Front matter (continued 4)

'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!'

'Not so low as she. That touches the last matter. She wants the ring back she lent thee.'

'The ring?'

'Ay, the ring.'

'Carlo!'

He searched his clothes and hands in amaze.

'My God! It's gone!'

'Gone? Look again.'

'I had it on my finger. Till this moment I had forgot it clean—my brain so ached. Cicca!'

He turned in trouble on his servant.

'I know nought of it,' growled the Fool. 'If you had but chose to tell me. I am no gossip. Bona's ring was it, and leased to thee? Mayhap the rain that night washed it from thy finger.'

'If it were so—so great a trust abused! O Carlo! What shall I do?'

'Come back and make thy peace with her.'

Yet his brow gloomed, and he shook his head.

'O, O!' choked Bernardo, noting him with anguish.

'She sent a message—I can't help myself,' grunted Carlo. 'Did you seek to retaliate on her innocent confidence by ruining her? She meant the ring—your withholding it—'twas her troth-token from the Duke. Well, this is like getting a woman into trouble.'

Bernardo cast himself with a cry upon him.

'I will go back! I have no longer choice. I must hold myself a hostage to that loss!'

Carlo let out his satisfaction in a growl. But Cicada, squinting at the two, and rasping thoughtfully on his chin, pondered a speculation into a conviction.

'Narcisso!' he mused, 'was it he took it? As sure as he is a villain, it was Narcisso took it!'

CHAPTER XV

The astutest of all the six Sforza brothers was, without question, Messer Ludovico, at present sojourning in the castello of Milan. No higher than fourth in point of age, policy or premonition had never ceased to present him to himself for the first in succession. The uncertainty of life's tenure, unless ameliorated a little by qualities of tact and conciliation like his own, made him some excuse for this secret conviction. His eldest brother was a monster of the order which, in every age, invites tyrannicide; the Lord of Bari, the second, an ease-loving, good-humoured monster of another kind (he was to die shortly, in fact, of his own obesity), he valued only as so much gross bulk of supineness to be surmounted; Filippo, the third, was an imbecile, whose very existence was already slipping into the obscurity which was presently to spell obliteration. There remained only, junior to himself, Ascanio, a nonentity, and Ottaviano, a headstrong, irresponsible boy, whose possible destiny concerned him as little as though he foresaw his drowning, within the year, in the Adda river.

It was true that one other, more shrilly self-assertive, stood between himself and the light—the Duke's little son, Gian-Galeazzo. Here, most people would have thought, was his real insuperable barrier.

He did not regard matters from these popular points of view. He was very patient and far-seeing. At the outset of his career he had adopted for his device the mulberry-tree, because he had observed it to be cautious of putting forth its leaves until the last of winter was assured. He could picture the fatherless child as the most opportune of all steps to his exaltation. To climb presently those little shoulders to the regency! It would go hard with him but they sank gradually crushed under his weight. This was the wise policy, to get his seat as proxy, and through merciful and enlightened rule secure its permanency. There was infinite scope in the reaction he would make from a coarse and bloody despotism. His nature hated violence; his reason recognised the eternal insecurity of power built on it. Otherwise there was little doubt he might, in that first emergency, strike with good chance the straight usurper's stroke. His name, for graciousness and refinement, already shone like a star in the gross bog of Milan, revealing to it its foulness. Men, in the shame of their fulsome bondage to tyranny, looked up to him for hope and sympathy. He was even persona grata with the people.

But he abhorred, and disbelieved in, violence. He would rule, if at all, in the popular recognition of great qualities: he would prevail through bounty and tolerance. Bona was his crux—Bona, and the secretary Simonetta, a fellow incorruptibly devoted to the reigning family. While these two lived in credit with the duchy, the regency was secure from him, and the State, he told himself, from progress. For what woman-regent had ever mothered an era of enlightenment? Good for Milan, good for Lombardy, could he once discredit and ruin Bona and Simonetta. They would fall together. The uses of Tassino as an instrument to this end had occurred to him—only to be rejected. How could he hope so to disgrace corruption in corruption's eyes? Such puppyish intrigue was not worth even the Duke's interference. He rated that curly perfumed head in Bona's lap at exactly the value of a puppy's.

But, with the advent of the stranger, the little pseudo-oracle, the child Tiresias, sweet and blind as Cupid, a sounder opportunity offered. To involve Bona in the defilement of this purity, in the violating of this holy trust, adored by the people and bequeathed to her by her lord—that was, in the vernacular, another pair of shoes. He had noted, with secret gratification, her first coquetting with the pretty toils. He had heard, with plenteous dismay, of the boy's untimely secession. But he possessed, almost alone in his tumultuous time, the faculty of patience; and he was well served by his well-paid spies and agents. Almost before he could order their reports, almost before he could gauge the significance of one especial piece of information they gave him, the boy, won to forgiveness, was back at court again. Thenceforth he saw his way smoothly, if any term so bland could be applied to such a devious course of policy.

That was a matter of cross-roads, leading from, or to, himself, the mute signpost of direction. One, for instance, pointed to Bona's disgrace through Bembo; another to Simonetta's disgrace through Bona's disgrace; a third, to Bembo's downfall; a fourth, and last, to his nephew's orphaned minority. And the meeting-place, the nucleus, of all these tendencies was—where he himself stood, on a grave. For did they not bury suicides at cross-roads, and was not Galeazzo's policy suicidal? Of all these birds he might kill three, at least, with one stone; and that stone, he believed, was already in his hand, or nearly.

Let it not be supposed that Ludovico was a wicked man. He was destined to bear one of the greatest of the renaissance reputations; but that reputation was to draw no less from munificence than from magnificence, from tolerance than from power. He stood, at this time, on the forehead of an epoch, feeling the promise of his wings, poising and waiting only for their maturity. His sympathies were all with progress, with moral emancipation. He was even now, in Milan (if it can be said without blasphemy), comparable to Christ in Hades. In a filthy age he was fastidious; precise and delicate in his speech; one of those men before whom the insolence of moral offences is instinctively silent. Guicciardini, a grudging Florentine, nevertheless pronounced him when he came to rule, 'milde and mercifull'; Arluno credited him with a sublimity of justice and benevolence. Others, less interested, testified to his wisdom and sagacity, about which there was certainly no disputing. If at any period the wrong that is ready to perpetrate itself in order to procure good is justifiable, it was to be justified in these corrupt years, when conformity with usage spelt putrefaction. He could foresee no health for the State in patching its disease. He was the operator predestined by Providence to remove, stock and block, the cancer.

Yet, though loving truth, he lied; yet, though hating the sight of blood, he procured its shedding; yet, though admiring virtue, he did not hesitate to prostitute it to his ends. There were crimes attributed to him of which he was no doubt innocent; there were lesser, or worse, unrecorded, of which he was no doubt guilty. Feeling himself, by temperament and intellect, the inevitable instrument of a vast emancipation, recognising his call to be as peremptory as it was unconsidered, he had no choice, in obeying it, but to cast scruples to the winds. With him, as with his contemporary the English Richard, a deep fervour of patriotism was at once the goad and the destruction. Judgment on the means both took to vindicate their commissions rests with the gods, who first inspired, then repudiated them. But there is no logic in Olympus.

Ludovico was sitting one evening in his private cabinet in the castello, when a lady was announced to him by the soft-voiced page. Every one instinctively subdued his speech in the presence of Messer Ludovico, even the rough venderaccios who occasionally came to make him their reports or receive his instructions.

The lady came in, and stood silent as a statue by the heavy portière, which, closed, cut off all eavesdropping as effectively as a mattress. Nevertheless Messer Ludovico waited for full assurance of the page's withdrawal before he rose, and courteously greeted his visitor.

'Ave, Madonna Beatrice!' he said. 'You are welcome as the moonlight in my poor apartment.'

It was so far from being that, as to make the compliment an extravagance. Yet the beauty of the woman in her long black robe and mantle, and little black silk cap dropping wings of muslin, sorted gravely enough with the slumberous gold of picture frames under the lamplight, and all the sombre sparkle of gems and glass and silver with which the chamber was strewed in a considered disorder.

'You sent for me, Messer, and I have come,' she said. Her low, untroubled voice was quite in keeping with the rest.

'Fie, fie!' he answered smoothly. 'I begged a privilege, I begged an honour—with diffidence, of one so lately stricken. Will you be seated while I stand?'

As her subject, he meant to imply. She accepted the condescension for what it was worth. He bent his heavy eyebrows on her pleasantly. They were full and shaggy for so young a man. Presently she found the silence intolerable.

'You sent for me, Messer,' she repeated coldly. 'Will you say on account of which of your interests?'

'See the dangerous intuition of your sex!' he retorted smilingly—'a weapon wont to cut its wielder's hand. On account of your interest, purely.'

She glanced up at him with insolent incredulity.

'True,' he said. 'I desired only to save you the consequences of an imprudence. That troth-ring, Madonna, our Duchess's: is it not rather a perilous toy to play with?'

She was startled, for all her immobility—so startled, that he could see the breath jump in her bosom. But, in the very gasp of her fear, she caught herself to recollection, and stiffened, silent, to the ordeal she felt was coming.

'How did I know it was in your possession?' he said, with a little whisper of a laugh. 'Your beauty is ever more speaking than your lips, Madonna; but I am an oracle: I can read the unspoken question. There is a creature, Narcisso his name, once fellow to a loved servant of our court. You know Messer Lanti? an honest, bluff gentleman. He did well to part with such a dangerous rogue. Why, the times are complicate: we should be choice in our confidants. This Narcisso is very well to slit a throat; but to negotiate a delicate theft——'

He paused. 'Go on,' she whispered.

'I will be frank as day,' he purred. ''Twas seen on this rogue's finger, when making for your house. It was not there when he left.'

'The gloating fool!' She stabbed out the words. 'Seen! By whom?'

'By one,' he answered, 'whose business it was to look for it.'

'Who, I say?'

'Most high lady, the very predestined man—no other. Would you still ask who? I had thought you more accomplished. Intrigue, like a statue, is not carved out with a single tool. The eyes, the ears, the lips, each demand their separate instrument. Dost thou seek to shape all with one? O, fie, fie!'

He shook his finger gaily at her. She sat, frowning, with her hands clenched before her; but she gave no answer.

'Why, I am but a tyro,' said the prince; 'yet could I teach thee, it seems, some first precepts in our craft—as thus: Use things most useful for their uses; employ not your dagger as a shoe-horn, or it may chance to cut your heel; an instrument hath its purpose and design; think not one password will unlock all camps; selection is the cream of policy—and so on.'

She started to her feet, in an instant resolution.

'I have the ring,' she said.

He bowed suavely. She stared at him.

'What then, Messer?'

'Why,' he said, 'only that, do you not think, it were safer in my hands than in yours?'

'Safer!' she cried in a suppressed voice; 'for whom?'

'Yourself,' he answered serenely.

'Ah!' she cried, 'you would threaten, if I refuse, to destroy me with it?'

He made a deprecating motion with his hands.

'Beware,' she said fiercely; 'I can retort. Where is Tassino?'

He looked at her kindly.

'Madonna, do you not know? Nay, do I not know that you know? He lies hidden in the burrow of this same Narcisso.'

'At whose instigation? Not yours, Messer—O no, of course, not yours!'

His lips never changed from their expression of smiling good-humour.

'Entirely at mine,' he said.

She gave a little gasp. His subtlety was too chill a thing for her fire; but she struggled against her quenching by it.

'Why do you not produce him, then? Do you not know that he is cried for high and low? that he is wanted to complete his contract with the armourer's drab? It is an ill thing to cross, this present ecstasy of conversion. We are all Bernardines now—lunatics—latter-day Cistercians—raging neophytes of love.'

'While the ecstasy lasts,' he murmured, unruffled.

'Ah!' she cried violently, 'yet may it last your time. Fanaticism is no respecter of rank or service. Standest thou so well with Bona? She would have racked the racker himself in the first fury of her contrition—torn confession from Jacopo's sullen throat with iron hooks, had not her saint rebuked her. Tassino had been last seen by him in the man's company, but, when they went to look for him, he was gone. When or whither, the fellow swore he knew not. It was like enough, thou being the lure. Will you not produce him now, and save your peace?'

Ludovico, regarding her vehemence from under half-closed lids, exhibited not the slightest tremor.

'Madonna,' he said, 'thy mourning beauty becometh thee like Cassandra's. Hast thou, too, so angered Apollo with thy continence as to make him nullify in thee his own gift of prophecy? Alas, that lips so moving must be so discounted in their warnings!'

She drew back, chilled and baffled.

'Thou wilt not?' she muttered. 'Well, then, thou wilt not. Take thou thine own course; I may not know thy purpose.'

For a moment the cold of him deepened to deadliness, and his voice to an iron hardness:—

'Nor any like thee—self-seekers—dominated by some single lust. My purpose is a labyrinth of Cnossus. Beware, rash fools, who would seek to unravel it!'

Her lips were a little parted; the fine wings of her nostrils quivered. For all her bravery she felt her heart constricting as in the frost of some terror which she could neither gauge nor compass. But, in the very instant of her fear, Ludovico was his own bland self again.

'Tools, tools!' he said smiling—'for the eyes, the ears, the lips. I shall take up this one when I need it, not before. Meanwhile it lies ready to my hand.'

'I do not doubt thy cunning,' she said faintly.

'What then, Madonna?' he asked.

She struggled with herself, swallowing with difficulty.

'Its adequacy for its purpose—that is all.'

'What purpose?'

She looked up, and dared him:—

'To destroy the Duchess.'

He laughed out, tolerantly.

'Intuition! Intuition! O thou self-wounding impulse! To destroy the Duchess? Well! What is thy ring for? To destroy Monna Beatrice, belike. And Monna Beatrice had her instrument too, they will say afterwards—a blunt, coarse blade, but hers, hers only—as she thought. Yet, it seems, one Ludovic used something of him, this Narcisso, also—played him for his ends—marked him down, even, for landlord to a fribble called Tassino. What, Carissima! He hath not told thee so much?'

She shook her head dully.

'No?' mocked the Prince. 'And ye such sworn allies! O sweet, you shall learn policy betimes! You will not yield the ring? Well, there is Tassino, as you say. Play him against it.'

She knew she dared not. The vague implication of forces and understandings behind all this banter quite cowed her. She had defied the serpent, and been struck and overcome. Hate was no match for this craft. But emotion remained. She dwelt a long minute on his smooth, impenetrable face; then, all in an instant, yielded up her sex, and stole towards him, arms and moist eyes entreating.

'I dared thee; I was wrong. Only——'

Her palms trembled on his shoulders; her bosom heaved against his hand.

'I have suffered, what only a woman can. O, Messer, let me keep the ring!'

Her voice possessed him like an embrace; the soft pleading of it made any concession to his kindness possible. He was very sensitive to all emotions of loveliness, but with the rare gift of reasoning in temptation. He shook his head.

'Ah!' she murmured, 'let me. Thou shalt find jealousy a hot ally.'

She pressed closer to him. He neither resisted nor invited.

'Most excellent sweetness,' he said gently. 'I melt upon this confidence. Henceforth we'll bury misunderstanding, and kiss upon his grave. But truth with sugar is still a drug. A jealous woman is bad in policy. Trust her always to destroy her betrayer, though through whatever betrayal of her friends. Besides, forgive me, Messer Bembo may yet prove accommodating.'

At that she dropped her hands and stepped back.

'Is this to bury misunderstanding?' she cried low. 'O, I would I were Duchess of Milan.'

'More impossible things might happen,' he said thickly, for all his self-control.

She stared at him fascinated a moment; then swiftly advanced again.

'Let me keep the ring,' she urged hoarsely. 'I could set something against it—some knowledge—some information.'

He had mastered himself in the interval; and now stood pondering upon her and fondling his chin.

'Yes?' he murmured. 'But it must be something to be worth.'

She hesitated; then spoke out:—

'A plot to kill the Duke—no more.'

The two stared at one another. She could see a pulse moving in his throat; but when at last he spoke, it was without emotion.

'Indeed, Madonna? They are so many. When is this particular one to be?'

'Do you not know?' she answered as derisively as she dared. 'I thought you had a tool for everything. Well, it is to be in Milan.'

'In Milan—as before,' he repeated ironically. 'And the heads of this conspiracy, Madonna?'

'Ah!' she cried, with a sigh of triumph; 'they are yours at the price of the ring.'

He canvassed her a little, but profoundly.

'After all,' he murmured, 'why should I seek to know?'

'Why?' she said, with a laugh of recovering scorn, 'why but to nip it in its bud, Messer?'

He was quick to grasp this implied menace of retaliation.

'Tell me,' he said, 'why are you so hot to retain this same ring?'

'For only a woman's reason,' she answered. 'Wouldst thou understand it? Not though I spoke an hour by St. Ambrose' clock. I would deal the blow myself, in my own way—that is all.'

'Thou wouldst ruin Bona?'

'Ay, and her saint, who robbed me of my love.'

'By her connivance? Marry, be honest, sweet lady. Was it not rather Messer Bembo who denied you Messer Bembo?'

'Will you have the names?'

'Hold a little. Here's matter black enough, but unsupported. I must have some proof. Tell me who's your informant?'

'And have you go and bleed him? Nay, I am learning my tools.'

'Bravo!' he said, and kissed his hand to her. 'Well, I see, we must call a truce awhile.'

'And I will keep the ring,' she said.

He beamed thoughtfully on her. No doubt he was considering the possibility of improving the interval by rooting out, on his own account, details of the secret she held from him.

'Provisionally,' he said pleasantly—'provisionally, Madonna; so long as you undertake to make no use of it until you hear from me my decision.'

'The longer that is delayed, the better for your purpose, Messer,' she dared to say.

He smiled blankly at her a little; then courteously advancing, and raising her hand, imprinted a fervent kiss on it.

'Though I fail to gather your meaning,' he said, 'it is nevertheless certain that you would make a very imposing Duchess, Monna Beatrice.'

CHAPTER XVI

'Father Abbot, we thank you for your trust. We were less than human to abuse it. O, it flew with white wings to shelter in our bosom! Shall we be hawks to such a dove! Take comfort. It hath ruffled its feathers on our heart; it hath settled itself thereon, and hatched out a winged love. Pure spirit of the Holy Ghost, whence came it? From a star, they say, born of some wedlock between earth and sky. I marvel you could part with it. I could never.... The pretty chuck! What angel heresies it dares! "Marry," saith the dove, "I have been discussing with Christ the subtleties of dogmatic definition, and I find he is no Christian." This for intolerance! He finds honesty in schism—speaks with assurance of our Saviour, his discourses with Him by the brook, in the garden, under the trees—but doubtless you know. How can we refute such evidence, or need to? Alas! we are not on speaking terms with divinity. But we listen and observe; and we woo our winsome dove with pretty scarves and tabbards embroidered by our fingers; and some day we too hope to hear the voices. Not yet; the earth clings to us; but he dusts it off. "Make not beauty a passion, but passion a beauty," says he. "Learn that temperance is the true epicurism of life. The palate cloys on surfeit." O, we believe him, trust me! and never his pretty head is turned by our adoring.... "By love to make law unnecessary,"—there runs his creed: the love of Nature's truths—continence, sobriety, mate bound to mate like birds. Only our season's life. He convinces us apace. Already Milan sweetens in the sun. We curb all licence, yield heat to reason, clean out many vanities; have our choirs of pure maidens in place of the Bacchidæ—hymns, too, meet to woo Pan to Christ, of which I could serve thee an example.... All in all, we prepare for a great Feast of the Purification which, at the New Year's beginning, is to symbolise our re-conversion to Nature's straight religion. Then will be a rare market in doves—let us pray there be at least—which all, conscious of the true virgin heart, are to bring. Doves! Alack! which of us would not wish to be worthy to carry one that we know?'

So wrote the Duchess of Milan to the Abbot of San Zeno, and he answered:—

'Cherish my lamb. The fold yearns for him. He would leave it, despite us all. My daughter, be gracious to our little dreamer, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.'

For years after it was become the dimmest of odd memories, men and women would recall, between laughter and tears, the strange little moral fantasia which, during a month or two of that glowing autumn of 1476, all Milan had been tickled into dancing to the pipe of a small shepherd of a New Arcadia. The measure had certainly seemed inspiring enough at the time—potential, original, weaving an earnest purpose with joy, revealing novel raptures of sensation in the seemliness of postures, which claimed to interpret Nature out of the very centre of her spiritual heart. David dancing before the ark must have exhibited just such an orderly abandonment as was displayed by these sober-rollicking Pantheists of the new cult. Crossness with them was sunk to an impossible discount. There was no market for gallantry, épanchements, or any billing and cooing whatever but of doves. Instead, there came into vogue intercourses between Dioneus and Flammetta of sweet unbashful reasonableness; high-junkettings on chestnut-meal and honey; the most engaging attentions, in the matter of grapes and sweet biscuits and infinite bon-bons, towards the little furred and feathered innocents of the countryside. That temperance really was, according to the angelic propagandist, the true epicurism, experience no less astonishing than agreeable came to prove. Then was the festival of beans and bacon instituted by some jaded palates. Charity and consideration rose on all sides in a night, like edible and nutritious funguses. From Hallowmas to Christmas there was scarce a sword whipped from its scabbard but reflection returned it. It was no longer, with Gregory and Balthazar, 'Sir, do you bite your thumb at me? Sir, the wall to you,' but 'Sir, I see your jostling of me was unavoidable; Sir, your courtesy turns my asps to roses.' Nature and the natural decencies were on all tongues; the licences of eye and ear and lip were rejected for abominations unpalatable to any taste more refined than yesterday's. Modesty ruled the fashions and made of Imola an Ippolita, and of Aurelio an Augustine. The women, as a present result, were all on the side of Nature. Impudicity with them is never a cause but a consequence. They found an amazing attractiveness in the pretty dogma which rather encouraged than denounced in them the graceful arts of self-adornment. 'Naked, like the birds,' attested their little priest, 'do we come to inherit our Kingdom. Shall we be more blamed than they for adapting to ourselves the plumages of that bright succession?' Only he pleaded for a perfect adaptation to conditions—to form, climate, environments, constitution. The lines of all true beauty, he declared, were such as both suggested and defended. Could monstrosities of head furniture, for instance, appeal to any but a monster? Locks, thereat, were delivered from their fantastic convolutions, from their ropes of pearls, from their gold-dust and iris-powder, and were heaped or coiled di sua natura, as any girl, according to circumstances, might naturally dispose of them. There was a general holocaust of extravagances, with some talk of feeding the sacrifice with fuel of useless confessional boxes; and, in the meanwhile, the church took snuff and smiled, and the devil hid his tail in a reasonable pair of breeches, and endured all the inconveniences of sitting on it without a murmur.

Alas! 'How quick bright things come to confusion!' But the moment while it held gathered the force of an epoch; and no doubt much moral amendment was to derive from it. Intellect in a sweet presence makes a positive of an abstract argument; and when little Bembo asserted, in refutation of the agnostics, that man's dual personality was proved by the fact of his abhorring in others the viciousnesses which his flesh condoned in himself, the statement was accepted for the dictum of an inspired saint. But his strength of the moment lay chiefly in his undeviating consistency with his own queer creed. He never swerved from his belief in the soul's responsibility to its past, or of its commitment to a retrogressive movement after death. 'We drop, fainting, out of the ranks in a desolate place,' he said. 'We come to, alone and abandoned. Shall we, poor mercenaries, repudiating a selfish cause, not turn our faces to the loved home, far back, from which false hopes beguiled us? Be, then, our way as we have made it, whether by forbearance or rapine.' Again he would say: 'Take, so thy to-day be clean, no fearful thought for thy to-morrow, any more than for thy possible estrangement from thy friend. There is nothing to concern thee now (which is all that is) but thy reason, love, and justice of this moment. They are the faculty, devotion, and quality to which, blended, thy soul may trust itself for its fair continuance.'

There was a little song of his, very popular with the court gentlemen in these days of their regeneracy, which, as exemplifying the strengths and weaknesses of his propaganda, is here given:—

'Here's a comrade blithe

To the wild wood hieth—

Follow and find!

Loving both least and best,

His love takes still a zest

From the song-time of the wind.

The chuckling birds they greet him,

The does run forth to meet him—

Follow and find!

Strange visions shall thou see;

Learn lessons new to thee

In the song-time of the wind.

Couldst, then, the dear bird kill

That kiss'd thee with her bill?

Follow and find

How great, having strength, to spare

That trusting Soft-and-fair

In the song-time of the wind.

He is both God and Man;

He is both Christ and Pan—

Follow and find

How, in the lovely sense,

All flesh being grass, wakes thence

The song-time of the wind.

It was, I say, popular with the Lotharios. The novelty of this sort of renunciation tickled their sensoriums famously. It suggested a quite new and captivating form of self-indulgence, in the rapture to be gathered from an indefinite postponement of consummations. The sense of gallantry lies most in contemplation. I do not think it amounted to much more. Teresa and Elisabetta enjoyed their part in the serio-comic sport immensely, and were the most cuddlesome lambs, frisking unconscious under the faltering knife of the butcher. Madonna Caterina laughed immoderately to see their great mercy-pleading eyes coquetting with the greatly-withheld blade. But then she had no bump of reverence. The little wretch disliked sanctity in any form; loved aggressiveness better than meekness; was always in her heart a little Amazonian terrier-bitch, full of fight and impudence. It might have gone crossly with Messer Bembo had she been in her adoptive mother's position of trustee for him.

But luckily, or most unluckily for the boy, he was in more accommodating hands. This was the acute period of his proselytising. He had been persuaded back to court, and Bona had received him with moist eyes and open arms, and indeed a very yearning pathos of emotionalism, which had gathered a fataler influence from the contrition which in the first instance must be his. He had stood before her not so much rebuking as rebuked. Knowing her no longer saint, but only erring woman, it added a poignancy to his remorse that he had led her into further error by his abuse of her trust. She had answered his confession with a lovely absolution:—

'What is lost is lost. Thou art the faithfullest warrant of my true observance of my lord's wishes. Only if thou abandon'st me am I betrayed.'

Could he do aught after this but love her, accept her, her fervour and her penitence, for a first factor in the crusade he had made his own? And, while the soft enchantment held, no general could have wished a loyaler adjutant, or one more ready to first-example in herself the sacrifices he demanded. She abetted him, as she had promised, in all his tactics; lent the full force of an authority, which his sweetness and modesty could by no means arrogate to himself, to compel the reforms he sang. She gave, amongst other gifts, her whole present soul to the righting of the wrong done to the girl Lucia and her father; and when all her efforts to discover the vanished Tassino had failed, and she, having sent on her own initiative a compensatory purse of gold to the blind armourer, had learned how Lucia had banged the gift and the door in the messenger's face, was readily mollified by Bernardo's tender remonstrance: 'Ah, sweet Madonna! what gold can give her father eyes, or her child a name!'

'What! it is born?' she murmured.

'I saw it yesterday,' said Bembo. 'It lay in her lap, like the billet that kills a woman's heart.'

And, indeed, he had not, because of his re-exaltation, ceased to visit his friends, or to go to occasional discussion with the crabbed Montano; whose moroseness, nevertheless, was petrifying. Yet had he even sought to interest the Duchess there; though, for once, without avail; for she dared not seem to lend her countenance to that banned, if injured, misanthrope.

So she led the chorus to his soloing, and helped and mothered him with an infatuation beyond a mother's. Like the Emperor's jewelled nightingale, he was the sweetest bird to pet while his tricks were new. His voice entranced the echoes of those sombre chambers and blood-stained corridors. The castello was reconsecrated in his breath, and the miasma from its fearful pits dispelled. His lute was his psalter and psaltery in one: it interpreted him to others, and himself to himself. Its sob was his sorrow, and its joy his jubilance. He could coax from it wings to expression inexpressible by speech alone. Here is one of his latest parables, or apologues, baldly running, as it appears, on the familiar theme, which, through that vehicle, he translated for his hearers into rapture:—

'Down by a stream that muttered under ice—

Winter's thin wasted voice, straining for air—

Lo! Antique Pan, gnawing his grizzled beard.

Chill was the earth, and all the sky one stone,

The shrunk sedge shook with ague; the wild duck,

Squattering in snow, sent out a feeble cry.

Like a stark root the black swan's twisted neck

Writhed in the bank. The hawk shook by the finch;

The stoat and rabbit shivered in one hole;

And Nature, moaning on a bedded drift,

Cried for delivery from her travail:—

"O Pan! what dost thou? Long the Spring's delayed!

O Pan! hope sickens. Son, where art thou gone?"

Thereat he heaved his brows; saw the starved fields,

The waste and horror of a world's eclipse;

And all the wrong and all the pity of it

Rushed from him in a roar:—

"I'm passed, deposed: call on another Pan!

Call Christ—the ates foretel him—he'll respond.

I'm old; grown impotent; a toothless dog.

New times, new blood: the world forgets my voice.

This Christ supplants me: call on him, I say.

Whence comes he? Whence, if not from off the streets?

Some coxcomb of the Schools, belike—some green,

Anæmic, theoretic verderer,

Shaping his wood-lore from the Herbary,

And Nature from his brazen window-pots.

The Fates these days have gone to live in town—

Grown doctrinaires—forgot their rustic loves.

Call on their latest nominee—call, call!

He'll ease thee of thy produce, bear it home,

And in alembics test and recompose it.

Call, in thine agony—loud—call on Christ:

He'll hear maybe, and maybe understand!"

"No Pan," she wailed: "No other Pan than thou!"

"What!" roared he, mocking: "Christ not understand?

Your loves, your lores, your secrets—will he not?

Not by his books be master of your heart?

Gods! I am old. I speak but by the woods;

And often nowadays to rebel ears.

He'll do you better: fold your fogs in bales;

Redeem your swamps; sweep up your glowing leaves;

People his straight pastures with your broods;

Shape you for man, to be his plain helpmeet;

No toys, no tricks, no mysteries, no sports—

But sense and science, scorning smiles and tears."

Raging, he rose: A light broke on the snow:

The ice upon the river cracked and spun:

Long milky-ways of green and starry flowers

Grew from the thaw: the trees nipped forth in bud:

The falcon sleeked the wren; the stoat the hare;

And Nature with a cry delivered was.

Pan stared: A naked child stood there before him,

Warming a frozen robin in his hands.

Shameless the boy was, fearless, white as milk;

No guile or harm; a sweet rogue in his eyes.

And he looked up and smiled, and lisped a word:—

"Brother, thou take and cure him, make him well.

Or teach me of thy lore his present needs."

"Brother!" choked Pan. "My father was a God.

Who art thou?" "Nature's baby," said the child.

"Man was my father; and my name is Christ."

He slid his hand within the woodman's palm:—

"Dear elder brother, guide me in my steps.

I bring no gift but love, no tricks but love's—

To make sweet flowers of frost—locked hearts unfold—

The coney pledge the weasel in a kiss.

Canst thou do these?" "No, by my beard," said Pan.

Gaily the child laughed: "Clever brother thou art;

Yet can I teach thee something." "All," said Pan.

He groaned; the child looked up; flew to his arms:—

"O, by the womb that bore us both, do love me!"

A minute sped: the river hushed its song:

The linnet eyed the falcon on its branch:

The bursting bud hung motionless—And Pan

Gave out a cry: "New-rooted, not deposed!

Come, little Christ!" So hand in hand they passed,

Nature's two children reconciled at last.'

And what about Messer Lanti and the Fool Cicada during this period of their loved little saint's apotheosis? Were they more advocati diaboli than Bona? Alas! they were perhaps the only two, in all that volatile city, to accept him, with a steadfast and indomitable faith, at his true worth. There was no angelic attribute, which Carlo, the honest blaspheming neophyte, would not have claimed for him—with blows, by choice; no rebuke, nor suggestion, nor ordinance issuing from his lips, which he would not accept and act upon, after the necessary little show of self-easing bluster. It was as comical as pathetic to observe the dear blunderhead's blushing assumptions of offence, when naughtiness claimed his intimacy; his exaggerated relish of spring water; his stout upholding, on an empty stomach, of the æsthetic values of abstinence. But he made a practical virtue of his conversion, and was become frequent in evidence, with his strong arm and voice and influence, as a Paladin on behalf of the oppressed. He and Cicada were the boy's bristling watch-dogs, mastiff and lurcher; and were even drawn, by that mutual sympathy, into a sort of scolding partnership, defensive and aggressive, which had for its aim the vindication of their common love. There, at least, was some odd rough fruit of the reconciliation preached by little Bembo between the God-man and the man-Nature. Such a relationship had been impossible in the old days of taskmaster and clown. Now it was understood between them, without superfluous words, that each held the other responsible to him for his incorruptible fidelity to his trust, and himself for a sleepless attention to the duty tacitly and by implication assigned to be his. That is to say, Messer Carlo's strength and long sword, and the other's shrewd wit, were assumed, as it were, for the right and left bucklers to the little charioteer as he drove upon his foes.

Carlo had a modest conception of his own abilities; yet once he made the mistake of appropriating to himself a duty—or he thought it one—rather appertaining to his fellow buckler. They had been, the Fool and himself, somewhat savagely making merry on the subject of Bona's conversion—in the singleness of which, to be candid, they had not much faith—when his honest brain conceived the sudden necessity of bluntly warning the little Bernardino of the danger he was courting in playing with such fire. His charge, no sooner realised than acted upon, took the boy, so to speak, in the wind. Bembo gasped; and then counter-buffed with angelic fury:—

'Who sleeps with a taper in his bed invites his own destruction? Then wert thou sevenfold consumed, my Carlo. O, shame! she is my mother!'

'Nay, but by adoption,' stammered the other abashed.

'Her assumption of the name should suffice to spare her. O, thou pagan irreclaimable—right offspring of Vesta and the incestuous Saturn! Is this my ultimate profit of thee? Go hide thy face from innocence.'

Lanti, thus bullied, turned dogged.

'I will hide nothing. Abuse my candour; spit on my love if thou wilt, it will endure for its own sake,' and he flung away in a rage.

But he had better have deputed the Fool to a task needing diplomacy. Cicada laughed over his grievance when it was exploded upon him.

'Shouldst have warned Bona herself, rather,' he said.

'How!' growled the other: 'and been cashiered, or worse, for my pains?'

'Not while her lost ring stands against her; and thou, her private agent for its recovery.'

'True; from the mud.'

'Well, if thou think'st so.'

'Dost thou not?'

'Ay; for as mud is mud, Narcisso is Narcisso.'

'Narcisso!'

He roared, and stared.

'Has he got it?'

'I do not say so.'

'I will go carve the truth out of him.'

'Or Monna Beatrice.'

'What!'

The great creature fairly gasped; then muttered, in a strangled voice: 'Why should she want it? What profit to her?'

'What, indeed?' whined the Fool. 'She fancies Messer Bembo too well to wish to injure him, or through him, Bona—does she not?'

Carlo's brow slowly blackened.

'I will go to her,' he said suddenly. The Fool leapt to bar his way.

'You would do a foolish thing,' he said—'with deference, always with deference, Messer. This is my part. Leave it to me.'

Carlo choked, and stood breathing.

'Why,' said the Fool, 'these are the days of circumspection. God, says Propriety, made out hands and faces, and whatever else that is not visible was the devil's work. You would be shown, by Monna Beatrice, for all her self-acknowledged parts, just clean hands and a smiling face. She conforms to fashion. For the rest, the devil will attend to his own secrets.'

The other groaned:—

'I would I could fathom thee. I would I had the ring.'

'I would thou hadst,' answered Cicada. ''Twould be a good ring to set in our Duchess's little nose, to persuade her from routling in consecrated ground: a juster weapon in thy hands than in some other's. Well, be patient; I may obtain it for thee yet.'

He meant, at least, to set his last wits to the task. Somehow, he was darkly and unshakably convinced, this same Lion ring was the pivot upon which all his darling's fortunes turned. That it was not really lost, but was being held concealed, by some jealous spirit or spirits, against the time most opportune for procuring the boy's, and perhaps others', destruction by its means, he felt sure. All Milan was not in one mind as to the disinterested motives of its Nathan. Tassino, Narcisso, the dowager of Casa Caprona, even the urbane Messer Ludovico himself, to name no others, could hardly be shown their personal profits in the movement. They might all, as the world's ambitions went, be excused from coveting the stranger's promotion. And there was no doubt that, at present, he was paramount in the eyes of the highest. That, in itself, was enough to make his sweet office the subject of much scepticism and blaspheming. Tough, wary work for the watch-dogs, Cicada pondered. That same evening he was walking in the streets, when a voice, Visconti's, muttered alongside him:—

'Good Patch, hast been loyal so far to thy bargain. Hold to it for thy soul's sake. There are adders in Milan.' Then he bent closer, and whispered: 'A word in thy ear: is the ring found yet?'

The Fool's hard features did not twitch. He shook his head.

'Marry, sir,' answered he, as low, 'the mud is as close a confidant as I. I have not heard of its blabbing.'

'So much the better,' murmured the other, and glided away. But he left Cicada thinking.

'It was not for them, then, the conspirators, that Narcisso stole it. And yet he stole it—that I'll be sworn. For whom? Why, for Monna Beatrice. For why? Why, for a purpose that I'll circumvent—when I guess it. A passenger going by cursed him under his breath. The oath, profound and heartfelt, was really a psychologic note in the context of this history. Cicada heard it, and, looking round, saw, to his amazement, the form of the very monster of his present deliberations.

Narcisso, the rancorous mongrel, having snarled his hatred of an old associate, who, he verily believed, had once betrayed him, slouched, with a heavier vindictiveness, on his way. The Fool, inspired, skipped into cover, and peeped. He knew that the coward creature, once secure of his distance, would turn round to sputter and glower. He was not wrong there, nor in his surmise that, finding him vanished, Narcisso would continue his road in reassurance of his fancied security. He saw him actually turn and glare; distinguished, as plainly as though he heard it, the villainous oath with which the monster flounced again to his gait. And then, very cautiously, he came out of his hiding, and slunk in pursuit.

It could serve, at least, no bad purpose, he thought, to track the beast to his lair; and, with infinite circumspection, he set himself to the task.

It proved a simple one, after all—the more so as the animal, it appeared, was tenant in a very swarming warren, where concealment was easy. It was into a frowzy hole that, in the end, he saw him disappear—a tunnel, with a grating over it, like a sewer-trap.

And so, satisfied and not satisfied, he was turning away, when he was conscious in a moment of a face looking from the grating.

A minute later, threading his path along a by-alley, he emerged upon a sweeter province of the town, and stood to disburden himself of a mighty breath.

'So!' he muttered: 'He is there, is he! Well, the plot grows complicate.'

CHAPTER XVII

There was a quarter of Milan into which the new light penetrated with some odd uncalculated effects. It was called, picturesquely enough, 'The Vineyard,' and as such certainly produced a great quantity of full-blooded fruit. Vines that batten on carrion grow fat; and here was the mature product of a soil so enriched. There was no disputing its appetising quality. That derived from the procreant old days of paganism, before the germ of the first headache had flown out of Pandora's box into a bung-hole. 'The Vineyard's' body yet owed to tradition, if centuries of adulteration had demoralised its spirit. Still, altogether, it was faithfuller of the soil, self-consciously nearer to the old Nature, than was ever the extrinsic Guelph or Ghibelline that had usurped its kingdom. Wherefore, it seemed, it had elected to construe this new reactionism, this redintegratio amoris, this sudden much-acclaiming of Nature, into a special vindication of itself, its tastes, methods and appetites, as representing the fundamental truth of things; and, ex consequenti, to appropriate Messer Bembo for its own particular champion and apologist.

Alas, poor Parablist! There is always that awakening for an enlightened agitator in any democratic mission. Does he look for some comprehension by the Demos of the necessity of radical reform, his eyes will be painfully opened. The pruning, by its leave, shall never be among the suckers down by the root, but always among the lordly blossoms. Shall Spartacus once venture openly to stoop with his knife, he shall lose at a blow the popular suffrage. At a later date, Robespierre, who was not enlightened, had to subscribe to the misapplication of his own reforms, or be crushed by the demon he had raised. Here in Milan, 'The Vineyard' was the first to renounce its champion, when once it found itself to be intimately included in that champion's neo-Christianising scheme.

Alas, poor Parablist! Not Reason but Fanaticism is the convincing reformer! the bigot, not the saint, the effective drover of men.

In the meanwhile 'The Vineyard' swaggered and held itself a thought more brazenly than heretofore, on the strength of its visionary election. Always a clamorous rookery, one might have fancied at this time a certain increase in the boisterous obscenity of its note, as that might presage the fulfilment of some plan for its breaking out, and planting itself in new black colonies all over the city. But as certainly, if this were so, its illusionment was a very may-fly's dance.

Now as, on a noon of this late Autumn, we are brought to penetrate its intricacies, a certain symbolic fitness in its title may or may not occur to us. Supposing that it does, we will accept this Via Maladizione where we stand, this gorge of narrow high-flung tenements, looped between with festoons of glowing rags, for the supports and dead trailers of a gathered vintage. Below, the vats are full to brimming, and the merchants of life and death forgathered in the markets. Half-way down the street a little degraded church suddenly spouts a friar, who, punch-like, hammers out on the steps his rendering of the new nature, which is to remember its cash obligations to Christ, and so vanishes again in a clap of the door. A barber, shaving a customer in the open street, gapes and misses his stroke, thereby adding a trickle to the sum of the red harvest. Mendicants pause and grin; oaths rise and buzz on all sides, like dung-flies momentarily disturbed. And predominant throughout, the vintagers, the true natives of the soil, swarm and lounge and discuss, under a rent canopy, the chances of the season and its likely profits.

Ivory and nut-brown are they all, these vintagers, with cheeks like burning leaves, and hair blue-black as grape-clusters, and eloquent animal eyes, and, in the women, copious bosoms half-veiled in tatters, like gourds swelling under dead foliage. But the milk that plumps these gourds is still of the primeval quality. Tessa's passions are of the ancient dimensions, if her religion is of to-day. Her assault and surrender borrow nothing from convention. No billing and rhyming for her, with canzonarists and madrigalists under the lemon trees, in the days when the awnings are hung over to keep the young fruit from scorching; but rough pursuit, rather, and capture and fulfilment—all uncompromising. She is here to eat and drink and love, to enjoy and still propagate the fruits of her natural appetites. She does not, like Rosamonda, brush her teeth with crushed pearls; she whets and whitens them on a bone. She does not powder her hair with gold dust; the sun bronzes it for her to the scalp. No spikenard and ambergris make her rags, or perfumed water her body, fragrant for her master's mouthing. Yet is she desirable, and to know her is to taste something of the sweetness of the apple that wrought the first discord. She is still a child of Nature, though Messer Bembo's creed surpasses her best understanding. She loves burnt almonds and barley-sugar, and crunches them joyously whenever some public festival gives her the chance; but the instincts of order and self-control are long vanished from the category of her qualities, and she survives as she is more by virtue of her enforced than her voluntary abstinences. For the rest, civilisation—the civilisation that always encompasses without touching, without even understanding her—has made her morals a terror, and the morals of most of her comrades, male or female, of 'The Vineyard.'

It is, in fact, the sink of Milan, is this vineyard—a very low quarter indeed; and, it is to be feared, other red juice than grapes' swells the profits from its vats. Here are to be found, and engaged, a rich selection of the tagliacantoni, the hired bravos who kill on a sliding scale of absolution, with fancy terms for the murder which allows no time for an act of contrition. Here the soldier of fortune, who has gambled away, with his sword and body-armour, the chances of an engagement to cut throats honestly, festers for a midnight job, and countersigns with every vein he opens his own compact with the devil. Here the oligarchy of beggars has its headquarters, and composes its budgets of social taxation; and here, finally, in the particular den of one Narcisso, desperado and ladrone, hides and shivers Messer Tassino, once a Duchess's favourite.

He does not know why he is hidden here, or for what purpose Messer Ludovico beguiled and threatened him from the more sympathetic custody of his friend Jacopo, to deposit him in this foul burrow. But he feels himself in the grip of unknown forces, and he fears and shivers greatly. He is always shivering and snuffling is Messer Tassino; whining out, too, in rebellious moods, his pitiful resentments and hatreds. His little garish orbit is in its winter, and he cries vainly for the sun that had seemed once to claim him to her own warmth and greatness. He has heard of himself as renounced by her, condemned, and committed, on his detested rival's warrant, to judgment by default. Yet, though it be to save his mean skin, he cannot muster the moral courage to come forth and right the wrong he has done. That, he knows, would spell his last divorce from privilege; and he has not yet learned to despair. He had been so petted and caressed, and—and there are no lusty babies to be gathered from Messer Bembo's eyes. At least, he believes and hopes not; and, in the meanwhile, he will lie close, and await developments a little longer.

Perhaps, after all, there is knowledge if little choice in his decision. He may be justified, of his experience, in being sceptical of the disinterestedness of spiritual emotionalism, or at least of the feminine capacity for accepting its appeal disinterestedly. But of this he is quite sure—that sanctity itself shall not propitiate, by mere virtue of its incorruptibility, the woman it has scorned; and, in that certainty, and by reason of that experience, he nurses the hope of still profiting by the revulsion of feeling which he foresees will occur in a certain high lady as a consequence of her rebuff.

Still, however that may chance, he finds his present state intolerable. It is not so much its dull and filthy circumstance that appals him, though that is noxious enough to a boudoir exquisite; it is the shadow of Messer Ludovico's purpose, shapeless, indistinct, eternally conning him from the dark corners of his imagination, which takes the knees out of his soul. Is he really his friend and patron, as he professes to be? He recalls, with a sick shudder, how once, when in the full-flood of his arrogance, he had dared to keep that smooth and accommodating prince waiting in an ante-room while he had his hair dressed. He, Tassino, the fungus of a night, had ventured to do this! What a fool he had been; yet how worse than his own folly is the dissimulation which can ignore for present profit so unforgettable an insult! It is not forgotten; it cannot be; yet, to all appearances, Ludovico now visits him, on the rare occasions when he does so, with the sole object of informing him, sympathetically, of the progress of Bona's new infatuation. Why? He has not the wit to fathom. Only he has not so much faith in this disinterestedness as in the probability of its being a blind to some deadly policy.

How he hates them all—the Duchess, the Prince, the whole world of courtly rascals who have flattered him out of his obscurity only to play with and destroy him! If he can once escape from this trap, he will show them he can bite their heels yet. But what hope is there of escaping while Ludovico holds the secret of the spring? Day after day finds him gnawing the bars, and whimpering out his spite and impotence.

He has not failed, of course, to question his landlord Narcisso, or to weep over the futile result. Even if the little wretch's tact and wit were less negligible quantities, there is that of crafty doggedness in his gaoler to baffle the shrewdest questioner. Deciding that the man is in the paid confidence of the 'forces,' Tassino soon desists from attempting to draw him, and vents on him instead his whole soul of vengeful and disappointed spite.

Narcisso, for his part, offers himself quite submissively to the comedy; waits on him with a sniggering deference; stands while he eats; brings water, none the most fragrant, for him to dip his fingers in afterwards; dresses his hair with a broken comb, and takes his own dressing for pulling it with a grinning impassivity; lends, in short, his huge carcass in every way to be the other's butt and footstool. This exercise in overbearance is a certain relief to the prisoner; but, for all the rest, his time hangs deadlily on his hands. There are no restrictions placed upon him. He is free to come and go—as he dares. His terror is held his sufficient gaoler, and it suffices. He never, in fact, puts his nose outside the door, but contents himself, like the waspish little eremite he has become, with criticising and cursing from his solitary grille the limbs and lungs and life of the f[oe]tid world in which his later fortunes seem cast. So much for Messer Tassino!

One particular night saw him cowering before the caldano, or little domestic brazier, which must serve his present need in lieu of hotter memories; for the season was chilling rapidly, and what freshness had ever been in him was long since starved out. He was grown a little grimy and unkempt in these days, and his clothes were stale. The room in which he sat was, in its meanness and squalor, quite typically Vineyardish. Its furniture was of the least and rudest; it had not so much as a solitary cupboard to hold a skeleton; it was as naked to inspection as honesty. That was its owner's way. Narcisso was a very Dacoit in carrying all his simple harness on and about him. He cut his throats and his meat impartially with the same knife; or toasted, as he was doing now, slices of Bologna sausage on its point. His abortive scrap of a face puckered humorously, as the other, drawing his cloak tighter about him, damned the pitiful dimensions of their hearth.

'I would not curse the fire for its smallness, Messer,' he said. 'Wilt need all thy breath some day for blowing out a furnace.'

Tassino wriggled and snarled:—

'May'st think so, beast; but I know myself damned as an unbaptized one, to no lower than the first circle of our Father Dante.'

'Wert thou not baptized?'

'Do I not say so? And, therefore, lacking that grace, exonerated.'

'What's that?'

'Not responsible for my acts, pig.'

'Who says so?'

'Dante.'

'Who's he? Has a' been there? I would not believe him. What doth a' say o' me?'

'You? That you shall choke for all eternity in a river of blood.'

'Anan!' said Narcisso, and blew, scowling, on his sausage, which had become ignited. 'That's neither sense nor justice, master. I kill by the decalogue, I do. Did I ever put out a man's eyes for sport?'

'It's no matter,' answered Tassino. 'Thou wert baptized.'

'What will they do to thee?'

'I shall be forbidden the Almighty's countenance, no more—punishment enough, of course, for a person of taste; but I must e'en make shift to do without.'

'It's not fair,' growled Narcisso. 'I had no hand in my own christening. Do without? Narry penalty in doing without what you've never asked nor wanted.'

A figure that had stolen noiselessly into the room as they spoke, and was standing watching, with its cloak caught to its face, sniggered, literally, in its sleeve.

Tassino snapped rebelliously at the knife point, and began to eat without ceremony.

'Punishment enough,' he whined, 'if it means such a life in death as this.'

He sobbed and munched, quarrelling with his meat.

'How canst thou understand! The foul fiend betray him who condemned me to it! That saint; O, that saint! If I could only once trip his soul by the heels!'

'No need, my poor Tassino,' murmured a sympathetic voice; 'indeed, I think, there is no need.'

The prisoner staggered from his stool, and stood shaking and gulping.

'Messer Ludovico!' he gasped. 'How——'

'By the door, my child—plainly, by the door,' interrupted the Prince smoothly. And then he smiled: 'Alas! thou hast no ante-room here for the scotching of undesirable suitors.'

The terrified creature had not a word to say. One could almost hear his fat heart thumping.

Ludovico, lowering his cloak a little, made an acrid face. The room offended his particular nostrils: its atmosphere was nothing less than sticky. But, reflecting on the choice moral of it, he looked at the little tarnished clinquant before him, and was content to endure. He even affected a pleasant envy.

'This is worth all the glamour of courts,' he said, waving his hand comprehensively. 'To eat, or lie down; to go in or out as thou will'st. Never to know that suspicion of thine own shadow on the wall. To waste no words in empty phrases, nor need the wealth to waste on empty show. What a rich atmosphere hath this untroubled, irresponsible freedom; it is a very meal of itself! I would I could say, For ever rest and grow fat thereon; but, alas! I bring discomforting news. My poor Tassino. I fear the fortress at last shows signs of yielding.'

The little wretch opposite him whimpered as if at a whip-cut.

'Is it so indeed? Then, Messer Ludovico, it is a foul shame of her. She hath betrayed me—may God requite her!' He snivelled like a grieved child; then, on a sudden thought, looked up, with a child's cunning. 'At least in that case I shall be forgotten. There can be no object in my hiding here longer.'

The Prince lifted his eyebrows, with an inward-drawn whistle.

'Object? Object?' he protested, acting amazement. 'But more than ever, my poor simpleton. Thy case is double-damned thereby. Think you the other would rest on the thought of a rival, and such a rival, at large? Thy very existence would be a menace to his guilty peace. I come, indeed, as a friend to warn thee. Lie close; stir not out; the very air hath knives. Be cautious, even of thy shadow on the wall, of thy hand in the dish.'

He said it calmly and distinctly, looking towards Narcisso, who all this time had stood hunched in the background, his dull brain struggling bewildered in a maze. But the urgency of this innuendo penetrated even him; the more so when he saw Tassino leap and fling himself on his knees at the Prince's feet.

'What do you mean?' shrieked the young man. 'Is he in their pay? O Messer, save me! don't let me be poisoned.'

He pawed and grovelled, looking madly over his shoulder. Ludovico laughed gently, disregarding him.

'Nay, I know not,' he cooed. 'It is a dog that serves more masters than one.'

Narcisso slouched forward, and ducked a sort of obeisance between sullen and deferential.

'What's to-do?' he growled. 'I serve my patron, Messer Duke's son, like an honest man. What call, I say, to warn 'en of me? Do I not earn my wages fairly?'

'Scarcely, fellow,' murmured Ludovico—'unless to betray thine employer be fair.'

Narcisso scowled and lowered.

'Betray!' he protested, but uneasily. 'That is a charge to be proved, Messer.'

Ludovico suddenly leapt to a blaze.

'Dog! Wouldst bandy with me, dog? Beware, I say! Who blabbed my secrets to the lady of Casa Caprona?'

He was himself again with the cry. His faculty of instant self-control was a thing quite fearful. Narcisso cowered before him; shrunk under the playful wagging of his finger.

'Messer—in the Lord's name!' he could only stammer—'Messer!'

'O thou fond knave!' complained the Prince, showing his teeth in a smile; 'to think to play that double game, one patron against another, and stake thine empty wits against the reckoning! Well, thou art confessed and damned.' He drew back a pace. 'But one word more,' he said, raising his voice. 'What hast thou to plead that I call not up those that will silence for ever thy false, treacherous tongue?'

He stood by the door. It was a very reasonable inference that he had not ventured into such a quarter unattended. Narcisso stood gasping and intertwining his thick fingers, but he could find no words.

'What!' smiled Ludovico; 'no excuse, no explanation? No answer of any kind? Shall I call, then?' He seemed to hesitate. 'Yet perhaps one loop-hole, though undeserved, I'll lease thee on condition.' He moved again forward a little, and spoke in a lower tone: 'There's news wanted of a certain stolen ring. Dog! do I not know who thieved it, and for whom? Now shalt thou undertake to go yet once again, and, robbing the receiver, bring the spoil to me—or be damned here and now for thy villainy.'

He thought he had netted at last the quarry of his long, patient stalking; but for once his confidence was at fault. Watching intently for the effect of his words, he grew conscious of some change transfiguring, out of terror and astonishment, the face of his victim. Foul, ignoble, animal beyond redemption as that was in all its features, its swinish eyes could yet extract and emit, it seemed, from the thin, dead ashes of some ancient fire, a stubborn spark of self-renunciation. He could read it in them unmistakably. The man stood straight before him, for the first and only time in his life, a hero.

Ludovico gazed in silence. He found, to do him the right justice, this psychic revelation of acuter interest to him than his own defeat foreseen in the light of it. But Tassino's subdued whimpering jarred him out of his abstraction.

'Well, is it agreed?' he asked with a sigh. For the moment he almost shrunk in the apprehension of an affirmative reply.

The rogue drew himself suddenly together.

'Call, Messer,' he said. 'That is my answer.'

His chin dropped on his breast. Tassino uttered a cry, and hid his face in his hands. Not a word or apparent movement followed; but when, goaded by the fearful stillness, the two dared to look up once more, they found themselves alone.

Then, at that, Tassino shrieked and sprang to the grille.

'My God!' he sobbed; 'he has gone, and left me to my fate!'

He moved to escape by the door, but Narcisso caught and wrenched him back.

'What ails the fool!' he protested in his teeth. 'My orders be to keep, not kill thee, man!'

Messer Ludovico, walking enveloped within a little cloud of his adherents, smiled to himself on his way back to the palace.

'The fascination of the serpent,' mused he, shaking his head—'the fascination of the serpent! How could that crude organism be expected to resist the arts of our Lamia, when I myself could fall near swooning to them? Hath he betrayed me to others? I think not; yet it were well to have him silenced betimes. The weakness was to threaten where I dared not yet perform. Yet it may chance, after all, he shall come to be prevailed on for the ring.'

'The ring!' he muttered, as he climbed presently to his chamber—'the ring! I think it comes to zone the world in my imagination!'

As he was passing through the ante-room to his private closet, a draped and voiceless figure moved suddenly out of the shadows to accost him. He gave the faintest start, then offered his hand, and, without a word, ushered this strange ghost into his sanctum. The portière swung back, the door clanged upon them, and there on the threshold he dwelt, looking with a silent, smiling inquisition into the eyes of his visitor.

Hast thou ever seen the dead, leafy surface of a woodland pool stir, scarce perceptibly, to the movement of some secret thing below? So, as Beatrice stood like a statue before the Prince, did the soul of her reveal itself to him, writhing somewhere under the surface of that still mask.

Then suddenly, swiftly, passionately, she thrust out a hand.

'There is the ring,' she said. 'Do what you will with it.'

CHAPTER XVIII

That same evening had witnessed, in the dower Casa Caprona, the abortive finish to a venture long contemplated by its mistress, and at length, in a moment of desperation, dared. She had wrought herself, or been wrought at this last, into privately communicating to the little Saint Magistrate of Milan, how she had certain information where the ring lay, which if he would learn, he must follow the messenger to her house. She had claimed his utmost confidence and secrecy, and, on that understanding alone, had procured herself an interview. And Bernardo had come, and he had gone—how, her tumbled hair, her self-bruised bosom, her abandonment to the utter shame and fury of her defeat, were eloquent witnesses.

She had not been able to realise her own impotence to disarm an antagonist already half-demoralised, as she believed this one to be. For, before ever she had precipitated this end, gossip had been busy whispering to her how the saint was beginning to melt in the sun of adulation, to confess the man in the angel, to inform with a more than filial devotion his attitude towards Bona. To have to cherish yet hate that thought had been her torture; to anticipate its consummation her frenzy. She had known him first; he was hers by right. Long wasting in the passion of her desire, she had conceived of its fruition a savour out of all proportion with her experiences. She must conquer him or die. He was hers, not Bona's.

She had disciplined herself, in order to propitiate his prejudices, into the enduring of a decent period of retirement. It must end at last. She never knew when Ludovico might exact from her that security, held by her conditionally only, against her ruin by him. For the present indeed she retained the ring, but any moment might see it claimed from her. Now, if she could only once lure, and overcome by its means, the object of her passion, the question of its restoration to, or use by another against, its owner, must necessarily cease of being an acute one with either her or Bernardo.

With him, at least—with him, at least. And as for herself?

Turning where she lay, she had seen her own insolent smile reflected from a mirror.

'He said,' she had whispered, pondering some words of Ludovico's, 'More impossible things might happen.'

Then, taking the ring from her bosom, and apostrophising its green sparkle softly:—

'A little star—a little bribe, to win me both love and a throne!' she had said, and so had sunk back, closing her eyes, and murmuring:—

'Let it only prove its power here, and it and the heads of that conspiracy shall be all Ludovico's. He will not claim the latter, I think, until their purpose is accomplished. And then——'

And then Messer Ludovico himself had been announced. He visited her not infrequently in these days, though never, it seemed, with any purpose of foreclosing on that little mortgage of the ring. He came in the fashion of a confidential gossip, to enlighten her as to the doings of the world outside. They were very pleasant and intimate together, with a hint, no more, of closer relations to come. The lion rolled in a silken net, and affected his subjugation, as the lady affected not to notice the stealthy claws of her capture. It was a pretty little comedy, which engaged the sympathies of both, each according to its temperament. But it ended in tragedy.

Ludovico had, indeed, no interest in dissuading his beautiful gossip's mind from its tormenting suspicions as to the Messer Saint's gradual corruption by Bona; a scandal to which, no doubt—the wish in him being father to the thought—he himself gave ready credence. The report suited him in every way, both as to his policy and its instruments; and he only awaited its certain substantiation to let fly the bolt which was to involve three fortunes in one ruin—under warrant of the ring, if possible, but timely in any event.

And in the meanwhile it afforded him, whether from jealousy or pure love of mischief, some wicked gratification to nip and sting this already tormented lady in sensitive places, and to do it all under an affectation of the softest sympathy.

Yet, while for his own purpose he hugged and fostered the slander, whose growth and justification he most desired, the slander itself, for some inexplicable reason, did not grow, but even began to exhibit signs, for a time almost imperceptible, of attenuating. Ludovico could not acknowledge this fact to himself, or even consider it. It is difficult, no doubt, while we are calculating our probable gains, to admit the possibility of a blight in the harvest of our hopes. A fervid prospect blinds us to the road between; and this prince, for all his far-seeing, because of it rather, may have been less open to immediate impressions than some others about him.

Yet to souls less acute, there were the signs: the first little shadow of a smut on the ear—a hitch, just the faintest, in the ecstatic programme of Nature. Was it that Tassino, the mean worldling, was a true prophet of his parts, and that the reaction from a starved continence was already actually threatening? Whispers there certainly were of a growing impatience of restrictions in the castello; of schisms from the pure creed of its little priest; of hankerings, even on the part of the highest, after the old fleshpots. They rose, and died down, and rose again. There was no melting a certain snow-child, it was said, into anything but ice water. The Duchess, who had somehow expected to gather flowers from frost, went about white and smiling, and chafing her hands as if they were numb. She had once stopped before a new young courtier, who bore some resemblance to a past favourite, and, while speaking to him kindly, had been seen to flush as though her cheeks had caught the sudden warmth of a distant fire. Madam Caterina, it was certain, waxing bold in impishness, had commisserated her mother on the bad cold she had caught. 'Madre mia,' she had said, 'you have wandered too much in the chill woods, and would be the better for a hot brick to your bed.'

For such tittle-tattle was this after season of the sowing responsible, when, against all expectations, tares began to appear amidst the crops. Messer Ludovico, for his part, would recognise no sinister note in the laughter. It was just the rocking and babbling of empty vessels. Its justification in fact would not have suited his book at all; and so he continued in confidence to plant his little shafts in madam's raw places.

Monna Cat'rina, he had told her on the occasion of this particular visit, had been very saucy to her mother the evening before, advising her, this cold weather, to make herself a coverlet of angel down. 'Whereat,' said he, 'Madam our Duchess slapped the chit's pink knuckles, answering, "Shall I wish him, then, to die of cold for me?" to which Catherine replied: "No; for to die of love is not to die of cold"'; and the other had blushed and laughed, and turned away.

And it had been this sting, thrust into the place of a long inflammation, which had finally goaded Beatrice into writing and sending her letter.

VENUS AND ADONIS

The days were beginning to darken early. It was the season when exotic flowers of passion luxuriate under glass, in that close coverture which is the very opposite to the law's understanding of the term.

Beatrice, like all tropical things, loved this time; basked in the glow of tapers; hugged her own warm sweetness in the confidence of a sanctuary for ever besieged by, and for ever impervious to, the forces of cold and gloom. To fancy herself the desired of night, unattainable through all its storming, was a commanding ecstasy. She liked to hear the hail on the roof, trampling and threshing for an opening, and flinging away baffled. The muffled slam of the thunder was her lullaby; while the candles shivered in it, she closed her eyes and dreamed. The thought of wrenched clouds, of crying human shapes, of torn beasts and birds sobbing and circling without the closed curtains of her shrine, served her imagination like a hymn. She measured her content against the strength of such hopeless appeals, like a very nun of incontinence, shut from the rigour of the world within the scented oratory of her own worship. She was Venus Anno Domini, the Paphian goddess yet undethroned, and yet justified of her influence over man and Nature.

'About her carven palace walls a thousand blossoming lilies brake;

Within, a thousand years of love had wrought, for utter beauty's sake,

Triumphs of art for her blue eyes, and for her feet rich stainèd floors,

And ever in her ears sweet moan of music down dim corridors?

Agapemone was her temple, and its inmost chamber her shrine. Here, under stained glass windows, ran a frieze in relievo of warm terra-cotta, thronged with little goat-faced satyrs pursuing nymphs through groves of pregnant vines. Here, supporting the frieze, were pilasters of blood-red porphyry, which burst high up into fronds of gold; while, screening the interspaces on the walls, were panels of glowing tapestry relating the legend of Adonis, from his first budding on the enchanted tree to his final shrouding under the winter of love's grief. Here, also, the faces of dead Capronas, past lords of this House Beautiful, winked and gloated out of shadowy corners, whenever a log, toppling over on the hearth, sent up a shower of sparks. Prominent in one place was a tall massive clock, copper and brass, a chef-d'[oe]uvre of Dondi the horologist, which thudded the hours melodiously, like a chime of distant bells, and made the swooning senses in love with time. Couches there were everywhere, soft and wooing to the soul of languor; thick rugs and skins upon the marble floor; tables with clawed legs, of chalcedony or jasper, on which were scattered in lovely wantonness a hundred toys of Elysium. Lutes, sweets, and goblets of rich repoussé; wine in green flasks, and delicate long-stemmed glasses; an ivory and silver crucifix, half-hidden under a pile of raisins; two love-birds in a gilded cage, and a golden salver containing an aspic of larks' tongues, tilted upon a volume of some French Romaunt touching the knightly adventures of Messer Roland a troubadour—these and their like, varied or repeated, returned, in a thousandfold interest of colour and sparkle, the soft investment of the tapers—enough, but not too many—in their beauty. One velvet cloth had been swept from its place, spilling upon a rug, where it sprawled unregarded, its costly burden of a begemmed chalice, a pair of perfumed gloves, and an illuminated volume of sonnets in a jewelled cover, dedicated to the goddess herself, and celebrating, in letters of gold and silver on vellum, her incomparable seductions. She had pulled them over, no doubt, when she reached for the orange which now, untasted, filled her hand, soft and covetous as a child's.

The warmth and drowsy stillness of the room penetrated her as she lay holding it. Gradually her lids closed, her bare arm drooped from its sleeve, and the orange rolled on the floor. Her thoughts and expectations had been already busy for an hour with, 'Will he come? Will he come? Will he come?' It had been like counting sheep trotting through a hedge—one, two, three, four—up to a hundred—and now her drugged brain confused the tally, and she seemed to herself to swerve all in a moment into a luminous mist.

He entered like a pale scented flower into her dream—a soft and shapely thing, melting into its ecstasy, fulfilling its enchantment. She held him, and whispered to him: 'The hour, sweet love! Is it mine at last?'—and, so murmuring, stirred and opened her eyes.

He was there, close by her, looking down upon her as she lay. How pale was his face, and how wistful. His walk through the icy dark had but just tinted it, as when November flaws blow the snow from the rose's dead cheek. He looked dispirited and tired. The childlike pathos of his eyes moved her heart-strings no less than did the red, combative swelling of his lips. She longed to master him in order to be mastered. Her hedonism's highest moral attainment was always in pleasing herself by surrendering herself to the pleasure of another; and how, knowing herself, could she doubt the irresistible persuasiveness of her faith?

She did not speak for a little, the wine of slumber in her brain emboldening her in the meanwhile to dare this vision with her beauty, to seek her response in its eyes. Her cheeks, her half-closed lids, were, like a baby's, flushed with sleep. Suddenly she stirred, and, smiling and murmuring, held out white arms to it:—

'The hour thou sang'st to me! Bernardo, hast thou come to make that mine?'

He stood as if stricken—white, dumfoundered. She stretched her shoulders a little, and, raising her hands, put their rosy knuckles to her eyes; and so relaxed all, and drooped.

'I was dreaming,' she murmured. 'I thought thou camest to me and said: "Beatrice, I will forego that heaven for thy sake. Give me the hour, to kiss and shame." She stole a glance at him, and dropped her clasped hands to her lap, and hung her head. 'And I answered,' she whispered, '"Take it, and make one woman happy."'

He gave a little cry. And then, suddenly, before he could move or speak, she had sat up swiftly, and whipped her arms about his neck, and pulled him to the couch beside her.

'Listen,' she urged—'nay, thou shalt not go. I hold thy weakness in a vice. Struggle, and I will tighten it. Listen, child, while I tell thee a child's tale. It is about a huntsman that followed a voice; and he pushed into a thicket, and lo! enchantment seized him beyond. And he whispered amazed, "What is this?" and the voice answered, "Love—the end to all thy hunting." O! little huntsman of Nature, be content. Thou hast traced the voice of thy long longing to its home.'

She repaid his struggles with kisses, his wild protests with honeyed words. He set his pretty teeth at her, and she pouted her mouth to them; he hurled insult at her head, and she bore the sweet ache of it for the sake of the lips that bruised. When he desisted, exhausted, she would get in her soft pleas, rebuking him with a tearful meekness:—

'Ay, scourge me, set thy teeth in me, only hate me not. Shalt find me but the tenderer, being whipped. Talk on of Nature. Is it not natural to want to be loved; and, for a woman, in a woman's way?'

'Forbear!—O, wicked! O, thou harlot!' he panted, still fighting with her.

'Lie still! So a sick infant quarrels with its food,' she answered. 'O love—dear love, will you not hear reason?'

'Reason!' he stormed. 'O, thou siren! to beguile me here on that lying pretext, and thus shame me for my trust!'

'No lie,' she pleaded. 'Thou shalt have the ring indeed.'

'At thy price? I will die first.'

'Bernardo!'

'Thou to talk of natural love! False to it; false to thy lord; false even to thy stained bed! Unhand me! Why, I loathe thee.'

'Not yet.'

Her eyes were hot waters, all misted over with passion. 'Thou canst not indeed, so pitiful to the worst. I cry to thee in my need. I knew thee first. Bernardo! will you forsake your friend?'

'Friend!'

'Ay. Only tell me what you would do with the ring?'

'What but return it to her that trusted me with it,'

'And for what reward?—Nay, strive not.'

'My conscience's peace—just that. Unclasp thy hands.'

'See there! Her gratitude would kill it in thee for ever. As would be hers to thee, so be thine to me. Art thou for a fall? Fall soft, then, on my love. She will not let thee down so kindly, who hath a lord and duchy to consider.'

He made a supreme effort—her robe tore in his hand—and, breaking from her, stood panting and disordered. She made no effort to recapture him, but, flinging herself to abandonment, sobbed and sighed.

'O, I am undone! Wilt thou forsake me? Kill me first! Nay, I will not let thee go!'

She sprang to her feet. He leapt away from her.

'Beast!' he cried, 'that foulest our garden! I will have thee whipped out of Milan with a bow-string.'

Scorn and hatred flashed into her face. She was no longer Venus, but Ashtoreth, the goddess of unclean frenzy.

'Thou wilt?' she hissed. 'I thank thee for that warning. Go, sir, and claim thy doxy to thy vengeance. She will leap, I promise thee, to that chance. Only, wouldst thou view the sport'—she struck her naked bosom relentlessly—'by this I advise thee—O, I advise thee like a lover!—hide well in her skirts—hide well. They will need to be thick and close to screen thee from a woman scorned. Wilt thou not go? I have the ring, I tell thee—I, myself, no other. Let her know. She'll bid thee pay the price perchance—too late. A fatal ring to thee. Why art thou lingering? I would not spare thee now, though thou knelt'st and prayed to me with tears of blood.'

She stood up rigid, her hands clenched, as, without another word, Bernardo turned, and, stalking with high head and glittering eyes, passed out of the room.

But, the moment the door had closed upon him, she flung herself face downwards on the couch, writhing and choking and clutching at her throat.

'I must kill him,' she moaned; 'I must kill my love!'

CHAPTER XIX

The hitch in the progress of the harvest came ever a little and a little more into evidence: the smut darkened on the ear; the whisper of a threatened blight grew from vague to articulate—grew clearer, grew bolder—until, lo!—all in a moment it was a definite voice.

This happened on the morning succeeding Bernardo's visit to the Casa Caprona—a visit of which, it would appear, the Duchess of Milan had been made somehow cognisant.

Bona, on this morning, came into the hall of council, her white hand laid, as she walked, upon the shoulder of Messer Cecco Simonetta, the State Secretary. That light, caressing touch was an arresting one to some eyes observing it—Ludovico's among the number. Its like, in that particular context of confidence and affection, had not been seen for many weeks—never, indeed, since the secretary had taken it upon himself to caution his mistress on the subject of a perilous fancy. He would have had no wish to balk any whim of hers that turned on self-indulgence. It was this whim of self-renunciation which had alarmed him. There was a mood which might conceivably vindicate itself in the sacrifice of a kingdom to a sentiment. Such things had happened; and saints were men. He would put it to her with all humility.

And she had listened and answered icily: 'I thank thee, Messer Secretary. But our faith is commensurate with our purpose, which is to sweep out our house, not pull it down. What then? Dread'st thou to be included in the scourings? Fear not. It is no part of our faith to forget our obligations.'

Which was a cruel response; but its hauteur silenced Mr. Secretary. And thenceforth he served in silence, watching, anxiously enough, the progress of his lady's infatuation, and feeling at last immensely relieved when on this day, her warm palm settled on his shoulder, melting the long frost between them.

She looked rather wistfully into his worn eyes, and smiled a little tale without words of confidence restored. And he, for his part, spoke of no matters less commonplace than the State's welfare.

'The Duke will make Christmas with us, Madonna,' he said; 'I have advices from him.'

'He will be most welcome,' she answered, and her face coloured with real pleasure. But the next moment it was like snow, and its vision hard crystals of frost. She had seen the Saint Magistrate advancing to accost her.

There was a strange look in the boy's eyes as they gazed, unflinchingly nevertheless, into hers—a look mingled of pain and doubt and fortitude. She had said no unkind word to him; yet a frost can nip without wind; and surely here was a plant very sensitive to the human atmosphere. He questioned her face a little; then spoke out bold, though low—while Messer Ludovico, turning papers at the table, was very busy—watching.