'A plot to kill the Duke--no more.'
The two stared at one another. She could see a pulse moving in his
throat; but when at last he spoke, it was without emotion.
'Indeed, Madonna? They are so many. When is this particular one to
be?'
'Do you not know?' she answered as derisively as she dared. 'I thought
you had a tool for everything. Well, it is to be in Milan.'
'In Milan--as before,' he repeated ironically. 'And the heads of this
conspiracy, Madonna?'
'Ah!' she cried, with a sigh of triumph; 'they are yours at the price of
the ring.'
He canvassed her a little, but profoundly.
'After all,' he murmured, 'why should I seek to know?'
'Why?' she said, with a laugh of recovering scorn, 'why but to nip it in
its bud, Messer?'
He was quick to grasp this implied menace of retaliation.
'Tell me,' he said, 'why are you so hot to retain this same ring?'
'For only a woman's reason,' she answered. 'Wouldst thou understand it?
Not though I spoke an hour by St. Ambrose' clock. I would deal the blow
myself, in my own way--that is all.'
'Thou wouldst ruin Bona?'
'Ay, and her saint, who robbed me of my love.'
'By her connivance? Marry, be honest, sweet lady. Was it not rather
Messer Bembo who denied you Messer Bembo?'
'Will you have the names?'
'Hold a little. Here's matter black enough, but unsupported. I must
have some proof. Tell me who's your informant?'
'And have you go and bleed him? Nay, I am learning my tools.'
'Bravo!' he said, and kissed his hand to her. 'Well, I see, we must
call a truce awhile.'
'And I will keep the ring,' she said.
He beamed thoughtfully on her. No doubt he was considering the
possibility of improving the interval by rooting out, on his own
account, details of the secret she held from him.
'Provisionally,' he said pleasantly--'provisionally, Madonna; so long as
you undertake to make no use of it until you hear from me my decision.'
'The longer that is delayed, the better for your purpose, Messer,' she
dared to say.
He smiled blankly at her a little; then courteously advancing, and
raising her hand, imprinted a fervent kiss on it.
'Though I fail to gather your meaning,' he said, 'it is nevertheless
certain that you would make a very imposing Duchess, Monna Beatrice.'
*CHAPTER XVI*
'Father Abbot, we thank you for your trust. We were less than human to
abuse it. O, it flew with white wings to shelter in our bosom! Shall
we be hawks to such a dove! Take comfort. It hath ruffled its feathers
on our heart; it hath settled itself thereon, and hatched out a winged
love. Pure spirit of the Holy Ghost, whence came it? From a star, they
say, born of some wedlock between earth and sky. I marvel you could
part with it. I could never.... The pretty chuck! What angel heresies
it dares! "Marry," saith the dove, "I have been discussing with Christ
the subtleties of dogmatic definition, and I find he is no Christian."
This for intolerance! He finds honesty in schism--speaks with assurance
of our Saviour, his discourses with Him by the brook, in the garden,
under the trees--but doubtless you know. How can we refute such
evidence, or need to? Alas! we are not on speaking terms with divinity.
But we listen and observe; and we woo our winsome dove with pretty
scarves and tabbards embroidered by our fingers; and some day we too
hope to hear the voices. Not yet; the earth clings to us; but he dusts
it off. "Make not beauty a passion, but passion a beauty," says he.
"Learn that temperance is the true epicurism of life. The palate cloys
on surfeit." O, we believe him, trust me! and never his pretty head is
turned by our adoring.... "By love to make law unnecessary,"--there
runs his creed: the love of Nature's truths--continence, sobriety, mate
bound to mate like birds. Only our season's life. He convinces us
apace. Already Milan sweetens in the sun. We curb all licence, yield
heat to reason, clean out many vanities; have our choirs of pure maidens
in place of the Bacchidae--hymns, too, meet to woo Pan to Christ, of
which I could serve thee an example.... All in all, we prepare for a
great Feast of the Purification which, at the New Year's beginning, is
to symbolise our re-conversion to Nature's straight religion. Then will
be a rare market in doves--let us pray there be at least--which all,
conscious of the true virgin heart, are to bring. Doves! Alack! which
of us would not wish to be worthy to carry one that we know?'
So wrote the Duchess of Milan to the Abbot of San Zeno, and he
answered:--
'Cherish my lamb. The fold yearns for him. He would leave it, despite
us all. My daughter, be gracious to our little dreamer, for of such is
the Kingdom of Heaven.'
For years after it was become the dimmest of odd memories, men and women
would recall, between laughter and tears, the strange little moral
fantasia which, during a month or two of that glowing autumn of 1476,
all Milan had been tickled into dancing to the pipe of a small shepherd
of a New Arcadia. The measure had certainly seemed inspiring enough at
the time--potential, original, weaving an earnest purpose with joy,
revealing novel raptures of sensation in the seemliness of postures,
which claimed to interpret Nature out of the very centre of her
spiritual heart. David dancing before the ark must have exhibited just
such an orderly abandonment as was displayed by these sober-rollicking
Pantheists of the new cult. Crossness with them was sunk to an
impossible discount. There was no market for gallantry, _epanchements_,
or any billing and cooing whatever but of doves. Instead, there came
into vogue intercourses between Dioneus and Flammetta of sweet unbashful
reasonableness; high-junkettings on chestnut-meal and honey; the most
engaging attentions, in the matter of grapes and sweet biscuits and
infinite bon-bons, towards the little furred and feathered innocents of
the countryside. That temperance really was, according to the angelic
propagandist, the true epicurism, experience no less astonishing than
agreeable came to prove. Then was the festival of beans and bacon
instituted by some jaded palates. Charity and consideration rose on all
sides in a night, like edible and nutritious funguses. From Hallowmas to
Christmas there was scarce a sword whipped from its scabbard but
reflection returned it. It was no longer, with Gregory and Balthazar,
'Sir, do you bite your thumb at me? Sir, the wall to you,' but 'Sir, I
see your jostling of me was unavoidable; Sir, your courtesy turns my
asps to roses.' Nature and the natural decencies were on all tongues;
the licences of eye and ear and lip were rejected for abominations
unpalatable to any taste more refined than yesterday's. Modesty ruled
the fashions and made of Imola an Ippolita, and of Aurelio an Augustine.
The women, as a present result, were all on the side of Nature.
Impudicity with them is never a cause but a consequence. They found an
amazing attractiveness in the pretty dogma which rather encouraged than
denounced in them the graceful arts of self-adornment. 'Naked, like the
birds,' attested their little priest, 'do we come to inherit our
Kingdom. Shall we be more blamed than they for adapting to ourselves
the plumages of that bright succession?' Only he pleaded for a perfect
adaptation to conditions--to form, climate, environments, constitution.
The lines of all true beauty, he declared, were such as both suggested
and defended. Could monstrosities of head furniture, for instance,
appeal to any but a monster? Locks, thereat, were delivered from their
fantastic convolutions, from their ropes of pearls, from their gold-dust
and iris-powder, and were heaped or coiled _di sua natura_, as any girl,
according to circumstances, might naturally dispose of them. There was
a general holocaust of extravagances, with some talk of feeding the
sacrifice with fuel of useless confessional boxes; and, in the
meanwhile, the church took snuff and smiled, and the devil hid his tail
in a reasonable pair of breeches, and endured all the inconveniences of
sitting on it without a murmur.
Alas! 'How quick bright things come to confusion!' But the moment
while it held gathered the force of an epoch; and no doubt much moral
amendment was to derive from it. Intellect in a sweet presence makes a
positive of an abstract argument; and when little Bembo asserted, in
refutation of the agnostics, that man's dual personality was proved by
the fact of his abhorring in others the viciousnesses which his flesh
condoned in himself, the statement was accepted for the dictum of an
inspired saint. But his strength of the moment lay chiefly in his
undeviating consistency with his own queer creed. He never swerved from
his belief in the soul's responsibility to its past, or of its
commitment to a retrogressive movement after death. 'We drop, fainting,
out of the ranks in a desolate place,' he said. 'We come to, alone and
abandoned. Shall we, poor mercenaries, repudiating a selfish cause, not
turn our faces to the loved home, far back, from which false hopes
beguiled us? Be, then, our way as we have made it, whether by
forbearance or rapine.' Again he would say: 'Take, so thy to-day be
clean, no fearful thought for thy to-morrow, any more than for thy
possible estrangement from thy friend. There is nothing to concern thee
now (which is all that _is_) but thy reason, love, and justice of this
moment. They are the faculty, devotion, and quality to which, blended,
thy soul may trust itself for its fair continuance.'
There was a little song of his, very popular with the court gentlemen in
these days of their regeneracy, which, as exemplifying the strengths and
weaknesses of his propaganda, is here given:--
'Here's a comrade blithe
To the wild wood hieth--
Follow and find!
Loving both least and best,
His love takes still a zest
From the song-time of the wind.
The chuckling birds they greet him,
The does run forth to meet him--
Follow and find!
Strange visions shall thou see;
Learn lessons new to thee
In the song-time of the wind.
Couldst, then, the dear bird kill
That kiss'd thee with her bill?
Follow and find
How great, having strength, to spare
That trusting Soft-and-fair
In the song-time of the wind.
He is both God and Man;
He is both Christ and Pan--
Follow and find
How, in the lovely sense,
All flesh being grass, wakes thence
The song-time of the wind.
It was, I say, popular with the Lotharios. The novelty of this sort of
renunciation tickled their sensoriums famously. It suggested a quite
new and captivating form of self-indulgence, in the rapture to be
gathered from an indefinite postponement of consummations. The sense of
gallantry lies most in contemplation. I do not think it amounted to
much more. Teresa and Elisabetta enjoyed their part in the serio-comic
sport immensely, and were the most cuddlesome lambs, frisking
unconscious under the faltering knife of the butcher. Madonna Caterina
laughed immoderately to see their great mercy-pleading eyes coquetting
with the greatly-withheld blade. But then she had no bump of reverence.
The little wretch disliked sanctity in any form; loved aggressiveness
better than meekness; was always in her heart a little Amazonian
terrier-bitch, full of fight and impudence. It might have gone crossly
with Messer Bembo had she been in her adoptive mother's position of
trustee for him.
But luckily, or most unluckily for the boy, he was in more accommodating
hands. This was the acute period of his proselytising. He had been
persuaded back to court, and Bona had received him with moist eyes and
open arms, and indeed a very yearning pathos of emotionalism, which had
gathered a fataler influence from the contrition which in the first
instance must be his. He had stood before her not so much rebuking as
rebuked. Knowing her no longer saint, but only erring woman, it added a
poignancy to his remorse that he had led her into further error by his
abuse of her trust. She had answered his confession with a lovely
absolution:--
'What is lost is lost. Thou art the faithfullest warrant of my true
observance of my lord's wishes. Only if thou abandon'st me am I
betrayed.'
Could he do aught after this but love her, accept her, her fervour and
her penitence, for a first factor in the crusade he had made his own?
And, while the soft enchantment held, no general could have wished a
loyaler adjutant, or one more ready to first-example in herself the
sacrifices he demanded. She abetted him, as she had promised, in all
his tactics; lent the full force of an authority, which his sweetness
and modesty could by no means arrogate to himself, to compel the reforms
he sang. She gave, amongst other gifts, her whole present soul to the
righting of the wrong done to the girl Lucia and her father; and when
all her efforts to discover the vanished Tassino had failed, and she,
having sent on her own initiative a compensatory purse of gold to the
blind armourer, had learned how Lucia had banged the gift and the door
in the messenger's face, was readily mollified by Bernardo's tender
remonstrance: 'Ah, sweet Madonna! what gold can give her father eyes, or
her child a name!'
'What! it is born?' she murmured.
'I saw it yesterday,' said Bembo. 'It lay in her lap, like the billet
that kills a woman's heart.'
And, indeed, he had not, because of his re-exaltation, ceased to visit
his friends, or to go to occasional discussion with the crabbed Montano;
whose moroseness, nevertheless, was petrifying. Yet had he even sought
to interest the Duchess there; though, for once, without avail; for she
dared not seem to lend her countenance to that banned, if injured,
misanthrope.
So she led the chorus to his soloing, and helped and mothered him with
an infatuation beyond a mother's. Like the Emperor's jewelled
nightingale, he was the sweetest bird to pet while his tricks were new.
His voice entranced the echoes of those sombre chambers and
blood-stained corridors. The castello was reconsecrated in his breath,
and the miasma from its fearful pits dispelled. His lute was his
psalter and psaltery in one: it interpreted him to others, and himself
to himself. Its sob was his sorrow, and its joy his jubilance. He
could coax from it wings to expression inexpressible by speech alone.
Here is one of his latest parables, or apologues, baldly running, as it
appears, on the familiar theme, which, through that vehicle, he
translated for his hearers into rapture:--
'Down by a stream that muttered under ice--
Winter's thin wasted voice, straining for air--
Lo! Antique Pan, gnawing his grizzled beard.
Chill was the earth, and all the sky one stone,
The shrunk sedge shook with ague; the wild duck,
Squattering in snow, sent out a feeble cry.
Like a stark root the black swan's twisted neck
Writhed in the bank. The hawk shook by the finch;
The stoat and rabbit shivered in one hole;
And Nature, moaning on a bedded drift,
Cried for delivery from her travail:--
"O Pan! what dost thou? Long the Spring's delayed!
O Pan! hope sickens. Son, where art thou gone?"
Thereat he heaved his brows; saw the starved fields,
The waste and horror of a world's eclipse;
And all the wrong and all the pity of it
Rushed from him in a roar:--
"I'm passed, deposed: call on another Pan!
Call Christ--the ates foretel him--he'll respond.
I'm old; grown impotent; a toothless dog.
New times, new blood: the world forgets my voice.
This Christ supplants me: call on him, I say.
Whence comes he? Whence, if not from off the streets?
Some coxcomb of the Schools, belike--some green,
Anaemic, theoretic verderer,
Shaping his wood-lore from the Herbary,
And Nature from his brazen window-pots.
The Fates these days have gone to live in town--
Grown doctrinaires--forgot their rustic loves.
Call on their latest nominee--call, call!
He'll ease thee of thy produce, bear it home,
And in alembics test and recompose it.
Call, in thine agony--loud--call on Christ:
He'll hear maybe, and maybe understand!"
"No Pan," she wailed: "No other Pan than thou!"
"What!" roared he, mocking: "Christ not understand?
Your loves, your lores, your secrets--will he not?
Not by his books be master of your heart?
Gods! I am old. I speak but by the woods;
And often nowadays to rebel ears.
He'll do you better: fold your fogs in bales;
Redeem your swamps; sweep up your glowing leaves;
People his straight pastures with your broods;
Shape you for man, to be his plain helpmeet;
No toys, no tricks, no mysteries, no sports--
But sense and science, scorning smiles and tears."
Raging, he rose: A light broke on the snow:
The ice upon the river cracked and spun:
Long milky-ways of green and starry flowers
Grew from the thaw: the trees nipped forth in bud:
The falcon sleeked the wren; the stoat the hare;
And Nature with a cry delivered was.
Pan stared: A naked child stood there before him,
Warming a frozen robin in his hands.
Shameless the boy was, fearless, white as milk;
No guile or harm; a sweet rogue in his eyes.
And he looked up and smiled, and lisped a word:--
"Brother, _thou_ take and cure him, make him well.
Or teach _me_ of thy lore his present needs."
"_Brother!_" choked Pan. "_My_ father was a God.
Who art thou?" "Nature's baby," said the child.
"Man was _my_ father; and my name is Christ."
He slid his hand within the woodman's palm:--
"Dear elder brother, guide me in my steps.
I bring no gift but love, no tricks but love's--
To make sweet flowers of frost--locked hearts unfold--
The coney pledge the weasel in a kiss.
Canst thou do these?" "No, by my beard," said Pan.
Gaily the child laughed: "Clever brother thou art;
Yet can I teach thee something." "All," said Pan.
He groaned; the child looked up; flew to his arms:--
"O, by the womb that bore us both, do love me!"
A minute sped: the river hushed its song:
The linnet eyed the falcon on its branch:
The bursting bud hung motionless--And Pan
Gave out a cry: "New-rooted, not deposed!
Come, little Christ!" So hand in hand they passed,
Nature's two children reconciled at last.'
And what about Messer Lanti and the Fool Cicada during this period of
their loved little saint's apotheosis? Were _they_ more _advocati
diaboli_ than Bona? Alas! they were perhaps the only two, in all that
volatile city, to accept him, with a steadfast and indomitable faith, at
his true worth. There was no angelic attribute, which Carlo, the honest
blaspheming neophyte, would not have claimed for him--with blows, by
choice; no rebuke, nor suggestion, nor ordinance issuing from his lips,
which he would not accept and act upon, after the necessary little show
of self-easing bluster. It was as comical as pathetic to observe the
dear blunderhead's blushing assumptions of offence, when naughtiness
claimed his intimacy; his exaggerated relish of spring water; his stout
upholding, on an empty stomach, of the aesthetic values of abstinence.
But he made a practical virtue of his conversion, and was become
frequent in evidence, with his strong arm and voice and influence, as a
Paladin on behalf of the oppressed. He and Cicada were the boy's
bristling watch-dogs, mastiff and lurcher; and were even drawn, by that
mutual sympathy, into a sort of scolding partnership, defensive and
aggressive, which had for its aim the vindication of their common love.
There, at least, was some odd rough fruit of the reconciliation preached
by little Bembo between the God-man and the man-Nature. Such a
relationship had been impossible in the old days of taskmaster and
clown. Now it was understood between them, without superfluous words,
that each held the other responsible to him for his incorruptible
fidelity to his trust, and himself for a sleepless attention to the duty
tacitly and by implication assigned to be his. That is to say, Messer
Carlo's strength and long sword, and the other's shrewd wit, were
assumed, as it were, for the right and left bucklers to the little
charioteer as he drove upon his foes.
Carlo had a modest conception of his own abilities; yet once he made the
mistake of appropriating to himself a duty--or he thought it one--rather
appertaining to his fellow buckler. They had been, the Fool and
himself, somewhat savagely making merry on the subject of Bona's
conversion--in the singleness of which, to be candid, they had not much
faith--when his honest brain conceived the sudden necessity of bluntly
warning the little Bernardino of the danger he was courting in playing
with such fire. His charge, no sooner realised than acted upon, took
the boy, so to speak, in the wind. Bembo gasped; and then
counter-buffed with angelic fury:--
'Who sleeps with a taper in his bed invites his own destruction? Then
wert thou sevenfold consumed, my Carlo. O, shame! she is my mother!'
'Nay, but by adoption,' stammered the other abashed.
'Her assumption of the name should suffice to spare her. O, thou pagan
irreclaimable--right offspring of Vesta and the incestuous Saturn! Is
this my ultimate profit of thee? Go hide thy face from innocence.'
Lanti, thus bullied, turned dogged.
'I will hide nothing. Abuse my candour; spit on my love if thou wilt,
it will endure for its own sake,' and he flung away in a rage.
But he had better have deputed the Fool to a task needing diplomacy.
Cicada laughed over his grievance when it was exploded upon him.
'Shouldst have warned Bona herself, rather,' he said.
'How!' growled the other: 'and been cashiered, or worse, for my pains?'
'Not while her lost ring stands against her; and thou, her private agent
for its recovery.'
'True; from the mud.'
'Well, if thou think'st so.'
'Dost thou not?'
'Ay; for as mud is mud, Narcisso is Narcisso.'
'Narcisso!'
He roared, and stared.
'Has _he_ got it?'
'I do not say so.'
'I will go carve the truth out of him.'
'Or Monna Beatrice.'
'What!'
The great creature fairly gasped; then muttered, in a strangled voice:
'Why should she want it? What profit to her?'
'What, indeed?' whined the Fool. 'She fancies Messer Bembo too well to
wish to injure him, or through him, Bona--does she not?'
Carlo's brow slowly blackened.
'I will go to her,' he said suddenly. The Fool leapt to bar his way.
'You would do a foolish thing,' he said--'with deference, always with
deference, Messer. This is my part. Leave it to me.'
Carlo choked, and stood breathing.
'Why,' said the Fool, 'these are the days of circumspection. God, says
Propriety, made out hands and faces, and whatever else that is not
visible was the devil's work. You would be shown, by Monna Beatrice,
for all her self-acknowledged parts, just clean hands and a smiling
face. She conforms to fashion. For the rest, the devil will attend to
his own secrets.'