Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 48

"They say he sang too well, and that was why they burnt him," said Andreino to her to-day, after telling her for the hundredth time of what he had seen once on the Ligurian sh.o.r.e, far away yonder northward, when he, who knew nothing of Adonais or Prometheus, had been called, a stout seafaring man in that time, amongst other peasants of the country-side, to help bring in the wood for a funeral pyre by the sea.

He had known nought of the songs or the singer, but he loved to tell the tale he had heard then; and say how he had seen, he himself, with his own eyes, the drowned poet burn, far away yonder where the pines stood by the sea, and how the flames had curled around the heart that men had done their best to break, and how it had remained unburnt in the midst, whilst all the rest drifted in ashes down the wind. He knew nought of the Skylark's ode, and nought of the Cor Cordium; but the scene by the seash.o.r.e had burned itself as though with flame into his mind, and he spoke of it a thousand times if once, sitting by the edge of the sea that had killed the singer.

"Will they burn me if I sing too well?" the child asked him this day, the words of Joconda being with her.

"Oh, that is sure," said Andreino, half in jest and half in earnest.

"They burnt him because he sang better than all of them. So they said.

I do not know. I know the resin ran out of the pinewood all golden and hissing and his heart would not burn, all we could do. You are a female thing, Musa; your heart will be the first to burn, the first of all!"

"Will it?" said Musa seriously, but not any way alarmed, for the thought of that flaming pile by the seash.o.r.e by night was a familiar image to her.

"Ay, for sure; you will be a woman!" said Andreino, hammering into his boat.

"Though there is not a soul here, still sometimes they come--Lucchese, Pistoiese, what not--they come as they go; they are a faithless lot; they love all winter, and while the corn is in the ear it goes well, but after harvest--phew!--they put their gains in their pockets and they are off and away back to their mountains. There are broken hearts in Maremma when the thres.h.i.+ng is done."

"Yes," said Musa again.

It was nothing to her, and she heeded but little.

"Yes, because men speak too lightly and women hearken too quickly; that is how the mischief is born. With the autumn the mountaineers come. They are strong and bold; they are ruddy and brown; they work all day, but in the long nights they dance and they sing; then the girl listens. She thinks it is all true, though it has all been said before in his own hills to other ears. The winter nights are long, and the devil is always near; when the corn goes down and the heat is come there is another sad soul the more, another burden to carry, and he--he goes back to the mountains. What does he care? Only when he comes down into the plains again he goes to another place to work, because men do not love women's tears. That is how it goes in Maremma."

"So the saints will pluck her to themselves at last," thought Joconda; and the dreariness, the lovelessness, the hopelessness of such an existence did not occur to her, because age, which has learned the solace and sweetness of peace, never remembers that to youth peace seems only stagnation, inanition, death.

The exhausted swimmer, reaching the land, falls p.r.o.ne on it, and blesses it; but the outgoing swimmer, full of strength, spurns the land, and only loves the high-crested wave, the abyss of the deep sea.

Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.

It is this narrowness of the peasant mind which philosophers never fairly understand, and demagogues understand but too well, and warp to their own selfish purposes and profits.

Flying, the flamingoes are like a sunset cloud; walking, they are like slender spirals of flame traversing the curling foam. When one looks on them across black lines of storm-blown weeds on a November morning in the marshes, as their long throats twist in the air with the flexile motion of the snake, the grace of a lily blown by wind, one thinks of Thebes, of Babylon, of the gorgeous Persia of Xerxes, of the lascivious Egypt of the Ptolemies.

The world has grown grey and joyless in the twilight of age and fatigue, but these birds keep the colour of its morning. Eos has kissed them.

For want of a word lives often drift apart.

Nausicaa, in the safe shelter of her father's halls, had never tended Odysseus with more serenity and purity than the daughter of Saturnino tended his fellow-slave.

The sanct.i.ty of the tombs lay on them, the dead were so near; neither profanity nor pa.s.sion seemed to have any place here in this mysterious twilight alive with the memories of a vanished people. Her innocence was a grand and n.o.ble thing, like any one of the largest white lilies that rose up from the noxious mud of the marshes; a cup of ivory wet with the dewdrops of dawn, blossoming fair on fetid waters. And in him the languor of sickness and of despair borrowed unconsciously for awhile the liveries of chast.i.ty; and he spoke no word, he made no gesture, that would have scared from its original calm the soul of this lonely creature, who succoured him with so much courage and so much compa.s.sion that they awed him with the sense of an eternal, infinite, and overwhelming obligation. It needs a great nature to bear the weight of a great grat.i.tude.

To a great nature it gives wings that bear it up to heaven; a lower nature feels it always a clog that impatiently is dragged only so long as force compels.

Her daily labours remained the same, but it seemed to her as if she had the strength of those immortals he told her she resembled. She felt as though she trod on air, as though she drank the sunbeams and they gave her force like wine; she had no sense of fatigue; she might have had wings at her ankles, and nectar in her veins. She was so happy, with that perfect happiness which only comes where the world cannot enter, and the free nature has lifted itself to the light, knowing nothing of, and caring nothing for, the bonds of custom and of prejudice with which men have paralysed and cramped themselves, calling the lower the higher law.

The world was so far from her; she knew not of it; she was a law to herself, and her whole duty seemed to her set forth in one single word, perhaps the n.o.blest word in human language--fidelity. When life is cast in solitary places, filled with high pa.s.sions, and led aloof from men, the laws which are needful to curb the mult.i.tudes, but yet are poor conventional foolish things at their best, sink back into their true signification, and lose their fict.i.tious awe.

Moreover, love is for ever measureless, and the deepest and most pa.s.sionate love is that which survives the death of esteem.

Friends.h.i.+p needs to be rooted in respect, but love can live upon itself alone. Love is born of a glance, a touch, a murmur, a caress; esteem cannot beget it, nor lack of esteem slay it. _Questi che mai da me non fia diviso_, shall be for ever its consolation amidst h.e.l.l. One life alone is beloved, is beautiful, is needful, is desired: one life alone out of all the millions of earth. Though it fall, err, betray, be mocked of others and forsaken by itself, what does this matter? This cannot alter love. The more it is injured by itself, derided of men, abandoned of G.o.d, the more will love still see that it has need of love, and to the faithless will be faithful.

He stood mute and motionless awhile. Then as the truth was borne in on him, tears gushed from his eyes like rain, and he laughed long, and laughed loud as madmen do.

He never doubted her.

He sprang up the stone steps, and leapt into the open air: into that light of day which he had been forbidden to see so long.

To stand erect there, to look over the plains, to breathe, and move, and gaze, and stretch his arms out to the infinite s.p.a.ces of the sea and sky--this alone was so intense a joy that he felt mad with it.

Never again to hide with the snake and the fox; never again to tremble as his shadow went beside him on the sand; never to waste the sunlit hours hidden in the bowels of the earth; never to be afraid of every leaf that stirred, of every bird that flew, of every moon-beam that fell across his path!--he laughed and sobbed with the ecstasy of his release.

"O G.o.d, Thou hast not forgotten!" he cried in that rapture of freedom.

All the old childish faiths that had been taught him by dim old altars in stately Mantuan churches came back to his memory and heart.

On the barren rock of Gorgona he had cursed and blasphemed the Creator and creation of a world that was h.e.l.l; he had been without hope: he had derided all the faiths of his youth as illusions woven by devils to make the disappointment of man the more bitter.

But now in the sweetness of his liberty, all the old happy beliefs rushed back to him; he saw Deity in the smile of the seas, in the light upon the plains. He was free!

The world has lost the secret of making labour a joy; but nature has given it to a few. Where the maidens dance the _Saltarello_ under the deep Sardinian forests, and the honey and the grapes are gathered beneath the snowy sides of Etna, and the oxen walk up to their loins in flowing gra.s.s where the long aisles of pines grow down the Adrian sh.o.r.e, this wood-magic is known still of the old simple charm of the pastoral life.

"Does it vex you that I am not a boy?" said the girl--"why should it vex you? I can do all they can, I can row better than many, and sail and steer; I can drive too, and I know what to do with the nets; if I had a boat of my own you would see what I could do."

"All that is very well," said Joconda with a little nod. "I do not say it is not. But you have not a boat of your own, that is just it; that is what women always suffer from; they have to steer, but the craft is some one else's, and the haul too."