Читать книгу The Essential Maurice Hewlett Collection - Maurice Hewlett - Страница 3

... There was a momentary quiver of withdrawal. Simonetta blushed vividly and drooped her eyes down to her little bare foot peeping out below the lines of the rosy cloak. The cloak's warmth shone on her smooth skin and rayed over her cheeks. In her flowery loveliness she looked diaphanous, ethereal; and yet you could see what a child she was, with her bright audacity, her ardour and her wilfulness flushing and paling about her like the dawn. There she stood trembling on the brink....

Suddenly all her waywardness shot into her eyes; she lifted her arms and the cloak fell back like the shard of a young flower; then, delicate and palpitating as a silver reed, she stood up in the soft light of the morning, and the sun, slanting in between the golden leaves and tendrils, kissed her neck and shrinking shoulder.

Sandro stood facing her, moody and troubled, fingering his brushes and bits of charcoal; his shaggy brows were knit, he seemed to be breathing hard. He collected himself with an effort and looked up at her as she stood before him shrinking, awe-struck, panting at the thing she had done. Their eyes met, and the girl's distress increased; she raised her hand to cover her bosom; her breath came in short gasps from parted lips, but her wide eyes still looked fixedly into his, with such blank panic that a sudden movement might really have killed her. He saw it all; she! there at his mercy. Tears swam and he trembled. Ah! the gracious lady! what divine condescension! what ineffable courtesy! But the artist in him was awakened almost at the same moment; his looks wandered in spite of her piteous candour and his own nothingness. Sandro the poet would have fallen on his face with an "Exi a me, nam peccator sum." Sandro the painter was different--no mercy there. He made a snatch at a carbon and raised his other hand with a kind of command--"Holy Virgin! what a line! Stay as you are, I implore you: swerve not one hair's breadth and I have you for ever!" There was conquest in his voice.

So Simonetta stood very still, hiding her bosom with her hand, but never took her watch off the enemy. As he ran blindly about doing a hundred urgent indispensable things--noting the lights, the line she made, how her arm cut across the folds of the curtain--she dogged him with staring, fascinated eyes, just as a hare, crouching in her form, watches a terrier hunting round her and waits for the end.

But the enemy was disarmed. Sandro the passionate, the lover, the brooding devotee, was gone; so was _la bella Simonetta_ the beloved, the be- hymned. Instead, here was a fretful painter, dashing lines and broad smudges of shade on his paper, while before him rose an exquisite, slender, swaying form, glistening carnation and silver, and, over all, the maddening glow of red-gold hair. Could he but catch those velvet shadows, those delicate, glossy, reflected-lights! Body of Bacchus! How could he put them in! What a picture she was! Look at the sun on her shoulder! and her hair--Christ! how it burned! It was a curious moment. The girl who had never understood or cared to understand this humble lover, guessed now that he was lost in the artist. She felt that she was simply an effect and she resented it as a crowning insult. Her colour rose again, her red lips gathered into a pout. If Sandro had but known, she was his at that instant. He had but to drop the painter, throw down his brushes, set his heart and hot eyes bare--to open his arms and she would have fled into them and nestled there; so fierce was her instinct just then to be loved, she, who had always been loved! But Sandro knew nothing and cared nothing. He was absorbed in the gracious lines of her body, the lithe long neck, the drooping shoulder, the tenderness of her youth; and then the grand open curve of the hip and thigh on which she was poised. He drew them in with a free hand in great sweeping lines, eagerly, almost angrily; once or twice he broke his carbon and--body of a dog!--he snatched at another.

This lasted a few minutes only: even Simonetta, with all her maiden tremors still feverishly acute, hardly noticed the flight of time; she was so hot with the feeling of her wrongs, the slight upon her victorious fairness. Did she not _know_ how fair she was? She was getting very angry; she had been made a fool of. All Florence would come and gape at the picture and mock her in the streets with bad names and coarse gestures as she rode by. She looked at Sandro. Santa Maria! how hot he was! His hair was drooping over his eyes! He tossed it back every second! And his mouth was open, one could see his tongue working! Why had she not noticed that great mouth before? 'Twas the biggest in all Florence. O! why had he come? She was frightened, remorseful, a child again, with a trembling pathetic mouth and shrinking limbs. And then her heart began to beat under her slim fingers. She pressed them down into her flesh to stay those great masterful throbs. A tear gathered in her eye; larger and larger it grew, and then fell. A shining drop rested on the round of her cheek and rolled slowly down her chin to her protecting hand, and lay there half hidden, shining like a rain-drop between two curving petals of a rose.

It was just at that moment the painter looked up from his work and shook his bush of hair back. Something in his sketch had displeased him; he looked up frowning, with a brush between his teeth. When he saw the tear- stained, distressful, beautiful face it had a strange effect upon him. He dropped nerveless, like a wounded man, to his knees, and covered his eyes with his hands. "Ah Madonna! for the pity of heaven forgive me! forgive me! I have sinned, I have done thee fearful wrong; I, who still dare to love thee." He uncovered his face and looked up radiant: his own words had inspired him, "Yes," he went on, with a steadfast smile, "I, Sandro, the painter, the poor devil of a painter, have seen thee and I dare to love!" His triumph was short-lived. Simonetta had grown deadly white, her eyes burned, she had forgotten herself. She was tall and slender as a lily, and she rose, shaking, to her height.

"Thou presumest strangely," she said, in a slow still voice, "Go! Go in peace!"

She was conqueror. In her calm scorn she was like a young immortal, some cold victorious Cynthia whose chastity had been flouted. Sandro was pale too: he said nothing and did not look at her again. She stood quivering with excitement, watching him with the same intent alertness as he rolled up his paper and crammed his brushes and pencils into the breast of his jacket. She watched him still as he backed out of the room and disappeared through the curtains of the archway. She listened to his footsteps along the corridor, down the stair. She was alone in the silence of the sunny room. Her first thought was for her cloak; she snatched it up and veiled herself shivering as she looked fearfully round the walls. And then she flung herself on the piled cushions before the window and sobbed piteously, like an abandoned child.

The sun slanted in between the golden leaves and tendrils and played in the tangle of her hair....

III

At ten o'clock on the morning of April the twenty-sixth, a great bell began to toll: two beats heavy and slow, and then silence, while the air echoed the reverberation, moaning. Sandro, in shirt and breeches, with bare feet spread broad, was at work in his garret on the old bridge. He stayed his hand as the strong tone struck, bent his head and said a prayer: "Miserere ei, Domine; requiem eternam dona, Domine"; the words came out of due order as if he was very conscious of their import. Then he went on. And the great bell went on; two beats together, and then silence. It seemed to gather solemnity and a heavier message as he painted. Through the open window a keen draught of air blew in with dust and a scrap of shaving from the Lung' Arno down below; it circled round his workshop, fluttering the sketches and rags pinned to the walls. He looked out on a bleak landscape--San Miniato in heavy shade, and the white houses by the river staring like dead faces. A strong breeze was abroad; it whipped the brown water and raised little curling billows, ragged and white at the edges, and tossed about snaps of surf. It was cold. Sandro shivered as he shut to his casement; and the stiffening gale rattled at it fitfully. Once again it thrust it open, bringing wild work among the litter in the room. He made fast with the rain driving In his face. And above the howling of the squall he heard the sound of the great bell, steady and unmoved as if too full of its message to be put aside. Yet it was coming to him athwart the wind.

Sandro stood at his casement and looked at the weather-beating rain and yeasty water. He counted, rather nervously, the pulses between each pair of the bell's deep tones. He was impressionable to circumstances, and the coincidence of storm and passing-bell awed him.... "Either the God of Nature suffers or the fabric of the world is breaking";--he remembered a scrap of talk wafted towards him (as he stood in attendance) from some humanist at Lorenzo's table only yesterday, above the light laughter and snatches of song. That breakfast party at the Camaldoli yesterday! What a contrast--the even spring weather with the sun in a cloudless sky, and now this icy dead morning with its battle of wind and bell, fighting, he thought,--over the failing breath of some strong man. Man! God, more like. "The God of Nature suffers," he murmured as he turned to his work....

Simonetta had not been there yesterday. He had not seen her, indeed, since that nameless day when she had first transported him with the radiance of her bare beauty and then struck him down with a level gaze from steel-cold eyes. And he had deserved it, he had--she had said--"presumed strangely." Three more words only had she uttered and he had slunk out from her presence like a dog. What a Goddess! Venus Urania! So she, too, might have ravished a worshipper as he prayed, and, after, slain him for a careless word. Cruel? No, but a Goddess. Beauty had no laws; she was above them, Agnolo himself had said it, from Plato.... Holy Michael! What a blast! Black and desperate weather.... "Either the God of Nature suffers."... God shield all Christian souls on such a day!....

One came and told him Simonetta Vespucci was dead. Some fever had torn at her and raced through all her limbs, licking up her life as it passed. No one had known of it--it was so swift! But there had just been time to fetch a priest; Fra Matteo, they said, from the Carmine, had shrived her (it was a bootless task, God knew, for the child had babbled so, her wits wandered, look you), and then he had performed the last office. One had fled to tell the Medici. Giuliano was wild with grief; 'twas as if _he_ had killed her instead of the Spring-ague--but then, people said he loved her well! And our Lorenzo had bid them swing the great bell of the Duomo--Sandro had heard it perhaps?--and there was to be a public procession, and a Requiem sung at Santa Croce before they took her back to Genoa to lie with her fathers. Eh! Bacchus! She was fair and Giuliano had loved her well. It was natural enough then. So the gossip ran out to tell his news to more attentive ears, and Sandro stood in his place, intoning softly "Te Deum Laudamus."

He understood it all. There had been a dark and awful strife--earth shuddering as the black shadow of death swept by. Through tears now the sun beamed broad over the gentle city where she lay lapped in her mossy hills. "Lux eterna lucet ei," he said with a steady smile; "atque lucebit," he added after a pause. He had been painting that day an agonising Christ, red and languid, crowned with thorns. Some of his own torment seems to have entered it, for, looking at it now, we see, first of all, wild eyeballs staring with the mad earnestness, the purposeless intensity of one seized or "possessed." He put the panel away and looked about for something else, the sketch he had made of Simonetta on that last day. When he had found it, he rolled it straight and set it on his easel. It was not the first charcoal study he had made from life, but a brush drawing on dark paper, done in sepia-wash and the lights in white lead. He stood looking into it with his hands clasped. About half a braccia high, faint and shadowy in the pale tint he had used, he saw her there victim rather than Goddess. Standing timidly and wistfully, shrinking rather, veiling herself, maiden-like, with her hands and hair, with lips trembling and dewy eyes, she seemed to him now an immortal who must needs suffer for some great end; live and suffer and die; live again, and suffer and die. It was a doom perpetual like Demeter's, to bear, to nurture, to lose and to find her Persephone. She had stood there immaculate and apprehensive, a wistful victim. Three days before he had seen her thus; and now she was dead. He would see her no more.

Ah, yes! Once more he would see her....

* * * * *

They carried dead Simonetta through the streets of Florence with her pale face uncovered and a crown of myrtle in her hair. People thronging there held their breath, or wept to see such still loveliness; and her poor parted lips wore a patient little smile, and her eyelids were pale violet and lay heavy to her cheek. White, like a bride, with a nosegay of orange- blossom and syringa at her throat, she lay there on her bed with lightly folded hands and the strange aloofness and preoccupation all the dead have. Only her hair burned about her like a molten copper; and the wreath of myrtle leaves ran forward to her brows and leapt beyond them into a tongue.

The great procession swept forward; black brothers of Misericordia, shrouded and awful, bore the bed or stalked before it with torches that guttered and flared sootily in the dancing light of day. They held the pick of Florence, those scowling shrouds--Giuliano and Lorenzo, Pazzi, Tornabuoni, Soderini or Pulci; and behind, old Cattaneo, battered with storms, walked heavily, swinging his long arms and looking into the day's face as if he would try another fall with Death yet. Priests and acolytes, tapers, banners, vestments and a great silver Crucifix, they drifted by, chanting the dirge for Simonetta; and she, as if for a sacrifice, lifted up on her silken bed, lay couched like a white flower edged colour of flame....

... Santa Croce, the great church, stretched forward beyond her into the distances of grey mist and cold spaces of light. Its bare vastness was damp like a vault. And she lay in the midst listless, heavy-lidded, apart, with the half-smile, as it seemed, of some secret mirth. Round her the great candles smoked and flickered, and mass was sung at the High Altar for her soul's repose. Sandro stood alone facing the shining altar but looking fixedly at Simonetta on her couch. He was white and dry--parched lips and eyes that ached and smarted. Was this the end? Was it possible, my God! that the transparent, unearthly thing lying there so prone and pale was dead? Had such loveliness aught to do with life or death? Ah! sweet lady, dear heart, how tired she was, how deadly tired! From where he stood he could see with intolerable anguish the sombre rings round her eyes and the violet shadows on the lids, her folded hands and the straight, meek line to her feet. And her poor wan face with its wistful, pitiful little smile was turned half aside on the delicate throat, as if in a last appeal:--"Leave me now, O Florentines, to my rest, I have given you all I had: ask no more. I was a young girl, a child; too young for your eager strivings. You have killed me with your play; let me be now, let me sleep!" Poor child! Poor child! Sandro was on his knees with his face pressed against the pulpit and tears running through his fingers as he prayed....

As he had seen her, so he painted. As at the beginning of life in a cold world, passively meeting the long trouble of it, he painted her a rapt Presence floating evenly to our earth. A grey, translucent sea laps silently upon a little creek, and in the hush of a still dawn the myrtles and sedges on the water's brim are quiet. It is a dream in half tones that he gives us, grey and green and steely blue; and just that, and some homely magic of his own, hint the commerce of another world with man's discarded domain. Men and women are asleep, and as in an early walk you may startle the hares at their play, or see the creatures of the darkness-- owls and night hawks and heavy moths--flit with fantastic purpose over the familiar scene, so here it comes upon you suddenly that you have surprised Nature's self at her mysteries; you are let into the secret; you have caught the spirit of the April woodland as she glides over the pasture to the copse. And that, indeed, was Sandro's fortune. He caught her in just such a propitious hour. He saw the sweet wild thing, pure and undefiled by touch of earth; caught her in that pregnant pause of time ere she had lighted. Another moment and a buxom nymph of the grove would fold her in a rosy mantle, coloured as the earliest wood-anemones are. She would vanish, we know, into the daffodils or a bank of violets. And you might tell her presence there, or in the rustle of the myrtles, or coo of doves mating in the pines; you might feel her genius in the scent of the earth or the kiss of the West wind; but you could only see her in mid- April, and you should look for her over the sea. She always comes with the first warmth of the year.

But daily, before he painted, Sandro knelt in a dark chapel in Santa Croce, while a blue-chinned priest said mass for the repose of Simonetta's soul.

VIII

THE BURDEN OF NEW TYRE

For a short time in her motley history, an old-clothesman, one Domenico-- he and his "Compagnia del Bruco," his _Company of the Worm_[1]-- reigned over Siena and gave to her people a taste for blood. It was bloodshed on easy terms they had; for surely no small nation (except that tiger-cat Perugia) has achieved so much massacre with so little fighting. Massacre considered as one of the Fine Arts? No indeed; but massacre as a _viaticum_, as "title clear to mansions in the skies"; for, with more complacency than discrimination, these sated citizens chose to dedicate their most fantastic blood-orgies by a _Missa de Spiritu Sancto_ in the Cathedral Church. The old-clothesman, who by some strange oversight died in his bed, was floated up on the incense of this devout service to show his hands, and--marvel!--Saint Catherine, the "amorosa sposa" of Heaven, reigned in his stead. Certainly, for unction spiced with ferocity, for a madness which alternately kissed the Crucifix and trampled on it, for mandragora and _fleurs de lys_, saints and succubi, churches and lupanars--commend me to Siena the red.

[Footnote 1: This was one of the _Contrade_ into which the City was divided, and of which each had its totem-sign.]

You are not to suppose that she has not paid for all this, the red Siena. None of it is absolved; it is there floating vaguely in the atmosphere. It chokes the gully-trap streets in August when the air is like a hot bath; it wails round the corners on stormy nights and you hear it battling among the towers overhead, buffeting the stained walls of criminal old palaces and churches grown hoary in iniquity--so many half-embodied centuries of deadly sin gnawing their spleens or shrieking their infamous carouse over again. So at least I found it. Without baring myself to the charge of any sneaking kindness for bloodshedding, I may own to the fascination of the precipitous fortress-town huddled red and grey on its three red crags, and of its suggestion of all the old crimes of Italy from Ezzelino's to Borgia's, of all unhappy deaths from Pia de' Tolomei's to Vittoria's, the White Devil of Italy. Its air seemed "blood-boltered" (like the shade of the hunted Banquho), its stones, curiously slippery for such dry weather, cried "Haro!" or "Out! Havoc!" And above it all shone a marble church, white as a bride; while now and again on a favourable waft of wind came the fragrant memory of Saint Catherine. It is the peak of earth most charged with wayward emotions--pity and terror blent together into a poignant beauty, a sorcery. Imagine yourself one of those old Popes--Linus or Anaclete or Damasius--whose heads spike the clerestory of the Duomo, you would look down upon a sea of pictures (by the best pavement-artists in the world)--the _Massacre of the Innocents_ like a patch of dry blood by the altar-steps, a winking Madonna in the Capella del Voto thronged with worshippers, Hermes Trismegistus, a freaksome wizard, by the West door, and a gilded array of the great world smiling and debonnair in the sacristy. Not far off is Sodoma's lovely Catherine fainting under the sweet dolour of her spousals. Are you for the White or the Black Mass? Cybel or the Holy Ghost? Catherine or Hermes Trismegistus? Siena will give you any and yet more cunning confections. It is very strange.

The approach to her three hills, if you are not flattened by the intolerable pilgrimage from Florence, is fine. Hints of what is to come greet you in the frittered shale of the grey country-side broken abruptly by little threatening hill-towns. The scar juts out of the earth's crust, rising sheer, and there on a fretted peak hovers a fortress-village, steep red roofs, an ancient bell-tower or two with a lean barrel of a church beyond; all the lines cut sharp to the clean sky; a bullock-cart creaking up homewards; the shiver and dust of olives round the walls. You could swear you caught the glint of a long gun over the machicolations; but it is only a casement fired by the westering sun. Such are San Miniato, Castel Fiorentino, Poggibonsi (where stayed Lorenzo's Nencia--his Nancy, we should call her), San Gimignano and its Fina, a little girl-saint of fifteen springs; such, too, is Siena when you get there, but redder, her grey stones blushing for her sins. And the country blushes for her as you draw near, for all the vineyards are dotted with burning willows in the autumn--osier-bushes flaming at the heart. Let it be night when you arrive--the dead vast and middle of a still night. Then suffer yourself to be whirled through the inky streets, over the flags, from one hill to another. It is deathly quiet: no soul stirs. The palaces rise on either hand like the ghosts of old reproaches; a flickering lamp reveals a gully as black as a grave, and shines on the edge of a lane which falls you know not whither. You turn corners which should complicate a maze, you scrape and clatter down steeps, you groan up mountain-sides. All in the dark, mind. And the great white houses slide down upon you to the very flags you are beating; you could near touch either wall with a hand. So you swerve round a column, under a votive lamp, and have left the stars and their violet bed. You are in a _cortile_: men say there is an inn here with reasonable entertainment. If it is the _Aquila Nera_, it will serve. There is no sound beyond the labouring of our horses' wind and of some outland dog in the far distance baying for a moon. This is Siena at her black magic.

I maintain that the impression you thus receive holds you. Next morning there is a blare of sun. It will blind you at first, blister you. Rayed out from plaster-walls which have been soaking in it for five centuries, driven up in palpable waves of heat from the flags, lying like a lake of white metal in the Piazza, however recklessly this truly royal sun may beam, in Siena you will feel furtive and astare for sudden death.

There is nothing frank and open about Siena; none of your robust, red- lunged, open-air Paganism. Thophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Poe--such supersensitive plants should have known it, instead of the ingenuous M. Bourget and the deliberate Mr. Henry James. M. Bourget looked at the Sodomas and Mr. James admired the view: what a romance we should have had from Gautier of illicit joys and their requital by a knife, what a strophe from Baudelaire half-obscene, half-mournful, wholly melodious. But Thophile Gautier tarried in Venice, and, as for M. Charles, the man of pronounced tastes and keen nose, stuck in the main to Paris. Failing them as guides, go you first to the Piazza del Campo where horses race in August--all roads lead thither. Contraries again! A square? It is a cup. A field? It is a Gabbatha: a place of burning pavements. Were red brick and Gothic ever so superbly compounded before, to be so strong and yet so lithe? That is the Palazzo Publico, the shrine of Aristotle's _Politics_ and the _Miracles of the Virgin_. What is that long spear which seems to shake as it glances skywards? It isn't a spear; it's the Torre del Mangia--the loveliest tower in Tuscany, the _filia pulchrior_ of a beautiful mother, the Torre della Vacca of Florence. That tower rises from the bottom of the cup and shoots straight upwards, nor stays till it has out-topped the proudest belfry on the hills about it. But what a square this is! The backs of the houses (whose front doors are high above on the hill-top) stand like bald cliffs on every side. You cannot see any outlets: most of them are winding stairways cut between the houses. The lounging, shabby men and girls seem handsomer and lazier than you found them in Florence. They seem to have room to stretch their fine limbs against these naked walls. Their maturity is almost tropical. The girls wear flopping straw hats: wide, sorrowful eyes stare at you from the shady recesses, and the rounding of their chins and beautiful proud necks are marked by glossy lights. "Morbida e bianca," sang Lorenzo. I suppose they think of little more than the market price of spring onions: but then, why do their eyes speak like that? And what do they speak of? _Dio mio_, I am an honest man! So was not Lorenzo; listen to him:--

"Two eyes hath she so roguish and demure That, lit they on a rock, they'd make it feel; How shall poor melting man meet such a lure?"

How indeed? Ah, Nenciozza mia!

"My little Nancy shows nor fleck nor pimple; Pliant and firm, is she, a reed for grace: In her smooth chin there's just one pretty dimple; That rounds the perfect measure of her face:"

That dimple has been the destruction of many a heart:--

"So wise, withal, above us other simple Plain folk--sure, Nature set her in this place To bloom her tender whiteness all about us, And break our hearts--and then bloom on without us."

Yes indeed, my Lorenzo. But enough! Let us take shelter in the Duomo.

Barred like a tiger, glistening snow and rose and gold, topped by a flaunting angel, her door flanked by the lean Roman wolf; paved with pictures, hemmed with the Popes from Peter to Pius, encrusted with marbles and gemmy frescoes, it is a casket of delights this church, and the quintessence of Siena--_molles Sen_ as Beccadelli, himself of this Tyre, dubbed his native town. Voluptuous as she was, tigerish Siena was more consistent than you would think. True, Saints Catherine and Bernardine consort oddly with the old-clothesman saying mass with wet hands, and Beccadelli the soft singer of abominations, just as the "Madones aux longs regards" of the Primitives--pious creatures of slim idle fingers and desirous eyes, pining in brocade and jewels--seem in a different sphere (as indeed they are) from Pinturricchio's well-found Popes and Princesses, and Sodoma's languishing boys or half-ripe Catherines dying of love. Have I not said this was once a city of pleasure? And whether the pleasure was a blood-feast or an _Agap_, or a Platonic banquet where the flute-players and wine-cups and crowns crushed out the high disquisition and philosophic undercurrent--it was all one to soft Siena drowsing the days out on her hills. Her pleasures were fierce, and beautiful as fierce. But the burden of Tyre is always the same. And so the memories of a thousand ancient wrongs unpurged howl over the red city, as once howled the ships of Tarshish.

IX

ILARIA, MARIOTA, BETTINA

(_Studies in Translation from Stone_)

Greatest of great ladies is Ilaria, _potens Lucc_, sleeping easily, with chin firmly rounded to the vault, where she has slept for five hundred years, and still a power in Lucca of the silver planes. It was a white-hot September day I went to pay my devotions to her shrine. Lucca drowsed in a haze, her bleached arcades of trees lifeless in the glare of high noon; all the valley was winking, the very bells had no strength to chime: and then I saw Ilaria lie in the deep shade waiting for the judgment. Ilaria was a tall Tuscan--the girls of Lucca are out of the common tall, and straight as larches--of fine birth and a life of minstrels and gardens. Pompous processions, trapped horses, emblazonings, were hers, and all refinements of High Masses and Cardinals. So she lived once a life as stately-ordered as old dance-music, in the airy corridors of a great marble palace, swept hourly by the thin, clear air of the Lucchesan plain; and her lord, went out to war with Pisa or Pescia, or even further afield, following Emperor or Pope to that Monteaperti which made Arbia run colour of wine, or shrill Benevento, or Altopasdo which cost the Florentines so dear.[1] But Ilaria stayed at home to trifle with lap-dogs and jongleurs under the orange trees: heard boys make stammering love, and laughed lightly at their Decameron travesty, being too proud to be ashamed or angered; and sometimes (for she was not too proud but that love should be of the party), she pulled a ring from one lithe finger, and looked down while the lad kissed it for a holy relic and put it in his bosom reverently,--pretending not to see. But, Ilaria, you knew well what gave colour to the faint and worn old words about _Fior di spin giallo, or O Dea fatale_, or

"O Dio de' Dei! La pi bellina mi parete voi; O quanto sete cara agli occhi miei!"

[Footnote 1: Historically he could have done none of these things, except, perhaps, fight at Altopascio.]

And so the days passed in your square corner palace, until the plague came down with the North wind, and you bowed your proud neck before it like a mountain pine. Young to die, young to die and leave the pleasant ways of Lucca, the green ramparts, the grassy walks in the pastures where the hawks fly and the shadows fleet over the green and gold of early May. Young enough, Ilaria. Scorner of love, now Death is at hand, with the bats' wings and wet scythe they give him in the Piazza, when your lord comes triumphing or God's Body takes the air: what of him, Madonna? Let him come, says Ilaria, with raised eyebrows and a wintry smile. Yet she fought: her thin hands held off the scythe at arms' length; she set her teeth and battled with the winged beast. Whenas she knew it must be, suddenly she relaxed her hold, and Death had his way with her.

Then her women came about her and robed her in a long robe, colour of olive leaves, and soft to the touch. And they covered soberly her feet and placed them on a crouching dog, which was Lucca. But her fine hands they folded peace-wise below her bosom, to rest quietly there like the clasps of a girdle. Her gentle hair (bright brown it was, like a yearling chestnut) they crowned also, and closed down her ringed eyes. So they let her lie till judgment come. And when I saw her the close robe still folded her about and ran up her throat lovingly to her chin, till her head seemed to thrust from it as a flower from its calyx. It would seem, too, as if her bosom rose and fell, that her nostrils quivered when the wind blew in and touched them; and the hem of her garment being near me, I was fain to kiss it and say a prayer to the divinity haunting that place. So I left the presence well disposed in my heart to glorify God for so fair a sight.

Whereafter I took the way to Florence among the vineyards and tangled hill-sides; and, anon, in the broad plain I stayed at Prato to honour the lady of the town. Madonna della Cintola she is called now, and one Luca, a worker in clay, knew her mind most intimately and did all her will. Quiet days she had lived at Prato, being wife to a decent metal-worker there and keeper of his house and stuff. Mariota she was then called for all her name, but as to her parentage none knew it, save that Marco's Vanna had been both frail and fair, and when she had been in flower the great Lord Ottoboni had flowered likewise--and often in her company. Giovanna I had never known; she died before her lord married the lady Adhelidis of Verona and the seven days' tilting were held in her honour in a field below the city wall. But when Luca first knew Mariota and saw how her mother's pride beaconed from her smooth brow, the girl was standing in the Piazza in a tattered green kirtle and bodice that gaped at the hooks, played upon by sun, and fallow wind, and longing looks driven at her eyes in vain. The wench carried her head and light fardel of years like a Princess; would laugh to show her fine teeth if your jest pleased her; and then she would look straightly upon you and be glad of you. If you pleased her not, she would look through you to the mountains or the church-tower. She had as squarely a modelled chin as ever I saw, and her lips firmly set and redder than strawberries in a wet May. None taught her anything; none, that Luca could learn, gave her sup or bed. He was a boy then and would have given her both. I think she knew he favoured her--what girl does not? Everybody favoured Mariota, stayed as she passed, and followed her stealthily with troubled eyes. But he was a moody boy then, at the mercy of dreams, and stammered when he was near her, blushing. When he came back she was seventeen years old, and the metal-worker's wife. It was then Luca saw her, in the street called of the Eye, where climbing plants top the convent wall and from the garden comes the scent of wall-flowers and sweet marjoram.

At her man's door she was standing, barefooted, fray-kirtled as of old; but riper, of more assured and triumphant beauty. In her arms a boy-child, lusty and half-naked, struggled to be fed, seeking with both fat hands to forage for himself. Turning her grey eyes, where pride slumbered and shame had never been, she knew Luca again, made him welcome at the door, with, superb assurance set wine and olives and bread before him; and so stood at the table while he ate, gravely recovering one by one the features of his face, smiling, preoccupied with her pleasure and unconscious of the cooing child. For with matronly composure she had eased my gentleman as soon as she had provided for her guest.

In comes the metal-worker, Sor Matteo, burly but watchful in a greasy apron, eyes the lad up and down with much burdensome pondering of hand to scrubby chin, as to say to Mariota "I'm no fool." With never a blush, nor a quailing of the eyes' level beam, Mariota begs cousin Luca to become conscious of her master.

There were the makings of a piece of right Boccacesque in all this, and the _padrone_ showed manifest disinclination for his accustomed part: but Luca's candid face disclaimed all dark-entry work. Mariota hurried to her task. A modeller in clay, a statuary, _via_, an admirer of the choicer contrivings of Mother Nature! What and if he should find his cousin, his scarce-remembered gossip Mariota, worth an artist's half- closed eye! And the _bambinaccio_ (with a side-look and face averted as she spoke)--_ecco_!--many a Gesulino showed a leaner thigh and cheeks less peachy than he. Had Papa seen the new dimple in Beppino's chin? And more soft piping to the same tune. Master Matteo was appeased; but Luca was far adrift with other matters. Love, for him, lay not in flesh and blood alone; rather, in what flesh and blood signified in another clay, not Messer Domeneddio's, but his own chosen task-stuff. He had come hither to Prato on the commission of the Opera, to work a _Madonna col Bambino_ for the great door of the Duomo. Well! he had his Madonna to hand, it would seem:--Mariota at the door of the smith's house, confident, lissom and fresh, and the lusty child groping for his breakfast. The light had been upon her, gleamed upon her skin, her brimming eyes, her glossy brown hair. What a bravery was hers! What a glorified presentment of young life, new-budded, was here! The town gaped, the husband admired; but Mariota, with her square chin and high carriage, looked as straightly before her, when in pale blue and silver-white, Madonna with the Babe and the holy deacons Stephen and Laurence stood, four months afterwards, within the shadow of the great church, and shone out to the day.

I pay silent respect to strapping Mariota and her baby-boy In the country of Boccace. Then, when I am in Florence again, under the spell of the city life, I lounge in the Borg' Ognissanti, or across Arno in the _quartiere_ San Niccolo, or out by San Frediano where Botticelli in his green old age pruned his vines, or in the pent streets between the Via della Pergola and Santa Croce, and watch the townsfolk lead their lives of patchwork and easy laughter, I fear I have a taste for such company. I am fond of verdure; I like trees as well as men: every oak for me has its hamadryad informing it, I like flowers better than men; and the most beautiful flower I know is a girl, I have a sweetheart in the Bargello, as you shall hear. I believe she is one of Donatello's sowing; but the critics are divided, I cannot trace Verocchio's bluntened lineaments in her, nor Mino's peaksomeness, nor anything of Desiderio. She's not very pretty, but she's like a summer flower, say, a campanula; and that is why I love to watch her and talk to her in this grandfatherly fashion. Bettina, I say to her, are you, I wonder, twelve years old yet? You cannot be much more I think, for you have let your bodice-strap slip off one of your shoulders and betray you to the sun. You are but a round rose-bud now and no one thinks any harm; but some day the sun will look at you in an odd way, and then, suddenly, you will be ashamed, and draw your frock right up to your neck.

And your hair strays where it likes at present. I know you have a golden fillet of box-leaves round your brow: that is because you are only a little girl still, not more than twelve. And you have tied the ends up in a sort of knot. But you romp so much and laugh so--I know you have two bright rows of little teeth--that you can never expect to keep tidy. Why, even now, while I am scolding you, you are itching to laugh and run away. I see a wavy lock trailing down your neck, _ragazza_, and those heavy tresses on your temples, instead of being drawn meekly back, droop down over your temples, and cover up your little ears. Don't you know that Florentine, ladies are proud of their foreheads, and when they have pretty ears, always show them? Some day, my dear, you will go out into the world; and your hair will be twisted up into coils with gold braid; perhaps you will have on it a flowery garland of Messer Domenico's making, and a string of Venice beads round your throat. And when that time comes, you won't let the sun play with your neck any more; he won't know his romp when he sees her in stiff velvet of Genoa and a high collar edged with seed-pearls.

And you won't look me in the eyes as you are doing now, saucy girl, with your chin pushed forward and your mouth all in a pucker--who's to know whether you are going to pout or giggle?--and your pert green eyes wide open, as if to say "Who's this old thickhead staring at me so hard?" No, Bettina, you will drop them instead; you will blush all over your neck and cheeks, and hang your round head. You have chestnuts in your two fists now, I know; there's some of the flour sticking to the corners of your mouth, little slut. But then you will have a fan perhaps, or a spyglass, or at least a mass-book in the mornings; and when I am looking at you, your ringers will tie themselves in knots and be very interesting. In two years' time, Bettina!

But though I shan't love you half as much as I do now, I shall always come to see you, I think; and, as I shall be a very old man by that time, perhaps you will still sit on a stool at my knee and give me a kiss now and then--oh, a mere bird's peck, just for kindness.... The Via de' Bardi is grey, and you are there in yellow. You are like a young daffodil dancing in the winter grass. But soon you will have strained to your full flower-time, and I see you in your summering, lithe and rather languid, with heavy-lidded eyes, and a slow smile.

Then you will not dance; but, instead, you will stoop gravely like a tall garden lily, and give your white hand to the lover kneeling below.

And all in two years, my little Bettina!

X

CATS

There was once a man in Italy--so the story runs--who said that animals were sacred because God had made them. People didn't believe him for a long time; they came, you see, of a race which had found it amusing to kill such things, and killed a great many of them too, until it struck them one fine day that killing men was better sport still, and watching men kill each other the best sport of all because it was the least trouble. Animals! said they, why, how can they be sacred; things that you call beef and mutton when they have left off being oxen and sheep, and sell for so much a pound? They scoffed at this mad neighbour, looked at each other waggishly, and shrugged their shoulders as he passed along the street. Well! then, all of a sudden, as you may say, one morning he walked into the town--Gubbio it was--with a wolf pacing at his heels--a certain wolf which had been the terror of the country-side and eaten I don't know how many children and goats. He walked up the main street till he got to the open Piazza in front of the great church. And the long grey wolf padded beside him with a limp tongue lolling out between the ragged palings which stood him for teeth. In the middle of the Piazza was a fountain, and above the fountain a tall stone crucifix. Our friend mounted the steps of the cross in the alert way he had (like a little bird, the story says), and the wolf, after lapping apologetically in the basin, followed him up three steps at a time. Then with one arm round the shaft to steady himself, he made a fine sermon to the neighbours crowding in the Square, and the wolf stood with his forepaws on the edge of the fountain and helped him. The sermon was all about wolves (naturally) and the best way of treating them. I fancy the people came to agree with it in time; anyhow when the man died they made a saint of him and built three churches, one over another, to contain his body. And I believe it is entirely his fault that there are a hundred-and-three cats in the convent- garden of San Lorenzo in Florence. For what are you to do? Animals are sacred, says Saint Francis. Animals are sacred, but cats have kittens; and so it comes about that the people who agree with Saint Francis have to suffer for the people who don't.

The Canons of San Lorenzo agree with Saint Francis, and it seems to me that they must suffer a good deal. The convent is large; it has a great mildewed cloister with a covered-in walk all round it built on arches. In the middle is a green garth with cypresses and yews dotted about; and when you look up you see the blue sky cut square, and the hot tiles of a huge dome staring up into it. Round the cloister walk are discreet brown doors, and by the side of each door a brass plate tells you the name and titles of the Canon who lives behind it. It is on the principle of Dean's Yard at Westminster; only here there are more Canons--and more cats.

The Canons live under the cloister; the cats live on the green garth, and sometimes die there, I did not see much of the Canons; but the cats seemed to me very sad-depressed, nostalgic even, I might describe them, if there had not been something more languid, something faded and spiritless about their habit. It was not that they quarrelled. I heard none of those long- drawn wails, gloomy yet mellow soliloquies, with which our cats usher in the crescent moon or hymn her when she swims at the full: there lacked even that comely resignation we may see on any sunny window-ledge at home;--the rounded back and neatly ordered tail, the immaculate fore-paws peering sedately below the snowy chest, the squeezed-up eyes which so resolutely shut off a bleak and (so to say) unenlightened world. That is pensiveness, sedate chastened melancholy; but it is soothing, it speaks a philosophy, and a certain balancing of pleasures and pains. In San Lorenzo cloister, when I looked in one hot noon seeking a refuge from the glare and white dust of the city, I was conscious of a something sinister that forbade such an even existence for the smoothest tempered cat. There were too many of them for companionship, and perhaps too few for the humour of the thing to strike them: in and out the chilly shades they stalked gloomily, hither and thither like lank and unquiet ghosts of starved cats. They were of all colours--gay orange-tawny, tortoiseshell with the becoming white patch over one eye, delicate tints of grey and fawn and lavender, brindle, glossy sable; and yet the gloom and dampness of the place seemed to mildew them all so that their brightness was glaring and their softest gradations took on a shade as of rusty mourning. No cat could be expected to do herself justice.

To and fro they paced, balancing sometimes with hysterical precision on the ledge of the parapet, passing each other at whisker's length, but _cutting each other dead_! Not a cat had a look or a sniff for his fellow; not a cat so much as guessed at another's existence. Among those hundred-and-three restless spirits there was not a cat but did not affect to believe that a hundred-and-two were away! It was horrible, the _inhumanity_ of it. Here were these shreds and waifs, these "unnecessary litters" of Florentine households, herded together in the only asylum (short of the Arno) open to them, driven in like dead leaves in November, flitting dismally round and round for a span, and watching each other die without a mew or a lick! Saint Francis was not the wise man I had thought him.

It was about two o'clock in the afternoon. I had watched these beasts at their feverish exercises for nearly an hour before I perceived that they were gradually hemming me in. They seemed to be forming up, in ranks, on the garth. Only a ditch separated us--I was in the cloister-walk, a hundred-and-three gaunt, expectant, desperate cats facing me. Their famished pale eyes pierced me through and through; and two-hundred-and-two hungry eyes (four cats supported life in one apiece) is more than I can stand, though I am a married man with a family. These brutes thought I was going to feed them! I was preparing weakly for flight when I heard steps in the gateway; a woman came in with a black bag. She must be going to deposit a cat on Jean-Jacques' ingenious plan of avoiding domestic trouble; it was surely impossible she wanted to borrow one! Neither: she came confidently in, beaming on our mad fellowship with a pleasant smile of preparation. The cats knew her better than I did. Their suspense was really shocking to witness. While she was rolling her sleeves up and tying on her apron--she was poor, evidently, but very neat and wholesome in her black dress and the decent cap which crowned her grey hair--while she unpacked the contents of the bag--two newspaper parcels full of rather distressing viands, scissors, and a pair of gloves which had done duty more than once--while all these preparations were soberly fulfilling, the agitation of the hundred-and-three was desperate indeed. The air grew thick, it quivered with the lashing of tails; hoarse mews echoed along the stone walls, paws were raised and let fall with the rhythmical patter of raindrops. A furtive beast played the thief: he was one of the one-eyed fraternity, red with mange. Somehow he slipped in between us; we discovered him crouched by the newspaper raking over the contents. This was no time for ceremony; he got a prompt cuff over the head and slunk away shivering and shaking his ears. And then the distribution began. Now, your cat, at the best of times, is squeamish about his food; he stands no tricks. He is a slow eater, though he can secure his dinner with the best of us. A vicious snatch, like a snake, and he has it. Then he spreads himself out to dispose of the prey-feet tucked well in, head low, tail laid close along, eyes shut fast. That is how a cat of breeding loves to dine, Alas! many a day of intolerable prowling, many a black vigil, had taken the polish off the hundred-and-three. As a matter of fact they behaved abominably: they leaped at the scraps, they clawed at them in the air, they bolted them whole with starting eyes and portentous gulpings, they growled all the while with the smothered ferocity of thunder in the hills. No waiting of turns, no licking of lips and moustaches to get the lingering flavours, no dalliance. They were as restless and suspicious here as everywhere; their feast was the horrid hasty orgy of ghouls in a churchyard.

But an even distribution was made: I don't think any one got more than his share. Of course there were underhand attempts in plenty, and, at least once, open violence--a sudden rush from opposite sides, a growling and spitting like sparks from a smithy; and then, with ears laid flat, two ill-favoured beasts clawed blindly at each other, and a sly and tigerish brindle made away with the morsel. My woman took the thing very coolly I thought, served them all alike, and didn't resent (as I should have done) the unfortunate want of delicacy there was about these vagrants. A cat that takes your food and growls at you for the favour, a cat that would eat _you_ if he dared, is a pretty revelation. _a donne furieusement penser_. It gives you a suspicion of just how far the polish we most of us smirk over will go. My cats at San Lorenzo knew some few moments of peace between two and three in the afternoon. That would have been the time to get up a testimonial to the kind soul who fed them. Try them at five and they would ignore you. But try them next morning!

My knowledge of the Italian tongue, in those days, was severely limited to the necessaries of existence; to take me on a fancy subject, like cats, was to strike me dumb. But at this stage of our intercourse (hitherto confined to smiles and eye-service) it became so evident my companion had something to say that I must perforce take my hat off and stand attentive. She pointed to the middle of the garth, and there, under the boughs of a shrub, I saw the hundred-and-fourth cat, sorriest of them all. It was a new-comer, she told me, and shy. Shy it certainly was, poor wretch; it glowered upon me from under the branches like a bad conscience. Shyness could not hide hunger--I never saw hungrier eyes than hers--but it could hold it in check: the silkiest speech could not tempt her out, and when we threw pieces she only winced! What was to be done next was my work. Plain duty called me to scale the ditch with some of those dripping, slippery, nameless cates in my fingers and to approach the stranger where she lurked bodeful under her tree. My passage towards her lay over the rank vegetation of the garth, in whose coarse herbage here and there I stumbled upon a limp white form stretched out--a waif the less in the world! I don't say it was a happy passage for me: it was made to the visible consternation of her I wish to befriend. Her piteous yellow eyes searched mine for sympathy; she wanted to tell me something and wouldn't understand! As I neared her she shivered and mewed twice. Then she limped painfully off--poor soul, she had but three feet!--to another tree, leaving behind her, unwillingly enough, a much-licked dead kitten. That was what she wanted to tell me then. As I was there, I deposited the garbage by the side of the little corpse, knowing she would resume her watch, and retired. My friend who had put up her parcels was prepared to go. She thanked me with a smile as she went out, looking carefully round lest she had missed out some other night-birds. One of the Canons had come out of his door and was leaning against the lintel, thoughtfully rubbing his chin. He was a spare dry man who seemed to have measured life and found it a childish business. He jerked his head towards the gateway as he glanced at me. "That is a good woman," he said in French, "she lendeth unto the Lord.... Yes," he went on, nodding his head slowly backwards and forwards, "lends Him something every day." The cats were sitting in the shady cloister-garth licking their whiskers: one was actually cleaning his paw. I went out into the sun thinking of Saint Francis and his wolf.

XI

THE SOUL OF A CITY

He hated Marco first of all because one day he undersold him in the Campo, put him to shame in open market. Figs were going cheap that October in spite of the waning year; but there was no earthly reason why he should give the English ladies more than four for two _soldi_. What were _soldi_ to English people? The scratch of a flea! He would have given them a handful, taken as they came, for their piece of _cinquanta_, and reaped a tidy little profit for himself. Who would have been the worse? God knew he needed it. Mariola crumpled with the ague like a dried leaf, and that long girl of his growing up so fast, and still running wild with goat-herds and marble quarrymen. How could he send her to the nuns for a place unless he bought her some shoes and a rosary? And then that pig Marco--thieving old miser--peered forward with his mock candour and silver-rimmed goggles and offered _ten_ for two _soldi_--ten! with the market price, _Dio mio_, at twelve! And _fichi totati_ too! Do you wonder that the ladies in striped blankets gave the cheek to Maso Cecci and turned to Marco Zoppa?

That wasn't all, but it was an accentuation of a long series of spiteful injuries wrought him by the wrinkled old villain. Maso endured, hating the old man daily more and more; tried little tricks, little revenges, upon him, upset his baskets, hid his pipe; but they generally failed or recoiled with a nasty swiftness upon himself. He only got deeper and deeper into the bad odour of the neighbours who traded in the Piazza with fruit and indifferent photographs. Nothing went very well--thanks to that unspeakable old Marco! His girl grew longer and lazier and handsomer, with a shapelier bust and a pair of arms like that snaky Bacchante in the _Opera_. Maso had to quail more than he liked to admit before the proud stare of her eyes; and when she dropped the heavy lids upon them and sauntered away, arms akimbo under her shawl, he could only swear. And he always cursed Marco Zoppa who gave her chestnuts and sage counsel for nothing. God only knew what devilry he might be whispering to her in the shady corner where the sun never came and the grass sprouted between the flags--she leaning against the wall, looking down at her toes, and he peering keen-eyed into her face and muttering in his beard, sometimes laying an old brown hand on her shoulder--Lord! he _did_ hate the man.

Then came the August races.

Maso had brought his Isotta into the city to see the fun and she had disappeared in the press just before the procession stayed by the Palazzo and the trumpets sounded for the first race. Maso shrugged his shoulders and cursed his luck, but didn't budge. The girl must look after herself. He was on the upper rim of the great fountain craning his neck over the pack of people: then he got a dig under the ribs enough to take the breath of an ox. It was the spout of old Marco's green umbrella. "Hey! silly fool," spluttered the old liar, "dost want that loose-legged slut of thine in trouble? I tell thee she's playing in a corner with Carlo Formaggia. Already he's pinched her cheek twice, and who knows what the end may be? Mud-coloured ass, wilt thou let thy child slip to the devil while thou standest gaping at a horse-race?" And this before all the neighbours! What to say to such a man? Maso babbled with rage; but he had to go, for Carlo Formaggia was well known. He had ruined more girls than enough; he was in league with vile houses, gambling dens, thieves' hells; Captain of an infamous secret society; the police were only waiting for a pretext to get him shipped off to the hulks. He must go of course. No thanks to Marco though: in fact he hated him worse than ever, partly because he had drawn all eyes and a fair share of sniggering and tongues thrust in the cheek upon his account; but most because he knew he had been trapped into losing a good place. For, as he mounted the narrow stair cut between old houses steep as rocks, he turned and saw Zoppa placidly smoking his pipe in the very spot he had held, squatted on the fountain-rim with his green umbrella between his knees. He was beaming through his spectacles, in a fatherly, indulgent sort of way, upon the shouting people; following the race too, like one who had paid for his box. Maso, when he heard the shatter of hoofs and the wild roar from thousands of throats down below him in the Campo, cursed old Zoppa with a grey face, and went muttering round the blinding sides of the Duomo to find his daughter. And when he did find her she was eating chestnuts at the open door of her aunt's shop in the Via Ghibellina! Bacchus! she was sick of all those folk in their _festa_ clothes, was all the explanation she would give him from between fine white teeth all clogged with chestnut-meal. If he chose to dress his daughter like a beggar's brat he had better not take her to the races. Maso's feeling of relief at finding her alone and looking her usual sulky impassive self, gave way very rapidly to a sort of righteous wrath against his triumphant enemy. So, by foul slanders of honest God-fearing people that old Jew had not scrupled to rob him of his place! His place and his day's fun. By Heaven, he was tricked, duped by a scaly-eyed Jew pedlar, a vile old dog tottering down to Hell with lies in his beard. Well! he would put this morning's work down to his score; some day there would be a choice little reckoning for Ser Marco.

Maso, green with impotent fury, poured out his flood of gutturals upon his _insouciante_ child. General reproaches were always a failure in cases of this sort. Some were sure to be wild guess-work and to drown the real ones: you could never tell when you had hit the mark. Had she not-- she fourteen, too!--slid astride down the railing into the Campo and been caught up in the arms of Carlo Formaggia waiting and laughing at the bottom? Had she not lain a whole minute in his arms, panting? And then, _Dio mio_, with the sweat still on her forehead, she had slipped off to San Domenico and confessed to coughing at mass the Sunday before! Pest! he would give her the strap over her shoulders when he got her home. The long, brown girl leaned against the lintel kicking one heel idly against the other. She was smiling at him, smiling with her lazy, languid eyes and with her glistening teeth. Every now and then she inspected a chestnut critically--like an amateur!--and slipped it between her jaws. They split it like a banana. And then she squeezed the half skins and dropped the flour down her throat. She had a long sinewy throat, glossy as velvet, with its silvery lights and dusky brown shadows. Maso stood helpless before her as she drank down her flour; he chattered like a little passionate ape. At last he lifted up both hands in a sudden frenzy of despair and went away.

Of course the races were over. The sober streets swarmed with people in their holiday clothes. They all seemed laughing and smoking, and talking fluently of something ridiculous. Maso, egoist, knew it must be about him-- or his daughter. Arms and heads went like mill-sails or tall trees in a gale of wind. Then, with a rattle and the sudden sliding of four hoofs on the flags, a cart would be in the thick of them, and the people scoured to the curb, still laughing, or spitting between the spasms of the interrupted jest. The boys tried to peep under the sagging hats of the girls, and the girls turned pettish shoulders to them and, as they turned, you caught the glint of fun in their great roes' eyes and saw the lips part before the quick breath. The streets were mere gullies, clefts hewn in zig-zag between grey houses that tottered up and up, and lay over them like cliffs. An ancient church with bleached stone saints under flowery canopies, a guttering candle before a tinsel shrine, and the hoarse babel of the streets--whips that cracked and spluttered like squibs, a swarming coloured stream of men and maids, once the twang of a chance mandoline. Siena was feasting, and the waiters furtively swept their foreheads with their coat-sleeves as they ran in and out of the _trattorie_.

In the _trattoria_ of the _Aquila Rossa_ old Marco Zoppa smoked his pipe and talked, between the spurts of smoke, to his neighbours. Fate brought him face to face with two enemies at once. Maso was battling his way up the street, white and strained as a grave-cloth; and Carlo Formaggia, the approved bravo--oiled and jaunty, with his brown felt fantastically rolled and stuck over one ear, with a long cigar which he alternately gnawed and sucked, Carlo the broad-chested, of the seared, evil face, came down with the stream on the arms of two other gilded youths. They met before the cafe, the man of intolerable wrongs and the Pilia-Borsa of Siena. Maso scowled till his thick eyebrows cut his face horizontally in two. He stood ostentatiously still, muttering with his lips as the trio went lightly by. Then he made to go on. But old Marco Zoppa stood up and made a speech. He had the wooden stem of his pipe 'twixt finger and thumb, and used it like a conductor's _bton_ to emphasise his points. As his voice shrilled and quavered, Carlo Formaggia caught his own name and turned back to listen, prick-eared. He stood out of sight resting one foot on a doorstep, and leaned forward on to his leg. He might have been dreaming of some night of love, but he held every word as it dropped.

"Maso," Marco went on, "thou art but a thin fool. I know what I know; but thou must needs stick dirt in thine ears and pass me by. Well, let be, let be; the end will come soon enough--this night even. And I have warned thee."

"Spawn of a pig, wilt never have done irking me? See, I scratch thee off me!" Maso drove home his gibe with a dramatic performance. The _trattoria_ was agape. Every table held its three craning necks and six piercing, twinkling eyes atop.

"I grow old, my Maso, I grow very old, and thy monkey's tricks are nought. 'Tis thy slip of a girl and thy poor twisted Mariola I would save in spite of thee. Listen then once more, and for the last time. Ser Carlo intends to snare thy pigeon. He has limed his twigs; the bird flutters free for this noon, but by to-night she will be caged. For me, I have done my possible--but I am old. Life tingles fiercer in the blood of a young man. Therefore beware. Wilt thou see that brawny assassin toying with thy girl; leaning over her where she crouches, poisoning her with fat words? That's how the snake licks the turtle before he gulps her--'tis to make her sleek, look you! Well, go thy way, dolt and blunderhead. For me--old as I am--I will shoot a last bolt for Mariola. This very night after supper I go to the Sbirro: and thy thanks will be a rounder oath and some more knave's tricks with my baskets."

"No thanks are owing, Marco Zoppa"; Maso was ashy with shame and rage at the old man's placid benevolence. "Marco Zoppa, thou hast been my enemy ever, and I have borne it"--the Caf roared with laughter; a fat old Capuchin nearly had a fit. Maso looked round with fright in his eyes. He went on, "Now thou hast gone too far--insulting me grossly before these citizens. Thou hast brought thine end upon thyself." He ran away fighting through the delighted crowd. Everybody who could get at him slapped him on the back. A big carter stove his hat in.

Old Marco shrugged his patient shoulders and sat down to read the _Secolo_. He balanced his silver-rimmed spectacles on his nose and held the journal at arm's length with hand a thought more shaky, perhaps, than usual. Presently he looked up: "Mother of God! what a white-faced rogue it is! Eh, Giuseppe?" "By Mars, if looks could stab, thou hadst been riddled by the knife before this," said his friend. Marco shrugged and went on reading--he was an old man.

But when Carlo Formaggia had heard the debate, he turned a shade shinier, and his eyes harder and brighter. As he motioned his friends off with a look, he swallowed something hard in his throat. Then he turned down the first side street, doubled round to the right, turned to the left down a kind of black sewer-trap and let himself into a wine-shop, where he sat down, breathing short. He drank brandy--but he drank like a machine. The muscles of his jaw were working spasmodically as he sat rigid on a tub, leaning against the counter. And he fingered something at his belt. His eyes were in a cold stare: he saw nothing and didn't move. But he went on drinking brandy till late in the afternoon, till the _Hail Mary_ bells began to sound a tinkling chorus through the still air.

And Maso Cecci, he too, rushed away white and chattering. Rage had past definition with him, he saw things red, and they choked him. The air felt thick to him, full of flies. He brushed his hands before his face, struck out vaguely, and swore as the dazzling black things settled round him again in a swarm. Irritated, maddened as he was, he still heard the derisive yells of the crowd at the _birreria_ and saw Marco's calm wise old face smiling urbanely behind silver spectacles. _Cristo amore!_ how he loathed that old man. Siena could never hold the pair of them: there must be an end--there _should_ be an end. His heart gave a jerk under his vest as he thought of it. An end!--an end of his eternal fretting jealousy in the Campo, his continued sense of being worsted, of galling inferiority to that methodical old villain. An end of his worries about Isotta; an end--ah! but there would be something rarer than that? To a man like Maso, a small man, of immoderate self-esteem, and that self- esteem always on the smart, there is another satisfaction--that of seeing the better man totter and slip forward to his knees. This insufferable old Marco who was always so right, with his slow methods and accursed accuracy--to see him stumble and drop! That was what made Maso's heart flutter and thud against his skin. And then, as he thought of it, it seemed inevitable. It could be done in a minute, _via!_ The old man was alone--it would be dusk--he would peer forward through the gloom to open the door and--_Madre di Dio!_--and then! Maso was sweating; the back of his palate itched intolerably; something hot and sticky clogged his mouth and glued his tongue against the roof of it. His knees shook so that he could scarcely walk. Some little boys stood to stare at him as he lurched by, and laughed stealthily to see the hated Maso tipsy. But Maso was unconscious of all this: he staggered on homewards with scorching eyes....

Old Marco lived down beyond the Railway Station--a room in a crazy block of buildings that had been run up for the needs of the factory hands. It was like a great smooth cliff, this block, and was washed over a raw pink, but it glowed in the setting sun that evening, like the city herself and all the hills, the colour of bright blood. As Maso neared its blind face, stepping warily with outstretched neck like some obscene bird, and with one hand under his coat--the sun was going down into a purple bank of cloud. He gilded the edges as he sank and shot broad rays of crimson light up into the green sky. Here and there a star twinkled faint; the city lay over him like a cloudy, silent company of rocks; the tower of the Palazzo ran up into the pallor of the sky, a shaking spear.

There was but one glimmer of light in the whole ghostly wall of tenements and that, Maso knew, was Marco Zoppa's. Every soul else was crowded in the Campo waiting for the fireworks. And, as he thought, he heard a dull thud behind him, and turned; and there, far up, a single shaft of flame shot aloft, and stayed, and burst into a fan of lights; and a puff told him it was the first rocket. "_Ecco! Madre di Dio_, a sign! a sign! So will _I_ go up; and so shall my enemy come down." And Maso crept up the stairway breathing thick and short....

With a hand still under his cloak he rapped his knuckles on the door. No answer. An echo, only, fluttered and grew faint down the stone steps. He hoisted his cloak from the shoulder and swung his right arm free. Then he knocked again. Nothing. No sign. Heavy silence; only a distant murmur of voices, muffled and infinitely far, from the Campo on the hill.

"The game has flown! Or the old dog sleeps." Maso sighed, for he wanted to see him drop gurgling to his knees. Still, it made his affair easier. He gave one fierce hoist to his cloak, twitched his right arm once or twice, and gently turned the handle. Then he stepped lightly and daintily into the room.

A candle guttered on a little table in the corner, and the Crucified showed white upon the black cross above. Marco Zoppa lay on his bed with his throat cut from ear to ear. The cut was so resolute that his head stuck out at an angle from his body--almost a right angle; and in some struggle he had got his nostril sliced. That gave him an odd, _mesquin_ expression, lying there with his mouth open and his yawning nostril, as if he wanted to sneeze. The room smelt stale and sour; the thick air gathered in a misty halo round the candle, and a fat shroud of tallow drooped over the edges of the candlestick.

Maso dropped his long, clean knife; dropped on to his knees and wailed like a chained dog. He could not take his eyes from the horrible black pit between the dead man's chin and trunk. Out of that pit a thin scarlet stream was still slipping lazily, and crawling down the white coverlet to the floor. Maso's wailing attracted a dog near by. He too set off howling from behind his door: and then another, and another. There was a chorus of howls, long-drawn, pitiful, desolate; and Maso, the only man in that woeful company, howled like any dog of the pack.

Gradually his moaning sank and then stopped with a dry sob. He crawled on his knees a little nearer to the bed and eyed fearfully a patch of blood on the counterpane. Just God! what was that patch? A faint circle smeared with the finger, and through the midst of it a ragged dart. Carlo Formaggia had been there! He knew that mark! And then the whole truth blazed before him like a sheet of fire. He fell forward on his face. The thin thread of scarlet from Marco Zoppa's gaping throat crawled drop by drop on to his shoulder.

Carlo Formaggia had limed his bird.

XII

WITH THE BROWN BEAR

The secret of happy travelling is contrast. Suffer, that you may drowse thereafter: grill, that you may have a heat on you worth assuagement. Wherefore, to the Italian wanderer, it will be worth while to endure the fierceness of the Lombard plain, even the gilded modernisms of Milan (blistering though they may be under the stroke of the naked sun) and the dusty, painful traverse of the Apennines, to drop down at last into the broad green peace of the Val D'Arno. Take, however, the first halting- place you can. You will find yourself in a hollow of the hills, helping the brown bear of Pistoja keep the Northern gates of Tuscany. It is not unlikely that the Apennine may "walk abroad with the storm," or hide his moss-brown slopes in great sheets of mist. This, while it means a fine sight, means also rain for Pistoja. A quiet rain will accordingly fall upon the little city, gently but persistently. Only in the gleams may you guess that you have the Tuscan sky over you and the smiling Tuscan Art round about. But the ways of the Pistolesi will confirm the feeble knees; such at least was my case.

For the Pistolesi were there beside foul weather, and splashed about under green umbrellas with prodigious jokes to cut at each other's expense, of a sort we reserve for Spring or early June. For them, with a vintage none too good to be garnered, it might have been the finest weather in the world: but I am bound to add my belief that they would have laughed were it the worst. With no money, no weather, and taxes intolerable, Pistoja laughed and looked handsome. Was not Boccaccio a Pistolese? I was reminded of his book at every turn of the road: life is a wanton story there, or, say, a Masque of Green Things, enacted by a splendid fairy rout. They were still the well-favoured race Dino Compagni described them far back in the fourteenth century--"formati di bella statura oltre a' Toscani," he says. The words hold good of their grandsons--the men leaner and longer, hardier and keener than you find them in Lucca or Siena; and the women carry their heads high, and when they smile at you (as they will) you think the sun must be shining. They are mountaineers, a strong race. At _pallone_ one day, I saw muscles "all a-ripple down the back," arms and shoulders, which would have intoxicated the great old "amatore del persona" himself. For their vivacity, it is racial; I think all Tuscans, more or less, retain the buoyant spirits, the alertness as of birds, which crowned Italy with Florence instead of Rome or Milan. Tuscan Art is a proof of that, and Tuscan Art can be studied at its roots in Pistoja: you see there the naked thing itself with none of the wealth of Florence to make the head swim. If Florence had stopped short at the death of Giuliano de' Medici, you might say Pistoja was Florence seen through the diminishing-glass. Is not that ribbed dome, with its purple mass domineering over the huddled roofs, Brunelleschi's? It is a faithful copy of Vasari's hatching; but no matter. So with the Baptistery, the towers, the grim old corniced palaces, the _sdruccioli_ and gloomy clefts which serve for streets. But you would be wrong. Pisa is the real parent of Pistoja, as indeed she is of Florence-Dante's Florence. Pisa's magnificent building repeats to itself here: Gothic with a touch of Latin sanity, a touch of the genuine Paganism which loves the ddal earth and cannot bring itself to be out of touch with it. San Giovanni _fuoricivitas_, what a rock-hewn church it is! A rigid oblong, dark as the twilight, running with the street without belfry or window or faade. Three tiers of shallow arcades on spiral columns, never a window to be seen, and the whole of solemn black marble narrowly striped with white. Is there such a beast as a black tiger--a tiger where the tawny and black change places? San Giovanni is modelled after that fashion. It is very old--twelfth century at latest--very shabby and weather-beaten, dusty and deserted. But it will outlive Pistoja; and that is probably what Pistoja desired.

This black and white, which is so reminiscent of early Florence, is carried out with more fidelity to the model in the Piazza. The octagonal Baptistery is, no doubt, a copy of Dante's beloved church; but it is much better placed, does not "shun to be admired" like its beautiful yellowed sister. The Duomo is of Pisa again, and has a tower, half belfry, half fortress, which once the Podest seized and held while the plucky little town endured a siege. The Brown Bear stood out long against the Lily. But Lorenzo showed his teeth: and the Wolf prevailed at last. Sculpture apart, the resemblance to Florence stops here. None of her Cinque-cento bravery and little of her earlier and finer Renaissance came this way. But one thing came; one clean breath from "that solemn fifteenth century" did blow to this verge of Tuscan soil, a breath from Luca della Robbia and his men. They may flower more exuberantly in Florence, those broad, blue-eyed platters of theirs; nowhere is their purpose more explicit, their charm more exquisitely appreciable than here. There is a chance of considering the art on its own merits; better, you can see it more truly as it was at home, since Florence has caught some little of Haussmannism and is not as Luca left it. So here, perhaps best of all, you may try to plumb the depths of the Della Robbia soul,--through its purity and limpid candour, through its shining, sweetly wholesome homeliness, down to the crystal sincerity burning recessed in the shrine. It is the fashion to say of Angelico da Fiesole that his was a navet which amounted to genius: a thin phrase, which may nevertheless pass to qualify the inspired miniaturist. The religiosity of the Della Robbia, while no less nave, is really far other. It is not Gothic at all, nor ascetic, nor mystic. It would be Latin, were it not blithe enough to be Greek. It speaks of what is and must be, and is well content; not of what should, or might be, if one could but tear off this crust. It seems probable that it speaks as pure a Paganism--just that very Paganism which Pisan building represents-- as has been seen since the workmen of Tanagra fashioned their little clay familiars for the tombs, slim Greek girls in their reedy habit as they lived, or chattering matrons like those you read of in Theocritus. Much fine phrasing has been spent upon the effort to analyse the sthetics of Delia Robbia ware. Its inexhaustible charm is unquestionable; but just where does it catch one's breath? Not altogether in the clean colouring, like nothing so much as that of a cool, glazed dairy at home,--"milky- blue," "cream-white," "butter-yellow," "parsley-green," all the dairy names come pat to pen--; not necessarily in the sheer, April loveliness of form and expression, though that would count for much; nor, I believe, as Mr. Pater would have us acknowledge, in the evanescent delicacy of each motive and sentiment,--the arresting of a single sigh, a single wave of desire, a single stave of the Magnificat. All this is true, and true only of Luca, and yet the whole charm is not there. Rather, I think, you will find it in the fusing of humble material--the age-old clay of the potter (of the Master-Potter, for that matter)--and fine art, whereby the wayside shrine is linked to the high altar, and _contadino_ and Vicar- Apostolic can hail a common ideal. Every lane, every cottage, has its Madonna-shrine here; lumped in clay or daubed in raw colour, nothing can obliterate the sweet sentiment of these poor weeds of art, these tawdry little appeals to the better part of us. Madonna cries with a bared red heart; she supports a white Christ; suave she stoops to enfold a legion of children in her mantle. She is as Tuscan as the brownest of them; but a Tuscan of the rarest mould, they would have you to see, of a cleanliness quite unapproachable, of a benignity wholly divine. One learns the secret of devotional art best of all in such ephemeral sanctuaries. And since Fine Art is the flower of these shabby roots, Italy only, where Cincinnatus worked in his garden, can furnish so wonderful a harmony of opposites. Surely it is the most democratic country in Europe. I saw a Colonel the other day, in Bologna, carrying a newspaper parcel. He was in full uniform. It was the secret of Saint Francis that he knew how to bridge the gulf on either side of which we, prisoners in feudal holds, have cried to each other in vain. It was the secret of the Delia Robbia too. The god shall sink that we may rise to meet him in the way. Why not? Here in Pistoja are some precious pieces--a _Visitation_ in San Giovanni, a pearly _Madonna Incoronata_ on the big door of San Giacopo, concerning which it would be difficult to account to one's self for the added zest given by the mantle of fine dust which has settled down on the pale folds of the drapery and outlined the square blue panels of the background. After all, is it not one more touch of the hedgerow, a symbol of the hedgerow-faith not quite dead in the byeways of Italy?

But I know I shall never convey the spontaneity with which Fra Paolino's _Visitation_ strikes quick for the heart. The thing is so momentary, a mere quiver of emotion passing from one woman to another. The pair of them have looked in to the deeps. Then the older stumbles forward to her knees, and the girl stoops down to raise her. One guesses the rest. They will be sobbing together in a minute, the girl's face buried in the other's shoulder. All you are to see is just the wistfulness,--"My dear! my dear!" And then the Virgin, full of Grace, but a shy girl in her teens for all that, hides her hot cheeks and cries her little wild heart to quietness. Some of it is in Albertinelli's fine picture, but not all. All of it--and here's the point--is to be seen in the street among these clear-eyed Tuscan women, just as Fra Paolino (himself of Pistoja) saw it before our time, and then fixed it for ever in blue and white.

And now cross the Piazza and come down the steep incline by the Palazzo Commune, turn to the left, and behold the crown of Pistoja, the Spedale del Ceppo. Everybody knows Luca's masterpiece at Florence, the Foundling Hospital on whose front are some twenty _bambini_ in pure white on blue: babies or flowers, one does not know which. In 1514 the Pistolesi remodelled their own hospital, and called in the successors to Luca's mystery to make it joyful. Andrea, Giovanni, Luca II. and Girolamo came and conjured in turn, and their wallflowers sprouted from the limewashed sides. I fancy myself out in the patched Piazzo del Ceppo as I write, looking again on the pleasant quietness of it all. It is a grey day with thunder smouldering somewhere in the hills, close and heavy. The blind walls about me stare hard in the raw light, but the wards of the hospital are open back and front to the air; it is a rest for the eye to look into their cool depths within the loggia. It is a square, very plain, yellow building, this hospital, unrelieved save for its loggia, its painted frieze of earthenware, and a rickety cross to denote its pious uses. Through the wards I can see to the wet sky again and a gable-end of vivid red and yellow. A thin black Christ on his cross stands up against this bright square of distance, pathetic silhouette enough for me; reminder something sinister, you might think, for the sick folk inside. But not so; this is a crucifix, not a _Crucifixion_. This poor wooden Rood, bowing in the shade, speaks not of high tragedy, but of the simple annals of the poor again; not of St. John, but of St. Luke, I shall be called sentimental; but with the band of garden colours before me I can't get away from the streets and alleys, I am not sure the craftsmen intended I should.

The hospital itself is low and square; it is limewashed all over, and has the blind and beaten aspect of all Italian houses:--red-purplish tiles running into deep eaves, jalousied windows, and the loggia. It is on the face of this that the workers in baked clay--"lavoro molto utile per la state," so cool and fresh is it, so redolent of green pastures and the winds of April--have moulded the Seven Acts of Pure Mercy in colours as pure; blue of morning sky, grass-green, daffodil-yellow. Once more, no heroics: here is what the workmen knew and we see. Black and white _frati_, not idealised at all, but sleek and round in the jaw as a monk will get on oil and _asciutta_, minister to sunburnt peasants, and ruddy girls as massive in the waist and stout in the ankle as their sisters of to-day. Then, of course, there is Allegory. Allegory of your well-ordered, gravitated sort, which takes us no whit further from wholesome earth and the men and women so plainly and happily made of it. No soaring, no transcendentalism. Carit is a deep-breasted market-girl nursing two brown babies, whom I have just seen sprawling over a gourd in the Campo Marzio; Fortezza, Speranza, Fede, I know them all, bless their sober, good eyes! in the fruit-market, or selling newspapers, or plaiting straws in the Piazza. After this we slide into religion pure and direct, the beautiful ridiculous Paganism which has never left the plain heathen- folk. Wreathed medallions in the spandrils give us Mary warned, Mary visited, Mary homing to her Son, Mary crowned; what would they do without their Bona Dea in Tuscany? She is of them, and yet always a little beyond their grasp. Not too far, however. That means Gothicism. The advantage of the Italian religious ideal is obvious. Art may never leave for long together the good brown earth; and it can serve religion well when it plucks up a type to set, clean as God made it, just a little above our reach, to show Whose is "the earth and the fulness thereof."

An example. I leave the white and crumbling Piazza, its old marble well, its beggars, its sick, and its meadow-fresh border of Delia Robbia planting, and stray up the Via del Ceppo towards the ramparts. High at a barred window a brown mother with a brown dependent baby smiles down upon my wayfaring. She has fine broad brows and a patient face; when she smiles, out of mere kindness for my solitary goings, it is pleasant to note the gleam of light on her teeth and lips. I take off my hat, as Luca or Lippo would have done, to "ma cousine la Reine des cieux."

Thus goes life In Pistoja and the rest of the world.

XIII

DEAD CHURCHES AT FOLIGNO

From my roof-top, whither I am fled to snatch what cooler airs may drift into this cup of earth, I can see above the straggling tiles of gable and loggia the cupolas and belfries of many churches. I know they are all dead; for I have wound a devious way through the close inhospitable streets and met them or their ghosts at every corner. The ghost of a dead church is the worst of all disembodied sighs: he wails and chatters at you. Here I have seen churches whose towers were fallen and their tribunes laid bare to the insults of the work-a-day world. There were churches with ugly gashes in them, fresh and smarting still; some had sightless eyes, as of skulls; and there were churches piecemeal and scattered like the splinters of the True Cross. A great foliated arch of travertine would frame a patch of plaster and soiled casement just broad enough for some lolling pair of shoulders and shock-head atop; a sacred emblem, some _Agnus_ indefinably venerable, some proud old cognisance of the See, or frayed Byzantine symbol (plaited with infinite art by its former contrivers), such and other consecrated fragments would stuff a hole to keep the wind away from a donkey-stall or _Fabbrica di pasta_ in a muddy lane. I met dismantled walls still blushing with the stains of fresco--a saint's robe, the limp burden of the Addolorata;--I met texts innumerable, shrines fly-ridden and, often as not, mocked with dead flowers. And now, as I see these grey towers and the grand purple line of the hills hemming in the Tiber Valley, I know I am come down to the sated South, to the confines of Umbria, the country of dead churches, and of Rome the metropolis of such deplorable broken toys. This appears to me the disagreeable truth concerning the harbourage of Saint Francis and Saint Bernardine, and of Roberto da Lecce, a man who, if everybody had his rights, would be known as great in his way as either. You will remember that Luther found it out before me. The religious enthusiasm we bring in may serve our turn while we are here: it will be odd if any survive for the return; impossible to go away as fervid as we come. Other enthusiasms will fatten; but the wonderful Gothic adumbration of Christianity was born in the North and has never been healthy anywhere else. Gothicism, driven southward, runs speedily to seed; an amazing luxuriance, a riot, strange flowers of heavy shapes and maddening savour; and then that worse corruption to follow a perfection premature. So medival Christianity in Umbria is a ruin, but not for Salvator Rosa; it has not been suffered a dignified death. That is the sharpest cut of all, that the poor bleached skull must be decked with paper roses.

All this is forced upon me by my last days in Tuscany where a lower mean has secured a serener reign. I had hardly realised the comeliness of its intellectual vigour without this abrupt contrast. Pistoja, with its pleasant worship of the wholesome in common life; Lucca, girdled with the grey and green of her immemorial planes, and adorned with the silvery gloss of old marble and stone-cutter's work exquisitely curious; then Prato, dusty little handful of old brick palaces and black and white towers, where I heard a mass before the high altar but two Sundays ago. All Prato was in church that showery morning, I think. The air was close, even in the depths of the great nave: the fans all about me kept up a continual flicker, like bats' wings, and the men had to use their hats, or handkerchiefs where they had them. To hear the responses rolling about the chapels and echoing round the timbers of the roof you would have said the thunder had come. It was too dark to see Lippi's light-hearted secularities in the choir; one saw them, however, best in the congregation--the same appealing innocence in the grey-eyed women, and the men with the same grave self-possession and the same respectful but deliberate concern with their own affairs which gives you the idea that they are lending themselves to divine service rather out of politeness than from any more intimate motive. Lippi saw this in Prato four centuries ago, and I, after him, saw it all again in a rustic sacrifice which I should find it hard to distinguish from earlier sacrifices in the same spot. And indeed it is informed with precisely the same spirit, an inarticulate reverence for the Dynamic in Nature. How many religions can be reduced to that! In Florence again, what a hardy slip of the old stock still survives! You may see how the worship of Venus Genetrix and Maria Deipara merged in the work of Botticelli and Ghirlandajo, Michael Angelo and Andrea del Sarto; you may see how, if asceticism has never thriven there, there was (and still is) an effort after selection of some sort and a scrupulous respect for the _elegantia qudam_ which Alberti held to be almost divine; you may see, at least, a religion which still binds, and which, making no great professions, has grown orderly and surely to respect. Thus from a Tuscany, pagan, kindly, exuberant and desponding by turns, but always ready with that long slow smile you first meet in the Lorenzetti of Siena and afterwards find so tenderly expressed in its different manifestations in the Delia Robbia and Botticelli--a smile where patience and wistfulness struggle together and finally kiss,--I came down to Umbria and a people dying of what M. Huysmans grandiosely calls "our immense fatigue." Here is a people that has loved asceticism not wisely. This asceticism, pushed to the limit where it becomes a kind of sensuality, has bitten into Umbria's heart; and Umbria, with a cloyed palate, sees her frescos peel and lets her sanctuaries out to bats and green lizards. Surely the worst form of moral jaundice is where the sufferer watches his affections palsy, but makes no stir.

From the ramp of the citadel at Perugia you can guess what a hornet's nest that grey stronghold of the Baglioni must have been. It commands the great plain and bars the way to Rome. Westward, on a spur of rock, stands Magione and a lonely tower: this was their outpost towards Siena. Eastward there is a white patch on the distant hills--Spello, "mountain built with quiet citadel," quiet enough now. There was always a Baglione at Spello with his eyes set on chance comers from Foligno and Rome. Seen from thence, _Augusta Perusia_ hangs like a storm cloud over her cliffs, impregnable but by strategy, as wicked and beautiful as ever her former masters, the Seven Deadly Sins, grandsons of Fortebraccio. The place is like its history, of course, having, in fact, grown up with it: you might say it was the incarnation of Perugia's spirit; it would only be to admit, what is so obvious over here, that a town is the work of art of that larger soul, the body politic. So to see the crazy streets cut in steps and crevasses across and through the rocks, spanning a gorge with a stone ladder or boring a twisted tunnel under the sheer of the Etruscan walls, to note the churches innumerable and the foundations of the thirty fortress-towers she once had--all this is to read the secret of Perugia's two love affairs. Of her towers Julius II. left but two standing, blind pillars of masonry; but there were thirty of them once, and the Baglioni held them all, for a season. Now it was these wild Baglioni--"filling the town with all manner of evil living," says Matarazzo, but nevertheless intensely beloved for their bold bearing and beauty, as of young hawks;-- it was just these blood-stained striplings, this Semonetto who rode shouting into the Piazza after an affray and swept his clogged hair clear of his eyes that he might see to kill, this black Astorre, "of the few words," who was murdered in his shirt on his marriage-eve by his cousin and best friend; it was this very cousin Grifone, so beautiful that "he seemed an angel of Paradise," who, in his turn, was cut down and laid out with his dead allies below San Lorenzo that his widow might not fail of finding him and his marred fairness--it was just this stormy crew that fell weeping at Suor Brigida's meek feet, confessed their sins and received the Communion (encompassers and encompassed together, and all in a rapture) on the very eve of the great slaughter of 1500; it was they who adorned the Oratory of San Bernardino and made it the miracle of rose- colour and blue that it is; who reared the enormous San Domenico below the Gate of Mars, and who, in this hot-bed of enormity, nurtured Perugino's dreamy Madonnas. What it meant I know not at all. There are other riddles as hard in Umbria. Renan saw the gentle cadence of the landscape--violet hills, the silver gauze of water, oliveyards all of a green mist; read the _Fioretti_ and the dolorous ecstasies of Perugino's Sebastian, and straightway adapted the high-flown parallel worked out in detail by Giotto. Umbria for him was the Galilee of Italy, and Francis son of Bernard an _avatar_ of Christ. But Renan was apt to allow his emotions to ride him. Another dazzling contrast, which has recently exercised another dextrous Frenchman, is Siena with her Saint Catherine and her Sodoma who betrayed her--Saint Catherine, as great a force politically as she was spiritually, and Sodoma, who painted her like a Dana with love-glazed eyes fainting before the apparition of the Crucified Seraph.

There is nothing like this in the history of Tuscany, whose palaces not long were fortresses nor her monks at any time successful politicians. Cosimo had pulled down the Florentine towers or ever the last Oddi had loosed hold of Ridolfo's throat, I know that Siena is just within that province geographically; in temperament, in art and manner, she has always shown herself intensely Umbrian. Take, then, the case of Savonarola. The Florentines received him gladly enough and heard him with honest admiration, even enthusiasm. Still, there is reason to believe they took him, in the main, spectacularly, as they also took that portentous old monomaniac Gemisthos Pletho who made religions as we might make pills. For, observe, Savonarola lost his head--and his life, good soul!--where the Florentines did not. The cobbler went beyond his last when the _Frate_ essayed politics. He suffered accordingly. But in Perugia, in Siena, in Gubbio and Orvieto, the great revivalists Bernardine, Catherine, Fra Roberto, held absolute rule over body and soul. For the moment Baglione and Oddi kissed each other; all feuds were stayed; a man might climb the black alleys of a night without any fear of a knife to yerk him (the Ancient's word) under the ribs or noose round his neck to swing him up to the archway withal. So Catherine brought back Boniface (and much trouble) from Avignon, and Da Lecce wrote out a new constitution for some rock-bound hive of the hills, whose crowd wailing in the market-place knew the ecstasy of repentance, and ran riot in religious orgies very much after the fashion of the Greater Dionysia or, say, the Salvation Army. And how Niccol Alunno would have painted the Salvation Army!

So it does seem that the two great passions of Umbria burnt themselves out together. They were, indeed, the two ends of the candle. When the Baglioni fell in the black work of two August nights, only one escaped. And with them died the love of the old lawless life and the infinite relish there was for some positive foretaste of the life of the world to come. Both lives had been lived too fast: from that day Perugia fell into a torpor, as Perugino, the glass of his time and place, also fell. Perugino, we know, had his doubts concerning the immortality of the soul, but painted on his beautiful cloister-dreams, and knocked down his saints to the highest bidder.[1] Vasari assures me that the chief solace of the old prodigal in his end of days was to dress his young wife's hair in fantastic coils and braids. A prodigal he was--true Peruginese in that-- prodigal of the delicate meats his soul afforded. His end may have been unedifying; it must at least have been very pitiful. Nowadays his name stands upon the Corso Vannucci of the town he uttered, and in the court wall of a little recessed and colonnaded house in the Via Deliziosa. Meantime his frescos drop mildewed from chapel walls or are borne away to a pauper funeral in the Palazzo Communale.

[Footnote 1: See, however, what he has to say for himself in Chapter V. _ante._]

In his finely studied _Sensations_ M. Paul Bourget, it seems to me, flogs the air and fails to climb it when he struggles to lay open the causes of poor Vannucci's embittering. If ever painting took up the office of literature it was in the fifteenth century. The _quattrocentisti_ stand to Italy for our Elizabethan dramatists. This may have produced bad painting: Mr. George Moore will tell you that it did. I am not sure that it very greatly matters, for, failing a literature which was really dramatic, really poetical, really in any sense representative, it was as well that there led an outlet somewhere. At any rate Lippi and Botticelli, to those who know them, are expressive of the Florentine temper when Pulci and Politian are distorted echoes of another; Perugino leads us into the recesses of Perugia while Graziani keeps us fumbling at the lock. And Perugino's languorous boys and maids are the figments of a riotous erotic, of a sensuous fancy without imagination or intelligence or humour. His Alcibiades, or Michael Archangel, seems green-sick with a love mainly physical; his Socrates has the combed resignation of his Jeromes and Romualds--smoothly ordered old men set in the milky light of Umbrian mornings and dreaming out placid lives by the side of a moonfaced Umbrian beauty, who is now Mary and now Luna as chance motions his hand. How penetrating, how distinctive by the side of them seems Sandro's slim and tearful Anima Mundi shivering in the chill dawn! With what a strange magic does Filippino usher in the pale apparition of the Mater Dolorosa to his Bernard, or flush her up again to a heaven of blue-green and a glory of burning cherubim! This he does, you remember, with rocket-like effect, in a chapel of the Minerva in Rome. But it is the unquenchable thirst of the Umbrians for some spiritual nutriment, some outlet for their passion to be found only in bloodshed or fainting below the Cross, some fierce and untameable animal quality such as you see to-day in the torn gables, the towers and bastions of Perugia, it is the spirit which informed and made these things you get in Perugino's pictures--in the hot sensualism of their colour-scheme, the ripeness and bloom of physical beauty encasing the vague longing of a too-rapid adolescence. The desire could never be fed and the bloom wore off. Look at Duccio's work on the facade of San Bernardino, Duccio was a Florentine, but where in Florence would you see his like? What a revel of disproportion in these long-legged nymphs, full- lipped and narrow-eyed as any of Rossetti's curious imaginings. Take the Povert, a weedy girl with the shrinking paps of a child. Here again (exquisite as she is in modelling and intensity of expression) you get the enticement of a malformation which is absolutely un-Greek--unless you are to count Phrygia within the magic ring-fence--and only to be equalled by the luxury of Beccadelli. You get that in Sodoma too, the handy Lombard; you have it in Perugino and all the Umbrians (in some form or other); but never, I think, in the genuine Tuscan--not even in Botticelli--and never, of course, in the Venetians, Duccio modelled these things while the Delia Robbia were at their Hellenics; and a few years after he did them came the end of the Baglioai and all such gear. The end of real Umbrian art was not long. Perugino awoke to have his doubts of the soul's immortality. No great wonder there, perhaps, given he acknowledged a merciful heaven....

I chanced to meet an old woman the other day in a country omnibus. We journeyed together from Prato to Florence and became very friendly. Your dry old woman, who hath had losses, who has become, in fact, world-worn and very wise, or like one of Shakespeare's veterans--the Grave-digger, or the Countryman in _Antony and Cleopatra_--has probed the ball and found it hollow; such a battered and fortified soul in petticoats is peculiar to Italy, and countries where the women work and the men, pocketing their hands, keep sleek looks. We had just passed a pleasant little procession. It was Sunday, the hour Benediction. A staid nun was convoying a party of school-girls to church; whereupon I remarked to my neighbour on their pretty bearing, a sort of artless piety and of attention for unknown but not impossible blessings which they had about them. But my old woman took small comfort from it. She knew those cattle, she said: Capuchins, Jacobins, Black, White and Grey,--knew them all. Well! Everybody had his way of making a living: hers was knitting stockings. A hard life, _via_, but an honest. Here it became me to urge that the religious life might have its compensations, without which it would perhaps be harder than knitting stockings; that one needed relaxation and would do well to be sure that it was at least innocent. Relaxation of a kind, said she, a man must have. Snuff now! She was inveterate at the sport. The view was very dry; but I think its reasoned limitations also very Tuscan, and by no means exclusive of a tolerable amount of piety and honest dealing. Foligno, by mere contrast reminds me of it--busy Foligno huddled between the mighty knees of a chalk down, city of fallen churches and handsome girls, just now parading the streets with their fans a-flutter and a pretty turn to each veiled head of them.

As I write the light dies down, the wind drops, huge inky clouds hang over the west; the sun, as he falls behind them, sets them kindling at the edge. The worn old bleached domes, the bell-towers and turrets looming in the blue dusk, seem to sigh that the century moves so slowly forward. How many more must they endure of these?

It is the hour of Ave Maria. But only two cracked bells ring it in.

ENVOY: TO ALL YOU LADIES

Lovely and honourable ladies, it is, as I hold, no mean favour you have accorded me, to sit still and smiling while I have sung to your very faces a stave verging here and there on the familiar. You have sat thus enduring me, because, being wrought for the most part out of stone or painter's stuff, your necessities have indeed forbidden retirement. Yet my obligations should not on that account be lighter. He would be a thin spirit who should gain a lady's friendly regard, and then vilipend because she knew no better, or could not choose. I hope indeed that I have done you no wrong, _gentildonne_, I protest that I have meant none; but have loved you all as a man may, who has, at most, but a bowing acquaintance with your ladyships. As I recall your starry names, no blush hinting unmannerliness suspect and unconfessed hits me on the cheek:-- Simonetta, Ilaria, Nenciozza, Bettina; you too, candid Mariota of Prato; you, flinching little Imola; and you, snuff-taking, wool-carding ancient lady of the omnibus--scorner of monks, I have kissed your hands, I have at least given our whole commerce frankly to the world; and I know not how any shall say we have been closer acquainted than we should. You, tall Ligurian Simonetta, loved of Sandro, mourned by Giuliano and, for a seasons by his twisted brother and lord, have done well to utter but one side of your wild humour? The side a man would take, struck, as your Sandro was, by a nympholepsy, or, as Lorenzo was, by the rhymer's appetite for wherewithal to sonnetteer? If I understand you, it was never pique or a young girl's petulance drove you to Phryne's one justifiable act of self-assertion. It was honesty. Madonna, or I have read your grey eyes in vain; it was enthusiasm--that flame of our fire so sacred that though it play the incendiary there shall be no crime--or where would be now the "Vas d'elezione"?--nor though it reveal a bystander's grin, any shame at all. I shall live to tell that story of thine, Lady Simonetta, to thy honour and my own respect; for, as a poet says,

"There is no holier flame Than flatters torchwise in a stripling heart, ... a fire from Heaven To ash the clay of us, and wing the God."

I have seen all memorials of you left behind to be pondered by him who played Dante to your Beatrice, Sandro the painting poet,--the proud clearness of you as at the marriage feast of Nastagio degli Onesti; the melting of the sorrow that wells from you in a tide, where you hold the book of your overmastering honour and read _Magnificat Anima Mea_ with a sob in your throat; your acquaintance, too, with that grief which was your own hardening; your sojourn, wan and woebegone as would become the wife of Moses (maker of jealous gods); all these guises of you, as well as the presentments of your innocent youth, I have seen and adored. But I have ever loved you most where you stand a wistful Venus Anadyomen-- "Una donzella non con uman volto," as Politian confessed; for I know your heart, Madonna, and see on the sharp edge of your threatened life, Ardour look back to maiden Reclusion, and on (with a pang of foreboding) to mockery and evil judgment. Never fear but I brave your story out to the world ere many days. And if any, with profane leer and tongue in the cheek, take your sorrow for reproach or your pitifulness for a shame, let them receive the lash of the whip from one who will trouble to wield it: _non ragioniam di lor_. For your honourable women I give you Ilaria, the slim Lucchesan, and my little Bettincina, a child yet with none of the vaguer surmises of adolescence when it flushes and dawns, but likely enough, if all prosper, to be no shame to your company. As yet she is aptest to Donatello's fancy: she will grow to be of a statelier bevy. I see her in Ghirlandajo's garden, pacing, still-eyed, calm and cold, with Ginevra de' Benci and Giovanna of the Albizzi, those quiet streets on a visit to the mother of John Baptist.

Mariota, the hardy wife of the metal-smith, is not for one of your quality, though the wench is well enough now with her baby on her arm and the best of her seen by a poet and made enduring. He, like our Bernardo, had motherhood in such esteem that he held it would ransom a sin. A sin? I am no casust to discuss rewards and punishments; but if Socrates were rightly informed and sin indeed ignorance, I have no whips for Mariota's square shoulders. Her baby, I warrant, plucked her from the burning. I am not so sure but you might find in that girl a responsive spirit, and--is the saying too hard?--a teacher. Contentment with a few things was never one of your virtues, madam.

There is a lady whose name has been whispered through my pages, a lady with whom I must make peace if I can. Had I known her, as Dante did, in the time of her nine-year excellence and followed her (with an interlude, to be sure, for Gentucca) through the slippery ways of two lives with much eating of salt bread, I might have grown into her favour. But I never did know Monna Beatrice Portinari; and when I met her afterwards as my Lady Theologia I thought her something imperious and case-hardened. Now here and there some words of mine (for she has a high stomach) may have given offence. I have hinted that her court is a slender one in Italy, the service paid her lip-service; the lowered eyes and bated breath reserved for her; but for Fede her sister, tears and long kisses and the clinging. Well! the Casa Cattolica is a broad foundation: I find Francis of Umbria at the same board with Sicilian Thomas. If I cleave to the one must I despise the other? Lady Fede has my heart and Lady Dottrina must put aside the birch if she would share that little kingdom. _Religio habet_, said Pico; _theologia autem invenit_. Let her find. But she must be speedy, for I promise her the mood grows on me as I become _italianato_; and I cannot predict when the other term of the proposition may be accomplished. For one thing, Lady Theologia, I praise you not. Sympathy seems to me of the essence, the healing touch an excellent thing in woman. But you told Virgil,

"Io son fatta da Dio, sua merc, tale, Che la vostra miseria non mi tange."

Sympathy, Madonna? And Virgil hopeless! On these terms I had rather gloom with the good poet (whose fault in your eyes was that he knew in what he had believed) than freeze with you and Aquinas on your peak of hyaline. And as I have found you, Donna Beatrice, so in the main have they of whom I pitch my pipe. Here and there a man of them got exercise for his fingers in your web; here and there one, as Pico the young Doctor of yellow hair and nine hundred heresies, touched upon the back of your ivory dais that he might jump from thence to the poets out beyond you in the Sun. Your great Dante, too, loved you through all. But, Madonna, he had loved you before when you were--

Donna pietosa e di novella etade,

and, as became his lordly soul, might never depart from the faith he had in you. For me, I protest I love Religion your warm-bosomed mate too well to turn from her; yet I would not on that account grieve her (who treats you well out of the cup of her abounding charity) by aspersing you. And if I may not kiss your foot as you would desire, I may bow when I am in the way with you; not thanking God I am not as you are, but, withal, wishing you that degree of interest in a really excellent world with which He has blessed me and my like, the humble fry.

Lastly, to the Spirits which are in the shrines of the cities of Tuscany, I lift up my hands with the offering of my thin book. To Lucca dove-like and demure, to Prato, the brown country-girl, to Pisa, winsome maid-of- honour to the lady of the land, to Pistoja, the ruddy-haired and ample, and to Siena, the lovely wretch, black-eyed and keen as a hawk; even to Perugia, the termagant, with a scar on her throat; but chiefest to the Lady Firenze, the pale Queen crowned with olive--to all of you, adored and adorable sisters, I offer homage as becomes a postulant, the repentance of him who has not earned his reward, thanksgiving, and the praise I have not been able to utter. And I send you, Book, out to those ladies with the supplication of good Master Cino, schoolman and poet, saying,

E se tu troverai donne gentile, Ivi girai; ch l ti vo mandare; E dono a lor d' audienza chiedi.

Poi di a costor: Gittatevi a lor piedi, E dite, chi vi manda e per che fare, Udite donne, esti valletti umili.