“For the fruit of the blood belongs to those who bring the price of
love.”
So, but in a less rapt and mystical sense than that in which the holy
virgin of Siena had poured out her soul, thought the young Duchess
Leonora, wife of Pietro, second son of Cosimo da Medici, Grand Duke of
Florence.
The price of love, the price of love! For eleven days she had wept,
burning to pay it--indignant, passionate, heart-broken, she had told
herself. And now that the altar was ready and the blade bared, what
was her desire? Only for mercy--only for life, shameful and abandoned
if needs must be, but life on any terms, the least regarded, the most
despised. She was so young, so untutored; she had been so led astray
by the casuistries of gallantry in this city of profligates. She would
confess her sin, plead its extenuations, abase herself before the
knees of the father of her child. That at least existed in pledge of
her wifely loyalty; no man else could boast so much of her. She had
borne that agony, that rapture, with a pure conscience. Surely the
father would not murder the mother of his babe! So monstrous a deed
would cry aloud for vengeance even in this place of monsters!
And even while she sat with white face and staring eyes, gnawing a
tumbled strand of her beautiful auburn hair, she knew that all the
extenuations she could plead were but so many aggravations of her
crime; that the reptile she had been forced into marrying had
insidiously encouraged her infidelity with this very purpose of
ridding himself of her; that all the light and flower of her youth
were but incentives to the lustful cruelty of one destitute of
compassion and nobility. She was to die, somewhere, somehow; and in
all that city she had no one courageous friend to whom to turn, no
hope anywhere of refuge or escape. Policy, the policy of the devil in
this cursed Gehenna, must turn a deaf ear, a blind eye to her peril.
The Duke himself----
She shuddered from the very poison of his name. The base emotions it
recalled robbed death for the moment of its worst terrors, picturing
its shadowy arms the sole merciful asylum from memories too dreadful
for endurance. Death, no grisly phantom, but the kind mother, lulling
to eternal forgetfulness!
Ah! but she was so young, so young! She buried her face in her hands,
and rocked herself to and fro, moaning.
* * * * *
Cosimo, the first of the junior branch of the house of Medici, had
come to reign in Florence as absolute Duke in 1537. His wife, Leonora
(daughter of Don Pedro de Toledo, Spanish viceroy at Naples), had died
twenty-five years later, after having borne him several children, of
whom Pietro was the second son. Within a month or two of her death the
Duke was involved in an intrigue with a second Leonora de Toledo,
niece of the first, a beautiful child who had been placed at the
Tuscan Court under her aunt’s care. The circumstances of the liaison
being revealed caused such a scandal that Cosimo, in order to quiet
it, married the girl to his son Pietro, a libertine of the sickliest
odour. The inevitable result followed in that city of furious passions
and perverted morals. The young wife, despised and neglected by her
husband, robbed, moreover, of her self-respect, accepted the usual
_cavaliere-servente_--in this case one Alessandro Gagi--more, it would
seem, out of pique than inclination. At least, when, the flirtation
having been noted, Gagi, privately warned of its danger, had elected
to resolve a poignant difficulty by retiring into a monastery, Leonora
had had no difficulty in transferring her affections to an object more
daring, or less discreet, than her melancholy new-fledged young
Capuchin. The fresh fancy was a youthful blood of Saint-Étienne, and
this time it was a case of genuine passion into which she rushed
headstrong. She may have affected to believe that indifference was the
worst thing she had to fear from her husband; if she did, she lied to
herself, as women will when their desire runs ahead of their prudence.
The case of Alessandro Gagi was her sufficient admonition. The dog was
not asleep because his eyes were shut.
The lovers met; and this time there was no hint of espionage
vouchsafed. But quite suddenly St. Étienne, as we must call him, was
ordered off to the Island of Elba. The pretext for his banishment was
a fatal duel in which he had lately been engaged with a young
nobleman, Francesco Ginori; the real object, undoubtedly, was the
procuring of incriminating evidence of the liaison in the shape of
written correspondence. St. Étienne, recklessly enamoured, was not
long in providing this, or the spies of the husband in intercepting
it. The guilty lover was seized, brought back privately to the prison
of the Bargello, and there at dead of night strangled. The news of his
death was conveyed to Leonora, whether in malice or sympathy, by
Francesco, her brother-in-law; and for eleven days thereafter she
wept, heedless of consequences, abandoned to her grief. She dreamed in
that time that she had the stuff of heroism in her; and her
illusionment only came to vanish utterly with the withdrawal of the
envoy who, on the twelfth day, had brought her a message from her
husband.
This envoy’s voice, his figure, each as chill, as precise, as
faultless as the other, still vividly haunted her as she sat. Not a
word or tone of his had been ill-considered; not a hair had been out
of place in his little pointed black beard, which had lain upon a ruff
like biscuit china. His cold, exquisite hands, his jerkin and trunk
hose of white silver-sprigged satin, his ivory sword-scabbard--all had
been so many graduated harmonies in a picture of icy perfection. He
had looked a man built out of frost; and from the heart of frost had
come his words, keen, dispassionate, killing:
“His Grace, Madonna, much concerning himself with a distemper into
which he hears you reported to be fallen, entreats your company at his
Villa of Cafaggiodo, where he is in hopes the silence and the sweeter
air will restore to you your health.”
And she had looked at him, with a sudden catch at her heart, though
the flame of defiance in her still flickered.
“I thank you, Messer. For when is my doom pronounced?”
Whereat the envoy had raised one white hand ineffably.
“Alas, Madonna! Is our dear prince’s tender consideration so hurtful?
Even now he waits to welcome you.”
Then she had put out entreating arms to him.
“Messer--a little time to prepare--to say goodbye. I have a son,
Messer, a very little child. Look, this is the Vecchio, is it not--the
Duke’s palace? I am quite alone in my corner of it, caged, shunned
like a leper, yet my every exit from it is guarded. Give me this night
in which to part seemingly with all I have left to love on earth.”
His laugh had sounded like the tinkle of ice on glass.
“Love? You wilfully postpone it, madam. Yet will I venture to enlarge
upon my credentials to the extent your Grace demands. To-morrow----”
“I will deliver myself without fail to the sacrifice, Messer.”
And, with a patient, deprecating shrug, in which shoulders, eyebrows,
and lips were all included, he had made his profound obeisance, and
left her. And then!
It came upon her like a stroke, electric, instant, agonising out of
numbness. She did not want to die; she had only been tricking herself
in the trappings of tragedy; like the spoiled beauty she was, she had
believed herself irresistible though playing with devils; and each
day’s grace had but confirmed her in her wilful self-delusion. And now
at last she was awake and mad with fear--confessed now to herself for
the unheroic creature of selfishness and vanity which her deeds had
already proclaimed her to the world.
Passion, indeed, often speaks big until it finds itself trapped. Its
artificial heat is very susceptible to chills. Then, in proportion as
it has burned furious, is the abjectness of its relapse. I speak of it
as an emotion apart from love. This poor Leonora, in her craven
frenzy, condoned in her mind the offences of the monster in whose
relentless grasp she now felt herself writhing. Her leaning towards
him, her desire to propitiate, was like a lust. She would swear
herself his creature, his sympathiser, his fellow-passionist, if only
he would accept and spare her as such. Do not blame her over-harshly.
The spirit crazed with fear of darkness has no volition but towards
the light. Moreover, the catalogue of the deadly sins was much
confused in her time, and some crimes which in our day would be held
unpardonable were avowed pleasantries. The butterfly bred to carrion
is not easily weaned to honey--our own fair Purple-Emperor is an
example--and grapes fattened on bullocks’ blood wither deprived of it.
What wonder that this poor lovely creature, bred on corruption,
confessed her tastes vitiated? It was life she wanted, and, at the
last, even with Pietro da Medici for her boon-fellow. The woman was
debased; yet the mother remained. It had been already dusk when the
envoy withdrew. Now, with streaming eyes and labouring bosom, she
hurried to spend her last night on earth by the cradle of her little
Cosimo.
* * * * *
With dawn came hope, came the jocund reassurance of the sun, of the
familiar greetings and services and customs. It seemed impossible that
tragedy could be lurking behind that kindly commonplace. Leonora’s
spirits rose with the morning, heightened with the glowing day. Had
the conquering glory of her beauty served her hitherto so implicitly
to fail her now? If jealousy were at the bottom of this resentment,
she carried the sweetest antidote to it in her bosom. Imploring eyes,
lovely submission and lovely solicitation--so she acted the part of a
prostitute in her soul, and almost counted the hours to the end.
In the late afternoon she was informed, unasked, that a carriage and
escort awaited her in the court by the Via de Leone. Half hysterical,
she sought her little boy for the last time, and her tears ran salt
over his face as she kissed him.
“Love mummia, bambinetto, always, always!”
It was the attitude of her escort that first struck a chill into her,
and caused a declension in her high spirits. They may have been
ignorant of her purposed fate; but she was under a ban, and they were
under orders. These, it was evident, included uncommunicativeness,
rigid surveillance, impassive force. The Villa Cafaggiodo lay at some
distance beyond the walls in a lonely country. The young Duchess
employed every artifice to delay the journey, now a purchase she must
make, now a friend she must speak to, now a church she must visit. She
was never denied; she was humoured--and watched--in everything. A
subtler treatment had, perhaps, allayed her alarms entirely, as it was
evidently the object of the escort to evade attention or suspicion;
but these common minds had not the _savoir faire_ to throw off the
weight of responsibility under which they laboured. At length they
left the city behind, and came into the open country--an abandonment
which the girl had dreaded unspeakably, and resisted as long as
possible.
And here Madama must alight to pick the wayside flowers--for the month
was July--and again, and yet again when she saw one more beautiful
than the rest; so that dusk was beginning to fall, windless and
melancholy, when they came in sight of the villa. But there was no
thought of flowers in her soul, then or at any time; and the loveliest
of all the blossoms lay crushed in her little hand when at last the
carriage rolled into the courtyard of the Villa Cafaggiodo, and the
attendants came round to the door to help her alight.
She looked up at the frowning portal, at the lifeless galleries, and
shrank back.
“My lord does not entertain?” she whispered.
“It is his will to be alone, Madonna,” they answered low.
Hardly conscious of her limbs, swaying a little, she mounted the
steps, and saw an open door before her. Standing there, as in a
fearful dream, she heard a sudden sound below, and started and turned.
The carriage, the escort, were all in retreat, returning by the road
they had come. She tried to call to them--her dry throat would not
articulate; she made a panic move as if to descend, and paused again.
They had closed and bolted the gates behind them; she was left quite
alone and unprotected in that deserted place.
There was no voice of anything but a little garrulous fountain, which
giggled and choked in the courtyard. The cold, grey house-front rose
above her; behind and to either side the cypresses reared their inky
minarets against an empty sky. In the spaces between, the bushes and
flowering shrubs were already clouds of impenetrable shadow,
palpitating with suggestion. What might not be beyond or within them,
watching for her descent--eyes, horrible eyes! With a shudder she
turned to the door, and saw the vast spaces of the vestibule,
melancholy, cavernous, waiting to engulf her. But not a sound came
from them, or from anywhere. The place seemed wholly vacant and
deserted.
Hush! a whisper--a footstep creeping on the stones of the court below.
Without pausing to look or convince herself, she fled into the great
hall, and found herself at the foot of the staircase, breathing in a
mortal fear, clutching at the balustrade for support. A faint glow
from the dying day smeared the marble walls, and illumined the limbs
of a dozen statues as if with phosphorescence. But the pits of
blackness between, more dense in consequence, were dreadfully
potential of evil, and, half swooning, she turned to the staircase as
her only resource. There was a room above--a room she knew and had
slept in--and thither, as to her one ark of refuge in that mad flight,
she instinctively made. If she could only reach it before she died of
terror!
She was there, had put out a shaking hand to part the tapestry on the
wall, when something, unfamiliar to her even in her blind agitation,
made her shrink back with a shock like death. She knew the woven
picture--Herodias’s daughter, and the dark arm of the executioner
holding the bleeding head over the charger. But now the poised hand
seemed empty--the head had run to a point--in a sudden sick
fascination she peered forward to examine it.
God in heaven! the arm was actual and living; the fingers gripped a
dagger!
And, even as she uttered a little whining cry, “Pero! per pietà!” she
saw a mad gleam at the crevice, and the arm struck down.
Her scream was still echoing through the empty house as a grinning,
soft-snarling beast parted the arras, and, leaping over the prostrate
body, turned and bent gloatingly to view it. His poniard stood buried
to the hilt in the soft flesh of the shoulder-blade.
“Pietro’s tooth!” he shrieked; “Pietro’s tooth!” His laugh reeled and
babbled among the galleries as if scores of invisible feet were
suddenly running down to the scene of the crime.
He paused, he listened; with an awful look he suddenly cast himself on
his knees by the murdered child, and, raising his bloody hands,
besought, in a shaking voice and with tears streaming down his cheeks,
Heaven’s pardon for his crime, vowing, in expiation of it, never to
marry again.
With moans and sobs he then raised the poor body, silent to his
remorse as to his hate, and, passionately kissing the lips, grown
desirable to him only in death, with his own hands laid it in the
coffin he had ready prepared for it in the very chamber to which the
living soul had fled, in thought, for refuge.
That same night it was secretly conveyed to Florence, and buried in
the Church of San Lorenzo. The murderer married Beatrice de Menesser
seventeen years later. But, no doubt, by then, as a great romancer
remarked, he had not only forgotten his vow, but that any reason had
ever existed for his making one. God, in mediæval Italy, was credited
with as short a memory as man, and with a much more amiable credulity.