'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?'