'I would I could fathom thee. I would I had the ring.'
'I would thou hadst,' answered Cicada. ''Twould be a good ring to set
in our Duchess's little nose, to persuade her from routling in
consecrated ground: a juster weapon in thy hands than in some other's.
Well, be patient; I may obtain it for thee yet.'
He meant, at least, to set his last wits to the task. Somehow, he was
darkly and unshakably convinced, this same Lion ring was the pivot upon
which all his darling's fortunes turned. That it was not really lost,
but was being held concealed, by some jealous spirit or spirits, against
the time most opportune for procuring the boy's, and perhaps others',
destruction by its means, he felt sure. All Milan was not in one mind
as to the disinterested motives of its Nathan. Tassino, Narcisso, the
dowager of Casa Caprona, even the urbane Messer Ludovico himself, to
name no others, could hardly be shown their personal profits in the
movement. They might all, as the world's ambitions went, be excused
from coveting the stranger's promotion. And there was no doubt that, at
present, he was paramount in the eyes of the highest. That, in itself,
was enough to make his sweet office the subject of much scepticism and
blaspheming. Tough, wary work for the watch-dogs, Cicada pondered. That
same evening he was walking in the streets, when a voice, Visconti's,
muttered alongside him:--
'Good Patch, hast been loyal so far to thy bargain. Hold to it for thy
soul's sake. There are adders in Milan.' Then he bent closer, and
whispered: 'A word in thy ear: is the ring found yet?'
The Fool's hard features did not twitch. He shook his head.
'Marry, sir,' answered he, as low, 'the mud is as close a confidant as
I. I have not heard of its blabbing.'
'So much the better,' murmured the other, and glided away. But he left
Cicada thinking.
'It was not for them, then, the conspirators, that Narcisso stole it.
And yet he stole it--that I'll be sworn. For whom? Why, for Monna
Beatrice. For why? Why, for a purpose that I'll circumvent--when I
guess it. A passenger going by cursed him under his breath. The oath,
profound and heartfelt, was really a psychologic note in the context of
this history. Cicada heard it, and, looking round, saw, to his
amazement, the form of the very monster of his present deliberations.
Narcisso, the rancorous mongrel, having snarled his hatred of an old
associate, who, he verily believed, had once betrayed him, slouched,
with a heavier vindictiveness, on his way. The Fool, inspired, skipped
into cover, and peeped. He knew that the coward creature, once secure
of his distance, would turn round to sputter and glower. He was not
wrong there, nor in his surmise that, finding him vanished, Narcisso
would continue his road in reassurance of his fancied security. He saw
him actually turn and glare; distinguished, as plainly as though he
heard it, the villainous oath with which the monster flounced again to
his gait. And then, very cautiously, he came out of his hiding, and
slunk in pursuit.
It could serve, at least, no bad purpose, he thought, to track the beast
to his lair; and, with infinite circumspection, he set himself to the
task.
It proved a simple one, after all--the more so as the animal, it
appeared, was tenant in a very swarming warren, where concealment was
easy. It was into a frowzy hole that, in the end, he saw him
disappear--a tunnel, with a grating over it, like a sewer-trap.
And so, satisfied and not satisfied, he was turning away, when he was
conscious in a moment of a face looking from the grating.
A minute later, threading his path along a by-alley, he emerged upon a
sweeter province of the town, and stood to disburden himself of a mighty
breath.
'So!' he muttered: 'He is there, is he! Well, the plot grows
complicate.'
*CHAPTER XVII*
There was a quarter of Milan into which the new light penetrated with
some odd uncalculated effects. It was called, picturesquely enough,
'The Vineyard,' and as such certainly produced a great quantity of
full-blooded fruit. Vines that batten on carrion grow fat; and here was
the mature product of a soil so enriched. There was no disputing its
appetising quality. That derived from the procreant old days of
paganism, before the germ of the first headache had flown out of
Pandora's box into a bung-hole. 'The Vineyard's' body yet owed to
tradition, if centuries of adulteration had demoralised its spirit.
Still, altogether, it was faithfuller of the soil, self-consciously
nearer to the old Nature, than was ever the extrinsic Guelph or
Ghibelline that had usurped its kingdom. Wherefore, it seemed, it had
elected to construe this new reactionism, this _redintegratio amoris_,
this sudden much-acclaiming of Nature, into a special vindication of
itself, its tastes, methods and appetites, as representing the
fundamental truth of things; and, _ex consequenti_, to appropriate
Messer Bembo for its own particular champion and apologist.
Alas, poor Parablist! There is always that awakening for an enlightened
agitator in any democratic mission. Does he look for some comprehension
by the Demos of the necessity of _radical_ reform, his eyes will be
painfully opened. The pruning, by its leave, shall never be among the
suckers down by the root, but always among the lordly blossoms. Shall
Spartacus once venture openly to stoop with his knife, he shall lose at
a blow the popular suffrage. At a later date, Robespierre, who was not
enlightened, had to subscribe to the misapplication of his own reforms,
or be crushed by the demon he had raised. Here in Milan, 'The Vineyard'
was the first to renounce its champion, when once it found itself to be
intimately included in that champion's neo-Christianising scheme.
Alas, poor Parablist! Not Reason but Fanaticism is the convincing
reformer! the bigot, not the saint, the effective drover of men.
In the meanwhile 'The Vineyard' swaggered and held itself a thought more
brazenly than heretofore, on the strength of its visionary election.
Always a clamorous rookery, one might have fancied at this time a
certain increase in the boisterous obscenity of its note, as that might
presage the fulfilment of some plan for its breaking out, and planting
itself in new black colonies all over the city. But as certainly, if
this were so, its illusionment was a very may-fly's dance.
Now as, on a noon of this late Autumn, we are brought to penetrate its
intricacies, a certain symbolic fitness in its title may or may not
occur to us. Supposing that it does, we will accept this Via
Maladizione where we stand, this gorge of narrow high-flung tenements,
looped between with festoons of glowing rags, for the supports and dead
trailers of a gathered vintage. Below, the vats are full to brimming,
and the merchants of life and death forgathered in the markets.
Half-way down the street a little degraded church suddenly spouts a
friar, who, punch-like, hammers out on the steps his rendering of the
new nature, which is to remember its cash obligations to Christ, and so
vanishes again in a clap of the door. A barber, shaving a customer in
the open street, gapes and misses his stroke, thereby adding a trickle
to the sum of the red harvest. Mendicants pause and grin; oaths rise
and buzz on all sides, like dung-flies momentarily disturbed. And
predominant throughout, the vintagers, the true natives of the soil,
swarm and lounge and discuss, under a rent canopy, the chances of the
season and its likely profits.
Ivory and nut-brown are they all, these vintagers, with cheeks like
burning leaves, and hair blue-black as grape-clusters, and eloquent
animal eyes, and, in the women, copious bosoms half-veiled in tatters,
like gourds swelling under dead foliage. But the milk that plumps these
gourds is still of the primeval quality. Tessa's passions are of the
ancient dimensions, if her religion is of to-day. Her assault and
surrender borrow nothing from convention. No billing and rhyming for
her, with canzonarists and madrigalists under the lemon trees, in the
days when the awnings are hung over to keep the young fruit from
scorching; but rough pursuit, rather, and capture and fulfilment--all
uncompromising. She is here to eat and drink and love, to enjoy and
still propagate the fruits of her natural appetites. She does not, like
Rosamonda, brush her teeth with crushed pearls; she whets and whitens
them on a bone. She does not powder her hair with gold dust; the sun
bronzes it for her to the scalp. No spikenard and ambergris make her
rags, or perfumed water her body, fragrant for her master's mouthing.
Yet is she desirable, and to know her is to taste something of the
sweetness of the apple that wrought the first discord. She is still a
child of Nature, though Messer Bembo's creed surpasses her best
understanding. She loves burnt almonds and barley-sugar, and crunches
them joyously whenever some public festival gives her the chance; but
the instincts of order and self-control are long vanished from the
category of her qualities, and she survives as she is more by virtue of
her enforced than her voluntary abstinences. For the rest,
civilisation--the civilisation that always encompasses without touching,
without even understanding her--has made her morals a terror, and the
morals of most of her comrades, male or female, of 'The Vineyard.'
It is, in fact, the sink of Milan, is this vineyard--a very low quarter
indeed; and, it is to be feared, other red juice than grapes' swells the
profits from its vats. Here are to be found, and engaged, a rich
selection of the tagliacantoni, the hired bravos who kill on a sliding
scale of absolution, with fancy terms for the murder which allows no
time for an act of contrition. Here the soldier of fortune, who has
gambled away, with his sword and body-armour, the chances of an
engagement to cut throats honestly, festers for a midnight job, and
countersigns with every vein he opens his own compact with the devil.
Here the oligarchy of beggars has its headquarters, and composes its
budgets of social taxation; and here, finally, in the particular den of
one Narcisso, desperado and ladrone, hides and shivers Messer Tassino,
once a Duchess's favourite.
He does not know why he is hidden here, or for what purpose Messer
Ludovico beguiled and threatened him from the more sympathetic custody
of his friend Jacopo, to deposit him in this foul burrow. But he feels
himself in the grip of unknown forces, and he fears and shivers greatly.
He is always shivering and snuffling is Messer Tassino; whining out,
too, in rebellious moods, his pitiful resentments and hatreds. His
little garish orbit is in its winter, and he cries vainly for the sun
that had seemed once to claim him to her own warmth and greatness. He
has heard of himself as renounced by her, condemned, and committed, on
his detested rival's warrant, to judgment by default. Yet, though it be
to save his mean skin, he cannot muster the moral courage to come forth
and right the wrong he has done. That, he knows, would spell his last
divorce from privilege; and he has not yet learned to despair. He had
been so petted and caressed, and--and there are no lusty babies to be
gathered from Messer Bembo's eyes. At least, he believes and hopes not;
and, in the meanwhile, he will lie close, and await developments a
little longer.
Perhaps, after all, there is knowledge if little choice in his decision.
He may be justified, of his experience, in being sceptical of the
disinterestedness of spiritual emotionalism, or at least of the feminine
capacity for accepting its appeal disinterestedly. But of this he is
quite sure--that sanctity itself shall not propitiate, by mere virtue of
its incorruptibility, the woman it has scorned; and, in that certainty,
and by reason of that experience, he nurses the hope of still profiting
by the revulsion of feeling which he foresees will occur in a certain
high lady as a consequence of her rebuff.
Still, however that may chance, he finds his present state intolerable.
It is not so much its dull and filthy circumstance that appals him,
though that is noxious enough to a boudoir exquisite; it is the shadow
of Messer Ludovico's purpose, shapeless, indistinct, eternally conning
him from the dark corners of his imagination, which takes the knees out
of his soul. Is he really his friend and patron, as he professes to be?
He recalls, with a sick shudder, how once, when in the full-flood of his
arrogance, he had dared to keep that smooth and accommodating prince
waiting in an ante-room while he had his hair dressed. He, Tassino, the
fungus of a night, had ventured to do this! What a fool he had been;
yet how worse than his own folly is the dissimulation which can ignore
for present profit so unforgettable an insult! It is not forgotten; it
cannot be; yet, to all appearances, Ludovico now visits him, on the rare
occasions when he does so, with the sole object of informing him,
sympathetically, of the progress of Bona's new infatuation. Why? He
has not the wit to fathom. Only he has not so much faith in this
disinterestedness as in the probability of its being a blind to some
deadly policy.
How he hates them all--the Duchess, the Prince, the whole world of
courtly rascals who have flattered him out of his obscurity only to play
with and destroy him! If he can once escape from this trap, he will show
them he can bite their heels yet. But what hope is there of escaping
while Ludovico holds the secret of the spring? Day after day finds him
gnawing the bars, and whimpering out his spite and impotence.
He has not failed, of course, to question his landlord Narcisso, or to
weep over the futile result. Even if the little wretch's tact and wit
were less negligible quantities, there is that of crafty doggedness in
his gaoler to baffle the shrewdest questioner. Deciding that the man is
in the paid confidence of the 'forces,' Tassino soon desists from
attempting to draw him, and vents on him instead his whole soul of
vengeful and disappointed spite.
Narcisso, for his part, offers himself quite submissively to the comedy;
waits on him with a sniggering deference; stands while he eats; brings
water, none the most fragrant, for him to dip his fingers in afterwards;
dresses his hair with a broken comb, and takes his own dressing for
pulling it with a grinning impassivity; lends, in short, his huge
carcass in every way to be the other's butt and footstool. This
exercise in overbearance is a certain relief to the prisoner; but, for
all the rest, his time hangs deadlily on his hands. There are no
restrictions placed upon him. He is free to come and go--as he dares.
His terror is held his sufficient gaoler, and it suffices. He never, in
fact, puts his nose outside the door, but contents himself, like the
waspish little eremite he has become, with criticising and cursing from
his solitary grille the limbs and lungs and life of the f[oe]tid world
in which his later fortunes seem cast. So much for Messer Tassino!
One particular night saw him cowering before the caldano, or little
domestic brazier, which must serve his present need in lieu of hotter
memories; for the season was chilling rapidly, and what freshness had
ever been in him was long since starved out. He was grown a little
grimy and unkempt in these days, and his clothes were stale. The room
in which he sat was, in its meanness and squalor, quite typically
Vineyardish. Its furniture was of the least and rudest; it had not so
much as a solitary cupboard to hold a skeleton; it was as naked to
inspection as honesty. That was its owner's way. Narcisso was a very
Dacoit in carrying all his simple harness on and about him. He cut his
throats and his meat impartially with the same knife; or toasted, as he
was doing now, slices of Bologna sausage on its point. His abortive
scrap of a face puckered humorously, as the other, drawing his cloak
tighter about him, damned the pitiful dimensions of their hearth.
'I would not curse the fire for its smallness, Messer,' he said. 'Wilt
need all thy breath some day for blowing out a furnace.'