Waking from a late troubled sleep, Ippolita found her little room
possessed by three noble ladies--Emilia Malaspina, Euforbia di
Ponterotto, and Domenica di Campodarsego--dressed all in saffron and
white (her sacred colours, they told her), who announced themselves,
with much kneeling and folding of arms over breasts, as her handmaids.
"Sagro cuor di Gesù!" thought poor Ippolita, "what a way to undo me!"
But aloud she only murmured, "Tante grazie, gentildonne," and got out of
bed.
They had prepared for her a scented bath, into which, in her dazed
condition, she entered without overmuch persuasion. True, she thought to
find her death in so much water, and crossed herself vehemently when
first it touched her back; but there might be worse deaths (she
supposed) than drowning for a poor girl bought and sold, and not so very
long ago a Jew had been baptized in Santa Giustina in water up to his
neck. Nothing, however, would induce her to sit down. They dressed her
then in silk, tied and garlanded her hair, put a gold chain round her
neck, silken shoes on her feet--talking in quick whispers to each other
all the time; and so announced with curtsies that she might enter the
litter as soon as she would. She was at the disposition of these ladies,
was her faltered reply. Emilia waved her hand out of the little window;
chords of music sounded from the street; the voices of men and ladies
rose upon a madrigal--
"Fior' di Maggio--Soave, pio e saggio--Salve, Ippolita!"--the work of
Alessandro's muse upon that night of discord from the Jew. So she went
downstairs.
The Vicolo Agnus Dei--a blind alley of low jutting houses over arcades,
full of squalor, pink wash, children, and cats--was on this early
morning ablaze with colour and music. From wall to wall (and eight feet
will measure that) it seemed packed with the nobility. Tousled heads
from above looked down curiously on heads elaborately frizzed, on
scarlet caps, on plumes, on garlands, on jewelled necks. Poverty and
riches touch at their extremes, like houses in the South. The shoulders
of the ladies at play were no barer than those of the slatterns who
gaped at them playing; but for Ippolita, who had always been a decent
girl, let us hope her blushes were a cloak. She felt naked. And the
bath, remember, had unnerved her.
What these neighbours of hers may have thought is no concern of ours,
since the actors in the play took no concern in it. Twenty pieces of
silver had bought an incomparable peg for their conceits. They were
rescuing, they said to each other, a lily from the gutter, taking a
jewel from a dirty finger, glorifying the glories--a pious act which
could not fail of returning honour to those who took honour in doing
it. The people! Sacks to be filled with garlic and black wine, liver and
blood-puddings--grunting hogs, let them keep their sty. Let them not
dare (and in truth it never occurred to them to dare) interfere with the
diversions of the great. Yet as the veiled sacrifice went to mount the
litter, one brown-eyed rascal from an upper window, holding a towel over
her neck, shrilled out in homely patois, "A vederti, 'Polita mia!" and
Ippolita turned her lovely head and showed for a moment her shining wet
eyes to those who watched. She smiled tenderly at the send-off, but
"Addio, Annina, addio!" she said softly, and turned bowing to her bowing
gaolers.
As the swaying litter of gold and white went out into the Pozzo Depinto
and turned up towards the Pontecorbo Gate; as the music and
chanting--"Candida Ippolita, premio d'Amore! Grazia insolita del sommo
Fattore!"--died away to a murmurous underflow of sound, perhaps a tongue
or two was thrust into a cheek or two, perhaps a bare shoulder shrugged
or one shock-head wagged to another. The air was sharp, beds still
warm--whose business was it? The street was left to the rats and
snuffing dogs again.
But Annina had sparks of fire in her brown eyes, and panted as she
tugged at her staylaces. It was not long before she clattered downstairs
on her clacking heels, and went to mark the cage they had gilded for her
dear Ippolita.
Those hierophants, that Collegio d'Amore (as the new style ran), bearing
in their midst the garlanded victim--Goddess at once and
Sacrifice--awoke the echoes of the streets without comment. The city
gates were open, it is true; in some churches the doors stood wide for
the first mass; they passed a priest or so just up, a friar or so,
furtive truants from their beds; then, at the edge of the Piazza del
Santo, Ippolita peeping through her curtains saw a little company of
goatherds, blanketted, brown-legged, shabby rogues, their feet white
with country dust, new in from the hills with their flocks. They blinked
to see the gay procession; but wistfully, longingly, she looked after
them from her cage. They were not so much market-stuff, per Dio! They
walked at large over bright hillsides, singing to the sky and the winds.
They were not pestered with love or fine buzzing ladies or capering
signori, who larded poor girls with compliments, and showed their teeth
most when they meant least. Ah, if she could run away! If she could hide
with them, lie on the hillsides while the goats cropped about her; lie
on her back, her hands a pillow, and sing to the sky and the winds
because she was so happy! The thought possessed her; she ached for
freedom; felt the water of desire hot in her mouth. The sleepy shepherds
huddled in their rags watched her go by; they little knew what a craving
the sight of their dusty ease had stirred in a heart whose covering was
fine silk and strung pearls. Her wrongs came back upon her like heaped
waters of a flood. That shameful bath--ah, Soul of Christ, to strip one
naked, and let souse in hot water, like a pig whose bristles must come
off! More than songs which she did not understand, more than
compliments which made her feel foolish and pictures which made her
look so, was this refined indignity. Seethed in water like a dead
pig--ah, Madonna! She arrived sulky--if so humble-minded a girl could be
sulky; defiant, suspicious, at least.
The place chosen for the new Collegio d'Amore was the Villa Venusta,
whose shady garden can still be seen from the Riviera Businello. This
garden is full of trees, myrtle, wisteria, lilac, acacia--flowering
trees--with a complement of firs and shining laurel to give a setting to
so much golden-green and white. It has a canal on two sides, is a deep,
leafy place, where nightingales sing day and night; it abounds in grass
lawns, flowers, weeping trees, and marble _hermæ_. The villa itself is
very stately, a three-storied house in the Venetian style, from whose
upper windows you can command a fine stretch of country; below you on
either hand the Piazza del Santo, the Prato della Valle, with their
enormous churches, pink and grey; beyond these the city walls, the green
plain; lastly, the ragged outline of the far distant hills. It has a
courtyard with lemon trees, long, dim rooms empty of all but coolness,
shuttered against the glare of noon; above, a great saloon coffered in
the ceiling, frescoed on the walls, with a dais and a throne; an open
loggia full of flowers; above all this again, raftered bedrooms smelling
of lavender. A roomy, stately place for those whose lives move easily in
such surroundings; for Ippolita, the girl of the people, happy in her
dark tenement in the Vicolo, gossip of the upper windows, shy beckoner
to the street, burnisher of doorposts at sundown--for Ippolita this
windy great house was a prison, neither more nor less.
It was a prison, at least, conducted according to the best rules of
gallantry then obtaining. They bowed her up the staircase to the
refectory: they sat her down and plied her on their knees with fruit and
cups of wine. They led her to the throne room, where, high above them
all, she was to sit, and (being crowned) hear them contend in verse and
prose for the privilege of her love for the day. It was all arranged.
She was to have a favourite every day, man or maid. Favour was to go by
merit among her slaves. The theme was always to be her incomparable
virtues--her beauty, discretion, wit (poor dumb fish!), her shining
chastity, power of binding and loosing by one soft blue ray from her
eyes, etc. They displayed her emblems on the walls--the peacock, because
her beauty was her pride, her pride her beauty; doves, because they were
Aphrodite's birds; rabbits, because the artist understood rabbits; the
beaver, that glorious witness of virtue, who makes himself less
certainly a beaver that he may be more safely a saint; the beaver, I
say, in white on a green field. Other symbols--the lily of her candour,
the rose of her glowing cheeks, the crocus of her hair, the pink
anemones which were her toes, the almond for her fingers: she saw
herself articulated; her fauna, her flora, her moral and physical
attributes cried at her from the four walls.
Ippolita sat very scared on her throne, and endured what she could by
catching firmly to the knobs of it and blinking her eyes. One by one
they came creeping, these silken ladies, these slashed and curled young
lords, to kiss her hand. "Dio mio!" thought she. "What is all this
about? And are maids courted this way among the great?" She knew very
little about it, yet was quite sure they were not. She wondered when
Alessandro's business was going to begin. As a matter of fact, it _had_
begun. He was now removing several inches of superfluous finger-nail
with a sword.
For the first day that same Alessandro del Dardo won her to himself by
his descant upon the theme, "How a gentleman may dismember himself
without dishonour for a lady's love; and how not."
"Now he has me," thought poor Ippolita, and set her teeth. But he lay at
her feet most of the day, and though at night he led her into the
garden, if you will believe me, he never even kissed her hand.
"Who is mad?" thought she to herself, staring from her bed into the
shadowy angles of the room. "Am I mad? Are these signori all mad? Is
this a mad-house? Dio! it soon should be at this rate." She cried
herself to sleep at last.
Next day it was Meleagro who won her by a careful consideration of the
question, "Whether or no, when a gentleman has served a lady for ten
years, and she falls sick of the small-pox, he is _ipso facto_ absolved
of his vow?" Meleagro decided that he was not, and was accepted by
Ippolita, not because she admired his reasoning but because she thought
it part of the game.
Next came the turn of Donna Emilia, a very burning poetess, for a
Sapphic ode; and so on and so on. After three days Ippolita found
herself yawning her head off; the longing for freedom returned, for the
open country, the hills, the goatherds. Not for her home in the Vicolo:
this everlasting love-making with its aftertaste of stale sugar had
turned her sick of Padua. The whole city, to her mind, reeked of
bergamot; she guessed a fawning lover at every street corner, a pryer at
every window--basta, basta, la città!
No: it was to the hills she lifted up her eyes, to the hills and the
swart goatherds free of their mystery. That _riviera_ across the canal,
where the budding planes made a mist of brown and rose, was a favourite
haunt of theirs. There they assembled and milked their goats, thence set
out homewards at night. Sitting in the pleached arbours, with two
adoring ladies at her feet and a little cluster of youths behind and
beside her, she used to peer long and earnestly through the branches to
see them collect their flocks and start for the hills at dusk. Lithe,
brown, sinewy lads they were! What long legs they had, with what bravery
wore their ragged cloaks! One carried a great bulging skin under his
arm--bagpipes! She was sure they made good music to each other in the
green country places. Very early in the morning she heard them come in;
they were known by their bells. She jumped out of her luxurious bed at
the first tinkle, and was at the shutter watching for them before ever
they rounded the angle of the Ponte della Morte. There they came! colour
of dust, with the straggling goats following after in a cloud of it. Her
impulse was to fling wide the casement, hold out both her arms, call to
them with all her might, "Ha! help, in the name of the Trinity! Take me
with you to the green hills. I am weary of life in this place!" Then,
knowing she could not, she would hold herself back by main force, stare
about her, run back, throw herself on the bed, lie there sobbing wildly,
and so be found by her ladies who came to put her in that detestable
bath. She was sure her skin was being rotted by so much water; she used
to feel her arms and thighs secretly to see if they were palpably more
flabby. It stood to reason that the water must soak in--where else could
it go to! She thought that she walked like a bladder, supposing a
bladder were to take itself legs. The whole affair was clean abominable;
but she saw no way out.
The way came.
V