'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.