Chapter XXI (4)

This day of Palm, when our Orte, so brown and so gray, was all full of foliage and blossom like an old pitcher full of orange-flowers for a bridal, it was a somewhat brilliant troop of gymnasts which came to amuse the town. The troop was composed of an old man and his five sons, handsome youths, and very strong, of course. They climbed on each other's shoulders, building up a living pyramid; they bent and broke bars of iron; they severed a sheep with one blow of a sword; in a word, they did what my father had done before them. As for me, I watched them stupefied, fascinated, dazzled, drunk with delight, and almost crazy with a torrent of memories that seemed to rain on me like lava as I watched each exploit, as I heard each shout of the applauding multitudes.

It is a terrible thing, a horrible thing, those inherited memories that are born in you with the blood of others. I looked at them, I say, intoxicated with joy, mad with recollection and with longing;--and my mother destined me to a notary's desk, and wished me to be shut there all my life, pen in hand, sowing the seeds of all the hatreds, of all the crimes, of all the sorrows of mankind, lighting up the flames of rage and of greed in human souls for an acre of ground, for a roll of gold! She wished to make me a notary's clerk! I gazed at these men who seemed to me so happy--these slender, agile, vigorous creatures in their skins that shone like the skins of green snakes, in their broidered, glittering, spangled vests, in their little velvet caps with the white plume in each. "Take me! take me!" I shrieked to them; and the old king of the troop looked hard at me, and when their games were finished crossed the cord that marked their arena and threw his strong arms about me, and cried, "Body of Christ! you are little Pippo!" For he had been my father's mate. To be brief, when the little band left Orte I went with them.

It was wickedly done, for my poor mother slept, knowing nothing, when in the dusk before daybreak I slipped through the bars of the casement and noiselessly dropped on to a raft in the river below, and thence joined my new friends. It was wickedly done; but I could not help it. Fate was stronger than I.

The old man did not disturb himself as to whether what he had encouraged me to do was ill or well. He foresaw in me an athlete who would do him honor and make the ducats ring merrier in his purse. Besides, I had cost him nothing.

From this time life indeed began for me. I wept often; I felt the barb of a real remorse; when I passed a crucifix on the road I trembled with true terror and penitence; but I fled away, always. I drew my girdle closer about my spangled coat, and, despite all my remorse, I was happy. When I was very, very far away I wrote to my mother, and she understood, poor soul! that there were no means of forcing me back to her. Children are egotists: childhood has little feeling. When the child suffers he thirsts for his mother, but when he is happy, alas! he thinks little and rarely about her.

I was very happy, full of force and of success: the men kept their word and taught me all their tricks, all their exploits. Soon I surpassed my teachers in address and in temerity. I soon became the glory of their band. In the summertime we wandered over the vast Lombard plains and the low Tuscan mountains; in winter we displayed our prowess in Rome, in Naples, in Palermo; we loitered wherever the sun was warm or the people liked to laugh.

From time to time I thought of my mother: I sent her money. I shivered a little when I saw a Madonna, for all Madonnas have the smile that our mother has for our infancy. I thought of her, but I never went home. I was Pipistrello the champion-wrestler. I was a young Hercules, with a spangled tunic in lieu of a lion-skin. I was a thousand years, ten thousand leagues, away from the child of Orte. God is just. It is just that I die here, for in my happy years I forgot my mother. I lived in the sunlight--before the crowds, the nervous crowds of Italy--singing, shouting, leaping, triumphing; and I forgot my mother alone in the old chamber above the Tiber--quite alone, for my grandam was dead. That I have slain what I have slain--that is nothing. I would do the same thing again had I to live my life again. Yes, without pause or mercy would I do it. But my mother--she has lived alone, and she is mad. That is my crime.

I was a tall, strong youth, full of courage and handsome to the eye of women: I led a life noisy and joyous, and for ever in movement. I was what my father had been before me. So they all said. Only I liked to finger a book, and my father never had looked inside one, and out of remembrance of the belief of my mother I uncovered my head as I passed a church or saw a shrine, and to do this had not been in my father's habits. In these years I made a great deal of money--a great deal, at least, for a stroller--but it went as fast as it came. I was never a vicious man, nor a great gambler or drinker, yet my plump pieces soon took wing from my pocket, for I was very gay and I liked to play a lover's part. My life was a good life, that I know: as for the life of the rich and of the noble, I cannot tell what it is like, but I think it is of a surety more gloomy and mournful than mine. In Italy one wants so little. The air and the light, and a little red wine, and the warmth of the wind, and a handful of maize or of grapes, and an old guitar, and a niche to sleep in near a fountain that murmurs and sings to the mosses and marbles,--these are enough, these are happiness in Italy. And it is not difficult to have thus much, or was not so in those days. I was never very poor, but whenever money jingled in my purse I treated all the troop and half the town, and we laughed loud till daybreak.

I was never aught save Pipistrello--Pipistrello the wrestler, who jumped and leaped, and lifted an ox from the ground as easily as other men lift a child. No doubt to the wise it seems a fool's life, to the holy a life impure. But I had been born for it: no other was possible to me; and when money rained upon me, if I could ease an aching heart, or make a sick lad the stouter for a hearty meal, or make a tiny child the gladder for a lapful of copper coins, or give a poor stray dog a friend and a bed of straw, or a belabored mule a helpful push to the wheels of his cart,--well, that was all the good a mountebank could look to do in this world, and one could go to sleep easy upon it.

When the old man died who had been my father's comrade the troop fell to pieces, quarrelling over his leavings. The five brothers came to a common issue of stabbing. In Italy one takes to the knife as naturally as a child to the breast. Tired of their disputes, I left them squabbling and struck off by myself, and got a little band together, quite of youths, and with them made merry all across the country from sea to sea. We were at that time in the south. I was very popular with the people. When my games were done I could sing to the mandoline, and improvise, and make them laugh and weep: some graver men who heard me said I might have been a great actor or a great singer. Perhaps: I never was anything but Pipistrello the stroller. I wanted the fresh air and the wandering and the sports of my strength too much ever to have been shut in a roofed theatre, ever to have been cooped up where lamps were burning.

One day, when we were in dusty, brown Calabria, parching just then under June suns, with heavy dust on its aloe-hedges and its maize-fields, a sudden remorse smote me: I thought of my mother, all alone in Orte. I had thought of her scores of times, but I had felt ashamed to go and see her--I who had left her so basely. This day my remorse was greater than my shame. I was master of my little troop. I said to them, "It is hot here: we will go up Rome-way, along the Tiber;" and we did so.

I have never been out of my own land: I fancy it must be so dark there, the other side of the mountains. I know the by-roads and the hill-paths of Italy as a citizen knows the streets and lanes of his own _contrada_. We worked and played our way now up through the Basilicata and Campania and Latium, till at last we were right near Orte--dull, old, gray-colored Orte, crumbling away on the banks of Tiber. Then my heart beat and my knees shook, and I thought, If she is dead?

I left my comrades drinking and resting at a wine-shop just outside the town, and went all alone to look for her. I found the house--the gloomy barred window hanging over the water, the dark stone walls frowning down on the gloomy street. There was a woman, quite old, with white hair, who was getting up water at the street-fountain that I had gone to a thousand times in my childhood. I looked at her. I did not know her: I only saw a woman feeble and old. But she, with the brass _secchia_ filled, turned round and saw me, and dropped the brazen pitcher on the ground, and fell at my feet with a bitter cry. Then I knew her.

When in the light of the hot, strong sun I saw how in those ten years my mother had grown old--old, bent, broken, white-haired, in those ten years that had been all glow and glitter, and pleasure and pastime, and movement and mirth to me--then I knew that I had sinned against her with a mighty sin--a sin of cruelty, of neglect, of selfish wickedness. She had been young still when I had left her--young and fair to look at, and without a silver line in her ebon hair, and with suitors about her for her beauty like bees about the blossoms of the ivy in the autumn-time. And now--now she was quite old.

She never rebuked me: she only said, "My son! my son! God be praised!" and said that a thousand times, weeping and trembling. Some women are like this.

When the bright, burning midsummer day had grown into a gray, firefly-lighted night, I laid me down on the narrow bed where I had slept as a child, and my mother kissed me as though I were a child. It seemed to purify me from all the sins of all the absent years, except, indeed, of that one unpardonable sin against her. In the morning she opened the drawers of an old bureau and showed me everything I had sent her all those years: all was untouched, the money as well as the presents. "I took nothing while you did not give me yourself," she said. I felt my throat choke.

It was early day: she asked me to go to mass with her. I did so to please her. All the while I watched her bent, feeble, aged figure and the white hair under the yellow kerchief, and felt as if I had killed her. This lone old creature was not the mother like Raffaelle's Madonna I had left: I could never make her again what she had been.

"It is my son," she said to her neighbors, but she said it with pain rather than with pride, for she hated my calling; but Orte was of another way of thinking. Orte flocked to see me, having heard of Pipistrello, its own Pipistrello, who had plagued it with his childish tricks, having grown into fame amongst the cities and villages as the strongest man in all Italy. For indeed I was that; and my mother, with dim, tear-laden eyes, looked at me and said, "You are the image of your father. Oh, my dear, my love! take care."

She, poor soul! saw nothing but the fall she had seen that day at Genoa of a strong man who dropped like a stone. But I fear to weary you. Well! I had left my spangled dress and all insignia of my calling with my comrades at the wine-shop, fearing to harass my mother by sight of all those things which would be so full of bitter recollection and dread to her. But Orte clamored for me to show it my powers--Orte, which was more than half asleep by Tiber's side, like that nymph Canens whom I used to read of in my Latin school-books--Orte, which had no earthly thing to do this long and lazy day in the drought of a rainless June.

I could not afford to baulk the popular will, and I was proud to show them all I could do--I, Pipistrello, whom they had cuffed and kicked so often in the old time for climbing their walnut trees and their pear trees, their house-roofs and their church-towers. So, when the day cooled I drew a circle with a red rope round myself and my men on a piece of waste ground outside the town, and all Orte flocked out there as the sun went down, shouting and cheering for me as though Pipistrello were a king or a hero. The populace is always thus--the giddiest-pated fool that ever screamed, as loud and as ignorant as a parrot, as changeful as the wind in March, as base as the cuckoo. The same people threw stones at me when they brought me to this prison--the same people that feasted and applauded me then, that first day of my return to Orte. To-day, indeed, some women weep, and the little child brings me half a pomegranate. That is more remembrance than some fallen idols get, for the populace is cruel: it is a beast that fawns and slavers, then tears.

It was a rainless June, as I say. It was very warm that evening; the low west was vermilion and the higher sky was violet; bars of gold parted the two colors; the crickets were hooting, the bats were wheeling, great night-moths were abroad. I felt very happy that night. With us Italians pain rarely stays long. We feel sharply, but it soon passes. I had drowned my remorse in the glory and vanity of showing Orte all I could do by the sheer force of my muscles and sinews. We are not a very brave people, nor a strong one, and so strength and bravery seem very rare and fine things on our soil, and we make a great clatter and uproar when we ever find them amidst us. I had them both, and the people were in ecstasies with all I did. I put out all my powers, and in the circle of red rope exerted all my might, as though I had been performing before kings. After all, there is no applause that so flatters a man as that which he wrings from unwilling throats, and I know Orte had been long set against me by reason of my boyish mischief and my flight.

In real truth, I did nothing now in my manhood so really perilous as I had done in my childhood, when I had climbed to the top of the cross on the church and sat astride of it. But they had called that mischief and blasphemy: they called the things I did now gymnastics, and applauded them till the noise might have wakened the Etrurian dead under the soil.

At last I came to the feat which, though far from the hardest to me, always looked to the crowd the most wonderful: it was my old master's trick of holding his five sons on his shoulder. Only I outshone him, and sustained on mine seven men in four tiers, and the topmost had on his head little Febo.

The mite whom we called Phoebus, because we had found him at sunrise and he had such yellow locks--yellow as the dandelion or the buttercup--was a stray thing picked up on the seashore in Apulia--a soft, merry, chirping little fellow, of whom we were all fond, and to whom we had easily taught that absence of fear which enabled us to play ball with him in our spectacles. He always delighted the people, he was such a pretty little lad, and not, perhaps, more than four years old then, and always laughing, always ready. To him it was only fun, as it had been to me at his years. I never thought it was cruel to use him so, I had been so happy in it myself. All at once, as I stood erect sustaining the men on my shoulders, the topmost one holding on his head our tiny Phoebus--all at once as I did this, which I had done a hundred times, and had always done in safety--all at once, amongst the sea of upturned faces in the glowing evening light, I saw one woman's eyes. She was leaning a little forward, resting her cheek on her hand. She had black lace about her head and yellow japonica-flowers above her left ear. She was looking at me and smiling a little.

I met her eyes, full, across the dust reddened by the sunset glow as the dust of a battlefield is reddened with blood. I felt as if I were stabbed; the red dust seemed to swim round me; I staggered slightly: in another instant I had recovered myself, but the momentary oscillation had terrified my comrades. The seventh and highest, feeling the human pyramid tremble beneath him, involuntarily, unconsciously, opened his arms to save himself. He did not lose his balance, but he let the child fall. It dropped as an apple broken off the bough falls to the earth.

There was a moment of horrible silence. Then the men leaped down, tumbling and huddling one over another, not knowing what they did. The audience rose screaming; and broke the rope and swarmed into the arena. I stooped and took up the child. He was dead. His neck had been broken in the fall. He had struck the earth with the back of his head; he was rolled up on the sand like a little dead kid; his tiny tinsel crown had fallen off his curls, his tiny tinselled limbs were crushed under him, his blossom-like mouth was half open. It was horrible.

People spoke to me: I did not see or hear them. The crowd parted and scattered, some voluble, some dumb, with the shock of what they had seen. I lifted up what a moment before had been little Phoebus, and bore him in my arms to my mother's house.

She was sitting at home alone, as she had been alone these ten years and more. When she saw the dead baby in those glistening spangled clothes she shuddered, and understood without words. "Another life?" she said, and said nothing more: she was thinking of my father. Then she took the dead child and laid him on her knees as if he had been a living one, and rocked him on her breast and smoothed the sand out of his pretty yellow curls. "The people go always in the hope of seeing something die," she said at length. "That is what they go for: you killed the baby for their sport. It was cruel."

I went out of the house and felt as if I had murdered him--the little fair, innocent thing who had run along with us over the dusty roads, and along the sad seashores, and under the forest trees, laughing and chirping as the birds chirp, and when he was tired lifting up his arms to be carried on the top of the big drum, and sitting there throned like a king. Poor little dead Phoebus! It was true what my mother had said: the people throng to us in hope of seeing our death, and yet when they do see it they are frightened and sickened and sorrowful. Orte was so this night.

"Could I help it?" I cried to my comrades fiercely; and in my own soul I said to myself, "Could I help it? That woman looked at me."

Who was she? All through the pain that filled me for the death of the child that wonder was awake in me always. She had looked so strange there, so unlike the rest, though she was all in black and had the lace about her head which is common enough in our country. All the night long I saw her face--a beautiful face, with heavy lids and drooping hair, like that marble head they call the Braschi Antinous down in Rome.

Little Phoebus was laid that night in my mother's house, with lilies about him, while a little candle that the moths flickered into burnt at his feet. As I sat and watched by him to drive away the rats which came up in hordes at night from Tiber into the rooms that overhung the river, I only saw that face. It had been a bad home-coming.

I would play no more in Orte, nor go with these men any more. I disbanded my troop and let them pass their own ways. I had coin enough to live on for months: that was enough for the present. I felt as if the sight of the red rope and the spangled vest and the watching crowd would be horrible to me--those things which I had loved so well. Little Phoebus was put away in the dark earth, as the little Etruscan children had been so many hundred years before him, and I buried his little crown and his little coat with him, as the Etruscans buried the playthings. Poor little man! we had taught him to make Death his toy, and his toy had been stronger than he.

After his burial I began my search for the woman whose face I had seen in the crowd. My mother never asked me whence I came or where I went. The death of Phoebus had destroyed the trembling joy with which she had seen me return to her: happiness came to her too late. When grief has sat long by one hearth, it is impossible to warm the ashes of joy again: they are cold and dead for ever. My time passed sadly; a terrible calmness had succeeded to the gayety and noise of my life; a frightful silence had replaced the frenzied shouts, the boisterous laughter, of the people: sometimes it seemed to me that I had died, not Phoebus.

The constant hope of finding the woman I had seen but once occupied me always. I roamed the country without ceasing, always with that single hope before me. Days became weeks: I wandered miserably, like a dog without master or home.

One day I saw her. Having on my shoulder my _girella_, which gave me a pretext for straying along the river-side, I came to that part of Etruria where (so I had used to learn from the school-books in my childhood) the Etruscans in ancient times drew up in order of battle to receive Fabius. The country is pretty about there, or at least it seemed so to me. The oak woods descend to the edge of the Tiber: from them one sees the snow of the Apennines; the little towns of Giove and Penna are white on the Umbrian hills; in the low fields the vine and the olive and the maize and the wheat grow together. Here one finds our Lagherello, which I had heard scholars say is no other than the Lake Vadimon of which Pliny speaks. Of that I know nothing: it is a poor little pool now, filled with rushes, peopled with frogs. By the side of this pool I saw her again: she looked at me. Like a madman I plunged into the water, but the reeds and the lilies entangled me in their meshes: the long grasses and water-weeds were netted into an impenetrable mass. I stood there up to my waist in water, incapable of movement, like the poor cattle of which Pliny tells, who used to mistake all this verdure for dry land, and so drifted out into the middle of the lake. She looked at me, laughed a little, and disappeared.

Before sunset I had learned who she was from a peasant who came there to cut the reeds.

Near to the Lagherello is a villa named Sant' Aloisa: about its walls there is a sombre, melancholy wood, a remnant of that famous forest which in the ancient times the Romans dreaded as the borders of hell. The Tiber rolls close by, yellow and muddy with the black buffaloes descending to its brink to drink, and the snakes and the toads in its brakes counting by millions--sad, always sad, whether swollen by flood in autumn and vomiting torrents of mud, or whether with naked sands and barren bed in summer, with the fever-vapors rising from its shallow shoals. The villa is dull and mournful like the river--built of stone, fortified in bygone centuries, without color, without light, without garden or greenery, all its casements closed like the eyelids of a living man that is blind.

This was and is Sant' Aloisa. In the old times, no doubt, the villa had been strong and great, and peopled with a brilliant feudal pomp, and noisy with the clash and stir of soldiery: now it is poverty-stricken and empty, naked and silent, looking down on the tawny, sullen swell of the Tiber--the terrible Tiber, that has devoured so much gold, so much treasure, so much beauty, and hidden so many dead and so many crimes, and flows on mute and gloomy between its poisonous marshes. Of Tiber I have always felt afraid.

Sant' Aloisa has always been a fief of the old counts Marchioni. One of that race lived still, and owned the old grounds and the old walls, though the fortunes of the family had long fallen into decay. Taddeo Marchioni was scarcely above his own peasants in his manners and way of life. He was ugly, avaricious, rustic, cruel. He was lord of the soil indeed, but he lived miserably, and this beautiful woman had been his wife seven years. At fifteen her father, a priest who passed as her uncle, had wedded her to Taddeo Marchioni. She had dwelt here seven mortal years, in this gloomy wood, by these yellow waters, amidst these pestilential marshes. Her marriage had made her a countess, that was all. For the rest, it had consigned her, living, to a tomb.

The lives of our Italian women are gay enough in the cities, but in the country these women grow gray and pallid as the wings of the night-moth. They have no love for Nature, for air, for the woods, for the fields: flowers say nothing to them. They look neither at the blossoms nor the stars. The only things which please them are a black mask and a murmur of love, a hidden meeting, the noise of the streets, the bouquets of a carnival. What should they do in the loneliness and wildness of the broad and open country--our women, who only breathe at their ease in the obscurity of their _palco_ or under the shelter of a domino?

The travellers who run over our land and see our women laughing with wide-opened rose-red mouths upon their balconies at Berlingaccio or at Pentolaccia can never understand the immense, the inconsolable, desolation of dulness which weighs on the lives of these women in the little towns of the provinces and the country-houses of the hills and plains. They have the priest and the chapel; that is all.

In Italy we have no choice between the peasant-woman toiling in the ploughed fields, and growing black with the scorch of the sun, and bowed and aged with the burdens she bears, and the ladies who live between the alcove and the confessional, only going forth from their chambers by night as fireflies glisten, and living on secret love and daily gossip. What can these do in their gaunt, dull villas--they who detest the sough of the wind and the sight of a tree, who flee from a dog and scream at a tempest, who will not read, and whose only lore is the sweet science of the passions?

This I came to know later. All I saw that day, as I tramped around it wet and cold, was the gloomy evil shadow of the great place that had once been a fortress, the barred and shattered windows, the iron-studded doors, the grass-grown bastions. She had made me kill Phoebus, and yet I only lived to see her face again.

Sometimes I think love is the darkest mystery of life: mere desire will not explain it, nor will the passions or the affections. You pass years amidst crowds and know naught of it: then all at once you meet a stranger's eyes, and never again are you free. That is love. Who shall say whence it comes? It is a bolt from the gods that descends from heaven and strikes us down into hell. We can do nothing.

I went home slowly when evening fell. I had seen her eyes across the crowd in Orte once, and once across the pool that was the Vadimon, and I was hers for evermore. Explain that, ye wise men, who in your pride have long words for all things. Nay, you may be wise, but it is beyond you.

My mother and I spoke but little at this time. That home was a sad one: the death of the child and the absence of long years had left a chill in it. We ate together, chiefly in silence: it was always a pain to her that I was but Pipistrello the gymnast--not a steadfast, deep-rooted, well-loved citizen of Orte, with a trade to my hand and a place in church and market. Every day she thought I should wander again; every day she knew my savings shrank in their bag; every day she heard her neighbors say, "And your Pippo? will he not quiet down and take a wife and a calling?"

Poor mother! Other women had their sons safe stay-at-homes, wedded fathers of children, peaceable subjects of the king, smoking at their own doors after the day's work was done. She would have been so blessed had I been like them--I, who was a wrestler and a roysterer, a mere public toy that had broken down in the sight of all Orte. My father had never failed as I had failed. He had never killed a child that trusted in his strength: he had fallen himself and died. That difference between us was always in her eyes. I saw it when I met them; and she would make up little knots of common flowers and carry them to the tiny grave of Phoebus, my victim. Once I said to her, "I could not help it: I would have given my life to save him." She only replied, "If you had consented to bide at home the child would be living."

Nay, I thought, if she had not looked at me--But of that I said nothing. I kept the memory of that woman in my heart, and went night and day about the lake and the river and the marshes of Sant' Aloisa. Once or twice I saw Taddeo Marchioni, the old count--a gray, shrunken, decrepit figure of a man, old, with a lean face and a long hard jaw--but of her, for days that lengthened into weeks, I saw nothing. There are fish in the Lagherello. I got the square huge net of our country, and set it in the water as our habit is, and watched in the sedges from dawn to eve. What I watched for was the coming of the vision I had once seen there: the fish came and went at their will for me.

One day, sick of watching vainly, and having some good fish in the net, I dragged them out into the reeds, and pushed them in a creel, and shouldered them, and went straight to the gloomy walls of Sant' Aloisa. There were no gates: the sedges of the low lands went along the front of the great pile, almost touching it. Around it were fields gray with olives, and there was neither garden nor grass-land: all had been ploughed up that was not marsh and swamp.

The great doors were close fastened. I entered boldly by a little entrance at the side, and found myself in the great naked hall of marble, empty and still and damp. There was a woman there, old and miserable, who called her master. Taddeo Marchioni came and saw the fish, and chaffered for them with long hesitation and shrewd greed, as misers love to do, and then at last refused them: they were too dear, he said. I threw them down and said to him, "Count, give me a stoup of wine and they are yours." That pleased him: he bade the serving-woman carry the fish away, and told me to follow him. He took me into a vaulted stone chamber, and poured with a niggard hand a glass of _mezzo-vino_. I looked at him: he was lean, gray, unlovely. I could have crushed him to death with one hand.

These great old villas in the lone places of Italy are usually full at least of pleasant life--of women hurrying to the silk-worms and the spinning and the linen-press, of barefooted men loitering about on a thousand pleas or errands to their master. But Sant' Aloisa was silent and empty.

Passing an open door, I saw her. She was sitting, doing nothing, in a room whose faded tapestries were gray as spiders' webs, and she was beautiful as only one woman is here and there in a generation. She looked at me, and I thought she smiled.

I went out with my brain on fire and my sight dim. I saw only that smile--that sudden, momentary smile whose fellow had brought death to little Phoebus. And I felt she had known me again, though she had seen me but once, in my spangled coat of velvet and silver, and now I had my legs bare to the knee, and was clad in a rough blue shirt and woollen jacket, like any other country-fellow upon Tiber's side.

As I was going out the serving-wench plucked my sleeve and whispered to me, "Come back a moment: she wishes to see you."

My heart leaped, then stood still. I turned back into the house, and with trembling knees went into that chamber where the dusky tapestry mouldered on the walls. She looked at me, sitting idly there herself in the bare, melancholy room--a woman with the face of our Titian's Venus.

"Did the child die?" she asked.

I stammered something, I knew not what.

"Why did you tremble that day?" she said, with the flicker of a smile about her lovely mouth: "you look strong--and bold."

How the words had courage and madness enough to leap to my lips I know not, but I do know I said to her, "You looked at me."

She frowned a moment: then she laughed. No doubt she had known it before. "Your nerves were not of iron, then, as they should be," she said carelessly. "Well! the people wanted to see something die. They always do: you must know that. Bring more fish for my husband to-morrow. Now go."

I trembled from head to foot. I had said this bold and insolent thing to her face, and she still bade me return!

No doubt had I been a man well born I should have fallen at her feet and sworn a midsummer madness: I should have been emboldened to any coarse avowal, to any passionate effrontery. But I was only a stroller--a poor ignorant soul, half Hercules, half fool. I trembled and was mute.

When the air blew about me once more I felt as if I had been drunk--drunk on that sweet yeasty wine of a new vintage which makes the brain light and foolish. She had bade me return!

That day my mother ate alone at home. When night fell it found me by the Lagherello. I set my nets: I slept in a shepherd's hut. I had forgotten Phoebus: I only saw her face. What was she like? I cannot tell you. She was like Titian's Venus. Go and look at it--she who plays with the little dog in the Tribune at Pitti: that one I mean. With all that beauty, half disclosed like the bud of a pomegranate-flower, she had been given to Taddeo Marchioni, and here for seven years she had dwelt, shut in by stone walls.

Living so, a woman becomes a saint or a devil. Taddeo Marchioni forgot or never knew that. He left her in his chamber as he left the figures of the tapestry, till her bloom should fade like theirs, and time write wrinkles on her as it wove webs on them. He forgot! he forgot! He was old and slow of blood and feeble of sight: she was scarcely beautiful to him. There were a few poor peasants near, and a priest as old as Taddeo Marchioni was; and though Orte was within five miles, the sour and jealous temper of her husband shut her up in that prison-house as Pia Tolomei was shut in the house of death in the Maremma.

That night I watched impatient for the dawn. Impatient I watched the daybreak deepen into day. All the loveliness of that change was lost on me: I only counted the hours in restless haste. Poor fools! our hours are in sum so few, and yet we for ever wish them shorter, and fling them, scarcely used, behind us roughly, as a child flings his broken toys.

The sultry morning was broad and bright over the land before I dared take up such fish as had entered my girella in the night and bend my steps to Sant' Aloisa. Fever-mists hung over the cane-brakes and the reedy swamps; the earth was baked and cracked; everything looked thirsty, withered, pallid, dull, decaying: in the heats of August it is always so desolate wherever Tiber rolls. "Marchioni is out," said the old brown crone whom I had seen the day before. "But come in: bring your fish to Madama Flavia."

It was a strange, gaunt wilderness of stone, this old villa of the Marchioni. It would have held hundreds of serving-men--it had as many chambers as one of the palaces down in Rome--but this old woman was all the servitor it had, and in the grand old hall, with sculptured shields upon the columns of it and Umbrian frescoes in the roof, she spread their board and brought them their onion-soup and their dish of _pasta_, and while they ate it looked on and muttered her talk and twirled her distaff, day after day, year after year, the same. Life is homely and frugal here, and has few graces. The ways of life in these grand old places are like nettles and thistles set in an old majolica vase that has had knights and angels painted on it. You know what I mean, you who know Italy. Do you remember those pictures of Vittorio Carpaccio and of Gentileo? They say that this is the life our Italy saw once in her cities and her villas: that is the life she wants. Sometimes, when you are all alone in these vast deserted places, the ghosts of all that pageantry pass by you, and they seem fitter than the living people for these courts and halls.

"Madama Flavia will see the fish," said the old crone, and hobbled away.

Madama Flavia! How many times has Tiber heard such a name as that breathed on a lover's mouth to the sigh of the mandoline, uttered in revel or in combat, or as a poisoner whispered it stealing to mix the drug with the wine in the goblet. Madama Flavia! All Italy seemed in it--all love, all woe! There is a magic in some names.

Madama Flavia! Just such a woman as this it needs would be to fitly wear such a name--a woman with low brows and eyes that burn, and a mouth like the folded leaves that lie in the heart of a rose--a woman to kneel at morn in the black shadows of the confessional, and to go down into the crowd of masks at night and make men drunk with love.

"Madama Flavia!" The name (so much it said to me) halted stupidly on my lips: I stood in her presence like a foolish creature. I never before had lacked either courage or audacity: I trembled now. I had been awake all the night, gazing at the dim, dusky pile of her roof as it rose out from the olives black against the stars; and she knew it--she knew it very well. That I saw in her face. And she was Madama Flavia, and I was Pipistrello the juggler. What could I say to her? I could have fallen at her feet and kissed her or killed her, but I could not speak. No doubt I looked but a poor boor to her--a giant and a dolt.

She was leaning against a great old marble vase--leaning her hands on it, and her chin on her hands. She had some red carnations in her breast: their perfume came to me. She was surrounded by decay, dusty desolation, the barrenness of a poverty that is drearier than any of the poverty of the poor; but so might have looked Madama Lucrezia in those old days when the Borgia was God's vicegerent.

At the haul of fish she never glanced: she gazed at me with meditation in her eyes. "You are very strong," she said abruptly.

At that I could do no less than laugh. It was as if she had said the ox in the yoke was strong or the Tiber strong at flood.

"Why are you a fisherman now?" she said. "Why do you leave your arena?"

I shuddered a little. "Since the child fell"--I muttered, thinking she would understand the remorse that made my old beloved calling horrible to me.

"It was no fault of yours," she said with a dreamy smile. "They say I have the evil eye--"

"You have, madama," I said bluntly, and then felt a choking in my throat, fearing my own rashness.

Her beautiful eyes had a bright scorn in them, and a cold mockery of me. "Why do you stay, then?" she asked, and smiled at the red carnations carelessly.

"Because--rather would I die of beholding you than live shut out from sight of you," I said in my madness. "Madama, I am a great useless fool: I have done nothing but leap and climb and make a show. I am big and strong as the oxen are, but they work, and I have never worked. I have shown myself, and the people have thrown me money--a silly life, good to no man or beast. Oh yes, that I know full well now; and I have killed Phoebus because you looked at me; and my mother, who has loved me all her life, is old before her time through my fault. I am a graceless fool, a mountebank. When I put off my spangles and stand thus, you see the rude peasant that I am. And yet in all the great, wide, crowded world I know there does not live another who could love you as I love--seeing you twice."

I stopped; the sound of my own voice frightened me; the dull tapestries upon the wall heaved and rocked round me. I saw her as through a mist, leaning there with both arms on the broken marble vase.

A momentary smile passed over her face. She seemed diverted, not angered as I feared. She had listened without protest. No doubt she knew it very well before I spoke. "You are very strong," she said at length. "Strong men are always feeble--somewhere. If the count Taddeo heard you he would--" Then some sudden fancy struck her, and she laughed aloud, her bright red lips all tremulous and convulsed with laughter. "What could he do? You could crush him with one hand, as you could crush a newt! Poor Taddeo! did he not beat your fish down, give you watered wine, the rinsings of the barrel, yesterday? That is Taddeo always."

She laughed again, but there was something so cruel in that laughter that it held me mute. I dared not speak to her. I stood there stupidly.

"Do you know that he is rich?" she said abruptly, gnawing with her lovely teeth the jagged leaf of one of her carnations. "Yes, he is rich, Taddeo. That is why my father sold me to him. Taddeo is rich: he has gold in the ground, in the trees, in the rafters and the stones of the house; he has gold in Roman banks; he has gold in foreign scrip, and in ships, and in jewels, and in leases: he is rich. And he lives like a gray spider in the cellar-corner. He shuts me up here. We eat black bread, we see no living soul: once in the year or so I go to Orte or to Penna. And I am twenty-three years old, and I can read my own face in the mirror." She paused; her breast heaved, her beautiful low brows drew together in bitter fury at her fate: she had no thought of me.

I waited, mute. I did not dare to speak.

It was all true: she was the wife of Taddeo Marchioni, shut here as in a prison, with her youth passing and her loveliness unseen, and her angry soul consuming itself in its own fires. I loved her: what use was that to her--a man who had naught in all the world but the strength of his sinews and muscles?

She remembered me suddenly, and gave me a gesture of dismissal: "Take your fish to the woman; I cannot pay you for them; I have never as much as a bronze coin. But--you may come back another day. Bring more--bring more." Then with a more imperious gesture she made me leave her.

I stumbled out of the old dark, close-shuttered house into the burning brilliancy of the August day, giddy with passion and with hope. She knew I loved her, and yet she bade me return!

I know not how much, how little, that may mean in other lands, but here in Italy it has but one language--language enough to make a lover's heart leap like the wild goat. Yet hope is perhaps too great a word to measure rightly the timid joy that filled my breast. I lay in the shepherd's hut wide awake that night, hearing the frogs croak from the Lagherello and the crickets sing in the hot darkness. The hut was empty: shepherd and sheep and dogs were all gone up to the higher grounds amongst the hills. There were some dry fern-plants in a corner of it. I lay on these and stared at the planets above me throbbing in the intense blue of the skies: they seemed to throb, they seemed alive.

A mile away, between me and the stars, was the grand black pile of Sant' Aloisa.

Christ! it was strange! I had led a rough life, I had been no saint. I had always been ready for jest or dance or intrigue with a pretty woman, and sometimes women far above me had cast their eyes down on the arena, as in Spain ladies do in the bull-ring to pick a lover out thence for his strength; but I had never cared. I had loved, laughed and wandered away with the stroller's happy liberty, but I had never cared. Now, all at once, the whole world seemed dead--dead heaven and earth--and only one woman's two eyes left living in the universe, living and looking into my soul and burning it to ashes. Do you know what I mean? No? Ah, then you know not love.

All the night I lay awake--the short hot night when the western gold of sunset scarce fades into dark ere the east seems to glow luminous and transparent with the dawn. Ah! the sunrise! I shall see it once more, only once more! I shall see it through those bars, a hand's breadth of it above Tiber, no more; and when again it spreads its rosy warmth over the sky and reddens the river and the plain, I shall be dead--a headless thing pushed away under the earth and lime, and over my brain and skull the wise men will peer with knife and scalpel, and pour the plaster over its bones to take a cast, and say most likely to one another, as I heard them say once before a cast in a museum, "A good face, a fair brow, fine lines: strange that he should have been a murderer!" Well! so be it. Even though I lived for fourscore years and ten, the sun would nevermore rise for me as it rose before Phoebus died.

At that time I lived only to see a shadow on the barred windows, a hand open a lattice, a veiled head glide by through the moonbeams. I was wretched, yet never had I been so happy. The bolt of the gods stuns as it falls, but it intoxicates also.

I had been such a fool! such a fool! When she had said so much I had said nothing: that last moment haunted me with unending pain. If I had been bolder, if I had only known what to answer, if I had only seized her in my arms and kissed her! It would have been better to have had that one moment, and have died for it, than have been turned out of her presence like a poor cowardly clod.

I cannot tell how the long hot days went on: they were days of drought to the land, but they were days of paradise to me. The fever-mists were heavy and the peasants sickened. Tiber was low, and had fetid odors as its yellow shallows dried up in the sun, clouds of gnats hovered over the Lagherello and its beds of rushes, and the sullen wind blew always from the south-east, bringing the desert sand with it. But to me this sickly summer was so fair that I continued to live in the absent shepherd's empty hut. I continued to net the fish when I could, and now and again I saw her. I lived only in the hope of seeing her face. She had the evil eye. Well, let it rest on me and bring me all woe, so that only I might live in its light one day! So I said in my madness, not knowing.

I must have looked mad at that time to the few scattered peasants about the pool. I lived on a handful of maize, a crust of bread. I cast my nets in the water, and once or twice went up to Sant' Aloisa with the small fish, and was sent away by the crone Marietta. August passed, and the time drew nigh for the gathering of the grapes, ripe here sooner than in the Lombard and the Tuscan plains. But the vintage of Sant' Aloisa was slight, for the ground was covered with olives in nearly every part. When they were stripping what few poor vines there were I offered myself for that work. I thought so I might behold her. There was no mirth on the lands of Taddeo Marchioni: the people were poor and dull. Fever that came from the river and the swamps had lessened their numbers by death and weakened those who were living: my strength was welcome to those ague-stricken creatures.

The day of the gathering was very hot: no rain had fallen. The oxen in the wains were merely skin and bone: their tongues were parched and swollen in their muzzled mouths. The grass had been long all burnt up, and the beasts famished: the air was stifling, pregnant with storm.

Amidst the sere and arid fields, and the woods, black and gray, of ilex and of olive, the great old square house rose before us, pale, solitary, mysterious--a mausoleum that shut in living creatures: it terrified me.