Little Novels of Italy Part 24

"Give me cold iron to play with another time," he growled; "I am sick of your monkey-tricks." This hurt Ugolino a good deal, for it made him feel a fool.

Will it be believed that the infatuate Master Cino spent the rest of the night in a rapture of poetry? It was not voiced poetry, could never have been written down; rather, it was a torrent of feeling upon which he floated out to heaven, in which he bathed. It thrilled through every fibre of his body till he felt the wings of his soul fluttering madly to be free. This was the very ecstasy of love, to suffer the extreme torment for the beloved! Ah, he was smitten deep enough at last; if poetry were to be won through b.l.o.o.d.y sweat, the pains of the rack, the crawling anguish of the fire, was not poetry his own? Yes, indeed; what Dante had gained through exile and the death of Monna Beatrice was his for another price, the price of his own blood. He forgot the physical agony of his scorched mouth, forgot the insult, forgot everything but this ineffable achievement, this desperate essay, this triumph, this anointing. Cino, Cino, martyr for Love! Hail, Cino, crowned with thy pain! He could have held up his bleeding heart and worshipped it. Surely this was the greatest hour of his life.

Before he left Pitecchio, and that was before the dawn came upon it, he wrote this letter to his mistress.

"To his unending Lady, the image of all lovely delight, the Lady Selvaggia, Cino the poet, martyr for love, wisheth health and honour with kissing of feet. Madonna, if sin it be to lift over high the eyes, I have sinned very grievously; and if to have great joy be a.s.surance of forgiveness, then am I twice absolved. Such bliss as I have had in the contemplation of your excellence cometh not to many men, yet that which hath befallen me this night (concerning which your honourable brothers shall inform you if you ask them)--this indeed is to be blessed of love so high, so rarely, that it were hard to believe myself the recipient, but for certain bodily testimony which, I doubt not, I shall carry about me to my last hour. I leave this house within a little while and go to the hermitage of Santa Marcella Pistoiese, there to pray Almighty G.o.d to make me worthy of my dignities and to contemplate the divine image of you wherewith my heart is sealed. So fare you well!--The most abject of your slaves, "CINO."

His reason for giving the name of his new refuge was an honourable one, and would appeal to a duellist. His flight, though necessary, should be robbed of all appearance of flight; if they wanted him they could find him. Other results it had--results which he could never have antic.i.p.ated, and which to have foreseen would have made him choose any other form of disgrace. But this was out of the question; nothing known to Cino or his philosophy could have told him the future of his conduct.

He placed his letter in an infallible place and left Pitecchio just as the western sky was throbbing with warm light.

For the present I leave him on his way.

IV

The third act of the comedy should open on Selvaggia in her bed reading the letter. Beautiful as she may have looked, flushed and loose-haired at that time, it is better to leave her alone with her puzzle, and choose rather the hour of her enlightenment. Ridolfo and Ugolino were booted and spurred, their hooded hawks were on their wrists when she got speech of them. They were not very willing witnesses in a cause which now seemed to tell against themselves. Selvaggia's cheeks burned as with poor Cino's live coal when she could piece together all the shameful truth; tears brimmed at her eyes, and these too were scalding hot.

Selvaggia, you must understand, was a very good girl, her only sin being none of her accomplishment; she was a child who looked like a young woman. Certainly she could not help that, though all the practice of her race were against her. She had never sought love, never felt to need it, nor cared to harbour it when it came. Love knocked at her heart, asking an entry; her heart was not an inn, she thought, let the wayfarer go on.

But the knocking had continued till her ears had grown to be soothed by the gentle sound; and now it had stopped for ever, and, Pitiful Mother, for what good reason? Oh, the thing was horrible, shameful, unutterable! She was crying with rage; but as that spent itself a great warm flood of genuine sorrow tided over her, floated her away: she cried as though her heart was breaking; and now she cried for pity, and at last she cried for very love. A pale ethereal Cino, finger on lip, rose before her; a halo burned about his head; he seemed a saint, he should be hers! Ugolino and Ridolfo, helpless and ashamed before her outburst, went out bickering to their sport; and Selvaggia, wild as her name, untaught, with none to tutor her, dared her utmost--dared, poor girl, beyond her strength.

Late in the afternoon of that day Cino, in the oratory of his hermitage, getting what comfort he could out of an angular Madonna frescoed there, heard a light step brush the threshold. The sun, already far gone in the west, cast on the white wall a shadow whose sight set his head spinning.

He turned hastily round. There at the door stood Selvaggia in a crimson cloak; for the rest, a picture of the Tragic Muse, so woebegone, so white, so ringed with dark she was.

Cino, on his feet, muttered a prayer to himself. He covered his scarred mouth, but not before the girl had caught sight of it. She set to wringing her hands, and began a low wailing cry.

"Ah, terrible--ah, terrible! That I should have done it to one who was always so gentle with me and so patient! Oh, Cino"--and she held out her hands towards him--"oh, Cino, will you not forgive me? Will you not? I, only, did it; it was through me that they knew what you had said.

Shameful girl that I am!" She covered her face and stood sobbing before him. But confronted with this toppled Madonna, Cino was speechless, wholly unprepared by jurisprudence or the less exact science of love for such a pa.s.s. As he knew himself, he could have written eloquently and done justice to the piercing theme; but love, as he and his fellows understood it, had no spoken language. I do not see, however, that Selvaggia is to be blamed for being ignorant of this.

Yet he had to say something, since there stood the weeping girl, all abandoned to her trouble. "I beseech you, Madonna," he was beginning, when she suddenly bared her face, her woe, and her beauty to his astonished eyes, looking pa.s.sionately at him in a way which even he could not misinterpret.

"Cino," she said brokenly, "I am a wilful girl, but not wicked, ah, no!

not hard-hearted. I think I did not understand you; I heard, but would not hear; it was wantonness, not evil in me, Cino. You have never wearied of telling me your devotion; is it too late to be thankful? Now I am come to tell you what I should have said long before, that I am grateful, proud of such love, that I receive it if still I may, that--that"--her voice fell to a thrilled whisper--"that I love you, Cino." Ah, but she had no more courage; she hid her blushes in her hands and felt that now she should by rights sink into the earth.

Judge you, who know the theory of the matter, if this were terrible hearing for Messer Cino. Terrible? It was unprecedented hearing; it was a thing which, so far as he knew, had never happened to a lover before.

That love should go smooth, the lady smile, the lady love, the lady woo?

Monstrous! The lady was never kind. Where was anguish? Where martyrdom?

Where poetry and sore eyes? Yet stay, was not such a thing in itself a torment, to be cut off your martyrdom?

Cino gasped for breath. "You love me, Madonna?" he said. "You love me?"

Selvaggia nodded her head in her hands; she felt that she was blushing all over her body.

Cino, at this new stab, struck his forehead a resounding smack. "This is terrible indeed!" he cried out in his distress; whereupon Selvaggia forgot to be ashamed any more, she was so taken by surprise.

"What do you mean, Cino?" she began to falter. "I don't understand you."

Cino plunged into the icy pool of explanation, and splashed there at large. "I mean, I mean"--he waved his hands in the air--"it is most difficult to explain. We must apprehend Love aright--if we can. He is a grim and dreadful lord, it appears, working out the salvation of the souls of poets, and other men, by great sufferings. There is no other way, as the books teach us. Such love is always towards ladies; the suffering is from them, the love for them. They deal the darts, and receive the more devotion. It is not to be otherwise--could not be--there can be no poetry without pain; and how can there be pain if the lady loves the poet? Ah, no, it is impossible! Anciently, very long ago, in the times of Troy, maybe, it was different. I know not what to say; I had never expected, never looked, nor even asked--ah, Madonna,"

he suddenly cried, and found himself upon his knees, "what am I to say to you for this speech of yours?"

Selvaggia, white enough now, froze hard. "Do you mean," she said slowly, in words that fell one by one, like cuts from a deliberate whip, "do you mean that you do not love me, Messer Cino, after all?"

"You are a light to my eyes and a lantern to my feet," Cino murmured: but she did not seem to hear.

"Do you mean," she went on, "that you are not prepared to be--to be my--my betrothed?"

It was done: now let the heavens fall! She could not ask the man to marry her, but it came to the same thing; she had practically committed that unpardonable sin; she had approached love to wedlock, a mystery to a bargain, the rapt converse of souls in heaven to a wrangle over the heeltaps in a tavern parlour. She was a heretic whom any Court of Love must excommunicate. The thing was so serious that it brought Cino to his feet, severe, formal, an a.s.sessor of Civil Causes. He spread out his hands as if to wave aside words he should never have heard. He had found his tongue, for he was now contemplating the Abstract.

"Be very sure, most sacred Lady," said he, "that no bodily torment could drive me to such sacrilege as your n.o.ble humility leads you to contemplate. No indeed! Wretchedly unworthy as I am to live in the light of your eyes, I am not yet fallen so far. There are yet seeds of grace within me--of your planting, Madonna, of your planting!" She paid no heed to his compliments; her eyes were fixed. On he hurried. "So far, indeed, as those worldly concerns go, whereof you hint, I am provided for. My wife is at Lucca in her father's house--but of such things it is not fitting we should speak. Rather we should reason together of the high philosophy of love, which--"

But Selvaggia was gone before he could invite her on such a lofty flight; the wife at Lucca sent her fleeting down the mossy slopes like a hare. It was too dark for men to see her face when she tiptoed into Pitecchio and slipped up to her chamber. Safe at last there, she shivered and drowsed the night away; but waking or sleeping she did not cease her dreary moan.

Cino, after a night of consternation, could endure the hermitage no more; the problem, he was free to confess, beat him. Next day, therefore, he took horse and rode over the mountains to Bologna, intent upon finding Dante there; but Dante had gone to Verona with half of his "Inferno" in his saddlebag. Thither Cino pursued and there found him in the church of St. Helen, disputing with the doctors upon the Question of the Land and the Water. What pa.s.sed between the great poet and the less I cannot certainly report, nor is it material. I think that the tinge of philosophy set here and there in Cino's verses, to say nothing of a couplet or two which give more than a hint of the "Vita Nova," may safely be ascribed to that time. I know at least that he did not cease to love his beautiful and wild Selvaggia, so far as he understood that delicate state of the soul which she, perverse child, had so signally misapprehended. The truth may well be that he was tolerably happy at Verona, able to contemplate at his ease the divine image of his lady without any interference from the disturbing original. He was, it is said, meditating an ambitious work, the history of the Roman Polity from Numa to Justinian, an epic in five and twenty books, wherein Selvaggia would have played a fine part, that of the Genius of Natural Law. The scheme might have ripened but for one small circ.u.mstance; this was the death of Selvaggia.

That healthy, laughing girl, Genius of Nature or not, paid the penalty of her incurable childishness by catching a malaria, whereof she died, as it is said, in a high delirium of some eight hours. So it seems that she was really unteachable, for first she had spoiled Cino's martyrdom, and next, by the same token, robbed the world of an epic in twenty-five books. Cino heard of it some time afterwards, and in due season was shown her tomb at Monte della Sambuca high on the Apennine, a grey stone solitary in a grey waste of shale. There he pondered the science of which, while she was so strangely ignorant, he had now become an adept; there, or thereabouts, he composed the most beautiful of all his rhymes, the _canzone_ which may stand for an elegy of the Lady Selvaggia.

"Ay me, alas! the beautiful bright hair,--"

Ay me, indeed! And thus he ends:

"Ay me, sharp Death! till what I ask is done And my whole life is ended utterly,-- Answer,--must I weep on Even thus, and never cease to moan _ay me_?"[2]

He might well ask. It should be accorded him that he was worthy of the occasion: the poem is very fine. But I think the good man did well enough after this; I know that if he was sad he was most melodiously sad. He throve; he became a professor; his wife bore him five children.

His native city has done him what honour she could, ousted his surname in favour of her own, set up a pompous monument in the Cathedral Church (where little Selvaggia heard her dull ma.s.s), and dubbed him once and for all, _L'amoroso Messer Cino da Pistoja_. That should suffice him. As for the young Selvaggia, I suppose her bones are dust of the Apennine.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] The translation is Rossetti's.

THE JUDGMENT OF BORSO

"Unde proverbii loco etiamnunc usurpatur, praeteriisse Borsii tempora."--_Este Chronicle_.

I

THE ADVENTURERS