'What wild words are these? Yet, peradventure, the giddy babble of a
conqueror. O Galeazzo! hast triumphed o'er thyself indeed--casting that
old familiar? chasing him hereout? Why, then, I whom thou hast
appointed to be thy conscience, interpreting thy rule through truth and
love, am the more emboldened to beseech the favour for which I came.'
'Ask it only, sweet.' His chest still heaved spasmodically to the
catching of his breath.
'It is,' said the boy steadily, 'that thou wouldst give me, thy
conscience's delegate, a last justification by the sacraments.'
The Duke smiled faintly, and nodded, and murmured: 'I will confess ere
midnight, and, fasting, receive the Holy Communion before I go
to-morrow. Does it please thee? Come, then.'
He re-entered his cabinet, reeling a little, and sat himself down, as if
exhausted, by the table.
'Bernardo,' he said weakly, half apologetically, 'I am overwrought:
there is wine in that jug: I prithee give it me to drink.'
The boy, unhesitating, handed him the flagon.
'It is the symbol of joy redeemed,' he said. 'Put thy lips to the
chalice, Galeazzo, and take what thy soul needest--no more.'
The Duke lifted the cup shakily, stumbled at its brim, steadied himself,
and sipped. His eyes dilated and grew wolfish--'I am vindicated,' he
stuttered: 'O sweet little saint!'--and he drank greedily, ecstatically,
and, smacking his lips, put down the vessel.
He was himself again from that draught.
'Bernardo,' he said, in a reassured, half-maudlin confidence, 'canst
thou read the stars?'
'Nay,' said the other gravely, 'they are the Sibyls' books.'
'True. Yet some essay.'
'Ay: then flies a comet, cancelling all their sums.'
'An impious vanity, is it not?'
'Truly, I think so.'
'And deserving of the last chastisement.'
'Poor fools, they make their own.'
'What?'
'Why, taking colds instead of rest--cramps, chills, and agues--immense
pains, and all for nothing; the dead moon for the living sun; nursing
all day that they may starve by night. God gave us level eyes. The
star's best resting place for them is on a hill. We need no more
knowledge than to read beauty through the wise lens Nature hath
proportioned us. Not God Himself can foretell a future.'
'Not God?'
'No, for there is no Future, nor ever will be. The Past but eternally
prolongs itself to the Present. Heaven or hell is the road we tread,
and must retrace when we come to the brink of the abyss where Time drops
sheer into nothingness. Joy or woe, then, to him the returning
wanderer, according as he hath provisioned his way. So shall he starve,
or travel in content, or meet with weary retributions. O, in
providence, hold thy hand, thinking on this, whenever thy hand is
tempted!'
Galeazzo was amazed, discomfited. This unorthodoxy was the last to
accommodate itself to his principles of conduct. The Future to him was
always an unmortgaged reversion, sufficient to pay off all debts to
conscience and leave a handsome residue for income. He could only
exclaim, again, like one aghast: '_No Future_?'
'Nay,' said Bembo, smiling, 'what is the heresy to reason or religion?
To foresee the issues of to-day were, for Omniscience, to suppress all
strains but the angels'. What irony to accept worship from the
foredoomed! What insensate folly wantonly to multiply the devil's
recruits! O Galeazzo, there is no Future for God or Men? Hope shudders
at the inexorable word: Evil presumes on it: it is the lodestone to all
dogmatism; the bogey, the weapon of the unversed Churchman; the very
bait to acquisition and self-greed. Be what, returning, ye would find
yourselves--no lovelier ambition. See, we walk with Christ, the human
God and comrade, I have but this hour left him bathing his tired feet in
the brook. He will follow anon; and all the pretty birds and insects
and wildflowers he watched while resting will have suggested to him a
thousand tales and reflections gathered of an ancient lore. He can be
full of wonder too, but wiser by many moons than we. There is no
Future. God possesses the Past.'
The Duke sprang to his feet, and went up and down once or twice. This
view of a self-retaliatory entity--of a returning body condemned by
natural laws to retraverse every point of its upward flight--disturbed
him horribly. He desired no responsibility in things done and gone.
Eternity, timely propitiated, was his golden chance. He stopped and
looked at Bembo, at once inexpressibly cringing and crafty.
'Bernardino,' murmured he: 'I can never get it out of my head that
whenever thou sayest God thou meanest gods. _The gods possess the
past?_--why, one would fancy somehow it ran glibber than the other.'
Bembo sighed.
'Well, why not? Nature, and Love, and the Holy Ghost--_Tria juncta in
Uno_--why not gods?'
The Duke pressed his hand to his forehead; then ran and clasped the boy
about the shoulders.
'Adorable little wisdom,' he cried: 'take my conscience, and record on
it what thou wilt!'
'To-morrow,' said Bembo, with a happy smile: 'when its tablets are
sponged and clean.'
Galeazzo fawned, showing his teeth. There was something in him
infinitely suggestive of the cat that, in alternate spasms of animalism,
licks and bites the hand that caresses it. This strange new heresy of a
limited omniscience oddly affected him. Could it be possible, after
all, that the soul's responsibility was to itself alone? In any case so
pure a spirit as this could represent him only to his advantage. Still,
at the same time, if God were no more than relatively wiser and stronger
than himself--why, it was not _his_ theory--let the Parablist answer for
it--on Messer Bembo's saintly head fall the onus, if any, of leaving
Capello where he was. For his own part, he told himself, the God of
Moses remaining in his old place in the heavens, he, Galeazzo, would
have been inclined to consider the virtuous policy of releasing the
Monk.
And so he prepared himself to confess and communicate.
*CHAPTER IX*
The Duke of Milan, confessed, absolved, and his conscience pawned to a
saint, had, on the virtue of that pledge, started in a humour of
unbridled self-righteousness for the territory of Vercelli. With him
went some four thousand troops, horse and footmen, a drain of bristling
splendour from the city; yet the roaring hum of that city's life, and
the flash and sting thereof, were not appreciably lessened in the flying
of its hornet swarm. Rather waxed they poignant in the general sense of
a periodic emancipation from a hideous thralldom. The tyrant was gone,
and for a time the intolerable incubus of him was lifted.
But, for the moment, there was something more--a consciousness, within
the precincts of the palace and beyond them, of a substituted
atmosphere, in which the spirit experienced a strange
self-expansion--other than mere relief from strain--which was foreign to
its knowledge. Men felt it, and pondered, or laughed, or were sceptical
according as their temperaments induced them. So, in droughty days, the
little errant winds that blow from nowhere, rising and falling on a
thought, affect us with a sense of the unaccountable. There was such a
sweet odd zephyr abroad in Milan. The queer question was, Was the
little gale a little mountebank gale, tumbling ephemerally for its
living, or did it represent a permanent atmospheric change?
A few days before Galeazzo's departure, Bernardo--by special appointment
_custos conscientiae ducalis_--had, while walking in the outer ward of
the Castello with Cicada, happened upon the vision of a Franciscan monk,
plump and rosy, but with inflammatory eyes, entering with Messer Jacopo
through a private postern in the walls. He had saluted the jocund figure
reverentially, as one necessarily sacred through its calling, and was
standing aside with doffed bonnet, when the other, halting with an
expression of good-humoured curiosity on his face, had greeted him,
puffed and asthmatic, in his turn:--
'Peace to thee, my son! Can this be he of whom it might be said, "_Puer
natus est nobis: et vocabitur nomen ejus, Magni Consilii Angelus_"?'
The Franciscan had rumbled the query at Jacopo, who had shrugged, and
answered shortly: 'Well; 'tis Messer Bembo.'
'So?' had responded the monk, gratified; 'the David of our later
generation?' and instantly and ingratiatory he had waddled up, and,
putting a prosperous hand on Bernardo's shoulder, had bent to whisper
hoarsely, and quite audibly to Cicada, into the boy's ear:--
'Child--I know--I am to thank _thee_ for this summons.' Then, before
Bembo, wondering, could respond: 'Ay, ay; Saul's ears are opened to the
truth. The stars cannot lie. You sent for me, yourself their sainted
emissary, to confirm the verdict. What! I might have failed to answer
else. We know the Duke, eh? But, mum!'
And with these enigmatic words, and a roguish wink and squeeze, he had
hurried away again, following the impatient summons of Jacopo, who was
beckoning him towards a flight of open stairs niched in the north
curtain, up which the two had thereon gone, and so disappeared among the
battlements.
Then had Bernardo turned, humour battling with reverence in his
sensorium, and 'Cicca!' had exclaimed, with a little click of laughter.
The Fool's answer had been prompt and emphatic.
'Cracked!' he had snapped, like a dog at a fly.
'Who was he?'
'Nay, curtail not his short lease. He is yet, and, being, is the Fra
Capello--may I die else.'
'Well, if he is, _what_ is he?'
'Why, a short-of-breath monk; yet soon destined, if I read him aright,
to be a breathless monk.'
'Nay, thou wilt only new-knot a riddle. I will follow and ask the
Provost-Marshal, though I love him not.'
'Nor he thee, methinks. Hold back. The butcher looks askance at the
pet lamb. Well, what wouldst thou? Of this same monkish rotundity,
this hemisphere of fat, this moon-paunch, this great blob of star-jelly,
this planet-counterfeiting frog, this astronomic globe stuffed out with
pasties and ortolans? Well, 'tis Fra Capello, I tell thee, an
astrologer, a diviner by the stars--do I not aver it, though I have
never set eyes on the man before?'
'How know'st, then?'
'Why, true, my perspicacity is only this and that, a poor matter of
inferences. As, for example, the inference of the fingers, that when I
burn them, fire is near; or the inference of the nose, that when I smell
cooking fish, it is a fast day; or the inference of the palate, that
when I drink water, I am a fool.'
'A dear wise fool.'
'Ay, a wise fool, to know what one and one make. Dost thou?'
'Two, to be sure.'
'Well, God fit thy perspicacity with twins, when thy time comes. One
out of one and one is enough for me.'
'Peace! How know'st this holy father is an astrologer?'
'Inference, sir--merely inference. As, for example again, the inference
of the ears, that when I mark the substance of his whisper to thee, I
seem to remember talk of a certain Franciscan, who, having predicted by
the stars short shrift for Galeazzo, and been invited to come and
discuss his reasons, did prove unaccountably coy, though certainly seer
to his own nativity. Imprimis, the astrologer was reported a Conventual
and fat; whereby comes in the inference of the eye. Now, "Ho-ho!"
thinks I, "this same swag-bellied monk who babbles of stars! Surely it
is our Fra Capello? And hooked at last? By what killing bait?"'
Here he had touched the boy's shoulder swiftly, and as swiftly had
withdrawn his hand, an ineffable expression, shrewd and caustic,
puckering his face. Bembo had looked serious.
'Cicca! I do believe thou art madder than any astrologer--unless----'
'No!' had cried the Fool; 'I am sober; wrong me not.'