The Black Marks become Magical.
That journey of Tito’s to Rome, which had removed many difficulties
from Romola’s departure, had been resolved on quite suddenly, at a
supper, only the evening before.
Tito had set out towards that supper with agreeable expectations. The
meats were likely to be delicate, the wines choice, the company
distinguished; for the place of entertainment was the Selva or Orto de’
Rucellai, or, as we should say, the Rucellai Gardens; and the host,
Bernardo Rucellai, was quite a typical Florentine grandee. Even his
family name has a significance which is prettily symbolic: properly
understood, it may bring before us a little lichen, popularly named
_orcella_ or _roccella_, which grows on the rocks of Greek isles and in
the Canaries; and having drunk a great deal of light into its little
stems and button-heads, will, under certain circumstances, give it out
again as a reddish purple dye, very grateful to the eyes of men. By
bringing the excellent secret of this dye, called _oricello_, from the
Levant to Florence, a certain merchant, who lived nearly a hundred
years before our Bernardo’s time, won for himself and his descendants
much wealth, and the pleasantly-suggestive surname of Oricellari, or
Roccellari, which on Tuscan tongues speedily became Rucellai.
And our Bernardo, who stands out more prominently than the rest on this
purple background, had added all sorts of distinction to the family
name: he had married the sister of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and had had the
most splendid wedding in the memory of Florentine upholstery; and for
these and other virtues he had been sent on embassies to France and
Venice, and had been chosen Gonfaloniere; he had not only built himself
a fine palace, but had finished putting the black and white marble
façade to the church of Santa Maria Novella; he had planted a garden
with rare trees, and had made it classic ground by receiving within it
the meetings of the Platonic Academy, orphaned by the death of Lorenzo;
he had written an excellent, learned book, of a new topographical sort,
about ancient Rome; he had collected antiquities; he had a pure
Latinity. The simplest account of him, one sees, reads like a laudatory
epitaph, at the end of which the Greek and Ausonian Muses might be
confidently requested to tear their hair, and Nature to desist from any
second attempt to combine so many virtues with one set of viscera.
His invitation had been conveyed to Tito through Lorenzo Tornabuoni,
with an emphasis which would have suggested that the object of the
gathering was political, even if the public questions of the time had
been less absorbing. As it was, Tito felt sure that some party purposes
were to be furthered by the excellent flavours of stewed fish and old
Greek wine; for Bernardo Rucellai was not simply an influential
personage, he was one of the elect Twenty who for three weeks had held
the reins of Florence. This assurance put Tito in the best spirits as
he made his way to the Via della Scala, where the classic garden was to
be found: without it, he might have had some uneasy speculation as to
whether the high company he would have the honour of meeting was likely
to be dull as well as distinguished; for he had had experience of
various dull suppers even in the Rucellai gardens, and especially of
the dull philosophic sort, wherein he had not only been called upon to
accept an entire scheme of the universe (which would have been easy to
him), but to listen to an exposition of the same, from the origin of
things to their complete ripeness in the tractate of the philosopher
then speaking.
It was a dark evening, and it was only when Tito crossed the occasional
light of a lamp suspended before an image of the Virgin, that the
outline of his figure was discernible enough for recognition. At such
moments any one caring to watch his passage from one of these lights to
another might have observed that the tall and graceful personage with
the mantle folded round him was followed constantly by a very different
form, thickset and elderly, in a serge tunic and felt hat. The
conjunction might have been taken for mere chance, since there were
many passengers along the streets at this hour. But when Tito stopped
at the gate of the Rucellai gardens, the figure behind stopped too. The
_sportello_, or smaller door of the gate, was already being held open
by the servant, who, in the distraction of attending to some question,
had not yet closed it since the last arrival, and Tito turned in
rapidly, giving his name to the servant, and passing on between the
evergreen bushes that shone like metal in the torchlight. The follower
turned in too.
“Your name?” said the servant.
“Baldassarre Calvo,” was the immediate answer.
“You are not a guest; the guests have all passed.”
“I belong to Tito Melema, who has just gone in. I am to wait in the
gardens.”
The servant hesitated. “I had orders to admit only guests. Are you a
servant of Messer Tito?”
“No, friend, I am not a servant; I am a scholar.”
There are men to whom you need only say, “I am a buffalo,” in a certain
tone of quiet confidence, and they will let you pass. The porter gave
way at once, Baldassarre entered, and heard the door closed and chained
behind him, as he too disappeared among the shining bushes.
Those ready and firm answers argued a great change in Baldassarre since
the last meeting face to face with Tito, when the dagger broke in two.
The change had declared itself in a startling way.
At the moment when the shadow of Tito passed in front of the hovel as
he departed homeward, Baldassarre was sitting in that state of
after-tremor known to every one who is liable to great outbursts of
passion: a state in which physical powerlessness is sometimes
accompanied by an exceptional lucidity of thought, as if that
disengagement of excited passion had carried away a fire-mist and left
clearness behind it. He felt unable to rise and walk away just yet; his
limbs seemed benumbed; he was cold, and his hands shook. But in that
bodily helplessness he sat surrounded, not by the habitual dimness and
vanishing shadows, but by the clear images of the past; he was living
again in an unbroken course through that life which seemed a long
preparation for the taste of bitterness.
For some minutes he was too thoroughly absorbed by the images to
reflect on the fact that he saw them, and note the fact as a change.
But when that sudden clearness had travelled through the distance, and
came at last to rest on the scene just gone by, he felt fully where he
was: he remembered Monna Lisa and Tessa. Ah! _he_ then was the
mysterious husband; he who had another wife in the Via de’ Bardi. It
was time to pick up the broken dagger and go—go and leave no trace of
himself; for to hide his feebleness seemed the thing most like power
that was left to him. He leaned to take up the fragments of the dagger;
then he turned towards the book which lay open at his side. It was a
fine large manuscript, an odd volume of Pausanias. The moonlight was
upon it, and he could see the large letters at the head of the page:
ΜΕΣΣΕΝΙΚΑ. ΚΒ′.
In old days he had known Pausanias familiarly; yet an hour or two ago
he had been looking hopelessly at that page, and it had suggested no
more meaning to him than if the letters had been black weather-marks on
a wall; but at this moment they were once more the magic signs that
conjure up a world. That moonbeam falling on the letters had raised
Messenia before him, and its struggle against the Spartan oppression.
He snatched up the book, but the light was too pale for him to read
further by. No matter: he knew that chapter; he read inwardly. He saw
the stoning of the traitor Aristocrates—stoned by a whole people, who
cast him out from their borders to lie unburied, and set up a pillar
with verses upon it telling how Time had brought home justice to the
unjust. The words arose within him, and stirred innumerable vibrations
of memory. He forgot that he was old: he could almost have shouted. The
light was come again, mother of knowledge and joy! In that exultation
his limbs recovered their strength: he started up with his broken
dagger and book, and went out under the broad moonlight.
It was a nipping frosty air, but Baldassarre could feel no chill—he
only felt the glow of conscious power. He walked about and paused on
all the open spots of that high ground, and looked down on the domed
and towered city, sleeping darkly under its sleeping guardians, the
mountains; on the pale gleam of the river; on the valley vanishing
towards the peaks of snow; and felt himself master of them all.
That sense of mental empire which belongs to us all in moments of
exceptional clearness was intensified for him by the long days and
nights in which memory had been little more than the consciousness of
something gone. That city, which had been a weary labyrinth, was
material that he could subdue to his purposes now: his mind glanced
through its affairs with flashing conjecture; he was once more a man
who knew cities, whose sense of vision was instructed with large
experience, and who felt the keen delight of holding all things in the
grasp of language. Names! Images!—his mind rushed through its wealth
without pausing, like one who enters on a great inheritance.
But amidst all that rushing eagerness there was one End presiding in
Baldassarre’s consciousness,—a dark deity in the inmost cell, who only
seemed forgotten while his hecatomb was being prepared. And when the
first triumph in the certainty of recovered power had had its way, his
thoughts centred themselves on Tito. That fair slippery viper could not
escape him now; thanks to struggling justice, the heart that never
quivered with tenderness for another had its sensitive selfish fibres
that could be reached by the sharp point of anguish. The soul that
bowed to no right, bowed to the great lord of mortals, Pain.
He could search into every secret of Tito’s life now: he knew some of
the secrets already, and the failure of the broken dagger, which seemed
like frustration, had been the beginning of achievement. Doubtless that
sudden rage had shaken away the obstruction which stifled his soul.
Twice before, when his memory had partially returned, it had been in
consequence of sudden excitation: once when he had had to defend
himself from an enraged dog: once when he had been overtaken by the
waves, and had had to scramble up a rock to save himself.
Yes, but if this time, as then, the light were to die out, and the
dreary conscious blank come back again! This time the light was
stronger and steadier; but what security was there that before the
morrow the dark fog would not be round him again? Even the fear seemed
like the beginning of feebleness: he thought with alarm that he might
sink the faster for this excited vigil of his on the hill, which was
expending his force; and after seeking anxiously for a sheltered corner
where he might lie down, he nestled at last against a heap of warm
garden straw, and so fell asleep.
When he opened his eyes again it was daylight. The first moments were
filled with strange bewilderment: he was a man with a double identity;
to which had he awaked? to the life of dim-sighted sensibilities like
the sad heirship of some fallen greatness, or to the life of recovered
power? Surely the last, for the events of the night all came back to
him: the recognition of the page in Pausanias, the crowding resurgence
of facts and names, the sudden wide prospect which had given him such a
moment as that of the Maenad in the glorious amaze of her morning
waking on the mountain top.
He took up the book again, he read, he remembered without reading. He
saw a name, and the images of deeds rose with it: he saw the mention of
a deed, and he linked it with a name. There were stories of inexpiable
crimes, but stories also of guilt that seemed successful. There were
sanctuaries for swift-footed miscreants: baseness had its armour, and
the weapons of justice sometimes broke against it. What then? If
baseness triumphed everywhere else, if it could heap to itself all the
goods of the world and even hold the keys of hell, it would never
triumph over the hatred which it had itself awakened. It could devise
no torture that would seem greater than the torture of submitting to
its smile. Baldassarre felt the indestructible independent force of a
supreme emotion, which knows no terror, and asks for no motive, which
is itself an ever-burning motive, consuming all other desire. And now
in this morning light, when the assurance came again that the fine
fibres of association were active still, and that his recovered self
had not departed, all his gladness was but the hope of vengeance.
From that time till the evening on which we have seen him enter the
Rucellai gardens, he had been incessantly, but cautiously, inquiring
into Tito’s position and all his circumstances, and there was hardly a
day on which he did not contrive to follow his movements. But he wished
not to arouse any alarm in Tito: he wished to secure a moment when the
hated favourite of blind fortune was at the summit of confident ease,
surrounded by chief men on whose favour he depended. It was not any
retributive payment or recognition of himself for his own behoof, on
which Baldassarre’s whole soul was bent: it was to find the sharpest
edge of disgrace and shame by which a selfish smiler could be pierced;
it was to send through his marrow the most sudden shock of dread. He
was content to lie hard, and live stintedly—he had spent the greater
part of his remaining money in buying another poniard: his hunger and
his thirst were after nothing exquisite but an exquisite vengeance. He
had avoided addressing himself to any one whom he suspected of intimacy
with Tito, lest an alarm raised in Tito’s mind should urge him either
to flight or to some other counteracting measure which hard-pressed
ingenuity might devise. For this reason he had never entered Nello’s
shop, which he observed that Tito frequented, and he had turned aside
to avoid meeting Piero di Cosimo.
The possibility of frustration gave added eagerness to his desire that
the great opportunity he sought should not be deferred. The desire was
eager in him on another ground; he trembled lest his memory should go
again. Whether from the agitating presence of that fear, or from some
other causes, he had twice felt a sort of mental dizziness, in which
the inward sense or imagination seemed to be losing the distinct forms
of things. Once he had attempted to enter the Palazzo Vecchio and make
his way into a council-chamber where Tito was, and had failed. But now,
on this evening, he felt that his occasion was come.