Chapter II: Part 2

Carlo roughly shouted him to their meal. His heart was throbbing with an emotional rapture as he obeyed. The table was served in a trellised alley, under hanging stalactites of grapes. Beatrice flagged on a bench at the end of the board, her shoulders sunk into a bower all crushed of sunshine and green shadows. It was the vine-goddess come home, soft, sensual, making a lust of fatigue. Her lids were half-closed; her teeth showed in a small, indolent smile; light, reflected from the purple clusters, slept on the warm ivory of her skin. Bernardo, coming opposite her, stood transfixed before a vision of such utter animal loveliness. His breath seemed to mount quicker as he gazed. Carlo drummed on the board, where he sat hunched over it. Looking from one to the other, he puffed out a little ironic laugh.

'Wonderest what is passing there, boy?' said he. 'Wilt never know. Not a hair would she turn though, like Althea, she were to find herself in child with a firebrand.'

Bernardo lowered his eyes with a blush.

'Nay,' said he, 'my thoughts of Madonna were more tempered. I coveted only her beauty for heaven.'

'Anon, Messer, anon!' cried the other banteringly: 'be not so free with my property. I hold her yet about the waist, seest, with a silver fetter? If there be a prior claim to mine----'

'Ay, Chastity's,' put in the boy.

Lanti hooted.

'Tempt her, if thou wilt, with such a suitor. She will follow him as she would the hangman. Wilt throw off thy belt, Beatrice? I gave a thousand scudi for it. See what Chastity here will offer thee in its room.'

'I will answer, if I may examine it,' said Bembo gravely. 'Will you tell her to unclasp it, Carlo, and let me look? I see it is all hinged of antique coins. There was a Father at San Zeno collected such things.'

'What, ladies' girdles!'

'Now, Carlo! you know I mean the coins. Methinks I recognise a text in one of them.'

Beatrice shrugged her shoulders, with a little yawn expressive of intolerable boredom.

'Well,' quoth Lanti impatiently, 'let him see it, you and he shall parable us for grace to meat, while these laggard dogs'--he looked over his shoulder, growling for his dinner.

Beatrice unclasped the cincture without a word, and flung it indifferently across the table. She had lain as impassive throughout her own discussing by the others as a slave being negotiated in a market. Not a tremor of her eyelids had acknowledged either her lord's rudeness or Bembo's provisional compliment.

The boy took up the belt and examined it. He was conscious of a sweet perfume that had come into his hands with the trinket. His lips were parted a little, his cheeks flushed. Presently he put it down softly, and looked across at Beatrice.

'It is what I thought,' said he--'the coin, I mean--a denarius of Tiberius, in the thirty-first year of Our Lord Shall I tell you what it says to me, Madonna?'

She did not take the trouble to answer.

'Yes,' roared Carlo.

Bembo slung his lute to the front, and began coaxing forth one of those odd, shy accompaniments of his, into which, a moment later, his voice melted:--

'When Tiberius was Emperor,
For thirty silver pieces bearing his image
Did Judas betray his Lord;
Then, himself betrayed to blood-guilt, cast them ringing
On the flags of the Temple, and maddened forth and died.
But the Jew elders eyed askance
The sleek, round coins, accurst and yet no whit
Depreciated as currency,
And ogling them and each other, were silent, till one spoke:
"Ill come; well sped. We need a place to bury the dead.
Let the Potter take these, and in return
Change us his field, o'er which we long have haggled.
So shall this outlay bring us two-fold profit,
Yet leave us conscience-clean before the Lord."

Thus, gentles dear, was bought "The Field of Blood";
And thus the wicked, damned price returned
Into the veins of traffic, there to circulate
And poison where it ran.
One piece found Hope, and changed was for Despair;
And Charity one led to hoard for self;
And one reached Faith, and Faith became a whore.
But, most of all, what had betrayed Love sore,
Sweet Love was used to betray for evermore.'

His voice broke on a long-drawn wailing chord. A little silence succeeded. Then, like one spent, he took up the belt and offered it to Beatrice.

'O Madonna!' he said, 'it is a denarius of the Caesar that betrayed Love. Take back thy wages.'

She dragged down a spray of vine-leaves, and fanned herself furiously with it, making no other response.

'So! I am Judas!' cried Carlo; and began to bite his moustache, mouthing and glowering.

'Love!' he sputtered, 'love! Is there no love in nature? You talk of the human God, you----'

Beatrice broke in scornfully:--

'It is the world-wisdom of the monastery. He shall sing you love only by the Litany. His queen shall be a virgin immaculate, and her bosom a shrine for the white lambs of chastity to fold in. A fine proselyte for passion's understanding! I would not be so converted for all Palestine.'

Carlo laughed, with some fierce recovery to good-humour.

'Hearest her, Bernardo? Thou shalt not prevail there, unless by convincing that thou speak'st from experience.'

Bembo had sunk down upon the bench, where, resting languidly, he still fingered the strings of his lute. Now suddenly, steadfastly, he looked across at the girl, and began to sing again:--

'Love kept me an hour
From all hours that pass;
In her breast, like a flower,
She stored it, sweet, fragrant,
Of all time the vagrant,
Alas, and alas!

Of all time the flower,
Of all hours that pass,
For me was that hour,
When I cared claim it,
And kiss it and shame it,
Alas, and alas!

I dared not, sweet hour--
I let thee go pass;
And heaven is my dower.
My crown is stars seven:
I am a saint in heaven,
Alas, and alas!'

He never took his eyes, while he sang, off the wondering face opposite him. It was strangely transformed by the end--flesh startled out of ivory--the face of a wakened Galatea. Narcisso coming at the moment to place the first dishes of the meal before the company, she sat up, her hands to her bosom, with a quick, agitated movement.

'It is well,' she said. 'I am thy convert, saint in heaven!' She lifted the dish before her, and held it out with a nervous smile. 'Let us exchange pledges, by the token. Give me thy meat, and take mine.'

Carlo, watching and listening, knitted his brow in a sudden frown, and his hand stole down to his belt.

'Give me thy dish,' said Beatrice, almost with entreaty.

Bernardo laughed. With the finish of his madrigal he had pushed his lute, in a hurry of pink shame, to his shoulder.

'Nay, Madonna,' he protested. 'Like the simplest doctor, I but spoke my qualifications. Feeling is half-way to curing, and the best recommended physician is he who hath practised on himself. I ask no reward but thy forbearance.'

'Give it me,' she still said. She was on her feet. She kissed the rim of the dish. 'Wilt thou refuse now? Bid him to, Carlo.'

'Not I,' said Lanti. 'Hath not, no more than myself, been whipped into the classics for nothing? _Quod ali cibus est aliis fuat acre venenum_. We know what that means, he and I.'

She seemed to turn very pale.

'Nay,' said Bernardo, jumping up, 'if Madonna condescends?' and the exchange was made, and the men fell to.

In a moment or two Lanti looked up.

'What ails thee, Beatrice?'

'I am not hungry.'

The word had scarcely left her lips before, leaping to his feet, and sprawling across the table, he had snatched the untasted dish from under her hands, turned, and dashed it with its contents full in the face of Narcisso, who waited, with others, behind. Fouled, bleeding, half-stunned, the man crashed down in a heap, and in the same instant his master was upon him, poniard in hand.

'Confess, wretch, before I kill thee!' he roared. 'It was meant for my guest! Thou wouldst have poisoned him.'

'Mercy!' shrieked the creature, through his filthy mask. 'O lord, mercy!'

The girl, risen in her place, stood panting as if she had been running. She had voice no more than to gasp across, 'Bernardo! For the love of God! Bernardo!' and that was all.

'No mercy, beast!' thundered Carlo. 'Down with thee to hell unshriven!'

His strenuous lifted arm was caught in a baby grasp.

'Carlo! forbear! The right is mine! Give me the knife! Nay, I am the stronger!'

With the blood-lust halted in him for one moment, the powerful creature turned upon his puny assailant with a roar:--

'The stronger! Thou!'

Nevertheless he rose, though he held the reptile crushed under his foot, while the company, landlord and all, stood huddled aghast. His breast was heaving like the pulse of a volcano.

'The knife!' he gurgled hoarsely; 'well, the right is thine, as thou sayest. Take it--under with thee, dog!--and drive in.'

Bembo seized and flung the dagger into the thick of the vines; then threw himself on his knees, and, with all his strength, tore the heavy foot from its victim.

'Narcisso,' he said, 'is it true? wouldst have slain Love! Ah, fool, not to know that Love is immortal!'

'Now, Christ in heaven,' roared Carlo, 'if that shall save him!'

Bernardo rose, and sprang, and cast himself upon his breast, writhing his limbs about him.

'Fly!' he shrieked, 'fly! while I hold him!' Then to Lanti: 'Ah, dear, do not hurt me, who owe thee so much!'

The fallen scoundrel was quick to the opportunity. He rose and fled, bloody and bemired, from the arbour. Madonna, seeing him escape, sunk, with a fainting sigh, upon her bench.

Carlo mouthed after his vanishing prey; yet he was tender with his burden.

'Love!' he groaned: 'Thou ow'st me? Not this--so damned to folly! There, let go. He was but the tool--and, for the rest----'

He glowered round.

'Hush!' said Bembo. 'It is but the fruits of her teaching. Blame not thy pupil, Carlo.'

'_My_ pupil!'

'Is she Christ's--or art thou? Love gives life, Carlo; and all life is God's, since Christ redeemed it.'

'What then?'

'Why, is not thine honour thy life?'

'I would die at least to prove it.'

'Alas! and thou hast dishonoured love, which is life, which is God's. Wouldst eat thy cake and have it, great schoolboy?'

'Pish! Art beyond me.'

'Why, if love is life, and life is honour--ergo, love is honour.'

'Is it? I dare say.'

'But thou must know it.'

'I know nothing but that thou hast balked my vengeance; and with that, and having exercised thy jaw, let us go back to dinner.'

'_Domine, emitte tuam lucem!_' sighed Bembo.

*CHAPTER IV*

Galeazzo Maria Sforza, third Duke of Milan of his line, was very characteristically engaged in a very characteristic room of his resplendent castello of the Porta Giovia, which dominated the whole city from the north-east. This room, buried like a captivating lust in the heart of the Rocca, or inner citadel of the castello, swarmed with those deft procurers to the great, panders between Art and emotion, who are satisfied, by contributing, each his share, to the glorification of a sensual despotism, to partake a rediffused flavour of its sum. They were poets, painters, and musicians, sculptors and learned doctors, and every one, despite his independent calling, a sycophant. Before the power, central and paramount, which alone in their particular orbit could amass within itself the total of their lesser lights, they prostrated themselves as before a God. It is so in all ages of man. He will contribute, of choice, to the prosperous charity; he will lay his gifts at the opulent shrine. The worldling, says Shakespeare, makes his testament of more to much. '_Ah! c'est le plus grand roi du monde!_' once cried Madame de Sevigne of Louis XIV., who had danced with her. 'He is the finest gentleman I have ever seen!' cried Johnson enthusiastically at a later date, after an interview with Farmer George; and though--perhaps because--the stout old Colossus was as independent as reason itself, he spoke the general moral. Professors were here, too, who did not blush to proclaim the exalted scion of Condottieri, the blood-lusting monster, the infernal atavism of Caligula, for the first gentleman in Italy, or to prostitute their erudition in his service.

It was Madonna Beatrice who had drawn that analogy, and there was plenty of justification for it; as also, it must be said, plenty of more immediate precedent for the abominations of this Galeazzo. If, like the grand-matricidal Roman, he had poisoned his mother, the Visconti, his predecessors, with their atrocious blood-profanations and exaltations of bastardy, were responsible for the conditions which had made so dreadful an act conceivable. If, emulating Caligula's treatment of frail vestals, he had buried alive some too-accommodating virgin of the cloister, whom he had first debauched, he could quote the Visconti precedent of carnality indulged till it became a very ecstasy of fiend-possession. Between old Rome and modern Milan, indeed, there was little to prefer. Caligula used to throw spectators in the theatres to the beasts, having first torn out the tongues of his victims, lest his ears should be offended by their articulate appeals. Bernabo Visconti and his brother, with whom he shared the duchy, agreed upon an edict subjecting State criminals to a scale of tortures which was calculated to culminate in death in not less than forty days. Giovanni Maria and Filippo Maria, last of the accursed race, organised man-hunts in the streets of their capitals, and fed their hounds on human flesh.

To starve his victims to death, and, when they complained (it was an age of practical jokes), to stuff their mouths with filth, was a pet sport with Galeazzo. Once, for a wretch who had killed a hare, a crime unpardonable, he procured a death of laughable, unspeakable torment by forcing him to devour the animal, bones and fur and all.

It is enough. They were all madmen, in fact, moral abortions of that 'breeding-in' of demi-gods which sows the world with chimeras. It is not good for any man to be subject to no government but his own, and least of all when a vicious heredity has imposed a sickness on his reason. Blood affinities on the near side of incest, power unquestioned, unbridled self-indulgences--these are no progenitors of temperance and liberality. Amongst savages, generations of inter-marryings will but refine exquisitely on savagery; and the despots of this era were little more than the last expressions of a decadent barbarism. Galeazzo, and such as Galeazzo, were, it is true, to project the long shadows of their lusts and cruelties over the times forthcoming; yet it is as certain that with him the limits of the worst were reached, and hereafter peoples and rulers were to grow to some common accord of participation in the enlightenments of their ages.

One might have fancied in him, in his apparent reachings to foreclose on such a state, to appropriate to himself not its moral but its material accessories, some uneasy premonition of the truth. He stood on the line of partition, his sympathies with the past, his greed for the opulent future, and, hesitating, was presently to drop between. That paradox of the lusts of savagery and the lusts of intellect hobnobbing in the individual, which characterised so many of his contemporaries, cried aloud in him. He was superstitious and a sceptic. Like Malatesta of Rimini--who could enshrine beneath the shadow of one glorious church the bones of a favourite mistress and those of an admired heathen philosopher which he had brought expressly from Greece for the purpose--he would make a compromise between Paganism and Christianity. He worshipped God and the devil, as if his arrogance halted at nothing short of reconciling two equal but antagonistic powers. He surrounded himself with monks and infidels; acclaimed impartially an illuminated psalter or a painting for a bagnio, a Roman canticle or a hymn to the Paphian Venus; sobbed in the soft throbbings of a lute, and went sobbing to witness a captive's torturing; conceived himself an enlightened patron of the arts, and, in a mad caprice, ordered his craftsmen, under penalty of instant death, to paint and hang with portraits of the ducal family in a single night a hall of the castello. He groped and grovelled in bestiality; founded a library and peopled a university with erudition; encouraged profligacy and printing; was covetous and lavish, and splendid as the clusters of diamonds on a Jewess's unclean fingers. His palaces swarmed with cutthroats and physicians, philosophers and empirics, pimps and theologians, heaven-commissioned artists and pope-commissioned agents for indulgences, who would sell one absolution beforehand for the foulest excesses in lust or violence. His crowded halls were the very stage of the ante-renaissance, where the priest, the poisoner, the romantic hero and the sordid villain, the flaunting doxy and the white dove of innocence, rubbed shoulders with the scene-painter and conductor in a disordered rehearsal of the melodrama to come. And so we alight on him in this Rocca, sinister and lonely, the protagonist of the piece to which he was in a little to supply the most tragic denouement.

He lay sunk back in pillows on a couch set in an alcove high and apart. One long, jewelled hand caressed the head of a boarhound. Judged by the swift code of his times, he was already mature, a sage of thirty-one. His eyes were small and deep-seated under gloomy thatches, his forehead narrow and receding, his cheeks ravenous, his nose was hooked. But in contrast with this pinched hunger of feature were the bagging chin and sensual neck, as well as the grossness of the body, which attenuated into feeble legs. One could not look on him and gather from crown to foot the assurance of a single generous youthful impulse. The curse of an inherited despotism had wrinkled him from his birth.

An effeminate luxury, which was presently to make Milan a byword among the austerer principalities, spoke in his dress. His short-skirted tunic, puff-shouldered, and pinched and pleated at the waist within a gem-encrusted girdle, was of Damascene silk, rose-coloured and lined with costliest fur. His hose were of white satin; his slippers, of crimson velvet, sparkled with rosettes of diamonds and rubies. On his head he wore a cap of maintenance, also of red velvet, and sewn with pearls; and a short jewelled dagger hung at his waist.

By his side, a very foil to his magnificence, stood one in a sad-coloured cloak. This was Lascaris, a Greek professor, whom he had invited to Milan for his learning, and used, like Pharaoh, to expound him his dreams. For he was subject to evil dreams, was this Galeazzo--hauntings and visions which wrought in him that state that he would become a very madman if so little as the shadow of an opposition crossed his imagination. And even now such a mood was working in him, as he lounged darkly conning the life of the hall from his eyrie.

That was a deep, semi-domed alcove, approached from the main chamber by a short avenue of square-sided pillars, and roofed with a mosaic of ultramarine and gold, into which were wrought the arms of the Sforzas and Viscontis, the lilies of France and the red cross of Savoy. Entablatures of white marble carved into bas-reliefs filled the inter-columniations of this approach; while the pillars themselves, of dark green panels inlaid on white, were sprayed and flowered with exquisite mouldings in gold. The capitals, blossoming crowns of gilt foliage and marble faces, supported a white cornice, which at the alcove's mouth ran down into twin fluted shafts, between which rose a shallow flight of steps to a sort of dais or shrine within. And thence, from a carved marble bench, Galeazzo looked down on the soft surging motley of the throng in the hall below.

Every sound there was instinctively subdued to the occasion: the laughter of girls, the thrum of lutes, the ring of steel and rustle of silk. Not so much as a misdirected glance, even, would venture to appropriate to the company's cynic merriment the figure of a solitary captive, who stood bound and guarded at the foot of the dais. Yet it was plain that this captive felt the enforced forbearance, and mocked it with a bitterer cynicism than its own.

He was a small, ill-formed, harsh-featured man, very soberly dressed, and with a cropped head--a feature sufficiently disdainful of the bushed and elaborately waved locks of those by whom he was surrounded. Lean-throated and short-sighted, his face was a face to scorn falsehood without loving truth, a face the mouthpiece of dead languages for dead languages' sake, a face the contemner of the present just because it was the present and alive. As he stood, loweringly phlegmatic as any caged hate, his peering eyes and snarling lip would occasionally lift themselves together, not towards the glittering lord of destinies on the dais, but towards his henchman, the Greek, who would answer the challenge with a stare of serene and opulent contempt. And so a long interval of silence held them opposed.

Suddenly the Duke stirred from his black reverie, his lips sputtering little inarticulate blasphemies. His knee peevishly dismissing the hound, he gripped an arm of the bench, and turning gloomily on Lascaris, uttered the one impatient word, 'Well?'

The Greek, temporising for the moment, inclined his smooth, black-bearded face, so that the oily essence on his hair, which was foppishly crimped and snooded, was wafted to the Sforza nostrils, offending their delicacy. Galeazzo, momentarily repelled, rallied to a harsher frown, and demanded: 'The fruit, man, the fruit of all this meditation? Jesu! it should be rotten-ripe by its smell!'

Lascaris expanded his chest, unoffended, and, caressing his beard, answered impassively:--

'Thou questionest of this vision, Theosutos? I answer, How many changes can be rung on a carillon of eight bells? By such measure shalt thou imagine, an thou canst, the changes possible to the myriad of particles that go to the composition of a single human eye. Now, in the unthinkable dispersements and readjustments of Infinity, shall it not sometimes happen that two particles, or two thousand particles, or two billion particles, out of the sum of particles which were that eye, shall chance together again, and recover, because of that meeting, some very ancient, very remote impression which they once absorbed in common? These, Theosutos, be the ghosts, haphazard, indefinable, visible to one and unseen of all the rest, which make the solitary seer; these be the lonely hauntings of the ages--dust blown over desolate places, to commingle a moment at some cross roads, and weave a phantom wreath of memory, and so again be cast and scattered among the cycles. Thy vision is but a shadow of old dead years.'

An ill-repressed stutter of laughter from the prisoner at the foot of the steps greeted the finish of this exegesis. Lascaris flushed scarcely perceptibly. The Duke took no more notice of man or sound than he would have of a whimpering dog. Once or twice he stammered an oath, gnawing his finger, and frowning up, and down, and up again at the Greek. Finally he broke out, in a fury:--

'Now, by the Host, thou consolest me--now, by the Host! To reconcile to this spectre by arguing it perpetual! To----'

Grinding his teeth, he clipped his long fingers on the bench arm, as if he were about to spring. Lascaris forestalled him with a placid word:--

'Not perpetual. The mood invokes these shadows, as the mood shall lay them.'

Galeazzo snarled.

'The mood! What mood, fool? You shift and shift. God! it will be the mood of the mood next. Hast thou no master-key to all? Go to, then!'

He sank back into his cushions, glooming and panting. The sleek olive mask of the face near him yielded no sign of perturbation.

Gradually a very deadly expression came to usurp in the Duke's eyes that blinder madness of desperation. An indolent smile relaxed his features. He yawned, it was because, the soul horror being temporarily withdrawn, the incontinent devil was supplanting in him the tempestuous one. He rolled lazily about, addressing his creature once more:--

'You doctors--all the same! Big words to little cures. Treat a State's constitution or a man's--'tis the word's the thing. Ye woo not the truth, but her raiment. Hear'st me? I had a tutor once, a crabbed fellow called Montano.'

He yawned again. The prisoner below (Cola Montano himself) gasped slightly, and shot one stealthy glance his way. Lascaris sniggered.

'Surely, lord,' he said, 'we need no reminding while the man himself keeps his tongue.'

A half-suppressed snarl broke from the prisoner. Galeazzo, hunched on his cushions, stared vacantly before him.

'Ah!' he said, 'he could talk. I remember him, a midwife to the wind--as ye all be--as ye all be. What of the fellow?'

Lascaris wondered.

'Little, in truth, Magnificence, save in so far as your Magnificence was pleased to introduce his name.'

'Did I? I had forgot. What was the connection? Empty words, was it not, and vainglory and presumption?'

'And discontent. Add it thereto, Illustrious.'

'Discontent? Of what? The man prospers, I understand, on his school of all the virtues. Discontent? Why, hath he not risen to that independence of power that he dares lampoon his prince? Discontent?'

'Like Alexander, thou standest in his light, Theosutos.'

'Discontent?'

'Ay, that he should be twitted with having schooled a despot.'

'Why, true; he taught me how to score a lesson with a scourge. My shoulders could tell.'

'Gods! did he dare?'

'He dared. 'Twas a fellow of Roman mettle.'

'He would dare more now.'

'What?'

'A republic, so they say.'

'Ah! he should be the man for visions--a seer, an exorcist.'

'Short-sighted for a seer, Illustrious. The man cannot see the length of his own nose.'

'Yet may he see far. I would he were here.'

The prisoner, wrought at last beyond self-control, turned on the Greek and squirted a little shriek of venom--

'Yet through and through thee, thou loathsome, envious pimp!'

Then he whipped upon the other--

'And why not a republic, Galeazzo? Thy father Francesco was a republican at heart, else had he never given his son's leading-strings into my hands. There was a confederacy dreamed of in his day--Genoa, Milan, and Venice; Florence, Sienna, and Bologna. One rampart to the rolling Alps, one wall on which barbarian hordes might burst and waste themselves in foam. Northwards, a baffled sea; south, all Italy a tranquil haven, a watered garden, where knowledge with all its flowers should find space, and breathing-space to grow. Dost thou love Italy? Then why not a republic, Galeazzo?'

The Duke, as utterly impassive as if he were deaf, turned musingly to Lascaris.

'I heard one talk once,' said he, 'of a confederacy of republics, as who should say, An army all serfs. Words! The tails must obey the heads. Every ox knows it.'

'Saving the frog-ox,' giggled the Greek, 'who bursts himself in emulation.'

'Ah!' murmured the Duke, 'the frog-ox: see us tickle his self-puffery.'

He feigned to catch sight all at once of Montano. His eyes opened wide in astonishment: he held out his hands.

'What!' he cried, 'the man of visions! the very man! Come hither, old friend. I was but now speaking of thee.'

His guards permitting him, Montano sullenly mounted the steps, and stood facing the tyrant. His arms hung very plainly fettered before him; but the other never took his languid, smiling eyes from his face.

'Galeazzo,' said the scholar, harsh and quick, 'I did not write the epigrams; but no matter. You seek to make an example; I submit myself. It is the despot's part to lay hands on order and sobriety. Despatch, then. Thou wilt serve my ends better than thine own. Every blow to freedom is a link gone from thy mail.'

The Duke listened to him as if in bland wonder.

'Epigrams! An example!' he exclaimed. 'O, surely there is some mistake here.'

The thick brows of the prisoner contracted over his leaden eyes. He set his teeth, breathing between them. Galeazzo appealed to Lascaris:--

'Know'st aught of this?'

The Greek shook his head ineffably, licking his lips.

'No,' said Galeazzo, 'nor is it conceivable that my old friend and reprover should condescend to that meaner scourge. Jesu! for one of his learning and condition to incur the fate of the common lampooner. Why, I mind me how one was invited to a ragout minced of his own tongue.'

'Yes, Illustrious.'

'And another to having his couplets scored in steel on the soles of his feet.'

'Yes, Illustrious.'

'And yet another to boiling eggs under his arm-pits, since he was clever at hatching those winged epigrams'--he turned smoothly again to the tutor--'but not clever, as thou art, at reforming constitutions.'

He fell back, with a sleek and hateful smile; then, sighing suddenly, advanced his body again.

'I am troubled, Montano, I am troubled, and, since you chance to be here----'

He yielded the explanation to Lascaris.

'I weary of relating. Tell him of my symptoms, thou'--and he sunk once more into his cushions.

The Greek diagnosed, his shifty eyes refusing to encounter the hard inquisition of the other's:--

'His Magnificence is of late ever conscious of a face behind him, mournful and threatening. And still, if he turns to challenge it, it is behind him; and still behind, maddening him with a thought of something he can never overtake.'

Galeazzo fixed his burning eyes on the prisoner, as if, through all his mockery, the hunger of a hopeless hope betrayed his soul.

'Canst _thou_ strike it away,' he whispered hoarsely, 'or at least tell me what it is?'

Montano growled:--

'Ghosts, and dead years, and eye-particles! This trash of pseudo-science--a saltimbanco braying in a doctor's skin! Less licence, Galeazzo, and more exercise--'tis all contained in that. This vision is but a swimming blot of bile.'

He was really half-deceived, half-convinced. The Duke seemed to listen reassured, then slowly rose, and, with an ingratiatory smile, patted his erst tutor's shoulder.

'Old honest friend,' he said, 'and ever true to the Roman in thee! Thou hast spoken as one might expect. Bile, is it--bile? and little wonder in this upset of constitutions. Ebbene! we will take instant means to throw it off.'

He made a sign to the chief of the guard below.

'Andrea!'

Lascaris slunk back with a little gloating smile. The officer brought up his men about Montano. The Duke murmured softly:--

'Take good Messer Cola, and--' he paused a little, gazing winningly into his captive's surprised, splenetic face--'and have him soundly flogged before the gate-house--to the bone, Andrea, tell Messer Jacopo.'

Before the luring treachery of this stroke the prisoner stood for one moment shocked, aghast. The next, as the guard seized him, he broke into a storm of vituperations and blasphemies, calling upon all the gods of Rome to protect him from a monster. Andrea crushed his mailed hand down on his writhing lips; he was dragged away struggling and screaming. As he disappeared Galeazzo descended mincingly to the hall, bent on pursuing the show. A cloud of courtiers, male and female flocked, like rooks following a plough, in his wake. As he left the citadel and was crossing the outer ward, two ladies--one a young woman in her late twenties; the other a slim, pale girl of thirteen--broke from a group of attendants, and came, wreathed in one embrace, to accost him. The elder, looking in his face with a certain questioning anxiety, spoke him with a propitiatory smile and sigh:--

'Galeazino, O thou little sweetest burden on my heart!'

The endearment was really an inquiry, a warning; for there was a foreboding madness in his eyes. He made as if he would have struck her from his path. Her child companion caught his wrist with a merry cry:--

'My little father, whither sportest thou without thy women?'

He changed the direction of his hand and flipped the younger's cheek.

'Come, then, chuck,' said he. 'There is a frolic toward that will speed an idle hour.'

She caught up her skirts and followed him, as did the other, but less closely.

The gatehouse commanded from its battlements an open panorama of the town as far as the piazza of the duomo. Immediately to its front, in a bare extended space, stood the whipping-post, a stout beam set on end on a stage and furnished with hooks and chains. Already on the ground beside this (by preconcerted arrangement indeed) was a certain functionary, much respected of Milan. This was Messer Jacopo, the high court executioner--one, by virtue of his dealings in blood, almost on an equality with the master herald himself. Immobile and voiceless, he stood there like a model in an armoury. A short shirt of mail, and over it a scarlet jerkin with a plain dagger at the waist; hose of sober grey; a bonnet and shoes of black velvet, the first adorned with a red quill, the second with red rosettes; gorget and steel gauntlets--such was the whole of Messer Jacopo, save for the wooden, inessential detail of his face and its fixed eyes of glass. There was something painfully human, by contrast, in his understrappers, two or three of whom stood at hand in leathern aprons--men of a rich, moist physique and greasy palms, and jocund, slaughter-house expression. These were on bantering terms with the mob, with all that loose raff of the neighbourhood, which had come streaming and pushing and chattering to witness the sport. It was not often that the rats of the quarter Giovia had a master of philosophy to desert.

They had not long to wait. Almost simultaneously a little surging group appeared at the gates, and a throng of gay heads above the ramparts. The jostle and delighted whisper went among the crowd. What proportion would the scourging of a prince's tutor bear to the punishment it avenged? It surely would not be allowed to lose by procrastination. They craned their necks to catch an early sight of the victim. One of the assistants whipped experimentally through his fingers a thick, cruel thong of bullock-hide. It clacked a dry tongue.

'Be quiet, thirsty one,' he cried boisterously. 'In a moment thou shalt drink thyself to a sop.'

Up on the ramparts the ladies, with bright, inquisitive eyes, stood by their lord. The girl Catherine, petted love-child of her father, hugged confidingly to his arm.

'Padre mio,' she said, 'how sweet the world looks from here! I could fancy we were all Lazaruses, laughing down on that wicked Dives!'

*CHAPTER V*

Messer Lanti and his party entered Milan, in a very subdued mood, by the Gate of Saint Mark. It had been with an emotion beyond words that Bembo had found himself approaching the walls of this fair city of his dreams. The prosperous contado, watered in every direction by broad dykes; the clustering vines and saintly-hued olive gardens; the busy peasantry; the richness of the very wayside shrines, had all appeared to speak a content and holiness with which the perverse passions of men were at such bitter variance. The discrepancy confounded, as it was presently upon a fuller experience to inspire, him. Here in one land, incessantly jostling and reacting on one another, were a devotional and a sensuous fervour, both exhibiting a lust of beauty at fever-heat; were a gross superstition and an excellent reason; were a powerful priestcraft and a jeering scepticism--all drawing from the forehead of a Papacy, which, latterly pledged to the most unscrupulous temporal self-aggrandisement, was reverenced for the vicarship of a poor and celibate Christ. Issuing, equipped with an artless conventual purpose, from the cool groves of his cloister, he found a land dyed in blood and the blue of heaven, festering under God's sun, and rejoicing in the colour schemes of its sores. On what principle could he study to sweeten this paradox of a constitution, where health was enamoured of disease? '_Deus meus, in te confido_,' he prayed, with hands clasped fervently upon his breast; '_Non erubescam, neque irrideant me inimici mei_! O Lord, give me the vision to find and show to others a path through this beautiful wilderness!'

As the long walls of the town, broken at intervals into turrets, broadened before him, violet against a deep, cloudless sky, his ecstasy but increased--he held out his arms.

'O thou,' he murmured, 'that I have hungered for, looking down on thee from the mountain of myrrh! Until the day break and the shadows flee away!'

A little later, in a deep angle of the enceinte, they came upon a gruesome sight. This was no less than the Montmartre of Milan--a great stone gallows with dangling chains, and tenanted--faugh! A cloud of winged creatures rose as they approached, and scattered, dropping fragments. It was the common repast, stuff of rogues and pilferers--nothing especial. The ground was trodden underneath, and Bembo shrieked to see two white, stiff feet sticking from it. Lanti followed the direction of his hand, and exclaimed with a moody shrug:--

'An assassin, Saint--nothing more. We plant them like that, head down.'

'Alive?'

'O, of course!'

Bembo cried out: 'These are not sons of God, but of Belial!' and passed on, with his head drooping. Carlo turned to Beatrice, where she rode behind, and, without a word, pointed significantly to the horrible vision. She laughed, and went by unmoved.

In a little after they had all entered by the gate, and the city was before them. Bembo, kindled against his will, rose in his saddle and uttered an exclamation of delight. Before his eyes was spread a white town with blue water and upstanding cypresses--wedges of midnight in midday. There were terraces and broad flagged walks, and palaces and spacious loggias--fair glooms of marble shaken in the spray of fountains. From its cold, shadowless bridges to the heaped drift of the duomo in its midst, there seemed no slur, but those dark cypresses, on all its candid purity. It looked like a city flushed under a veil of hoar frost, the glare of its streets and markets and gardens subdued to one softest harmony of opal.

Yet in quick contrast with this chill, sweet austerity, glowed the burning life of it. In the distance, like travelling sparks in wood ashes; nearer, flashing from roof or balcony in harlequin spots of light; nearest of all, a very baggage-rout of figures, fantastic, chameleonic, an endless mutation and interflowing of blues, and crimsons, and purples--tirelessly that life circulated, the hot arterial blood which gave their tender hue to those encompassing veins of marble.

It was on this drift of souls going by him, gay and light, it seemed, as blown petals, that Bernardo gazed with the most loving fondness. He pictured them all, eager, passionate, ardent, moving about the business of the Nature-God, propagating His Gospel of sweetness, adapting to imperishable works the endlessly varying arabesques of woods, and starry meadows, and running clouds and waters--epitomising His System. He admired these works, their beauty, their stability, their triumphant achievement; though, in truth, his soul of souls could conceive no achievement for man so ideal as a world of glorious gardens and little abodes. But the sun was once more in his heart, and heaven in his eyes.

The swallows stooped in the streets to welcome him: 'Hail, little priest of the cloistered hills!' The scent of flowers offered itself the incense to his ritual; the fountains leapt more merrily for his coming. 'Love! love!' sang the birds under the great eaves; 'He will woo this cruel world to harmlessness. Where men shall lead with charity, all animals shall follow. The good fruits ripen to be eaten; it is their love, their lust to be consumed in joy. What lamb ever gave its throat to the knife? The violet flowers the thicker the more its blossoms are ravished. What new limb ever budded on a maimed beast?'

'Ah! the secret,' sang Bembo's soul--'the secret, or the secret grievance, of the cosmos will yield itself only to love. Useless to try to wrench forth its confession by torture. Let retaliation spell love, for once and for ever, and to the infinite sorrows of life will appear at last their returned Redeemer.'

His heart was full as they rode by the narrow streets. His eyes and ears were tranced with colour, the murmur of happy voices, the clash of melodious bells. He could not think of that late vision of horror but as a dream. These blithe souls, in all their moods and worships such true apostles of his gay, sweet God! They could not love or practise harshness but as a deterrent from things unnameable. The very absence of sightseers from that pit of scowling death proved it.

And then, in a moment, they had debouched upon an open place overlooked by a massive fortress, and in its midst, the cynosure of hundreds of gloating eyes, was a human thing under the flail--a voice moaning from the midst of a red jelly.

His heart sunk under a very avalanche. He uttered a cry so loud as to attract the attention of the spectators nearest.

'Who is it? What hath he done?' he roared of one. 'Trampled on the Host? Defiled a virgin of the mother? Murdered a priest?'

The face puckered and grinned.

'Worse, Messer Cavalier. He once whipped the Duke when his tutor.'

Bembo's whole little body braced itself to the spring.

'Tutor!' he cried: 'is that, then, Cola Montano?'

The gross eye winked--

'What is left of it.'

He was answered with a leap and rush. The mob at that point staggered, and bellowed, and fell away from the hoofs of a furious assailant. Carlo, pre-admonished, was already on the boy's flank. 'Stop, little lunatic!' he shouted, sweating and spurring to intervene. He had no concern for the feet he trampled or the ribs he bruised. He stooped and snatched at the struggling horse's bridle. 'It is the Duke's vengeance!' he panted. 'See him there above! Art mad?'

A face, flushed as the face of Him who scourged the hucksters from the temple, was turned upon him.

'Art thou? Strike for retaliation by love, or get behind!'

'Know'st nothing of his deserts,' cried Carlo. 'Be advised!'

'By love,' cried the boy. 'He is worthy of it--a good man--I carry a letter to him from my father. Fall back, I say.'

He drove in his heels, and the horse plunged and started, tearing the rein from Lanti's grasp. It was true that Bembo bore this letter, among others, in his pouch. The Abbot of San Zeno was so long out of the world as to have miscalculated the durations of court favour. Cola had been an influence in _his_ time.

'Devil take him!' growled Carlo; but he followed, scowling and slashing, in his wake. The mob, authorised of its worst humour, took his truculence ill. That reduced him to a very devilish sobriety. He began to strike with an eye to details, 'blazing' his passage through the throng. The method justified itself in the opening out of a human lane, at the end of which he saw Bembo spring upon the stage.

The executioner was cutting deliberately, monotonously on, and as monotonously the voice went moaning. Messer Jacopo, standing at iron ease beside, took no thought, it seemed, of anything--least of all of interference with the Duke's will. It must have been, therefore, no less than an amazing shock to that functionary to find himself all in an instant stung and staggered by a bolt from the blue. He may have been, like some phlegmatic serpent, conscious of a hornet winging his way; but that the insect should have had it in its mind to pounce on _him_!

He found himself and his voice in one metallic clang:--

'Seize him, men!'

Carlo panted up, and Jacopo recognised him on the moment.

'Messer Lanti! Death of the Cross! Is this the Duke's order?'

'Christ's, old fool!' gasped the cavalier. 'Touch him, I say, and die. I neither know nor care.'

His great chest was heaving; he whipped out his sword, and stood glaring and at bay. Bembo had thrown himself between the upraised thong and its quivering victim. He, too, faced the stricken mob.

'Christ is coming! Christ is coming!' he shrieked. 'Prepare ye all to answer to Him for this!'

A dead silence fell. Some turned their faces in terror. Here and there a woman cried out. In the midst, Messer Jacopo raised his eyes to the battlements, and saw a white hand lifted against the blue. He shrugged round grumpily on his fellows.

'Unbind him,' he said; and the whip was lowered.

The poor body sunk beside the post. Bembo knelt, with a sob of pity, to whisper to it--

'Courage, sad heart! He comes indeed.'

The livid and suffering face was twisted to view its deliverer.

'Escape, then,' the blue lips muttered, 'while there is time.'

Bembo cried out: 'O, thou mistakest who I mean!'

The face dropped again.

'Never. Christ or Galeazzo--it is all one.'

A hand was laid on the boy's shoulder. He looked up to find himself captive to one of the Duke's guard. A grim little troop, steel-bonneted and armed with halberts, surrounded the stage. Messer Lanti, dismounted, had already committed himself to the inevitable. He addressed himself, with a laugh, to his friend:--

'Very well acquitted, little Saint,' said he--'of all but the reckoning.'

Bembo lingered a moment, pointing down to the bleeding and shattered body.

"'And there passed by a certain priest,"' he cried, '"and likewise a Levite; but a Samaritan had compassion on him,"' and he bowed his head, and went down with the soldiers.

Now, because of his beauty, or of the fear or of the pity he had wrought in some of his hearers, for whatever reason a woman or two of the people was emboldened to come and ask the healing of that wounded thing; and they took it away, undeterred of the executioners, and carried it to their quarters. And in the meanwhile, Bembo and his comrade were brought before the Duke.

Galeazzo had descended from the battlements, and sat in a little room of the gatehouse, with only a few, including his wife and child, to attend him. And his brow was wrinkled, and the lust of fury, beyond dissembling, in his veins. He took no notice of Lanti--though generally well enough disposed to the bully--but glared, even with some amazement in his rage, on the boy.

'Who art thou?' he thundered at length.

'Bernardo Bembo.'

The clear voice was like the call of a bird's through tempest.

'Whence comest thou?'

'From San Zeno in the hills.'

'What seek'st thou here?'

'Thy cure.'

The Duke started, and seemed actually to crouch for a moment. Then, while all held their breath in fear, of a sudden he fell back, and gripped a hand to his heart, and muttered, staring: 'The face!'

He closed his eyes, and passed a tremulous hand across his brow before he looked again; and lo! when he did so, the madness was past.

'Child,' he said hoarsely, almost whispered, 'what said'st thou? Come nearer: let me look at thee.'

He rose himself, with the word, stiffly, like an old man, and stood before the boy, and gazing hungrily for a little into the solemn eyes, dropped his own as if abashed--half-blinded. In the background, Bona, his wife, and the child Catherine clung together in a silence of fear and wonder.

'Ah, I am haunted!' shuddered the tyrant. 'Who told thee that? It is a face, child, a face--there--in the dead watches of the night--behind me--and by day, always the same, a damned clinging bur on my soul--not to be shaken off--always behind me!'

He gave a little jerk and motion of repugnance, as if he were trying to throw something off. Carlo struck in: 'Lord, let him sing to thee! I say no more.'

The deep, gloomy eyes of the Duke were lifted one instant to the strange seraph-gaze fixed silently upon him; then, making an acquiescent motion with his hand, he turned, and sat himself down again as if exhausted, and hid his brow under his palm.

Now the boy, never looking away, slung forward his lute, and like one that charms a serpent, began softly to finger the strings. And Galeazzo's head, in very truth like an adder's, swung to the rhythm; and as the chords rose piercing, he clutched his brow, and as they melted and sobbed away, so did he sink and moan. And then, suddenly, into that wild symphony drew the voice, as a spray of sweetbriar is drawn into a wheel; and all around caught their breath to listen:--

'Two children, a boy and girl, were playing between wood and
meadow.
They pledged their faith, each to the other, with rosy lips on
lips,
He to protect, she to trust--always together for ever and ever.
A storm rose: the dragon of the thunder roared and hissed,
Probing the earth with its keen tongue.
How she cowered, the pretty, fearful thing!
Yet adored her little love to see him dare
That tree-cleaving monster with his sword of lath.
And in the end, because she trusted in her love, her love
prevailed,
And drove the roaring terror from the woods.
She never felt such faith, nor he such pride of virtue in his
strength.
Then shone out the rainbow,
And he bethought him of the jewelled cup hid at its foot.
"Stay here," quoth he, new boldened by his triumph,
"And I'll fetch it ye."
But she cried to him: "Nay, leveling, take me too!
We were to be aye together: O leave me not behind!"
But he was already on his way.
And still, as he pursued, the rainbow fled before,
And the voice of his playmate, faint and fainter, followed in
his wake:
"O leave me not behind!"
Then grew he wild and desperate, clutching at that mirage,
the unattainable,
The lustrous cup that was to bring him happiness in its
possession.
And the voice blew ghostly in his wake, mingling with rain and
the whirl of dead leaves:
"Leave me not behind!"
But now the fire of unfulfilment seared his brain,
And often he staggered in the slough,
Or fell and cut himself on rocks.
And so, pushing on half-blindly,
Knew not at last from the dead rainbow the _ignis fatuus_,
The false witch-light that danced upon his path,
Leading him to destruction. Until, lo!
With a flash and laugh it was not,
And he awoke to a mid-horror of darkness--
Night in the infernal swamps--
Blind, crawling, desolate; and for ever in his heart
The weeping shadow of a voice, "O leave me not behind!"
Then at that, like one amazed, he turned,
And cried in agony: "Innocenza, my lost Innocence,
Where art thou? O, little playmate, follow to my call!"
And there answered him only from the gates of the sunset a
heart-broken sigh.'

He ended to a deep silence, and, while all stood stricken between tears and expectancy, moved to within a pace of the Duke.

'O prince!' he cried, 'haunted of that Innocence! Turn back, turn back, and find in thy lost playmate's face the ghost that now eludes thee!'

Carlo gave a little gasp, and his hand shivered down to his sword-hilt. He must die for his Saint, if provoked to that martyrdom; but he would take a desperate pledge or two of the sacrifice with him. One of the women, the younger, watching him, knew what was in his mind, and breathed a little scornfully. The other's eyes were set in a sort of rapture upon the singer's face. A minute may have passed, holding them all thus suspended, when suddenly Galeazzo rose, and, throwing himself at Bembo's feet, broke into a passion of sobs and moans.

'Margherita, my little playmate, that liest under the daisies. O, I will be good, sweet--I will be good again for thy sake.'

*CHAPTER VI*