She made no answer, only fixing Montano with her glittering eyes. He
rose from his stool stiffly, with a snarl for his aching wounds. But
his face brightened towards her like a spark of wintry sun.
'We meet to kill, Madonna,' he said, 'ruined, crippled, debauched--the
victims of a monster and his system. And thou shalt have thy share,
never fear, when the feast comes to follow the sacrifice.'
Bembo had fled, like one distracted, from the walls, his faithful shadow
jumping in his wake. The two, running and following, never slackened in
their pace until a half-mile separated them from the city; and then, in
a gloomy thicket, under a falling sky, the boy threw himself down on the
grass, and buried his face from heaven. Pitiful and distraught, the
Fool stood over, silently regarding him. At length he spoke, panting
and reproachful.
'Nay, in pity, master, wert thou not advised?'
The boy writhed.
'So lying, so wicked cunning, to make me his decoy and seeming abettor!
O, I am punished for my faith! Is Christ dead?'
The Fool sighed.
'By thy showing, He lingers behind in the wood.'
'Tell Him I have gone on to my father.'
'Thou wilt?'
Bernardo sat up, a towzled angel. In the interval the tears had come
fast, and his face was wet.
'God help you all!' he sobbed. 'You, even you, prevaricated to me.
Whither shall I turn? I see everywhere a death-dealing wilderness, lies
and lust and inhumanity.'
'I prevaricated,' said Cicada mournfully. 'I admit it. You once
claimed my wit and experience to your tutoring. Well, do I not know the
tyrant--the persistent devil in him? He had his teeth in that monk.
Not Christ Himself would have loosened them.'
'Ah! what shall I do?'
'What, but go forward steadfast. This is but a jog by the way. Judge
life on the broad lines of action, the ruts which mark the progress of
the wheels. 'Tis a morbid sentiment that wastes itself on the quarrel
between the wheels and the road.'
'Ah, me! if I could but foresee the end of that bloody mire--the sweet,
crisp path again! I can advance no further. My weak heart fails. I
will go back to the wood.'
'Then back, a' God's name, so I come too.'
Bernardo rose and seized the Fool's hand, the tears streaming down his
cheeks.
'This dreadful race--monsters all!' he cried. 'Is there one kind deed
recorded to its credit--one, one only, one little deed? Tell me, and if
there is, by its memory I will persevere.'
'Humph! Should I wish thee to? Think again of that wood.'
'Tell me, kind, good Cicca, my nurse and friend.'
'Go to! Shalt not put a bone in my throat. Well, they are monsters,
but made by that same brute Circumstance thou decriest. "Wavering out
of chaos," says you? Very like, sir; but, after all, Circumstance is
our head artist in a tuneless world. What a dull sing-song 'twould be
without him--league-long choirs of saints praising God--a universe of
chirping crickets! With respect, sir, I, though his Fool, would not have
him caged in my time.'
'Alas, dear, for thine understanding! Love, that I would have depose
him, is ten thousand times his superior in art--ay, and in humour. But
go on.'
'I doubt the humour. However, as things are, I owe to him, as do you,
and Galeazzo--the Fool, the Saint, and the Monster. Could love conceive
such a trio? But to the point. Hast ever heard speak of our Duke's
grand-dad?'
'Muzio?'
'So he called himself, or was called, pretending to trace his descent
from Mutius Scaevola the Roman. Flattery, you see, will make a braying
ass of honesty. He was Giacommuzzo--just that; one of a family of
fighting yeomen. But he had points. Hast been told how he began?'
'No.'
'Why, he was digging turnips by the evening star in his father's farm at
Cotignola, when the sound of pipes and drums disturbed him. 'Twas some
band of Boldrino of Panicale come to recruit from the fields; and they
halted by the big man. "Be a soldier of fortune like us," says they;
and he tossed his dusty hair from his eyes, and saw the glint of gold in
baldricks. He looked at the evening star, and 'twas pale beside.
Borrowers glean the real heaven of credit in this topsy-turvy world.
Look at any pool of water: what a glittering prospectus it makes of the
moon! Muzzo flung his spade into an oak hard by, leaving the decision
to Circumstance. If it fell, he would resume it; if it stayed, a
soldier he would be. It stuck in the branches.'
'Cicca!'
'Peace! I will tell thee. He fought up and down, but never back to
Cotignola. He put his ploughing shoulder to his work, and dug a furrow
to fame. Popes and kings engaged for and against this Condottieri. He
took them all to market like his beans. He knew the values of fear and
money and discipline--bought over honour; wrenched treason by the
joints; flogged slackness for a rusty hinge in its armour; made warriors
of his rabble. Sought letters, too, to spur them on by legend.'
'All this is nothing.'
'He went to Mass every day----'
'Alas!'
'Cast his true plain wife, and took to bed the widow of Naples----'
'Alas! Alas!'
'And lost his life at Pescara, trying to save another.'
'Ah! How was that?'
'He had crossed the river on a blown tide, when he saw his page
a-drowning in the stream. "Poor lad," quoth he, "will none help thee?"
And he dashed back, was overwhelmed himself, and sank. They saw his
mailed hands twice rise and clutch the air. A' was never seen again.
The waters were his tomb.'
Bernardo was silent.
'Was not that a creditable deed?' quoth the Fool.
The boy, pressing the tangled hair from his eyes, feverishly seized his
comrade's hands in his own.
'God forgive me!' he cried; 'am I one to judge him, who have let my
father's friend go under, and never reached a hand?'
The Fool looked frankly amazed.
'Montano,' cried Bembo, 'whom, in my pride of place, I have forgotten!
I will go down among the people where he lies, and seek to heal his
wounds, and sing Christ's parables to simple hearts. Love lies not in
palaces. I will seek Montano.'
'Come, then,' said Cicada.
'Nay, in a little,' said the boy. 'Let the kind night find us first. I
will flaunt my creed no longer in the sun.'
From behind the barred door of Lupo's shop came the sound of muffled
laughter. The tragic incongruity of it in that house of ruin was at
least arresting enough to halt a pedestrian here and there on his
passage along the dark, wet-blown street outside. The mirth broke
gustily, with little snarls at intervals, bestial and worrying; hearing
which, the lingerer would perhaps hurry on his way with a shudder,
crossing himself against, or spitting out like a bad odour, the
influence of the fiend who had evidently got hold of the master
armourer. _Libera nos a malo_!
The fiend, in fact, in possession was no other than Messer Montano's
Cerberus, and its orgy, had the listener known it, had more than
justified his apprehensions. The mirth which terrified his heart was
perhaps even a degree more deadly in its evocation than anything he
could imagine. It was really laughter so dreadful that, had he guessed
its import, he had rushed, in an agony of self-vindication, to summon
the watch. But guessing nothing, unless it might be Lupo's madness under
the shock of his misfortunes, he simply crossed himself and hurried
away.
Blood conspiracies are rarely successful. Perhaps a too scrupulous
forethought against contingencies tends to clog the issues. If that is
so, the recklessness of these men may, in a measure, have spelt their
present security. A laugh, after all, is less open to suspicion than a
whisper. Who could imagine a fatal thrust in a guffaw? Nevertheless,
every chuckle uttered here punctuated a stab.
In rehearsal only at present, it is true; but practice, good practice,
sirs. The victim of the attack was a dummy, contrived suggestively to
represent Galeazzo. At least the habit made the man; and hate and a
stinging imagination supplied the rest.
It stood in a dusky corner by the dead forge. Not so much light as
would certainly guide a hand was allowed to fall upon it; for deeds of
darkness, to be successful, must be prepared against darkness. Its
stuffed, daubed face, staring from out this gloom, was like nothing
human. To catch sudden sight, within a vista of dim lamp-shine, of its
motionless eyes and features warped with stabs, was to gasp and shrink,
as if one had looked into a glass and seen Death reflected back. Its
suggestion of reality (and it possessed it) was to seek rather in velvet
and satin; in a cunning, familiar disposition of its dress; in the
sombre but profuse sparkle of artificial gems with which it was looped
and hung. Thence came a grotesque and wicked semblance to a doomed
figure. For the rest, in the bloodless slashes, gaping, rag-exuding,
which had taken it cunningly in weak places--through the neck, under the
gorget, between joints of the mail with which Lupo's craft had fitted
it--there was a suggestiveness almost more horrible than truth.
It was in actual fact a sop to Cerberus, was this grisly-ludicrous doll,
fruit of the decision (which had followed much discussion of ways and
means) to postpone its prototype's murder to some occasion of public
festivity, when the sympathies of the mob might be kindled and a
revolution accomplished at a stroke. Politic Cerberus must nevertheless
have something to stay the gnawing and craving of a delayed revenge
which had otherwise corroded him. He took a ferociously boyish delight
in fashioning this lay-figure, and, having made, in whetting his teeth
on it; in clothing it in purple and fine linen; in addressing it
wheedlingly, or ironically, or brutally, as the mood swayed him. And
to-night his mood, stung by the tempest, perhaps, was unearthly in its
wildness. It rose in fiendish laughter; it mocked the anguish of the
blast, a threefold litany, now blended, now a trifurcating blasphemy.
There were the roaring bass of Visconti, Lampugnani's smooth treble, the
deadly considered baritone of Olgiati. And, punctuating all, like the
tap of a baton, flew the interjections of Messer Montano, the
conductor:--
'Su! Gia-gia! Bravo, Carlo! That was a Brutus stroke! Uh-uh, Andrea!
hast bled him there for arrears of wages! a scrap of gold-cloth, by
Socrates! A brave sign, a bright token, Andrea!'
He chuckled and hugged himself, involuntarily embracing in the action
the long pendant which hung from his roundlet or turban, and
half-pulling the cap from his skull-like forehead.
'Death!' he screeched in an ecstasy, and Lampugnani, glancing at him,
went off into husky laughter, and sank back, breathed, upon a bench.
'Cometh in a doctor's gown,' he panted. 'Nay, sir, bonnet! bonnet! or
the dummy will suspect you.'
He might have, himself, and with a better advantage to his fortunes,
could he have penetrated the vestments of that drear philosophic heart.
There was a secret there would have astounded _his_ self-assurance.
Montano wore his doctor's robe, meetly as a master of rhetoric, not the
least of whose contemplated flights was one timely away from that
political arena, whose gladiators in the meanwhile he was bent only on
inflaming to a contest in which he had no intention of personally
participating. He had a fixed idea, his back and his principles being
still painfully at odds, that the cause would be best served by his
absence, when once the long train to the explosion he was engineering
had been fired at his hand. And so he hugged himself, and Lampugnani
laughed.
'Look at Master Lupo, with the sound of thy screech in his ears! As if
he thought we contemplated anything but to bring slashed Venetian
doublets into vogue!'
He was a large, fleshly creature, was this Lampugnani, needing some
fastidious lust to stir him to action, and then suddenly violent. His
face was big and vealy, with a mouth in its midst like a rabbit's,
showing prominently a couple, no more, of sleek teeth. His eyes drooped
under lids so languid as to give him an affectation of fatigue in
lifting them. His voice was soft, but compelling: he never lent it to
platitudes. An intellectual sybarite, a voluptuary by deliberation, he
had tested God and Belial, and pronounced for the less Philistine
lordship of the beast. Quite consistent with his principles, he not
hated, but highly disapproved of Galeazzo, who, as consistently, had
pardoned him some abominable crime which, under Francesco the father,
had procured him the death sentence. But Messer Andrea had looked for a
more sympathetic recognition of his merits at the hands of his deliverer
than was implied in an ill-paid lieutenancy of Guards; and his exclusion
from a share in the central flesh-pots was a conclusive proof to him of
the aesthetic worthlessness of the master it was his humility to serve.
The Visconti, at whom he breathed his little laugh, was a contrast to
him in every way--a bluff, stout-built man, with fat red chaps flushing
through a skin of red hair, a braggadocio manner, and small eyes red
with daring. There was nothing of his house's emblematic adder about
him, save a readiness with poisons; and after all, that gave him no
particular distinction. He took a great, stertorous pull at a flagon of
wine, and smacked his lips bullyingly, before he answered with a roar:--
'Wounds! scarlet scotched on a ground of flesh-tint--a fashion will
please our saint.'
Montano chuckled again, and more shrilly.
'Good, good!' he cried: 'scarlet on flesh!' and he squinted roguishly at
the blind smith, who sat beside him on a bench, nervously kneading
together his wasted hands.
'Messers,' muttered the poor fellow; 'but will this holy boy approve the
means to such a fashion? For Love to exalt himself by blood!'
He turned his sightless eyes instinctively towards Olgiati, where the
boy stood, a dark, fatalistic young figure, breathing himself by the
forge. He, he guessed, or perhaps knew, was alone of the company
actuated by impersonal motives in this dread conspiracy. But he did not
guess that, by so much as the young man was a pure fanatic of liberty,
his hand and purpose were the most of all to be dreaded.
Olgiati gave a melancholy smile, and, stirring a little, looked down.
He was habited, as were his two companions, for the occasion--a
recurrent dress-rehearsal--in a coat and hose of mail, and a jerkin of
crimson satin. It was not the least significant part of his undertaking
that he, like the others, was court-bred and court-employed. The fact,
at its smallest, implied in them a certain anatomic-cum-sartorial
acquaintance with their present business.
'_Offerimus tibi, Domine, Calicem salutaris!_' he quoted from the Mass,
in his sweet, strong voice. 'Hast thou not a first example of that
exaltation, Lupo, in the oblation of the chalice?'
Revolution knows no blasphemy.
'Bah!' grumbled Visconti.
'He died for men: we worship the sacrifice of Himself,' protested the
armourer.
'And shall not Messer Bembo sacrifice himself, his scruples and his
reluctances, that love may be exalted over hate, mercy over tyranny?'
asked Olgiati.
'I know not, Messer,' muttered the suffering armourer. 'I cannot trace
the saint in these sophistries, that is all.'
'True, he is a saint,' conceded Lampugnani, yawning as he lolled. 'Now,
what is a saint, Lupo?'
'O, Messer! look on his mother's son, and ask!'
'Why, that is the true squirrel's round. We are all born of women'--he
yawned again.
'They bear us, and we endure them,' he murmured smilingly, the water in
his eyes. 'It is so we retaliate on their officiousness.'
Montano tittered.
'Lupo,' Lampugnani went on, lazily stirring himself, 'you suggest to me
two-thirds of a syllogism: _I_ am my mother's son; therefore I am a
saint.'
'Ho! ho!' hooted Visconti.
'Messer,' entreated the bewildered armourer, 'with respect, it turns
upon the question of the mother.'
'The mother? O dog, to question the repute of mine!'
'I did not--no, never.'
'Well, who was his?'
'None knows. A star, 'tis said.'
'Venus, of course. And his father?'
'Some son of God, perchance.'
'Ay, Mars. He was that twain's by-blow, and fell upon an altar. I know
now how saints are made. Yet shall we, coveting sanctity, wish our
parents bawds? 'Tis a confusing world!'
He sank back as if exhausted, while Montano chirped, and Visconti roared
with laughter.
'Saints should be many in it, Andrea,' he applauded. 'Knows how they are
made, quotha!' and he stamped about, holding his sides till, reeling
near to the dummy, he paused, and made a savage lunge at it with his
dagger. His mood changed on the instant.
'Death!' he snarled, 'I warrant here's one hath propagated some saints
to his undoing!' and he went muttering a rosary of curses under his
breath.