Front matter

BY

BERNARD CAPES

'...Some Jay of Italy,

Whose mother was her painting, hath betrayed him.'

CYMBELINE

FOURTH EDITION

METHUEN AND CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON

First Published . . July 1905 Second Edition . . August 1905 Third Edition . . September 1905 Fourth Edition . . October 1905

A JAY OF ITALY

CHAPTER I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Illustrious, no.'

'Where were your ears? Nailed to the pillory?'

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

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

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

'These skipjacks of the Sforzas! limbs of a country churl!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Mercy!' implored the landlord, staggering and groping.

'Nothing for nothing. At what price, tunbelly?'

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

'The best in my house.'

'What best, paunch?'

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

'And what wine, beast?'

'What thou wilt, indeed.'

The jester spurred him with a vicious heel.

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

'Alas, I cannot see!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Deep in the ribs of the cellars, meanest, O, ciacco?'

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

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

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

'Malvasia, hog?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'He should have stopped at the rill, methinks.'

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

Lanti guffawed.

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

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

The other laughed louder.

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

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

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

The landlord abased himself between deference and roguery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'On foot, my lord, like a prophet's.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He advanced into the sunlight.

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

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

Lanti pushed rudely forward.

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

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

'What would you have, gracious sir?' he said.

'What? Why, prophesy us our case in parable.'

'I know not your name nor calling.'

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

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

'A lord of little else possessed a jewel,

Of his small state incomparably the crown.

But he, going on a journey once,

To his wife committed it, saying,

"This trust with you I pledge till my return;

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

But she, when he was gone, thinking "he will not know,"

Procured its exact fellow in green glass,

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

Then, conscience-haunted, wasted all those gains

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

But he returning, she gave him the bauble,

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

Left her that precious jewel for all dower,

Bequeathing elsewhere the residue of his estate.

Now, was not this lady very well served,

Inheriting the whole value, as she had appraised it,

Of her lord's dearest possession?

Gentles, Dishonour is a poor estate.'

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

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

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

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

Carlo was suddenly illuminated.

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

'Hold your tongue!' cried the lady sharply.

The honest blockhead went into a roar of laughter.

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

'Not with my consent,' cried madam.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looked with a serene severity at the countess.

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

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

'He shall, I say.'

'I will bite, and rake him with my nails.'

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER II

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

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

'Put thine arms about me.'

'Nay, I am not holy enough.'

She was silent again, for five minutes.

'Your lute bangs my nose.'

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

'Who taught you to play it, Saint?'

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

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

'My gospel?'

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

'Of course.'

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

'I did not.'

'Nay, is that to be a saint?'

'Whom the shoe fits, let her wear it.'

'Bernardo! Where got you the shoe?'

'Does it fit, I say?'

'I fear me 'twas in some bagnio.'

'Where you had dropped it? For shame!'

A rather long pause.

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

'I am no eavesdropper.'

'Who enlightened you?'

'Your cicisbeo.'

'Under that title?'

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

A shorter pause.

'But you had heard of me?'

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

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

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

Silence, and then a sigh.

'Whom do you mean by Uriah?'

'Thy lord, the Count of Casa Caprona.'

'He is a soldier, and an old man.'

'Didst covenant with his age in thy marriage vows?'

'Bernardino, I am very sleepy.'

'Sleep, then, and forget thyself, and awake, another.'

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

'Hast converted her, Parablist? Art a saint indeed?'

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

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

'I know not what you mean.'

'Are they all saints, then, in San Zeno?'

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

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

'Ay, like a dear son.'

'Is he your father, Bernardo?'

'Is he not the father of us all?'

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

'He could not discount the voices.'

'What voices?'

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

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

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

'And the Father Abbot, I wot?'

'Yes: "Since," says he, "Christ bequeathed His Kingdom to beauty."'

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

'I hope so, Madonna.'

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

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

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

'It would have saved others, alack!'

'What do you mean?'

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

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

'If you like; and whom Christ forgave.'

'And He said: "Go, and sin no more"'

She began to weep softly.

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

He sighed.

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

'To Christ, His service of Love,' he said simply.

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

'Else why am I here?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'What!' she said, amazed: 'Bernardo?'

He ground his teeth.

'I do not mark his pink cheeks for nothing.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her hand settled light as a bird on his.

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

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

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

Sin cannot speak too low.

The night-wind stealing to thy bosom,

The dead star, dropping like a blossom,

Less voiceless be than thou!

Low, lower yet, false love, if to confess

What guilt, what shameful need?

God, who can hear the budding grass,

And flake kiss flake in the snowy pass,

Your secret else will heed.

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

And true love knows no fear.

Creeping, soft-footed, in the dust,

It is not love, but conscious lust,

Which dreads that God shall hear.'

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

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

'For shame!' he said quietly; 'for shame! Christ weeps for thee!'

She looked up with a frozen, insolent smile.

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

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

'Carlo!' she hissed; 'Carlo! follow and kill him!'

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

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

He burst out laughing, not fierce, but low.

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

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

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

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

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

'Lord save me,' he cried, 'or I sink!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Meaning me?—meaning this?' he said.

Bembo nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fool fell a-chuckling.

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

'Ay, do I.'

'Thou shalt be confuted with thine own text.'

'How, dear Fool?'

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

'Ay, if she would be unkind to her own.'

The Fool scratched his head, his hood thrown back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fool caught his breath in a sudden gasp—

'Thy mother! I!'

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

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

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

'In what?'

'In this propaganda to govern men by love.'

'Thou playest, a child, with the cross-bow.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fool sat very still awhile.

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

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

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

'Cicada, dear, but there is no Chastity without Temperance.'

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

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

'Alas!' cried Bembo, 'then am I lost indeed!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III

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

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

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

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

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

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

'And who to illustrate it, lord?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Nothing is gained to start apace,

After another hath won the race.

Shall you and I be jogging, master?'

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

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

Carlo burst into a vexed laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He put Bembo between himself and Lanti.

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

Carlo, on the further side, laughed loud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'No, by my faith!'

Lanti growled, and grunted, and smacked his thigh.

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

Bembo smiled very kindly.

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

'And He was crucified,' said Carlo grimly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernardo lowered his eyes with a blush.

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

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

'Ay, Chastity's,' put in the boy.

Lanti hooted.

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

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

'What, ladies' girdles!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

She did not take the trouble to answer.

'Yes,' roared Carlo.

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

'When Tiberius was Emperor,

For thirty silver pieces bearing his image

Did Judas betray his Lord;

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

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

But the Jew elders eyed askance

The sleek, round coins, accurst and yet no whit

Depreciated as currency,

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

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

Let the Potter take these, and in return

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

So shall this outlay bring us two-fold profit,

Yet leave us conscience-clean before the Lord."

Thus, gentles dear, was bought "The Field of Blood";

And thus the wicked, damned price returned

Into the veins of traffic, there to circulate

And poison where it ran.

One piece found Hope, and changed was for Despair;

And Charity one led to hoard for self;

And one reached Faith, and Faith became a whore.

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

Sweet Love was used to betray for evermore.'

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

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

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

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

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

Beatrice broke in scornfully:—

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

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

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

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

'Love kept me an hour

From all hours that pass;

In her breast, like a flower,

She stored it, sweet, fragrant,

Of all time the vagrant,

Alas, and alas!

Of all time the flower,

Of all hours that pass,

For me was that hour,

When I cared claim it,

And kiss it and shame it,

Alas, and alas!

I dared not, sweet hour—

I let thee go pass;

And heaven is my dower.

My crown is stars seven:

I am a saint in heaven,

Alas, and alas!'

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

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

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

'Give me thy dish,' said Beatrice, almost with entreaty.

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

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

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

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

She seemed to turn very pale.

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

In a moment or two Lanti looked up.

'What ails thee, Beatrice?'

'I am not hungry.'

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

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

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

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

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

His strenuous lifted arm was caught in a baby grasp.

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

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

'The stronger! Thou!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He glowered round.

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

'My pupil!'

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

'What then?'

'Why, is not thine honour thy life?'

'I would die at least to prove it.'

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

'Pish! Art beyond me.'

'Why, if love is life, and life is honour—ergo, love is honour.'

'Is it? I dare say.'

'But thou must know it.'

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

'Domine, emitte tuam lucem!' sighed Bembo.

CHAPTER IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Galeazzo snarled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lascaris wondered.

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

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

'And discontent. Add it thereto, Illustrious.'

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

'Like Alexander, thou standest in his light, Theosutos.'

'Discontent?'

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

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

'Gods! did he dare?'

'He dared. 'Twas a fellow of Roman mettle.'

'He would dare more now.'

'What?'

'A republic, so they say.'

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

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

'Yet may he see far. I would he were here.'

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

'Yet through and through thee, thou loathsome, envious pimp!'

Then he whipped upon the other—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Duke listened to him as if in bland wonder.

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

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

'Know'st aught of this?'

The Greek shook his head ineffably, licking his lips.

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

'Yes, Illustrious.'

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

'Yes, Illustrious.'

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

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

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

He yielded the explanation to Lascaris.

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

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

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

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

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

Montano growled:—

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

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

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

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

'Andrea!'

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

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

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

'Galeazino, O thou little sweetest burden on my heart!'

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

'My little father, whither sportest thou without thy women?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER V

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

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

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

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

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

'Alive?'

'O, of course!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The face puckered and grinned.

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

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

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

The gross eye winked—

'What is left of it.'

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

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