Chapter III: Part 3

Many a head in the palace, though accustomed witness of strange things, tossed on its pillow that night in sleepless review of a scene which had been as amazing in its singularity as it was potential in its promise. What were to be the first-fruits of that cataclysmic revulsion of feeling in a nature so habitually frozen from all tenderness? If no more than a shy snowdrop or two of reason, mercy, justice, pushing their way up through a savage soil, the result would be marvel enough. Yet there seemed somehow in the atmosphere an earnest of that and better. The hearts of all trod on tiptoe, fearful of waking their souls to disenchantment--agitated, exultant; wooing them to convalescence from an ancient sickness. The spring of a joyous hope was rising voiceless somewhere in the thick of those drear corridors. The f[oe]tid air, wafted through a healing spray, came charged with an unwonted sweetness. Whence had he risen, the lovely singing-boy, spirit of change, harbinger of a new humanity? Whither had he gone? To the Duke's quarters--that was all they knew. They had seen him carried off, persuaded, fondled, revered by that very despot whom he had dared divinely to rebuke, and the doors had clanged and the dream passed. To what phase of its development, confirming or disillusioning, would they reopen? The answer to them was at least a respite; and that was an answer sufficient and satisfying to lives that obtained on a succession of respites. Alas! as there is no logic in tyranny, so can there be none in those who endure it.

The earliest ratification of the promise was to witness in the figure of the Duke coming radiant from his rooms in company with the stranger himself, his left arm fondly passed about the boy's neck, his eyes full of admiration and flattery. He felt no more discomfort, it appeared, than had Madam Beatrice on a certain occasion, in the thought of his late self-exposure before his creatures. Such shamelessness is the final condition of autocracy. He had slept well, untormented of his vision. As is the case with neurotics, a confident diagnosis of his disease had proved the shortest means to its cure. Clever the doctor, too, who could make such a patient's treatment jump with his caprices; and with an inspired intuition Bernardo had so manoeuvred to reconcile the two. A whim much indulged may become a habit, and he was determined to encourage to the top of its bent this whim of reformation in the Duke. No ungrateful physicking of a soured bile for him; no uncomfortable philosophy of organic atoms recombined. He just restored to him that long-lost toy of innocence, trusting that the imagination of the man would find ever novel resources for play in that of which the invention of the child had soon tired. So for the present, and until virtue in his patient should have become a second nature, was he resolved wisely to eschew all reference to the intermediate state, and only by example and analogy to win him to consciousness and repentance of the enormities by which it had been stained. A very profound little missionary, to be sure.

The Duke, leaning on his arm as he strolled, had a smile and a word for many. The only visible token of his familiar self which he revealed was the arbitrariness with which he exacted from all a fitting deference towards his protege. This, however, none, not the greatest, was inclined to withhold, especially on such a morning. Soft-footed cardinals, princes of the blood, nobles and jingling captains, vied with one another in obsequious attentions to our little neophyte of love. The reasons, apart from superstitious reverence, were plentiful: his sweetness, his beauty, his gifts of song--all warm recommendations to a sensuous sociality; the whispered romance of his origin, no less a patent in its eyes because it turned on a title doubly bastard; finally, and most cogently, no doubt, his political potentialities as a favourite _in posse_.

This last reason above any other may have accounted for the extraordinary complaisance shown him by Messer Ludovico, the Duke's third younger brother, at present at court, who was otherwise of a rather inward and withdrawing nature. He, this brother, had come from Pavia, riding the final stage that morning, and though he had only gathered by report the story of the last twelve hours, thought it worth his while to go and ingratiate himself with the stranger. He found him in the great hall of the castello, awaiting the trial of certain causes, which, as coming immediately under the ducal jurisdiction, it was Galeazzo's sport often to preside over in person. Here he saw the boy, standing at his brother's shoulder by the judgment-seat--the comeliest figure, between Cupid and angel, he had ever beheld; frank, sweet, child-eyed--in every feature and quality, it would seem, the antithesis of himself. Messer Ludovico came up arm in arm, very condescendingly, with his excellency the Ser Simonetta, Secretary of State, a gentleman whom he was always at pains to flatter, since he intended by and by to destroy him. Not that he had any personal spite against this minister, however much he might suspect him of misrepresenting his motives and character to the Duchess Bona, his sister-in-law, to whom he, Ludovico, was in reality, he assured himself, quite attached. His policy, on the contrary, was always a passionless one; and the point here was simply that the man, in his humble opinion, affected too much reason and temperance for a despotic government.

As he approached the tribune he uncapped, a thought on the near side of self-abasement, to his brother, whose cavalier acknowledgment of the salute halted him, however, affable and smiling, on the lowest step of the dais. He was studious, while there, to inform with the right touch of pleasant condescension (at least while Galeazzo's regard was fixed on him) his attitude towards Simonetta, lest the ever-suspicious mind of the tyrant should discover in it some sign of a corruptive intimacy. With heirs-possibly-presumptive in Milan, sufficient for the day's life must be the sleepless diplomacy thereof; and better than any man Ludovico knew on what small juggleries of the moment the continuance of his depended. His complexion being of a swarthiness to have earned him the surname of The Moor, he had acquired a habit of drooping his lids in company, lest the contrastive effect of white eyeballs moving in a dark, motionless face should betray him to the subjects of those covert side-long glances by which he was wont to observe unobserved. Even to his shoulders, which were slightly rounded by nature, he managed, when in his brother's presence, to give the suggestion of a self-deprecatory hump, as though the slight burden of State which they already endured were too much for them. His voice was low-toned; his expression generally of a soft and rather apologetic benignity. His manner towards all was calculated on a graduated scale of propitiation. Paying every disputant the compliment of deferring outwardly to his opinions, he would not whip so little as a swineherd without apologising for the inconvenience to which he was putting him. His dress was rich, but while always conceived on the subdominant note, so to speak, as implying the higher ducal standard, was in excellent taste, a quality which he could afford to indulge with impunity, since it excited no suspicion but of his simplicity in Galeazzo's crude mind. In point of fact Messer Ludovico was a born connoisseur, and, equally in his choice of men, methods, and tools, a first exemplar of the faculty of selection.

Presently, seeing the Duke's gaze withdrawn from him, he spoke to Messer Simonetta more intimately, but still out of the twisted corner of his mouth, while his eyes remained slewed under their lids towards the throne:--

'Indeed, my lord, indeed yes; 'tis a veritable Castalidis, fresh from Parnassus and the spring. Tell me, now--'tis no uncommon choice of my brother to favour a fair boy--what differentiates this case from many?'

The secretary, long caged in office, and worn and toothless from friction on its bars, had yet his ideals of Government, personal as well as political.

'Your Highness,' said he, in his hoarse, thin voice, 'what differentiates sacramental wine from Malvasia?'

'Why,' answered Ludovico, 'perhaps a degree or two of headiness.'

'Nay,' said the secretary, 'is it not rather a degree or two of holiness?'

'Ebbene!' said the other, 'I stand excellently corrected. (Your servant, Messer Tassino,' he said, in parenthesis, to a pert and confident young exquisite, who held himself arrogantly forward of the group of spectators. The jay responded to the attention with a condescending nod. Ludovico readdressed himself to the secretary.) 'How neatly you put things! It is a degree or two, as you say--between the intoxication of the spirit and the intoxication of the senses. And is this pretty stranger sacramental wine, and hath Heaven vouchsafed us the Grael without the Quest? It is a sign of its high favour, Messer Slmonetta, of which I hope and trust we shall prove ourselves worthy.'

'And I hope so, Highness,' said the grave secretary.

'Hush!' whispered Ludovico. 'The court opens.'

There was a little stir and buzz among the spectators who, thronging the hall, left a semi-circle of clear space about the dais; and into this, at the moment, a fellow in a ragged gabardine was haled by a guard of city officers. The Duke, seated above, stroked his chin with a glance at the prisoner of sinister relish, which, on the thought, he smoothed, with a little apologetic cough, into an expression of mild benignancy. Messer Lanti, planted near at hand amid a very parterre of nobles, envoys, ecclesiastics, bedizened _cheres amies_ and great officers of the court who supported their lord on the dais, sniggered under his breath till his huge shoulders shook.

The Jew was charged with a very heinous offence--sweating coins, no less. He was voluble and nasal over his innocence, until one of the officers flicked him bloodily on the mouth with his mailed hand.

'Nay,' said Bembo, shrinking; 'that is to give the poor man a dumb advocate, methinks.'

The Duke applauded--eliciting some louder applause from Ludovico--and forbade the fellow sternly to strike again without orders. A sudden sigh and movement seemed to ripple the congregated faces and to subside. The prisoner, however, was convicted, on sound enough evidence, and stood sullen and desperate to hear his sentence. Galeazzo eyed him covetously a moment; then turning to a clerk of the court who knelt beside him with his tablets ready, bade that obsequious functionary proclaim the penalty which by statute obtained against all coiners or defacers of the ducal image. It was bad enough--breaking on the wheel--to pass without deadlier revision; yet to such, and to the high will or caprice of his lord, Master Scrivener humbly submitted it.

Then, to the dumfoundering of all, did his Magnificence appeal, with a smile, to the little Parablist at his shoulder:--

'Mi' amico; thou hearest? What say'st?'

'Lord,' answered Bernardo, in the soft, clear young voice that all might hear like a bird's song in the stillness after rain, 'this wretch hath defaced thy graven image.'

'It is true.'

'What if, in a more impious mood, he had dared to raise his hand against thyself?'

'Ha! He would be made to die--not pleasantly.'

'Is to be broken on the wheel pleasant?'

'Well, the dog shall hang.'

'Still for so little? Why, were he Cain he could pay no higher. Valuest thy life, then, at a pinch of gold dust? This is to put a premium on regicide.'

The Duke bit his lip, and frowned, and laughed vexedly.

'How now, Bernardino?'

'Lord, I am young--a child, and without comparative experience. I pray thee put this rogue aside, while we consider.'

Galeazzo waved his hand, and the Jew, staring and stumbling, was removed. Another, a creature gaunt and wolfish, took his place. What had he done? He had trodden on a hare in her form, and, half-killing, had despatched her. Why? asked Bembo. To still her telltale cries, intimated the wretched creature. Galeazzo's eyes gleamed; but still he called upon Heaven to sentence. In such a case? Men glanced at one another half terrified. Any portent, even of good, is fearful in its rising. Bembo turned to the kneeling clerk.

'Come, Master Scrivener! A little offence, in any case, and with humanity to condone it.'

The frightened servant shook his head, with a glance at his master. He murmured the worst he dared--that the law exacted the extremest penalty from the unauthorised killer of game. Bembo stared a moment incredulous, then pounced in mock fury at the prisoner:--

'Wretch! what didst thou with this hare?'

The hind had to be goaded to an answer.

'Master, I ate it.'

'What!' cried the other--'a monster, to devour thy prince's flesh!'

'God knows I did not!'

'Nay, God is nothing to the law, which says you did. Else why should it draw no distinction between the crimes of harecide and regicide? Thou hast eaten of thy prince.'

'Well, if I have I have.'

'Thou art anthropophagous.'

'Mercy!'

'No shame to thee--a lover of thy kind' (the Saint chuckled). 'And no cannibal neither, since we have made game of thy prince.' He chuckled again, and turned merrily on the Duke. 'Is the hare to be prince, or the prince hare? And yet, in either case, O Galeazzo, I see no way for thee out of this thy loving subject's belly!'

The tyrant, half captivated, half furious, started forward.

'Give him,' he roared--and stopped. 'Give him,' he repeated, 'a kick on his breach and send him flying. Nay!' he snarled, 'even that were too much honour. Give him a scudo with which to buy an emetic.'

Bembo smiled and sighed: 'I begin to see daylight'; and Ludovico, after laughing enjoyingly over his brother's pleasantry, exclaimed audibly to Simonetta: 'This is the very wedding of human wit and divine. I seem to see the air full of laughing cherubs having my brother's features.'

Now there brake into the arena one clad like an artificer in a leathern apron; a sinewy figure, but eloquent, in his groping hands and bandaged face, of some sudden blight of ruin seizing prime. And he cried out in a great voice:--

'A boon, lord Duke, a boon! I am one Lupo, an armourer, and thou seest me!'

'Certes,' said the Duke. 'Art big enough.'

'O lord!' cried the shattered thing, 'let me see justice as plain with these blinded eyes.'

'Well, on whom?'

'Lord, on him that took me sleeping, and struck me for ever from the rolls of daylight, sith I had cursed him for the ruin of my daughter.'

Galeazzo shrugged his shoulders.

'This thine assailant--is he noble?'

'Master, as titles go.'

'Wert a fool, then, to presume. He were like else to have made it good to thee. Now, an eye for--' but he checked himself in the midst of the enormous blasphemy.

'Judge thou, my guardian angel,' he murmured meekly.

'What!' answered the boy, with a burning face, 'needs _this_ revision by Heaven?' And he cried terribly: 'Master armourer, summon thy transgressor!'

For a moment the man seemed to shrink.

'Nay,' cried the Saint, 'thou need'st not. I see the hand of God come forth and write upon a forehead.' His eyes sparkled, as if in actual inspiration. 'Tassino!' he cried, in a ringing voice.

('He heard me address him,' thought Ludovico, curious and watchful.)

At the utterance of that name, the whole nerve of the audience seemed to leap and fall like a candle-flame. Galeazzo himself started, and his lids lifted, and his mouth creased a moment to a little malevolent grin. For why? This Tassino, while too indifferent a skipjack for his jealousy, was yet the squire amoroso, the lover _comme il faut_ to his own correct Duchess, Madam Bona.

A minute's ticking silence was ended by the stir and pert laugh of the challenged himself, as he left the ring of spectators and sauntered into the arena. It was a little showy upstart, to be sure, as ebulliently curled and groomed as her Grace's lap-dog, and sharing, indeed, with Messer Tinopino the whole present caprice of their mistress's spoiling. His own base origin and inherent vulgarity, moreover, seeming to associate him with the ducal brutishness (an assumption which Galeazzo rather favoured than resented), confirmed in him a self-confidence which had early come to see no bounds to its own viciousness or effrontery.

Now he cocked one arm akimbo, and stared with insufferable insolence on the pronouncer of his name.

'Know'st me, Prophet?' bawled he. 'Not more than I thee, methinks. Wert well coached in this same inspiration.'

'Well, indeed,' answered Bembo. 'Thou hast said it. It was God spake in mine ear.'

Tassino laughed scornfully. It was a study to see these young wits opposed, the one such plated goods, the other so silver pure.

'In the name of this lying carle,' he cried, 'what spake He?'

'He said,' said Bembo quietly, '"Let the false swearer remember Ananias!"'

Then in a moment he was all ruffled and combative, like a young eagle.

'Answer!' he roared. 'Didst thou this thing?'

Now, a woman-petted, cake-fed belswagger is too much of an anomaly for the test of nerves. Tassino, shouted at, gave an hysteric jump which brought him to the very brink of tears. He was really an ill-bred little coward, made arrogant by spoiling. He had the greatest pity and tenderness for himself, and to any sense of his being lost would always respond with a lump in his throat. Now he suddenly realised his position, alone and baited before all--no petticoat to fly to, no sympathy to expect from a converted tyrant, none from a mob which, habitually the butt to his viciousness, would rejoice in his discomfiture. Actually the little beast began to whimper.

'Darest thou!' he cried, stamping.

'Didst thou this thing?' repeated Bernardo.

'It is no business of thine.'

'Didst thou this thing?'

'An oaf's word against----'

'Didst thou this thing?'

'Lord Duke!' appealed Tassino.

'Didst thou this thing?'

The victim fairly burst into tears.

'If I say no----'

'Die, Ananias!' shouted the Duke. His eyes gleamed maniacally. He half rose in his chair. He seemed as if furious to foreclose on a denouement his superstition had already anticipated. Tassino fell upon his knees.

'I did it!' he screamed.

The Duke sank back, his lips twitching and grinning. Then he glanced covertly at Bembo, and rubbed his hands together, with a motion part gloating, part deprecatory. The Ser Ludovico's eyes, shaded under his palm, were very busy, to and fro. Bembo stood like frowning marble.

'The law, Master Scrivener?' said he quietly.

The kneeling clerk murmured from a dry throat--

'Holy sir, it takes no cognisance of these accidents. The condescensions of the great compensate them.'

The Parablist, his lips pressed together, nodded gravely twice or thrice.

'I see,' he said; 'a condescension which ruins two lives.'

He addressed himself, with a deadly sweetness, to the Duke.

'I prithee, who standest for God's vicegerent, call up the Jew to sentence.'

Jehoshaphat was produced, and placed beside the blubbered, resentful young popinjay. The Saint addressed him:--

'Wretch, thou art convicted of the crime of defacing the Duke's image; and he at thine elbow of defacing God's image. Shall man dare the awful impiety to pronounce the greater guilt thine? Yet, if it merits death and mutilation, what for this other?'

He paused, and a stir went through the dead stillness of the hall. Then Bembo addressed one of the tipstaves with ineffable civility:--

'Good officer, this rogue hath sweated coins, say'st?'

'Ay, your worship,' answered the man; 'a hundred gold ducats, if a lire. Shook 'em in a leathern bag, a' did, like so much rusted harness.'

Bembo nodded.

'They are forfeit, by the token; and he shall labour to provide other hundred, with cost of metal and stamping.'

Jehoshaphat, secure of his limbs, shrieked derisive--

'God of Ishril! O, yes! O, to be sure! I can bleed moneys!'

'Nay,' said the Saint, 'but sweat them. Go!'

The coiner was dragged away blaspheming. He would have preferred a moderate dose of the rack; but the standard set by his sentence elicited a murmur of popular approval. From all, that is to say, but Tassino, who saw his own fate looming big by comparison. He rose and looked about him desperately, as if he contemplated bolting. The spectators edged together. He whinnied. Suddenly the stranger's voice swooped upon him like a hawk:--

'Man's image shall be restored; restore thou God's.'

The little wretch screamed in a sudden access of passion:--

'I don't know what you mean! Leave me alone. It was his own fault, I say. Why did he insult me?'

'Restore thou this image of God his sight,' said Bembo quietly.

'You know I cannot!'

'Thou canst not? Then an eye for an eye, as it was spoken. Take ye this wicked thing, good officers, and blind him even as he blinded the poor armourer.'

A vibrant sound went up from the spectators, and died. Messer Ludovico veiled his sight, and, it might be said, his laughter. Tassino was seen struggling and crying in the half-fearful clutch of his gaolers.

'Thou darest not! Dogs! Let me go, I say. What! would ye brave Madonna? Lord Duke, lord Duke, help me!'

'To repentance, my poor Tassino,' cried Galeazzo, leaning lustfully forward. 'I trow thy part on earth is closed.'

The little monster could not believe it. This instant fall from the heights! He was flaccid with terror as he fell screeching on his knees.

'Mercy, good stranger! Mercy, dear lord saint! The terror! the torture! I could not suffer them and live. O, let me live, I pray thee!--anywhere, anyhow, and I will do all; make whatever restitution you impose.'

As he prayed and wept and grovelled, the Saint looked down with icy pity on his abasement.

'Restitution, Tassino!' he cried, 'for that murthered vision, for that ruined virtue? Wouldst thou even in thine impiousness arrogate to thyself such divine prerogatives? Yet, in respect of that reason with which true justice doth hedge her reprisals, the Duke's mercy shall still allot thee an alternative. Sith thou canst not restore his honour or his eyes to poor Lupo, thou shalt take his shame to wife, and in her seek to renew that image of God which thou hast defaced. Do this, and only doing it, know thyself spared.'

A silence of stupefaction fell upon the court. What would Bona say to this arbitrary disposal of her pet, made husband to a common gipsy he had debauched? True, the sentence, by virtue of its ethical completeness, seemed an inspiration. But it was a disappointment too. None doubted but that the popinjay would subscribe to the present letter in order to evade the practice of it by and by. Already the paltry soul of the creature was struggling from its submersion, gasping, and blinking wickedly to see how it could retort upon its judge and deliverer. It had been better to have trodden it under for once and for good--better for the moral of the lesson, as for all who foresaw some hope for themselves in the crushing of an insufferable petty tyranny. Galeazzo himself frowned and bit his nails. He would have lusted to see heaven pluck off this vulgar burr for him. Only his brother, sleek and smiling, applauded the verdict. He had a far-seeing vision, had Ludovico, and perhaps already it was alotting a more telling role to the little aristocrat of San Zeno than had ever been played by the cockney parvenu down in the arena.

Suddenly the Duke was on his feet, fierce and glaring.

'Answer, dog!' he roared; 'acceptest thou the condition?'

Tassino started and sobbed.

'Yes, yes. I accept. I will marry her.'

The Duke took a costly chain from his own neck, and hung it about the shoulders of the Parablist.

'Wear this,' he said, 'in earnest of our love and duty.'

Then he turned upon the mob.

'These judgments stand, and all that shall be spoken hereafter by our dear monitor and proctor. It is our will. Make way, gentlemen.'

He took Bernardo's arm and descended the steps. A cloud of courtiers hovered near, acclaiming the boy Saint and Daniel. Messer Ludovico saluted him with fervour. He foresaw the millennium in this association of piety with greatness. Galeazzo sneered.

'Remember that three spoils company, brother,' said he. 'Keep thou thine own confessor, and leave me mine.'

It was then only that Bernardo learned the rank of his accoster.

'Alas! sweet lord,' said he, 'is piety such a stranger here that ye must entertain him like a king?'

The Duke laughed loudly and drew him on. He was extravagant in his attentions to him--eager, voluble, feverish. He would point out to him the lavish decorations of his house--marbles, sculptures, paintings, the rising fabric of a new era--and ask his opinion on all. A word from the child at that period would have floored a cardinal or a scaffolding, have clothed Aphrodite in a cassock, have made a _fete champetre_ of all Milan, or darkened its walls with mourning. Messer Lanti, following in their wake, was amazed, and dubious, and savage in turns. Earlier in the day the Duke had had from him the whole story of his connection with the Parablist, up to the moment of their interference in Montano's punishment.

'_Meschino me!_' he had said, greatly laughing over that episode; 'yet I cannot but be glad that the old code beat itself out on his back. 'Twas a reptile well served--a venomous, ungrateful beast. A mercy if it has broken his fang.'

That remained to be seen; and in the meantime Carlo, the old auxiliary in debauch, was taken again into full favour. He accepted the condescension with reserve. The oddest new attachment had come to supplant in him some ancient devotions that were the furthest from devout. He found himself in a very queer mood, between irritable and gentle. He had never before felt this inclination to hit hard for virtue, and it bewildered his honest head. But it made him a dangerous watchdog.

By and by the Duke carried his protege into the Duchess's privy garden. There was a necessary economy of ornamental ground about the castello, though the most was made of what could be spared. In a nest of green alleys, and falling terraces, and rose-wreathed arches, they came upon the two ladies whom Bembo had already seen, themselves as pretty, graceful flowers as any in the borders. The young Catherine sat upon a fountain edge, fanning herself with a great leaf, and talking to a flushed, down-looking page, who, it seemed likely, had brought news from the court of a recent scandal and its sequel. Her shrewd, pretty face took curious stock of the new comers. She was a pale slip of a girl, lithe, bosomless, the green plum of womanhood. Her thin, plain dress was green, fitting her like a sheath its blade of corn, and she wore on her sleek fair head a cap of green velvet banded with a scroll of beaten gold. A child she was, yet already for two years betrothed to a Pope's nephew. His presents on the occasion had included a camera of green velvet, sewn with pearls as thick as daisies in grass. It seemed natural to associate her with spring verdure, so sweet and fair she was; yet never, surely, worked a more politic little brain under its cap of innocence.

Hard by, on one of the walks, a woman and a child of seven played at ball. These were Bona, and her little son Gian-Galeazzo. As the other was spring, so was she summer, ripe in figure and mellowed in the passion of motherhood. Her eyes burned with the caress and entreaty of it--appealed in loveliness to the fathers of her desires. Her beauty, her stateliness, the very milk of her were all sweet lures to increase. She loved babies, not men--saw them most lusty, perhaps, in the glossy eyes of fools, the breeding-grounds of Cupids. She was always a mother before a wife.

The Duke led Bernardo to her side. Pale as ivory, she bent and embraced her boy, and dismissed him to the fountain; then rose to face the ordeal.

'Hail, judgments of Solomon!' she said, with a smile that quivered a little. 'O believe me, sir, thy fame has run before!'

'Which was the reason thou dismissedst Gian,' said Galeazzo, 'in fears that Solomon would propose to halve him?'

He did not doubt her, or wing his shaft with anything but brutality. It was his coward way, and, having asserted it, he strolled off, grinning and whistling, to the fountain.

Bona shivered and drew herself up. Her robe was all of daffodil, with a writhed golden hem to it that looked like a long flicker of flame. On her forehead, between wings of auburn hair, burned a great emerald. She seemed to Bernardo the loveliest, most gracious thing, a vision personified of fruitfulness, the golden angel of maternity, warm, fragrant, kind-bosomed. He met the gaze of her eyes with wonderment, but no fear.

'Sweet Madonna,' he said, 'hail me nothing, I pray thee, but the clear herald of our Christ--His mouthpiece and recorder. We may all be played upon for truth, so we be pure of heart.'

'And that art thou? No guile? No duplicity? No self-interest?'

He marvelled. She looked at him earnestly.

'Bernardo, didst know this Tassino was my servant?'

'Nay, I knew it not.'

'Wouldst have spared him hadst thou known?'

'How could I spare him the truth?'

'But its shame, its punishment?'

'Greater shame could no man have than to debauch innocence. His punishment was his redemption.'

'Ah! I defend him not. Yet, bethink thee, she may have been the temptress?'

'He should have loathed, not loved her, then.'

'Madreperla, mother-of-pearl,' cried Catherine, with a little shriek of laughter, from the fountain; 'come and help me! I have caught a butterfly in my hand, and my father wishes to take it from me and kill it!'

*CHAPTER VII*

Bernardo wrote to the Abbot of San Zeno:--

'MOST DEAR AND HONOURED FATHER,--Many words from me would but dilute the wonder of my narrative. Also thou lovest brevity in all things but God's praise. Know, then, how I have surpassed expectation in the early propagation of our creed, which is by Love to banish Law, that old engine of necessarianism. [_Here follows a brief recapitulation of the events which had landed him, a little sweet oracle of light, in the dark old castello of Milanl._] Man' (he goes on) 'is of all creatures the most susceptible to his environments. Thou shalt induce him but to feed on the olive branches of Peace in order that he may take their colour. O sorrow, then, on the false appetites which have warped his nature! on the beastly doctrines which, Satan-engendered, have led him half to believe there is no wrong or right, but only necessity! Is there no such thing as discord in music, at which even a dog will howl? Harmony is God--so plain. Yet there is a learned doctor here, one Lascaris who disputeth this. My father, I do not think that learned doctors seek so much the intrinsic truth of things as to impress their followers with their perspicacity in the pursuit. John led James over-the-way by a "short cut" of three miles, and James thought John a very clever fellow. Pray for me!...

'I will speak first of the Duchess, to whom I delivered your letter. She is a most sweet lady, with eyes, so kind and loving were they, they made me think of those soft stars which light the flocks to fold. She asked me did I remember my mother? "That is a strange question," quoth I, "to a foundling." "Ah!" said she, "poor child! I had forgot how thou fell'st, a star, into Mary's lap. I would have taken care, for my part, not so to tumble out of heaven." "Nay," I said, "but if thou, a mother there, hadst let slip thy baby first?" "What," she said, looking at me so strange and wistful, "did she follow, then?" My father, thou know'st my fancies. "I cannot tell," I said. "Sometimes, in a dream, the dim, sad shadow of a woman's face seems to hang over me lying on that altar." She held out her arms to me, then withdrew them, and she was weeping. "We are all wicked," she cried; "there is no heart, nor faith, nor virtue, in any of us!" and she ran away lamenting. Now, was not that strange? for she is in truth a lady of great virtue, a pure wife and mother, and to me most sweet-forgiving for an ill-favour I was forced to do her upon one of her servants. But not women nor men know their own hearts. They wear the devil's livery for fashion's sake, when he introduces it on a pretty sister or young gentleman, and so believe themselves bound to his service. But it is as easy as talking to make virtue the mode. Thou shalt see.

'Does not the beautiful Duomo itself stand in their midst, the fairest earnest of their true piety? Could intrinsic baseness conceive this ethereal fabric, or, year by year, graft it with sprigs of new loveliness? There is that in them yet like a little child that stretches out its arms to the sky.

'I have, besides the greatest, two converts, or half-converts, already, my dear Carlo and his Fool. The former is a great bull gallant, whom a spark will set roaring and a kiss allay. I love him greatly, and he bellows and prances, and swearing "I will not" follows to the pipe of peace. Alas! if I could woo him from a great wrong! It will happen, when men see honour whole, and not partisanly. In the meantime I have every reason to be charitable to that lady Beatrice, sith she holds herself my mortal enemy. And indeed I excuse her for myself, but not for the honest soul she keeps in thrall. My father, is it not a strange paradox, that holding the senses such a rich possession and life so cheap? Here is one would prolong the body's pleasure to eternity, yet at any moment will risk its destruction for a spite. Nathless she is warm, loamy soil for the bearing of our right lily of love, and some day shall be fruitful in cleanliness.

'Now the Fool--poor Fool! I have won to temperance, and so Carlo growleth, "A murrain on thee, spoil-sport! What want I with a sober Fool? Take him, thou, to be valet to thy temperance!" by which gibe he seeks to cover a gracious act. And, lo! I have a Fool for servant, a most notable Fool and auxiliary, who, having sworn himself to abstinence, would unplug and sink to the bottomless abyss every floating hogshead. In sooth the good soul is my shadow, and so they call him. "Well," says he, "so be it. But what sort of fool art thou, to cast a fool for shadow?" "Why, look," says I, for it was sunset on the grass--"at least not so great a fool as thou." "That may well be," says he, "for you do not serve Messer Bembo." So caustic is he--a biting love; yet, as is proper between a man and his shadow, equal attached to me as I to him. And so, talking of his gift to me, brings me to the greater gifts of the Duke.

'O my father! How can I speak my gratitude to heaven and thy teaching, which brought me so swiftly, so wonderfully, to prevail with that dread man! I think evil is like the false opal, which needs but the first touch of pure light to shatter it. I have come with no weapon but my little lamp of sunshine; and behold! in its flash the base is discredited and the truth acknowledged. It is all so easy, Christ guard me! There is a Providence in what men call chance. Only, my father, pray that thy child be not misled by flattery to usurp its prerogatives. Men, in this dim world, are all too prone to worship the visible symbols of Immortality--to accept the prophet for the Master. I am already feted and caressed as if I were a god. The Duke hath impropriated to me an income of a thousand ducatos, with free residence in the castello, and a retinue to befit a prince. At all this I cavil not, sith it affords me the sinews to a crusade. But what shall I say to his delegating me to the chief magistracy of Milan during his forthcoming absence? for he is on the eve of an expedition into Piedmont, touching the lordship of Vercelli, which he claims through his wife Bona of Savoy. Carlo, it is true, warns me against this perilous exaltation. "Seek'st thou," says he, "to depose the devil? Well, the devil, on his return, will treat thee like any other palace revolutionist." "Nay," says I, "the devil was never the devil from choice. Restore him to a converted dukedom, and he will aspire to be the saint of all." "Yes," he said, "I can imagine Galeazzo endowing a hospital for Magdalenes and washing the poor's feet. But I will stick to thee." A dear worldling he is, and only less uncertain than his master in these first infant steps towards godliness. For vice is very childlike in its self-plumings upon a little knowledge. Desiring beauty, it tears the rose-bush or clutches the moth, and so sickens on disillusionment. Forbearance is the wisdom of the great.

'The more destructive is a man, the simpler is he. Now, my father, this destroying Duke covets nothing so much as the applause of the world for gifts with which, in truth, he is ill-endowed. He cannot sing, or rhyme, or improvise but with the worst, yet, thinks he, they shall call me poet and musician, or burn. Well, he might fiddle over the holocaust, like Nero, and still be first cousin to a peacock. I told him so, but in gentler words, when he asked me to teach him my method. "To every soul its capacities," says I, "and mine are not in ruling a great duchy greatly." "So we are neither of us omnipotent," says he, with a smile. "Well, I will take the lesson to heart." Now, could so simple a creature be all corrupt?

'Of more complicated fibre is his brother, the Signior Ludovico. Very politic and abiding, he rushes at nothing; yet in the end, I think, most things come to him. He is gracious to thy child, as indeed are all; yet, God forgive me, I find something more inhuman in his gentleness than in Galeazzo's passion. These inexplicable antipathies are surely the weapons of Satan; whereby it behoves us to overcome them. That same Lascaris attributes them to an accidental re-fusion of particles, opposed to other chance re-combinations, in a present body, of particles similarly antipathetic to us in a former existence--a long "short cut" over the way again.

'Now, as for my days in this poignant city--where even the benches and clothes-chests, not to speak of most walls and ceilings, yea, and the very stair-posts themselves, are painted with crowded devices of scrolls and figures in loveliest gold and azure and vermilion--thou mayest believe they are strange to me. Amidst this wealth I, thy simple acolyte, am glorified, I say, and courted beyond measure. Yet fear nothing for me. I appraise this distinction at its right market value. The higher the Duke's favour, the greater my presumptive influence. Believe me, dear, my urbanity towards his attentions is an investment for my Master. I am an honest factor.

'In a week the Duke sets out. In the meantime, like an ambassador that must suffer present festival for the sake of future credit, I sit at feasts and plays; or, perchance, rise to denounce the latter for no better than whores' saturnalia. (O my father! to see fair ladies, the Duchess herself, smile on such shameless bawdry!) Whereon the Duke thunders all to stop, with threats of fury on the actors to mend their ways, making the poor fools gasp bewildered. For how had _they_ presumed upon custom? Bad habit is like the moth in fur, so easily shaken out when first detected; so hardly when established. Once, more to my liking, we have a mummers' dance, with clowns in rams' heads butting; and again a harvest ballet, with all the seasons pictured very pretty. Another day comes a Mantuan who plays on three lutes at once, more curious than tuneful; and after him one who walks on a rope in the court, a steel cuirass about his body. Now happens their festival of the _Bacchidae_, a pagan survival, but certes sweet and graceful, with its songs and vines and dances. Maybe for my sake they purge it of some licence. Well, Heaven witness to them what loss or gain thereby to beauty.

'Often the court goes hunting the wolf or deer--I care not; or a-picnicking by the river, which I like, and where we catch trouts and lampreys to cook and eat on the green; then run we races, perchance, or play at ball. So merry and light-hearted--how can wickedness be other than an accident with these children of good-nature? To mark the jokes they play on one another--mischievous sometimes--suggests to one a romping nursery, which yet I know not. Father, who was my mother? I trow we romped somewhere in heaven. Once some gallants of them, being in collusion with the watch, enter, in the guise of robbers, Messer Secretary Simonetta's house at midnight, and bind and blindfold that great man, and placing him on an ass in his night-gear (which is an excuse for nothing), carry him through the streets as if to their quarters. Which, having gained, they unbind; and lo! he is in the inner ward of the castello, the Duke and a great company about him and shouts of laughter; in which I could not help but join, though it was shameful. Next day the Duchess herself does not disdain a wrestling match with the lady Catherine, her adoptive daughter; when the lithe little serpent, enwreathing that stately Queen, doth pull her sitting on her lap, whereby she conquers. For all improvising and stories they have as great a passion as ingenuity; and therein, my gifts by Christ's ensample lying, comes my opportunity. Dear Father, am I presumptuous in my feeble might, like the boy Phaeton when he coaxed the Sun's reins from Ph[oe]bus, and scorched the wry road since called the Milky Way? That is such an old tale as we tell by moonlight under trees--such as Christ Himself, the child-God, hath recounted to us, sitting shoulder-deep in meadow-grass, or by the pretty falling streams. Is He that exacting, that exotic Deity, lusting only for adoration, eternally gluttonous of praise and never surfeited, whom squeamish indoor men, making Him the fetish of their closets, have reared for heaven's type? O, find Him in the blown trees and running water; in the carol of sweet birds; in the mines from whose entrails are drawn our ploughshares; yea, in the pursuit of maid by man! So, in these long walks and rests of life, shall He be no less our Prince because He is our joyous comrade. For this I know: Not to a pastor, a lord, a parent himself, doth the soul of the youth go out as to the companion of his own age and freedom.

'Christ comes again as He journeyed with His Apostles, the bright wise comrade, fitting earth to heaven in the puzzle of the spheres. We know Him Human, my father, feeling the joy of weariness for repose' sake; not disdaining the cool inn's sanctuary; expounding love by forbearance. He beareth Beauty redeemed on His brow. Before the clear gaze of His eyes all heaped sophistries melt away like April snow. He calleth us to the woods and meadows. _Quasimodo geniti infantes rationabile sine dolo lac concupiscete_. O, mine eyelids droop! We are seldom at rest here before two o' the morning. The beds have trellised gratings by day, to keep the dogs from smirching their coverlets. _Ora pro me_!'

*CHAPTER VIII*

The castle at the Porta Giovia had its glooms as well as its pleasances. Indeed, it may be questioned if the latter were not rather in proportion to the former as a tiger's gay hide is to the strength and ferocity it clothes. Built originally for a great keep, or, as it were, breakwater, to stem the rush of barbarian seas which were wont to come storming down from the north-west, its constructors had aimed at nothing less than its everlastingness. So thick were its bastioned walls, so thick the curtains which divided its inner and outer wards, a whole warren of human 'runs' could honeycomb without appreciably weakening them. Hidden within its screens and massy towers, like the gnawings of a foul and intricate cancer, ran dark passages which discharged themselves here and there into dreadful dungeons, or secret-places not guessed at in the common tally of its rooms. These oubliettes were hideous with blotched and spotted memories; rotten with the dew of suffering; eloquent in their terror and corruption and darkness, of that same self-sick, self-blinded tyranny which, in place of Love and Justice, the trusty bodyguards, must turn always to cruelty and thick walls for its security. The hiss and purr of subterranean fire, the grinding of low-down grated jaws, the flop and echo of stagnant water, oozed from a stagnant moat into vermin-swarming, human-haunted cellars,--these were sounds that spoke even less of grief to others than of the hellish ferment in the soul of him who had raised them for his soul's pacifying. Himself is for ever the last and maddest victim of a despot's oppression.

There had been stories to tell, could the coulter of Time once have cut into those far-down vaults, and his share laid open. Now this was so far from promising, that their history and mystery were in process of being still further overlaid and stifled under accumulations of superstructure. Francesco, the great Condottiere, the present Duke's father, had been the first to realise dimly how a tyrant, by converting his self-prison into a shrine for his aestheticism, might enjoy a certain amelioration of his condition. It was he who, yielding an older palace and its grounds to the builders of the cathedral, had transferred the ducal quarters to the great fortress, which henceforth was to be the main seat of the Sforzas. Here the first additions and rebuildings had been his, the first decorations and beautifyings--tentative at the best, for he was always more a soldier than a connoisseur. The real movement was inaugurated by his successor, and continued, as cultivation was impressed on him, on a scale of magnificence which was presently to make the splendour of Milan a proverb. Galeazzo, an indifferent warrior, to whose rule but a tithe of the territory once gathered to the Visconti owned allegiance, contented his ambitions by rallying an army of painters and sculptors and decorators to the glorification of his houses at Milan, Cremona, and his ancestral petted Pavia,--after all a worthier role than the conqueror's for a good man; but then, this man was so bad that he blighted everything he touched. It is true that the disuse of secret torture would have been considered, and by men more enlightened than he, so little expedient a part of any ethical or aesthetical 'improvement' of an existing house, as that a premium would be put thereby on assassination. Yet Galeazzo's death-pits were never so much a politic necessity as a resource for cruelty in idleness. He would descend into them with as much relish as he would reclimb from, to his halls above, swelling and bourgeoning with growth of loveliness. The scream of torture was as grateful to his ears as was the love-throb of a viol; the scum bubbling from his living graves as poignant to his nostrils as was the scent of floating lilies. He continued to make his house beautiful, yet never once dreamt, as a first principle of its reclamation to sweetness, of cutting out of its foundations those old cesspools of disease and death.

One night he sat in his closet of the Rocca, a little four-square room dug out of the armourer's tower, and having a small oratory adjoining. This eyrie was so high up as to give a comfortable sense of security against surprise. There was but one window to it--just a deep wedge in the wall, piercing to the sheer flank of the tower. Sweet rushes carpeted the floor; the arras was pictured with dim, sacred subjects--Ambrosius in his cradle, with the swarm of bees settling on his honeyed lips; Ambrosius elected Bishop of Milan by the people; Ambrosius imposing penance on Theodosius for his massacre of the Thessalonicans--and the drowsy odours of a pastile, burning in the little purple shrine-lamp, robbed the air of its last freshness.

Another lamp shone on a table, at which the Duke was seated somewhat preoccupied with a lute, and his tablets propped before him; while, motionless in the shadows opposite, stood the figure of the provost marshal, its fixed, unregarding eyes glinting in the flame.

Intermittently Galeazzo strummed and murmured, self-communing, or addressing himself, between playfulness and abstraction, to the ear of Messer Jacopo:--

'_The lowliest of all Franciscans was St. Francis, meek mate of beasts and birds, boasting himself no peer of belted stars_.... Ha! a good line, Jacopo, a full significant line; I dare say it, our Parablist despite. Listen.' (He chaunted the words in a harsh, uncertain voice, to an accompaniment as sorry.) 'Hear'st? Belted stars--those moon-ringed spheres the aristocracy of the night. Could Messer Bembo himself have better improvised? What think'st? Be frank.'

'I think of improvising by book,' said Jacopo, short and gruff.

Galeazzo said 'Ha!' again, like a snarl, and his brow contracted.

'Why, thou unconscionable old surly dog!' he said--'why?'

Jacopo pointed to the tablets.

'Your saint asks no notes to _his_ piping. A' sings like the birds.'

'Now,' answered his master, in a deep, offended tone, 'I'm in a mind to make _thee_ sing on a grill,--ay, and dance too. What, dolt! are not first thoughts first thoughts, however they may be pricked down? Look at this, I say; flatten thy bull nose on it. Is it not clean, untouched, unrevised? Spotless as when issued from Helicon? Beast! thou shalt call me, too, an improvisatore.'

The statue was silent. Galeazzo sat glaring and gnawing his fingers.

'Answer!' he screeched suddenly.

'I will call thee one,' said Jacopo obstinately, 'but not the best.'

The Duke fell back in his chair, then presently was muttering and strumming with his disengaged fingers on the table.

'No--not the best, not the best--not to rival heaven! Yet, perhaps, it should be the Duke's privilege.'

The executioner laughed a little.

'The Duke should know how to take it.'

Galeazzo stopped short, quite vacant, staring at him.

'I've heard tell,' said Jacopo, 'how one Nero, a fiddling emperor, came to be acknowledged first fiddle of all.'

He paused, then answered, it seemed, an unspoken invitation: 'He just silenced the better ones.'

Galeazzo got hurriedly to his feet.

'Blasphemer! thou shalt die for the word. What! this Lord's anointed! A natural songster! no art, no culture in his voice--sweet and wild, above human understanding. I said nothing. Be damned, and damned alone! Go hang thyself like Judas!'

'Well, name my successor first,' said Jacopo.

The Duke leapt, and with one furious blow shattered his lute to splinters on the other's steel headpiece, then stamped upon the fragments, his arms flapping like wing stumps, his teeth sputtering a foam of inarticulate words. Jacopo, erect under the avalanche, stood perfectly silent and impassive. Then, as suddenly as it had burst, the storm ended. Galeazzo sank back on his seat, panting and nerveless.

'Well, I am no poet--curse thy block head, and mine for trusting to it--the Muses shall decide--Apollo or Marsyas--the Christian Muses and a Christian penance--flaying only for heretics. I am no poet nor musician, say'st? Calf! what know'st thou about such things?' He roared again: 'What brings thee here, with thy damned butcher's face, scaring my pretty lambs of song?'

'Thine order.'

'Mine?'

'This astrologer monk, this Fra Capello was it not? I neither know nor care.'

'Dost thou not? A faithful dog!'

'Faithful enough.'

'O! art thou? By what token?'

'By the token of the quarry run to earth.'

'To earth? Thou hast him? Good Jacopo!'

'This three days past. Had I not told thee so already? Let thine improvising damn thyself, not me.'

'The villain! to call himself a Franciscan, a lowly Franciscan, and pretend to read the stars! How about his prophecy now?'

'Why, he holds to it.'

'What! that I have but eleven years in all to reign--less than one to live?'

'Just that--no more.'

'Now, is it not a wicked schism from the plain humility of his founder? A curse on their spirituals and conventuals! _This_ fellow to claim kinship with the stars--profess to be in their confidence, to share heaven's secrets? Dear Jacopo, sweet Jacopo! is it not well to cleanse this earth of such lying prophets, that truth may have standing-room?'

'Ask truth, not me.'