"I bid you farewell, sir," says I very stiff.
"But I say, To our next meeting!" he cried, and plunged down the hillside. I heard him for a long time shouting songs at the top of his voice.
Resting no more on the road, I pressed my way southward, descending through chestnut woods to the olives, the garlanded vines, the wonderful husbandry of a generous land, amazed and enchanted by the profusion I beheld. The earth seemed to well forth rich blood at the mere tread of a foot. Boys and girls, young men and women, half naked but glowing with beauty and vigour, watched their beasts on the woody slopes or drove the plough through the deep soil, following after great oxen, singing as they toiled. The ground sent up heat intoxicating to the blood of a northern wanderer. It was the Land of Promise indeed, flowing with milk and honey, a pastoral land of easy love and laughter, where man clove to woman and she yielded to him at the flutter of desire, yet all was sanctioned by the Providence which fashioned the elements and taught the very ivy how to cling. Was there not deep-seated truth, methought, in those old fables which told of the Loves of the Nymphs, the Loves of the Fauns? Was there not some vital well-spring within our natures, some conduit of the heart which throbbed yet at the call of such instincts? I was more sure of it than I had ever been before. The Loves of the Nymphs--the clinging ivy, the yielding reed! The Loves of the Fauns-- buffeting wind and kissing rain! These shy brown girls who peered at me from between the trees; these musing shepherd lads calling them upon oaten pipes--"Panaque, Silvanumque senem, nymphasque sorores." I saw them, I saw them! I walked fast! my feet raced with my thoughts. My heart was beating, my blood was hot, my inclinations were pastoral, but enthusiastic. I was disposed to admire, and prepared to prove that I admired. I could have embraced a sapling and swooned as I called upon Dryas or Syrinx. Then, by-and-by, in the fulness of the time I saw a slim solitary girl ahead of me in a glade, walking bolt upright with a huge faggot of sticks upon her head. It was growing dusk. I could see little of her save that she was tall and walked superbly well from the hips, that her skirts were thin and close about her person, that she was alone, young and over-burdened. I quickened my steps.
She stopped, she turned to face me; I saw her black hair close- curtaining her whiteness; I saw her steady eyes under dark and level brows; I saw she was very thin and as wild as a hawk. I was foolishly agitated, she not at all.
"Buona sera," said she. She stood easily, upright, her burden on her head. Her hands were on her hips, she was perfectly simple, as simple as a nymph, and as handsome in her proud, calm, savage way.
I returned her greeting, and more for the sake of getting countenance than for the answer, asked her to direct me to some lodging not too far off. She took some time in replying, but her eyes never left mine. She gave me a steady scrutiny, in which were neither vulgar curiosity nor equally vulgar stupidity to be discerned. It seemed that she was busy with her thoughts how she was to answer me, for when she had looked her full she shrugged and turned her head stiffly, saying, "There is none, for your excellency."
"God knows," said I, "how excellent I am, and that where there is lodging for the meanest upon earth there is lodging for me."
"What God knows," she said, "He mostly keeps to Himself. I speak of what I see. Your excellency is on a frolic."
"My excellency died three weeks ago," I told her. "Oblige me by not referring to it again; and if you will not give me direction, let me carry your faggot for you."
"Why, how will that help your excellency?" says she.
"By satisfying you that I have some title left to the name," I replied. "Believe me, I need the good opinion of my fellow-creatures. Will you not humour me?"
"I cannot, sir," she said. "I can cease to carry my faggot, but that won't help you very much."
I insisted--I don't know why; she stared at me with raised brows, then jerked the faggot to the ground.
"Try," she said, and folded her arms across her chest, waiting.
It is a fact that I tussled, laboured and wrought at the accursed thing, an ineffectual Hercules. Its weight was really enormous; how her slim neck could have borne it without cracking puzzles me still, though I know how like a Caryatid she was formed. She did not laugh at me, or smile, she merely watched me--and so goaded me to put out all my strength, which was considerable. Knack, of course, was a-wanting. I got it upon end, put my head against it, lifted it--and it fell behind my back. Twice I did this, and grew dank with humiliation. Then I rushed at it, lifted it bodily on high, and crammed it down on my head. Clumsy malapert that I was! It slipped to my shoulder, thence upon the girl's bare foot. "Hey!" she cried sharply, "now I hope you are satisfied." I saw that her cheek was bleeding as well as her foot. I would have struck off my fumbling hands at the wrists for this vexatious affair.
"Forgive me," I said, "forgive me, pray," and went to her. I implored her pity, execrated my clumsiness; I was born, I said, to be fatal to ladies. Hereupon she looked at me with some interest.
"You?" she said. I bore the brunt of her extraordinarily intent eyes with great modesty. "Yes," she continued, "that may be true, for I see that you are a signore. It is the prerogative of signori to ruin ladies."
I was stabbed more deeply than she knew, and said at once, "It is true that I was born a gentleman, it is true that I have ruined a lady, but I repudiate your conclusion with horror. I beg of you to allow me to stanch your wound."
She smiled. "Perhaps it may not need it. Perhaps I may not desire it. But try--try." She offered me her cheek, down which a thin stream of blood had wandered as it would. A ridiculous difficulty presented itself; I hovered, undecided. "Suck the wound, suck the wound," said the girl, "we shall not poison each other." I obeyed: the flow of blood ceased. I knelt down and treated her foot in the same simple fashion. When I stood up again she thanked me with what seemed shining eyes and emotion in the voice.
"I don't know what sort of ladies you have ruined," said she, "but you have a pleasant manner of reparation. The scratch on my cheek smarts, but not unduly--my foot is as sound as ever it was." She helped me perch the faggot on my head, and we walked on together. This last generosity had touched me.
Her name, she told me, was Virginia Strozzi, and her people were very poor folk of Condoglia. Condoglia was a village on a spur of the mountains, the property, with the bodies and souls of its inhabitants, of a great lord, a marchese. She was sixteen years old and had never tasted meat. Condoglia was but a mile away; it was getting dark. Would I spend the night there? "Your honour must not look for decency," she said with a sad patience which was very touching to me; "you can judge of what you will find by what you see of me. Rags cover my leanness and wattles cover my rags. As I am, so are my father and mother, sisters and brothers--and so I suspect were theirs. You will sleep on litter, you will eat black bread, and drink foul water. It is what we do year in and year out, except that sometimes we go without the bread. What do you say?"
"I say," I replied, "that I am thankful for your kindness to one who has used you ill. My maladroitness was horrible."
"Your amendment was, however, handsomely done," she said--and added fiercely, "Let me tell you that nobody has ever touched my foot with his lips before. I owe you for that."
"You are generous indeed, Virginia," I said; "I shall be proud to be in your debt for a lodging." We were not long in reaching Condoglia, which, so far as I could see, was no more than a row of hovels on the summit of a crag; and then we entered the meanest dwelling I have ever seen.
It was like a gipsy's tent, made of mud, thatched with furze, and consisted of a single room, on whose floor of beaten dung huddled a family of starving wretches--hollow-eyed, pale, gaunt, and almost naked; a round dozen of them. There were a man, bright and peaked with hunger; a poor drudge of a woman, worn to a rag before her time, with a dying child upon her empty breast; a grown son and seven children--all crouched there close together like pigs in a yard to keep life in their bodies.