Part 4

He was a small, ill-formed, harsh-featured man, very soberly dressed, and with a cropped head--a feature sufficiently disdainful of the bushed and elaborately waved locks of those by whom he was surrounded. Lean-throated and short-sighted, his face was a face to scorn falsehood without loving truth, a face the mouthpiece of dead languages for dead languages' sake, a face the contemner of the present just because it was the present and alive. As he stood, loweringly phlegmatic as any caged hate, his peering eyes and snarling lip would occasionally lift themselves together, not towards the glittering lord of destinies on the dais, but towards his henchman, the Greek, who would answer the challenge with a stare of serene and opulent contempt. And so a long interval of silence held them opposed.

Suddenly the Duke stirred from his black reverie, his lips sputtering little inarticulate blasphemies. His knee peevishly dismissing the hound, he gripped an arm of the bench, and turning gloomily on Lascaris, uttered the one impatient word, 'Well?'

The Greek, temporising for the moment, inclined his smooth, black-bearded face, so that the oily essence on his hair, which was foppishly crimped and snooded, was wafted to the Sforza nostrils, offending their delicacy. Galeazzo, momentarily repelled, rallied to a harsher frown, and demanded: 'The fruit, man, the fruit of all this meditation? Jesu! it should be rotten-ripe by its smell!'

Lascaris expanded his chest, unoffended, and, caressing his beard, answered impassively:--

'Thou questionest of this vision, Theosutos? I answer, How many changes can be rung on a carillon of eight bells? By such measure shalt thou imagine, an thou canst, the changes possible to the myriad of particles that go to the composition of a single human eye. Now, in the unthinkable dispersements and readjustments of Infinity, shall it not sometimes happen that two particles, or two thousand particles, or two billion particles, out of the sum of particles which were that eye, shall chance together again, and recover, because of that meeting, some very ancient, very remote impression which they once absorbed in common? These, Theosutos, be the ghosts, haphazard, indefinable, visible to one and unseen of all the rest, which make the solitary seer; these be the lonely hauntings of the ages--dust blown over desolate places, to commingle a moment at some cross roads, and weave a phantom wreath of memory, and so again be cast and scattered among the cycles. Thy vision is but a shadow of old dead years.'

An ill-repressed stutter of laughter from the prisoner at the foot of the steps greeted the finish of this exegesis. Lascaris flushed scarcely perceptibly. The Duke took no more notice of man or sound than he would have of a whimpering dog. Once or twice he stammered an oath, gnawing his finger, and frowning up, and down, and up again at the Greek. Finally he broke out, in a fury:--

'Now, by the Host, thou consolest me--now, by the Host! To reconcile to this spectre by arguing it perpetual! To----'

Grinding his teeth, he clipped his long fingers on the bench arm, as if he were about to spring. Lascaris forestalled him with a placid word:--

'Not perpetual. The mood invokes these shadows, as the mood shall lay them.'

Galeazzo snarled.

'The mood! What mood, fool? You shift and shift. God! it will be the mood of the mood next. Hast thou no master-key to all? Go to, then!'

He sank back into his cushions, glooming and panting. The sleek olive mask of the face near him yielded no sign of perturbation.

Gradually a very deadly expression came to usurp in the Duke's eyes that blinder madness of desperation. An indolent smile relaxed his features. He yawned, it was because, the soul horror being temporarily withdrawn, the incontinent devil was supplanting in him the tempestuous one. He rolled lazily about, addressing his creature once more:--

'You doctors--all the same! Big words to little cures. Treat a State's constitution or a man's--'tis the word's the thing. Ye woo not the truth, but her raiment. Hear'st me? I had a tutor once, a crabbed fellow called Montano.'

He yawned again. The prisoner below (Cola Montano himself) gasped slightly, and shot one stealthy glance his way. Lascaris sniggered.

'Surely, lord,' he said, 'we need no reminding while the man himself keeps his tongue.'

A half-suppressed snarl broke from the prisoner. Galeazzo, hunched on his cushions, stared vacantly before him.

'Ah!' he said, 'he could talk. I remember him, a midwife to the wind--as ye all be--as ye all be. What of the fellow?'

Lascaris wondered.

'Little, in truth, Magnificence, save in so far as your Magnificence was pleased to introduce his name.'

'Did I? I had forgot. What was the connection? Empty words, was it not, and vainglory and presumption?'

'And discontent. Add it thereto, Illustrious.'

'Discontent? Of what? The man prospers, I understand, on his school of all the virtues. Discontent? Why, hath he not risen to that independence of power that he dares lampoon his prince? Discontent?'

'Like Alexander, thou standest in his light, Theosutos.'

'Discontent?'

'Ay, that he should be twitted with having schooled a despot.'

'Why, true; he taught me how to score a lesson with a scourge. My shoulders could tell.'

'Gods! did he dare?'

'He dared. 'Twas a fellow of Roman mettle.'

'He would dare more now.'

'What?'

'A republic, so they say.'

'Ah! he should be the man for visions--a seer, an exorcist.'

'Short-sighted for a seer, Illustrious. The man cannot see the length of his own nose.'

'Yet may he see far. I would he were here.'

The prisoner, wrought at last beyond self-control, turned on the Greek and squirted a little shriek of venom--

'Yet through and through thee, thou loathsome, envious pimp!'

Then he whipped upon the other--

'And why not a republic, Galeazzo? Thy father Francesco was a republican at heart, else had he never given his son's leading-strings into my hands. There was a confederacy dreamed of in his day--Genoa, Milan, and Venice; Florence, Sienna, and Bologna. One rampart to the rolling Alps, one wall on which barbarian hordes might burst and waste themselves in foam. Northwards, a baffled sea; south, all Italy a tranquil haven, a watered garden, where knowledge with all its flowers should find space, and breathing-space to grow. Dost thou love Italy? Then why not a republic, Galeazzo?'

The Duke, as utterly impassive as if he were deaf, turned musingly to Lascaris.

'I heard one talk once,' said he, 'of a confederacy of republics, as who should say, An army all serfs. Words! The tails must obey the heads. Every ox knows it.'

'Saving the frog-ox,' giggled the Greek, 'who bursts himself in emulation.'

'Ah!' murmured the Duke, 'the frog-ox: see us tickle his self-puffery.'

He feigned to catch sight all at once of Montano. His eyes opened wide in astonishment: he held out his hands.

'What!' he cried, 'the man of visions! the very man! Come hither, old friend. I was but now speaking of thee.'

His guards permitting him, Montano sullenly mounted the steps, and stood facing the tyrant. His arms hung very plainly fettered before him; but the other never took his languid, smiling eyes from his face.

'Galeazzo,' said the scholar, harsh and quick, 'I did not write the epigrams; but no matter. You seek to make an example; I submit myself. It is the despot's part to lay hands on order and sobriety. Despatch, then. Thou wilt serve my ends better than thine own. Every blow to freedom is a link gone from thy mail.'

The Duke listened to him as if in bland wonder.

'Epigrams! An example!' he exclaimed. 'O, surely there is some mistake here.'

The thick brows of the prisoner contracted over his leaden eyes. He set his teeth, breathing between them. Galeazzo appealed to Lascaris:--

'Know'st aught of this?'

The Greek shook his head ineffably, licking his lips.

'No,' said Galeazzo, 'nor is it conceivable that my old friend and reprover should condescend to that meaner scourge. Jesu! for one of his learning and condition to incur the fate of the common lampooner. Why, I mind me how one was invited to a ragout minced of his own tongue.'

'Yes, Illustrious.'

'And another to having his couplets scored in steel on the soles of his feet.'

'Yes, Illustrious.'

'And yet another to boiling eggs under his arm-pits, since he was clever at hatching those winged epigrams'--he turned smoothly again to the tutor--'but not clever, as thou art, at reforming constitutions.'

He fell back, with a sleek and hateful smile; then, sighing suddenly, advanced his body again.

'I am troubled, Montano, I am troubled, and, since you chance to be here----'

He yielded the explanation to Lascaris.

'I weary of relating. Tell him of my symptoms, thou'--and he sunk once more into his cushions.

The Greek diagnosed, his shifty eyes refusing to encounter the hard inquisition of the other's:--

'His Magnificence is of late ever conscious of a face behind him, mournful and threatening. And still, if he turns to challenge it, it is behind him; and still behind, maddening him with a thought of something he can never overtake.'

Galeazzo fixed his burning eyes on the prisoner, as if, through all his mockery, the hunger of a hopeless hope betrayed his soul.

'Canst _thou_ strike it away,' he whispered hoarsely, 'or at least tell me what it is?'

Montano growled:--

'Ghosts, and dead years, and eye-particles! This trash of pseudo-science--a saltimbanco braying in a doctor's skin! Less licence, Galeazzo, and more exercise--'tis all contained in that. This vision is but a swimming blot of bile.'

He was really half-deceived, half-convinced. The Duke seemed to listen reassured, then slowly rose, and, with an ingratiatory smile, patted his erst tutor's shoulder.

'Old honest friend,' he said, 'and ever true to the Roman in thee! Thou hast spoken as one might expect. Bile, is it--bile? and little wonder in this upset of constitutions. Ebbene! we will take instant means to throw it off.'

He made a sign to the chief of the guard below.

'Andrea!'

Lascaris slunk back with a little gloating smile. The officer brought up his men about Montano. The Duke murmured softly:--

'Take good Messer Cola, and--' he paused a little, gazing winningly into his captive's surprised, splenetic face--'and have him soundly flogged before the gate-house--to the bone, Andrea, tell Messer Jacopo.'

Before the luring treachery of this stroke the prisoner stood for one moment shocked, aghast. The next, as the guard seized him, he broke into a storm of vituperations and blasphemies, calling upon all the gods of Rome to protect him from a monster. Andrea crushed his mailed hand down on his writhing lips; he was dragged away struggling and screaming. As he disappeared Galeazzo descended mincingly to the hall, bent on pursuing the show. A cloud of courtiers, male and female flocked, like rooks following a plough, in his wake. As he left the citadel and was crossing the outer ward, two ladies--one a young woman in her late twenties; the other a slim, pale girl of thirteen--broke from a group of attendants, and came, wreathed in one embrace, to accost him. The elder, looking in his face with a certain questioning anxiety, spoke him with a propitiatory smile and sigh:--

'Galeazino, O thou little sweetest burden on my heart!'

The endearment was really an inquiry, a warning; for there was a foreboding madness in his eyes. He made as if he would have struck her from his path. Her child companion caught his wrist with a merry cry:--

'My little father, whither sportest thou without thy women?'

He changed the direction of his hand and flipped the younger's cheek.

'Come, then, chuck,' said he. 'There is a frolic toward that will speed an idle hour.'

She caught up her skirts and followed him, as did the other, but less closely.

The gatehouse commanded from its battlements an open panorama of the town as far as the piazza of the duomo. Immediately to its front, in a bare extended space, stood the whipping-post, a stout beam set on end on a stage and furnished with hooks and chains. Already on the ground beside this (by preconcerted arrangement indeed) was a certain functionary, much respected of Milan. This was Messer Jacopo, the high court executioner--one, by virtue of his dealings in blood, almost on an equality with the master herald himself. Immobile and voiceless, he stood there like a model in an armoury. A short shirt of mail, and over it a scarlet jerkin with a plain dagger at the waist; hose of sober grey; a bonnet and shoes of black velvet, the first adorned with a red quill, the second with red rosettes; gorget and steel gauntlets--such was the whole of Messer Jacopo, save for the wooden, inessential detail of his face and its fixed eyes of glass. There was something painfully human, by contrast, in his understrappers, two or three of whom stood at hand in leathern aprons--men of a rich, moist physique and greasy palms, and jocund, slaughter-house expression. These were on bantering terms with the mob, with all that loose raff of the neighbourhood, which had come streaming and pushing and chattering to witness the sport. It was not often that the rats of the quarter Giovia had a master of philosophy to desert.

They had not long to wait. Almost simultaneously a little surging group appeared at the gates, and a throng of gay heads above the ramparts. The jostle and delighted whisper went among the crowd. What proportion would the scourging of a prince's tutor bear to the punishment it avenged? It surely would not be allowed to lose by procrastination. They craned their necks to catch an early sight of the victim. One of the assistants whipped experimentally through his fingers a thick, cruel thong of bullock-hide. It clacked a dry tongue.

'Be quiet, thirsty one,' he cried boisterously. 'In a moment thou shalt drink thyself to a sop.'

Up on the ramparts the ladies, with bright, inquisitive eyes, stood by their lord. The girl Catherine, petted love-child of her father, hugged confidingly to his arm.

'Padre mio,' she said, 'how sweet the world looks from here! I could fancy we were all Lazaruses, laughing down on that wicked Dives!'

*CHAPTER V*

Messer Lanti and his party entered Milan, in a very subdued mood, by the Gate of Saint Mark. It had been with an emotion beyond words that Bembo had found himself approaching the walls of this fair city of his dreams. The prosperous contado, watered in every direction by broad dykes; the clustering vines and saintly-hued olive gardens; the busy peasantry; the richness of the very wayside shrines, had all appeared to speak a content and holiness with which the perverse passions of men were at such bitter variance. The discrepancy confounded, as it was presently upon a fuller experience to inspire, him. Here in one land, incessantly jostling and reacting on one another, were a devotional and a sensuous fervour, both exhibiting a lust of beauty at fever-heat; were a gross superstition and an excellent reason; were a powerful priestcraft and a jeering scepticism--all drawing from the forehead of a Papacy, which, latterly pledged to the most unscrupulous temporal self-aggrandisement, was reverenced for the vicarship of a poor and celibate Christ. Issuing, equipped with an artless conventual purpose, from the cool groves of his cloister, he found a land dyed in blood and the blue of heaven, festering under God's sun, and rejoicing in the colour schemes of its sores. On what principle could he study to sweeten this paradox of a constitution, where health was enamoured of disease? '_Deus meus, in te confido_,' he prayed, with hands clasped fervently upon his breast; '_Non erubescam, neque irrideant me inimici mei_! O Lord, give me the vision to find and show to others a path through this beautiful wilderness!'

As the long walls of the town, broken at intervals into turrets, broadened before him, violet against a deep, cloudless sky, his ecstasy but increased--he held out his arms.

'O thou,' he murmured, 'that I have hungered for, looking down on thee from the mountain of myrrh! Until the day break and the shadows flee away!'

A little later, in a deep angle of the enceinte, they came upon a gruesome sight. This was no less than the Montmartre of Milan--a great stone gallows with dangling chains, and tenanted--faugh! A cloud of winged creatures rose as they approached, and scattered, dropping fragments. It was the common repast, stuff of rogues and pilferers--nothing especial. The ground was trodden underneath, and Bembo shrieked to see two white, stiff feet sticking from it. Lanti followed the direction of his hand, and exclaimed with a moody shrug:--

'An assassin, Saint--nothing more. We plant them like that, head down.'

'Alive?'

'O, of course!'

Bembo cried out: 'These are not sons of God, but of Belial!' and passed on, with his head drooping. Carlo turned to Beatrice, where she rode behind, and, without a word, pointed significantly to the horrible vision. She laughed, and went by unmoved.

In a little after they had all entered by the gate, and the city was before them. Bembo, kindled against his will, rose in his saddle and uttered an exclamation of delight. Before his eyes was spread a white town with blue water and upstanding cypresses--wedges of midnight in midday. There were terraces and broad flagged walks, and palaces and spacious loggias--fair glooms of marble shaken in the spray of fountains. From its cold, shadowless bridges to the heaped drift of the duomo in its midst, there seemed no slur, but those dark cypresses, on all its candid purity. It looked like a city flushed under a veil of hoar frost, the glare of its streets and markets and gardens subdued to one softest harmony of opal.

Yet in quick contrast with this chill, sweet austerity, glowed the burning life of it. In the distance, like travelling sparks in wood ashes; nearer, flashing from roof or balcony in harlequin spots of light; nearest of all, a very baggage-rout of figures, fantastic, chameleonic, an endless mutation and interflowing of blues, and crimsons, and purples--tirelessly that life circulated, the hot arterial blood which gave their tender hue to those encompassing veins of marble.

It was on this drift of souls going by him, gay and light, it seemed, as blown petals, that Bernardo gazed with the most loving fondness. He pictured them all, eager, passionate, ardent, moving about the business of the Nature-God, propagating His Gospel of sweetness, adapting to imperishable works the endlessly varying arabesques of woods, and starry meadows, and running clouds and waters--epitomising His System. He admired these works, their beauty, their stability, their triumphant achievement; though, in truth, his soul of souls could conceive no achievement for man so ideal as a world of glorious gardens and little abodes. But the sun was once more in his heart, and heaven in his eyes.

The swallows stooped in the streets to welcome him: 'Hail, little priest of the cloistered hills!' The scent of flowers offered itself the incense to his ritual; the fountains leapt more merrily for his coming. 'Love! love!' sang the birds under the great eaves; 'He will woo this cruel world to harmlessness. Where men shall lead with charity, all animals shall follow. The good fruits ripen to be eaten; it is their love, their lust to be consumed in joy. What lamb ever gave its throat to the knife? The violet flowers the thicker the more its blossoms are ravished. What new limb ever budded on a maimed beast?'

'Ah! the secret,' sang Bembo's soul--'the secret, or the secret grievance, of the cosmos will yield itself only to love. Useless to try to wrench forth its confession by torture. Let retaliation spell love, for once and for ever, and to the infinite sorrows of life will appear at last their returned Redeemer.'

His heart was full as they rode by the narrow streets. His eyes and ears were tranced with colour, the murmur of happy voices, the clash of melodious bells. He could not think of that late vision of horror but as a dream. These blithe souls, in all their moods and worships such true apostles of his gay, sweet God! They could not love or practise harshness but as a deterrent from things unnameable. The very absence of sightseers from that pit of scowling death proved it.

And then, in a moment, they had debouched upon an open place overlooked by a massive fortress, and in its midst, the cynosure of hundreds of gloating eyes, was a human thing under the flail--a voice moaning from the midst of a red jelly.

His heart sunk under a very avalanche. He uttered a cry so loud as to attract the attention of the spectators nearest.

'Who is it? What hath he done?' he roared of one. 'Trampled on the Host? Defiled a virgin of the mother? Murdered a priest?'

The face puckered and grinned.

'Worse, Messer Cavalier. He once whipped the Duke when his tutor.'

Bembo's whole little body braced itself to the spring.

'Tutor!' he cried: 'is that, then, Cola Montano?'

The gross eye winked--

'What is left of it.'

He was answered with a leap and rush. The mob at that point staggered, and bellowed, and fell away from the hoofs of a furious assailant. Carlo, pre-admonished, was already on the boy's flank. 'Stop, little lunatic!' he shouted, sweating and spurring to intervene. He had no concern for the feet he trampled or the ribs he bruised. He stooped and snatched at the struggling horse's bridle. 'It is the Duke's vengeance!' he panted. 'See him there above! Art mad?'

A face, flushed as the face of Him who scourged the hucksters from the temple, was turned upon him.

'Art thou? Strike for retaliation by love, or get behind!'

'Know'st nothing of his deserts,' cried Carlo. 'Be advised!'

'By love,' cried the boy. 'He is worthy of it--a good man--I carry a letter to him from my father. Fall back, I say.'

He drove in his heels, and the horse plunged and started, tearing the rein from Lanti's grasp. It was true that Bembo bore this letter, among others, in his pouch. The Abbot of San Zeno was so long out of the world as to have miscalculated the durations of court favour. Cola had been an influence in _his_ time.

'Devil take him!' growled Carlo; but he followed, scowling and slashing, in his wake. The mob, authorised of its worst humour, took his truculence ill. That reduced him to a very devilish sobriety. He began to strike with an eye to details, 'blazing' his passage through the throng. The method justified itself in the opening out of a human lane, at the end of which he saw Bembo spring upon the stage.

The executioner was cutting deliberately, monotonously on, and as monotonously the voice went moaning. Messer Jacopo, standing at iron ease beside, took no thought, it seemed, of anything--least of all of interference with the Duke's will. It must have been, therefore, no less than an amazing shock to that functionary to find himself all in an instant stung and staggered by a bolt from the blue. He may have been, like some phlegmatic serpent, conscious of a hornet winging his way; but that the insect should have had it in its mind to pounce on _him_!

He found himself and his voice in one metallic clang:--

'Seize him, men!'

Carlo panted up, and Jacopo recognised him on the moment.

'Messer Lanti! Death of the Cross! Is this the Duke's order?'

'Christ's, old fool!' gasped the cavalier. 'Touch him, I say, and die. I neither know nor care.'

His great chest was heaving; he whipped out his sword, and stood glaring and at bay. Bembo had thrown himself between the upraised thong and its quivering victim. He, too, faced the stricken mob.

'Christ is coming! Christ is coming!' he shrieked. 'Prepare ye all to answer to Him for this!'