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
amphorae, 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.'