'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 Sevigne 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
denouement.
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!'