The Avenger’s Secret.
It was the first time that Baldassarre had been in the Piazza del Duomo
since his escape. He had a strong desire to hear the remarkable monk
preach again, but he had shrunk from reappearing in the same spot where
he had been seen half naked, with neglected hair, with a rope round his
neck—in the same spot where he had been called a madman. The feeling,
in its freshness, was too strong to be overcome by any trust he had in
the change he had made in his appearance; for when the words “_some
madman, surely_,” had fallen from Tito’s lips, it was not their
baseness and cruelty only that had made their viper sting—it was
Baldassarre’s instantaneous bitter consciousness that he might be
unable to prove the words false. Along with the passionate desire for
vengeance which possessed him had arisen the keen sense that his power
of achieving the vengeance was doubtful. It was as if Tito had been
helped by some diabolical prompter, who had whispered Baldassarre’s
saddest secret in the traitor’s ear. He was not mad; for he carried
within him that piteous stamp of sanity, the clear consciousness of
shattered faculties; he measured his own feebleness. With the first
movement of vindictive rage awoke a vague caution, like that of a wild
beast that is fierce but feeble—or like that of an insect whose little
fragment of earth has given way, and made it pause in a palsy of
distrust. It was this distrust, this determination to take no step
which might betray anything concerning himself, that had made
Baldassarre reject Piero di Cosimo’s friendly advances.
He had been equally cautious at the hospital, only telling, in answer
to the questions of the brethren there, that he had been made a
prisoner by the French on his way from Genoa. But his age, and the
indications in his speech and manner that he was of a different class
from the ordinary mendicants and poor travellers who were entertained
in the hospital, had induced the monks to offer him extra charity: a
coarse woollen tunic to protect him from the cold, a pair of peasant’s
shoes, and a few _danari_, smallest of Florentine coins, to help him on
his way. He had gone on the road to Arezzo early in the morning; but he
had paused at the first little town, and had used a couple of his
_danari_ to get himself shaved, and to have his circle of hair clipped
short, in his former fashion. The barber there had a little hand-mirror
of bright steel: it was a long while, it was years, since Baldassarre
had looked at himself, and now, as his eyes fell on that hand-mirror, a
new thought shot through his mind. “Was he so changed that Tito really
did not know him?” The thought was such a sudden arrest of impetuous
currents, that it was a painful shock to him; his hand shook like a
leaf, as he put away the barber’s arm and asked for the mirror. He
wished to see himself before he was shaved. The barber, noticing his
tremulousness, held the mirror for him.
No, he was not so changed as that. He himself had known the wrinkles as
they had been three years ago; they were only deeper now: there was the
same rough, clumsy skin, making little superficial bosses on the brow,
like so many cipher-marks; the skin was only yellower, only looked more
like a lifeless rind. That shaggy white beard—it was no disguise to
eyes that had looked closely at him for sixteen years—to eyes that
ought to have searched for him with the expectation of finding him
changed, as men search for the beloved among the bodies cast up by the
waters. There was something different in his glance, but it was a
difference that should only have made the recognition of him the more
startling; for is not a known voice all the more thrilling when it is
heard as a cry? But the doubt was folly: he had felt that Tito knew
him. He put out his hand and pushed the mirror away. The strong
currents were rushing on again, and the energies of hatred and
vengeance were active once more.
He went back on the way towards Florence again, but he did not wish to
enter the city till dusk; so he turned aside from the highroad, and sat
down by a little pool shadowed on one side by alder-bushes still
sprinkled with yellow leaves. It was a calm November day, and he no
sooner saw the pool than he thought its still surface might be a mirror
for him. He wanted to contemplate himself slowly, as he had not dared
to do in the presence of the barber. He sat down on the edge of the
pool, and bent forward to look earnestly at the image of himself.
Was there something wandering and imbecile in his face—something like
what he felt in his mind?
Not now; not when he was examining himself with a look of eager
inquiry: on the contrary, there was an intense purpose in his eyes. But
at other times? Yes, it must be so: in the long hours when he had the
vague aching of an unremembered past within him—when he seemed to sit
in dark loneliness, visited by whispers which died out mockingly as he
strained his ear after them, and by forms that seemed to approach him
and float away as he thrust out his hand to grasp them—in those hours,
doubtless, there must be continual frustration and amazement in his
glance. And more horrible still, when the thick cloud parted for a
moment, and, as he sprang forward with hope, rolled together again, and
left him helpless as before; doubtless, there was then a blank
confusion in his face, as of a man suddenly smitten with blindness.
Could he prove anything? Could he even begin to allege anything, with
the confidence that the links of thought would not break away? Would
any believe that he had ever had a mind filled with rare knowledge,
busy with close thoughts, ready with various speech? It had all slipped
away from him—that laboriously-gathered store. Was it utterly and for
ever gone from him, like the waters from an urn lost in the wide ocean?
Or, was it still within him, imprisoned by some obstruction that might
one day break asunder?
It might be so; he tried to keep his grasp on that hope. For, since the
day when he had first walked feebly from his couch of straw, and had
felt a new darkness within him under the sunlight, his mind had
undergone changes, partly gradual and persistent, partly sudden and
fleeting. As he had recovered his strength of body, he had recovered
his self-command and the energy of his will; he had recovered the
memory of all that part of his life which was closely enwrought with
his emotions; and he had felt more and more constantly and painfully
the uneasy sense of lost knowledge. But more than that—once or twice,
when he had been strongly excited, he had seemed momentarily to be in
entire possession of his past self, as old men doze for an instant and
get back the consciousness of their youth: he seemed again to see Greek
pages and understand them, again to feel his mind moving unbenumbed
among familiar ideas. It had been but a flash, and the darkness closing
in again seemed the more horrible; but might not the same thing happen
again for longer periods? If it would only come and stay long enough
for him to achieve a revenge—devise an exquisite suffering, such as a
mere right arm could never inflict!
He raised himself from his stooping attitude, and, folding his arms,
attempted to concentrate all his mental force on the plan he must
immediately pursue. He had to wait for knowledge and opportunity, and
while he waited he must have the means of living without beggary. What
he dreaded of all things now was, that any one should think him a
foolish, helpless old man. No one must know that half his memory was
gone: the lost strength might come again; and if it were only for a
little while, _that_ might be enough.
He knew how to begin to get the information he wanted about Tito. He
had repeated the words “Bratti Ferravecchi” so constantly after they
had been uttered to him, that they never slipped from him for long
together. A man at Genoa, on whose finger he had seen Tito’s ring, had
told him that he bought that ring at Florence, of a young Greek,
well-dressed, and with a handsome dark face, in the shop of a
_rigattiere_ called Bratti Ferravecchi, in the street also called
Ferravecchi. This discovery had caused a violent agitation in
Baldassarre. Until then he had clung with all the tenacity of his
fervent nature to his faith in Tito, and had not for a moment believed
himself to be wilfully forsaken. At first he had said, “My bit of
parchment has never reached him; that is why I am still toiling at
Antioch. But he is searching; he knows where I was lost: he will trace
me out, and find me at last.” Then, when he was taken to Corinth, he
induced his owners, by the assurance that he should be sought out and
ransomed, to provide securely against the failure of any inquiries that
might be made about him at Antioch; and at Corinth he thought joyfully,
“Here, at last, he must find me. Here he is sure to touch, whichever
way he goes.” But before another year had passed, the illness had come
from which he had risen with body and mind so shattered that he was
worse than worthless to his owners, except for the sake of the ransom
that did not come. Then, as he sat helpless in the morning sunlight, he
began to think, “Tito has been drowned, or they have made _him_ a
prisoner too. I shall see him no more. He set out after me, but
misfortune overtook him. I shall see his face no more.” Sitting in his
new feebleness and despair, supporting his head between his hands, with
blank eyes and lips that moved uncertainly, he looked so much like a
hopelessly imbecile old man, that his owners were contented to be rid
of him, and allowed a Genoese merchant, who had compassion on him as an
Italian, to take him on board his galley. In a voyage of many months in
the Archipelago and along the seaboard of Asia Minor, Baldassarre had
recovered his bodily strength, but on landing at Genoa he had so weary
a sense of his desolateness that he almost wished he had died of that
illness at Corinth. There was just one possibility that hindered the
wish from being decided: it was that Tito might not be dead, but living
in a state of imprisonment or destitution; and if he lived, there was
still a hope for Baldassarre—faint, perhaps, and likely to be long
deferred, but still a hope, that he might find his child, his cherished
son again; might yet again clasp hands and meet face to face with the
one being who remembered him as he had been before his mind was broken.
In this state of feeling he had chanced to meet the stranger who wore
Tito’s onyx ring, and though Baldassarre would have been unable to
describe the ring beforehand, the sight of it stirred the dormant
fibres, and he recognised it. That Tito nearly a year after his father
had been parted from him should have been living in apparent prosperity
at Florence, selling the gem which he ought not to have sold till the
last extremity, was a fact that Baldassarre shrank from trying to
account for: he was glad to be stunned and bewildered by it, rather
than to have any distinct thought; he tried to feel nothing but joy
that he should behold Tito again. Perhaps Tito had thought that his
father was dead; somehow the mystery would be explained. “But at least
I shall meet eyes that will remember me. I am not alone in the world.”
And now again Baldassarre said, “I am not alone in the world; I shall
never be alone, for my revenge is with me.”
It was as the instrument of that revenge, as something merely external
and subservient to his true life, that he bent down again to examine
himself with hard curiosity—not, he thought, because he had any care
for a withered, forsaken old man, whom nobody loved, whose soul was
like a deserted home, where the ashes were cold upon the hearth, and
the walls were bare of all but the marks of what had been. It is in the
nature of all human passion, the lowest as well as the highest, that
there is a point where it ceases to be properly egoistic, and is like a
fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere
fuel.
He looked at the pale black-browed image in the water till he
identified it with that self from which his revenge seemed to be a
thing apart; and he felt as if the image too heard the silent language
of his thought.
“I was a loving fool—I worshipped a woman once, and believed she could
care for me; and then I took a helpless child and fostered him; and I
watched him as he grew, to see if he would care for me only a
little—care for _me_ over and above the good he got from me. I would
have torn open my breast to warm him with my life-blood if I could only
have seen him care a little for the pain of my wound. I have laboured,
I have strained to crush out of this hard life one drop of unselfish
love. Fool! men love their own delights; there is no delight to be had
in me. And yet I watched till I believed I saw what I watched for. When
he was a child he lifted soft eyes towards me, and held my hand
willingly: I thought, this boy will surely love me a little: because I
give my life to him and strive that he shall know no sorrow, he will
care a little when I am thirsty—the drop he lays on my parched lips
will be a joy to him... Curses on him! I wish I may see him lie with
those red lips white and dry as ashes, and when he looks for pity I
wish he may see my face rejoicing in his pain. It is all a lie—this
world is a lie—there is no goodness but in hate. Fool! not one drop of
love came with all your striving: life has not given you one drop. But
there are deep draughts in this world for hatred and revenge. I have
memory left for that, and there is strength in my arm—there is strength
in my will—and if I can do nothing but kill him—”
But Baldassarre’s mind rejected the thought of that brief punishment.
His whole soul had been thrilled into immediate unreasoning belief in
that eternity of vengeance where he, an undying hate, might clutch for
ever an undying traitor, and hear that fair smiling hardness cry and
moan with anguish. But the primary need and hope was to see a slow
revenge under the same sky and on the same earth where he himself had
been forsaken and had fainted with despair. And as soon as he tried to
concentrate his mind on the means of attaining his end, the sense of
his weakness pressed upon him like a frosty ache. This despised body,
which was to be the instrument of a sublime vengeance, must be
nourished and decently clad. If he had to wait he must labour, and his
labour must be of a humble sort, for he had no skill. He wondered
whether the sight of written characters would so stimulate his
faculties that he might venture to try and find work as a copyist:
_that_ might win him some credence for his past scholarship. But no! he
dared trust neither hand nor brain. He must be content to do the work
that was most like that of a beast of burden: in this mercantile city
many porters must be wanted, and he could at least carry weights.
Thanks to the justice that struggled in this confused world in behalf
of vengeance, his limbs had got back some of their old sturdiness. He
was stripped of all else that men would give coin for.
But the new urgency of this habitual thought brought a new suggestion.
There was something hanging by a cord round his bare neck; something
apparently so paltry that the piety of Turks and Frenchmen had spared
it—a tiny parchment bag blackened with age. It had hung round his neck
as a precious charm when he was a boy, and he had kept it carefully on
his breast, not believing that it contained anything but a tiny scroll
of parchment rolled up hard. He might long ago have thrown it away as a
relic of his dead mother’s superstition; but he had thought of it as a
relic of her love, and had kept it. It was part of the piety associated
with such _brevi_, that they should never be opened, and at any
previous moment in his life Baldassarre would have said that no sort of
thirst would prevail upon him to open this little bag for the chance of
finding that it contained, not parchment, but an engraved amulet which
would be worth money. But now a thirst had come like that which makes
men open their own veins to satisfy it, and the thought of the possible
amulet no sooner crossed Baldassarre’s mind than with nervous fingers
he snatched the _breve_ from his neck. It all rushed through his
mind—the long years he had worn it, the far-off sunny balcony at Naples
looking towards the blue waters, where he had leaned against his
mother’s knee; but it made no moment of hesitation: all piety now was
transmuted into a just revenge. He bit and tore till the doubles of
parchment were laid open, and then—it was a sight that made him
pant—there _was_ an amulet. It was very small, but it was as blue as
those far-off waters; it was an engraved sapphire, which must be worth
some gold ducats. Baldassarre no sooner saw those possible ducats than
he saw some of them exchanged for a poniard. He did not want to use the
poniard yet, but he longed to possess it. If he could grasp its handle
and try its edge, that blank in his mind—that past which fell away
continually—would not make him feel so cruelly helpless: the sharp
steel that despised talents and eluded strength would be at his side,
as the unfailing friend of feeble justice. There was a sparkling
triumph under Baldassarre’s black eyebrows as he replaced the little
sapphire inside the bits of parchment and wound the string tightly
round them.
It was nearly dusk now, and he rose to walk back towards Florence. With
his _danari_ to buy him some bread, he felt rich: he could lie out in
the open air, as he found plenty more doing in all corners of Florence.
And in the next few days he had sold his sapphire, had added to his
clothing, had bought a bright dagger, and had still a pair of gold
florins left. But he meant to hoard that treasure carefully: his
lodging was an outhouse with a heap of straw in it, in a thinly
inhabited part of Oltrarno, and he thought of looking about for work as
a porter.
He had bought his dagger at Bratti’s. Paying his meditated visit there
one evening at dusk, he had found that singular rag-merchant just
returned from one of his rounds, emptying out his basketful of broken
glass and old iron amongst his handsome show of miscellaneous
second-hand goods. As Baldassarre entered the shop, and looked towards
the smart pieces of apparel, the musical instruments, and weapons,
which were displayed in the broadest light of the window, his eye at
once singled out a dagger hanging up high against a red scarf. By
buying the dagger he could not only satisfy a strong desire, he could
open his original errand in a more indirect manner than by speaking of
the onyx ring. In the course of bargaining for the weapon, he let drop,
with cautious carelessness, that he came from Genoa, and had been
directed to Bratti’s shop by an acquaintance in that city who had
bought a very valuable ring here. Had the respectable trader any more
such rings?
Whereupon Bratti had much to say as to the unlikelihood of such rings
being within reach of many people, with much vaunting of his own rare
connections, due to his known wisdom, and honesty. It might be true
that he was a pedlar—he chose to be a pedlar; though he was rich enough
to kick his heels in his shop all day. But those who thought they had
said all there was to be said about Bratti when they had called him a
pedlar, were a good deal further off the truth than the other side of
Pisa. How was it that he could put that ring in a stranger’s way? It
was, because he had a very particular knowledge of a handsome young
signor, who did not look quite so fine a feathered bird when Bratti
first set eyes on him as he did at the present time. And by a question
or two Baldassarre extracted, without any trouble, such a rough and
rambling account of Tito’s life as the pedlar could give, since the
time when he had found him sleeping under the Loggia de’ Cerchi. It
never occurred to Bratti that the decent man (who was rather deaf,
apparently, asking him to say many things twice over) had any curiosity
about Tito; the curiosity was doubtless about himself, as a truly
remarkable pedlar.
And Baldassarre left Bratti’s shop, not only with the dagger at his
side, but also with a general knowledge of Tito’s conduct and
position—of his early sale of the jewels, his immediate quiet
settlement of himself at Florence, his marriage, and his great
prosperity.
“What story had he told about his previous life—about his father?”
It would be difficult for Baldassarre to discover the answer to that
question. Meanwhile, he wanted to learn all he could about Florence.
But he found, to his acute distress, that of the new details he learned
he could only retain a few, and those only by continual repetition; and
he began to be afraid of listening to any new discourse, lest it should
obliterate what he was already striving to remember.
The day he was discerned by Tito in the Piazza del Duomo, he had the
fresh anguish of this consciousness in his mind, and Tito’s ready
speech fell upon him like the mockery of a glib, defying demon.
As he went home to his heap of straw, and passed by the booksellers’
shops in the Via del Garbo, he paused to look at the volumes spread
open. Could he by long gazing at one of those books lay hold of the
slippery threads of memory? Could he, by striving, get a firm grasp
somewhere, and lift himself above these waters that flowed over him?
He was tempted, and bought the cheapest Greek book he could see. He
carried it home and sat on his heap of straw, looking at the characters
by the light of the small window; but no inward light arose on them.
Soon the evening darkness came; but it made little difference to
Baldassarre. His strained eyes seemed still to see the white pages with
the unintelligible black marks upon them.