CHAPTER XXXII
SCENES BY THE WAY
When it came to the point of quitting the reposeful life of Monte Beni,the sculptor was not without regrets, and would willingly have dreamed alittle longer of the sweet paradise on earth that Hilda's presencethere might make. Nevertheless, amid all its repose, he had begun to besensible of a restless melancholy, to which the cultivators of the idealarts are more liable than sturdier men. On his own part, therefore, andleaving Donatello out of the case, he would have judged it well to go.He made parting visits to the legendary dell, and to other delightfulspots with which he had grown familiar; he climbed the tower again, andsaw a sunset and a moonrise over the great valley; he drank, on theeve of his departure, one flask, and then another, of the Monte BeniSunshine, and stored up its flavor in his memory as the standard of whatis exquisite in wine. These things accomplished, Kenyon was ready forthe journey.
Donatello had not very easily been stirred out of the peculiarsluggishness, which enthralls and bewitches melancholy people. He hadoffered merely a passive resistance, however, not an active one, to hisfriend's schemes; and when the appointed hour came, he yielded to theimpulse which Kenyon failed not to apply; and was started upon thejourney before he had made up his mind to undertake it. They wanderedforth at large, like two knights-errant, among the valleys, and themountains, and the old mountain towns of that picturesque andlovely region. Save to keep the appointment with Miriam, a fortnightthereafter, in the great square of Perugia, there was nothing moredefinite in the sculptor's plan than that they should let themselvesbe blown hither and thither like Winged seeds, that mount upon eachwandering breeze. Yet there was an idea of fatality implied in thesimile of the winged seeds which did not altogether suit Kenyon's fancy;for, if you look closely into the matter, it will be seen that whateverappears most vagrant, and utterly purposeless, turns out, in the end,to have been impelled the most surely on a preordained and unswervingtrack. Chance and change love to deal with men's settled plans, not withtheir idle vagaries. If we desire unexpected and unimaginable events,we should contrive an iron framework, such as we fancy may compel thefuture to take one inevitable shape; then comes in the unexpected, andshatters our design in fragments.
The travellers set forth on horseback, and purposed to perform much oftheir aimless journeyings under the moon, and in the cool of the morningor evening twilight; the midday sun, while summer had hardly begun totrail its departing skirts over Tuscany, being still too fervid to allowof noontide exposure.
For a while, they wandered in that same broad valley which Kenyon hadviewed with such delight from the Monte Beni tower. The sculptor soonbegan to enjoy the idle activity of their new life, which the lapse ofa day or two sufficed to establish as a kind of system; it is so naturalfor mankind to be nomadic, that a very little taste of that primitivemode of existence subverts the settled habits of many preceding years.Kenyon's cares, and whatever gloomy ideas before possessed him, seemedto be left at Monte Beni, and were scarcely remembered by the timethat its gray tower grew undistinguishable on the brown hillside. Hisperceptive faculties, which had found little exercise of late, amid sothoughtful a way of life, became keen, and kept his eyes busy with ahundred agreeable scenes.
He delighted in the picturesque bits of rustic character and manners, solittle of which ever comes upon the surface of our life at home. There,for example, were the old women, tending pigs or sheep by the wayside.As they followed the vagrant steps of their charge, these venerableladies kept spinning yarn with that elsewhere forgotten contrivance,the distaff; and so wrinkled and stern looking were they, that you mighthave taken them for the Parcae, spinning the threads of human destiny.In contrast with their great-grandmothers were the children, leadinggoats of shaggy beard, tied by the horns, and letting them browse onbranch and shrub. It is the fashion of Italy to add the petty industryof age and childhood to the hum of human toil. To the eyes of anobserver from the Western world, it was a strange spectacle to seesturdy, sunburnt creatures, in petticoats, but otherwise manlike,toiling side by side with male laborers, in the rudest work of thefields. These sturdy women (if as such we must recognize them) wore thehigh-crowned, broad brimmed hat of Tuscan straw, the customary femalehead-apparel; and, as every breeze blew back its breadth of brim, thesunshine constantly added depth to the brown glow of their cheeks. Theelder sisterhood, however, set off their witch-like ugliness to theworst advantage with black felt hats, bequeathed them, one would fancy,by their long-buried husbands.
Another ordinary sight, as sylvan as the above and more agreeable, wasa girl, bearing on her back a huge bundle of green twigs and shrubs,or grass, intermixed with scarlet poppies and blue flowers; the verdantburden being sometimes of such size as to hide the bearer's figure, andseem a self-moving mass of fragrant bloom and verdure. Oftener, however,the bundle reached only halfway down the back of the rustic nymph,leaving in sight her well-developed lower limbs, and the crooked knife,hanging behind her, with which she had been reaping this strangeharvest sheaf. A pre-Raphaelite artist (he, for instance, who paintedso marvellously a wind-swept heap of autumnal leaves) might find anadmirable subject in one of these Tuscan girls, stepping with a free,erect, and graceful carriage. The miscellaneous herbage and tangledtwigs and blossoms of her bundle, crowning her head (while her ruddy,comely face looks out between the hanging side festoons like alarger flower), would give the painter boundless scope for the minutedelineation which he loves.
Though mixed up with what was rude and earthlike, there was still aremote, dreamlike, Arcadian charm, which is scarcely to be found in thedaily toil of other lands. Among the pleasant features of the waysidewere always the vines, clambering on fig-trees, or other sturdy trunks;they wreathed themselves in huge and rich festoons from one tree toanother, suspending clusters of ripening grapes in the interval between.Under such careless mode of culture, the luxuriant vine is a lovelierspectacle than where it produces a more precious liquor, and istherefore more artificially restrained and trimmed. Nothing can bemore picturesque than an old grapevine, with almost a trunk of its own,clinging fast around its supporting tree. Nor does the picture lack itsmoral. You might twist it to more than one grave purpose, as you saw howthe knotted, serpentine growth imprisoned within its strong embracethe friend that had supported its tender infancy; and how (as seeminglyflexible natures are prone to do) it converted the sturdier treeentirely to its own selfish ends, extending its innumerable arms onevery bough, and permitting hardly a leaf to sprout except its own. Itoccurred to Kenyon, that the enemies of the vine, in his native land,might here have seen an emblem of the remorseless gripe, which the habitof vinous enjoyment lays upon its victim, possessing him wholly, andletting him live no life but such as it bestows.
The scene was not less characteristic when their path led the twowanderers through some small, ancient town. There, besides thepeculiarities of present life, they saw tokens of the life that had longago been lived and flung aside. The little town, such as we see in ourmind's eye, would have its gate and its surrounding walls, so ancientand massive that ages had not sufficed to crumble them away; but in thelofty upper portion of the gateway, still standing over the empty arch,where there was no longer a gate to shut, there would be a dove-cote,and peaceful doves for the only warders. Pumpkins lay ripening in theopen chambers of the structure. Then, as for the town wall, on theoutside an orchard extends peacefully along its base, full, not ofapple-trees, but of those old humorists with gnarled trunks and twistedboughs, the olives. Houses have been built upon the ramparts, orburrowed out of their ponderous foundation. Even the gray, martialtowers, crowned with ruined turrets, have been converted into rustichabitations, from the windows of which hang ears of Indian corn. At adoor, that has been broken through the massive stonework where itwas meant to be strongest, some contadini are winnowing grain. Smallwindows, too, are pierced through the whole line of ancient wall, sothat it seems a row of dwellings with one continuous front, built in astrange style of needless strength; but remnants of the
old battlementsand machicolations are interspersed with the homely chambers andearthen-tiled housetops; and all along its extent both grapevines andrunning flower-shrubs are encouraged to clamber and sport over theroughness of its decay.
Finally the long grass, intermixed with weeds and wild flowers, waveson the uppermost height of the shattered rampart; and it is exceedinglypleasant in the golden sunshine of the afternoon to behold the warlikeprecinct so friendly in its old days, and so overgrown with ruralpeace. In its guard rooms, its prison chambers, and scooped out of itsponderous breadth, there are dwellings nowadays where happy human livesare spent. Human parents and broods of children nestle in them, even asthe swallows nestle in the little crevices along the broken summit ofthe wall.
Passing through the gateway of this same little town, challenged onlyby those watchful sentinels, the pigeons, we find ourselves in a long,narrow street, paved from side to side with flagstones, in the old Romanfashion. Nothing can exceed the grim ugliness of the houses, most ofwhich are three or four stories high, stone built, gray, dilapidated, orhalf-covered with plaster in patches, and contiguous all along fromend to end of the town. Nature, in the shape of tree, shrub, or grassysidewalk, is as much shut out from the one street of the rustic villageas from the heart of any swarming city. The dark and half ruinoushabitations, with their small windows, many of which are drearily closedwith wooden shutters, are but magnified hovels, piled story upon story,and squalid with the grime that successive ages have left behind them.It would be a hideous scene to contemplate in a rainy day, or whenno human life pervaded it. In the summer noon, however, it possessesvivacity enough to keep itself cheerful; for all the within-doors ofthe village then bubbles over upon the flagstones, or looks out from thesmall windows, and from here and there a balcony. Some of the populaceare at the butcher's shop; others are at the fountain, which gushes intoa marble basin that resembles an antique sarcophagus. A tailor is sewingbefore his door with a young priest seated sociably beside him; a burlyfriar goes by with an empty wine-barrel on his head; children are atplay; women, at their own doorsteps, mend clothes, embroider, weave hatsof Tuscan straw, or twirl the distaff. Many idlers, meanwhile, strollingfrom one group to another, let the warm day slide by in the sweet,interminable task of doing nothing.
From all these people there comes a babblement that seems quitedisproportioned to the number of tongues that make it. So many words arenot uttered in a New England village throughout the year--except itbe at a political canvass or town-meeting--as are spoken here, with noespecial purpose, in a single day. Neither so many words, nor so muchlaughter; for people talk about nothing as if they were terriblyin earnest, and make merry at nothing as if it were the best of allpossible jokes. In so long a time as they have existed, and within suchnarrow precincts, these little walled towns are brought into a closenessof society that makes them but a larger household. All the inhabitantsare akin to each, and each to all; they assemble in the street as theircommon saloon, and thus live and die in a familiarity of intercourse,such as never can be known where a village is open at either end, andall roundabout, and has ample room within itself.
Stuck up beside the door of one house, in this village street, is awithered bough; and on a stone seat, just under the shadow of thebough, sits a party of jolly drinkers, making proof of the new wine, orquaffing the old, as their often-tried and comfortable friend. Kenyondraws bridle here (for the bough, or bush, is a symbol of the wine-shopat this day in Italy, as it was three hundred years ago in England), andcalls for a goblet of the deep, mild, purple juice, well diluted withwater from the fountain. The Sunshine of Monte Beni would be welcomenow. Meanwhile, Donatello has ridden onward, but alights where a shrine,with a burning lamp before it, is built into the wall of an inn stable.He kneels and crosses himself, and mutters a brief prayer, withoutattracting notice from the passers-by, many of whom are parentheticallydevout in a similar fashion. By this time the sculptor has drunk off hiswine-and-water, and our two travellers resume their way, emerging fromthe opposite gate of the village.
Before them, again, lies the broad valley, with a mist so thinlyscattered over it as to be perceptible only in the distance, and most soin the nooks of the hills. Now that we have called it mist, it seemsa mistake not rather to have called it sunshine; the glory of so muchlight being mingled with so little gloom, in the airy material of thatvapor. Be it mist or sunshine, it adds a touch of ideal beauty to thescene, almost persuading the spectator that this valley and those hillsare visionary, because their visible atmosphere is so like the substanceof a dream.
Immediately about them, however, there were abundant tokens that thecountry was not really the paradise it looked to be, at a casual glance.Neither the wretched cottages nor the dreary farmhouses seemed topartake of the prosperity, with which so kindly a climate, and sofertile a portion of Mother Earth's bosom, should have filled them, oneand all. But possibly the peasant inhabitants do not exist in so grimya poverty, and in homes so comfortless, as a stranger, with his nativeideas of those matters, would be likely to imagine. The Italians appearto possess none of that emulative pride which we see in our New Englandvillages, where every householder, according to his taste andmeans, endeavors to make his homestead an ornament to the grassyand elm-shadowed wayside. In Italy there are no neat doorstepsand thresholds; no pleasant, vine-sheltered porches; none of thosegrass-plots or smoothly shorn lawns, which hospitably invite theimagination into the sweet domestic interiors of English life.Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the scene around, isespecially disheartening in the immediate neighborhood of an Italianhome.
An artist, it is true, might often thank his stars for those old houses,so picturesquely time-stained, and with the plaster falling in blotchesfrom the ancient brick-work. The prison-like, iron-barred windows, andthe wide arched, dismal entrance, admitting on one hand to the stable,on the other to the kitchen, might impress him as far better worthhis pencil than the newly painted pine boxes, in which--if he be anAmerican--his countrymen live and thrive. But there is reason to suspectthat a people are waning to decay and ruin the moment that their lifebecomes fascinating either in the poet's imagination or the painter'seye.
As usual on Italian waysides, the wanderers passed great, black crosses,hung with all the instruments of the sacred agony and passion: therewere the crown of thorns, the hammer and nails, the pincers, the spear,the sponge; and perched over the whole, the cock that crowed to St.Peter's remorseful conscience. Thus, while the fertile scene showed thenever-failing beneficence of the Creator towards man in his transitorystate, these symbols reminded each wayfarer of the Saviour's infinitelygreater love for him as an immortal spirit. Beholding these consecratedstations, the idea seemed to strike Donatello of converting theotherwise aimless journey into a penitential pilgrimage. At each of themhe alighted to kneel and kiss the cross, and humbly press his foreheadagainst its foot; and this so invariably, that the sculptor soon learnedto draw bridle of his own accord. It may be, too, heretic as he was,that Kenyon likewise put up a prayer, rendered more fervent by thesymbols before his eyes, for the peace of his friend's conscience andthe pardon of the sin that so oppressed him.
Not only at the crosses did Donatello kneel, but at each of the manyshrines, where the Blessed Virgin in fresco--faded with sunshine andhalf washed out with showers--looked benignly at her worshipper; orwhere she was represented in a wooden image, or a bas-relief of plasteror marble, as accorded with the means of the devout person who built,or restored from a mediaeval antiquity, these places of wayside worship.They were everywhere: under arched niches, or in little penthouses witha brick tiled roof just large enough to shelter them; or perhaps insome bit of old Roman masonry, the founders of which had died before theAdvent; or in the wall of a country inn or farmhouse; or at the midwaypoint of a bridge; or in the shallow cavity of a natural rock; or highupward in the deep cuts of the road. It appeared to the sculptor thatDonatello prayed the more earnestly and the more hopefully at theseshrines, because the mild face of
the Madonna promised him to intercedeas a tender mother betwixt the poor culprit and the awfulness ofjudgment.
It was beautiful to observe, indeed, how tender was the soul of man andwoman towards the Virgin mother, in recognition of the tenderness which,as their faith taught them, she immortally cherishes towards all humansouls. In the wire-work screen 'before each shrine hung offerings ofroses, or whatever flower was sweetest and most seasonable; some alreadywilted and withered, some fresh with that very morning's dewdrops.Flowers there were, too, that, being artificial, never bloomed on earth,nor would ever fade. The thought occurred to Kenyon, that flower-potswith living plants might be set within the niches, or even thatrose-trees, and all kinds of flowering shrubs, might be reared under theshrines, and taught to twine and wreathe themselves around; so thatthe Virgin should dwell within a bower of verdure, bloom, and fragrantfreshness, symbolizing a homage perpetually new. There are many thingsin the religious customs of these people that seem good; many things,at least, that might be both good and beautiful, if the soul of goodnessand the sense of beauty were as much alive in the Italians now as theymust have been when those customs were first imagined and adopted. But,instead of blossoms on the shrub, or freshly gathered, with the dewdropson their leaves, their worship, nowadays, is best symbolized by theartificial flower.
The sculptor fancied, moreover (but perhaps it was his heresy thatsuggested the idea), that it would be of happy influence to place acomfortable and shady seat beneath every wayside shrine. Then the wearyand sun-scorched traveller, while resting himself under her protectingshadow, might thank the Virgin for her hospitality. Nor, perchance,were he to regale himself, even in such a consecrated spot, with thefragrance of a pipe, would it rise to heaven more offensively thanthe smoke of priestly incense. We do ourselves wrong, and too meanlyestimate the Holiness above us, when we deem that any act or enjoyment,good in itself, is not good to do religiously.
Whatever may be the iniquities of the papal system, it was a wise andlovely sentiment that set up the frequent shrine and cross along theroadside. No wayfarer, bent on whatever worldly errand, can fail to bereminded, at every mile or two, that this is not the business whichmost concerns him. The pleasure-seeker is silently admonished to lookheavenward for a joy infinitely greater than he now possesses. Thewretch in temptation beholds the cross, and is warned that, if he yield,the Saviour's agony for his sake will have been endured in vain. Thestubborn criminal, whose heart has long been like a stone, feels itthrob anew with dread and hope; and our poor Donatello, as he wentkneeling from shrine to cross, and from cross to shrine, doubtless foundan efficacy in these symbols that helped him towards a higher penitence.
Whether the young Count of Monte Beni noticed the fact, or no, there wasmore than one incident of their journey that led Kenyon to believe thatthey were attended, or closely followed, or preceded, near at hand, bysome one who took an interest in their motions. As it were, thestep, the sweeping garment, the faintly heard breath, of an invisiblecompanion, was beside them, as they went on their way. It was like adream that had strayed out of their slumber, and was haunting them inthe daytime, when its shadowy substance could have neither density noroutline, in the too obtrusive light. After sunset, it grew a little moredistinct.
"On the left of that last shrine," asked the sculptor, as they rode,under the moon, "did you observe the figure of a woman kneeling, withher, face hidden in her hands?"
"I never looked that way," replied Donatello. "I was saying my ownprayer. It was some penitent, perchance. May the Blessed Virgin be themore gracious to the poor soul, because she is a woman."