Chapter VII: Part 7

For years after it was become the dimmest of odd memories, men and women would recall, between laughter and tears, the strange little moral fantasia which, during a month or two of that glowing autumn of 1476, all Milan had been tickled into dancing to the pipe of a small shepherd of a New Arcadia. The measure had certainly seemed inspiring enough at the time--potential, original, weaving an earnest purpose with joy, revealing novel raptures of sensation in the seemliness of postures, which claimed to interpret Nature out of the very centre of her spiritual heart. David dancing before the ark must have exhibited just such an orderly abandonment as was displayed by these sober-rollicking Pantheists of the new cult. Crossness with them was sunk to an impossible discount. There was no market for gallantry, _epanchements_, or any billing and cooing whatever but of doves. Instead, there came into vogue intercourses between Dioneus and Flammetta of sweet unbashful reasonableness; high-junkettings on chestnut-meal and honey; the most engaging attentions, in the matter of grapes and sweet biscuits and infinite bon-bons, towards the little furred and feathered innocents of the countryside. That temperance really was, according to the angelic propagandist, the true epicurism, experience no less astonishing than agreeable came to prove. Then was the festival of beans and bacon instituted by some jaded palates. Charity and consideration rose on all sides in a night, like edible and nutritious funguses. From Hallowmas to Christmas there was scarce a sword whipped from its scabbard but reflection returned it. It was no longer, with Gregory and Balthazar, 'Sir, do you bite your thumb at me? Sir, the wall to you,' but 'Sir, I see your jostling of me was unavoidable; Sir, your courtesy turns my asps to roses.' Nature and the natural decencies were on all tongues; the licences of eye and ear and lip were rejected for abominations unpalatable to any taste more refined than yesterday's. Modesty ruled the fashions and made of Imola an Ippolita, and of Aurelio an Augustine. The women, as a present result, were all on the side of Nature. Impudicity with them is never a cause but a consequence. They found an amazing attractiveness in the pretty dogma which rather encouraged than denounced in them the graceful arts of self-adornment. 'Naked, like the birds,' attested their little priest, 'do we come to inherit our Kingdom. Shall we be more blamed than they for adapting to ourselves the plumages of that bright succession?' Only he pleaded for a perfect adaptation to conditions--to form, climate, environments, constitution. The lines of all true beauty, he declared, were such as both suggested and defended. Could monstrosities of head furniture, for instance, appeal to any but a monster? Locks, thereat, were delivered from their fantastic convolutions, from their ropes of pearls, from their gold-dust and iris-powder, and were heaped or coiled _di sua natura_, as any girl, according to circumstances, might naturally dispose of them. There was a general holocaust of extravagances, with some talk of feeding the sacrifice with fuel of useless confessional boxes; and, in the meanwhile, the church took snuff and smiled, and the devil hid his tail in a reasonable pair of breeches, and endured all the inconveniences of sitting on it without a murmur.

Alas! 'How quick bright things come to confusion!' But the moment while it held gathered the force of an epoch; and no doubt much moral amendment was to derive from it. Intellect in a sweet presence makes a positive of an abstract argument; and when little Bembo asserted, in refutation of the agnostics, that man's dual personality was proved by the fact of his abhorring in others the viciousnesses which his flesh condoned in himself, the statement was accepted for the dictum of an inspired saint. But his strength of the moment lay chiefly in his undeviating consistency with his own queer creed. He never swerved from his belief in the soul's responsibility to its past, or of its commitment to a retrogressive movement after death. 'We drop, fainting, out of the ranks in a desolate place,' he said. 'We come to, alone and abandoned. Shall we, poor mercenaries, repudiating a selfish cause, not turn our faces to the loved home, far back, from which false hopes beguiled us? Be, then, our way as we have made it, whether by forbearance or rapine.' Again he would say: 'Take, so thy to-day be clean, no fearful thought for thy to-morrow, any more than for thy possible estrangement from thy friend. There is nothing to concern thee now (which is all that _is_) but thy reason, love, and justice of this moment. They are the faculty, devotion, and quality to which, blended, thy soul may trust itself for its fair continuance.'

There was a little song of his, very popular with the court gentlemen in these days of their regeneracy, which, as exemplifying the strengths and weaknesses of his propaganda, is here given:--

'Here's a comrade blithe
To the wild wood hieth--
Follow and find!
Loving both least and best,
His love takes still a zest
From the song-time of the wind.

The chuckling birds they greet him,
The does run forth to meet him--
Follow and find!
Strange visions shall thou see;
Learn lessons new to thee
In the song-time of the wind.

Couldst, then, the dear bird kill
That kiss'd thee with her bill?
Follow and find
How great, having strength, to spare
That trusting Soft-and-fair
In the song-time of the wind.

He is both God and Man;
He is both Christ and Pan--
Follow and find
How, in the lovely sense,
All flesh being grass, wakes thence
The song-time of the wind.

It was, I say, popular with the Lotharios. The novelty of this sort of renunciation tickled their sensoriums famously. It suggested a quite new and captivating form of self-indulgence, in the rapture to be gathered from an indefinite postponement of consummations. The sense of gallantry lies most in contemplation. I do not think it amounted to much more. Teresa and Elisabetta enjoyed their part in the serio-comic sport immensely, and were the most cuddlesome lambs, frisking unconscious under the faltering knife of the butcher. Madonna Caterina laughed immoderately to see their great mercy-pleading eyes coquetting with the greatly-withheld blade. But then she had no bump of reverence. The little wretch disliked sanctity in any form; loved aggressiveness better than meekness; was always in her heart a little Amazonian terrier-bitch, full of fight and impudence. It might have gone crossly with Messer Bembo had she been in her adoptive mother's position of trustee for him.

But luckily, or most unluckily for the boy, he was in more accommodating hands. This was the acute period of his proselytising. He had been persuaded back to court, and Bona had received him with moist eyes and open arms, and indeed a very yearning pathos of emotionalism, which had gathered a fataler influence from the contrition which in the first instance must be his. He had stood before her not so much rebuking as rebuked. Knowing her no longer saint, but only erring woman, it added a poignancy to his remorse that he had led her into further error by his abuse of her trust. She had answered his confession with a lovely absolution:--

'What is lost is lost. Thou art the faithfullest warrant of my true observance of my lord's wishes. Only if thou abandon'st me am I betrayed.'

Could he do aught after this but love her, accept her, her fervour and her penitence, for a first factor in the crusade he had made his own? And, while the soft enchantment held, no general could have wished a loyaler adjutant, or one more ready to first-example in herself the sacrifices he demanded. She abetted him, as she had promised, in all his tactics; lent the full force of an authority, which his sweetness and modesty could by no means arrogate to himself, to compel the reforms he sang. She gave, amongst other gifts, her whole present soul to the righting of the wrong done to the girl Lucia and her father; and when all her efforts to discover the vanished Tassino had failed, and she, having sent on her own initiative a compensatory purse of gold to the blind armourer, had learned how Lucia had banged the gift and the door in the messenger's face, was readily mollified by Bernardo's tender remonstrance: 'Ah, sweet Madonna! what gold can give her father eyes, or her child a name!'

'What! it is born?' she murmured.

'I saw it yesterday,' said Bembo. 'It lay in her lap, like the billet that kills a woman's heart.'

And, indeed, he had not, because of his re-exaltation, ceased to visit his friends, or to go to occasional discussion with the crabbed Montano; whose moroseness, nevertheless, was petrifying. Yet had he even sought to interest the Duchess there; though, for once, without avail; for she dared not seem to lend her countenance to that banned, if injured, misanthrope.

So she led the chorus to his soloing, and helped and mothered him with an infatuation beyond a mother's. Like the Emperor's jewelled nightingale, he was the sweetest bird to pet while his tricks were new. His voice entranced the echoes of those sombre chambers and blood-stained corridors. The castello was reconsecrated in his breath, and the miasma from its fearful pits dispelled. His lute was his psalter and psaltery in one: it interpreted him to others, and himself to himself. Its sob was his sorrow, and its joy his jubilance. He could coax from it wings to expression inexpressible by speech alone. Here is one of his latest parables, or apologues, baldly running, as it appears, on the familiar theme, which, through that vehicle, he translated for his hearers into rapture:--

'Down by a stream that muttered under ice--
Winter's thin wasted voice, straining for air--
Lo! Antique Pan, gnawing his grizzled beard.

Chill was the earth, and all the sky one stone,
The shrunk sedge shook with ague; the wild duck,
Squattering in snow, sent out a feeble cry.
Like a stark root the black swan's twisted neck
Writhed in the bank. The hawk shook by the finch;
The stoat and rabbit shivered in one hole;
And Nature, moaning on a bedded drift,
Cried for delivery from her travail:--

"O Pan! what dost thou? Long the Spring's delayed!
O Pan! hope sickens. Son, where art thou gone?"

Thereat he heaved his brows; saw the starved fields,
The waste and horror of a world's eclipse;
And all the wrong and all the pity of it
Rushed from him in a roar:--
"I'm passed, deposed: call on another Pan!
Call Christ--the ates foretel him--he'll respond.
I'm old; grown impotent; a toothless dog.
New times, new blood: the world forgets my voice.
This Christ supplants me: call on him, I say.
Whence comes he? Whence, if not from off the streets?
Some coxcomb of the Schools, belike--some green,
Anaemic, theoretic verderer,
Shaping his wood-lore from the Herbary,
And Nature from his brazen window-pots.
The Fates these days have gone to live in town--
Grown doctrinaires--forgot their rustic loves.
Call on their latest nominee--call, call!
He'll ease thee of thy produce, bear it home,
And in alembics test and recompose it.
Call, in thine agony--loud--call on Christ:
He'll hear maybe, and maybe understand!"

"No Pan," she wailed: "No other Pan than thou!"

"What!" roared he, mocking: "Christ not understand?
Your loves, your lores, your secrets--will he not?
Not by his books be master of your heart?
Gods! I am old. I speak but by the woods;
And often nowadays to rebel ears.
He'll do you better: fold your fogs in bales;
Redeem your swamps; sweep up your glowing leaves;
People his straight pastures with your broods;
Shape you for man, to be his plain helpmeet;
No toys, no tricks, no mysteries, no sports--
But sense and science, scorning smiles and tears."

Raging, he rose: A light broke on the snow:
The ice upon the river cracked and spun:
Long milky-ways of green and starry flowers
Grew from the thaw: the trees nipped forth in bud:
The falcon sleeked the wren; the stoat the hare;
And Nature with a cry delivered was.

Pan stared: A naked child stood there before him,
Warming a frozen robin in his hands.
Shameless the boy was, fearless, white as milk;
No guile or harm; a sweet rogue in his eyes.
And he looked up and smiled, and lisped a word:--

"Brother, _thou_ take and cure him, make him well.
Or teach _me_ of thy lore his present needs."

"_Brother!_" choked Pan. "_My_ father was a God.
Who art thou?" "Nature's baby," said the child.
"Man was _my_ father; and my name is Christ."

He slid his hand within the woodman's palm:--
"Dear elder brother, guide me in my steps.
I bring no gift but love, no tricks but love's--
To make sweet flowers of frost--locked hearts unfold--
The coney pledge the weasel in a kiss.
Canst thou do these?" "No, by my beard," said Pan.

Gaily the child laughed: "Clever brother thou art;
Yet can I teach thee something." "All," said Pan.

He groaned; the child looked up; flew to his arms:--
"O, by the womb that bore us both, do love me!"

A minute sped: the river hushed its song:
The linnet eyed the falcon on its branch:
The bursting bud hung motionless--And Pan
Gave out a cry: "New-rooted, not deposed!
Come, little Christ!" So hand in hand they passed,
Nature's two children reconciled at last.'

And what about Messer Lanti and the Fool Cicada during this period of their loved little saint's apotheosis? Were _they_ more _advocati diaboli_ than Bona? Alas! they were perhaps the only two, in all that volatile city, to accept him, with a steadfast and indomitable faith, at his true worth. There was no angelic attribute, which Carlo, the honest blaspheming neophyte, would not have claimed for him--with blows, by choice; no rebuke, nor suggestion, nor ordinance issuing from his lips, which he would not accept and act upon, after the necessary little show of self-easing bluster. It was as comical as pathetic to observe the dear blunderhead's blushing assumptions of offence, when naughtiness claimed his intimacy; his exaggerated relish of spring water; his stout upholding, on an empty stomach, of the aesthetic values of abstinence. But he made a practical virtue of his conversion, and was become frequent in evidence, with his strong arm and voice and influence, as a Paladin on behalf of the oppressed. He and Cicada were the boy's bristling watch-dogs, mastiff and lurcher; and were even drawn, by that mutual sympathy, into a sort of scolding partnership, defensive and aggressive, which had for its aim the vindication of their common love. There, at least, was some odd rough fruit of the reconciliation preached by little Bembo between the God-man and the man-Nature. Such a relationship had been impossible in the old days of taskmaster and clown. Now it was understood between them, without superfluous words, that each held the other responsible to him for his incorruptible fidelity to his trust, and himself for a sleepless attention to the duty tacitly and by implication assigned to be his. That is to say, Messer Carlo's strength and long sword, and the other's shrewd wit, were assumed, as it were, for the right and left bucklers to the little charioteer as he drove upon his foes.

Carlo had a modest conception of his own abilities; yet once he made the mistake of appropriating to himself a duty--or he thought it one--rather appertaining to his fellow buckler. They had been, the Fool and himself, somewhat savagely making merry on the subject of Bona's conversion--in the singleness of which, to be candid, they had not much faith--when his honest brain conceived the sudden necessity of bluntly warning the little Bernardino of the danger he was courting in playing with such fire. His charge, no sooner realised than acted upon, took the boy, so to speak, in the wind. Bembo gasped; and then counter-buffed with angelic fury:--

'Who sleeps with a taper in his bed invites his own destruction? Then wert thou sevenfold consumed, my Carlo. O, shame! she is my mother!'

'Nay, but by adoption,' stammered the other abashed.

'Her assumption of the name should suffice to spare her. O, thou pagan irreclaimable--right offspring of Vesta and the incestuous Saturn! Is this my ultimate profit of thee? Go hide thy face from innocence.'

Lanti, thus bullied, turned dogged.

'I will hide nothing. Abuse my candour; spit on my love if thou wilt, it will endure for its own sake,' and he flung away in a rage.

But he had better have deputed the Fool to a task needing diplomacy. Cicada laughed over his grievance when it was exploded upon him.

'Shouldst have warned Bona herself, rather,' he said.

'How!' growled the other: 'and been cashiered, or worse, for my pains?'

'Not while her lost ring stands against her; and thou, her private agent for its recovery.'

'True; from the mud.'

'Well, if thou think'st so.'

'Dost thou not?'

'Ay; for as mud is mud, Narcisso is Narcisso.'

'Narcisso!'

He roared, and stared.

'Has _he_ got it?'

'I do not say so.'

'I will go carve the truth out of him.'

'Or Monna Beatrice.'

'What!'

The great creature fairly gasped; then muttered, in a strangled voice: 'Why should she want it? What profit to her?'

'What, indeed?' whined the Fool. 'She fancies Messer Bembo too well to wish to injure him, or through him, Bona--does she not?'

Carlo's brow slowly blackened.

'I will go to her,' he said suddenly. The Fool leapt to bar his way.

'You would do a foolish thing,' he said--'with deference, always with deference, Messer. This is my part. Leave it to me.'

Carlo choked, and stood breathing.

'Why,' said the Fool, 'these are the days of circumspection. God, says Propriety, made out hands and faces, and whatever else that is not visible was the devil's work. You would be shown, by Monna Beatrice, for all her self-acknowledged parts, just clean hands and a smiling face. She conforms to fashion. For the rest, the devil will attend to his own secrets.'

The other groaned:--

'I would I could fathom thee. I would I had the ring.'

'I would thou hadst,' answered Cicada. ''Twould be a good ring to set in our Duchess's little nose, to persuade her from routling in consecrated ground: a juster weapon in thy hands than in some other's. Well, be patient; I may obtain it for thee yet.'

He meant, at least, to set his last wits to the task. Somehow, he was darkly and unshakably convinced, this same Lion ring was the pivot upon which all his darling's fortunes turned. That it was not really lost, but was being held concealed, by some jealous spirit or spirits, against the time most opportune for procuring the boy's, and perhaps others', destruction by its means, he felt sure. All Milan was not in one mind as to the disinterested motives of its Nathan. Tassino, Narcisso, the dowager of Casa Caprona, even the urbane Messer Ludovico himself, to name no others, could hardly be shown their personal profits in the movement. They might all, as the world's ambitions went, be excused from coveting the stranger's promotion. And there was no doubt that, at present, he was paramount in the eyes of the highest. That, in itself, was enough to make his sweet office the subject of much scepticism and blaspheming. Tough, wary work for the watch-dogs, Cicada pondered. That same evening he was walking in the streets, when a voice, Visconti's, muttered alongside him:--

'Good Patch, hast been loyal so far to thy bargain. Hold to it for thy soul's sake. There are adders in Milan.' Then he bent closer, and whispered: 'A word in thy ear: is the ring found yet?'

The Fool's hard features did not twitch. He shook his head.

'Marry, sir,' answered he, as low, 'the mud is as close a confidant as I. I have not heard of its blabbing.'

'So much the better,' murmured the other, and glided away. But he left Cicada thinking.

'It was not for them, then, the conspirators, that Narcisso stole it. And yet he stole it--that I'll be sworn. For whom? Why, for Monna Beatrice. For why? Why, for a purpose that I'll circumvent--when I guess it. A passenger going by cursed him under his breath. The oath, profound and heartfelt, was really a psychologic note in the context of this history. Cicada heard it, and, looking round, saw, to his amazement, the form of the very monster of his present deliberations.

Narcisso, the rancorous mongrel, having snarled his hatred of an old associate, who, he verily believed, had once betrayed him, slouched, with a heavier vindictiveness, on his way. The Fool, inspired, skipped into cover, and peeped. He knew that the coward creature, once secure of his distance, would turn round to sputter and glower. He was not wrong there, nor in his surmise that, finding him vanished, Narcisso would continue his road in reassurance of his fancied security. He saw him actually turn and glare; distinguished, as plainly as though he heard it, the villainous oath with which the monster flounced again to his gait. And then, very cautiously, he came out of his hiding, and slunk in pursuit.

It could serve, at least, no bad purpose, he thought, to track the beast to his lair; and, with infinite circumspection, he set himself to the task.

It proved a simple one, after all--the more so as the animal, it appeared, was tenant in a very swarming warren, where concealment was easy. It was into a frowzy hole that, in the end, he saw him disappear--a tunnel, with a grating over it, like a sewer-trap.

And so, satisfied and not satisfied, he was turning away, when he was conscious in a moment of a face looking from the grating.

A minute later, threading his path along a by-alley, he emerged upon a sweeter province of the town, and stood to disburden himself of a mighty breath.

'So!' he muttered: 'He is there, is he! Well, the plot grows complicate.'

*CHAPTER XVII*

There was a quarter of Milan into which the new light penetrated with some odd uncalculated effects. It was called, picturesquely enough, 'The Vineyard,' and as such certainly produced a great quantity of full-blooded fruit. Vines that batten on carrion grow fat; and here was the mature product of a soil so enriched. There was no disputing its appetising quality. That derived from the procreant old days of paganism, before the germ of the first headache had flown out of Pandora's box into a bung-hole. 'The Vineyard's' body yet owed to tradition, if centuries of adulteration had demoralised its spirit. Still, altogether, it was faithfuller of the soil, self-consciously nearer to the old Nature, than was ever the extrinsic Guelph or Ghibelline that had usurped its kingdom. Wherefore, it seemed, it had elected to construe this new reactionism, this _redintegratio amoris_, this sudden much-acclaiming of Nature, into a special vindication of itself, its tastes, methods and appetites, as representing the fundamental truth of things; and, _ex consequenti_, to appropriate Messer Bembo for its own particular champion and apologist.

Alas, poor Parablist! There is always that awakening for an enlightened agitator in any democratic mission. Does he look for some comprehension by the Demos of the necessity of _radical_ reform, his eyes will be painfully opened. The pruning, by its leave, shall never be among the suckers down by the root, but always among the lordly blossoms. Shall Spartacus once venture openly to stoop with his knife, he shall lose at a blow the popular suffrage. At a later date, Robespierre, who was not enlightened, had to subscribe to the misapplication of his own reforms, or be crushed by the demon he had raised. Here in Milan, 'The Vineyard' was the first to renounce its champion, when once it found itself to be intimately included in that champion's neo-Christianising scheme.

Alas, poor Parablist! Not Reason but Fanaticism is the convincing reformer! the bigot, not the saint, the effective drover of men.

In the meanwhile 'The Vineyard' swaggered and held itself a thought more brazenly than heretofore, on the strength of its visionary election. Always a clamorous rookery, one might have fancied at this time a certain increase in the boisterous obscenity of its note, as that might presage the fulfilment of some plan for its breaking out, and planting itself in new black colonies all over the city. But as certainly, if this were so, its illusionment was a very may-fly's dance.

Now as, on a noon of this late Autumn, we are brought to penetrate its intricacies, a certain symbolic fitness in its title may or may not occur to us. Supposing that it does, we will accept this Via Maladizione where we stand, this gorge of narrow high-flung tenements, looped between with festoons of glowing rags, for the supports and dead trailers of a gathered vintage. Below, the vats are full to brimming, and the merchants of life and death forgathered in the markets. Half-way down the street a little degraded church suddenly spouts a friar, who, punch-like, hammers out on the steps his rendering of the new nature, which is to remember its cash obligations to Christ, and so vanishes again in a clap of the door. A barber, shaving a customer in the open street, gapes and misses his stroke, thereby adding a trickle to the sum of the red harvest. Mendicants pause and grin; oaths rise and buzz on all sides, like dung-flies momentarily disturbed. And predominant throughout, the vintagers, the true natives of the soil, swarm and lounge and discuss, under a rent canopy, the chances of the season and its likely profits.

Ivory and nut-brown are they all, these vintagers, with cheeks like burning leaves, and hair blue-black as grape-clusters, and eloquent animal eyes, and, in the women, copious bosoms half-veiled in tatters, like gourds swelling under dead foliage. But the milk that plumps these gourds is still of the primeval quality. Tessa's passions are of the ancient dimensions, if her religion is of to-day. Her assault and surrender borrow nothing from convention. No billing and rhyming for her, with canzonarists and madrigalists under the lemon trees, in the days when the awnings are hung over to keep the young fruit from scorching; but rough pursuit, rather, and capture and fulfilment--all uncompromising. She is here to eat and drink and love, to enjoy and still propagate the fruits of her natural appetites. She does not, like Rosamonda, brush her teeth with crushed pearls; she whets and whitens them on a bone. She does not powder her hair with gold dust; the sun bronzes it for her to the scalp. No spikenard and ambergris make her rags, or perfumed water her body, fragrant for her master's mouthing. Yet is she desirable, and to know her is to taste something of the sweetness of the apple that wrought the first discord. She is still a child of Nature, though Messer Bembo's creed surpasses her best understanding. She loves burnt almonds and barley-sugar, and crunches them joyously whenever some public festival gives her the chance; but the instincts of order and self-control are long vanished from the category of her qualities, and she survives as she is more by virtue of her enforced than her voluntary abstinences. For the rest, civilisation--the civilisation that always encompasses without touching, without even understanding her--has made her morals a terror, and the morals of most of her comrades, male or female, of 'The Vineyard.'

It is, in fact, the sink of Milan, is this vineyard--a very low quarter indeed; and, it is to be feared, other red juice than grapes' swells the profits from its vats. Here are to be found, and engaged, a rich selection of the tagliacantoni, the hired bravos who kill on a sliding scale of absolution, with fancy terms for the murder which allows no time for an act of contrition. Here the soldier of fortune, who has gambled away, with his sword and body-armour, the chances of an engagement to cut throats honestly, festers for a midnight job, and countersigns with every vein he opens his own compact with the devil. Here the oligarchy of beggars has its headquarters, and composes its budgets of social taxation; and here, finally, in the particular den of one Narcisso, desperado and ladrone, hides and shivers Messer Tassino, once a Duchess's favourite.

He does not know why he is hidden here, or for what purpose Messer Ludovico beguiled and threatened him from the more sympathetic custody of his friend Jacopo, to deposit him in this foul burrow. But he feels himself in the grip of unknown forces, and he fears and shivers greatly. He is always shivering and snuffling is Messer Tassino; whining out, too, in rebellious moods, his pitiful resentments and hatreds. His little garish orbit is in its winter, and he cries vainly for the sun that had seemed once to claim him to her own warmth and greatness. He has heard of himself as renounced by her, condemned, and committed, on his detested rival's warrant, to judgment by default. Yet, though it be to save his mean skin, he cannot muster the moral courage to come forth and right the wrong he has done. That, he knows, would spell his last divorce from privilege; and he has not yet learned to despair. He had been so petted and caressed, and--and there are no lusty babies to be gathered from Messer Bembo's eyes. At least, he believes and hopes not; and, in the meanwhile, he will lie close, and await developments a little longer.

Perhaps, after all, there is knowledge if little choice in his decision. He may be justified, of his experience, in being sceptical of the disinterestedness of spiritual emotionalism, or at least of the feminine capacity for accepting its appeal disinterestedly. But of this he is quite sure--that sanctity itself shall not propitiate, by mere virtue of its incorruptibility, the woman it has scorned; and, in that certainty, and by reason of that experience, he nurses the hope of still profiting by the revulsion of feeling which he foresees will occur in a certain high lady as a consequence of her rebuff.

Still, however that may chance, he finds his present state intolerable. It is not so much its dull and filthy circumstance that appals him, though that is noxious enough to a boudoir exquisite; it is the shadow of Messer Ludovico's purpose, shapeless, indistinct, eternally conning him from the dark corners of his imagination, which takes the knees out of his soul. Is he really his friend and patron, as he professes to be? He recalls, with a sick shudder, how once, when in the full-flood of his arrogance, he had dared to keep that smooth and accommodating prince waiting in an ante-room while he had his hair dressed. He, Tassino, the fungus of a night, had ventured to do this! What a fool he had been; yet how worse than his own folly is the dissimulation which can ignore for present profit so unforgettable an insult! It is not forgotten; it cannot be; yet, to all appearances, Ludovico now visits him, on the rare occasions when he does so, with the sole object of informing him, sympathetically, of the progress of Bona's new infatuation. Why? He has not the wit to fathom. Only he has not so much faith in this disinterestedness as in the probability of its being a blind to some deadly policy.

How he hates them all--the Duchess, the Prince, the whole world of courtly rascals who have flattered him out of his obscurity only to play with and destroy him! If he can once escape from this trap, he will show them he can bite their heels yet. But what hope is there of escaping while Ludovico holds the secret of the spring? Day after day finds him gnawing the bars, and whimpering out his spite and impotence.

He has not failed, of course, to question his landlord Narcisso, or to weep over the futile result. Even if the little wretch's tact and wit were less negligible quantities, there is that of crafty doggedness in his gaoler to baffle the shrewdest questioner. Deciding that the man is in the paid confidence of the 'forces,' Tassino soon desists from attempting to draw him, and vents on him instead his whole soul of vengeful and disappointed spite.

Narcisso, for his part, offers himself quite submissively to the comedy; waits on him with a sniggering deference; stands while he eats; brings water, none the most fragrant, for him to dip his fingers in afterwards; dresses his hair with a broken comb, and takes his own dressing for pulling it with a grinning impassivity; lends, in short, his huge carcass in every way to be the other's butt and footstool. This exercise in overbearance is a certain relief to the prisoner; but, for all the rest, his time hangs deadlily on his hands. There are no restrictions placed upon him. He is free to come and go--as he dares. His terror is held his sufficient gaoler, and it suffices. He never, in fact, puts his nose outside the door, but contents himself, like the waspish little eremite he has become, with criticising and cursing from his solitary grille the limbs and lungs and life of the f[oe]tid world in which his later fortunes seem cast. So much for Messer Tassino!

One particular night saw him cowering before the caldano, or little domestic brazier, which must serve his present need in lieu of hotter memories; for the season was chilling rapidly, and what freshness had ever been in him was long since starved out. He was grown a little grimy and unkempt in these days, and his clothes were stale. The room in which he sat was, in its meanness and squalor, quite typically Vineyardish. Its furniture was of the least and rudest; it had not so much as a solitary cupboard to hold a skeleton; it was as naked to inspection as honesty. That was its owner's way. Narcisso was a very Dacoit in carrying all his simple harness on and about him. He cut his throats and his meat impartially with the same knife; or toasted, as he was doing now, slices of Bologna sausage on its point. His abortive scrap of a face puckered humorously, as the other, drawing his cloak tighter about him, damned the pitiful dimensions of their hearth.

'I would not curse the fire for its smallness, Messer,' he said. 'Wilt need all thy breath some day for blowing out a furnace.'

Tassino wriggled and snarled:--

'May'st think so, beast; but I know myself damned as an unbaptized one, to no lower than the first circle of our Father Dante.'

'Wert thou not baptized?'

'Do I not say so? And, therefore, lacking that grace, exonerated.'

'What's that?'

'Not responsible for my acts, pig.'

'Who says so?'

'Dante.'

'Who's he? Has a' been there? I would not believe him. What doth a' say o' me?'

'_You_? That you shall choke for all eternity in a river of blood.'

'Anan!' said Narcisso, and blew, scowling, on his sausage, which had become ignited. 'That's neither sense nor justice, master. I kill by the decalogue, I do. Did I ever put out a man's eyes for sport?'

'It's no matter,' answered Tassino. 'Thou wert baptized.'

'What will they do to thee?'

'I shall be forbidden the Almighty's countenance, no more--punishment enough, of course, for a person of taste; but I must e'en make shift to do without.'

'It's not fair,' growled Narcisso. 'I had no hand in my own christening. Do without? Narry penalty in doing without what you've never asked nor wanted.'

A figure that had stolen noiselessly into the room as they spoke, and was standing watching, with its cloak caught to its face, sniggered, literally, in its sleeve.

Tassino snapped rebelliously at the knife point, and began to eat without ceremony.

'Punishment enough,' he whined, 'if it means such a life in death as this.'

He sobbed and munched, quarrelling with his meat.

'How canst thou understand! The foul fiend betray him who condemned me to it! That saint; O, that saint! If I could only once trip _his_ soul by the heels!'

'No need, my poor Tassino,' murmured a sympathetic voice; 'indeed, I think, there is no need.'

The prisoner staggered from his stool, and stood shaking and gulping.

'Messer Ludovico!' he gasped. 'How----'

'By the door, my child--plainly, by the door,' interrupted the Prince smoothly. And then he smiled: 'Alas! thou hast no ante-room here for the scotching of undesirable suitors.'

The terrified creature had not a word to say. One could almost hear his fat heart thumping.

Ludovico, lowering his cloak a little, made an acrid face. The room offended his particular nostrils: its atmosphere was nothing less than sticky. But, reflecting on the choice moral of it, he looked at the little tarnished clinquant before him, and was content to endure. He even affected a pleasant envy.

'This is worth all the glamour of courts,' he said, waving his hand comprehensively. 'To eat, or lie down; to go in or out as thou will'st. Never to know that suspicion of thine own shadow on the wall. To waste no words in empty phrases, nor need the wealth to waste on empty show. What a rich atmosphere hath this untroubled, irresponsible freedom; it is a very meal of itself! I would I could say, For ever rest and grow fat thereon; but, alas! I bring discomforting news. My poor Tassino. I fear the fortress at last shows signs of yielding.'

The little wretch opposite him whimpered as if at a whip-cut.

'Is it so indeed? Then, Messer Ludovico, it is a foul shame of her. She hath betrayed me--may God requite her!' He snivelled like a grieved child; then, on a sudden thought, looked up, with a child's cunning. 'At least in that case I shall be forgotten. There can be no object in my hiding here longer.'

The Prince lifted his eyebrows, with an inward-drawn whistle.

'Object? Object?' he protested, acting amazement. 'But more than ever, my poor simpleton. Thy case is double-damned thereby. Think you the other would rest on the thought of a rival, and such a rival, at large? Thy very existence would be a menace to his guilty peace. I come, indeed, as a friend to warn thee. Lie close; stir not out; the very air hath knives. Be cautious, even of thy shadow on the wall, of thy hand in the dish.'

He said it calmly and distinctly, looking towards Narcisso, who all this time had stood hunched in the background, his dull brain struggling bewildered in a maze. But the urgency of this innuendo penetrated even him; the more so when he saw Tassino leap and fling himself on his knees at the Prince's feet.

'What do you mean?' shrieked the young man. 'Is _he_ in their pay? O Messer, save me! don't let me be poisoned.'

He pawed and grovelled, looking madly over his shoulder. Ludovico laughed gently, disregarding him.

'Nay, I know not,' he cooed. 'It is a dog that serves more masters than one.'

Narcisso slouched forward, and ducked a sort of obeisance between sullen and deferential.

'What's to-do?' he growled. 'I serve my patron, Messer Duke's son, like an honest man. What call, I say, to warn 'en of me? Do I not earn my wages fairly?'

'Scarcely, fellow,' murmured Ludovico--'unless to betray thine employer be fair.'

Narcisso scowled and lowered.

'Betray!' he protested, but uneasily. 'That is a charge to be proved, Messer.'

Ludovico suddenly leapt to a blaze.

'Dog! Wouldst bandy with me, dog? Beware, I say! Who blabbed my secrets to the lady of Casa Caprona?'

He was himself again with the cry. His faculty of instant self-control was a thing quite fearful. Narcisso cowered before him; shrunk under the playful wagging of his finger.

'Messer--in the Lord's name!' he could only stammer--'Messer!'

'O thou fond knave!' complained the Prince, showing his teeth in a smile; 'to think to play that double game, one patron against another, and stake thine empty wits against the reckoning! Well, thou art confessed and damned.' He drew back a pace. 'But one word more,' he said, raising his voice. 'What hast thou to plead that I call not up those that will silence for ever thy false, treacherous tongue?'

He stood by the door. It was a very reasonable inference that he had not ventured into such a quarter unattended. Narcisso stood gasping and intertwining his thick fingers, but he could find no words.

'What!' smiled Ludovico; 'no excuse, no explanation? No answer of any kind? Shall I call, then?' He seemed to hesitate. 'Yet perhaps one loop-hole, though undeserved, I'll lease thee on condition.' He moved again forward a little, and spoke in a lower tone: 'There's news wanted of a certain stolen ring. Dog! do I not know who thieved it, and for whom? Now shalt thou undertake to go yet once again, and, robbing the receiver, bring the spoil to me--or be damned here and now for thy villainy.'

He thought he had netted at last the quarry of his long, patient stalking; but for once his confidence was at fault. Watching intently for the effect of his words, he grew conscious of some change transfiguring, out of terror and astonishment, the face of his victim. Foul, ignoble, animal beyond redemption as that was in all its features, its swinish eyes could yet extract and emit, it seemed, from the thin, dead ashes of some ancient fire, a stubborn spark of self-renunciation. He could read it in them unmistakably. The man stood straight before him, for the first and only time in his life, a hero.

Ludovico gazed in silence. He found, to do him the right justice, this psychic revelation of acuter interest to him than his own defeat foreseen in the light of it. But Tassino's subdued whimpering jarred him out of his abstraction.

'Well, is it agreed?' he asked with a sigh. For the moment he almost shrunk in the apprehension of an affirmative reply.

The rogue drew himself suddenly together.

'Call, Messer,' he said. 'That is my answer.'

His chin dropped on his breast. Tassino uttered a cry, and hid his face in his hands. Not a word or apparent movement followed; but when, goaded by the fearful stillness, the two dared to look up once more, they found themselves alone.

Then, at that, Tassino shrieked and sprang to the grille.

'My God!' he sobbed; 'he has gone, and left me to my fate!'

He moved to escape by the door, but Narcisso caught and wrenched him back.

'What ails the fool!' he protested in his teeth. 'My orders be to keep, not kill thee, man!'

Messer Ludovico, walking enveloped within a little cloud of his adherents, smiled to himself on his way back to the palace.

'The fascination of the serpent,' mused he, shaking his head--'the fascination of the serpent! How could that crude organism be expected to resist the arts of our Lamia, when I myself could fall near swooning to them? Hath he betrayed me to others? I think not; yet it were well to have him silenced betimes. The weakness was to threaten where I dared not yet perform. Yet it may chance, after all, he shall come to be prevailed on for the ring.'

'The ring!' he muttered, as he climbed presently to his chamber--'the ring! I think it comes to zone the world in my imagination!'

As he was passing through the ante-room to his private closet, a draped and voiceless figure moved suddenly out of the shadows to accost him. He gave the faintest start, then offered his hand, and, without a word, ushered this strange ghost into his sanctum. The portiere swung back, the door clanged upon them, and there on the threshold he dwelt, looking with a silent, smiling inquisition into the eyes of his visitor.

Hast thou ever seen the dead, leafy surface of a woodland pool stir, scarce perceptibly, to the movement of some secret thing below? So, as Beatrice stood like a statue before the Prince, did the soul of her reveal itself to him, writhing somewhere under the surface of that still mask.

Then suddenly, swiftly, passionately, she thrust out a hand.

'There is the ring,' she said. 'Do what you will with it.'

*CHAPTER XVIII*

That same evening had witnessed, in the dower Casa Caprona, the abortive finish to a venture long contemplated by its mistress, and at length, in a moment of desperation, dared. She had wrought herself, or been wrought at this last, into privately communicating to the little Saint Magistrate of Milan, how she had certain information where the ring lay, which if he would learn, he must follow the messenger to her house. She had claimed his utmost confidence and secrecy, and, on that understanding alone, had procured herself an interview. And Bernardo had come, and he had gone--how, her tumbled hair, her self-bruised bosom, her abandonment to the utter shame and fury of her defeat, were eloquent witnesses.

She had not been able to realise her own impotence to disarm an antagonist already half-demoralised, as she believed this one to be. For, before ever she had precipitated this end, gossip had been busy whispering to her how the saint was beginning to melt in the sun of adulation, to confess the man in the angel, to inform with a more than filial devotion his attitude towards Bona. To have to cherish yet hate that thought had been her torture; to anticipate its consummation her frenzy. She had known him first; he was hers by right. Long wasting in the passion of her desire, she had conceived of its fruition a savour out of all proportion with her experiences. She must conquer him or die. He was hers, not Bona's.

She had disciplined herself, in order to propitiate his prejudices, into the enduring of a decent period of retirement. It must end at last. She never knew when Ludovico might exact from her that security, held by her conditionally only, against her ruin by him. For the present indeed she retained the ring, but any moment might see it claimed from her. Now, if she could only once lure, and overcome by its means, the object of her passion, the question of its restoration to, or use by another against, its owner, must necessarily cease of being an acute one with either her or Bernardo.

With him, at least--with him, at least. And as for herself?

Turning where she lay, she had seen her own insolent smile reflected from a mirror.

'He said,' she had whispered, pondering some words of Ludovico's, '_More impossible things might happen_.'

Then, taking the ring from her bosom, and apostrophising its green sparkle softly:--

'A little star--a little bribe, to win me both love and a throne!' she had said, and so had sunk back, closing her eyes, and murmuring:--

'Let it only prove its power here, and it and the heads of that conspiracy shall be all Ludovico's. He will not claim the latter, I think, until their purpose is accomplished. And then----'

And then Messer Ludovico himself had been announced. He visited her not infrequently in these days, though never, it seemed, with any purpose of foreclosing on that little mortgage of the ring. He came in the fashion of a confidential gossip, to enlighten her as to the doings of the world outside. They were very pleasant and intimate together, with a hint, no more, of closer relations to come. The lion rolled in a silken net, and affected his subjugation, as the lady affected not to notice the stealthy claws of her capture. It was a pretty little comedy, which engaged the sympathies of both, each according to its temperament. But it ended in tragedy.

Ludovico had, indeed, no interest in dissuading his beautiful gossip's mind from its tormenting suspicions as to the Messer Saint's gradual corruption by Bona; a scandal to which, no doubt--the wish in him being father to the thought--he himself gave ready credence. The report suited him in every way, both as to his policy and its instruments; and he only awaited its certain substantiation to let fly the bolt which was to involve three fortunes in one ruin--under warrant of the ring, if possible, but timely in any event.

And in the meanwhile it afforded him, whether from jealousy or pure love of mischief, some wicked gratification to nip and sting this already tormented lady in sensitive places, and to do it all under an affectation of the softest sympathy.

Yet, while for his own purpose he hugged and fostered the slander, whose growth and justification he most desired, the slander itself, for some inexplicable reason, did not grow, but even began to exhibit signs, for a time almost imperceptible, of attenuating. Ludovico could not acknowledge this fact to himself, or even consider it. It is difficult, no doubt, while we are calculating our probable gains, to admit the possibility of a blight in the harvest of our hopes. A fervid prospect blinds us to the road between; and this prince, for all his far-seeing, because of it rather, may have been less open to immediate impressions than some others about him.

Yet to souls less acute, there _were_ the signs: the first little shadow of a smut on the ear--a hitch, just the faintest, in the ecstatic programme of Nature. Was it that Tassino, the mean worldling, was a true prophet of his parts, and that the reaction from a starved continence was already actually threatening? Whispers there certainly were of a growing impatience of restrictions in the castello; of schisms from the pure creed of its little priest; of hankerings, even on the part of the highest, after the old fleshpots. They rose, and died down, and rose again. There was no melting a certain snow-child, it was said, into anything but ice water. The Duchess, who had somehow expected to gather flowers from frost, went about white and smiling, and chafing her hands as if they were numb. She had once stopped before a new young courtier, who bore some resemblance to a past favourite, and, while speaking to him kindly, had been seen to flush as though her cheeks had caught the sudden warmth of a distant fire. Madam Caterina, it was certain, waxing bold in impishness, had commisserated her mother on the bad cold she had caught. 'Madre mia,' she had said, 'you have wandered too much in the chill woods, and would be the better for a hot brick to your bed.'

For such tittle-tattle was this after season of the sowing responsible, when, against all expectations, tares began to appear amidst the crops. Messer Ludovico, for his part, would recognise no sinister note in the laughter. It was just the rocking and babbling of empty vessels. Its justification in fact would not have suited his book at all; and so he continued in confidence to plant his little shafts in madam's raw places.

Monna Cat'rina, he had told her on the occasion of this particular visit, had been very saucy to her mother the evening before, advising her, this cold weather, to make herself a coverlet of angel down. 'Whereat,' said he, 'Madam our Duchess slapped the chit's pink knuckles, answering, "Shall I wish him, then, to die of cold for me?" to which Catherine replied: "No; for to die of love is not to die of cold"'; and the other had blushed and laughed, and turned away.

And it had been this sting, thrust into the place of a long inflammation, which had finally goaded Beatrice into writing and sending her letter.

VENUS AND ADONIS

The days were beginning to darken early. It was the season when exotic flowers of passion luxuriate under glass, in that close coverture which is the very opposite to the law's understanding of the term.

Beatrice, like all tropical things, loved this time; basked in the glow of tapers; hugged her own warm sweetness in the confidence of a sanctuary for ever besieged by, and for ever impervious to, the forces of cold and gloom. To fancy herself the desired of night, unattainable through all its storming, was a commanding ecstasy. She liked to hear the hail on the roof, trampling and threshing for an opening, and flinging away baffled. The muffled slam of the thunder was her lullaby; while the candles shivered in it, she closed her eyes and dreamed. The thought of wrenched clouds, of crying human shapes, of torn beasts and birds sobbing and circling without the closed curtains of her shrine, served her imagination like a hymn. She measured her content against the strength of such hopeless appeals, like a very nun of incontinence, shut from the rigour of the world within the scented oratory of her own worship. She was Venus Anno Domini, the Paphian goddess yet undethroned, and yet justified of her influence over man and Nature.

'_About her carven palace walls a thousand blossoming lilies
brake;_
_Within, a thousand years of love had wrought, for utter
beauty's sake,_
_Triumphs of art for her blue eyes, and for her feet rich
stained floors,_
_And ever in her ears sweet moan of music down dim corridors?_