'Exactly: on the hop of grievance. Well?'
'Why, I spoke him fair: "Whither away, master?" A' spat a saintly
word--'twere a curse in a sinner--and sprang back, a' did, glaring at
me. But the great Fool pushed him by. "You're the man," says he.
"Desperation knows its fellows. Where's Montano?" "Why, what would you
with him?" says I, taken off my guard. "A salve for his wounds," he
answered. And so I considered a bit, and brought 'em on, and there they
wait.'
Visconti uttered a furious oath, but Lampugnani hushed him down.
'Didst well, pretty innocence,' he said to Narcisso. 'The hop of
grievance?--never a riper moment. Show in your friends.'
He was serenely confident of his policy--waved all protest aside.
'I see my way: the hook is baited: let him bite.'
'Bite?' growled Visconti. 'And what about our occupation here?'
'Why, 'tis testing mail, nothing more. Is a lay-figure in an armoury so
strange?'
'Ay, when 'tis a portrait-model.'
'O glowing tribute to my art! I designed the doll, true. You make me
look down, sir, and simper and bite my finger. Yet my mind misgives me
thou flatterest. A portrait-model, yes; but will he recognise of whom?'
'The knave may--the shrewder fool of the pair.'
'The greater fool will testify to me? O happy artist! Well, if he do, I
will still account him naught. He will take the bait also. The shadow
swims and bites with the fish. Besides, should this befall, 'twill save
mayhap a world of preliminaries. Remember that "hop of grievance." He
comes, it seems, in a mood to jump with ours. Let them in.'
Like souls salvaged from a wreck they came--the Fool propping the
Saint--staggering in by the door. Grief and storm and weariness had
robbed the boy of speculation, almost of his senses. His drenched hair
hung in ropes, his wild eyes stared beneath like a frightened doe's, his
clothes slopped on his limbs.
Narcisso struggled with the door and closed it.
Suddenly Bernardo, lifting his dazed lids, caught sight of the shadowed
lay-figure, recoiled, and shrieking out hoarsely:--'Galeazzo! Thou! O
God, doomed soul!' tottered and slid through Cicada's limp arms upon the
floor. Instantly Narcisso was down by his side, and fumbling with his
hands.
'A's in a swound,' he was beginning, when, with a rush and heave, the
Fool sent him wallowing.
'Darest thou, hog! darest thou! Go rub thy filthy hoofs in ambergris
first!' and he squatted, snarling and showing his teeth.
Narcisso rose, to a chorus of laughter, and stood grinning and rubbing
his head.
'Well, I never!' he said.
*CHAPTER XIII*
The Countess of Casa Caprona was a widow. The news was waiting to
overwhelm, or transport, her upon her return to the castello after her
interview with Lanti. On the one hand it committed her to dowagery,
that last infirmity of imperious minds; on the other to the freedom of a
glorified spinsterhood. Though she recognised that, on the whole, the
blow was destructive of the real zest of intrigue, she behaved very
handsomely by the memory of the deceased, who had died, like a soldier,
in harness. She caused a solemn requiem mass to be sung for him in the
Duomo; she commissioned a monody, extolling his marital virtues, from an
expensive poet; she distributed liberal alms to the poor of the city.
There is no trollop so righteous in her matronhood as she made timely a
widow. Besides, to this one, the zest of all zests for the moment was
revenge. She withdrew to mature it, and to lament orthodoxly her lord,
to her dower-house in the Via Sforza.
It was a very pretty spot for melancholy and meditation--cool, large,
secluded, and its smooth, silent walks and bubbling fountains cloistered
in foliage. From its gardens one had glimpses of the castello and of
the candied, biscuit-like pinnacles of the cathedral. Cypresses and
little marble fauns broke between them the flowering intervals, and
peacocks on the gravel made wandering parterres of colour. Sometimes,
musing in the shades, with a lock of her long hair between her lips, she
would pet her frowning fancy with the figure of a youthful Adam, golden
and glorious, approaching her down an avenue of this smiling paradise,
making its mazes something less than scentless; and then, behold! a
lizard, perhaps, would wink on the terrace, and she would snatch and
crush the little palpitating life under her heel, cursing it for a
symbol of the serpent desolating her Eden, and transforming it all into
a mirage of warmth and passion. Not Adam he, that lusted-for, but the
angel at the gate, menacing and awful. She must be more and worse than
Eve to seek to corrupt an angel.
Perhaps she was, in her most tortured, most animal moods. The sensuous,
by training and heredity, had quite over-swollen and embedded in her
beautiful trunk the small spike of conscience, which as a child had
tormented, and which yet, at odd moments, would gall and tease her like
an ancient wound. She might even have been stung by it into some
devotional self-sacrifice in her present phase of passion, could she
have been assured of, or believed in, its object's inaccessibility to a
higher grace of solicitation. But jealousy kept her ravening.
On a languorous noon of this week of losses she was lying, a
conventionally social exile, having her hair combed and perfumed, in a
little green pavilion pitched in her grounds, when a heavy step on the
gravel outside aroused her from a dream of voluptuous rumination. The
tread she recognised, yet, though moved by it to a little flutter of
curiosity, would not so far alloy a drowsy ecstasy as to bid the visitor
enter while it lasted. Hypnotised by the soft burrowing of the comb, she
closed her eyes until the perfect moment was passed, when, with a sigh,
she bade the intruder enter, and Narcisso came slouching in by the
opening.
Beatrice dismissed her attendants with a look. She never spoke to her
servants where a gesture would serve, and could draw hour-long silent
enjoyment from the weary hands of tire-woman or slave, hairdresser or
fanner, without a sign of embarrassment, or indeed understanding. Now
she lay back, restful, impassive--indifferent utterly to any impression
her will for a solitary interview with this gross creature might make
upon them. And, indeed, there was little need for such concern. Hired
assassination, a recognised institution, explained many otherwise
strange conjunctions between the beauties and beasts of Milan.
The beast, in the present instance, behaved as was habitual with him in
the presence of this Circe. That is to say, he was awkward,
deprecating, and, of stranger significance, devoted to truthfulness. He
adored her, as Caliban Miranda, but more fearfully: was her slave, the
genii of the lamp of her loveliness, with which to be on any familiar
terms, even of debasement, was enough. What did it matter that she paid
him with offence and disdain? Her use of him was as her use of some
necessary organic part of herself. And she might deprecate the
necessity; but the secret of it was, nevertheless, their common
property. Her beauty and his devotion were as near akin as blood and
complexion. Perhaps some day, in the resurrection of the flesh, he
would be able to substantiate that kinship.
The thought may have been there in him, instinctive, unilluminated, as
he stood fumbling with his cap, and raising and lowering his hang-dog
eyes, and waiting for her to open. Physically, at least, she showed no
shame in implying his close right to her confidence. The noon was a
noon of slumbering fires, and her mood a responsive one. A long white
camisole, of the frailest tissue, rounded on her lower limbs, and,
splitting at the waist, straddled her shoulders clingingly, leaving a
warm breathing-space between. Round her full neck clung one loop of
emeralds; and to the picture her black falling hair made a tenderest
frame, while the sun, penetrating the tilt above, finished all with a
mist of green translucence. A Circe, indeed, to this coarse and animal
rogue, and alive with awful and covetable lusts, to which, nevertheless,
he was an admitted procurer. He had not ceased to be in her pay and
confidence, cursed and repudiated though he had been by his master, her
erst protector. He had not even resented that episode of his betrayal
at her hands, though it had condemned him for a living to the role of
the hired bravo. She might always do with him as she liked; overbid with
one imperious word his fast pledges to others; convert his craft
wheresoever she wished to her own profit. The more she condescended to
him, the more was he claimed a necessary part of her passions'
functions. She discharged through him her hates and desires, and he was
beatified in the choice of himself as their medium. There was a
suggestion of understanding, of a conscious partnership between them, in
the very fulsomeness with which he abased himself before her.
'Well,' she murmured at last, 'hast drunk thy senses to such surfeit
that they drown in me?'
'Ay,' he mumbled, 'I could die looking.'
'A true Narcissus,' she scoffed; 'but I could wish a sweeter. Stand
away, fellow. Your clothes offend me.'
He backed at once.
'Now,' she said, 'I can breathe. Deliver yourself!'
He heaved up his chest, and looked above her, concentrating his wits on
an open loop of the tent, behind which a bird was flickering and
chirping.
'I come, by Madonna's secret instructions, from privately informing
Messer Lanti where Messer Bembo lies hidden,' he said, speaking as if by
rote.
She nodded imperiously.
'What questions did he ask?'
'How I knew; and I answered, that I knew.'
'Good. That least was enough. Art a right rogue. Now will he go seek
him, and be drawn by his devotion into this net.'
Narcisso was silent.
'Will he not?' she demanded sharply.
The fellow dropped his eyes to her an instant.
'Madonna knows. He loves the Messer Saint. No doubt a' will hold by
him.'
'What then, fool?'
'They have not caught Messer Bembo yet, they at the forge--that is all.'
'How!' she cried angrily, 'when thou told'st me----'
'With humility, Madonna,' he submitted, 'I told thee naught but that he
and this Montano were agreed on the State's disease.'
'Well?'
'But I never said on its cure.'
She frowned, leaning forward and again biting a strand of her hair--a
sullen trick with her in anger.
'A doctor of rhetoric, and so feeble in persuasion!' she muttered
scornfully.
'A' starts at a shadow, this saint,' pleaded Narcisso. 'A' must be
coaxed, little by little, like a shy foal. We will have him in the
halter anon. Yet a' be only one out of five, when all's said.'
'Dolt!' she hissed. 'What are the other four, or their purpose, to me,
save as a lever to my revenge? I foresee it all. Why telled'st me not
before I sent thee? Now this gross lord, instead of himself tangling in
the meshes, will persuade the other back to court and reason and
forgiveness, and I shall be worse than damned. Dolt, I could kill
thee!'
She rose to her height, furious, and he shrunk cowering before her.
'Listen, Madonna,' he said, trembling: 'Canst net them all yet at one
swoop. Go tell Messer Ludovico, and certes a' will jump to destroy the
nest and all in it, before a' inquires their degrees of guilt.'
She stared at him, still threatening.
'Why?'
'Why, says Madonna? Listen again, then. Does the Ser Simonetta trust
Messer Ludovico, or Messer Ludovico love the Ser Simonetta? The
secretary clings to the Duchess. If she falls, a' falls with her.'
'Again, thou tedious rogue, why should the Saint's destruction bring
Bona down?'
'A' would have his mouth shut from explaining.'
'Explaining what? I lose patience.'
'How a' came, a conspirator against the Duke, to be found wi' his wife's
troth ring in his possession. Here it be. I've filched it for thee at
last.'
She sprang to seize the token, glowing triumphant in a moment, and
putting it on her own finger, pressed the clinched hand that enclosed it
into her bosom.
She laughed low and rejoicingly, shameless in the quick transition of
her mood.
'Good Narcisso! It is the Key at last! Let Lanti persuade him back
now--I am content. I hold them, and Bona too, in the hollow of this
hand.'
She held it out, her right one, palm upwards, and, smiling, bade him
kiss it.
'Rogue,' she said, 'to tease and vex me, and all the time this talisman
in thy sleeve. Ay, make the most of it: snuffle and root. My dog has
deserved of me.'
He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, as if he had drunk.
'Now,' she said, 'how wert successful? how won'st it, sweet put?'
'Took it from him, that was all.'
'How?'
'When a' came tumbling in and staggered in a swound. Had heard Messer
Andrea relating of how 'twas on him as I entered. Ho, ho! thinks I,
here's that, maybe, will pay the filching! and I dropped and got it, all
in a moment like.'
'You never told me.'
'You never asked till yesterday. Then I had it not with me. But
to-day, thinks I, I'll bring it up my sleeve for a win-favour--a good
last card.'
'No matter, since I have got it.'
She held it out, and gloated on its device and sparkle. She knew it
well: indeed it was a famous gem, the Sforza lion cut in cameo on a deep
pure emerald, and known as the Lion ring.
'Hath he not missed it?' she murmured.
'Not by any sign a' gives. The sickness of that night still holds him
half-amazed. A' thinks our fine doll, even, but a bug of it--fancies a'
saw it in a dream like. They'd locked it away when he came to.'
'Poor worldling! Poor little new-born worldling! He shall cut his
pretty teeth anon. Well--for Messer Lanti? Did he leap to the trail, or
what?'
'That same moment. Belike they are together now.'
She stood musing a little: then heaved a sudden sigh.
'Poor boy,' she murmured, 'poor boy! is it I must seek to destroy thee!'
Her mood had veered again in a breath. Her eyes were full of a brooding
love and pity.
'Not for the first time,' muttered Narcisso.
She seemed not to hear him--to have grown oblivious of his presence.
'The song he sang to me!' she murmured: 'Ah, me, if that hour could be
mine! A saint in heaven?--not Bona's! she hath a lord--no saint, did he
love her. He looked at me: it came from his heart. If that hour could
be mine! Not then--'twere a sin--but now! That one
hour--cherished--unspent--the seed of the unquickened pledge between us
to all eternity. I could be content, knowing him a saint through that
abstinence. My hour--_mine_--to passion to my breast--the shadow of the
child that would not be born to me. He looked at me--no spectre of a
dead lost love in his eyes--only a hopeless quest--bonds never to be
riven. But now--Ah! I cannot kill him!'
She hid her eyes, shuddering. Narcisso, vaguely troubled, gloomed at
her.
'You will not go to Messer Ludovico?' he said.
She returned to knowledge of him, as to a sense of pain out of oblivion.
'Go,' she said coldly. 'Leave all to me. You have done well, and been
paid your wages.'
And he did not demur. It was not in her nature to gild her favours
unnecessarily. Gold came less lavishly from her than kisses. Her
pounds of flesh were her most profitable assets. She was a spendthrift
in everything but money.
*CHAPTER XIV*
'Messer Bembo,' said Montano, between meditative and caustic, 'you do
not agree that our poor Lupo's definition of a perfect government, an
autocracy with an angel at its head, is a practicable definition?'
He was sitting, as often during the last few days, at talk with the boy,
on subjects civic, political, and theological. They had discussed at
odd times the whole ethics of government, from the constitution of
Lycurgus to the code of Thomas Aquinas: they had expounded, each in his
way, a scheme or a dream of socialism: they had agreed, without
prejudice, to liken the evolution of the simple Church of Peter into the
complicated fabric of the fourth Sixtus to a woodland cottage, bought by
some great princely family, and improved into a summer palace, which was
grown out of harmony with its environments. Somewhat to his amazement,
Montano discovered that the boy was the opposite to a dogmatic
Christian; that his was a religion, which, while conforming or adapting
itself to the orthodox, was in its essence a religion of mysticism. No
doubt the traditions of his origin were, to some extent, to seek for
this. A pledge, so to speak, of spontaneous generation, Bernardo
accounted for himself on a theory of reincarnation from another sphere.
He believed in the possibility of the resurrection of the body, which,
though destroyed, and many times destroyed, could be, in its character
of mere soul-envelope or soul expression, as regularly reconstructed at
the will of its informing spirit. Death, he declared, was just the
beginning of the return of that divested spirit to the spring of
life--to the river welling in the central Eden from the loins of the
Father, the spouse of Nature, the secret, the unspeakable God, of whom
was Christ, his own dear brother and comrade.
He would tell Messer Montano, with his sweet, frank eyes arraigning that
crabbed philosopher's soul, how this unstained first-born of Nature,
this sinless heir of love, this wise and pitying Christ, moved by an
infinite compassion to see the wounded souls of his brothers--those few
who had not made their backward flight too difficult--come, soiled and
earth-cloyed, to seek their reincarnation in the spring, had descended,
himself, upon earth at last, sacrificing his birthright of divinity,
that he might teach men how to live. And the men his brothers had slain
him, in jealousy, even as Cain slew Abel; yet had his spirit,
imperishably great, continued to dwell in their midst, knowing that, did
it once leave the earth, it must be for ever, and to mankind's eternal
unregeneracy. For, so Bernardo insisted, there was an immutable law in
Nature that no soul reincarnated could re-enter the sphere from which it
was last returned, but must seek new fields of action. Wherefore all
earth-loving spirits, which we call apparitions, were such as after
death clung about the ways of men, in a yearning hopefulness to redeem
them by touching their hearts with sympathy and their eyes with a mist
of sorrow. And, of such gentle ghosts, Christ was but the first in
faith and tenderness.
A wild, dim theory, peopling woods, and fields, and cities with a mystic
company--phantoms, yet capable of revealing themselves in fitful
glimpses to the sinless and the sympathetic among men--ghosts, weaving
impalpable webs of love across populous ways to catch men's souls in
their meshes. Montano called it all transcendental fustian. It aroused
his most virulent scorn. What had this cloud-moulding, moon-paring
stuff to do with the practical issues of life, with freedom, and
government by popular representation? He even professed to prefer to it
Lascaris, with his metaphysical jargon and apostolic succession of
atoms.
'He gives you at least something to take hold of,' he snarled. 'Listen
to this'--and he condescended to read an excerpt from a recent treatise
by his hated rival:--
'"Life,"' he read, '"is put out at compound interest. We represent, each
in himself, a fraction of the principal, having a direct pedigree _ab
initio_. As a spider will gather the hundred strands of his web into a
little ball which he will swallow, so might we each absorb and claim the
whole vast web of life. Rolled up to include each radiating thread, the
web becomes I; the spider is I; I am the principal of life--not the
principle: that is Prometheus' secret."'
'"I am a fraction of life's compound interest. The sum of the mental
impressions of all my thread of tendency (which gathers back, taking up
cross threads by the way, to the central origin) is invested in my
paltry being, and lieth there, together with mine own interest on the
vast accumulation, in tail for my next of kin. What can I do in my tiny
span but touch the surface of this huge estate: pluck here and there a
flower of its fields, whose roots are in immemorial time? Imagination
founders in those fathomless depths. Tenuous, dim-forgotten ghosts rise
from them. Who shall say that my dreams, however seeming mad and
grotesque, are not faithful reflexes of states and conditions which were
once realities; memories of forms long extinct; echoes of times when I
flew, or spun, or was gaseous, or vast, or little; when I mingled
intimate with shapes which are chimerical to my present
understanding----"'
The reader broke off, with an impatient grunt.
'There!' he said, 'dreams mad and grotesque enough, in good sooth; yet
not so mad as thine.'
'Well,' said Bernardo, 'well,' with perfect sweetness and good temper.
'Christ in the world? Fah!' snarled the philosopher. 'I know him. He
sits at Rome under a triple tiara. Quit all this sugared dreaming, boy,
and face the future like a man.'
'Does the sun shine out of yesterday or to-morrow? It is enough for the
moment to take thought for itself. The future is not.'
'Pooh! a mere Jesuitry, justifying the moment's abomination.'
'Nay: for we shall have to retraverse our deeds, and carry back their
burden to our first account--with most, a toilful journey.'
'They would do better to stop with your Christ, then; and, judged by the
preponderance of evil spirits here, I think most do. No future, say'st?
But how about that heir of the compound interest? Is there not one
waiting to succeed to him? Where? Why, in the future, as surely and
inevitably as this date, which I am going to swallow in a moment, will
be blood and tissue in me to-morrow.'
He held the fruit up--with a swift movement Bernardo whipped it out of
his hand and ate it himself.
'How for your future now?' he chuckled, pinking all over.
Cicada laughed loudly, and Montano swore. His philosophy was not proof
against such practical jokes. But, seeing his fury, the boy put out all
his sweetness to propitiate him. He was his father's friend; he was a
man of learning; he had suffered grievous wrong. The dog was coaxed
presently into opening again upon the angelic principles. It was by
such virulent irony that he thought--so warped was his mental vision--to
corrode the candour of this saint, and bend him to his own views and
uses--a diseased vanity, even had he not reckoned, as will now appear,
without the consideration of another possible factor.
And 'So,' said he upon a later occasion, in the sentence which opens
this chapter, 'you do not agree with our poor Lupo's practicable
definition of a perfect government?'
The Saint's steadfast eyes canvassed the speaker's soul, as if in some
shadowy suspicion of an integrity which they were being led, not for the
first time, to probe.
'Why, Messer,' said he, 'practicable in so far as, by the dear Christ's
influence, grace may come to make an angel even of our Duke.'
Montano tried to return his steady gaze, but failed meanly.
'With submission, Messer Bernardo,' he sniggered, 'I can only follow, in
my mind's eye, one certain road to that great man's apotheosis.'
Bembo was silent.
''Tis the road,' continued the other, 'taken before by the Emperor
Nero.'
'He stabbed himself, the most wretched pagan, in fear of a worser
retribution than heaven's,' said Bembo. 'Alas! do you call that an
apotheosis?'
'There are gods and gods,' said Montano,--'Hades and Olympus. Belike
Nero was welcomed of his kind, as Galeazzo would be. I can scarce see
in the Duke the raw material of your fashion of angel. There's more of
the harpy about him than the harp.'
It was a heavenly day. Bernardo, still a little hectic and languid from
his fever, sat in the embrasure of a window which gave upon the back
court of the smithy. A muffled tinkling of armourers' hammers reached
his ears pleasantly from the rear of neighbouring premises. There was a
certain happy suggestiveness to him in the sound, evoked, as he hoped it
might be, at his host Lupo's instigation. For his endearing optimism
had so wrought upon that stricken artificer, during the week he had
dwelt in hiding with him, as to persuade the poor man to quit his
self-despairing, and hire out his skill--not practically; that was no
longer possible; but theoretically--to a deserving fellow-craftsman.
Already the sense of touch was curiously refining in the sightless
creature, and the glimmer of a new dawn of interest penetrating him. And
he was at work again elsewhere.
On the floor at Bembo's feet squatted Cicada, acrid, speaking little,
and spending his long intervals of silence in staring at the girl Lucia,
who, crouching at a distance away by the fireless forge, in the gloom of
the shuttered smithy, seemed given over to an eternal reverie of hate.
She, alone of the household, had remained impervious to all the sweet
influences of sorrow and pity. Her wrong was such as no angel could
remedy.