Pippa's son, I did believe him yours. But either way he
was my kith and kin. I erred. I say so. No man can do
more. But chiefly I erred through weakness, letting a too
violent woman have her way in my little household. I have
admitted my fault there. I did not continue loyal to your
trust as I should have done. I sacrificed duty to the sake
SIGN A.
471
of keeping peace at home, In a word—I was a coward.
You who are brave as lions are, have furious scorn for that.
But Bruno, as we are sons of one sainted mother, my heart
is free of every taint of bitterness against you or the boy.
I have been proud of his greatness. Any ray of it is so
much light and honour on us all. I grieve, as any creature
with human blood in him would do, to know that all his
future has been put in pawn to a vile woman. I come to
tell you because I said—how should he hear anything on
that lonely hill ? And because I thought that if you saw
him—went to him—some change might come, or you might
save him from some rash, mad deed, when he finds out
what thing it is he worships. That is why I come. Up-
braid me if you will; but do not doubt me."
" Do you know more of her ? "
" Nothing more."
" Where does she come from ? "
" From France, I think."
" She is called that name—Innocence ? "
" Yes."
"It is the same woman whose likeness was shown in the
town yonder ? "
" That I do not know."
" A man called Istriel painted her."
" That I do not know either ; I only know what I have
told you."
" She passes for rich ? "
" She is rich."
" How long has—he—been with her ? "
" Two months—or something more; so they say."
" Where does she live ? "
" At a palace called the Sciallara ; going up by what they
call the Campidoglio."
" That is hard to remember. Write it."
Lippo took out a torn letter and a pencil, and, making the
wall his desk, wrote it in the clumsy handwriting which he
had taught himself late in life. "You will do nothing
rash," he said, pleadingly, as he gave the paper.
Bruno took it.
" I cannot tell what to do."
His face was dark and weary ; his breath came quickly ;
his eyes had a sort of piteous wish for counsel in them; he
472
SIGN A.
was so utterly ignorant of what course to take. He could
not see his way. He would have grasped any hand as a
friend's that could have led him through the darkness.
" I wish I had not told you," said Lippo, with sudden
candid self-rebuke and regret in his vexed tones. " Perhaps
I should have held my tongue. But it seemed horrible.
To know the lad in such a woman's power, and not speak
of it to you, to whom he is the very apple of the eye,
though he forgets so—"
Bruno winced, as a brave steer that has borne the heat
and labour of the day unflinchingly winces at the fly that
stings him in the wrung nostril, where the iron is.
"You did right to tell me," he said simply. "It was
good in you and honest."
" I asked the grace of heaven on it," answered Lippo.
Bruno looked at him.
Lippo's eyes met his with clear and honest candour.
A short troubled sigh heaved Bruno's chest quickly for a
moment.
" I must think," he muttered, and he turned and took the
ladder on his shoulder, and began to mount the hill.
" Stay, Bruno," said his brother, " stay one moment.
We have been sundered so long. Tell me we are friends ? "
Bruno looked at him, turning his head, as he went slowly
up the grass between the olives. His own eyes were very
sad, and had a heavy dark reproach in them.
" I am not a man to forget," he said, " a foe is a foe—
always—to me. A traitor always a traitor. But if you
mean well by the lad, and would save him, I will forgive
you if I can."
Then he went onward.
Lippo stood silent; a little faint smile came on his mouth.
" He "will go to Borne," he thought.
Suddenly Bruno turned once more and came downward
to him with a swift stride. The generous, fierce, tender
nature of him welled up in a sudden warmth and emotion.
" Lippo, you have done good now, it shall cancel the evil.
I cannot forget; it is not in me to forget; but if I save the
boy we will live in fellowship. You stole the land—yes.
But I will ask God's grace to wash that out of mind with
me. If you mean well by the lad—that is enough."
He stretched his hand out: Lippo took it.
SIGNA.
473
Then they parted.
Bruno went upward to his house, leaving the olive trees
untouched.
Lippo went downward into the Lastra.
" He will go to Rome," he thought, " and he will quarrel
with the hoy, or kill the wanton."
And he smiled, going through the buoyant springlike air,
as the western wind blew keen from the mountains.
Lippo knew that wise men do not do harm to whatever
they may hate.
They drive it on to slay itself.
So without blood-guiltiness they get their end, yet stain-
less go to God.
Lippo, content, walked on in the brilliant sunshine of the
morning; he smiled on children as he passed them and gave
a beggar money.
As he went back he saw Raima carrying up linen to wash
in the washing-place behind her on the hill-side.
" Shall I tell her," thought he, and he paused a moment.
But Lippo was a kindly man when he had no end to serve
by being cruel; and he disliked giving pain, unless he gained
something by it. He had soft words and gentle deeds for
everybody when they cost him nothing. So he went on
and left Palma in ignorance; Palma, who every year, on the
feast of the dead, prayed for her sister as for one safe in
heaven.
CHAPTER LII.
A little later the girl had her linen plunged in the cold
deep water, and stood washing with half a dozen other
women. To keep her brothers from want and a roof over
all their heads, she had to take any and all work as it came ;
the rough with the smooth. She got a little something—
washing the shirts and shifts of peasants too busy with
field work to have time to do it for themselves, and Palma's
linen was always white, and always was well wrung out and
dried.
474
SIGNA.
Here and there on the hills there are these big water
places, like the stone tanks that the women wash at in the
streets of Rome. Only these tanks upon the hills are in
wide wooden sheds, and have the green country shining
through the doors of lattice-work.
Raima was washing among the other women, the water
was splashing and bubbling, the sun was shining, the wind
was whistling, the tongues were chattering, she alone of all
was silent, her bare arms in the cold brown pool.
" You are wanted," the women said to her, surprised, for
no one ever wanted her, unless, indeed, as they wanted the
mule or the cart-horse : she left the linen soaking, and went
outside the wooden door.
Bruno stood there.
He put a little picture in her hand.
"Have ever you seen any one like that?" he asked her,
covering all but the face of it. Palma's brown cheek grew
ashen : then the blood rushed over her forehead.
" What is it ? Where did you get it ? "
" Whom is it like ? "
" It is like—Gemma ; only it is a woman."
" Yes, it is a woman."
He laughed a little, and took his hand away and left the
figure of the dancer of Istriel visible.
Raima coloured over her throat and up to her dusky
growing hair.
" It is a shameful woman. Oh, why did you show me
that ? "
"It is only a picture," said Bruno, moodily, and he
pitched it into the water that flowed and foamed outside the
washing-house. She caught his arm.
" Why did you show it me ? Do you know anything ?
Do you mean anything ? "
" Nothing. It is only a picture."
And he walked away.
She leant over the tank and reached and plucked it out
from the water ; it was a photograph, and the moisture ran
off, and did not harm it. She stood and looked at it. She
was alone against the white brick wall, her rough, blue
skirt clung wet and close to her ; she had a red handkerchief
over her short cropped hair; the wind blew over her naked
feet and her bared arms; the wide green hills were behind
SIGNA.
475
her, the brown wooden door of the shed before her; there
was a cold azure sky above the golden budding trees.
She stood and looked at the picture. Her face burned,
though she was all alone. She shuddered and hated it.
" He is a hard, cruel man," she said. " How could he
bring me such a thing ? My Gemma is safe with Christ."
Then she threw the picture in the water again, and as
it floated put a great stone on it and sunk it, and as it rose,
flung another greater stone, and then another, and then
another, until the picture dropped under it like a drowned
dead thing, and lay at the bottom with the mud and weeds.
She felt as if she slew a devil.
"My Gemma is with Christ," she said; and she went
back to the washing women and the hard work and the
coarse linen, while the winter sun shone, and the winter
wind blew.
CHAPTER LIIL
Bkuno went straight to the steward, and told him that he
was about to go to Rome.
It was as base to him to leave his land as it is to the
soldier to desert his post.
The land was more than your mother ; so he thought; it
fed you all your life long, and gave you shelter when you
were dead, and men would have you cumber their house-
holds no more. He loved every clod of the good sound
earth, and every breath of its honest fresh fragrance. He
looked to lie in it when he should be buried and gone for
ever, by the side of Dina, under the pines, with his feet
resting for ever on the mountain-side that they had trodden
so long. He had always a fancy that in his grave there he
should know when the corn was springing and feel the soft
rainfall.
The love of the country was in his blood, in his brain, in
all the soul he had. He could not comprehend how life
would go on with him elsewhere. He was rooted to his
birthplace as an oak is to its forest.
476
SIGN A t
Nevertheless he tore himself away.
He did not know what penalty might avenge, what fato
might follow, his desertion of the soil. His lord might he
furious. His possessions might be pillaged. When he
returned he might find himself ruined, ejected, displaced ;—
if he returned at all;—if;—who could tell ?
The thing he did was, to him, as if he stepped off a great
precipice into the emptiness and nothingness of silent and
unfathomable air.
His bones might be broken in the fall, and his very exist-
ence cease to be.
Nevertheless he went: as he would have leapt off an
actual height down into unknown space, if by so doing he
could have saved the boy.
In the white marble of the great Borghese sculpture,
Curtius leaps down, and the world hails a hero:—no one
saw Bruno, or would have praised him had they seen, yet
the courage was scarcely less, and the sacrifice nearly as
absolute.
Indeed the hero saw glory in the bottomless abyss and
darted to it:—the peasant saw nothing except impenetrable
gloom and hopelessness. Yet he went; because the son of
Pippa was in peril.
He went back to his homestead, and put all his things
in order.
It was high noon.
He took out from its hiding place his copper pitcher with
his savings in it. They were not much in value. He had
had only one harvest time and one vintage to save from,
since his all had been taken for the Actea. Such as they
were he stitched them in the waistband of his trousers, and
put a shirt or two up in a bundle, and so was ready for his
journey. He could not go until evening. He worked all
day; leaving everything as it should be, and so far as it
was possible nothing for new hands to do ; except so far as
seeing to the beasts went, that was of necessity a new care
every day.
He had been brought up" on this wooded spur, looking
down on the Signa country ; all his loves and hatreds, joys
and pains, had been known here; from the time he had
plucked the maple leaves in autumn for the cattle with little
brown five-year-old hands he had laboured here, never see-
SIGN A.
477
ing the sun set elsewhere except onthat one night at the sea.
He was close rooted to the earth as the stonepines were and
the oaks. It had always seemed to him that a man should
die where he took life first, amongst his kindred and under
the sods that his feet had run over in babyhood. He had
never thought much about it, but unconsciously the fibres
of his heart had twisted themselves round all the smallest
and the biggest things of his home as the tendrils of a
strong ivy bush fasten round a great tower and the little
stones alike.
The wooden settle where his mother had sat; the shrine
in the house wall; the copper vessels that had glowed in
the wood-fuel light when a large family had gathered there
about the hearth; the stone well under the walnut tree
where dead Bina had often stayed to smile on him; the
cypress-wood presses where Pippa had kept her feast-day
finery and her pearls; the old vast sweet-smelling sheds
and stables where he had threshed and hewn and yoked his
oxen thirty years if one : all these things, and a hundred like
them, were dear to him with all the memories of his entire
life ; and away from them he could know no peace.
He was going away [ into a great darkness. He had
nothing to guide him. The iron of a wasted love, of a use-
less sacrifice, was in his heart. His instinct drove him
where there was peril for Pippa's son:—that was all.
If this woman took the lad away from him—where was
there any mercy or justice, earthly or divine ? That was
all he asked himself, blindly and stupidly ; as the oxen seem
to ask it with their mild sad eyes as they strain under the
yoke and goad, suffering, and not knowing why they suffer.
Nothing was clear to Bruno.
Only life had taught him that Love is the brother of
Death.
One thing and another had come between him and the
lad he cherished. The dreams of the child, the desires of
the youth, the powers of art, the passion of genius, one by
one had come in between him and loosened his hold, and
made him stand aloof as a stranger. But Love he had
dreaded most of all; Love which slays with one glance
dreams and art and genius, and lays them dead as rootless
weeds that rot in burning suns.
Now Love had come.
478
SIGNA.
He worked all day, holding the sickness of fear off him as
best he could, for he was a brave man;—only he had
wrestled with fate so long, and it seemed always to beat
him, and almost he grew tired.
He cut a week's fodder for the beasts, and left all things
in their places, and then, as the day darkened, prepared to
go.
Tinello and Pastore lowed at him, thrusting their broad
white foreheads and soft noses over their stable door.
He turned and stroked them in farewell.
" Poor beasts ! " he muttered, " shall I never muzzle and
yoke you ever again ? "
His throat grew dry, his eyes grew dim. He was like a
man who sails for a voyage on unknown seas, and neither he
nor any other can tell whether he will ever return.
He might come back in a day; he might come back
never.
Multitudes, well used to wander, would have laughed at
him. But to him it was as though he set forth on the
journey which men call death.
In the grey lowering evening he kissed the beasts on their
white brows; there was no one there to see his weakness,
and year on year he had decked them with their garlands of
hedge flowers, and led them up on God's day to have their
strength blessed by the priest—their strength that laboured
with his own from dawn to dark over the bare brown fields.
Then he turned his back on his own home, and went
down the green sides of the hill, and lost sight of his birth-
place as the night fell.
All through the night he was borne away by the edge of
the sea, along the wild windy shores, through the stagnant
marshes and the black pools where the buffalo and the wild
boar herded, past the deserted cities of the coast, and
beyond the forsaken harbours of iEneas and of Nero.
The west wind blew strong; the clouds were heavy ; now
and then the moon shone on a sullen sea; now and then the
darkness broke over rank maremma vapours; at times he
heard the distant bellowing of the herds, at times he heard
the moaning of the water; mighty cities, lost armies,
slaughtered hosts, foundered fleets, were underneath that
soil and sea, whole nations had their sepulchres on that low
windblown shore. But of these he knew nothing.
SIGN A.
479
It only seemed to him that day would never come.
Once or twice he fell asleep for a few moments, and
waking in that confused noise of the stormy night and the
wild water, and the frightened herds, thought that he was
dead and that this sound was the passing of the feet of all
the living multitude going for ever to and fro, unthinking,
over the depths of the dark earth where he lay.
CHAPTER LIV.
Lippo in this last lengthening day of February found
hours of sunshine and of leisure to loiter in and out the
Lastra doors, set open to the noonday brightness and the
smell of the air from the hills, which brought the fragrance
of a world of violets with it.
Lippo, with sad eyes and softened voice, said to his
gossips:
" My brother is gone down to Rome. Yes—left the old
house where we were born, and all his labours, and gone
down to Rome. I dread the worst—poor Bruno ! He has
been an unbrotherly soul to me, and harsh and hasty, and
has been misguided always and mistaken. But before he
went, he asked my pardon frankly, and you know when a
man does that, bygones are bygones. I do not understand
those hard hearts which never will forgive. Yes : I dread
the worst. You see the poor lad Sign a has fallen in evil
courses, and been taken in the coils of a base woman, and
Bruno hears of it, and will go see for himself, and says that
he will drag the boy from ruin though it cost bloodshed.
I do dread the worst. Because, you see, youths are not
lightly turned from their mad passions, and Bruno is too
quick of hand and heavy of wrath—it makes me very
anxious. Oh, yes indeed, I know he has had little love for
me, and been unjust to me, and done me harm; but when a
man says that he repents—it may be weak, but I for one
could not refuse my hand. And between brothers, too. In-
deed, I loved him always, and the poor bow knew that."
480
SIGN A,
And Lippo smiled.
"What a heart of gold!" said the barber, looking after
him as he went- up the street.
"Aye, truly, tender as a woman when you take him the
right way," quoth the butcher.
" And a man of thrift: money soon jumps itself treble in
his pocket," said Toto the tinman.
"And a good son of the church," said the parish priest,
who was passing by ; and the barber nodded solemnly and
added:
" And never a shrewder brain under my razor, with all
the polls I have shaved as clean as pumpkins—forty years
and one last St. Michael—in the Lastra."
Lippo went on to the sacristy of the Misericordia, where
he had risen to be of good report, and one of the foremost
capi di guardia, by dint of assiduous service in the black
robes, and bearing to and fro hospital or graveyard his sick
or lifeless fellow-creatures ; and being constantly present at
mass and requiem.
There was a dead body lying upon the hills as far away as
Mosciano—the body of a poor sister of the order, a peasant
woman—and the bier and catafalque were going out to fetch
her. One of the daily servitors, whose turn it was, had met
with an accident to his foot in answering the summons:
Lippo, with kindliest quickest willingness, took his place,
and bade the man go home and rest, and he would himself
pay his fine of absence.
Amidst blessings Lippo moved away under the black and
dismal pall.
" A pure good Christian soul," said the bystanders. "It
will be hard for such a man if his wild brother make a
shame and scandal for him down in Rome."
From the Lastra to Mosciano is a long and toilsome way
winding up into the green hills and under the steep heights
that are left as nature made them, and have the arbutus and
the oak and the stone pines growing at free will in beautiful
dells and on bold rocky knolls that lie high under the skies,
nameless, and rarely seen of men. There is infinite loveli-
ness in these lonely, wild, richly-foliaged hill-tops, with the
great golden valley far below, and bejmnd on the other side
the shining plains by the sea. The day was fair ; the oppo-
site mountains were silvered with snow; the fox and tho
SIGNA. 481
wild hare ran across the solitary paths; but it was cold;
the north wind blew, the ascent was steep, and the way
seemed endless, lying along over the green chain of the high
woods. The men, labouring under the weight of the bier,
grew footsore and tired; when they brought the poor dead
sister down, and laid her in the chapel to await her burial
on the morrow, the long hours of the day were already
gone—it was night.
Lippo wiped the sweat from his forehead as he laid away
his cowl; he was aching in every limb, and his feet were
cut and bruised, but he was well content. Those were the
things which smelt sweet in the nostrils of his neighbours.
To walk in a steam of good savour is, he knew, to walk
soon or late to the goal of success.
" You are not strong enough to take such exertion; it
was noble of you, but you overtask yourself," said pretty
Candida, the vintner's wife, as he left the church ; and she
would have him in, and made him warm himself beside her
otove, and brewed him some coffee, and praised him, and
hoped with a sigh that Nita knew her own good fortune and
his worth.
"Do not make me vain," murmured Lippo, with a
pathetic appeal in his soft lustrous eyes, "Do not make me
vain—nor miserable."
And he said it so sweetly, and his hand stole so gently
into hers, and his eyes were so eloquent and so plaintive, that
pretty Candida was ready to promise him coffee—or aught
else—whenever he passed that way.
So Lippo went home, having done a good day's work, and
meeting the vintner within a few yards from the door,
pressed him by the hand warmly, and said—was Candida
well ? he had not seen her for a week or more ; and being
praised a little farther onward by the parish priest, said—
he had done nothing: oh no ! Mosciano was a stretch, but
what mattered a little fatigue when there was Gfod's labour
to be done, and the saints' pleasure ? and then, with modest
denial of any virtue in himself, took a few farther steps, and
mounted to the upper chamber, where his wife was sitting
and waiting for him with a scowl and loud upbraiding.
"Nay, dear," said he, " do not be angered. Poor Tista
hurt his ancle at the church, and so I took his turn in
fcccking a corpse down from the hills; that is all. From
1 1
STGNA.
Mosciano—an endless way; a day's work, and a hard
one, for a mule. I thought I should have died. And not
a bit or drop passing my mouth since noonday, and it is
nine of the clock. De&r, give me some wine—quick—I feel
faint."
And Nita, who loved him in a jealous, eager, tyrannous
way, got him of the best,, and waited on him, and roasted
him some little birds upon a toast, and sorrowed over
him.
For she was a fierce-tongued, fierce-eyed, jealous creature
—but his dupe. The sharpest woman will be the merest
fool of the man she loves, if he choose to fool her.
" There is a letter come for you," said Nita, when the
birds were eaten.
A letter was a rarity in any household of the Lastra.
Lippo broke it open, and slowly spelled it out, syllable by
syllable.
" Heaven is good to us," he said softly, and laid it down
by the brass lamp.
" What is in it ?" asked his wife, watching his face
breathlessly.
"Dear—your aunt of most blessed memory is dead;
God rest her soul! She died of a stricture of the stomach,
all in a moment. Would I had been there ! She leaves us
all she had; it seems she saved much; her cottage at
Assisi and twenty thousand francs in scrip ; all to us—to
me—without reserve."
Nita screamed aloud, with her black eyes all kindling
with ferocious joy, and flung her brown arms about his
neck and kissed him.
" Oh Lippo ! oh Lippino ! How clever you are ! To
have thought of taking the silly old soul those conserves and
cough potions just in the nick of time ! How clever!—I
never will say you nay ! "
Lippo returned her caress, thinking the lips of Can-
dida were softer. His face grew very grave, with a pensive
reproach upon it.
" Oh, my love, your words are unbecoming. You know
full well I had no thought of after gain in paying that poor
soul the deference due to age. You know it pains me not
to be in friendship with all our relatives—and she so old
too—it was only duty, Nita; believe me, dear, when we
SIGNA.
483
do right, heaven goes with us. I am thankful, of course,
that so much more is added to us to keep you and the
children in good comfort; but I would sooner far that the
kind old creature were living and enjoying life, than gain
this greater prosperity by her death; and so, I know,
would you, though your quick tongue outruns your heart
and does belie it."
Nita suddenly drew back, and made unseen a grimace
behind her husband's handsome head. She began to feel
he was her master. She began to realise her own clumsy
inferiority to this delicate fine workmanship of his.
" Anyhow, the cough syrup has brought good measure
back! " she muttered, her eyes still aglow.
" My journey to Rome, in my boy's interests, has prospered,
thanks to heaven," said Lippo, with calm serious grace ; and
went and read the notary's letter to old Baldo.
"You will be a warm man, Lippo," chuckled the cobbler,
who had grown very infirm and kept his bed ; "a warm
man. You will have all I have too, ere long."
" May it be very long! " said Lippo, and said it with
such earnest graceful tenderness that the old man, though
he had known him tell lies morning, noon, and night for
five-and-twenty years, was touched, and almost thought that
Lippo said the truth and meant it.
" Once," said Baldo, " I did wish that my girl had taken
your mad brother. But now I know that she chose aright.
Yes—you are a man to prosper, Lippo."
"All things are with God," said Lippo ; and tired though
he was, sat down by the bed and spelt out aloud to the old
man, who was drawing near his end, and liked to be well
with heaven, one of the seven psalms of penitence.
The window-shutter was not closed; a pretty woman,
leaning in the opposite casement, could see, and a canon,
who dwelt on the other side of the thin wall, could hear
him.
484
SIGNA.
CHAPTER LV.
It was three in the afternoon, owing to accident and
delay, when Bruno, dazzled, stupefied, cold and fasting,
stumbled on his first steps on the stones of Rome.
There was a sort of awe for him in Rome.
He had been taught that it was there the great St. Peter
always lived, and held the keys of heaven and hell. That
was all. Other thoughts of Rome he had none, and even
that died out of him in the engrossing dread that possessed
him of all he should learn here of the boy.
He got down, and on his feet, and stared blandly across
the square, and felt blind and bewildered with that sense
of strangeness which overpowers beyond all other sense
the ignorant and the untravelled who alight in an unknown
place.
"What had he come for ?—he did not know.
He came on the impulse which his brother had set alight
in him ; the impulse to save Signa.
The men and women who had come with him in that
dreary journey went all their several ways with noise and
tumult, quarrelling and difficulty. Bruno stood stock still,
like a lost dog, in the midst of the uproar ; and it soon had
ceased.
" Where are you going ? " said a man to him, who had
a horse and vehicle, and thought that he might need both,
as other travellers did.
Bruno stared at him; and, without answering, felt to
make sure that both his belt and knife were safe.
" You will be sick and sorry not to have taken me," said
the driver, irritated with the churlishness of silence. " There
is not another beast to be hired under its worth in scudi all
over the city to-day : not one."
" What is there amiss in the city? " he asked. He was
hungry, and felt a dizzy stupor in his head.
The driver laughed outright.
" Oh, Tuscan gaby, where are your wits ? Is it not
Shrove Tuesday ? "
" I forgot," said Bruno, and stood still, wondering where
he had best go.
S1GNA.
485
" Are you come to get a job on the Campagna ? " said
the man, knowing him to be a peasant, and guessing his
province by his accent. "You are too early. They come
in by troops in another month ; labourers like you."
Bruno moved away mechanically ; as the lost dog will
when some one teases it.
It had been a mild and golden day, and the sun was now
setting.
The mists had been left with the marshes, and the clouds
had blown away over the sea; the dark, lowering, windy
weather had been left in the north; and over Rome there
was a flood of amber radiant light.
The sunshine of Rome has a great influence in it. It
makes happiness an ecstacy. It makes pain a despair.
Bruno moved away in it; a lofty, erect, dark figure, with
his brown cloak on one shoulder.
He wished the light was not so bright. The grey sullen
mists of the pools and the shores had hurt him less.
Very soon his wish was fulfilled. The sun sank, and night
fell.
He had not tasted food or drink for fifteen hours.
He saw a winehouse in a crooked street; he went in and
took a draught and ate a bit of bread and a few mushrooms ;
then he went out again, the stupor of his brain clearing a
little as his body was refreshed.
It was already quite dark.
Undying Petrus dwelt here, and kept the keys of eternal
life. So he had always been told. He did not doubt it.
It made the city mysterious and half divine to him. That
was all. Otherwise he was scarcely sensible of the difference
of place.
His mind was absorbed in his errand.
Bruno would have moved unabashed and unconscious
through all the palaces of the world; and now, when he
thought that he was where the Regent of Christ dwelt, he
said to himself:
" If I could see him—I would tell him to shut me out for
ever, for ever ; it will not matter for me ; so that only the
boy may go to God."
To Bruno heaven and hell were as two visible worlds :
had not he seen them, one golden as morning, the other
lurid as a tempestuous night, painted by great Orgagna, who
486
SIGN A.
had been suffered to behold them, as in a vision, and pre-
figure them for the warning of men ?
He went through the lonely streets pondering within
himself. Their solemnity was welcome to him, and soothed
the jagged, weary, impatient bitterness of his mind.
A girl laughed above, in an open lattice behind a grating.
He wondered to hear her. It seemed to him as if the
city were a mighty grave in which sinners waited for judg-
ment.
He remembered hearing from the priests and preachers
church tales of the martyrs who had perished here for their
faith. He envied them such death.
If only they would take him so, and bind him and burn
him ;—if by such means he could save the boy.
Those men were happy. They made their bond with
God, and paid clown their brief, fiery pang, and got eternal
life by it—or so they thought.
Bruno envied them. He could only see the soul he loved
drift into hell; and could do nothing.
He walked on, seeing the greatness round him as in a
dream. The mind of the man was larger than the shell in
which it had been imprisoned all its years.
He was ignorant; his brain had never gone out from its
narrow confines of pastoral knowledge and of daily cares.
But in it there was a certain unawakened power which,
under other habits and under other modes of life, might
have become strength and dignity of thought.
As it was, his brain, dumb, fettered, confused, confined,
was only pain to him ; and no more use than the lion's force
is to the lion born in an iron cage, and doomed to live and
die in one.
It was quite night when he left the wine-house and walked
onward.
It was all dark. For Koine is ill lit at all times, and the
streets are narrow and the walls are high, and the moon-
beams only shine in here and there, save when the moon is
at her full, and the white glory of her is spread everywhere
like a phosphorescent sea.
It was all dark as Bruno passed along its unknown ways,
his hand upon his knife. He made his way slowly, with a
curious sense of something greater than himself, and greater
than the world that he had known around him.
SIGNA.
487
A vast stillness and obscurity reigned everywhere, but
ever and again there loomed out from the gloom a thing of
Borne, such as only Borne can give : a colossal statue,
sombre and crowned, with the orb of the world at its feet;
a saint with gigantic crozier raised on high to awe into
subjection the rulers of the universe; a mighty form tiared
and robed in travertine that gleamed to a red pale gold in
the light of some solitary lamp ; a huge column fitted for the
grip of Samson ; a dusky arch with wild grasses growing in
its keystone, or a white fountain with its fantastic play of
foam cast up in silver on the black background of towering
walls or endless stairways. These and such as these
gleamed ever and again out from the universal shadow.
There was a vague nameless sense of immensity around.
These statues were Titans frozen into stone ; the S. Agnese
was the full-breasted, fleet-footed daughter of a god; this
naked Gregorius had the brow and the loins of banished
Zeus.
These are all Borne gives at night—some prophet with
outstretched arms raised in imprecation; some stern stone
face of an Assyrian lion ; some Sphynx with cold and
' dreaming eyes that hold the mysteries of the lost races in
them; some Christian martyr with white marble limbs
wound about a cross of bronze; some Latin god with
thyrsus broken in his hand and wine-cup filled with dust
and ashes;—these and their like gleam here and there,
parted by great breadths of shadow and gloom of impene-
trable darkness, where any crime may have been wrought
and any woe been suffered.
A strange perpetual sense of power and of measureless
empire is still upon the air; here all the passions and all the
forces of humanity were once at their fullest and their
fiercest; here giants moved and breathed and worked and
fought and had their being ; and in their turn died—died
mortal men also at the last, but to the last also in their
sinew and substance, by their legacy and tradition, giants
even in the silence and the impotence of Death.
Bruno going through the night, and seeing these, was
moved to a vague fear such as even a bold man may feel
entering a haunted house at midnight and alone.
Borne had been once the throne of the world, and was
pow the refuge of God.
488
SIGN A.
That was all he knew. But it was enough.
He wandered without knowing where he went, or whither
he ought to go.
Used to a fairy city, he was lost and bewildered in this
city of giants.
Until he had set foot in Home it had never come to his
mind that the boy might be hard to find.
" They must know of him at the Theatre of Apollo," he
said to himself; and tried to reach the theatre ; and missed
his way ; and came on what seemed to him most beautiful
and most appalling—a great arena strewn with fallen pillars
and mutilated friezes, and with a carved column that alone
stood erect, and seemed to tower to the clouds, and deep
stone ways in which stagnant black water glittered ; and all
around there was an intense stillness; and above all there
rose a mountain as it seemed, of marble and brick and
sculpture ; and over all was the silvery mist of the new^
risen moon and wide sombre veils of shadow.
It was the Forum of Trajan.
And the mountain of stone was the back of the Capitol.
Bruno, knowing nothing, thought it a vast sepulchre,
whose tombs and temples had been overthrown in war.
No living mortal met his eye. It seemed to him that
spirits alone could have their dwelling there.
All the thousands and tens of thousands were away in the
feasting of the grandest day of carnival; gathered together
by the Pincian Hill. They had told him so ; but he forgot
it as he went.
The stillness, the vastness, the sadness of the mighty
wilderness of stone in which he wandered oppressed him.
He had been reared on the mountain side, amidst the waving
seas of corn, the fresh fragrance of woods, the width of the
green valleys, and the smell of the wet wind-tossed pines.
This maze of brick, this labyrinth of broken marble, was
wonderful to him, and terrible to him. When he saw a
green curled palm rising over the granite of a palace bastion
he could have stretched his arms to it as to a friend.
Nature—living and laughing, Nature, eternal and ever
triumphant everywhere else over all the works of men,—
Nature is cowed and hushed in Rome.
Men have cast such weight of stone upon her breasts that
their milk is dry,
SIGN J.
489
She has crept slowly, as a bereaved childless creature
might, over this vast battle-ground, and has covered with a
green mantle the nakedness of the innumerable slain ; but
she is stilled and sterile in her office. She lies barren in the
plains, and forsakes the city where the people so long ago
denied her, and turned to worship their gods of bronze and
clay.
He mounted the steep stairway and entered by it the
grand granite desolation that saw Rienzi fall.
It was all deserted.
Through an arch where the moonrays shone he saw a
colossal river-god lying dark and prostrate. The cold, damp,
lofty courts were all silent. The bronze Augustus sat alone ;
gazing over Rome. Castor and Pollux caught their great
horses back on a field of stone. The stairways seemed
measureless and endless, shelving into the dim unknown
depths of the silent city.
Bruno shuddered.
He was a brave man amidst mad cattle, furies of the flood,
bare knives unsheathed in feud, or any bodily peril. But
here he was stupefied and afraid.
Here ; alone with this great past, of which he knew nothing.
He doffed his hat to the bronze emperor erect there in his
lonely grandeur.
Was it a statue or a spectre ? He did not know. The
air had grown very cold. On the vast steps which had felt
the feet of millions the moonbeams were shining.
When he saw at last a human form he was thankful.
He spoke aloud.
" Where am I ?—tell me."
The ascending shadow answered him.
" This is the Capitol."
" Who is that ?—who reigns in the midst ? "
" Men called him Augustus—lord of the world."
" And those two that struggle with the horses ? "
" They are the Gemini. They ride in the heavens too.
You may see them any night amongst the stars from tulip
time to vintage."
Bruno did not understand.
Yet he felt that the words suited the place better than any
bare bald answer, and he had sense enough to know that no
common man spoke so.
490
SIGNA.
" Do they ride with the stars ?" he said, doubtfully, half
believing.
" Yes. All the summer long."
" Are they stronger than Argol ?"
" What is Argol ?"
"A star of evil: so they say."
" Then be sure they are not. Evil is always stronger
than good."
Bruno made the sign of the cross, and stood silent, looking
at the brothers straining at their steeds.
The ascending figure, pausing too, looked at him. With
his stature, his unconscious dignity of posture, his oval,
olive face, his broad brows, his dark, fathomless gaze, he
had a grandeur in him, though he had followed his oxen and
trodden the ploughed earth all his days.
The other looked at him from head to foot.
" Do you fear that star—your Argol ? "
" It is to be feared," said Bruno.
"Is it in your horoscope?"
" What is that ?"
" It is a fate, read by the stars."
" Is there such a thing ? "
"No doubt. Sow else should anyone have known that
some stars are good, some evil ?"
" Where are the living people ?"
" You must go onward for them. Take that way. You
will find them by tens of thousands."
" What do they do there ? "
" They are at the Mocoletti."
" Vfhat is that ?"
"Fire-worship. In Egypt it was of old the Feast of
Lamps."
" But they worship Christ in Borne."
"A few did, eighteen hundred years ago," said the other,
with a smile, and ascended the rest of the stairs.
"Is he the Evil One ?" thought Bruno, with a chill, as he
saw the smile in the moonlight.
The stranger passed away into the empty space of the
Capitol, and Bruno took his way through the darkness,
leaving the heaven-born Gemini to wrestle with their
coursers.
Fie moved always in the direction which the other had
SIGN A.
49!
pointed to him. For a time all was still, sombre, and soli-
tary ; frowning masses of masonry ascending to the skies on
either side, with here and there the slender feathers of a
palm cast up against the silver of the night.
Then he came to a great battlemented brown pile, and to
a continuous living stream of tumultuous people, and stood
still with utter amaze :—for what he saw was a winding way
of fire, which seemed to be without end, as though all the
fireflies of the old eastern world and the new south-west had
met there and there held revel. Clouds of starry little flames
were moving everywhere; the earth was all alive with them,
and the air; a river of light stretched away, away, away,
with cupolas and stairs and domes all ablaze in golden corus-
cations in the far distance; whilst all along the channel of
fire clusters and plumes of sparks flew and fought and
whirled and sprang aloft, as though all the million stars of
heaven had dropped to the lower air, and were in battle.
Bruno stood and gazed entranced, and doubting his own
sight.
It was only the great game of the Mocoletti. But in his
own province Carnival knows not this crown and glory of
the high feast day; and he had never heard of it, and could
not comprehend the torrent of light that rushed down the
long and crowded Corso towards him, and the mad uproar
of shouts and cries that deafened him like the roar of
cannon.
For a few moments he stood and gazed aghast at the
sight, whilst at the end of the river of flame the great round
domes of the church, raised to lay Nero's wandering soul at
rest, gleamed like globes of light in the fiery rain of a
thousand rockets. Then, as the fantastic cars and chariots
passed him, their gay combatants armed with blazing wands,
and as the grotesque masks and harlequins and dominoes
flew by him, striking with their long tapers right and loft, he
saw that it was some feast of carnival unknown to him, and
tried to turn away from it, and gain the solitude of some
side street. For his heart was heavy and his brain was
dull; and the tumult and the mirth and the madness were
hateful to him.
But to escape from such a crowd was no longer possible.
The Moccoli once lit at Ave Maria, the Komans are mad till
the last light dies. He was wedged in a multitude, whose
493
SIGN A.
numbers were swelled with every moment; the frightened
horses, the great allegorical cars, the throngs of masque-
raders, the striking, dancing, nodding, flaming tapers, all
hemmed him in, and pushed him upward almost off his feet,
and bore him on by the force of the screaming and rapturous
mob. The utmost he could do was to defend his face from
blows, and his clothes from the flying fires. Against his
will, he was carried along, higher and higher, under tho
crowded casements and balconies, nearer to the domes and
the obelisks and the fountains glowing to gold and crimson
in the feast of fire.
When he at last got breathing space and rest a moment,
and leaned against an open doorway, to watch this strange
fantastic war of flames, that seemed to make the very stones
and walls and winds and clouds alive with it, he rested
opposite a wide open window, with a gallery running under-
neath it, and draped with gold cloths and furs and silken
stuffs, more richly than any of those near it. A woman
leaned her arms on the balustrade, and gazed down on the
sea of lights below, and with a long white wand, alight at
the end, fought the lights underneath her, and laughed as
she moved it for the thousandth time, burning still, despite
all efforts from the street to blow it out or strike it from her
hand.
She laughed as a little child might have done at the sport
they made her; and many, looking upward, forgot their
warfare and let her vanquish them, because, in the flickering,
fitful light of the countless flames, she looked so lovely,
leaning there, as if the fire were burning in her and shining
through her, as its flame in an alabaster lamp.
Bruno looked up, as all the others did, seeing how the
chariots paused and the faces were upturned, and the wands
were lowered under this one casement.
He knew her in an instant: the wanton whose likeness
Palma had flung under the water and stoned; the child who
had sunned her snowy little limbs in the long grass amongst
the daisies and the wind-flowers of Giovoli.
At her feet lay a youth, whose hands held a change of
tapers ready to tip her wand afresh should she be van-
quished ; every now and then he gave her a knot of roses or
lilies of the valley that she asked for; always he was looking
upward to her face.
SIGNA.
493
The river of fire ran unheeded by him; the feast of folly
had its wild way unshared by him ; he saw only her;—as
the hot, changeful light shone over her laughing eyes and
mouth, and her shining throat, whiter than the pearls that
clasped it.
He was screened from the sight of the multitude by the
draperies of the balustrade ; but as he raised himself on his
arm to give her flowers, Bruno's gaze found him.
Bruno's hand went to the knife in his waistbelt; and,
with a curse, thrust it back again.
It could not reach the smiling thing throned up there on
high.
He wished that he had never burned that deadly fair
weapon which had been broken up and destroyed in his haste.
His eyes devoured her with that hate which is deep as
lava and as ruthless;—he thought of one day when he had
seen her a little, white, new-born thing, lying at her mother's
toil-worn breast; and poor, improvident Sandro, gleeful and
rueful at another branch to his roof-tree, and another mouth
to feed, had said,—
" Such a white child !—so white ! Heaven send her a
white soul, too. We will bring her up to the cloister life.
When one has so many, one can spare one to God ! "
So Sandro had said :—a faulty man, but loving his children
and hating shame.
And the white child was here.
Some roses fell through from the rails of her balcony—
winter roses—fair and rare. A boy, whose rags were
covered with a goatskin, and who wore a mask of Bacchus,
grinning from ear to ear, as though life were one long wine-
song, caught them eagerly, as boys do all such things in
carnival; then, seeing where they came from, threw them
under his feet and stamped on them and spit on their seat-
tered leaves.
Bruno saw, and felt for a coin to reward the lad that
hated her.
" Why do you hate her ?" he asked.
" She let her horse lame my brother a month ago ; he, a
little child ; and she laughed and drove on, saying never a
word, and Lili with both feet jammed and bleeding in the
dust. If she were a princess one would not mind ; but they
say she was a beggar, like ourselves."
494
SIGN A,
Bruno gave him money.
"Does she live up yonder ?—tell me."
" No. She is there to see. I will show you her house
when the sport is all over. You hate her too ?"
Bruno was silent.
He was watching the flame of her wand as it played,
seeming to lick her cheek and her throat, while the shadows
above enfolded her softly like a cloud. There were many
faces round her; one was the face which had been like the
face of the sleeping Endymion, but there were no dreams
there now; it was haggard with the exhaustion of passion,
hectic, wasted, with all the beautiful youthfulness of it
burned away, as the bloom of a flower is consumed in the
heat of a lamp ; in the eyes were the hunger of jealousy, the
hunger which drives out all other sense as the famine of
the body kills the mind.
With a loud cry Bruno flung his arms upward towards the
boy he loved. The great city, the strange crowds, the
blazing fires faded from his sight; he had no eyes except for
Pippa's son. But his shout was drowned in the uproar of
the screaming multitude ; the close-packed throngs swept
with one movement outward to where the coloured fires
were blazing and roaring from the Place of the People,
around the great obelisk of Egypt; he was borne off his
feet, wedged in, hemmed round, carried and forced by the
rushing tide of human life away from the spot where the
White Child played with fire ; he lost his consciousness for
a moment in the great roar and pressure of the over-
whelming mass ; when he came to himself he had been
pushed upward into the- square under the domes of the
church raised to lay the ghost of Nero; all was dark;
the sport was over; the throngs were still dense, the horses
of the city guard were slowly scattering them; there were
no lights; except the quiet stars above in the cloudless skies.
The boy in the goatskin was by him, and looked at him
curiously.
" They hit you on the head; not meaning. You would
have fallen, I think, only the crowd was so close, it kept
you upright; you are a strong man. I ran with you
because you hate that woman, and you gave me money.
Will you give me more ? Shall I show you where she
lives ?"
SIGNA.
495
"Aye!—show me!" said Bruno, stupidly; and by in-
instinct, like a dog, stooped and drank from the hollow of
his hand the water of the lions' mouths.
"You are her father or her brother?" said the boy;
" you must be something to her since you look like that..
She is an evil one—yes—that is sure. Did you see that lad
with her; the one with the great dark eyes and the girl's
face ? That is the one who makes all that great music. He
will make no more. Not he."
And the boy turned a somersault on the stones under
the stars, and flung his Bacchus mask up in the starlight.
"He is good," said the lad, when his somersault was
ended, and he dipped his mask in the fountain and drank
from it and spit it out again, because water was not wine.
" He is good. When Lili was lamed that day he came and
found us out and gave us money and spoke soft words ; and
there was an old lute of Lili's lying there, and he took it up
and made it sound so—one would have said the angels were
all singing—and then, all in a minute, he put it down and
tears were in his eyes, and he went,—so,—saying nothing
more. But he sent to us often ; only Lili always says—
since that—the lute seems dumb."
Bruno gave him more money.
" Show me where," he said.
The boy pressed through the loosening crowd, and bade
him follow.
They went through many a narrow street, solitary and
dark, until all the noise of the multitude was left behind
them, and they even ceased to see the stray noisy groups of
the straggling maskers.
" Why should he play no more ? " said Bruno, suddenly,
in the stillness ; the words were haunting him.
"That is what the city says," answered the boy, who
went leaping and turning in endless gyrations ; a ghastly
figure in the moon rays and the shadows in his satyr's garb,
and with his wine-god's head.
" The city says it ? Why ? "
Bruno felt stupid still; a falling torch had struck him on
the head, and he had fasted long, and all his heart and soul
were sick with hopelessness.
" Because it is dead ; gone out of kirn ; that is what they
say. She killed it—just for sport. Why not ? That is
SIGN A.
what she would ask: Why not ? " And the hoy whirled
like a wheel in the gloom under the beetling houses.
" Why not! " said Bruno, as a rock might give back an
echo sullenly.
There arose near them iron gates and high black walls,
and the heads of palm trees. The boy pointed to them.
" There it is. Pay me."
At that moment wheels passed them; horses foaming
and plunging passed them; the gates opened; the mud
from the winter rains struck Bruno in the face.
" That is she," said the boy in the mask of Bacchus.
The gates closed, shutting her in. Bruno wiped the mud
from his mouth.
He put money in the child's hand again, and bade him go.
"He was with her," said the boy, with his white teeth
shining through the wide jaws of his mask. " She has not
done with him yet. She maddens him with jealousy and
pain. She cheats him always—and them all. It must be
brave sport to be a woman ? "
Bruno bade him begone.
The little lad ran off; but, once more lingering, returned.
"Do not hurt him," he said, again, and then reluctantly
went away; a quaint, small, faun-like figure in the moon
rays.
Bruno remained by the closed gates. He sat down on
the stone coping of the wall and wrapped his cloak around
him. It was now the tenth hour.
There was no sound, except from a fountain that was
within the gates and of the night wind amongst the palm-
trees. He had no hope : all was dark. He could not see
why God dealt thus with him. His heart hardened against
earth and heaven.
To behold the dominion of evil; the victory of the liar ;
the empire of that which is base; to be powerless to resist,
impotent to strip it bare ; to watch it suck under a beloved
life as the whirlpool the gold-freighted vessel; to know that
the soul for which we would give our own to everlasting
ruin is daily, hourly, momentarily subjugated, emasculated,
possessed, devoured by those alien powers of violence and
fraud which have fastened upon it as their prey ; to stand
by fettered and mute, and cry out to heaven that in this
conflict the angels themselves should descend to wrestle for
SIGNA.
497
tis, and yet know that all the while the very stars in their
courses shall sooner stand still than this reign of sin be
ended :—this is the greatest woe that the world holds.
Beaten, we shake in vain the adamant gates of a brazen
iniquity ; we may bruise our breasts there till we die ; there
is no entrance possible. For that which is vile is stronger
than all love, all faith, all pure desire, all passionate pain;
that which is vile has all the forces that men have called the
powers of hell.
CHAPTER LVI.
A great bell clanging within the iron gates jarred on the
silence.
He looked up ; there was a man there by his side without
who rang thus.
A voice answered the stranger's demand through a grated
wicket. Was she within ? No ; she was not within.
Bruno opened his lips to say that they lied; but kept
back the words unuttered : the other was naught to him.
" I raised her from the very dust and have to ring at her
gates like a beggar," the stranger muttered, with tones too
low for Bruno's ear to hear them ; then he turned and went
away unwillingly. The moon fell full upon him. He saw
the motionless dark figure of the peasant leaning by the
wall. He looked and spoke :
" Is it you who dread Argol ? What do you do here ?"
" What do you ?" said Bruno ; his mouth scarcely un-
closed, his whole heart and soul were full of frozen pain ;
his hand was against every man's ; he would have struck a
child dead, or have spat upon the cross. What use were
man or God ? Where was their justice ?
He looked at the stranger sullenly ; who rang at her
gates must be her friend—his foe.
The moon had risen fully, and shone with that pure and
dreamful light which takes two thousand years of age away
from Rome ; the moonlight in which they say the dead gods
rise and walk—weeping.
K K.
493
SIGNA.
The face of the man was turned to him in it; a fair proud
face, with something arrogant and something gentle, and the
eyes of a poet and the lips of a cynic.
Bruno stared on him, wondering 'doubting, remembering;
then ground his teeth as a mastiff would at sight of what he
loathed, and sprang erect.
" Wait! I know you," he said, slowly ; " You are the
painter—Istriel."
" Yes," said the other, with a careless smile, as of one
whose name meant homage. He was known so well by
princes and by people. It seemed nothing strange.
"I meant to look for you. Wait there," said Bruno.
" Oh ! I went and read your face, line by line, in the city
where you have painted it; I meant to deal with you one
day—and, yet, yonder, it was so dark there; you escaped
me. Oh, I know you now."
He spoke savagely, with his teeth set, still staring upon
Istriel; startled, the other looked and kept his ground; he
was a bold man, and knew that in his life he had sown
enemies broadcast. This might be one of them.
"So you come to ring at her gates?" said Bruno.
" When you shared her with all the world, were you not
sick of her ? You great men are less squeamish than we
peasants are. When we throw the rotten fruit away, we
have done with it. Do you know what Sandro said when
she came to the birth ? ' Such a white child—so white—
God send her a white soul too.' That is what he said,
and he died looking at the little white plaster Christ on the
wall, and saying, ' I had a white child too ; has the Holy
Mother got her safe ? Shall I see her the other side of the
sun ? ' That is what he died saying "
"I do not understand," said Istriel.
Bruno laughed aloud.
"No, 110 doubt: why should you? You take the love-
liest, vilest thing you own, and strip it bare and smile, and
paint it so, and send it out to all the multitudes—that is
genius. You go down to hell and bring up a curse from it,
and throw it out broadcast amongst the living people—that,
is genius. You have cursed my boy. Ten thousand others,
too, for aught I know. But his was the gentlest, purest,
sweetest soul that lived, and came so fresh from heaven*
that he brought all heaven's music with him in his ear and-
SIGNA.
499
{la his mouth, and was for ever hearing it and making others
hear it. I have seen fierce men fighting cease and grow
quiet, only because the child passed—singing. Look you,
the lizards would come from their holes and the sheep and
the goats stand listening round him, and the snakes lie still
and quiet, in the sun there on the hills, because he piped
upon his little lute—the broken lute I gave him. He never
hurt a living thing. When he was a young child, he would
take scorpions in his hand and say that he was sorry for them,
because they hated men and had no one to love them—that
was my boy. It is of no use telling you ; how should you
know, how should any one know, as I do ? God sent him
on to earth, I think, just to show what a human thing can be
—how beautiful—when it has no greed and no vile thought.
I laboured for the land and got it, and then I lost that, and
all was to begin over again; and I could bear it—somehow
—because he was safe, and things went well with him, and
he had his heart's desire; and when he came home to me,
though the world had got him, it had not hurt him—not one
whit, nor did he.forget nor cease to care. But after he saw
the accursed picture, then it was all over. There are
women that have little white souls like doves, and when
they enter the heart of a man, it is with him as if the Holy
Spirit were there, and they nestle in him, and keep him
from evil; but there are others ; — your picture was
accursed, I say. It bewitched him.. It poured fire into
him; the fire that consumes the bones and the nerves and
the brain. When a boy or a man loves a woman that is
vile, he kisses corruption on the mouth."
"That is true," said the other; "but what have I done
to you that you should upbraid me thus ? "
He did not understand in any way the fierce onslaught
and the confused meanings of the unknown man who
fronted and arraigned him in the moonlight; but the rough
eloquence of it fascinated him, and the courage and very
rudeness of it and passionate pathos moved him to know
more.
"You are a great man, that I hear," answered Bruno,
"and you spend your strength painting lewd women. I do
not know. I suppose it seems good to you. For me, it
looks a poor pastime. Those men of old that coloured our
walls—they saw God and the saints, and the great' deeds
SIGNA»
that were done when men were giants; so they painted
them. You paint what you see—I suppose. Is that what
it is to have talents ? to make dancing wantons live un-
perishing and drive innocent souls mad with sick passions ?
I praise heaven that I am a peasant and a fool. When you
come to die, will it be well with you ? to see these women
for ever about your bed, and think of the young lives you
have burned up with the teachings of wicked desire ? If
my right hand could create such things as that Innocence of
yours, I would cut my hand off rather than leave it its
cunning."
"You are an ascetic?" said Istriel, with a smile. He
was surprised at the fierce earnestness of this peasant, and
was of that temper which will quarrel with nothing which
is new to it and diverts it.
" I do not know what you mean," said Bruno. "lama
man, and have been a bad man. At least, they have always
said so. But I would slay myself before I would pander to
the vileness of the world as you do. God gives you that
gift of yours, to make the likeness of his living things, and
give them more beauty than any real life has. And what
do you do with it ? Make shameless women glow like the
fire, and the rose, and the jewels of the kings; and drive
pure souls to hell with longing for them. What are you
better than a pander and a tempter ? You might make
men see heaven, and you will not. You are like a jewel in
a toad's head. Has all your learning taught you no greater
thing ? is there nothing on all the broad earth but a naked
wanton ? For me, I have been a fool and a sinner with
many a living woman in my time: that is the folly of all
men ; there is nature in that, and good may come out of its
evil; but to set a vile creature up on high, and colour every
hue of her, and draw every line, and set her up in the midst
of the people, and seem to say to them, ' There is nothing
in all the world to worship but only a beautiful body, with
a foul cancer hid in it;' since to do that is what they call
genius, I praise Fate that made me unlettered and un-
learned, and sent me to dwell with my beasts at the
plough."
The painter Istriel looked at him with greater intentness:
the rough eloquence stirred a certain shame in fiim; ho
knew that in it there was a grain of truth; in his own
SIGN A.
501
youth he had had pure aspirations and spiritual aims, and
be had descended to delight and stimulate with the match-
less grace of his colour, and the vital power of his hand,
the sated materialism of his age.
He recognised in the passionate imperfect words of the
man before him the temper which had made the men of the
Middle Ages hurl their marble bacchanals and painted
syrens into the flames at Savonarola's word.
He was less offended than aroused.
"What has any one of my pictures done to you?" he
asked. " Men like you feel no impersonal pain; what is
your personal wrong at my hand ? "
Bruno's eyes glanced at him with a deep mute scorn.
"I do not know what you mean. Your wantons never
hurt me. Only I would hew the wood you paint them on
into a million pieces, and thrust them in the nearest kiln to
burn to ashes—if I could. From the time he saw that
accursed thing all was altered with him. It got into him like
wine^—like poison. It made him drunk. Before—he lived in all
the sweet sounds he heard; just as a bird does in the leaves
and the light. He was always hearing beautiful things, and
seeing them—we could not. He was so near the angels—
my boy! But after he saw your accursed picture, it was
the woman he saw—always the woman; she got between
him, and God. Do you not know ? And so when she
chose, she took him. It is like the plague. He looked
with innocent eyes on your picture; when he looked away,
he knew that we are all beasts. Yes, that is what your
genius does for men. It is great; ah ! so is the marsh
fever, for it can kill a king if he pass by; your picture has
killed my boy. When he found it living, he fell- down
before it. You see. He has no brain, or soul, or memory,
or beauty left; all his dreams are dead; he only sees your
wanton. Because you played with a wretched thing like
that, must you make her a public glory to lure men's souls ?
Why did you do it ? Was there not the sea, and the sun,
and the children, and the face of the mountains, and all the
wide world for you to make a likeness of, and call all the
nations to look ? Was the great blue sky too narrow for
you that you must needs go and make a devil-star out of
the mud of the sewer ? Because the woman had no shame
with you, must you crown her for that, and make others
502
SIGNA.
that look 011 her shameless ? Your hand is accursed; youf
hand is accursed, I say. Were I lord and king, I would
have it struck off in the sight of all the people. Look—the
wanton you made takes my boy from me; from the world,
from his art, from his God ! "
He paused abruptly; he had spoken with broken im-
petuous passion; the long-locked gates of his silence once
hurst asunder, all his heart rushed forth in his words; he
smote wildly like a blind man in the midst of foes.
Istriel listened; the wrath that rose in him was daunted
by a vague trouble, a restless uncertain shame.
"Whom do you speak of? " he said, with a wonder that
held his wrath in check. " Your boy! is it possible that
you mean the musician that they call Signa ? "
Bruno made a gesture of assent.
Istriel was silent. In his soul he hated the young lover
of his Innocence ; the beautiful boy who had youth, who
had fame, who had her.
" What have I to do with that ? " he said, bitterly. " She
takes a whim for him; a fancy of a month ; he thinks it
heaven and eternity. She has ruined him. His genius is
burned up; his youth is dead ; he will do nothing more of
any worth. Women like her are like the Indian drugs, that
sleep and kill. How is that any fault of mine ? He could
see the thing she was. If he will fling his soul away upon
a creature lighter than thistle-down, viler than a rattlesnake's
poison, poorer and quicker to pass than the breath of a gnat ■
—whose blame is that except his own ? There was a sculps
tor once, you know, that fell to lascivious worship of the
marble image he had made ; well,—poets are not even so
far wise as that. They make an image out of the gossamer
rainbow stuff of their own dreams, and then curse heaven
and earth because it dissolves to empty air in their fond
arms—whose blame is that ? The fools are made so "
He spoke with fierce curt scorn; he too had loved this
worthless loveliness that he had christened Innocence.
" It is as bad as that with him ? " muttered Bruno. " It
is true then all they say ? "
Istriel laughed.
" Most true. All Rome can read it. Her fancy is done;
and now his hell has come. It is always so. But what can
it be to you ? What is he to you ? " he said, abruptly.
SIGNA.
503
Bruno smiled ; a smile of the pale passion which is bitter
as death, and deep as the bottomless sea.
"I have given him all my life," he said, simply. " All
my life. And you and your wanton have destroyed him."
" He is your son ? " said Istriel.
" No. They all thought so, but they were wrong. He
was Pippa's son," said Bruno, whose mind was clouded with
the force and fury of his pain, and who at all times had the
peasant's opticism, and believed that every one must know,
without need of explanation, who he was, and what he
meant, and why he spoke.
" Pippa ! " echoed Istriel. His memories were wakened
by the name, and went back to the days of his youth, when
he had gone through the fields at evening, when the purple
beanflower was in bloom.
" What is your name then ? " he asked, with a changed
sound in his voice, and with his fair cheek paler.
" I am Bruno Marcillo ; I come from the hills above the
Lastra a Signa."
Istriel rose, and looked at him ; he had not remembered
dead Pippa for many a year. All in a moment he did
remember : the long light days, the little grey-walled town,
the meetings in the vine-hung paths, when sunset burned
the skies ; the girl with the pearls on her round brown
throat, the moonlit nights, with the strings of the guitar
throbbing, and the hearts of the lovers leaping ; the sweet,
eager, thoughtless passion that swayed them one to another,
as two flowers are blown together in the mild soft winds of
summer ; he remembered it all now.
And he had forgotten so long; forgotten so utterly ; save
now and then, when in some great man's house he had
chanced to see some painting done in his youth, and sold
then for a few gold coins, of a tender tempestuous face,
half smiling and half sobbing, full of storm and sunshine,
both in one; and then at such times had thought "Poor
little fool! she loved me too well;—it is the worst fault a
woman has."
Some regret he had felt, and some remorse when he had
found the garret empty, and had lost Pippa from sight in the
great sea of chance ; but she had wearied him, importuned
him, clung to him ; she had had the worst fault, she had
loved him too much. He had been young and poor, and
S°4
SIGNA.
very ambitious ; he had been soon reconciled ; he had soon
learned to think that it was a burden best fallen from his
shoulders. No doubt she had suffered; but there was no
help for that—someone always suffered when these ties were
broken—so he had said to himself. And then there had
come success and fame, and the pleasures of the world and
the triumphs of art, and Pippa had dropped from his
thoughts as dead blossoms from a bough ; and he had loved
so many other women, that he could not have counted them;
and the memory of that boy and girl romance in the green
hill country of the old Etruscan land had died away from
him like a song long mute.
Now, all at once, Pippa's hand seemed to touch him—
Pippa's voice seemed to rouse him—Pippa's eyes seemed to
look at him.
This was Bruno, then ?—the great, dark, elder brother,
whom she had feared, and had often pointed out to him in
the fading evening light from afar on the hillsides, and had
begged him never to meet, lest there should be feud about
her and bloodshed.
This was Bruno.
All in a moment the past leaped up to him, and grew
fresh as yesterday.
This was Bruno—and what, then, was the boy ? "
He mastered the horror and the emotion which possessed
him; but his mouth was dry, and his voice was unsteady,
as he asked,
" She was your sister—Pippa ?"
" Yes."
" Is she dead, then ? "
" Yes."
" When did she die ? "
"On the night of the flood, in the dark, we found her
dead, Lippo and I. The child was at her breast. She had
fallen from the edge of the road. She could tell us nothing.
What is it to you ? Why do you want to know ? "
Istriel was silent a moment—a shiver as of some great
cold went over him. Then he spoke suddenly,
" Because I was her lover. I took her from your country.
That lad, if he be hers, is mine. She loved me too well to
be faithless. There are women so."
Bruno stared at him stupidly. The sense of what he
SIGN A.
505
heard was long before it reached him, or brought perception
of its truth. Then all at once he understood.
"It will kill him! " he muttered, at last; "it will kill
him ! Do you not see ? "
With a shudder, Istriel looked him slowly in the face.
Remembering the boy, their mutual thoughts dulled pas-
sion, numbed rage, and struck them mute.
Bruno's hand, raised to strike the lover of dead Pippa, fell
to his side nerveless and strengthless as a reed that is
plucked upward by the roots.
CHAPTER LYII.
" Let me think—let me breathe ! " said Bruno, and he
staggered farther out into the darkness, gasping for air.
The horror of an inevitable and irrevocable destiny closed
in on him like a cage of iron.
There are hours in the lives of men when the old Greek
sense of being but the sport of an inexorable Fate, from
which there is no possible escape, sweeps away all hope and
power of self-help, and strikes all courage blinded to the
dust.
What could he do ?
The powers of heaven and hell were alike against him—
so he thought.
He was no god to struggle with this ghastly curse of
risen years—these poison-mists of perished passions.
It was no fault of his.
His hands were innocent—his soul was free of guilt; yet
he suffered as the guilty do not. It is often so.
There was a sound as of many waters in his ears; the
white moon and the curled palm leaves went round and
round; the great stones seemed to heave beneath his feet.
He saw the face of the man before him as in a mist—
blood-red.
" Get you gone," he muttered, " get you gone. You have
SIGNA.
no share with him. For you, he would have drowned, like
any lamb that the flood took. He is mine—mine—mine.
My hands worked for him; my bread fed him; my roof
sheltered him. He was naught to you. You have lived
your life and never thought. He is naught to you; he is
mine. Get you gone ! "
And he struck at the air—blindly.
The other shrank away before that great just passion—
shrank, palsied and awed, in all his proud vain manhood, as
though old age had seized him. He had dropped the
serpent's tooth of a careless love by the wayside, and
thought no more; and now an armed host sprang on him.
"But,—to save him? " he murmured, and was still.
Bruno stood erect, and in the changing shadows his form
seemed to tower and dilate, and grow to giant's stature.
" Leave him to me! " he cried ; and his voice rolled
like thunder down the deserted ruined ways of Borne. " He
is mine ; he is mine ! My soul for his—that I have said—
always—always—while you feasted and were famous, and
kissed your wantons, and took no thought. Get you gone;
get you gone. You gave him your life ; but I gave him my
soul."
The other shrank back into the shadows.
Bruno stood silent, with his face to the stars.
" Is there a God, there ? " he cried to them. " Is there a
God, that he lets the innocent suffer for the guilty ? "
The serene star-covered heavens seemed chill as any vault
of ice. What cared they for his pain !
It was no blasphemy in him that cried thus, and thus
doubted; it was faith in its death agony; the faith of
David's "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief."
He was alone in the pale night.
The lover of dead Pippa, who had never feared anything
in life, feared him.
" Is it all of no use ? " muttered Bruno to the silence;
and silence answered him. Was it all of no use ?—the long
years of toil; the patient sacrifice ; the unceasing resistance
of selfish desire ; the bitter winters ; the burning summers;
the effort ; the anxiety ; the prayers ; the love ?
Was it all of no use ? Did neither men nor God care
anything ?
That unutterable and terrible loneliness which comes to
SIGN A.
So 7
all in their death-hour, and comes to some in their full
height of life, encompassed Bruno now.
It seemed to him as if he stood solitary amidst the wreck
of the whole world.
He had tried to build up in safety the temple of this
young life, so that every fair and pure thing might be
garnered therein, and no foul spirits ever enter; he had
been willing to cement its corner-stone with his heart's
blood; and by the sweat of his labour, and by the pain of
his perishing hopes, purchase a blessing upon it. And now
it burned and crumbled before his sight, blasted with the
lightning of a hideous passion. And he stood by, with bound
hands.
" My soul for his," he muttered. That he had said
always ; that he would give still; only it seemed to him that
there was no way to force on fate such barter.
It is not given to any life to be the providence of another
—so the old man had told him in the sacristy of the Lastra,
and he found the truth now.
A great sickness came on him; a loathing of life and of
the hopes with which he had cheated himself through these
twenty long years of vain sacrifices.
He seemed to feel the long wet hair of dead Pippa, and
the cold of her lifeless breasts. Was it an hour ago that
they had found her by the old sea road, or was it twenty
years ?
He stood stunned and stupid in the silent ways of Rome.
A great darkness was over all his mind like the plague of
that unending night which brooded over Egypt.
All the ferocity of his nature was scourged into its greatest
strength; he was sensible of nothing except the sense that
he was beaten in the one aim and purpose of his life.
Only—if by any chance he could still save the boy.
That one thought—companion with him, sleeping and
waking, through so many joyless nights—stayed with him
still.
It seemed to him that he would have strength to scale the
Very heights of heaven, and shake the very throne of God
until He heard—to save the boy.
The night was far gone ; the red of the day-dawn began to
glow, and the stars paled.
He did not know how time went; but he knew the look
5°8
SIGNA.
of the daybreak. When the skies looked so, through his
grated windows at home, he rose and said a prayer, and
went down and unbarred his doors, and led out his white
beasts to the 'plough, or between the golden lines of the
reaped corn; all that was over now.
The birds were waking on the old green hills and the
crocus flowers unclosing; but he
" I shall never see it again," he thought, and his heart
yearned to it, and the great hot slow tears of a man's woe
stole into his aching eyes and burned them. But he had no
pity on himself.
He had freedom and health and strength and manhood,
and he was still not old, and still might win the favour of
women, and see his children laugh—if he went back to the
old homestead, and the old safe ways of his fathers. And
the very smell of the earth there was sweet to him as a
virgin's breath, and the mere toil of the ground had been
dear to him by reason of the faithful love that he bore to his
birthplace. But he had no pity on himself.
" My soul for his," he had said ; and he cleaved to his
word and kept it.
In his day he had been savage to others. He was no less
so to himself.
He had done all that he knew how to do. He had crushed
out the natural evil of him, and denied the desires of the
flesh, and changed his very nature to do good by Pippa's
son : and it had all been of no use ; it had all been spent
in vain,' as drowning seamen's cries for help are spent on
angry winds and yawning waters. He had tried to follow
God's will and to drive the tempter from him, for the boy's
sake; and it had all been of no avail. Through the long
score of years his vain sacrifices echoed dully by him as a
dropt stone through the dark shaft of a well.
Perhaps it was not enough.
Perhaps it was needful that he should redeem the boy's
soul by the utter surrender and eternal ruin of his own-—
perhaps. After all it was a poor love which balanced cost;
a meek, mean love which would not dare take guilt upon it
for the thing it cherished.
To him crime was crime in naked utter blackness; with-
out aught of those palliatives with which the cultured and
philosophic temper can streek it smooth and paint its soft
SIGN A.
509
oxeuse, and trace it back to influence or insanity. To bim
sin was a mighty, hideous, hell-born thing, which, being
embraced, dragged him who kissed it on the mouth, down-
ward and downward into bottomless pits of endless night
and ceaseless torment. To him the depths of hell and
heights of heaven were real as he had seen them in the
visions of Orgagna.
Yet he was willing to say, " Evil be thou my good," if by
such evil he could break the bonds of passion from the life
of Pippa's son.
He had in him the mighty fanaticism which has made at
once the tyrants and the martyrs of the world.
"Leave him to me," he had said, and then the strength
and weakness, and ruthless heat, and utter self-deliverance
of his nature, leaped to their height, and nerved him with
deadly passion.
" There is but one way," he said to himself;—there was
but one way to cut the cords of this hideous, tangled knot
of destiny, and let free the boy to the old ways of inno-
cence.
"He will curse me," he thought; "I shall die—never
looking on his face—never hearing his voice. But he will
be freed—so. He will suffer—for a day—a year. But he
will be spared the truth. And he is so young—he will be
glad again before the summer comes."
For a moment his courage failed him.
He could face the thought of an eternity of pain, and not
turn pale, nor pause. But to die with the boy's curse on
him—that was harder.
"It is selfishness to pause," he told himself. '* He will
loathe me always; but what matter—he will be saved; he
will be innocent once more; he will hear his ' beautiful
things ' again; he will never know the truth ; he will be at
peace with himself, and forget before the summer comes.
He never has loved me—not much. What does it matter—
so that he is saved ? When he sees his mother in heaven
some day, then she will say to him—' It was done for your
sake.' And I shall know that he sees then, as God sees.
That will be enough."
And he refused to have pity on himself; and hardened
his heart, and faced the red of the breaking day with his
resolve stronger and firmer in his soul, till he seemed to
SIGNA.
himself to be no more a man with nerves to wound and
heart to suffer, but a thing of iron set to vengeance as a
clock is wound to strike.
There was no other way, that was what he thought; no
other way to turn the boy to innocence, and spare him ever
any knowledge of the truth.
The same terrible sense of crime as duty which of old
nerved the hands of Judith and of Jael, came on him now.
In the great blindness that was upon him it seemed to him
that to shrink from this act set to him, would be the feeblest
cowardice. It seemed to him that all the forces of Satan
were at war with him, and that not to strike them down and
crush them out, would be to pander to and aid them, and
shrink, a craven, from their path.
The passion which makes tyrannicides was in him now.
"I have lived righteously, and no good has come of it,"
he said to himself. " If crime can save him—crime shall be
sweeter to me than all virtue."
That was all he felt; dully, savagely, hopelessly, with
that despair upon him which is irresponsible as madness.
He had given all his manhood to the boy, and surrendered
all the hopes and ties and pleasures and tender follies
which make the toil of manhood bearable, and soften creep-
ing age of half its terrors—and one after another alien forces
had arisen and taken the thing he had laboured for away
from him.
His heart was hard. His blood was fire. Fate had been
merciless and God been deaf. He grew merciless too, and
stopped his ears to pity.
Pity!
Where was there any in all this wide world ? The fiend
sent a creature on to earth with a wooing mouth and a white
body, and she ate up youth and innocence, and all pure
desires, and all high endeavours, and devoured souls as swine
the garbage; and from heaven there was never any sign.
The young day grew wider and brighter and redder in the
sky. Nightingales sang in the gardens on the other side of
the high walls. The wind rose fragrant with the smell of
wet grass-ways and of the laden orange boughs. He noticed
nothing. The time had gone by with him when any sight
or sound had power on him. He only waited—waited
silently—drawn back within the shadow of the walls.
SIGNA.
S«
With the full morning the bolts of the gates were drawn
back, there came forth a young man with a face strange to
him, and rich garments, and a smile of triumph on his
mouth ; a little later came a woman, with brass buckets on
her shoulders going to fetch water from the fountain in the
public square a street or two beyond.
He, waiting for such a moment's favouring chance, went
within. The fresh dark gardens were deserted. There was
a stone terrace with two flights of steps ; winged lions ; and
grim marble masks. ITe ascended the stairs, and pushed
back some great doors which were unlatched within. They
yielded to his hand. He entered the silent house.
Two or three servants, drowsy or drunken, lay about on
the couches in the great vaulted entrance whose white and
red marbles gleamed in the golden glory of the slanting
sunrays.
One of them raised himself sleepily, and stopped him with
a stupid smile.
" Where do you go ?—what would you do ? "
Bruno pushed him aside :
"I go to my work," he answered, and passed onward.
The other, muttering, dropped back again into his vinous
rest.
Bruno went on. Long corridors, empty banqueting rooms,
chambers rich with sculptures and with frescoes, deserted
splendours where the flowers were fading, and the morning
shining through the crevices of closed shutters, all followed
one on another like the tombs of dead Etrurian kings. All
the household slept, after the long, gay amorous vigil of the
night. He traversed the silent places as a living man
traverses the solitude oi sepulchres. He had no knowledge
where to find the thing he sought; but he went on without
a pause; he had grasped Evil by the hand; it guides
unerringly.
His bare feet smote the bare marble and trode on,
inexorable as the tread of time. After many chambers—the
vast, beautiful, painted chambers of Borne, lofty as temples,
and cool as the deep sea—he saw a door closed, with
garlands of roses coloured on its panels under the morning
sunbeams.
He thrust his strength against it; it resisted a moment,
then gave way and opened noiselessly; a fierce exultant joy
512
SIGN A.
leaped up in his heart like a sudden flame ; he had found his
goal.
Here no daylight came ; a little lamp was burning, a
Cupid swung it from a chain ; there was deep colour in the
shadows everywhere; the gloom of the place was filled with
aromatic odours.
He paused neither for the loveliness nor the stillness of it;
he went through its fragrant darkness with the same slow
calm steps. As destiny comes to men to strike, unhasting
but unresting, so he went to her.
He paused a moment and looked on her. Her bed was
white as sea-foam is, it rose and sunk like billows under
her ; her loosened hair half covered her; her arms were cast
above her head; her limbs were lightly crossed; she was
one of those women who are most beautiful in sleep; and
her sleep was soft and smiling and profound in its repose,
as when she had slumbered on the nest of hay by Palma's
side in the old hut at Giovoli.
In her disarray, in her abandonment, in her deep dream-
less rest, she was like a white rose just rufiled with the dew
and wind, and shutting all the summer in its breast.
He stood and looked on her.
In her nude beauty she was to him sexless ; in her perfect
loveliness she was to him loathsome.
She was no woman ; but all the evil, all the wrong, all the
injustice, and all the mockery of human life made manifest
in the flesh in her.
He stood and looked on her ; at her red closed mouth, at
her fair curled limbs, at her soft breast that rose and fell
with the even measures of her peaceful breath.
Then he leaned forward and drew his knife from his belt,
and, stooping, stabbed her through the heart—again and
again and again—driving each stroke farther home.
She quivered a moment, then was still; she passed from
sleep to death.
He went out, no man staying him, or asking him anything,
into the broad bright daylight of the outer air.
" It was for him," he said in his thoughts, and a great
serenity was with him as of some duty done.
Man would slay him, and God would bid him burn in hell
for ever:—what matter ?—the boy was saved.
He went on, erect, in the full sunshine. Justice was done.
SIGN A.
5*3
A deep, fierce, exultant calm was on him. He would
perish—body and soul—but the boy was saved.
In the streets there were many people, and the multitudes
were silent and afraid, and there was a sound as of weeping
among women, and the stir and the press grew greater at
each step ; and6 through the crowds there was brought out
in the living light of the joyous day an open bier; men
followed mourning as once they followed Raffaele.
" What is it ? " he asked, and paused, for a great fear fell
upon him.
A woman answered him.
" His wanton was faithless, look you—and last night
alone he knew it. So he slew himself—why not ? She had
killed all his soul in him. When Love is dead, one's body
best dies too."
They brought the bier through the weeping crowds.
The face was uncovered to the light. It was the face of
Signa.
They had folded his hands on his breast, and his eyes
were closed as in slumber.
Love had killed him.
Why not ? It is the only mercy that Love ever has.
CHAPTER LVIII.
In a warm cloudless morning, with the scent of wild
flowers upon the wind, when the summer had drawn near,
and the world was filled with life and light, they brought
Bruno out into the public place of Rome to meet his death.
He was quite silent. He had been always silent.
When the sun smote his eyes, and the wind blew on his
face, he shivered a little, that was all.
" It was all of no use," he muttered. " It was all of no
use."
He mounted the scaffold with a firm step. He was
unconscious what he did, but courage remained an instinct
with him.
L L
5r4
SIGNA.
Priests could do naught for him. He repelled them. He
had no remorse.
" I did what I could," he said in his heart. " But it was
all of no use—of no use."
He looked a moment at the blue sky—at the fair sailing
clouds—at the hills which rose between hjm and his old
home—then he surrendered himself.
They bared his throat.
" Pray for your soul," said some voice in his ear.
He looked straight upward at the sun.
"Let my soul burn for ever!" he said. "Save the
boy's."
That was his prayer.
Then he bowed his head, and knelt.
The axe fell.
They flung his body in a ditch, and threw the quicklime
on it, and the heavy earth.
That was the end.
The hills lie quiet and know no change; the winds
wander amongst the white arbutus-bells and shake the
odours from the clustering herbs; the stone-pines scent the
storm; the plain outspreads its golden glory to the morning
light ; the sweet chimes ring ; the days glide on ; the
splendours of the sunsets burn across the sky, and make
the mountains as the jewelled thrones of gods.
Signa, hoary and old, stands there unchanged; beholding
the sun shine alike on the just and on the unjust.
Why not ?
Signa can count her age by many centuries. Before the
Latins were, she knew Etruria ; but many as be her
memories, she remembers no other thing than this, there
is no justice that she knows of anywhere. Signa is wise.
She lets this world go by; and sleeps.
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date and author of the several dramatic works set down ; and the second, the
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Chairmen of Public Boards and Professional Men. Safe and free by post.
IN return for a £xo note, free and safe per post, one o:
BENNETT'S LADY'S GOLD WATCHES, perfect for time,
beauty, and workmanship, with keyless action, air-tight, damp'
tight, and dust-tight. —65, Cheapside, London.
Gold Chains at Manufacturers' prices. Post Office Order,
John Bennett.
BENNETT'S CLOCKS.
6S and 64, CHEAPSIDE.
TO CLOCK PURCHASERS.—JOHN BENNETT, having just completed great
alterations in his Clock Show Rooms, is enabled to offer to purchasers the most
Extensive Stock in London, comprising Clocks for the Drawing, Dining Rooms, and
Presentation, of the highest quality and Newest Designs.
DENNETT'S GOLD P R ES E N T AT I O N WATC H ES, 20 guineas,
~ From 30 guineas and 40 guineas, to 100 guineas.
DENNETT'S LADIES' GOLD K E Y L E SSWA T C H E S,
*—^ from 10 guineas.
DENNETT'S SILVER WATCHES, with Keyless Action, from
~ 6 guineas.
DENNETT'S HALF-CHRONOMETERS, compensated for
^ variations of temperature, adjusted in positions. No Key.
NNETT'S 18-CARAT Hail-Marked CHAINS and Choice
JEWELLERY. Free and safe for Post-office Order.
BE
"TO CLOCK PURCHASERS.—JOHN BENNETT, having just
' completed great alterations in his Clock Show Rooms, is enabled to offer to
Purchasers the Most Extensive Stock in London, comprising Clocks for the Drawing,
Dining Rooms, and Presentation, of the highest quality and Newest Designs.
JOHN BENNETT'S WATCHANTCLOCK MANUFACTORY,
6S and 64, CHEAPSIDE.
DR. J. COLLIS BROWNE'S
CHLORODYNE.
The Original and only Genuine.
ADVICE TO INVALIDS.—If you wish to obtain quiet refreshing sleep,
free from headache, relief from pain and anguish, to calm and assuage the
weary achings of protracted disease, invigorate the nervous media, and regulate
the circulating systems of the body, you will provide yourselves with that
marvellous remedy discovered by Dr. J. COLLIS BROWNE (late Medical
Staff), to which he gave the name of
CHLORODYNE.
And which is admitted by the Profession to be the most wonderful and valuable
remedy ever discovered.
is the best remedy known for Coughs, Consump-
tion. Bronchitis, Asthma.
effectually checks and arrests those.too often fatal
diseases known as Diphtheria, Fever, Croup,
Ague.
acts like a charm in Diarrhcea, and is the only
specific in Cholera and Dysentery.
effectually cuts short all attacks of Epilepsy,
Hysteria, Palpitation, and Spasms.
is the only palliativein Neuralgia, Rheumatism,
Gout, Cancer, Toothache, Meningitis, &c.
The Right Hon. Earl RUSSELL has graciously favoured J. _T DAVENPORT
•with the following—
" Earl Russell communicated to the College of Physicians that he received a despatch
from Her Majesty's Consul at Manilla:, to the effect that Cholera has been raging
fearfully, and that the only remedy of any service was Chlorodyne."—See Lancet,
December xst, 1864.
From \V. Vesalius Pettigrew, M.D.
" I have no hesitation in stating that I have never met with any medicine so efficacious
as an Anti-spasmodic and Sedative. I have used it in Consumption, Asthma, Diarrhoea,
and other diseases, and am perfectly satisfied with the results."
From Dr. B. J. Boulton & Co., Horncastle.
" We have made pretty extensive use of Chlorodyne in our practice lately, and look
upon it as an excellent direct Sedative and Anti-spasmodic. It seems to allay pain and
irritation in whatever organ, and of whatever cause. It induces a feeling of comfort and
quietude not obtainable by any other remedy, and it seems to possess this great advan-
tage over all other Sedatives, that it leaves no unpleasant after-effects."
CAUTION.—Theextraordinary medical reports of the efficacy of Chloro-
dyne render it of vital importance that the public should obtain the genuine,
which bears the words, " Dr. J. Collis Browne's Chlorodyne."
Vice-Chancellor Wood stated that Dr. J. Collis Browne was undoubt-
edly the Inventor of CHLORODYNE ; that the whole story of the defendant
was deliberately untrue.
Sold in Bottles at is. 1 hi., is. 9d., and 4s. 6d., by all Chemists.
Sole Manufacturer: J.T. DAVENPORT, Gt. Russell Street, London, W.C.
Henry
r 393 (aty i
j Hat Manufacturer*
end of) Oxford Street, London, W«
Henry Heath's
HEAD-MEASURING band
for taking the form and size of the head.
The Band is forwarded post free to country
residents for " Self-Measurement/5'
ensuring a comfortable fitting hat,
EXTRA QUALITY, Silk Hats,
(Cash Price)
Other Qualities (Unequalled for Hard
Wear) 13/6&IG>£@
BEST FELT HATS... 7/6 9/6 &WM
Photograph pattern sheet of shapes', wilh
instructions forself-measurement on appli5sif.se
The " LAPLANDER," in Seal, Astrac&as,
and various rough Furs, 15/-, 21/-, 25/-,
Sent free by post. Send tape measurement round
Fashion Plates on application by posir
HANDY GAS IRON,
Heats on any gas burner in 2 minutes.
Price 1/-, Post free 1/4.
: the fashion this For ironing Hats, Laces, Ribbons,
LADIES' REAL FUR SEAL HATS, Marking Linen, &c.
Perfectly |oft. Rimmed sabletails. N0 CLEANING REQUIRED.
t- Sentfree by registered post. No Valet OV lady's-maid should be -without this iSTdisif:.
HENRY HEATH, Hat Manufacturer
393 (city end of) Oxford Street, London, W.
Established 57 Years. (OVER-AGAINST NEWMAN STREET^
IMPORTANT AND UNSOLICI^JD^TESTIMONIAL.
The Senior Surgeon «■* St. John's Hospital Jui' the Skin, 'J&icester-square,
London, Mr. JOHN MILTON, in lis iu.portant Work on the
Hygiene of the Skin (published by Messrs. jChatto Sf WindusJ, writes:—
" From time to time I have tried many different Soaps, specimens of -which
have been sent to the Hospital; others I nave procured, so that I tal^ht pursue
my investigation with perfeet independence; and I have now, after Fifteen
Years' careful trial in many hundreds of cases, both in hospital and private
practice, no hesitation in givin * my verdict to the effect that nothing has
answered so well or proved ro bene icicd tc the skin, as
1 have excellent reason to think it is the best Soap that iB made, an opinion not
only attested by the late Mr. STARTIH, (Senior Suigeon at the Hospital
for the Skin, Blackfriars, London), by Professor ERASMUS WILSON,
and by Dr. TILBURY FOX, but vouched for by the strictness of Chemical
Analysis. So effectually has the process o£ purification been carried out, that
this Soap may be used even to a surface abraded by EczemaP
SOLD EVERYWHERE BY CHEMISTS AND JPEREtTMEES.
/pjrietors—A. & F. PEARS,
SOAP MAKERS TO H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES.
(BF APPOINTMENT),
91, CtEEAT EUSSELL STEEET, LOroON, w.c.
THE SKIN & COMPLEXION.