Part 2

It was the early rapture of the renaissance, penetrating like an April song into these newly reclaimed lands. The wind blew from Florence, and all the peaceful vales, so long trodden into a bloody mire, were awakening to the ecstasy of the _Promise_. That men interpreted according to their lights--lights burning fast and passionate in most places, but in a few quiet and holy. The breed of German bandits, of foreign mercenaries, was swept away. Gone was the whole warring race of the Visconti, and in its place the peasant Sforza had set a guard about the land of his fierce adoption, that he might till and graft and prosper in peace. Italy had asserted itself the inheritance of its children, the Court of God's Vicegerent, the chosen land of Love's gospel. That, too, men interpreted according to their lights. 'We are all the vineyard of Rome,' said the little Parablist. Alas! he thought Rome the Holy of Holies, and his father a saint. But his father, who adored him, had committed him, with his blessing, to this mad romance! Such were the paradoxes of the Gospel of Love.

Beatrice spoke no more, and they rode on in silence. About evening they came into a pleasant dell, where there was a level sward among rocks; and a little stream, running down a stairway of stones, dropped laughing, like a child going to bed, into the quiet of a rushy pool. Great chestnuts clothed the slopes, and made a mantle, powdered with stars, to the setting sun. It was a very nest for love.

Messer Lanti, halting, commanded the green tents to be pitched on the grass. Then, with a stormy scowl and a mockery of courtesy, he came to dismount his lady.

'Now,' says he, as he got her aside, 'if I do not show thy saint to be a petticoat, my hug of thee is like to prove a bear's.'

'What!' she said, amazed: 'Bernardo?'

He ground his teeth.

'I do not mark his pink cheeks for nothing.'

'Well, an he be,' she retorted coldly, 'I am liker, than if he be not, to lose my gallant.'

'That depends,' he growled, 'upon whom your fickleship honours with that title'; and he strode away, calling roughly to Bembo, 'Art for a bath, saint, before supper?'

'Why, gladly, Carlo,' said the boy, 'so we may be private.'

They went down to the pool together, and stripped and entered. Lanti saw a Ganymede, and was not pleased thereat. He came to supper in a very bad humour, which no innocent artifice of his guest could allay. The kill that day of their falcons--partridges, served in their own feathers, and stuffed with artichokes and truffles--was tough; the pears and peaches were sour; the confetti savourless and of stale design. He rated his cook, cursed his servitors, and drank more than he ate. When the disagreeable meal was ended, he strode ruffling away, saying he desired his own sole company, which it were well that all should respect. Bembo saw him go, with a sigh and a smile.

'Good, honest soul,' quoth he, 'that already wakes to the reckoning!'

Madam misunderstood him, and pressed a little closer, with a happy echo of his sigh. Her eyes were soft with wine and passion. She had no precedent for doubting her influence on the moment she chose to make her own.

'The reckoning!' she murmured. 'But I am wax in thy hands, pretty saint. Shalt confess me, and take what toll thou wilt of my sins?'

Her hand settled light as a bird on his.

'Sing to me, Bernardino,' she whispered wooingly, 'sith the cloud is gone from our moon, and I am in the will to love.'

He shot one little startled glance her way; then slowly slung round his lute, and, touching the strings pensively, melted into the following reproach:--

'Speak low! What do you ask, false love? Speak low! Sin cannot speak too low. The night-wind stealing to thy bosom, The dead star, dropping like a blossom, Less voiceless be than thou!

Low, lower yet, false love, if to confess What guilt, what shameful need? God, who can hear the budding grass, And flake kiss flake in the snowy pass, Your secret else will heed.

Ah! thou art silent, not from love, but fear, And true love knows no fear. Creeping, soft-footed, in the dust, It is not love, but conscious lust, Which dreads that God shall hear.'

He rose swiftly beside her, while she sat, dumbly biting a lock of her own hair. The frown of outraged passion was in her eyes. What had the fool dared in rejecting her!

To touch the perfumed essence of sin with a rebuke which was like a caress--that, _pace_ his monks, was Bernardo's rendering of the Gospel; and who shall say that, in its girlish tenderness, its earnest emotionalism, it was not the most dangerous method of all? Not every adulterous woman is fit to meet the gentle fate of Christ's. It is not always well to doctor too much kindness with more. Surfeit, surely, is not safely cured, unless by a God, with sugar-plums.

'For shame!' he said quietly; 'for shame! Christ weeps for thee!'

She looked up with a frozen, insolent smile.

'Yet there is no tear in all the night, prophet.'

He raised his hand. A star trailed down the sky, and disappeared behind the trees. It startled her for a moment, and in that moment he was gone, striding into the moonlight. She saw a sword gleam in the shadow of the tent.

'Carlo!' she hissed; 'Carlo! follow and kill him!'

Messer Lanti came out of his ambush, sheathing his blade. His teeth grinned in the white glow. He sauntered up to her, and stood looking down, hand on hip.

'Not for all the bona-robas in the world,' he said, and struck his hilt lightly. 'This I dedicate to his service from this day. Let who crosses my little saint beware it.'

He burst out laughing, not fierce, but low.

'Thou art well served in thy confessor, woman. Wert never dealt a fitter penance.'

It was significant enough that he had no word but mockery for her discomfiture. He might have spitted the seduced on a point of gallantry; for the siren, she was sacred through her calling.

In the meanwhile Bernardo had left the green, had passed the low, roistering camp pitched at a respectful distance beyond, and had thrown himself upon his knees in the wide fields.

'Sweet Jesus,' he prayed, 'O justify Thy Kingdom before Thy servant! Already my young footsteps are warned of the bitter pass to come. Be Thou with me in the rocky ways, lest I faint and slip before my time.'

He remained long minutes beseeching, while the moon, anchored in a little stream of clouds, seemed to his excited imagination the very boat which awaited the coming of One who should walk the waters. He stretched out his arms to it.

'Lord save me,' he cried, 'or I sink!'

He heard a snuffle at his back, and looked round and up to find the fool Cicada regarding him glassily.

'Sink!' stuttered the creature, swaying where he stood. 'Lord save me too! I am under already--drowned in Malmsey!'

Bembo rose to his feet with a happy sigh. '_Exultate Deo adjutori nostro!_' he murmured, 'I am answered.'

His clear, serene young brow confronted the fuddled wrinkles of the other's like an angel's.

'Cicada mio,' he said endearingly; 'judge if God is dull of hearing, when, on the echo of my cry, here is one holding out his hand to me!'

The Fool, staring stupidly, lifted his own lean right paw, and squinted to focus his gaze on it.

'Meaning me?--meaning this?' he said.

Bembo nodded.

'A return, with interest, on the little service I was able to render thee this morning. O, I am grateful, Cicada!'

The Fool, utterly bemused, squatted him down on the grass in a sudden inspiration, and so brought his wits to anchor. Bernardo fell on his knees beside him.

'What moved you to come and save me?' he said softly. 'What moved you?'

Cicada, disciplined to seize the worst occasion with an epigram, made a desperate effort to concentrate his parts on the present one.

'The wine in my head,' he mumbled, waggling that sage member. ''Tis the wet-nurse to all valour. I walked but out of the furnace a furlong to cool myself, and lo! I am a hero without knowing it.'

He looked up dimly, his face working and twitching in the moonlight.

'Recount, expound, and enucleate,' said he. 'From what has the Fool saved the Parablist?'

'From the deep waters,' said Bembo, 'into which he had entered, magnifying his height.'

The Fool fell a-chuckling.

'There was a hunter once,' said he, 'that thought he would sound his horn to a hymn, and behold! he was chasing the deer before he had fingered the first stops. Expound me the parable, Parablist. Thou preachest universal goodwill, they say?'

'Ay, do I.'

'Thou shalt be confuted with thine own text.'

'How, dear Fool?'

'Why, shall not every wife be kind to her friend's husband?'

'Ay, if she would be unkind to her own.'

The Fool scratched his head, his hood thrown back.

'And so, in thy wisdom, thou step'st into a puddle, and lo! it is over thy ears. Will you come out, good Signor Goodwill, and ride home in a baby's pannier?'

Bembo caught one of the wrinkled hands in his soft palms.

'Dear Cicada,' he said, 'are there not tears in your heart the whiles you mock? Do you not love me, Cicada, as one you have saved from death?'

Some sort of emotion startled the harsh features of the Fool.

'What better love could I show,' he muttered, 'than to warn thee back from the toils that stretch for thy wings?'

'Ah, to warn me, to warn me, Cicada!' cried the boy, 'but not home to the nest. How shall he ever fly that fears to quit it? Be rather like my mother, Cicada, and advise these my simple wings.'

The Fool caught his breath in a sudden gasp--

'Thy mother! I!'

A spasm of pain seemed to cross his face. He laughed wildly.

'An Angel out of a Fool! That were a worthy parent to hold divinity in leading-strings.'

'Zitto, Cicca mio!' said Bembo sweetly, pressing a finger to his lips. 'Do I not know what wit goes to the acting of folly--what experience, what observation? If thou wouldst lend these all to my help and aid!'

'In what?'

'In this propaganda to govern men by love.'

'Thou playest, a child, with the cross-bow.'

'I know it. I have been warned; direct thou my hand.'

'I!' exclaimed the Fool once more in a startled cry. And suddenly, wonder of wonders! he was grovelling at the other's knees, pawing them, weeping and moaning, hiding his face in the grass.

'What saint is this?' he cried, 'what saint that claims the Fool to his guide?'

'Alas!' said the boy, 'no saint, but a child of the human God.'

'And He mated with Folly,' cried Cicada, 'and Folly is to direct the bolt!'

He sat up, beating his brow in an ecstasy, then all in a moment forbore, and was as calm as death.

'So be it,' he said. 'Be thou the divine fool, and I thy mother.'

With a quick movement Bembo caught the Fool's cheeks between his palms.

'Ay, mother,' said he, with a little choking laugh, 'but see that thy hand on mine be steady, lest the quarrel fly wide or rebound upon ourselves.'

It was the true mark indeed to which the cunning rascal had all this time been sighting his bow. He watched anxiously now for the tokens of a hit.

The Fool sat very still awhile.

'Speak clearer,' he muttered; then of a sudden: 'What wouldst ask of me?'

'Ah! dear,' sighed Bembo; 'only that thou wouldst justify thyself of this new compact of ours.'

'I am clean--as thou readest love. Who but God would consort with Folly? The Fool is cursed to virginity.'

'Cicada, dear, but there is no Chastity without Temperance.'

The Fool tore himself away, and slunk crouching back upon the grass.

'I renounce thy God!' he chattered hoarsely, 'that would have me false to my love, my mistress, my one friend! Who has borne me through these passes, stood by me in pain and madness, dulled the bitter tooth of shame while it tore my entrails? Cure wantonness in women, gluttony in wolves, before you ask me to be dastard to my dear.'

'Alas!' cried Bembo, 'then am I lost indeed!'

A long pause followed, till in a moment the Fool had flung himself once more upon his face.

'Lay not this thing on me,' he cried, clutching at the grass; 'lay it not! It is to tear my last hope by the roots, to banish me from the kingdom of dreams, to bury me in the everlasting ice! I will follow thee in all else, humbly and adoringly; I will try to vindicate this love which has stooped from heaven to a clown; I will perish in thy service--only waste not my paradise in the moment of its realisation.'

Bembo stooped, kneeling, and laid one hand softly on his shoulder.

'Poor Cicada,' he said, 'poor Cicada! Alas! I am a child where I had hoped a man, and my head sinks beneath the waters. Tired am I, and fain to go rest my head in a lap that erst invited me. Return thou to thy bottle, as I to my love.'

The Fool, trailing himself up on his knees, caught his hands in a wild, convulsive clutch.

'Fiend or angel!' he cried, 'thou shall not!--The woman!--The skirts of the scarlet woman! Go rest thyself--not there--but in peace. From this moment I abjure it--dost hear, I abjure it? I kill my love for love's sake. O! O!'

And he fell writhing, like a wounded snake, on the grass.

'_Salve, sancta parens!_' said Bembo, lifting up his hands fervently to the queen of night. The pious rogue was quite happy in his stratagem, since it had won him his first convert to cleanness.

*CHAPTER III*

The lady of Casa Caprona had flown her tassel-gentle and missed her quarry. Outwardly she seemed little disturbed by her failure--as insolent as indolent--an imperious serenity in a velvet frame. The occasion which had given, which was still giving, Carlo a tough thought or two to digest, she had already, on the morning following her discomfiture, assimilated, apparently without a pang. 'The which doth demonstrate,' thought Cicada, as he took covert and venomous note of her, 'a signal point of difference between the sexes. In self-indulgent wickedness there may be little to distinguish man from woman. In the reaction from it, there is this: The man is subject to qualms of conscience; the woman is not. She may be disenchanted, surfeited, aggrieved against fate or circumstance; she is not offended with herself. Remorse never yet spoiled her sleep, unless where she desired and doubted it on her account in another. What she hath done she hath done; and what she hath failed to do slumbers for her among the unrealities--among things unborn--seeds in the womb of Romance, which, though she be the first subject for it, she understands as little as she does beauty. From the outset hath she been manoeuvring to confuse the Nature in man by using its distorted image in herself to lure him. Out upon her crimps and lacings! _He_ would be dressing and thinking to-day like an Arcadian shepherd, an she had not warped his poor vision with her sorcery! She wears the vestments of ugliness, and its worship is her religion.'

It must be admitted that he offered himself a cross illustration to his own text. The desperate concession wrung from him last night in a moment of vinous exaltation, had found his sober morning senses under a mountain of depression. He was bitterly aggrieved against fate; yet the only quarrel he had with himself was for that mad vow of temperance, not for the vice which had exacted it of him. The tongue in his head was like a heater in an iron. Tantalus draughts lipped and bubbled against his palate. The parched soil of his heart, he felt, would never again blossom in little lonely oases--never again know the solace of dreams aloof from the world. His traffic being by no means with heaven, God, he supposed, had sent an angel to convert it. And he had succumbed through the angel's calling him--mother!

He struck his hollow breast with a wild laugh. He groaned over the memory of that emotional folly. He damned himself, his trade, his employer, his aching head--everything and every one, in short, but the author of his misery. Him he could not curse--not more than if that preposterous relationship between them had been real. Neither did he once dream of violating his word to him, since it had been given--absurd thought--to his child.

He was none the less savage against circumstance--vicious, desperate, insolent with his master, as cross all over as a Good Friday bun. Messer Lanti, himself in a curiously sober mood, indulged his most acrid sallies with a good-humoured tolerance which, contemptuously oblivious as it was of any late smart of his own inflicting, was harder than the blow itself in its implication of a fault overlooked.

'Rally, Cicca!' said he, as they were preparing to horse; 'look'st as sour as a green crab. What! if we are to ride with Folly, give us a fool's text for the journey, man.'

Cicada dwelt a moment on his stirrup, looking round banefully.

'And who to illustrate it, lord?'

'Why, thy lord, if thou wilt,' said Carlo. 'He will be no curmudgeon in a bid for laughter.'

The Fool gained his mule's saddle, and digging heels into the beast's flanks, drove forward. Lanti, with a whoop, spurred alongside of him. Cicada slowed to a stop.

'Hast overtaken Folly, master?' said he, with a leer. 'I knew you would not be long.'

Carlo scratched his head. The Fool turned and rode back; so did the other. By the brook-side little Bembo was preparing to mount a steed with which he had been accommodated, since the lady had peremptorily declined to ride pillion to him again. Cicada referred to him with a gesture.

'For us,' he said, 'we are two fools in a leash, sith Sanctity, stopping where he was, is at the goal before us.'

Lanti grumbled: 'O, if this is a text!' and beat his wits desperately.

'A text, sirrah!' he roared, 'a text for the journey.'

'I will rhyme it you,' said the Fool imperturbably, pointing his bauble at Madam Beatrice, who at the moment stepped from the green tent:--

'Nothing is gained to start apace, After another hath won the race.

Shall you and I be jogging, master?'

Lanti raised his whip furiously. Cicada, slipping from his mule, dodged behind Bembo.

'Save me!' he squealed, 'save me! I am sound. It is folly to give a sound man a tonic.'

Carlo burst into a vexed laugh.

'Well,' said he, 'go to. I think I am in a rare mood for charity.'

The little party breakfasted on cups of clear water from the spring, and, in the fresh of the morning, folded its tents and started leisurely on the final stages of its journey. Madonna, lazy-lidded, sat her palfrey like a vine-goddess. Her bosom rose and fell in absolute tranquillity. She bestirred herself only, when Bembo rode near, to lavish ostentatious fondness on her Carlo, a regard which her Carlo repaid with a like ostentation of attention towards his little saint. It was an open conspiracy of souls, bared to one another, to justify their nakedness before heaven; only the woman carried off her shame with an air. Bernardo she ignored loftily; but her heart was busy, under all its calm exterior, with a poisonous point of vengeance.

Presently, the sun striking hot, she dismounted and withdrew into her litter, a miniature long waggon, drawn on rude wheels by a yoke of sleepy oxen, and having an embroidered tilt opening to the side. A groom, walking there in attendance, led her palfrey by the bridle. Lanti and his guest, with the Fool for company, rode a distance ahead. The young nobleman was thoughtful and silent; yet it was obvious that he, with the others, felt the relief of that secession. Bernardo broke into a bright laugh, and rallied Cicada on his glumness.

'Why should I be merry,' said the jester, with a sour face, 'when I was invited to a feast, and threatened with a cudgelling for attending?'

Bernardo looked at him lovingly. He thought this was some allusion to his self-enforced abstinence.

'Dear Cicca,' said he, 'the feast was not worth the reckoning.'

'O, was it not!' cried Cicada with a hoarse crow. 'But I spoke of my lord's brains, which, by the token, are the right flap-doodle.'

He put Bembo between himself and Lanti.

'Judge between us,' he cried, 'judge between us, Messer Parablist. He offered to serve himself up to me, and, when I had no more than opened my mouth, was already at my ribs.'

Carlo, on the further side, laughed loud.

'It is always the same here,' grumbled the Fool. 'They will have our stings drawn like snakes' before they will sport with us. They love not in this Italy the joke which tells against themselves--of that a poor motley must ware. It muzzles him, muzzles him--drives the poison down and in; and you wonder at the bile in my face!'

He fell back, having uttered his snarl, with politic suddenness, and posted to the rear of the litter. The moment he was away, Bembo turned upon his host with a kindling look of affection.

'I am glad to have thee alone one moment,' said he. 'O Carlo, dear! the base bright metal so to seduce thine eyes. Are they not opened?'

Now the tale of madam's discomfiture at her amoroso's hands the night before had not been long in reaching the boy's ears. She had not deigned, equally in confessing her predilections as her shame, to utter them out of the common hearing. Modesty in intrigue was a paradox; and, in any case, one could undress without emotion in the presence of one's dogs.

So Cicada, putting two and two together, had gathered the whole story, and given this spiritual bantling of his a hint as to his wise policy thereon, scarce a sentence of which had he uttered before he was casting down his eyes and mumbling inarticulate under the piercing gaze of an honesty which would have been even less effective had it spoken. Then had he slunk away, blessing all beatitudes whose innocence entailed such responsibilities on their worshippers; and, as a result, here was Master Truth taking his own course with the problem.

Messer Lanti's eyes opened indeed to hear truth so fearless; but he made an acrid face.

'On my soul!' he muttered, glistening, and stopped, and his brow was shadowed a moment under a devil's wing. Then suddenly, with an oath, he clapped spurs to his horse, and galloped a furlong, and, circling, came back at a trot, and falling again alongside, put a quite gentle hand on the boy's bridle arm.

'Dear, pretty Messer Truth,' said he, 'I pray you, on my sincerity, turn your horse's head. Whither, think you, are you making?'

'Why, for heaven, I hope, Carlo,' said the boy with a smile.

'Milan is not the gate to it,' answered the rough voice, quite entreatingly. 'Go back, I advise you. You will break your heart on the stones. Why, look here: dost think I am so concerned to have this intrigue proved the common stuff of passion? I care not the feather in thy cap, Bernardino. Nay, I am the better for it, sith it opens the way to a change. And so with ten thousand others. There is the measure of your task. Now, will you go back?'

'No, by my faith!'

Lanti growled, and grunted, and smacked his thigh.

'Then I cannot help thee: and yet I will help thee. Saint Ambrose! To remodel the world to goodwill, statecraft and all, on the lisp of a red mouth! Wilt be the fashion for just a year and a day, shouldering us, every one, poor gallants, to the wall? Why should I love thee for that? and I love thee nevertheless. There thou goest in a silken doublet, to whip all hell with a lute-string; and I--I had shown less temerity horsed and armoured, and with a whole roaring crusade at my back.'

Bembo smiled very kindly.

'Christ's love was all _His_ sword and buckler,' said he.

'And He was crucified,' said Carlo grimly.

'And died a virgin,' answered the boy, 'that He might make for ever chaste Love His heir.'

'Well,' grumbled Lanti, 'there reigns an impostor these fourteen hundred years or so in His place, that's all. I hope the right heir may prove his title. 'Tis a long tenure to dispossess. Methinks men have forgotten.'