Vittoria. Complete

‘Rinaldo, Rinaldo!’ he shouted: ‘Clelia!—no answer from man or ghost. She is dead. We two said to her die! and she died. Therefore she is silent, for the dead have not a word. Oh! Milan, Milan! accursed betraying city! I should have found my work in you if you had kept faith. Now here am I, talking to the strangled throat of this place, and can get no answer. Where am I? The world is hollow: the miserable shell! They lied. Battle and slaughter they promised me, and enemies like ripe maize for the reaping-hook. I would have had them in thick to my hands. I would have washed my hands at night, and eaten and drunk and slept, and sung again to work in the morning. They promised me a sword and a sea to plunge it in, and our mother Italy to bless me. I would have toiled: I would have done good in my life. I would have bathed my soul in our colours. I would have had our flag about my body for a winding-sheet, and the fighting angels of God to unroll me. Now here am I, and my own pale mother trying at every turn to get in front of me. Have her away! It’s a ghost, I know. She will be touching the strength out of me. She is not the mother I love and I serve. Go: cherish your daughter, you dead woman!’

Angelo reeled. ‘A spot of blood has sent me mad,’ he said, and caught for a darkness to cross his sight, and fell and lay flat.

Vittoria looked around her; her courage was needed in that long silence.

She adopted his language: ‘Our mother Italy is waiting for us. We must travel on, and not be weary. Angelo, my friend, lend me your help over these stones.’

He rose quietly. She laid her elbow on his hand; thus supported she left a place that seemed to shudder. All the heavy day they walked almost silently; she not daring to probe his anguish with a question; and he calm and vacant as the hour following thunder. But, of her safety by his side she had no longer a doubt. She let him gather weeds and grasses, and bind them across her feet, and perform friendly services, sure that nothing earthly could cause such a mental tempest to recur. The considerate observation which at all seasons belongs to true courage told her that it was not madness afflicting Angelo.

Near nightfall they came upon a forester’s hut, where they were welcomed by an old man and a little girl, who gave them milk and black bread, and straw to rest on. Angelo slept in the outer air. When Vittoria awoke she had the fancy that she had taken one long dive downward in a well; and on touching the bottom found her head above the surface. While her surprise was wearing off, she beheld the woodman’s little girl at her feet holding up one end of her cloak, and peeping underneath, overcome by amazement at the flashing richness of the dress of the heroine Camilla. Entering into the state of her mind spontaneously, Vittoria sought to induce the child to kiss her; but quite vainly. The child’s reverence for the dress allowed her only to be within reach of the hem of it, so as to delight her curiosity. Vittoria smiled when, as she sat up, the child fell back against the wall; and as she rose to her feet, the child scampered from the room. ‘My poor Camilla! you can charm somebody, yet,’ she said, limping; her visage like a broken water with the pain of her feet. ‘If the bell rings for Camilla now, what sort of an entry will she make?’ Vittoria treated her physical weakness and ailments with this spirit of humour. ‘They may say that Michiella has bewitched you, my Camilla. I think your voice would sound as if it were dragging its feet after it just as a stork flies. O my Camilla! don’t I wish I could do the same, and be ungraceful and at ease! A moan is married to every note of your treble, my Camilla, like December and May. Keep me from shrieking!’

The pangs shooting from her feet were scarce bearable, but the repression of them helped her to meet Angelo with a freer mind than, after the interval of separation, she would have had. The old woodman was cooking a queer composition of flour and milk sprinkled with salt for them. Angelo cut a stout cloth to encase each of her feet, and bound them in it. He was more cheerful than she had ever seen him, and now first spoke of their destination. His design was to conduct her near to Bormio, there to engage a couple of men in her service who would accompany her to Meran, by the Val di Sole, while he crossed the Stelvio alone, and turning leftward in the Tyrolese valley, tried the passage into Switzerland.

Bormio, if, when they quitted the forest, a conveyance could be obtained, was no more than a short day’s distance, according to the old woodman’s directions. Vittoria induced the little girl to sit upon her knee, and sang to her, but greatly unspirited the charm of her dress. The sun was rising as they bade adieu to the hut.

About mid-day they quitted the shelter of forest trees and stood on broken ground, without a path to guide them. Vittoria did her best to laugh at her mishaps in walking, and compared herself to a Capuchin pilgrim; but she was unused to going bareheaded and shoeless, and though she held on bravely, the strong beams of the sun and the stony ways warped her strength. She had to check fancies drawn from Arabian tales, concerning the help sometimes given by genii of the air and enchanted birds, that were so incessant and vivid that she found herself sulking at the loneliness and helplessness of the visible sky, and feared that her brain was losing its hold of things. Angelo led her to a half-shaded hollow, where they finished the remainder of yesterday’s meat and wine. She set her eyes upon a gold-green lizard by a stone and slept.

‘The quantity of sleep I require is unmeasured,’ she said, a minute afterwards, according to her reckoning of time, and expected to see the lizard still by the stone. Angelo was near her; the sky was full of colours, and the earth of shadows.

‘Another day gone!’ she exclaimed in wonderment, thinking that the days of human creatures had grown to be as rapid and (save toward the one end) as meaningless as the gaspings of a fish on dry land. He told her that he had explored the country as far as he had dared to stray from her. He had seen no habitation along the heights. The vale was too distant for strangers to reach it before nightfall. ‘We can make a little way on,’ said Vittoria, and the trouble of walking began again. He entreated her more than once to have no fear. ‘What can I fear?’ she asked. His voice sank penitently: ‘You can rely on me fully when there is anything to do for you.’

‘I am sure of that,’ she replied, knowing his allusion to be to his frenzy of yesterday. In truth, no woman could have had a gentler companion.

On the topmost ridge of the heights, looking over an interminable gulf of darkness they saw the lights of the vale. ‘A bird might find his perch there, but I think there is no chance for us,’ said Vittoria. ‘The moment we move forward to them the lights will fly back. It is their way of behaving.’

Angelo glanced round desperately. Farther on along the ridge his eye caught sight of a low smouldering fire. When he reached it he had a great disappointment. A fire in the darkness gives hopes that men will be at hand. Here there was not any human society. The fire crouched on its ashes. It was on a little circular eminence of mossed rock; black sticks, and brushwood, and dry fern, and split logs, pitchy to the touch, lay about; in the centre of them the fire coiled sullenly among its ashes, with a long eye like a serpent’s.

‘Could you sleep here?’ said Angelo.

‘Anywhere!’ Vittoria sighed with droll dolefulness.

‘I can promise to keep you warm, signorina.’

‘I will not ask for more till to-morrow, my friend.’

She laid herself down sideways, curling up her feet, with her cheek on the palm of her hand.

Angelo knelt and coaxed the fire, whose appetite, like that which is said to be ours, was fed by eating, for after the red jaws had taken half-a-dozen sticks, it sang out for more, and sent up flame leaping after flame and thick smoke. Vittoria watched the scene through a thin division of her eyelids; the fire, the black abyss of country, the stars, and the sentinel figure. She dozed on the edge of sleep, unable to yield herself to it wholly. She believed that she was dreaming when by-and-by many voices filled her ears. The fire was sounding like an angry sea, and the voices were like the shore, more intelligible, but confused in shriller clamour. She was awakened by Angelo, who knelt on one knee and took her outlying hand; then she saw that men surrounded them, some of whom were hurling the lighted logs about, some trampling down the outer rim of flames. They looked devilish to a first awakening glance. He told her that the men were friendly; they were good Italians. This had been the beacon arranged for the night of the Fifteenth, when no run of signals was seen from Milan; and yesterday afternoon it had been in mockery partially consumed. ‘We have aroused the country, signorina, and brought these poor fellows out of their beds. They supposed that Milan must be up and at work. I have explained everything to them.’

Vittoria had rather to receive their excuses than to proffer her own. They were mostly youths dressed like the better class of peasantry. They laughed at the incident, stating how glad they would have been to behold the heights all across the lakes ablaze and promising action for the morrow. One square-shouldered fellow raised her lightly from the ground. She felt herself to be a creature for whom circumstance was busily plotting, so that it was useless to exert her mind in thought. The long procession sank down the darkness, leaving the low red fire to die out behind them.

Next morning she awoke in a warm bed, possessed by odd images of flames that stood up like crowing cocks, and cowered like hens above the brood. She was in the house of one of their new friends, and she could hear Angelo talking in the adjoining room. A conveyance was ready to take her on to Bormio. A woman came to her to tell her this, appearing to have a dull desire to get her gone. She was a draggled woman, with a face of slothful anguish, like one of the inner spectres of a guilty man. She said that her husband was willing to drive the lady to Bormio for a sum that was to be paid at once into his wife’s hand; and little enough it was which poor persons could ever look for from your patriots and disturbers who seduced orderly men from their labour, and made widows and ruined households. This was a new Italian language to Vittoria, and when the woman went on giving instances of households ruined by a husband’s vile infatuation about his country, she did not attempt to defend the reckless lord, but dressed quickly that she might leave the house as soon as she could. Her stock of money barely satisfied the woman’s demand. The woman seized it, and secreted it in her girdle. When they had passed into the sitting-room, her husband, who was sitting conversing with Angelo, stretched out his hand and knocked the girdle.

‘That’s our trick,’ he said. ‘I guessed so. Fund up, our little Maria of the dirty fingers’-ends! We accept no money from true patriots. Grub in other ground, my dear!’

The woman stretched her throat awry, and set up a howl like a dog; but her claws came out when he seized her.

‘Would you disgrace me, old fowl?’

‘Lorenzo, may you rot like a pumpkin!’

The connubial reciprocities were sharp until the money lay on the table, when the woman began whining so miserably that Vittoria’s sensitive nerves danced on her face, and at her authoritative interposition, Lorenzo very reluctantly permitted his wife to take what he chose to reckon a fair portion of the money, and also of his contempt. She seemed to be licking the money up, she bent over it so greedily.

‘Poor wretch!’ he observed; ‘she was born on a hired bed.’

Vittoria felt that the recollection of this woman would haunt her. It was inconceivable to her that a handsome young man like Lorenzo should ever have wedded the unsweet creature, who was like a crawling image of decay; but he, as if to account for his taste, said that they had been of a common age once, when he married her; now she had grown old. He repeated that she ‘was born on a hired bed.’ They saw nothing further of her.

Vittoria’s desire was to get to Meran speedily, that she might see her friends, and have tidings of her lover and the city. Those baffled beacon-flames on the heights had become an irritating indicative vision: she thirsted for the history. Lorenzo offered to conduct her over the Tonale Pass into the Val di Sole, or up the Val Furva, by the pass of the Corno dei Tre Signori, into the Val del Monte to Pejo, thence by Cles, or by Bolzano, to Meran. But she required shoeing and refitting; and for other reasons also, she determined to go on to Bormio. She supposed that Angelo had little money, and that in a place such as Bormio sounded to her ears she might possibly obtain the change for the great money-order which the triumph of her singing had won from Antonio-Pericles. In spite of Angelo’s appeals to her to hurry on to the end of her journey without tempting chance by a single pause, she resolved to go to Bormio. Lorenzo privately assured her that there were bankers in Bormio. Many bankers, he said, came there from Milan, and that fact she thought sufficient for her purpose. The wanderers parted regretfully. A little chapel, on a hillock off the road, shaded by chestnuts, was pointed out to Lorenzo where to bring a letter for Angelo. Vittoria begged Angelo to wait till he heard from her; and then, with mutual wavings of hands, she was driven out of his sight.

CHAPTER XXV

ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS

After parting from Vittoria, Angelo made his way to an inn, where he ate and drank like a man of the fields, and slept with the power of one from noon till after morning. The innkeeper came up to his room, and, finding him awake, asked him if he was disposed to take a second holiday in bed. Angelo jumped up; as he did so, his stiletto slipped from under his pillow and flashed.

‘That’s a pretty bit of steel,’ said the innkeeper, but could not get a word out of him. It was plain to Angelo that this fellow had suspicions. Angelo had been careful to tie up his clothes in a bundle; there was nothing for the innkeeper to see, save a young man in bed, who had a terrible weapon near his hand, and a look in his eyes of wary indolence that counselled prudent dealings. He went out, and returned a second and a third time, talking more and more confusedly and fretfully; but as he was again going to leave, ‘No, no,’ said Angelo, determined to give him a lesson, ‘I have taken a liking to your company. Here, come here; I will show you a trick. I learnt it from the Servians when I was three feet high. Look; I lie quite still, you observe. Try to get on the other side of that door and the point of this blade shall scratch you through it.’

Angelo laid the blue stilet up his wrist, and slightly curled his arm. ‘Try,’ he repeated, but the innkeeper had stopped short in his movement to the door. ‘Well, then, stay where you are,’ said Angelo, ‘and look; I’ll be as good as my word. There’s the point I shall strike.’ With that he gave the peculiar Servian jerk of the muscles, from the wrist up to the arm, and the blade quivered on the mark. The innkeeper fell back in admiring horror. ‘Now fetch it to me,’ said Angelo, putting both hands carelessly under his head. The innkeeper tugged at the blade. ‘Illustrious signore, I am afraid of breaking it,’ he almost whimpered; ‘it seems alive, does it not?’

‘Like a hawk on a small bird,’ said Angelo; ‘that’s the beauty of those blades. They kill, and put you to as little pain as a shot; and it ‘s better than a shot in your breast—there’s something to show for it. Send up your wife or your daughter to take orders about my breakfast. It ‘s the breakfast of five mountaineers; and don’t “Illustrious signore” me, sir, either in my hearing or out of it. Leave the knife sticking.’

The innkeeper sidled out with a dumb salute. ‘I can count on his discretion for a couple of hours,’ Angelo said to himself. He knew the effect of an exhibition of physical dexterity and strength upon a coward. The landlord’s daughter came and received his orders for breakfast. Angelo inquired whether they had been visited by Germans of late. The girl told him that a German chasseur with a couple of soldiers had called them up last night.

‘Wouldn’t it have been a pity if they had dragged me out and shot me?’ said Angelo.

‘But they were after a lady,’ she explained; ‘they have gone on to Bormio, and expect to catch her there or in the mountains.’

‘Better there than in the mountains, my dear; don’t you think so?’

The girl said that she would not like to meet those fellows among the mountains.

‘Suppose you were among the mountains, and those fellows came up with you; wouldn’t you clap your hands to see me jumping down right in front of you all?’ said Angelo.

‘Yes, I should,’ she admitted. ‘What is one man, though!’

‘Something, if he feeds like five. Quick! I must eat. Have you a lover?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fancy you are waiting on him.’

‘He’s only a middling lover, signore. He lives at Cles, over Val Pejo, in Val di Non, a long way, and courts me twice a year, when he comes over to do carpentering. He cuts very pretty Madonnas. He is a German.’

‘Ha! you kneel to the Madonna, and give your lips to a German? Go.’

‘But I don’t like him much, signore; it’s my father who wishes me to have him; he can make money.’

Angelo motioned to her to be gone, saying to himself, ‘That father of hers would betray the Saints for a handful of florins.’

He dressed, and wrenched his knife from the door. Hearing the clatter of a horse at the porch, he stopped as he was descending the stairs. A German voice said, ‘Sure enough, my jolly landlord, she’s there, in Worms—your Bormio. Found her at the big hotel: spoke not a syllable; stole away, stole away. One chopin of wine! I’m off on four legs to the captain. Those lads who are after her by Roveredo and Trent have bad noses. “Poor nose—empty belly.” Says the captain, “I stick at the point of the cross-roads.” Says I, “Herr Captain, I’m back to you first of the lot.” My business is to find the runaway lady-pretty Fraulein! pretty Fraulein! lai-ai! There’s money on her servant, too; he’s a disguised Excellency—a handsome boy; but he has cut himself loose, and he go hang. Two birds for the pride of the thing; one for satisfaction—I ‘m satisfied. I’ve killed chamois in my time. Jacob, I am; Baumwalder, I am; Feckelwitz, likewise; and the very devil for following a track. Ach! the wine is good. You know the song?

       “He who drinks wine, he may cry with a will,        Fortune is mine, may she stick to me still.”

I give it you in German—the language of song! my own, my native ‘lai-ai-lai-ai-la-la-lai-ai-i-ie!’

          “While stars still sit          On mountain tops,          I take my gun,          Kiss little one             On mother’s breast.               Ai-iu-e!          “My pipe is lit,          I climb the slopes,          I meet the dawn          A little one             On mother’s breast.             Ai-aie: ta-ta-tai: iu-iu-iu-e!”

Another chopin, my jolly landlord. What’s that you’re mumbling? About the servant of my runaway young lady? He go hang! What–?’

Angelo struck his foot heavily on the stairs; the innkeeper coughed and ran back, bowing to his guest. The chasseur cried, ‘I ‘ll drink farther on-wine between gaps!’ A coin chinked on the steps in accompaniment to the chasseur’s departing gallop. ‘Beast of a Tedesco,’ the landlord exclaimed as he picked up the money; ‘they do the reckoning—not we. If I had served him with the worth of this, I should have had the bottle at my head. What a country ours is! We’re ridden over, ridden over!’ Angelo compelled the landlord to sit with him while he ate like five mountaineers. He left mere bones on the table. ‘It’s wonderful,’ said the innkeeper; ‘you can’t know what fear is.’

‘I think I don’t,’ Angelo replied; ‘you do; cowards have to serve every party in turn. Up, and follow at my heels till I dismiss you. You know the pass into the Val Pejo and the Val di Sole.’ The innkeeper stood entrenched behind a sturdy negative. Angelo eased him to submission by telling him that he only wanted the way to be pointed out. ‘Bring tobacco; you’re going to have an idle day,’ said Angelo: ‘I pay you when we separate.’ He was deaf to entreaties and refusals, and began to look mad about the eyes; his poor coward plied him with expostulations, offered his wife, his daughter, half the village, for the service: he had to follow, but would take no cigars. Angelo made his daughter fetch bread and cigars, and put a handful in his pocket, upon which, after two hours of inactivity at the foot of the little chapel, where Angelo waited for the coming of Vittoria’s messenger, the innkeeper was glad to close his fist. About noon Lorenzo came, and at once acted a play of eyes for Angelo to perceive his distrust of the man and a multitude of bad things about him he was reluctant, notwithstanding Angelo’s ready nod, to bring out a letter; and frowned again, for emphasis to the expressive comedy. The letter said:

‘I have fallen upon English friends. They lend me money. Fly to Lugano by the help of these notes: I inclose them, and will not ask pardon for it. The Valtellina is dangerous; the Stelvio we know to be watched. Retrace your way, and then try the Engadine. I should stop on a breaking bridge if I thought my companion, my Carlo’s cousin, was near capture. I am well taken care of: one of my dearest friends, a captain in the English army, bears me company across. I have a maid from one of the villages, a willing girl. We ride up to the mountains; to-morrow we cross the pass; there is a glacier. Val di Non sounds Italian, but I am going into the enemy’s land. You see I am well guarded. My immediate anxiety concerns you; for what will our Carlo ask of me? Lose not one moment. Away, and do not detain Lorenzo. He has orders to meet us up high in the mountain this evening. He is the best of servants but I always meet the best everywhere—that is, in Italy. Leaving it, I grieve. No news from Milan, except of great confusion there. I judge by the quiet of my sleep that we have come to no harm there.

             ‘Your faithfullest                       ‘VITTORIA.’

Lorenzo and the innkeeper had arrived at an altercation before Angelo finished reading. Angelo checked it, and told Lorenzo to make speed: he sent no message.

‘My humanity,’ Angelo then addressed his craven associate, ‘counsels me that it’s better to drag you some distance on than to kill you. You ‘re a man of intelligence, and you know why I have to consider the matter. I give you guide’s pay up to the glacier, and ten florins buon’mano. Would you rather earn it with the blood of a countryman? I can’t let that tongue of yours be on the high-road of running Tedeschi: you know it.

‘Illustrious signore, obedience oils necessity,’ quoth the innkeeper. ‘If we had but a few more of my cigars!’

‘Step on,’ said Angelo sternly.

They walked till dark and they were in keen air. A hut full of recent grass-cuttings, on the border of a sloping wood, sheltered them. The innkeeper moaned for food at night and in the morning, and Angelo tossed him pieces of bread. Beyond the wood they came upon bare crag and commenced a sharper ascent, reached the height, and roused an eagle. The great bird went up with a sharp yelp, hanging over them with knotted claws. Its shadow stretched across sweeps of fresh snow. The innkeeper sent a mocking yelp after the eagle.

‘Up here, one forgets one is a father—what’s more, a husband,’ he said, striking a finger on the side of his nose.

‘And a cur, a traitor, carrion,’ said Angelo.

‘Ah, signore, one might know you were a noble. You can’t understand our troubles, who carry a house on our heads, and have to fill mouths agape.’

‘Speak when you have better to say,’ Angelo replied.

‘Padrone, one would really like to have your good opinion; and I’m lean as a wolf for a morsel of flesh. I could part with my buon’mano for a sight of red meat—oh! red meat dripping.’

‘If,’ cried Angelo, bringing his eyebrows down black on the man, ‘if I knew that you had ever in your life betrayed one of us look below; there you should lie to be pecked and gnawed at.’

‘Ah, Jacopo Cruchi, what an end for you when you are full of good meanings!’ the innkeeper moaned. ‘I see your ribs, my poor soul!’