Part 47 (1/2)
Then he again, in obstinacy and against all the priest's better knowledge as a Mantuan, had insisted and said, ”The man is innocent.”
And the sun had gone down as he had spoken, and the priest had smiled--a smile cold as a dagger's blade--perhaps recalling sins confessed to him of love that had changed to hate, of fierce delight ending in as fierce a death-blow. Mantua in her day had seen so much alike of love and hate.
”The man is innocent,” he had said insisting, whilst the carmine light had glowed on the lagoons and bridges, and on the Lombard walls, and Gothic gables, and high bell-towers, and ducal palaces, and feudal fortresses of the city in whose street Crichton fell to the hired steel of bravoes.
She had the heaven-born faculty of observation of the poets, and she had that instinct of delight in natural beauty which made Linnaeus fall on his knees before the English gorse and thank G.o.d for having made so beautiful a thing.
Her sympathies and her imaginings spent themselves in solitary song as she made the old strings of the lute throb in low cadence when she sat solitary by her hearth on the rock floor of the grave; and out of doors her eyes filled and her lips laughed when she wandered through the leafy land and found the warbler's nest hung upon the reeds, or the first branching asphodel in flower. She could not have told why these made her happy, why she could watch for half a day untired the little wren building where the gladwyn blossomed on the water's edge. It was only human life that hurt her, embittered her, and filled her with hatred of it.
As she walked one golden noon by the Sa.s.so Scritto, clothed with its myrtle and thyme and its quaint cacti that later would bear their purple heads of fruit; the s.h.i.+ning sea beside her, and above her the bold arbutus-covered heights, with the little bells of the sheep sounding on their sides, she saw a large fish, radiant as a gem, with eyes like rubies. Some men had it; a hook was in its golden gills, and they had tied its tail to the hook so that it could not stir, and they had put it in a pail of water that it might not die too quickly, die ere they could sell it. A little further on she saw a large green and gold snake, one of the most harmless of all earth's creatures, that only asked to creep into the suns.h.i.+ne, to sleep in its hole in the rock, to live out its short, innocent life under the honey smile of the rosemary; the same men stoned it to death, heaping the pebbles and broken sandstone on it, and it perished slowly in long agony, being large and tenacious of life. Yet a little further on, again, she saw a big square trap of netting, with a blinded chaffinch as decoy. The trap was full of birds, some fifty or sixty of them, all kinds of birds, from the plain brown minstrel, beloved of the poets, to the merry and amber-winged oriole, from the dark grey or russet-bodied fly-catcher and whinchat to the glossy and handsome jay, cheated and caught as he was going back to the north; they had been trapped, and would be strung on a string and sold for a copper coin the dozen; and of many of them the wings or the legs were broken and the eyes were already dim. The men who had taken them were seated on the thymy turf grinning like apes, with pipes in their mouths, and a flask of wine between their knees.
She pa.s.sed on, helpless.
She thought of words that Joconda had once quoted to her, words which said that men were made in G.o.d's likeness!
While it is winter the porphyrion sails down the willowy streams beside the sultan-hen that is to be his love, and sees her not, and stays not her pa.s.sage upon the water or through the air; she does not live as yet to him. But when the breath of the spring brings the catkins from the willows, and the violets amidst the wood-moss on the banks, then he awakes and beholds her; and then the stream reflects but her shape for him, and the rushes are full of the melody of his love-call. It was still winter with Este--a bitter winter of discontent; and he had no eyes for this water-bird that swam with him through the icy current of his adversity.
To break the frozen flood that imprisoned him was his only thought.
Air is the king of physicians; he who stands often with nothing between him and the open heavens will gain from them health both moral and physical.
”Yes; you have a right to know. After all, it was ruin to me, but it is not much of a story; a tale-teller with his guitar on a vintage night would soon make a better one. I loved a woman. She lived in Mantua. So did I, too. For her sake I lost three whole years--three years of the best of my life. And yet, what is gain except love, and what better than joy can we have? A pomegranate is ripe but once. And I--my pomegranate is rotten for evermore! We lived in Mantua. It is a strange sad place.
It was great and gay enough once. Grander pomp than Mantua's there was never known in Italy. Felix Mantua!--and now it is all decaying, mouldering, sinking, fading; it is silent as death; the mists, the waters, the empty palaces, the walls that the marshes are eating little by little every day, the gra.s.s and the moss and the wild birds' nests on the roofs, on the temples, on the bridges, all are desolate in Mantua now. Yet is it beautiful in its loneliness, when the sunrise comes over the seas of reeds, and the towers and the arches are reflected in the pools and streams; and yet again at night, when the moon is high and the lagoons are as sheets of silver, and the shadows come and go over the bulrushes and St. Andrea lifts itself against the stars. Yes; then it is still Mantova la Gloriosa.”
His voice dropped; the tears came into his closing eyes as though he looked on the dead face of a familiar friend.
He felt the home sickness of the exile, of the wanderer who knows not where to lay his head.
The glory was gone from the city.
Its greatness was but as a ghost that glided through its deserted streets calling in vain on dead men to arise.
The rough red sail of the fis.h.i.+ng-boat was alone on the waters once crowded with the silken sails of gilded galleys; the toad croaked and the stork made her nest where the Lords of Gonzaga had gone forth to meet their brides of Este or of Medici; Virgil, Alboin, great Karl, Otho, Petrarca, Ariosto, had pa.s.sed by here over this world of waters and become no more than dreams; and the vapours and the dust together had stolen the smile from Giulio's Psyche, and the light from Mantegna's arabesques. On the vast walls the gra.s.s grew, and in the palaces of princes the winds wandered and the beggars slept. All was still, disarmed, lonely, forgotten; left to a silence like the silence of the endless night of death. Yet it was dear to him; this sad and stately city, waiting for the slow death of an unpitied and lingering decay.
It was dear to him from habit, from birth, from memory, from affinity, as the reeds of its stagnant waters were dear to the sedge-warbler that hung its slender nest on the stem of a rush. A price was set on his head; and never more, he thought, would he see the suns.h.i.+ne in ripples of gold come over the grey lagoons.
No one cared; the terrible, barren, acrid truth, that science trumpets abroad as though it were some new-found joy, touched her ignorance with its desolating despair. No one cared. Life was only sustained by death.
The harmless and lovely children of the air and of the moor were given over, year after year, century after century, to the b.e.s.t.i.a.l play and the ferocious appet.i.tes of men. The wondrous beauty of the earth renewed itself only to be the scene of endless suffering, of interminable torture. The human tyrant, without pity, greedy as a child, more brutal than the tiger in his cruelty, had all his way upon the innocent races to which he begrudged a tuft of reeds, a palm's breadth of moss or sand.
The slaughter, the misery, the injustice, renewed themselves as the greenness of the world did. No one cared. There was no voice upon the blood-stained waters. There was no rebuke from the offended heavens. To all prayer or pain there was eternal silence as the sole reply.