Earthwork out of Tuscany Part 5

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 sc.r.a.p 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 cas.e.m.e.nt; 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 cas.e.m.e.nt 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 circ.u.mstances, and the coincidence of storm and pa.s.sing-bell awed him.... "Either the G.o.d of Nature suffers or the fabric of the world is breaking";--he remembered a sc.r.a.p of talk wafted towards him (as he stood in attendance) from some humanist at Lorenzo's table only yesterday, above the light laughter and s.n.a.t.c.hes 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! G.o.d, more like.

"The G.o.d 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 G.o.ddess! 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 G.o.ddess. 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 G.o.d of Nature suffers."... G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed. 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, G.o.d 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s 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 G.o.ddess. 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 s.p.a.ces 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 ma.s.s 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 G.o.d! that the transparent, unearthly thing lying there so p.r.o.ne 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, pa.s.sively 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.sacre with so little fighting.

Ma.s.sacre considered as one of the Fine Arts? No indeed; but ma.s.sacre as a _viatic.u.m_, as "t.i.tle 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 h.o.a.ry 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 _Ma.s.sacre 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 Ma.s.s?

Cybele 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 cas.e.m.e.nt 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 sc.r.a.pe 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. Theophile 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 Theophile Gautier tarried in Venice, and, as for M. Charles, the man of p.r.o.nounced 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 Senae_ 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 ma.s.s 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 _Agape_, 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 Luccae_, 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 Ma.s.ses 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 piu 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.sy 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed, 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 a.s.sured and triumphant beauty. In her arms a boy-child, l.u.s.ty 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 a.s.surance 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.