by Grant Allen
Nobody mentioned my mother’s name throughout. But my father caught my eye, and saw that I understood. He stooped down and kissed me. There was always something pathetic about my father. I burst into tears. I scarce knew myself at the moment why I did so.
But when once he had really gone beyond the dark little ilex-grove, and was winding his way down the hillpath towards Vicenza — a dignified peasant-figure in his crimson sash and loose mantle of sheepskin, — I climbed the housetop, scrambling up it like a monkey, and waved my white handkerchief to him a dozen times over, and cried aloud again and again: “Good-bye, little father! — Addio, babbino!
Good-bye, good-bye, darling!”
It was one of those prophetic things that one does half unconsciously, and of which the full meaning only comes to one by the light of what follows.
Father was to be away for four or five days, for the Party was agitated by important proposals at Padua. “Anti-dynastic proposals,” my papa remarked, dropping his voice, with the preternatural seriousness of the Italian radical; and though I had no notion what manner of wild beast an anti-dynastic proposal might be, I felt sure it was something of the gravest import, like the revolution that drove those fabulous ogres, the Austrians, out of Italy. So we did not expect to see him back for about a week, during which time I felt sure he would have performed prodigies of valour, and reduced the wicked borghesi with his own right hand to much the same condition that Henry V. in the Talk-Book reduced the Frenchmen.
For the first two or three days of his absence, relations between mother and Mariana were a trifle strained. No sooner was father’s back turned, indeed, on his way to scatter the hordes of the borghesia, than mother began to perceive the compact we conspirators had entered into. Just at first she turned huffy; but after the second day or so, while avoiding Mariana’s cold gaze, she showed a strange disposition to make up to me. She called me “Honey” and “Me darlint” till I began to wonder at what end she could be aiming. Mother was always most affectionate when she wanted something from us. On the third day, after siesta time, she straggled up the arcaded path as far as Al Cristo. She had the shuffling gait of her countrywomen in England. It was early autumn, the season when grapes and love apples turn colour, and when the annual crop of tourists is expected to ripen at Madonna del Monte. Already old Giuseppe began to loiter officiously on the chequer-work pavement by the outer steps, rubbing his wrinkled brown hands in pleased anticipation of the coming soldi-harvest.
I was playing alone on the platform just below the cross that bears the effigy of the dead Signore. Mother sidled up to me with an insinuating smile. “Shure it’s two English gintlemen that’s advancing up the road,” she muttered in a voice of disguised suggestion.
I looked up and saw them — two middle-aged tourists of the uninteresting sort. Both stout; both perspiring; both taking off their crush hats and mopping their foreheads. Nothing new in all that! They held in their hands the regulation red books, and looked onward fixedly, like all their tribe, towards the Madonna del Monte.
This kind did not interest me. I went on with the construction of Prospero’s island, in which I had just engineered a neat and commodious morass for the reception of Trinculo and his drunken companions. I flooded it by diverting the water from the drain at the roadside. Make-believe was always more to me than reality.
Presently my mother spoke again, in her blandest accents: “It’s wanting a guide the gintlemen will be, maybe.”
I took no notice once more. If mother had not been there, of course I should have left Miranda (represented by a forked acacia-twig, with two branches for legs and a rose-hip for head) to perish Ophelia-like in the sodden morass, while I rushed off to follow the strangers round the church. But I didn’t quite like the tone in which mother made the suggestion. It seemed to me to cloak ulterior motives.
“Go up an’ spake to them, darlint,” mother broke out at last, seeing I continued stolidly to manufacture my Ferdinand from a short piece of stick and an unripe grape.
I asserted my ego. “I don’t want to speak to them,” I answered, without taking my eyes from my home-made puppets.
She drew nearer to me. “Run, quick, there’s a jool, an’ ask them to give ye half a lira,” she whispered low, pushing me forward. “If ye bring me half a lira ye may ate ivvery grape ye’ll be wanting at all, at all, this ayvening.”
I looked up at her angrily. The self-respect of the Lupari was offended in my person. I did not mind conducting a tourist to the door of the Rotonda in a friendly way, with a hop, a skip, and a jump; nor did I object to accepting a soldo or two at the end of the visit, if he chose to offer them; but this was a plain hint of deliberate mendicancy. It was what the Moro children did, who lived down the road — they had never been in England, and their father was a shepherd. As mother said herself, we moved in different circles.
“I am not a beggar,” I answered proudly.
She took my arm in her hand, with a gentle pressure as yet, though there was a threat in her touch. “There, now, quick, me darlint, or ye’ll be too late intoirely,” she murmured in my ear. “Shure, it’s meself, Rosalba, that’s in want of the money.”
“Then why don’t you ask for it yourself?” I retorted coldly.
She gazed down on me and smiled. “An’ is it to an ould woman like me they’d be giving it?” she answered with persuasiveness, though an undercurrent of asperity ran through her coaxing. “Isn’t it the graceful little dancer like yerself that’ll be spiriting the nimble silver out of the pockets of the quality as aisy as asking it? Shure, they couldn’t resist ye, me fairy, when ye’d turn yer big moons of eyes up at them.”
I went on with my play without answering a word.
“Why wouldn’t ye be going, bad cess to ye?” she inquired at last, after a long pause.
I continued the arrangement of Ferdinand’s arms by running a cross-piece through the middle of his body, and answered without raising my head, “Because I know what you want it for.”
She did not curse me. She did not rush at me and seize me in her grasp, as I expected.
She let her hand tighten almost imperceptibly on my arm, and waited without one word till the two perspiring middle-aged tourists had vanished into the church, and were lost to our vision. Then she turned on me in her fury. Never before had she beaten me so fiercely or so mercilessly. She was too angry for words. She did not speak. She only beat and beat till her arms dropped to her side for pure physical weariness.
While she beat me, I cowered and bit my lip. I would not cry. But as soon as she paused for breath, I stooped down, as if I had not even noticed her blows, and picked up Miranda, on whose fragile form she had stamped her foot. “You have spoilt my dolly!” I exclaimed, holding it up before her.
My forced and pretended nonchalance exasperated her. She fell upon me again. This time I could not help letting the tears break their barrier. “You would not dare to do it,” I cried out, grinding my teeth, “if my father was here!” She cuffed me till I could scarce cry out any longer. Then she let me fall in the sultry white dust of the road, and shuffled angrily homeward.
I lay there long, huddled up in a mass, sobbing and crouching in my helpless misery. A dog came and sniffed at me. I could not move, I was so sore. My shoulders just quivered convulsively. I lay and let my grievance rankle in my breast. But this was the end: I had made up my mind. I would stand it no longer. I would set forth on the world, like Rosalind and Celia.
My hair lay draggled in the white dust. I sobbed and sobbed till I could sob no more. My strength failed me. It was not the pain that troubled me; it was the ignominy.
Presently old Giuseppe hobbled down from the church, muttering to himself as he went on his way home to his dinner. When he saw me lying there, huddled together on the road like a dead thing, he approached me with caution, and turned me over with his foot, as one might turn a bundle of rags. “Come, come,” he said. “It is thou, Rosalba Lupari! Why, what hast thou, my little one? Thy face is
crimson; it burns with crying!”
“Mother beat me — because I would not beg,” I answered, aglow with rage and shame, yet blurting out my wrongs like a child. “I will not beg for her — when my babbino is at Padua!”
He raised me, and held me off by one arm as one might hold a wounded puppy. “She has hurt thee,” he said at last, scanning my bruised face and ears. “She is cattiva, that Englishwoman!”
“She isn’t English!” I cried, eager even in my pain for the honour of my native country. “She is an Irishwoman!”
“And yet, she is a Christian!” old Giuseppe murmured, stroking his three-days-old beard. “A Catholic like ourselves, too, not one of these mad heretic Inglesi. And she beats you like a dog! Come home with me, my child, and have some supper!”
He led me by the hand to his cottage on the slope, and gave me polenta, and salami, and a little thin red wine. The polenta and the sausage I ate greedily, for I was hungry; but the wine I- put away. “No, never any more,” I said solemnly, child as I was; “I will not taste it. That makes beasts of men and women. I hate it! I hate it!”
“The child is a strange creature!” old Giuseppe murmured to his niece, who kept house for him. “She has the evil eye, Adela. Look. at her thick black eyebrows and her black lashes, long like a cat’s. ‘T is fairy spawn. But her mother treats her ill. Let her eat and rest here!”
I stopped there till evening. Then Mariana, sucking her thumb as was her wont, came on an embassy to fetch me.
“If I go home will she beat me again?” I asked the ambassador.
“No,” Mariana answered defiantly. “How can she? She dare not! She is afraid of me. I will not let her lower the honour of the Lupari. This is the last time. I will tell all to father.”
It was the last time, I felt sure. That thought consoled me. I limped home, carrying with me ostentatiously Miranda and Ferdinand, whom I had upholstered afresh with great care and many new decorations, including some tags of coloured wool picked up from Adela’s workbox; and when I entered our kitchen, I pretended to be altogether absorbed in playing with them, never casting an eye in my mother’s direction. Her glance was fixed upon me, but she said nothing. I sat there till bedtime, arranging Miranda’s skirt from a blue rag Mariana had found for me. Then I rose abruptly and stole off to bed. Mariana stole after me with an approving smile. “You are of the Lupari,” she whispered at my ear. “Never yield, Rosalba!”
I have never yielded.
CHAPTER V
THE WIDE WORLD
I COVERED my head with the bedclothes and sobbed myself to sleep. Reality merged into dreamland. But before I slept, I had made up my mind. God gave me the great gift of discontent I was born a revolutionist in the grain, like my father. In the little State called home I saw no way of successfully resisting constituted authority by constitutional means. You cannot lead a Parliamentary Opposition against your mother. My one resource lay in open rebellion. I must publish my Declaration of Independence. Before sunrise to-morrow I would go forth on the world, in defiance of all law, to seek adventures like Rosalind and Celia.
Law is injustice, backed up by force. Freedom is lawlessness. Read these, my simple creed. You may take it or leave it Very early in the morning I woke from a sound sleep. The rooks cawed. That caw was a bugle-call. I woke with a start, half crying. Then everything came back to me: I recalled the courage expected from one of the house of the Lupari. (We had high ideals of the honour of the family. Such legends are always false — and always useful.) I rose and dressed myself very noiselessly indeed. Mariana opened her eyes under the long black, lashes, and stared at me with a sleepy stare, but said nothing. I think she knew what I meant, and approved my plan, but scrupled to commit herself to active connivance. Dear Mariana’s rôle in life is diplomatic prudence. I crept down-stairs on tiptoe, lifted the latch of the door, and walked out. Nobody else was up. I had the Monti Berici to myself. The silence assailed me. It was a bright, clear morning, though the sun was unrisen; the pale sky reddened in the direction of Padua.
I took a huge hunk of bread and a piece of salt fish, and stepped lightly forth on my voyage of exploration. The fiend at my elbow tempted me. “Via!” says the fiend, as he spake to Lancelot Gobbo in the Talk-Book. “Via!” says the fiend. “Away!” says the fiend, “‘fore the heavens!”
I was not at all sad, in spite of the great hush, the vast blank of silence. On the contrary, I remember, as soon as I got free of our cottage, such a sense of joy and liberty thrilled me that I began to peal out Lodate Maria from sheer delight at recovered freedom. The world was all before me where to choose. I was bound for Bagdad or the Forest of Arden.
Which did not matter. In all rational geographies they lie all round us.
I knew not what strange joys might yet be in store for me in those far, near realms: what dervishes might waft me on enchanted carpets; what Orlandos might take pity on my forlorn condition.
Nevertheless, I was wise in my generation. I did not go down to Vicenza. People were abroad there in the streets all night; and I knew that mother’s first idea when she found I had flown would be to follow me into the town and make inquiries. Besides, Vicenza was familiar — that is to say, commonplace. I courted the Unknown. So I mounted instead towards the Madonna del Monte; offered a little prayer to Our Dear Lady as I passed, that she might direct me aright to some fortunate issue; and then descended the hill past the Seven Winds’ House — the Casa dei Sette Venti — so as to strike the main road from Vicenza to Verona beyond the Campo Marzio.
Verona was the town where Juliet loved and died. I peopled it still with Montagues and Capulets.
Beyond the Sette Venti the road was strange to me and very lonely. A long white vista between poplars that narrowed and met, it ended nowhere. Tall black cypresses pointed heavenward their forbidding fingers. Dragons guarded the way; unseen magicians lined it. I began to be afraid and felt half minded to turn back, lest basilisks should block my path. Dante’s harpies affrighted me. Then I remembered in good time that I was my father’s daughter. Was it not my papa who, almost single-handed, drove a hundred thousand armed Austrians before him, and waded in their hateful Tedesco blood till he expelled the last of the craven wretches from the soil of Italy? Courage, Rosalba! Let not cockatrices alarm you! Go on, go on, nor ever halt nor falter till fair fortune find you in the market-place of Verona!
I trudged alone along the road in the grey of early dawn. The red flush faded from the Paduan sky. A rim of sun rose silent over the edge of the Monti Berici. I plodded on and on, meeting scarce a soul, though now blue wreaths of smoke began to roll slowly from isolated farmhouses, and men to creep out into the misty fields, among the maize and the vineyards. The dragons retreated as the men came forth; my basilisks hid themselves; the only magicians left were kindly Prospéras. My spirits rose again. Ay, now I was in Arden.
I had plodded a long way, with the Monti Berici always on my left, and the trenchant skyline of the Alps on my right, when I saw on a hilltop towards the great mountains a ruined castle. It loomed against the sky strange and romantic — just such a castle, massive and battlemented, with huge red towers, the exiled Duke must have quitted when he went forth into the woods at the cruel behest of his unnatural brother. Not distant from it rose another and far newer château, a fantastic modern building of much gaudy magnificence, walled in with gardens of myrtle and bay, and terraced with balustrades, where I could fancy that Rosalind and Celia even now disported themselves at the usurper’s court I went to visit both long after from our home at Vicenza, and recalled them perfectly. The exiled Duke’s embattled ruin turned out to be the mediaeval castle of Montecchio — the home, strange to say, of those very “Montagues” whom Shakespeare had immortalised; the flimsy modern château was the Montebello Vincentino, the domain of Count Arrighi. But I knew nothing then either of Shakespeare or of the Arrighi. The Talk-Book was to me as authorless a document as the Arabian Nights, while Roméo and Juliet were historic denizens of that very Verona
towards whose domes and towers my weary feet were plodding.
Men passed me now with waggons and teams of cream-coloured oxen — big, patient, large-eyed, slow-paced oxen toiling on resignedly. The day grew hot. The sun beat on me.
Yet I was immensely happy, though happy, I will admit, with a fearsome joy — the tumultuous throbbing joy of first-tasted freedom. The eloquent silence spoke to me. Gnomes peeped from caverns in the limestone cliffs.
Puck danced on the thistle-down. I had finished my crust of bread and my chunk of salt fish, which last had made me intolerably thirsty. At a roadside fountain where Melusina lurked I scooped up water with my curved hands and drank. The jet spurted from a broken-nosed dolphin in a shell-shaped niche. Then I sat down with my back against the peeling trunk of a southern plane, and began to sing, out of pure glee in my liberty.
The song I sang was an English one — I have forgotten now what. But I sang it with a will, very loud and merrily.
As I sat and sang, taking no heed for the morrow, a man and a woman approached. I looked up and beheld — the One-eyed Calender!
That he was the One-eyed Calender I never doubted for a moment. What a Calender’s precise function in life may be I had not and have not the faintest conception. I do not desire to know. On John Stodmarsh’s library shelf in Avenue Road, St John’s Wood, there stood, and no doubt still stands, in a conspicuous position the volume of Dr. Murray’s great English Dictionary which contains the words from Cabin to Castaway. I looked at its cover often, and reflected that there (if I chose to open it) I could learn the whole truth, the cold, scientific, etymological truth, about the origin and meaning of the word Calender. But I preferred, as I still prefer, my ignorance. Let us leave some illusions. A Calender to me is someone vague, mysterious, oriental, wonderful. He dresses, most likely, in white samite, and lives upon dainties culled from silken Samarcand and cedared Lebanon. I do not wish to be told that he merely makes tape, or shoes horses, or sells false jewellery, or manufactures steel pens for the use of the India Office. I hold a Calender to be essentially a man with one eye, whose duties and prerogatives are altogether evasive.
