"Amor che a null' amato amar perdona."
Bellaroba, who pleased the Countess, for the same reasons, no doubt, did
not please the Count. It is possible to be too demure, and very little
good to have domestic charm if you shut the door upon the amateur.
Lionella had never had so much of her lord's society as during the month
that followed her return to Ferrara. She did not complain of this; on
the contrary, the more the maid held off and the man pursued, the more
Lionella was entertained. Angioletto, invited to share her sport, proved
dull. She confessed to more than one of her women (including Bellaroba)
that if she had not been very much in love with the poet she would have
thought him a fool. You see that she made no secret of her weakness. The
fact is, she did not consider it a weakness; whereby you have this
remarkable position of affairs at the Schifanoia, that Bellaroba was
invited to be a student of her husband's amours, and he of hers.
Considering the state of their secret hearts this might have led to
matter of tragic concern; if they had loved less it would have done so.
As it was, they were quite indifferent. Their hours were a series of
breathless escapades--romance at fever heat. Stolen meetings before
dawn among the dewy rose-bushes, chance touchings, chance kisses,
embraces half tasted, and looks often crossed--of such were their days
at the Schifanoia. Meantime a coiled ladder watched out the sun from a
myrtle thicket, of which and its works came their happy nights. Then, as
she lay in his arms, the Maid of Honour vanished in the child who was so
lovely because she so loved; she could prattle, in the soft Venetian
brogue, of boundless faith in her little lord, of her simple admiration
of him and all he did, of her wonder and delight to be loved. She could
tell him of what she could do, and of how much she could never do, to
please him and pay him honour. And Angioletto would nod gravely at each
point that she made, and kiss her now and then very softly to show her
that he was perfectly satisfied. So soon as the first swallow twittered
in the eaves, or the first pale line of light trembled at the casement,
he had to fly. But he waited in the rosery till she came tiptoe out; and
then the day's alarms and the day's delight began. Eh! It was a royal
month, a honeymoon indeed!
But it could not last--barely saw its round of eight and twenty days.
Lionella was a lady born, as it were, in the purple. Command sat lightly
on her; she had never been disobeyed. She now grew querulous, exacting,
suspicious, moody, sometimes petulant, sometimes beseeching. It gave
Angioletto the deuce's own time now and then; but he might yet have
weathered the rocks--for his tact was only equalled by his good
temper--if the Countess had not precipitated matters. There came a day,
and an hour of a day, when she spoke to him. She had spoken before; her
ambitions had always been verbal--but now they were literal, all the
"t's" were crossed. That was a moment for Angioletto to take with quick
breath.
He took it so. Instead of hinting at his duty, or hers, he blundered out
the fact that he did not love her.
"Dog," cried the Countess, "do you dare to tell me that?"
"Madama, I do indeed," he answered sadly, for he saw his house about his
ears.
Lionella checked herself; she bit her lip, put her hands ostentatiously
behind her back.
"You had better leave the house, Master Angioletto," said she drily,
"before I go further and see to it."
He bowed himself out. Then he sought his poor Bellaroba, found her in
the garden, drew her aside without trouble of a pretext, and told her
the whole story.
"My lovely dear," he said, "I am a broken man. There has been a terrible
scene with Madama, in which she got so much the worst of it that I was
very triumphantly ruined. You behold me decked with the ashes of my
scorched prosperity. What is to be done with you? For I must go."
"Oh, Angioletto," cried Bellaroba, trembling and catching at his breast,
"won't you--can't you--ruin me too? Then we shall be happy again."
He pressed her to his heart. "Dearest dear," he said, half laughing,
half sobbing, "you are quite ruined enough. Stay as you are. I will see
you every night What! By the Mass, are you not my wife?"
"Of course I am, Angioletto. But nobody thinks so--not even any priest."
"Eh!" he cried, "but that is all the better. Only you and I and Madonna
the Virgin of the Greeks know it. She never blabs secrets, and you dare
not, and I can't. So you see it is well arranged."
She loved him most of all in this gay humour, and provoked him to new
flights.
"But, you wild boy, how can you see me when you are ruined?" she asked,
all her roses in flower at the fun of the thing. "How can you be in the
Schifanoia if you are thrust out of it?"
Angioletto, with a mysterious air, kissed her for answer. "Leave that to
me, my dear," he said. "Never have another of the maids to sleep with
you, and lock your chamber door. Now I must go, because I am kicked out.
Good-bye, my bride; I shall see you long before another dawn."
She let him go at last, and turned to her duties with less sighing than
you would have supposed, and no tears at all. Her belief in the wisdom,
audacity, and decision of her Angioletto was absolute. She had never
known him to fail. Yet if she chanced to think of the towering Count
Guarini plying her with flowers and sweatmeats, she shivered to remember
her citadel naked of all defences. This made her feel homesick for her
lover's arms. Like a sensible girl, therefore, she thought of the Count
as little as possible; still less of another sinister apparition, that
of the obsequious Captain Mosca, craning his lean neck round the corners
of her vision, grinning from ear to ear.
Free of the Schifanoia (whose dust he was yet careful to keep upon his
shoes for the sake of her it harboured), Angioletto walked briskly down
the street, shaping his course for the Borgo. He had been rounding a
plan even while he was announcing to Bellaroba that he had it cut and
dried; and now he was to execute it. True, it was a little extravagant,
depended too much, perhaps, upon other people's estimations of him
tallying with his own; but you will have found out by this time that the
youth was a realist. Ideas stood for things with him; and, as he said,
if he could not make them stand so to his auditory he was no poet. This
was a heresy he could not allow even supposititiously. The idea was
excellent; the thing, therefore, no less. Therefore he concluded that he
should not fail of his plan.
Beyond the Porta Angeli, in Borso's day, was to be found a huddle of
tenements--fungus-growth upon the city wall--single-storied,
single-roomed affairs, mostly the lodging of artificers in the lesser
crafts. Among them all there was but one of two floors, a substantial
red-brick little house with a most grandiloquent chimney-stack. And very
rightly it was so, for it belonged to the Court chimney-sweep.
On this eventful noon Sor Beppo, the sweep, was sitting on his doorstep
in the sun, eating an onion, one of many which reposed in a vinegar
bath on his knees. He was quite black, save where a three-days beard
lent a gleam of snow to chaps and chin; being toothless, he was an
indifferent performer upon the onion. But his hearing was as keen as his
eyesight. He caught Angioletto's vivacious heeltaps upon the flags, and
peered from burly brows at the smart little gentleman, cloaked,
feathered, and gaudy, who looked as suitable to his dusty surroundings
as a red poppy to a rubbish heap.
Angioletto, stopping before him, took off his scarlet cap with a
flourish.
"Well, young stabbing blade," said Beppo, "and who may you be?"
"Sir," replied the youth, "I am a poet." Beppo rubbed his shooting chin
with a noise like the scraping of nutmegs.
"Well," said he, "I'll not deny that it's a trade, and a lawful trade;
but for my part I sweep noblemen's chimneys and am proud of it. Shake
hands, poet."
They shook hands, with great cordiality on the poet's part.
"Sit down, poet," said Beppo.
Angioletto sat on the doorstep beside him without a word.
"Will you have an onion, my friend?" the old fellow went on to ask.
"Thank you, Sor Beppo, but I have already dined. Let me rather talk to
you while you finish your meal."
"It is not so much a meal as a relish," said the sweep. "But talk
away--we'll never quarrel over terms."
"I hope not," Angioletto took him up; "because I have done with
poetising and have a mind to try your trade."
Beppo, his mouth full of onion, paused in his bite to gape at this
dapper page, who, all scarlet and white as he was, talked after such a
fashion.
"How'll that be now?" he said. "You've never come all this way to crack
a joke?"
"Ah, never in the world, my friend," cried Angioletto. "I am in
earnest."
"You may be as earnest as a friar in the pulpit, and yet pretty bad at
chimney-work, young master. What do you know of it, pray?"
"Nothing at all," replied Angioletto, as if that helped him.
"Look at that now," cried the triumphant Sor Beppo.
"Pardon me, Master Beppo," said the youth, "you cannot look at it yet,
but you very soon shall. Have you a chimney to hand?"
"Ah, I might have that," the old man agreed, with a chuckle which ended
as a snort. "There might be a chimney in my house that's not been swept
for thirty year, having little time and less inclination to sweep 'em
for nothing but glory. But, happen there were such a piece of work, what
then?"