Chapter IV: Part 4

“My boy, what’s your rank?” said he. “I perceive you are a soldier.”

The officer stared, and drew himself up.

“Colonel Manton, sir, at your service,” he answered distantly.

He was surprised; but the man was old, near seventy by his appearance, and very possibly from his cut a retired veteran like himself. Familiarity from a general, say, would be pardonable, and even kindly. Besides, he did not dislike the implied suggestion of juniority.

“Hey!” said the stranger--“retired?”

“Yes, sir, retired.”

“Brevet rank?”

“Brevet be damned!” said Colonel Manton hotly. “I owe my promotion, sir, if you wish to know, to Waterloo.”

The stranger glanced at him with a curiously sly look, and pinched the arm on which his own fingers rested.

“What!” he said, “were you there?”

“I had the honour, sir,” said the Colonel grandiloquently, “of playing my little part in that Homeric contest.”

“Whose division, hey?”

“Picton’s--Pack’s brigade. You are a little--you will excuse my saying it--particular.”

“Certainly I will, my boy. Wounded--hey?”

A distinct flush suffused the Colonel’s cheek.

“Wounded--yes,” he replied shortly.

The old fellow nudged him confidentially.

“Tell me,” he said--“how?”

“Look here--you must forgive me, you know,” exploded the Colonel; “but I must point out that we are strangers. Still--as a fellow-campaigner--if that is the case--may I ask, sir, if _you_ were at Waterloo?”

The other laughed enjoyingly.

“_Was_ I?” he said. “To be sure I was. You had all good reason for knowing it.”

Colonel Manton’s eyes opened. Here was a momentous implication. Evidently he had to do with some great general of division, though the boast sounded a little extravagant and unmilitary. He ran over in his mind a dozen possible names, but without success. And then the thought occurred to him: “Good reason for knowing it? What the devil! Is it possible he was on the other side?”

The idea seemed too preposterous for belief; the stranger was so obviously British. Who, in wonder’s name, could he be, then? Hill, Macdonnell, Saltoun, Uxbridge, Vandeleur, Somersett, Hackett--all divisional or brigadier-generals? He could not identify him, of his knowledge, with any one of these. The Iron Duke himself? He had never been brought into very close personal contact with the great man, but naturally he was familiar with his features. Could it be possible that time had so fused and blunted those that their characteristic contour had degenerated into this scarce distinguishable pulp? Prosperity, he knew, could play strange tricks with countenances, yet a _volte-face_ so revolutionary seemed incredible. And yet who else but the Duke had been on that day as indispensable as implied? But it was conceivable that some might have so regarded themselves--that certain heads might have been turned by their share in the success of so stupendous a victory.

Colonel Manton had been living abroad on his half-pay for some years, and, until the occasion of this visit during the summer of 1830, had dwelt for long a stranger to his native land. He could but suppose that he had in a measure lost the clue, through subsequent developments, to old events. It remained clear only that he was in the presence of one who had, or believed himself to have, contributed signally to the success of the epoch-making battle. And that must be enough for him. He spoke thenceforth as a subordinate to his commanding officer.

“I beg your indulgence, sir,” he said. “I have been absent from my country for a considerable time, and features once familiar elude me. You asked about my wound. It is a ridiculous matter, and I recall it without enthusiasm. The fact is that, when d’Erlon’s guns were pounding us before the advance, a ball smashed the head of a sergeant standing near me, and one of the fellow’s cursed double-teeth was driven into my neck. It was not enough to cripple my fighting power, but I would have given a dozen of my own to boast a more honourable scar.”

The stranger chuckled.

“Scars are not the only guarantee of valour,” he said.

The Colonel ventured: “You brought away some of your own, sir?”

“No,” said the old fellow. “No; Wellington and I got off scot-free.”

The Colonel dared again: “Were you, may I ask, on his personal staff?”

“Well, yes,” said the stranger, chuckling still more, “I suppose you might call it that.”

Suppose? Colonel Manton gaped. It was positively a matter of history that not one of that staff had escaped death or mutilation. The other may have noticed his perplexity, for he turned on him with an air of sudden annoyance.

“You haven’t the assurance to question my word, I hope, sir?” he demanded.

“Certainly not,” answered the Colonel.

“I could give you convincing proof,” said the stranger. “Did the Commander-in-Chief--now did he or did he not--visit General Blücher at Wavre the night before the battle to make sure of his co-operation?”

“It is a disputed point, sir,” said the Colonel. “I believe that even his Grace has been known to contradict himself in the matter, saying at one time that he would never have fought without Blücher’s explicit promise to back him up, at another flatly contradicting the report that he saw the Prussian general on the night before the battle.”

“And he did not, my boy,” sniggered the old fellow triumphantly, “for his interview with him was after midnight, and therefore on the day _of_ the battle. I ought to know, _for I sent him off there myself_.”

He cackled into such a spasm of laughter that the convulsion caught his wind.

“O, my chest!” he wheezed and gasped, “my miserable chest! I’m the most wretched creature on earth. But it’s nothing, nothing--the youngest fellows are subject to it.” He coughed and wiped his eyes with a heavily scented handkerchief. “Yes,” he said presently, “yes, Wellington was a sound workaday general, a fine soldier, an inspired commissary, but, of genius--h’m! We need only suggest, Manty my boy, that he was well advised. The man at his elbow, hey? You need not mention it, you know, but the real hero of Waterloo--hey, d’ye see? Keep it to yourself; there were reasons against its being divulged--you understand? What, my boy!”

The Colonel stared before him as if hypnotised; he stumbled in his walk. Was it possible to mistake the implication--that the laurels ought by rights to have adorned the brow of this stranger beside him? He felt like one whose faith had suddenly exploded of its own intensity, leaving his breast a blackened shell. Could there actually have been another, of whom he had never heard, at the Duke’s right hand on that tremendous day, the presiding but unconfessed genius of it? He had heard speak of the Corsican’s little red familiar. Was his great rival, were possibly all commanding intellects, so supernaturally provided?

He was really a simple man, with a mind ruled to certain prescriptive lines of conduct. He glanced askance at his companion, who was smiling and murmuring to himself. Who in Heaven’s name could he be? and why had he selected _him_ for his astounding confidences? For all his own fearless rectitude, an uncanny feeling began to possess him. He was glad, in turning a corner, to see the end of the path, and the head of a waiting coachman showing above the hedge. And the next moment they had emerged on to the village green.

A barouche stood there, with a bare-headed gentleman standing at its door. The liveries of the servants were scarlet, and a mounted man in a scarlet embroidered coat waited a little apart. The gentleman came forward.

“Will your Majesty be pleased to ascend?” he asked.

The King dropped the Colonel’s arm, and appeared on the instant to forget all about him.

“Yes, Watty; yes, certainly, my boy,” he said. “Is that the fiery chariot?”

Beau Brummell

George Bryan Brummell, Esq., his Britannic Majesty’s Consul in the Norman city of Caen, was about to entertain. He had given instructions to his attendant that great company was expected, together with a list of the distinguished names to be announced; and by eight o’clock his room in the Hôtel d’Angleterre was prepared, the tables for whist were set out and the _bougies_ lighted. Staring, half hypnotised, into the radiance of one of these placed on the mantelpiece, the Beau’s eyes blinked, and the Beau himself faced about with a puzzled look and a suspicious sniff.

“What is that smell, Loustalot?”

He spoke to the attendant, who in his little black _jaquette_ and blue apron looked very much like what, in fact, he was--a waiter at the hotel. The expression on this man’s face scintillated between gravity and mockery; the tone of his voice hovered between audacity and deference.

“It will doubtless be the soot in the chimney, Monsieur,” he said coolly.

“H’m! You are sure it is not a candle in need of snuffing?”

“The best wax, Monsieur? Monsieur speaks as if he burnt filthy tallow. Monsieur’s nostrils are more sensitive than discriminating. _A, là!_ What it is to be bred to this imperishable refinement!”

He was busy while he spoke in snuffing the wick, and in privately depositing the reeking instrument on the hob.

“I go to announce the company, Monsieur,” he said. “In the meantime, if I were Monsieur, I would not spit too much on the carpet.”

“An insolent rascal!” muttered the Beau to himself as the man disappeared. “I shall have to discharge him.”

He had, however, so completely forgotten his resolve the next minute, that when Loustalot, returning, thrust his head round the door, he could not for the moment recall who he was.

“O! by the by, Monsieur,” said the man, “Monsieur Magdelaine, the confectioner, desires to know if you will settle with him your little account for Maraschino and Biscuits de Rheims.”

The Beau smiled, waving his hand.

“To be sure--when it is full moon. Tell him so, my friend.”

“Will not Monsieur tell him himself? His smile is such a surety, and I cannot reproduce it.”

Brummell burst into a scream of rage.

“You dare to mock me! Leave the room, you scoundrel!”

The man grinned and disappeared. The spurt of fury ran to instant waste. Brummell set to pacing the room, eyeing successively the walls, the shining mantelpiece, his own shoes--all with an expression of the most complacent satisfaction. The last, indeed, as he saw them, evoked a positive sigh of transport.

“That Vernis de Guiton!” he murmured: “positively a Corinthian polish! But it’s devilish expensive--devilish.”

He strutted again, sticking out his chest and quavering a little stanza of his own, which someone at some time had set to music:

“_Oh ye! who so lately were blithesome and gay,_ _At the Butterfly’s banquet carousing away;_ _Your feasts and your revels of pleasure are fled,_ _For the soul of the banquet, the Butterfly’s dead!_”

He paused, cocking his head on one side, inquisitive.

“Now, where did I hear that?” he said. “Aye, aye--the poor butterfly, and dead, with the honey in his throat! Well, ’tis best--to fold one’s plumes upon the feast, and, sunk in the happy flush of revelry, to die and leave a golden record. So may Fortune favour me. But there’s time yet--poor butterfly, poor butterfly! Gad! he makes me weep.”

But it was only the oil dropping from his wig and running down his face. He attended personally to its lubrication in these days, and far too liberally. In a moment he looked up, the transcendent light returned to his eyes. He hummed a livelier air. Self-gratification beamed from him. It was something, after all, in this world, he reflected, to have that indomitable spirit which could rebound, like an india-rubber ball, from the blows of Fortune, the rebuffs of false friends, and exhibit always the same polished, undinted surface. He had not allowed hard Fate to subdue his spirit, to impair his wit, to hammer him into forgetfulness of his duty to his own original ineffable self, and he prayed only that the doom of the butterfly might overtake him long before age came to blunt his exquisite perceptions of fitness, his fastidious taste, his delicate palate! What if one were to come to realise, in moments of lucidity, one’s debased reputation, out-of-dateness, personal uncleanliness, perhaps?--O horrible, horrible! He shuddered; he touched the immaculate frill at his throat, smoothed the satin on his thighs with a trembling hand. An ugly dream! Thank God he could congratulate himself, had always been able to congratulate himself, on an intellectual strength capable of carrying the extremest extravagance of foppery. He had shaped himself deliberately to a fame he would never have attained on the force of his wit alone. And yet he had always remained a gentleman, and a gentleman could never come to forget himself. Intellect and character both told against any such possible demoralisation.

Loustalot threw open the door wide, and announced in a loud voice, “Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire!”

With a bright smile and extended hands the Consul tripped forward.

“Ah! my dear Duchess,” he said, “you are welcome a thousand times. A chair, Loustalot.” (He seated himself close beside the lovely visitor.) “I was dreaming of old age,” he said, “and imperishable youth comes to rebuke me. Your Grace, more loving-kind than Aurora, once bestowed immortality on me, but with a better percipience than the goddess when she doomed her poor Tithonus to perpetual dotage. This is no dry grasshopper’s note, but the same liquid cackle that greeted our sallies at Chatsworth. Do you remember the French Marquis, whose hair-powder we dusted with sugar, and how at the breakfast-table, the heat and _sueur_ having melted it, the flies settled until the poor man’s head was like a plum pudding? _Hélas!_ the jocund spirit survives; only the environment dejects. But now that your Grace----”

“Milord Byron!” announced Loustalot at the door. The Beau rose, and advanced with infinite courtesy. Always the pink of breeding, he had yet an especial part to play before this pale, distinguished guest, whose compliment on the “exquisite propriety” of his dress and conduct had once reached his ears, never to be forgotten.

“I greet your lordship,” he said, “with a particular confidence, since for the nonce a goddess does the honours of my poor abode. Ah! that Sèvres biscuit figure--a girl bathing, after Falconet. It will appeal to you--a new acquisition. You know my fancy for canes and snuff-boxes and china--trivial pursuits, but more profitable than fox-hunting.”

“His Grace the Duke of Bedford!” bellowed Loustalot.

Brummell, having deposited the poet in a third seat, hurried to the door.

“Bedford, my dear fellow,” he whispered, horrified, “do you realise that the collar of your coat is turned up at the back? It recalls to me the most supreme moment in my life. I was due at Lady Dungannon’s reception, and circumstances had forced me--hush! the admission is inexpressibly painful--to, to take a hackney coach. However, I believed that I had successfully evaded detection, and had mounted the stairs into full view of the drawing-room, when a servant whispered in my ear, ‘Sir--do you know that you have got a straw in your shoe?’ Conceive, if you can, my horror. I shall never forget that moment.”

The memory, indeed, appeared so to weigh upon him, that for a little he forgot his company, and sat apart from it in dreary abstraction. The name of Mr. Chig Chester being called withdrew him from it, and he rose gaily.

“Our redoubtable gamester and sportsman,” he said, returning with the visitor. “We have material here for a table, Duchess. But remember, in Caen we play only for love and crackers.”

He dissolved into a fit of chuckling laughter, until the Lady Jersey was announced. And then came others--my Lord Petersham, the Duke of Rutland, Scrope Davies, Mrs. O’Neill, the Duchess of Gordon, and half a dozen more. The little room was soon too full for its capacity; but the spirits of the courtly host surmounted all difficulties and made a positive grace of inconvenience. He tripped, he chatted, he was perpetually talking and on the move, exchanging badinage with one, recalling incidents of past happy days with another, pointing out the treasures of his modest sanctum to a third--a picture by Morland, a clock by Verdier, a Louis XV _bonheur du jour_. Exile, he wished to show, had not dulled his appreciation of the beautiful, or shaken his position as a wit and supreme arbiter of the elegancies. Now as always it was a privilege to claim his acquaintanceship, to be seen on his arm; now as always his smile or his frown could make or break.

In the midst, a candle guttered heavily on the mantelpiece, and a little girl, the landlord’s petted one, ran into the room.

“Monsieur Brummell,” she cried, “Monsieur Brummell, you have not yet given me the sou you promised for _nanan_.”

He caught her by the arm.

“Hush!” he said. “Do you not see the company?”

She stared round with wide, wondering eyes.

“What company, Monsieur? I see only a row of chairs!”

“Look again, Babette.”

“I am looking hard, Monsieur.”

The Beau, releasing his grip, sank into a seat. Before him on the wall loomed a cheap mirror. He saw the reflection in it of a broken, toothless old man, semi-palsied, dirty, degraded. His scratch-wig, poked awry, was foul with rancid grease; his shoes were lustreless and in holes. He raised dim, wandering eyes, and marked the squalid, unfurnished walls, the one whist-table with a broken leg, the three common shells on the mantelpiece flanked by a couple of reechy tallow candles in brass sconces. And--yes, the row of empty chairs. Staring like one awakened, he uttered a dreary little laugh, and beckoned to the child.

“Come, Babette,” he said, “and we will hunt for the sou. Let us hope it has not slipped through the hole in my pocket. I had been playing, child--playing with the shadows of some little dolls, long, long dead everyone of them, and my company, after all, turns out to be one lonely old man, with a tattered coat and a single pair of trousers, which Madame Fichet has to patch while their owner lies abed.”

Paganini

It was in Florence that Baronte at last ran to earth that terrific secret which for ten long months had eluded and maddened him. Here, in the summer of 1819, was present once again that fiend incarnate of melody, that monster Paganini--and more astounding, more inexplicable than ever. He had taken the city captive as utterly as any Marmaldo; he drew its people, extravagantly laughing and sobbing, in the wake of his devil’s music. And Florence was Baronte’s native town, and it was here, he had felt, that his quest must end, though even at the gates of Death. And, behold! Fate, even in the shadow of his reason’s overthrow, had vouchsafed him at length and at least an approximate solution of the mystery.

What mystery, then, and what secret? Why those that touched upon the source of the Maestro’s superhuman powers--nothing more nor less. But, for whatever was their ethical value, they had haunted Baronte’s soul for full ten months--ever since that night, in fact, when he had first heard Paganini play in the Scala Theatre at Milan. And from that night onwards he had followed his evil genius, as he regarded the man, from town to town, feeding yet hungering, drinking yet thirsting, loathing and lusting at once.

Baronte was himself, though an amateur, a rare violinist. He knew as well as most the extreme capacities of the instrument, and the sympathies possible to be created between its sensitive mechanism and the interpretative soul of its player. But here was something which as much surpassed the conceivable limits of human execution as it surpassed mortal understanding in its expression of superhuman passions and emotions. It was not instrumentation to which one listened, but temptation--melodious frenzy, an ecstatic lure to things forbid, rendered not by, but through a human medium. The great Master, it was very certain, was in league with the devil to betray mankind through the most voluptuous of its senses, and in no other way could the miracle be explained. Baronte felt it in every nerve of his responsible being, and sought nothing but a confirmation of his suspicions to dare a martyr’s fate. Young, emotional, fanatic, with haggard face and brilliant eyes, he retained all of that religious fervour which had once kept him hesitating on the threshold of the Church, and which still yielded to nothing but his passion for music.

And at last he stood on the brink, as he believed, of the great discovery. The dread secret lay to be exhumed, he had convinced himself, from the recesses of the little black morocco handbag which the dark Master perpetually carried about with him.

It might contain some demoniac philtre; it might conceal some vessel, like the Fisherman’s flask, loaded with the concentrated essence of all wickedness. It was certain that the bag never left its possessor’s custody day or night; that he bore it with him on his rare excursions abroad; that he hugged it to his pillow throughout the hours of darkness. Baronte knew all this from his confidant and sympathiser young Varano, who had hired, at his instance, a room adjoining the Maestro’s, in the hotel occupied by the latter, and who had been able to keep a pretty incessant watch, through an unsuspected crack in the party panelling, on his tremendous neighbour. It was this friend who had described to him the sympathy apparent between Paganini and his hidden fetish, who had whispered to him awfully of day-long prostrations on a couch, broken only by spasmodic writhings, by fiendish ejaculations and brief explosions of laughter, or by wild apostrophisings of the _thing_, held up in worshipping hands before two gloating eyes. It contained, without doubt, the key to the mystery--only how to find an opportunity to examine it? That was as yet as stultifying a problem as itself. And in the meantime the Maestro’s engagement was drawing to a close.

One night before the end Baronte sat in the theatre. It was packed from floor to ceiling, and his restless vision hunted, as always, among the massed audience for some confirmation of a shadowy legend. It related, this legend, of a beautiful weeping girl, and of a man, her companion, bleak, sardonic, with whom the player would be seen to exchange a smile of ghastly import, and of the sudden inexplicable disappearance of the two. He believed the story--and he did not believe it; as he believed and disbelieved that other tale of the shape dimly adumbrated behind the Master’s figure and directing its bowing. The whispers of libertinism and nameless cruelties which pursued the great performer’s footsteps affected him no more, either way, than these others. It was sufficient, in his conception of evil, to credit the fiend with a capacity for achieving without betraying himself, of directing the touch on the instrument, of _being_ the instrument itself, the imagined Guanerius, if he chose.

And then instant silence, a shock, a thrill, and Paganini stood before the expectant house.

Music! He appeared the antithesis of every grace, of every emotion associated with its production--an impossible grotesque, like a clown got up as a fiddle and proposing to play upon himself. There he stood in the glare of the footlights, as ungainly an anomaly as the mind could conceive. He was tall, he was supernaturally gaunt and angular; his long kit-shaped face, pallid as Death’s own, seemed pierced with two blackened sockets for eyes; his hair, lank and raven, straggled upon his shoulders. He was dressed in a tight-buttoned black swallow-tail and black trousers, loose for the period and awkwardly short at the ankles. As the storm of greeting subsided and the orchestra crashed out its symphony, he settled himself upon his right hip, like a badly articulated skeleton, and, raising bow and fiddle, dived his long chin into the latter, and, with a grinning snarl upon his face, poised the former, like a veritable fiend of extravaganza.

Baronte knew it all so well, and waited impassive for the sequel, his eyes canvassing the breathless house rather than the performer. And then suddenly the bow descended, with a blow like a melodious sledge-hammer, and the wild, lovely orgy had begun.

Paganini surely had never played before as he played that night. It was all stupendous, unsurpassable, horrible. The very violin seemed to bend and spring beneath his hands like the body of a young witch, alluring, eluding, brutifying. At the finish it was with a feeling of utter emotional collapse that Baronte crept from the house and sought his lodgings. This thing must end, he told himself--somehow this thing must end, and to-morrow.

In the late morning he rose--to ominous skies and a sensation of stifling heat. A haggard ghost of himself, he sought the Master’s hotel. He knew the obscene creature’s customs--to fast at times, to gorge at times, to lie brooding all day, hating company as he hated priests and doctors; sometimes to break abroad in a wild convulsion of energy, and go tearing none knew whither. And to-day Fortune, whether for good or evil, favoured Baronte. As he approached the hotel, with the intent to take counsel of his friend Varano, he saw the demoniac figure itself issue from the portal, and hurry with distracted visage northwards. He hesitated a moment--then started in pursuit.

Near the bridge Alle Grazie stood three men--an itinerant butcher, a bird-vender, and one, a pert, showy vagabond, with a pallid face, and the dirty little finger-nail of his left hand grown long as a charm against the evil eye. The butcher, in blue jacket and leathern cap, carried in one hand a single joint of meat upon a hook, and in the other a shrill small horn on which to blow its praises; the bird-seller, a stalwart, bronzed young fellow, with gold rings in his ears and his shirted torso half bared to the heat, bore over his shoulders a yoke of cord, from each of whose ends hung a netted sieve alive with twittering songsters; the loafer carried nothing but himself, and that cheaply. As the figure of the Maestro, hopping like a great crow, approached and passed, the bird-seller stared, the butcher gaped, and the loafer, crossing himself with a muttered prayer, sprang back into the roadway--and collided with Baronte, who pushed him aside and sped on.

“The devil!” gasped the loafer; and the bird-seller laughed deridingly.

“In escaping the smoke you have jumped into the fire, gossip,” said he. “The second was the true devil.”

He looked it, indeed, if his burning eyes were any criterion, as he hurried in the wake of the receding figure. It led him across the south-eastern angle of the city to the gate of the Pinti, through which it passed like a striding shadow, and thence, turning northwards, took the winding ascent to Fiesole. Baronte followed, with what purpose he himself did not know.

It was a terrible day, lowering, oppressive, fateful with tempest. And all in a moment the heavens were delivered. They burst in a crash of rain and fire that made the reason stagger. Through the smoke of flung water Baronte could still see the figure mounting before him, gesticulating, whirling its long arms, from time to time uttering peals of loud laughter that mingled unearthly with the tumult of the storm. And then, all in a moment, it was gone.

A ruined villa stood up stark and streaming against the sky. Baronte, panting to the shelter of its broken walls, was suddenly aware, in a brief lull of the storm, of a voice clamant hard by. It wailed, it laughed, it sobbed; it uttered, it seemed, inarticulate blasphemies; it sought to out-roar the thunder, to out-screech the wind. With an answering cry the young man ran round--and staggered to a stop before the vision which his eyes encountered. For there, prone among the tumbled masonry and the long weeds and grass, lay the figure of the black Master himself.

It was flung upon its back, writhing as if in torment. It screamed; it hugged and crumpled itself into grotesque contortions; it gnashed grinning teeth; its eyeballs glinted like porcelain in the lightning.

“_Ah, póvero me!_” screamed Paganini. “Why did I forget the bag! _Eccomi perdûto!_ I am lost--I am lost!”

With a gasp Baronte stepped back, undiscovered of the other. The next moment he was racing down the hill towards Florence.

At the door of the hotel, wild and drenched, he ran upon young Varano, and, clutching him by the shoulders, glared into his eyes.

“Quick!” he panted. “He is up there on the hill--I have seen him--and without his fetish. Quick! Our opportunity has arrived.”

Varano nodded pallidly.

“I know,” he whispered. “I was coming to look for you.”

Together they stole up to the Maestro’s chamber; opened the unlatched door like thieves; entered, and discovered the forgotten bag lying upon a chair. Dreading he knew not what terrific revelation, Baronte pressed the snap and disclosed----

Down in the vestibule a moment later they ran upon the landlord.

“_Benedetto, mi’ amico_,” said Varano smoothly, “can you tell us what is ‘Leroy’?”

“Of a verity, Signore,” answered the man. “‘Leroy’ is a quack remedy, a sedative, and very good for relieving pain. You should ask the great Maestro Paganini, whom it is my distinction to lodge, and who applies it to a bowel complaint from which he has long suffered terribly. He is never without a bottle or two of it in his little black bag.”

Napoleon

It was the 4th of July, 1809, and a thunderous, close evening. In Lobau, the largest of the five islands on the Danube, where were the imperial headquarters, the huge machinery of war, human and insentient, was getting up steam, so to speak, for the morrow’s milling, and eliciting, as its flywheel slowly revolved, an automatic response in all its myriad parts from Pressburg to Vienna. The occasion, it might be said, was an emergency occasion. If the Emperor, himself commanding, had not been thrashed by the Austrians, under the Archduke Charles, a couple of months earlier at Aspern, his retreat upon the islands had looked so much like a defeat, that for the moment his supremacy, moral and material, hung in the balance. For the first time the Grand Army had suffered a shock to its _amour-propre_ and its hitherto invincible faith in its leader. A little might turn the scale, and send all its disintegrated legions scuttling back to Strasburg.

That the impenetrable “Antichrist” himself was fully aware of the nature of the hazard there is no reason to doubt, or that he was concentrating all the deepest faculties of his genius on the delivery of a blow which should be immense and final. He was much alone in his tent, and his orders were laconic and momentous. The ordinary mind cannot picture such a situation, and dismiss its surrounding distractions--one might say its hauntings. There were the arsenals, the forges, the rope-walks, the sheds for boat-mending, the canteens and parks of artillery all over the five islands; there were the boats themselves in the river, scores of them, and the massive chains which bound them into bridges; there were the ammunition wagons and their loaded boxes, the forests of piled arms, the tossed oceans of tents, the miles of tethered horses, the ring-fences of palisades; and there were the troops for last, enough to people a great city, and each man of them as cheerily busy as if he were one of an exodus of Israelites picketing on his way to the promised land. Seven weeks before this same island of Lobau had been littered with the legs and arms of those wounded at Aspern--limbs hastily severed and flung helter-skelter among the grass of its meadows. Its soil was soaked with blood; thousands of mangled men and horses had sunk screaming in the waters which thundered by its shores; a hail of iron had smashed into it and its even more luckless neighbours; fire from burning mills had roared down upon its bridges, melting men and metal into one horrible annealing; it had heaved and vomited with the filth of war. And had all that hideous picture a place in the background of the mastermind, or had its present aspect, of busy preparation for another scene as sickening, or worse? One sorrow may have haunted him, one bloody ghost out of all the multitudes--the figure of his old comrade Marshal Lannes, as he had seen him borne hither on a litter of branches and muskets on the fatal day--one shattered horror more to feed the carnage. He had been moved a moment, had wept, and kissed the dying man. An unconscious thought of him may have lingered still like a melancholy shadow in his soul. But, for the rest, one may be sure that he looked over and beyond all these things, as a great architect sees through the maze of scaffolding the glory of the fabric his soul has raised. This man, it is to be supposed, ever regarded a battlefield but as a map, so clear to his mind that, as the opposing troops manœuvred on it, he could check or reinforce them, show them the way to defeat or victory with his eyes shut. He was a calculating “freak,” and as such superhuman--or superdiabolic.

As the dark gathered, lit only by the flickering lightnings, an immense hush fell over the islands. Every lamp and fire was extinguished; the multitudinous tramp of moving hosts mingled with the boom of the river, and became part with it; the song of the bugles, soft and short, mounted on the wind, and fled with its shrilling through the branches of the trees. One might never have guessed the universal movement that was taking itself cover, as it were, under these silences, as if the islands themselves had been unmoored, and were drifting soundlessly, with their freight of death, towards the shores.

In the midst, a little cry, sharp and sudden, rang out in the neighbourhood of the Emperor’s tent--it might have been a trodden bird’s; it passed, and was not repeated. A young officer, de Sainte Croix, of the personal staff, hurried towards the spot. It was he, vigorous and enthusiastic, who had often gained the Emperor’s approval by climbing tall trees on the island to watch the Austrian preparations on the distant plain. He found a sentry standing by a clump of bushes, and another, one of the Old Guard, lying prone at his feet.

“Malediction!” he whispered. “Who had the daring?”

The man saluted.

“It is Corporal Lebrun, Monsieur. He gave one cry--thus; and I saw him fall. He was hit over the heart at Essling, and only his cartouchier saved him; but he has complained since of an oppression. I think the closeness, the thunder----”

The officer interrupted him:

“That will do. You had no right to leave your post. Return to it.”

The soldier saluted again, wheeled, and retreated. De Sainte Croix bent over the fallen man.

“How is it, Lebrun?”

The corporal lay with a ghastly face, his breath labouring, his chest lifting in spasms. He was not a young man, yet prematurely aged, toughened, grizzled, tanned like old leather in the service of his god. There was a wild, lost look in his eyes which betokened the coming end. He struggled to speak.

“Lift me up, monsieur, in God’s name!”

De Sainte Croix took the livid head on his knee. The posture somewhat eased the fighting heart.

“Courage, comrade! This fit will pass with the oppression. Why, I myself feel it--I. When the storm breaks----”

The blue lips caught at the word.

“When the storm breaks! What will he have answered?”

“He? Who?” said the young officer.

The dying corporal, twisting in his arms, made an awful gesture towards the Emperor’s tent.

“As always,” said de Sainte Croix, “with the cry to victory.”

The other clutched his hand with a grip like madness.

“I believe it, monsieur. He will have renewed the compact.”

“What compact, my poor friend?”

“With the red man.”

De Sainte Croix could hardly catch the answer.

He laughed--men must laugh, though they died for it--and spoke a soothing word. He believed the poor fellow delirious.

“I have laughed too, I have scorned, I have feigned to disbelieve,” said Lebrun, thickly and passionately. “I laugh no longer. Marengo, Hohenlinden, Jena, Austerlitz--what mortal brain unassisted could have so added victory to victory, could so, and for so long a time, have held the world’s destinies in the hollow of one hand? I am a soldier, monsieur, a simple, uneducated man, and yet I know things and I have seen things that would make the wise falter in their wisdom.”

“This red man, amongst others,” said the young officer conciliatingly.

A quiver of lightning at the moment glazed the dying face. Great drops stood on it; the fallen cheeks were filling with shadow; the eyeballs shone like porcelain. In spite of himself, a shiver ran down de Sainte Croix’s spine. There was certainly something uncanny in the night, even to war-toughened nerves. Lebrun’s voice had sunk to a whisper as he answered:

“Didst thou never hear of the General’s proclamation in Egypt to the Ulemas and Shereefs? He stood then on shifting sand--the English sea-captain had just beaten us. A false step, and he were engulfed for ever. And, to gain the people, he told them that their God had sent him to destroy the enemies of Islam and to trample on the cross.”

“Policy, Lebrun,” said de Sainte Croix, lifting his hand to wipe his own wet forehead. “He never meant it.”

“Then why, monsieur, did this blasphemy follow immediately on the visit of the red man? There had been no hint of it before--and afterwards he swore to them that their false bible was the true word.”

De Sainte Croix snapped somewhat fretfully:

“This red man? Who the devil is he?”

A shudder quite convulsed the corporal.

“Thou hast spoken it, monsieur.”

“A figment of your excited fancy, soldier.”

“With these eyes I saw him, monsieur. It was ten years ago. I was on guard in a corridor of the Palace at Cairo, _and there came out of the General’s cabinet one who had never gone in_. Little he was, like a child of a hundred years, and he had on a blood-red _bernous_, and his face was black as a Nubian’s. Only at the lips it pulsed with fire, and fire, dim and wavering, travelled under his cheeks. One moment thus he stood--I could have touched him--and, behold! he was a little draped black figure of bronze that stood on a pedestal by a red curtain. It had always been there--I rubbed my eyes----”

“_Voilà la chose!_”

“Monsieur, I dared. I listened at the General’s door, and I heard him laugh softly to himself--he who never laughs--and he said: ‘Greet thee, Zamiel! Ten years I have given thee to make me a god, or our compact is ended!’ Monsieur, the ten years are passed, and to-night he stands again, as he stood then, at the parting of the ways.”

A flash, more brilliant than any that had yet shown, weltered and was gone. The dying soldier lifted his head quickly, with a fearful cry:

“_Ne savoir à quel saint se vouer!_ I saw him again--but now, before I fell, I saw the red man again, and he passed into the Emperor’s tent!”

The thunder followed on his word, with a rolling slam that shook the island.

“Lebrun!” cried the young officer. “Lebrun!”

The head was like a stone in his hands; he peered down sickly; the soul of the corporal had been shaken out of him with the crash.

And, even as de Sainte Croix rose, the storm broke, and under cover of it, and of the tearing wind and rain, began the first of those silent movements which were to precipitate the gathered hosts of the French upon the opposite shore--and victory.

A moment later the young man was back at his post, amid a shadowy flurry of equerries and staff officers. All seemed confusion, but it was the kaleidoscopic agitation which falls into place and order. As he stood, the enemy’s guns, startled into action, flashed deep and melancholy from the distant blackness, their roar mingling with the thunder’s.

It was in an instant of quivering light that, looking down, he was aware of something strange and red standing by his side. It might have been a child, a dwarf, a cuirassier’s scarlet cloak, grotesquely alive. In the momentary blinding darkness which followed it was lost to him. He heard, as his eyes recovered their focus, a measured voice speaking close by:

“I think we have them, M. de Sainte Croix, since I have resolved to renew my compact with Destiny.”

He started violently, saluted instinctively. It was the Emperor himself.

“By God’s favour, sire,” he said.

“Precisely,” said the Emperor dryly, and walked away.

Leonardo da Vinci

“I cannot read the truth into these eyes. Their riddle still eludes me.” When the passion of two natures meets in perfect reciprocity the resulting fruit is genius. It is procreation in the divine sense--divine creation by deputy, that is to say--whereby the love that is in the souls of both, each for the other, blossoms in the flawless understanding. Leonardo, the glorious bastard, was the earnest of such a meeting--a moment rarely possible, but still possible to any union--and the seal of its creative ecstasy was on his hand and on his brow. He was beautiful as he was inspired; yet, even as the Fates keep secrets from the gods themselves, from him was withheld the full interpretation of his own transcendent visions.

The young man to whom he spoke, and into whose eyes he had turned to look, lowered his lids as if abashed or aggrieved, and just perceptibly shrugged his shoulders.

“Master,” he said, presuming on the Master’s tolerance, “is it not the mystery of original sin in them which baffles you? And where on this earth are eyes to lack that riddle? You are too old, Master, by near fifteen hundred years to find the model you seek. There was never but one in all the world.”

He looked up suddenly, an odd shadow of challenge or defiance in those same vilified orbs, and again veiled them under drooped lashes.

Messer Leonardo stood musing, half abstracted. He was wont to hunt for the faces for his pictures about the city, and when he marked a quarry, to pursue it in and out of the human warren like a weasel, tasting its life in anticipation, until the moment came to seize and drain it. So had he captured the model for his Christ--among the people, as was meet--Lucio, the widow’s son, who had a face like an angel’s, and the gift, it seemed, of immortal youth. Lucio’s mother was the poorest of the poor, and bedridden at that; yet the fond pride in her kept her grown child in idleness. She embroidered rich cloths for tailors, and made a sufficient pittance; but him she would never let soil his lovely hands in menial service. It had been a different thing, however, when Messer Leonardo, the Duke’s own petted protégé, had proposed to introduce Lucio into the great picture of the Last Supper he was about to paint for the monks of Santa Maria delle Grazie. And as its divine protagonist! Here was service deliriously sanctified. Lucio must be enraptured to consecrate his young glowing beauty to an end so sublime. And he went, indeed, to the great Master’s atelier in the Palace, and was made the subject of innumerable studies, pending his appearance in the fresco.

The fresco itself was to be painted on an end wall of the monastery refectory, continuing in perspective the actual rafters of the room, and so far consisted in no more than a charcoal drawing, masterly outlining the group assembled at the consecration. Only the Christ Himself bloomed in flowery suggestion from the midmost throng, a figure iridescent, half revealed, as if it were verily a dream materialising.

Before this figure da Vinci, tall, comely, a rapt look on his beardless, keen-cut features, the solemnity of the riddle in his eyes, stood one morning, his forefinger to his lip, and pondered--pondered. His model for the Christ stood at his shoulder.

“Ho, Lucio!” he said suddenly, like a man awakening; “you suggest it is thus; and perhaps it is thus. How, then, to elude the riddle which eludes me?”

“Why not paint me so, Master, with my lids down?”

Leonardo glanced quickly at the speaker; then, raising his left hand with the brushes and the pallet in it, selected here and there and began to work. Presently, as he modelled with deft fingers, half-murmured fragments of speech came from him.

“What is thine age, Lucio? I forget.”

“Yet under twenty-five, Master.”

“Why, a miracle, Lucio! The bloom of thee; the round chin of thee; the golden dusky wings of thy hair! What ensures such youth in manhood? Innocence? A mother’s love? Art thou very innocent, Lucio?”

“Who can be wholly innocent, Master, with the stain of that original sin in him?”

“True. Yet, for all that, a good son, a pious son. Show me thine eyes again. Ah, the shy revealing! Art afraid it will out--the answer to the riddle?”

“No, Master.”

“Once more, then. There! Now keep them so.”

Presently he spoke again:

“Your poor mother, Lucio--she mends?”

“She mends a little, Messer.”

“All due to the reliquary, is it not? Tell me the true story.”

“The story, Messer!”

“Saints, what a gasp! Yes, the story, Lucio. I had heard a whisper of it--how a dream came to the bedridden woman, down by the Volta gate, promising her she should recover if she would make gift to the Sanctuary of the Holy Virgin at Saronno of that possession which, next to her son, she held in all the world most dear. You know what thing that was--a little gold and crystal reliquary, empty of all save her child’s and her husband’s hair; you know--or doth the story lie? It relates at least of how the woman called her son to her, and yielded to him that treasure from its hiding-place, and bade him by his love of her do with it what he would. He did not hesitate, the good son who owed his mother all in all, but straightway he went his pilgrimage, fifteen miles thither and fifteen back, through perils and much hunger, and left his reliquary at the shrine, and won his guerdon. Well won, I say. He owed her all, and what he could pay he paid. There ends the story--and she mends, you say?”

“Faith is the great physician, Messer.”

“Well, God be thanked for it. I think it is.”

He looked round again quickly, then wrought on, while a long silence ensued. Presently, with an exclamation, he threw down his brushes.

“The stain!” he said. “What folly! It confounds the issue. I shall not find my Christ!”

He dismissed his model, and returned to the ducal Palace. On his way he encountered a birdseller; a number of wee songsters imprisoned in a yoke of netted sieves hung over his shoulders. He paid the man for all, cut the strings, and released the pretty flock. A wide-eyed child, his moist lips parted in an eager smile, watched the quivering escape heavenwards.

“There stands my Christ,” thought the artist. “For the moment his small soul is free, free from the world, free from the shadow of the Fall, mounting with the happy little birds all mirrored in his eyes.”

From that day he set aside the divine problem, and confined his labours to the grosser figures of his group. He worked, forgetting his former model, and Lucio, the ideal of guileless manhood, passed into the mist of half-remembered things.

Messer Leonardo was a very great man. His genius was as multifarious as it was gigantic; but of its very nature it confessed a flaw. One vast conception in him pushed out another, so that the last was for ever claiming precedence over all before. His mind was a great hall thronged with uncompleted Titans. A scheme once realised, the way pointed out, he was impatient of its mere achievement. No supreme creator ever left so many immortal works unfinished--the varnishing and the sand-papering, so to speak, were matters for lesser souls.

Of these, perhaps, was the Prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the aged Padre Bandelli. He “kicked” over the intolerable tardiness of the artist; years rolled by--five years, ten years, and more--and still the fresco was not done. At length all was finished saving only two heads, those of the betrayer and the Betrayed, the opposite poles of darkness and glory; and there once more, and finally it seemed, the composition halted. Bandelli protested, grew wroth, complained at last to the Duke himself. Leonardo responded with a demand for models--the one wholly guiltless of original sin, the other--Judas. Of the latter he lived in hopes; if he could find him, he might help him to the former, as the deepest darkness of a well betrays the stars above; if he could not, he might use the Prior himself at a pinch. The Duke laughed, sided with his favourite, and the Prior withdrew discomfited. More years went by.

At length one day, as he was strolling in the streets with Duke Ludovico, his Magnificence hanging familiarly on his arm, Leonardo looked up and saw his Judas. He was one of two criminals, being carted for their gibbeting, who went by at the moment. The rogues jogged in a tumbril, their arms spliced back, their teeth grinning without merriment. A monk, holding up a small crucifix and gabbling mechanically as he ogled the passing petticoats, faced them; the executioner, brawny and impassive, sat before, chewing a fig; a ragged _contadino_ with straw in his shoes, leading a horse as dusty and threadbare as an old overbeaten carpet, shambled at the head. Leonardo exclaimed “At last!” and adding excitedly “Release unto me Barabbas!” halted the procession with a gesture. “Give me this man,” he appealed to the Duke, “for my Judas. Eternal infamy shall be his in lieu of death.”

It was a trifling gift; Ludovico graciously, of his omnipotence, bestowed it. Leonardo begged permission to return to the Palace, and thence ascended to his atelier, that unclean hostage slinking at his heels. In the room he stood the creature up against a wall and studied him. Low cupidity, bestial self-indulgence, sin at its meanest and rankest were struggling there, out of the abject terror of death, to reassert themselves. Squalid, fulsome, with battered evil face and wild eyes shadowed under hair, the tint and almost the texture of ruined thatch, the thing fawned on its preserver, and was repelled, and fawned again, but at a distance, and stood whimpering. And thenceforward Leonardo set himself to unravel the riddle of this monstrous life.

He wrought for many days; and then gradually a strange awe began to assail him. There was something emerging from the darkness, a light, a vibration, which shook and confused his purpose. What was it? A Judas--with the glimmer of some lost angel reappearing, faint and indefinite, in the backward abysm of his eyes! That would never do--or would it--perhaps the best of all? He stayed his hand in amazement. The wonder grew, and with it some emotion, some reluctant sympathy with the debased thing--reciprocal, he somehow felt it to be.

And then one morning suddenly the creature spoke. It was in the refectory, whither he had been conveyed, that the Master might consider him in his actual relation to the composition--whence, still flowered, faint and mystic, the unsolved riddle of the Christ--and his voice came in a moment like a breaking water:

“He lied to Heaven and his mother, Messer; he had never hung the little gold and crystal reliquary at the shrine of the Beata Virgine in Saronno!”

Leonardo started violently and faced round. He stood gazing rigid at the speaker, like one stricken by some mortal memory.

“He was a hypocrite and a libertine,” cried the apparition, wildly striking its breast. “He had never left Milan. He had hung the reliquary about the neck of a little evil courtesan of the Ghetto, and with it had bought of her the hour’s bliss he had long and greedily coveted. But his mother, believing him, was cured through her faith; and, when she was restored, she herself made a pilgrimage of gratitude to the shrine, and she discovered what alone was to be found there--the killing truth. And thence she returned, the false life ebbing from her drop by drop, and, coming home, she read the confirmation in his eyes and she died of it. And you could not read it, Messer, as a mother came to; but the riddle spoiled your Christ--as it need not spoil your Judas. I am well portrayed at last--I am well.”

He ceased, dropping his head; and Leonardo found his voice in a cry:

“Thou art Lucio!”

And the other muttered:

“Yes, I am Lucio, who came to thee for Christ and remain’st as Judas.”

Then Leonardo said:

“He forgave them on the cross. As thou look’st towards Him whom in thine own image thou hast betrayed, so shalt thou find mercy, even thou. In Judas’ eyes I find my Christ at last.”

Wu Taotsz, the Celestial Painter