Chapter XXVII: ’twixt Gabriel and Lucifer

He beckoned me to follow and I made no resistance. Possibly I was unwise, but how scant had been the moment for reflection! In any case, I meditated, a German count of the Empire was not to be made away with at the Imperial Diet itself, even by such a personage as the Cardinal di Forli. Besides, a little tingle was going through my veins; come good, come evil, I was about to see Marianna. I stepped on boldly even when an inner voice prompted me, “turn back.” Orosi, smiling fulsomely, led the way past the unquestioning sentinel into the interior of the episcopal palace. It was a huge rambling structure. As I penetrated one gray courtyard after another I seemed leaving Germany behind me, and stepping, with incredible rapidity, back into the Southland. The faces I saw were all dark and olivine, all Italian or Spanish. Above the gateways were festooned the banners of Naples, Palermo, Valencia, Cordova, Seville and a dozen other southern cities ruled by the Emperor. I heard the Tuscan and Sicilian dialects of Italy, as well as the differing tongues of Castile and Aragon. The armor of the mustachioed sentry at an inner gate was indubitably from Toledo. And now I began to pass courtiers all in elegant lace and silk garments that might have graced the court of Ferrara or Mantua. Verily if _these_ were folk of Kaiser Karl I knew the case of Luther was prejudged already!

But Orosi led onward without letting me tarry to analyze my sensations. We were at a doorway before which a pair of valets in the Forli livery squatted on the pavement killing their time with dice. They leaped up very nimbly, and their caps came off with abject bows at the upraised finger of my conductor. Orosi guided me at once into a dim hall, lighted by high and heavily curtained windows, and motioned to a spacious armchair.

“Eccellenza, if you will but deign to repose yourself a little, I will at once seek his Eminence and Madonna. They did not of course expect your fair advent so speedily, but I am sure you have not long to wait.”

Before I could answer, I heard the heavy tassels of the arras clicking behind him; I was alone, alone waiting Marianna.

The chamber was a veritable segment of Italy. Forli had evidently travelled with all necessary furniture to make himself at home. The chairs were of dark wood, with elegant Florentine carving, and luxurious taffeta upholsteries; the rugs were from Constantinople, the walls were hidden by a series of tapestry cartoons depicting the taking of Carthage by Scipio the Younger. A genuine Roman brazier charged with charcoal sent off its fumes in one corner, dispelling the springtime chill. A Venetian lamp, swung from silver chains over my head, sent a faint ruby gleam through its dome of red crystal. There were books on the table; they proved to be a set of Poggio’s _Facetiae_, and kindred free and merry stories, charmingly bound in white and purple vellum. The odor of the brazier, the dimly mysterious light, the looming of the vague figures on the cartoons, the red twinkling from the lamp, all produced for an instant an effect nigh intoxicating. I threw myself into the cushioned chair, and felt old memory and habits of mind surging back upon me like the billows cast up by an ever advancing tide of ocean.

Either because I was not expected or because of design I was held some slight time waiting. At last in a distant chamber I heard a step. Instantly all my senses quivered. I knew I was being profoundly affected, albeit very differently from the manner that other step had moved me when I waited in beggar’s rags at the cold grille by Quedlinburg convent. Suddenly it came over me how even now I was very shabbily clad, and what a mean impression I must make upon any one beholding me. I was execrating all the luck which had involved me in this immediate adventure, when the tapestry parted; Marianna di Forli came straight into my presence.

She wore a light blue cendal gown that fell straight down from her shoulders, the height of art in its simplicity. A thin gold chain was her girdle. Her only ornament was a large brooch on her shoulder, but the brooch was set with a Greek antique cameo of vast beauty and price. In the great coil of her dark hair she had set a single white spring flower. In that twilight her face seemed to stand out as a thing self illumined, diffusing its own white light.

“Gualtiero!” she cried, in her musical native tongue, “Gualtiero! I have missed you so long. Oh! blessed, blessed hour to bring you!”

She held both her hands to me, opening her arms wide; but the sight of her, the sound of her voice, had snapped the spell that momentarily bound me. Very deliberately, with studied courtesy I fell on one knee, took her right hand coldly to my lips, and kissed it formally. Then I rose and stood with bowed head, but at safe distance.

“You must pardon me, Madonna,” said I, “if this interview slightly overwhelms me; only a very few hours since have I entered Worms, and it was by the merest fortune that I rambled out by the palace and was confronted by Orosi. I consented that he lead me to you, perhaps without considering whether an interview would lead to mutual happiness or the reverse.”

She drew back, and the muscles of her neck seemed to twitch.

“Your words are cold as your northern wind, Gualtiero, all the spark and fire is gone out of them. Can three years away from Italy change so much? destroy habit, thought, memory? Do you not remember the Corso, and the Vatican gardens, and the boats on the Tiber, and the Carnival, and the fiestas of roses, and--”

I folded my arms across my breast.

“I forget none of them, Madonna.”

“Santo Spirito, and do you never long for them? Are you turned all to ice?”

“Not quite,” I replied gently.

“Then I,” and her eyes shot fire, “demand in the name of that passion which once you will not deny blazed swift and hot,--what marvel has wrought this change?”

“You will never understand, Madonna,” I answered slowly, “not though my speech went far into the night. The North has claimed me; I am of my father’s world and not of my mother’s. The North has claimed me, and the Cause, which is so great.”

“The Cause? I cannot understand.”

“I said you could not. Once you laughed at us Germans, called us winebibbers and fools; we are stirring now. Once you mocked at our friar Martin Luther; he is giving the Monsignori gloomy evenings now. Great things are coming to pass, and greater things will follow. Here in Worms we may hear words that will be remembered so long as men read books; for the Cause is moving to triumph, and he who aids therein is aiding even God.”

“Your words are Italian,” she said, misdoubtingly, “but your thought still is all hid. What is this Cause? explain.”

“The Cause is the Word of God as spoken by Luther, and from him caught by the world.”

She threw her hands over her head and laughed. The laugh grated. It was scornful and evil.

“At last! at last! Well, I could have thought as much. Still bewitched by that babbling demon of an excommunicate friar. My father and I will have to learn how to disenchant you.”

“In that case you must prove wiser than Merlin, for I swear to you, never went cavalier more earnestly on his crusade than I on this.”

She paused one shrewd instant. Some instinct told me that she was bidding herself not to press a dangerous point, but to seek other means of vantage.

“Come, Gualtiero,” she resumed, holding out one hand winningly, “three years is a long time. At Palaestro we parted in a quarrel, let us not meet again only to renew it. We have always liked each other better after quarrelling. Do you remember the fearful war we had because I believed you had given those pearls to that Carlotta di Empoli, and how we were vastly more devoted than ever, after the wretched thing was made up? Yes? Well then, here we will sit together. These cushions are filled with silk floss from Parma. Old Cardinale di Piombo swears there is nothing more comfortable, and surely he is the softest liver in the whole conclave. After all, what is it to me if you wish to run after a heretic friar or the very Maestro Diavolo himself if but your ‘Cause’ does not keep you in this vile Germany. O _Miseria_! But what a dress you have on! Very foul and worn even for this dreadful country. You have already paid for your folly towards the heretic by being brought to poverty?”

“I have still sufficient revenues,” said I dryly, not without inward meditation as to whether Marianna’s attitude would alter if I avowed myself poor. “I am wearing this dress simply to avoid remark upon the streets.”

“Happy relief then to my fears! Now I will ask you, as if you were at the confessional, and do you answer. Are you married?”

“No.”

“Are you betrothed?”

“No.”

“Are you in love?”

I could have cut her tongue out. I saw heavy disadvantages either in telling the truth, or framing any reasonable manner of a lie.

“You need not press that question, Marianna,” I returned sharply.

“But you equivocate, proof enough you are truly in love. Fie, do not think I am going to be angry. Every one must amuse himself. Declare the lady.”

“I have forbidden you to interrogate.”

“_Buono!_ only one question, then; is she that Ilsa--such I swear was the name--whose father held the castle close to yours? Am I not right? You are blushing.”

“The lady whereof you ask has entered the convent. As a nun she is beyond all our discussions.”

Marianna’s hands floated out and her long fingers moved in a gesture as if she were untangling spider webs.

“Oh, simple, simple Gualtiero! Do you not think I can see through you as through yonder goblet of Venetian glass? Do you think that while you have been running about Germany for the sake of your mad heretic, I have not been informed by a dozen correspondents about you. Did not many letters report ‘The Graf von Regenstein, rumor has it, made offers of marriage to Ilsa von Blankenburg, but she rejecting his proffer has entered the convent?’ And lo! now by your own silence and blushes you confess to the secret that you, _you_ who preach to us Italians of your serious purpose and your zeal for your ‘Cause,’ are actually engaged in the quest of a nun!”

I let her wander on even farther, while I slowly readjusted my wits.

“Yet you might spare your blushes, Gualtiero. Wiser and cleverer men than you have loved nuns, yes, and been none the worse for it. The nephew of his one-time Holiness, Urban the Sixth, had such an intrigue, and the indulgent Pope actually issued a dispensation to him and let him marry the wench. You might get the same, though if truth be told, you have not ingratiated yourself with the Vatican lately. Still if you have kept your fortune--”

But here I rose to my feet.

“Marianna di Forli,” spoke I, and my voice shook, “if you would converse with me as friend and not as foe, do not let the name of that nun again cross your lips. What we are to each other and what we will be to each other is something so high, so holy, so ineffable that never in any tongue I can speak could you learn to understand me. I have no intrigue with the lady you have so lightly named, and I forbid you to discuss her further.”

“Then Dante sighs hopelessly from afar for his Beatrice,” said she, demurely; “very good, I merely wished to show that I was not playing the part of jealousy.”

“What part you are playing, Madonna,” I replied sourly, “I confess is to me quite hid, the more as by your own confession you have kept a marvellously sharp watch upon my doings. You know, then, that I am utterly committed to the cause of that Wittenberg friar whom the Church, with paternal benignity, is seeking to consign to the flames. You know that I broke with you finally at Palaestro. What now are you seeking?”

She looked up at me steadily, striving to catch me with her glorious eyes. If mortal could have been ensnared by a pagan goddess, I were lost hopelessly.

“Hear then, Gualtiero,” spoke she, and her voice rose and sobbed like some plaintive æolian harp, “hear then, I come to save you from yourself.”

“Myself? Am I my own enemy?”

“Your own worst enemy, Gualtiero. Your own noble qualities betray you. You were nurtured in Italy, but a false loyalty to your father’s last injunctions held you to a destructive pride in your German ancestry. Because you dreamed you found something noble in the utterances of that Wittenberg heretic, you also dreamed it was your duty to defend him. Even as your forefathers deemed it noble to toss their lives away against the infidel, one man against twenty, so you, again hopelessly beset, have allowed your fine chivalry to ruin you. You dwell in a world of dreams, of gossamer hopes, of unrealities. You have followed this friar even to Worms. Then your foam bubble will burst. What will you find? A heretic’s bonfire, your friends’ favor forfeited, your fortune imperiled, your body and soul jeopardized by the ban of the Church. And from all this I--I, who have been so much to you, will save you yet.”

“I thank you for your solicitude, Madonna,” was my rejoinder. I confess when she spoke of “unrealities” I thought of our life at Palaestro, and could scarce suppress a smile.

“You are not grateful--now. Ah! I understand that very well. But you will thank me hereafter. Come”--she caught at my sleeve, “sit once more, side by side as in the olden days. Let us pretend these are the Vatican gardens, and we are under the roses by the Pope’s belvedere. Far away are they not, but we will see them again. You will not, you will not refuse even this?”

Her voice trembled, but I stood before her obdurate. I remembered that other hour at Mainz when honor spoke one voice, and Marianna another, and Marianna had prevailed. But, thank God, I was stronger now. She was looking up at me with every manner of entreaty springing out of her eyes,--the entreaty of a Cleopatra saying to Antonius, “Choose now, Rome or me?” But I, looking upon her, yet beyond her, saw other figures whom she might not see, a figure in the veil of a nun, a figure in the cowl of a friar. “Get thee behind me, Satan!” were the words that almost crossed my teeth, but I would not wound too harshly. I only removed her hand gently from my sleeve and motioned her away.

“You talk of that which can never be, Madonna,” I said. “I am sorely grieved that you will still live in memory.”

“In memory?” she cried, her voice now rising almost to a shriek, “in memory? And can the memory of a Roman woman ever die? Because I have laughed and lived merrily do you think that I have never loved you? Oh! Santa Maria! one need not turn nun every time one has a broken heart. Curse me, beat me, flay me, slay me, do not say you will quit me forever!”

Alas for Marianna! even as she cast herself at my feet in a paroxysm of tears, I was reflecting, “How far is this real, how far the actress?” This scene however I well knew could not be prolonged. With a pitilessness I did not wholly feel, I drew myself up haughtily.

“Noble lady,” I spoke distantly; “If in the past I have erred by giving you friendship and more than friendship, I am heartily repentant. The wrong that I may have done to you I may never be able to efface. So heaven orders things--that much of evil cannot be undone, however much the doer would. If you have had your bitter hours in past years, believe me I have had mine. Believe me, too, God has laid His comforting hand upon me and given me a peace and hope such as not Filelfo or Chrysoloras or Porphyry or Plato or any other of those philosophers we worshipped at Rome could give. I have chosen my path with open eyes, and I follow it boldly. It may lead through the sunlight, may lead under only the starlight, nay clouds and darkness may wrap thick about me. The path is still before me. I will follow. For you I will ever crave that peace which neither the world nor the Church as you know it can give. Curse you I will not, and I will remember you often and not with hate, but for the final time I say it, your path you must follow, and leave me free to follow mine.”

I bowed ceremoniously and moved toward the door. She lifted her face towards me; it was struggling with entreaty.

“Never, never, never will I give you up!” she cried, then fell in a heap upon the chair.

Without more adieus I thrust aside the tapestries, and strode past many gazing menials, much amazed to see a shabbily clad man burst from the inner apartments of the Cardinal. Fortunately no one strove to halt me. In a moment I was past the last sentry, and in the street, lighted by the last sunshine of the waning afternoon. Italy and all its strange visions seemed vanished behind me. I heard the pompous Geheimrat of some Pomeranian princeling cursing in broadest Low German at the inattention of his varlets. The very oaths seemed good to hear. I strode over to a convenient beer house, and quaffed a stein of good brown Nürnberger.

“Realities?” I spoke to myself; “here are the realities,--the life to live and the death to die. I have escaped from Merlin and his house of dreams.”

* * * * *

The crowds in the street had hardly thinned. Never, save at the Venice carnivals, had I seen greater multitudes. “Luther,” “Luther,” seemed on every tongue.

“He will recant,” I heard an earnest-faced young student declaiming to a fellow; “Holy God strengthen him, but he will recant. Pope, Emperor, princes, priests are all against him. Flesh and blood are not made to endure such things, he will retract all his books to-morrow.”

“And yet,” answered the second student more confidently, “when I caught his eye this noon, I said, ‘that is not the face of one whom fiend or man can frighten.’ I still hope he will stand fast.”

“Ay, so I pray every hour,” rejoined the first somberly; “for the day he retracts is the blackest day that has ever set for Germany, after such a dawn of hope of better things! But--”

Here we were swept asunder and I caught no more of their hopes or fears. A moment later I was behind two black-cloaked Dominicans. Easily enough one seized the thread of their talk.

“I tell you, Sebaldus, this hideous leniency has already nigh wrecked the Church. A few good faggots two years ago should have ended everything. But first Caïetanus tarried, then the Pope, and now finally the Emperor. The blessed Dominic grant we see the end of this Anti-Christ to-morrow. Will they execute him here or send him to Rome?”

“The legates Aleander and Forli have done their uttermost to have him clapped under arrest already, but alas! the Emperor hesitates.”

“Hesitates? Great God! as a Christian prince how can he hesitate in his duty?”

“Why, my dear brother, he has most unfortunate scruples about that matter of a safe-conduct which he issued.”

“And _he_ hesitates to violate it? As if faith were to be kept with Turks and heretics! Let him remember how Kaiser Sigismund piously let the safe-conduct he gave to Hus be set aside, for as the King of Aragon then said, ‘Faith is not to be kept with those who have not kept faith with God.’”

“Aptly spoken, like a true doctor of the Church. And--heaven grant--even if the Emperor prove over-scrupulous, there will be a short way found with the wretch. I am told that the Cardinal of Forli said--”

But here, just as I would have given fifty gulden for the rest of their talk, the two turned down an unfrequented lane, whither it was impossible for me to follow undetected.

The conversation, however, made me exceeding thoughtful. Clearly all that I might do for Luther was not at end. If there were any pious projects against Luther entertained by his Eminence of Forli, it was not for me to ignore them. And as for Orosi, I was certain that the redoubted bravo was not serving the Cardinal simply as postilion. I therefore quickened my steps back toward the house of the Knights of St. John. The day was fading into twilight, the hucksters and merchants were illuminating their shops and booths with innumerable red torches that cast a flickering radiance upon the moving crowds, and gave the streets of Worms more the aspect of a fête than of a sedate grave German city. I was almost again at our quarters when the folk in the narrow street were thrust aside by the passing of a small cavalcade. I saw a few mounted retainers, a stately ritter in half armor, and behind him, with sweeping white robes, a lady abbess upon her palfrey. Behind the abbess rode several women, hooded and cloaked in black.

“Give way, honest people,” cried the leading rider; “way for their High Nobilities the Abbess of Quedlinburg and the Graf von Blankenburg!”

The crowd opened good naturedly, but a lumbering vintner’s cart in the street ahead made very slow progress. The cavalcade fell to a walk. As for me, I stopped for an instant like a man stark mad, and then guided more by instinct than reason, kept pace with the little company, edging nearer until I was close to the women who followed the abbess. I had not long to seek. Would I not have known to pick that rider on the darkest night and amid a hundred?

I was almost against her side-saddle, and the noise of the street rose in a babel hum around me, when I suddenly spoke in a voice low and clear.

“Ilsa, here I am.”

Under the black cape there was a startled quaking and rustling, but was I not proud of my Lady, when with hardly an instant’s hesitation came the softly spoken answer.

“I am trusting you to do nothing foolish, Walter.”

“Your trust is safe,” I answered; “I am guarding Dr. Luther. But is Trude in your company?”

“She is.”

“Then since her father is with me, all is well. I have your letter.”

The wagon had been turned from the way. “Forward!” came the shout. I heard the riders ahead slap their horses. From under the black cape stole a white hand; there was just the chance for me to touch the tips of the fingers. Ilsa’s palfrey caught the stride of the others. I sprang back, spattered with mud. The whole had been done so quickly Abbess Theckla could have known nothing. And so in one afternoon, almost in one hour, I had words with two women who were making or marring my life. I stood marvelling at my strange fortune, and still more at the strange manner of our meeting--so different, so utterly different.

On turning in at the house of the Knights of St. John I told myself it would be very easy later to ascertain the lodging place of so important a personage as the Abbess of Quedlinburg, but for the moment I had enough else to busy me. Poor Dr. Luther was still beset by a host of well intentioned friends thrusting upon him all manner of bad advice. There could be no doubt that the Emperor had formed an unfriendly opinion of him and that more than half of Worms expected him to retract at least the more extreme of his writings.

“If you will merely recall two or three of the pamphlets,” I remember a Saxon councillor urging patronizingly, “say the ‘Babylonish Captivity’ and that violent last ‘Letter to the Pope,’ why it’s quite possible there will be very little urged against the others.”

And I, knowing Dr. Luther, could see the quiet twinkle in his eyes, serious, yet not unmerry as he took all these friendly words in silence. At last he looked around, and on his face was the old smile so familiar in Wittenberg.

“Ach! dear Christian friends. There is a good verse of Scripture, spoken I think for such poor wights as I, in cases like these ‘When they bring you unto the magistrates and powers, take ye no thought how or what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall say, for the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say.’”

“But reverend Doctor,” cried Von Thun, “it cannot be you are without a well considered course of action?”

“Noble Privy Councillor,” answered my master, “Years ago when I lay very sick at Erfurt, when I was only a young student, and I was in great fear of death, there came to me an old priest, pious and good, who spoke, saying, ‘Take courage. You shall not now die, our God will yet make you an instrument for the comforting of many.’ And by God’s mercy, that prophesy has not proved vain. Nor do I think,” and his voice rose a little, “I have yet reached the end of that service appointed unto me. When I stand before Cæsar, I shall, heaven willing, say that which will make no friend of mine ashamed.”

Nothing more could any man get out of him. Seeing that he was surely weary, Amsdorf and I at length sent the busybodies away. I stationed Gunter, Adolf, and Andrea, well armed, around Dr. Luther’s chamber, and myself lay down in the next room with a ready sword and pistols. Nothing, however, disturbed us that night. Fatigued myself with all the strange sights and vicissitudes, I slept soundly, interrupted only by the rumbling of the city cart that coursed the streets after midnight, to carry home the topers left sprawling in the gutters after a riotous evening.