Daphne: An Autumn Pastoral Part 9

The hope of the house was presented to the Signorina after breakfast.

He was a broad-shouldered, round-headed offshoot of Italian soil, with honest brown eyes like those of both father and mother. It was a face to be trusted, Daphne knew, and when, recovering from the embarra.s.sment caused by his parents' pride in him, he blurted out the fact that he had already been to the village that morning to find a little donkey for the Signorina's wider journeyings, the girl welcomed the plan with delight. Grinning with pride Bertuccio disappeared among the stables, and presently returned, leading an asinetto. It was a little, dun-colored thing, wearing a red-ta.s.seled bridle and a small sheepskin saddle with red girth, but all the gay trappings could not soften the old primeval sadness of the donkey's face, under his long, questioning ears. So Daphne won palfrey and cavalier.

In the succeeding days the two jogged for hours together over the mountain roads. Now they followed some gra.s.sy path climbing gently upward to the site of a buried town, where only mound and gray fragment of stone marked garden and forum. Here was a bit of wall, with a touch of gay painting mouldering on an inner surface,--Venus, in robe of red, rising from a daintily suggested sea in lines of green. They gathered fragments of old mosaic floor in their hands, blue lapis lazuli, yellow bits of giallo antico, red porphyry, trodden by gay feet and sad, unnumbered years ago. They found broken pieces of iridescent gla.s.s that had fallen, perhaps, from shattered wine cups of the emperors, and all these treasures Bertuccio stored away in his wide pockets. Again, they climbed gracious heights and looked down over slopes and valleys, where deep gra.s.s grew over rich, crumbling earth, deposit of dead volcanoes, or saw, circled by soft green hills, some mountain lake, reflecting the perfect blue of Italian sky.

Bertuccio usually walked behind; Daphne rode on ahead, with the sun burning her cheeks, and the air, fragrant with the odor of late ripening grapes on the upper hillsides, bringing intoxication. She seemed to herself so much a thing of falling rain, rich earth, and wakening sunshines that she would not have been surprised to find the purple bloom of those same grapes gathering on her cheeks, or her soft wisps of hair curling into tendrils, or spreading into green vine leaves. They usually came home in the splendor of sunset, tired, happy, the red of Daphne's felt hat, the gorgeousness of Bertuccio's blue trousers and yellow waistcoat lighting the gloom of the cool, green-shaded ways. Hermes always ran frisking to meet them, outstripping by his swiftness the slow plodding of the little a.s.s.

Perhaps the lambkin felt the shadow of a certain neglect through these long absences, but at least he was generous and loved his rival.

Quitting the kitchen and dining-room, he chose for his portion the pasture where the donkey grazed, in silence and in sadness, and frisked dangerously near his comrade's heels. For all his melancholy, the asinetto was not insensible to caresses, and at night, when the lamb cuddled close to him as the two lay in the gra.s.s in the darkness, would curl his nose round now and then protectingly to see how this small thing fared.

So Daphne kept forgetting, forgetting, and nothing recalled her to her perplexity, except her donkey. San Pietro Martire she named him, for on his face was written the patience and the suffering of the saints.

Some un-Italian sense of duty stiffened his hard little legs, gave rigid strength to his back. Willing to trudge on with his load, willing to rest, carrying his head a little bent, blinking mournfully at the world from under the drab hair on his forehead, San Pietro stood as a type of the disciplined and chastened soul. His very way of cropping the gra.s.s had something ascetic in it, reminding his mistress of Eustace at a festive dinner.

"San Pietro, San Pietro," said Daphne one day, when Bertuccio was plodding far in the rear, whistling as he followed, "San Pietro, must I do it?"

There was a drooping forward of the ears, a slight bending of the head, as the little beast put forth more strength to meet the difficulty of rising ground.

"San Pietro, do you know what you are advising? Do you at all realize what it is to be a clergyman's wife?"

The steady straining of the donkey's muscles seemed to say that, to whatever station in life it pleased Providence to call him, he would think only of duty.

Then Daphne alighted and sat on a stone, with the donkey's face to hers, taking counsel of those long ears which were always eloquent, whether p.r.i.c.ked forward in expectation or laid back in wrath.

"San Pietro, if I should give it up, and stay here and live,--for I never knew before what living is,--if I should just try to keep this sunshine and these great s.p.a.ces of color, what would you think of me?"

Eyes, ears, and the tragic corners of the mouth revealed the thought of this descendant of the burden bearers for all the earth's thousands of years.

"Little beast, little beast," said Daphne, burying her face in the brownish fuzz of his neck, and drying her eyes there, "you are the one thing in this land of beauty that links me with home. You are the Pilgrim Fathers and the Catechism in one! You are the Puritan Conscience made visible! I will do it; I promise."

San Pietro Martire looked round with mild inquiry on his face as to the meaning and the purpose of caresses in a hard world like this.

CHAPTER XI

Bertuccio sprawled on his stomach on the gra.s.sy floor of the presence chamber in a palace of the Caesars', kicking with one idle foot a bit of stone that had once formed the cla.s.sic nose of a G.o.d. San Pietro Martire was quietly grazing in the long s.p.a.ces of the Philosophers'

Hall, nibbling deftly green blades of gra.s.s that grew at the bases of the broken pillars. Near by lay the old amphitheatre, with its roof of blue sky, and its rows of gra.s.sy seats, circling a level stage and pit, and rising, one above another, in irregular outlines of green. Here, in the spot on which the central royal seat had once been erected, sat Daphne on her Scotch plaid steamer blanket: her head was leaning back against the turf, her lips were slightly parted, her eyes half closed.

She thought that she was meditating on the life that had gone on in this Imperial villa two thousand years ago: its banquets, its philosophers' disputes, its tragedies and comedies played here with tears and laughter. In reality she was half asleep.

They were only a half mile from home, measuring by a straight line through the intervening hill; in time they were two hours away. San Pietro had climbed gallantly, with little silvery bells tinkling at his ears, to the summit of the mountain, and had descended, with conviction and with accuracy, planting firm little hard hoofs in the slippery path where the dark soil bore a coating of green gra.s.s and moss. For all their hard morning's work they were still on the confines of the Villa Gianelli, whose kingdom was partly a kingdom of air and of mountain.

Drowsing there in the old theatre in the sun, Daphne presently saw, stepping daintily through one of the entrances at the side, an audience of white sheep. They overspread the stage, cropping as they went.

They climbed the green encircling seats, leaping up or down, where a softer tuft of gra.s.s invited. They broke the dreamy silence with the m.u.f.fled sound of their hoofs, and an occasional bleat.

The girl knew them now. She had seen before the brown-faced twins, both wearing tiny horns; they always kept together. She knew the great white ewe with a blue ribbon on her neck, and the huge ram with twisted horns that made her half afraid. Would he mind Scotch plaid, she wondered, as he raised his head and eyed her? She sat alert, ready for swift flight up the slope behind her in case of attack, but he turned to his pasture in the pit with the air of one ready to waive trifles, and the girl leaned back again.

When Apollo, the keeper of sheep, entered, Daphne received his greeting with no surprise: even if he had come without these forerunners she would have known that he was near. It was she who broke the silence as he approached.

"A theatre seems a singularly appropriate place for you and your flock," she remarked. "You make a capital actor."

There was no laughter in his eyes to-day and he did not answer. A wistful look veiled the triumphant gladness of his face.

"They didn't play pastorals in olden time, did they?" asked Daphne.

"No," he answered, "they lived them. When they had forgotten how to do that they began to act."

He took a flute from his pocket and began to play. A cry rang out through the gladness of the notes, and it brought tears to the girl's eyes. He stopped, seeing them there, and put the flute back into his pocket.

"Did you take my advice the other day?" he asked.

"The advice was very general," said Daphne. "I presume an oracle's always is. No, I did not follow it."

"Antigone, Antigone," he murmured.

"Why Antigone?" demanded the girl.

"Because your duty is dearer to you than life, and love."

"Please go down there," said the girl impetuously, "and play Antigone for me. Make me see it and feel it. I have been sitting here for an hour wishing that I could realize here a tragedy of long ago."

He bowed submissively.

"Commands from Caesar's seat must always be obeyed," he observed. "Do you know Greek, Antigone?"

She nodded.

"I know part of this play by heart," she faltered. "My father taught me Greek words when I was small enough to ride his foot."

He stepped down among the sheep to the gra.s.sy stage, laying aside his hat and letting the sun sparkle on his bright hair. The odd sheepskin coat lent a touch of grotesqueness to his beauty as he began.

"'Nay, be thou what thou wilt; but I will bury him: well for me to die in doing that. I shall rest, a loved one with him whom I have loved, sinless in my crime; for I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living: in that world I shall abide forever.'"

Slow, full, and sweet the words came, beating like music on the girl's heart. All the sorrow of earth seemed gathered up in the undertones, all its hunger and thirst for life and love: in it rang the voice of a will stronger than death and strong as love.

The sheep lifted their heads and looked on anxiously, as if for a moment even the heart of a beast were touched by human sorrow. From over the highest ridge of this green amphitheatre San Pietro looked down with the air of one who had nothing more to learn of woe. Apollo stood in the centre of the stage, taking one voice, then another: now the angry tone of the tyrant, Creon, now the wail of the chorus, hurt but undecided, then breaking into the unspeakable sweetness and firmness of Antigone's tones. The sheep went back to their nibbling; San Pietro trotted away with his jingling bells, but Daphne sat with her face leaning on her hands, and slow tears trickling over her fingers.

The despairing lover's cry broke in on Antigone's sorrow; Haemon, "bitter for the baffled hope of his marriage," pleaded with his father Creon for the life of his beloved. Into his arguments for mercy and justice crept that cry of the music on the hills that had sounded through lonely hours in Daphne's ears. It was the old call of pa.s.sion, pleading, imperious, irresistible, and the girl on Caesar's seat answered to it as harp strings answer to the master's hand. The wail of Antigone seemed to come from the depths of her own being:--

"Bear me witness, in what sort, unwept of friends, and by what laws I pa.s.s to the rock-closed prison of my strange tomb, ah me unhappy!...

No bridal bed, no bridal song hath been mine, no joy of marriage."

The sun hung low above the encircling hills when the lover's last cry sounded in the green theatre, drowning grief in triumph as he chose death with his beloved before all other good. Then there was silence, while the round, golden sun seemed resting in a red-gold haze on the hilltop, and Daphne, sitting with closed eyes, felt the touch of two hands upon her own.

"Did you understand?" asked a voice that broke in its tenderness.

She nodded, with eyes still closed, for she dared not trust them open.

He bent and kissed her hands, where the tears had fallen on them, then, turning, called his sheep. Three minutes later there was no trace of him or of them: they had vanished as if by magic, leaving silence and shadow. The girl climbed the hill toward home on San Pietro's back, shaken, awed, afraid.