'God a' mercy! Lady, lady! the boy, the very boy you sped the ring to
kill.'
'Dead!' she whispered.
'Ay,' he snivelled from the ground; 'what would you? dead as last
Childermas--starved to death, in the "Hermit's Cell" they call it, by
the Duke's orders.'
Her fingers battled softly with her throat.
'Dead!' she said again. 'Narcisso, good Narcisso, who hath gulled thee
with this lie?'
'No lie,' he answered, squatting, reassured, on his hams. ''Twas Messer
Tassino, no less, that carried thy token to Vigevano. 'Twas no later
than yesternight I met our fine cockerel louping from the stews. A' was
drunk as father Noah--babbled and blabbed, a' did--perked up a's comb,
and cursed me for presuming fellowship with a duke's minion. I plied
him further, e'en to tears and confidence--had it all out of him; how
a'd carried the ring for Messer Ludovic, and brought back the deadly
order. Jacopo nipped the Saint that noon. A's singing in paradise
these days past.'
Beatrice stood and listened. A dreadful smile was on her lips. But,
when she spoke, it was with wooing softness.
'Good trust--always the faithful trust. Why, Narcisso, what should I do
betraying thee? We'll work and end together, and take our wages. Dead,
do you say? Why, then, all's said. Now go, and tuck thyself within the
roof till the storm pass. This lightning's all below. Go, comrade, do
you hear?'
He dwelt a moment only to gasp and mumble out his thanks; then turned
and slouched away.
For minutes she dwelt as he had left her, rigid, smiling, bloodless.
Presently, still standing motionless, she moved her lips and was
muttering:--
'Dead? So swift? Made sure against all chances? Starved? He said
starved. Not to that I betrayed him. Inhuman hound! Thou mightst have
spared him bread!--left sorrow and cold durance to work their lingering
end. What then? Why, Bona then--Bona made widow; free to work her
will. Should _I_ be the better?--Dead? was he not always dead to me?
Starved to death! O, hell heat Lampugnani's dagger scarlet, that it
hiss and bubble in his flesh! Galeazzo! Galeazzo! I'll follow soon to
nurse thy pains to ecstasy!'
She fell silent; presently began to sway; then, with a sudden shriek,
had leapt upon the picture, and torn aside its curtain.
'Bernardo!' she moaned and sobbed--'Bernardo, I loved thee! O God! he
eats me with his eyes. Here, here! fasten with thy starved lips. I'll
not speak or cry, though they burrow to my heart. All thine--hold
on--I'll smile and pet mine agony--Bernardo----!'
In the tumult of her passion she heard a sound at the door; caught her
breath; caught herself to knowledge of herself, and, instinctively
closing the curtain, stood panting, dishevelled, its hem in her hand.
Someone, something, had entered--a haggard, unshorn ghost of ancient
days. It came very softly, closing the door behind; then, set and
silent, moved upon her. Her pulses seemed to sink and wither.
'Carlo!' she shuddered softly.
It was fearful that the thing never spoke as it came on. Nor did she
speak again. Love that has once joined keeps understanding without
words. What has it bred but death? Here was the natural fruit of a sin
matured--she saw it gleam suddenly in his clutch.
She watched fascinated. As he drew near, without a word she slowly
raised her hands, and rent from her bosom its already desecrated veil.
Then at last she spoke--or whispered:--
'I'm ready. Here's where you kissed and sighed. Bloody thy bed.'
He took her to his remorseless grasp. She had often thrilled to know
her helplessness therein--wondered what it would be to feel it closed in
hate. Now she had her knowledge--and instantly, in an ecstasy of
terror, succumbed to it.
'No, no!' she gasped. 'Carlo, don't kill me!'
Voiceless still, he raised his hand. She gave a fearful scream.
'I never meant it. I'm innocent. Not without a word. Carlo! Carlo!--I
loved him!'
Writhing in her agony, she tore herself free a moment, and sank at his
feet, rending, as she fell, the curtain from its rings. His back was to
the wall. In a mirror opposite he caught the sudden vision of his
intent, and, looking down upon it, dim and spiritual, the sweet face of
the Saint.
The dagger dropped from his hand.
The silence of a minute seemed to draw into an age.
Suddenly he was groping and stumbling like a drunken man. Words came to
him in a babble:--
'Let be!--I'll go--spare her?--Where's thy Christ? He forgave too--I'm
coming--answer for me--here!'
And he drove a staggering course from the room.
Tears began to gush from her as she lay prone. Then suddenly, in a
quick impulse, she rose to her feet, and re-veiling the picture, turned
with her back to it.
'Ludovic remains,' she whispered.
Reeling, dancing, to himself it seemed, Carlo passed down the streets.
White was on the ground; his brain was thick with whirling flakes; the
roar of coming waters tingled in his veins. Sometimes he would pause
and look stupidly at his right hand, as if in puzzle of its emptiness.
There should have been something there--what was it?--a knife--a stone
for two birds--Beatrice--and then Galeazzo. What had he omitted? He
must go back and pick up the thread from the beginning.
The waters came on as he stood, not close yet, but portentous, with a
threatening roar. A crying shape, waving a bloody blade, sped towards
and past him.
'Arm, arm, for liberty!' it yelled as it ran. 'Tyranny is dead!'
Carlo chuckled thickly to himself.
'That was Olgiati. What does he with my dagger? I'll go and take it
from him.'
He turned, swaying, and in the act was swept upon, enveloped, and washed
over by the torrent. It stranded him against a wall, where he stood
blinking and giggling in the vortex of a multitudinous roar.
'Murdered! the Duke! Murdered! Close the gates!'
It thundered on and away. He looked at his hand once more; then turned
for home.
*CHAPTER XXVII*
Murdered? Ay; struck down in a moment on the threshold of God's house,
lest his bloody footsteps entering should desecrate its pavement;
snatched away to perdition from under the very shadows of stone saints,
the gleam of the golden doors fading out of the horror of his fading
eyes. He had had but time for one cry--'O Mother of God!'--a
soul-clutch as wild as when a drowning man grasps at a flowering reed.
In vain; he is under; the fair blossom whisks erect again, dashing the
tears from her eyes; the white face far below is a stone among the
stones.
'_So passeth the world's glory!_'
The choir sang, the organ thundered on; and still their blended fervour,
while the dead body was relaxing and settling into the pool itself had
made, rose poignant, sharper, more unearthly, piercing with tragic
utterance its own burden, until at length, flood crashing upon flood,
the roar of human passion below burst and overwhelmed it.
What had happened?
This.
As the Duke entered the church by the west door, a full-bodied
gentleman, dressed all in mail, with a jaque of crimson satin, had
stepped from the crowd to make a way for him; which having affected to
do, he had turned, and raising his velvet beret with his left hand, and
dropping on one knee as if to crave some boon, had swiftly driven a
dagger into Galeazzo's body, and again, as the Duke fell away from the
stroke, freeing the blade, into his throat. Whereat, springing on the
mortal cry that followed, flew other sparks of crimson from the body of
the spectators, and pierced the doomed man with vicious stings,
labouring out cries as they stabbed:--
'For my sister!'
'For liberty!'--until the hilts slipping in their fingers sent their
aims wavering.
It was all the red act of a moment--the lancing of a ripened
abscess--the gush, the scream, the silence.
And then, the sudden stun and stupefaction yielding to mad tumult.
None might know the gross body of this terror; only for the moment red
coats and their partisans seemed paramount. But for the moment. The
next, the scarlet clique seemed to break up and scatter, like a ball of
red clay in a swirl of waters, and, flying on all sides, was caught and
held in isolated particles among the throng. Whereat, for the first
time, authority began to feel its paralysed wits, and to counter-shriek
the desperate appeals of murder to rally and combine for liberty. A
mighty equerry of the Duke, one da Ripa, fought, bellowing and
struggling, to pull out his sword. Francione, a fellow of Visconti's,
stabbed him under the armpit, and he wobbled and dropped amid the
screaming crush, grinning horribly. Lampugnani, smiling and
insinuative, slipped into a wailing group of women, and urged his soft
passage through it, making for the door. He was almost out when,
catching his foot in a skirt plucked sickly from his passing, he
stumbled and rolled; and the spear of a giant Moor, who on the instant
mounted the steps, passed through his throat.
His body was first-fruits to the frenzied people without. They seized
and bowled it through the streets, whacking it into shreds; then
returned, breathed and blooded, for more. They were in high feather,
ripe for prey and plunder. Galeazzo was dead! Viv' Anarchia!
They pressed their way into the tumult; snatched gems and trinkets from
the hair and bosoms of girls half mad with terror; took their brief toll
of dainties, and only fell away, pushing and gabbling, before the onset
of the ducal guard.
Order followed presently; and then the tally and reckoning. The last
fell swift enough to crown an orgy of perfection: screams in the
squares; dismembered limbs; mangled scarecrows tossing in file from the
battlements. Only two principals, Olgiati and Visconti, escaping for
the moment, were reserved for later torments. A conspiracy, like near
all blood conspiracies, abortive; founded on the common error that
slaves abhor their bonds. They do not, in this world of unequal gifts
and taxes. Moreover, it is inconsistent to suppose one can inaugurate
an era of tolerance with murder.
Olgiati, the last of that dark band to suffer, was also its only martyr.
He had struck for a principle, straight in itself, oblique in its
fanatic workings. Cursed by his father, abandoned by his friends and
relatives, committed to unspeakable tortures, his courage never blenched
or wavered. He gloried in his deed to the last; and, if a prayer
escaped him, it was only that his executioners should vouchsafe him
strength at the end to utter forth his soul in prayer. To Bona he sent
a gentle message, deprecating his own instrumentality in the inevitable
retributions of Providence. She answered, saintly vengeance, with a
priest, urging him to save his soul by penitence. He retorted that, by
God's mercy, his final deed should serve his sins for all atonement;
and, so insisting, was carried to his mortal mangling. At the last
moment a cry escaped him: 'Mors acerba: fama perpetua!' and, with that,
and the shriek of 'Courage, Girolamo!' on his lips, he passed to his
account.
'The peace of Italy is dead!' cried Pope Sixtus on the day when news of
the crime was brought to him. His prophecy found its first
justification in a fervent appeal from the Duchess of Milan that he
would posthumously absolve of his sins the man whom 'next to God she had
loved above all else in the world.'
And no doubt, being left to the present mercy of factions, she believed
it.
*EPILOGUE*
Long after the body of that tragedy had been committed to its eternal
sleep, silently and by night, under the pavement of the vast cathedral;
long after, in years so remote that the very bones of it, crumbling into
ashes, might hardly be distinguished from the fibrous weeds of the
golden shroud in which they had first been laid, fit moral to the deadly
irony of human glory; long after, when the rise and fall of Ludovico
Sforza, ripe achievement of his house and race, were already grown a
tale for the wind to sob and whisper through lonely keyholes of a
winter's night, there survived in Lombard legend the story of a
marvellous boy, who, coming to earth and Milan once upon a time with
some strange message of Christ in Arcady, had taken the winter in men's
hearts with a brief St. Martin's summer of delight, and had so, in the
bright morning of his promise, been snatched back to the heaven's
nursery from which he had estrayed, leaving faint echoes of divinity in
his wake. It whispered of a tomb, to which old tyranny had consigned
this embodied angel, found emptied, like its sacred prototype's; and of
the awe thereat which had fallen on its searchers. A fable, scared away
at first in the strenuous roar of Time struggling for the mastery of
great events; yet, in the later days of peace, still to be heard, very
faint and far like a lark's song, dropping from the clouds.
Sweet music, but a fable; and therefore more potent than reality to move
men's hearts. Beatitudes are pronounced on things less tangible. Had
Bernardo preached a creed more orthodox, he had been at this day a
calendared saint on the strength of it. But he had only interpreted the
human Christ to a people his prince and comrade had wrought to redeem.
There had been those who--unless crushed under the fall of the tyranny
which had sustained them--might have nipped the legend at its sprouting;
telling how, on the night of that first dark and dire confusion, a
cavalier, taking advantage of the brief anarchy that reigned, had
appeared, with a force of his adherents, before the provost-marshal of
that date, and had demanded of his hands the body of the martyred boy;
how, kissing and wrapping the poor corpse in a costly cloak, this
cavalier had lifted it with giant strength to his pommel, and,
dismissing his silent followers, had ridden forth with his burden into
the snowy darkness of the plains; how, in the ghostly dawn of a winter's
morning, there had broken tears and wailing from a spectral throng
gathered about the portal of an abbey in the distant hills; how, when
presently the spring came with music of birds and gushing waters, there
were no turves so green, no daisies so lush and fearless in all the
monastic God's-acre, as those which the heart-stricken sorrow and
tenderness of a newly received brother had brought to cover the grave of
one, the youngest and most innocent of all the silent community gathered
thereto.
God rest thee, Carlo! Peace to thy faithful, passionate heart.
An imperishable love, whose fruits, descended from that ancient stock,
we eat to-day.
But the body of the Fool, flung into a pit, was the carrion which first
enriched its roots.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press