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THE FRIAR OF WITTENBERG
[Illustration:(colophon)]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
THE FRIAR OF WITTENBERG
BY
WILLIAM STEARNS DAVIS
AUTHOR OF “A FRIEND OF CÆSAR”
“GOD WILLS IT,” ETC.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1912
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1912,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1912.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
AT THE COURT OF HIS HOLINESS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A ROOM IN THE VATICAN 1
II. MARIANNA 14
III. THE FEAST AT THE VILLA FARNESINA 26
IV. THE JUDGMENT OF LEO DE’ MEDICI 38
BOOK I
THE AWAKENING
V. I COME TO SCHLOSS REGENSTEIN 49
VI. ILSA OF THE HARZ 59
VII. WHAT BEFELL AT SCHLOSS BLANKENBURG 73
VIII. I HEAR JOHN TETZEL 86
IX. I HEAR MARTIN LUTHER 98
X. THE HAMMER STROKES 114
XI. I COME TO MAINZ 125
XII. THE VOICE OF ITALY 131
XIII. THE CALL FROM THE NORTH 139
BOOK II
THE STRUGGLE
XIV. HOW I LEFT PALAESTRO 151
XV. WHAT I FOUND IN THE NORTH 170
XVI. THE GREAT WORD AT LEIPZIG 185
XVII. DR. LUTHER GIVES COURAGE 196
XVIII. I HEAR OF ILSA 207
XIX. I REVISIT THE HOLY CITY 217
XX. THE HOLY FATHER ORDAINS 227
XXI. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS 241
XXII. THE FRIAR OF WITTENBERG ORDAINS 253
XXIII. I MEET ABBESS THECKLA 263
XXIV. I PLAY WITH FIRE 273
XXV. THE ROAD TO WORMS 284
XXVI. WE ENTER WORMS 292
BOOK III
THE VICTORY
XXVII. ’TWIXT GABRIEL AND LUCIFER 299
XXVIII. BEHOLD, HE PRAYETH 314
XXIX. THE WITNESS BEFORE CÆSAR 327
XXX. THE HAND OF FORLI 341
XXXI. THE OFFER OF CÆSAR 356
XXXII. I REFUSE CÆSAR 371
XXXIII. ILSA VICTRIX 388
XXXIV. THE DEED UNDER THE BEECHWOOD 406
XXXV. THE BRIDE OF WARTBURG 426
AFTERWORD 433
THE FRIAR OF WITTENBERG
PROLOGUE
AT THE COURT OF HIS HOLINESS
CHAPTER I
A ROOM IN THE VATICAN
“Martin Luther--yes, the name of that fool of a German comes back to
me.”
“You were going to tell a story about him, Eminenza,” I remarked.
“A very brief and scurvy story.” The Cardinale di Forli stretched
out his red-slippered feet, and reached languidly for the carafe
of Chianti upon the table at his elbow. He had already emptied the
cup several times and his thick lips were a little flushed. “It was
six years ago--1511, to be exact, I remember; just before my lucky
elevation. Well, I was then lodging at our convent near Santa Maria
in Ara Cœli. I was the prior and manager, and very good dinners we
had. What must needs happen but that stupid northern brute of a friar
should visit Rome, and demand hospitality at our convent. Ugh! but
what an unkempt rogue! He had come from Wittenberg, some den or town
up in your frozen north, on business for his order before the papal
chancery. We tried to show him kindness, and it was as good as a
mummer’s play to see the way the fellow ran around to visit all the
holy spots in the city. I doubt if there was a smoky shrine at which
he didn’t burn a candle, or a dirty saint’s relic he didn’t want
to see. He was amazingly anxious to go everywhere possible to heap
up indulgence for the souls of his parents, and one day I told him
about the Scala Santa. ‘Just mount the Holy Stairs on your knees,’ I
advised, ‘say a prayer on each of the twenty-eight, and though your
father were a bandit and your mother a witch, the devil will never
get a glimpse of them in the hereafter.’ So off he went like one
possessed, but came back much sooner than I thought. ‘Did you mount
and pray on the stairs?’ I asked. ‘Reverend prior,’ answered he with
a bad genuflection, and worse Latin, ‘as I knelt on the middlemost
stair it seemed as though a voice spoke to me from heaven, “The just
shall live by faith!” I arose and descended without kneeling on the
rest.’ ‘The just shall live by faith!’ That from a bristly boar! Oh!
his lousy impudence! He was so utterly comical I had to laugh in his
face.”
“The incident is vastly entertaining,” interposed the other member of
our conference, his Eminence of Rocca, “but the Cardinale di Forli
will allow me to remind him that I have a dinner appointment with a
lady by the Ponte Molle, and that we have much to discuss.”
“Ah, yes,” returned Forli, good-humoredly, tossing down his cupful,
“so business before pleasure--” And he reached for a pile of papers
upon the table....
A handsome, well-groomed man was Forli, barely gray, and becoming
somewhat stout from abundant good living, though his red robes and
red biretta could make him look half saintly when he rolled in his
open carriage down the Corso. His companion, the Cardinale di Rocca,
a leaner, younger personage, was in civilian costume, the latest
achievement of his Venetian tailor, and even now he was glancing
down with satisfaction upon his party-colored red and green hose,
delicately embroidered with falcons and herons in gold thread, his
black velvet doublet with its slashed sleeves, and the large jewelled
buckles upon his morocco shoes.
The room wherein we found ourselves was one of those numberless
huge, rambling apartments upon the upper floor of the Vatican. It
was richly furnished in a dark heavy way, with a good “Annunciation”
(I believe by Timoteo Viti) upon the wall, Persian carpets under
foot, and three wide windows opening gloriously upon the wide Vatican
gardens, whence--a great distance below--sounded the shouts of a bevy
of young court chamberlains and court ladies at some game, mingled
with the dull clicks of the masons chipping on the marble blocks for
the rebuilding of S. Pietro. Forli of course had his own palace in
the city, but like the other Papal vice-chancellors, preferred to
keep a few rooms at the Vatican, since he wished to be in easy touch
with His Holiness. Here he had arranged for us to meet him.
“Draw your chair nearer, Gualtiero,” he motioned to me, “and you
also, Rocca. I take it the servants are out of earshot, but stones
and plaster in the Vatican tell tales. Ahem! We’ve not discussed the
matter fairly yet. Since the Conte di Palaestro is so interested--”
“I cry your pardon, Eccellenza,” I interposed, “I prefer the
Cardinale di Rocca shall know me as the Graf von Regenstein.”
Forli’s good humor was not shaken. “As you wish it,” he laughed,
“let me tell Rocca, then, that you are the son of the Graf von
Lichtenstein zum Regenstein (do I get your barbarous German
aright?), that most valorous condottieri who did Popes Alexander
Borgia and Julius such rare service, and who showed himself wise
beyond his people by marrying the Contessa di Palaestro. Whereby
their noble son and heir here is by title at once ‘Regenstein’ and
‘Palaestro,’--although why, being Italian born and bred, he prefers
his outlandish northern name, may the Madonna tell me--he cannot tell
himself!”
And then with another good-natured shrug he began unrolling the
papers.
“So, then, we are agreed that the Archbishop of Bari should be
displaced, and his benefices divided?”
Rocca nodded, his thin lips curling, “He was asked on the hunt only
last week by His Holiness--surest sign he is in succession for the
next creation.”
“The cardinals will hardly consent to that,” I suggested, “the
college is over large already.”
Forli shook his head. “I know the Pope. He smiles blandly and denies
when you hint ‘more cardinals,’ but I understand positively he is
resolved. There will be another red hat in a twelvemonth, unless Bari
is ruined--or removed,” letting his voice drop.
“And I,” thrust in Rocca, “have had my eyes since Easter on that
benefice of his in Aragon. Mine as soon as he leaves it vacant!
Haven’t I paid good gold for the reversion? And the income, six
thousand florins; what a godsend in my present debts and poverty!”
“I share your anxiety, my dear Rocca,” returned Forli with benignity.
“The reasons I wish Bari away from home are more personal, although
he holds one or two other preferments I would be glad to add to my
own,--a priory in Flanders, with a very good little canonry somewhere
near Bordeaux. And our dear Gualtiero here--his interest, of course,
is yet more immediate.”
“The conte then has decided to seek advancement in the Church?” asked
Rocca, glancing at me keenly.
“I have not really considered it until very lately,” I replied;
“but the continued favor of His Holiness has led me to feel that my
ambition might lie there, and if the Archbishopric of Bari were
offered me, I presume I could gratify my friends by ceding the
dependent benefices. I am passing rich,” I added a little proudly;
“it would be the preferment, the opportunity, of course--”
“Never despise the florins, my friend!” cried Forli, paternally;
“recall the old Tuscan proverb, ‘Good cats mouse better just to
grow fat, than from mere hunger.’ Still, we will not decline Bari’s
benefices,--eh, Rocca?”
“No--by Santo Paolo!”
“Don’t swear by the old saints, Rocca,” urged Forli, frowning; “very
vulgar: the worthy Bembo, our arbiter of letters, would be incensed.
‘By Jupiter!’ ‘By Diana!’ those are the oaths for philosophers and
gentlemen. Yet again to business: we are agreed Bari has become
dangerous to my influence with His Holiness, to Rocca’s pocket,
to Regenstein’s ambition. The Archbishopric of Bari once vacated,
it will take only a timely hint to secure it for our Gualtiero,
who will, of course, be content to wait a few years for the actual
cardinalate.”
“I will,” I assented, “yet, Eminenza, consider that his present
Holiness raised his nephew to the red hat, though only twenty-one
years old; I am twenty-five--”
“But hardly a kinsman of His Holiness,” smiled Forli; “a vast
difference. Yet patience,--Leo de’ Medici is living a long while for
a pope. That abscess which got him so many votes at the conclave may
break out again at any time, and then!--”
He waved his arms with true Italian elegance. “We trust the conclave
will appreciate the learning, eloquence, and ah,--the piety of the
Cardinale di Forli,” completed Rocca.
“_Grazie!_” cried the other, half rising.
“I consent, gentlemen,” I said, a trifle bored at the meandering of
the conversation. “I understand you do not wish to attack Bari unless
you can propose me as his successor; otherwise, some candidate of
the Cardinale di Metaponto would reap all your reward. I consent to
aid your undertaking, and I pledge myself not to lack in gratitude.
Yet wisdom would advise due caution in compassing the disgrace of
Bari.”
“Disgrace?” echoed both cardinals, looking at me a little blankly.
“I used the word, reverend sirs.”
“Why,” smiled Rocca, blowing through his teeth, “I presume there is
after all some disgrace in dying with great abruptness.”
Before I could make answer, a polite knock upon the door brought a
“Pestilenza!” from the lips of Forli, but he promptly called out to
enter.
The stranger was a dapper little man all in black, with a black chin
beard, and long, clawlike hands and fingers.
“Pardon, a thousand pardons, for intruding upon my masters,” he
began, almost ere he had straightened himself after a profound bow;
“but knowing your excellencies’ admiration for all objects of virtue,
I venture to intrude to tell you that the ‘Crucifixion,’ by Messere
Raffaello, being completed, is now this instant on exhibition at the
end of this gallery. No doubt you will be pleased to see it.”
Not a cloud seemed to darken Forli’s face as he rose and signed to us
to follow.
“We thank you, Signor Primati; indeed we are not so busy but that we
can give ourselves the pleasure of a hasty inspection.”
Rocca and I could do nothing save accompany him, and of what
followed I have no need to speak at great length, save how we all
agreed that the distinguished artist had surpassed almost all his
earlier triumphs in dealing with such themes.[1] Very happily he
had grouped the weeping women before the cross; and in the face of
the agonizing Madonna I recognized a most fortunate treatment of the
features of the famous Fornarina, his mistress, the baker’s daughter
from the Trastevere, while in St. Peter, St. John and others, I
noticed well-known Roman ecclesiastics. I was especially pleased to
see Forli’s daughter, my own beloved Marianna, portrayed as Mary
Magdelene, although in so doing the artist had been obliged to depart
from custom, and represent her with dark instead of golden hair.
It was, in short, a masterpiece, even for the master, and well repaid
the interruption. Rocca and I also were given a new opportunity to
observe that just power of critical appreciation which made Forli so
esteemed among the art patrons of Rome.
“The foreshortening of the arms of the impenitent thief--how
admirable! The reflection upon the helmet of the centurion to the
left could hardly have been better. I could wish Messere Raffaello
could have concentrated more light upon the cross. A mere trifle.
He’s wise in avoiding over-theatrical effects. And notice the
chiaroscuro of the background: that magnificent fork of lightning
over Jerusalem! I congratulate you, Signore Primati, upon having the
oversight of such a picture. Imagine the delight of His Holiness.”
“I knew your excellencies would be repaid,” replied the custodian,
rubbing his lean little hands. “Messere Raffaello will rejoice in
your kind judgments. He was so fearful of your verdict, I could not
induce him to remain. He has slipped away, not daring to await your
august decision. Ah! New pleasure,--I see the most worthy Sanazzaro
coming to bestow his approbation upon your Eminenza’s opinion.”
The newcomer was a sleek, well-oiled gentleman, sprucely dressed in
a tight-fitting suit of mouse color, with only a quill pen behind an
ear to show that he called himself a professional scholar. He was
full of fine phrases for us, and laudations of the picture, which
last were obviously perfunctory, for it soon appeared, to the vast
disgust of Primati, that he had come not to admire the painting but
to submit to Forli about forty new lines of his half-finished epic,
“The Virgin Birth,” and to crave the cardinal’s wisdom upon certain
doubtful quantities and Latinisms, a judgment in which he politely
invited Rocca and myself to join; and Forli, pleased to show the
same mastery of one art as of another, made haste to run over the
hexameters, bestowing a profusion of compliments, intermixed with
tactful criticism.
“The introduction of the cattle in the stable at Bethlehem,--charming
and natural. But _bos_--a crude and grating word--is scarcely used in
this sense by Seneca or Cicero. Again you speak of ‘Our Lord coming
for the remission of our sins.’ Excellent, thrice excellent were we
mere theologians, but a poet with such an exalted theme might with
more dignity say ‘Apollo come to bear the divine pity of the Manes.’
Happier, is that not? And more genuinely classical and Latin? But
the next two lines--how delicately you throw the accent upon this
_venisset_. Yet I cannot approve this ‘Virgo Maria’; ‘Virgo Diana’ is
the only proper term, as I observed before; I crave your opinion in
this, my dear conte, your Latinity is impeccable.”
“I agree with you, Eminenza,” I assented, “although in view of the
theme, some slight concession might be made in the nomenclature.”
“Consistency, consistency,” urged the senior cardinal. “Signor
Sanazzaro is not writing for ignorant monks, but for men of true
learning and _virtù_. You will find all the best authorities on my
side,--Bembo, Pomponazzo, Politiano, Pontano, and many more. Purge
away these small blemishes, my noble friend, and who dare not hope
that the ‘Virgin Birth’ may not enjoy the immortality of the ‘Æneid’?”
“The Eminenza’s praise is overpowering,” smiled the poet, receiving
back the paper with a profound reverence; “but I fear I have intruded
upon some grave conversation. I invoke the blessings of Olympus upon
your excellencies, and crave leave to depart.” With which he bowed
himself away.
Rocca, mindful of his own appointment, was clearly glad to have him
gone, nor did I wish to detain him. Primati had already quitted us,
and as the poet’s smart mantle disappeared down the gallery, Rocca at
once broke in with,
“Now let us resume the former discussion.”
“About ‘the Crucifixion’?” I asked.
“About the assassination,” corrected Forli, smiling gently, and
beckoning us back to his chamber.
I suspect the others had already noticed my reluctant manner, for by
the time the door was closed behind us Rocca had me by the arm and
was demanding: “Wherefore do you look so sour?”
“Because,” I retorted bluntly, “I do not enjoy the answer given me by
his Eminence of Forli,” at which the elder cardinal burst out in a
hearty laugh.
“Assassination? Well, by Jupiter, the word is uncouth, and we will
find one that will sit better on squeamish German stomachs! Say,
then, we discuss the means for the withdrawal, departure, translation
to a happier Elysian field than Rome of the learned and pious
Monsignore di Bari.”
I could see both Forli and Rocca watching me with the same glance
itinerant students fix on younger neophytes, when testing their
ability to drain a very deep flagon. But I was resolved not to let
myself be browbeaten. “Your Eminences,” I said a little crossly, “do
not think I fail to appreciate the service you have proposed to do a
very young man like myself; but you must not think me ungrateful if I
say I did not contemplate the murder of the Archbishop of Bari when I
accepted this appointment.”
“And what, pray,” drawled Rocca with insulting irony, “did the
estimable Graf von Lichtenstein zum Regenstein conceive we _did_
purpose to arrange at this charming tête-à-tête?”
I was aware I seemed to play the fool. I was no stranger at Rome.
However, I refused to capitulate.
“You told me to come and concert the displacement of Bari. Good.
I will do so. So far I go with you. He has intrigued against His
Holiness with the King of France. We can secure proofs. The Spanish
Ambassador will aid us. My body-servant Andrea knows some women in
Bari’s household; through them we can get gossip to be used against
him. A little cleverness--such as your Eminences can so readily
supply--will suffice to send Bari an outlaw to Paris. Assassination
becomes doubly a crime when it is needless.”
Forli sat back in his armchair, complacently twirling his thumbs.
“My dear Gualtiero,” he said slowly, “despite your Germanisms I love
you well, and so of course does Marianna. But I confess it is your
thick northern wits that now are working, not your Italian ones.
You stick at poison or dagger, but a man’s fair name or riches you
would filch with all merriment: though betwixt a swift, easy death,
and an outlawry with Donna Poverty for companion and mistress--_pro
dei immortales!_ give me the dying! Besides, your scheme is
impracticable. You know how strong French influence is with His
Holiness, King Francis will move heaven and hell to save a precious
adherent from disgrace. Bari is a skilful huntsman, a good Latin
versifier, and plays excellently at cards--three strong reasons why
Leo will hesitate to believe ill of him. In fine--_amico mio_--you
are brought back to only one way,--a very short one.”
I stood drumming with my fingers on the window-sill, staring
stupidly out into the Vatican gardens. I could not controvert the
practical arguments of Forli. Bari’s position with the Pope was nigh
impregnable. I could not give warning of the plot concocted by an
intimate friend and the father of my lady-love,--and of these facts
the others were quite aware. I had always expected some day to be
dragged into a plot like this--and had dreaded it. But what must be
must. After all, the murder was not of _my_ contriving. Meantime
Forli conferred eagerly with Rocca.
“Well--how manage it?”
“I always liked Pope Alexander Borgia’s way--an invitation to
dinner--a box of sweetmeats put within tempting reach--”
“Ugh!” interrupted Forli, “I was almost nipped thus at Siena four
years ago,--took medicine just in time. But it will not do now. Bari
distrusts us. He’ll accept none of our invitations.”
“A fee to his cook?”
“Very uncertain. Sometimes such servants are devilishly faithful.”
“Then we seem driven to look for bravoes.”
“Very right. Bari is reckless where he goes. I know where his lady
friends live and when he visits them. It can be managed. I used to
know the proper man, but he got himself hanged and quartered up at
Ferrara last autumn.”
Rocca scratched his chin meditatively.
“I believe Ettore Orosi is in Rome. His price, however, would be very
high.”
“He who put the Duke of Gandia in the river, and later cut down the
Cardinal of Pavia, whilst he was on his way to visit the Pope?”
“The same man. I think I can reach him. My valet saw him
yesterday--just returned from Naples.”
“We must pay his fee. A very proper man,” Forli was reflecting aloud,
when I turned upon them angrily.
“Reverend sirs, I repeat to you, despite my southern breeding I am
northern enough not to enjoy this calm discussion of a bandit’s
business. You understand that, if you continue in the act you propose
so deliberately, I will have no part therein. I cry pardon for my
discourteous tone, but I trust you both understand me.”
“You will not refuse the Archbishopric, however,” sneered Rocca
wolfishly.
“Pious sirs,” I retorted, “an old proverb, current in many tongues,
warns against dividing the bear’s skin ere slaying the bear.”
Forli brought his hands together with a smart slap.
“My dear Gualtiero,” spoke he, smiling, “I once counted myself the
happy intimate of the illustrious Prince Caesare Borgia. I may
humbly claim some modest experience in these and other like delicate
matters. When I have fairly made my pact with Orosi, Bari will not be
in danger. Bari will be--in heaven. The chance of a slip is not worth
an argument.”
I felt the disadvantage of my position and reached rather stiffly for
my biretta.
“Eminenzas,” I announced, “you know I am bound to you by the ties of
hospitality and friendship to do nothing to warn Bari. I owe him no
love, and will gladly pleasure you in aiding to work his downfall;
but I am fain to recall the command my honored father gave me before
his last campaign,--‘slay your man, but with the sword, not the
stiletto.’ If, therefore, you continue in your present intent, I
can only wish you a very good day, and avow I have no part in your
deliberations.”
I was moving towards the door, but Rocca called after me.
“Ah! noble conte, you do so recall to me that very illustrious Roman,
Pontius Pilatus, who once washed his hands when he saw the Jews doing
something very wrong.”
“I do not thank you for the simile, Cardinale di Rocca,” I said,
with my hand on the latch, “but if I am Pilatus, I leave behind me
Caiaphas and Herod. And so, _addio_!”
I walked away briskly, thoroughly angered at being made party to
so crude a transaction. (I did not at that time use a harsher
adjective.) I was in fact, in great ill-humor, and was about to
work it off by seeking some gayer friends on the Corso, when, upon
descending the stairs, I ran upon a grinning Moorish boy who, “Begged
to inform his lordship that Donna Marianna awaited him in the Vatican
gardens.”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This picture seems to have perished in the sack of Rome in 1527
A.D.--EDITOR.
CHAPTER II
MARIANNA
I made my way downward through the huge palace, bowed to this red
robe and to that, exchanged greetings with various “Gentlemen
Chamberlains” whom I called my friends, promised Monsignore the
General of the Dominicans that I would loan him a parcel of Greek
books just come from Aldus’s press at Venice, and congratulated
Messere Bibbiena on the piquancy and wit of his last comedy--in
short, I moved on my way as became a man who knew how to avoid both
discourteous haste and needless dallying; until at the entrance
gate of the gardens the yellow-clad Swiss guardsman on duty saluted
with his halberd, and before me opened the delightful masses of
cool shrubbery and green lawn interspersed with the white marble of
statuary,--the charming confines of the gardens that I knew so well.
As stated, I was not in good humor. No man could live in Rome, as
I had lived in recent years, and fail to come close to deeds which
non-Italian folk must needs call murder. Only the year before I
had stood with my back to a wall and my rapier and three bravoes
before me until timely help arrived; and I had met the instigator
of those bravoes at a supper party not long since,--as polite and
polished a nobleman as ever graced a court. Yet I had never actually
been myself a prime mover in an assassination. I had killed my man
in a duel, but that was another matter. I strongly suspected the
cardinals had summoned me in, not to secure my help, but to laugh
at my squeamishness, and I was inclined to wish that Orosi would
grievously disappoint his employers, and turn the laugh against them.
“After all,” I reflected, “I am not certain that I wish to enter the
Church; and if I do, His Holiness can give me a better preferment
than this debated to-day.”
Likewise the memory of sundry injunctions of my father (grizzled
warrior) must needs at such times ring in my ears, especially his
word just ere he was slain at Ravenna. “You have your mother’s hair
and eyes, my Walter, but your heart is from me; and remember that
long as I have lived in this merry southland my heart is German.
Live like a German, think like a German, and remember the German
honor--the honor of the Regensteins. Many of us have been caught by
the Devil; but never has the Devil caught us in the back!”
“And may the Devil eat Orosi, and Forli, too!” I at length muttered.
“If the chance comes, I am even minded to give the wink to poor Bari.”
Yet despite my mood I quickened my steps, for I knew my lady would
be ungracious over delaying. One or two excursions into the nooks of
shrubbery failed to discover her, and I was a little at a loss until
I ran upon one of the smooth-lipped eunuch-sopranos of His Holiness’s
choir, who informed me that Donna Marianna was walking with a
gentleman of the Spanish embassy, near the Pope’s casino; and so near
the garden lodge I found her.
Don Velasco let his mustaches quiver with vexation when he saw
me,--surely he was having a most pleasant stroll under those
splendid box trees: but Madonna knew how to do an ungracious thing
graciously. Very politely she explained that the Conte di Palaestro
was present by appointment: very ceremoniously Velasco and I scraped
and flourished as he bade us farewell. Not until he was fairly out of
sight behind a curve in the leafy way did her white hand go out to
me, as I fell on my knees and kissed it; then I rose for a fairer
kiss upon my lips, whereupon I forgot our conversation; for were
we not close together, I at least intoxicated by the glory of her
presence, and the mere joy of her companionship?
Years ago it was; and years how full of many things! Yet the richness
of those moments in the Vatican gardens lingers with me still. And if
you could have seen her then, with the gold of that Latin sunlight
pouring itself over her, you would not have wondered that all Rome
called me as lucky in my love as in my fortune. For Marianna’s beauty
was the hot dark beauty of the south,--of Trojan Helen, of Aspasia,
or more likely of Poppaea Sabina, enchantress of Nero. Angel she was
not. Pinturicchio’s and Perugino’s seraphs had never such raven hair,
nor that full bare neck, nor the black eyes, the cheeks of cream and
rose color tinted by the Neapolitan sun: also their glances were mild
and dove-like, not lit by Queen Juno’s wit and fire. Still do I see
her, as she walked with me; the springtime sun glowing on her face
and forehead, on her long arms, on the Arabian pearls upon her hair,
the Egyptian turquoise at her throat, and the full satin sheen of her
scarlet dress and golden girdle; while all the time her hands flew
in those quick Italian gestures, accenting the music of her voice.
Verily, were not the Vatican gardens even as the gardens of the
Hesperides to me that hour? And would I then have accepted heaven had
an archangel offered it?
But at last we were ready to talk of many matters, and plainly
Marianna had somewhat to ask.
“So, Gualtiero, you have seen my father?”
“I have just left his chambers.”
“And who was there?”
“Why, Rocca--a little criticism of some of Sanazarro’s verses--”
Marianna shook her head charmingly.
“Manifestly, Gualtiero, your wits were made in the north. Did my
father and Rocca meet solely to weigh Latin metres?”
“I do not understand, _cara mia_.”
“The Conte (she called me thus to make me vexed) is disingenuous. I
will refresh his memory. He was asked if he did not wish to enter the
Church?”
“I was.” It displeased me Forli had revealed matters to his daughter.
I always discussed with Marianna at disadvantage.
“And of course you consented?”
“How fast that green lizard runs across the path,” I observed, trying
to change the subject.
“Not more fast than a thousand others. Tell me,--are you to be
Archbishop of Bari?”
“When I found precisely what their Eminences had to propose,” I
replied constrainedly, “I was obliged to decline my share in the
project.”
“Excellent!” she clapped her hands prettily. “I have won my wager
with Rocca! His best white palfrey against my Moorish boy.”
“Your wager with Rocca?”
“Assuredly. You remember the horse races in the Piazza di San Pietro?
I sat with Rocca near His Holiness at the Vatican windows. We talked
of you and your northern ancestry. Rocca vowed you had become wholly
Italian, a true virtuoso and humanist. I rejoined I knew you better.
You would fight a score of duels, but never hire a bravo. He doubted.
We laid a wager. My father’s plans fell in well with the test. He has
long held you must enter the Church, in justice both to yourself and
your friends. Bari of course has been a marked man for months. To-day
the bait was proffered you. _Ecco!_ I have won.”
With any save Marianna, I would have been exceeding angry, but with
her hand upon my wrist, her breath almost upon my face, I think she
could have said, “I will feed you to the Hydra,” and I would have
cheerfully assented. After I had finished laughing at her pleasantly,
I asked why she seemed so anxious to have me enter the Church.
“Because, Gualtiero _mio_, look on the world,--I mean, of course,
Italy. What secular prince is of consequence? Did not Caesare Borgia
have as fair a chance to found a great power as can be given any
man--ability, an iron will, a ready hand, a Pope for father, and
marvellous good luck? But he is dead, an exile in Spain. Are not we
Italians caught betwixt the French and Spanish millstones? If we keep
our duchies and counties is it not by foreign sufferance? Does not
His Holiness chafe daily at the insolent dictation of the foreign
ambassadors? But art, learning, the love of the beautiful, the tongue
of Cicero, and the tongue of Dante still are ours. And the Church is
ours--the revenues drawn from frozen Norway and foggy England, from
all Christendom,--still they come to Rome! And Rome having riches,
wit, beauty, learning, has still her Empire. Therefore I would have
you enter the Church. For I am ambitious for you, _caro mio_, very
ambitious,”--and again she kissed me.
“The good sisters who taught you at the convent of San Silvesto may
well be proud of their pupil,” I rejoined gratefully. “Greece boasted
Sappho as the peeress of Homer in poetry. May not Italy then praise
Marianna di Forli as rival to the ancient Cicero and the modern
Piccolomini in the fair art of eloquence?”
Madonna shook her glorious head.
“Praise me, after you obey me. If you enter the Church, what a fair
future! You are rich, the Pope proverbially poor. How you can win
his favor! The red hat in a very few years, and then”--with a little
laugh--“will not the Conclave prefer a gay young Pope to an old surly
one? And who handsomer, wittier, more learned, better bred?--”
She did not finish, but flashed at me with her black eyes till my
head fairly buzzed with fine notions. And yet her suggestion amused
me mightily, and I replied:--
“I am glad you did not add, ‘and who more devout in life and
conversation.’”
“Devout? You, Gualtiero? Oh, Santo Spirito, what a noble figure you
would make arrayed as a black Dominican! You would even pass for a
Master Inquisitor.”
“In which case I think I know a noble lady one could send to the
rack for a thousand pagan heresies. Well--Rocca has just hinted your
father will be Pope: may he have a long pontificate ere I succeed
him. But less merrily, I sometimes wonder whither all this pleasant,
gay life at His Holiness’s court is tending.”
“To a great fête on Corpus Christi day, I trust sincerely.”
“And something thereafter. Hear this, Madonna,--Italy is not quite
all the world, though you may think it. What if we, with our Greek
and Latin, our Plato and our Plotinus, have learned to laugh at much
of the old theology, to think that San Marco and Æsop alike wrote
very good fables? Believe me, beyond the Alps they still receive the
old story of God and the saints as open-eyed peasants stand before a
mountebank. And if some day your ‘doltish Germans’ (as you say) learn
how His Holiness and the rest use these fables to filch money from
their purses,--do you think the round bags of gulden will come to
Rome quite so steadily as before?”
Marianna shrugged her shoulders gracefully.
“I don’t like your talk, Gualtiero. I only know that almost everybody
who has advised keeping back the Pope’s dues has been burned, and
that the last indulgence sale in Germany was profitable.”
“Excellent,” I assented; “still, suppose I do not prosper in the
Church? My plans go wrong?”
“The dispensation to reënter the world is purchasable. You would
still have your countships. We might even marry.”
“Marriage is the death of true love, carissima,” said I, my face
close now to hers. And what more we might have done I know not,
for at this instant our friends the Bishop of Montebello and the
guards-captain Della Fabriano surprised us, evidently upon some
errand....
An excursion up the Tiber towards Primaporta was what they wanted
us to join, and you may wager we did not decline on such a day. His
Reverence of Montebello was accompanied by a charming Florentine lady
whom he called his cousin: Fabriano was with a handsome, but somewhat
dull lady of Ravenna whom he did not call his cousin. Both of the
gentlemen had a lively wit, and there was enough bright dialogue
amongst us to go into a stage-play. Whilst our six stout watermen
stroked us along the yellow twisting stream we made Latin verses in
praise of Fabriano’s exploits upon the recent Urbino expedition:
verses which Montebello swore were equal to Ovid’s; and we attempted
a few in Greek, although here none of the ladies could follow us save
Marianna.
Oh! It was a day worth living, with the wind chasing down from the
Apennines, and sending little cohorts of white clouds flying before
the sun, and the soft, southern air, telling of Naples, Sicily,
Greece, caressing us. On the shore sounded the notes of the shepherds
piping to their sheep. Around our bow was the lapping music of the
old, old river. Behind us, into a golden haze, faded the domes and
campaniles of the undying city. If we had been Hellenes of Attica,
like mad Alcibiades full of the pagan sparkle and glory, never could
the “joy of life” have come more to us than it came upon that day.
And I think Marianna knew in part my thoughts, when the general
banter flagged a little, and we sat together listening to the water
and the oars.
“Confess to me, Gualtiero,” she broke softly in at last, “are you not
glad your mother was an Italian?”
“I thank all Olympus and its gods.”
“Yet you have visited your dreary north. Was it not very dreadful?”
“I went only as a young boy. What I recall is not unpleasant.”
“Come tell me, _caro mio_; I have known you so long, yet you tell
little enough of yourself. I know that you are rich, are a nobleman
in your own right both in Italy and Germany. What is this German
inheritance, Lich-ten-stein, and Re-gen-stein?” (She puckered her
lips, pronouncing each syllable as if it hurt her.) “Where is it?
When did your father get it?”
“A long story,” I began listlessly, leaning back on the cushions
and gazing more at Madonna’s face than at the gliding river bank.
“I have had no patience to learn it all. But the tale of my house
is this. I am a Lichtenstein; and anywhere north of the Alps there
is not a herald or pursuivant who will not tell you that many Dukes
and Markgrafs have no better blood than ours. Well--the older
line has kept the paternal principality near Austria. The younger
line--whereof I am the chief--acquired by marriage a castle in the
Harz, nigh to the centre of Germany--Regenstein. Therefore I am
called the Graf von Lichtenstein zum Regenstein, or more briefly, in
the speech of the country, the Graf von Regenstein.”
“I understand. But what is Regenstein? A black rocky tower amid a
desert?”
“By no means. I spent three years within it as a boy. I remember the
great turrets, with their spirelike roofs; the gray stretches of
impenetrable walls; the clouds of dusky rooks above every pinnacle;
huge halls where great fires roared, and shot out a ruddy glare upon
the bearskin rugs and the antlers and array of spears upon the wall.
The folk of the castle were gruff, unlike our sleek fellows here, all
oiled and bowing,--but honest and kindly. Around the castle, to every
side, stretched a deep wood such as is nowhere in Italy; sentinel
beeches and ancient firs; and not far off ran a stream. In winter it
was very cold. My father and his friends sat by the chimney place at
their beer all day long,--save when the foresters reported a wild
boar close to the castle--”
Madonna’s hands went up in a playful kind of horror.
“Oh! To talk of your Regenstein, while we float here upon the
beautiful river. Liefer would I fall amongst the man-eating savages
the Spaniards say they are finding over seas, than spend a winter
there!”
“I shall not compel you, _cara mia_,” I said, ardently.
“Blessed Mother! I trust not. Three years even as a boy in such
a place--why were you not ruined? The boorish habits,--guzzling,
gorging, and a boar hunt for interim! Doubtless not a book in the
whole vast dungeon?”
“Old chaplain Jakob had a small library.”
“Of saints’ lives and sham miracles, or else of outworn theology.
Perhaps a tract by a Hussite heretic; but no Latin poet, not to name
a Greek?”
“I fear not, Madonna.”
“Pity on you, my poor Gualtiero! How comes it you are such a
tolerable cavalier, and speak good Italian and Latin?”
“You forget,” I said, smiling, “my mother was the Contessa di
Palaestro. She died while I was a young boy, but her kinsfolk bred me
up amidst the best afforded by Padua and Florence. Since my father’s
death, five years since, I have sought Rome--and you.”
She ignored this last, and pushed her interrogations.
“Nevertheless, although you speak as an Italian, dress as an Italian,
are as gallant and learned as many an Italian, still you prefer to be
called the lord of Re-gen-stein?”
“It was my father’s wish. He found favor and fortune in Italy, even
an Italian title through my mother, yet his heart was ever in the
north. I know it was his dear wish that I should keep the old name,
and even return to the old land, and spend my days chasing the wild
doe over the slopes of the Brocken.”
“Will you ever return to Germany, Gualtiero?” she asked, holding down
her head.
“It is unlikely. Adolf, a bearish, loyal old martinet keeps the
castle and forwards the rents from the peasants. You would rather
visit me at Palaestro.”
“Yes: in the hills above Perugia, and infinitely beautiful. We could
hold a court there, as did the late Duke of Urbino. Poets, music,
fêtes-of-love, theatricals, carnivals,--that would amuse us all the
year long. How delightful!”
And then she smiled radiantly, and I knew she was about to press a
petition.
“Gualtiero, I shall never be happy until I know you severed from
your uncouth north forever. Sell Regenstein,--some fool will surely
buy it. The Pisani bank at Venice is a safer place for your fortune;
then, whether you enter the Church or not, I can think you are wholly
ours.”
“Impossible, Madonna; I must retain Regenstein, if only to honor my
father’s desire.”
She was not pleased, but I persisted; yet I was not sorry when
Montebello made the discussion general again by proposing a
new attack at the old question,--how many angels (infinitely
compressible) could dance upon the point of a needle (infinitely
small). Upon this merry whetstone, we sharpened our wits right
valiantly until the boat touched the shore near Primaporta. Here,
under some noble ilexes, the bishop’s servants spread us a
delightful collation,--everything choice, from the roasted thrushes
to the cool Frascati. The luncheon ended, it was then time to pull
back Romewards....
I accompanied Marianna to the Forli palace near the Ponte San Angelo.
The streets were crowded: five bandits had just been hanged by the
police upon the bridge, and everybody had turned out to see the
execution. The recent rains had left the ways very muddy, and pigs
and goats were running loose among the people, who treated them
with characteristic Roman indifference. The shadows were advancing;
already numerous gay-robed cavaliers and ladies of the merrier
sort,--all masked, were out for the evening pleasures, and mingling
with the ubiquitous water vendors and the Swiss guards off duty. Our
servants made us a path through the crowds, and we soon gained the
palazzo. In the courtyard I found Forli, a little apart, taking leave
of some elegantly clad personage, with a golden chain, a jewelled
hilt, and a delicately trimmed little red beard. Thinking him a
gentleman-in-waiting with whom I was acquainted, I drew near, but
their conversation soon undeceived me.
“So you intend to fulfil my little commission promptly?” urged the
cardinal.
The stranger pressed one hand upon his heart, while he swept the
pavement with his black hat-feather in salutation.
“Your Magnificence--I have been overwhelmed with the honor of
fulfilling your august desires. Is not my word given? Have I not
sworn by the Holy Mother of Loretto? Eccellenza--you deal with a man
of virtue and honor, who has but one and the same word for promise
and performance.”
“Then I may hope soon to hear of your dealings with Monsignore di
B----”? with a glance lest the servants be within ear-shot.
“Eccellenza--to-night: to-morrow at the latest. I know the
gentleman’s haunts and habits. I pledge to your service the skill of
Orosi, Ettore Orosi the valiant, the incomparable.”
“Very good; you already understand your honorarium.”
“I do, Eminenza: but in addition to the small gratification for
myself which you named, you will, I am sure, have a due number of
masses said for the soul of the unfortunate Monsignore. For as a
Christian”--he crossed himself devoutly,--“I profess, I would not
have his damnation upon my conscience. The more as the event does not
admit his being rightly shriven.”
“I pledge you they shall be most ample. I will even persuade the Holy
Father to perform one in person. Therefore report quickly. Addio!”
Thus with a wave of the hand Forli sent the bravo out; then turned to
me.
“Ecco! A most proper man: and stumbled on most promptly the very hour
we wanted him. As for you, I trust that Marianna has laughed you out
of your scruples.”
“She has surely laughed enough at me. How convinced I am I dare not
say. Enough that she has just promised to go with me to a late supper
party at Messere Chigi’s: and now I must hurry to my own palazzo in
order to dress in a manner not to disgrace her.”
“Donna Venus bless you, my children!” cried the good man; “how gay
you are together. I feared I was about to have a stupid evening with
my books, but His Holiness has summoned me to join him at his cards.
Then perhaps, ere we go to bed, we can hear from Orosi.”
Which surmise came true, though not as His Eminence expected.
CHAPTER III
THE FEAST AT THE VILLA FARNESINA
My own chambers were on a quiet street near Messere Raffaello’s
lodgings at the Palazzo dei Convertendi. On the walk I had time to
reflect that ere actually embracing a career in the Church I ought to
write to my father’s friend, the Senator Contarini of Venice, for his
opinion as to my chances of advancement at the French court.
“Surely,” I considered, “Marianna must realize that I cannot marry
her if I am to seek a secular career. A cardinal’s daughter is all
very well, but she is not a countess; while if I become a churchman
everything will go on as now, and my money will still be just as
useful to her and to Forli. And why should I take holy orders just to
humor them?” Amid such reflections I came to my palazzo.
Although Messere Chigi had invited us to “a very simple supper,”
I knew I ought not to ignore my toilet. All the world was aware
that the Chigis were brothers to Croesus and Crassus, that their
banks covered the Levant, that twenty thousand men manned their
argosies, and that barring the Fuggers of Augsburg, no mortals had
more ready money to lend to King or Pope. Accordingly, I let Andrea
and my second and third valets dress me with some carefulness;
and as I paused before the glass while Andrea gave me a finishing
touch of civet, I told myself I would make a tolerable figure. My
Milanese tailor had provided a gray suit which set my unimposing
figure to good advantage,--with a genteel fulness at the sleeves,
and fashionable slashes at the hips. Fine French lace at my
throat, a gold chain of curious carving, a couple of antique cameo
rings, and some excellent Venetian chasing upon my silver hilt and
scabbard,--these would make people say, “His Excellency the Conte
knows how to dress.” My own face was too familiar for me to observe
keenly, yet I remember thinking that with my black hair and mustache,
I certainly passed for an Italian gentleman, not for the heir of as
old a German house as could be found in the rolls of nobility at
Vienna.
It had been dark for hours when I returned to the Forli palace to
escort Marianna. We went with half a dozen stout fellows of the
Cardinal, as well as four men of my own, for we had no wish to meet
the surprise awaiting Monsignore di Bari. But despite two suspicious
looking fellows lurking in the shadows by the Ponte Sisto, we had no
adventures and came safely to the Villa Farnesina across the river
whither Messere Chigi had invited us.
The now famous decorations in the hall--by Raffaello and his
pupils--were not yet complete, but above our heads were already
traced the graceful forms and elegant draperies of the myth of
Psyche; and the master’s glorious Galatea in the antechamber I had
long before admired. But I confess I had little interest in the
paintings that night. After so many years,--so many scenes, grave and
gay, flitting in between,--I recall this banquet, even as I recall
my meeting with Marianna in the gardens, clearly, vividly. For was
not this to be the last day and evening of my old life? My life as
a child of the Southland,--careless, free, joyous,--obeying the law
of fair fancy, with the harsh words “duty” and “conscience” very far
away. I have learned to view life differently, yet well do I recall
it all!
Messere Chigi had surpassed himself. He greeted us with his wonted
courtly grace.
At his side was his beautiful friend, Francesca Andreozza, whom,
the year following, he was to marry. Her diamonds, I swear, were
better than those of the Queen of England. Raffaello was there and
his delightful Fornarina. Signor Bembo, the Pontifical Secretary,
and arbiter of correct Latin and Italian poetry, had come with his
pleasant companion, Donna Morosina; but I will not name all the
cardinals and their escorts, nor the Roman gentlemen,--Orsinis,
Contis, Colonnas, Ludovisis, Rospigliosis, and the rest. In short,
there were more than forty covers laid, and for elegance of manner
and brilliancy of conversation a more notable company could not have
been found in Rome. The guests then were worthy of Messere Chigi’s
best, which “best” implied a feast such as an Apicius might have laid
for an emperor.
The hall was cooled by great fans fixed overhead and worked by
invisible hands; in the centre rose a column whereon a beautiful
boy, stripped, and gilded like a statue, stood pouring water from
a silver urn. The scores of servants passing with silent feet were
clad in Eastern silks. The seneschal in charge changed his gorgeous
dress four times during the banquet. Rose water was brought for our
hands. Many of the dishes were triumphs of art--statuary rather than
confectionery. Perseus was shown saving Andromeda, and Ceres came
in her chariot drawn by five tigers. There was a sturgeon five feet
long upon one silver dish, and a stag served whole. The very bread
was gilded. Yet with it all there was no burden in the magnificence.
Messere Chigi had all his guests at their ease, and I soon found
myself separated from Marianna, who sat opposite with Rocca, while my
companion chanced to be the vivacious Contessa della Valle, with the
learned Master “Censor” Priario close at hand.
I forget all that we talked about during the innumerable courses, but
I recall that when some luscious pheasants were served, the Contessa
shrugged her shoulders.
“After all,” smiled she, “it is not yet midnight and to-day was
Friday.”
“All things are permitted in Rome,” I replied lightly. “How is that,
my wise Priario?”
“Excellently said,” returned the censor, lifting a choice morsel.
“Says not Scripture, ‘The Kings of the Earth take tribute of
strangers, but the Children (ourselves, of course), are free.’”
“Full pardon, then!” cried the Contessa, who had taken enough wine to
be a little gay. She helped herself, and I was complimenting her upon
some fine corals, when Cardinale di Porto, near by, asked if I had
read Pomponazzi of Mantua’s new essay upon “The Immortality of the
Soul.”
“Yes, I have read it,” I assented; “but I cannot claim to judge it as
an expert churchman.”
“Yet you have an opinion?”
“If I were a theologian, I should say the learned author has the
incredulity of Lucretius and the infidelity of a Moslem.”
“Too harsh, my dear Conte. It is a most excellent book. The author
declares clearly he submits to the Church in all its teachings, even
if the immortality of the soul is disproved by all human reasoning.”
“Nevertheless,” I contended, “for much lesser heresies better men
have walked to the stake.”
“The stake! Don’t mention the horrid word, Eccellenza,” begged the
lady nervously.
“Nevertheless,” I rejoined, “the book is so dangerous and heretical
that its sale is forbidden in Venice.”
“Of course,” retorted Porto, “your Venetian is ultra-orthodox;
praised be the immortals, His Holiness is more liberal!”
“I fear he would not prove so liberal,” I ventured, “if instead
of writing for a few philosophers, Pomponazzi had declared to the
multitude that ‘since it is doubtful whether we have immortal souls,
it is also doubtful whether we ought to pay tithes to Rome.’”
“There is no parallel!” cried the lady.
“The Contessa is right,” chimed Porto. “It is quite a different
matter to advance a cautious theory for the learned few, than to cast
pearls before swine,--I mean to cast sage conclusions before the
ignorant.”
“We will deal with your second case when it arises,” thrust in
Priario grimly, but at this moment the discussion was widened by a
question I heard the learned Messere Bembo putting, a little way down
the table.
“And tell me, my dear Chigi, how the last indulgence in Germany
sells? Will it not relieve His Holiness’s financial troubles?”
“The sale has hardly begun,” returned the banker; “but since the
Archbishop of Mainz has taken it over, it seems likely to prosper
tolerably. The appeal to ‘build St. Peter’s Church’ opens purse
strings. Then I hear that some admirably clever preachers have been
hired to do the hawking.”
“Clever?” queried Bembo, looking up from his goblet. “It cannot need
great cleverness to bewitch the money from the pouches of those
‘Barbarians,’ as the great Magister Gustiniani called them.”
“Yet you wrong our Northern friends,” said Chigi lightly. “True they
have more fleas than Latin words, more beer than good wine; and yet
they have a hearty rude civility and a learning after the old pious
sort. I have been in Nuremberg. I avow it was a passably handsome
city.”
“Impossible!” challenged the savant. “‘What good can come from such a
land of the frozen Hyperboreï?’ as Plato most irrefutably says in the
ninth chapter of the Timeaus--”
“We do not all understand Greek,” said Chigi deprecatingly. Perhaps
he saw that my face was growing red, and that others were looking at
me. “In my day I have seen many men of many countries. Believe me,
even a blackamoor improves on acquaintance. The French have a good
proverb, ‘The absent are always wrong.’”
But the secretary arose in the dogmatic pride of a complacent pedant.
“I have seen the brutes. I have learned to despise them. The French
are tolerable, but the Germans--” a gesture completed his disgust.
“Their best Latinist, Erasmus--who is he but a mere schoolboy still
conning his Donatus’s grammar?”
I was on my feet; Chigi beckoned for silence, but Bembo swept on.
“No thanks to Julius Cæsar, I assert, for bringing this disgusting
North by his conquests within reach of our civilization. Let them
freeze and moulder in their bogs! If their present credulity, ‘the
sins of the Germans’ as we say, is profitable to Rome,--whether
to build St. Peter’s or to pay His Holiness’s debts--’tis but the
just tribute of vice to virtue, of ignorance to learning. I tell
you, Chigi, neither you nor another can name a German or a son of a
German who was a tolerable scholar, and by habits a virtuoso and a
gentleman.”
The savant paused for breath. I attacked instantly. I spoke in my
best Latin, choosing each word carefully. The wine had only made my
senses more acute. I could see Marianna signalling to me “caution,”
but my fighting spirit was roused.
“Magister Bembo,” I began, “do me the honor to hearken. I tell you
that I am the son of a German nobleman, as honorable and perfect a
cavalier as ever drew a sword; and I will not have my father’s nation
slandered to my face. If I have spent most of my life in my mother’s
Southland, it is not through shame for my father’s North. Nobility
and learning, and ripe wisdom there are in the North,--things which
it ill becomes you men of erudition to deny. Honesty, kindliness and
loyalty there are in the North--things which you of Italy might learn
right well. And if the Germans still believe heartily divers matters
of religion, which you of Italy pretend to believe, and scoff at in
private,--the greater glory theirs, the greater shame for you!”
Bembo was red now, and it was not from wine; but I would not cease in
order to let him speak. My own anger was kindling. I was precisely in
the mood for plain truths and cutting words.
“Let us be frank, noble friends! You know that this Christian
religion which is so often on our tongues is to us as great a legend
as that of Isis and Osiris of Egypt. If we acknowledge a deity is
He not in reality the God of Plato, not of Moses and the Nazarene?
Are not our master-philosophers and teachers from Athens, not from
Jerusalem? Our wise Bembo, I understand, has lately warned his
students against reading St. Paul because of his bad Greek. Rather
let us tell the world to withdraw from the teachings of Matthew
and Luke because they are but fair fables. Let us not depose His
Holiness--avert it, Gods!--let us rather proclaim him the leader,
the arch-hierophant of ourselves the emancipated, the lovers of the
beautiful, of the eternal verities which we grasp, not through blind
Jewish tradition, but through exalted reason. Then--_then_ we can
taunt the Germans for their credulity, when we have ceased to take
their money, and ceased to profess to believe a lie.”
I had silenced Bembo. That triumph at least was mine. Stunned by
my audacity, no one for a long moment either laughed or applauded.
Then I saw a lady--in scared fashion--crossing herself. Several of
the older cardinals were trying hard to look horrified. Then came
a little ripple of voices, half-deriding, half-approving, if not
my sentiments, at least my boldness. I stood for a moment with the
hot flush on my cheeks, my heart prompting me to say more; but
Marianna’s upraised finger commanded silence, and Chigi with ready
wit answered for the writhing Bembo.
“Monsignore the Secretary, I am sure, spoke in haste and without
intent to insult the ancestors or fatherland of so illustrious a
gentleman as the Conte di Palaestro. As for the latter’s answer, let
us all confess it was not unprovoked. In the heat of such a sortie no
man can be required to weigh all he utters. The Conte would hardly
subscribe to-morrow to all he has expressed to-night. Heaven forbid,
we should either undervalue or overrate his words! Being no learned
classicist, as are these highly esteemed gentlemen, I cry their
pardon if I beg them to forego this discussion before this most noble
and virtuous company.”
I had shot my arrow, and readily bowed assent. Bembo muttered
something about “having no desire to wound the Conte’s honor.”
Monsignore Priario and a couple of other ecclesiastics looked at me
rather blackly, but I felt none the worse for that. The conversation
became general, everybody steering clear of dangerous subjects. The
Prince of Colonna explained the latest discoveries of the Spaniards
in the Indies and the possibility of a great increase in the supply
of gold. Raffaello spoke charmingly about his latest project for the
reconstruction of San Pietro. Bembo--quite mollified--told of the
rediscovery of a manuscript of Plautus at the Milanese library, while
Rocca aired his ingenious theory of how the ancient gourmands served
oysters. The night, or rather the morning, advanced. The candles were
changed; more wine was passed--although nobody was drinking really to
excess. We were so charmed by our own wit that no one noted the hour
when we dismissed the subject of the Laocoön, lately installed in the
Vatican Belvidere, and took up the theory of Pindar, as propounded by
the Bishop of Montebello,--“that a noble action is worthless to the
doer, unless it is accompanied by the praise of his fellow-men.” On
this point we all,--including the ladies,--had much to say, and I was
being charmed by the manner wherewith Madonna Marianna entered into
the argument, when I was diverted by the touch of a servant.
“Many pardons, Eccellenza; this gentleman says he must speak to you.”
Looking about I saw the guards-captain, Fabriano, our companion on
the boat ride, and leaped up immediately.
“Happily met, good fellow,” I cried, holding out my hand; “the wine
has loosed our tongues and unsealed our wit and wisdom. Here, boy--a
chair and a glass for the noble captain.”
He did not take my hand, and gazed at me awkwardly.
“Pest take me, Gualtiero,” he began at last; “I scarce know what to
say. I have come here as an official, not as a friend. Be sure I come
with all the reluctance in the world.”
“But my dear fellow, I don’t see why you look at me as gingerly as
San Giorgio at his dragon.”
He seized me by the sleeve, then blurted,
“The fiends make me out with it! I am come to demand your sword and
take you to the Castle of San Angelo. The governor of the city has
ordered it.”
“To arrest me?--” I was indeed dazed.
“Come quietly--at least away from here,” he urged; “I will explain--”
But here the Contessa della Valle, who had listened like a cat to
everything, gave a little shriek.
“Arrested! Conte di Palaestro arrested! To San Angelo? Oh!
impossible--”
The babel of conversation ceased instantly, and Chigi interposed
without delay.
“You arrest the Conte, Fabriano? My guest? Monstrous! Incredible! An
outrageous intrusion: explain!”
“Most noble banker,” returned the Captain, very ill at ease, “be
assured I undertook this disagreeable task only that another less
delicate officer might not perform it. I grieve to inform you that
the Conte is charged with attempting to procure the murder of the
Archbishop of Bari--”
“Murder Monsignore di Bari?” came as one cry from all over the room.
“Calm yourselves, illustrious ladies and gentlemen. The Archbishop is
unharmed. Nevertheless, I must execute my orders.”
“At least,” spoke Chigi peremptorily, “you are to satisfy us that
this charge is not a mere fiction, some ill-timed jest, aimed at the
Conte di Palaestro?”
As I glanced towards Marianna and Rocca I could see them both
flushed, disturbed and whispering excitedly one with the other. Then
Madonna caught my eye and laid her hand upon her lips. There was dead
silence whilst all craned and listened to Fabriano’s answer.
“Noble friends--believe me I did not announce this thing touching his
Excellency the Conte as something proved, but only alleged. The known
facts are these. This evening the Archbishop left his apartments near
the Pantheon to keep an appointment with a lady in a garden near the
Colosseum. He had had affairs with bravoes lately, and as precaution
wore a ring shirt of proof. Luckily, too, he was followed by several
trusty valets, among whom were two old soldiers from the Milanese
wars. Passing a narrow street by San Pietro in Vincoli several men
were observed following. Bari proceeded and the fellows disappeared;
but when near their destination, on turning a convent wall, suddenly,
three men ran out against them with drawn swords. The leader sprang
on Bari and would infallibly have pierced him, but his sword was
snapped on the ring mail. The recoil of the unfortunate stroke threw
the murderer off his balance. He fell, and instantly his comrades
fled into the darkness. Bari’s servants flung themselves upon the
prostrate bravo and secured him. The Archbishop, finding himself
unhurt, at once caused his people to conduct the prisoner to the
Governor of Rome at San Angelo. The captive was promptly recognized
as the desperate and notorious Ettore Orosi. Knowing that such a
man only attempted murders for a price, he was at once confronted
with the rack, to secure the name of his employer. After a certain
hesitancy, he gave way before the threats, and presently mentioned
our illustrious Conte; yet told his story with such plausibility that
the Governor could only yield to the hot demands of Bari and direct
me to summon the Conte to San Angelo.”
This somewhat long recital had given me time to recover my wits, and
I divined quickly the signals cast me by Marianna and Rocca. I drew
myself up a little haughtily.
“Worthy Fabriano,” I said, “I exonerate you in this strange affair,
but as an immediate and noble vassal of the Holy See, I deny the
right of the Governor of San Angelo to hale me before him on the
witness of a professional bravo. Let me be taken not to San Angelo
but to the Vatican; let me be examined at once by the Pope himself.”
“Impossible,” Fabriano began to object; “the lateness of the hour, my
clear orders--”
But Rocca stepped forward. “I will take it upon myself to shield you
from all consequences. Let the Conte be conducted instantly to His
Holiness.”
“If the Cardinale di Rocca pledges,” bowed the captain, yielding; and
so the matter was concluded. I could see well enough how Rocca was
anxious for himself, and Marianna for her father in the business, and
vastly preferred the sifting of the approachable Pope, rather than of
the stern-browed Governor. As for myself, I was resolved to shield
Forli and Rocca if I could, without putting my own affairs in too
much jeopardy. Plainly Orosi had tried to screen his real employer
by accusing me, and my wishes for the renowned bravo were not the
kindest.
The feast broke up as I was led out. I pitied Messere Chigi. What an
unlucky ending for a most carefully planned supper--and how all the
tongues in Rome would wag in the morning!
CHAPTER IV
THE JUDGMENT OF LEO DE’ MEDICI
The captain had a closed carriage ready, and did not do me the
indignity of taking away my sword. Marianna and Rocca had gone out
simultaneously, and started ahead in one of Chigi’s vehicles, hastily
harnessed. A messenger was sent to San Angelo to summon Bari to the
Vatican, and ask that Orosi be sent thither under due guard. My
custodian, an excellent-hearted cavalier, spent most of the ride
across the now dark and silent city, assuring me that there was
nothing to fear, that the charges of Orosi were absurd, and that
the Pope was all benignity in every case where his kinsfolk did not
interfere to arouse him. I, however, knowing the plot better, foresaw
trouble in clearing myself without implicating Forli, especially
as the bravo would doubtless say anything to save his neck.
Nevertheless, I took a certain grim satisfaction in realizing that
Forli’s unsavory plot was thwarted.
“No,” I asserted to myself, almost aloud, “I do not think that I will
soon be forced to become the Archbishop of Bari!”
So we went on, till the wheels rolled into the court of the Vatican.
A few torches made the great pile of buildings rise darkly above us.
A subaltern of the Swiss guards threw open the door. I descended
with the captain. Rocca was there already, having put his horses at
their speed, and at a signal from him my custodian conducted me up
the long staircases, and along the half-lighted galleries, until
we came to a line of yawning gentlemen-chamberlains and flunkies
outside the private apartments of His Holiness; and after some delay
Messere Paris di Grassis, the Master of Ceremonies, and two other
green-cassocked ushers, came forward to demand our wishes.
I let Rocca do the negotiating. The worthy Paris’s protests against
disturbing the Pope were presently beaten down; but before we
were admitted another group had joined us,--my accuser, Bari, in
civilian’s dress, and still flushed and excited, besides a squad
of soldiers with the valiant Orosi pinioned in their midst. The
Archbishop’s smooth, olive face darkened ominously when he glanced
at me, but Fabriano clapped a kindly hand on my shoulder, and we
exchanged no defiances. Then with a little rumble the doors were
thrown open, and Monsignore Paris was calling:--
“You may enter, Signori.”
The scene was not unfamiliar. The high, brilliantly frescoed room
was lighted by a score of lamps swinging from silver chains, a dozen
prelates and court gentlemen were lounging on divans around the
chamber, and conversing in polite whispers. In the centre of the room
was a round table covered with white velvet, about which were three
low chairs occupied by Forli and two other cardinals. On the table
lay cards and a goodly pile of golden scudi. Directly facing the
door, upon a high armchair, sat Leo de’ Medici.
“His Eminence of Rocca, Monsignore di Bari and the Conte di
Palaestro,” announced Paris’s clear voice, “crave audience with His
Holiness upon a matter admitting no delay.”
We entered in a little group and stood in respectful attention
until the Pope--disturbed in the dealing of a new game of his
favorite _primiera_--could recover from his slight surprise. The
Maltese poodle at his knee rose, begging and barking for one of the
bonbons on the stand at his lord’s elbow. The Pope stared at us, his
near-sighted, glassy eyes starting prominently out of his large,
florid face. His light hair was covered by a white skullcap, and
from under his red stole peeped the scarlet slippers with the golden
cross on the right foot. It took a minute for him to fidget his thick
body in the armchair, reach with his much beringed hand a dainty to
the dog, and fumble for his eyeglass. He surveyed us briefly, and at
last in his usual brisk and pleasant manner began:--
“Well met, well met--Rocca, Bari, Palaestro. Good hands all of you! I
am sure these noble cardinals here will be glad to have you replace
them, especially as I seem to have won most of their money. And how
have you spent the evening? I hear Chigi gave one of his charming
suppers. I trust the ladies’ toilets were elegant.”
He paused to cast another bonbon to the dog.
“May your Holiness be graciously pleased,” began Rocca in a
constrained tone. “I fear we cannot usurp their Eminences’ places at
your table. A little difference has arisen between Monsignore di Bari
and the Conte di Palaestro which only your Holiness can arbitrate.”
“A difference,--excellent!” the Pope’s eyes brightened. “Some matter
of Latin versification, no doubt. I heard yesterday that Bari was
preparing some excellent pentameters.”
“I grieve to say, your Holiness,” spoke the Archbishop, abruptly,
“our ‘differences’ touch quite another business. The illustrious
Conte di Palaestro has hired this bravo Orosi here to take my life,
and but for my good mail shirt, I would have been dead these three
hours!”
“Murder? Hired bravoes?” the Pope’s thick features paled at the words
of ill-omen. “Impossible! Why, man--all Rome knows the Conte’s worthy
German scruples. Impossible, I say!”
“I can convince your Holiness,” asseverated Bari. “The Pope surely
knows this Orosi’s reputation. The Governor of San Angelo can be
witness both to his identity and his character. He was caught
red-handed in the deed, and has confessed. As a prelate of the
Church, if not as your friend, I demand your Holiness’s punishment
upon his hirer, the Conte di Palaestro.”
“Pest take the business!” cried the Pope, casting his cards upon the
table. “Was ever a quiet evening so spoiled? Well--Gualtiero, why
don’t you speak? What have you to say?”
“I say,” I rejoined brusquely, “that the Pope knows me long enough
to make this monstrous charge fall of its own weight. I did not hire
this bravo to murder Monsignore di Bari.”
“Bear witness, your Holiness,” cried the Archbishop, triumphantly;
“he does not deny, however, knowing of a plot to take my life.”
“Come, come,” exclaimed Leo, half testily; “let us not act like
hasty schoolboys. Since you are safe and sound, Bari, don’t grow
vindictive. We will sift the whole business; first let us examine the
assassin.”
During all this dialogue Forli and Rocca had been whispering, and now
Forli came to my elbow.
“A good heart, Gualtiero!” he shot in my ear; “do not betray me. All
will end well.”
“But better never begun,” I darted back. Now, however, the Pope began
to interrogate the prisoner, and all our attention was concentrated
upon Orosi.
To do the bravo credit he stuck to his lie with admirable dexterity.
Clearly enough he understood that Forli’s gratitude for his perverted
tale would far offset any anger of mine. He swore circumstantially
that I had summoned him to an interview that afternoon, had
represented that Bari was crossing me in the matter of a lady; and
then we had arranged for the Archbishop’s removal. He named places,
persons, and times with inimitable plausibility. The exalted rank
of his questioner disturbed him not the least. When asked as to
his experience in such matters, he looked upon Bari with capital
nonchalance, and avowed that “he had helped eleven better than
Monsignore into purgatory,--praised be Santo Paolo!--for had he not
learned his art in the school of _il illustrissimo_ Caesare Borgia?”
When all direct attempts to shake his story had failed, the Pope
turned on me.
“And now your denial, Conte?”
“As before. I swear I did not employ this cut-throat. His story is a
tissue of lies.”
“He said you talked with him at your lodgings before you left
for Chigi’s. If you did not, who were with you at that time, to
substantiate your denial?”
“I will not deceive your Holiness, only my own servants.”
“And where were you before that?”
“At the palazzo of the Cardinale di Forli.”
“And who was there?”
I felt the flush mount to my temples. I never cursed my German blood
as I cursed it then. Why did my tongue trip at a well-placed lie? I
knew my reputation for blunt Northern veracity. Why dared I not trade
on it?
“Madonna Marianna, of course,” I answered, sparring for time.
“Naturally; and the Forli servants, and some of your own, perhaps.
Who else?”
“I do not recollect. I was not there long.”
But the words did not come boldly; and simultaneously I saw Bari’s
keen face flash from me to Forli, then back with a sudden gleam of
intelligence.
“I demand a better answer, your Holiness,” he thrust in. “The Conte
is not making a full answer. He _does_ recollect. Command that he
declare upon his honor whom he saw at that palazzo.”
“Can you answer the Archbishop?” said the Pope, with unwonted
firmness. He was a shrewd judge of men when once aroused.
I looked His Holiness fairly in the eye.
“I regret to pique Monsignore’s curiosity,” I said, “but I cannot
reply to his question.”
You could have counted twelve ere any in the company spoke a word.
They had all pressed near to catch my disclosure. Not one could miss
the point of the question and answer. Forli was looking downward
sheepishly. I knew he was execrating my hesitancy to prevaricate.
Then the Pope began again--ominously gentle.
“I trust you appreciate the unfortunate results of withholding
anything. If you cannot swear you saw no stranger at the Cardinal’s,
whom did you see? Describe as precisely as possible if you cannot
identify him.”
I glanced furiously at Rocca and Forli. I was more angry at their
involving me in their fell project, than fearful of its consequences.
“Your Holiness, I regret it, but my answer is final. I can say
nothing as to anything that occurred at the palazzo of the Cardinal.”
Bari--an irascible man--threw down his biretta in the Pope’s presence.
“I call your Holiness to witness! To-night my life was attempted.
By the confession of the assassin the Conte was his employer. The
Conte’s denial is most imperfect. By plain implications from his
silences it is likely others were in the plot. I know well certain
high personages,”--he darted a glance upon Forli and Rocca, “have
envied the favor awarded me by your Holiness, and coveted the
prebends and benefices you have deigned to bestow upon me. If the
Pope is not a lord merely over bravoes and bandits, I demand--”
But Forli had already whispered to a fellow-cardinal, and he to the
Master of Ceremonies. Now good Messere Paris stepped forward with
uplifted hand.
“May it please the Pope! The very reverend Archbishop is about,
I fear, to say many harsh things, calculated--if bruited through
Rome, to spread even through Christendom, to the great scandal of
the Church. He is saved. _Laus Deo!_ The bravo is taken. _Laus Deo
in excelsis!_ But this being the case I pray your Holiness to act
delicately in opening a matter in which more may be involved than the
mere avenging of Monsignore.”
“Well said,” uttered an influential cardinal, in audible whisper.
“Yet I,” asserted Bari, “have been all but murdered. I insist--”
“_Pax_”! ordered the Pope, moving uneasily on his cushions. “Was ever
there a less happy case! Bari must be vindicated? Right. The Church
must be spared a scandal? Right. But how do both. Have I Solon,
Periander, Thales and all the other Seven Sages in my council? How
could you do this, Forli? how could you?” The cardinal addressed
tried hard not to seem to comprehend. “What lack of judgment?
What lack of consideration for me? And now you have involved our
unfortunate Gualtiero--”
The Holy Father took refuge in a new demand by the poodle to be fed,
and stopped to satisfy the dog.
“At least,” urged Bari, his eyes like daggers, “there is no scandal
to the Church in the case of the gallant Conte,--to all intents my
murderer. Let _him_ pay out his penalty.”
But I had now measured the situation, and broke my silence.
“Hear me, your Holiness. It is true I am so unluckily situated that
to refute this bravo’s story I must involve others whom I would,
as an honorable friend, fain spare. I will not whine abjectly for
leniency: but I will remind the Pope of the day when not the
Holy Father, but the then Cardinale de’ Medici, was banished from
Florence, was driven with insults from Bologna, but found refuge and
true friendship at my grandfather’s castle at Palaestro.”
“I remember,” muttered the Pope, “I remember.”
“Then I entreat your Holiness, in whatever you decide to recall this
service in dealing with your protector’s grandson.”
Bari would have charged in again, but Leo forbade him with a gesture.
A minute of tense silence, and then the Pope’s face relaxed. I knew
that he had reached a relatively merciful decision. He cleared his
throat.
“A sad business, Gualtiero; a sad business, Forli. Very bunglingly
managed as I think I see through it. Not that I applaud the attack
on poor Bari,--Jove forbid!--but then there can be a certain finesse
even in great crimes. This Orosi is not nearly as redoubtable a
villain as he boasts--to that I’ll swear. Well,--what’s to be done? A
pity surely to have Bari in such jeopardy and no reparation. I must
mollify him. A good prebend at Orvieto fell vacant last week. You
have applied for it, Forli: but you must withdraw your petition now.
It shall go to Bari--eleven hundred ducats income. A fair salve for
that sword thrust--eh?” The Pope’s eyes gleamed, and the Archbishop
looked decidedly appeased. “I’ll not press Rocca whether _he_ knows
anything of this business, though mayhap he ought to share the
penalty with Forli. And now as to this bravo--a sturdy rascal, a very
sturdy rascal! What a pity not in a more honest calling! And yet he
were better hanged.”
“I cry your Holiness’s mercy,” began Orosi, dropping deftly on his
knees, and squeezing the drops out of his eyes. “I swear by the
Mother of God and all Angels that I have resolved, if spared this
once, to devote all my days to the war against the Turkish infidels.
Peccavi! Peccavi! The compassion of your Holiness is known to all the
world.”
“Tush!” commanded the Pope, almost laughing now. “Rise up! Do you
think I’ll spare you for vows like that? I was only wondering whether
you would prove useful to my kinsmen in Florence.”
“Ah, yes! yes! Holiness. There is much that a man of my ability can
do in Florence. I will be faithful forever. My gratitude--”
“Stand him aside,” ordered Leo; “at least he needn’t hang to-night.”
And then he fixed his eyes on me.
“So you are left, Gualtiero? Let me see. Did the company at Chigi’s
hear the whole story, the bravo’s accusation and all the rest?”
“The greater part, your Holiness,” said Fabriano.
“_Misericordia!_ It will be all over Rome then in the morning. If
it had only first come to me privately! Surely you see that I can’t
pardon you now. What an unlucky position! And you desire to make no
defence? Well--how can I seem to temper justice with mercy, and yet
punish you? I believe you have a castle and estates in Germany?”
I bowed assent.
“Then it will not be so bad. Naturally you wish to visit them
ere very long. Why not at present? We shall miss you here,
Gualtiero--miss you at cards and at the hunt, but _Deo volente_ not
forever. Your Germans are a credulous folk, but I have travelled
among them. They are not so vile as many of us suppose. So, then, my
decision. Give ear.” His tone grew formal. “Seeing that the Conte di
Palaestro has been unable to clear himself of prompting an attempt
upon the Archbishop of Bari, I do declare that he has laid himself
liable to the penalties of a great crime: but in the paternal mercy,
never failing to the Holy See, and lest the full uncovering of the
crime breed a great scandal in the Church, I do remit the major part
of the punishment, and command that he depart to-morrow for his
German estates, giving his word not to reënter Italy for one year,
nor to return to Rome for two years.”
“Your Holiness is very indulgent,” I said humbly. The Pope thrust out
his right slipper upon the footstool. I knelt and kissed the shoe,
and then bowed myself out into the antechamber. The card players
dispersed. A little group was gathering around Bari to congratulate
him upon his new prebend.
“Lucky fellow,” Rocca was saying in my ear. “How loath the Pope was
to do anything to you! With his chronic need for money he might have
fined you fifty thousand scudi.”
Forli, too, had like felicitations over the merciful outcome, but I
answered both coldly. “I owe you no thanks, Eminenzas. This has been
your plot, but my penalty. I warned in advance against your scheme.
But for that sense of honor which you so little cultivate, and which
you would never have exercised in my behalf, I could have passed the
debt on to you, and gone scot free.”
“We are grateful, Gualtiero, we are grateful,” Forli kept repeating.
“Orosi did his work perfectly. No one is really to blame. But, _Dii
Immortales!_ who could have dreamed that dolt of a Bari had wit
enough to wear a chain shirt!”
* * * * *
A little later, in the gray dawn, before I left the Vatican, I stood
alone for a little while with Marianna. I will not tell how she wept,
accused herself and her father a thousand times for the “blunder,”
or how I vowed to carry her miniature ever with me and to write from
Padua and Augsburg, and again as soon as I reached my castle of
Regenstein.
“I will think of you always, always!” she kept declaring.
“You will soon have other lovers, Madonna,” I said with sad
truthfulness.
“Never such a one as you, Gualtiero. Never such a one as you! I
will never forget you. And who knows but that I may come even into
your frozen North in search of you? For remember my saying: you are
Italian, never German. You belong to the South, to us forever!”
“Nevertheless,” I answered, “at present I fare toward the Northland.”
Then I told her that after all we were both young, and this was only
a passing cloud across the long summer of life before us, and that
after a year I could at least receive her at Palaestro. I need not
repeat all that we said and did at the parting.
And so ended my last night in Rome, not for two, but for more than
three, years.
BOOK I
THE AWAKENING
CHAPTER V
I COME TO SCHLOSS REGENSTEIN
The copy of a letter written soon after my arrival in Germany to my
old friend and correspondent, Rocca, tells at least what I wished my
associates at Rome to know of my journey and its surroundings. It is
couched in the style much affected by the virtuosi of the day; and
although I have come to be ashamed enough of such literary vanities,
I allow the letter to stand that it may be a true chronicle of at
least one person--myself.
“... Pardon indeed, my honored Rocca, that I now write you in
mere Italian, and not in Latin. But my books have not yet arrived
from Augsburg, and while it is indeed possible I could write in
the classic tongue without the immortal illustrations of pure
Latinity before me, I fear I might lapse into some monkish idiom
unless I could refer to my Cicero and Statius. However, I do not
intend to imitate Agrippina and Trajan (not to name Cæsar) and
recite my deeds in formal commentaries, but simply to declare
that your friend is in good health, and so far as a banished man
may be, in good spirits.
“Here I am, then, in my mountain eyrie, snug as an eagle above
intruding ken. Conceive me too as sovereign lord over all human
creatures about me, possessed of right of pit and gallows, and
expected to prove my princely blood by administering frequent
floggings with my own hand, and accounted not a little lacking in
spirit if I fail to crowd my overlarge dungeons with many victims
of my capricious displeasure. In short, within my little kingdom
I find that I am possessed of all the absolute tyranny of the
Grand Turk or the Great Prince of Muscovy.
“The tale of my journey over the Alps to Augsburg and Erfurt,
I must omit, knowing you have had your surfeit of stories of
travellers. I will simply remark that the inns had even as many
hungry fleas as I had feared (excelling even their ferocious
comrades of Naples), the cookery was bad, the folk we met, even
of the better sort, were oafish: and Andrea and his underlings
have had their heads repeatedly broken (and have retorted in
kind) in brawls with sheep-pated inn servants. Indeed, when I
look on my poor Andrea and observe his hang-dog countenance as he
goes among these Northerners, I feel that for him the expiation
of his sins in purgatory has begun already.
“Shortly after leaving Erfurt we had our first real adventure.
We ran upon a band of armed villains led by a fellow styled a
‘Ritter’ (_i.e._ with some pretence to coat-armor) in the act
and article of rifling the wagons of certain Halle merchants
who were sadly watching the plundering with their arms strapped
behind them. Modesty forbids me to tell of my own feats in
combat; nevertheless, Andrea afterward proclaimed that I laid
about me like a veritable Orlando. In any case, we dispersed the
rascals, rescued the merchants, and I pinked the Ritter through
the shoulder. Afterwards when we trussed him up to carry onward
to Nordhausen and to summary justice, the fellow professed no
sorrow for his misdeeds, but asserted his rights to plunder along
that highway. ‘From time immemorial his family had possessed the
right to plunder every cart which broke its axle upon the road
betwixt certain limits, and assuredly _that_ cart had so broken
its axle. Besides, every Ritter now and then made his horse “bite
off the purses of travellers.”’
“All this gave me a taste of the country I was entering. From
Nordhausen, as I fared northward, the country became ever more
wild and rocky. Not sublime like the Alps; not softly sensuous
like the south of our dear Italy; but one green hill after
another, each a little higher, each a little steeper than its
predecessor, until at last you wind in and out the mountains,
following the line of some green rushing brook, while high above,
the great ridges of pointed pines rise line upon line, like the
spear points of a serried army.
“So we plunged into the Harz, over hill and dale, past castles
and brown-thatched hamlets. Sometimes a red-roofed village, with
its peaked parish spire would loom before us; sometimes a little
chapel upon a soaring crag. The country folk were haler and
brawnier than the lowlanders we were quitting. We met a great
flock of black sheep, with a grizzled, blue-coated shepherd,
filling all the roadway and crowding us nigh across the wall.
We passed five ox-teams pulling great creaking loads of hay, so
high that the latter seemed to dwarf both the double yoke and
the sturdy driver who was guiding the whole vast mass with a
deft touch of his goad. Again there was the melodious tinkling
of fifty cow-bells, as the long herd came plodding down the
pine-hung way.
“And as we wound deeper into the mountains, past one red-roofed
village after another, and saw the sturdy forms of the men,
straight as the firs above them; saw the blond, clear beauty of
the farmer maids, with their long, fair hair wound round their
heads like shining wreaths, I confess the blood began to stir
within me, and despite the remembrance of Rome and Florence and
Venice and the rest, I began to find the upland air all spring
and sparkle, and to think the German speech less harsh; yes, even
to say under breath, ‘I will never mourn that my father sprang
from this North.’
“After we passed Hasselfelde and entered upon the last stage of
the journey, the country grew yet wilder. Over a clearing we saw
the red coat of a startled deer go flashing through the pine
stumps. A wolfish wood-cutter stopped and looked at us hard as we
approached, as if wondering whether he had not best scamper up
the hillside out of reach of our arquebuses. We crossed a roaring
torrent by a rough timber bridge that swayed uncannily under our
horses. Then at a sudden turn in the rocks we came face to face
with half a score of men on big lumbering steeds, and clad in
black and very nondescript armor. They bore halberds big enough
to fell oxen, and Andrea--our vanguard,--had his firelock ready
in a trice, ere I could call out ‘hold!’ But the foremost rider,
a mighty man, too big for his tall roan horse, came straight on,
and his grizzled mustaches, his wolf-white teeth, and the long
scar over his forehead, I remembered from boyhood days right well.
“‘Adolf!’ I cried.
“By some magic instantly the whole band reined in, and the ten
giants leaping down with direful clatter began to bend and scrape.
“‘Your Countly Grace! Your Countly Grace!’ they all chanted
together, and Adolf then begun to shuffle up to me, seizing my
hand, kissing it in a slobbering way. Next he must needs tell in
harshest mountain German, how he had always sworn that I would
come back like a Regensteiner to the old schloss; that he had
received my advance messenger; that he had kept the schloss true
and fast even as my fathers had loved it; that there was a great
boar in the Tannenwald waiting my hunting; that the dogs were in
excellent fettle; that he had in the dungeon two poachers whom he
was sure I would enjoy hanging, or perhaps I preferred breaking
them on the wheel; and that--
“But here I shook off his bearlike embraces, and in what German
I had, I thanked him for his faithfulness, assured him and
his followers that I would try by my gratitude to merit their
loyalty, and that I would be delighted with their escort onward
to Schloss Regenstein. So then we rode forward, Andrea still
casting one anxious eye upon our new companions and the other
upon his well-primed arquebuse.
“How we passed the town of Blankenburg I quite forgot, and indeed
I thought of little save that I was returning to the castle of my
father’s fathers. I knew that Adolf and his company were taking
mental account of their new lord; of his Milanese hosiery, his
Florentine mantle, his Venice corselet, and his Bologna bonnet.
More quizzical, too, I knew they were of my smooth chin and
smooth white hands, so unlike their mighty spades: but I was
resolved to teach them in due time they had a true lord to rule
over them, and kept my peace, and thus we fared toward the castle.
“There it rose on its green crest above the foothills, with its
gaunt battlements and towers; and I meditated, as I neared it,
on all the iron-handed, flinty-hearted ritters, my forbears, who
had ridden forth under its gates to fight their feuds, lift their
neighbors’ cattle, and strip the Magdeburg caravans, even as had
the rascal I had lately captured. Hardly two generations since,
and to be Graf von Regenstein had been to fear the Devil only a
little and God not at all, and to be the wildest lance in all
Saxony. Yet here was I,--lineal heir of those men,--returning to
my ancestral home, with its dungeons, portcullis, sally-ports,
its cavernous halls adorned with wolf-heads, bearskins, and
dingy armor! But, lo! my head was filled with the tinkling of
languishing Tuscan sonnets, and as we trudged up the hill I fell
to musing how one might describe the peaceful landscape in the
Doric of Theocritus,--true language surely for such an idyll! A
cursing in fiercest dialect, from Adolf, as his horse stumbled,
recalled me in a trice from ancient Sicily to present Harzland. I
glanced upward. We were almost beneath the fortress.
“No smug, smooth-stuccoed palazzo was Schloss Regenstein,
fashioned after Messere Bramante’s clever ideas filched from
Vitruvius. Hard and harsh reared the castle, one great jagged
mass of walls, battlements, gable roof and uncouth peak-capped
donjons,--an inchoate thing, like the savage icebergs which
sailors say course the northern seas. At first it seemed a single
shapeless creation, wrought out of unhewn rock by the primeval
giants and kobolds. Then as my awe of it began a little to wane,
the thing took on a certain order. I could distinguish the steep
winding way of hard round cobbles, the narrow drawbridge over the
dizzy moat, the portcullis hanging its spikes like the welcoming
upper fangs of a hungry monster. Behind that were walls--gray
and sheer save for ominous loopholes. Within these walls, others
still higher and more precipitous. Above these were standing what
appeared to be portions of a vast rambling house with numerous
arch-topped windows; again above this house--Ossa piled on
Pelion--were three round towers of prodigious size, and from the
tallest whipped a banner--my own green standard with the three
white boars’ heads. Upon the tower to the left dangled something
black that was swinging slowly--a skeleton hung in chains.
“I was just meditating whether I should take this fell sight
as an omen, when suddenly our approach seemed to have been
observed in the castle above. Instantly all the windows above
the battlement were crowded with faces, and right before me I
saw no grim-visaged cross-bowmen, but flaxen curls and rosy
faces,--a score of eager children, shouting their ‘_Gruss!_’ to
their strange lord and master. And then--boom! boom! boom! three
clouds of culverin smoke blew across the gate. I entered the
castle,--not the Conte di Palaestro, but the Graf von Regenstein
returning to his own.
“I passed my hand across my forehead, saying inwardly ‘At last I
am in the North.’”
* * * * *
“There is a precept, my dear Rocca, ‘When in Rome do as the
Romans do.’ An excellent rule, removing a thousand absurdities;
and its reverse is also excellent. ‘When absent from Rome,
conform yourself to your country.’ Not indeed that I would advise
imitating the rites and banquets of the fabled anthropophagi
or of other utterly outlandish speaking-animals, but I esteem
it both unwisdom and discourteous for the newcomer from one
land to another to refuse to adapt himself to the honest habits
of his hosts, assuming both have the names of decent folk and
Christians. Therefore I think I quite scandalized Andrea by the
way in which I drained a great horn of atrocious Harz-brewed
ale which the fat and worthy seneschal’s wife brought me when I
leaped down in the castle court. And from that time on I strove
diligently to appear, if not a right German, at least a compliant
guest. Much do I fear I have offended the loyal folk around me;
as when I so far forgot myself as to curse the heavy feather beds
they had heaped up for me in the state chamber, and to adjure
Andrea by all the saints to bring me my comfortable travelling
pallet. Likewise the next morning I trod on Adolf’s toes most
sorely when I hinted my displeasure at suffering so many swine to
root around the castle yard, delving in innumerable dunghills.
“‘But your Grace--may I humbly present to you--the honest pigs
have rooted in these dunghills since Regenstein was a castle.
’Twere depriving them of an established privilege--an undoubted
right. Whither shall they go?’
“‘To the sty or the field where God intended them. If I am king
here, I will change their evil privilege, will-you, nill-you.’
“‘It shall be done, your Grace,’ grumbled the bear; but under his
mustachios he kept muttering, ‘Oh, these Welschland (Italian)
customs! What a lord we have over us! _Liebe Gott!_ To remove the
pigs!’
“But these are mere incidents. I can hardly call myself at home
as yet, or master of my castle and destinies until my books have
come from Augsburg. I have found some chambers in the fortress
which can be fitted up very tolerably after Andrea has arranged
my tapestries from Paris. I have had as yet time simply to
assure myself that Regenstein is a very Emperor of strongholds.
I promise myself a thousand interesting nights diverting myself
with the tales of raids, forays, ghosts, goblins, witches,
romances, fair and foul, in short, of adventures of every
conceivable sort which every soul in the castle is eager to pour
out to me whenever I deign my august ear to listen: so if I can
only find paper enough in this place I can readily vie with
Messere Boccaccio’s tales in the _Decamerone_. I have explored
all the nooks and crannies of this vast pile of stone I call my
mansion. Adolf has displayed for my admiration the long passage
hewn in the living rock leading down to the privy sally-port; the
numerous store chambers embedded likewise in the rocky bowels
of the mountain. He has taken me out upon the topmost tower, by
dizzy ladders over scaffoldings whence the rooks and daws fled
noisily, and showed me the whole broad countryside spread out
like a map of foreign seas: far to the east over the low hills he
showed me the spires of the famed abbey church of Quedlenburg;
to the west the nestling village of Heimburg, ‘your Grace’s own
peculiar domain land,’ as he explained; to north the wide flat
plain with the turrets of Halberstadt dim in the distance; and to
south the whole wide green hill-land of the Harz, growing bolder
and bolder as the eye followed the contours into the distance.
“‘Noble landscape,’ quoth I, in reply to his obvious demand for
praise; ‘and well may my fathers have loved it. But this town to
southward, with its castle upon a rock, rising like a worthy peer
to Regenstein--what is its name? I have forgotten.’
“‘Blankenburg, your Grace, both town and castle.’
“‘A castle of the Duke of Brunswick, or of a fellow noble like
myself?’
“‘Of the free and immediate Counts of Blankenburg, your Grace;
even of your own condition.’
“‘Close neighbors we are, I vow, unless there is abundant love
between us.’
“Adolf gave a great horse laugh.
“‘Ei; by St. Martin there were lively times in your Grace’s
grandfather’s day--Graf Ludwig’s, I mean! Feud all the year
long,--cutting down of beech trees, houghing of cattle, a good
many peasants slaughtered, once a merry passage at arms in which
we lost six stout men and they eight. But all is quiet now.
The present Graf loves his beer and his hunt too well for long
quarrels; and again, the Duke of Brunswick might interfere. Your
Grace has nothing to dread. Besides, we have these.’ He pointed
significantly to ‘Wake-up’ and ‘Roaring-Mol’--two bell-mouthed
wall-pieces that grinned harmlessly over the parapet.
“‘We shall not use them. I am entirely satisfied to have a
nobleman of old family for neighbor. And has he no wife and
family?’
“‘The Graf von Blankenburg,’ replied Adolf, as if under some
constraint, ‘is a very peculiar lord. Your Grace will learn his
habits later. His son Moritz is a most worthy young ritter, and
his unmarried daughter, my Lady Ilsa, is reported pious and
comely.’
“‘My Lady Ilsa,’ cried I with a laugh. ‘Excellent; I see the
beginnings of a pleasant adventure already!’
“But here the blowing of a horn warned me of the visit of a
Hamburg pedlar to the castle to chaffer for pins and ribbons with
the maids, and I made haste to indite this letter that he might
start it on its southward journey. Salute Madonna Marianna for
me, and tell her I stand in no danger of this ‘pious and comely’
Graf’s daughter, and I pray you also to commend me to all my many
friends at Rome.”
CHAPTER VI
ILSA OF THE HARZ
I will quote no more letters to Rocca. Truth to tell, by my praises
addressed to him of the beauty of the land and by my hints of
admiration for the rough virtues of the people, I was but heartening
myself up, as do men when they sing lustily ere plunging into the
battle. Seldom have I spent three more heartsick, homesick weeks
than the first three that crept by at Schloss Regenstein, after the
novelty had waned. Some excitement there was on the second day when
I had uncovered a deep but dry well, and we found a goodly quantity
of bones at the bottom--relics no doubt of obstinate merchants who
withheld their proper ransoms. But the tingle of discovery soon
passed. My eyes were offended with a thousand uncouth domestic
sights, my ears by the constant gutturals of my vassals’ dialect,
my nose--enough that good Herr Adolf and his fellow myrmidons had
many things to learn,--at least I forced them to remove the great
dung heap that was stacked right under my chamber windows. Ah!
Marianna--if you would have seen my loyalty and longing for the south
rekindle, you should have seen me then!
As a chief misery I had no person of my own condition in life with
whom I could exchange a word. A few inquiries developed that the Graf
von Blankenburg and his children were visiting some noble kinsmen
beyond Halberstadt. There was no other man entitled to coat-armor
in the region, nor even any half-learned monk who could fence with
me in bad Latin. Heavy rains delayed the coming of my principal
baggage from Augsburg, and kept me far from my dear books. Father
Joseph, the castle chaplain, was too deaf and doddering to do more
than shuffle through his chapel masses,--which I honored by my
absence. Even the great boar whereof Adolf promised the hunting,
disappeared when we sent out the beaters, and we returned from the
chase with two miserable hares, scarce worth the pursuing. To add
to my unhappiness Andrea poured out his complaints day and night,
consigning Regenstein, Harzland, Germany, and all dwellers therein
to instant and eternal perdition, quarrelling with all the maids and
varlets in the castle, and making it not the least of their offences
that they did not understand his anathemas vociferated in fiercest
and most idiomatic Tuscan.
And then came a day after the storms; a day of calm green and golden
beauty the like whereof I thought I had never met on sea or land.
A warm sweet air seemed to come sweeping down from the mountains;
an air of growing leaves and bursting flowers; an air of talking
oaks and great pines sighing like the waves of a wide green ocean.
All the Harzland was pushing back the mists, and calling “come out
hither!” And as if in answer to the call I felt my spirits rising,
my feet stirring almost perforce under me. Many, many times since I
have heard that call--the call of the summer forest of the North,--a
call no lush and luxuriant Southland wood can find voice to utter!
a call of cool streams leaping over cool rocks, while the great
sun warms the fragrant ferns above them. And as often as that call
comes, a dozen times during springtime and summer, I am become like
the bird who has wintered afar in the tropics, but at the bidding of
the season must away. So succumbing to the gentle magic of the hour,
I found myself alone, happily alone, and happy to be lost in the
greenwood, wandering over the hills by Schloss Regenstein.
How long I wandered I do not know. I had my rapier--I feared nothing.
I had bread in my wallet--I would not grow hungry. I drank a clear
draught from a moss-clustered spring gushing out of the primeval
rock. I started a squirrel and sent him scampering away across the
upper branches. I followed for a long way into the thickets some
calling thrush that lured me onward and onward like a sweet-voiced
will-o’-the-wisp. At last I brought myself upon a little path that
led upward beside a trickling brook, over ferns and bluebells;
with here and there the tracks of some loitering deer. The sun was
striking in golden slants through a clearing, and I sat down upon a
fallen log to listen to the rustling melody of the greenwood. There
I fell naturally into a musing. My gift of sonnet-making came back
to me. I was wandering into some imitation of Petrarco in praise of
the glories of the forest, when I detected a sound--a human sound.
Nothing to alarm, that was certain, though I confess in that strange
woodland I clapped a hand instinctively upon my hilt. It was the
voice of a woman--as I guessed, of a young girl. Not wishing to have
her burst suddenly upon me, I stepped lightly back into a thicket and
waited.
The singer was quite out of sight, although her clear crooning music
proclaimed that she was close at hand. Nearer she came, and first I
saw a pair of white feet and ankles twinkling in and out amid the
twigs and grasses,--feet that Messere Raffaello would have rejoiced
to get for model. I saw the feet while yet the screen of beech
saplings hid her face. Her song was in broad Harz dialect. I caught
glimpses of a loose blue frock. Then into the open she passed, and as
I stepped from my covert I had a sight of a daintily poised head,
two long braids of golden hair, cheeks exceeding red, eyes exceeding
blue, and such prettily curved lines of face and throat that they
seemed blooming into life from some Vatican canvass. A sight for a
moment only. Back went the head like a startled doe’s. The cheeks
flashed to scarlet. She drew up with abrupt pride, as well she might,
upon seeing a totally strange gentleman step from a covert.
I was half ashamed at my action, but reflected that a Harz peasant
maid was not likely to prove timid or prudish.
“Fair greetings, my fine lass,” I said in my best German; “this is
truly a pleasant day to go walking in the greenwood.”
She surveyed me very steadily, then to my infinite surprise crossed
herself upon the breast.
“I think,” said she, looking at me with great soberness, “that you
are the Master Devil. But I warn you, you can do me no hurt, for I am
an honest Christian maid, and the blessed St. Anna is my protectress.”
Was ever a good cavalier greeted thus before! I confess it was I who
was staggered a little, although I could scarcely keep from laughing.
“My worthy maiden,” said I, “I will not pretend to saintly virtues,
but I am not so often known as the Master Devil as the Graf von
Regenstein.”
I had expected a mortified smirk and simper at this, when the worthy
daughter of some forester or huntsman discovered her mistake.
Instead, I saw the golden head and blue frock bend in a graceful and
highly decorous courtesy.
“I beg my Lord of Regenstein’s pardon,” she said, with a grave
simplicity that disarmed any reply. “If he will persist in wandering
in our wood in a dark dress with a blue hat and an eagle’s feather,
he will remember that although such costume may be excellent for
Italy, it is in exactly such a garb as we are taught is worn by
the Master Devil, especially as your lordship has a little black
mustache and a smooth chin.”
By this time I had the offending hat off, and was sweeping the
feather against my knees, for I was not wholly lacking in wits. “And
who may be the gracious lady I have the honor to address?” I asked.
“Ilsa of the Harz; Ilsa von Blankenburg, who claims your Lordship’s
service.”
Another courtesy; out went a small white hand, and I bowed low whilst
I kissed it. Peasant maiden! All the noble pride and dignity of a
Cleopatra was in her bearing when I stood before her, and explained,
as I might, my unmannerly intrusion. And then as I strove to find
elegant words, suddenly I saw a marvellous change come over her
beauty. The dignity all vanished to the winds. Before me was standing
an arch, golden-haired, bright-cheeked girl who was laughing in pure
music at my confusion.
“Graf von Regenstein,--and I have called you the Master Devil,
and adjured you as the fiend! Oh, blessed Mother, was there ever
confusion like to that!” Her laughter went on and on, until I fell
to laughing too, and then we both laughed,--the best way to cement a
friendship.
And after a little, I hardly know how or why, I was walking along
that path through the forest, with Gräfin Ilsa chattering at my elbow
as freely as to her own brother. She seemed a mere child to me as
I looked and listened, yet I could not forget that long flash of
noble dignity at our first encounter. And how much she had to tell!
Yes, she was the only daughter of the Graf von Blankenburg. They
had returned only two days since from Halberstadt. At their schloss
they had been filled by the servants with stories of the new lord of
Regenstein, of his Italian clothes, Italian servants, and Italian
accent. It had rained since their coming, otherwise her father would
surely have sent over to offer hospitality. Her brother Moritz I
would rejoice to see. He had served in the southern wars and had been
clear to Rome, and once had actually seen the Holy Father. Had I also
seen the Holy Father? Yes? Several times? And actually conversed with
him? Oh! How sinful she had been; how could I, how could the saints,
forgive her? To have mistaken a pious Christian gentleman fresh from
the Apostolic benison for the author of lies? Of course I could not
fail to be an exceeding good man, having lived in the veritable
atmosphere of saintliness surrounding the Lord Pope.
If I turned my head at this last, remembering somewhat of my last
scenes and pleasures at the Vatican, I did not contradict her, and
she soon wandered on. Had I heard of her aunt, the great Abbess
Theckla of the nuns of Quedlinburg? No? Well, even a learned Italian
like myself could yet hear something to advantage. There was no
one in all the world--save the Lord Pope--so holy as Aunt Theckla.
Sometimes she prayed all night in winter in a thin shift in the cold
church, kneeling on sharp chains. To atone for her own sins? Not at
all. It was for the sins of her family,--her brother, his son, and
especially for her niece.
But here I had to cry out perforce. “Ah! gracious Gräfin,--you do not
mean she prays for sins of _yours_?”
“Why not?” The answer came with a matter-of-fact seriousness truly
startling. “Of course I am very sinful. If it were not for Aunt
Theckla’s prayers, I should surely go to hell. As it is, I hope the
good Lord God will some day let me out of purgatory. Do you think
He will?” This question straight in my face, and asked with all the
honesty in the world.
_O tempora! O mores!_ How was I, gayest of the gallants of Rome, with
my head filled with Plato and Porphyry and Avicenna, and every other
doubting misbeliever, to answer this question, levelled at me by a
young girl whom I had met not half an hour before? I confess I dared
not look her in the face.
“But, noble Lady, do you not by your own pious efforts try to appease
the saints?”
“Of course,” came the same calm answer. “I belong to ‘St. Ursula’s
Little Ship.’”
“I crave pardon, gracious Gräfin, but I do not understand.”
“I forget,” with a little sigh of impatience. “You are from Italy.
I mean the ‘Sodality of the Eleven Thousand Virgins.’ We are all
pledged to pray regularly, and say two Credos, five Paternosters,
and fifty Ave Marias every day. We fast all we can, and pray to
St. Ursula of Cologne. Besides that I wear haircloth all of Lent,
and pray still more to St. Anna. You see, she entreats her blessed
daughter Mary for us, and makes the Holy Virgin get the Lord Christ
to show us mercy. It is clearly explained in a little book I bought
at the last Halberstadt fair. But all this, they say, is not enough
to satisfy the Lord God. If it were not for Aunt Theckla, I could
never sleep, I would be so afraid of hell.”
I think by this time I would have welcomed a bear out of the forest,
just to change this flow of personal theology; but I was saved by
less drastic means.
“Did I know where she was going?” I had been following her blindly,
forgetful of forest or stream, but now I became interested in the
path. She would tell me. She was going to visit Dame Hedwig, “a very
wise woman.” Surely not a witch? Dame Hedwig had been confessed
only last month by Father Augustin. But she gathered all manner of
healing herbs in the forest, and Gräfin Ilsa must needs visit her
to renew the supply at Schloss Blankenburg. And why had the Graf’s
daughter gone this solitary road without escort? Another wonderful
laugh rewarded my question. Had she not wandered over the slopes
of the Harzland since she was at her nurse’s knee? Did she not know
every trout-pool, every pine crest from the Brocken to the wondrous
Bodethal? The red deer were her friends. All the peasant folk loved
her. What need of a pack of silly serving-men to scamper at her heels?
She led me onward till the leafy path came out upon a more traversed
way, which brought us soon into a still more open clearing. Here
before us to the westward spread a noble vista of the pine-crowned
hills, and in the purple distance, a monarch among the summits, which
Lady Ilsa was not slow to tell me, was the famous Brocken. A long
tale was soon being poured into my ears of the awful witches who
flew every evening on broomsticks from the Witches’ Dancing Ground
above the rushing Bode to this weird summit, there to consort the
night through with their lord, the Master Devil. “And I thought you
had come down by day from the Brocken to visit them,” she was saying
sweetly, when we halted before a little thatch-roofed hut, with a
great oak tree spreading its ample shade over the cavernous chimney.
Dame Hedwig was before the door, watering her bright array of
hollyhocks. Her bent old shape courtesied as she saw the Gräfin,
while she looked up at me from under her white cap with shrewd gray
eyes of questioning. My new friend made haste to explain who I might
be and what was her errand, and Hedwig courtesied again when Ilsa had
ceased, and I could feel her keen gaze going all over me.
“Ei: so you are the new ‘Countly Grace,’ the Lord of Regenstein? You
the heir of old Graf Sigismund who was lord when I was a girl? How
times have changed! And so you are just come from the Welschland?--”
I cannot say I felt complimented at her running commentary as she
bustled about her little kitchen, opening bags and boxes, and making
up sundry small packages for the lady.
“I am not unworthy of Graf Sigismund and the rest, I trust,” I said
a little stiffly, put on the defensive by her cold scrutiny, and
somewhat piqued as I saw that the Gräfin regarded her comments with
suppressed amusement.
“Unworthy? I said not that to your Lordship. Your Lordship is like
an unproved herb among my simples. How can I tell yet whether you
can kill or cure? Graf Sigismund had a two-handed sword as long
as a man. Your Lordship carries--that.” Her skinny finger pointed
contemptuously at my slight rapier.
“Nevertheless, honest Dame,” I said, “weak though my rapier seem,
I avow I can hold my own against any master of the greater weapon.
It is not a matter of strength, but of skill--thus--and thus--and
thus--” And carried away with pride in my martial art, I swept out
the glittering blade and flashed it about with rapid feints and
passes.
Dame Hedwig showed her sharp teeth testily.
“I don’t question your skill with that bodkin, young Lord. I only
know everything from your beardless chin to your flourishings now,
and the way you talk with your hands more than with your tongue,
prove that you are no German.”
“No German?” I was beginning to lose my temper. “This noble lady
here will pardon me if I tell you I demand a civil tongue from my
equals and my inferiors. I am hereditary lord of Regenstein, only son
of the last Graf. I have ever defended my father’s people and land
against the slanders of Italians, and I will not now, on my return to
my possessions, be told that I am a stranger and interloper amongst
them.”
Hedwig put down the bag of wormwood and walked straight up to me. Her
attitude was respectful, but firm. I could see that Ilsa was watching
all we did.
“No offence, noble Lord. When you spoke then, I saw your eye light up
in a manner worthy of the Grafs your fathers. Regenstein you may be,
and German you may become. But you are not yet. Will your Lordship
hold out your right hand?”
I complied, half misdoubting her intentions. She opened my fingers
and peered, with her sharp nose down into the palm, then dropped it
abruptly.
“What do you read, Hedwig?” asked Ilsa, with a very girlish giggle.
“Read? Oh! He has a life line and a wealth line both favorable. He
shall have two affairs of the heart, the first sorrowful and broken,
the second exceeding joyous.”
Ilsa clapped her own hands, ejaculating, “How excellent!” But Hedwig
went on. “Above all a great change shall come into his life. A change
altering the whole of his being,--his mode of thought, speech, hope,
life, soul--”
“Ah! tell!” commanded the young lady. Hedwig, however, shook her
head, and looked up craftily into my face.
“Noble Lord, I cannot tell the rest. But if you are wise, give ear.”
She half danced, half glided away from me, all the time keeping my
eye, and chanted shrilly:--
“Half of Northland,
Half of Southland,
Never gay
Till all of _one_ land!”
“Do you understand?” she concluded, with a meaning smile.
Before I could decide whether to be pleased or to be angry, a clatter
of hoofs sounded outside the cottage. I saw half a dozen mounted
serving-men with lances and cross-bows, and at their head a lady in
the sweeping white robes of a sovereign abbess, upon a stately black
palfrey. Ilsa had sprung to the door as the cortège drew up, making a
very wry face the while.
“Aunt Theckla,” she threw out. “I knew she would be vexed if I came
to Hedwig’s.”
A nimble young squire had dismounted and approached the door
abruptly, though he veiled his cap before the lady.
“Gracious Gräfin,” said he, “I am commanded to say that the reverend
abbess your aunt is not pleased at your custom of visiting this woman
of doubtful honesty. Having learned for what purpose you left the
castle, she has ridden hither to fetch you back to Blankenburg, and
your prompt obedience will spare me further mixing in an unpleasant
duty.”
Ilsa looked back with another wry face. I stood by the chimney,
disliking an introduction to the reverent abbess in such a dubious
spot.
“Fare you well,” spoke the Gräfin, as if to Hedwig, “just for a
little. I don’t mind the scolding, if my aunt _is_ a saint. I am so
glad you were not the Master Devil! We’ll go hunting together after
the red deer by the Brocken. _Auf wiedersehen!_”
And with that she was gone. I heard the murmur of a brief, sharp
colloquy with the abbess, doubtless accented by the fact that Lady
Ilsa had carried forth a neat little packet of Hedwig’s simples under
her elbow. I saw the Gräfin clamber upon a pillion behind the squire.
A clatter of hoofs--the troop was gone, and the young mistress with
it. It was as if a sunbeam had vanished from the cottage. The sun
still shone unclouded, but darkened. Inscrutable as she had been in
her mode of greeting, her mingling of the serious and the gay, her
girlishness, yet her occasional bursts of high womanhood, I felt
myself wholly baffled at the impression she had made upon me. I stood
in silence while Hedwig glanced cautiously out of the door to be sure
her unwelcome guests were gone.
“The abbess is like flint,” she spoke at length; “all white, and
pure, and hard--”
I took out a gulden and laid it significantly on the table.
“Hark you, wise dame,” I said civilly; “while I deny I am a foreigner
here, I confess I lack your local gossip. Who is this Gräfin von
Blankenburg I met by chance in the forest?”
“A moonbeam, a spring rose, a wood dove with an eagle’s heart and
will.”
“You have known her, then?”
“Ei! Didn’t I help her into the world the day her mother--God rest
her soul--passed from it?”
“Good woman,” I continued, “my folk at the castle do not like to give
me an evil opinion of my noble neighbors. Whenever I ask of the Graf
of Blankenburg they praise his hunting and let it go at that.”
“Holy St. Elizabeth--well they may!”
“What is he, then?”
She looked slyly at the coin.
“Your Lordship will not reveal _I_ told you tales. The Graf of
Blankenburg had his coat of arms burned on the cheek of a castle
varlet last year just for telling a few stories about his betters.”
“You are safe, continue.”
“Well, in a word, he is the most drunken, roaring, cruel lord in all
Saxony and Brunswick. Two months since he had a peasant’s guts torn
out and wound around a tree--and just for barking the trunk thereof.
‘To cover the peeled part,’ said his Lordship, merrily. He forces the
peasants to beat the bushes by night to quiet the frogs. He leads
his whole trampling hunt across their cornfields. He forces their
children to serve in the castle without pay--and woe then to the
honest, modest wenches among his foul varlets.”
“Verily,” said I, with a dry shrug, “I have a right courtly neighbor!”
“Pray God, he will not last very long. Graf Moritz, his son, is a
very prudent, honorable young lord. But his father will have drunk
and gambled away nigh everything. Moritz will get nothing but the
stripped acres and the bare castle. Poor young ritter--we all pity
him.”
“You seem to have no pity for Lady Ilsa, however?”
“Pity? My heart has broken long since for her. I’ll lament no more.
How she has lived through these years and not become even as her
sire, the Holy Mother knows! But she will become a saint, and need
none of our pity.”
“Become a saint? I really saw no signs of that.”
“Then she did not tell your Lordship? Her aunt is resolved she should
join her in the convent. She works upon the Graf’s fears, saying
‘Give your daughter to God, and He will spare your soul.’ As yet he
has not consented, but he will give way at last. He fears hell, and
well he may.”
“And Lady Ilsa?”
“Will of course yield. She is betwixt the abbess all ice, and her
father all vice.”
“Ah!” I let the conversation drop. Hedwig pointed out my way to
Regenstein, and I walked back, under the long northern twilight,
filled with thought. This then was the destined fate of the baffling
creature who had crossed my path this day. The veiling in the church;
the shorn hair; the severance from the world; the perpetual fast,
vigil, and service; the hardening monotony of years of routine
performance; the shadows of old age. Once I tried to contrast
Ilsa and my glorious Marianna; the thing was impossible: who can
contrast the noontide sun with starlight? Yet the starlight had its
beauty. I confess I was not sorry, in my isolation at Regenstein, to
think there was a young woman within reach to whom I could pay my
addresses. Just how far my addresses should go, whether even they
should be entirely honorable, I admit I did not let come into my
consideration. But I was determined not to let any ill-repute of the
father prevent me from company with the daughter.
The next morning, when Andrea came to shave me, I ordered him to take
his razor away.
“I will not be stared at by all the country. I will grow a beard.”
“But Eccellenza?” he began in dismay.
“And furthermore, I will order over a tailor from Halberstadt to have
my clothes made in the German fashion.”
He was too agonized now even to protest. As for myself, I leaned
upon the casement and gazed forth upon the neighborly battlements of
Schloss Blankenburg. Old Hedwig’s words were running in my head:--
“Half of Northland,
Half of Southland,
Never gay
Till all of _one_ land.”
“Perhaps,” I said very carelessly to myself, “Lady Ilsa will never
enter the convent.”
CHAPTER VII
WHAT BEFELL AT SCHLOSS BLANKENBURG
Two days later young Lord Moritz rode over from Blankenburg, and
with blunt civility invited me to join in the hunt; and I ran down
a red deer that afternoon in his company, enjoying a notable chase.
His sister rode with us. She mounted a tall Pomeranian bay, taking
the hedges and ravines like a Turkish trooper. She wore a bewitching
green habit, with a green silk cap set with a long red feather; and
was in at the death, aiding us in flogging off the dogs. “A proper
novitiate for a destined nun,” I meditated, as I watched her spring
unaided from the saddle, her golden hair flying, her eyes dancing,
her cheeks all red and bloom with fair excitement.
Artlessly as the brook she chattered, and I found the same delight
in her company one would take with a merry child. Our chase led us
far over the Harz, beside the rocky windings of the stream by the
Ilsenburg, and while we halted to watch the slim trout shooting in
the pools, my companion told me the story of the Princess Ilsa--her
namesake of legend--the king’s daughter who dwelt on the crags
above the stream, and all that befell her. As for Ritter Moritz, I
found him a sober young cavalier, courteous after a blunt way, and
very anxious to show civility. I could guess that his position at
Blankenburg was a hard one, and resolved to return his friendship.
The next day my precious books arrived at the Regenstein and I was
happy for the next two weeks. Then came an invitation to spend the
evening with the Graf von Blankenburg, and since I was beginning to
grow tired even of Homer, Sophocles, and Politiano, I was not sorry
to signify my acceptance.
* * * * *
I rode over to Schloss Blankenburg in what state I could affect. My
neighbor’s castle was much like my own, only in general more dingy,
though not without some display of tawdry magnificence. There was a
swarm of lousy grooms and hangers-on in the dirty court. My troop
was saluted with much blowing of horns and burning of powder. In the
entrance to the great hall Graf Eckbert came to meet me, and his
person did not belie the character Dame Hedwig gave him. He had a
girth nigh equal his moderate stature; sandy, frowsy hair and beard,
with small bluish eyes peering out of as seared and sensual face as
ever there was betwixt Kiel and Basel. Two missing teeth gave his jaw
a most uncanny grin. A great staff of a sabre clattered at his thigh.
His green velvet jacket boasted much gold lace, but was slovenly
with wine stains. In short, his person was such that it took all my
self-control to greet this noble lord courteously, as my equal and my
neighbor.
But Moritz was there, gravely and properly arrayed; and leaning on
his shoulder was Gräfin Ilsa, bedecked even as St. Dorothea, a rose
branch in her hand, a rose wreath on her hair, and a great bunch
of roses and cherries tied to her silver girdle. She wore a blue
sweeping gown of Antwerp taffeta, and some very good pearls at her
throat. I wondered a little at this display of taste and wealth,
knowing the condition of the Blankenburg estate, but it later
appeared that the jewels and dress were the gifts of her uncle, the
Castellan of Wittenberg.
Graf Eckbert, whatever his sins, was not taciturn. My flesh crept
as he kissed me on both cheeks. He poured a volley of maudlin
compliments in my ear, asked fifty questions without awaiting
an answer, introduced me to half a dozen oafish creatures, whom
I discovered were local petty nobles, or discharged lanz-knecht
subalterns,--for which “full-brothers” he evidently kept continually
a roaring open house,--and so led me into the great hall to the seat
at his right on the upper dais. The rest of the company scrambled for
places near by. One petty officer thrust himself into a seat more
exalted than his deserts, and was pushed out with tumult. Soon the
feast was in full progress. The hall shone all black and red under
the smoking pine torches. The greasy old server brought us vast lumps
of boars’ meat on dingy pewter platters. In the long hall under the
dais, a score of dirty retainers chattered, gorged, and quarrelled
over the brawn and beer at the table below. All of which time I,
the honored guest, thought gloomily on how in that whole castle
there was not one soul save myself who so much as knew the names of
Homer and Dante, and I tried to picture the delightful little supper
the Cardinale di Palaestrina was surely serving that night on the
Aventine,--and the wit, the learning and the elegance of the ladies.
But just as the feast started there was a trifling hush, while with
a great rustle into the hall swept my lady abbess of Quedlinburg
and took her seat at my other hand. She might well have become
a sculptured saint. It needed only to turn her black robes, the
white frill of her cap, the pale pink of her face, into hard
porphyry,--then the image would have been complete. In her youth Lady
Theckla could not have been uncomely. The lines of her mouth were
refined, but ungentle. She spoke to me in a clear monotone, opening
her lips very little. The only lively thing about her seemed her
steel-blue eyes. I did not love this close sight of the abbess. I
told myself one might argue half eternity with that fine strong face,
and win only denial; and as for pity or charity, you could more
wisely beseech the stone saint, for then your prayers were at least
heard up in heaven.
Grievous to tell, her coming did not impose the least check upon the
conversation of her brother and his boon companions, which was at all
times unspeakably foul,--so foul that I winced as I looked across the
table at Gräfin Ilsa, who sat silent and a little pale, while the
great hall buzzed around her,--a very different person from the merry
creature in the woodland and at the hunt.
Graf Eckbert was so anxious to air his views that he graciously
spared me the trouble of much speaking. He dominated the entire
discussion, his other guests and his children giving respectful
attention to his loudly delivered wisdom. That the world was awry,
and Germany in particular, he informed me long before the platters
of boars’ flesh had been replaced by those of venison. He cursed
the Emperor Maximilian, whom he described as a shuffling dotard
who starved Germany to feed his Austrian lands; he damned the last
Imperial Diet as a gathering of fools; particularly he devoted to the
pit the authors of the recent decree forbidding private warfare to
the nobility.
“As if we, Walter” (he appropriated my first name at the outset), “if
_we_ fell into any merry little debate, could not settle it with our
own good pikes and cross-bows, and not have to call in a snivelling,
black-gowned clerk with a pen behind his ear, to draw up parchments,
patter in Latin to a court, and then cheat us out of fair justice for
a beggaring fee.”
“Your Lordship does not believe in courts, then?” I ventured to ask.
“Ay, by St. Laurenz, but not of that kind. Courts are for peasants.
I hold court myself every Monday. Two fellows were triced up on the
gallows the other day for cutting firewood in my forest! Zounds--they
ought to have been drawn and quartered, but I am too tenderhearted!”
A tear trickled down his nose at recollection of his signal mercy.
“Your Lordship,” I said, “does exceeding well to avoid lawyers. There
is an old Florentine proverb ‘may sorrow, evil, and lawyers be far
from thee.’”
“Well said, Walter,--well said.” His vast hand clapped me on the back
outrageously. “Here, rascal. Bring the noble Graf a deeper flagon.
Put good warm Rhenish in it. We will teach him how deep a true
Harzlander can go. ’Tis under the table for all of us before morning.
Ten gulden, Walter, that you go there before me!”
I could see the face of Lady Ilsa growing whiter than ever. Her
father had evidently begun his challenges to deep potations very
early. I saw her sign to her aunt, and the abbess leaning towards us
tried to turn her brother’s conversation.
“It is not time for the wine yet, Eckbert. Our guest is not yet
thirsty. Do I understand that your Lordship has spent several years
in Rome?”
“I have had the honor, Reverend Abbess,” I replied.
“I am glad, for now you can contradict my impious nephew here.
Moritz was as quiet and God-fearing a lad as ever said his prayers
until he went to Italy; on his return he vows he is almost a Turkish
unbeliever, so great was the luxury and frivolity which he dares to
assert were displayed by many churchmen, dwellers at His Holiness’s
actual court, and even by certain most sacred cardinals.”
Moritz looked up from his trencher at me, and his sober eyes winked
slyly.
“Surely,” spoke Ilsa, hanging on my answer, “Moritz is a wicked boy.
He repeats these dreadful lies just to dismay us all, because we,
forsooth, have never been to Italy and Rome.”
“Lies! Lies!” vociferated her father, not waiting for me. “I vow
they are. Almost heresy--and never shall heretic dwell in Schloss
Blankenburg, not even my own child.”
“Your Lordship will soon learn,” observed Moritz quietly, with a
sidling glance at his aunt, “that my father, though liberal in other
matters, is a valiant defender of Holy Church and all things touching
her.”
“Well, then,” roared the Graf, “speak it out, Walter. Has not Moritz
lied outrageously concerning Rome and the Holy Pope’s court? Don’t
spare him if he _is_ my son.”
Alas for my courtesy! A man cannot sit through a feast like that and
not give place to the devil. I had one eye in my head when I answered,
“No foreigner can visit Rome and the Holy Father’s court and not
see many things he is liable to misunderstand. I do not doubt that
my noble friend Moritz _did_ hear of one or two cardinals whose
lives were a bit worldly. You see the Lord Pope, with the best of
intentions, is sometimes surrounded by a few self-seeking men.”
“Only a ‘few’--do you hear, Moritz?” cried his father, putting down a
prodigious goblet, which he had drained at a draught. “And the rest,
of course--” a long hiccough finished the remark.
“No doubt His Holiness,” interposed the abbess, “will soon reduce
these unworthy cardinals to pious regularity. I am told the Pope
delivers daily most eloquent and edifying sermons in the new church
of St. Peter.”
Moritz’s lip curled.
“I never heard of the Pope’s preaching any sermons,” he sneered.
“There is only one preacher in all Christendom _I_ ever cared for.”
“And who is he, graceless boy?” asked his aunt.
“Dr. Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar of Wittenberg. If all
parsons were like him, I’d be a holier man and a better listener at
church.”
“He is a pious young monk, I’ve heard,” said his aunt coldly, “but
naturally not comparable to His Holiness. Of course you, my Lord
Graf, have often heard the present Pope turn multitudes from their
sins by his burning eloquence.”
“I have certainly seen him appear in great state at St. John
Lateran,” I replied, with twitching lips, “on Corpus Christi day,
when thousands of people knelt to adore him in a place so holy that
the former Pope Benedict VIII--of blessed memory--said that if the
folk only knew how great indulgence was afforded by a mere visit to
that church they would sin yet more.”
“And his sermon?”
“I regret, my Lady Abbess, on that day His Holiness was suffering
from a cold. He could only hold up his fingers to bestow the
benediction. I merely mention the occasion as witness to the
veneration in which the Romans hold the most sacred Pontiff.”
Moritz looked at me reproachfully. He had evidently expected a more
active defence of his heterodoxy. Perhaps the heady wine--which I was
being forced very reluctantly to imbibe by my importunate host--was
making me reckless; I resolved not to disappoint Moritz.
“But on thousands of other occasions,” spoke Ilsa, evidently deeply
interested, “the Lord Pope has preached to the multitude, to the vast
saving of their souls. A wandering Dominican, very dirty and very
holy, told me as much yesterday.”
“Then,” I replied dryly and rashly, “your gracious Ladyship was very
ill-informed, for I grieve to tell you his present Holiness, though
a very learned and urbane prince, is better at playing cards than
saying masses, and a better huntsman than preacher.”
It must have been the wine that made me throw this out bluntly. I saw
the abbess nigh swooning back in her chair, muttering “blasphemy!”
Poor Ilsa turned deathly pale, Moritz grinned in manifest glee, but
his father almost jumped from his seat, his face growing livid.
“God’s death! Take back your words--”
“Father! Father! Our guest,” cried Ilsa in dismay, while Moritz
caught his sleeve, at the same time asserting that “He has only said
what I have always said.”
Unwilling to brawl then and there, I turned on my angry host very
coolly.
“My gracious Lord,” I said, “I do not mean to slander the Sacred
Pontiff. I was about to add that the Pope suffers from an ulcer which
prevents him from executing the various sacred offices, and that his
physicians recommend to him divers innocent diversions.”
“Ah! Very well,” quoth the Graf, mollified for the moment, and
settling back in his great chair. But the abbess and Ilsa still
stared at me ominously, accepting my last words at true value.
The feast proceeded. It was impossible for me, without giving dire
offence, to avoid drinking large quantities of the fiery Rudesheimer.
I boasted a strong head, but I felt I was gradually losing complete
self-mastery. With a kind of dread I found the conversation drifting
again toward religious topics. Graf Eckbert had been airing more of
his grievances.
“The times are evil. Wholly out of joint! The peasants, insolent
hounds, think themselves as good as their masters. They drink wine in
place of beer, and are actually enraged if you flog them. All from
lack of piety! True religion is dying out. How can the clod-hoppers
hope to obey God if they do not first obey their masters? To hell
they’ll go, all of them.”
“Their masters, of course,” I added viciously, “setting an example of
all Christian graces.”
“Graces? What d’ye say?” the Graf’s mind leaped from one thing to
another. “What need have _we_, the ritters, of graces? Can’t we
drink, swear, indulge, carouse, kill as we like, and square with the
saints at the end? The saints are very good-natured, I tell you. We
do as we please, and at the end, a good indulgence from some vendor,
a few acres given the abbey, the merits that come of owning some
saints’ relics--ei!--we slip through Master Satan’s fingers like a
greased pig, and up we go to heaven!”
“So your pious Lordship owns some saints’ relics?” I asked, fingering
my goblet.
“Relics! By my father’s soul; haven’t I squandered half my fortune on
them! Suffering in this world to lay up treasure in heaven, as says
Father Augustin.” Tear-drops were again on his nose at thought of his
piety. “Three hairs of St. Laurenz, plucked by a soldier just ere
he was toasted on the gridiron; a finger nail of St. John the Less;
a toe of St. Agatha, and the whole right thigh bone of St. Anthony.
Here, Dietrich--bring me the reliquary.”
“You need not hasten,” spoke up Moritz, whom the wine had rendered
wholly irresponsible; “that thigh bone is from a pig, as any but
a fool can recognize. At Pisa there are _both_ thigh bones of the
selfsame saint. My father was easily hoodwinked by the glozing friar
who sold it him.” He glanced at me for confirmation.
“Certainly,” I nodded recklessly, though imagining a storm. “I have
seen them there myself; only, there is still another pair at Mantua.
I fear the worthy saint--”
But this time I had roused the demon. Mine host bounded out of his
chair, and seized me furiously by the shoulder.
“Holy Wounds! Will you say I was cheated, and that to my very face?
Men have died for less than that!”
“Very possibly,” I replied, with drunken abandon, loosening his
clutch. “But I shall not. And now, Graf von Blankenburg, since you
would lay hands on a guest, and insult me before your family and
servants, hear at length the truth. All the country-side proclaims
you the most profligate, cruel, dastardly lord in the Harzland. You
prate of the saints, when you care as little for saintliness as a dog
for Lent.”
He brandished his fists in my face, but for the instant I held him
back by the lightnings in my eyes.
“You make your daughter to be pitied by every old woman and every
clown. You think to smuggle yourself into heaven, when hell--if hell
there be--yawns to receive you. You are one of those Germans who
make the German name hateful in Italy, as the name for false piety,
oafishness, swinishness, and pure devilishness.”
But here, with a great beast-like roar, he had broken away from
Moritz, trying to hold him, and clutched a heavy boar’s spear from
the rack behind the table. I paused in my torrent of words just
enough to see the weapon glittering over his head, and whing!--it
had shot across my shoulder, just grazing the skin, and dug into
the table below the dais. A scream from Ilsa, the abbess rising
with every sign of horror, shouts, runnings to and fro, some of my
own Regensteiners hurrying me from the hall, a rending volley of
curses from the Graf, who was struggling with his son and trusted
retainers,--it all passed like a hideous dream.
I was outside the castle and standing under the black night while
they brought up the horses. The cool wind was lessening the effects
of the wine. I looked upward. Above me was the selfsame canopy of
stars that had been when Marianna and I had gazed upon them together,
sitting still and close in the Vatican gardens. Marianna! At the
moment I was ready to retract every word spoken publicly or privately
in praise of Germany; to denounce it as the most man-accursed and
God-forsaken land on the wide earth, from the savage Indes to roaring
Muscovy.
“By Zeus and the Styx,” I swore in true classic style, “let me but
live out one year in this crow’s nest of mine, and then back to
Italy--and to _her_!”
In this mood I fared home to Regenstein. The next morning, sober, and
with a headache, I sent Adolf with my cartel, telling the Graf von
Blankenburg I must needs desire to meet him on the field of honor,
the insult which he proffered me affording but one atonement.
* * * * *
However, in the cool of the day, as I walked moody and alone in the
little pine grove at the foot of the Regenstein, lo! out of the
trees, as in the manner of an apparition, glided Gräfin Ilsa. She was
white as new paper; her eyes were red: her hair flew uncombed over
her shoulders; her dress was sombre and mean. Much embarrassed at her
coming, I stood stock still, while she, moving up to me, paused as if
to take courage, then without more ado knelt at my very feet. Next
her words came, mingled in a torrent of sobbing.
“Oh, you are generous! You are noble and forgiving. _Liebe Gott_, do
not, do not--”
“Do not what, gracious Lady?” I asked, still sorely confused myself.
“Do not press this duel on my father. You know he was in his cups. He
has treated you--his own guest--most foully. He sought your life. But
Moritz egged you both on. Be merciful, be generous--spare him, spare!”
All her womanly dignity was gone. I seemed dealing with a very young
girl.
“Noble Gräfin,” I said, drawing myself up, “arise. Let us talk
calmly. You know what men of my rank mean by ‘honor.’ And has not
mine been basely stained? How can I suffer this insult to pass?”
“Yes, yes,” she moaned, still at my knees. “I understand. It is
‘honor’ when you, a master swordsman, meet my father. He is old; his
hand unsteady. Ten passes and he is dead. And then”--She pressed her
hands to her face.
“Dear Lady,” I replied, I thought not unkindly, striving to raise
her; “then you and yours will be rid of one who has made your life
wretched; who has wearied heaven with his deeds.”
But now she caught my girdle, and seemed like some wild bird
struggling in defence of its young and nest.
“Ah! you have said it. Sinful he is, vile, godless. I begged of
Aunt Theckla, ‘will his saints’ relics save him? Will he ever join
my blessed mother up in heaven?’ And she only looked at me in her
unmoved way, and said, ‘It will take vast indulgence and good
works, and then I cannot tell.’ She dared not say the devils were
waiting for his soul, but I know it. Oh, blessed Christ, but I am so
miserable! Hear now, Lord Graf; if kill you must, kill me! I can bear
it. I can die, wicked as I am. Even the dreadful quenchless fire will
not feel so terrible, when I think ‘I endure this to ransom the soul
of my father.’”
She had seized the skirt of my cloak, and clung piteously. And I,
being neither iron nor adamant, could not hear unmoved.
“Dear Lady,” I said very gently now, “if any man in Rome had ever
told me I would overlook an insult like that of last night, and
not make the doer walk up my rapier, the sayer himself would have
eaten his words or died for it; but you fight me with weapons I
cannot parry. If any saint can open the gate of heaven for the Graf
von Blankenburg, I swear it will be his noble daughter. Go to your
brother. He is a man of honor and sense. Tell him I withdraw the
challenge; only he must send me some kind of an apology in behalf of
his father which I can show to my Regensteiners. And now, gracious
Gräfin, this dialogue has been overlong; you would do well to be
setting homeward, the more as I cannot wisely escort you far.”
She would have kissed my feet had I only suffered it.
“I will pray St. Anna, St. Elizabeth, and all the rest to bless you
to-night. You are the noblest, most chivalrous ritter in the world. I
knew you would be merciful. But this is a dreadful earth we dwell in;
Aunt Theckla is right--there is no peace save in the convent, where
one can try to please God all day long.”
And with these very ill-connected sentences she was gone down into
the trees, almost as suddenly as she had come. I stood shrugging my
shoulders. I had been mortally insulted, and had suddenly forgiven
the insult as meekly as a St. Francis,--and all for the tears of
a superstitious, crying, pleading girl, as bereft of true wit and
elegance as the pine stumps.
“Bah!” I cried, and spat vehemently. “A few more months in this place
and I shall be bewitched and befooled every hour. Well--at Rome they
are wise to depend on ‘The Sins of the Germans’ to fill the Pope’s
coffers. What a fearful and wonderful thing is this fear of hell
fire!”
CHAPTER VIII
I HEAR JOHN TETZEL
Moritz sent all possible apologies in behalf of his father. “An
affair of the cups” explained everything to my castle-folk. The
clouds so suddenly gathered as suddenly blew over. I visited no more
at Schloss Blankenburg, but almost daily Moritz met me at a great oak
betwixt our respective fortress mansions, and forth we rode on the
hunt. The Graf wisely kept to himself. The abbess had returned to
Quedlinburg. Lady Ilsa was with us often. A chameleon was she,--now
the dignified, courtly dame who honored me merely by suffering me to
ride decorously at her saddle-bow, now the merry-eyed girl who gave
me the same familiar chatter she granted her brother, now the sedate
and pious woman who told long stories of the blessed saints and the
evil witches, pressed me as to the nature of “succubi and incubi,”
and asked with perfect seriousness “whether she did not have an
entire vocation for the convent?” At Rome I had conceitedly thought
that I comprehended womankind; but I did not then know Ilsa.
Life at the Regenstein was become, by this time, tolerable. Ever
the northern beauty of the Harzland grew on me; the sniff of the
pines, the long silences of the hills. I began to find the honest
friendliness of my uncouth retainers more agreeable than the
elaborate service of lips and gesture which Andrea bestowed. I even
began to find a music in the German speech. The stubble on my chin
was grown to a decent length. I wore clothes after the somewhat loud
and full-cut fashion of the country.
“Your noble Grace is become a right Harzlander like his sires,” said
Adolf, one day, approvingly.
Nevertheless, when summer passed into autumn, and I saw the rains
destroying the glory of the greenwood, I concurred with Moritz when
he suggested that I ride with him to Wittenberg. Ilsa had been asked
thither for the winter to the home of her maternal aunt, the Freifau
von Steinitz; and as for me, I would find congenial and advantageous
company at the local court of the Elector of Saxony, the far renowned
Frederick the Wise.
How we fared down from the Harzland into the rich valley of the Elbe,
how by a detour we visited the free and wealthy city of Magdeburg,
and were astonished at the elegance of its princely burghers, and how
finally we must needs make another detour towards Berlin to visit
an old military friend of my father’s, I leave out as immaterial.
After quitting our host’s castle we found ourselves, late in
October, traversing the sandy plain that forms the southern part of
the Markgravate of Brandenburg. The country was poor, the peasants
dwelling in wretched little mud villages, the castles to offer us
hospitality few, and the inns intolerable. We therefore hastened over
the last stages of the way to Jüterbog with all possible speed, being
told that a cleanly inn and decent fare at last awaited us, and need
we had of both.
While yet we were about two German miles[2] from the town, and upon
a most solitary road, we were amazed at the number of wayfarers our
cavalcade overtook--old men on their canes, round peasant women
with children hanging at their skirts, and whole bands of sturdy
wayfarers, usually carrying goodly bundles of provisions as if for
a long journey. Occasionally we passed creaking ox-carts whereon a
whole family were sitting in the straw. Once a company of wandering
scholars ran up to us to beg “Charity for God’s sake!” in very bad
Latin. We were all mystified, until at a watering trough a trudging
rascal, who called himself a mendicant friar on pilgrimage to the
Swiss shrine of Eisiedeln, gave the key.
“Whither go all these folk?” asked Moritz from his saddle; “to a
shooting tournament?”
“To a holier sport than that, please your Lordship,” spoke the
fellow, holding out his hand for a groschen.
“Well, tell us, then.”
“Why, the reverend Master Tetzel, His Holiness’s own special
Commissioner, will preach and sell the new plenary indulgences this
afternoon before the church at Jüterbog.”
“Indulgences?” I saw Gräfin Ilsa’s pretty ears prick up like a
rabbit’s. “What do you mean?”
“Why, your Ladyship can learn for herself when she gets to Jüterbog.
Not that noble folk like you have great sins upon your conscience,
but still these are the most potent indulgences ever hawked. The Lord
Pope’s special granting, you know.”
“What we heard of at Magdeburg,” frowned Moritz to me, but Ilsa was
all attention.
“Your Lordships would do well to hear Master Tetzel,” ran on the glib
rogue. “You see, he goes to Jüterbog because it is the nearest town
to Saxony, the Elector having forbidden him to enter his dominions.”
“Another proof the Elector is justly called ‘the Wise,’” I remarked,
signing to ride on. But from that moment Ilsa had lost interest in
everything else, and questions from other wayfarers brought out
abundance of information.
“Oh, yes, your Ladyship,” said an old peasant, “we have travelled
clear from Bitterfeld, my wife and I, to hear Master Tetzel. They say
he sells a wondrous indulgence--if you have one, your sins are washed
clean white; and they avail equally well to get your friends out of
purgatory if they have gone before you.”
“Crafty rascal,” I was muttering to Moritz. “I heard of this
indulgence even in Rome. Half of the money _may_ go to build St.
Peter’s church, but the other half, I take my oath, goes to the
Fuggers, those Augsburg bankers who advanced the Archbishop of Mainz
his 30,000 gulden to pay the Pope’s fees for his confirmation: and
now the Archbishop is recouping himself.”
“And as for Tetzel,” quoth Moritz, with an equal shrug, “he is a
hang-dog Dominican of vile fame in these parts. Rumor makes him out
as condemned for adultery at Innsbruck five years ago, and barely
saved by the Elector of Saxony’s pleading; possibly the story’s
unjust, but you can judge the man after you see him. At least, he has
a front and a voice of brass--the noisy villain.”
But my Lady Ilsa heard, or would hear, nothing of such innuendoes.
After another pious wayfarer had suggested that one could probably
buy an indulgence for some absent friend, I could ever see her giving
the whip to her palfrey and leading us all.
“It’s her father that’s on her mind, poor lass!” spoke Moritz to me
under his breath. “I know what you are thinking, and I think the
same; but if for a few gulden we can get a scrap of paper that will
make _her_ a bit happier--who in the devil’s name should make a face?”
And so we pressed onward. We saw the towers of Jüterbog, a little
before noon, across the brown, sear grain fields of the advancing
autumn. Solemn dark windmills were waving their long arms above the
farmsteads. The squalid little thatched villages were pouring out
their tow-headed northern peasantry, all headed for Jüterbog. At
the gate of the small city and in the main street we could hardly
win a way to the principal inn--despite vigorous laying about with
our riding whips. We found the ‘Reichskanzler’ a very endurable
hostelry, and luckily the best rooms were not taken, but mine host
bustled up to us while at dinner to inform “their Lordships that
they had best hasten their repast if they wished to see the reverend
Commissioner of Indulgences enter the city.”
The inn naturally faced upon the chief square opposite the church.
A convenient window was reserved for us, and quite at our ease we
witnessed a sight which we were not to forget for many a long day.
Only, through it all, I had one eye on the swarming street below,
and one on Gräfin Ilsa, who sat flushed, eager, beautiful, as if
expecting some kind angel to come down and bring a miraculous
deliverance. And repeatedly I marvelled to myself at the fate which
made the mad heretic and infidel of Messere Chigi’s feast the silent
witness of what now came to pass.
At first the market-place seemed a mere fair ground. Two husky
peasants were wrestling in a ring; a juggler was showing a few poor
tricks from the church steps; vendors of bright ribbons, little
knives, and red cloth caps cried their wares; a swarm of thirsty folk
were coming and going from the wine cellar under the Rathaus. Then
of a sudden the great bell on high began its booming. The folk came
thronging into the square from every alley, making the whole place
a sea of heads with a narrow avenue up to the church door. Next the
blowing of horns and the chanting of the _Te Deum_ by many voices;
and in streamed the procession. The local priests in their whitest
surplices led, next the dark-gowned monks of the local convent, while
altar boys ran at either side swinging the smoking censers; then the
gravely gowned magistrates of the town, after them a vast herd of
laymen, members of various religious brotherhoods, bearing many gay
banners. These were followed by a multitude of school children, rosy
and clean, and dressed in their best, all singing a hymn in praise
of the Blessed Virgin. Then a kind of trembling seized the crowd.
Necks craned, hats came off, a great many fell upon their knees on
the flagging.
“Give heed, Christians,” a crier’s voice proclaimed. “The Reverend
Master Tetzel and the warrant of His Holiness!”
A young monk bore a great parchment on a purple velvet cushion,--the
commission of the Pope to the indulgence vendor. A second monk
bore a tall red cross whereon the papal arms were emblazoned; and
then, walking alone, and turning from time to time to lift his hand
unctuously to bestow benediction upon the awestruck multitude, came
the Reverend Master Tetzel.
The organ rumbled from the church, the procession streamed into it,
and as many of the less orderly multitude followed as could find
room. They were gone long enough to say a brief mass, and then,
just as Ilsa was showing every sign of impatience, the Commissioner
emerged again, and with similar pomp took his stand upon a small
pulpit erected near the portal, with the red papal cross above him,
and at his right,--significantly enough--a stout, iron-bound chest,
secured by several padlocks. Beside the chest I saw a well-groomed
merchant’s clerk whom I rightly suspected was the agent of the
Fuggers, to make sure those worthy bankers received their share of
the pious offerings.
Master Tetzel was a tall, full-necked Dominican who knew how to make
his black robe fall in impressive folds. Later I discovered that his
face was hard, cynical, and none too honest; but we saw him then only
from across the market-place, whence his bull’s voice easily carried.
The harangue he uttered was evidently a well-tested article, approved
by its effect on many similar audiences. He began by extolling the
charity of the Pope, who deigned to bestow such peculiar graces
upon the German people, a folk he preferred above all the rest of
Christendom. As for the object for which they were summoned to
contribute their money, it was for the building of the Basilica of
St. Peter, the holiest sanctuary in the world. But what, in any case,
were a few miserable gulden beside the chance then and there for
every one present to win eternal life for himself and for all his
friends?
I cannot tell all his artful threatenings and persuadings, all his
utterances about the vast treasury of good deeds accumulated by
Christ, the Apostles, and manifold saints but now thrown freely at
the disposal of any purchaser of indulgence. I will not deny he
dropped words to the effect that a formal confession was necessary
before the “blessed medicine” began its perfect effect upon the
living, but it was very plain that he who paid the money would
not find many difficulties in the shriving. As for the dead--now
doubtless in purgatory--here was a marvellous chance to deliver them!
“I call on you all--great sinners, murderers, robbers, adulterers,
to turn to God and receive this miraculous medicine which He in his
mercy and wisdom has provided for your benefit. St. Stephen gave up
his body to be stoned--his virtue is yours. St. Laurenz his to be
burned, yours also. The martyrdom of St. Bartholomew is imputed to
you again. And yet you--amongst whom even the most righteous is a
miserable offender--will you not give one little gift of vile money
to purchase eternal life?”
And then while women wept, and stolid peasants shook, he thundered
the virtue of his indulgences touching the dead; and through it all I
could see Ilsa’s tense, white face leaning farther, farther from the
balcony.
“Your parents and relatives, sinners before God even if righteous
before men, are in the flames of purgatory. They are crying out to
you, ‘We are in bitterest torments; with a small alms you could save
us, but you will not. We gave you birth, nourished you, and left you
all our temporal goods; yet such is your cruelty towards us that
you, so able to make us free, suffer us to lie in the fire.’”
“Is the action of the indulgence swift and sure even in purgatory?”
cried some voice from the front of the gaping multitude.
Tetzel clapped his powerful hands together. “Yea verily! By God and
all his angels!
‘The money in the strong box rings--
The ransomed soul to heaven upsprings!’
“I say unto you no words can describe the power and merit of these
indulgences. Never before was such opportunity for sinful men. Yes!
He who had been marvellously suffered to do foulest insult to the
Holy Mother of God--pardon would be here for him!”
And then he threw his eyes upward and made the market-place shake
with his stentorian summons.
“Lo! Heaven is opened! When will you enter if not now? Oh, senseless
men, too hardened to appreciate such a bestowal of divine grace! How
hard-hearted! If you will not think of yourselves, think at least
of your parents, your father, your mother!” (Poor Ilsa’s head went
down upon her hands. Moritz put his manly arm about her, while I
discreetly looked upon Tetzel. The orator swept on to his turgid
climax.) “Thus I have spoken. The hour of mercy passes. The hour of
awful judgment will be at hand. At that last judgment I am free, you
responsible; for I tell you that if you have but one garment, sell
it; sell it--rather than fail to gain such a wondrous grace!”
By this time men and women were down on the stones, moaning, beating
their breasts, and crying out for all manner of mercy. Tetzel stepped
deliberately from the pulpit; and a lieutenant of milder voice
explained the practical details. There was a scale of prices for the
indulgence based upon the rank of the purchaser and the enormity of
his guilt. Wives were advised to get indulgences for their absent
husbands, who need know nothing about them in advance. There were
priests ready in the church to hear confessions, and as soon as these
had been gone through (and very perfunctorily, I may add) and the
money paid, the indulgence was granted; while of course for souls in
purgatory only the money would be required.
Soon a swarm as of bees was around the tables set now on the church
steps, where several of the Commissioner’s clerks busily filled in
the blank indulgence papers; and you could hear the steady chink,
chink of good coin into the chest. Master Tetzel had known his
audience. He was reaping an abundant harvest for his holy employers
and the Fuggers.
Half amused and half disgusted I turned away, when I saw Gräfin Ilsa
rising.
“My purse, brother,” she was saying; “I must go to the church.”
I let Moritz remonstrate with her, uttering, myself, not a word. He
availed nothing. Away she went to the church with her two maids,
both about as scared and fluttering as herself; and we sat gnawing
our lips and thinking hard thoughts till they came back again. As
imagined, the Gräfin had been as a lamb among wolves to the reverend
indulgence sellers. She had purchased “graces” for herself, for her
brother, for her departed mother, and above all for her father. The
crafty vendors, at once divining her gentle blood, had pried out her
true rank and taxed her ten good gulden per document, as the tariff
duly provided for “abbots, great prelates, counts, barons, and others
of the higher nobility,” for each of the precious letters. And there
these letters were, most handsomely engrossed and sealed; whilst over
her father’s the little lady poured especially, and read aloud to us
the solemn words.
“Our Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on thee, Eckbert von
Blankenburg, and absolve thee by the merits of his most holy
sufferings. And I in virtue of the apostolic power granted unto
me, absolve thee from all ecclesiastical censures, judgments, and
penalties that thou mayest have incurred, however great. I efface
all the stains of weakness and traces of shame. I remit the pains
thou wouldest have had to endure in purgatory. I reincorporate
thee in the communion of the saints, so at the moment of death
the gate of paradise shall be opened to thee. And if thou
shouldest live long, this grace continueth unchangeable, until
the time of thy end.”
“But,” asked Moritz, none too enthusiastically, “must not our father
go to confession before this indulgence becomes potent for him?”
“There was, indeed,” admitted Ilsa, “a little said about a
confession, but the Commissioner’s clerk was very certain the main
thing was the ten gulden. In any case, I can get Father Augustin to
absolve my father, and all will be well.”
“So, dear Gräfin,” I said, I fear a little cynically, “you are quite
satisfied of the strength and validity of these holy indulgences?”
“You saw the Pope’s arms; you heard the preacher’s words. It _must_
be all true, else whom in God’s world are we poor maids to believe?”
“Don’t press her,” growled Moritz in my ear; “drowning men will
clutch at straws. For a little while she is being made very happy.”
But as for me, my blood had nigh boiled over. That night, after the
Gräfin and her brother had retired, I went down into the great common
room of the inn, and there in a roaring company, cans clinking and
foul jests going about full merrily, was his Reverence the Pope’s
Commissioner. I strode straight into the herd of wandering friars,
discharged lanz-knechts, guzzling burghers, and up to the armchair
where the Herr Preacher sat, with a fat, sly-eyed bar wench hanging
on his elbow. The sight of a man in the dress of a gentleman, and
with a silver scabbard, made everybody put down his mug, and look
sharply as I accosted the Commissioner.
“Magister Johannes Tetzel,” spoke I clearly in Latin, standing before
him, “I would speak with you.”
“Welcome, welcome to your Lordship,” the fellow slipped his flagon
back to the woman and turned on me an eye as worldly wise as a rat’s;
“your nobility would purchase one of my matchless and infallible soul
medicaments?”
“Not for all the world. Now hear me, Herr Papal Commissioner. I have
perforce to-day listened to your sermon, and very vile it was. I am a
layman, but I know as much theology as full many gorging clerks; and
I say to your face, you are befooling these honest folk out of their
poor money as foully as did ever a Jew with his usury.”
The reverend domine flashed out of his seat like a bursting petard.
His face was red as a beet.
“A million fiends! What have we here--a Turkish infidel? Am I not the
lawful Apostolic Commissioner and Inquisitor into Heretical Pravity?
Do you want utter anathema and the major excommunication?”
“Pish,” I responded, deliberately banging my hilt upon the table, “I
have lived in Rome. I’m not a silly girl to be scared by big words
and hell fire. I say to you, you have exceeded your commission.
Debatable as are all the Pope’s indulgences, you have preached them
in a manner your betters never authorized.”
“Now, by St. Dominic,” sneered the preacher, recovering a little of
his poise, “who are you, my brave ritter, to swagger in here, and
talk like a bishop? If you _have_ been in Rome, you will remember the
saying there current, ‘God desireth not the death of any sinner, but
that he should _pay_ and live’; and as for my instructions, I have
followed them so excellently well that my chest is exceeding heavy,
and that is all the Archbishop of Mainz or the Pope are likely to ask
about.”
“Or the banking house of the Fuggers,” I flung back, casting an eye
upon the spruce agent who sat by his wine in a corner. “Verily,
Magister Tetzel, I hear that at your north country festivals there is
a prize to the champion telling the greatest lie. By all the devils
in hell I swear you are full victor!”
All this cut and thrust brought nowhere, and I was a fool to have
believed that I could have accomplished anything. I was too furious
to argue calmly, and Tetzel was beyond all argument. At least the
reverend rascal heard his sins set before him in no mincing language.
At last realizing that our colloquy was passing into a mere badinage
of coarse epithets and empty threats, I had the wisdom to turn on my
heel.
“No doubt, my venerable scoundrel,” I cried, as a last volley, “you
have never heard of the learned Italian Masuccio. Grow wise, then,
hearing what he said of you friars. ‘The best punishment for you
would be for God to abolish purgatory and the fear thereof; then you
would get no more alms and must go back to your spades.’”
“Heresy! Blasphemy!” roared the Commissioner and a dozen satellites.
So I left them, calling for their “sleeping drinks” and making the
dice rattle.
I went to bed in the most impious mood imaginable. The affair had
confirmed me in my long standing suspicion that what most men called
religion was a noxious lie.
“Curses on the faith that makes a creature like Ilsa--born to dwell
in the sunlight--live out her days in terror and gnawing woe! If god
I must have, let him be the Zeus of Plato and Aristotle.” And with
such unholy thoughts, presently I went to sleep.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] About nine English miles.
CHAPTER IX
I HEAR MARTIN LUTHER
The next day we journeyed on to Wittenberg, through the white birch
forests and seared autumn grain fields, the villages still keeping
their poverty-stricken character, and our company overtaking again
many plodding companies, this time all headed away from Jüterbog.
Hardly a person but bore his or her little scroll signed by Master
Tetzel. But although the Gräfin would hear never a word, Moritz
and I were pleased to catch not a little adverse comment upon the
proceedings of yesterday.
“Your Lordships doubtless understand, but I do not,” grumbled a gray
old farmer at a tavern where we stopped for beer. “I have bought my
paper, but I can never see why the dear God so loves money that for
lack of a few groschen He would leave a soul in everlasting torment.
Best no doubt to be on the safe side,--but I cannot make it out.”
“Nor I,” spoke a younger companion, “why the Lord Pope--who, they
say, is a most charitable man--does not out of pure love empty the
whole of purgatory, since he is willing to free so many souls just
for such a trifle as a gift for a church?”
“Hush, Grundold,” urged a third, cautiously; “don’t talk against the
reverend commissioner. Priests have ears everywhere.”
“We will never betray your gossip, good folk,” said I, quitting them:
“but we have no answer to your questions.”
Others however were more complacent, and I heard one rogue boasting
how he had committed a robbery four months since and his conscience
now felt “white as a new dropped lamb.” All of which made me think
more hard thoughts of Master Tetzel.
Shortly before noon we saw lifting above the plain to westward the
tall round tower of the “Castle Church” of Wittenberg, and beside
it the lower twin towers of the “Parish Church,” and presently
the capital town of Electoral Saxony spread out its walls and
houses before us. Often have I recalled that first sight of the
little city wherein my whole life, yes, and the whole life of half
of wide Christendom, was to be run as through a crucible, and
changed--changed so that only the shadow of our old uncouth selves
remained. I remember the feeling of disappointment when on passing
the gate I saw the muddy, ill-paved streets, where lean hens and
dirty geese were picking in the piles of offal. I saw too the long,
ill-built street of ugly wooden houses, the only thoroughfare of the
city. Even as we came under the gate we met two drunken students
belaboring one another with sturdy cudgels, while a ring of more
sober comrades stood by, urging them merrily to “lay on!”
“A scurvy hole,” I commented to Moritz, and he cheerfully replied
that Wittenberg was reputed “the most drunken town in Germany,”
adding, however, that since the establishment of the new University
things had been somewhat on the mend.
Luckily we found the town a little less obnoxious as we proceeded
west along the Collegien-strasse, and at last before the sombre,
unpretending Schloss we found the palatial home of the elector’s
castellan, the Freiherr von Steinitz, who with his noble lady granted
us worthy hospitality. It was my first sight of a German patrician’s
city house, and the display of gold and silver plate, the rare
Venetian glass, the costly tapestries, the paintings by Memling, the
engravings by Dürer, the rich massive furniture covered with delicate
carving,--all these told of a taste and elegance worthy of the best
palazzo in Rome.
The Prince Elector was absent from the city, but I was assured there
were gentlemen at the Schloss well worth my acquaintance and company.
As for Gräfin Ilsa she was happy as a bird in her aunt’s enlivening
society, and there were soon half a dozen young ritters pranked out
in their best, and hanging around the Freiherr’s great hall all day
for a chance to have a few words with her, and show her the sights of
Wittenberg. They were a little disgusted, perhaps, to learn that she
was most interested in the marvellous collection of saints’ relics
assembled by the pious elector at the Castle Church. She told us that
evening about all the wonders she had met,--five thousand infallible
and genuine relics of the holy ones, including some skin from the
face of St. Bartholomew, drops of the milk of Mary, a piece of the
rod of Aaron, and some straw whereon the Christchild lay.
“Five hundred thousand years indulgence just for visiting them,” she
concluded. “Oh! if I could only bring my father!”
The good-hearted Freifrau here tactfully changed the subject. Her
husband, however, and certain of the ‘Honorability’[3] who joined us
at the board, spoke with veiled bitterness of the recent mania for
indulgences.
“Tetzel is a greater knave than Judas,” concluded the testy Freiherr;
“all honest men are enraged at him--but who will bell the cat?”
Who indeed? For I considered his words as prophetic when, a little
later in the evening, as we sat listening to a recital of the recent
troubles betwixt Kaiser Maximilian and the princes, a visitor was
introduced, requesting to see none other than myself.
“Dr. Andreas Carlstadt,” said the Freiherr as intermediary; “one of
the most learned and honored of our University professors.”
The newcomer was a man of smallish stature, dark and sunburned,
with over-sharp features; he had a harsh voice, and I judged a warm
temper, though not lacking in learning and intellectual ability.
Having ascertained my identity he drew his fur-lined doctor’s gown
about him and gave me a profound reverence; then proceeded to ask
questions. I was familiar with Rome? Yes. Recently come thence? Yes.
I had seen Tetzel at Jüterbog? Yes. Good, then, would I deign to do
him a favor?
“What was it?”
The professor cleared his throat. He was evidently on a delicate
mission. Had I ever heard of Dr. Martin Luther of Wittenberg
University? I had,--a tolerably well-known preacher and scholar. My
visitor then opened his business.
“Then, very noble Graf, I am come to you to crave a favor. His
Lordship the Freiherr will bear testimony to this Dr. Martin’s piety,
sincerity, and zeal.”
“Gladly,” assented the gentleman warmly; “never do I miss the parish
church when he preaches. My wife and most of Wittenberg call him
everything but a saint; and better, he is a right manly man. _He_ is
no sailor in the ship with Tetzel.”
“Ah!” interposed Carlstadt promptly; “your Lordship has said it. He
_is_ no friend of Tetzel’s. The tale of the preaching at Jüterbog
has come to his ears, and has driven him almost frantic. This
morning, being filled up with stories of the indulgence hawking,
he shut himself in his study at the Augustinian convent, and all
day has wrought on certain theses--propositions, your Lordships
understand,--which he proposes for public debate. In them he
assails Tetzel rightly but rashly. ‘God willing,’ he vowed when I
remonstrated, ‘I will make a hole in his drum!’ But that is not the
worst. I have had a glimpse of the theses. They contain many things
that Tetzel and his Dominican friends can wrestle into downright
heresy, even attacks upon the power and prerogative of His Holiness
the Pope.”
“Your Dr. Martin must be a very Hercules to rouse that Cerberus,” I
threw out, smiling.
“The Graf does not know him. He would walk to the stake as cheerfully
as to dinner, if only he felt that plain duty summoned him.”
“Well,” I rejoined, “that being the case, worthy Dr. Carlstadt, what
can I do for you?”
“Do? Your Nobility can do everything. You are a man of learning. You
are acquainted with Rome. You understand the sensitiveness of the
Papal Court to all innuendoes. Go to Dr. Luther; remonstrate. Point
out it is useless to dip one’s fingers in Roman ink. Urge him to let
Tetzel bray himself silent. Your influence as an experienced man of
affairs will be great. Were I not the friend of this truly pious and
learned young friar, I would not urge this; but ’tis a mighty grief
to see a man who could even hope for a bishopric throw away all
chance of promotion by a few Latin theses rashly published.”
I demurred at first, raising various objections. But the Fraiherr
reënforced Carlstadt’s petition.
“He is indeed a pious and eloquent young friar, with a notable career
before him. We have none too many such in these days. He must not be
blighted by the Dominican’s claws so early. Besides, he may breed
great scandal for the University. Go to him, then, in heaven’s name,
and talk him out of it.”
Thus it befell that, after more protesting, I consented.
* * * * *
It had been agreed I could accomplish most if I went upon my mission
alone. The lackeys of the Freiherr lighted me down the long miry
street to the Augustinian convent, which, by night, I could only
see was a tall, massive building near the eastern gate. A knocking
brought a young lay-brother to the door, who turned out to be Dr.
Luther’s famulus.[4] On explaining my business I was escorted up a
dark, winding staircase into a large study, and left alone while the
fellow went to hunt up his professor.
Two candles on a broad oaken table in one corner shed a fitful
light over the wide apartment. I saw a tall, green-tiled stove in
the opposite corner. The floor was uncarpeted. On one wall hung a
well-carved wooden crucifix, but I missed the display of crosses and
saints’ pictures I had expected in the room of such a friar. Two or
three solid, uncushioned chairs were by the table; beside the brass
candlesticks was a battered pewter mug and also a number of books,
the bindings worn and thumbed. I noted particularly a Plautus and a
Vergil--favorite authors clearly; a copy of Erasmus’s new edition of
the Greek Testament, and a Vulgate open at the 118th psalm,[5] also
the _Postilla_, a learned commentary upon the Bible by De Lyra.
Here was the room of no snoring monkish idler, manifestly; and
as surely, one could say, that of no cultured churchly sybarite.
Interested by the whole aspect and atmosphere, I was bending farther
over the books when I heard a firm step.
“Welcome, my Lord Graf,” a voice was saying heartily. The man I
sought had entered.
In the candle-light when first I saw him I could hardly distinguish
his features. I saw a man in the white Augustinian tunic. He seemed
a person of a little over middle height, his body very lean--by
fasting, I imagined--his head widely tonsured, leaving merely a
dark ring of hair. I could see enough of the face to tell that
it was rugged and interlined, but not old; distinctly a peasant
countenance; yet it was the uncouthness of strength, not of
ignorance. Then out of it all flashed eyes so bright, so keen, that
the word of condescending salutation halted on my lips. I removed my
cap silently. Kings, emperors, popes I have met, but never one of
whom first instinct spoke as of that tonsured monk, “A master.”
“I have the honor to meet Dr. Luther?” I asked, with a diffidence not
my wont; and he, looking on me frankly, extended a wide hand. His
voice, clear as a deep bell, added to the influence of his eyes.
“Martin Luther, Augustinian friar, lecturer on theology, preacher
to the convent, vicar to the priory, pastor to the parish,--and
generally struggling with flesh and blood, the devil, and the world.
See what an idle man I am! and now how may I serve you?”
Very diffidently--I could have faced the Prince Elector with greater
ease--I explained my errand, Carlstadt’s fears, my own experience,
and the friendly intent of my mission. Dr. Luther proffered me a
chair, and threw on the table a small pile of papers, motioning for
me to peruse them.
“Oh! my brave Carlstadt,” he cried in broad Saxon, whilst I examined.
“All fears to-day, hot flame to-morrow! Whither will your weasel
courage jump next? A merry day for the Church and poor Christians
when all we theologians are of your fine boldness! Well, your
Lordship, do you find in those black marks on white sheets anything
very heretical?”
“Magister Doctor,” said I, trying once more to use my best Florentine
Latin, and beginning already to dislike my task; “I am not learned in
the niceties of theology; but in these ninety-five theses here, which
I gather are propositions concerning Tetzel’s indulgences that you
wish to propound for public debate, I fear are certain matters which
you would wisely moderate here and there, lest you raise greater
scandal for the Church than that which you so piously endeavor to
quell.”
“Moderate? How many, your Lordship?” His hand fell vehemently on the
table.
“Why, not a few, to speak the candid truth. For instance, you
say ‘Every Christian, truly contrite, has full remission from
both punishment, and guilt, even without letters of indulgence.’
‘Christians should be taught that he who gives to a poor man, or
lends to needy man, does better than if he bought pardons’; or, more
especially, ‘We affirm that Papal pardons cannot take away even the
least of venial sin, as regards its guilt.’ There are a great many
more in like vein. I am bound to tell you, reverend Doctor, such
utterances are exceedingly unwise.”
“Unwise? And does your Lordship tell me you approve of Tetzel’s
blasphemies and filching from our miserable bewitched peasantry? God
forbid!”
“God forbid, say I likewise. I myself have told the rascal to his
face all that I think of him. But, learned Sir, it is plain you do
not understand what troubles I would spare you. If Tetzel’s were the
only back to smart, I would full merrily cry ‘Lay on!’ But who is
Tetzel? A pawn on the great Church chess board. In attacking him whom
do you attack? His masters, Albrecht, Prince-Archbishop of Mainz, the
great banking house of the Fuggers,--and last, but not least, His
Holiness himself.”
“The Archbishop and the Pope? The Graf is jesting. Heaven keep me
from thinking so foully of them! Tetzel exceeded his mandate in his
preaching. On hearing my complaints they will silence him.”
“Tetzel exceeded his mandate? Yes. So I told him at Jüterbog. And I
will tell you his answer. ‘My chest is exceeding heavy, and that is
all the Archbishop of Mainz and the Pope are likely to ask about.’
And the artful fox is wholly right.”
The Augustinian had sprung from his chair, and began pacing the
room with quick, nervous strides. He twisted and untwisted his long
powerful arms.
“The Pope and the Archbishop? It cannot be! It cannot be! No little
theses of mine can disturb such great men. Can a sparrow destroy an
elephant? At worst they will merely ignore my charges, and let Tetzel
weave his own rope to hang himself.”
“I fear the learned Doctor is wrong,” I said; “allow me to play the
prophet. If you publish those theses against Tetzel, in six months
your name will be blazoned all over Christendom as little better than
a heretic.”
I thought I saw the friar’s face turn pale, but he only paused,
crossed himself hurriedly, and muttered “Impossible.”
“By no means impossible. It is because, even in these brief moments,
I come to take an interest in your Reverence’s honor and welfare
which I cannot explain even to myself, I urge this again. Believe
me, I know Italy and I know Rome. I am no fox-hunting northern
ritter, better at brawling than at books. I have learned my Latin
at Florence, my Greek at Padua. Hardly six months since I sat at
cards with His Holiness. I speak with knowledge. Delve in philosophy
and abstract theology as you will. The Pope is tolerant. He permits
any subtle message to the learned. But these theses here will speak
like booming cannon to the myriad laity. They will dry up one of
the richest sources of Roman revenue. As you love a venerable name,
honor, churchly promotion, do not touch the Pope’s, or the Pope’s
lieutenant’s, money bags.”
“A question?” the other stood straight before me and held me fixed by
the power of his wonderful eyes.
“I will answer,” I replied uneasily.
“Tell me, then, Graf von Regenstein: do you urge me to suppress these
theses because what I say in them is untrue, or because what I say in
them is unwise?”
“Unwise, utterly unwise.”
“Then Tetzel must continue to play the Simon Magus with his lecherous
villainy?”
“For a while, yes. One must endure him now, as one bears the plague.
He is mortal.”
“But meantime he will continue to hoodwink and plunder from
thousands?”
“I presume so.”
The friar seemed to grow a foot taller. Thunderbolts seemed springing
out of his countenance. Unconsciously he lifted his hands on high,
and raised his voice as in the pulpit before his people.
“Oh! dear Lord Jesus Christ: when Thou didst die for sinful me upon
the cross, shall I draw back from my sworn task when Thy word is
being defied, Thy little children led astray, Thy holy gospel brought
into contempt, and the devil’s wolves and hirelings are raging within
the fold, and all because this noble Graf here says it will blast my
chance of worldly greatness, and even expose me to the slanders of
evil men. Oh! let rather this poor carcass of mine, which folk call
Martin Luther, go straight to the scorching flame, than that I show
such contempt for all Thy love, sacrifice, and bloody sweat.”
Never in my life--and though not old, I had lived through many a
strange scene--had I experienced the sensations I did when that
trumpet call sounded in my ears. It came like a blast from another
world, speaking a tongue I knew not, though every word I understood.
For here was a man speaking good Latin, and with learned books on his
table. He was no bead-counting, unwashed Italian hermit run after by
an adoring country-side. No crack-brained lay enthusiast. No smugly
hypocritical mendicant seeking an alms. And behold! he was speaking
of “the Love of Christ” as of a very intimate and wholly tangible
thing, and meeting my cry of “expediency” with an argument before
which all my skilfully wrought reasonings would fly back blunted. And
yet I would not retire thus. I also rose from my seat.
“Your Reverence speaks eloquently, but your heart masters your
head. Granted your willingness to make great sacrifice, you must in
any case be sure your sacrifice will achieve its end. I tell you,
therefore, in all fairness, I believe you will be speedily silenced,
and your memory condemned.”
“St. Stephen was silenced. That was no reason to him for denying his
Lord, though no doubt the Jews condemned his memory.”
“But your Reverence can do vast good in a long life if you will only
be discreet to-day. Public gossip makes you a bishop ere very long.
Your piety is famous.”
“Fools will babble folly. My piety is but as filthy rags. A noble
bishop would I make to my people, when I bought the mitre at the
price of my soul!”
“Believe me,” I said deprecatingly, “I have no brief for Master
Tetzel. Haste is never a good councillor. If you will but consider
carefully you will find a thousand reasons for caution. As Aristotle
says--”
Again I struck sparks from his eyes.
“Quote to me no Aristotle, Sir Graf, as to my duty. Quote God’s
word--but nothing pagan.” But he checked himself; “Ei!” with a laugh
he continued, “who am I to bandy proud words with your gracious
Lordship? Be seated again; hear me out patiently, then call me a mad
fool all you will.”
So I sat, hearkening while he paced the room, talking very fast.
“Peasant born I am, and peasant I am like to remain in speech and
thought till God orders otherwise. Many a day as a boy have I seen my
mother toiling under a load of sticks too heavy for her weak back. I
have been schoolboy at Eisenach, student at Erfurt, and then friar at
Erfurt and Wittenberg, but I am peasant still. Pardon therefore my
blunt uncourtly speech. My tongue is a bow that sends arrows straight
at the mark; your Lordship will forgive me.”
“No more apologies. Proceed, I beg you.”
“In years past I have gone down all the paths of monkery,--fast,
flagellation, vigils, long prayers; I have tried them all. If, as
Paul would say, ‘I could glory after the flesh,’ even I, sinful
Martin Luther, could claim to be pious, righteous, holy. And yet, I
say to you, Graf von Regenstein, my monk’s merits were as nothing,
nothing. My soul was in exquisite torment. I feared hourly the pangs
and anguish of hell. My righteousness I knew was but as worthless
dross. Then--no matter how--it came to me that it was not by the
merits of Martin the Sinner but of Christ the Righteous that I would
be justified. That all the outward things men call ‘holy’ are ‘holy’
only so far as they are tokens of that inner light and hope within.
My soul was born again, and unto peace. And with that peace which the
world cannot give came keen desire to pass my hope to my fellow-men
also.”
He paused an instant, and asked, “You do not catch my drift?”
“Not wholly, Magister Doctor,” replied I, following his pacings with
my eyes, fascinated.
“Good, then. I will explain. God has given me some slight gifts as a
preacher and teacher to stir the hearts of men. Here in Wittenberg I
have, week after week, given my message, ‘not fasts, not pilgrimages,
not indulgences, but the pure heart, the humble mind, will buy the
way to the kingdom of heaven.’ Nay more; zealous friends have thrust
upon me the honors of the doctorate. And as doctor of theology I have
sworn ever to expound and defend the truth. And now what has come
to pass?” He struck his hands together with his increasing passion.
“Tetzel! Fox, ass, chattering ape, mountebank! I leave God to judge
his soul! Task enough it is to acquit mine own. But he has come
to Jüterbog, as close as he might to this my own town and people.
My Wittenbergers, whom I have chided for their sins, and urged to
repentance, come home to me boasting their indulgence sheets and
their self-righteousness. And I know, and you Sir Graf know, and
Carlstadt knows, and all honest and learned men know it is vile
deceit and fiends’ villainy. And yet you and Carlstadt still cry
‘peace, peace,’ when if I should hold my peace surely the very stones
would cry out to shame my unfaithfulness.”
Never in my life did I return to an argument with greater reluctance.
Indeed, I own that I was mightily inclined to rejoin, “Go, then, in
your sublime folly. Earn martyrdom, and some day even this world will
bless you!” But I was more resolved than ever not to see an honest
man ruined by his own virtues.
“Learned Doctor,” answered I, “in eloquence I cannot match you. The
nobility of your preaching I do not doubt. Yet even a righteous and
rightful champion does not charge in the lists rashly. Tetzel is but
a cloud in the ecclesiastical firmament. The wind will scatter him.
Long after his indulgences have been tattered I trust you will preach
to the good folk of Wittenberg, and lead them to your way of truth.
But how will you preach to ‘your Wittenbergers’ when your case comes
before the stern twelve judges of the Papal Rota, after you have gone
to Rome for your trial? You may never see Wittenberg and Germany
more. Even martyrdom comes best, when it comes amongst one’s own
people.”
Again he halted. I thought I detected the least hesitancy when he
resumed his pacings.
“Behind the Rota is the Pope,” he answered. “I have heard Leo is a
very kindly man.”
“Kindly? even so, as I have experienced, but his kindness is for
his associates,--artists, poets, boon companions. Consider what
manner of man he really is,--his experience in your manner of
holiness. Tonsured when a boy of seven, too young to conceive the
meaning of his sacred vows; ever immersed in worldly affairs; more
concerned with French alliances than with the betterment of the
Church; continually in debt, so that 500,000 ducats per year still
leave him crying ‘poverty.’ Around him is a swarm of ever hungry
and begging bishops and cardinals. He is full of expensive schemes,
from building St Peter’s church to conquering the Duchy of Urbino.
And you--reverend Doctor, will be chargeable with one great crime;
namely, you have lessened His Holiness’s revenues. Deny the Blessed
Trinity if you will; blaspheme the Holy Mother; call St. Paul a pagan
and St. Peter a Mohammedan. All these you may do, and in the end find
your lot a milder one. His Holiness will probably never pass upon
your appeals. You will never find the money to bribe your way to an
interview with even a powerful cardinal. The Vatican will speak once.
You will be crushed.”
“Do not exaggerate,” interposed the friar, I thought somewhat
quailing at my onset. “Never will I believe the Pope is what you say.
Yet even then my blast will be a mere puff on a horse-trough. Tetzel
will fume a little, perhaps a few of his betters will gnaw their
lips. That will be all. If I diminish his bad gains but fifty gulden,
I am satisfied.”
“You forget, Magister Doctor,” I rejoined, “that behind Tetzel is his
whole powerful Dominican order, who will fly as one wolf-pack against
the defamer of their fellow. The Dominicans are all-potent at Rome.
They never forgive an enemy.”
“And they call themselves _Christian_ friars,” he repeated bitterly,
standing by the table.
“They will malign your motive, imputing it to jealousy that your own
order was not given the indulgence hawking.”
“Men like Tetzel will do anything,” he assented gloomily.
“Then, my dear Doctor Luther,” I cried, resolving to strike while the
iron seemed hot, “I have convinced you. The theses are unwise. Leave
Tetzel to his sins. They will punish him. See--I will burn the papers
in the candle.”
As I held out my hand, the packet was seized from it by force
irresistible. Over me stood the friar, all transfigured by his
passion.
“No!--while God rules in heaven! Let my right hand forget her
cunning, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, let my poor
body crumble to ashes in the flame,--but I will do that to which my
Master summons me. When I set pen to paper I had not dreamed of all
this you tell. But shall I be bold in the morning, and craven at
nightfall? Not so. This is God’s battle. And if He must be crucified
afresh, thrice blessed am I if counted worthy to suffer with Him!
Some trust in chariots, and some in horses, but I will remember the
name of the Lord, our God!”
The room was very still for a moment. I rose awkwardly and took my
cap.
“Reverend Doctor,” I said stiffly, moving towards the door, “I leave
you. I have no other arguments. I could have refuted you out of
Aristotle, Plato, or Aquinas, but not out of the Psalter. And I pray
one prayer--that all whereof I have warned may prove forever untrue.”
But as I was going out, he came over to me, and with a familiarity
impossible to resent laid his hand with honest brotherly touch upon
my shoulder.
“Oh, dear young Graf,” said he, lapsing out of Latin into Saxon;
“forgive my bluntness. My heart is moved for you. Truly I fear you
have been in Italy, where a ‘bon Christian,’ as they say, of our old
German honesty and piety is utterly despised. Somehow your manner
tells me the word and love of Christ is not the thing most precious
in your sight. Oh! seek humbly for a new and better mind,--be not
Italian, but German; for whether Martin Luther lives or dies, the
Fatherland will have need for all brave young nobles such as you.”
How could I answer this? The whole interview had been one of strange
sensations.
“Dear Doctor,” I said, with churlish simplicity, “be sure I shall
remember all you say.”
* * * * *
Once back at the Steinitz mansion, the Freiherr inquired the success
of my errand.
“I have failed absolutely,” I replied. “I have battered my head
against a stone wall. But,” I added, “your friar Martin is the
noblest fool in Germany. Doomed to be silenced, probably to be
burned: I admire and honor him still!”
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Heads of the City Council.
[4] A kind of half-assistant, half disciple of a German professor.
[5] A favorite psalm of Luther’s.
CHAPTER X
THE HAMMER STROKES
Long afterward I heard the story that on the night of October 30th
of that year of grace, 1517, while the Elector Frederick of Saxony
tarried at Schweinitz (a goodly distance from Wittenberg) he dreamed
a dream, which in the morning he said “he could not forget, though
he lived a thousand years.” A monk there had been, a son of Paul the
Apostle, writing upon the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg,
and in letters so large they could be read clear in Schweinitz, and
using a goose-quill of such a length that it reached to Rome, pierced
there the ear of a lion, so that it roared with pain, and then struck
the triple crown of the Pope, so that it nigh toppled from his head.
I do not pass on the truth of this story. Let every man be his own
judge from the things which followed. I only know that I awakened
that morning after a troubled sleep,--somewhat interrupted by
roistering students in the street,--and lay long on my host’s great
feather bed. I was very ill at ease. The interview of the preceding
evening had shaken my self-complacency utterly. Here was I, Walter
von Lichtenstein zum Regenstein, or Di Palaestro, as you wished,
accounted young, high-born, rich, with a thousand puissant friends,
with any fortune short of a dukedom open to me, a master fencer and
dancer, learned in all that the Hellenes and Latins could give me
from Thales to Hermes Trismegistus, able to write Italian sonnets and
Latin orations, to criticize a picture, to defend a philosophy--and
yet I was profoundly dissatisfied with this ‘myself’, and must needs
ask the reason? And the answer presently came--that it was because
since I had come to Germany, I had met two persons,--a mountain
maiden and more lately an Augustinian friar. They had taught me
that there was another world of moral and spiritual values wherein
I had not so much as entered. Gräfin Ilsa had perhaps only reached
the threshold of that new Empire; and pitiful indeed were her pains
and stumblings whilst she tried to enter in. Martin Luther had long
since passed inside, and what he had said to me sounded as strange
words,--tales by a traveller from the far Antipodes, telling of
things he had seen, but which the common language was too feeble to
paint to the unimaginative dwellers at home. The problem baffled me.
Left thus without solution I fell into a kind of anger, not at these
twain, but at myself. After all, I was not so wise as my conceit had
told me. Well, then, years were still left to learn. Should I not
attack this new problem in the same cold scientific spirit in which
Messere Leonardo da Vinci attacked a new problem in engineering or
architecture? And the solution could not fail too long in the finding.
That morning I roamed the long street of Wittenberg, half expecting
to meet Dr. Luther, but he kept to his convent, and I began to
suspect my arguments had carried their weight after all. It was a
clear, cold, windy morning. I was glad of my cloak. Walking eastward
from the town, I came to the mighty Elbe winding its swift course
along the sear autumn plain. A few sail-boats were struggling with
the wind and current, but most of the level brown country was
deserted. Finding little of interest, I returned again to the town,
where I found a procession winding along, escorting a newly capped
graduate in his magister’s gown and hood, surrounded by various
University dignitaries,--all headed for some friendly wein-stube and
a merry afternoon. But just as the company disappeared in the tavern,
I saw two monkish figures coming westward from the Augustinian
Convent and headed for the Schloss-Kirche; and at sight of one of
those figures I made haste to follow after them.
Dr. Martin Luther and a young disciple, the later famous Johann
Agricola, were moving steadily down the Collegien-strasse. The doctor
carried a hammer clutched firmly in his right hand; in his left
flapped a packet of long white papers,--papers I had seen before. He
went forward, with his head held high, a little defiantly, even. His
eyes were brighter than ever; his shaven cheeks seemed pale. When he
saw me, he wheeled and held out his hand with his hearty laugh.
“A fair day, noble Graf. And so you are ready to see me trample your
fine words underfoot. Am I not a grateful fellow for all your trouble
and courtesy!”
“I am pleased if you are pleased, dear Doctor,” said I, while my
fingers cracked under his grasp; “and as for my prophesies, I hope
they all will blow away on this wind. The decision is yours, not
mine.”
“Ah!” cried the other, “too much imprudence displeases men: too
much prudence displeases God. You will pardon again my uncourtly
bluntness. And now let us on to the Schloss-Kirche.”
Worthy Master Agricola explained to me as we went before that the
door of the Castle Church was the regular bulletin board for the
University. The others talked. I perforce lapsed into silence. Yet it
seemed a very simple thing to do. I can see everything that happened
as clearly as though it were yesterday.
I stood in the street under the lofty round tower while Doctor
Martin, and Agricola (hanging a bit timidly behind), strode up to the
side door of the Schloss-Kirche. We were near the gate. A produce
cart pulled by two brown dogs yoked along with a brown country maid,
rattled by, dimming the hammer strokes. Three jaunty students halted
to cast glances at the girl, pulling away at their young mustaches,
and I heard “At the Black Eagle to-night; smacking beer there, pretty
women.” A young pig slipped from his sty outside the gate, ran past,
grunting, with his owner’s son in angry chase. Old Willy, the blind
church beggar, shuffled up to me, rattling the pfennigs in his pewter
mug, and not to be denied another copper. The keen breeze would send
the Doctor’s papers flying, yet he pounded away doggedly, reaching to
Agricola for more nails, making every corner fast, while his black
cassock flapped in the wind. Then he stepped back, and slipped the
hammer in a pocket. Willy wandered back into the church. The pig was
chased out of the gate. The students, anxious for the latest academic
notice, drew nigh the papers. Three necks craned: craned yet further.
No ordinary announcement of allocutions, evidently.
“Jesu-Maria!” I caught the mutter; and behold! two more had joined
them, then a third, and three others. And ere one could think it,
twenty seemed conning the Latin upon that church door, while others
were swarming like bees out of every tall gabled house; out of every
beer and wine cellar. And like bees went the buzzing of their voices.
I saw the priests of the parish church coming; I saw the
golden-chained and bearded ritters of the schloss; I saw also the
venerable burgomaster. Dr. Martin was turning quietly away. Men were
as yet too amazed to question him. A little firmer were those strong
lips; a little deeper seemed the glint in his eyes: but he was calm,
apparently triumphant.
“Dear Doctor,” I said, “you should be satisfied. You have awakened
the dragon. Now if you are St. George, you will slay him.”
“I shall try, God helping me.” That was all he said; again however,
his hand went out, and again we clasped, I think even harder than
before.
“You are a brave man, Dr. Martin,” I said, “and may the heaven you
know so well give you full courage.”
But here Carlstadt and another professor swept up to him with long
faces, and hurried him thence, deep in talk; nor did I see him again
that day.
* * * * *
And so it began. A windy street, a few long strips of paper, twelve
firmly planted nails, a group of feather-brained students,--the deed
brave and holy that was to shake the world. The commonplace act of a
peasant-born monk protesting against what he deemed a wrong. “Not by
might nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord.”
But how could I know it then? For the moment I was sorely troubled
in heart, having seen a brave and honest man do what I deemed a
hopelessly imprudent thing.
* * * * *
That night began a sound in Wittenberg that was never to cease, while
Leo at Rome and all his cardinals must needs hold council long and
late--the clang of the printing press spreading Dr. Luther’s theses
to all the world. Written in Latin they were speedily turned into
German. They went in every merchant’s bale, every pedlar’s pack,
north, south, east, west. In fourteen days they were in every corner
of Germany; in a month they had gone to the ends of Christendom; “as
though,” said a chronicler of that which came to pass, “the angels
were the postmen.” And everywhere men learned and men ignorant talked
thereof, some applauding, some condemning, but all attending. My
prediction that the theses would prove a spark in the ecclesiastical
magazine was verified sooner than I had dreamed.
Whether they would prove the ruin of their bold author, time alone
would tell. Carlstadt was still very dubious; Dr. Schurf, professor
of law, expostulated vehemently with his colleague. From Hamburg came
a letter from Albert Kranz, the famous historian. “You have truth on
your side, brother Martin, but you cannot succeed. Poor monk,--get
you to your cell, and cry ‘O God have mercy upon me.’” From Erfurt,
Dr. Luther’s old university, came words of caution and cold cheer.
So from some; but there were abundant words in another vein,--words
of praise, comfort, approval. As for the friar, I can still see him,
sitting at the great oak table in his convent chamber, and penning to
Link, his prior at Erfurt, “If the work be of God, who shall prevent
it? If it be of man, who shall promote it? Not my will, nor their
will, nor our will, but _Thy_ will, O Heavenly Father, be done.”
So the clouds gathered, and we began to watch for the lightnings.
With Dr. Luther I was often, very often; for there was a property
about this man, which later I found was even in his theology; one
either hated him, or loved him: one could have no half acquaintance.
And what a man he was to know! Very human, very shrewd in worldly
judgment, though sometimes touched by ‘another worldliness’ which
was utterly disconcerting. He talked of himself, his student life
at Eisenach and Erfurt, his later career as a friar, with naïve
frankness. All Wittenberg called him blameless and pious, and so he
surely was, observing all the fasts and enjoined abstinences of his
order with an abnegation worthy of a St. Francis: yet on a feast day
I can still see him, sitting behind the green stove, a mug of beer
upon the table, and across his knees his mellow lute, strumming the
strings with no clumsy fingers, and singing with deep, strong voice
Latin student songs that were anything but Misereres. Very early I
remarked his fondness for music, and his answer was characteristic.
“Yes, for where good music is, and an honest song, there the devil
knows there is no spoil for him, and flaps his black wings away.”
If my Roman companions had seen me daily walking, talking, dining
with this Augustinian friar, who was already setting the world by
the ears, I do not think they would have believed their own sight.
And why was I so fascinated? I could not explain even to myself.
Surely, I meditated, I had not become more convinced of this friar’s
theology--it was not proved valid because _he_ believed it, and my
Roman friends did not. Nor was he extraordinarily learned in the
pagan classics, although I found him a very adequate Latin scholar,
with a fair foundation in Greek. Nor was I greatly charmed by the
social life in Wittenberg. The Steinitz family were delightful
hosts, but I found few congenial spirits among the gentlemen at the
Electoral Schloss.
Perhaps I dared not then to admit even to my own soul wherefore I let
myself linger into the winter at this meanly famed and dull town of
Wittenberg; yet in the after days I think I knew the reason,--Gräfin
Ilsa was still in the city.
The young gräfin had unfolded as a rosebud under the sun in the
genial warmth of her kinsfolk’s cultured home,--so different from the
tawdry savagery of Schloss Blankenburg. What to me was a small and
stupid town, was to her a thriving and delightful metropolis. The
gallant attentions of the official folk of the city were as charming
and unaccustomed to her as they were commonplace to me. Less and
less she seemed the grave nun, or the chattering mountain maiden,
and more and more the noblewoman--the bearer of a long and honored,
if slightly tarnished name. Stately and wise she seemed, and grew
more so day by day, taking the pleasant homage as her rightful due,
until I heard two under-captains swearing over their wine that “The
Gräfin of Blankenburg was handsome as the new snow, but,--holy St.
Agatha!--equally cold to all their gallantries.” A fact, however,
which left them still her slaves.
Only to one person she never showed the well-moderated hauteur
she displayed to the others. That person was myself. As far as I
could discover, she regarded me as almost on an equality with her
brother,--a kind of kinsman, or even cousin, to treat with all manner
of confidences, without the need of any great thing to follow.
“Are we not both from the Harzland, and are not Blankenburg and
Regenstein very near?” she said once, as in kind of apology for
repeating the over-polite remarks of a certain Von Benningen at a
recent skating party on the marshes by the Elbe.
“You are very happy in Wittenberg these days, Ilsa?” said I. (We had
dropped formal titles between ourselves, long since.)
“Of course. It is all as a new world to me. Am I disloyal to the
Harzland in preferring a winter here to the dreary mountain snow and
cold? But I will tell you something. Listen close.”
A disagreeable sensation seized me. She was about to confess an
admiration for some more notable ritter than Von Benningen. Why,
however, that should trouble me, I really did not understand.
“I am listening,” I rejoined.
“Well, then. It is Dr. Martin’s sermons. A letter from Aunt Theckla
says she fears he is an unwise and heretical man, but I know even she
must be wrong. I hear him every day he preaches in the Pfarr-kirche.
I cannot understand all that he says, at least not to repeat it.
But somehow his words are like the cool cloth that was laid on
my forehead whilst I burned with the fever. I go away feeling so
comforted!”
“And how comforted?” I asked, slightly amused.
“Why, he makes me feel that God is not so terrible and austere
after all; that He is not so anxious to thrust folk into hell as to
keep them out of it; that He is kind and piteous and loving, and
understands that we cannot all do great works of holiness like the
saints. The other day he even made me believe--if I _really_ heard
aright--that it was proper, nay best, to pray direct to the Lord
Jesus Christ, and not to any intercessor or saint.”
“Dr. Martin is an upright and eloquent man. I am glad he has brought
you such comfort. But what do you gather as to saints’ relics and
good works?”
“Do you know, Walter,” she made answer, “I do not think he says out
all he believes. Yet I seem to gather that saints’ relics are not
bad, provided they are genuine, and are venerated only to recall the
Christian virtues of the holy martyrs; as for good works, they must
be performed as signs that the love of Christ is in our hearts, but
not out of a selfish hope to buy our way to heaven.”
“And you forgive him, then, for destroying your confidence in Master
Tetzel.”
Her usually mild eyes sparkled angrily. “Master Tetzel is a sinful
and deceiving man. Do not name him before me.”
Clearly, then, Dr. Luther had robbed the good Dominican of at least
one noble customer, and I soon had reason to believe he had spoiled
the trade of others. For after the first weeks of wavering I began to
gather indubitable signs that if the bold Augustinian had awakened
enemies he had also won countless friends. “He has said what we
desired to say and dared not,”--such was the burden of innumerable
letters, and they came in ever increasing volume from every quarter
of Germany; from ermined doctors, girded noblemen, elegant burghers,
and from hundreds of poor but honest souls, until I began to wonder
whether I had played the wise part, when like Cassandra, I had
prophesied him evil.
Dr. Luther’s correspondence grew to that of a bishop. Many a day when
I came to solicit a stroll by the icy river he must needs put me
off to toil on his letters with Spalatin, the Elector’s high-minded
confessor and spiritual counsellor, and fifty other learned men; or
to write retorts pungent and pithy to the abusive counter-theses
which Tetzel and his Dominicans had hasted to fling against him. “The
more they rage, the more I go forward,” he had asserted merrily, when
friends spoke still of danger; and he challenged anybody charging him
with heresy, and who wished “to chew iron and blow up rocks,” to come
to Wittenberg and argue it out,--a good table and a quiet lodging
would be provided. So the storm beat, and I presently brought to Dr.
Luther an Italian letter to the effect that the news of his utterance
had spread even to Rome, where His Holiness, as yet unalarmed,
looked on the whole matter as a mere squabble betwixt jealous monks.
“Brother Martin,” said the Pope, “has a very fine head!”
“And do you hold, Sir Graf,” asked the friar, “to your prophesies of
evil now?”
I fear I smiled with a superior wisdom. “Ah! Dear Dr. Martin. We will
know a little better after the Pope understands that the indulgence
money has ceased to flow in.”
Thus we went through December very pleasantly, and were entering
January, when of a sudden Ilsa’s delightful sojourn ended, and
mine with hers. A letter from Abbess Theckla was the bearer of
ill-tidings. “Your father,” ran the substance, “lies sorely ill at
Blankenburg. Hasten back to him, or come too late.” There was but
one thing to do. Moritz would escort her. As for me, I had too long
trenched on the hospitality of their kinsfolk. We had to set forth
hurriedly, and I had only time for a brief word with Dr. Martin.
Again he held my hand before the departure.
“Fare you well, dear Graf Walter, and the good God keep you. And if
poor Martin Luther has any word that may ring truly in your ears,
remember you are a Christian and a knight. Seek God with a clear
heart, and leave the rest to Him, and He will bring to pass that
which is beyond all that you can ask or think.”
A Christian and a knight?--I?--But not stopping to inquire into
his injunction, I thanked him warmly. I promised to return in
three months to Wittenberg, bringing him various books then at the
Regenstein. Ilsa knelt for his blessing. Moritz and I respectfully
veiled our caps. We rode out across the winter country, with the
Wittenberg church spires long in sight. I was not to reënter the
little Saxon city until after a momentous interval. As I rode
westward, perhaps it was Dr. Martin’s last words which recalled Dame
Hedwig’s prophecy, and I mused considerably thereon.
“Half of Northland,
Half of Southland,
Never gay
Till all of one land.”
After all, which was it to be? Was I to prove German or Italian?
CHAPTER XI
I COME TO MAINZ
On our travel we had abundant chances to measure popular opinion
touching Dr. Luther. Whether on the road, or halting for dinner at
the inns, or lodging for the night with some hospitable nobleman,
the remark “we are from Wittenberg,” was the signal for numerous
questions, followed by comments almost invariably friendly to the
hardy Augustinian, whilst the views expressed about his monkish
maligners were frequently violent.
“No, by my father’s bones!” swore an impetuous ritter as we left his
schloss one morning; “we have had enough of priest-made bonfires with
honest men, who have told the black crows their sins, thrust into
them; and ere they light one for Martin Luther, there’ll be a mighty
clattering of swords from every ‘circle’ of Germany.”
The good nobleman was by no means alone in his vehemence. In the
tap-room of the inn at Dessau, where we broke the journey, I was
silent witness to a colloquy betwixt a stout, shrewd Leipzig merchant
coming from Lubeck with salt-cod and soap, and a strong-lunged,
red-nosed creature who wished to be taken for a friar. The latter
had liquor in his crown, and had been delivering himself against
Wittenberg as “tainted with heresy,” and its professor as “a mad man,
a seducer, and a wizard possessed by the devil.” As he paused for
breath the merchant charged in on him heartily.
“Crack-brain and wizard, is he? Well, who, Master Friar, is
responsible for his folly?”
“Why, the devil, of course.”
“Say, rather, those long-frocked devils, you ‘cheese hunters,’[6]
whereof your Tetzel is the master fiend.”
“_Malefice!_” howled the friar, “what have we here,--a Bohemian
infidel?”
“A poor honest Christian, and much at your worshipful service,” the
merchant was just drunk enough to bow ironically, “and of a mind to
tell you that your merry dance is nearly over, and that the musicians
will be asking their penny. Rome is your city; go there then, and ask
alms of your ‘Apostolic Father.’ We Germans grow weary.”
“Don’t blaspheme the holy Pope,” stormed the other.
“I can’t blaspheme what isn’t holy. You’ve heard the saying, ‘If hell
there be, Rome is built over it.’ Just as the wolf preached and sung
masses to gather the geese around him, and then ate them all, so
priest and prelate promise all things, and pretend to love our souls
till they get their benefices, and then--prutt!” his diatribe ended
with a contemptuous gesture.
“Is there no man here,” cried the friar at the top of his voice, “to
hale this fellow to the inquisitor?”
“Is there no man here to hale this fellow to the horse pond,”
retorted the merchant, and a dozen hands were ready to obey the
suggestion, when the host enforced a kind of truce.
The friar slunk away, not one in the tap-room failing to fling
ribaldry after him. When I went out, a tapster was telling amid roars
how Tetzel had sold an indulgence for _premeditated_ assault and
robbery to a Saxon nobleman and had been _himself_ a few days later
soundly thrashed, then pillaged by his pious customer; while another
traveller had already recited how the Wittenberg students had burned
a copy of Tetzel’s counter theses, as being in turn heretical,
“giving them the fate, God knows, which they deserve.”
Thus it was on all the journey back to the Harzland. Our travel was
clouded by the manifest anxiety of Ilsa lest she arrive too late to
find her father alive. I pitied her drawn lips and anxious eyes; her
respite at Wittenberg had been such a joyous one, and all too short.
In my sympathy for her, and in her willingness to turn to any one
who might afford hope and comfort, we were drawn more together than
ever. If we were not yet lovers, my relations to her were already
exceedingly brotherly. I could see that Moritz was remarking as much
with sly and friendly eyes.
“You forget that I also have ears, Ilsa,” he remarked once meaningly;
“you keep all your fine talk for Walter.”
The little Gräfin colored and let me alone for the next hour’s ride,
but the next day we were more friendly than ever.
Near Blankenburg we met news, welcome indeed to Ilsa; not so welcome
for me (who heartily wished the venerable wretch dead, and his
daughter through mourning him). Graf Eckbert was still alive, and
despite his evil courses his tough old frame seemed like to keep his
soul from his last deserts for some months longer. He was utterly
helpless, however, and the ribald clowns around him were wholly unfit
nurses.
Ilsa’s mouth grew firm when she comprehended the situation.
“He is my father,” she said gravely. “So long as he lives my place is
at his side.”
* * * * *
Her decision, of course, destroyed my pleasure for the rest of the
winter. It was impossible for me to see her; save at very rare
intervals. She would not join Moritz and myself in a gallop over
the frozen crust, for might not the end come at any instant? Moritz
himself felt bound not to quit Schloss Blankenburg too frequently.
Despite, therefore, the glory of ice and snow upon the hills and
gorges I could hardly bring myself to await the end of the winter in
the barren halls of the Regenstein, with only Adolf and Andrea for
company. I could hardly return at once to Wittenberg, and, therefore,
I resolved to go to the Rhine lands, and present letters which I had
to the Archbishop of Mainz’s elegant court. I went the more willingly
because I believed I might be able to win the favor of that mighty
prelate, and influence him in behalf of Dr. Luther.
The day before I set forth, I rode across to Blankenburg, and took
leave of Ilsa. Her brother was present and we made no attempt at many
words or sentiment. Her face showed her to be weary with watching,
but she seemed to be striving hard to seem gay when I talked of
returning “with the first buds of the spring” to join her in the
chase of a red deer over the Brocken.
“By that time,” I said, “I trust your father will be--better.”
“Yes, better--surely better,” answered she, with a tremor in her
voice, as I bowed and kissed her hand.
She let it linger under my lips perhaps a little longer than mere
courtesy demanded. Perhaps I, in turn, made no haste with the little
ceremony.
“The dear God and all His saints bless you, Walter, and bring you
safely back to me--to us,” she altered, with no lack of color in her
cheeks at this last.
I muttered some smooth civilities to her, took leave of Moritz, and
rode away.
* * * * *
All the time Adolf, Andrea, and I plodded wearily over the
snow-drifted roads of Hesse I meditated upon my own attitude toward
Ilsa. Clearly, I told myself, the young lady, once freed from the
savage gloom of Blankenburg would develop into a gracious and seemly
dame, well able to play the noble consort even to such an ambitious
personage as the Graf von Regenstein. On the other hand, I reflected,
in the cold calm manner which was my pride, that to marry such
a portionless little creature would be sheer worldly folly. Her
father’s broken condition was notorious, and could I not hope for
almost any heiress in Saxony? If, however, I _did_ desire to win
Ilsa, I made not the least doubt that the glory of an alliance in my
quarter would end any idea of a ‘vocation’ for the convent.
“Is not the little witch half in love with me already?” I
deliberated, “and am I not half in love with her myself? Fie, Graf
von Regenstein! Do not be so hasty. I am not yet resolved to spend
all my days in this cold Germany. I may not succumb to the first
flaxen-haired northern Gräfin! and whither are vanished my thoughts
of Italy--and of you, O glorious Marianna?”
Then I repeated to myself that I had a great career to carve for
myself in the world, and must not let the naïve attractiveness of the
daughter of a depraved mountain Graf (my admiration being mingled
perchance with a little pity for her condition) interfere with my
better judgment. “In two months I will see myself more clearly; it
will be time then to make up my mind as to Ilsa.”
So I completed my journey to Mainz, glad enough to see the spires
of the old Cathedral city at last and to escape from the bad roads,
and the worse hostelries. I halted at a very comfortable inn, on an
afternoon, and was sitting down to a well-cooked meal in a pleasant
room, intending to present my credentials at the Archbishop’s schloss
the next day, when I heard shouting under the windows, and the
rumbling as of a great coach passing.
“Way! way for his sacred Eminence!” outriders were bawling.
“Is it the Archbishop’s carriage?” I demanded of the serving boy.
“Oh, no, gracious Herr; it is the great Italian Cardinal of Forli; he
has come on the Pope’s business, people say.”
Forli in Mainz? And if he, then assuredly Marianna. I fear I thought
very little on Ilsa the rest of that day.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] The Friars were charged with being arrant beggars of dainties.
CHAPTER XII
THE VOICE OF ITALY
An elegant and hospitable court it was which the Archbishop-Elector
Albrecht maintained at Mainz. I had no sooner made known my
credentials than I was overwhelmed with kindnesses, both from the
prince-prelate himself and all his courtiers. A kindly, open-handed,
well intentioned lord was Albrecht, young and handsome, friendly
to art and learning, pleasure loving, but not a rake. Alas!
that ambition had led him into the Church, when he had fewer
qualifications for leadership in things spiritual than had his
Arabian horses. He lived the life of a luxurious secular magnate,
with never a thought of any duty touching the ‘cure of souls’ such as
was assumed to pertain to the episcopal state. To him all Tetzel’s
doings were but a piece of clever secular business, the wrong whereof
he could never have understood had he tried. Therefore the world has
condemned him,--not because he was a knave, but because he knew not
the time and the opportunity.
Life in this old Rhineland town seemed one perpetual holiday. The
young western German nobles of the court were a mawkish lot, far
inferior to their sturdy Saxon cousins. They wore curly, blond-dyed
hair, laced tightly like women, and covered themselves with necklaces
and bracelets; likewise they affected long tight hose of startling
color, each leg of a different hue. With such gentry I had little in
common, but others whom I met, poets, scholars, and soldiers, made
my life very agreeable. Hunts, song recitals, giddy balls, and the
like, whiled away our time. Above all there was the constant company
of the Cardinale di Forli and of Marianna.
Forli, I soon learned, was in Mainz on an important mission from the
Vatican touching the impending choice of a new Emperor. Every rumor
from Vienna gave old Maximilian only a few more months, and the Pope
had cause enough to be interested in his successor. Forli’s splendid
travelling carriages and long retinue of handsome servants had made
a deep impression on the good folk of Mainz. As a concession to
Northern prudery Marianna had travelled as his “niece,” but I suspect
that many sagacious mortals guessed the truth.
At our first meeting I of course heard all the gossip from Rome,--of
the Pope’s successful stag hunts, of the nipping of a sensational
conspiracy against His Holiness’s person, and particularly of the
creation of thirty new cardinals.
“Absolutely unheard of,” Forli grumbled; “most unfair to us older
members! But the treasury was dry, and every rascal could be taxed
twenty to forty thousand ducats for his red hat. Then, too, what a
magnificent banquet we had in their honor and at their expense at the
Vatican!”
“You will be among the next creations,” threw out Marianna.
“Possibly,” I assented coldly, “but I doubt exceedingly if my career
lies in the Church.”
So ended our conversation then, but what more privately I said to
Marianna, I leave for the wise to imagine....
Pleasant indeed for me was that early springtime at Mainz. Again I
was mingling with men of gentility and ideas; again I was speaking
French, Latin, and often the incomparable Italian. Many a day I rode
back to the Electoral schloss intoxicated by the favor and beauty of
Marianna, while her tall palfrey pranced beside mine. Yet I was never
wholly at my ease. Very soon this lotus eating at Mainz would end,
and then--whither should I go? Back to Italy, to the roses, poets,
Michelangelo’s sculptures and Raffaelo’s paintings? Or to Saxony,
where the clouds of battle were gathering, where warriors were
buckling on the cuirass for a contest not with French or Turkomans,
but with powers spiritual and celestial,--and the stake the empire
over men’s souls?
Marianna pressed me, but I long evaded discussing my intents. Quickly
I had learned that arguments to turn the Prince-Archbishop in favor
of Luther were as dust sprinkled on the ocean. Already the high
prelates of Germany had prejudged his cause. “I will not lay down
my head in peace,” the Bishop of Brandenburg had vowed, “until I
cast Martin into the flames like _this_!” whereat into the roaring
fireplace he had flung a dry faggot. From Rome issued anxious orders
to “quiet the tumult.” And speedily I knew would come to Luther, to
his friends, nay, to all Germany, the direful choice--to bow to the
Vatican or join battle with Rome,--a battle older than the Church and
always lost.
And where should I stand? I who had come to think of that friar of
Wittenberg as of no other living man? I who knew that truth and
God--if God there was--were with Luther and against Tetzel and
Rome? Who had promised to revisit Wittenberg in the springtime? Who
had also given my promise to Ilsa von Blankenburg to return to the
Harzland, and to break the monotony of her barren life with her
sottish and dying father? In short, what should be my great, abiding
choice,--peace or storm, ease or knightly battle, Southland or
Northland? How would Dame Hedwig’s song find its fulfilment?...
Coward fashion I postponed decision, and then, even as I deserved,
it was thrust upon me. I was standing one afternoon at a glorious
mullioned window in an upper hall of the palace, looking out upon
the country just turning green under the northerning sun, when beside
me stood Marianna. Her black dress of Lyons silk fell around her in
lustrous sheen. On her hair were the white spring flowers I had left
at her chambers that morning. What wonder my heart beat faster!
“Well, Gualtiero,” she began in her most musical Italian; “I have
tidings for you.”
“Of what, Madonna?”
“My father is recalled to Italy. I cannot stay here alone. What--”
oh! the subtlety of her eyes as she put the question--“what are you
going to do?”
I stood for a long time sillily playing with my sword belt, and
willing to give a thousand gulden for an hour’s quiet reflection.
“_Ecco!_” she cried in her sweetest mockery. “Since the Conte di
Palaestro grew a German beard and put on German clothes he has either
lost the use of his tongue, or forgotten how to understand my Tuscan!
Do you not hear me? Am I not plain? I go back to Italy: and where go
you?”
Her hands flew out in those gestures that double the eloquence of her
race.
“A thousand pardons, Madonna,” I began awkwardly; “I had not expected
this so soon. I had expected your father would stay longer. I had not
arranged--”
“You had not arranged? You had not arranged? O Santo Spirito, you had
not intended to go back to Italy the moment the year required by His
Holiness had expired? Have you turned mad, Gualtiero?”
I dared not look her in the face. She knew her power over me, and
used it pitilessly.
“You do not answer? You do not say ‘The year expires. I am away with
you to Milan, Padua, Venice, Palaestro, instantly?’ Am I in turn of
flesh and blood and expected to endure this, when you have promised--”
I knew she was deliberately creating her passion, but that did not
make it easier to evade her. Vainly I raised a deprecating hand.
“What have I promised, Madonna?”
“Mater Dolorosa! Have you the perfidy to forget how, when you quitted
Rome, you vowed to receive me at the end of the year at Palaestro?
And _thus_ must I rate all your lip service, all your pretty speeches
and courtly attention since you came to Mainz. O Gualtiero--”
Tears, sobbing, white hands pressed to her streaming eyes, ended the
entreaty. When I approached with some effort to comfort her I was
repulsed angrily.
“None of your caresses, Eccellenza! I am but a poor cardinal’s
daughter, but I am southern born: better death than to endure
ingratitude and faithlessness. If you hesitate to return to Italy, at
least declare your reasons. Honor demands that!”
“I cannot well express them, and yet I would stay a season or so
longer in Germany.”
“Cannot express them?” her eyes were now flashing daggers. “O
miracle,--the Conte di Palaestro and his nimble tongue at a loss.
Here, then. Answer as I suggest them. You fear the vengeance of the
Archbishop of Bari?”
“Folly. He at least knows I am not the man to seek after.”
“Your castle--your noble and elegant Palazzo di Regenstein needs your
amiable watch-care over its garrison of wolf-hounds?”
“Not so.” I rejoined abruptly.
“Ah,” spoke she archly; “I think you have spoken of a lady in
a neighboring bandit’s warren; no doubt beautiful, nobly born,
learned--the Contessa di Blankenburg.”
“I would not tarry for her,” I replied, though I felt my forehead
glow guiltily.
“You find this charming German climate, with its thaws, and snows,
and winter, more delectable than the breezes from Soracte and the
Apennines?”
“Marianna,” spoke I, turning at bay at last, “do not chatter
foolishness. Those are none of my reasons.”
“Then,” said she, looking me straight in the face, “the Wittenberg
friar has bewitched you. You would stay for his sake.”
Instantly I felt the cords of my tongue loosed.
“Yes,” I answered. “I would stay for his sake. He is not a friar, he
is a man. He is protesting against foul hypocrisy and iniquity. I do
not follow all his theology, but I know _he_ for one believes all
he preaches, and he is no ignorant, unlearned bawler either. He has
hatched the egg, which great Master Erasmus laid years since,--the
egg wherein is contained the exposure and ending of all this merry
indulgence selling, and cant, and filching that men have called
religion. For religion I care little; for theology I care less: but
for an honest man fighting a brave fight I care much. And such a man
is Martin Luther.”
I had spit out my words in a counter passion of fury, which Marianna
cooled by a long, musical laugh that left me silent and flushed.
“O greater miracle! The Conte di Palaestro turning from his course
to aid--an honest friar. Staying in Germany to aid--an honest friar.
Yes, running even into the pains of heresy for his sake. What will
your friends say? What will the Corso say? What will they say at
Messere Chigi’s and Cardinal di Rocca’s parties? Give me wings--wings
to flit back to Rome with the wondrous tidings. The tale is too good
to keep!”
The laugh; her gesture more potent than the laugh; her words; the
picture conjured up in my mind of my boon companions roaring at her
recital,--all were like ice to freeze up my zeal and courage. Why,
ah! why had I not been given an hour of calm reflection alone. But
Marianna was there, alert, persistent, aggressive. She gave me no
quarter.
“Come, now, Gualtiero. You say you will stand by this silly friar?
Good, then, what will you do?”
“Plead for him, argue his cause with such German princes as I can
visit.”
“And what can _they_ do?”
“Why, much. At their request His Holiness will go slowly.”
“Slowly? perhaps. But Rome is always most terrible when she moves
slowly. Do you think your Luther will retract his errors?”
“Sooner will the stars fall. I have taken measure of the man.”
“Then, Gualtiero, speak sensibly. No princes can save him. They could
not if they would. Many of your loutish Germans wish him well. Very
likely. They have no armies, however. See in your mind his end.”
“You mean?--”
“A great company, perhaps at Rome in the Piazza di San Pietro,--for
there he will be sent,--a great pile of faggots, a mighty blaze,
a procession of Swiss guardsmen and the holy Inquisitors, your
Wittenberg friar clothed in a yellow robe and pinioned in the
midst--and then--”
“It cannot be. You are imagining.”
“This Augustinian is not the first to rail against what are called
‘the misdeeds of the Vatican.’ Others are before him: yes, and they
did not lack brave friends. Recall them. What befell Arnold of
Brescia?”
“Burned.”
“And Wyclif of England?”
“His bones cast into the river.”
“And John Hus?”
“Burned.”
“And Jerome of Prague?”
“Burned.”
“And Savonarola?”
“Burned.”
“And Martin Luther?--”
I stood dumb. Bursting into an irresistible passion she flung herself
into my arms.
“Gualtiero! Gualtiero! Break this foul spell. Cast over this mad
friar. You were not born for strife and disaster, and following a bad
cause to a worse end. You were born for the South; for poetry and
song; for all that is best from old Hellas and Rome; for blue skies
and soft beds and fair visions; for happiness--and love--and for me!”
And then she covered my face with hot kisses.
Why did I succumb? Why does any man succumb when on one side are
truth, honor, justice, salvation; and on the other expediency,
pleasure, and a beautiful beseeching woman? I was neither a Socrates
nor a Christian martyr.
I pressed her in my arms. I returned her kiss.
“I will go with you,” I said; “I will go with you to Palaestro.”
Since then I have often wondered if I did not almost commit the
unpardonable sin of grieving the Holy Spirit; for I knew the good,
and I chose the evil.
CHAPTER XIII
THE CALL FROM THE NORTH
A week at the fashionable waters of Baden, an easy trip across the
Alps through Basel, Lucerne, Lugano; then again the Italian speech,
the Italian color, the Italian sky.
Two weeks at Milan, a month in the palace of the lordly Contarini’s
at Venice, with the plashing oars of the gondola ever in my ears,
with Marianna divinely radiant ever at my side,--and the Harzland,
Ilsa, and Martin the friar, all seemed exceeding far away. With a
pleasure rekindled by a year’s absence I plunged back into the old
voluptuous life. Delightful indeed to hear again the tinkle of the
castinets, to taste the delicate Chianti and Frascati, to wake in
the morning, to fall asleep in the evening, with the renewed vow,
“to-day, to-morrow, forever, let black care hide his face. My life is
to enjoy.”
Yet even in Venice I heard rumors of the insolent disturber at
Wittenberg. I heard his case discussed during a charming supper at
the Doge’s palace. Everybody agreed he was a bold, sincere man,
probably of considerable piety and attacking undoubted evils.
“But,” spoke the sagacious Senator Morosini, stroking his long gray
beard, as he wound up the conversation, “what will you? On the Rialto
they tell me his propaganda has already cost the Vatican four hundred
thousand ducats. He must be silenced speedily,--if necessary by
stake and faggots. However, if His Holiness is wise, he will recall
the very disagreeable commotions following the execution of Hus
the Bohemian heretic. The safest way to silence this fellow is by a
bishopric.”
“There is no gag like a mitre,” nodded the Spanish Ducca de Obispo.
“I hear Rome is likely to use it.”
As for me, I sat wisely in silence, by no means confident the proffer
of a bishopric would prove so efficacious as these two experienced
and noble gentlemen imagined.
The glittering revels and water parties, however, the excursions to
Chiogia, the fêtes on the Grand Canal, the masques on the Piazza di
San Marco,--all these at length palled upon Marianna and upon me. We
were away to our own little kingdom--Palaestro.
What was Palaestro? The antithesis of the Regenstein, a pocket
among the green Apennines, a clump of gray moss-clustered towers,
and overhead the southern sky. Before the towers nestled the little
village, tall balconied houses of dirty pink stucco, and dignified
beggars dozing in the shade, waking only to whine their “caritas!”
for a soldo. At night far down the valley pealed the silver call of
the bell of the little brown church. By day the sun sprinkled his
brightness over the fragrant orchards, lusty chestnut groves, and
twisted oaks. Behind the old gray towers rose the newer palazzo of
the lords of Palaestro,--a vast mansion, stately with Romanesque
windows, Corinthian columns, and foliate sculpture. Pupils of
Donatello had carved the marbles; Signor Andrea del Sarto had painted
a _Pieta_ which looked down upon the great state gallery. Venetian
glass, Syrian carpets, cases of antique medallions, vast quantities
of silver plate,--these were a few of the things a stranger would
have noted instantly. Our spacious halls and sunny logias looked
abroad upon the old Etruscan country, and in them we could walk
interminably, and take our ease. If one would turn Epicurean,
Palaestro was indeed a retreat for philosophers!
Thither we came by way of Ferrara, after enjoying hospitality at the
court of its prince. His Eminence of Forli travelled in vast state in
a carriage entirely white, with silver used in place of iron down to
the smallest rail and a harness of silver likewise. I wished my own
equipage to correspond, and I fear I made many drafts on my Venetian
bankers in those days,--both for myself and for Madonna, who seemed
daily more beautiful as she neared her native Southland.
“Here is a fair binding for a rose,” I remember crying, as I flung
around her neck a chain of Indian pearls straight from a Portuguese
out of Calicut; and she took them with a gracious condescension, as
if all I gave to her was but her due.
The deft servants my kinsmen had sent from Florence soon put the
palace in excellent order, and we made haste to summon certain
old boon companions from Rome. Signor Campelli the distinguished
Hellenist came, a bishop or two famous for wit, Latinity, and
judgment of good cookery, an artist aiding Raffaello, and our
particular friend Cardinal Rocca, as well as sundry ladies of whose
charms I will not particularize. Our heads were full of Boccaccio’s
_Decamerone_, and surely never was there a better place to imitate
the luxurious revels of Pampinea, Pamfilo, and their peers. My _major
domus_ was an adept in organizing entertainments. Every day we had
new dishes, new excursions, new fêtes.
We organized classical revels after the manner of Theocritus, and far
up among the rocks above the palazzo we found the ruins of an ancient
temple, three shivered columns, and a great rock whereon a millennium
and more ago they had burned the sacrifice. Here one day we imitated
the rites of Pan, slaying a young kid, crowning ourselves with fern
and fennel, and shouting a mad “Evoë!” as we danced like Grecian
mænads.
“In truth, our worship was more interesting,” said one of the ladies,
as with blithe steps we descended the mountain, “than what the Church
teaches to-day. Not that I am a heretic,” she crossed herself--“but
you understand--”
“Assuredly, noble Signora,” spoke Signor Campelli, “only you must not
dream that the true Hellenist is hostile to the Church. Ours is the
truest piety. Has not our incomparable Marsilio Ficino established
that Zoroaster, Socrates, and Vergil are but prophets to prove
the divinity of Christ? Believe me, our cult to-day was as truly
religious as a Christian mass, only its significance is of course hid
from the unlearned.”
“Pope Pius II made a true remark,” added Rocca at my elbow. “He said,
‘Even if Christianity were not confirmed by miracles, still it ought
to be accepted on account of its morality.’ The Church naturally
shows one face to the multitude, another to the wise and initiated.”
* * * * *
Unbridled indeed had been my joy that day; and yet in the evening,
as I stood in my chamber, overlooking the starlit valley, the great
mansion still, the guests all retired, I experienced one of the most
marked revulsions of feeling it has ever been my fate to know.
I saw again as in a dream--yet never was I more awake--the little
room in the Augustinean convent at Wittenberg, the green tile
stove, the books and papers on the table, and beside me was the
deep-voiced friar with his wonderful eyes, speaking to me of duty
and righteousness, making the chamber ring with the grave melody of
the Psalter, using arguments no pagan could refute, and speaking as
though dweller in a world no pagan could enter. And I almost heard
again his word as I went forth from the humble doorway: “My heart
is moved for you. Oh! seek humbly for a new and better mind; be not
Italian, but German; for whether Martin Luther lives or dies, the
Fatherland will have need for all brave young nobles such as you.”
And I had answered his appeal--by going to Palaestro.
I had laughed a dozen times with Marianna over the absurd appeal of
his theology. I had made merry with her over the unsophisticated
piety of Ilsa. I had vowed I had seen enough of the cold bleak
Northland, with its drunken ritters and its swinish peasants. But
had I, in actual truth? To what end was I idling away the days
at Palaestro? I was surely growing no richer, nor extending my
landed possessions, nor advancing my interest at the royal courts,
nor gaining reputation in arms, nor even winning fame as poet
and scholar. Was I prepared to choose as my adopted city neither
Athens nor Imperial Rome, but Sybaris? When would all these days of
unceasing pleasure end? Was there no better name for me to leave
to the after world than that of a delightful host, a talented
improviser, a clever talker, an elegant dresser, and a potent
drinker? Assuming even that the Christian theology was a snare or
a fantasm, was I justified as a confessed pagan in this inglorious
life? As I turned away from my window I saw on my marble writing desk
the vellum-bound volumes of Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius,
newly come from the presses of Venice and Basel. In a kind of frenzy
I searched them, striving to find some convenient maxim to beat back
the train of my questionings. I could not have sought worse helpers.
Everywhere was incentive to despise creature delights; to seek the
hard tasks of duty--otherwise life was rottenness and failure. I
flung down the books in disgust. I had read them often before, and
had been merely charmed by their pure Greek or Latinity. Why did
they seem but as harsh reprovers now? I leaped up from the table and
clinched my hands.
“_Pestilenza!_” I swore in Italian; “it is that cursed friar of
Wittenberg that has done this! He may make his own bonfire and roast
in it, for all me. Can I have no peace for my thoughts?”
I cast myself upon my bed. Sleep came, but this time with vivid
dreams of the Regenstein, and the rolling Harzland. I saw Ilsa
galloping before me, as we chased a flying roe. I saw her yellow hair
blowing out in the wind; I heard her clicking to her great tall horse
“faster! faster!” Down on a fallen log we swept; I saw her beast
stumble, I put out my hand to grasp her bridle--missed it. My heart
surged with horror as she plunged headlong--then to my vast relief, I
awoke.
No sleep returned to me that night. I rose in the morning unrested
and out of humor. Marianna scolded me for sitting too long with my
books. Was not Signor Campelli learned enough for all of us? We had
a magnificently conceived fête that day; a “Court of Love” after the
Provençal troubadour fashion; Madonna Marianna sitting in a rose
bower, while all we gentlemen came before our goddess, and chanted
verses in her honor, each striving to outdo the other in elaborate
compliment; and then laid before her carefully wrought questions
touching matters of the “gay science” of Messere Cupido. Her own wit
was exquisite, but afterward she scolded me for my banal remarks and
verses.
“You were even more stupid than the bishop,” she said at the end of
her reproof.
I promised amends, but in truth my mind was growing ill at ease. The
festival of Pan had been the climax to my days of pleasure. After
that, the reaction--often resisted--never abated. Strangely enough,
now that I was released from all need of speaking it, my thoughts
frequently came to me in German. I once so far forgot myself as to
assert I preferred beer to Chianti, and when a valet was very slow
and clumsy I whipped out “Donnerwetter!”--an awful oath, that made
the poor fool turn pale as a sheet. If one had asked me what was
wrong, I would have answered frankly, “I do not know. All seems well
with me.” Yet I was ever moody, irritable, and frequently, I fear, an
ungracious host.
“Ah! carissime,” Marianna said one evening, as we stood together on
the logia, her hand on my shoulder; “are we not happy? Very happy?
Are not our days drifting on like a little brown boat on the blue
waves of a bay, straight in the face of the sunshine?”
“Very happy, Madonetta, but I do not like your simile to the
sunshine.”
“Wherefore, Gualtiero?”
“The sun will set, and take the light with him.”
“Our sun will never set.”
“If we only could be sure, Marianna mia!”
“Silence,” she commanded. “Have you not everything a man could wish?
For us there is no sunset, only an ever brightening glow and glory.”
“I will not argue against the wisdom of Signora Minerva and the grace
of Donna Venus.”
She seemed appeased at my answer, but I was not pleased at myself.
Spasmodically and by marked effort I threw myself into the task of
enlivening my guests. For a few days the festivities at the palazzo
were more furious than ever. Once I heard Andrea remarking to a
fellow valet, “His Excellency is drinking an unusual amount of late.”
This, however, hardly troubled me. So long as I did not think about
Wittenberg and the Harzland, about Luther and Ilsa, I was tolerably
content. Then came a letter from Rome which raked up old memory. A
quondam boon companion sent a goodly parcel of court news, an account
of the wedding of the Duca di Caserna, a discussion of the latest
Latin play, and thus concluded:--
“Since you are lately out of your barbarous Germany, you of course
know all about that friar Luther. People here talk of him more and
more. ‘To the flames’ say some, but that is not easy. The Elector of
Saxony is protecting him, and they say many of his countrymen are mad
enough to call him not a heretic, but a saint. Sylvestro Priario,
His Holiness’s censor, has written a bitter and biting retort to
those much discussed theses. Some men here say it is somewhat too
harsh really to serve its end. He asks ‘if Luther has an iron snout
and a head of brass which it is impossible to shatter?’ Again he
says, ‘It is the nature of dogs to bite. I fear thou hast a dog for
thy father.’ Again--seeing that Luther has said there is no warrant
for indulgences in the Scripture--‘we have not the authority of the
Scripture for them, but we have the authority of the Roman Church and
the Popes, which is the greater of the twain.’ All this is, beyond
doubt, abrupt, and I fear Priario was ill advised in publishing it.
Still this German trouble-monger must be quieted, and perhaps the
sharpest way is the best. I understand he is about to be cited to
Rome to answer for his heresies. Then if he recants, he is stultified
with his countrymen, and his influence is gone. If he refuses, there
is assuredly only one end for him. But I plague you enough with
such trifles. Let me tell you of the Conte di Rampogli’s Genoese
inamorata. She has grown marvellously handsomer since she bleached
her hair.”
So Rome was acting at last. Of course I had been a true prophet. The
Wittenberg friar would learn what it was to curtail the perquisites
of the Vatican. But I had not the least interest in the small talk
that concluded the gossipy letter. I threw down the offending sheets,
and stamped them under foot.
“Why in the name of every saint,” I vowed, “cannot Dominati write
like a sensible man?” And again, despite all my efforts, I was a very
tiresome host that afternoon.
But letters, like misfortunes, seldom come singly, and surely I was
ready to call them all unlucky. About a week later came a letter in
German, forwarded by a courier of the Elector of Saxony bound for
Rome. It was from the Freiherr von Steinitz at Wittenberg, and I
could not complain that it was not informing. On the contrary, I read
it through thrice and carefully before tearing it into very small
bits. The Freiherr was clearly disappointed I had not kept my pledge
to return to Wittenberg. “We speak of you often and miss you much;
but of course you will be again in Germany ere many months.” Then
he went on with news. Old Graf Eckbert of Blankenburg was dead. His
last days had been drunken and blasphemous. Even his wildest “drink
brothers” had shuddered at his end. Naturally he left to Moritz only
a decrepit castle and heavy debts owing the Frankfurt Jews. Moritz
would have to cut down most of his fine forest to pay them. As for
Ilsa, she was of course left with next to nothing. Her aunt Theckla
was bringing great pressure upon her to take the veil at Quedlinburg,
as the only means to redeem her father’s soul. She would have
already consented had not her Wittenberg kinsfolk, under the advice
of Dr. Luther, strongly urged against it. “For,” said Von Steinitz
significantly, “we would rejoice to see her married to some noble
young graf or ritter who would do her honor, and we engage she shall
not come to him without a fair dowry, seeing that God has denied us
daughters of our own. However, if no such proper gentleman appears
soon at Blankenburg, we fear the abbess will have her own way.”
After this broad hint he went on to speak of Dr. Luther and the
contest raging around him. The struggle had passed far beyond any
matter of indulgences. Men were wagging their heads over questions
as to the whole of the priest’s right to power. It was hard for an
unlearned man to know what was right, but Von Steinitz would never
believe such a saintly man as Dr. Luther a heretic,--and he knew ten
thousand other German nobles felt with him. They would not let the
friar be haled to Rome to fall into the claws of his enemies. If
he must be judged, it must be before an impartial tribunal, and in
Germany. Otherwise they would teach His Holiness and the cardinals a
few plain things.
The letter concluded with expressing an earnest hope that I would
soon return to Germany, “where there is a work for all of us.”
Yes, a work! Life was real there; real deeds to do; real hopes to
strive for; real deaths if needs be to die. And lo! I was spending
the months in this palace of dreams at Palaestro. And while I tarried
Ilsa was hesitating on the threshold of the convent. Why were such
obnoxious questions and choices thrust upon me?
“Your letter was from Germany?” asked Marianna that afternoon.
“Yes, Madonna.”
“That is why you are all scowls; why your laughter and jests are
forced; why you lapse so often into silence. I have a command to give
you.”
“Deliver it.”
“You are to receive no more letters from Germany.”
“Obedience is easy. It is not likely that I will get another for many
a long day.”
“Come, then, Signor Compelli has arranged a delightful mask up by
the grotto. We are to act the fifth eclogue of Vergil. He is to be
Menalcas and we ask you to be Mopsus.”
“No doubt heaven intended me for a shepherd,” I rejoined dryly, and
did my best to please them all the afternoon.
* * * * *
Marianna’s injunction, however, was broken far sooner than
anticipated. Only a week after the coming of Von Steinitz’s letter
a barefoot friar came to the palazzo. He was on pilgrimage to Rome,
he said, and had turned aside from Perugia to deliver this. Andrea
brought the packet to me just as I had returned from a luncheon upon
the rocks. It was in vigorous, though not hyper-polished Latin, and
in a strong, firm hand. I read it like a man possessed.
“_Martin Luther, Augustinian friar, to the right noble Graf
Walter von Lichtenstein zum Regenstein, my good friend_; grace
and peace be to you through our Lord Jesus Christ.
“A blunt man God made me; if then my bluntness offends, His, not
mine, must be the blame. Dearest Graf, I do not write you now,
because I have looked for you in Wittenberg all these months and
seen you not. I write you because tales strange and grievous of
your manner of life have come from Italy even to Saxony, borne
by too many travellers for me to doubt their truth. And now in
my ears sounds the warning of God through Ezekiel the Prophet,
saying, ‘When thou speakest not to warn the wicked from his
wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity, but his blood will I
require at thy hand.’ Therefore lest His displeasure be upon me I
am constrained to speak.
“Did I not love you, nevertheless I would strive the more to be
silent, yet now I feel even as did Paul bereft of his friend
Demas, ‘who,’ he wrote, ‘hath forsaken me, having loved this
present world.’ Again, did I not see you noble, rich, gifted with
all manner of earthly knowledge, fitted to play a notable part in
the battle betwixt Michael and his angels and the Dragon and his
angels, I would yet strive to be silent. But silent now I cannot
be, for I have yearned for you.
“What has bewitched you? Who has ensnared you and plucked you
away from the works of God to the works of the devil? Ah! the
devil is crafty and strong, and we are told can array himself as
an angel of light. Is it as an angel that he has come to you?
Has some woman of glozing tongue and unvirtuous heart spoken
unto you, and have you been beguiled? Are you in the case of
the simple wayfarer, to whom she has said, ‘Stolen waters are
sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.’ Remember then the
remainder of the tale, ‘He knoweth not that the dead are there
and that her guests are in the depths of hell.’
“Therefore, I say unto you, be you warned and repent. No man
while living has sinned beyond the gracious forgiveness of
heaven. Be not as one of those who wrapped his talent in the
napkin, and must return it to his Master tarnished and without
usury. Return to Germany: to the contest to which God is
summoning all men good and true. Then on the last great day will
your soul be clear, and whether poor Martin Luther’s body lives
or is burned will matter little. The Truth is from above and will
prevail forever. I have spoken. Farewell.”
I tore the paper to small bits the instant I had read it, but even at
this far day I can repeat every word.
BOOK II
THE STRUGGLE