Chapter IX: Part 9

He turned sharply to the sound of its thud, and gave a quick little stoop and start, as if he were dodging something. The face--that haunting, indefinable ghost--was it behind him again, unlayed, in spite of all the hope and promise? Why not, since its exorcist had proved himself a Judas?

He ground his teeth, and moved on, muttering and maddening. Only yesterday he had been flattering himself with the thought of returning to his capital wreathed in all the glamour of conquest. And now! False fire--false, damning fire. What victor was he, who could not command himself? What vicegerent of the All-seeing, who could nominate a traitor and hypocrite to be his proxy? And he had so believed in the accursed boy!

The prophecy of the monk Capello stuck like a poisonous burr in his soul. He could not shake it off. Now, he remembered, was the near season for its maturing--a superstition aggravated tenfold by the thought that its ripening had been let to prosper in the sun of his own credulous trust. And he could not temporise while the moment struck and passed, for his fate turned upon the moment. Moreover, Christmas was at hand, a time dear to the traditions of his house; and, rightly or mistakenly, he believed that upon a maintenance of those traditions depended his house's prevalence. His acts must continue to compare royally, in seasonable largesse and bounty, with those of Francesco, its yet adored founder; and he could not afford to ignore those obligations. He felt himself trapped, and turning, turning, between the devil and the deep sea.

But he was not without a sort of desperado courage; and fury lent him nerve.

'Lead on, lead on, Castellano,' he snarled, grinning like a wolf. 'The calf by now should be in train for his blooding.'

They found him stalled deep among the foundations of the fortress, in a stone chamber whose kiln-like conformation shaped itself horribly to the needs and privacies of the 'question.' He might, this Tassino, have been a calf indeed, by the deadly pallor of his flesh. From the moment when, still in the glow of his send-off, he had dared, producing his _piece de conviction_ before the Duke, to incriminate Bona on its evidence, and had been gripped by the neck for his pains, and flung, squealing like a rat, into this sewer, it had never warmed by a degree from this livid hue. Sickened, rather, since here, dreadfully interned throughout the day, like a schoolboy locked in with an impossible imposition, he had been left to writhe and moan, in awful anticipation of the coming inquisition and its likely consequences to himself. They were prefigured for him, in order to the sharp-setting of his wits, in a score or so instruments, all slack and somnolent and unstrung for the time being, but suggestive of hideous potentialities in their tautening. The rack riveted to the floor; the pulley pendent from the ceiling; the stocks in the corner, with the chafing-dish, primed with knobs of charcoal, ready at its foot-holes; the escalero or chevalet, which was a trough for strangling recalcitrant hogs in, limb by limb; the iron dice for forcing into the heels, and the canes for twisting and breaking the fingers; the water-bag and the thumbscrew and the fanged pincers--such, and such in twenty variations of hook and stirrup and dangling monstrosities of block and steel, but all pointing a common moral of terrific human pain, where the inducements to a calmly thought-out self-exculpation which had been offered to Tassino's solitary consideration. No wonder that, when at last the key turned and the harsh door creaked to admit his inquisitors, he should have screamed out with the mortal scream of a creature that finds itself cut off from escape in a burning house.

The Castellan struck him, judicially, across the mouth, and he was silent immediately, falling on his knees and softly chattering bloody teeth. Galeazzo, rubbing his chin, conned him at his smiling leisure; while, motionless and apathetic in the opening of the door, stood a couple of dark, aproned figures, one a Nubian.

'Ebbene, Messer Tassino,' purred the Duke at length; 'has reconsideration found your indictment open to some revision? Rise, sir--rise.'

He waved his hand loftily. The wretch, after a vain attempt or two, succeeded in getting to his feet, on which he stood like a man palsied. He essayed the while to answer; but somehow his tongue was at odds with his palate.

The Duke, watching him, stealthily lifted his left hand, showing a green stone on one of its fingers.

'Mark ye that?' said he, smiling.

The other's lips moved inaudibly; his glittering eyes were fixed upon the token.

'Say again,' said Galeazzo, 'who charged ye with it to this errand?'

The poor animal mumbled.

'Now hist, now hist, my lord's Grace,' put in the Castellan, the light in his solitary eye travelling like a spark in dead tinder: 'there's an emetic or so here would assist the creature's delivery.'

Tassino gulped and found his voice--or a mockery of it:--

'My lord--spare me--'twas Caprona's widow.'

'And for what purpose?'

The fool, lost in terror, garbled his lesson.

'To destroy the Duchess, whom she hates. I know not: 'twas Messer Ludovic made himself her agent to me.'

'Ho!' cried the Duke, and the monosyllable rolled up and round under the roof, and was returned upon him. 'Here's addition, not subtraction. What more?'

Advancing, with set grinning lips, he thumbed the victim's arm, as he might be a market-wife testing a fowl.

'Plump, plump,' he said, turning his head about. 'Shall we not singe the fat capon, Messer Castellan, before trussing him for the spit?'

At a sign, the two butchers at the door advanced and seized their victim. He struggled desperately in their grasp. Shriek upon shriek issued from his lips. Galeazzo thundered down his cries:--

'Lay him out,' he roared, 'and bare his ribs.'

In a moment Tassino was stretched in the rack, an operator, head and heel, gripping at the spokes of the drums. The Duke came and stood above, contemplative again now, and ingratiatory.

'So!' he said; 'we are in train, at last, for the truth. Tassino, my poor boy, who indeed sent you with this ring to me?'

'O Messer! before God! It was your brother.'

'And acting for whom?'

'The lady, Beatrice.'

'Who had been given it by?'

'Messer Bembo.'

'Ay: and he had received it from----?'

The poor wretch choked, and was silent. Galeazzo glanced aside: the winches creaked.

'Mercy, in God's name! Mercy!' shrieked the miserable creature. 'I will swear that it was won from her Grace by fraud--that she never knowingly parted with it to--to----'

'Ha!' struck in the Duke; and drew himself up, and pondered awhile blackly.

'My brother--my brother,' ran his thought. 'It may be; it may well be. To ruin her in mine eyes--yes: a fond fool. But a loyal fool. She'd not conspire--not she; nor Simonetta, loyal too--who mistrusts him, and whom he 'd drag down with her. What, Ludovic!--too crafty, too overreaching. Yet, conspiracy there may be, and she its unconscious tool.'

He looked down again, glooming, grating his chin.

'Here's some revision, then. Thou whelp, so to have bitten the hand that stroked thee! Shall I not draw thy teeth for it?'

'Pity, pity!' moaned Tassino. 'I spoke under compulsion.'

'And so shall,' snarled the other. 'What! To mend a slander on compulsion! More physic may bring more cure. Perchance hast made this Countess too thy cats-paw?'

'My lord! No! On my soul!'

'She hates the Duchess?'

'Yes, poisonously.'

'Why?'

'My lord!'

'Why, I say?'

'Alas! she covets for herself what the Duchess claims to heaven.'

'Riddles, swine! Covets! What or whom?'

'O, O! Your Grace's false deputy, Messer Bembo.'

'What! false? You'll stick to it?'

'How can I help?--O! dread my lord, how can I help the truth, unless you 'd wrench from me a travesty of it?'

His breast heaved and sobbed. The tyrant gloomed upon him.

'Is it true, then, he's a traitor?'

'O, the blackest--the most subtle! There can I utter without prompting.'

It was true that he believed he could. Remember how, mongrel though he was, his mind had been fed on slander of our saint.

Galeazzo dropped into a moody reverie. A long quivering sigh thereat broke from his prostrate victim. Mean wits are cunning for themselves; and, looking up into the dark eyes bent above him, Tassino thought he saw reflected there a first faint ghost of hope. O, to hold, to materialise it! He must be infinitely cautious.

He moaned, and wagged his head. The Duke broke out again:--

'False! is he false to me? And yet my wife is true, thou sayest? and yet this woman of Caprona's jealous, thou sayest? Of whom?--O, dog, beware!'

'Master, of a shadow. She reads the woman's baseness in the man's.'

'Ho! Not like thou: what, puppy?'

'Before God, no. 'Tis Madonna's very innocence helps his designs.'

'How?'

'By trusting in, and exalting them for heaven's. She'll wake when it's too late, and weep and curse herself for having betrayed thee.'

'She will? Betray? Too late? These be terms meeter to a rebellion than a schism.'

'Yet must I speak them, weeping, though I die.'

The despot gnawed his lip.

'Hast venom in thee, and with reason, to sting the boy?'

'Alas! to warn thee rather from his fang.'

'Ha!'

'It will lie flat against his palate, till the time when with his subtle eyes he shall invite thy hand to stroke his head. No rebellion, lord; no python rearing on his crushing folds. Yet may the little snake be deadlier.'

He was gathering confidence hair by hair. There were glints of coming tempest, well known to him, blooding the corners of Galeazzo's eyes. He believed, by them, that he should presently ride this storm of his own evoking.

'Ah!' he moaned, 'I'm sick. Mercy, lord! Truth 's not itself unless upright.'

The tyrant tossed his hand:--

'Set the dog on his legs.'

The dog so far justified his title that, being released, he crawled abject on all fours to his master's feet, and crouched there ready to lick them.

'Bah!' cried the Duke, and spurned him. 'Get on thy hind legs, ape! The rope's but slackened from thy hanging; the noose yet cuddles to thy neck. Stand'st there to justify thyself, or answer with a separate rack and screw for every lie thou 'st uttered.'

He strode a pace or two like one demented; turned, snarled out a sudden shocking laugh, and came close up again to the trembling, but still confident wretch.

'See, we'll be reasonable,' he said, mockingly insinuative; 'a twin amity of dialecticians, ardent for the truth, cooing like love-birds. "Well, on my faith, he's a traitor," says you; and "your faith shall be mine on vindication, sweet brother," says I. Now, what proves him traitor? I ask.'

'He rules the palace.'

'Why, I set him in my place.'

'You did indeed; but--ah! dare I say what's whispered?'

'You 'd better.'

'Why--O, mercy! Bid me not.'

'I'll not ask again.'

'You force me to it--that, being there, he designs to stay.'

'He'll be Duke?'

'No, no.'

'You shall wince with better reason. Dog, you dog my patience. I'll turn. What then?'

'Only that he sits for Christ. Let them depose him that are devils' men.'

'My men?'

'O! he's subtle. No word against your Grace; only the dumb pleas of love and pity courting comparison.'

'With what?'

'Your Grace's sharper methods.'

'Beast! Did I not waive them for his sake? Did I not leave my conscience in his keeping?'

'Alas! if thou didst, he's used it, like a false friend, in damning evidence against thee.'

'O Judas!'

'Used it to point the moral of his own large tolerance. The people rise to him--cry him in the streets: "Down with Galeazzo! Nature's our God!"'

'Ha! He's Nature?'

'As they read him--lord of the slums.'

'Lord of filthy swine. I'll ring their snouts. Well, goon. God of the slums, is he?'

'God of thy palace, too; mends and amends thy laws--sugars them for sweet palates--gains the women--O, a prince of confectioners! There's the ring to prove.'

'What!'

'I can guess when he wheedled it.'

'Thou canst?'

'The moment thy back was turned. So quick he sped to discredit thee--to reverse thy judgments. The monk thou'd left to starve, a dog well-served--he'd release him, a fine text to open on. But Jacopo was obdurate--would not let him pass, neither him nor Cicada----'

'What! the Fool?'

'O, they're in one conspiracy--inseparable. He's to be Vizier some day.'

'I'll remember that.'

'So he ran off, and presently returned with a pass-token. I guessed not what at the time; now I guess. It was the ring he'd coaxed from Madonna.'

'And saved the monk thereby?'

'Ah-ha! Jacopo had forestalled him; the monk was dead.'

'What did he then?'

'Cursed thy lord's Grace, and ran; ran and hid himself away among the people, he and his Fool, and spat his poison in that sewer, to fester and bear fruit. 'Twas only presently the Duchess heard of him, and persuaded him on sweet promise of amendment back to the Court. He's made the most of that concession since, using it to----'

He checked himself, and whimpered and sprang back. On the instant the storm which he had dreaded while provoking was burst upon him. Credulous and irrational like all tyrants, Galeazzo never thought to analyse interests and motives in any indictment whose pretext was devotion to himself and his safety. Wrapped in eternal unbelief in all men, no man was so easily arrested as he by the first hint of a plausible rogue professing to serve him, or so quick, being inoculated, to develop the very confluent scab of suspicion. It were well only for Autolycus to make the most of his fees during his little spell of favour, and to disappear on the earliest threat of himself falling victim to the disease he had promoted.

Now, for this dumb-struck quartette of knaves and butchers, was enacted one of those little _danses-diaboliques_ in which this fearful man was wont to vent his periodic frenzies. He shrieked and leapt and foamed, racing and twisting to and fro within the narrow confines of the dungeon. Ravings and blasphemies tore and sputtered from his lips; mad destruction issued at his hands. He spurned whatever blocked his path, things living or inanimate; nor seemed to feel or recognise how he bruised himself, but stumbled over, and snatched at, and hurled aside, all that crossed the red vision of his rage. Struggling for coherence, he could force his imprecations but by fits and snatches to rise articulate:--

'Subtle!--I'll be subtler--devil unmasked--no Future?--a specious dog--hell gapes in front--master of my own--to vindicate the monk?--treason against his lord--ha, ha! Jacopo! good servant! good refuter of a sacrilegious hound!'

Then all at once, quite suddenly as it had risen, the tempest passed. Slack, dribbling, hoarse, unashamed, he stopped beside his death-white informer and pawed and mouthed upon him:--

'Why, Tassino! Why--my little honest carver o' joints! Thou mean'st me well, I do believe.'

'O my lord!' cried the trembling rogue, 'if you would but trust me!'

'Why, so I do, Tassino,' urged the Duke, nervously handling and stroking the young man's arm. 'So I do, little pretty varlet. I believe thy story--fie! an impious tale. Deserv'st well of me for that boldness--good courage--the truth needs it. Wilt serve me yet?'

'My lord, to the death.'

'Fie, fie! Not so far, I hope. Yet, listen; 'twere meet this viper were not let to crawl himself within our laurels, and crown our triumph with a poisonous bite. Hey?'

'I understand your Grace.'

'A hint's enough, then. 'Tis no great matter; but these worms will sting.'

'I'll jog Jacopo.'

'You will? He's true to me?'

'O yes!'

'No convert to the other?'

'He hates him well.'

'Does he? A viper has no friends but his kind. This one--hark! a word in your ear. He 'd loose Capello, who damned me, and was damned? Were it not right then the false prophet should take the false prophet's place?'

'Most right.'

'The word's with thee, little chuck. How about the Fool?'

'As bad, or worse, my lord.'

'Hush! Two vipers, do you say?'

'My lord!'

'Be circumspect, that's all. 'Tis our will to give great largesse this Christmastide.'

'The very sound will jingle out his memory--bury the golden calf under gold.'

'Good, little rogue. We'll linger on the Mount meanwhile--just a day or so, to let the promise work. 'Twere a sleeveless triumph through a grudging city. Let these thorns be plucked first from our road.'

'I'll ride at once, saving your Grace.'

'Do so, and tell Jacopo, "Quietly, mind--without fuss."'

'Trust me.'

The Duke flicked his arm and turned, smiling, to the Castellan.

'You shall provide Messer Tassino,' said he smoothly, 'with his liberty, and a swift horse.'

A week later, Sforza the second of Milan set out for his Capital, in all the pomp and circumstance of state which befitted a mighty prince greatly homing after conquest. His path, by all the rules of glory, should have been a bright one; yet his laurels might have been Death's own, from the gloom they cast upon his brow. Last night, looking from his chamber window, he had seen a misty comet cast athwart that track: to-day, scarce had he started, when three ravens, rising from the rice-swamps, had come flapping with hoarse crow to cross it. He had thundered for an arbalest--loosed the quarrel--shot wide--spun the weapon to the ground. An inexplicable horror had seized him. Thenceforth he rode with bent head and glassy eyes fixed upon the crupper. The road of death ran before; behind sat the shadow of his fear, cutting him from retreat. So he reached the Porta Giovia, passed over the drawbridge, in silence dismounted, and for the first time looked up vaguely.

'Black, black!' he muttered to the page who held his horse. 'Let Mass be sung in it to-morrow, and for the chaunts be dirges. See to it.'

Did he hope so to hoodwink heaven, by abasing himself in the vestments of remorse? Likely enough. He had always been cunning to hold from it the worst of his confidence.

But in the thick of the night a voice came to him, blown upon the wind of dreams:--

'No Future, O, no Future! Look to thy Past!'

And he started up in terror, quavering aloud:--

'Who's that that being dead yet speaketh!'

*CHAPTER XXIII*

It is remarkable how quickly the brute genii will adapt himself to his pint bottle when once the cork is in. Elastic, it must be remembered, has the two properties of expansion and retraction, the latter being in corresponding proportion with the former. Wherefore, the greater its stretching capacity the more compact its compass unstretched.

So it is with life, which is elastic, and mostly lived at a tension. Relax that tension, and behold the buoyant temperament rinding roomier quarters in a straitened confinement than would ever a flaccid one in the same; and this in defiance of Bonnivard, that fettered Nimrod of the mountains, whose heart broke early in captivity, and who, nevertheless, as a matter of fact, did not exist.

The truth is, a pint pot is over-enough to contain the mind of many an honest vigorous fellow; and it is the mind, rather than the body, which struggles for elbow-room. Carlo, in his prison, suffered little from that mere mental horror of circumscription which, to a more sensitive soul, had been the infinite worst of his doom. He champed, and stamped, and raged, sure enough; cursed his fate, his impotence, his restrictions; but all from a cleaner standpoint than the nerves--from one (no credit to him for that) less constitutionally personal. That he should be shut from the possibility of helping in a sore pass the little friend of his love, of his faith, of his adoration--the pretty child who had needed, never so much as at this moment, the help and protection of his strong arm--here was the true madness of his condition. And he bore it hardly, while the fit possessed him, and until physical exhaustion made room for the little reserves of reason which all the time had been waiting on its collapse.

Then, suddenly, he became very quiet; an amenable, wicked, dangerous thing; fed greedily; nursed his muscles; spake his gaolers softly when they visited him; refrained from asking useless questions to elicit evasive answers; brooded by the hour together when alone. They treated him with every consideration; answered practically his demands for books, paper, pens and ink, wine--for all bodily ameliorations of his lot which he chose to suggest, short of the means to escape it. There, only, was there no concession--no response to the request of an insulted cavalier to be returned the weapons of his honour of which he had been basely mulcted. His fingers must serve his mouth, he was told, and his teeth his meat--they were sharp enough. At which he would grin, and click those white knives together, and return to his brooding.

But not, at last, for long. Very soon he was engaged in exploring his dungeon, a gloomy cellar, two-thirds of it below the level of the moat, and lit by a single window, deep-shafted under the massive ceiling. His search, at first, yielded him no returns but of impenetrable induracy--no variations, knock where he might, in the echoless irresponsiveness of dumb-thick walls. Only, with that incessant tap-tapping of his, the trouble in his brain fell into rhythm, chiming out eternally, monotonously, the inevitable answer to a fruitless question with which, from the outset, he had been tormenting himself, and from which, for all his sickness of its vanity, he could not escape.

'What hath Cicada done? Concluded me safely sped? Done nothing, therefore. What hath Cicada done? Concluded me safely sped? Done nothing, therefore.'

So, the villainy was working, and he in his dungeon powerless to counteract it.

He lived vividly through all these phases--of despair, of self-concentration, of resourceful hope--during the opening twenty-four hours of his confinement. And then, once upon a time, very suddenly, very softly, very remotely, there was borne in upon him the strange impression that he was not alone in his underworld.

The first shadow of this conviction came to haunt him during the second night of his imprisonment, when, having fallen asleep, there presently stole into his brain, out of a deep sub-consciousness of consciousness, the knowledge that some voice, extraneous to himself, was moaning and throbbing into his ear.

At the outset this voice appealed to him for nothing more than the emotional soft babble of a dream. It seemed to reach to him from a vast distance, breathing very faint, and thin, and sweet through aeons of pathetic memories. He could not identify or interpret it, save in so far as its burden always hinted of a wistful sadness. But, gradually, as the spell of it enwrapped and claimed him, out of its inarticulateness grew form, and out of that form recognition.

It was Bernardo singing to his lute. How could he not have known it, when here was the boy actually walking by his side? They trod a smiling meadow, sweet with narcissus and musical with runnels. The voice made ecstasy of the Spring; frisked in the blood of little goats; unlocked the sap of trees, so that they leapt into a spangled spray of blossoms.

A step--and the turf was dry beneath their feet. The sun smote down upon the plain; the grasshopper shrieked like a jet of fire; the full-uddered cattle lowed for evening and the shadowed stall.

Again, a step--and the leaves of the forest blew abroad like flakes of burning paper; the vines shed fruit like heavy drops of blood; the sky grew dark in front, rolling towards them a dun wall of fog--the music wailed and ceased.

He turned upon his comrade; and saw the lute swung aside, the pale lips yet trembling with their song. He knew the truth at once.

'We part here,' he murmured. 'Is it not? So swiftly run thy seasons. And you return to Spring; and I--O, I, go on! Whither, sweet angel? O, wilt thou not linger a little, that, reaching mine allotted end, I may hurry back to overtake thee?'

Then, clasping his hands in agony, the tears running down his cheeks, he saw how the boy bent to whisper in his ear--words of divine solace--nay, not words, but music--music, music all, of an unutterable pathos.

And he awoke, to hear the shrunk, inarticulate murmur of it still whispering to his heart.

He sat up, panting, in the deep blackness. His hands trembled; his face was actually wet. But the music had not ended with his dream. Grown very soft and far and remote, it yet went sounding on in fact--or was it only in fancy?

His still-drugged brain surged back into slumber on the thought. Instantly the voice began to take shape and reality: he caught himself from the mist--as instantly it fell again into a phantom of itself.

And thus it always happened. So surely as he listened wakeful, straining his hearing, the voice would reach him as a far plaintive murmur, a vague intolerable sweetness, without identity or suggestion save of some woful loss. So surely did his brain swerve and his aching eyes seal down, it would begin to gather form, and words out of form, and expression out of words--expression, of a sorrow so wildly sad and moving, that his dreaming heart near broke beneath the burden of its grief.

A strange experience; yet none so strange but that we must all have known it, what time our errant soul has leapt back into our waking consciousness, carrying with it, on the wind of its return, some echo of the spirit world with which it had been consorting. Who has not known what it is to wake, in a dumb sleeping house, to the certain knowledge of a cry just uttered, a sentence just spoken, of a laugh or whisper stricken silent on the instant, nor felt the darkness of his room vibrate and settle into blankness as he listened, and, listening, lost the substance of that phantom utterance?

But at length for Carlo dream and reality were blended in one forgetfulness.

Morning weakened, if it could not altogether dissipate, his superstitions. Though one be buried in a vault, there's that in the mere texture of daylight, even if the thinnest and frowziest, to muffle the fine sense of hearing. If, in truth, those mystic harmonics still throbbed and sighed, his mind had ceased to be attuned to them. He lent it to the more practical business of resuming his examination of his prison.

At midday, while he was sitting at his dinner, a visitor came and introduced himself to him, leaping, very bold and impudent, to the table itself, where he sat up, trimming his whiskers anticipatory. It was a monstrous brown rat; and self-possessed--Lord! Carlo dropped his fists on the cloth, and stared, and then fell to grinning.

'O, you've arrived, have you!' said he. 'Your servant, Messer Topo!'

It was obviously the gentleman's name. At the sound of it, he lowered his fore-paws, flopped a step or two nearer, and sat up again. Carlo considered him delightedly. He was one of those men between whom and animals is always a sympathetic confidence.

'Is it, Messer Topo,' said he, 'that you desire to honour me with the reversion of a former friendship? What! You flip your whiskers in protest? No friend, you imply, who could educate your palate to cooked meats, and then betray it, returning you to old husks? Has he deserted you, then? Alas, Messer! We who frequent these cellars are not masters of our exits and our entrances. How passed he from your ken, that same unknown? Feet-first? Face-first? Tell me, and I'll answer for his faith or faithlessness.'

The visitor showed some signs of impatience.

'What!' cried Carlo. 'My grace is overlong? Shall we fall to? Yet, soft. Fain would I know first the value of this proffered love, which, to my base mind, seems to smack a little of the cupboard.'

His hand went into the dish. Messer Topo ceased from preening his moustache, and stiffened expectant, his paws erect.

'Ha-ha!' cried Carlo. 'You are there, are you? O, Messer Topo, Messer Topo! Even prisoners, I find, possess their parasites.'

He held out a morsel of meat. The big rat took it confidently in his paws; tested, and approved it; sat up for more.

'What manners!' admired Carlo. 'Art the very pink of Topos. Come, then; we'll dine together.'

Messer Topo acquitted himself with perfect correctness. When satisfied, he sat down and cleaned himself. Carlo ventured to scratch his head. He paused, to submit politely to the attention--which, though undesired, he accepted on its merits--then, the hand being withdrawn, waited a moment for courtesy's sake, and returned to his scouring. In the midst, the key grated in the door, and like a flash he was gone.

'Ehi!' pondered Carlo; 'it is very evident he has been trained to shy at authority.'

It seemed so, indeed, and that authority knew nothing of him. Otherwise, probably, authority would have resented his interference with its theories of solitary confinement to the extent of trapping and killing him.

The prisoner saw no more of his little sedate visitor that evening; but, with night and sleep, the voice again took up the tale of his haunting; and this time, somehow, to his dreaming senses, Messer Topo seemed to be the medium of its piteous conveyance to him. Once more he woke, and slept, and woke again; and always to hear the faint music gaining or losing body in opposite ratio with his consciousness. He was troubled and perplexed; awake by dawn, and harking for confirmation of his dreams. But daylight plugged his hearing.

He had expected Messer Topo to breakfast. He did not come. He called--and there he was. They exchanged confidences and discussed biscuits. The key grated, and Messer Topo was gone.

This day Carlo set himself to solve the mystery of his visitor's lightning disappearances--_Anglice_, to find a rat-hole. Fingering, in the gloom, along the joint of floor and wall, he presently discovered a jagged hole which he thought might explain. Without removing his hand, he called softly: 'Topo! Messer Topo!' Instantly a little sharp snout, tipped with a chilly nose, touched him and withdrew. He stood up, as the key turned in the lock once more.

This time it was Messer Jacopo himself who entered, while his bulldogs watched at the door. He came to bring the prisoner a volume of Martial, which Carlo had once had recommended to him, and of which he had since bethought himself as a possible solace in his gloom. The Provost Marshal advanced, with the book in his hand, and seeing his captive's occupation, as he thought, paused, with a dry smile on his lips. Then, with his free palm, he caressed the wall thereabouts.

'Strong masonry, Messer,' he said; 'good four feet thick. And what beyond? A dungeon, deadlier than thine own.'

Carlo laughed.

'A heavy task for nails, old hold-fast, sith you have left me nothing else. _Lasciate ogni speranza_, hey, and all the rest? I know, I know. Yet, look you, there should have been coming and going here once, to judge by the tokens.'

He signified, with a sweep of his hand, a square patch on the stones, roughly suggestive of a blocked doorway, wherein the mortar certainly appeared of a date more recent than the rest.

The other made a grim mouth.

'Coming, Messer,' he said; 'but little going. Half-way he sticks who entered, waiting for the last trump. He'll not move until.'

Carlo recoiled.

'There's one immured there?'

'Ay, these ten years----'

And the wooden creature, laying the book on the table, stalked out like an automaton.

He left the prisoner gulping and staring. Here, in sooth, was food for his fancy, luckily no great possession. But the horror bit him, nevertheless. Presently he took up the book--tried to forget himself in it. He found it certainly very funny, and laughed: found it very gross, and laughed--and then thought of Bernardo, and frowned, and threw the thing into a corner. Then he started to his feet and went up and down, nervously, with stealthy glances to the wall. Haunted! No wonder he was haunted. Did it sob and moan in there o' nights, beating with its poor blind hands on the stone? Did it----

A thought stung him, and he stopped. The rat! Its run broke into that newer mortar, penetrated, perhaps, as far as the buried horror itself. Was _there_ the secret of the music? Was it wont, that hapless spectre, putting its pallid lips to the hole, to sigh nightly through it its melodious tale of griefs?

He stood gnawing his thumb-nail.

What might it be--man or woman? There was that legend of a nun with child by--Nay, horrible! What might it be? Nothing at this last, surely--sexless--just a spongy chalk of bones, a soft rubble for rats to nest in. O, Messer Topo, Messer Topo! on what dust of human tragedy did you make your bed! Perhaps----

No! perish the thought! Messer Topo was a gentleman--descendant of a long line of gentlemen--no hereditary cannibal. He preferred meats cooked to raw. An hereditary guardian, rather, of that flagrant tomb. And yet--

He lay down to rest that night, lay rigid for a long while, battling with a monstrous soul-terror. A burst of perspiration relieved him at last, and he sank into oblivion.

Then, lo! swift and instant, it seemed, the unearthly music caught him in its spell. It was more poignant than he had known it yet--loud, piercing, leaping like the flame of a blown candle. He awoke, sweating and trembling. The vibration of that gale of sorrow seemed yet ringing in his ears--from the walls, from the ceiling, from the glass rim of his drinking-vessel on the table, which repeated it in a thousand tinkling chimes. But again the voice itself had attenuated to a ghost of sound--a mere AEolian thread of sweetness.

_But it was a voice_.

Carlo sat up on his litter. He was a man of obdurate will, of a conquering resolution; and the moment, unnerving as it seized him out of sleep, found him nevertheless decided. A shaft of green moonlight struck down from the high grate into his dungeon, spreading like oil where it fell; floating over floor and table; leaving little dark objects stranded in its midst. Its upper part, reflecting the moving waters of the moat outside, seemed to boil and curdle in a frantic dance of atoms, as though the spirit music were rising thither in soundless bubbles.

He listened a minute, scarce breathing; then dropped softly to the floor, and stole across his chamber, and stooped and listened at the wall.

The next moment he had risen and staggered back, panting, glaring with dilated eyes into the dark. There was no longer doubt. It was by way of Messer Topo's pierced channel that the music had come welling to him.

But whence?

Commanding himself by a tense effort, he bent once more, and listened. Long now--so long, that one might have heard the passion in his heart conceive, and writhe, and grow big, and at length deliver itself in a fierce and woful cry: 'Bernardo! my little, little brother!'

With the words, he leapt up and away--tore hither and thither like a madman--mouthed broken imprecations, fought for articulate speech and self-control. The truth--all the wicked, damnable truth--had burst upon him in a flash. No ghostly voice was this of a ten years immured; but one, now recognised, sweet and human beyond compare, the piteous solution of all his hauntings. The run pierced further than to that middle tragedy--pierced to a tragedy more intimate and dreadful--pierced through into the adjoining cell, where lay his child, his little love, perishing of cold and hunger. He read it all in an instant--the disastrous consequences of his own disaster. And he could not comfort or intervene while this, his pretty swan, was singing himself to death hard by.

Pity him in that minute. I think, poor wretch, his state was near the worse--so strong, and yet so helpless. He shrieked, he struck himself, he blasphemed. Monstrous? it was monstrous beyond all human limits of malignity. So the ring had sped and wrought! What had this angel done, but been an angel? What had Cicada, so hide-bound in his own conceit of folly? Curst watchdogs both, to let themselves be fooled and chained away while the wolf was ravening their lamb!

He sobbed, fighting for breath:--

'Messer Topo, Messer Topo! Thou art the only gentleman! I crave thy forgiveness, O, I crave thy forgiveness for that slander! A rat! I'll love them always--a better gentleman, a better friend, bringing us together!'

With the thought, he flung himself down on the floor, and put his ear to the hole. Still, very faint and remote, the music came leaking by it--a voice; the throb of a lute.

He changed his ear for his lips:--

'Bernardo!' he screamed; 'Bernardo! Bernardo!' and listened anew.

The music had ceased--that was certain. It was succeeded by a confused, indistinguishable murmur, which in its turn died away.

'Bernardo!' he screeched again, and lay hungering for an answer.

It came to him, suddenly, in one rapturous soft cry:--

'Carlo!'

No more. The sweet heart seemed to break, the broken spirit to wing on it. Thereafter was silence, awful and eternal.

He called again and again--no response. He rose, and resumed his maddened race, to and fro, praying, weeping, clutching at his throat. At length worn out, he threw himself once more by the wall, his ear to the hole, and lying there, sank into a sort of swoon.

Messer Topo, sniffing sympathetically at his face, awoke him. He sat up; remembered; stooped down; sought to cry the dear name again, and found his voice a mere whisper. That crowned his misery. But he could still listen.

No sound, however, rewarded him. He spent the day in a dreadful tension between hope and despair--snarled over the periodic visits of his gaolers--snarled them from his presence--was for ever crouching and listening. They fancied his wits going, and nudged one another and grinned. He never thought to question them; was always one of those strong souls who find, not ask, the way to their own ends. He knew they would lie to him, and was only impatient of their company. Seeing his state, they were at the trouble to take some extra precautions, always posting a guard on the stairs before entering his cell. Messer Lanti, normal, was sufficiently formidable; possessed, there was no foretelling his possibilities.

But they might have reassured themselves. Escape, at the moment, was farthest from his thoughts or wishes. He would have stood for his dungeon against the world; he clung to his wall, like a frozen ragamuffin to the outside of a baker's oven.

Presently he bethought himself of an occupation, at once suggestive and time-killing. He had been wearing his spurs when captured--weapons, of a sort, overlooked in the removal of deadlier--and these, in view of vague contingencies, he had taken off and hidden in his bed. His precaution was justified; he saw a certain use for them now; and so, procuring them, set to work to enlarge with their rowels the opening of the rat hole. He wrought busily and energetically. Messer Topo sat by him a good deal, watching, with courteous and even curious forbearance, this really insolent desecration of his front door. They dined together as usual; and then Carlo returned to his work. His plan was to enlarge the opening into a funnel-like mouth, meeter for receiving and conveying sounds. It had occurred to him that the point of the tiny passage's issue into the next cell might be difficult of localisation by one imprisoned there, especially if the search--as he writhed to picture it--was to be made in a blinding gloom. If he could only have continued to help by his voice--to cry 'Here! Here!' in this tragic game of hide-and-seek! He wrought dumbly, savagely, nursing his lungs against that moment. But still by night it had not come to be his.

Then, all in an instant, an inspiration came to him. He sat down, and wrote upon a slip of paper: '_From Carlo Lanti, prisoner and neighbour. Mark who brings thee this--whence he issues, and whither returns. Speak, then, by that road_--' and having summoned Messer Topo, fastened the billet by a thread about his neck, and, carrying him to his run, dismissed him into it. Wonder of wonders! the great little beast disappeared upon his errand. Henceforth kill them for vermin that called the rat by such a name!

Messer Topo did not return. What matter, if he had sped his mission? Only, had he? There was the torture. Hour after hour went by, and still no sign.

Carlo fell asleep, with his ear to the funnel. That night the music did not visit him. He awoke--to daylight, and the knowledge of a sudden cry in his brain. Tremulous, he turned, and found his voice had come back to him, and cleared it, and quavered hoarsely into the hole, 'Who speaks? Who's there?'

He dwelt in agony on the answer--thin, exhausted, a croaking gasp, it reached him at length:--

'Cicca--the Fool--near sped.'

'The Fool! Thou--thou and none other?' His cry was like a wolf's at night; 'none other? Bernardo!' he screeched.

A pause--then: 'Dead, dead, dead!' came wheezing and pouring from the hole.

'Ah!'

He fell back; swayed in a mortal vertigo; rallied. He was quite calm on the instant--calm?--a rigid, bloodless devil. He set his mouth and spoke, picking his words:--

'So? Is it so? All trapped together, then? When did he die?'

'Quick!' clucked the voice; 'quick, and let me pass. When, say'st? Time's dead and rotten here. I know not. A' heard thee call--and roused--and shrieked thy name. His heart broke on it. A' spoke never again. All's said and done. What more? I could not find the hole--till thy rat came. Speak quick.'

What more? What more to mend or mar? Nothing, now. Hope was as dead as Time--a poxed and filthy corpse. Love, Faith, and Charity--dead and putrid. Only two things remained--two things to hug and fondle: revenge and Messer Topo. He bent and spoke again:--

'Starved to death?'

'Starved----'

The queer, far little mutter seemed to reel and swerve into a tinkle--an echo--was gone. Carlo called, and called again--no answer. Then he set himself to ruminate--a cud of gall and poison.

On the eighth morning of his confinement, Jacopo, in person and alone, suddenly showed himself at the door, which he threw wide open.

'Free, Messer,' he said; 'and summoned under urgency to the palace.'

Carlo nodded, and asked not a single question, receiving even his weapons back in silence. He had had a certain presentiment that this moment would arrive. He begged only that the Provost Marshal would leave him to himself a minute. He had some thanks to offer up, he said, with a smile, which had been better understood and dreaded by a gentler soul.

The master gaoler was a religious man, and acquiesced willingly, going forward a little up the stairway, that the other might be private. Carlo, thereupon, stepped across to the wall, and whispered for Messer Topo.

The big rat responded at once, coming out and sitting up at attention. Carlo put his hands under his shoulders, and lifting him (the two were by now on the closest terms of intimacy), apostrophised him face to face:--

'My true, mine only friend at last,' he said (his voice was thick and choking). 'I must go, leaving him to thee. Be reverent with him for my sake--ah! if I return not anon, to carry out and plant that sweet corse in the daisied grass he loved--not dust to dust, but flower to the dear flowers. Look to it. Shall I never see him more--nor thee? I know not. I've that to do first may part us to eternity--yet must I do it. Come, kiss me God-be-with-ye. Nay, that's a false word. How can He, and this bloody ensign on my brow? My brain in me doth knell already like a leper's bell. Canst hear it, red-eyes? No God for me. Why should I need Him--tell me that? Christ could not save His friend. I must go alone--quite alone at last. Only remember I loved thee--always remember that. And so, thou fond and pretty thing, farewell.'

He put his lips to the little furry head; put the animal gently down; longed to it a moment; then, as it disappeared into its run, turned with a wet and burdened sigh.

But, even with the sound, a black and gripping frost seemed to fall upon him. He drew himself up, set his face to the door, and passed out and on to freedom and the woful deed he contemplated.

*CHAPTER XXIV*

A despotism (Messer Bembo invitus) is the only absolute expression of automatic government. The fly-wheel moves, and every detail of the machinery, saw, knife, or punch, however distant, responds instantly to its initiative. Galeazzo, for example, had but to make, in Vigevano, the tenth part of a revolution, and behold, in Milan! Messer Jacopo--saw, knife, and punch in one--had 'come down,' automatically, upon the objectives of that movement. Within a few minutes of Tassino's return, Bernardo and his Fool, seized quietly and without resistance as they were taking the air on the battlements, were being lowered with cords into the 'Hermit's Cell.'

_Sic itur ad astra_.

The Duke of Milan re-entered his capital on the 20th of December. His Duchess met him with happy smiles and tears, loving complaints over his long absence, a sweet tongue ready with vindication of her trust, should that be demanded of her. The last week had done much to reassure her, in the near return to familiar conditions which it had witnessed; and she felt herself almost in a position to restore to her Bluebeard the key, unviolated, of the forbidden chamber. If only he would accept that earnest of her loyalty without too close a questioning!

And, to her joy, he did; inasmuch, you see, as he had his own reasons for a diplomatic silence. It would appear, indeed, that recent great events had altogether banished from his memory the pious circumstances of his departure to them. He had returned to find his duchy as to all moral intents he had left and could have wished to recover it. The fashion of Nature had shed its petals with the summer brocades, and Milan was itself again.

For the exquisite, who had set it, was vanished now some seven days gone; and that is a long time for the straining out of a popular fashion. He had departed, carrying his Fool with him, none--save one or two in the secret--knew whither; but surmise was plentiful, and for the most part rabid. That he had fallen out of home favour latterly was obvious and flagrant; now, the report grew that this alienation had received its first impetus from Piedmont. That whisper in itself was Nature's very quietus. Eleven out of a dozen presumed upon it, and themselves, to propitiate tyranny with a very debauch of reactionism to old licence. Moreover, scandal, in mere self-justification, must run intolerable riot. Nothing was too gross for it in its accounting for this secession. The pure love which had striven to redeem it, it tortured into a text for filthy slanders. The Countess of Caprona had her windows stoned in retaliation one day by a resentful crowd; the wretched girl Lucia was dragged from her bed and suffocated in a muddy ditch. The logic of the mob.

The most merciful of these tales represented Bembo as having run back to San Zeno, there to hide in terror and trembling his diminished head. It was the solution of things most comforting to Bona--one on which her conscience found repose. She wished the boy no evil; had acted as she did merely in the interests of the State, she told herself. If, for a moment, her thoughts ever swerved to Tassino--now returned, as it was whispered, to his old quarters with the Provost Marshal, and abiding there a readjustment of affairs--she hid the treason under a lovely blush, and vowed herself for ever more true wife and incorruptible.

So for the most part all was satisfactory again; and there remained only to alienate the popular sympathy from its idol. And that the Church undertook to do. The moment the false prophet was exposed and deposed, it rose, shook the crumbs from its lap, and gave him his _coup de grace_ in the public estimation.

'He but sought,' it thundered, 'to turn ye over, clods; to cleanse your gross soil for the fairer growing of his roses.' A parable: but so far comprehensible to the demos in that it implied its narrow escape from some cleaning process, a vindication of its prescriptive rights to go unwashed, and therefore convincing. Down sank the threatening swine-monster thereon; and, being further played upon with comfits of a festal Christmas-tide, did yield up incontinent its last breath of revivalism, and kick in joyful reassurance of its sty.

So the whole city absolved itself of redemption, and set to making enthusiastic provision for the devil's entertainment against the season of peace and goodwill.

_Si finis bonus est, totum bonum erit_: nor less _Bona bona erit_. Only there was a rift within the happy wife's lute, which somehow put the whole orchestra out of tune. She saw, for all her sweet chastened sense of relief, that the Duke was darkly troubled. The oppression of his mood communicated itself to hers; and she began to dream--horrible visions of cloyed fingers, and clinging shrouds, and ropey cobwebs that would drop and lace her mouth and nostrils, the while she could not fight free a hand to clear them.

Then, double-damned in his own depression, by reason of its reacting through his partner on himself, the Duke one day sent for the Provost Marshal.

'The season claims its mercies,' gloomed he. 'Take the boy out and send him home to his father.'

'His father!' jeered Jacopo brusquely, grunting in his beard. 'A's been safe in his bosom these three days.'

'What!' gasped the tyrant.

'Dead, Messer, dead, that's all,' said the other impassively; 'passed in a moment, like a summer shower.'

There was nothing more to be said, then. As for poor Patch, he was too cheap a mend-conscience for the ducal mind even to consider. It took instead to brooding more and more on the drawn whiteness of its Duchess's face, hating and sickened by it, yet fascinated. The air seemed full of portents in its ghostly glimmer. His fingers were always itching to strike the hot blood into it. A loathly suspicion seized him that perhaps here, after all, was revealed the illusive face of his long haunting. Constantly he fancied he saw reflected in other faces about him some shadow of its menacing woe. Once he came near stabbing a lieutenant of his guards, one Lampugnani, for no better reason than that he had caught the fellow's eyes fixed upon him.

So the jovial season sped, and Christmas day was come and gone, bringing with it and leaving, out of conviviality, some surcease of his self-torment.

But, on that holy night, Madonna Bona was visited by a dream, more ugly and more definite than any that had terrified her hitherto. Groping in a vast cathedral gloom, she had come suddenly upon a murdered body prostrate on the stones. Dim, shadowy shapes were thronged around; the organ thundered, and at its every peal the corpse from a hundred hideous wounds spouted jets of blood. She turned to run; the gloating stream pursued her--rose to her hips, her lips--she awoke choking and screaming.

That morning--it was St. Stephen's Day--the Duke was to hear Mass in the private chapel of the castello. He rose to attend it, only to find that, by some misunderstanding, the court chaplain had already departed, with the sacred vessels, for the church dedicated to the Saint. The Bishop of Como, summoned to take his place, declined on the score of illness. Galeazzo decided to follow his chaplain.

Bona strove frantically to dissuade him from going. He read some confirmation of his shapeless suspicions in her urgency, and was the more determined. She persisted; he came near striking her in his fury, and finally drove her from his presence, weeping and clamorous.

She was in despair, turning hither and thither, trusting no one. At length she bethought herself of an honest fellow, always a loyal friend and soldier of her lord, of whom, in this distracting pass, she might make use. She had spoken nothing to the Duke of her disposal of his favourite, Messer Lanti, leaving the explanation of her conduct to an auspicious moment. Now, in her emergency, she sent a message for Carlo's instant release, bidding him repair without delay to the palace. She had no reason, nor logic, nor any particular morality. She was in need, and lusting for help--that was enough.