'MOST DEAR AND HONOURED FATHER,--Many words from me would but dilute the
wonder of my narrative. Also thou lovest brevity in all things but
God's praise. Know, then, how I have surpassed expectation in the early
propagation of our creed, which is by Love to banish Law, that old
engine of necessarianism. [_Here follows a brief recapitulation of the
events which had landed him, a little sweet oracle of light, in the dark
old castello of Milanl._] Man' (he goes on) 'is of all creatures the
most susceptible to his environments. Thou shalt induce him but to feed
on the olive branches of Peace in order that he may take their colour.
O sorrow, then, on the false appetites which have warped his nature! on
the beastly doctrines which, Satan-engendered, have led him half to
believe there is no wrong or right, but only necessity! Is there no
such thing as discord in music, at which even a dog will howl? Harmony
is God--so plain. Yet there is a learned doctor here, one Lascaris who
disputeth this. My father, I do not think that learned doctors seek so
much the intrinsic truth of things as to impress their followers with
their perspicacity in the pursuit. John led James over-the-way by a
"short cut" of three miles, and James thought John a very clever fellow.
Pray for me!...
'I will speak first of the Duchess, to whom I delivered your letter.
She is a most sweet lady, with eyes, so kind and loving were they, they
made me think of those soft stars which light the flocks to fold. She
asked me did I remember my mother? "That is a strange question," quoth
I, "to a foundling." "Ah!" said she, "poor child! I had forgot how thou
fell'st, a star, into Mary's lap. I would have taken care, for my part,
not so to tumble out of heaven." "Nay," I said, "but if thou, a mother
there, hadst let slip thy baby first?" "What," she said, looking at me
so strange and wistful, "did she follow, then?" My father, thou know'st
my fancies. "I cannot tell," I said. "Sometimes, in a dream, the dim,
sad shadow of a woman's face seems to hang over me lying on that altar."
She held out her arms to me, then withdrew them, and she was weeping.
"We are all wicked," she cried; "there is no heart, nor faith, nor
virtue, in any of us!" and she ran away lamenting. Now, was not that
strange? for she is in truth a lady of great virtue, a pure wife and
mother, and to me most sweet-forgiving for an ill-favour I was forced to
do her upon one of her servants. But not women nor men know their own
hearts. They wear the devil's livery for fashion's sake, when he
introduces it on a pretty sister or young gentleman, and so believe
themselves bound to his service. But it is as easy as talking to make
virtue the mode. Thou shalt see.
'Does not the beautiful Duomo itself stand in their midst, the fairest
earnest of their true piety? Could intrinsic baseness conceive this
ethereal fabric, or, year by year, graft it with sprigs of new
loveliness? There is that in them yet like a little child that
stretches out its arms to the sky.
'I have, besides the greatest, two converts, or half-converts, already,
my dear Carlo and his Fool. The former is a great bull gallant, whom a
spark will set roaring and a kiss allay. I love him greatly, and he
bellows and prances, and swearing "I will not" follows to the pipe of
peace. Alas! if I could woo him from a great wrong! It will happen,
when men see honour whole, and not partisanly. In the meantime I have
every reason to be charitable to that lady Beatrice, sith she holds
herself my mortal enemy. And indeed I excuse her for myself, but not
for the honest soul she keeps in thrall. My father, is it not a strange
paradox, that holding the senses such a rich possession and life so
cheap? Here is one would prolong the body's pleasure to eternity, yet
at any moment will risk its destruction for a spite. Nathless she is
warm, loamy soil for the bearing of our right lily of love, and some day
shall be fruitful in cleanliness.
'Now the Fool--poor Fool! I have won to temperance, and so Carlo
growleth, "A murrain on thee, spoil-sport! What want I with a sober
Fool? Take him, thou, to be valet to thy temperance!" by which gibe he
seeks to cover a gracious act. And, lo! I have a Fool for servant, a
most notable Fool and auxiliary, who, having sworn himself to
abstinence, would unplug and sink to the bottomless abyss every floating
hogshead. In sooth the good soul is my shadow, and so they call him.
"Well," says he, "so be it. But what sort of fool art thou, to cast a
fool for shadow?" "Why, look," says I, for it was sunset on the
grass--"at least not so great a fool as thou." "That may well be," says
he, "for you do not serve Messer Bembo." So caustic is he--a biting
love; yet, as is proper between a man and his shadow, equal attached to
me as I to him. And so, talking of his gift to me, brings me to the
greater gifts of the Duke.
'O my father! How can I speak my gratitude to heaven and thy teaching,
which brought me so swiftly, so wonderfully, to prevail with that dread
man! I think evil is like the false opal, which needs but the first
touch of pure light to shatter it. I have come with no weapon but my
little lamp of sunshine; and behold! in its flash the base is
discredited and the truth acknowledged. It is all so easy, Christ guard
me! There is a Providence in what men call chance. Only, my father,
pray that thy child be not misled by flattery to usurp its prerogatives.
Men, in this dim world, are all too prone to worship the visible symbols
of Immortality--to accept the prophet for the Master. I am already
feted and caressed as if I were a god. The Duke hath impropriated to me
an income of a thousand ducatos, with free residence in the castello,
and a retinue to befit a prince. At all this I cavil not, sith it
affords me the sinews to a crusade. But what shall I say to his
delegating me to the chief magistracy of Milan during his forthcoming
absence? for he is on the eve of an expedition into Piedmont, touching
the lordship of Vercelli, which he claims through his wife Bona of
Savoy. Carlo, it is true, warns me against this perilous exaltation.
"Seek'st thou," says he, "to depose the devil? Well, the devil, on his
return, will treat thee like any other palace revolutionist." "Nay,"
says I, "the devil was never the devil from choice. Restore him to a
converted dukedom, and he will aspire to be the saint of all." "Yes,"
he said, "I can imagine Galeazzo endowing a hospital for Magdalenes and
washing the poor's feet. But I will stick to thee." A dear worldling
he is, and only less uncertain than his master in these first infant
steps towards godliness. For vice is very childlike in its
self-plumings upon a little knowledge. Desiring beauty, it tears the
rose-bush or clutches the moth, and so sickens on disillusionment.
Forbearance is the wisdom of the great.
'The more destructive is a man, the simpler is he. Now, my father, this
destroying Duke covets nothing so much as the applause of the world for
gifts with which, in truth, he is ill-endowed. He cannot sing, or
rhyme, or improvise but with the worst, yet, thinks he, they shall call
me poet and musician, or burn. Well, he might fiddle over the
holocaust, like Nero, and still be first cousin to a peacock. I told
him so, but in gentler words, when he asked me to teach him my method.
"To every soul its capacities," says I, "and mine are not in ruling a
great duchy greatly." "So we are neither of us omnipotent," says he,
with a smile. "Well, I will take the lesson to heart." Now, could so
simple a creature be all corrupt?
'Of more complicated fibre is his brother, the Signior Ludovico. Very
politic and abiding, he rushes at nothing; yet in the end, I think, most
things come to him. He is gracious to thy child, as indeed are all;
yet, God forgive me, I find something more inhuman in his gentleness
than in Galeazzo's passion. These inexplicable antipathies are surely
the weapons of Satan; whereby it behoves us to overcome them. That same
Lascaris attributes them to an accidental re-fusion of particles,
opposed to other chance re-combinations, in a present body, of particles
similarly antipathetic to us in a former existence--a long "short cut"
over the way again.
'Now, as for my days in this poignant city--where even the benches and
clothes-chests, not to speak of most walls and ceilings, yea, and the
very stair-posts themselves, are painted with crowded devices of scrolls
and figures in loveliest gold and azure and vermilion--thou mayest
believe they are strange to me. Amidst this wealth I, thy simple
acolyte, am glorified, I say, and courted beyond measure. Yet fear
nothing for me. I appraise this distinction at its right market value.
The higher the Duke's favour, the greater my presumptive influence.
Believe me, dear, my urbanity towards his attentions is an investment
for my Master. I am an honest factor.
'In a week the Duke sets out. In the meantime, like an ambassador that
must suffer present festival for the sake of future credit, I sit at
feasts and plays; or, perchance, rise to denounce the latter for no
better than whores' saturnalia. (O my father! to see fair ladies, the
Duchess herself, smile on such shameless bawdry!) Whereon the Duke
thunders all to stop, with threats of fury on the actors to mend their
ways, making the poor fools gasp bewildered. For how had _they_
presumed upon custom? Bad habit is like the moth in fur, so easily
shaken out when first detected; so hardly when established. Once, more
to my liking, we have a mummers' dance, with clowns in rams' heads
butting; and again a harvest ballet, with all the seasons pictured very
pretty. Another day comes a Mantuan who plays on three lutes at once,
more curious than tuneful; and after him one who walks on a rope in the
court, a steel cuirass about his body. Now happens their festival of
the _Bacchidae_, a pagan survival, but certes sweet and graceful, with
its songs and vines and dances. Maybe for my sake they purge it of some
licence. Well, Heaven witness to them what loss or gain thereby to
beauty.
'Often the court goes hunting the wolf or deer--I care not; or
a-picnicking by the river, which I like, and where we catch trouts and
lampreys to cook and eat on the green; then run we races, perchance, or
play at ball. So merry and light-hearted--how can wickedness be other
than an accident with these children of good-nature? To mark the jokes
they play on one another--mischievous sometimes--suggests to one a
romping nursery, which yet I know not. Father, who was my mother? I
trow we romped somewhere in heaven. Once some gallants of them, being in
collusion with the watch, enter, in the guise of robbers, Messer
Secretary Simonetta's house at midnight, and bind and blindfold that
great man, and placing him on an ass in his night-gear (which is an
excuse for nothing), carry him through the streets as if to their
quarters. Which, having gained, they unbind; and lo! he is in the inner
ward of the castello, the Duke and a great company about him and shouts
of laughter; in which I could not help but join, though it was shameful.
Next day the Duchess herself does not disdain a wrestling match with the
lady Catherine, her adoptive daughter; when the lithe little serpent,
enwreathing that stately Queen, doth pull her sitting on her lap,
whereby she conquers. For all improvising and stories they have as
great a passion as ingenuity; and therein, my gifts by Christ's ensample
lying, comes my opportunity. Dear Father, am I presumptuous in my
feeble might, like the boy Phaeton when he coaxed the Sun's reins from
Ph[oe]bus, and scorched the wry road since called the Milky Way? That is
such an old tale as we tell by moonlight under trees--such as Christ
Himself, the child-God, hath recounted to us, sitting shoulder-deep in
meadow-grass, or by the pretty falling streams. Is He that exacting,
that exotic Deity, lusting only for adoration, eternally gluttonous of
praise and never surfeited, whom squeamish indoor men, making Him the
fetish of their closets, have reared for heaven's type? O, find Him in
the blown trees and running water; in the carol of sweet birds; in the
mines from whose entrails are drawn our ploughshares; yea, in the
pursuit of maid by man! So, in these long walks and rests of life,
shall He be no less our Prince because He is our joyous comrade. For
this I know: Not to a pastor, a lord, a parent himself, doth the soul of
the youth go out as to the companion of his own age and freedom.
'Christ comes again as He journeyed with His Apostles, the bright wise
comrade, fitting earth to heaven in the puzzle of the spheres. We know
Him Human, my father, feeling the joy of weariness for repose' sake; not
disdaining the cool inn's sanctuary; expounding love by forbearance. He
beareth Beauty redeemed on His brow. Before the clear gaze of His eyes
all heaped sophistries melt away like April snow. He calleth us to the
woods and meadows. _Quasimodo geniti infantes rationabile sine dolo lac
concupiscete_. O, mine eyelids droop! We are seldom at rest here
before two o' the morning. The beds have trellised gratings by day, to
keep the dogs from smirching their coverlets. _Ora pro me_!'
*CHAPTER VIII*
The castle at the Porta Giovia had its glooms as well as its pleasances.
Indeed, it may be questioned if the latter were not rather in proportion
to the former as a tiger's gay hide is to the strength and ferocity it
clothes. Built originally for a great keep, or, as it were, breakwater,
to stem the rush of barbarian seas which were wont to come storming down
from the north-west, its constructors had aimed at nothing less than its
everlastingness. So thick were its bastioned walls, so thick the
curtains which divided its inner and outer wards, a whole warren of
human 'runs' could honeycomb without appreciably weakening them. Hidden
within its screens and massy towers, like the gnawings of a foul and
intricate cancer, ran dark passages which discharged themselves here and
there into dreadful dungeons, or secret-places not guessed at in the
common tally of its rooms. These oubliettes were hideous with blotched
and spotted memories; rotten with the dew of suffering; eloquent in
their terror and corruption and darkness, of that same self-sick,
self-blinded tyranny which, in place of Love and Justice, the trusty
bodyguards, must turn always to cruelty and thick walls for its
security. The hiss and purr of subterranean fire, the grinding of
low-down grated jaws, the flop and echo of stagnant water, oozed from a
stagnant moat into vermin-swarming, human-haunted cellars,--these were
sounds that spoke even less of grief to others than of the hellish
ferment in the soul of him who had raised them for his soul's pacifying.
Himself is for ever the last and maddest victim of a despot's
oppression.
There had been stories to tell, could the coulter of Time once have cut
into those far-down vaults, and his share laid open. Now this was so
far from promising, that their history and mystery were in process of
being still further overlaid and stifled under accumulations of
superstructure. Francesco, the great Condottiere, the present Duke's
father, had been the first to realise dimly how a tyrant, by converting
his self-prison into a shrine for his aestheticism, might enjoy a
certain amelioration of his condition. It was he who, yielding an older
palace and its grounds to the builders of the cathedral, had transferred
the ducal quarters to the great fortress, which henceforth was to be the
main seat of the Sforzas. Here the first additions and rebuildings had
been his, the first decorations and beautifyings--tentative at the best,
for he was always more a soldier than a connoisseur. The real movement
was inaugurated by his successor, and continued, as cultivation was
impressed on him, on a scale of magnificence which was presently to make
the splendour of Milan a proverb. Galeazzo, an indifferent warrior, to
whose rule but a tithe of the territory once gathered to the Visconti
owned allegiance, contented his ambitions by rallying an army of
painters and sculptors and decorators to the glorification of his houses
at Milan, Cremona, and his ancestral petted Pavia,--after all a worthier
role than the conqueror's for a good man; but then, this man was so bad
that he blighted everything he touched. It is true that the disuse of
secret torture would have been considered, and by men more enlightened
than he, so little expedient a part of any ethical or aesthetical
'improvement' of an existing house, as that a premium would be put
thereby on assassination. Yet Galeazzo's death-pits were never so much a
politic necessity as a resource for cruelty in idleness. He would
descend into them with as much relish as he would reclimb from, to his
halls above, swelling and bourgeoning with growth of loveliness. The
scream of torture was as grateful to his ears as was the love-throb of a
viol; the scum bubbling from his living graves as poignant to his
nostrils as was the scent of floating lilies. He continued to make his
house beautiful, yet never once dreamt, as a first principle of its
reclamation to sweetness, of cutting out of its foundations those old
cesspools of disease and death.
One night he sat in his closet of the Rocca, a little four-square room
dug out of the armourer's tower, and having a small oratory adjoining.
This eyrie was so high up as to give a comfortable sense of security
against surprise. There was but one window to it--just a deep wedge in
the wall, piercing to the sheer flank of the tower. Sweet rushes
carpeted the floor; the arras was pictured with dim, sacred
subjects--Ambrosius in his cradle, with the swarm of bees settling on
his honeyed lips; Ambrosius elected Bishop of Milan by the people;
Ambrosius imposing penance on Theodosius for his massacre of the
Thessalonicans--and the drowsy odours of a pastile, burning in the
little purple shrine-lamp, robbed the air of its last freshness.
Another lamp shone on a table, at which the Duke was seated somewhat
preoccupied with a lute, and his tablets propped before him; while,
motionless in the shadows opposite, stood the figure of the provost
marshal, its fixed, unregarding eyes glinting in the flame.
Intermittently Galeazzo strummed and murmured, self-communing, or
addressing himself, between playfulness and abstraction, to the ear of
Messer Jacopo:--
'_The lowliest of all Franciscans was St. Francis, meek mate of beasts
and birds, boasting himself no peer of belted stars_.... Ha! a good
line, Jacopo, a full significant line; I dare say it, our Parablist
despite. Listen.' (He chaunted the words in a harsh, uncertain voice,
to an accompaniment as sorry.) 'Hear'st? Belted stars--those
moon-ringed spheres the aristocracy of the night. Could Messer Bembo
himself have better improvised? What think'st? Be frank.'
'I think of improvising by book,' said Jacopo, short and gruff.
Galeazzo said 'Ha!' again, like a snarl, and his brow contracted.
'Why, thou unconscionable old surly dog!' he said--'why?'
Jacopo pointed to the tablets.
'Your saint asks no notes to _his_ piping. A' sings like the birds.'
'Now,' answered his master, in a deep, offended tone, 'I'm in a mind to
make _thee_ sing on a grill,--ay, and dance too. What, dolt! are not
first thoughts first thoughts, however they may be pricked down? Look
at this, I say; flatten thy bull nose on it. Is it not clean,
untouched, unrevised? Spotless as when issued from Helicon? Beast!
thou shalt call me, too, an improvisatore.'
The statue was silent. Galeazzo sat glaring and gnawing his fingers.
'Answer!' he screeched suddenly.
'I will call thee one,' said Jacopo obstinately, 'but not the best.'
The Duke fell back in his chair, then presently was muttering and
strumming with his disengaged fingers on the table.
'No--not the best, not the best--not to rival heaven! Yet, perhaps, it
should be the Duke's privilege.'
The executioner laughed a little.
'The Duke should know how to take it.'
Galeazzo stopped short, quite vacant, staring at him.
'I've heard tell,' said Jacopo, 'how one Nero, a fiddling emperor, came
to be acknowledged first fiddle of all.'
He paused, then answered, it seemed, an unspoken invitation: 'He just
silenced the better ones.'
Galeazzo got hurriedly to his feet.
'Blasphemer! thou shalt die for the word. What! this Lord's anointed!
A natural songster! no art, no culture in his voice--sweet and wild,
above human understanding. I said nothing. Be damned, and damned
alone! Go hang thyself like Judas!'
'Well, name my successor first,' said Jacopo.
The Duke leapt, and with one furious blow shattered his lute to
splinters on the other's steel headpiece, then stamped upon the
fragments, his arms flapping like wing stumps, his teeth sputtering a
foam of inarticulate words. Jacopo, erect under the avalanche, stood
perfectly silent and impassive. Then, as suddenly as it had burst, the
storm ended. Galeazzo sank back on his seat, panting and nerveless.
'Well, I am no poet--curse thy block head, and mine for trusting to
it--the Muses shall decide--Apollo or Marsyas--the Christian Muses and a
Christian penance--flaying only for heretics. I am no poet nor
musician, say'st? Calf! what know'st thou about such things?' He
roared again: 'What brings thee here, with thy damned butcher's face,
scaring my pretty lambs of song?'
'Thine order.'
'Mine?'
'This astrologer monk, this Fra Capello was it not? I neither know nor
care.'
'Dost thou not? A faithful dog!'
'Faithful enough.'
'O! art thou? By what token?'
'By the token of the quarry run to earth.'
'To earth? Thou hast him? Good Jacopo!'
'This three days past. Had I not told thee so already? Let thine
improvising damn thyself, not me.'
'The villain! to call himself a Franciscan, a lowly Franciscan, and
pretend to read the stars! How about his prophecy now?'
'Why, he holds to it.'
'What! that I have but eleven years in all to reign--less than one to
live?'
'Just that--no more.'
'Now, is it not a wicked schism from the plain humility of his founder?
A curse on their spirituals and conventuals! _This_ fellow to claim
kinship with the stars--profess to be in their confidence, to share
heaven's secrets? Dear Jacopo, sweet Jacopo! is it not well to cleanse
this earth of such lying prophets, that truth may have standing-room?'
'Ask truth, not me.'
'Nay, not to grieve truth's heart--the onus shall be ours. This same
Franciscan--this soothsaying monk--where hast lodged him?'
'In the "Hermit's Cell."'
'Ah, old jester! He shall prove his asceticism thereby. Let practised
abstinence save him in such pass. He shall eat his words--an
everlasting banquet. A fat astrologer, by the token, as I hear.'
'He went in, fat.'
'Wretch! wouldst thou starve him? Remember the worms, thy cousins.
Hath he foretold his end?'
'Ay, by starvation.'
'He lies, then. Thou shalt take him _in extremis_, and, with thy knife
in his throat, give him the lie. An impostor proved. What sort of
night is it?'
'Why, it rains and thunders.'
'Hush! Why should we fear rain and thunder? God put His bow in the
sky. Jacopo, it is a sweet and fearful thing to be chosen minister of
one of His purifications--Noah, and Lot, and now thy prince.'
'Purification?' said the executioner: 'by what?'
'By love, thou fool!' whispered Galeazzo, half ecstatic, half furious,
with a nervous glance about him. 'There were the purifications by water
one, one by fire, and a third by blood, to the last of which His
servants yet testify in the spirit of their Redeemer. Blood, Jacopo,
thou little monster--blood flowing, streams of it, the visible token of
the sacrifice. That was our task till yesterday. Now in the end comes
Love, and calleth for a cleansed and fruitful soil. Let us hasten with
the last tares--to cut them down, and let their blood consummate the
fertilising. Quick: we have no time to lose.'
He flung himself from the statue, and tiptoed, in a sort of gloating
rapture, to the door.
'Show me this tare, I say.'
He went down the tower a few paces, with assured steps, then, bethinking
himself, beckoned the other to lead. The flight conducted them to a
private postern, well secured and guarded inside and out. As they
issued from this, the howl of blown rain met and staggered them. Looking
up at the blackened sky from the depths of that well of masonry, it
seemed to crack and split in a rush of fusing stars. The mad soul of
the tyrant leapt to speed the chase. He was one with this mighty
demonstration--as like a chosen instrument of the divine retribution.
His brain danced and flickered with exquisite visions of power. He was
an angel, a destroying angel, commissioned to purge the world of lies.
'Bring me to this monk!' he screamed through the thunder.
Deep in the foundations of the north-eastern tower the miserable
creature was embedded, in a stone chamber as utterly void and empty as
despair. The walls, the floor, the roof, were all chiselled as smooth
as glass. There was not anywhere foothold for a cat--nor door, nor
trap, nor egress, nor window of any kind, save where, just under the
ceiling, the grated opening by which he had been lowered let in by day a
haggard ghost of light. And even that wretched solace was withdrawn as
night fell--became a phantom, a diluted whisp of memory, sank like water
into the blackness, and left the fancy suddenly naked in
self-consciousness of hell. Then Capello screamed, and threw himself
towards the last flitting of that spectre. He fell and bruised his
limbs horribly: the very pain was a saving occupation. He struck his
skull, and revelled in the agonised dance of lights the blow procured
him. But one by one they blew out; and in a moment dead negation had
him by the throat again, rolling him over and over, choking him under
enormous slabs of darkness. Now, gasping, he cursed his improvidence in
not having glued his vision to the place of the light's going. It would
have been something gained from madness to hold and gloat upon it, to
watch hour by hour for its feeble re-dawn. Among all the spawning
monstrosities of that pit, with only the assured prospect of a lingering
death before him, the prodigy of eternal darkness quite overcrowed that
other of thirst and famine.
Yet the dawn broke, it would seem, before its due. Had he annihilated
time, and was this death? He rose rapturously to his feet, and stood
staring at the grating, the tears gushing down his fallen cheeks. The
bars were withdrawn; and in their place was a lamp intruded, and a face
looked down.
'Capello, dost thou hunger and thirst?'
The voice awoke him to life, and to the knowledge of who out of all the
world could be thus addressing him. He answered, quaveringly: 'I hunger
and thirst, Galeazzo.'
'It is a beatitude, monk,' said the voice. 'Thou shalt have thy fill of
justice.'
'Alas!' cried the prisoner: 'justice is with thee, I fear, an empty
phrase.'
'Comfort thyself,' said the other: 'I shall make a full measure of it.
It shall bubble and sparkle to the brim like a great goblet of Malmsey.
Dost know the wine Malmsey, monk?--a cool, heady, fragrant liquid, that
gurgles down the arid throat, making one o' hot days think of gushing
weirs, and the green of grass under naked feet.'
The monk fell on his knees, stretching out his arms.
'I ask no mercy of thee, but to end me without torture.'
'Torture, quotha!' cried the fiend above--'what torture in the vision of
a wine-cup crushed, or, for the matter of that, a feast on white tables
under trees. Picture it, Capello: the quails in cold jelly; the melting
pasties; the salmon-trout tucked under blankets of whipped cream; the
luscious peaches, and apricots like maiden's cheeks. Why, art not a
Conventual, man, and rich in such experiences of the belly? And to call
'em torture--fie!'
'Mercy!' gasped the monk. His swollen throat could hardly shape the
word. Galeazzo laughed, and bent over.
'Answer, then: how long am I to live?'
'By justice, for ever.'
'What! live for ever on an empty phrase? Then art thou, too,
provisioned for eternity.'