Little Novels of Italy/Ippolita in the Hills/Chapter 4
IV
IPPOLITA LIFTS UP HER EYES TO THE HILLS
Waking from a late troubled sleep, Ippolita found her little room possessed by three noble ladies—Emilia Malaspina, Euforbia di Ponterotto, and Domenica di Campodarsego—dressed all in saffron and white (her sacred colours, they told her), who announced themselves, with much kneeling and folding of arms over breasts, as her handmaids. "Sagro cuor di Gesù!" thought poor Ippolita, "what a way to undo me!" But aloud she only murmured, "Tante grazie, gentildonne," and got out of bed.
They had prepared for her a scented bath, into which, in her dazed condition, she entered without overmuch persuasion. True, she thought to find her death in so much water, and crossed herself vehemently when first it touched her back; but there might be worse deaths (she supposed) than drowning for a poor girl bought and sold, and not so very long ago a Jew had been baptized in Santa Giustina in water up to his neck. Nothing, however, would induce her to sit down. They dressed her then in silk, tied and garlanded her hair, put a gold chain round her neck, silken shoes on her feet—talking in quick whispers to each other all the time; and so announced with curtsies that she might enter the litter as soon as she would. She was at the disposition of these ladies, was her faltered reply. Emilia waved her hand out of the little window; chords of music sounded from the street; the voices of men and ladies rose upon a madrigal—
"Fior' di Maggio—Soave, pio e saggio—Salve, Ippolita!"—the work of Alessandro's muse upon that night of discord from the Jew. So she went downstairs.
The Vicolo Agnus Dei—a blind alley of low jutting houses over arcades, full of squalor, pink wash, children, and cats—was on this early morning ablaze with colour and music. From wall to wall (and eight feet will measure that) it seemed packed with the nobility. Tousled heads from above looked down curiously on heads elaborately frizzed, on scarlet caps, on plumes, on garlands, on jewelled necks. Poverty and riches touch at their extremes, like houses in the South. The shoulders of the ladies at play were no barer than those of the slatterns who gaped at them playing; but for Ippolita, who had always been a decent girl, let us hope her blushes were a cloak. She felt naked. And the bath, remember, had unnerved her.
What these neighbours of hers may have thought is no concern of ours, since the actors in the play took no concern in it. Twenty pieces of silver had bought an incomparable peg for their conceits. They were rescuing, they said to each other, a lily from the gutter, taking a jewel from a dirty finger, glorifying the glories—a pious act which could not fail of returning honour to those who took honour in doing it. The people! Sacks to be filled with garlic and black wine, liver and blood-puddings—grunting hogs, let them keep their sty. Let them not dare (and in truth it never occurred to them to dare) interfere with the diversions of the great. Yet as the veiled sacrifice went to mount the litter, one brown-eyed rascal from an upper window, holding a towel over her neck, shrilled out in homely patois, "A vederti, 'Polita mia!" and Ippolita turned her lovely head and showed for a moment her shining wet eyes to those who watched. She smiled tenderly at the send-off, but "Addio, Annina, addio!" she said softly, and turned bowing to her bowing gaolers.
As the swaying litter of gold and white went out into the Pozzo Depinto and turned up towards the Pontecorbo Gate; as the music and chanting—"Candida Ippolita, premio d'Amore! Grazia insolita del sommo Fattore!"—died away to a murmurous underflow of sound, perhaps a tongue or two was thrust into a cheek or two, perhaps a bare shoulder shrugged or one shock-head wagged to another. The air was sharp, beds still warm—whose business was it? The street was left to the rats and snuffing dogs again.
But Annina had sparks of fire in her brown eyes, and panted as she tugged at her staylaces. It was not long before she clattered downstairs on her clacking heels, and went to mark the cage they had gilded for her dear Ippolita.
Those hierophants, that Collegio d'Amore (as the new style ran), bearing in their midst the garlanded victim—Goddess at once and Sacrifice—awoke the echoes of the streets without comment. The city gates were open, it is true; in some churches the doors stood wide for the first mass; they passed a priest or so just up, a friar or so, furtive truants from their beds; then, at the edge of the Piazza del Santo, Ippolita peeping through her curtains saw a little company of goatherds, blanketted, brown-legged, shabby rogues, their feet white with country dust, new in from the hills with their flocks. They blinked to see the gay procession; but wistfully, longingly, she looked after them from her cage. They were not so much market-stuff, per Dio! They walked at large over bright hillsides, singing to the sky and the winds. They were not pestered with love or fine buzzing ladies or capering signori, who larded poor girls with compliments, and showed their teeth most when they meant least. Ah, if she could run away! If she could hide with them, lie on the hillsides while the goats cropped about her; lie on her back, her hands a pillow, and sing to the sky and the winds because she was so happy! The thought possessed her; she ached for freedom; felt the water of desire hot in her mouth. The sleepy shepherds huddled in their rags watched her go by; they little knew what a craving the sight of their dusty ease had stirred in a heart whose covering was fine silk and strung pearls. Her wrongs came back upon her like heaped waters of a flood. That shameful bath—ah, Soul of Christ, to strip one naked, and let souse in hot water, like a pig whose bristles must come off! More than songs which she did not understand, more than compliments which made her feel foolish and pictures which made her look so, was this refined indignity. Seethed in water like a dead pig—ah, Madonna! She arrived sulky—if so humble-minded a girl could be sulky; defiant, suspicious, at least.
The place chosen for the new Collegio d'Amore was the Villa Venusta, whose shady garden can still be seen from the Riviera Businello. This garden is full of trees, myrtle, wisteria, lilac, acacia—flowering trees—with a complement of firs and shining laurel to give a setting to so much golden-green and white. It has a canal on two sides, is a deep, leafy place, where nightingales sing day and night; it abounds in grass lawns, flowers, weeping trees, and marble hermæ. The villa itself is very stately, a three-storied house in the Venetian style, from whose upper windows you can command a fine stretch of country; below you on either hand the Piazza del Santo, the Prato della Valle, with their enormous churches, pink and grey; beyond these the city walls, the green plain; lastly, the ragged outline of the far distant hills. It has a courtyard with lemon trees, long, dim rooms empty of all but coolness, shuttered against the glare of noon; above, a great saloon coffered in the ceiling, frescoed on the walls, with a dais and a throne; an open loggia full of flowers; above all this again, raftered bedrooms smelling of lavender. A roomy, stately place for those whose lives move easily in such surroundings; for Ippolita, the girl of the people, happy in her dark tenement in the Vicolo, gossip of the upper windows, shy beckoner to the street, burnisher of doorposts at sundown—for Ippolita this windy great house was a prison, neither more nor less.
It was a prison, at least, conducted according to the best rules of gallantry then obtaining. They bowed her up the staircase to the refectory: they sat her down and plied her on their knees with fruit and cups of wine. They led her to the throne room, where, high above them all, she was to sit, and (being crowned) hear them contend in verse and prose for the privilege of her love for the day. It was all arranged. She was to have a favourite every day, man or maid. Favour was to go by merit among her slaves. The theme was always to be her incomparable virtues—her beauty, discretion, wit (poor dumb fish!), her shining chastity, power of binding and loosing by one soft blue ray from her eyes, etc. They displayed her emblems on the walls—the peacock, because her beauty was her pride, her pride her beauty; doves, because they were Aphrodite's birds; rabbits, because the artist understood rabbits; the beaver, that glorious witness of virtue, who makes himself less certainly a beaver that he may be more safely a saint; the beaver, I say, in white on a green field. Other symbols—the lily of her candour, the rose of her glowing cheeks, the crocus of her hair, the pink anemones which were her toes, the almond for her fingers: she saw herself articulated; her fauna, her flora, her moral and physical attributes cried at her from the four walls.
Ippolita sat very scared on her throne, and endured what she could by catching firmly to the knobs of it and blinking her eyes. One by one they came creeping, these silken ladies, these slashed and curled young lords, to kiss her hand. "Dio mio!" thought she. "What is all this about? And are maids courted this way among the great?" She knew very little about it, yet was quite sure they were not. She wondered when Alessandro's business was going to begin. As a matter of fact, it had begun. He was now removing several inches of superfluous finger-nail with a sword.
For the first day that same Alessandro del Dardo won her to himself by his descant upon the theme, "How a gentleman may dismember himself without dishonour for a lady's love; and how not."
"Now he has me," thought poor Ippolita, and set her teeth. But he lay at her feet most of the day, and though at night he led her into the garden, if you will believe me, he never even kissed her hand.
"Who is mad?" thought she to herself, staring from her bed into the shadowy angles of the room. "Am I mad? Are these signori all mad? Is this a mad-house? Dio! it soon should be at this rate." She cried herself to sleep at last.
Next day it was Meleagro who won her by a careful consideration of the question, "Whether or no, when a gentleman has served a lady for ten years, and she falls sick of the small-pox, he is ipso facto absolved of his vow?" Meleagro decided that he was not, and was accepted by Ippolita, not because she admired his reasoning but because she thought it part of the game.
Next came the turn of Donna Emilia, a very burning poetess, for a Sapphic ode; and so on and so on. After three days Ippolita found herself yawning her head off; the longing for freedom returned, for the open country, the hills, the goatherds. Not for her home in the Vicolo: this everlasting love-making with its aftertaste of stale sugar had turned her sick of Padua. The whole city, to her mind, reeked of bergamot; she guessed a fawning lover at every street corner, a pryer at every window—basta, basta, la città!
No: it was to the hills she lifted up her eyes, to the hills and the swart goatherds free of their mystery. That riviera across the canal, where the budding planes made a mist of brown and rose, was a favourite haunt of theirs. There they assembled and milked their goats, thence set out homewards at night. Sitting in the pleached arbours, with two adoring ladies at her feet and a little cluster of youths behind and beside her, she used to peer long and earnestly through the branches to see them collect their flocks and start for the hills at dusk. Lithe, brown, sinewy lads they were! What long legs they had, with what bravery wore their ragged cloaks! One carried a great bulging skin under his arm—bagpipes! She was sure they made good music to each other in the green country places. Very early in the morning she heard them come in; they were known by their bells. She jumped out of her luxurious bed at the first tinkle, and was at the shutter watching for them before ever they rounded the angle of the Ponte della Morte. There they came! colour of dust, with the straggling goats following after in a cloud of it. Her impulse was to fling wide the casement, hold out both her arms, call to them with all her might, "Ha! help, in the name of the Trinity! Take me with you to the green hills. I am weary of life in this place!" Then, knowing she could not, she would hold herself back by main force, stare about her, run back, throw herself on the bed, lie there sobbing wildly, and so be found by her ladies who came to put her in that detestable bath. She was sure her skin was being rotted by so much water; she used to feel her arms and thighs secretly to see if they were palpably more flabby. It stood to reason that the water must soak in—where else could it go to! She thought that she walked like a bladder, supposing a bladder were to take itself legs. The whole affair was clean abominable; but she saw no way out.
The way came.