A JAY OF ITALY

CHAPTER I

On a hot morning, in the year 1476 of poignant
memory, there drew up before an osteria on the
Milan road a fair cavalcade of travellers. These were
Messer Carlo Lanti and his inamorata, together with a
suite of tentmen, pages, falconers, bed-carriers, and other
personnel of a migratory lord on his way from the cooling
hills to the Indian summer of the plains. The chief of
the little party, halting in advance of his fellows, lifted
his plumed scarlet biretta with one strong young hand,
and with the other, his reins hanging loose, ran a cluster
of swarthy fingers through his black hair.

‘O little host!’ he boomed, blaspheming—for all good
Catholics, conscious of their exclusive caste, swore by
God prescriptively—’O little host, by the thirst of Christ’s
passion, wine!’

‘He will bring you hyssop—by the token, he will,’
murmured the lady, who sat her white palfrey languidly
beside him. She was a slumberous, ivory-faced creature
warm and insolent and lazy; and the little bells of her
bridle tinkled sleepily, as her horse pawed, gently
rocking her.

The cavalier grunted ferociously. ‘Let me see him!’
and, bonneting himself again, sat with right arm akimbo,
glaring for a response to his cry. He looked on first
acquaintance a bully and profligate—which he was; but,
for his times, with some redeeming features. His thigh,
in its close violet hose, and the long blade which hung at
it seemed somehow in a common accord of steel and
muscle. His jaw was underhung, his brows were very
thick and black, but the eyes beneath were
good-humored, and he had a great dimple in his cheek.

A murmur of voices came from the inn, but no answer
whatever to the demand. The building, glaring white as
a rock rolled into the plains from the great mountains
to the north, had a little bush of juniper thrust out on a
staff above its door. It looked like a dry tongue
protruded in derision, and awoke the demon in Messer
Lanti. He turned to a Page:—’Ercole!’ he roared,
pointing; ‘set a light there, and give these hinds a
lesson!’

The lady laughed, and, stirring a little, watched the
page curiously. But the boy had scarcely reached the
ground when the landlord appeared bowing at the door.
The cavalier fumed.

‘Ciacco—hog!’ he thundered: ‘did you not hear us
call?’

‘Illustrious, no.’

‘Where were your ears? Nailed to the pillory?’

‘Nay, Magnificent, but to the utterances of the little
Parablist of San Zeno.’

‘O hog! now by the Mass, I say, they had been better
pricked to thy business. O ciacco, I tell thee thy
Parablist was like, in another moment, to have addressed
thee out of a burning bush. What! I would drink,
swine! And, harkee, somewhere from those deep vats
of thine the perfume of an old wine of Cana rises to my
nostrils. I say no more. Despatch!’

The landlord, abasing himself outwardly, took solace
of a private curse as he turned into the shadow of his
porch—

‘These skipjacks of the Sforzas! limbs of a country
churl!’

Something lithe and gripping sprang upon his back
as he muttered, making him roar out; and the chirrup
of a great cricket shrilled in his ear—

‘Biting limbs! clawing, hooking, scoring limbs! ha-ha,
hee-hee, ho-bir-r-r-r!’

Boniface, sweating with panic, wriggled to shake off
his incubus. It clung to him toe and claw. Slewing his
gross head, he saw, squatted upon his shoulders, a
manikin in green livery, a monstrous grasshopper in
seeming.

‘Messer Fool,’ he gurgled—’dear my lord’s most
honoured jester!’ (he was essaying all the time to stagger
with his burden out of earshot)—’prithee spare to damn
a poor fellow for a hasty word under provocation!
Prithee, sweet Messer Fool!’

The little creature, sitting him as a frog a pike, hooked
its small talons into the corners of his eyes.

‘Provocation!’ it laughed, rocking—’provocation by
his grandness to a guts! If I fail to baste thee on a
spit for it, call me not Cicada!’

‘Mercy!’ implored the landlord, staggering and groping.

‘Nothing for nothing. At what price, tunbelly?’

The landlord clutched in his blindness at the post of a
descending stair.

‘The best in my house.’

‘What best, paunch?’

‘Milan cheese—boiled bacon. Ah, dear Messer Cicada,
there is a fat cold capon, for which I will go fasting to
thee.’

‘And what wine, beast?’

‘What thou wilt, indeed.’

The jester spurred him with a vicious heel.

‘Away, then! Sink, submerge, titubate, and evanish
into thy crystal vaults!’

‘Alas, I cannot see!’

The rider shifted his clutch to the fat jowls of his
victim, who thereupon, with a groan, descended a rude
flight of steps at a run, and brought up with his burden
in a cool grotto. Here were casks and stoppered jars
innumerable; shelves of deep blue flasks; lolling
amphoræ, and festoons of cobwebs drunk with must.
Cicada leapt with one spring to a barrel, on which he
squatted, rather now like a green frog than a grasshopper.
His face, lean and leathery, looked as if dipped
in a tan-pit; his eyes were as aspish as his tongue; he
was a stunted, grotesque little creature, all vice and
whipcord.

‘Despatch!’ he shrilled. ‘Thy wit is less a desert
than my throat.’

‘Anon!’ mumbled the landlord, and hurried for a
flask. ‘Let thy tongue roll on that,’ he said, ‘and call
me grateful. As to the capon, prithee, for my bones’
sake, let me serve thy masters first.’

The jester had already the flask at his mouth. The
wine sank into him as into hot sand.

‘Go,’ he said, stopping a moment, and bubbling—’go,
and damn thy capon; I ask no grosser aliment than
this.’

The landlord, bustling in a restored confidence, filled a
great bottle from a remote jar, and armed with it and
some vessels of twisted glass, mounted to daylight once
more. Messer Lanti, scowling in the sun, cursed him for
a laggard.

‘Magnificent!’ pleaded the man, ‘the sweetest wine,
like the sweetest meat, is near the bone.’

‘Deep in the ribs of the cellars, meanest, O, ciacco?’

He took a long draught, and turned to his lady.

‘Trust the rogue, Beatrice; it is, indeed, near the
marrow of deliciousness.’

She sipped of her glass delicately, and nodded. The
cavalier held out his for more.

‘Malvasia, hog?’

‘Malvasia, most honoured; trod out by the white feet
of prettiest contadina, and much favoured, by the token,
of the Abbot of San Zeno yonder.’

Messer Lanti looked up with a new good-humour.
The party was halted in a great flat basin among hills,
on one of the lowest of which, remote and austere,
sparkled the high, white towers of a monastery.

‘There,’ he said, signifying the spot to his companion
with a grin; ‘hast heard of Giuseppe della Grande,
Beatrice, the father of his people?’

‘And not least of our own little Parablist, Madonna,’
put in the landlord, with a salutation.

‘Plague, man!’ cried Lanti; ‘who the devil is this
Parablist you keep throwing at us?’

‘They call him Bernardo Bembo, my lord. He was
dropped and bred among the monks—some by-blow of
a star, they say, in the year of the great fall. He was
found at the feet of Mary’s statue; and, certes, he is
gifted like an angel. He mouths parables as it were
prick-songs, and is esteemed among all for a saint.’

‘A fair saint, i’faith, to be carousing in a tavern.’

‘O my lord! he but lies here an hour from the sun, on
his way, this very morning, to Milan, whither he vouches
he has had a call. And for his carousing, spring water
is it all, and the saints to pay, as I know to my cost.’

‘He should have stopped at the rill, methinks.’

‘He will stop at nothing,’ protested the landlord
humbly; ‘nay, not even the rebuking by his parables
of our most illustrious lord, the Duke Galeazzo himself.’

Lanti guffawed.

‘Thou talkest treason, dog. What is to rebuke there?’

‘What indeed, Magnificent? Set a saint, I say, to
catch a saint.’

The other laughed louder.

‘The right sort of saint for that, I trow, from Giuseppe’s
loins.’

‘Nay, good my lord, the Lord Abbot himself is no
less a saint.’

‘What!’ roared Lanti, ‘saints all around! This is
the right hagiolatry, where I need never despair of a
niche for myself. I too am the son of my father, dear
Messer Ciacco, as this Parablist is, I’ll protest, of your
Abbot, whose piety is an old story. What! you don’t
recognise a family likeness?’

The landlord abased himself between deference and
roguery.

‘It is not for me to say, Magnificent. I am no expert
to prove the common authorship of this picture and the
other.’

He lowered his eyes with a demure leer. Honest
Lanti, bending to rally him, chuckled loudly, and then,
rising, brought his whip with a boisterous smack across
his shoulders. The landlord jumped and winced.

‘Spoken like a discreet son of the Church!’ cried the
cavalier.

He breathed out his chest, drained his glass, still
laughing into it, and, handing it down, settled himself in
his saddle.

‘And so,’ he said, ‘this saintly whelp of a saint is on
his way to rebuke the lord of Sforza?’

‘With deference, my lord, like a younger Nathan. So
he hath been miscalled—I speak nothing from myself.
The young man hath lived all his days among visions
and voices; and at the last, it seems, they’ve spelled him
out Galeazzo—though what the devil the need is there? as
your Magnificence says. But perhaps they made a
mistake in the spelling. The blessed Fathers themselves
teach us that the best holiness lacks education.’

Madonna laughed out a little. ‘This is a very good
fool!’ she murmured, and yawned.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Lanti, answering the
landlord, and wagging his sage head. ‘I’m not the
most pious of men myself. But tell us, sirrah, how
travels his innocence?’

‘On foot, my lord, like a prophet’s.’

”Twill the sooner lie prone.’ He turned to my lady.
‘Wouldst like to add him to Cicada and thy monkey,
and carry him along with us?’

‘Nay,’ she said pettishly, ‘I have enough of monstrosities.
Will you keep me in the sun all day?’

‘Well,’ said Lanti, gathering his reins, ‘it puzzles me
only how the Abbot could part thus with his discretion.’

‘Nay, Illustrious,’ answered the landlord, ‘he was in a
grievous pet, ’tis stated. But, there! prophecy will no
more be denied than love. A’ must out or kill. And
so he had to let Messer Bembo go his gaits with a letter
only to this monastery and that, in providence of a
sanctuary, and one even, ’tis whispered, to the good
Duchess Bona herself. But here, by the token, he comes.’

He bowed deferentially, backing apart. Messer Lanti
stared, and gave a profound whistle.

‘O, indeed!’ he muttered, showing his strong teeth,
‘this Giuseppe propagates the faith very prettily!’

Madam Beatrice was staring too. She expressed no
further impatience to be gone for the moment. A young
man, followed by some kitchen company adoring and
obsequious, had come out by the door, and stood
regarding her quietly. She had expected some apparition of
austerity, some lean, neurotic friar, wasting between
dogmatism and sensuality. And instead she saw an
angel of the breed that wrestled with Jacob.

He was so much a child in appearance, with such an
aspect of wonder and prettiness, that the first motion of
her heart towards him was like the leap of motherhood.
Then she laughed, with a little dye come to her cheek,
and eyed him over the screen of feathers she held in her
hand.

He advanced into the sunlight.

‘Greeting, sweet Madonna,’ he said, in his grave young
voice, ‘and fair as your face be your way!’ and he was
offering to pass her.

She could only stare, the bold jade, at a loss for an
answer. The soft umber eyes of the youth looked into
hers. They were round and velvety as a rabbit’s, with
high, clean-pencilled brows over. His nose was short
and pretty broad at the bridge, and his mouth was a
little mouth, pouting as a child’s, something combative,
and with lips like tinted wax. Like a girl’s his jaw was
round and beardless, and his hair a golden fleece, cut
square at the neck, and its ends brittle as if they had
been singed in fire. His doublet and hose were of
palest pink; his bonnet, shoes, and mantlet of cypress-green
velvet. Rose-coloured ribbons, knotted into silver
buckles, adorned his feet; and over his shoulder, pendent
from a strand of the same hue, was slung a fair lute.
He could not have passed, by his looks, his sixteenth
summer.

Lanti pushed rudely forward.

‘A moment, saint troubadour, a moment!’ he cried.
‘It will please us, hearing of your mission, to have a taste
of your quality.’

The youth, looking at him a little, swung his lute
forward and smiled.

‘What would you have, gracious sir?’ he said.

‘What? Why, prophesy us our case in parable.’

‘I know not your name nor calling.’

‘A pretty prophet, forsooth. But I will enlighten thee.
I am Carlo Lanti, gentleman of the Duke, and this fair
lady the wife of him we call the Count of Casa Caprona.’

The boy frowned a little, then nodded and touched
the strings. And all in a moment he was improvising
the strangest ditty, a sort of cantefable between prose
and song:—

‘A lord of little else possessed a jewel,

Of his small state incomparably the crown.

But he, going on a journey once,

To his wife committed it, saying,

“This trust with you I pledge till my return;

See, by your love, that I redeem my trust.”

But she, when he was gone, thinking “he will not know,”

Procured its exact fellow in green glass,

And sold her lord’s gem to one who bid her fair;

Then, conscience-haunted, wasted all those gains

Secretly, without enjoyment, lest he should hear and wonder.

But he returning, she gave him the bauble,

And, deceived, he commended her; and, shortly after, dying,

Left her that precious jewel for all dower,

Bequeathing elsewhere the residue of his estate.

Now, was not this lady very well served,

Inheriting the whole value, as she had appraised it,

Of her lord’s dearest possession?

Gentles, Dishonour is a poor estate.’

 

Half-chaunting, half-talking, to an accompaniment of
soft-touched chords, he ended with a little shrug of
abandonment, and dropped the lute from his fingers.
His voice had been small and low, but pure; the sweet
thrum of the strings had lifted it to rhapsody. Messer
Lanti scratched his head.

‘Well, if that is a parable!’ he puzzled. ‘But
supposing it aims at our case, why—Casa Caprona is neither
poor nor dead; and as to a jewel——’

He looked at Madam Beatrice, who was frowning and
biting her lip.

‘Why heed the peevish stuff?’ she said. ‘Will you
come? I am sick to be moving.’

Carlo was suddenly illuminated.

‘O, to be sure, of course!’ he ejaculated—’the
jewel——’

‘Hold your tongue!’ cried the lady sharply.

The honest blockhead went into a roar of laughter.

‘He has touched thee, he has touched thee! And
these are his means to convert the Duke! By Saint
Ambrose, ’twill be a game to watch! I swear he shall
go with us.’

‘Not with my consent,’ cried madam.

Carlo, chuckling tormentingly, looked at her, then
doffed his cap mockingly to the boy.

‘Sweet Messer Bembo,’ he said, ‘I take your lesson
much to heart, and pray you gratefully—as we are both
for Milan, I understand—to give us the honour of your
company thither. I am in good standing with the Duke,
I say, and you would lose nothing by having a friend
at court. Those half-boots’—he glanced at the pretty
pumps—’could as ill afford the penalties of the road as
your innocence its dangers.’

‘I have no more fear than my divine Master,’ said the
boy boldly, ‘in carrying His gospel of love.’

‘Well for you,’ said Carlo, with a grin of approval for
his spirit; ‘but a gospel that goes in silken doublet and
lovelocks is like to be struck dumb before it is uttered.’

‘As to my condition, sir,’ said the boy, ‘I dress as for a
feast, our Master having prepared the board. Are we
not redeemed and invited? We walk in joy since the
Resurrection, and Limbo is emptied of its gloom. The
kingdom of man shall be love, and the government
thereof. Preach heresy in rags. ‘Twas the Lord Abbot
equipped me thus, my own stout heart prevailing.
“Well, they will encounter an angel walking by the
road,” quoth he, “and, if they doubt, show ’em thy white
shoulder-knobs, little Bernardino, and they will see the
wings sprouting underneath like the teeth in a baby’s
gums.”‘

He was evidently, if sage or lunatic, an amazing child.
The rough libertine was quite captivated by him.

‘Well, you will come with us, Bernardino?’ said he;
‘for with a cracked skull it might go hard with you to
prove your shoulder-blades.’

‘I will come, lord, to reap the harvest where I have
sowed the grain.’

He looked with a serene severity at the countess.

‘Shalt take thee pillion, Beatrice,’ shouted Lanti. ‘Up,
pretty troubadour, and recount her more parables by the
way.’

‘May I die but he shall not,’ cried the girl.

‘He shall, I say.’

‘I will bite, and rake him with my nails.’

‘The more fool you, to spoil a saint! Reproofs come
not often in such a guise as this. Up, Bernardino, and
parable her into submission!’

She made a show of resisting, in the midst of which
Bembo won to his place deftly on the fore-saddle. At
the moment of his success, the fool Cicada sprang from
the tavern door, and, lurching with wild, glazed eyes,
leapt, hooting, upon the crupper of the beast, almost
bringing it upon its haunches. With an oath Lanti
brought down his whip with such fury that the fool rolled
in the dust.

‘Drunken dog!’ he roared, and would have ridden
over the writhing body, had not Bembo backed the white
palfrey to prevent him.

‘Thou strik’st the livery, not the man!’ he cried.
‘Hast never thyself been drunk, and without the excuse
of this poor fool to make a trade of folly?’

Messer Lanti glared, then in a moment laughed. The
battered grasshopper took advantage of the diversion to
rise and slink to the rear. The next moment the whole
cavalcade was in motion.

CHAPTER II

They travelled on till sundown through the green
plains; and, for one good hour dating from their
start, not a word would Madam Beatrice utter. Then
she gave out—Messer Carlo being a distance in
advance—but with no grace at all.

‘You are an ill horseman, Saint. I am near jogged
from my seat.’

‘Put thine arms about me.’

‘Nay, I am not holy enough.’

She was silent again, for five minutes.

‘Your lute bangs my nose.’

He shifted it. She held her peace during two minutes.

‘Who taught you to play it, Saint?’

‘It was one of the fathers. What would it profit you
to know which?’

‘Nothing at all. I trow he was a good master to that
and your gospel.’

‘My gospel?’

‘Ay, of love. He has made you worldly-wise for a
saint. Hast ever before been beyond thy walls?’

‘Of course.’

‘And studied this and that? Experience, methinks is
the right nurse for such a creed. What made you accuse
me of dishonour?’

‘I did not.’

‘Nay, is that to be a saint?’

‘Whom the shoe fits, let her wear it.’

‘Bernardo! Where got you the shoe?’

‘Does it fit, I say?’

‘I fear me ’twas in some bagnio.’

‘Where you had dropped it? For shame!’

A rather long pause.

‘I will not be angry—just yet. Where got you the
shoe, I say? An eavesdropper is well equipped for a
prophet.’

‘I am no eavesdropper.’

‘Who enlightened you?’

‘Your cicisbeo.’

‘Under that title?’

‘Nay; it is not the devil’s policy to call himself devil.’

A shorter pause.

‘But you had heard of me?’

‘Nothing escapes the Church’s hearing. Besides,
Messer Lanti’s summer lodge is within call, one may say
of San Zeno.’

‘You are daring. Dost know in what high favour he
stands with the Duke?’

‘Else how could he have compassed Uriah’s dismissal
to the wars?’

Silence, and then a sigh.

‘Whom do you mean by Uriah?’

‘Thy lord, the Count of Casa Caprona.’

‘He is a soldier, and an old man.’

‘Didst covenant with his age in thy marriage vows?’

‘Bernardino, I am very sleepy.’

‘Sleep, then, and forget thyself, and awake, another.’

She sighed, and put her arms softly about him and her
cheek against his shoulder. Messer Lanti, falling back,
saw her thus, with closed eyes; and laughed, and then
frowned, and cried boisterously—

‘Hast converted her, Parablist? Art a saint indeed?’

He spurred forward again, with a discontented look,
and madam opened her eyes.

‘What gossips are thine old monks, Bernardino; and
what hypocrites, denouncing the licence they example!’

‘I know not what you mean.’

‘Are they all saints, then, in San Zeno?’

‘That is for Rome to say. It is a good law which lays
down this wine of sanctity to mature. In a hundred
years we shall know what stood the test.’

‘Ah me! And I am but seventeen. Will you speak
for your Abbot?’

‘Ay, like a dear son.’

‘Is he your father, Bernardo?’

‘Is he not the father of us all?’

‘Maybe. But ’tis of Benjamin I ask. Now, he is a
strange father, methinks, to bid his Benjamin, thus
apparelled, on a wild goose chase.’

‘He could not discount the voices.’

‘What voices?’

The boy lifted his face and eyes to the heavens, and
lowered them again with no answer but a sigh of rapture.

‘So? And did the voices bid thee wear a velvet
mantlet and roses to thy shoes?’ whispered the girl,
with a tiny chuckle.

‘They said, “Not in cockle shells, but a plume, goes
the Pilgrim of Love,”‘ answered Bembo. ‘As I am and
have been, God finds me fitting in His sight.’

‘And the Father Abbot, I wot?’

‘Yes: “Since,” says he, “Christ bequeathed His
Kingdom to beauty.”‘

‘And you have inherited it? I think I will be your
subject, Bernardo.’

‘I hope so, Madonna.’

He spoke perfectly gravely, and made her a little
courtly gesture backwards.

‘Well,’ said she, ‘had I been Father Abbot, I had
put this pet of my fancy in a cage.’

‘You know not of what you speak,’ he answered
seriously. ‘God works great ends with little instruments.
The puny bee is yet the very fairy midwife of the forests,
I should have broke my heart had he denied me.’

‘It would have saved others, alack!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing at all. Will you sing me another parable,
Bernardo?’

‘Ay, Madonna; and on what subject? The woman
taken in adultery?’

‘If you like; and whom Christ forgave.’

‘And He said: “Go, and sin no more”‘

She began to weep softly.

‘It is shocking to be so abused for a little thing. I
would you were back with your monks.’

He sighed.

‘Ah!’ she murmured, still weeping, ‘that this bee
had been content to remain a pander to his flowers! To
dup hell’s door with a reed! You know not to what you
have engaged yourself, my poor boy.’

‘To Christ, His service of Love,’ he said simply.

‘Go back, go back!’ she cried in pain. ‘There are
ten thousand sophisters to interpret that word according
to their lusts. Convert Galeazzo? Convert the
brimstone lake from burning! Dost know the manner of
man he is?’

‘Else why am I here?’

‘Ay, but his moods, his passions, his nameless,
shameless deeds? He hath no pity but for his desires; no
mercy but through his caprices. To cross him is to taste
the rack, the fire, the living burial. He is possessed.
Some believe him Caligula reincarnate—an atavism of
that dreadful stock. And dost think to quench that
furnace with a parable? Unless, indeed—Go back, little
Bembo, and waste thy passion for reform on thy monks.’

‘Madonna,’ he said, ‘I obey the voices. I shall not
be let to perish, since Christ died to save His world to
loveliness.’

It was the early rapture of the renaissance,
penetrating like an April song into these newly reclaimed
lands. The wind blew from Florence, and all the
peaceful vales, so long trodden into a bloody mire,
were awakening to the ecstasy of the Promise. That
men interpreted according to their lights—lights burning
fast and passionate in most places, but in a few quiet
and holy. The breed of German bandits, of foreign
mercenaries, was swept away. Gone was the whole
warring race of the Visconti, and in its place the
peasant Sforza had set a guard about the land of his
fierce adoption, that he might till and graft and prosper
in peace. Italy had asserted itself the inheritance of its
children, the Court of God’s Vicegerent, the chosen land
of Love’s gospel. That, too, men interpreted according
to their lights. ‘We are all the vineyard of Rome,’ said
the little Parablist. Alas! he thought Rome the Holy
of Holies, and his father a saint. But his father, who
adored him, had committed him, with his blessing, to
this mad romance! Such were the paradoxes of the
Gospel of Love.

Beatrice spoke no more, and they rode on in silence.
About evening they came into a pleasant dell, where
there was a level sward among rocks; and a little stream,
running down a stairway of stones, dropped laughing,
like a child going to bed, into the quiet of a rushy pool.
Great chestnuts clothed the slopes, and made a mantle,
powdered with stars, to the setting sun. It was a very
nest for love.

Messer Lanti, halting, commanded the green tents to
be pitched on the grass. Then, with a stormy scowl
and a mockery of courtesy, he came to dismount his
lady.

‘Now,’ says he, as he got her aside, ‘if I do not show
thy saint to be a petticoat, my hug of thee is like to
prove a bear’s.’

‘What!’ she said, amazed: ‘Bernardo?’

He ground his teeth.

‘I do not mark his pink cheeks for nothing.’

‘Well, an he be,’ she retorted coldly, ‘I am liker, than
if he be not, to lose my gallant.’

‘That depends,’ he growled, ‘upon whom your fickleship
honours with that title’; and he strode away, calling
roughly to Bembo, ‘Art for a bath, saint, before
supper?’

‘Why, gladly, Carlo,’ said the boy, ‘so we may be
private.’

They went down to the pool together, and stripped
and entered. Lanti saw a Ganymede, and was not
pleased thereat. He came to supper in a very bad
humour, which no innocent artifice of his guest could
allay. The kill that day of their falcons—partridges,
served in their own feathers, and stuffed with artichokes
and truffles—was tough; the pears and peaches were
sour; the confetti savourless and of stale design. He
rated his cook, cursed his servitors, and drank more than
he ate. When the disagreeable meal was ended, he
strode ruffling away, saying he desired his own sole
company, which it were well that all should respect.
Bembo saw him go, with a sigh and a smile.

‘Good, honest soul,’ quoth he, ‘that already wakes to
the reckoning!’

Madam misunderstood him, and pressed a little closer,
with a happy echo of his sigh. Her eyes were soft
with wine and passion. She had no precedent for
doubting her influence on the moment she chose to
make her own.

‘The reckoning!’ she murmured. ‘But I am wax
in thy hands, pretty saint. Shalt confess me, and take
what toll thou wilt of my sins?’

Her hand settled light as a bird on his.

‘Sing to me, Bernardino,’ she whispered wooingly,
‘sith the cloud is gone from our moon, and I am in the
will to love.’

He shot one little startled glance her way; then
slowly slung round his lute, and, touching the strings
pensively, melted into the following reproach:—

‘Speak low! What do you ask, false love? Speak low!

Sin cannot speak too low.

The night-wind stealing to thy bosom,

The dead star, dropping like a blossom,

Less voiceless be than thou!

Low, lower yet, false love, if to confess

What guilt, what shameful need?

God, who can hear the budding grass,

And flake kiss flake in the snowy pass,

Your secret else will heed.

Ah! thou art silent, not from love, but fear,

And true love knows no fear.

Creeping, soft-footed, in the dust,

It is not love, but conscious lust,

Which dreads that God shall hear.’

 

He rose swiftly beside her, while she sat, dumbly
biting a lock of her own hair. The frown of outraged
passion was in her eyes. What had the fool dared in
rejecting her!

To touch the perfumed essence of sin with a rebuke
which was like a caress—that, pace his monks, was
Bernardo’s rendering of the Gospel; and who shall say
that, in its girlish tenderness, its earnest emotionalism,
it was not the most dangerous method of all? Not
every adulterous woman is fit to meet the gentle fate of
Christ’s. It is not always well to doctor too much
kindness with more. Surfeit, surely, is not safely cured,
unless by a God, with sugar-plums.

‘For shame!’ he said quietly; ‘for shame! Christ
weeps for thee!’

She looked up with a frozen, insolent smile.

‘Yet there is no tear in all the night, prophet.’

He raised his hand. A star trailed down the sky, and
disappeared behind the trees. It startled her for a
moment, and in that moment he was gone, striding into
the moonlight. She saw a sword gleam in the shadow
of the tent.

‘Carlo!’ she hissed; ‘Carlo! follow and kill him!’

Messer Lanti came out of his ambush, sheathing his
blade. His teeth grinned in the white glow. He
sauntered up to her, and stood looking down, hand
on hip.

‘Not for all the bona-robas in the world,’ he said,
and struck his hilt lightly. ‘This I dedicate to his
service from this day. Let who crosses my little saint
beware it.’

He burst out laughing, not fierce, but low.

‘Thou art well served in thy confessor, woman. Wert
never dealt a fitter penance.’

It was significant enough that he had no word but
mockery for her discomfiture. He might have spitted
the seduced on a point of gallantry; for the siren, she
was sacred through her calling.

In the meanwhile Bernardo had left the green, had
passed the low, roistering camp pitched at a respectful
distance beyond, and had thrown himself upon his
knees in the wide fields.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ he prayed, ‘O justify Thy Kingdom
before Thy servant! Already my young footsteps are
warned of the bitter pass to come. Be Thou with me
in the rocky ways, lest I faint and slip before my
time.’

He remained long minutes beseeching, while the
moon, anchored in a little stream of clouds, seemed to
his excited imagination the very boat which awaited
the coming of One who should walk the waters. He
stretched out his arms to it.

‘Lord save me,’ he cried, ‘or I sink!’

He heard a snuffle at his back, and looked round and
up to find the fool Cicada regarding him glassily.

‘Sink!’ stuttered the creature, swaying where he
stood. ‘Lord save me too! I am under already—drowned
in Malmsey!’

Bembo rose to his feet with a happy sigh. ‘Exultate
Deo adjutori nostro!‘ he murmured, ‘I am answered.’

His clear, serene young brow confronted the fuddled
wrinkles of the other’s like an angel’s.

‘Cicada mio,’ he said endearingly; ‘judge if God is
dull of hearing, when, on the echo of my cry, here is one
holding out his hand to me!’

The Fool, staring stupidly, lifted his own lean right
paw, and squinted to focus his gaze on it.

‘Meaning me?—meaning this?’ he said.

Bembo nodded.

‘A return, with interest, on the little service I was able
to render thee this morning. O, I am grateful, Cicada!’

The Fool, utterly bemused, squatted him down on the
grass in a sudden inspiration, and so brought his wits to
anchor. Bernardo fell on his knees beside him.

‘What moved you to come and save me?’ he said
softly. ‘What moved you?’

Cicada, disciplined to seize the worst occasion with an
epigram, made a desperate effort to concentrate his
parts on the present one.

‘The wine in my head,’ he mumbled, waggling that
sage member. ”Tis the wet-nurse to all valour. I
walked but out of the furnace a furlong to cool myself,
and lo! I am a hero without knowing it.’

He looked up dimly, his face working and twitching
in the moonlight.

‘Recount, expound, and enucleate,’ said he. ‘From
what has the Fool saved the Parablist?’

‘From the deep waters,’ said Bembo, ‘into which he
had entered, magnifying his height.’

The Fool fell a-chuckling.

‘There was a hunter once,’ said he, ‘that thought he
would sound his horn to a hymn, and behold! he was
chasing the deer before he had fingered the first stops.
Expound me the parable, Parablist. Thou preachest
universal goodwill, they say?’

‘Ay, do I.’

‘Thou shalt be confuted with thine own text.’

‘How, dear Fool?’

‘Why, shall not every wife be kind to her friend’s
husband?’

‘Ay, if she would be unkind to her own.’

The Fool scratched his head, his hood thrown back.

‘And so, in thy wisdom, thou step’st into a puddle,
and lo! it is over thy ears. Will you come out, good
Signor Goodwill, and ride home in a baby’s pannier?’

Bembo caught one of the wrinkled hands in his soft palms.

‘Dear Cicada,’ he said, ‘are there not tears in your
heart the whiles you mock? Do you not love me, Cicada,
as one you have saved from death?’

Some sort of emotion startled the harsh features of
the Fool.

‘What better love could I show,’ he muttered, ‘than
to warn thee back from the toils that stretch for thy
wings?’

‘Ah, to warn me, to warn me, Cicada!’ cried the boy,
‘but not home to the nest. How shall he ever fly that
fears to quit it? Be rather like my mother, Cicada, and
advise these my simple wings.’

The Fool caught his breath in a sudden gasp—

‘Thy mother! I!’

A spasm of pain seemed to cross his face. He laughed
wildly.

‘An Angel out of a Fool! That were a worthy
parent to hold divinity in leading-strings.’

‘Zitto, Cicca mio!’ said Bembo sweetly, pressing a
finger to his lips. ‘Do I not know what wit goes to the
acting of folly—what experience, what observation? If
thou wouldst lend these all to my help and aid!’

‘In what?’

‘In this propaganda to govern men by love.’

‘Thou playest, a child, with the cross-bow.’

‘I know it. I have been warned; direct thou my hand.’

‘I!’ exclaimed the Fool once more in a startled cry.
And suddenly, wonder of wonders! he was grovelling at
the other’s knees, pawing them, weeping and moaning,
hiding his face in the grass.

‘What saint is this?’ he cried, ‘what saint that claims
the Fool to his guide?’

‘Alas!’ said the boy, ‘no saint, but a child of the
human God.’

‘And He mated with Folly,’ cried Cicada, ‘and Folly
is to direct the bolt!’

He sat up, beating his brow in an ecstasy, then all in a
moment forbore, and was as calm as death.

‘So be it,’ he said. ‘Be thou the divine fool, and I thy
mother.’

With a quick movement Bembo caught the Fool’s
cheeks between his palms.

‘Ay, mother,’ said he, with a little choking laugh, ‘but
see that thy hand on mine be steady, lest the quarrel fly
wide or rebound upon ourselves.’

It was the true mark indeed to which the cunning
rascal had all this time been sighting his bow. He
watched anxiously now for the tokens of a hit.

The Fool sat very still awhile.

‘Speak clearer,’ he muttered; then of a sudden: ‘What
wouldst ask of me?’

‘Ah! dear,’ sighed Bembo; ‘only that thou wouldst
justify thyself of this new compact of ours.’

‘I am clean—as thou readest love. Who but God
would consort with Folly? The Fool is cursed to
virginity.’

‘Cicada, dear, but there is no Chastity without
Temperance.’

The Fool tore himself away, and slunk crouching back
upon the grass.

‘I renounce thy God!’ he chattered hoarsely, ‘that
would have me false to my love, my mistress, my one
friend! Who has borne me through these passes, stood
by me in pain and madness, dulled the bitter tooth of
shame while it tore my entrails? Cure wantonness in
women, gluttony in wolves, before you ask me to be
dastard to my dear.’

‘Alas!’ cried Bembo, ‘then am I lost indeed!’

A long pause followed, till in a moment the Fool had
flung himself once more upon his face.

‘Lay not this thing on me,’ he cried, clutching at the
grass; ‘lay it not! It is to tear my last hope by the
roots, to banish me from the kingdom of dreams, to bury
me in the everlasting ice! I will follow thee in all else,
humbly and adoringly; I will try to vindicate this love
which has stooped from heaven to a clown; I will perish
in thy service—only waste not my paradise in the moment
of its realisation.’

Bembo stooped, kneeling, and laid one hand softly on
his shoulder.

‘Poor Cicada,’ he said, ‘poor Cicada! Alas! I am a
child where I had hoped a man, and my head sinks
beneath the waters. Tired am I, and fain to go rest my
head in a lap that erst invited me. Return thou to thy
bottle, as I to my love.’

The Fool, trailing himself up on his knees, caught his
hands in a wild, convulsive clutch.

‘Fiend or angel!’ he cried, ‘thou shall not!—The
woman!—The skirts of the scarlet woman! Go rest
thyself—not there—but in peace. From this moment
I abjure it—dost hear, I abjure it? I kill my love for
love’s sake. O! O!’

And he fell writhing, like a wounded snake, on the
grass.

‘Salve, sancta parens!‘ said Bembo, lifting up his hands
fervently to the queen of night. The pious rogue was
quite happy in his stratagem, since it had won him his
first convert to cleanness.

CHAPTER III

The lady of Casa Caprona had flown her
tassel-gentle and missed her quarry. Outwardly she
seemed little disturbed by her failure—as insolent as
indolent—an imperious serenity in a velvet frame. The
occasion which had given, which was still giving, Carlo
a tough thought or two to digest, she had already, on
the morning following her discomfiture, assimilated,
apparently without a pang. ‘The which doth demonstrate,’
thought Cicada, as he took covert and venomous
note of her, ‘a signal point of difference between the
sexes. In self-indulgent wickedness there may be little
to distinguish man from woman. In the reaction from
it, there is this: The man is subject to qualms of
conscience; the woman is not. She may be disenchanted,
surfeited, aggrieved against fate or circumstance; she is
not offended with herself. Remorse never yet spoiled
her sleep, unless where she desired and doubted it
on her account in another. What she hath done she
hath done; and what she hath failed to do slumbers for
her among the unrealities—among things unborn—seeds
in the womb of Romance, which, though she be the first
subject for it, she understands as little as she does
beauty. From the outset hath she been manoeuvring to
confuse the Nature in man by using its distorted image
in herself to lure him. Out upon her crimps and lacings!
He would be dressing and thinking to-day like an
Arcadian shepherd, an she had not warped his poor
vision with her sorcery! She wears the vestments of
ugliness, and its worship is her religion.’

It must be admitted that he offered himself a cross
illustration to his own text. The desperate concession
wrung from him last night in a moment of vinous
exaltation, had found his sober morning senses under a
mountain of depression. He was bitterly aggrieved
against fate; yet the only quarrel he had with himself
was for that mad vow of temperance, not for the vice
which had exacted it of him. The tongue in his head
was like a heater in an iron. Tantalus draughts lipped
and bubbled against his palate. The parched soil of his
heart, he felt, would never again blossom in little lonely
oases—never again know the solace of dreams aloof from
the world. His traffic being by no means with heaven,
God, he supposed, had sent an angel to convert it. And
he had succumbed through the angel’s calling him—mother!

He struck his hollow breast with a wild laugh. He
groaned over the memory of that emotional folly. He
damned himself, his trade, his employer, his aching
head—everything and every one, in short, but the author of his
misery. Him he could not curse—not more than if that
preposterous relationship between them had been real.
Neither did he once dream of violating his word to him,
since it had been given—absurd thought—to his child.

He was none the less savage against circumstance—vicious,
desperate, insolent with his master, as cross all
over as a Good Friday bun. Messer Lanti, himself in a
curiously sober mood, indulged his most acrid sallies
with a good-humoured tolerance which, contemptuously
oblivious as it was of any late smart of his own inflicting,
was harder than the blow itself in its implication of
a fault overlooked.

‘Rally, Cicca!’ said he, as they were preparing to
horse; ‘look’st as sour as a green crab. What! if we
are to ride with Folly, give us a fool’s text for the
journey, man.’

Cicada dwelt a moment on his stirrup, looking round
banefully.

‘And who to illustrate it, lord?’

‘Why, thy lord, if thou wilt,’ said Carlo. ‘He will be
no curmudgeon in a bid for laughter.’

The Fool gained his mule’s saddle, and digging heels
into the beast’s flanks, drove forward. Lanti, with a
whoop, spurred alongside of him. Cicada slowed to a
stop.

‘Hast overtaken Folly, master?’ said he, with a leer.
‘I knew you would not be long.’

Carlo scratched his head. The Fool turned and rode
back; so did the other. By the brook-side little Bembo
was preparing to mount a steed with which he had been
accommodated, since the lady had peremptorily declined
to ride pillion to him again. Cicada referred to him with
a gesture.

‘For us,’ he said, ‘we are two fools in a leash, sith
Sanctity, stopping where he was, is at the goal
before us.’

Lanti grumbled: ‘O, if this is a text!’ and beat his
wits desperately.

‘A text, sirrah!’ he roared, ‘a text for the journey.’

‘I will rhyme it you,’ said the Fool imperturbably,
pointing his bauble at Madam Beatrice, who at the
moment stepped from the green tent:—

‘Nothing is gained to start apace,

After another hath won the race.

Shall you and I be jogging, master?’

Lanti raised his whip furiously. Cicada, slipping from
his mule, dodged behind Bembo.

‘Save me!’ he squealed, ‘save me! I am sound. It
is folly to give a sound man a tonic.’

Carlo burst into a vexed laugh.

‘Well,’ said he, ‘go to. I think I am in a rare mood
for charity.’

The little party breakfasted on cups of clear water
from the spring, and, in the fresh of the morning, folded
its tents and started leisurely on the final stages of its
journey. Madonna, lazy-lidded, sat her palfrey like a
vine-goddess. Her bosom rose and fell in absolute
tranquillity. She bestirred herself only, when Bembo
rode near, to lavish ostentatious fondness on her Carlo,
a regard which her Carlo repaid with a like ostentation
of attention towards his little saint. It was an open
conspiracy of souls, bared to one another, to justify
their nakedness before heaven; only the woman carried
off her shame with an air. Bernardo she ignored
loftily; but her heart was busy, under all its calm
exterior, with a poisonous point of vengeance.

Presently, the sun striking hot, she dismounted and
withdrew into her litter, a miniature long waggon, drawn
on rude wheels by a yoke of sleepy oxen, and having
an embroidered tilt opening to the side. A groom,
walking there in attendance, led her palfrey by the
bridle. Lanti and his guest, with the Fool for company,
rode a distance ahead. The young nobleman was
thoughtful and silent; yet it was obvious that he, with
the others, felt the relief of that secession. Bernardo
broke into a bright laugh, and rallied Cicada on his
glumness.

‘Why should I be merry,’ said the jester, with a sour
face, ‘when I was invited to a feast, and threatened
with a cudgelling for attending?’

Bernardo looked at him lovingly. He thought this
was some allusion to his self-enforced abstinence.

‘Dear Cicca,’ said he, ‘the feast was not worth the
reckoning.’

‘O, was it not!’ cried Cicada with a hoarse crow.
‘But I spoke of my lord’s brains, which, by the token,
are the right flap-doodle.’

He put Bembo between himself and Lanti.

‘Judge between us,’ he cried, ‘judge between us,
Messer Parablist. He offered to serve himself up to
me, and, when I had no more than opened my mouth,
was already at my ribs.’

Carlo, on the further side, laughed loud.

‘It is always the same here,’ grumbled the Fool.
‘They will have our stings drawn like snakes’ before they
will sport with us. They love not in this Italy the joke
which tells against themselves—of that a poor motley must
ware. It muzzles him, muzzles him—drives the poison
down and in; and you wonder at the bile in my face!’

He fell back, having uttered his snarl, with politic
suddenness, and posted to the rear of the litter. The
moment he was away, Bembo turned upon his host with
a kindling look of affection.

‘I am glad to have thee alone one moment,’ said he.
‘O Carlo, dear! the base bright metal so to seduce thine
eyes. Are they not opened?’

Now the tale of madam’s discomfiture at her amoroso’s
hands the night before had not been long in reaching
the boy’s ears. She had not deigned, equally in
confessing her predilections as her shame, to utter them out
of the common hearing. Modesty in intrigue was a
paradox; and, in any case, one could undress without
emotion in the presence of one’s dogs.

So Cicada, putting two and two together, had gathered
the whole story, and given this spiritual bantling of his
a hint as to his wise policy thereon, scarce a sentence of
which had he uttered before he was casting down his
eyes and mumbling inarticulate under the piercing gaze
of an honesty which would have been even less effective
had it spoken. Then had he slunk away, blessing all
beatitudes whose innocence entailed such responsibilities
on their worshippers; and, as a result, here was Master
Truth taking his own course with the problem.

Messer Lanti’s eyes opened indeed to hear truth so
fearless; but he made an acrid face.

‘On my soul!’ he muttered, glistening, and stopped,
and his brow was shadowed a moment under a devil’s
wing. Then suddenly, with an oath, he clapped spurs to
his horse, and galloped a furlong, and, circling, came back
at a trot, and falling again alongside, put a quite gentle
hand on the boy’s bridle arm.

‘Dear, pretty Messer Truth,’ said he, ‘I pray you, on
my sincerity, turn your horse’s head. Whither, think
you, are you making?’

‘Why, for heaven, I hope, Carlo,’ said the boy with a
smile.

‘Milan is not the gate to it,’ answered the rough voice,
quite entreatingly. ‘Go back, I advise you. You will
break your heart on the stones. Why, look here: dost
think I am so concerned to have this intrigue proved the
common stuff of passion? I care not the feather in thy
cap, Bernardino. Nay, I am the better for it, sith it
opens the way to a change. And so with ten thousand
others. There is the measure of your task. Now, will
you go back?’

‘No, by my faith!’

Lanti growled, and grunted, and smacked his thigh.

‘Then I cannot help thee: and yet I will help thee.
Saint Ambrose! To remodel the world to goodwill,
statecraft and all, on the lisp of a red mouth! Wilt be
the fashion for just a year and a day, shouldering us,
every one, poor gallants, to the wall? Why should I love
thee for that? and I love thee nevertheless. There thou
goest in a silken doublet, to whip all hell with a
lute-string; and I—I had shown less temerity horsed and
armoured, and with a whole roaring crusade at my back.’

Bembo smiled very kindly.

‘Christ’s love was all His sword and buckler,’ said he.

‘And He was crucified,’ said Carlo grimly.

‘And died a virgin,’ answered the boy, ‘that He might
make for ever chaste Love His heir.’

‘Well,’ grumbled Lanti, ‘there reigns an impostor these
fourteen hundred years or so in His place, that’s all. I
hope the right heir may prove his title. ‘Tis a long
tenure to dispossess. Methinks men have forgotten.’

‘Yes, they have forgotten,’ said the boy; and he began
to sing so sweetly as he rode, that the other, after a grunt
or two, sunk into a mere grudging rapture of listening.

In the meantime, sombre and taciturn, the Fool rode
in the rear. Before him hulked the great shoulders,
stoppered with the little round head, of Narcisso, the
groom who led Madonna’s palfrey. Cicada, regarding
this beauty, snarled out a laugh to himself. ‘Sure
never,’ he thought, ‘was parental fondness worse
bestowed than in nicknaming such a satyr.’ The
creature’s small, bony jaw, like a pike’s, underhung,
black-tufted, viciousness incarnate; his pursed,
overlapping brow, with the dirty specks of eyes set fixedly in
the under-hollows—in all, the mean smallness of his
features, contrasted with the slouching, fleshly bulk below,
suggested one of those antediluvian monsters, whose
huge bodies and little mouths and throttles give one a
sense of disproportion that is almost like an indecency.
Nevertheless, Narcisso was madam’s chosen attendant at
her curtain side, where occasionally Cicada would detect
some movement, or the shadow of one, which convinced
him that the two were in stealthy communication.
Indeed, he had posted himself where he was, with no
other purpose than to watch for such a sign.

Once he saw the hem of the curtain lift ever so slightly,
and Narcisso at the same instant respond, with a secret
movement of his hand, towards the place. Something
glittered momentarily, and was extinguished. Cicada
stretched himself in his saddle, and began to whistle.

Presently he pushed ahead once more and joined his
master. Opening with some jest, he led him away, and
they fell into an amble together. Afterwards it was
apparent to some of Messer Lanti’s following that, as
the morning advanced, their lord’s brow darkened from
its early rude frankness, and began to exhibit certain
tokens of a wakening devil with which they had plenty
of reason to be familiar. Perhaps he wanted his dinner.
Perhaps the near-approaching termination of his summer
idyll—for they were long now in the great Lombardy
plain, and the towers of Milan were growing, low and
small, out of the horizon—was depressing him. Anyhow,
his first condescension was all gone by noon, when they
halted, a league short of the city, to rest and dine at the
‘Angel and Tower,’ a prosperous inn of the suburbs set
among mellowing vineyards.

Of all the company Bernardo was perhaps the only
one unconscious of the threatening atmosphere. Wonderful
thoughts were kindling in him at the near prospect
of this, the goal to all his hopes and ambitions. Milan!
It was Milan at last—the capital of his promised estate
of love. Blue and small, swimming far away in the sun
mists of the plains, he felt that he could clasp it all in his
arms, and carry it to the foot of the Throne. His eyes
brightened with clear tears: this salvage of the dark,
dead ages reclaimed to God! ‘Domine!‘ he exclaimed
in ecstasy, clasping his hands: ‘Emitte lucem tuam et
veritatem tuam! O Lord, touch mine eyes, that they
may penetrate even where Thy light shineth like a
glow-worm in deep mosses!’

Carlo roughly shouted him to their meal. His heart
was throbbing with an emotional rapture as he obeyed.
The table was served in a trellised alley, under hanging
stalactites of grapes. Beatrice flagged on a bench at the
end of the board, her shoulders sunk into a bower all
crushed of sunshine and green shadows. It was the
vine-goddess come home, soft, sensual, making a lust of
fatigue. Her lids were half-closed; her teeth showed in
a small, indolent smile; light, reflected from the purple
clusters, slept on the warm ivory of her skin. Bernardo,
coming opposite her, stood transfixed before a vision of
such utter animal loveliness. His breath seemed to
mount quicker as he gazed. Carlo drummed on the
board, where he sat hunched over it. Looking from one
to the other, he puffed out a little ironic laugh.

‘Wonderest what is passing there, boy?’ said he.
‘Wilt never know. Not a hair would she turn though,
like Althea, she were to find herself in child with a
firebrand.’

Bernardo lowered his eyes with a blush.

‘Nay,’ said he, ‘my thoughts of Madonna were more
tempered. I coveted only her beauty for heaven.’

‘Anon, Messer, anon!’ cried the other banteringly:
‘be not so free with my property. I hold her yet about
the waist, seest, with a silver fetter? If there be a prior
claim to mine——’

‘Ay, Chastity’s,’ put in the boy.

Lanti hooted.

‘Tempt her, if thou wilt, with such a suitor. She will
follow him as she would the hangman. Wilt throw off
thy belt, Beatrice? I gave a thousand scudi for it. See
what Chastity here will offer thee in its room.’

‘I will answer, if I may examine it,’ said Bembo
gravely. ‘Will you tell her to unclasp it, Carlo, and let
me look? I see it is all hinged of antique coins. There
was a Father at San Zeno collected such things.’

‘What, ladies’ girdles!’

‘Now, Carlo! you know I mean the coins. Methinks
I recognise a text in one of them.’

Beatrice shrugged her shoulders, with a little yawn
expressive of intolerable boredom.

‘Well,’ quoth Lanti impatiently, ‘let him see it, you
and he shall parable us for grace to meat, while these
laggard dogs’—he looked over his shoulder, growling for
his dinner.

Beatrice unclasped the cincture without a word, and
flung it indifferently across the table. She had lain as
impassive throughout her own discussing by the others
as a slave being negotiated in a market. Not a tremor
of her eyelids had acknowledged either her lord’s
rudeness or Bembo’s provisional compliment.

The boy took up the belt and examined it. He was
conscious of a sweet perfume that had come into his
hands with the trinket. His lips were parted a little,
his cheeks flushed. Presently he put it down softly, and
looked across at Beatrice.

‘It is what I thought,’ said he—’the coin, I mean—a
denarius of Tiberius, in the thirty-first year of Our Lord
Shall I tell you what it says to me, Madonna?’

She did not take the trouble to answer.

‘Yes,’ roared Carlo.

Bembo slung his lute to the front, and began coaxing
forth one of those odd, shy accompaniments of his, into
which, a moment later, his voice melted:—

‘When Tiberius was Emperor,

For thirty silver pieces bearing his image

Did Judas betray his Lord;

Then, himself betrayed to blood-guilt, cast them ringing

On the flags of the Temple, and maddened forth and died.

But the Jew elders eyed askance

The sleek, round coins, accurst and yet no whit

Depreciated as currency,

And ogling them and each other, were silent, till one spoke:

“Ill come; well sped. We need a place to bury the dead.

Let the Potter take these, and in return

Change us his field, o’er which we long have haggled.

So shall this outlay bring us two-fold profit,

Yet leave us conscience-clean before the Lord.”

Thus, gentles dear, was bought “The Field of Blood”;

And thus the wicked, damned price returned

Into the veins of traffic, there to circulate

And poison where it ran.

One piece found Hope, and changed was for Despair;

And Charity one led to hoard for self;

And one reached Faith, and Faith became a whore.

But, most of all, what had betrayed Love sore,

Sweet Love was used to betray for evermore.’

 

His voice broke on a long-drawn wailing chord. A
little silence succeeded. Then, like one spent, he took
up the belt and offered it to Beatrice.

‘O Madonna!’ he said, ‘it is a denarius of the Cæsar
that betrayed Love. Take back thy wages.’

She dragged down a spray of vine-leaves, and fanned
herself furiously with it, making no other response.

‘So! I am Judas!’ cried Carlo; and began to bite his
moustache, mouthing and glowering.

‘Love!’ he sputtered, ‘love! Is there no love in
nature? You talk of the human God, you——’

Beatrice broke in scornfully:—

‘It is the world-wisdom of the monastery. He shall
sing you love only by the Litany. His queen shall be a
virgin immaculate, and her bosom a shrine for the white
lambs of chastity to fold in. A fine proselyte for
passion’s understanding! I would not be so converted for
all Palestine.’

Carlo laughed, with some fierce recovery to good-humour.

‘Hearest her, Bernardo? Thou shalt not prevail
there, unless by convincing that thou speak’st from
experience.’

Bembo had sunk down upon the bench, where, resting
languidly, he still fingered the strings of his lute. Now
suddenly, steadfastly, he looked across at the girl, and
began to sing again:—

‘Love kept me an hour

From all hours that pass;

In her breast, like a flower,

She stored it, sweet, fragrant,

Of all time the vagrant,

Alas, and alas!

Of all time the flower,

Of all hours that pass,

For me was that hour,

When I cared claim it,

And kiss it and shame it,

Alas, and alas!

I dared not, sweet hour—

I let thee go pass;

And heaven is my dower.

My crown is stars seven:

I am a saint in heaven,

Alas, and alas!’

 

He never took his eyes, while he sang, off the wondering
face opposite him. It was strangely transformed by
the end—flesh startled out of ivory—the face of a
wakened Galatea. Narcisso coming at the moment to
place the first dishes of the meal before the company, she
sat up, her hands to her bosom, with a quick, agitated
movement.

‘It is well,’ she said. ‘I am thy convert, saint in
heaven!’ She lifted the dish before her, and held it out
with a nervous smile. ‘Let us exchange pledges, by the
token. Give me thy meat, and take mine.’

Carlo, watching and listening, knitted his brow in a
sudden frown, and his hand stole down to his belt.

‘Give me thy dish,’ said Beatrice, almost with
entreaty.

Bernardo laughed. With the finish of his madrigal he
had pushed his lute, in a hurry of pink shame, to his
shoulder.

‘Nay, Madonna,’ he protested. ‘Like the simplest
doctor, I but spoke my qualifications. Feeling is
half-way to curing, and the best recommended physician is
he who hath practised on himself. I ask no reward but
thy forbearance.’

‘Give it me,’ she still said. She was on her feet. She
kissed the rim of the dish. ‘Wilt thou refuse now?
Bid him to, Carlo.’

‘Not I,’ said Lanti. ‘Hath not, no more than myself,
been whipped into the classics for nothing? Quod ali
cibus est aliis fuat acre venenum. We know what that
means, he and I.’

She seemed to turn very pale.

‘Nay,’ said Bernardo, jumping up, ‘if Madonna
condescends?’ and the exchange was made, and the men
fell to.

In a moment or two Lanti looked up.

‘What ails thee, Beatrice?’

‘I am not hungry.’

The word had scarcely left her lips before, leaping to
his feet, and sprawling across the table, he had snatched
the untasted dish from under her hands, turned, and
dashed it with its contents full in the face of Narcisso,
who waited, with others, behind. Fouled, bleeding,
half-stunned, the man crashed down in a heap, and in
the same instant his master was upon him, poniard in
hand.

‘Confess, wretch, before I kill thee!’ he roared. ‘It
was meant for my guest! Thou wouldst have poisoned
him.’

‘Mercy!’ shrieked the creature, through his filthy
mask. ‘O lord, mercy!’

The girl, risen in her place, stood panting as if she had
been running. She had voice no more than to gasp
across, ‘Bernardo! For the love of God! Bernardo!’
and that was all.

‘No mercy, beast!’ thundered Carlo. ‘Down with thee
to hell unshriven!’

His strenuous lifted arm was caught in a baby grasp.

‘Carlo! forbear! The right is mine! Give me the
knife! Nay, I am the stronger!’

With the blood-lust halted in him for one moment, the
powerful creature turned upon his puny assailant with a
roar:—

‘The stronger! Thou!’

Nevertheless he rose, though he held the reptile
crushed under his foot, while the company, landlord and
all, stood huddled aghast. His breast was heaving like
the pulse of a volcano.

‘The knife!’ he gurgled hoarsely; ‘well, the right is
thine, as thou sayest. Take it—under with thee,
dog!—and drive in.’

Bembo seized and flung the dagger into the thick of
the vines; then threw himself on his knees, and, with all
his strength, tore the heavy foot from its victim.

‘Narcisso,’ he said, ‘is it true? wouldst have slain
Love! Ah, fool, not to know that Love is immortal!’

‘Now, Christ in heaven,’ roared Carlo, ‘if that shall
save him!’

Bernardo rose, and sprang, and cast himself upon his
breast, writhing his limbs about him.

‘Fly!’ he shrieked, ‘fly! while I hold him!’ Then to
Lanti: ‘Ah, dear, do not hurt me, who owe thee so much!’

The fallen scoundrel was quick to the opportunity.
He rose and fled, bloody and bemired, from the arbour.
Madonna, seeing him escape, sunk, with a fainting sigh,
upon her bench.

Carlo mouthed after his vanishing prey; yet he was
tender with his burden.

‘Love!’ he groaned: ‘Thou ow’st me? Not this—so
damned to folly! There, let go. He was but the
tool—and, for the rest——’

He glowered round.

‘Hush!’ said Bembo. ‘It is but the fruits of her
teaching. Blame not thy pupil, Carlo.’

‘My pupil!’

‘Is she Christ’s—or art thou? Love gives life, Carlo;
and all life is God’s, since Christ redeemed it.’

‘What then?’

‘Why, is not thine honour thy life?’

‘I would die at least to prove it.’

‘Alas! and thou hast dishonoured love, which is life,
which is God’s. Wouldst eat thy cake and have it, great
schoolboy?’

‘Pish! Art beyond me.’

‘Why, if love is life, and life is honour—ergo, love is
honour.’

‘Is it? I dare say.’

‘But thou must know it.’

‘I know nothing but that thou hast balked my
vengeance; and with that, and having exercised thy jaw,
let us go back to dinner.’

‘Domine, emitte tuam lucem!‘ sighed Bembo.

CHAPTER IV

Galeazzo Maria Sforza, third Duke of
Milan of his line, was very characteristically
engaged in a very characteristic room of his resplendent
castello of the Porta Giovia, which dominated the whole
city from the north-east. This room, buried like a
captivating lust in the heart of the Rocca, or inner
citadel of the castello, swarmed with those deft
procurers to the great, panders between Art and emotion,
who are satisfied, by contributing, each his share, to the
glorification of a sensual despotism, to partake a
rediffused flavour of its sum. They were poets, painters,
and musicians, sculptors and learned doctors, and every
one, despite his independent calling, a sycophant. Before
the power, central and paramount, which alone in their
particular orbit could amass within itself the total of
their lesser lights, they prostrated themselves as before a
God. It is so in all ages of man. He will contribute, of
choice, to the prosperous charity; he will lay his gifts at
the opulent shrine. The worldling, says Shakespeare,
makes his testament of more to much. ‘Ah! c’est le plus
grand roi du monde!‘ once cried Madame de Sévigné of
Louis XIV., who had danced with her. ‘He is the finest
gentleman I have ever seen!’ cried Johnson enthusiastically
at a later date, after an interview with Farmer
George; and though—perhaps because—the stout old
Colossus was as independent as reason itself, he spoke
the general moral. Professors were here, too, who did
not blush to proclaim the exalted scion of Condottieri,
the blood-lusting monster, the infernal atavism of Caligula,
for the first gentleman in Italy, or to prostitute their
erudition in his service.

It was Madonna Beatrice who had drawn that analogy,
and there was plenty of justification for it; as also, it
must be said, plenty of more immediate precedent for
the abominations of this Galeazzo. If, like the
grand-matricidal Roman, he had poisoned his mother, the
Visconti, his predecessors, with their atrocious
blood-profanations and exaltations of bastardy, were responsible
for the conditions which had made so dreadful an act
conceivable. If, emulating Caligula’s treatment of frail
vestals, he had buried alive some too-accommodating
virgin of the cloister, whom he had first debauched, he
could quote the Visconti precedent of carnality indulged
till it became a very ecstasy of fiend-possession. Between
old Rome and modern Milan, indeed, there was little to
prefer. Caligula used to throw spectators in the theatres
to the beasts, having first torn out the tongues of his
victims, lest his ears should be offended by their articulate
appeals. Bernabo Visconti and his brother, with whom
he shared the duchy, agreed upon an edict subjecting
State criminals to a scale of tortures which was calculated
to culminate in death in not less than forty days.
Giovanni Maria and Filippo Maria, last of the accursed race,
organised man-hunts in the streets of their capitals, and
fed their hounds on human flesh.

To starve his victims to death, and, when they complained
(it was an age of practical jokes), to stuff their
mouths with filth, was a pet sport with Galeazzo. Once,
for a wretch who had killed a hare, a crime unpardonable,
he procured a death of laughable, unspeakable torment
by forcing him to devour the animal, bones and fur and all.

It is enough. They were all madmen, in fact, moral
abortions of that ‘breeding-in’ of demi-gods which sows
the world with chimeras. It is not good for any man to
be subject to no government but his own, and least of all
when a vicious heredity has imposed a sickness on his
reason. Blood affinities on the near side of incest, power
unquestioned, unbridled self-indulgences—these are no
progenitors of temperance and liberality. Amongst
savages, generations of inter-marryings will but refine
exquisitely on savagery; and the despots of this era
were little more than the last expressions of a decadent
barbarism. Galeazzo, and such as Galeazzo, were, it is
true, to project the long shadows of their lusts and
cruelties over the times forthcoming; yet it is as certain
that with him the limits of the worst were reached, and
hereafter peoples and rulers were to grow to some
common accord of participation in the enlightenments of
their ages.

One might have fancied in him, in his apparent reachings
to foreclose on such a state, to appropriate to himself
not its moral but its material accessories, some uneasy
premonition of the truth. He stood on the line of
partition, his sympathies with the past, his greed for the
opulent future, and, hesitating, was presently to drop
between. That paradox of the lusts of savagery and the
lusts of intellect hobnobbing in the individual, which
characterised so many of his contemporaries, cried aloud
in him. He was superstitious and a sceptic. Like
Malatesta of Rimini—who could enshrine beneath the
shadow of one glorious church the bones of a favourite
mistress and those of an admired heathen philosopher
which he had brought expressly from Greece for the
purpose—he would make a compromise between
Paganism and Christianity. He worshipped God and the
devil, as if his arrogance halted at nothing short of
reconciling two equal but antagonistic powers. He
surrounded himself with monks and infidels; acclaimed
impartially an illuminated psalter or a painting for a
bagnio, a Roman canticle or a hymn to the Paphian
Venus; sobbed in the soft throbbings of a lute, and went
sobbing to witness a captive’s torturing; conceived
himself an enlightened patron of the arts, and, in a mad
caprice, ordered his craftsmen, under penalty of instant
death, to paint and hang with portraits of the ducal
family in a single night a hall of the castello. He groped
and grovelled in bestiality; founded a library and peopled
a university with erudition; encouraged profligacy and
printing; was covetous and lavish, and splendid as the
clusters of diamonds on a Jewess’s unclean fingers.
His palaces swarmed with cutthroats and physicians,
philosophers and empirics, pimps and theologians,
heaven-commissioned artists and pope-commissioned agents for
indulgences, who would sell one absolution beforehand
for the foulest excesses in lust or violence. His crowded
halls were the very stage of the ante-renaissance, where
the priest, the poisoner, the romantic hero and the sordid
villain, the flaunting doxy and the white dove of innocence,
rubbed shoulders with the scene-painter and conductor
in a disordered rehearsal of the melodrama to come.
And so we alight on him in this Rocca, sinister and
lonely, the protagonist of the piece to which he was in a
little to supply the most tragic dénouement.

He lay sunk back in pillows on a couch set in an
alcove high and apart. One long, jewelled hand caressed
the head of a boarhound. Judged by the swift code of
his times, he was already mature, a sage of thirty-one.
His eyes were small and deep-seated under gloomy
thatches, his forehead narrow and receding, his cheeks
ravenous, his nose was hooked. But in contrast with
this pinched hunger of feature were the bagging chin
and sensual neck, as well as the grossness of the body,
which attenuated into feeble legs. One could not look
on him and gather from crown to foot the assurance of
a single generous youthful impulse. The curse of an
inherited despotism had wrinkled him from his birth.

An effeminate luxury, which was presently to make
Milan a byword among the austerer principalities, spoke
in his dress. His short-skirted tunic, puff-shouldered,
and pinched and pleated at the waist within a
gem-encrusted girdle, was of Damascene silk, rose-coloured
and lined with costliest fur. His hose were of white
satin; his slippers, of crimson velvet, sparkled with
rosettes of diamonds and rubies. On his head he wore
a cap of maintenance, also of red velvet, and sewn with
pearls; and a short jewelled dagger hung at his waist.

By his side, a very foil to his magnificence, stood one
in a sad-coloured cloak. This was Lascaris, a Greek
professor, whom he had invited to Milan for his learning,
and used, like Pharaoh, to expound him his dreams.
For he was subject to evil dreams, was this
Galeazzo—hauntings and visions which wrought in him that state
that he would become a very madman if so little as the
shadow of an opposition crossed his imagination. And
even now such a mood was working in him, as he lounged
darkly conning the life of the hall from his eyrie.

That was a deep, semi-domed alcove, approached from
the main chamber by a short avenue of square-sided
pillars, and roofed with a mosaic of ultramarine and gold,
into which were wrought the arms of the Sforzas and
Viscontis, the lilies of France and the red cross of Savoy.
Entablatures of white marble carved into bas-reliefs filled
the inter-columniations of this approach; while the pillars
themselves, of dark green panels inlaid on white, were
sprayed and flowered with exquisite mouldings in gold.
The capitals, blossoming crowns of gilt foliage and marble
faces, supported a white cornice, which at the alcove’s
mouth ran down into twin fluted shafts, between which
rose a shallow flight of steps to a sort of dais or shrine
within. And thence, from a carved marble bench,
Galeazzo looked down on the soft surging motley of
the throng in the hall below.

Every sound there was instinctively subdued to the
occasion: the laughter of girls, the thrum of lutes, the
ring of steel and rustle of silk. Not so much as a
misdirected glance, even, would venture to appropriate to
the company’s cynic merriment the figure of a solitary
captive, who stood bound and guarded at the foot of the
dais. Yet it was plain that this captive felt the enforced
forbearance, and mocked it with a bitterer cynicism than
its own.

He was a small, ill-formed, harsh-featured man, very
soberly dressed, and with a cropped head—a feature
sufficiently disdainful of the bushed and elaborately waved
locks of those by whom he was surrounded. Lean-throated
and short-sighted, his face was a face to scorn
falsehood without loving truth, a face the mouthpiece of
dead languages for dead languages’ sake, a face the
contemner of the present just because it was the present
and alive. As he stood, loweringly phlegmatic as any
caged hate, his peering eyes and snarling lip would
occasionally lift themselves together, not towards the
glittering lord of destinies on the dais, but towards his
henchman, the Greek, who would answer the challenge
with a stare of serene and opulent contempt. And so a
long interval of silence held them opposed.

Suddenly the Duke stirred from his black reverie, his
lips sputtering little inarticulate blasphemies. His knee
peevishly dismissing the hound, he gripped an arm of
the bench, and turning gloomily on Lascaris, uttered
the one impatient word, ‘Well?’

The Greek, temporising for the moment, inclined his
smooth, black-bearded face, so that the oily essence on
his hair, which was foppishly crimped and snooded, was
wafted to the Sforza nostrils, offending their delicacy.
Galeazzo, momentarily repelled, rallied to a harsher
frown, and demanded: ‘The fruit, man, the fruit of all
this meditation? Jesu! it should be rotten-ripe by
its smell!’

Lascaris expanded his chest, unoffended, and, caressing
his beard, answered impassively:—

‘Thou questionest of this vision, Theosutos? I
answer, How many changes can be rung on a carillon
of eight bells? By such measure shalt thou imagine,
an thou canst, the changes possible to the myriad of
particles that go to the composition of a single human
eye. Now, in the unthinkable dispersements and
readjustments of Infinity, shall it not sometimes happen
that two particles, or two thousand particles, or two
billion particles, out of the sum of particles which were
that eye, shall chance together again, and recover,
because of that meeting, some very ancient, very remote
impression which they once absorbed in common?
These, Theosutos, be the ghosts, haphazard, indefinable,
visible to one and unseen of all the rest, which make
the solitary seer; these be the lonely hauntings of the
ages—dust blown over desolate places, to commingle
a moment at some cross roads, and weave a phantom
wreath of memory, and so again be cast and scattered
among the cycles. Thy vision is but a shadow of old
dead years.’

An ill-repressed stutter of laughter from the prisoner
at the foot of the steps greeted the finish of this
exegesis. Lascaris flushed scarcely perceptibly. The
Duke took no more notice of man or sound than he
would have of a whimpering dog. Once or twice he
stammered an oath, gnawing his finger, and frowning
up, and down, and up again at the Greek. Finally he
broke out, in a fury:—

‘Now, by the Host, thou consolest me—now, by the
Host! To reconcile to this spectre by arguing it
perpetual! To——’

Grinding his teeth, he clipped his long fingers on the
bench arm, as if he were about to spring. Lascaris
forestalled him with a placid word:—

‘Not perpetual. The mood invokes these shadows,
as the mood shall lay them.’

Galeazzo snarled.

‘The mood! What mood, fool? You shift and shift.
God! it will be the mood of the mood next. Hast thou
no master-key to all? Go to, then!’

He sank back into his cushions, glooming and panting.
The sleek olive mask of the face near him yielded no
sign of perturbation.

Gradually a very deadly expression came to usurp in
the Duke’s eyes that blinder madness of desperation.
An indolent smile relaxed his features. He yawned,
it was because, the soul horror being temporarily
withdrawn, the incontinent devil was supplanting in him
the tempestuous one. He rolled lazily about, addressing
his creature once more:—

‘You doctors—all the same! Big words to little cures.
Treat a State’s constitution or a man’s—’tis the word’s the
thing. Ye woo not the truth, but her raiment. Hear’st
me? I had a tutor once, a crabbed fellow called Montano.’

He yawned again. The prisoner below (Cola Montano
himself) gasped slightly, and shot one stealthy glance
his way. Lascaris sniggered.

‘Surely, lord,’ he said, ‘we need no reminding while
the man himself keeps his tongue.’

A half-suppressed snarl broke from the prisoner.
Galeazzo, hunched on his cushions, stared vacantly
before him.

‘Ah!’ he said, ‘he could talk. I remember him, a
midwife to the wind—as ye all be—as ye all be. What
of the fellow?’

Lascaris wondered.

‘Little, in truth, Magnificence, save in so far as your
Magnificence was pleased to introduce his name.’

‘Did I? I had forgot. What was the connection?
Empty words, was it not, and vainglory and presumption?’

‘And discontent. Add it thereto, Illustrious.’

‘Discontent? Of what? The man prospers, I understand,
on his school of all the virtues. Discontent?
Why, hath he not risen to that independence of power
that he dares lampoon his prince? Discontent?’

‘Like Alexander, thou standest in his light, Theosutos.’

‘Discontent?’

‘Ay, that he should be twitted with having schooled
a despot.’

‘Why, true; he taught me how to score a lesson with
a scourge. My shoulders could tell.’

‘Gods! did he dare?’

‘He dared. ‘Twas a fellow of Roman mettle.’

‘He would dare more now.’

‘What?’

‘A republic, so they say.’

‘Ah! he should be the man for visions—a seer, an
exorcist.’

‘Short-sighted for a seer, Illustrious. The man
cannot see the length of his own nose.’

‘Yet may he see far. I would he were here.’

The prisoner, wrought at last beyond self-control,
turned on the Greek and squirted a little shriek of
venom—

‘Yet through and through thee, thou loathsome,
envious pimp!’

Then he whipped upon the other—

‘And why not a republic, Galeazzo? Thy father
Francesco was a republican at heart, else had he never
given his son’s leading-strings into my hands. There
was a confederacy dreamed of in his day—Genoa, Milan,
and Venice; Florence, Sienna, and Bologna. One
rampart to the rolling Alps, one wall on which barbarian
hordes might burst and waste themselves in foam.
Northwards, a baffled sea; south, all Italy a tranquil
haven, a watered garden, where knowledge with all its
flowers should find space, and breathing-space to grow.
Dost thou love Italy? Then why not a republic,
Galeazzo?’

The Duke, as utterly impassive as if he were deaf,
turned musingly to Lascaris.

‘I heard one talk once,’ said he, ‘of a confederacy of
republics, as who should say, An army all serfs. Words!
The tails must obey the heads. Every ox knows it.’

‘Saving the frog-ox,’ giggled the Greek, ‘who bursts
himself in emulation.’

‘Ah!’ murmured the Duke, ‘the frog-ox: see us tickle
his self-puffery.’

He feigned to catch sight all at once of Montano.
His eyes opened wide in astonishment: he held out his
hands.

‘What!’ he cried, ‘the man of visions! the very man!
Come hither, old friend. I was but now speaking of thee.’

His guards permitting him, Montano sullenly mounted
the steps, and stood facing the tyrant. His arms hung
very plainly fettered before him; but the other never
took his languid, smiling eyes from his face.

‘Galeazzo,’ said the scholar, harsh and quick, ‘I did
not write the epigrams; but no matter. You seek to
make an example; I submit myself. It is the despot’s
part to lay hands on order and sobriety. Despatch,
then. Thou wilt serve my ends better than thine own.
Every blow to freedom is a link gone from thy mail.’

The Duke listened to him as if in bland wonder.

‘Epigrams! An example!’ he exclaimed. ‘O, surely
there is some mistake here.’

The thick brows of the prisoner contracted over his
leaden eyes. He set his teeth, breathing between them.
Galeazzo appealed to Lascaris:—

‘Know’st aught of this?’

The Greek shook his head ineffably, licking his lips.

‘No,’ said Galeazzo, ‘nor is it conceivable that my
old friend and reprover should condescend to that
meaner scourge. Jesu! for one of his learning and
condition to incur the fate of the common lampooner.
Why, I mind me how one was invited to a ragout minced
of his own tongue.’

‘Yes, Illustrious.’

‘And another to having his couplets scored in steel
on the soles of his feet.’

‘Yes, Illustrious.’

‘And yet another to boiling eggs under his arm-pits,
since he was clever at hatching those winged epigrams’—he
turned smoothly again to the tutor—’but not clever,
as thou art, at reforming constitutions.’

He fell back, with a sleek and hateful smile; then,
sighing suddenly, advanced his body again.

‘I am troubled, Montano, I am troubled, and, since
you chance to be here——’

He yielded the explanation to Lascaris.

‘I weary of relating. Tell him of my symptoms,
thou’—and he sunk once more into his cushions.

The Greek diagnosed, his shifty eyes refusing to
encounter the hard inquisition of the other’s:—

‘His Magnificence is of late ever conscious of a face
behind him, mournful and threatening. And still, if
he turns to challenge it, it is behind him; and still
behind, maddening him with a thought of something he
can never overtake.’

Galeazzo fixed his burning eyes on the prisoner, as
if, through all his mockery, the hunger of a hopeless
hope betrayed his soul.

‘Canst thou strike it away,’ he whispered hoarsely,
‘or at least tell me what it is?’

Montano growled:—

‘Ghosts, and dead years, and eye-particles! This
trash of pseudo-science—a saltimbanco braying in a
doctor’s skin! Less licence, Galeazzo, and more
exercise—’tis all contained in that. This vision is but a
swimming blot of bile.’

He was really half-deceived, half-convinced. The
Duke seemed to listen reassured, then slowly rose,
and, with an ingratiatory smile, patted his erst tutor’s
shoulder.

‘Old honest friend,’ he said, ‘and ever true to the
Roman in thee! Thou hast spoken as one might expect.
Bile, is it—bile? and little wonder in this upset of
constitutions. Ebbene! we will take instant means to throw
it off.’

He made a sign to the chief of the guard below.

‘Andrea!’

Lascaris slunk back with a little gloating smile. The
officer brought up his men about Montano. The Duke
murmured softly:—

‘Take good Messer Cola, and—’ he paused a little,
gazing winningly into his captive’s surprised, splenetic
face—’and have him soundly flogged before the
gate-house—to the bone, Andrea, tell Messer Jacopo.’

Before the luring treachery of this stroke the prisoner
stood for one moment shocked, aghast. The next, as
the guard seized him, he broke into a storm of vituperations
and blasphemies, calling upon all the gods of Rome
to protect him from a monster. Andrea crushed his
mailed hand down on his writhing lips; he was dragged
away struggling and screaming. As he disappeared
Galeazzo descended mincingly to the hall, bent on
pursuing the show. A cloud of courtiers, male and female
flocked, like rooks following a plough, in his wake. As
he left the citadel and was crossing the outer ward, two
ladies—one a young woman in her late twenties; the
other a slim, pale girl of thirteen—broke from a group
of attendants, and came, wreathed in one embrace, to
accost him. The elder, looking in his face with a certain
questioning anxiety, spoke him with a propitiatory smile
and sigh:—

‘Galeazino, O thou little sweetest burden on my heart!’

The endearment was really an inquiry, a warning; for
there was a foreboding madness in his eyes. He made
as if he would have struck her from his path. Her child
companion caught his wrist with a merry cry:—

‘My little father, whither sportest thou without thy
women?’

He changed the direction of his hand and flipped the
younger’s cheek.

‘Come, then, chuck,’ said he. ‘There is a frolic toward
that will speed an idle hour.’

She caught up her skirts and followed him, as did the
other, but less closely.

The gatehouse commanded from its battlements an
open panorama of the town as far as the piazza of the
duomo. Immediately to its front, in a bare extended
space, stood the whipping-post, a stout beam set on end
on a stage and furnished with hooks and chains. Already
on the ground beside this (by preconcerted arrangement
indeed) was a certain functionary, much respected of
Milan. This was Messer Jacopo, the high court
executioner—one, by virtue of his dealings in blood, almost on
an equality with the master herald himself. Immobile
and voiceless, he stood there like a model in an armoury.
A short shirt of mail, and over it a scarlet jerkin with a
plain dagger at the waist; hose of sober grey; a bonnet
and shoes of black velvet, the first adorned with a red
quill, the second with red rosettes; gorget and steel
gauntlets—such was the whole of Messer Jacopo, save
for the wooden, inessential detail of his face and its fixed
eyes of glass. There was something painfully human,
by contrast, in his understrappers, two or three of whom
stood at hand in leathern aprons—men of a rich, moist
physique and greasy palms, and jocund, slaughter-house
expression. These were on bantering terms with the
mob, with all that loose raff of the neighbourhood, which
had come streaming and pushing and chattering to
witness the sport. It was not often that the rats of the
quarter Giovia had a master of philosophy to desert.

They had not long to wait. Almost simultaneously a
little surging group appeared at the gates, and a throng
of gay heads above the ramparts. The jostle and
delighted whisper went among the crowd. What
proportion would the scourging of a prince’s tutor bear to
the punishment it avenged? It surely would not be
allowed to lose by procrastination. They craned their
necks to catch an early sight of the victim. One of the
assistants whipped experimentally through his fingers a
thick, cruel thong of bullock-hide. It clacked a dry
tongue.

‘Be quiet, thirsty one,’ he cried boisterously. ‘In a
moment thou shalt drink thyself to a sop.’

Up on the ramparts the ladies, with bright, inquisitive
eyes, stood by their lord. The girl Catherine, petted
love-child of her father, hugged confidingly to his arm.

‘Padre mio,’ she said, ‘how sweet the world looks from
here! I could fancy we were all Lazaruses, laughing
down on that wicked Dives!’

CHAPTER V

Messer Lanti and his party entered Milan, in
a very subdued mood, by the Gate of Saint Mark.
It had been with an emotion beyond words that Bembo
had found himself approaching the walls of this fair city
of his dreams. The prosperous contado, watered in every
direction by broad dykes; the clustering vines and saintly-hued
olive gardens; the busy peasantry; the richness of
the very wayside shrines, had all appeared to speak a
content and holiness with which the perverse passions of
men were at such bitter variance. The discrepancy
confounded, as it was presently upon a fuller experience to
inspire, him. Here in one land, incessantly jostling and
reacting on one another, were a devotional and a sensuous
fervour, both exhibiting a lust of beauty at fever-heat;
were a gross superstition and an excellent reason;
were a powerful priestcraft and a jeering scepticism—all
drawing from the forehead of a Papacy, which,
latterly pledged to the most unscrupulous temporal
self-aggrandisement, was reverenced for the vicarship
of a poor and celibate Christ. Issuing, equipped with
an artless conventual purpose, from the cool groves of
his cloister, he found a land dyed in blood and the
blue of heaven, festering under God’s sun, and rejoicing
in the colour schemes of its sores. On what principle
could he study to sweeten this paradox of a constitution,
where health was enamoured of disease? ‘Deus meus, in
te confido,’ he prayed, with hands clasped fervently upon
his breast; ‘Non erubescam, neque irrideant me inimici
mei! O Lord, give me the vision to find and show to
others a path through this beautiful wilderness!’

As the long walls of the town, broken at intervals into
turrets, broadened before him, violet against a deep,
cloudless sky, his ecstasy but increased—he held out his
arms.

‘O thou,’ he murmured, ‘that I have hungered for,
looking down on thee from the mountain of myrrh!
Until the day break and the shadows flee away!’

A little later, in a deep angle of the enceinte, they
came upon a gruesome sight. This was no less than the
Montmartre of Milan—a great stone gallows with
dangling chains, and tenanted—faugh! A cloud of winged
creatures rose as they approached, and scattered,
dropping fragments. It was the common repast, stuff of
rogues and pilferers—nothing especial. The ground
was trodden underneath, and Bembo shrieked to see two
white, stiff feet sticking from it. Lanti followed the
direction of his hand, and exclaimed with a moody
shrug:—

‘An assassin, Saint—nothing more. We plant them
like that, head down.’

‘Alive?’

‘O, of course!’

Bembo cried out: ‘These are not sons of God, but of
Belial!’ and passed on, with his head drooping. Carlo
turned to Beatrice, where she rode behind, and, without
a word, pointed significantly to the horrible vision. She
laughed, and went by unmoved.

In a little after they had all entered by the gate, and
the city was before them. Bembo, kindled against his
will, rose in his saddle and uttered an exclamation of
delight. Before his eyes was spread a white town with
blue water and upstanding cypresses—wedges of
midnight in midday. There were terraces and broad
flagged walks, and palaces and spacious loggias—fair
glooms of marble shaken in the spray of fountains.
From its cold, shadowless bridges to the heaped drift
of the duomo in its midst, there seemed no slur, but
those dark cypresses, on all its candid purity. It looked
like a city flushed under a veil of hoar frost, the glare of
its streets and markets and gardens subdued to one
softest harmony of opal.

Yet in quick contrast with this chill, sweet austerity,
glowed the burning life of it. In the distance, like
travelling sparks in wood ashes; nearer, flashing from
roof or balcony in harlequin spots of light; nearest of
all, a very baggage-rout of figures, fantastic,
chameleonic, an endless mutation and interflowing of blues,
and crimsons, and purples—tirelessly that life circulated,
the hot arterial blood which gave their tender hue to
those encompassing veins of marble.

It was on this drift of souls going by him, gay and
light, it seemed, as blown petals, that Bernardo gazed
with the most loving fondness. He pictured them all,
eager, passionate, ardent, moving about the business of
the Nature-God, propagating His Gospel of sweetness,
adapting to imperishable works the endlessly varying
arabesques of woods, and starry meadows, and running
clouds and waters—epitomising His System. He
admired these works, their beauty, their stability, their
triumphant achievement; though, in truth, his soul of
souls could conceive no achievement for man so ideal as
a world of glorious gardens and little abodes. But the
sun was once more in his heart, and heaven in his eyes.

The swallows stooped in the streets to welcome him:
‘Hail, little priest of the cloistered hills!’ The scent of
flowers offered itself the incense to his ritual; the
fountains leapt more merrily for his coming. ‘Love! love!’
sang the birds under the great eaves; ‘He will woo this
cruel world to harmlessness. Where men shall lead
with charity, all animals shall follow. The good fruits
ripen to be eaten; it is their love, their lust to be
consumed in joy. What lamb ever gave its throat to the
knife? The violet flowers the thicker the more its
blossoms are ravished. What new limb ever budded on
a maimed beast?’

‘Ah! the secret,’ sang Bembo’s soul—’the secret, or the
secret grievance, of the cosmos will yield itself only to
love. Useless to try to wrench forth its confession by
torture. Let retaliation spell love, for once and for ever,
and to the infinite sorrows of life will appear at last their
returned Redeemer.’

His heart was full as they rode by the narrow streets.
His eyes and ears were tranced with colour, the murmur
of happy voices, the clash of melodious bells. He could
not think of that late vision of horror but as a dream.
These blithe souls, in all their moods and worships such
true apostles of his gay, sweet God! They could not
love or practise harshness but as a deterrent from things
unnameable. The very absence of sightseers from that
pit of scowling death proved it.

And then, in a moment, they had debouched upon an
open place overlooked by a massive fortress, and in its
midst, the cynosure of hundreds of gloating eyes, was a
human thing under the flail—a voice moaning from the
midst of a red jelly.

His heart sunk under a very avalanche. He uttered
a cry so loud as to attract the attention of the spectators
nearest.

‘Who is it? What hath he done?’ he roared of one.
‘Trampled on the Host? Defiled a virgin of the mother?
Murdered a priest?’

The face puckered and grinned.

‘Worse, Messer Cavalier. He once whipped the Duke
when his tutor.’

Bembo’s whole little body braced itself to the spring.

‘Tutor!’ he cried: ‘is that, then, Cola Montano?’

The gross eye winked—

‘What is left of it.’

He was answered with a leap and rush. The mob at
that point staggered, and bellowed, and fell away from
the hoofs of a furious assailant. Carlo, pre-admonished,
was already on the boy’s flank. ‘Stop, little lunatic!’
he shouted, sweating and spurring to intervene. He had
no concern for the feet he trampled or the ribs he bruised.
He stooped and snatched at the struggling horse’s bridle.
‘It is the Duke’s vengeance!’ he panted. ‘See him there
above! Art mad?’

A face, flushed as the face of Him who scourged the
hucksters from the temple, was turned upon him.

‘Art thou? Strike for retaliation by love, or get
behind!’

‘Know’st nothing of his deserts,’ cried Carlo. ‘Be
advised!’

‘By love,’ cried the boy. ‘He is worthy of it—a good
man—I carry a letter to him from my father. Fall back,
I say.’

He drove in his heels, and the horse plunged and
started, tearing the rein from Lanti’s grasp. It was true
that Bembo bore this letter, among others, in his pouch.
The Abbot of San Zeno was so long out of the world
as to have miscalculated the durations of court favour.
Cola had been an influence in his time.

‘Devil take him!’ growled Carlo; but he followed,
scowling and slashing, in his wake. The mob, authorised
of its worst humour, took his truculence ill. That
reduced him to a very devilish sobriety. He began to
strike with an eye to details, ‘blazing’ his passage
through the throng. The method justified itself in the
opening out of a human lane, at the end of which he saw
Bembo spring upon the stage.

The executioner was cutting deliberately, monotonously
on, and as monotonously the voice went moaning.
Messer Jacopo, standing at iron ease beside, took no
thought, it seemed, of anything—least of all of
interference with the Duke’s will. It must have been,
therefore, no less than an amazing shock to that
functionary to find himself all in an instant stung and
staggered by a bolt from the blue. He may have been,
like some phlegmatic serpent, conscious of a hornet
winging his way; but that the insect should have had it
in its mind to pounce on him!

He found himself and his voice in one metallic
clang:—

‘Seize him, men!’

Carlo panted up, and Jacopo recognised him on the
moment.

‘Messer Lanti! Death of the Cross! Is this the
Duke’s order?’

‘Christ’s, old fool!’ gasped the cavalier. ‘Touch him,
I say, and die. I neither know nor care.’

His great chest was heaving; he whipped out his
sword, and stood glaring and at bay. Bembo had thrown
himself between the upraised thong and its quivering
victim. He, too, faced the stricken mob.

‘Christ is coming! Christ is coming!’ he shrieked.
‘Prepare ye all to answer to Him for this!’

A dead silence fell. Some turned their faces in terror.
Here and there a woman cried out. In the midst, Messer
Jacopo raised his eyes to the battlements, and saw a
white hand lifted against the blue. He shrugged round
grumpily on his fellows.

‘Unbind him,’ he said; and the whip was lowered.

The poor body sunk beside the post. Bembo knelt,
with a sob of pity, to whisper to it—

‘Courage, sad heart! He comes indeed.’

The livid and suffering face was twisted to view its
deliverer.

‘Escape, then,’ the blue lips muttered, ‘while there is
time.’

Bembo cried out: ‘O, thou mistakest who I mean!’

The face dropped again.

‘Never. Christ or Galeazzo—it is all one.’

A hand was laid on the boy’s shoulder. He looked up
to find himself captive to one of the Duke’s guard. A
grim little troop, steel-bonneted and armed with
halberts, surrounded the stage. Messer Lanti, dismounted,
had already committed himself to the inevitable. He
addressed himself, with a laugh, to his friend:—

‘Very well acquitted, little Saint,’ said he—’of all but
the reckoning.’

Bembo lingered a moment, pointing down to the
bleeding and shattered body.

“‘And there passed by a certain priest,”‘ he cried,
‘”and likewise a Levite; but a Samaritan had compassion
on him,”‘ and he bowed his head, and went down with
the soldiers.

Now, because of his beauty, or of the fear or of the
pity he had wrought in some of his hearers, for whatever
reason a woman or two of the people was emboldened to
come and ask the healing of that wounded thing; and
they took it away, undeterred of the executioners, and
carried it to their quarters. And in the meanwhile,
Bembo and his comrade were brought before the Duke.

Galeazzo had descended from the battlements, and sat
in a little room of the gatehouse, with only a few,
including his wife and child, to attend him. And his
brow was wrinkled, and the lust of fury, beyond
dissembling, in his veins. He took no notice of
Lanti—though generally well enough disposed to the bully—but
glared, even with some amazement in his rage, on the boy.

‘Who art thou?’ he thundered at length.

‘Bernardo Bembo.’

The clear voice was like the call of a bird’s through
tempest.

‘Whence comest thou?’

‘From San Zeno in the hills.’

‘What seek’st thou here?’

‘Thy cure.’

The Duke started, and seemed actually to crouch for a
moment. Then, while all held their breath in fear, of
a sudden he fell back, and gripped a hand to his heart,
and muttered, staring: ‘The face!’

He closed his eyes, and passed a tremulous hand
across his brow before he looked again; and lo! when
he did so, the madness was past.

‘Child,’ he said hoarsely, almost whispered, ‘what
said’st thou? Come nearer: let me look at thee.’

He rose himself, with the word, stiffly, like an old man,
and stood before the boy, and gazing hungrily for a little
into the solemn eyes, dropped his own as if
abashed—half-blinded. In the background, Bona, his wife, and the
child Catherine clung together in a silence of fear and
wonder.

‘Ah, I am haunted!’ shuddered the tyrant. ‘Who
told thee that? It is a face, child, a face—there—in the
dead watches of the night—behind me—and by day,
always the same, a damned clinging bur on my soul—not
to be shaken off—always behind me!’

He gave a little jerk and motion of repugnance, as if
he were trying to throw something off. Carlo struck in:
‘Lord, let him sing to thee! I say no more.’

The deep, gloomy eyes of the Duke were lifted one
instant to the strange seraph-gaze fixed silently upon
him; then, making an acquiescent motion with his hand,
he turned, and sat himself down again as if exhausted,
and hid his brow under his palm.

Now the boy, never looking away, slung forward his
lute, and like one that charms a serpent, began softly to
finger the strings. And Galeazzo’s head, in very truth
like an adder’s, swung to the rhythm; and as the chords
rose piercing, he clutched his brow, and as they melted
and sobbed away, so did he sink and moan. And then,
suddenly, into that wild symphony drew the voice, as a
spray of sweetbriar is drawn into a wheel; and all around
caught their breath to listen:—

‘Two children, a boy and girl, were playing between wood and meadow.

They pledged their faith, each to the other, with rosy lips on lips,

He to protect, she to trust—always together for ever and ever.

A storm rose: the dragon of the thunder roared and hissed,

Probing the earth with its keen tongue.

How she cowered, the pretty, fearful thing!

Yet adored her little love to see him dare

That tree-cleaving monster with his sword of lath.

And in the end, because she trusted in her love, her love prevailed,

And drove the roaring terror from the woods.

She never felt such faith, nor he such pride of virtue in his strength.

Then shone out the rainbow,

And he bethought him of the jewelled cup hid at its foot.

“Stay here,” quoth he, new boldened by his triumph,

“And I’ll fetch it ye.”

But she cried to him: “Nay, leveling, take me too!

We were to be aye together: O leave me not behind!”

But he was already on his way.

And still, as he pursued, the rainbow fled before,

And the voice of his playmate, faint and fainter, followed in his wake:

“O leave me not behind!”

Then grew he wild and desperate, clutching at that mirage,

the unattainable,

The lustrous cup that was to bring him happiness in its possession.

And the voice blew ghostly in his wake, mingling with rain and

the whirl of dead leaves:

“Leave me not behind!”

But now the fire of unfulfilment seared his brain,

And often he staggered in the slough,

Or fell and cut himself on rocks.

And so, pushing on half-blindly,

Knew not at last from the dead rainbow the ignis fatuus,

The false witch-light that danced upon his path,

Leading him to destruction. Until, lo!

With a flash and laugh it was not,

And he awoke to a mid-horror of darkness—

Night in the infernal swamps—

Blind, crawling, desolate; and for ever in his heart

The weeping shadow of a voice, “O leave me not behind!”

Then at that, like one amazed, he turned,

And cried in agony: “Innocenza, my lost Innocence,

Where art thou? O, little playmate, follow to my call!”

And there answered him only from the gates of the sunset a

heart-broken sigh.’

 

He ended to a deep silence, and, while all stood
stricken between tears and expectancy, moved to within
a pace of the Duke.

‘O prince!’ he cried, ‘haunted of that Innocence!
Turn back, turn back, and find in thy lost playmate’s
face the ghost that now eludes thee!’

Carlo gave a little gasp, and his hand shivered down to
his sword-hilt. He must die for his Saint, if provoked
to that martyrdom; but he would take a desperate
pledge or two of the sacrifice with him. One of the
women, the younger, watching him, knew what was in
his mind, and breathed a little scornfully. The other’s
eyes were set in a sort of rapture upon the singer’s face.
A minute may have passed, holding them all thus
suspended, when suddenly Galeazzo rose, and, throwing
himself at Bembo’s feet, broke into a passion of sobs
and moans.

‘Margherita, my little playmate, that liest under the
daisies. O, I will be good, sweet—I will be good again
for thy sake.’

CHAPTER VI

Many a head in the palace, though accustomed
witness of strange things, tossed on its pillow
that night in sleepless review of a scene which had been
as amazing in its singularity as it was potential in its
promise. What were to be the first-fruits of that
cataclysmic revulsion of feeling in a nature so habitually
frozen from all tenderness? If no more than a shy
snowdrop or two of reason, mercy, justice, pushing their
way up through a savage soil, the result would be marvel
enough. Yet there seemed somehow in the atmosphere
an earnest of that and better. The hearts of all trod on
tiptoe, fearful of waking their souls to disenchantment—agitated,
exultant; wooing them to convalescence from
an ancient sickness. The spring of a joyous hope was
rising voiceless somewhere in the thick of those drear
corridors. The f[oe]tid air, wafted through a healing
spray, came charged with an unwonted sweetness.
Whence had he risen, the lovely singing-boy, spirit of
change, harbinger of a new humanity? Whither had he
gone? To the Duke’s quarters—that was all they knew.
They had seen him carried off, persuaded, fondled,
revered by that very despot whom he had dared divinely
to rebuke, and the doors had clanged and the dream
passed. To what phase of its development, confirming
or disillusioning, would they reopen? The answer to
them was at least a respite; and that was an answer
sufficient and satisfying to lives that obtained on a
succession of respites. Alas! as there is no logic in tyranny,
so can there be none in those who endure it.

The earliest ratification of the promise was to witness
in the figure of the Duke coming radiant from his rooms
in company with the stranger himself, his left arm fondly
passed about the boy’s neck, his eyes full of admiration
and flattery. He felt no more discomfort, it appeared,
than had Madam Beatrice on a certain occasion, in the
thought of his late self-exposure before his creatures.
Such shamelessness is the final condition of autocracy.
He had slept well, untormented of his vision. As is the
case with neurotics, a confident diagnosis of his disease
had proved the shortest means to its cure. Clever the
doctor, too, who could make such a patient’s treatment
jump with his caprices; and with an inspired intuition
Bernardo had so manoeuvred to reconcile the two. A
whim much indulged may become a habit, and he was
determined to encourage to the top of its bent this whim
of reformation in the Duke. No ungrateful physicking
of a soured bile for him; no uncomfortable philosophy
of organic atoms recombined. He just restored to him
that long-lost toy of innocence, trusting that the
imagination of the man would find ever novel resources for play
in that of which the invention of the child had soon
tired. So for the present, and until virtue in his patient
should have become a second nature, was he resolved
wisely to eschew all reference to the intermediate state,
and only by example and analogy to win him to
consciousness and repentance of the enormities by which it
had been stained. A very profound little missionary, to
be sure.

The Duke, leaning on his arm as he strolled, had a
smile and a word for many. The only visible token of
his familiar self which he revealed was the arbitrariness
with which he exacted from all a fitting deference
towards his protégé. This, however, none, not the
greatest, was inclined to withhold, especially on such a
morning. Soft-footed cardinals, princes of the blood,
nobles and jingling captains, vied with one another in
obsequious attentions to our little neophyte of love. The
reasons, apart from superstitious reverence, were plentiful:
his sweetness, his beauty, his gifts of song—all warm
recommendations to a sensuous sociality; the whispered
romance of his origin, no less a patent in its eyes because
it turned on a title doubly bastard; finally, and most
cogently, no doubt, his political potentialities as a
favourite in posse.

This last reason above any other may have accounted
for the extraordinary complaisance shown him by Messer
Ludovico, the Duke’s third younger brother, at present
at court, who was otherwise of a rather inward and
withdrawing nature. He, this brother, had come from Pavia,
riding the final stage that morning, and though he had
only gathered by report the story of the last twelve
hours, thought it worth his while to go and ingratiate
himself with the stranger. He found him in the great
hall of the castello, awaiting the trial of certain causes,
which, as coming immediately under the ducal jurisdiction,
it was Galeazzo’s sport often to preside over in
person. Here he saw the boy, standing at his brother’s
shoulder by the judgment-seat—the comeliest figure,
between Cupid and angel, he had ever beheld; frank,
sweet, child-eyed—in every feature and quality, it would
seem, the antithesis of himself. Messer Ludovico came
up arm in arm, very condescendingly, with his excellency
the Ser Simonetta, Secretary of State, a gentleman
whom he was always at pains to flatter, since he intended
by and by to destroy him. Not that he had any personal
spite against this minister, however much he might
suspect him of misrepresenting his motives and character
to the Duchess Bona, his sister-in-law, to whom he,
Ludovico, was in reality, he assured himself, quite
attached. His policy, on the contrary, was always a
passionless one; and the point here was simply that the
man, in his humble opinion, affected too much reason and
temperance for a despotic government.

As he approached the tribune he uncapped, a thought
on the near side of self-abasement, to his brother, whose
cavalier acknowledgment of the salute halted him,
however, affable and smiling, on the lowest step of the dais.
He was studious, while there, to inform with the right
touch of pleasant condescension (at least while Galeazzo’s
regard was fixed on him) his attitude towards Simonetta,
lest the ever-suspicious mind of the tyrant should discover
in it some sign of a corruptive intimacy. With
heirs-possibly-presumptive in Milan, sufficient for the day’s
life must be the sleepless diplomacy thereof; and better
than any man Ludovico knew on what small juggleries
of the moment the continuance of his depended. His
complexion being of a swarthiness to have earned him
the surname of The Moor, he had acquired a habit of
drooping his lids in company, lest the contrastive effect
of white eyeballs moving in a dark, motionless face
should betray him to the subjects of those covert
side-long glances by which he was wont to observe unobserved.
Even to his shoulders, which were slightly rounded by
nature, he managed, when in his brother’s presence, to
give the suggestion of a self-deprecatory hump, as though
the slight burden of State which they already endured
were too much for them. His voice was low-toned; his
expression generally of a soft and rather apologetic
benignity. His manner towards all was calculated on a
graduated scale of propitiation. Paying every disputant
the compliment of deferring outwardly to his opinions,
he would not whip so little as a swineherd without
apologising for the inconvenience to which he was putting
him. His dress was rich, but while always conceived on
the subdominant note, so to speak, as implying the higher
ducal standard, was in excellent taste, a quality which he
could afford to indulge with impunity, since it excited no
suspicion but of his simplicity in Galeazzo’s crude mind.
In point of fact Messer Ludovico was a born connoisseur,
and, equally in his choice of men, methods, and tools, a
first exemplar of the faculty of selection.

Presently, seeing the Duke’s gaze withdrawn from him,
he spoke to Messer Simonetta more intimately, but still
out of the twisted corner of his mouth, while his eyes
remained slewed under their lids towards the throne:—

‘Indeed, my lord, indeed yes; ’tis a veritable
Castalidis, fresh from Parnassus and the spring. Tell me,
now—’tis no uncommon choice of my brother to favour a
fair boy—what differentiates this case from many?’

The secretary, long caged in office, and worn and
toothless from friction on its bars, had yet his ideals of
Government, personal as well as political.

‘Your Highness,’ said he, in his hoarse, thin voice,
‘what differentiates sacramental wine from Malvasia?’

‘Why,’ answered Ludovico, ‘perhaps a degree or two
of headiness.’

‘Nay,’ said the secretary, ‘is it not rather a degree or
two of holiness?’

‘Ebbene!’ said the other, ‘I stand excellently
corrected. (Your servant, Messer Tassino,’ he said, in
parenthesis, to a pert and confident young exquisite, who
held himself arrogantly forward of the group of
spectators. The jay responded to the attention with a
condescending nod. Ludovico readdressed himself to the
secretary.) ‘How neatly you put things! It is a degree
or two, as you say—between the intoxication of the spirit
and the intoxication of the senses. And is this pretty
stranger sacramental wine, and hath Heaven vouchsafed
us the Grael without the Quest? It is a sign of its high
favour, Messer Slmonetta, of which I hope and trust we
shall prove ourselves worthy.’

‘And I hope so, Highness,’ said the grave secretary.

‘Hush!’ whispered Ludovico. ‘The court opens.’

There was a little stir and buzz among the spectators
who, thronging the hall, left a semi-circle of clear space
about the dais; and into this, at the moment, a fellow in
a ragged gabardine was haled by a guard of city officers.
The Duke, seated above, stroked his chin with a glance
at the prisoner of sinister relish, which, on the thought,
he smoothed, with a little apologetic cough, into an
expression of mild benignancy. Messer Lanti, planted
near at hand amid a very parterre of nobles, envoys,
ecclesiastics, bedizened chères amies and great officers of
the court who supported their lord on the dais, sniggered
under his breath till his huge shoulders shook.

The Jew was charged with a very heinous offence—sweating
coins, no less. He was voluble and nasal over
his innocence, until one of the officers flicked him
bloodily on the mouth with his mailed hand.

‘Nay,’ said Bembo, shrinking; ‘that is to give the poor
man a dumb advocate, methinks.’

The Duke applauded—eliciting some louder applause
from Ludovico—and forbade the fellow sternly to strike
again without orders. A sudden sigh and movement
seemed to ripple the congregated faces and to subside.
The prisoner, however, was convicted, on sound enough
evidence, and stood sullen and desperate to hear his
sentence. Galeazzo eyed him covetously a moment; then
turning to a clerk of the court who knelt beside him
with his tablets ready, bade that obsequious functionary
proclaim the penalty which by statute obtained against
all coiners or defacers of the ducal image. It was bad
enough—breaking on the wheel—to pass without deadlier
revision; yet to such, and to the high will or caprice of
his lord, Master Scrivener humbly submitted it.

Then, to the dumfoundering of all, did his Magnificence
appeal, with a smile, to the little Parablist at his
shoulder:—

‘Mi’ amico; thou hearest? What say’st?’

‘Lord,’ answered Bernardo, in the soft, clear young
voice that all might hear like a bird’s song in the
stillness after rain, ‘this wretch hath defaced thy graven
image.’

‘It is true.’

‘What if, in a more impious mood, he had dared to
raise his hand against thyself?’

‘Ha! He would be made to die—not pleasantly.’

‘Is to be broken on the wheel pleasant?’

‘Well, the dog shall hang.’

‘Still for so little? Why, were he Cain he could pay
no higher. Valuest thy life, then, at a pinch of gold
dust? This is to put a premium on regicide.’

The Duke bit his lip, and frowned, and laughed
vexedly.

‘How now, Bernardino?’

‘Lord, I am young—a child, and without comparative
experience. I pray thee put this rogue aside, while we
consider.’

Galeazzo waved his hand, and the Jew, staring and
stumbling, was removed. Another, a creature gaunt and
wolfish, took his place. What had he done? He had
trodden on a hare in her form, and, half-killing, had
despatched her. Why? asked Bembo. To still her
telltale cries, intimated the wretched creature. Galeazzo’s
eyes gleamed; but still he called upon Heaven to
sentence. In such a case? Men glanced at one another
half terrified. Any portent, even of good, is fearful in
its rising. Bembo turned to the kneeling clerk.

‘Come, Master Scrivener! A little offence, in any
case, and with humanity to condone it.’

The frightened servant shook his head, with a glance
at his master. He murmured the worst he dared—that
the law exacted the extremest penalty from the
unauthorised killer of game. Bembo stared a moment
incredulous, then pounced in mock fury at the prisoner:—

‘Wretch! what didst thou with this hare?’

The hind had to be goaded to an answer.

‘Master, I ate it.’

‘What!’ cried the other—’a monster, to devour thy
prince’s flesh!’

‘God knows I did not!’

‘Nay, God is nothing to the law, which says you did.
Else why should it draw no distinction between the
crimes of harecide and regicide? Thou hast eaten of thy
prince.’

‘Well, if I have I have.’

‘Thou art anthropophagous.’

‘Mercy!’

‘No shame to thee—a lover of thy kind’ (the Saint
chuckled). ‘And no cannibal neither, since we have
made game of thy prince.’ He chuckled again, and
turned merrily on the Duke. ‘Is the hare to be prince,
or the prince hare? And yet, in either case, O Galeazzo,
I see no way for thee out of this thy loving subject’s
belly!’

The tyrant, half captivated, half furious, started
forward.

‘Give him,’ he roared—and stopped. ‘Give him,’ he
repeated, ‘a kick on his breach and send him flying.
Nay!’ he snarled, ‘even that were too much honour.
Give him a scudo with which to buy an emetic.’

Bembo smiled and sighed: ‘I begin to see daylight’;
and Ludovico, after laughing enjoyingly over his
brother’s pleasantry, exclaimed audibly to Simonetta:
‘This is the very wedding of human wit and divine. I
seem to see the air full of laughing cherubs having my
brother’s features.’

Now there brake into the arena one clad like an artificer
in a leathern apron; a sinewy figure, but eloquent,
in his groping hands and bandaged face, of some sudden
blight of ruin seizing prime. And he cried out in a
great voice:—

‘A boon, lord Duke, a boon! I am one Lupo, an
armourer, and thou seest me!’

‘Certes,’ said the Duke. ‘Art big enough.’

‘O lord!’ cried the shattered thing, ‘let me see
justice as plain with these blinded eyes.’

‘Well, on whom?’

‘Lord, on him that took me sleeping, and struck me
for ever from the rolls of daylight, sith I had cursed him
for the ruin of my daughter.’

Galeazzo shrugged his shoulders.

‘This thine assailant—is he noble?’

‘Master, as titles go.’

‘Wert a fool, then, to presume. He were like else to
have made it good to thee. Now, an eye for—’ but he
checked himself in the midst of the enormous blasphemy.

‘Judge thou, my guardian angel,’ he murmured meekly.

‘What!’ answered the boy, with a burning face,
‘needs this revision by Heaven?’ And he cried terribly:
‘Master armourer, summon thy transgressor!’

For a moment the man seemed to shrink.

‘Nay,’ cried the Saint, ‘thou need’st not. I see the
hand of God come forth and write upon a forehead.’ His
eyes sparkled, as if in actual inspiration. ‘Tassino!’
he cried, in a ringing voice.

(‘He heard me address him,’ thought Ludovico, curious
and watchful.)

At the utterance of that name, the whole nerve of the
audience seemed to leap and fall like a candle-flame.
Galeazzo himself started, and his lids lifted, and his
mouth creased a moment to a little malevolent grin.
For why? This Tassino, while too indifferent a skipjack
for his jealousy, was yet the squire amoroso, the lover
comme il faut to his own correct Duchess, Madam Bona.

A minute’s ticking silence was ended by the stir and
pert laugh of the challenged himself, as he left the ring
of spectators and sauntered into the arena. It was a
little showy upstart, to be sure, as ebulliently curled and
groomed as her Grace’s lap-dog, and sharing, indeed,
with Messer Tinopino the whole present caprice of their
mistress’s spoiling. His own base origin and inherent
vulgarity, moreover, seeming to associate him with the
ducal brutishness (an assumption which Galeazzo rather
favoured than resented), confirmed in him a self-confidence
which had early come to see no bounds to its
own viciousness or effrontery.

Now he cocked one arm akimbo, and stared with
insufferable insolence on the pronouncer of his name.

‘Know’st me, Prophet?’ bawled he. ‘Not more than
I thee, methinks. Wert well coached in this same
inspiration.’

‘Well, indeed,’ answered Bembo. ‘Thou hast said it.
It was God spake in mine ear.’

Tassino laughed scornfully. It was a study to see
these young wits opposed, the one such plated goods, the
other so silver pure.

‘In the name of this lying carle,’ he cried, ‘what
spake He?’

‘He said,’ said Bembo quietly, ‘”Let the false swearer
remember Ananias!”‘

Then in a moment he was all ruffled and combative,
like a young eagle.

‘Answer!’ he roared. ‘Didst thou this thing?’

Now, a woman-petted, cake-fed belswagger is too
much of an anomaly for the test of nerves. Tassino,
shouted at, gave an hysteric jump which brought him to
the very brink of tears. He was really an ill-bred little
coward, made arrogant by spoiling. He had the greatest
pity and tenderness for himself, and to any sense of his
being lost would always respond with a lump in his
throat. Now he suddenly realised his position, alone
and baited before all—no petticoat to fly to, no
sympathy to expect from a converted tyrant, none from a
mob which, habitually the butt to his viciousness, would
rejoice in his discomfiture. Actually the little beast
began to whimper.

‘Darest thou!’ he cried, stamping.

‘Didst thou this thing?’ repeated Bernardo.

‘It is no business of thine.’

‘Didst thou this thing?’

‘An oaf’s word against——’

‘Didst thou this thing?’

‘Lord Duke!’ appealed Tassino.

‘Didst thou this thing?’

The victim fairly burst into tears.

‘If I say no——’

‘Die, Ananias!’ shouted the Duke. His eyes gleamed
maniacally. He half rose in his chair. He seemed as if
furious to foreclose on a dénouement his superstition had
already anticipated. Tassino fell upon his knees.

‘I did it!’ he screamed.

The Duke sank back, his lips twitching and grinning.
Then he glanced covertly at Bembo, and rubbed his
hands together, with a motion part gloating, part
deprecatory. The Ser Ludovico’s eyes, shaded under his
palm, were very busy, to and fro. Bembo stood like
frowning marble.

‘The law, Master Scrivener?’ said he quietly.

The kneeling clerk murmured from a dry throat—

‘Holy sir, it takes no cognisance of these accidents.
The condescensions of the great compensate them.’

The Parablist, his lips pressed together, nodded gravely
twice or thrice.

‘I see,’ he said; ‘a condescension which ruins two lives.’

He addressed himself, with a deadly sweetness, to the Duke.

‘I prithee, who standest for God’s vicegerent, call up
the Jew to sentence.’

Jehoshaphat was produced, and placed beside the
blubbered, resentful young popinjay. The Saint
addressed him:—

‘Wretch, thou art convicted of the crime of defacing
the Duke’s image; and he at thine elbow of defacing
God’s image. Shall man dare the awful impiety to
pronounce the greater guilt thine? Yet, if it merits
death and mutilation, what for this other?’

He paused, and a stir went through the dead stillness
of the hall. Then Bembo addressed one of the tipstaves
with ineffable civility:—

‘Good officer, this rogue hath sweated coins, say’st?’

‘Ay, your worship,’ answered the man; ‘a hundred
gold ducats, if a lire. Shook ’em in a leathern bag, a’ did,
like so much rusted harness.’

Bembo nodded.

‘They are forfeit, by the token; and he shall labour to
provide other hundred, with cost of metal and stamping.’

Jehoshaphat, secure of his limbs, shrieked derisive—

‘God of Ishril! O, yes! O, to be sure! I can
bleed moneys!’

‘Nay,’ said the Saint, ‘but sweat them. Go!’

The coiner was dragged away blaspheming. He would
have preferred a moderate dose of the rack; but the
standard set by his sentence elicited a murmur of popular
approval. From all, that is to say, but Tassino, who saw
his own fate looming big by comparison. He rose and
looked about him desperately, as if he contemplated
bolting. The spectators edged together. He whinnied.
Suddenly the stranger’s voice swooped upon him like a
hawk:—

‘Man’s image shall be restored; restore thou God’s.’

The little wretch screamed in a sudden access of passion:—

‘I don’t know what you mean! Leave me alone.
It was his own fault, I say. Why did he insult me?’

‘Restore thou this image of God his sight,’ said Bembo
quietly.

‘You know I cannot!’

‘Thou canst not? Then an eye for an eye, as it was
spoken. Take ye this wicked thing, good officers, and
blind him even as he blinded the poor armourer.’

A vibrant sound went up from the spectators, and
died. Messer Ludovico veiled his sight, and, it might
be said, his laughter. Tassino was seen struggling and
crying in the half-fearful clutch of his gaolers.

‘Thou darest not! Dogs! Let me go, I say. What! would
ye brave Madonna? Lord Duke, lord Duke,
help me!’

‘To repentance, my poor Tassino,’ cried Galeazzo,
leaning lustfully forward. ‘I trow thy part on earth is
closed.’

The little monster could not believe it. This instant
fall from the heights! He was flaccid with terror as he
fell screeching on his knees.

‘Mercy, good stranger! Mercy, dear lord saint! The
terror! the torture! I could not suffer them and live.
O, let me live, I pray thee!—anywhere, anyhow, and I
will do all; make whatever restitution you impose.’

As he prayed and wept and grovelled, the Saint looked
down with icy pity on his abasement.

‘Restitution, Tassino!’ he cried, ‘for that murthered
vision, for that ruined virtue? Wouldst thou even in
thine impiousness arrogate to thyself such divine
prerogatives? Yet, in respect of that reason with which
true justice doth hedge her reprisals, the Duke’s mercy
shall still allot thee an alternative. Sith thou canst not
restore his honour or his eyes to poor Lupo, thou shalt
take his shame to wife, and in her seek to renew that
image of God which thou hast defaced. Do this, and
only doing it, know thyself spared.’

A silence of stupefaction fell upon the court. What
would Bona say to this arbitrary disposal of her pet,
made husband to a common gipsy he had debauched?
True, the sentence, by virtue of its ethical completeness,
seemed an inspiration. But it was a disappointment too.
None doubted but that the popinjay would subscribe to
the present letter in order to evade the practice of it by
and by. Already the paltry soul of the creature was
struggling from its submersion, gasping, and blinking
wickedly to see how it could retort upon its judge and
deliverer. It had been better to have trodden it under
for once and for good—better for the moral of the lesson,
as for all who foresaw some hope for themselves in the
crushing of an insufferable petty tyranny. Galeazzo
himself frowned and bit his nails. He would have lusted
to see heaven pluck off this vulgar burr for him. Only
his brother, sleek and smiling, applauded the verdict.
He had a far-seeing vision, had Ludovico, and perhaps
already it was alotting a more telling rôle to the little
aristocrat of San Zeno than had ever been played by the
cockney parvenu down in the arena.

Suddenly the Duke was on his feet, fierce and glaring.

‘Answer, dog!’ he roared; ‘acceptest thou the condition?’

Tassino started and sobbed.

‘Yes, yes. I accept. I will marry her.’

The Duke took a costly chain from his own neck, and
hung it about the shoulders of the Parablist.

‘Wear this,’ he said, ‘in earnest of our love and duty.’

Then he turned upon the mob.

‘These judgments stand, and all that shall be spoken
hereafter by our dear monitor and proctor. It is our
will. Make way, gentlemen.’

He took Bernardo’s arm and descended the steps. A
cloud of courtiers hovered near, acclaiming the boy Saint
and Daniel. Messer Ludovico saluted him with fervour.
He foresaw the millennium in this association of piety
with greatness. Galeazzo sneered.

‘Remember that three spoils company, brother,’ said
he. ‘Keep thou thine own confessor, and leave me mine.’

It was then only that Bernardo learned the rank of his
accoster.

‘Alas! sweet lord,’ said he, ‘is piety such a stranger
here that ye must entertain him like a king?’

The Duke laughed loudly and drew him on. He
was extravagant in his attentions to him—eager, voluble,
feverish. He would point out to him the lavish decorations
of his house—marbles, sculptures, paintings, the
rising fabric of a new era—and ask his opinion on all. A
word from the child at that period would have floored a
cardinal or a scaffolding, have clothed Aphrodite in a
cassock, have made a fête champêtre of all Milan, or
darkened its walls with mourning. Messer Lanti, following
in their wake, was amazed, and dubious, and savage
in turns. Earlier in the day the Duke had had from him
the whole story of his connection with the Parablist,
up to the moment of their interference in Montano’s
punishment.

‘Meschino me!‘ he had said, greatly laughing over
that episode; ‘yet I cannot but be glad that the old code
beat itself out on his back. ‘Twas a reptile well
served—a venomous, ungrateful beast. A mercy if it has
broken his fang.’

That remained to be seen; and in the meantime
Carlo, the old auxiliary in debauch, was taken again
into full favour. He accepted the condescension with
reserve. The oddest new attachment had come to
supplant in him some ancient devotions that were the
furthest from devout. He found himself in a very
queer mood, between irritable and gentle. He had
never before felt this inclination to hit hard for virtue,
and it bewildered his honest head. But it made him a
dangerous watchdog.

By and by the Duke carried his protégé into the
Duchess’s privy garden. There was a necessary economy
of ornamental ground about the castello, though the
most was made of what could be spared. In a nest
of green alleys, and falling terraces, and rose-wreathed
arches, they came upon the two ladies whom Bembo had
already seen, themselves as pretty, graceful flowers as
any in the borders. The young Catherine sat upon a
fountain edge, fanning herself with a great leaf, and
talking to a flushed, down-looking page, who, it seemed
likely, had brought news from the court of a recent
scandal and its sequel. Her shrewd, pretty face took
curious stock of the new comers. She was a pale slip of
a girl, lithe, bosomless, the green plum of womanhood.
Her thin, plain dress was green, fitting her like a sheath
its blade of corn, and she wore on her sleek fair head a
cap of green velvet banded with a scroll of beaten gold.
A child she was, yet already for two years betrothed to
a Pope’s nephew. His presents on the occasion had
included a camera of green velvet, sewn with pearls as
thick as daisies in grass. It seemed natural to associate
her with spring verdure, so sweet and fair she was; yet
never, surely, worked a more politic little brain under its
cap of innocence.

Hard by, on one of the walks, a woman and a child of
seven played at ball. These were Bona, and her little
son Gian-Galeazzo. As the other was spring, so was she
summer, ripe in figure and mellowed in the passion of
motherhood. Her eyes burned with the caress and
entreaty of it—appealed in loveliness to the fathers of
her desires. Her beauty, her stateliness, the very milk
of her were all sweet lures to increase. She loved
babies, not men—saw them most lusty, perhaps, in the
glossy eyes of fools, the breeding-grounds of Cupids. She
was always a mother before a wife.

The Duke led Bernardo to her side. Pale as ivory,
she bent and embraced her boy, and dismissed him to
the fountain; then rose to face the ordeal.

‘Hail, judgments of Solomon!’ she said, with a smile
that quivered a little. ‘O believe me, sir, thy fame has
run before!’

‘Which was the reason thou dismissedst Gian,’ said
Galeazzo, ‘in fears that Solomon would propose to halve
him?’

He did not doubt her, or wing his shaft with anything
but brutality. It was his coward way, and, having
asserted it, he strolled off, grinning and whistling, to the
fountain.

Bona shivered and drew herself up. Her robe was all
of daffodil, with a writhed golden hem to it that looked
like a long flicker of flame. On her forehead, between
wings of auburn hair, burned a great emerald. She
seemed to Bernardo the loveliest, most gracious thing, a
vision personified of fruitfulness, the golden angel of
maternity, warm, fragrant, kind-bosomed. He met the
gaze of her eyes with wonderment, but no fear.

‘Sweet Madonna,’ he said, ‘hail me nothing, I pray
thee, but the clear herald of our Christ—His mouthpiece
and recorder. We may all be played upon for truth, so
we be pure of heart.’

‘And that art thou? No guile? No duplicity? No
self-interest?’

He marvelled. She looked at him earnestly.

‘Bernardo, didst know this Tassino was my servant?’

‘Nay, I knew it not.’

‘Wouldst have spared him hadst thou known?’

‘How could I spare him the truth?’

‘But its shame, its punishment?’

‘Greater shame could no man have than to debauch
innocence. His punishment was his redemption.’

‘Ah! I defend him not. Yet, bethink thee, she may
have been the temptress?’

‘He should have loathed, not loved her, then.’

‘Madreperla, mother-of-pearl,’ cried Catherine, with a
little shriek of laughter, from the fountain; ‘come and
help me! I have caught a butterfly in my hand, and my
father wishes to take it from me and kill it!’

CHAPTER VII

Bernardo wrote to the Abbot of San Zeno:—

‘MOST DEAR AND HONOURED FATHER,—Many
words from me would but dilute the wonder of my
narrative. Also thou lovest brevity in all things but
God’s praise. Know, then, how I have surpassed
expectation in the early propagation of our creed, which is
by Love to banish Law, that old engine of necessarianism.
[Here follows a brief recapitulation of the events which had
landed him, a little sweet oracle of light, in the dark old
castello of Milanl.] Man’ (he goes on) ‘is of all creatures
the most susceptible to his environments. Thou shalt
induce him but to feed on the olive branches of Peace in
order that he may take their colour. O sorrow, then, on
the false appetites which have warped his nature! on the
beastly doctrines which, Satan-engendered, have led him
half to believe there is no wrong or right, but only
necessity! Is there no such thing as discord in music, at
which even a dog will howl? Harmony is God—so
plain. Yet there is a learned doctor here, one Lascaris
who disputeth this. My father, I do not think that
learned doctors seek so much the intrinsic truth of things
as to impress their followers with their perspicacity in
the pursuit. John led James over-the-way by a “short
cut” of three miles, and James thought John a very
clever fellow. Pray for me!…

‘I will speak first of the Duchess, to whom I delivered
your letter. She is a most sweet lady, with eyes, so kind
and loving were they, they made me think of those soft
stars which light the flocks to fold. She asked me did I
remember my mother? “That is a strange question,”
quoth I, “to a foundling.” “Ah!” said she, “poor child!
I had forgot how thou fell’st, a star, into Mary’s lap. I
would have taken care, for my part, not so to tumble out
of heaven.” “Nay,” I said, “but if thou, a mother there,
hadst let slip thy baby first?” “What,” she said, looking
at me so strange and wistful, “did she follow, then?” My
father, thou know’st my fancies. “I cannot tell,” I
said. “Sometimes, in a dream, the dim, sad shadow of a
woman’s face seems to hang over me lying on that
altar.” She held out her arms to me, then withdrew
them, and she was weeping. “We are all wicked,” she
cried; “there is no heart, nor faith, nor virtue, in any of
us!” and she ran away lamenting. Now, was not that
strange? for she is in truth a lady of great virtue, a pure
wife and mother, and to me most sweet-forgiving for an
ill-favour I was forced to do her upon one of her servants.
But not women nor men know their own hearts. They
wear the devil’s livery for fashion’s sake, when he
introduces it on a pretty sister or young gentleman, and so
believe themselves bound to his service. But it is as
easy as talking to make virtue the mode. Thou shalt see.

‘Does not the beautiful Duomo itself stand in their
midst, the fairest earnest of their true piety? Could
intrinsic baseness conceive this ethereal fabric, or, year
by year, graft it with sprigs of new loveliness? There is
that in them yet like a little child that stretches out its
arms to the sky.

‘I have, besides the greatest, two converts, or
half-converts, already, my dear Carlo and his Fool. The
former is a great bull gallant, whom a spark will set
roaring and a kiss allay. I love him greatly, and he
bellows and prances, and swearing “I will not” follows
to the pipe of peace. Alas! if I could woo him from a
great wrong! It will happen, when men see honour
whole, and not partisanly. In the meantime I have
every reason to be charitable to that lady Beatrice, sith
she holds herself my mortal enemy. And indeed I
excuse her for myself, but not for the honest soul she
keeps in thrall. My father, is it not a strange paradox,
that holding the senses such a rich possession and life so
cheap? Here is one would prolong the body’s pleasure
to eternity, yet at any moment will risk its destruction
for a spite. Nathless she is warm, loamy soil for the
bearing of our right lily of love, and some day shall be
fruitful in cleanliness.

‘Now the Fool—poor Fool! I have won to temperance,
and so Carlo growleth, “A murrain on thee, spoil-sport!
What want I with a sober Fool? Take him, thou, to be
valet to thy temperance!” by which gibe he seeks to
cover a gracious act. And, lo! I have a Fool for servant,
a most notable Fool and auxiliary, who, having sworn
himself to abstinence, would unplug and sink to the
bottomless abyss every floating hogshead. In sooth the
good soul is my shadow, and so they call him. “Well,”
says he, “so be it. But what sort of fool art thou, to
cast a fool for shadow?” “Why, look,” says I, for it
was sunset on the grass—”at least not so great a fool as
thou.” “That may well be,” says he, “for you do not
serve Messer Bembo.” So caustic is he—a biting love;
yet, as is proper between a man and his shadow, equal
attached to me as I to him. And so, talking of his
gift to me, brings me to the greater gifts of the Duke.

‘O my father! How can I speak my gratitude to
heaven and thy teaching, which brought me so swiftly,
so wonderfully, to prevail with that dread man! I think
evil is like the false opal, which needs but the first touch
of pure light to shatter it. I have come with no weapon
but my little lamp of sunshine; and behold! in its flash
the base is discredited and the truth acknowledged. It
is all so easy, Christ guard me! There is a Providence
in what men call chance. Only, my father, pray that
thy child be not misled by flattery to usurp its
prerogatives. Men, in this dim world, are all too prone to
worship the visible symbols of Immortality—to accept
the prophet for the Master. I am already fêted and
caressed as if I were a god. The Duke hath
impropriated to me an income of a thousand ducatos, with
free residence in the castello, and a retinue to befit a
prince. At all this I cavil not, sith it affords me the
sinews to a crusade. But what shall I say to his
delegating me to the chief magistracy of Milan during his
forthcoming absence? for he is on the eve of an expedition
into Piedmont, touching the lordship of Vercelli, which
he claims through his wife Bona of Savoy. Carlo, it is
true, warns me against this perilous exaltation. “Seek’st
thou,” says he, “to depose the devil? Well, the devil,
on his return, will treat thee like any other palace
revolutionist.” “Nay,” says I, “the devil was never the
devil from choice. Restore him to a converted dukedom,
and he will aspire to be the saint of all.” “Yes,”
he said, “I can imagine Galeazzo endowing a hospital
for Magdalenes and washing the poor’s feet. But I will
stick to thee.” A dear worldling he is, and only less
uncertain than his master in these first infant steps
towards godliness. For vice is very childlike in its
self-plumings upon a little knowledge. Desiring beauty,
it tears the rose-bush or clutches the moth, and so sickens
on disillusionment. Forbearance is the wisdom of the
great.

‘The more destructive is a man, the simpler is he.
Now, my father, this destroying Duke covets nothing
so much as the applause of the world for gifts with
which, in truth, he is ill-endowed. He cannot sing, or
rhyme, or improvise but with the worst, yet, thinks he,
they shall call me poet and musician, or burn. Well,
he might fiddle over the holocaust, like Nero, and still
be first cousin to a peacock. I told him so, but in
gentler words, when he asked me to teach him my
method. “To every soul its capacities,” says I, “and
mine are not in ruling a great duchy greatly.” “So we
are neither of us omnipotent,” says he, with a smile.
“Well, I will take the lesson to heart.” Now, could so
simple a creature be all corrupt?

‘Of more complicated fibre is his brother, the Signior
Ludovico. Very politic and abiding, he rushes at nothing;
yet in the end, I think, most things come to him. He
is gracious to thy child, as indeed are all; yet, God
forgive me, I find something more inhuman in his
gentleness than in Galeazzo’s passion. These inexplicable
antipathies are surely the weapons of Satan; whereby
it behoves us to overcome them. That same Lascaris
attributes them to an accidental re-fusion of particles,
opposed to other chance re-combinations, in a present
body, of particles similarly antipathetic to us in a
former existence—a long “short cut” over the way
again.

‘Now, as for my days in this poignant city—where
even the benches and clothes-chests, not to speak of
most walls and ceilings, yea, and the very stair-posts
themselves, are painted with crowded devices of scrolls
and figures in loveliest gold and azure and vermilion—thou
mayest believe they are strange to me. Amidst
this wealth I, thy simple acolyte, am glorified, I say,
and courted beyond measure. Yet fear nothing for
me. I appraise this distinction at its right market
value. The higher the Duke’s favour, the greater my
presumptive influence. Believe me, dear, my urbanity
towards his attentions is an investment for my Master.
I am an honest factor.

‘In a week the Duke sets out. In the meantime, like
an ambassador that must suffer present festival for the
sake of future credit, I sit at feasts and plays; or,
perchance, rise to denounce the latter for no better than
whores’ saturnalia. (O my father! to see fair ladies,
the Duchess herself, smile on such shameless
bawdry!) Whereon the Duke thunders all to stop, with threats
of fury on the actors to mend their ways, making the
poor fools gasp bewildered. For how had they presumed
upon custom? Bad habit is like the moth in fur, so
easily shaken out when first detected; so hardly when
established. Once, more to my liking, we have a
mummers’ dance, with clowns in rams’ heads butting;
and again a harvest ballet, with all the seasons pictured
very pretty. Another day comes a Mantuan who plays
on three lutes at once, more curious than tuneful; and
after him one who walks on a rope in the court, a steel
cuirass about his body. Now happens their festival of
the Bacchidæ, a pagan survival, but certes sweet and
graceful, with its songs and vines and dances. Maybe
for my sake they purge it of some licence. Well, Heaven
witness to them what loss or gain thereby to beauty.

‘Often the court goes hunting the wolf or deer—I
care not; or a-picnicking by the river, which I like, and
where we catch trouts and lampreys to cook and eat on
the green; then run we races, perchance, or play at
ball. So merry and light-hearted—how can wickedness
be other than an accident with these children of
good-nature? To mark the jokes they play on one
another—mischievous sometimes—suggests to one a romping
nursery, which yet I know not. Father, who was my
mother? I trow we romped somewhere in heaven.
Once some gallants of them, being in collusion with
the watch, enter, in the guise of robbers, Messer Secretary
Simonetta’s house at midnight, and bind and blindfold
that great man, and placing him on an ass in his night-gear
(which is an excuse for nothing), carry him through
the streets as if to their quarters. Which, having gained,
they unbind; and lo! he is in the inner ward of the
castello, the Duke and a great company about him and
shouts of laughter; in which I could not help but join,
though it was shameful. Next day the Duchess herself
does not disdain a wrestling match with the lady
Catherine, her adoptive daughter; when the lithe little
serpent, enwreathing that stately Queen, doth pull her
sitting on her lap, whereby she conquers. For all
improvising and stories they have as great a passion
as ingenuity; and therein, my gifts by Christ’s ensample
lying, comes my opportunity. Dear Father, am I
presumptuous in my feeble might, like the boy Phæton
when he coaxed the Sun’s reins from Ph[oe]bus, and
scorched the wry road since called the Milky Way?
That is such an old tale as we tell by moonlight under
trees—such as Christ Himself, the child-God, hath
recounted to us, sitting shoulder-deep in meadow-grass,
or by the pretty falling streams. Is He that exacting,
that exotic Deity, lusting only for adoration, eternally
gluttonous of praise and never surfeited, whom squeamish
indoor men, making Him the fetish of their closets,
have reared for heaven’s type? O, find Him in the
blown trees and running water; in the carol of sweet
birds; in the mines from whose entrails are drawn our
ploughshares; yea, in the pursuit of maid by man! So,
in these long walks and rests of life, shall He be no
less our Prince because He is our joyous comrade. For
this I know: Not to a pastor, a lord, a parent himself,
doth the soul of the youth go out as to the companion
of his own age and freedom.

‘Christ comes again as He journeyed with His
Apostles, the bright wise comrade, fitting earth to
heaven in the puzzle of the spheres. We know Him
Human, my father, feeling the joy of weariness for
repose’ sake; not disdaining the cool inn’s sanctuary;
expounding love by forbearance. He beareth Beauty
redeemed on His brow. Before the clear gaze of His
eyes all heaped sophistries melt away like April snow.
He calleth us to the woods and meadows. Quasimodo
geniti infantes rationabile sine dolo lac concupiscete. O,
mine eyelids droop! We are seldom at rest here before
two o’ the morning. The beds have trellised gratings
by day, to keep the dogs from smirching their coverlets.
Ora pro me!’

CHAPTER VIII

The castle at the Porta Giovia had its glooms as
well as its pleasances. Indeed, it may be questioned
if the latter were not rather in proportion to the
former as a tiger’s gay hide is to the strength and ferocity
it clothes. Built originally for a great keep, or, as it
were, breakwater, to stem the rush of barbarian seas
which were wont to come storming down from the north-west,
its constructors had aimed at nothing less than its
everlastingness. So thick were its bastioned walls, so
thick the curtains which divided its inner and outer
wards, a whole warren of human ‘runs’ could honeycomb
without appreciably weakening them. Hidden within its
screens and massy towers, like the gnawings of a foul
and intricate cancer, ran dark passages which discharged
themselves here and there into dreadful dungeons, or
secret-places not guessed at in the common tally of its
rooms. These oubliettes were hideous with blotched and
spotted memories; rotten with the dew of suffering;
eloquent in their terror and corruption and darkness, of
that same self-sick, self-blinded tyranny which, in place
of Love and Justice, the trusty bodyguards, must turn
always to cruelty and thick walls for its security. The
hiss and purr of subterranean fire, the grinding of
low-down grated jaws, the flop and echo of stagnant water,
oozed from a stagnant moat into vermin-swarming,
human-haunted cellars,—these were sounds that spoke
even less of grief to others than of the hellish ferment
in the soul of him who had raised them for his soul’s
pacifying. Himself is for ever the last and maddest
victim of a despot’s oppression.

There had been stories to tell, could the coulter of
Time once have cut into those far-down vaults, and his
share laid open. Now this was so far from promising,
that their history and mystery were in process of being
still further overlaid and stifled under accumulations of
superstructure. Francesco, the great Condottiere, the
present Duke’s father, had been the first to realise dimly
how a tyrant, by converting his self-prison into a shrine
for his æstheticism, might enjoy a certain amelioration
of his condition. It was he who, yielding an older palace
and its grounds to the builders of the cathedral, had
transferred the ducal quarters to the great fortress, which
henceforth was to be the main seat of the Sforzas. Here
the first additions and rebuildings had been his, the first
decorations and beautifyings—tentative at the best, for
he was always more a soldier than a connoisseur. The
real movement was inaugurated by his successor, and
continued, as cultivation was impressed on him, on a
scale of magnificence which was presently to make the
splendour of Milan a proverb. Galeazzo, an indifferent
warrior, to whose rule but a tithe of the territory once
gathered to the Visconti owned allegiance, contented his
ambitions by rallying an army of painters and sculptors
and decorators to the glorification of his houses at
Milan, Cremona, and his ancestral petted Pavia,—after
all a worthier rôle than the conqueror’s for a good man;
but then, this man was so bad that he blighted
everything he touched. It is true that the disuse of secret
torture would have been considered, and by men more
enlightened than he, so little expedient a part of any
ethical or æsthetical ‘improvement’ of an existing house,
as that a premium would be put thereby on assassination.
Yet Galeazzo’s death-pits were never so much a
politic necessity as a resource for cruelty in idleness. He
would descend into them with as much relish as he
would reclimb from, to his halls above, swelling and
bourgeoning with growth of loveliness. The scream of
torture was as grateful to his ears as was the love-throb
of a viol; the scum bubbling from his living graves as
poignant to his nostrils as was the scent of floating
lilies. He continued to make his house beautiful, yet
never once dreamt, as a first principle of its reclamation
to sweetness, of cutting out of its foundations those old
cesspools of disease and death.

One night he sat in his closet of the Rocca, a little
four-square room dug out of the armourer’s tower, and
having a small oratory adjoining. This eyrie was so
high up as to give a comfortable sense of security
against surprise. There was but one window to it—just
a deep wedge in the wall, piercing to the sheer flank
of the tower. Sweet rushes carpeted the floor; the arras
was pictured with dim, sacred subjects—Ambrosius in
his cradle, with the swarm of bees settling on his honeyed
lips; Ambrosius elected Bishop of Milan by the people;
Ambrosius imposing penance on Theodosius for his
massacre of the Thessalonicans—and the drowsy odours
of a pastile, burning in the little purple shrine-lamp,
robbed the air of its last freshness.

Another lamp shone on a table, at which the Duke
was seated somewhat preoccupied with a lute, and his
tablets propped before him; while, motionless in the
shadows opposite, stood the figure of the provost marshal,
its fixed, unregarding eyes glinting in the flame.

Intermittently Galeazzo strummed and murmured,
self-communing, or addressing himself, between playfulness
and abstraction, to the ear of Messer Jacopo:—

‘The lowliest of all Franciscans was St. Francis, meek
mate of beasts and birds, boasting himself no peer of belted
stars…. Ha! a good line, Jacopo, a full significant
line; I dare say it, our Parablist despite. Listen.’ (He
chaunted the words in a harsh, uncertain voice, to an
accompaniment as sorry.) ‘Hear’st? Belted stars—those
moon-ringed spheres the aristocracy of the night.
Could Messer Bembo himself have better improvised?
What think’st? Be frank.’

‘I think of improvising by book,’ said Jacopo, short
and gruff.

Galeazzo said ‘Ha!’ again, like a snarl, and his brow
contracted.

‘Why, thou unconscionable old surly dog!’ he said—’why?’

Jacopo pointed to the tablets.

‘Your saint asks no notes to his piping. A’ sings like
the birds.’

‘Now,’ answered his master, in a deep, offended tone,
‘I’m in a mind to make thee sing on a grill,—ay, and
dance too. What, dolt! are not first thoughts first
thoughts, however they may be pricked down? Look at
this, I say; flatten thy bull nose on it. Is it not clean,
untouched, unrevised? Spotless as when issued from
Helicon? Beast! thou shalt call me, too, an improvisatore.’

The statue was silent. Galeazzo sat glaring and
gnawing his fingers.

‘Answer!’ he screeched suddenly.

‘I will call thee one,’ said Jacopo obstinately, ‘but not
the best.’

The Duke fell back in his chair, then presently was
muttering and strumming with his disengaged fingers on
the table.

‘No—not the best, not the best—not to rival heaven!
Yet, perhaps, it should be the Duke’s privilege.’

The executioner laughed a little.

‘The Duke should know how to take it.’

Galeazzo stopped short, quite vacant, staring at him.

‘I’ve heard tell,’ said Jacopo, ‘how one Nero, a fiddling
emperor, came to be acknowledged first fiddle of all.’

He paused, then answered, it seemed, an unspoken
invitation: ‘He just silenced the better ones.’

Galeazzo got hurriedly to his feet.

‘Blasphemer! thou shalt die for the word. What! this
Lord’s anointed! A natural songster! no art, no
culture in his voice—sweet and wild, above human
understanding. I said nothing. Be damned, and damned
alone! Go hang thyself like Judas!’

‘Well, name my successor first,’ said Jacopo.

The Duke leapt, and with one furious blow shattered
his lute to splinters on the other’s steel headpiece, then
stamped upon the fragments, his arms flapping like wing
stumps, his teeth sputtering a foam of inarticulate words.
Jacopo, erect under the avalanche, stood perfectly silent
and impassive. Then, as suddenly as it had burst, the
storm ended. Galeazzo sank back on his seat, panting
and nerveless.

‘Well, I am no poet—curse thy block head, and mine
for trusting to it—the Muses shall decide—Apollo or
Marsyas—the Christian Muses and a Christian penance—flaying
only for heretics. I am no poet nor musician,
say’st? Calf! what know’st thou about such things?’ He
roared again: ‘What brings thee here, with thy
damned butcher’s face, scaring my pretty lambs of song?’

‘Thine order.’

‘Mine?’

‘This astrologer monk, this Fra Capello was it not?
I neither know nor care.’

‘Dost thou not? A faithful dog!’

‘Faithful enough.’

‘O! art thou? By what token?’

‘By the token of the quarry run to earth.’

‘To earth? Thou hast him? Good Jacopo!’

‘This three days past. Had I not told thee so already?
Let thine improvising damn thyself, not me.’

‘The villain! to call himself a Franciscan, a lowly
Franciscan, and pretend to read the stars! How about
his prophecy now?’

‘Why, he holds to it.’

‘What! that I have but eleven years in all to
reign—less than one to live?’

‘Just that—no more.’

‘Now, is it not a wicked schism from the plain humility
of his founder? A curse on their spirituals and
conventuals! This fellow to claim kinship with the
stars—profess to be in their confidence, to share heaven’s
secrets? Dear Jacopo, sweet Jacopo! is it not well to
cleanse this earth of such lying prophets, that truth may
have standing-room?’

‘Ask truth, not me.’

‘Nay, not to grieve truth’s heart—the onus shall be
ours. This same Franciscan—this soothsaying monk—where
hast lodged him?’

‘In the “Hermit’s Cell.”‘

‘Ah, old jester! He shall prove his asceticism thereby.
Let practised abstinence save him in such pass. He shall
eat his words—an everlasting banquet. A fat astrologer,
by the token, as I hear.’

‘He went in, fat.’

‘Wretch! wouldst thou starve him? Remember the
worms, thy cousins. Hath he foretold his end?’

‘Ay, by starvation.’

‘He lies, then. Thou shalt take him in extremis, and,
with thy knife in his throat, give him the lie. An impostor
proved. What sort of night is it?’

‘Why, it rains and thunders.’

‘Hush! Why should we fear rain and thunder? God
put His bow in the sky. Jacopo, it is a sweet and fearful
thing to be chosen minister of one of His purifications—Noah,
and Lot, and now thy prince.’

‘Purification?’ said the executioner: ‘by what?’

‘By love, thou fool!’ whispered Galeazzo, half ecstatic,
half furious, with a nervous glance about him. ‘There
were the purifications by water one, one by fire, and a
third by blood, to the last of which His servants yet
testify in the spirit of their Redeemer. Blood, Jacopo,
thou little monster—blood flowing, streams of it, the
visible token of the sacrifice. That was our task till
yesterday. Now in the end comes Love, and calleth for
a cleansed and fruitful soil. Let us hasten with the last
tares—to cut them down, and let their blood consummate
the fertilising. Quick: we have no time to lose.’

He flung himself from the statue, and tiptoed, in a sort
of gloating rapture, to the door.

‘Show me this tare, I say.’

He went down the tower a few paces, with assured
steps, then, bethinking himself, beckoned the other to
lead. The flight conducted them to a private postern,
well secured and guarded inside and out. As they issued
from this, the howl of blown rain met and staggered them.
Looking up at the blackened sky from the depths of that
well of masonry, it seemed to crack and split in a rush of
fusing stars. The mad soul of the tyrant leapt to speed
the chase. He was one with this mighty demonstration—as
like a chosen instrument of the divine retribution.
His brain danced and flickered with exquisite visions of
power. He was an angel, a destroying angel, commissioned
to purge the world of lies. ‘Bring me to this
monk!’ he screamed through the thunder.

Deep in the foundations of the north-eastern tower the
miserable creature was embedded, in a stone chamber as
utterly void and empty as despair. The walls, the floor,
the roof, were all chiselled as smooth as glass. There was
not anywhere foothold for a cat—nor door, nor trap, nor
egress, nor window of any kind, save where, just under
the ceiling, the grated opening by which he had been
lowered let in by day a haggard ghost of light. And
even that wretched solace was withdrawn as night
fell—became a phantom, a diluted whisp of memory, sank like
water into the blackness, and left the fancy suddenly naked
in self-consciousness of hell. Then Capello screamed, and
threw himself towards the last flitting of that spectre. He
fell and bruised his limbs horribly: the very pain was a
saving occupation. He struck his skull, and revelled in
the agonised dance of lights the blow procured him. But
one by one they blew out; and in a moment dead negation
had him by the throat again, rolling him over and over,
choking him under enormous slabs of darkness. Now,
gasping, he cursed his improvidence in not having glued
his vision to the place of the light’s going. It would have
been something gained from madness to hold and gloat
upon it, to watch hour by hour for its feeble re-dawn.
Among all the spawning monstrosities of that pit, with
only the assured prospect of a lingering death before him,
the prodigy of eternal darkness quite overcrowed that
other of thirst and famine.

Yet the dawn broke, it would seem, before its due.
Had he annihilated time, and was this death? He rose
rapturously to his feet, and stood staring at the grating,
the tears gushing down his fallen cheeks. The bars were
withdrawn; and in their place was a lamp intruded, and
a face looked down.

‘Capello, dost thou hunger and thirst?’

The voice awoke him to life, and to the knowledge
of who out of all the world could be thus addressing
him. He answered, quaveringly: ‘I hunger and thirst,
Galeazzo.’

‘It is a beatitude, monk,’ said the voice. ‘Thou shalt
have thy fill of justice.’

‘Alas!’ cried the prisoner: ‘justice is with thee, I fear,
an empty phrase.’

‘Comfort thyself,’ said the other: ‘I shall make a full
measure of it. It shall bubble and sparkle to the brim
like a great goblet of Malmsey. Dost know the wine
Malmsey, monk?—a cool, heady, fragrant liquid, that
gurgles down the arid throat, making one o’ hot days
think of gushing weirs, and the green of grass under
naked feet.’

The monk fell on his knees, stretching out his arms.

‘I ask no mercy of thee, but to end me without torture.’

‘Torture, quotha!’ cried the fiend above—’what
torture in the vision of a wine-cup crushed, or, for the
matter of that, a feast on white tables under trees.
Picture it, Capello: the quails in cold jelly; the melting
pasties; the salmon-trout tucked under blankets of
whipped cream; the luscious peaches, and apricots like
maiden’s cheeks. Why, art not a Conventual, man, and
rich in such experiences of the belly? And to call ’em
torture—fie!’

‘Mercy!’ gasped the monk. His swollen throat could
hardly shape the word. Galeazzo laughed, and bent over.

‘Answer, then: how long am I to live?’

‘By justice, for ever.’

‘What! live for ever on an empty phrase? Then art
thou, too, provisioned for eternity.’

He held out his hand:—

‘Art humbled at last, monk, or monkey? How much
for a nut?’

Leaping at the mad thought of some relenting in the
voice and question, the prisoner ran under the
outstretched hand, and held up his own, abjectly, fulsomely.

‘Master, give it me—one—one only, to dull this living
agony!’

‘A sop to thee, then,’ cried Galeazzo, and dropped a
chestnut. The monk caught it, and, cracking it between
his teeth, roared out and fell spitting and sputtering. He
had crunched upon nothing more savoury than a shell
filled up with river slime. The Duke screamed and
hopped with laughter.

‘Is not that richer than quail, more refreshing than
Malmsey?’

The monk fell on his knees:—

‘Now hear me, God!’ he gabbled awry: ‘Let not this
man ever again know surcease from torment, in bed, at
board, in his body, or in his mind. Let his lust
consummate in frostbite; let the worm burrow in his entrails,
and the maggot in his brain. May his drink be salt, and
his meat bitter as aloes. May his short lease of wicked
life be cancelled, and death seize him, and damnation
wither in the moment of his supreme impenitence.
Darken his vision, so that for evermore it shall see
despair and the mockery of fruitless hope. Let him walk
a self-conscious leper in the sunshine, and strive vainly to
propitiate the loathing in eyes in which he sees himself
reflected an abhorred and filthy ape. May the curse of
Assisi——’

Galeazzo screamed him down:—

‘Quote him not—beast—vile apostate from his teaching!’

For a moment the two battled in a war of screeching
blasphemy: the next, the grate was flung into place, the
light whisked and vanished, a door slammed, and the
blackness of the cell closed once more upon the moaning
heap in its midst.

Quaking and ashen, babbling oaths and prayers,
Galeazzo flung back to his closet.

‘Bring wine!’ he shook out between his teeth to Jacopo.

When it came, he tasted, and flung it from him.

‘Salt!’ he shrieked. His fancy quite overcrowed his
reason. ‘O God, I am poisoned!’

He rose, staggering, and entered his oratory, and cast
himself on his knees before the little shrine.

‘Not from this man,’ he protested, whimpering and
writhing; ‘Lord, not from this man—I know him better
than Thou—a recusant, a sorcerer! Be not deceived
because of his calling. To curse Thine anointed! kill
him, Lord—kill the blasphemer—I hold him ready to
Thy hand! Good sweet St. Francis, I but weed thy
pastures—a wicked false brother, tainting the fold. How
shall love prevail, this poison at its root?—Poison! O
my God, to be stricken for evermore! life’s fruit to change
to choking ashes in my mouth! It cannot be—I, Galeazzo
the Duke—yet I taunted him with visions: what if I have
caught the infection of mine own imagination—too
fearful, spare me this once. Lord God, consider—as I put it
to Thee—now—like this—listen. To starve with him
should be but a fast enlarged. What then? Some, honest
ascetics, no Conventuals, so push abstinence to ecstasy as
that they may cross the lines of death in a dream, and
wake without a pang to heaven gained. If he does not,
should he suffer, he is properly condemned for a gross
pampered brother, false to his vows, unworthy Thine
advocacy. Now, call the test a fair one. Chain back this
dog that ravens to tear me. How, so stricken, made
corrupt, could I work Thy will but through corruption?
Hush! Thou mean’st it not—only as a jest? Give me
some sign, then. Ah! Thou laugh’st—very quietly, but
I hear Thee. Canst not deceive Galeazzo—ha-ha! between
me and You, Lord, between me and You!
Silence, thou dog monk! What dost thou here?
Escaped! by God, get back—the first word was mine—thou
art too late. What! damnation seize thee! Lord! he
scorns Thy judgment—catch him, hold him—he is there
by the door!’

He sprang to his feet, glaring and gesticulating.

‘Galeazzo!’ exclaimed Bembo. The boy had mounted
to the closet unheard. It was his privilege to come
unannounced. He stood a moment regarding the madman
in amazement and pity, then hurried softly to his side.

‘What is it? The face again?’

His tone, his entreaty, dispelled the other’s delirium.
The tyrant gazed at him a minute, slow recognition
dawning in his eyes; then, of a sudden, broke into a
thick fast flurry of sobs, and cast himself upon his
shoulder.

‘My saint,’ he wept adoringly—’my Conscience, my
little angel! and I had thought thee—nay, but the sign
for which I prayed art thou given.’

His emotion gushed inwardly, filling all his channels
to gasping. Presently he looked up, with a passionate
murmur and caress.

‘Love, with thy red lips like a girl’s! Would that my
own were worthy to marry with them.’

Bembo withdrew a little:—

‘What wild words are these? Yet, peradventure, the
giddy babble of a conqueror. O Galeazzo! hast
triumphed o’er thyself indeed—casting that old
familiar? chasing him hereout? Why, then, I whom thou hast
appointed to be thy conscience, interpreting thy rule
through truth and love, am the more emboldened to
beseech the favour for which I came.’

‘Ask it only, sweet.’ His chest still heaved
spasmodically to the catching of his breath.

‘It is,’ said the boy steadily, ‘that thou wouldst give
me, thy conscience’s delegate, a last justification by the
sacraments.’

The Duke smiled faintly, and nodded, and murmured:
‘I will confess ere midnight, and, fasting, receive the
Holy Communion before I go to-morrow. Does it please
thee? Come, then.’

He re-entered his cabinet, reeling a little, and sat
himself down, as if exhausted, by the table.

‘Bernardo,’ he said weakly, half apologetically, ‘I am
overwrought: there is wine in that jug: I prithee give it
me to drink.’

The boy, unhesitating, handed him the flagon.

‘It is the symbol of joy redeemed,’ he said. ‘Put thy
lips to the chalice, Galeazzo, and take what thy soul
needest—no more.’

The Duke lifted the cup shakily, stumbled at its brim,
steadied himself, and sipped. His eyes dilated and grew
wolfish—’I am vindicated,’ he stuttered: ‘O sweet little
saint!’—and he drank greedily, ecstatically, and,
smacking his lips, put down the vessel.

He was himself again from that draught.

‘Bernardo,’ he said, in a reassured, half-maudlin
confidence, ‘canst thou read the stars?’

‘Nay,’ said the other gravely, ‘they are the Sibyls’
books.’

‘True. Yet some essay.’

‘Ay: then flies a comet, cancelling all their sums.’

‘An impious vanity, is it not?’

‘Truly, I think so.’

‘And deserving of the last chastisement.’

‘Poor fools, they make their own.’

‘What?’

‘Why, taking colds instead of rest—cramps, chills, and
agues—immense pains, and all for nothing; the dead
moon for the living sun; nursing all day that they may
starve by night. God gave us level eyes. The star’s
best resting place for them is on a hill. We need no
more knowledge than to read beauty through the wise
lens Nature hath proportioned us. Not God Himself
can foretell a future.’

‘Not God?’

‘No, for there is no Future, nor ever will be. The
Past but eternally prolongs itself to the Present. Heaven
or hell is the road we tread, and must retrace when we
come to the brink of the abyss where Time drops sheer
into nothingness. Joy or woe, then, to him the returning
wanderer, according as he hath provisioned his way. So
shall he starve, or travel in content, or meet with weary
retributions. O, in providence, hold thy hand, thinking
on this, whenever thy hand is tempted!’

Galeazzo was amazed, discomfited. This unorthodoxy
was the last to accommodate itself to his principles of
conduct. The Future to him was always an unmortgaged
reversion, sufficient to pay off all debts to
conscience and leave a handsome residue for income. He
could only exclaim, again, like one aghast: ‘No Future?’

‘Nay,’ said Bembo, smiling, ‘what is the heresy to
reason or religion? To foresee the issues of to-day were,
for Omniscience, to suppress all strains but the angels’.
What irony to accept worship from the foredoomed!
What insensate folly wantonly to multiply the devil’s
recruits! O Galeazzo, there is no Future for God or
Men? Hope shudders at the inexorable word: Evil
presumes on it: it is the lodestone to all dogmatism;
the bogey, the weapon of the unversed Churchman; the
very bait to acquisition and self-greed. Be what,
returning, ye would find yourselves—no lovelier ambition.
See, we walk with Christ, the human God and comrade,
I have but this hour left him bathing his tired feet in the
brook. He will follow anon; and all the pretty birds
and insects and wildflowers he watched while resting
will have suggested to him a thousand tales and
reflections gathered of an ancient lore. He can be full of
wonder too, but wiser by many moons than we. There
is no Future. God possesses the Past.’

The Duke sprang to his feet, and went up and down
once or twice. This view of a self-retaliatory entity—of
a returning body condemned by natural laws to
retraverse every point of its upward flight—disturbed him
horribly. He desired no responsibility in things done
and gone. Eternity, timely propitiated, was his golden
chance. He stopped and looked at Bembo, at once
inexpressibly cringing and crafty.

‘Bernardino,’ murmured he: ‘I can never get it out of
my head that whenever thou sayest God thou meanest
gods. The gods possess the past?—why, one would fancy
somehow it ran glibber than the other.’

Bembo sighed.

‘Well, why not? Nature, and Love, and the Holy
Ghost—Tria juncta in Uno—why not gods?’

The Duke pressed his hand to his forehead; then ran
and clasped the boy about the shoulders.

‘Adorable little wisdom,’ he cried: ‘take my conscience,
and record on it what thou wilt!’

‘To-morrow,’ said Bembo, with a happy smile: ‘when
its tablets are sponged and clean.’

Galeazzo fawned, showing his teeth. There was
something in him infinitely suggestive of the cat that, in
alternate spasms of animalism, licks and bites the hand
that caresses it. This strange new heresy of a limited
omniscience oddly affected him. Could it be possible,
after all, that the soul’s responsibility was to itself alone?
In any case so pure a spirit as this could represent him
only to his advantage. Still, at the same time, if God
were no more than relatively wiser and stronger than
himself—why, it was not his theory—let the Parablist
answer for it—on Messer Bembo’s saintly head fall the
onus, if any, of leaving Capello where he was. For his
own part, he told himself, the God of Moses remaining
in his old place in the heavens, he, Galeazzo, would have
been inclined to consider the virtuous policy of releasing
the Monk.

And so he prepared himself to confess and communicate.

CHAPTER IX

The Duke of Milan, confessed, absolved, and his
conscience pawned to a saint, had, on the virtue
of that pledge, started in a humour of unbridled
self-righteousness for the territory of Vercelli. With him
went some four thousand troops, horse and footmen, a
drain of bristling splendour from the city; yet the roaring
hum of that city’s life, and the flash and sting thereof,
were not appreciably lessened in the flying of its hornet
swarm. Rather waxed they poignant in the general sense
of a periodic emancipation from a hideous thralldom.
The tyrant was gone, and for a time the intolerable
incubus of him was lifted.

But, for the moment, there was something more—a
consciousness, within the precincts of the palace and
beyond them, of a substituted atmosphere, in which the
spirit experienced a strange self-expansion—other than
mere relief from strain—which was foreign to its
knowledge. Men felt it, and pondered, or laughed, or were
sceptical according as their temperaments induced them.
So, in droughty days, the little errant winds that blow
from nowhere, rising and falling on a thought, affect us
with a sense of the unaccountable. There was such a
sweet odd zephyr abroad in Milan. The queer question
was, Was the little gale a little mountebank gale, tumbling
ephemerally for its living, or did it represent a permanent
atmospheric change?

A few days before Galeazzo’s departure, Bernardo—by
special appointment custos conscientiae ducalis—had, while
walking in the outer ward of the Castello with Cicada,
happened upon the vision of a Franciscan monk, plump
and rosy, but with inflammatory eyes, entering with
Messer Jacopo through a private postern in the walls.
He had saluted the jocund figure reverentially, as one
necessarily sacred through its calling, and was standing
aside with doffed bonnet, when the other, halting with an
expression of good-humoured curiosity on his face, had
greeted him, puffed and asthmatic, in his turn:—

‘Peace to thee, my son! Can this be he of whom it
might be said, “Puer natus est nobis: et vocabitur nomen
ejus, Magni Consilii Angelus“?’

The Franciscan had rumbled the query at Jacopo, who
had shrugged, and answered shortly: ‘Well; ’tis Messer
Bembo.’

‘So?’ had responded the monk, gratified; ‘the David
of our later generation?’ and instantly and ingratiatory
he had waddled up, and, putting a prosperous hand on
Bernardo’s shoulder, had bent to whisper hoarsely, and
quite audibly to Cicada, into the boy’s ear:—

‘Child—I know—I am to thank thee for this
summons.’ Then, before Bembo, wondering, could respond: ‘Ay,
ay; Saul’s ears are opened to the truth. The stars
cannot lie. You sent for me, yourself their sainted
emissary, to confirm the verdict. What! I might have
failed to answer else. We know the Duke, eh? But, mum!’

And with these enigmatic words, and a roguish wink
and squeeze, he had hurried away again, following the
impatient summons of Jacopo, who was beckoning him
towards a flight of open stairs niched in the north
curtain, up which the two had thereon gone, and so
disappeared among the battlements.

Then had Bernardo turned, humour battling with
reverence in his sensorium, and ‘Cicca!’ had exclaimed,
with a little click of laughter.

The Fool’s answer had been prompt and emphatic.

‘Cracked!’ he had snapped, like a dog at a fly.

‘Who was he?’

‘Nay, curtail not his short lease. He is yet, and,
being, is the Fra Capello—may I die else.’

‘Well, if he is, what is he?’

‘Why, a short-of-breath monk; yet soon destined, if I
read him aright, to be a breathless monk.’

‘Nay, thou wilt only new-knot a riddle. I will follow
and ask the Provost-Marshal, though I love him not.’

‘Nor he thee, methinks. Hold back. The butcher
looks askance at the pet lamb. Well, what wouldst
thou? Of this same monkish rotundity, this hemisphere
of fat, this moon-paunch, this great blob of star-jelly,
this planet-counterfeiting frog, this astronomic globe
stuffed out with pasties and ortolans? Well, ’tis Fra
Capello, I tell thee, an astrologer, a diviner by the
stars—do I not aver it, though I have never set eyes on the
man before?’

‘How know’st, then?’

‘Why, true, my perspicacity is only this and that, a
poor matter of inferences. As, for example, the inference
of the fingers, that when I burn them, fire is near; or the
inference of the nose, that when I smell cooking fish, it is
a fast day; or the inference of the palate, that when I
drink water, I am a fool.’

‘A dear wise fool.’

‘Ay, a wise fool, to know what one and one make.
Dost thou?’

‘Two, to be sure.’

‘Well, God fit thy perspicacity with twins, when thy
time comes. One out of one and one is enough for me.’

‘Peace! How know’st this holy father is an astrologer?’

‘Inference, sir—merely inference. As, for example
again, the inference of the ears, that when I mark the
substance of his whisper to thee, I seem to remember
talk of a certain Franciscan, who, having predicted by
the stars short shrift for Galeazzo, and been invited to
come and discuss his reasons, did prove unaccountably
coy, though certainly seer to his own nativity. Imprimis,
the astrologer was reported a Conventual and fat;
whereby comes in the inference of the eye. Now,
“Ho-ho!” thinks I, “this same swag-bellied monk who babbles
of stars! Surely it is our Fra Capello? And hooked at
last? By what killing bait?”‘

Here he had touched the boy’s shoulder swiftly, and
as swiftly had withdrawn his hand, an ineffable
expression, shrewd and caustic, puckering his face. Bembo
had looked serious.

‘Cicca! I do believe thou art madder than any
astrologer—unless——’

‘No!’ had cried the Fool; ‘I am sober; wrong me not.’

Then Bembo had repented lovingly:—

‘Pardon, dear Cicca. But, indeed, I understand thee not.’

‘Why,’ I said, ‘what killing bait had tempted the
monk’s shyness at length?’

‘What, then?’

‘Thyself.’

‘I?’

‘Art thou not a star-child and Galeazzo’s protégé?
O, pretty, sweet decoy, to draw the astrologer from his
cloister!’

‘Dost mean that the Duke would use me to question
the truth of these predictions? Alas! not I, nor any
man, can interpret nothingness into a text.’

‘Wilt thou tell him so?’

‘Who?’

‘The Duke.’

‘I have told him so.’

‘Thou hast? Then God keep the Franciscan in breath!’

‘Amen!’ had said Bembo, in all fervour and innocence.
He had thought the other to mean nothing more than
that the Duke was designing, on his authority, to win a
faulty brother from the heresy—as he construed it—of
divination.

As he construed it. Young and inexperienced as he
was, he had yet a prophet’s purpose and vision—the
vision which, in despite of all traditional beliefs, looks
backwards. His soft eyes were steadfast to that end
which was the beginning. No sophistries could beguile
him from the essential truth of his kind creed. He was
an atavism of something vastly remoter than Caligula—than
any tyranny. He ‘threw back’ to the stock of
those first angels who knew the daughters of men—to
the first fruits of an amazed and incredible sorrow. By
so great a step was he close to the God his sires had
offended; was close to the parting of the ways between
earth and heaven, and with all the lore of the
since-accumulated ages to instruct him in his choice of roads.
O, believe little Bernardo that his was the true insight,
the true wisdom! There is no Future, nor ever will be.
The past but prolongs itself to the present; and all
enterprise, all yearning, are but to recover the ground we
have lost. That truth once recognised, the horror of
Futurity shall close its gates; its timeless wastes shall
be no more to us; and we—we shall be wandering back,
by æons of pathetic memories, to trace to its source the
love that gushed in Paradise.

Three days later the boy—the Duke being gone—was
strolling, again with Cicada his shadow, on the ramparts.
It had become something his habit to take the air, after
hearing the morning causes, on these outer walls, whence
the tired vision could stretch itself luxuriantly on leagues
of peaceful plain. He liked then to be left alone, or at
the most to the sole company of his dogged henchman,
the erst Fool. Cicada’s gruff but jealous sympathy was
an emollient to lacerated sensibilities; his wit was a
tonic; his tact the fruit of long necessity. No one would
have guessed, not gentle Bernardo himself, how the little,
ugly, caustic creature was, when most wilful or eccentric
in seeming, watching over and medicining his moods of
inevitable weariness or depression.

Perhaps he was in such a mood now—induced by that
passion of the irremediable which occasionally must
overtake every just judge—as he leaned upon the
battlements, his cheek propped on his palm, and gazed out
dreamily over the shining campagna.

‘Cicca,’ he said suddenly, ‘what made thee a Fool?’

‘Circumstance,’ answered the other promptly.

‘Ah!’ sighed Bembo—’that blind brute force of
Nature, wavering out of chaos. No agent of God—His
foe, rather, to be anticipated and circumvented. Providence
is the true wise name for our Master. He provideth,
of the immensity of His love, for and against. He can
do no further, nor foretell but by analogy the blundering
spites of Circumstance. But always He persuades the
monster of his interest lying more and more in sweet
order—dreams of him sleeping caged, a lazy, satiated
chimera, in the mid-gardens of love.’

‘Che allegria!’ said Cicada; ‘I will go then, and poke
him in the ribs, and ask him why he made a Fool of me.’

Bembo smiled and sighed.

‘There is a proof of his blindness. What, in truth,
was thy origin, dear Cicca?’

The Fool came and leaned beside him.

‘Canst look on me and ask? I was born in this dark
age of tyranny, and of it; I shall die in it and of it. I
have never known liberty. Sobriety and reason are
empty terms to me. Ask of me no fruit but the fruit of
mine inheritance. A drunken woman in labour will
bring forth a drunken child. I am Cicada the Fool,
lower than a slave, curst pimp to Folly.’

Soft as a butterfly, Bernardo’s hand fluttered to his
shoulder and rested there. The creature’s dim eyes were
fixed upon the crawling plain; his face worked with
emotion.

‘There was a time,’ he said, ‘I understand, when
governments were loyal at once to the individual and the
state—when they wrought for the common weal. In
those days, it would seem certain, riches—anything above
a specified income—must have disqualified a man for
office. It is the ideal constitution. Corruption will
enter else. Wealth, and the emulation of wealth, are the
moth in stored states. That was the age of the republics
and all the virtues. I am born, alack, after my time. I
have held Esau the first saint in the calendar. I am not
sure I do not do so now, Messer Bembo despite.’

‘And I, too, love Esau,’ said Bernardo quietly.

Cicada, amazed, whipped upon him; then suddenly
seized him in his arms.

‘Thou dearest, most loving of babes!’ he cried
rapturously; ‘sweet saint of all to me! What! did I twit
thee, mine emancipator, with my curse to thralldom?
Loves Esau, quotha! No cant his creed. Child, thou
art asphodel to that cactus. Put thy foot on this mouth
that could so slander thee!’

‘Poor Cicca!’ said Bembo, gently disengaging himself.
‘Thou rebukest sweetly my idle curiosity.’

‘Curiosity!’ cried the other. ‘Would the angels
always showed as much! Thou art welcome to all
of me I can tell:—as, for example, that my mother—exitus
acta probat—was a fool, a sweet, pretty, vicious
fool; and yet, after all, not such a fool as, having borne,
to acknowledge me.’

‘Poor wretch! Why not?’

‘Why not? Why, for the reason Pasiphae concealed
her share in the Minotaur. Motley is the labyrinth of
Milan. My father was a bull.’

‘Well, I am answered.’

‘Ah! thou think’st I jest. Relatively—relatively only,
sir, I assure thee. Hast ever heard speak of Filippo
Maria, the last of the Visconti?’

‘Little, alas! to his credit.’

‘I will answer in my person to that. He was uglier
than any bull—a monster so hideous as to be attractive
to a certain order of frailty. I inclined his way.
Perhaps that was my salvation. The child most interests
the parent whose features it reflects. It is bad-luck to
break a mirror; and so I was spared—for the labyrinth.’

‘O infamous! He made thee his jester?’

‘And fed me. Let that be remembered to him.
When the reckoning comes, the bull, not Pasiphae, shall
have my voice.’

‘Hideous! Thy mother?’

‘Let it pass on that. I need say no more, if a word
can damn.’

‘Cicca!’

‘He was meat and drink to me, I say.’

‘Drink, alas!’

‘He meant it kindly. When I sparkled, ’twas his
own wit he felt himself applauding. That was my
easy time. He died in ’47, and my majesty’s Fooldom
was appropriated incontinent to the titillation of these
peasants of Cotignola their hairy ears.’

‘Hush, and thou wilt be wise!’

‘In my grave, not sooner. Francesco, our Magnificent’s
father, was so-so for humour—a good, blunt soldier,
who’d take his cue of laughter from some quicker wit,
then roar it out despotically. No sniggerer, like his son,
who qualifies all praise with envy. Shall I tell thee
how I lost Galeazzo’s favour? He wrote a sonnet.
‘Twas an achievement. A Roman triumph has been
ceded to less—hardly to worse. Lord, sir! there was
that applause and hand-clapping at Court! But
Wisdom looked sour. “What, fool!” demanded the
Duke: “dost question its merit?” “Nay,” quoth
Wisdom; “but only the sincerity of the praise. Sign
thy next with my name, and mark its fate.” He
did—actually. Poor Wisdom! as if it had been truth the
sonneteer desired! Never was poor doxy of a Muse
worse treated. This was exalted like the other; but
in a pillory. It made a day’s sport for the mob, at
my expense. Was not that pain and humiliation enough?
But Galeazzo must visit upon me the rage of his
mortification. Well, when he was done with me,
Messer Lanti, high in favour, begged the remnant of
my folly, and it was thrown to him. The story leaked
out; I had had so many holes cut in me. It had been
wiser to seal my lips with kindness. But the Duke, as
you may suppose, loves me to this day.’

As he spoke, they turned an angle of the battlements,
and saw advancing towards them, smiling and
insinuative, the figure of Tassino. Bernardo started, in
some wonder. He had not set eyes on this dandiprat
since his public condemnation of him, and, if he thought
of him at all, had believed him gone to make the
restitution ordered. Now he gazed at him with an expression
in which pity and an instinctive abhorrence fought for
precedence.

The young man was brilliantly, even what a later
generation would have called ‘loudly,’ dressed. He
had emerged from his temporary pupation a very
tiger-moth; but the soul of the ignoble larva yet obtained
between the gorgeous wings. Truckling, insinuative,
and wicked throughout, he accosted his judge with a
servile bow, as he stood cringing before him. Bembo
mastered his antipathy.

‘What! Messer cavalier,’ he said, struggling to be
gay. ‘Art returned?’—for he guessed nothing of the
truth. Then a kind thought struck him. ‘Perchance
thou comest as a bridegroom, bene meritus.’

Tassino glanced up an instant, and lowered his eyes.
How he coveted the frank audacity of the Patrician
swashbuckler, with which he had been made acquainted,
but which he found impossible to the craven meanness
of his nature. To dare by instinct—how splendid! No
doubt there is that fox of self-conscious pusillanimity
gnawing at the ribs of many a seeming-brazen upstart.
He twined and untwined his fingers, and shook his head,
and sobbed out a sigh, with craft and hatred at his heart.
Bernardo looked grave.

‘Alas, Messer Tassino!’ said he: ‘think how every
minute of a delayed atonement is a peril to thy soul.’

This sufficed the other for cue.

‘Atone?’ he whined: ‘wretch that I am! How could
a hunted creature do aught but hide and shake?’

‘Hunted!’

‘O Messer Bembo! ’twas so simple for you to let loose
the mad dog, and blink the consequences for others.’

‘Mad dog!’

‘Now don’t, for pity’s sake, go quoting my rash simile.
Hast not ruined me enough already?’

‘Alas, good sir! What worth was thine estate so
pledged? I had no thought but to save thee for heaven.’

‘And so let loose the Duke, that Cerberus? O, I am
well saved, indeed, but not for heaven! Had it not
been for the good Jacopo taking me in and hiding me,
I had been roasting unhousel’d by now.’

‘Tassino, thou dost the Duke a wrong. ‘Twas thy
fear distorted thy peril. He is a changed man, and most
inclined to charity and justice.’

Tassino let his jaw drop, affecting astonishment.

‘Since when?’

‘Since the day of thy disgrace.’

The other shook his head, with a smile of growing
effrontery.

‘Why, look you, Messer Bembo,’ he said: ‘you represent
his conscience, they tell me, and should know. Yet
may not a man and his conscience, like ill-mated
consorts, be on something less than speaking terms?’

He laughed, half insolent, half nervous, as Bernardo
regarded him in silence with earnest eyes.

‘Supposing,’ said he, ‘you were to represent, of your
holy innocence and credulity, a little more and a little
sweeter than the truth? Think’st thou I should
have dared reissue from my hiding, were Galeazzo still
here to represent his own? If I had ever thought to,
there was that buried a week ago in the walls yonder
would have stopped me effectively.’

‘Buried—in the walls! What?’

‘Dost not know? Then ’tis patent he is not all-confiding
in his conscience. And yet thou shouldst know.
‘Tis said thou lead’st him by the nose, as St. Mark the
lion. Well, I am a sinner, properly persecuted; yet,
to my erring perceptives, ’tis hard to reconcile thy
saintship with thy subscribing to his sentence on a poor
Franciscan monk, a crazy dreamer, who came to him
with some story of the stars.’

‘O, I cry you mercy! I quote Messer Jacopo, who
was present. “Deserving of the last chastisement”—were
not those thy words? And Omniscience
dethroned—a bewildered mortal like ourselves? Anyhow,
he held thy saintship to justify his sentence on
the monk.’

‘What sentence?’

‘Wilt thou come and see? I have my host’s pass.’

He staggered under the shock of a sudden leap and
clutch. Young strenuous hands mauled his pretty
doublet; sweet glaring eyes devoured his soul.

‘I see it in thy face! O, inhuman dogs are ye all!
Show me, take me to him!’

Tassino struggled feebly, and whimpered.

‘Let go: I will take thee: I am not to blame.’

Shaking, but exultant in his evil little heart, he broke
loose and led the way to a remote angle of the battlements,
where the trunk of a great tower, like the drum
of a hinge, connected the northern and eastern curtains.
This was that same massy pile in whose bowels was
situate the dreadful oubliette known as the ‘Hermit’s
Cell’: a grim, ironic title signifying deadness to the
world, living entombment, utter abandonment and
self-obliteration. It was delved fathoms deep; quarried out
of the bed-rock; walled in further by a mountain of
masonry. Tyranny sees an Enceladus in the least of
its victims. On so exaggerated a scale of fear must the
sum of its deeds be calculated.

Here the Provost-Marshal had his impregnable
quarters. Looking down, one might see the huge blank
bulge of the tower enter the pavement below unpierced
but by an occasional loop or eyelet hole. Its only
entrance, indeed, was from the rampart-walk; its direct
approach by way of the flying stair-way, up which
Bembo had seen the monk disappear. His heart burned
in his breast as he thought of him. There was a fury
in his blood, a sickness in his throat.

A sentry, lounging by the door, offered, as if by
preconcert with Tassino, no bar to his entrance. But,
when Cicada would have followed, he stayed him.

‘Back, Fool!’ he said shortly, opposing his halberd.

Cicada struggled a moment, and desisted.

‘A murrain on thy tongue,’ snapped he, ‘that calls
me one!’

The sentry laughed, and, having gained his point,
produced a flask leisurely from his belt.

‘What! art thou not a fool?’ said he, unstoppering it,
and preparing to drink.

‘Understand, I have forsworn all liquor,’ said Cicada,
with a wry twinkle.

‘So art thou certainly a fool,’ said the sentry, eye and
body guarding the doorway, as he raised the horn.

‘Hist!’ whispered Cicada, staying him: ‘this
remoteness—that damning gurgle—come! a ducat for a
mouthful! Be quick, before he returns!’

The soldier, between cupidity and good-nature,
laughed and handed over the flask. ‘Done on that!’
said he. But on the instant he roared out, as the other
snatched and bolted with his property.

‘How, thou bloody filcher! Give me back my wine!’

Cicada crowed and capered, dangling his spoil.

‘Judas! for a dirty piece of silver to betray temperance!’

The sentry, with a furious oath, made at him. He
dodged; eluded; finally, under the very hands of his
pursuer, threw the flask into a corner, and, as the other
dived for it, slipped by and disappeared into the tower.
The soldier, cursing and panting in his wake, ran into
the arms of an impassive figure—staggered, fell back,
and saluted.

Messer Jacopo eyed the delinquent a long minute
without a word. He had been silent witness, within the
guard-room, of all the little scene, and was considering
the penalty meet to such a breach of orders and
discipline.

There had been something of pre-arrangement in this
matter between him and Messer Tassino. The two were
in a common accord as to the loss and inconvenience to
be entailed upon themselves by any reform of existing
institutions—comprehensively, as to the menace this
stranger was to their interests. It would be well to
demonstrate to him the unreality of his influence with
Galeazzo. Let him see the starving monk, in evidence
of his power’s short limits. It was possible the sight
might kill his presumption for ever: return him
disillusioned to obscurity.

So his presence here had been procured, with orders
to the sentry to debar the Fool. Jacopo wanted no
shrewd cricket at the boy’s side, to leaven the horror
for him with his song of cheer. The full impressiveness
of the awful scene must be allowed to overbear his
soul in silence. This sentry had erred rather foolishly.

It abated nothing of the terror of the man that no
sign of passion ever crossed his face, nor word his lips.
He turned away, not having uttered a sound; and left
the delinquent collapsed as under a heat-stroke.

‘Now, let it be no worse than the strappado!’ prayed
the poor wretch to himself.

In the meanwhile, Cicada, swift, quivering, alert, was
descending, like a gulped Jonah, into the bowels of the
tower. He had no need to pick his path: the
well-stairway, like a screw pinning the upper to the
underworld, transmitted to him every whisper and shuffle of
the footsteps he was pursuing. Sometimes, so deceptive
were the echoes in that winding shaft, he fancied himself
treading close upon the heels of the chase; yet each
little loop-lighted landing found him, as he reached it,
audibly no nearer. His mocking mouth was set grim;
he dreaded, not for himself but for his darling, some
nameless entrapping wickedness. ‘If they design it,’ he
thought—’if they design it! Hell shall not hide them
from me.’

Suddenly the sounds below died away and ceased.
He listened an instant; then went down again, turning
and turning in a nightmare of blind horror. The walls
grew dank and viscous to his palm. A stumble, and
all might end for him hideously. Then, at the same
moment, weak light and a weaker cry greeted him. He
descended, still without pause—and shot into the
glowing mouth of a tiny tunnel, where were the figures he
sought.

They stood at a low grating in the wall, which was
pierced into a subterranean chamber. The bars were
thrown open, and through the aperture Tassino directed
the light of a flaring torch he held upon a figure lying
prostrate on the stones below. Cicada crept, and peered
over his master’s shoulder. The thing on the floor
was grotesque, unnatural—a human skeleton emitting
noises, heaving in its midst. That great bulk had
become in its shrinkage a monstrous travesty of life.
But existence still preyed upon its indissoluble
vestments of flesh.

‘He clings to life, for a monk,’ whispered the Fool.

With the sound of his voice, Bernardo was sprung into
a Fury. He lashed upon Cicada, tooth and claw:—

‘Thou knew’st, and hid it from me in parables!’

‘Inference, inference!’ cried the Fool. ‘I would have
spared thee.’

‘Spared me? Thus?’

‘Ah! thy shame through wicked sophistries! He
was foredoomed. Had I interfered, I had been lying
myself there now, and you a loving servant the less.’

Bembo flung his arms abroad, as if sweeping all away
from him.

‘Love! Let pass!’ he shrieked: ‘Fiends are ye all,
with whom to breathe is poison!’ and he broke by them,
and went flying and crying up into the daylight. He ran,
without pause, by the walls, down the notched stairway,
across the ward, and came with flaming colour into the
buttery.

‘Give me wine and bread!’ he screamed of the steward
there; and the man, in a flurry of wonder, obeyed him.
Then away he raced again, his hands full, and never
stopped until the sentry, a new one, at the tower door
barred his progress. The way was private, quoth the
man. He could let none past but by order.

‘Of whom?’ panted Bembo.

‘Why, the Provost-Marshal.’

Then the boy tried wheedling.

‘Dear soldier: thou art well cared for. There is one
within perishes for a little bread.’

But the man was adamant.

‘Where, then, is the Provost-Marshal?’ cried the other
in desperation.

Within or without—the sentry professed not to know.
In any case, it was death to him to leave his post.

Bernardo put down his load on the battlements, and,
turning, fled away again.

CHAPTER X

Bona sat amongst her maidens. They were all
busy as spiders upon a loom of tapestry, spinning
a symbolic web. The subject was as edifying as
their talk over it was free. Their lips and fingers were
perpetually at odds, weaving reputations and pulling
them to pieces. Bona herself said little; but abstraction
gave some indulgence to the smile with which she
listened, or seemed to.

‘Whither do her thoughts travel?’ whispered one girl
of another.

‘Hush!’ was the answer. ‘Along the Piedmont Road
with her lord, of course. What else would you?’

The first giggled.

‘Nothing, indeed, if it left a chance for poor little me.
But, alack! I fear her charity stops nearer home.’

‘What then, insignificance? Would your presumption
fly at an angel?’

‘Yes, indeed, though it got a peck for its pains. (Mark
the Caprona’s ear pricked our way! She knows we are
on the eternal subject.) Heigho! it will be something to
share in this promised commonwealth of love, at least.’

She spoke loud enough for the little Catherine Sforza,
sitting by her adopted mother, to hear her.

‘Ehi, Carlina,’ cried that pert youngster: ‘What share
do you expect for your small part?’

‘I thought of Messer Bembo, Madonna,’ answered
Carlina demurely.

They crowed her down with enormous laughter.

‘Nay, child,’ said Catherine: ‘there is to be no talk of
exclusiveness in this Commonwealth. We are all to take
alike—Mamma, and I, and the Countess of Casa Caprona,
and whoever else subscribes to the Purification. For my
part I shall be content with becoming very good; and I
have hopes of myself. See the reformation in our dear
Countess; and she was in his company but a day or two.’

‘Peace, thou naughtiness!’ cried Bona; while Beatrice’s
eyes burned dull fire; and a girl, one who worked near
her, a soft and endearing little piety, looked up and
choked in a panic, ‘O Madonna!’

Catherine mimicked her:—

‘O Biasia! Is the subject too tender for thy
conscience? Alas, dear! but if thy only hope is in this
Commonwealth? Angels are not monogamous.’

Biasia blushed like a poppy; yet managed to stammer
amidst the laughter: ‘It is only that he,—that the
subject, seems to me too sacred. He preaches heavenly
love—the brotherhood of souls—in all else, one man one maid.’

Catherine very gravely got upon a stool, and
paraphrased Messer Bembo, voice and manner:—

‘I kiss thee, kind Madonna, for thine exposition. A
man must put a fence about his desires, would he be
happy. A sweet mate, a cot, beehives and a garden—he
shall find all love’s epitome in these. None can
possess the world but in the abstract—a plea for
universal brotherhood. What doth it profit me to own a
palace, and live for all my needs’ content in one room of
it? Go to and join, and leave superfluous woman to the
preacher.’

Some tittered, some applauded; Biasia hung her head,
and would say no more. Bona cried, ‘Come down, thou
wickedness!’ but indulgently, as if she half-dreaded
attracting to herself the flicker of the little forked tongue.

‘O!’ cried Catherine, ‘I grant you that, with an
angel, the manner spices the lesson. I will tell you,
girls, how he rebuked me yesterday on this same legend
of reciprocity. “How could you take sport,” says he,
“of witnessing that poor Montano’s punishment?” “Why,
very well,” says I, “seeing he was a man, and
therefore my natural enemy.” “How is man so?” says
he. “He makes me bear his children for him,” says I.
“But I suppose he will be made to suffer his share of the
toil in this new Commonwealth of love.” “You talk like
a child,” he says. “Then,” says I, “I will sing like a
woman,” and I extemporised—very clever, you will admit.’

She pinched up her skirts, and put out a little foot,
and chirruped, in no voice at all, but with a sauce of
impudence:—

‘”Love is give and take,” says he,

“Every gander knows—

Wear the prickle for my sake;

For thine, I’ll wear the rose.”

“Grazie, kind and true,” says I,

“For that noble dower—

Only, between me and you,

I should like the flower.”

“And hast thou not it?” cries St. Bernardo, interrupting
me; and, would you believe it, swinging round his
lute, his lips and his finger-tips join issue in the prettiest
nonsense ever conceived for a poor wife’s fooling. Wait,
and I will recall it.’

She had the quickest wit and memory, and in a
moment was chaunting:—

‘”Whence did our bird-soft baby come?

How learned to prattle of this for home?

Some sleepy nurse-angel let her stray,

And she found herself in the world one day.

She heard nurse calling, and further fled:

She hid herself in our cabbage bed.

There we came on her fast asleep,

What could we do but take and keep,

Carry her in and up the stair?

She would have died of cold out there.

She woke at once in a little fright;

But Love beckoned her from the light.

Lure we had lit, for dear love fain;

She had seen it shine through the window pane.

Lure we had kindled of flame and bliss,

To catch such a little ghost-moth as this.

Ah, me! it shrivelled her pretty wing.

Here she must stay, poor thing, poor thing!”‘

 

She ended: ‘Faith, St. Charming’s lips make that
daintiest setting to his fancies, that I could have kissed
’em while he improved his song with a homily’ (she
mimicked again the boy’s manner, comically emphasised).
‘”Why,” saith he, “would you grudge yourself that poignant
privilege of your sex? would ye share the agony and
halve the gain? What gift so careless in all the world
makes such sweet possession? Furs, gowns, and trinkets
pall; perishable things grow less by use; the diamond
suffers by its larger peer. Only the gift of love, the wee
babe, takes new delight of time; renews woman’s best
through herself; is a perpetual novelty, spring all the
year round, flowers fresh burgeoning through faded
blooms. To be sole warden of the quickening soul ye
bore—you, you! to see the lamb-like heaven of its
eyes cuddling to your bosom’s fold—all thine, save the
spent heat that cast it! O, rather be the mould than
the turbulent metal it shapes! Go to, and thank God
for labours yielding such reward. Go to, and be the
mother of saints.” Whereat I curtsied, and “Thank you,
sir,” says I, “for the offer, but my bed’s already laid
for me in Rome,” and then——’

What more she might have quoted or invented none
might say, for at the moment a wild figure burst into
the chamber, and ran to its mistress, and entreated her
with lips and hands.

‘Give me thy gage—quick! There is one starves in
the “Hermit’s Cell,” and they will not let me pass to him
without. Thou art the Duke, thou art the Duke now.
Give it me, in mercy, and avert God’s vengeance from
this wicked house!’

Bona had arisen, pale as death, pity and anguish
pleading in her eyes.

‘Alas! What say’st thou? Thou, not I, art the Duke.’

‘Give it me,’ demanded Bembo feverishly. ‘Nay,
quibble not, while he gasps out his agony—a
monk—hear’st thou? A monk!’

She temporised a moment in her pain.

‘There are black sheep in those flocks.’

‘God forgive thee!’

‘Alas! thou wilt not. Indeed I have no talisman will
open doors that my lord has shut.’

Beatrice, intent, with veiled eyes, from her place,
bestirred herself with an indolent smile.

‘Madonna forgets. Love laughs at locksmiths.’

The two women faced one another a minute. Some
subtle emotion of antagonism, already born, waxed into
a larger consciousness between them.

‘How, Countess?’ said Bona quietly.

‘Madonna wears her bethrothal ring—a very passepartout.
It is the talisman will serve her with monks
and saints alike.’

A little flush mantled to the Duchess’s brow.
Standing erect a moment she slipped the ring from her finger,
and held it out to Bernardo.

‘It should be the pledge through love of Charity.
Take it, in my lord’s good name, whose jealous
representative I remain. And when thou return’st it, may it
be sanctified of new justice, child, against the prick of
envy and slander and the spite of venomous tongues.’

She turned away stately and resumed her needle as
Bernardo, with a cry of thanks, ran from the room. A
minute or two later he appeared before the sentry on the
ramparts and flourished his token. To his surprise the
man hardly glanced at it as he stepped aside to let him
pass. He thought on this with some shapeless foreboding,
as he leapt like a chamois down the steeps of the
tower, the food, which he had snatched up, in his hands.
God pity him and his awakening! There are emotions
too sacred for minuting. Let it suffice that Jacopo had
proved too faithful a prophylactic to superstition. The
wretched monk had not been allowed to justify his own
prediction by dying of starvation. In that last interval,
between the Parablist’s going and coming, his throat
had been cut.

A minute later Bernardo leapt like a madman from
the tower. His face was ashy, his hands trembling. At
the foot of the curtain he stumbled over a poor patch,
prostrate and moaning.

‘I am thy Fool, and I shall never make thee smile again.’

All quivering and unstrung, he threw himself on his
knees by Cicada’s side.

‘Up!’ he screamed, ‘up! Get you out of this Sodom
ere the Lord destroy it!’

The Fool bestirred himself, raising eyes full of a
sombre, eager questioning.

‘I am forgiven?’ he gasped; but Bernardo only cried
frenziedly, ‘Up! up!’

CHAPTER XI

There was consternation in the castello, for its
angel visitant had disappeared. The evening
following upon the episode of the ring saw his quarters
void of him, his household retinue troubled and anxious,
and some others in the palace at least as perturbed. It
was not alone that the individual sense of stewardship
towards so rare a possession filled each and all with
forebodings as to the penalty likely to be exacted should
Galeazzo return to a knowledge of his loss; the loss
itself of so sweet and cleansing a personality was blighting.
Now, for the first time, perhaps, people recognised
the real political significance of that creed which they
had been inclined hitherto merely to pet and humour as
the whimsey of a very engaging little propagandist.
How sweet and expansive it was! how progressive by
the right blossoming road of freedom! Where was their
silver-tongued guide? And they flew and buzzed, agitated
like a bee-swarm that has lost its queen.

But, while they scurried aimless, a rumour of the truth
rose like a foul emanation, and, circulating among them,
darkened men’s brows and drove women to a whispering
gossip of terror. So yet another of the Duke’s inhumanities
was at the root of this secession! By degrees the
secret leaked out—of that living entombment, of the
boy’s interference, of his bloody forestalling by the
executioner, of his flight, accompanied by his Fool, from
the gates. And now he was gone, whither none knew;
but of a certainty leaving the curse of his outraged suit
on the house he had tried to woo from wickedness.

The story gained nothing in relief as it grew. Whispers
of that free feminine bandying with their Parablist’s
name, of Catherine’s childish mockery of a sacred
sentiment, deepened the common gloom. It mattered nothing
to the general opinion that this little vivacious Sforza
had but echoed its own bantering mood. Every popular
joke that spells disaster must have its scapegoat. And
she was not liked. In the absence of her father there were
even venturings of frowning looks her way, which, when
she observed, the shrewd elfin creature did not forget.

And Bernardo returned not that night, nor during all
the following day was he heard of. Inquiries were set
on foot, scouts unleashed, the sbirri warned: he remained
undiscovered.

Messer Carlo Lanti went about his business with a
brow of thunder. Once, on the second day, traversing,
dark in cogitation, a lonely corner of the castle enceinte,
he came upon a figure which, as it were some apparition
of his thoughts suddenly materialised, shocked him to a
stand. The walls in this place met in a sunless, abysmal
wedge; and, gathered into the hollow between, the waters
of the canal, welling through subterranean conduits, made
a deep head for the moat. And here, gazing down at her
reflection, it seemed, in that black stone-framed mirror,
stood Beatrice.

She was plainly conscious, for all her deep abstraction
of the moment before, of his approach, yet neither spoke
nor so much as turned her head as he came and stood
beside her. It must have been some startle more than
human that had found her nerves responsive to its shock.
Her languor and indolence seemed impregnable, insensate,
revealing no token of the passion within. Like the warm,
rich pastures which sleep over swelling fires, the placid
glow of her cheek and bosom appeared never so fruitful
in desire as when most threatening an outburst. Carlo,
for all his rage of suspicion, could not but be conscious of
that appeal to his senses. He frowned, and shifted, and
grunted, while she stood tranquilly facing him and fanning
herself without a word. At length he broke silence:—

‘I had wished to see thee alone’—he stared fixedly
and significantly at the water, struggling to bully himself
into brutality—’Nay, by God and St. Ambrose,’ he burst
out, ‘I believe we are well met in this place!’

Not a tremor shook her.

‘Alone?’ she murmured sleepily. ‘Why not? there
was not used to be this ceremony between us.’

‘I have done with all that,’ he cried fiercely. ‘I see
thee now—myself, at least, in the true light.
Harlot! wouldst have turned my hand against the angel that
revealed thee! Where is he? Hast struck surer the
second time? I know thee—and if——’

He seized her wrist and turned her to the water. She
did not resist or cry out, though her cheek flushed in the
pain of his cruel clutch.

‘Know me!’ she said. ‘Didst thou ever know me?
Only as the bull knows the soft heifer—the nearest to his
needs. Thou hast done with me—thou! I tell thee, if
Fate had made a sacrament of thy passion, yielding the
visible sign, I had brought hither the monstrous pledge
and drowned it like a dog. Do we so treat what we
love? I am not guilty of Bernardo’s death, if that is
what you mean.’

He let her go, and retreated a step, glaring at her.
Her blood ebbed and flowed as tranquilly as her low
voice had stabbed.

‘This—to my face!’ he gasped. Then he broke into
furious laughter. ‘Art well requited, if it is the truth.
Love him! But, dead or alive, he will not love
thee—that saint—a wife dishonoured.’

‘O noble bull—thou king of beasts!’ she murmured.

‘Why should I be generous?’ he snarled. ‘Have I
reason to spare thee? Yet I will be generous, an thou
art guiltless of this, Beatrice. I have loved thee, after my
fashion.’

‘Thou hast. Ah! If I might sponge away that memory!’

‘Well, I would fain do the same for his sake.’

‘Dog!’

‘What!’

‘Barest thou talk of love?—thou, who hast rolled me
in thine arms, and waked from sated ecstasy to call me
murderess!’

‘Had I not provocation, then? Faith, you bewilder me!’

‘Poor, stupid brute!’

‘Stupid I may be, yet not so blind as woman’s folly.
Hast borne me once, Beatrice. Well, it is past: I ask
nothing of it but thy trust.’

‘My trust!‘

‘Ay, when I warn thee. This saint is not for thee.
O, I am wide awake! Stupid? like enough; but when a
wife, the queenliest, parts with her betrothal ring——’

She made a quick, involuntary gesture, stepping
forward; then as suddenly checked herself, with a soft,
mocking laugh.

‘O this bull!’ she cried huskily—’this precisian of the
new cult! Not for me, quotha, but for another—a saint
to all but the highest bidder!’

‘Not for you nor any one,’ he said savagely.

‘What! not Bona either?’ she said. ‘Be warned by
me, rather. Yours is no wit for this encounter. Love is
a coil, dear chuck; no battering-ram. Not for me nor
any? Maybe; but the game is in the strife. Go, find
your saint: I know nothing of him.’

‘No, nor shall. Be warned, I say.’

‘Well, you have said it, and more than once.’

He hesitated, ground his teeth, clapped his hands
together, and turning, left her.

Glooming and mumbling, he went back to the palace.
A page met him with the message that the Duchess of
Milan desired his attendance. He frowned, and went, as
directed, to her private closet. He found Bona alone,
busy, or affecting to be busy, over a strip of embroidery.
She greeted him chilly; but it was evident that nervousness
rather than hauteur kept her seated. He saluted
her coldly and silently, awaiting her pleasure. She
glanced once or twice at the closed portière; then braced
herself to the ordeal with a rather quivering smile.

‘This is a sad coil, Messer Carlo.’

He answered gruffly:—

‘If I understand your Grace.’

She put the quibble by.

‘We, you and I, are in a manner his guardians—accountable
to the Duke.’

‘I can understand your Grace’s anxiety,’ he said shortly.

‘Nevertheless, it was not I introduced him to the
court,’ she said.

‘But only to some of its secrets,’ he responded.

‘I do not understand you.’

‘It is very plain, Madonna. You gave him the key to
that discovery.’

She rose at once, breathing quickly, her cheeks white.

‘Ah, Messer! in heaven’s name procure me the return
of my ring!’

Her voice was quite pitiful, entreating. He looked at
her gloomily, gnawing his upper lip.

‘Madonna commands? I will do my best to find and
take it from him, alive or dead.’

She fell back with a little crying gasp.

‘Find him—yes.’

‘No more?’ he demanded grimly.

‘I thought you loved him?’ she gulped.

‘Too well,’ he answered, ‘to be your go-between.’

She uttered a fierce exclamation, and clenched her
hands.

‘Go, sir!’ she said.

He turned at once. She came after him, fawning.

‘Good Messer Carlo, dear lord,’ she breathed weepingly;
‘nay, thou art a loyal and honest friend. Forgive me.
We are all in need of forgiveness.’

He faced about again.

‘Penitence is blasphemy without reform,’ he said.

‘Ah me! it is. How well thou hast caught the sweet
preacher’s style. Hast thou reformed?’

‘Ay, in the worst.’

‘Thou hast made an enemy of thy mistress? Poor
Bembo, poor child! He will need a mother.’

‘Wouldst thou be that to him?’

‘What else? Get me my ring.’

‘Beatrice hates him——’

‘She would, the wretch, for his parting you and her.’

‘Or loves him—I don’t know which.’

‘Wanton! how dare she?’

‘Well, if you will play the mother to him——’

‘Is he not a child to adore? Ah me! to be foster-parent
to that boon-comrade of the Christ!’

Carlo looked at her with some satisfaction darkling out
of gloom. His honest hot brain was no Machiavellian
possession; his temper was the travail of a warm heart.
He believed this woman meant honestly; and so, no
doubt, she did in her loss, not considering, or choosing
not to consider, the emotionalism of regain.

‘Ay, Madonna,’ said he, kindling, ”tis the most
covetable relation. Who but a Potiphar’s wife would
associate what we call love with this Joseph? God! a
look of him will make me blush as I were a brat caught
stealing sugar. There is that in him, we blurt out the
truth in the very act of hiding it. A child to adore? Is
he not, now, the dear put? and to hearken to and imitate
what we can. Ay, and more—to shield with this arm—let
men beware. Only the women harass me, this way
and that. Their loves and hates be like twin babes.
None but their dam can tell each from the other.
Therefore, would ye mother him—’

‘Yes—’

‘And cherish and protect—’

‘Yes—’

‘And of your woman’s wisdom keep skirts at a distance—’

‘I will promise that most.’

‘Why, I will bring him back to thee, ring and all,
though I turn Milan upside down first.’

He bowed and was going; but she detained him, with
sycophant velvet eyes.

‘Dear lord, so kind and loyal. Tell him that without
him we find ourselves astray.’

‘Ay.’

‘Tell him that from this moment his Duchess will aid
and abet him in all his reforms.’

‘I will tell him.’

‘Ask him—’ she hesitated, and turned away her sweet
head—’doth he seek to retaliate on his mistress’s innocent
confidence, that, by absenting himself, he would turn it to
her undoing?’

Carlo grunted.

‘By your Grace’s leave, an I find him, I will put it my way.’

She acquiesced with a meek, lovely smile, and the
words of the Mass: ‘Ite, missa est!‘

And when he was gone, she sighed, and looked in a
mirror and murmured to herself in a semi-comedy of
grief: ‘Alas! too weak to be Messalina! I must be
good if he asks me.’

And, being weak, she let her thoughts drift.

CHAPTER XII

In a street of the quarter Giovia the armourer Lupo
had his smithy. He had been a notable artisan in
a town famous for its steel and niello work; but in his
age, as in any, a plethora of fine production must cheapen
the value of the individual producer. Therefore when a
vengeful caprice blinded him, and his door remained shut
and his chimney ceased to smoke, patronage transferred
its custom to the next house or street without a qualm;
and his achievements in his particular business were
forgotten, or confounded with those of fellow-craftsmen,
deriving, perhaps, in their art from him. It was a
sample of that banal heartlessness of society, which in a
moral age breeds collectivists, and desperadoes in an age
of lawlessness. And of the two one may pronounce the
latter the more logical.

In Milan men came quickly to maturity, whether in
the art of forging a blade or using it. Life flamed up
and out on swift ideals of passion. Parental love, high
education, the intricate cults of beauty and chivalry, were
all gambling investments in a speculative market. The
odds were always in favour of that old broker Death.
Yet the knowledge abated nothing of the zeal. It was
strange to be so fastidious of the terms of so hazardous a
lease. One might be saving, just, virtuous—one’s
life-tenancy was not made thereby a whit securer. The
ten commandments lay at the mercy of a dagger-point;
wherefore men hurried to realise themselves timely,
and to cram the stores of years into a rich banquet or
two.

Master Lupo, a sincere workman and a conscientious,
was flicked in one moment off his green leaf into the
dust. There, maimed and helpless, the tears for ever
welling in his empty sockets, he cogitated tremulously,
fiercely, the one sentiment left to him, revenge—revenge
not so primarily on the instrument of his ruin, as on
Tassino through the system which had made such a
creature possible. He lent his darkened abode to be the
nest to one of those conspiracies, which are never far to
gather in despotic governments, and which opportunity
in his case showed him actually at hand.

Cola Montano, it has been said, had been borne away
after his scourging by some women of the people. Grace,
or pity, or fear was in their hearts, and they nursed him.
Scarcely for his own sake; for, democracy being
impersonal, he was at no trouble to be a grateful patient.
He took their ministries as conceded to a principle, and
individually was as surly and impatient with them as any
ill-conditioned cur.

Recovering betimes (the dog had a tough hide), he
learned of neighbour Lupo’s condition, and walked
incontinently into that wretched artificer’s existence. He
found a blind and hopeless wreck, shelves of rusting
armour, a forge of dead embers, and, brooding sullen
beside it, a girl too plainly witnessing to her own
dishonour. He heard the rain on the roof; he saw the set
grey mother creeping about her work; and he sat himself
down by the sightless armourer, and peered hungrily into
his swathed face.

‘Dost know me, Lupo? I am Montano.’

The miserable man groaned.

‘Master Collegian? Stands yet thy school of
philosophy? A’ God’s name, lay something of that on this
hot bandage!’

‘The school stands in its old place, armourer; but its
doors, like thine, are shut. What then? Its principles
remain open to all.’

The poor wretch put out a hand, feeling.

‘Where art thou? Have thy wounds healed so quickly?
Mine are incurable.’

‘What!’ croaked Montano jeeringly, ‘with such a
salve to allay them! I heard of it—logic meet to an
angel—to renew thine image through her yonder.
Marry, sir! conception runs before the law. Hast
chased thy likeness down and taken it to church?
Mistress Lucia there would seem a sullen bride. Hath
her popinjay come and gone again? Well, you must be
content with the legitimising.’

The armourer writhed in answering.

‘What think you? There has been none. Mock not
our misery. Is it the concern of angels to see their
sentences enforced?’

‘No, but to be called angels. Heaven is not easy
surfeited with adulation.’

‘He was glorified in his judgment; and there, for us,
the matter ended.’

‘Not quite.’

The pedagogue bent his evil head to look again into
that woful face.

‘Lupo, my school is closed; alumnus loiters in the
streets. Shall he come in here?’

There was something so significant in his tone that
the broken man he addressed started, as if a hand had
been laid on his eyes.

‘For what? Who is he?’ he muttered.

‘I will tell you anon,’ answered Montano. ‘No prelector
but hath his favourite pupils. He, alumnus, is in
this case threefold—three dear homeless scholars of mine,
Lupo, needing a rallying-place in which to meet and
mature some long-discussed theory of social cure. I
have heard from them since—since my illness. They
chafe to resume their studies and their mentor—honest,
good fellows, confessing, perhaps, to a heresy or so.’

‘Master,’ muttered the armourer, ‘you will do no harm
to be explicit.’

‘Shall I not? Well, if you will, and by grace of an
example, such a heresy, say, as that, when the devil rules
by divine right, the God who nominated him is best
deposed.’

‘Yes, yes, to be sure. That is blasphemy as well as
heresy. But I think of Messer Bembo, who is still His
minister, and I believe your pupils go too far.’

‘Why, what hath this minister done for you?’

‘Very much, in intention.’

‘Well, I thought that was said to pave the other place;
but, in truth, the issues of all things are confounded, since
we have an angel for the Lord’s minister and a devil for
His vicegerent.’

‘Pity of God! are they not? And ye would resolve
them by deposing the Christ—by knocking out the very
keystone of hope?’

‘Nay, by substituting a rock for a crumbling brick.’

‘What rock?’

‘The people.’

‘Might they not, too, elect a tyrant to be their
representative?’

‘How could tyranny represent a commonwealth?’

‘A commonwealth! It is out, then! It is not God
ye would depose, but Galeazzo. Commonwealth! Is
that a name for keeping all men under a certain height?
But the giant will dictate the standard, and any one may
reach to him who can. Messer Montano, I seem to have
heard of a republican called Cæsar.’

‘Then you must have heard of another called Brutus?’

‘Ay, to be sure; and of a third called Octavian.’

‘Those were distracted times, my friend.’

‘And what are these? Have you ever heard of the
times when a man’s interest was one with his neighbour’s?
Besides, the flame of art burns never so sprightly as under
a despot. It finds no fuel in uniformity—each man equal
to his neighbour.’ He put out groping hands pitifully.
‘I loved my art,’ he quavered. ‘They might have spared
me to it!’

Montano bit his lip scornfully. It was on his tongue to
spurn this spiritless creature. But he suppressed himself.

‘What would you, then?’ he demanded; ‘you, the
wretched victim of the system you commend?’

‘Ah!’ sighed Lupo, ‘ideally, Messer, an autocracy,
with an angel at its head.’

The philosopher laughed harshly.

‘Why,’ he sneered, ‘there is your ideal come to hand.
Be plain. Shall we depose a tyrant, and elect in his place
this new-arrived, this divine boy, as ye all title him?’

‘Why not?’

Montano started and stared at the speaker. There
was suggestion here—of a standard for innovation; of a
rallying-point for reform. A republic, like a despotism,
might find its telling battle-cry in a saint. The boy, as
representing the liberty of conscience, was already a
subject of popular adoration. Why should they not use
him as a fulcrum to the lever of revolution, and, having
done with, return him to the cloisters from which he
drew? There was suggestion here.

He mused a little, then broke out suddenly:—

‘Brutus is none the less indispensable.’

‘I do not gainsay it, master.’

‘What! you do not? Then there, at least, we are
agreed. Wilt have him come here?’

‘Who is he, this Brutus? I grope in the dark—O my
God, in the dark!’

During all this time the two women had remained
passive and apparently apathetic listeners. Now,
suddenly, the girl rose from her place by the chimney and
came heavily forward, her eyes glaring, her hands clenched
in woe, like some incarnated, fallen pythoness.

‘Tell me,’ she said hoarsely. ‘I haven’t his patience
for my wrongs, nor caution neither. What’s gained by
caution when one stands on an earthquake? Let me
make sure of him, my fine lover, and the world may fall
in, for all I care.’

The pale mother hurried to her husband’s side. He
put out helpless, irresolute hands, with a groan. Montano
stooping, elbow on knee, and rubbing his bristly chin,
conned the speaker with sinister approval.

‘Spoken like a Roman,’ said he. ‘Thou art the better
vessel. If all were as you! Tyranny is hatched of the
gross corpse of manliness—a beastly fly. Wilt tell thee
my Brutus’s name, girl, if thou wilt answer for these.’

He pointed peremptorily at her parents.

‘Ay, will I,’ she answered scornfully; ‘though I have
to wrench out their tongues first.’

He applauded shrilly, with a triumphant, contemptuous
glance at the cowering couple.

‘That is the right way with cowards. I commit my
Brutus to thee. ‘Tis a threefold dog, as I have
said—a fanged Cerberus. Noble, too—as Roman as thou; and,
in one part at least, like wounded. He, this third part,
this Carlo Visconti, had a sister. Well, she was a flower
which Galeazzo plucked; and, not content therewith
threw into the common road. Another head is
Lampugnani, beggared by the Sforzas; and Girolamo
Olgiati is my third, a dear beardless boy, and
instigated only by the noblest love of liberty.’

The girl nodded.

‘And are these all?’

‘All, save a fellow called Narcisso—a mere instrument
to use and break—no principles but hate and gain.
Was servant to that bully Lanti and dismissed—hum! for
excess of loyalty. Fear him not.’

‘Alas!’ broke in the armourer: ‘why should we fear
him or anybody? There is no harm in this letting my
shop to be thy school’s succedaneum.’

Lucia laughed like a fury.

‘No harm at all,’ sniggered Montano, ‘save in these
heresies I spoke of. And what are they?—to reorganise
society on a basis of political and social freedom. No
harm in these young Catalines discussing their drastic
remedies, perhaps in the vanity of a hope that some
Sallust may be found to record them.’

‘Nay, have done with all this,’ cried the girl witheringly.
‘I know nothing of your Catalines and Sallusts.
Ye meet to kill—own it, or ye meet elsewhere.’

Her mother cried out: ‘O Lucia! per pieta.’

She made no answer, only fixing Montano with her
glittering eyes. He rose from his stool stiffly, with a
snarl for his aching wounds. But his face brightened
towards her like a spark of wintry sun.

‘We meet to kill, Madonna,’ he said, ‘ruined, crippled,
debauched—the victims of a monster and his system.
And thou shalt have thy share, never fear, when the
feast comes to follow the sacrifice.’

Bembo had fled, like one distracted, from the walls,
his faithful shadow jumping in his wake. The two,
running and following, never slackened in their pace
until a half-mile separated them from the city; and
then, in a gloomy thicket, under a falling sky, the boy
threw himself down on the grass, and buried his face
from heaven. Pitiful and distraught, the Fool stood
over, silently regarding him. At length he spoke,
panting and reproachful.

‘Nay, in pity, master, wert thou not advised?’

The boy writhed.

‘So lying, so wicked cunning, to make me his decoy
and seeming abettor! O, I am punished for my faith!
Is Christ dead?’

The Fool sighed.

‘By thy showing, He lingers behind in the wood.’

‘Tell Him I have gone on to my father.’

‘Thou wilt?’

Bernardo sat up, a towzled angel. In the interval
the tears had come fast, and his face was wet.

‘God help you all!’ he sobbed. ‘You, even you,
prevaricated to me. Whither shall I turn? I see
everywhere a death-dealing wilderness, lies and lust and
inhumanity.’

‘I prevaricated,’ said Cicada mournfully. ‘I admit
it. You once claimed my wit and experience to your
tutoring. Well, do I not know the tyrant—the persistent
devil in him? He had his teeth in that monk. Not
Christ Himself would have loosened them.’

‘Ah! what shall I do?’

‘What, but go forward steadfast. This is but a jog by
the way. Judge life on the broad lines of action, the
ruts which mark the progress of the wheels. ‘Tis a
morbid sentiment that wastes itself on the quarrel
between the wheels and the road.’

‘Ah, me! if I could but foresee the end of that bloody
mire—the sweet, crisp path again! I can advance no
further. My weak heart fails. I will go back to the
wood.’

‘Then back, a’ God’s name, so I come too.’

Bernardo rose and seized the Fool’s hand, the tears
streaming down his cheeks.

‘This dreadful race—monsters all!’ he cried. ‘Is there
one kind deed recorded to its credit—one, one only, one
little deed? Tell me, and if there is, by its memory I
will persevere.’

‘Humph! Should I wish thee to? Think again of
that wood.’

‘Tell me, kind, good Cicca, my nurse and friend.’

‘Go to! Shalt not put a bone in my throat. Well,
they are monsters, but made by that same brute
Circumstance thou decriest. “Wavering out of chaos,”
says you? Very like, sir; but, after all, Circumstance
is our head artist in a tuneless world. What a dull
sing-song ‘twould be without him—league-long choirs of
saints praising God—a universe of chirping crickets!
With respect, sir, I, though his Fool, would not have
him caged in my time.’

‘Alas, dear, for thine understanding! Love, that I
would have depose him, is ten thousand times his
superior in art—ay, and in humour. But go on.’

‘I doubt the humour. However, as things are, I owe
to him, as do you, and Galeazzo—the Fool, the Saint, and
the Monster. Could love conceive such a trio? But
to the point. Hast ever heard speak of our Duke’s
grand-dad?’

‘Muzio?’

‘So he called himself, or was called, pretending to trace
his descent from Mutius Scævola the Roman. Flattery,
you see, will make a braying ass of honesty. He was
Giacommuzzo—just that; one of a family of fighting
yeomen. But he had points. Hast been told how he
began?’

‘No.’

‘Why, he was digging turnips by the evening star in
his father’s farm at Cotignola, when the sound of pipes
and drums disturbed him. ‘Twas some band of Boldrino
of Panicale come to recruit from the fields; and they
halted by the big man. “Be a soldier of fortune like us,”
says they; and he tossed his dusty hair from his eyes,
and saw the glint of gold in baldricks. He looked at
the evening star, and ’twas pale beside. Borrowers glean
the real heaven of credit in this topsy-turvy world. Look
at any pool of water: what a glittering prospectus it
makes of the moon! Muzzo flung his spade into an
oak hard by, leaving the decision to Circumstance. If
it fell, he would resume it; if it stayed, a soldier he would
be. It stuck in the branches.’

‘Cicca!’

‘Peace! I will tell thee. He fought up and down,
but never back to Cotignola. He put his ploughing
shoulder to his work, and dug a furrow to fame. Popes
and kings engaged for and against this Condottieri. He
took them all to market like his beans. He knew the
values of fear and money and discipline—bought over
honour; wrenched treason by the joints; flogged slackness
for a rusty hinge in its armour; made warriors of
his rabble. Sought letters, too, to spur them on by
legend.’

‘All this is nothing.’

‘He went to Mass every day——’

‘Alas!’

‘Cast his true plain wife, and took to bed the widow of
Naples——’

‘Alas! Alas!’

‘And lost his life at Pescara, trying to save another.’

‘Ah! How was that?’

‘He had crossed the river on a blown tide, when he
saw his page a-drowning in the stream. “Poor lad,”
quoth he, “will none help thee?” And he dashed back,
was overwhelmed himself, and sank. They saw his
mailed hands twice rise and clutch the air. A’ was
never seen again. The waters were his tomb.’

Bernardo was silent.

‘Was not that a creditable deed?’ quoth the Fool.

The boy, pressing the tangled hair from his eyes,
feverishly seized his comrade’s hands in his own.

‘God forgive me!’ he cried; ‘am I one to judge him,
who have let my father’s friend go under, and never
reached a hand?’

The Fool looked frankly amazed.

‘Montano,’ cried Bembo, ‘whom, in my pride of place,
I have forgotten! I will go down among the people
where he lies, and seek to heal his wounds, and sing
Christ’s parables to simple hearts. Love lies not in
palaces. I will seek Montano.’

‘Come, then,’ said Cicada.

‘Nay, in a little,’ said the boy. ‘Let the kind night
find us first. I will flaunt my creed no longer in
the sun.’

From behind the barred door of Lupo’s shop came
the sound of muffled laughter. The tragic incongruity
of it in that house of ruin was at least arresting enough
to halt a pedestrian here and there on his passage along
the dark, wet-blown street outside. The mirth broke
gustily, with little snarls at intervals, bestial and
worrying; hearing which, the lingerer would perhaps hurry
on his way with a shudder, crossing himself against,
or spitting out like a bad odour, the influence of the
fiend who had evidently got hold of the master armourer.
Libera nos à malo!

The fiend, in fact, in possession was no other than
Messer Montano’s Cerberus, and its orgy, had the
listener known it, had more than justified his apprehensions.
The mirth which terrified his heart was perhaps
even a degree more deadly in its evocation than
anything he could imagine. It was really laughter so
dreadful that, had he guessed its import, he had rushed,
in an agony of self-vindication, to summon the watch.
But guessing nothing, unless it might be Lupo’s madness
under the shock of his misfortunes, he simply crossed
himself and hurried away.

Blood conspiracies are rarely successful. Perhaps a
too scrupulous forethought against contingencies tends
to clog the issues. If that is so, the recklessness of these
men may, in a measure, have spelt their present security.
A laugh, after all, is less open to suspicion than a whisper.
Who could imagine a fatal thrust in a guffaw? Nevertheless,
every chuckle uttered here punctuated a stab.

In rehearsal only at present, it is true; but practice,
good practice, sirs. The victim of the attack was a
dummy, contrived suggestively to represent Galeazzo.
At least the habit made the man; and hate and a
stinging imagination supplied the rest.

It stood in a dusky corner by the dead forge. Not so
much light as would certainly guide a hand was allowed
to fall upon it; for deeds of darkness, to be successful,
must be prepared against darkness. Its stuffed, daubed
face, staring from out this gloom, was like nothing human.
To catch sudden sight, within a vista of dim lamp-shine,
of its motionless eyes and features warped with stabs,
was to gasp and shrink, as if one had looked into a glass
and seen Death reflected back. Its suggestion of reality
(and it possessed it) was to seek rather in velvet and
satin; in a cunning, familiar disposition of its dress; in
the sombre but profuse sparkle of artificial gems with
which it was looped and hung. Thence came a grotesque
and wicked semblance to a doomed figure. For the rest,
in the bloodless slashes, gaping, rag-exuding, which had
taken it cunningly in weak places—through the neck,
under the gorget, between joints of the mail with which
Lupo’s craft had fitted it—there was a suggestiveness
almost more horrible than truth.

It was in actual fact a sop to Cerberus, was this
grisly-ludicrous doll, fruit of the decision (which had followed
much discussion of ways and means) to postpone its
prototype’s murder to some occasion of public festivity,
when the sympathies of the mob might be kindled and a
revolution accomplished at a stroke. Politic Cerberus
must nevertheless have something to stay the gnawing
and craving of a delayed revenge which had otherwise
corroded him. He took a ferociously boyish delight in
fashioning this lay-figure, and, having made, in whetting
his teeth on it; in clothing it in purple and fine linen;
in addressing it wheedlingly, or ironically, or brutally, as
the mood swayed him. And to-night his mood, stung
by the tempest, perhaps, was unearthly in its wildness.
It rose in fiendish laughter; it mocked the anguish of
the blast, a threefold litany, now blended, now a
trifurcating blasphemy. There were the roaring bass of
Visconti, Lampugnani’s smooth treble, the deadly
considered baritone of Olgiati. And, punctuating all, like
the tap of a baton, flew the interjections of Messer
Montano, the conductor:—

‘Su! Gia-gia! Bravo, Carlo! That was a Brutus
stroke! Uh-uh, Andrea! hast bled him there for arrears
of wages! a scrap of gold-cloth, by Socrates! A brave
sign, a bright token, Andrea!’

He chuckled and hugged himself, involuntarily
embracing in the action the long pendant which hung from
his roundlet or turban, and half-pulling the cap from his
skull-like forehead.

‘Death!’ he screeched in an ecstasy, and Lampugnani,
glancing at him, went off into husky laughter, and sank
back, breathed, upon a bench.

‘Cometh in a doctor’s gown,’ he panted. ‘Nay, sir,
bonnet! bonnet! or the dummy will suspect you.’

He might have, himself, and with a better advantage
to his fortunes, could he have penetrated the vestments
of that drear philosophic heart. There was a secret there
would have astounded his self-assurance. Montano wore
his doctor’s robe, meetly as a master of rhetoric, not the
least of whose contemplated flights was one timely away
from that political arena, whose gladiators in the
meanwhile he was bent only on inflaming to a contest in which
he had no intention of personally participating. He had
a fixed idea, his back and his principles being still
painfully at odds, that the cause would be best served by his
absence, when once the long train to the explosion he
was engineering had been fired at his hand. And so he
hugged himself, and Lampugnani laughed.

‘Look at Master Lupo, with the sound of thy screech
in his ears! As if he thought we contemplated anything
but to bring slashed Venetian doublets into vogue!’

He was a large, fleshly creature, was this Lampugnani,
needing some fastidious lust to stir him to action, and
then suddenly violent. His face was big and vealy, with
a mouth in its midst like a rabbit’s, showing prominently
a couple, no more, of sleek teeth. His eyes drooped
under lids so languid as to give him an affectation of
fatigue in lifting them. His voice was soft, but
compelling: he never lent it to platitudes. An intellectual
sybarite, a voluptuary by deliberation, he had tested God
and Belial, and pronounced for the less Philistine
lordship of the beast. Quite consistent with his principles,
he not hated, but highly disapproved of Galeazzo, who,
as consistently, had pardoned him some abominable
crime which, under Francesco the father, had procured
him the death sentence. But Messer Andrea had looked
for a more sympathetic recognition of his merits at the
hands of his deliverer than was implied in an ill-paid
lieutenancy of Guards; and his exclusion from a share
in the central flesh-pots was a conclusive proof to him of
the æsthetic worthlessness of the master it was his
humility to serve.

The Visconti, at whom he breathed his little laugh,
was a contrast to him in every way—a bluff, stout-built
man, with fat red chaps flushing through a skin of red
hair, a braggadocio manner, and small eyes red with
daring. There was nothing of his house’s emblematic
adder about him, save a readiness with poisons; and
after all, that gave him no particular distinction. He
took a great, stertorous pull at a flagon of wine, and
smacked his lips bullyingly, before he answered with a
roar:—

‘Wounds! scarlet scotched on a ground of flesh-tint—a
fashion will please our saint.’

Montano chuckled again, and more shrilly.

‘Good, good!’ he cried: ‘scarlet on flesh!’ and he
squinted roguishly at the blind smith, who sat beside
him on a bench, nervously kneading together his wasted
hands.

‘Messers,’ muttered the poor fellow; ‘but will this holy
boy approve the means to such a fashion? For Love to
exalt himself by blood!’

He turned his sightless eyes instinctively towards
Olgiati, where the boy stood, a dark, fatalistic young
figure, breathing himself by the forge. He, he guessed,
or perhaps knew, was alone of the company actuated by
impersonal motives in this dread conspiracy. But he
did not guess that, by so much as the young man was a
pure fanatic of liberty, his hand and purpose were the
most of all to be dreaded.

Olgiati gave a melancholy smile, and, stirring a little,
looked down. He was habited, as were his two
companions, for the occasion—a recurrent dress-rehearsal—in
a coat and hose of mail, and a jerkin of crimson satin.
It was not the least significant part of his undertaking
that he, like the others, was court-bred and court-employed.
The fact, at its smallest, implied in them a
certain anatomic-cum-sartorial acquaintance with their
present business.

‘Offerimus tibi, Domine, Calicem salutaris!‘ he quoted
from the Mass, in his sweet, strong voice. ‘Hast thou
not a first example of that exaltation, Lupo, in the
oblation of the chalice?’

Revolution knows no blasphemy.

‘Bah!’ grumbled Visconti.

‘He died for men: we worship the sacrifice of
Himself,’ protested the armourer.

‘And shall not Messer Bembo sacrifice himself, his
scruples and his reluctances, that love may be exalted
over hate, mercy over tyranny?’ asked Olgiati.

‘I know not, Messer,’ muttered the suffering armourer.
‘I cannot trace the saint in these sophistries, that is all.’

‘True, he is a saint,’ conceded Lampugnani, yawning
as he lolled. ‘Now, what is a saint, Lupo?’

‘O, Messer! look on his mother’s son, and ask!’

‘Why, that is the true squirrel’s round. We are all
born of women’—he yawned again.

‘They bear us, and we endure them,’ he murmured
smilingly, the water in his eyes. ‘It is so we retaliate on
their officiousness.’

Montano tittered.

‘Lupo,’ Lampugnani went on, lazily stirring himself,
‘you suggest to me two-thirds of a syllogism: I am my
mother’s son; therefore I am a saint.’

‘Ho! ho!’ hooted Visconti.

‘Messer,’ entreated the bewildered armourer, ‘with
respect, it turns upon the question of the mother.’

‘The mother? O dog, to question the repute of mine!’

‘I did not—no, never.’

‘Well, who was his?’

‘None knows. A star, ’tis said.’

‘Venus, of course. And his father?’

‘Some son of God, perchance.’

‘Ay, Mars. He was that twain’s by-blow, and fell
upon an altar. I know now how saints are made. Yet
shall we, coveting sanctity, wish our parents bawds?
‘Tis a confusing world!’

He sank back as if exhausted, while Montano chirped,
and Visconti roared with laughter.

‘Saints should be many in it, Andrea,’ he applauded.
‘Knows how they are made, quotha!’ and he stamped
about, holding his sides till, reeling near to the dummy,
he paused, and made a savage lunge at it with his dagger.
His mood changed on the instant.

‘Death!’ he snarled, ‘I warrant here’s one hath
propagated some saints to his undoing!’ and he went
muttering a rosary of curses under his breath.

Lampugnani, smilingly languid, continued:—

‘Well, Lupo, so Messer Bembo is the son of his
mother? It seems like enough—what with his wheedling
and his love-locks. He shall be Saint Cupid on
promotion. I think he will regard scarlet or pink as no
objectionable fashion, does it come to make a god of
him.’

The armourer uttered an exclamation:—

‘Some think him that already. It is the question of
his coming to be Duke that hips me. I can’t see him
there.’

‘Nor I,’ said Visconti, with a sarcastic laugh.

Olgiati interposed quietly:—

‘Have comfort, Lupo. We are all good republicans.
The exaltation of Messer Bembo is to be provisional
only, preceding the consummation. He is to be lifted
like the Host, to bring the people to their knees, and then
lowered, and——’

‘Put away,’ said Lampugnani blandly.

The armourer started to his feet in agitation.

‘Messers!’ he cried, ‘he poured oil into my wounds; I
will consent to no such wickedness.’

‘You won’t?’ roared Visconti; but Lampugnani soothed
him down.

‘When I said “put away,” I meant in a tabernacle,
like that sacred bread. I assure you, Lupo, he is the
rose of our adoration also; he shall cultivate his thorn in
peace; he shall wax fat like Jeshurun, and kick.’

‘And in the meantime,’ grumbled Visconti, ‘we are
measuring our fish before we’ve hooked him.’

Lampugnani’s face took on a very odd expression.

‘What the devil’s behind that?’ hectored the bully.

‘O, little!’ purred the other. ‘I fancy I feel him
nibble, that’s all. Perhaps you don’t happen to know
how he hath cut his connection with the palace?’

‘What! When?’

They all jumped to stare at him.

‘This day,’ he said, ‘in offence of some carrion of
Galeazzo’s which he had nosed out. The poor boy is
particular in his tastes, for a shambles—ran like a sheep
from the slaughter-house door, taking his Patch with
him, and a ring her Grace had loaned him for a
safe-conduct. I heard it said she would have been ravished
of anything rather—by him. ‘Twas her lord’s troth-gift.
The castle is one fume of lamentation.’

Montano, rubbing his lean hands between his knees,
went into a rejoicing chatter:—

‘We have him, we have him! Gods! who’s here?’

Their intentness had deafened them some minutes
earlier to a more mouthing note in the thunder of the
rain, as if the swell of the tempest had been opened
an instant and shut. The moment, in fact, and a
master-key, had let in a new comer. He had closed the
latch behind him, and now, seeing himself observed,
stood ducking and lowering in the blinking light. The
philosopher heaved a tremulous sigh of relief.

‘Narcisso!’

The hulking creature grinned, and stabbed a thumb
over his shoulder.

‘Hist! him you speak of’s out there, a-seeking your
worship.’

‘Seeking me? Messer Bembo?’

‘Why not? A’ met him at the town gate half-drowned,
with his Patch to heel. The report of his running was
got abroad, and, thinks I to myself, here’s luck to my
masters. To take him on the hop of grievance like——’

Montano seemed to sip the phrase:—

‘Exactly: on the hop of grievance. Well?’

‘Why, I spoke him fair: “Whither away, master?” A’
spat a saintly word—’twere a curse in a sinner—and
sprang back, a’ did, glaring at me. But the great Fool
pushed him by. “You’re the man,” says he. “Desperation
knows its fellows. Where’s Montano?” “Why,
what would you with him?” says I, taken off my guard.
“A salve for his wounds,” he answered. And so I
considered a bit, and brought ’em on, and there they wait.’

Visconti uttered a furious oath, but Lampugnani
hushed him down.

‘Didst well, pretty innocence,’ he said to Narcisso.
‘The hop of grievance?—never a riper moment. Show
in your friends.’

He was serenely confident of his policy—waved all
protest aside.

‘I see my way: the hook is baited: let him bite.’

‘Bite?’ growled Visconti. ‘And what about our
occupation here?’

‘Why, ’tis testing mail, nothing more. Is a lay-figure
in an armoury so strange?’

‘Ay, when ’tis a portrait-model.’

‘O glowing tribute to my art! I designed the doll,
true. You make me look down, sir, and simper and bite
my finger. Yet my mind misgives me thou flatterest.
A portrait-model, yes; but will he recognise of whom?’

‘The knave may—the shrewder fool of the pair.’

‘The greater fool will testify to me? O happy artist!
Well, if he do, I will still account him naught. He will
take the bait also. The shadow swims and bites with
the fish. Besides, should this befall, ’twill save mayhap
a world of preliminaries. Remember that “hop of
grievance.” He comes, it seems, in a mood to jump
with ours. Let them in.’

Like souls salvaged from a wreck they came—the Fool
propping the Saint—staggering in by the door. Grief
and storm and weariness had robbed the boy of speculation,
almost of his senses. His drenched hair hung in
ropes, his wild eyes stared beneath like a frightened
doe’s, his clothes slopped on his limbs.

Narcisso struggled with the door and closed it.

Suddenly Bernardo, lifting his dazed lids, caught sight
of the shadowed lay-figure, recoiled, and shrieking out
hoarsely:—’Galeazzo! Thou! O God, doomed soul!’
tottered and slid through Cicada’s limp arms upon the
floor. Instantly Narcisso was down by his side, and
fumbling with his hands.

‘A’s in a swound,’ he was beginning, when, with a
rush and heave, the Fool sent him wallowing.

‘Darest thou, hog! darest thou! Go rub thy filthy
hoofs in ambergris first!’ and he squatted, snarling and
showing his teeth.

Narcisso rose, to a chorus of laughter, and stood
grinning and rubbing his head.

‘Well, I never!’ he said.

CHAPTER XIII

The Countess of Casa Caprona was a widow. The
news was waiting to overwhelm, or transport, her
upon her return to the castello after her interview with
Lanti. On the one hand it committed her to dowagery,
that last infirmity of imperious minds; on the other to
the freedom of a glorified spinsterhood. Though she
recognised that, on the whole, the blow was destructive
of the real zest of intrigue, she behaved very
handsomely by the memory of the deceased, who had died,
like a soldier, in harness. She caused a solemn requiem
mass to be sung for him in the Duomo; she commissioned
a monody, extolling his marital virtues, from an
expensive poet; she distributed liberal alms to the poor
of the city. There is no trollop so righteous in her
matronhood as she made timely a widow. Besides, to
this one, the zest of all zests for the moment was
revenge. She withdrew to mature it, and to lament
orthodoxly her lord, to her dower-house in the Via
Sforza.

It was a very pretty spot for melancholy and
meditation—cool, large, secluded, and its smooth, silent walks
and bubbling fountains cloistered in foliage. From its
gardens one had glimpses of the castello and of the
candied, biscuit-like pinnacles of the cathedral. Cypresses
and little marble fauns broke between them the flowering
intervals, and peacocks on the gravel made wandering
parterres of colour. Sometimes, musing in the shades,
with a lock of her long hair between her lips, she would
pet her frowning fancy with the figure of a youthful
Adam, golden and glorious, approaching her down an
avenue of this smiling paradise, making its mazes
something less than scentless; and then, behold! a lizard,
perhaps, would wink on the terrace, and she would snatch
and crush the little palpitating life under her heel, cursing
it for a symbol of the serpent desolating her Eden, and
transforming it all into a mirage of warmth and passion.
Not Adam he, that lusted-for, but the angel at the gate,
menacing and awful. She must be more and worse than
Eve to seek to corrupt an angel.

Perhaps she was, in her most tortured, most animal
moods. The sensuous, by training and heredity, had
quite over-swollen and embedded in her beautiful trunk
the small spike of conscience, which as a child had
tormented, and which yet, at odd moments, would gall and
tease her like an ancient wound. She might even have
been stung by it into some devotional self-sacrifice in her
present phase of passion, could she have been assured of,
or believed in, its object’s inaccessibility to a higher grace
of solicitation. But jealousy kept her ravening.

On a languorous noon of this week of losses she was
lying, a conventionally social exile, having her hair
combed and perfumed, in a little green pavilion pitched
in her grounds, when a heavy step on the gravel outside
aroused her from a dream of voluptuous rumination.
The tread she recognised, yet, though moved by it
to a little flutter of curiosity, would not so far alloy a
drowsy ecstasy as to bid the visitor enter while it lasted.
Hypnotised by the soft burrowing of the comb, she closed
her eyes until the perfect moment was passed, when, with
a sigh, she bade the intruder enter, and Narcisso came
slouching in by the opening.

Beatrice dismissed her attendants with a look. She
never spoke to her servants where a gesture would serve,
and could draw hour-long silent enjoyment from the weary
hands of tire-woman or slave, hairdresser or fanner,
without a sign of embarrassment, or indeed understanding.
Now she lay back, restful, impassive—indifferent utterly
to any impression her will for a solitary interview with
this gross creature might make upon them. And, indeed,
there was little need for such concern. Hired assassination,
a recognised institution, explained many otherwise
strange conjunctions between the beauties and beasts
of Milan.

The beast, in the present instance, behaved as was
habitual with him in the presence of this Circe. That is
to say, he was awkward, deprecating, and, of stranger
significance, devoted to truthfulness. He adored her, as
Caliban Miranda, but more fearfully: was her slave, the
genii of the lamp of her loveliness, with which to be on
any familiar terms, even of debasement, was enough.
What did it matter that she paid him with offence and
disdain? Her use of him was as her use of some necessary
organic part of herself. And she might deprecate the
necessity; but the secret of it was, nevertheless, their
common property. Her beauty and his devotion were as
near akin as blood and complexion. Perhaps some day,
in the resurrection of the flesh, he would be able to
substantiate that kinship.

The thought may have been there in him, instinctive,
unilluminated, as he stood fumbling with his cap, and
raising and lowering his hang-dog eyes, and waiting for
her to open. Physically, at least, she showed no shame
in implying his close right to her confidence. The noon
was a noon of slumbering fires, and her mood a responsive
one. A long white camisole, of the frailest tissue, rounded
on her lower limbs, and, splitting at the waist, straddled
her shoulders clingingly, leaving a warm breathing-space
between. Round her full neck clung one loop of emeralds;
and to the picture her black falling hair made a tenderest
frame, while the sun, penetrating the tilt above, finished
all with a mist of green translucence. A Circe, indeed, to
this coarse and animal rogue, and alive with awful and
covetable lusts, to which, nevertheless, he was an admitted
procurer. He had not ceased to be in her pay and
confidence, cursed and repudiated though he had been by his
master, her erst protector. He had not even resented
that episode of his betrayal at her hands, though it had
condemned him for a living to the rôle of the hired bravo.
She might always do with him as she liked; overbid with
one imperious word his fast pledges to others; convert
his craft wheresoever she wished to her own profit. The
more she condescended to him, the more was he claimed
a necessary part of her passions’ functions. She
discharged through him her hates and desires, and he was
beatified in the choice of himself as their medium. There
was a suggestion of understanding, of a conscious
partnership between them, in the very fulsomeness with which
he abased himself before her.

‘Well,’ she murmured at last, ‘hast drunk thy senses
to such surfeit that they drown in me?’

‘Ay,’ he mumbled, ‘I could die looking.’

‘A true Narcissus,’ she scoffed; ‘but I could wish a
sweeter. Stand away, fellow. Your clothes offend me.’

He backed at once.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘I can breathe. Deliver yourself!’

He heaved up his chest, and looked above her, concentrating
his wits on an open loop of the tent, behind which
a bird was flickering and chirping.

‘I come, by Madonna’s secret instructions, from
privately informing Messer Lanti where Messer Bembo lies
hidden,’ he said, speaking as if by rote.

She nodded imperiously.

‘What questions did he ask?’

‘How I knew; and I answered, that I knew.’

‘Good. That least was enough. Art a right rogue.
Now will he go seek him, and be drawn by his devotion
into this net.’

Narcisso was silent.

‘Will he not?’ she demanded sharply.

The fellow dropped his eyes to her an instant.

‘Madonna knows. He loves the Messer Saint. No
doubt a’ will hold by him.’

‘What then, fool?’

‘They have not caught Messer Bembo yet, they at the
forge—that is all.’

‘How!’ she cried angrily, ‘when thou told’st me——’

‘With humility, Madonna,’ he submitted, ‘I told thee
naught but that he and this Montano were agreed on the
State’s disease.’

‘Well?’

‘But I never said on its cure.’

She frowned, leaning forward and again biting a strand
of her hair—a sullen trick with her in anger.

‘A doctor of rhetoric, and so feeble in persuasion!’
she muttered scornfully.

‘A’ starts at a shadow, this saint,’ pleaded Narcisso.
‘A’ must be coaxed, little by little, like a shy foal. We
will have him in the halter anon. Yet a’ be only one out
of five, when all’s said.’

‘Dolt!’ she hissed. ‘What are the other four, or their
purpose, to me, save as a lever to my revenge? I foresee
it all. Why telled’st me not before I sent thee? Now
this gross lord, instead of himself tangling in the meshes,
will persuade the other back to court and reason and
forgiveness, and I shall be worse than damned. Dolt, I
could kill thee!’

She rose to her height, furious, and he shrunk cowering
before her.

‘Listen, Madonna,’ he said, trembling: ‘Canst net
them all yet at one swoop. Go tell Messer Ludovico,
and certes a’ will jump to destroy the nest and all in it,
before a’ inquires their degrees of guilt.’

She stared at him, still threatening.

‘Why?’

‘Why, says Madonna? Listen again, then. Does the
Ser Simonetta trust Messer Ludovico, or Messer Ludovico
love the Ser Simonetta? The secretary clings to the
Duchess. If she falls, a’ falls with her.’

‘Again, thou tedious rogue, why should the Saint’s
destruction bring Bona down?’

‘A’ would have his mouth shut from explaining.’

‘Explaining what? I lose patience.’

‘How a’ came, a conspirator against the Duke, to be
found wi’ his wife’s troth ring in his possession. Here it
be. I’ve filched it for thee at last.’

She sprang to seize the token, glowing triumphant in a
moment, and putting it on her own finger, pressed the
clinched hand that enclosed it into her bosom.

She laughed low and rejoicingly, shameless in the
quick transition of her mood.

‘Good Narcisso! It is the Key at last! Let Lanti
persuade him back now—I am content. I hold them,
and Bona too, in the hollow of this hand.’

She held it out, her right one, palm upwards, and,
smiling, bade him kiss it.

‘Rogue,’ she said, ‘to tease and vex me, and all
the time this talisman in thy sleeve. Ay, make the
most of it: snuffle and root. My dog has deserved
of me.’

He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, as if he
had drunk.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘how wert successful? how won’st it,
sweet put?’

‘Took it from him, that was all.’

‘How?’

‘When a’ came tumbling in and staggered in a swound.
Had heard Messer Andrea relating of how ’twas on him
as I entered. Ho, ho! thinks I, here’s that, maybe, will
pay the filching! and I dropped and got it, all in a
moment like.’

‘You never told me.’

‘You never asked till yesterday. Then I had it not
with me. But to-day, thinks I, I’ll bring it up my sleeve
for a win-favour—a good last card.’

‘No matter, since I have got it.’

She held it out, and gloated on its device and sparkle.
She knew it well: indeed it was a famous gem, the
Sforza lion cut in cameo on a deep pure emerald, and
known as the Lion ring.

‘Hath he not missed it?’ she murmured.

‘Not by any sign a’ gives. The sickness of that night
still holds him half-amazed. A’ thinks our fine doll, even,
but a bug of it—fancies a’ saw it in a dream like. They’d
locked it away when he came to.’

‘Poor worldling! Poor little new-born worldling! He
shall cut his pretty teeth anon. Well—for Messer Lanti?
Did he leap to the trail, or what?’

‘That same moment. Belike they are together now.’

She stood musing a little: then heaved a sudden sigh.

‘Poor boy,’ she murmured, ‘poor boy! is it I must
seek to destroy thee!’

Her mood had veered again in a breath. Her eyes
were full of a brooding love and pity.

‘Not for the first time,’ muttered Narcisso.

She seemed not to hear him—to have grown oblivious
of his presence.

‘The song he sang to me!’ she murmured: ‘Ah, me,
if that hour could be mine! A saint in heaven?—not
Bona’s! she hath a lord—no saint, did he love her. He
looked at me: it came from his heart. If that hour could
be mine! Not then—’twere a sin—but now! That one
hour—cherished—unspent—the seed of the unquickened
pledge between us to all eternity. I could be content,
knowing him a saint through that abstinence. My
hour—mine—to passion to my breast—the shadow of the child
that would not be born to me. He looked at me—no
spectre of a dead lost love in his eyes—only a hopeless
quest—bonds never to be riven. But now—Ah! I
cannot kill him!’

She hid her eyes, shuddering. Narcisso, vaguely
troubled, gloomed at her.

‘You will not go to Messer Ludovico?’ he said.

She returned to knowledge of him, as to a sense of pain
out of oblivion.

‘Go,’ she said coldly. ‘Leave all to me. You have
done well, and been paid your wages.’

And he did not demur. It was not in her nature to
gild her favours unnecessarily. Gold came less lavishly
from her than kisses. Her pounds of flesh were her most
profitable assets. She was a spendthrift in everything
but money.

CHAPTER XIV

‘Messer Bembo,’ said Montano, between meditative
and caustic, ‘you do not agree that our poor
Lupo’s definition of a perfect government, an autocracy
with an angel at its head, is a practicable definition?’

He was sitting, as often during the last few days, at
talk with the boy, on subjects civic, political, and
theological. They had discussed at odd times the whole
ethics of government, from the constitution of Lycurgus
to the code of Thomas Aquinas: they had expounded,
each in his way, a scheme or a dream of socialism: they
had agreed, without prejudice, to liken the evolution of
the simple Church of Peter into the complicated fabric of
the fourth Sixtus to a woodland cottage, bought by some
great princely family, and improved into a summer
palace, which was grown out of harmony with its
environments. Somewhat to his amazement, Montano
discovered that the boy was the opposite to a dogmatic
Christian; that his was a religion, which, while conforming
or adapting itself to the orthodox, was in its essence
a religion of mysticism. No doubt the traditions of
his origin were, to some extent, to seek for this. A
pledge, so to speak, of spontaneous generation, Bernardo
accounted for himself on a theory of reincarnation from
another sphere. He believed in the possibility of the
resurrection of the body, which, though destroyed, and
many times destroyed, could be, in its character of mere
soul-envelope or soul expression, as regularly
reconstructed at the will of its informing spirit. Death, he
declared, was just the beginning of the return of that
divested spirit to the spring of life—to the river welling
in the central Eden from the loins of the Father, the
spouse of Nature, the secret, the unspeakable God, of
whom was Christ, his own dear brother and comrade.

He would tell Messer Montano, with his sweet, frank
eyes arraigning that crabbed philosopher’s soul, how this
unstained first-born of Nature, this sinless heir of love,
this wise and pitying Christ, moved by an infinite
compassion to see the wounded souls of his brothers—those
few who had not made their backward flight too difficult—come,
soiled and earth-cloyed, to seek their reincarnation
in the spring, had descended, himself, upon earth at
last, sacrificing his birthright of divinity, that he might
teach men how to live. And the men his brothers had
slain him, in jealousy, even as Cain slew Abel; yet had
his spirit, imperishably great, continued to dwell in their
midst, knowing that, did it once leave the earth, it must
be for ever, and to mankind’s eternal unregeneracy. For,
so Bernardo insisted, there was an immutable law in
Nature that no soul reincarnated could re-enter the
sphere from which it was last returned, but must seek
new fields of action. Wherefore all earth-loving spirits,
which we call apparitions, were such as after death clung
about the ways of men, in a yearning hopefulness to
redeem them by touching their hearts with sympathy
and their eyes with a mist of sorrow. And, of such
gentle ghosts, Christ was but the first in faith and
tenderness.

A wild, dim theory, peopling woods, and fields, and
cities with a mystic company—phantoms, yet capable of
revealing themselves in fitful glimpses to the sinless and
the sympathetic among men—ghosts, weaving impalpable
webs of love across populous ways to catch men’s souls
in their meshes. Montano called it all transcendental
fustian. It aroused his most virulent scorn. What had
this cloud-moulding, moon-paring stuff to do with the
practical issues of life, with freedom, and government by
popular representation? He even professed to prefer to
it Lascaris, with his metaphysical jargon and apostolic
succession of atoms.

‘He gives you at least something to take hold of,’ he
snarled. ‘Listen to this’—and he condescended to read
an excerpt from a recent treatise by his hated rival:—

‘”Life,”‘ he read, ‘”is put out at compound interest.
We represent, each in himself, a fraction of the principal,
having a direct pedigree ab initio. As a spider will
gather the hundred strands of his web into a little ball
which he will swallow, so might we each absorb and
claim the whole vast web of life. Rolled up to include
each radiating thread, the web becomes I; the spider
is I; I am the principal of life—not the principle: that
is Prometheus’ secret.”‘

‘”I am a fraction of life’s compound interest. The
sum of the mental impressions of all my thread of
tendency (which gathers back, taking up cross threads
by the way, to the central origin) is invested in my
paltry being, and lieth there, together with mine own
interest on the vast accumulation, in tail for my next of
kin. What can I do in my tiny span but touch the
surface of this huge estate: pluck here and there a flower of
its fields, whose roots are in immemorial time? Imagination
founders in those fathomless depths. Tenuous,
dim-forgotten ghosts rise from them. Who shall say
that my dreams, however seeming mad and grotesque, are
not faithful reflexes of states and conditions which were
once realities; memories of forms long extinct; echoes
of times when I flew, or spun, or was gaseous, or vast,
or little; when I mingled intimate with shapes which
are chimerical to my present understanding——”‘

The reader broke off, with an impatient grunt.

‘There!’ he said, ‘dreams mad and grotesque enough,
in good sooth; yet not so mad as thine.’

‘Well,’ said Bernardo, ‘well,’ with perfect sweetness
and good temper.

‘Christ in the world? Fah!’ snarled the philosopher.
‘I know him. He sits at Rome under a triple tiara.
Quit all this sugared dreaming, boy, and face the future
like a man.’

‘Does the sun shine out of yesterday or to-morrow?
It is enough for the moment to take thought for itself.
The future is not.’

‘Pooh! a mere Jesuitry, justifying the moment’s
abomination.’

‘Nay: for we shall have to retraverse our deeds, and
carry back their burden to our first account—with most,
a toilful journey.’

‘They would do better to stop with your Christ, then;
and, judged by the preponderance of evil spirits here, I
think most do. No future, say’st? But how about that
heir of the compound interest? Is there not one waiting
to succeed to him? Where? Why, in the future, as
surely and inevitably as this date, which I am going to
swallow in a moment, will be blood and tissue in me
to-morrow.’

He held the fruit up—with a swift movement Bernardo
whipped it out of his hand and ate it himself.

‘How for your future now?’ he chuckled, pinking all over.

Cicada laughed loudly, and Montano swore. His
philosophy was not proof against such practical jokes.
But, seeing his fury, the boy put out all his sweetness to
propitiate him. He was his father’s friend; he was a
man of learning; he had suffered grievous wrong. The
dog was coaxed presently into opening again upon the
angelic principles. It was by such virulent irony that he
thought—so warped was his mental vision—to corrode
the candour of this saint, and bend him to his own views
and uses—a diseased vanity, even had he not reckoned,
as will now appear, without the consideration of another
possible factor.

And ‘So,’ said he upon a later occasion, in the sentence
which opens this chapter, ‘you do not agree with our poor
Lupo’s practicable definition of a perfect government?’

The Saint’s steadfast eyes canvassed the speaker’s soul,
as if in some shadowy suspicion of an integrity which
they were being led, not for the first time, to probe.

‘Why, Messer,’ said he, ‘practicable in so far as, by
the dear Christ’s influence, grace may come to make an
angel even of our Duke.’

Montano tried to return his steady gaze, but failed
meanly.

‘With submission, Messer Bernardo,’ he sniggered, ‘I
can only follow, in my mind’s eye, one certain road to
that great man’s apotheosis.’

Bembo was silent.

”Tis the road,’ continued the other, ‘taken before by
the Emperor Nero.’

‘He stabbed himself, the most wretched pagan, in fear
of a worser retribution than heaven’s,’ said Bembo.
‘Alas! do you call that an apotheosis?’

‘There are gods and gods,’ said Montano,—’Hades and
Olympus. Belike Nero was welcomed of his kind, as
Galeazzo would be. I can scarce see in the Duke the
raw material of your fashion of angel. There’s more of
the harpy about him than the harp.’

It was a heavenly day. Bernardo, still a little hectic
and languid from his fever, sat in the embrasure of a
window which gave upon the back court of the smithy.
A muffled tinkling of armourers’ hammers reached his
ears pleasantly from the rear of neighbouring premises.
There was a certain happy suggestiveness to him in the
sound, evoked, as he hoped it might be, at his host Lupo’s
instigation. For his endearing optimism had so wrought
upon that stricken artificer, during the week he had dwelt
in hiding with him, as to persuade the poor man to quit
his self-despairing, and hire out his skill—not practically;
that was no longer possible; but theoretically—to a
deserving fellow-craftsman. Already the sense of touch
was curiously refining in the sightless creature, and the
glimmer of a new dawn of interest penetrating him.
And he was at work again elsewhere.

On the floor at Bembo’s feet squatted Cicada, acrid,
speaking little, and spending his long intervals of silence
in staring at the girl Lucia, who, crouching at a distance
away by the fireless forge, in the gloom of the shuttered
smithy, seemed given over to an eternal reverie of hate.
She, alone of the household, had remained impervious to
all the sweet influences of sorrow and pity. Her wrong
was such as no angel could remedy.

Cicada spoke now, with a scowl of significance for
Montano:—

‘Speak plain, master philosopher. Innuendo is the
weapon of Fools, and wisdom shall prevail in candour.
Thou canst not picture to thyself this evangelised
Duke?’

Montano shot a lowering glance at him.

‘No, I confess, master Patch,’ said he—’unless,’ he
added grinning, ‘by Nero’s road.’

‘Two whispers do not make one outspokenness,’
answered the Fool. ‘Hast hinted Nero once, and once
again, and still we lack the application. Nero was driven
to the road, quotha; well, by whom?—one Galba, an
my learning’s not a’rust. What then? Is Galba going
to drive Galeazzo?’

‘Nay, Love, dear Cicca,’ put in Bernardo, but half
hearing and half understanding.

‘Love!’ cried the Fool. ‘Thou hast hit it. Hear
wisdom from the mouths of babes. Love in the hands
of rascals—a tool, a catspaw, to pull them their chestnuts
from the fire, and then be cast burnt aside.’

He addressed himself, with infinite irony, to Montano.

‘Good master philosopher,’ said he, ‘there is one fable
for you: listen while I relate another. A certain rogue
was stripped and beaten by a greater, who going on his
way, there came a stranger, a mere child, and marked
the fellow groaning. “Poor soul!” quoth he in pity;
and knelt and bound his hurts and gave him wine, and
by kind arts restored him. When shortly the aggressor
returning and whistling by that place, his erst-victim,
stung to revenge, yet having no weapon left him, did
leap and incontinent seize up by his heels the ministering
angel, and using his body for flail, knock down his
enemy with him, killing both together. Which having
done, and picked their pockets, on his way goes he
rejoicing, “Now do I succeed to mine enemy’s purse
and roguery!”‘

He ended. Montano, glancing stealthily at Bernardo,
wriggled and tittered uneasily.

‘Patch hath spoken,’ he said; ‘great is Patch!’

‘I have spoken,’ quoth the Fool. ‘Dost gather the
moral?’

‘Not I, indeed.’

‘Why, sir, ’tis of roguery making himself master of
Love’s estate; and yet that is not the full moral neither.
For I mind me of a correction; how, before the blow
was struck, Folly stepped between, and snatched Love
from such a fate, and left the rogues to their conclusions.’

‘Well, Folly and Love were well mated. Have you
done? I am going to my books.’

He yawned, and stretched himself, and rose.

‘I will show you to the door, says Folly,’ chirped
Cicada, and skipped about the other as he went, with
a mincing affectation of ceremonial. But when they
were got out of immediate sight and hearing of Bernardo
into the front chamber, like a wolf the Fool snapped upon
the philosopher, and pinned him into a corner.

‘Understood’st my fable well enough,’ he grated, in a
rapid whisper. ‘What! I have waited this opportunity
a day or two. Now the stopper is out, let us flow.’

Montano, taken by surprise, was seized with a tremor
of irresolution. He returned the Fool’s gaze with a
frown uncertain, sullen, eager all in one.

‘Flow, then,’ he muttered, after a little.

‘I flow,’ went on the other, ‘oil and verjuice combined.
Imprimis, think not that because I read I would betray
thee. Ay, ay—no need to start, sir. Thou shalt not
quit playing with thy doll for me; nay, nor dressing and
goring it, if thou wilt, with triangles of steel. O, I
saw!—the face and the slashes in it, too. I have not since
been so ill, like him there, as to read a phantasy out of
fact. What then? Would ye silence me?’

‘Go on,’ whispered Montano hoarsely.

‘Well, I flow,’ returned the Fool. ‘Did I not tell thee
candour was the best part of wisdom? Learn by it,
then. I have marked thee of late; O, trust me, I have
marked thee, thy hints and insinuations. And hereby
by folly I swear, could once I think my master wax to
such impressions, I would kill him where he stands, and
damn my soul to send his uncorrupt to heaven. You
sneer? Sneer on. Why, I could have laughed just now
to see you, tortuous, sound his sweet candid shallows,
where every pebble’s plain. Do your own work, I’ll not
speak or care. You shall not have him to it, that’s all.
Sooner shall the heavens fall, than he be led by you to
poison Galeazzo. Is that plain?’

It was so plain, that the philosopher gasped vainly for
a retort.

‘Who—who spoke of poison?’ he stammered. ‘Not
I. Dear Messer Fool, you wrong me. This boy—the
protégé of della Grande—mine old friend—I would not
so misuse him. Why, he succoured me—an ill requital. If
I sounded him, ’twas in self-justification only. We seek
the same end by different roads—the ancient Gods
restored—the return to Nature. Is it not so? Christ or
Hyperion—I will not quarrel with the terms. “Knowledge,”
saith he, “is the fool that left his Eden.” Well,
he harks back, and so do I.’

‘No further, thou, than to Rome and Regillus; but he
to Paradise. Halt him not, I say. He shall not be thy
catspaw. On these terms only is my silence bought.’

‘Then is it bought. Why, Fool, I could think thee
a fool indeed. He hath forsworn the court: how could
we think to employ him there?’

‘You know, as I know, sir, that this secession is a
parenthesis, no more. He came to cure the State—not
your way. A little repentance will win him back. The
disease is in the head—he sees it; not in these warped
limbs that the brain governs. He will go back anon.’

‘And reign again by love?’

‘I hope so, as first ministers reign.’

‘No more? Well, we will back him there.’

‘Again, be warned; not your way. Make him no
text for the reform which builds on murder. I have
spoken.’

‘Well, we will not. Vale!‘—and the philosopher,
bowing his head, slunk out by the door which the other
opened for him.

A little later, creeping into a narrow court which was
the ‘run’ to his burrow, at the entrance he crossed the
path of two cavaliers, whom, upon their exclaiming over
the encounter, he drew under an archway.

They were come from playing pall-mall on the ramparts,
and carried over their shoulders the tools of their
sport—thin boxwood mallets, painted with emblematic devices
in scarlet and blue, and having handle-butts of chased
silver. Each gentleman wore red full-hose ending in
short-peaked shoes, a plain red biretta, and a little green
bodice coat, tight at the waist and open at the bosom
to leave the arms and shoulders free play. Montano
squinted approval of their flushed faces and
strong-breathed lungs.

‘Well exercised,’ quoth he, in his high-pitched whisper;
‘well exercised, and betimes belike.’

‘News?’ drawled Lampugnani. ‘O, construe thyself!’

‘The Fool,’ answered Montano, ‘sees through us, that
is all.’

‘What!’ Visconti’s brows came down.

‘Hush! He hath warned me—not finally; only he
pledges his silence on the discontinuance of my practices
on his cub.’

‘Well,’ said Lampugnani serenely; ‘discontinue.’

‘Messer, he looks, with certainty, to the boy being
won back to court anon. How, then! shall we let him go?’

‘No!’ rapped out Visconti.

‘Yes,’ said Lampugnani. ‘I trow his good way is after
all our best. Let him go back, and make the State so
fast in love with Love as to prove Galeazzo impossible.
He will sanctify our holocaust for us.’

‘But the Fool, Messer—the Fool!’

‘Will never conspire against his adored master’s
exaltation.’

‘Exaltation? Would ye let this saint, then, to become
the people’s idol?’

‘Ay, that we may discredit him presently for an
adulterous idol. No saint so scorned as he whose
sanctity trips on woman.’

‘What! You think——?’

‘Exactly—yes—the Duchess. Vale, Messer Montano!’—and
he lifted his cap mockingly, and moved off.

In the meanwhile Cicada, having watched, through a
slit of the unclosed door, the retreat and disappearance
of the philosopher, was about to shut himself in again,
with a muttered objurgation or two, when a rapid step
sounded without, and on the instant the door was flung
back against him, and Messer Lanti strode in. There
was no opportunity given him to temporise: the great
creature was there in a moment, and had recognised him
with a ‘pouf!’ of relief. He just accepted the situation,
and closed the door upon them both.

‘Well,’ he said acridly, ‘here you be, and whether for
good or ill let the gods answer!’

Lanti stretched his great chest.

‘It is well, Fool; and I am well if he is well. Where
is he?’

Cicada pointed. The girl by the forge crouched and
glared unwinkingly. The next moment Carlo was in
his loved one’s arms.

‘Why hast hidden thyself, boy?—ah! it is a long while,
boy—good to see thee again—stand off—I cannot see
thee after all—a curse on these blinking eyes!’

‘Dear Carlo, I have been a little ill; my joints ached.’

He wept himself, and fondled and clung to his friend.

‘Thou great soft bully! For shame! Why, I love
thee, dear. Wert thou so hurt? O Carlo! I have been
most ill in spirit.’

‘Come back, and we will nurse thee.’

‘Alas! What nurses!’

‘The tenderest and most penitent—Bona, first of all.’

The arms slid from his neck. Sweet angel eyes
glowered at him.

‘Bona to heal my spirit? To pour fire into its wounds
rather! O, I had thought her pure till yesterday!’

And, indeed, Montano, in the furtherance of his
corroding policy, had spared him no evidences of court
scandal.

Carlo hung his bullet head.

‘Lucia!’ cried the boy suddenly and sternly.

The girl, at the word, came slinking to him like a dog,
setting her teeth by the way at the stranger. Bernardo
put his hand on her lowered head.

‘Dost know who this is?’ he asked of Carlo.

‘Why, I can guess.’

‘Canst thou, and still talk of Bona’s penitence? Here’s
proof of it—in this foul deed unexpiated. Was it ever
meant it should be?’

He raised his arm denunciatory.

‘They have used me to justify their abominations;
they have made mine innocence a pander to their lusts.
Beware! God’s patience nears exhaustion. We wait
for Tassino. Will he come? Not while lewd arms
imprison and protect him. Talk to me of Bona! Go,
child.’

The girl crept back to her former seat. Carlo burst
out, low and urgent:—

‘Nay, boy, you do the Duchess wrong; now, by Saint
Ambrose, I swear you do! She hath not set eyes on
Jackanapes since that day—believe it—nor knows, more
than another, what’s become of him.’

‘I could enlighten her. Can she be so fickle?’

‘What! Don’t you want her fickle? You make my
brain turn.’

‘O Carlo! What can such a woman see in such a man?’

‘God! You have me there. She’s just woman,
conforming to the fashions.’

‘Ah, me! the fashions!’

‘Woman’s religion.’

‘She was taught a better. The fashions! Her wedding-gown
should suffice her for all.’

‘What! Night and day? But, there, I don’t defend her!’

‘No, indeed. Art thyself a fashion.’

‘I don’t defend her, I say. I’m worn and cast aside too.’

‘Poor fashion! You’ll grace your mistress’ tire-woman
next; and after her a kitchen-maid; and last some draggled
scarecrow of the streets. O, for shame, for shame!’

‘Go on. Compare me to Tassino next.’

‘Indeed, I see no difference.’

‘A low-born Ferrarese! A greasy upstart! Was
carver to the Duke, no better; and oiled his fingers in
the dish, and sleeked his hair!’

‘Well, he was made first fashion. The Duchess sets
them.’

‘Now, by Saint Ambrose! First fashion! this veal-faced
scullion, this fat turnspit promoted to a lap-dog!
His fashion was to nurse lusty babies in his eyes!’

‘What nursed thou in thine?’

‘Go to! I’m a numskull, that I know; but to see no
more in me!’

‘I speak not for myself.’

‘Why, these women, true, whom we hold so delicate—coarser
feeders than ourselves—their tastes a fable.
There, you’re right; I’ve no right to talk.’

‘Not yet.’

‘Then, you’re wrong. We’ve parted, I and Beatrice.’

‘Carlo!’

‘Didst think I ‘d risk a quarrel with my saint on so
small a matter?’

‘Carlo!’

He flew upon the great creature and hugged him.

‘My dear, my love! O, I went on so! Why did you
let me? O, you give me hope again!’

‘There,’ growled the honest fellow, still a little sulkily.
”Twas to please myself, not you.’

‘Not me!’

‘Well, if I did, please me by returning.’

Bernardo shook his head.

‘And seem to acquiesce in this?’ He signified the girl.

‘No seeming,’ said Lanti. ‘The Duchess promises to
abet you in everything. I was to say so, an I could find
thee.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘Let that pass. Will you come?’

‘Will she hold Tassino to his bond?’

‘She’ll try to—I’ll answer for it.’

‘Will she excuse the Countess of Casa Caprona from
her duties to her—for your sake, dear?’

‘No need. The lady’s a widow, and already self-dismissed.’

‘Alas, a widow! O Carlo, that heavy witness gone before!’

‘I must stand it. Will you come?’

‘Why is this sudden change? I sore misdoubt it for
a fashion.’

‘Not sudden. I have her word the court goes all
astray without thee. She pines to mother thee.’

‘Mother!—an adulteress for mother! Alack, I am
humbled!’