stairs in a tower opening on the courtyard, beckoning the two youths to
follow him. Up and up they climbed, until at last the fool turned and
motioned them to halt.
“Come within,” he said to Giovanni. “Let your servant await you
with your baggage on the landing here. He will tell us if any one
approaches.”
The room in which Giovanni found himself was a small wainscoted
apartment in the top of the tower, furnished in a grotesque fashion well
suited to the humped and twisted figure of its master. The jester flung
off his tall curved cap and seated himself on the corner of a table.
From a flask he poured out a cup of wine and offered it to his guest.
“It is not drugged,” he said with a laugh, “you need not fear. No? Ah,
well, perhaps you are right. I will drink it myself, though I should
keep it for the night--the nights are very long sometimes.”
He set down the cup and leaned forward, peering intently into Giovanni's
face. “You gave me a start just now,” he said. “I took you for a
ghost--the ghost of a man I once knew--Giovanni Bergamotto.”
This was more than exciting; Giovanni's father had been one of the
murdered hostages of Crema, and if his name came to the ears of the
Emperor he would never leave the castle.
Searching his impassive face the jester nodded approvingly. “I knew
it,” he said. “No one else would have behaved as you did--and it is
for Milan. Milan!” He slipped from the table and stood up, the bells
jangling a weird undertone to his every movement. “It is better you
should know--I am--I was when I was alive--Stefano Baldi.”
Giovanni's eyes blazed, “And you dare ask a Milanese to drink with you?”
“Hear me,” begged the jester. “I sinned a great sin--yes; but I have
lived twelve years in torment of body and soul for that sin. I sinned
for love of a woman, and when I had betrayed my people she denied me,
and her brothers delivered me over to the executioners. They spared
my life because they thought it not worth the taking, and left me the
wrecked and crooked thing you see. Yet I have served Milan since her
fall--I, the traitor,--served her by a thousand petty treacheries and
inventions. It was I who sent Henry Plantagenet the news of Barbarossa's
plans. I have the favor of the Emperor, and hidden things are freely
discussed before me. They know I am Milanese and despise me, but they
believe me bought with gold and with the wine which is my besetting
sin.”
Giovanni was silent for very amazement. The fool mistook his attitude.
“See,” he pleaded, tearing open his tunic, “here on my heart are the
arms of Milan. I kept the badge hidden here under the floor for years,
for fear that when I was whipt they would find it. But since I have the
Emperor's favor none dare touch me.
“Do you need money? Are you a spy? But nay--tell me not your errand. I
might--I might babble in the wine-shop, and then they would torture me
to find out the truth, and I might betray you as I betrayed your father.
But if you need money--look!”
He knelt above a corner of the hearth and raised a stone, thrusting his
hand into the deep hollow under it. He threw out handful after handful
of rich gold pieces that winked and gleamed in the pale sunlight. “They
are yours--all yours--for Milan.”
Giovanni found his tongue. “When I was but a child,” he said slowly,
weighing his words, “my mother taught me to hate and fear Stefano Baldi.
Yet in truth I neither hate nor fear you, Stefano, and I will trust
you in this matter. I have an errand at the court of Henry the Lion in
Saxony, and it was my hope that the Emperor, should he be pleased with
our marionettes, might give me safe-conduct that my journey be the
sooner ended. Then I shall go southward to fight for Milan.”
Stefano pushed the gold back into the hole and replaced the stone.
“I see,” he said. “The Emperor is as easily diverted by shows as the
Brocken by its clouds. Yet I think I can find a way to make him serve
you. Be ready to-night with your puppets and put your own soul into the
jesting and the mummery. That is the only thing for you to do. If that
fails we will try the gold.”
Giovanni spent the hours before the banquet in setting his mimic theater
in order, trying every cord, pulley and weight to make sure that it
worked perfectly, brushing and reshaping the costumes, going over the
songs and speeches of the play in his head. Cimarron also was busy
tuning his rebeck and trying over the melodies of the songs which
Ranulph the troubadour had written for this little drama. It was based
on the story of the ten virgins, and contained much by-play and shrewd
comment on the follies and fashions of the day. Besides the written text
Giovanni was wont to add some patter of his own, improvised according
to the mood of his audience and the scene of the performance, but he
ventured on very little of this impromptu comedy on such an occasion as
this. Too much was at stake.
After what seemed endless waiting the time came. The huge hall was
filled with gayly dressed knights, ladies, serving people, soldiers, and
half the petty princes of the Empire. The feasting had given place to
wine-drinking, songs and jesting. The Emperor, cold and impassive, sat
in his chair of state, his mind apparently a thousand miles away. Then
there was a great roar of laughter from the doorway, and a lane opened
among the audience to let Stefano come prancing through in all his
grotesque bravery, his bells chiming a goblin march. After him came
Giovanni, and Cimarron bearing the puppet theater. Giovanni made his
obeisance and his opening speech, and the play began.
There seemed to Giovanni to be two of him that night. One self was
utterly absorbed in the performance, intent on making every speech tell,
every song win its meed of applause and laughter, every little figure
act with the spirit and gayety of life. The other self hovered somewhere
in the air among the rafters of the hall, critically watching the whole
scene. He remembered a sensation something like it when he and Cimarron
had crossed a mountain torrent in Spain on a log a hundred and fifty
feet above the jagged rocks and tearing waters. And as on that occasion,
Cimarron did his part as calmly and indifferently as if he were mending
a strap in the donkey's harness.
Certainly the play was a success. Giovanni had never met with greater
applause or received more substantial rewards. The ladies gathered to
inspect his wooden figures after the play, like children at a fair. He
was just leaving the hall when a page came to him and directed him to
wait in an ante-room until the Emperor should be at leisure.
It was cold and bleak, and Giovanni's tense nerves shivered as he
waited. The noise of departing guests and the tramp of hoofs died away.
It grew colder and stiller in the small grim room. At last the Emperor
came in, and seated himself in a great chair. A servant brought in a
brazier full of coals and went away. The ruler of the Holy Roman Empire,
a small man with red hair and beard, and cold eyes, looked Giovanni over
from head to foot.
“You go,” he said, “to the court of Henry Duke of Saxony?”
“Aye, Sire,” said the youth.
“It is not a very safe journey. There are robbers in the forest.”
“Surely,” said Giovanni humbly, “a poor showman might hope to escape
them?”
“I fear not,” said the Emperor with the ghost of a smile. “In their
disappointment they might break up your puppets and leave you fastened
to a tree for the wolves to devour. Such things have been done. I will
give you safe conduct and send you on with a company of merchants and
soldiers, if you will carry a message for me. Henry the Lion is
delaying too long with his answer. Tell him that the time has passed for
trifling.”
“Who,” said Giovanni, wonderingly, “could dream of trifling with your
expressed wish?”
“Henry dreams, but he will awake,” said the Emperor curtly. “Hark
you--you seem to be a clever mountebank, and I know what power fellows
of your sort have over the mob--add to your play lines to be spoken by
your puppet King. They should convey this meaning--that although he is a
King he is but a puppet incapable of independent action. Puppets that
go wrong are broken up and burned in the fire. My will is the law for
my realm. Saxony shall be taught that law as Milan was taught, if Henry
dares disobey.”
Writing a brief sentence or two on his tablets, the Emperor affixed his
signet and gave the missive to Giovanni. “That shall be your proof that
you come from me. Stefano tells me that you go on into Lombardy. Forget
not the meaning of your puppet-show when you reach those rebellious
states. They have been chastised once or twice before.”
Giovanni was left alone. On the morrow he took his departure for Saxony
and did his errand. The Duke of Saxony remained at home, and Barbarossa
went on without his aid to meet defeat at Legnano. Giovanni met Stefano
by chance in Venice when the Emperor went there to sign the peace
treaty.
“His armies were doomed from the first,” the jester said in his hoarse
guttural sing-song. “They were weighted with the souls of the martyred
hostages of Crema. I have lived to see that siege avenged,--and now I
must go on livin--and never see Milan again.”
Marveling much at the heights and depths in the soul of a traitor
Giovanni went on his way to England. There he discussed with Tomaso the
Paduan physician, Ranulph the troubadour and Brother Basil of the Irish
Benedictines the astonishing destruction of the Emperor's army. But he
said no word of Stefano.
“It is all in the formula on which his power was based,” said the
alchemist thoughtfully. “No man--be he duke, prince or kaiser--can pose
as the master of humanity. Men are not puppets; they are free souls in
a free world. You cannot make even a puppet-player move contrary to its
nature.”
“That is true,” said Giovanni. “And I have never had two that behaved
exactly alike. Fantoccini have their own ways of acting--and when you
pull the strings yourself, you know.”
THE ABBOT'S LESSON
There were twelve good monks and an Abbot who came
To found the Abbey and give the name
In the early days when the stones were laid,
And each of them knew a craft or a trade.
Sebastian the shepherd and Peter the smith,
James who made leather, and sandals therewith,
Hilarius the cook, of great skill in his art,
Anselm whose herbal lay close to his heart,
Gildas the fisherman, Paul of the plough,
Arnold who looked to the bins and the mow,
Matthew the vintner and Mark the librarian,
Clement the joiner and John apiarian,
Each wise in his calling as craftsmen are made,--
And each deep in love with his own special trade.
But the Abbot was canny, and never would raise
One above other by blame or by praise.
Now the angel who guarded the Eden gate
Had pity in thinking on Adam's fate,
And sent him three servants, for earth, air and sea,
The sheep, and the fish, and the wise little bee.
And thus it has happened that some people know
More than the rest of us here below.
There was jealousy, bitterness, wrath and fear
Among these reverend brethren here,
With their leather and parchment and metal and stone,
And the seeds of dissension were freely sown--
Only Sebastian, Gildas and John
In their work appointed went placidly on.
The Abbot considered his turbulent flock,
And he saw the wicked beginning to mock,
And he gathered the craftsmen about him, to see
Why there was peace with the other three.
They found Brother John by his bee-skeps brown
Watching his bees in their elfin town.
“Little folk, little folk all a-wing,
More honey is yours when ye do not sting,
And that is a very sensible thing,”
Said Brother John to the bees.
They found Brother Gildas a-fishing for trout,
Oblivious that any one was about.
“Finny folk, finny folk, deep in the fen,
There's a bait for each fish if we only know when,--
And that is the way to fish for men,”
Said Brother Gildas to the fishes.
They found on the moorland bleak and cold
Brother Sebastian, far from the fold.
“Sheep of my sheepfold, by night and by day
I seek ye untiring wherever ye stray,--
For thus ye have taught me the Master's own way,”
Said Brother Sebastian the shepherd.
And the brethren were silent. Each prayed in his heart
That in all of his doings in craft or in art
He might give God the glory. Since Adam's fall
The workman is nothing, the work is all.
There was peace in the cloisters. The Abbot that night
Gave thanks that his children had found the light.
IV
PADRAIG OF THE SCRIPTORIUM
Padraig sat on the side of the hill where the Good People were said to
dance rings in the turf, his chin on his folded arms, his, arms resting
on his drawnup knees--thinking. He might have been taken for a sheogue
himself had any one been there to see. His hair was like a red flame,
and his eyes were blue as the sky; his arms and legs were as brown as
his young, sharp face, and he wore but one garment, a goatskin tunic. He
could run like a hare and climb like a squirrel and swim like a salmon,
for he had lived like a savage all his life, among the Irish hills.
Before he could remember, he had lost his father, a clever tinker who
could make silver brooches and mend brass kettles and had married an
Irish colleen in a seashore village. Then pirates raided the coast, and
the Irish girl with her baby escaped only by hiding in a cellar under
a ruined house. When the boy was seven years old his mother died, and
since then he had gone from one village to another as the fancy took
him. For a week or more he might be herding goats or sheep, fishing, or
cutting peat for fires; he stayed nowhere longer than he chose and owned
nothing in the world except what he wore. Under the tunic there hung a
small leather bag with the few relics his mother had left him. He could
make a fish-hook of a bit of bone, a boat of reeds, or a snare of almost
any material he could find where he happened to be.
From this place where he sat he could see a valley of wet meadow-land,
in the midst of which gray stone buildings were massed inside a wall
which enclosed also the garden and the cloisters. He knew that this was
an abbey.
Years before a company of twelve monks and a Prior had come there to
found a religious house. They brought from England an arklike chest
containing some manuscript books, and relics, chalices, candlesticks and
other treasures, and little else except their long black robes, girdles
and sandals. These monks, working in orderly and diligent fashion
under their superior's direction, had built a chapel, a dormitory, a
dining-hall, store-houses, barns,--and the community grew. The building
was done first of rough stone and wattle-work after the manner of the
country, but later of good cut stone. Half the countryside had been
employed there when the chapel was building. They had drained the marsh
for their meadow-land, their young trees were growing finely, their
vineyard was thriving in a sunny selected nook, their sheep flecked the
hills all about them. A deep fish-pond had been made where now two monks
sat fishing. Padraig wondered if they had caught anything as good as the
lithe trout he had taken from a mountain stream.
He was hungry, for he had been afoot since daylight, and he was
wondering whether to make a fire and cook his trout or offer them to the
monks in exchange for a supper. The wind that blew from the eight-side
cone-roofed kitchen brought to his nostrils a smell so delicious that he
was drawn like a fish on a line to the gates of the abbey.
He had met wandering monks and friars, but this was the first abbey he
had entered. When he knocked at the gate and the porter asked him what
he wanted, he was a little excited and rather scared.
But the porter, although rheumatic and grumpy, knew good fish when he
saw them, and considered them just the thing for the Abbot's supper. He
let Padraig in by the wicket gate, the door with a grating in it set in
the big door and only about a third as large. Soon the boy was sitting
by the kitchen fire eating a bowl of the most delicious broth he
had ever tasted. Round-faced Brother Hilarius, who had charge of the
kitchens, was in so good a humor over the trout that he suggested to
Padraig that he might herd sheep for the Abbey. The monks did a great
deal of the work about their farms and in their workshops themselves,
but there was still much to do, and they were usually willing to give
work to anybody who did not ask for more than food and lodging.
Padraig liked the Abbey, but he would probably have gone on before very
long had he not found something which interested him more than anything
else ever had. Brother Sebastian, the head shepherd, sent him one day to
a part of the buildings he had not before seen. The long stone-walled,
stone-floored room had little stalls down one side, each with its wooden
bench and reading-desk. On one of these desks lay open the first book
Padraig had ever seen.
It was not printed, but written, each letter carefully drawn with a
quill pen. The initials of the chapters, and the border around each
page, had been painted in an ornamental design like a tangle of leaves
and vines, in bright red, green, yellow, brown, black, blue. Twisted
vines bore fruits, flowers, tiny animals and birds, here and there a
saint, angel or cherub. The monk who was doing this illuminating was too
much absorbed in his work to know that any one had come in, at first.
When he looked up and saw Padraig standing there he smiled very kindly.
He was a gaunt man with eyes as blue as Padraig's own, black eyebrows
and lashes, and a queer dreamy look except when he smiled. His name was
Brother Basil. When he saw the bundle of especially fine sheepskins that
Padraig had brought his face lit up so that it seemed as if the sun
had come into the cloister. “Good!” he said. “I will give you a note to
carry back.”
He took a bit of parchment which had once been written upon and had been
scraped clean enough to use again, and made some queer marks upon it
with his pen dipped in black fluid. That was the first time Padraig had
ever seen any one write.
It did not take long for Brother Basil to find out how fascinated the
herd-boy was with the work of the scriptorium. Before any one knew it
Padraig was learning to read and write. He learned so quickly that the
Abbot and Brother Mark, the librarian, thought he might make a scribe.
But when he was asked if he would like to be a monk, he shook his head
like a colt eager to be off. Writing was great fun; he practiced with a
stick in the sand or charcoal on a stone. But it did not suit his
idea of life to sit all day long filling books with page after page of
writing.
He liked the making of colors even better than writing. In the twelfth
century painters could not buy paints wherever they might chance to be.
They had to make them. Brother Basil had studied in Constantinople, or
Byzantium as he called it, the treasure-house of books and of learning,
with its great libraries and its marvelous old parchments illuminated
in colors too precious to be used except for the Gospels or some rare
volume of the Church. As time went on Padraig learned all that Brother
Basil could teach him.
When a man is working on an important and difficult task, it means much
to have a helper tending the fires or grinding the paints, who regards
the work as the most important thing in the world and gives his whole
mind to his occupation. Such a helper may ask as many questions as he
likes, and his master will be glad to give him all the instruction he
can possibly want.
Most of the people of the Abbey, in fact, liked Padraig. He knew so
little that the monks and lay brothers and even the novices knew, and
learned so quickly, and was so ready to put his own knowledge at their
disposal, that it gave them the very comfortable feeling of being
superior persons, whenever he was about. But there was one person who
did not like him. This was Simon, a clerk attached to the house of the
Irish prince who had given the land for the Abbey. Simon was of the
opinion that vagabond urchins from no one knew where were not proper
pupils for monastic schools even in Ireland, which was on the extreme
western edge of Christendom. But Brother Basil paid no attention to
Simon's opinion. In fact, it is doubtful whether he ever knew that Simon
had one.
The most serious trouble Brother Basil had in his work was that many of
the materials he needed could not be had in Ireland, nor could the Abbey
afford to send for them except in very small quantities. The monks were
rich compared with most other folk about them. They had food and drink
and warm clothing and well-built houses, and productive land. But as yet
they could not sell much of their produce at a profit which would make
them rich in money. Brother Basil therefore manufactured all the colors
he could, from the resources at hand. To make blue, he pounded up a
piece of an old stone he had brought from Canterbury. Gilding was done
by making gold-leaf out of real gold. The Tyrian purple was made from a
gastropod of the seas near Byzantium, and a little snail-like mollusk of
Ireland would serve to make a crimson like it. Thinning it, the painter
could make pink. There was no vermilion to be had, and red lead must be
used for that color and made by roasting white lead. The white lead was
prepared by putting sheets of lead in vats of grape skins when the wine
had been crushed out of them. Copper soaked in fermenting grape skins
would make green, saffron made it a yellower green,--and saffron was
grown on the Abbey land--cedar balsam would make it more transparent.
Brother Basil was always trying experiments. He was always glad to see a
new plant or mineral which might possibly give him a new color.
In all this Padraig was extremely useful. He made friends with a smith
who had a forge and furnace miles away, and wheedled him into lending
them the furnace for the roasting of metals. He ranged the woods and
cliffs all around the Abbey in search of plants, shrubs, trees and
minerals. His knowledge of the country saved Brother Basil many a weary
tramp, and he always took Padraig with him when he went looking for any
especial thing that was needed.
It was some time, however, before Padraig learned what Brother Basil
needed most of all. Now that the work of the scriptorium was coming to
be known, orders were received for splendidly illuminated missals and
other volumes, for which gilding was necessary. The brilliant colors
would lose half their beauty without the decorative touches of gilding
to set them off. And gold was costly.
“Where do men get gold?” Padraig asked one day.
“Out of the earth,” answered Brother Basil absently.
“I mean,” said Padraig hesitating, “what is it like when it is in the
earth? Is it a different color--like copper?” Copper, he knew, was often
green when it was found.
“Gold is always gold,” said Brother Basil, coming out of his fit of
dreamy abstraction. “I have seen it washed out of rivers. Gold is
heavier than gravel, and when the river carries the gold with the earth
down from the mountains, the gold sinks to the bottom.”
Padraig said no more, but a day or two later he was missing. The Abbot
was not pleased, for now he would have to take a man from other work to
do what the boy had been doing. Brother Basil was surprised and hurt. He
had never had such a pupil, and had begun to hope that they might always
work together for the love of the work and the glory of their Church.
“I suppose he was tired of us,” Brother Basil said with a sigh. “He is
only a boy.”
But Padraig was only a few miles away, high up among the hills where a
stream flowed through a ravine,--digging. He remembered seeing something
there long ago, before ever he came to the Abbey. He worked for two or
three days without finding anything at all. Then, just at sunset, he saw
a gleam of something like sunshine in a shadow where no sun shone. He
grubbed like a mole for a few minutes, and half a dozen tiny grains of
gold lay in his palm.
There was not much gold in the stream, but there was some. He dug and
pried and washed the scanty soil until he was sure that no more was
there, and then toward evening of the next day started home to the
Abbey. When he reached the gate it was dark, and the porter was
astonished to see him.