The Third Macabre Megapack (19 page)

“With the perspiration starting from my forehead and with trembling hands I threw myself upon the floor beside the body that was not yet cold. The starting eyes had a look that froze me with horror. The blackened tongue was thrust out between the teeth; the limbs exhibited the most remarkable contortions. I mustered all my courage with a violent effort of will, took the animal by the paws, and left the house. Hurrying down the silent street, I proceeded to the quays along the banks of the Loire, and, on reaching them, threw my burden into the river. Until daylight I roamed around the city, just where I know not; and not until the sky began to grow pale and then to be flushed with light did I at last have the courage to return home. As I laid my hand upon the door, I shivered. I had a dread of finding there still living, as in the celebrated tale of Poe, the animal that I had so lately put to death. But no, my room was empty. I fell half-fainting upon my bed, and for the first time I slept, with a perfect sense of being all alone, a sleep like that of a beast or of an assassin, until evening came.”

Some one here interrupted, breaking in upon the profound silence in which we had been listening.

“I can guess the end. Linda disappeared at the same time as the cat.”

“You see perfectly well,” replied Tribourdeaux, “that there exists between the facts of this story a curious coincidence, since you are able to guess so exactly their relation. Yes, Linda disappeared. They found in her apartment her dresses, her linen, all even to the night-robe that she was to have worn that night, but there was nothing that could give the slightest clue to her identity. The owner of the house had let the apartment to ‘Mademoiselle Linda, concert-singer,’ He knew nothing more. I was summoned before the police magistrate. I had been seen on the night of her disappearance roaming about with a distracted air in the vicinity of the river. Luckily the judge knew me; luckily also, he was a man of no ordinary intelligence. I related to him privately the entire story, just as I have been telling it to you. He dismissed the inquiry; yet I may say that very few have ever had so narrow, an escape as mine from a criminal trial.”

For several moments the silence of the company was unbroken. Finally a gentleman, wishing to relieve the tension, cried out:

“Come now, doctor, confess that this is really all fiction; that you merely want to prevent these ladies from getting any sleep tonight.”

Tribourdeaux bowed stiffly, his face unsmiling and a little pale.

“You may take it as you will,” he said.

A LEMON-TREE, by Ouida

I

It was a small lemon-tree, not more than forty inches high, growing in its red earthen vase as all lemons are obliged to be grown further north than Rome. There were many thousands and tens of thousands of other such trees in the land; but this one, although so little, was a source of joy and pride to its owner. He had grown it himself from a slender slip cast away on a heap of rubbish, and he had saved his pence up with effort and self-denial to purchase, second-hand, the big pot of ruddy clay in which it grew, now that it had reached its first fruit-bearing prime. It had borne as its first crop seven big, fragrant lemons, hanging from its boughs amidst leaves which were as fresh and green as a meadow in May. He had watched its first buds creep out of the slender twigs, and swell and swell gradually into sharp-pointed little cones, which in their turn became pale yellow fruit, “fit for a princess,” as he said, patting their primrose-coloured rind. They seemed so many separate miracles to him, coming as by some magic out of the little starry white flowers on the glossy twigs.

He was a poor, ignorant man, by name Dario Baldassino, known as Fringuello (or the Chaffinch) to his neighbourhood and fellow workmen. He lived on the south side of the ferry of Royezano, and dug and carted the river-sand; a rude labour and a thankless, taking the sinew and spirit out of a man, and putting little in return into his pocket. The nave or ferry is a place to please an artist. All the land around on this south side is orchard—great pear-trees and cherry-trees linked together by low-growing vines, and in the spring months making a sea of blossom stretching to the river’s edge. The watermills, which were there centuries ago, stand yellow and old, and cluster like beavers’ dams upon the water. The noise of the weir is loud, but the song of the nightingale can be heard above it. Looking along westward down the widening, curving stream, above the fruit-trees planted thick as woods, there arise, two miles off, the domes and spires of the city of Florence, backed by the hills, which here take an Alpine look upon them when the sun sets beyond the rounded summits of the more distant Carrara range; and the spurs of the Apennines grow deeply blue with that intense transparent colour which is never seen in northern lands. To the north also lie the mountains, and on the east; and late into May the snow lingers where the day breaks above Vallombrosa and Casentino. All the vale is orchard, broken now and then by some great stone-pine, some walnut or chestnut tree, some church spire with its statue of its saint, some low, red-brown roofs, some grey old granary with open-timbered lofts. It is a serene and sylvan scene—at sunset and at sunrise grand—and the distant city rises on its throne of verdure, seeming transfigured as Dante, exiled, may have seen it in his dreams.

Of all this beauty outspread before his sight Fringuello saw little; his eyes were always set on the sand and shingle into which he drove his heart-shaped spade—all which is the pageant of the painter, the paradise of the poet, but is nothing to the toiler of the soil. The sweat of his fatigue drops down before his eyes, and shuts out from him the scenes amidst which he dwells. For him the weir has no song, the orchard no poem, the mountains no counsel, and the vales no charm. He does but see the cart-rucks in the sand, the house-fly in the sunlight, the coins hard-earned in his horny palm, the straw which covers the coveted wine-flask, or the glass which holds the hot and acid flavours of less natural drinks. Now and then Giotto looks up from his sheepfold, and Robert Burns from his furrow, but it is only once in a century. This poor labourer, Fringuello, lived in two little rooms in a poor house which looked on the weir and the water-mills. He had never been able to have a house of his own, and even the small charge of the rooms was more than he could easily pay, miserable though they were. His employment was intermittent, and in winter, when the river was spread wide over its bed, covering the sand and shingle, it ceased entirely. Some odd jobs he got elsewhere, but nothing certain. He had no knowledge of any other work than the digging and carrying which had been his lot. But he was always merry, with the mirth which had gained him his nickname, and in his light-hearted poverty had done what the poorest always do—he had married at twenty a girl as poor as himself. She was called Lizina, the familiar corruption of Luisa, and was the daughter of a cobbler of the adjacent village of Ripoli.

It was an imprudent union and a foolish one, but it was happier than many which fulfil every condition of prudence and thrift. Lizina was a blithe, buoyant, active, and laborious creature, and whilst she lived he never had a hole in his hempen shirt, or went without a tablespoonful of oil to his beans and bread. They were as merry and happy as if they had really been a pair of chaffinches in a nest in one of the pear-trees. But of joy the gods are envious, whether it go to roost in garret or palace, and in a few brief years Lizina died of fever and left him all alone with one little girl, as like herself as the bud is like the flower.

For months he never sang as he worked, and his ruddy face was pale, and he had long fits of weeping when he lay on his lonely bed, and stared up at the starry skies which were visible through the square, unshuttered window. Lizina was in the ground, in a nameless grave, with two crossed sticks set above it, and the river rolled over the weir, and the wide wheel turned, and the orchards blossomed, and the people laughed on the yellow sand, and no one cared that a little merry, glad, tender, harmless life was done for and over, stamped down into the clay like a crushed butterfly, a broken branch, a rotten fruit, or a dead grasshopper. Nobody cared; and after a time he, too, ceased to care, and began to hum and whistle and carol once more as he worked, and laughed once more at his comrades’ jokes as they dug up the heavy sand. In the lives of the poor there is little leisure for sorrow, and toil passes over them like an iron roller over the inequalities of a road, forcing them down into dull indifference, as the roller forces into level nothingness alike the jagged flint and the sprouting grass.

Meanwhile, Lizina, as she was called after her mother, grew up apace like the little lemon-tree which had been planted at her birth, a lovely child like a Correggio cherub, thriving on her dry bed and herb-soup as the lemon plant thrived on the dry earth and uncongenial atmosphere of the attic under the roofs.

Fringuello did his best by both of them, making up to them by tenderness and gentleness what he was forced to refuse to both of material comfort. Both the child and the tree went hungry often, suffered from cold and frost in the sharp, short winters, and languished in the scorching days, when foul odours rose from the naked bed of the shrunken river, and white clouds of little moths hovered over the cracked sand, and the leaves of the orchards grew yellow and wrinkled, and curled up, and dropped in the heat before their time.

All that he could not help; he could not help it more than he could help the shrinking of the river in drought, and the coming of blight to the orchards. Though it went to his soul like a knife-thrust when he saw the child pale and thin, and the lemon-tree sickly and shrunk, he could do nothing. But he murmured always, “Patience, courage,” as he coaxed the child to eat a morsel of crust, and consoled the tree with a spray of spring-water, and he got them both safely through several burning summers and icy winters, and when they were both sixteen years old the tree was strong and buxom, with glossy foliage and fine fruit, and the child was healthy and handsome, with shining eyes and laughing mouth.

He had worked as hard as any mule for them both, and though a young man in years, he looked an old man from excess of toil, though his heart was light and his smile was like sunshine.

When he got up in the dark to go to his work, and drew his leathern belt about his lean ribs, he always looked at the pale light of dawn as it touched the green leaves of the tree and the closed eyes of the child, and then he muttered an Ave, content and thankful at heart. Many would have thought the hardness of his lot excuse enough for suicide; he never knew what it was not to feel tired, he never knew what it was to have a coin in his pocket for pleasure. His bones ached, and the gnawing of rheumatism was in his nerves, from the many hours spent knee-deep in water or damp sand, and always at the pit of his stomach was that other still worse gnawing of perpetual insufficiency of food. But he was content and grateful to his fate, as the birds are, though they hunger and thirst, and every man’s hand is against them.

The child and the tree were indissolubly united in his mind and memory. They had grown up together, and seemed part and parcel of each other. Imagination scarcely exists in the brains of the poor; they do not know what it is. The perpetual grind of daily want leaves no space for or possibility of impersonal fancy in it; but, in a vague kind of superstitious way, he associated the well-being of the one with the welfare of the other. If the tree sickened and drooped for a day, he always looked nervously at Lizina to see if she ailed anything also. If the little girl coughed or grew hot with fever, he always watched anxiously the leaves of the lemon. It was a talisman and fetish to him; and when he came up from the river at evening when his work was done, he looked upward always to see the green boughs of the tree at the square little window of his garret under the deep eaves, and above an archway of old brown-red brick.

If it had been missing at the window, he would have told himself that Lizina was dead. There was no likelihood that it would ever be missing there. Lemon-trees live long, and this one would, he knew, most likely outlive himself if he kept it from worm and fly, and rot and mildew. Nevertheless, he always glanced upward to make sure that it was there when he toiled up the strip of road which led to his home when his work in the sand was done. Lizina herself did not wait at the window. She always came jumping and dancing down the path, her auburn curls flying, and her big brown eyes sparkling; barefooted, ill-clad, scarcely fed, but happy and healthy, singing at the top of her voice as her father had always done in his youth.

When they reached their fifteenth birthday, neither she nor the lemon-tree had ever ailed anything worse than a passing chill from a frosty week, or a transient sickness from a sultry drought.

The lemon-tree had given her the few little gifts she had ever received. The pence brought in by its fruit were always laid out for her: cake at Christmas, sugar-egg at Easter, a white ribbon for her first Communion, a pair of shoes to wear on high feasts and holy days—these little joys, few and far between, had all come to her from the copper pieces gained by the pale, wrinkled, fragrant fruit sold at five centimes each in the village or the town. “
Soldi della Lizinanina
,” said her father whenever he put any so gained in his trousers pocket.

Well as he loved his pipe, and thankful as he was when he could get a drink of watered wine, he never touched a halfpenny of the lemon money to buy a pinch of tobacco or a glass of
mezzo-vino
. It was all saved up carefully for his little girl’s small wants. Sometimes in hard seasons it had even to go in bread for her, but of that bread he would never himself take a mouthful. Moreover, the pence were few, for the lemons were not many.

Lizina remained quite a child, though she grew fast, and her little round breasts swelled up high and firm where the rough hempen shift cut across them. Young as she was, the eyes of an admirer had fallen upon her, and young Cecco, the son of Lillo, the
contadino
where the big pine stood (a pine three hundred years old if one), had said to her father and to her that when he had served out his time in the army he should say something serious about it; but Fringuello had answered him ungraciously that he could never give her bridal clothes or bridal linen, so that she would needs die a maid, and his own people had told him roughly that when he should have served his time he would be in a different mind. But Cecco, nevertheless, thought nothing would please him ever so well as this ragged, pretty child with her blowing cloud of short, crisp bright curls, and he said to her one evening as she sat on the wall by the ferry, “If you will be patient, my Lizinanina, I will be true;” and Lizina, too young to be serious, but amused and triumphant, laughed gaily and saucily, and replied to him: “I will make no promises, Cecco. You will come back with a shorn pate and soft hands and tender soles to your feet.”

For the soldier seems but a poor creature to the children of the soil, and is, indeed, of but little use when the barracks vomit him out of their jaws and send him back to his home, a poor, indifferent trooper, but also a spoiled peasant; having learned to write indeed, but having forgotten how to handle a spade, drive a plough, or prune a grape-vine, and to whose feet, once hard and firm as leather, the once familiar earth with its stones and thorns and sticks seems rough and sharp and painful, after having marched in ill-fitting boots for three years along smooth roads and paven streets.

To the city lad and lass the conscript may seem somebody very fine; but to the country ones he seems but a mere popinjay, only useful to waste powder. Lizina, although only a river labourer’s daughter, was country born and bred, and had the prejudices and preferences of the country, and had run about under the orchard boughs and down the vineyards of the countryside till she thought as a peasant and spoke as one.

Cecco was mortified, but he shared her views of the life to which he was about to go. He was useful now to tame a steer, to milk a heifer, to fell a tree, to mow a meadow, to reap a field, to get up in the dark and drive the colt into the city with a load of straw and bring back a load of manure. But in the barracks he would be nothing—worse than nothing; a poor numb-skull, strapped up in stiff clothes with a pack on his back, and a musket, which he must fire at nothing, on his shoulder.

“Wait for me, Lizina,” he said sadly. “The time will soon pass, and I will come back and marry you, despite them all.”

“Pooh! I shall have married a man with a mint of money by the time they let you come back,” said the unkind child, saucily tossing the curls out of her eyes; but through her long lashes her glance rested a moment softly on the ruddy face of Cecco, which had looked down on her so often through the boughs and twigs of the cherry or pear trees of his father’s farm, as he threw down fruit into her outstretched and eager little hands where she stood in the grass of the orchard.

She said nothing more tender then, being coy and wayward and hard to please, as became her incipient womanhood; but before she went to bed that night she came close to her father’s side and put her hand on his.

“Cecco says he will come back and marry me,
babbo
,” she said, with a child’s directness. Her father stroked her curls.

“That is a joke, dear; his people would never let him marry a little penniless chit like you.”

Lizina shook her head sagely with a little proud smile.

“He will not mind his people. He will do it—if I wish—when he comes back.”